Mohamed Choukri - For Bread Alone

Too much beauty is bad for you, I said.

We tossed a coin to see which one would go first. Tafersiti drew heads. But he said: It would be better if you went first.

You’re used to it. You always go first.

I went in. ¡Antonio! she called. Trae agua y una toalla .

A handsome boy came to the doorway. Ya voy , he said. His eyelashes had kohl on them, and his face was covered with pink powder. He seemed to have breasts, and they stood out. He wore his trousers very tight.

Give him something, the woman told me. I was confused. I gave him two pesetas. Then I tried to give the woman her fifteen pesetas.

No, no. Afterwards. Are you going to run away, or what? First we make love.

She washed my sex with soap and water. She squeezed it and rolled it. Why is she doing that? I wondered. The Moroccan women don’t wash it or squeeze it.

I was unable to keep it from growing hard as she worked, and I was ashamed. She smiled, and I smiled back at her.

¿Eres fuerte, eh? she laughed.

She took off her brassiere and underpants. It was not shaved. I expected her to wash herself, too, but she lay back on the bed, one leg across the other, with her hands on her thighs. They all know that the less they show, the more interesting they are, I thought.

So she did not wash. Perhaps that was because she knew she was clean. And now, she did not grip me with her scissors, but merely lay there like a great tuna-fish. I had heard how the Prophet Jonah had been swallowed by a whale. She folded one leg under the other, and I looked between them, thinking that this was a strange position for her to take. But obligingly she let me kiss her lips. They tasted good.

Suddenly she cried: Ay! Ay! Wait! We’ve got some hairs caught in there. Take it out, and let me move. That wasn’t a good way to lie. Perhaps this will be better for you.

She changed her position, and I was afraid she was not going to let me get back in. As far as I was concerned, both positions were good. She did not mind when I touched her breasts, or when I sucked on her lower lip. Filling my mouth with one of her breasts gave me a wild desire to sink my teeth into the flesh. The hairs had caused me some pain as well. She was in no hurry to finish.

How is she? Tafersiti asked when I came out.

Fine! Wonderful! She lets you have everything. She’s clean, too, and smells of perfume.

She does?

You’ll see for yourself.

That night I dreamed I was sucking a woman’s breast. The stream of milk that shot out of it struck me violently in the face.

One day little brother Achor died. His death left me with no feeling of regret. I had heard him crying and seen him crawling, but I had never thought of him as another person.

My new pleasures kept me from being submerged by life at home. Without interest I watched my sister Khemou grow and learn to talk. I was buried in my own melancholy, intent only upon my own body and the pleasure it could give me. Each day the world seemed to become a more complicated place. I slept in the street more often than I slept at home.

My mother lent me some money. Tafersiti and I began to buy fruit and vegetables from the warehouses and sell them for our own profit in the street. When grapes came into season, we bought huge quantities of them and carried them out to sell in the country markets. This did not last very long, and we spent all we had earned in bars and brothels. When winter came we regretted our thoughtlessness.

Khemou had begun to go and sit in the street with my mother as she sold her vegetables, where she could help keep an eye on the small boys who came to steal. One afternoon Comero, the bully of the quarter, slapped her. I was smoking kif in a café when a friend came by and told me.

Comero hit your sister. He was trying to steal a head of cabbage. Your mother wasn’t there.

I went and found Khemou crying. Some boys I knew came by. He’s in the Café Bab et Toute! Why don’t you go and beat him up? You can do it. I know you can. Boras butted him in the face and knocked him out. Yes! Fight him! We’re all with you. He’ll have nobody on his side. Who’s as good as you with a razor-blade?

I bought three razor-blades and sent friends to tell Comero I would be waiting for him outside the walls. We began in the Souq el Berra with our fists. He was stronger than I was, but I managed to keep out of his reach. When I saw that he was going to win, I pulled out one of the razor-blades and began to slash his face and hands and chest. My friends and I ran off, leaving him yelling and dancing in circles.

My father’s brothers had left the Rif and gone to Oran to live, and he had been preparing to go and see them. That night, having learned of the fight, he called in some of the neighbours and got them to help him catch me. He had been going to make the trip by himself, but now he went and bought another ticket, and at one in the morning he and I boarded a bus for Nador. We got down at Ketama for some black coffee. It was the first time I had walked on snow. The voyage was tiring. We ate dry bread and hard-boiled eggs, and we crossed the River Moulouya on the shoulders of the men who always waited there to help those who did not want to face the police on the bridge. Then we walked on to a place in the road further ahead, and bought a ride on a truck going past.

We passed a night in Oujda at the house of some friends of my father’s. I spent the next morning killing the lice that crawled everywhere in my clothing.

It was night when we arrived in Oran. My father found a man who spoke Riffian, and he showed us to the house in the New Medina where my father’s friends lived. There the houses were built into the cliffs like caves, and dogs ran out at us, barking. One of them tore my trousers. I was walking ahead of my father while he picked up stones to throw at them. When they came nearer, he clubbed them with the stick he was carrying. He swore at the dogs and then he swore at me. Go on ahead, you coward, damn you!

I stumbled and fell. He pounded me with the stick, and I yelled. As I continued to walk ahead, he prodded me in the back. The stones under my feet were pointed, and I was walking through nettles. He hits me and curses me aloud, and I do the same to him secretly. Without my imagination I should have exploded.

A man in tattered clothing came out of one of the caves and greeted us. We went inside. His wife was on the floor praying, dressed in spotless white.

Presently the woman asked me for news of my mother and my brothers and sisters who had been born in exile, in Tangier. The only one she had seen was Abdelqader, and she was sad to hear of his death. I did not tell her how he had died. The last time I saw you, you were only five or six years old, she told me. And here it is nine years later.

The following day we met my uncle and my grandmother in Douar ej Jdid, and then we went to see my aunt in the quarter of Serimine. She had married a man from Marrakech.

You’ve grown up, my grandmother told me. Soon you’ll be a man. Then you’ll work and help me to live. Isn’t that right?

Yes. She was thin and sick.

My father left me behind with my aunt, and went on to look for his brothers in other Algerian cities far from Oran. Three months later a letter came from him saying that he had gone back to Tetuan, and that it would be better for me to stay on in Oran.

My aunt got her husband to find me a job, and soon I was working on the farm of the same French woman in whose stable he worked. I was in the vineyard from five in the morning to six in the evening. The pause at midday for eating and resting lasted only an hour, but often we managed to prolong it another hour more, if nobody came by. My work consisted in guiding two mules along the ploughed tracks in the earth.