The Last Friend (6 page)

A sort of mutual modesty had emerged between Mamed and me. We no longer joked about our private lives. Sex became something we never talked about. I was tempted to tell him about my affair with Lola, but I knew he might be shocked, so I said nothing. It was impossible to know which of the two of us had the upper hand in our relationship. We complemented each another; we needed each other. We both acknowledged this, and we took a certain pride in it. Like me, Mamed preferred friendship, a bond we chose, to the family bonds imposed on us. I had no reason to complain about my older brother, but we were not friends.

Lola liked to make love everywhere but in the bedroom. She had spots all over the city, as well as on the Old Mountain, where she liked to have sex. The first time, we did it in her car. I hated it. It reminded me of the frustrating sessions with Zina in my youth. Lola had thought of everything: condoms in the glove compartment, cloths dipped in eau de cologne, towels, even a club hidden under the seat in case we were attacked. She was an expert. I left her car stiff and disheveled, feeling like I had just ridden the bumper cars at a carnival.

The second time, she took me to an abandoned hut near Donabo Park. She pulled a blanket and all the other necessary accoutrements out of her car. She was highly aroused. When she came, she cried out in Arabic, "Hamdoullah," and in Spanish, "Gracias a Dios," thanks to God. This made me laugh. I had barely caught my breath when she turned over on her stomach and told me to take her from behind. That evening, my knees hurt.

Another time, Lola arranged to meet me in the office of the Spanish consul, who had gone back to Madrid on family business. She was naked under a transparent
jellaba
.
"Fuck me here, on the boss's desk, on top of his files and old newspapers. Don't touch anything, or move anything," she said. "Here. I want you. Shut the door, but don't close the curtains. The light is beautiful."

With Lola I traveled through time and space. She gave me enormous pleasure. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed making love. As in our youth, I thought of Mamed, who must have experienced the same feelings. Once we had shared a girl. It was a game. Afterward, we asked which one of us she preferred. She laughed and said it was like making love with the same man, which we took as proof of our virility. The sharing stopped when we both married. The time for games and swapping was over. We entered a serious phase-that is, a boring routine. It was to escape this routine that I had my affair with Lola.

Every night, I came home exhausted. I went to bed thinking how much energy I needed to satisfy this insatiable woman. I joined a gym, less to exercise than to have an alibi in case Soraya started to get suspicious. I began to enjoy the intrigue of my double life. No one knew about it. I called Lola at her office every other day at 5 p.m., let the telephone ring three times, hung up, then called her back. "Will you fuck me tonight?" Lola would ask. 'Td like to do it in a Turkish bath, so try to reserve one just for the two of us. Unless youd like me to ask Carmen to join us…"

She knew how to excite me, to unsettle me, to push me toward dangerous new paths. Now I was obsessed with the idea of doing it in a Turkish bath. I didn't know Carmen, but apparently she was a divorcee who had not had sex for a year and was ready to do anything to end her long stretch of abstinence. Physically, she was very different from Lola, with big breasts and a small ass.

Carmen met me instead of Lola. She took my hand and led me back to her place. After Lola's less conventional tastes, I rediscovered the comfort of a large bed. She asked me a favor. "Let me smell you. It's been so long since I've smelled a man. Don't mind me; this is what I've missed." She stuck her nose in my armpits, breathing deeply, then rubbed her nose along the rest of my body, lingering a long time between my thighs. I let her do it. I was excited. She writhed in my arms like a wounded animal, holding me tightly. "I don't want to take Lola's place," she said, "but we're very good friends, and she gave me this as a present. This is the first time I've done anything like this. I was a faithful wife, but when my husband left me for our young housekeeper, I became depressed, and I didn't want to touch a man. I touch myself every evening, but nothing can replace a man's skin, his smell, his sweat, his breath, his caress, even if it's clumsy. You've made my friendship with Lola even stronger. I don't know whether two men would have done that out of friendship. I doubt it. Men are much more selfish, less courageous, and they never share anything. Thank you and good-bye. I have no intention of seeing you again. This was a just a deal I had with my friend. I'm going to find another man and live normally again."

