The Bottom of the Jar

by Abdellatif Laabi

  Abdellatif Laâbi

  The Bottom of the Jar

  Translated from the French by André Naffis-Sahely

  archipelago books

  Copyright © Editions Gallimard, Paris, 2002

  English language translation © André Naffis-Sahely, 2013

  First Archipelago Books Edition, 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  First published as Le fond de la jarre by Editions Gallimard in 2002.

  Archipelago Books

  232 3rd Street #A111

  Brooklyn, NY 11215

  www.archipelagobooks.org

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Laâbi, Abdellatif, 1942–

  [Fond de la jarre. English]

  The bottom of the jar / Abdellatif Laabi ;

  translated from the French by Andre Naffis-Sahely. –

  First Archipelago books edition.

  pages cm

  “First published as Le fond de la jarre by Gallimard in 2002”–

  Title page verso.

  eISBN 978-1-935744-61-0

  1. Families – Fiction. 2. Community life – Fiction. 3. City and town life – Fiction. 4. Fès (Morocco) – Fiction. I. Naffis-Sahely, André, translator. II. Title.

  PQ3989.2.L23F6613 2013

  843'.914–dc23 2012051041

  The publication of The Bottom of the Jar was made possible with support from Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

  Cet ouvrage, publié dans le cadre du programme d’aide à la publication, bénéficie du soutien du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères et du Service Culturel de l’Ambassade de France représenté aux Etats-Unis.

  This work received support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States through their publishing assistance program.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Epilogue

  End Notes

  The Bottom of the Jar

  1

  I WAS IN Fez when the fall of the Berlin Wall was announced. That morning, the family had come together at my father’s house, and the television was already on. But no one around me was interested in those historical images scrolling past on the screen.

  If Europeans are obsessed with background music, Moroccans have invented the background image, and without skimping on decibels either. In our home, clamor and din seemed to be inextricably mixed with our joy at coming together as a family.

  Oblivious to these events that were convulsing the world, our little tribe was focused on a far more pressing topic: the inexplicable and continuing absence of my older brother. Over the years, Si Mohammed had become a subject of controversy.

  He had wanted to be admired ever since he had come into this world. At seventeen, after a brilliant career as a student, he took a position in the civil service. Then he got mixed up with the colonial authorities. Here, ideas began to differ. After his nuptials and ill-starred wedding night, all sorts of trials ensued – a divorce, another marriage, more trouble with the authorities (this time with the newly independent Moroccan administration) – all of which were perceived as being the outward manifestations of an intemperate personality, against which one had to guard oneself. Whatever evils my brother endured, he paid in kind with an incredible indifference toward our family affairs.

  I should say that I was no stranger to the direction the conversation had taken. After the rosaries and jeremiads over issues of health, talk began to falter, when – the devil take me – I let slip the following question: “Any news of Si Mohammed?”

  My little niece, malicious and as cute as one could wish for, replied tit for tat by repeating the refrain of a then-fashionable song: “No letters or phone calls!”

  “You and your itchy tongue,” her mother reprimanded her. “One ought to rub your lips with paprika. Shut up when your elders are speaking, you little devil!”

  My sister Zhor, who was wisdom personified, breathed out a sorrowful sigh and served up one of her ditties: “What can one do? So goes the world.”

  My brother Abdel, usually quite reserved, got heated up and passed the following sentence: “His heart is dead!”

  “Come now, come now,” soothed my younger sister, Hayat. “He too has his problems. The poor thing, his health has abandoned him. And things are not well with his new wife. There is no peace in life.”

  Such self-indulgent talk didn’t please my sister-in-law, who possessed a remarkable vitality and was known for her clear-cut opinions.

  “Who doesn’t have any problems? Come on! It has been years since he’s come to visit Sidi,” which is what she called my father. “Even dogs don’t forget their parents.”

  My father, whose health and sight were failing, but not his hearing – let alone his conciliatory ways – let out a thin trickle of words: “Nobody wants to be feather-brained. May God endow him with wisdom and guide him onto the right path. I love every one of my children, and he is no exception.”

  The silence we kept so that my father’s blessing could enter our bodies, and which hovered above our heads like a protective cloud, allowed me to lift my eyes toward the wall where a portrait of Si Mohammed was hung. His face is as vivid now as it was forty years ago.

  In my mind, Si Mohammed was more or less exactly as the painter had depicted him. This painter, whose studio was deep in the heart of the Medina, never used models, preferring to work from a single photograph, usually that on the subject’s ID card. The greater care he put into correcting nature’s discrepancies, doing his subjects more justice than had otherwise been allotted to them, the more his art was appreciated. One could say that he had the foresight to realize plastic surgery could be achieved in more ways than one. In this way, Si Mohammed’s premature baldness was advantageously corrected. The few surviving stray hairs on his high forehead were replaced by a wavy tuft. Suddenly, his once prominent nose was chiseled down, refined. His bulging eyes were tucked neatly into their orbits. His lips seemed to grow more delicate. Only his chin had for some reason been reproduced with a degree of realism. All in all, the portrait managed to be both frumpish and alive. That’s what it takes for images to move up the incoherent ascent of time.