These clandestine affairs restored the vigor and sexual appetite I had almost lost. I asked myself whether Married would have appreciated what Lola had done. He might have when we were younger, when we reveled in fantasy, when our illusions were still intact, and when our imaginations offered flights of escape.

Our friendship had become too serious. Mamed, who in the past had been such a joker, a master of wordplay, always ready to make us laugh, had definitely changed. After his mother died, he came back to Tangier often. He came alone and stayed with us, and he drank too much. He had become extremely sensitive, got angry easily, and continued to smoke cheap, disgusting cigarettes.

One evening, when Soraya was already asleep, Mamed started to cry. He blamed himself for having left Morocco, for having been away during his mother's illness. He started to confuse everything, drunk from all the whisky. Perhaps he was also suffering from depression. The next morning, he had no recollection of what had happened. He told me I had made the whole thing up to make him feel guilty, to destroy his mood. I said nothing.

During his stay, he learned that an apartment on the fifth floor of our building was for sale. He went to see it, and decided to buy it then and there. He called his wife, who was less than enthusiastic about owning a place in Tangier, but she ended up agreeing. The apartment belonged to Soraya's parents. They sold it to Mamed for below market price. They knew he was my best friend. Mamed went back to Sweden, asking me to take care of the interior decoration and the furniture. Soraya and I worked to get the apartment ready, sending Mamed photos of rooms as they were finished, along with fabric swatches for the sofas and the curtains.

The apartment would be finished by summer. I put up the money for the remodeling, which involved borrowing from my bank. Mamed did not know about this. I waited until several days after his arrival in Tangier to show him the bills. He coughed more and more these days, and his face had taken on a strange cast. His wife told me that Mamed had refused to stop smoking and drinking, despite the advice of a colleague, a professor of medicine who worked in the same hospital. When I presented Mamed with the bills for the work on the apartment, he pushed them away, indicating that this was not the right time.

Our two families spent the summer together, sharing every meal. One evening, I arrived late; dinner was waiting. Mamed shot me a reproachful look. Even my wife never looked at me in such a cold, suspicious way. After dinner, he suggested we take a short walk on the Avenue d'Espagne. There was something dark about him. Something had changed in the way he spoke and thought. "I've studied the bills you gave me. I even showed them to Ramon. What you've done is wrong. It's unworthy of our relationship. For a long time I've felt that something like this might happen. I wasn't sure you were capable of abusing my trust this way. Don't interrupt me. Let me say what's on my mind."

He paused, as if he were about to give up the idea of saying anything, and then he blurted out: "You took advantage of my being gone to cheat me. You did it as though I were some kind of idiot, probably telling yourself, 'He's far away, he's in Sweden. He's not even Moroccan anymore. He won't suspect anything. He'll swallow everything.' But I'm more Moroccan than you are. I'm suspicious of everything and everyone. Actually, in Sweden I learned that money is money, and there's no shame or hypocrisy in talking about it. It's not like our charming country: 'No, no, let me pay. I insist! Look, we're not going to be like Germans who split their restaurant bills.' No, in this country we're generous, hospitable. We'll even go into debt to avoid seeming poor. We sell our animals so we won't lose face in the village when it's time for a religious feast. Well, I'm not who you think I am. I've finally understood. Your friendship is worthless. You've always looked out for yourself. I've tried to tell you that friendship is not a series of profitable little calculations. But you and your wife and your in-laws had the nerve to sell me the apartment at thirty percent above the going rate, pretending to give me a good deal because we were friends. And you were an accomplice. You forgot to mention the commission you made on the deal."

Mamed stopped talking, then continued hammering away. "Don't interrupt me. Don't say anything. I know what you'll say, that in the name of Allah and the prophets you're an honest man, that you even lost money on the whole deal, that I should thank you for taking care of everything. Well, I let you do it as long as I thought you were my friend, not a traitor or a thief. No, let me finish. You can talk later. Wait until I've said my piece. Everything between us has been ruined. First it was your wife, bothering us with her jealous scenes. You were always complaining about them. You would even call me at the hospital when you knew I was making my rounds. You would leave a message. 'Please call your friend in Tangier.' And I did! I called you back. What an idiot!"