  I AM SEVEN years old, maybe eight. Fez. In the district called Spring of Horses, the house where I was born. An Egyptian. This is what we called the little houses that flanked the vast mansions of the wealthy. The houses each had their own independent entrances that were accessed via a ladder. This layout assured a certain sense of discretion fit for a bachelor’s pad, which the owners could either rent out to poorer families or else keep in their possession, where they could organize soirées where the devil would be far from being stoned.

  Ten of us would crowd into our Egyptian, and I believe I can say we were happy.

  Si Mohammed burst on the scene, an old illustrated Larousse in his hands. He would pace arrhythmically around the patio, reading out the definitions of words. “Avanie: to give offense, to humiliate. Avarie: of Arabi
c origins. Damage done to a ship or the goods being transported on it. Avatar: metamorphosis, transformation . . .”

  My recollections do not extend beyond the letter A. But I know that Si Mohammed had put it into his head to learn all of the difficult words in his dictionary by heart – and in alphabetical order. I was in awe.

  CROSS-FADE. Two years later. Si Mohammed has picked up his high-school diploma and has been awarded a medal by the Alliance Française for the high standard of his essays, where he’d let drop a quote from Marshal Lyautey’s book Paroles d’action. Haloed by scholastic distinctions, he passed his civil service examination and became an operating officer for the postal and telecommunications services. Following which he was posted to Tiznit, in the deep south of the country. This was the time of the “troubles” in Morocco. Resident-General Guillaume had threatened to make every Moroccan who opposed the protectorate eat straw – and a plot had been hatched to conspire against the sultan of the country, Mohammed ben Youssef, to overthrow him.

  The new grave. My mother had come back to the house. She had brought a bag of walnuts. Ecstatic, my sister Hayat and I rushed to find a hammer with which we could open the nuts, when a cry burst forth from my mother: “My son, my son, my son!”

  We turned around and, bewilderingly, my mother, who had not yet extricated herself from her djellaba, threw the bag of coveted nuts to the floor. Like a full handful of marbles, the nuts scattered across the patio. With this spectacle, my mother became more vociferous.

  “My son, my son, my son!”

  Indifferent to her cries, we had eyes for nothing but the nuts that continued to disperse; I threw myself to gather one that was rolling dangerously toward the ladder when a slap stopped me dead in my tracks.

  “That’ll teach you, you sinner!” said my mother. “Your soul is in your stomach. You can’t spare a thought for your older brother, who’s rotting away in a prison at the end of the world.”

  “What, what, what?” asked my sister Zhor, who emerged from the little storeroom that served as our kitchen, her stubby hands in the air, covered with the dough she had been kneading.

  Contemptuous of her question, my mother fell on a mattress, took her scarf from her head, and started to strike the floor with her fists, uttering a mantra that gave me goose bumps:

  My son, my son, my son

  My little angel

  Lost in the forgotten corners of the planet

  Thrown down a bottomless well

  In cold and nakedness

  By the enemies of God

  My son, my little angel

  Apple of my eye

  And no one can hear you

  No one can come to your aid

  In the desert and desolation

  But God is everywhere

  Who sees the black ant

  In the blackest night

  God is generous

  And takes no pity on miscreants

  Be damned, Nazarenes

  Sons of dogs

  Drinkers of alcohol

  Eaters of pork

  And of frogs

  And long live the King

  And Allal al-Fassi!

  The house had meanwhile filled with a crowd as women and children had one by one come from neighboring terraces, having learned of the situation either from the cries or from the news bulletin issued by Radio Medina, a highly efficient mouth-to-ear station, completely independent of electromagnetic waves.

  Instead of comforting my mother, who had begun to beat her thighs and tear at her cheeks, the neighborhood gossips threw fuel on the fire.

  “Yes, Lalla,” said one of them, “the Nazarenes have become Pharaohs. No pity or mercy.”

  “May the black typhus obliterate them and cast them into hell,” added another.

  “May their children be cursed,” said a third.

  “Poor Si Mohammed,” continued a fourth, who was more conservative, or at least less of a nationalist. “He didn’t deserve this fate.”

  “A fawn,” concluded a fifth, “and so gentle. Incapable of upsetting a hen incubating her eggs.”

  Was I insensitive, or oblivious, or simply overpowered by the strength of my own gluttony natural to that age when sweets are in view? The fact remains, I took advantage of the situation to gather those walnuts with care and put them back in their place, after having subtracted two of them by slipping them into my pocket.

  At that moment we heard knocking on the door. It was my father’s apprentice who had been sent as a messenger. He emerged breathless at the top of the ladder and, mustering up a virile tone, addressed the female crowd: “Make way! The men have arrived.”

  The busybodies, dragging their brats away, headed for the ladder that led to the terrace. My mother, having magically recovered from her outburst, replaced her scarf around her head and took refuge in the children’s room.

  “Ahem!” was heard at the foot of the ladder. “Has everyone gone?”

  I recognized my father’s voice. He soon appeared, followed by my uncle and an assembly of artisans, members of the guild of saddlers. Also present were the barber-circumciser and the master tanner, a strong-arm man, fireman, and the occasional removal man.

  The discussion had already begun. My uncle, who was very much listened to because he was the eldest, had attended my brother’s preliminary hearing.

  “How did you find out?” my father asked him.

  “It was the policeman from the Nejjarine precinct who came to tell me. That one there, God keep us from him, only delivers bad news.”

  “And Si Mohammed, what did he do exactly?”

  “You know he’s a firebrand. How many times did we warn him? He was at the counter at the post office and got into an argument with a French lieutenant. The guy insulted him and the boy found no better solution than to punch him in the face.”

  “And then?”

  “After that, Si Mohammed took off. He went to the palace of the sultan’s caliph in Tiznit and asked for sanctuary. They shut the door in his face and the gendarmes came to arrest him. They beat him and threw him in jail. Something stinks here,” my uncle surmised.

  “It really stinks,” echoed the master tanner.

  “What to do?” asked the barber-circumciser. “One does not joke with the makhzan.”

  “The makhzan has nothing to do with it. We will have to make recourse to the protectorate’s authorities. These are matters that can only be fixed at the highest of levels, at the resident-general.”

  My father, taken aback by this analysis, replied submissively, “Whatever you say we will do.”

  The plan of action was thus decided. My uncle laid out the groundwork by recalling a few aphorisms: “Lust is an epidemic. Wax a piece of thread and it will pass better. If you hate, pretend to love. You must kiss the hand that you cannot cut off.” Then, returning to more mundane matters, he proposed: “The Nazarenes are like everyone else. Greed leaves them defenseless. This is what we will do. Tomorrow I will make all the necessary inquiries. In the meantime, you go to the Kissarya souk and buy two golden belts. We’ll offer the first of these to the local military commander. The second must be of a higher caliber: We’ll go to Rabat and present it to the wife of the resident-general. And God will come to our aid.”

  “God will come to our aid,” the assembly said as one.

  “And now, the Fatiha,” my uncle concluded.

  Everyone present opened their palms and struck up a chorus: “In the name of God, the Beneficent, the Merciful. . . . It is You whom we worship and You whom we implore to help us. Direct us onto the right path: the path of those on whom You have bestowed Your grace, not that of those who have earned Your wrath, nor that of those who have lost their way.”

  “Amen!”

  “Amen!”

  THE AFFAIR WAS thus put right along the lines envisioned by my uncle. The local military commander had “eaten” and facilitated a meeting with the resident-general, who had then “eaten” in his turn. Two weeks later, Si Mohammed was not on
ly freed but also transferred to Fez, and more specifically to the post office in Batha Square, the most spruced-up one in town. There was, however, a flip side to the story. In order to buy the golden belts, my father, a modest artisan, had to sell the few trinkets of value my mother possessed and dip into my sister Zhor’s dowry – who, barely of marriageable age, had already been promised. Above all, he had to borrow the largest part of the sum from one of the more well-off members of his guild, who left him no other choice but to reimburse in kind with his labor. He had to slave away for this man for an entire year, without of course neglecting his ordinary duties.

  Driss, which was my father’s name, was a saint. It took me some time to understand this.

  THE PORTRAIT OF Si Mohammed again took its place on the wall. And by looking at it with eyes that had revisited the past, I rediscovered him with a half smile. Under the portrait, my father had fallen asleep. The conversation hadn’t stopped. I heard snatches of the conversation. Other images of Berlin in celebration continued to scroll by on the screen. But I had stalled. The sound and fury of the world was now receding and was slowly being put out. Another screen was superimposed on that of the cathode tube. The hand of the one who watches over the genesis of narratives has stripped away all colors. What follows will as a consequence be in black and white.

  2

  BEFORE SI MOHAMMED’s return from Tiznit, my mother had decided the time had come for him to fulfill his religious duties and become acquainted with marriage. For this woman, who was far from bigoted, this pious concern was an analysis that was not devoid of its psychological merits. Getting married, and taking up the responsibilities that came with it, was sure to act as a positive sort of therapy, calming the jinn that had taken hold of her mind, obsessed as it was with the thought of children. On the matter of jinn, she had moreover taken the initiative. A faqih1 from the mellah,2 who was renowned for his abilities, notably that of freezing water inside bottles, had furnished my mother with the appropriate amulet.

  “With this amulet,” he explained, “the evil spirits can either play hopscotch, play the fool, or else go packing. It’s an expensive piece of metallurgy, a viper-eating wild cat, a seven-bladed sword. May it never leave your son’s neck, not even in the hammam. Go now, Lalla, you won’t regret it.”