Mamed was out of breath, his eyes red. "It was only later that I realized how cheap you are, that nothing came out of your pocket without careful calculation. That brought me back to our childhood, our youth. When we first met, I protected you. I liked you because you seemed fragile. You never had any money on you. After school, you hung around so you could have an afternoon snack at my parents'. You claimed you liked the bread from the Spanish bakery better than your mother's, but you were really trying to save money. I knew you had a problem, but I told myself that one day you'd get over it, you'd be a decent guy, generous, unselfish. But you stayed the same, cheap and opportunistic. When it came to political commitment, you lied, too, skipping political meetings on the pretext that your mother was ill. You were never very brave. You always arranged things to appear to be someone you're not. People always knew they couldn't count on you! And now these bills!"

There was a brief pause in Mamed's monologue. "Those bills are all fake. Are you going to tell me that the carpet came from Ceuta, and the fabric for the sofas came from Gibraltar? Did you go there? No, you sent Ramon, the newly-converted good Samaritan. He did this little job for you, for me. I should thank him. But Ramon wasn't in Ceuta, and certainly not in Gibraltar. I've checked the prices, and they've all been upped by twenty to thirty percent. Yes, my dear friend, the one I used to play with, in whom I confided my romantic adventures, it turns out that all this childhood friend wanted was to make a couple of thousand dirhams behind my back. You thought, 'He's an easy target. He's a doctor, he has better things to do than check these bills.' But don't kid yourself. I listened to my wife, and we conducted a little investigation. What you've done is shameful. I guess you decided to reimburse yourself for the computer you bought me for my fortieth birthday. You said, 'Learn how to use a computer. It's amazing'. At the time, I thought it was an expensive present, but you had it all calculated in advance to cheat me.

"I was blind, refusing to listen to my intuition, or my wife's. I believed everything you said. To think we served time in prison together for our ideals, for the values we shared. You should never have gone to prison for your ideals, since they are totally insincere, a lot of hot air, a lot of talk, not serious at all. You're a phony. Don't try to defend yourself. To think I always wanted the best for you, that I put your interests above my own, above those of my wife and children. You were the friend, untouchable in my eyes, whom I preferred to my own brother. I was proud of you, especially when you rejected the easy life of bars, friends, prostitutes, and more bars. I thought you had settled down, that you never cheated on your wife. That's what I thought. Now I know not only that you betrayed my trust, but that you lead a double, maybe even a triple life here. Sure, you told me a little about that Spanish woman, but the others? Anyway, now I know about them, too. Rumors? Don't interrupt me. Here in Tangier, everyone knows everything. Nothing is secret. You can try to hide things, to take precautions, but in the end everyone finds out. You might say that your sexual transgressions are not my business; that's between you and your wife. But they're low and common. They've opened my eyes to all the rest of it.

"And the rest is huge. It stinks. The little tricks in order to spend the least money possible, to be two-faced. With you, there's always another way out, so you can work the situation to your advantage. But it's not really possible, my friend. You are careful with your health: you don't smoke, and you barely drink. Even sex is carefully calculated according to what you think your body can handle. Everything is measured. You don't get sick, so you don't have to pay a doctor. It works for you-you're in good health, which is not my case. I cough when I get out of bed, when I talk, when I go to bed, and even when I sleep. I drink a glass of whisky every night. I am killing myself slowly, methodically. But I'm happier than you are. No, leave me alone. Don't try to help me. It's fitting that I would be coughing during our moment of truth. I've emptied my lungs to tell you how much you disgust me, how much I regret these thirty years of illusions. Don't forget anything I said. Get away from me. Don't try to help me. My family and I are going to sleep somewhere else. This is a final good-bye. I never want to hear your voice again. I never want to hear anything more about you or your family. This is it, forever."