The Hospital

by Ahmed Bouanani

  “Oh man did we have a good time! Think about it, a barely healed vagina perfumed with Lancôme for God’s sake — and that’s not even the half of it! The husband was shaking all over, he was begging, groveling on his hands and knees. ‘Take my wallet,’ he moaned, ‘take all my money, I’ll give it to you, and here, take my bracelet chain and my watch, they’re both solid silver! But don’t touch my wife, please!’ Idiot! Worthless pimp! He thought we only wanted at his bitch. Here, in this neighborhood, we don’t quibble over details. A hole’s a hole! So while a few of the guys were tearing off his pants, me and the others were fucking his unconscious wife. It felt like penetrating a fresh cadaver, a warm, quivering cadaver like a doll in a store window, and believe me, there’s a lot more pleasure to be had, way more, in manipulating an inert and limp body just as you please — you take advantage of all the holes without having to ask permission. By the end I was going at it so hard my knees were covered in blood . . .”

  The gang laughed. Hyenas. I stayed alone on the path. Guzzler and his followers disappeared. I found them later on in the bathroom, they were masturbating their hearts out, no doubt imagining the unconscious woman.

  A little before dinner, which was always served at 5:00 p.m., I smoked a cigarette with Rover. By way of preamble, he loudly blew his nose before telling me not to pay any attention to Guzzler’s stupid boasting.

  “Every year he tells the same story with one or two extra details. Who the hell ever told him about Lancôme perfume?!”

  “He comes back to the hospital every year?”

  “Like everyone, like all of us. Hmm, every year, every three months, what’s the difference? In a way, the hospital has become our home. Once you’re healed, you’ll leave, but us? Come on. Where will we go?”

  He pauses to take a puff on his cigarette, spits out a bit of tobacco, and asks: “You’re not mad at me anymore?”

  “Huh? Why?”

  “But I don’t see what the harm is. Once you’re dead, a penis isn’t good for anything, even less so when it belongs to a septuagenarian who hasn’t gotten a hard-on since the Protectorate!”

  Before I can figure out that he’s alluding to the dead old man, he moves on: “I had a grandfather who looked like him. He wasn’t really my grandfather — I called him that to make him happy but also out of habit. People would respectfully call him ‘Al-Haj’ even though he never set foot in the Kaaba. His memories stretched all the way back to the end of the last century, and he would soliloquize about the reign of Sultan Moulay Hassan I as confidently as he did about the conquest of the moon.”

  Rover speaks with a verbose eloquence that I find more and more surprising. The words tumble out of his mouth so fast that it would have been hard for anyone to interrupt. He fills the silence to avoid feeling the passage of time. Aside from another sleeping patient, we’re alone in the room; the others are outside, taking advantage of the sun. I’m in my bed, Rover is at my side like a visitor come to notify me that time no longer exists, evoking the memory of someone from another era: the owner of a Moorish bathhouse who used to sponsor various businesses, marriages, circumcisions, divorces, and reconciliations, nothing happened or didn’t happen without his presence, without his permission. He sat on his throne in the changing room of his bathhouse, which transformed by turn into a dating or real estate agency, neighborhood courtroom, charity, and forum for varied debates.

  Rover relights his extinguished cigarette. I hear myself ask if the Al-Haj of the bathhouse is still alive.

  “He’s the kind of man who doesn’t die easily,” responds Rover. “He’s probably still alive, if being shut up in a mental asylum can be considered living. Do you think that it’s possible to lose it, just like that, from one day to the next, to have your brain functions fall apart like a car whose spark plugs, cylinder head gasket, and radiator all give way with no warning?”

  Rover, once again, stops talking. He stares at the ground, transfixed. You could say that a spring, stretched as far as it can go, had snapped. Later, I’ll understand that the medications provoke not only this secondary state between vertigo and nausea, but also his memory lapses. Rover continues his story, as if there’d been no interruption. He tells me for the second time that Al-Haj was the owner of a Moorish bathhouse, that’s why he knew everyone and everything — even the most insignificant events. Seated on a prayer rug in the changing room where his clients liked to linger and gossip, Al-Haj looked exactly like a Baghdad caliph in the middle of his harem, the air laden with hints of sweat, armpits, and scrubbed flesh, rather than with perfumes of the Orient. As soon as he started speaking, everyone shut up. His voice reverberated. When he chose to ignore his clientele, he would take a pipe out of a small box and carefully stuff it with hashish. He then surrounded himself with an opaque cloud, and no one dared disturb him. Some suspected him of being involved in smuggling, some even accused him of owning hashish plantations in the North, in Ketama and Targuist . . . “At the same time, anything is possible,” Rover adds with a smile. “Our neighborhood barber is a police snitch, honest to God! Hoummane, the taxi driver, is in reality an inspector for the general intelligence services, so yeah, they say the old man was knee-deep in questionable dealings, but what could be more normal in a rotten world where we’re all so suspicious that one day we’ll end up betraying our own children?”

  whether we’re hungry or not, the last meal of the day is hastily served at 5 p.m., one hour before the nurses leave. The patients in each wing set the large tables themselves, in a clamor of chairs being unceremoniously moved onto the veranda tiles. Rover flicks away his cigarette butt and tells me we should go eat. He adds as he rises: “The first are always the best served.” I’d barely gotten out of bed and he was already gone. Nothing in the world could have turned him away from the table, he was always among the first to volunteer and after checking the menu he would help hand out plates, forks, knives, and glasses. In the beginning, he used to tell me: “Follow my lead, I manage to convince myself that I haven’t eaten since the day I was born! It’s close to the truth, I’ve gone hungry for so long that that my stomach has gotten used to digesting just about anything.” On other days, with minor variations, he would say: “I know people who have eaten shit — for real — and they didn’t die from it, so you shouldn’t turn your nose up my friend, you aren’t at your house or your parents’ house anymore, and if you don’t want to die with your mouth open, eat! So come on, let’s eat some shit, and then some more shit — after all, even the most sumptuous, the most refined, the most delicate food ends up as shit, right?” Little by little, after defeating the knot in my stomach that was preventing me from swallowing anything at all, I had acquired almost robotic reflexes. I would stuff the food down blindly, thinking about other things — a distant wedding, dream-like tagines — anything that had the power to yank me out of my chair and transport me far, far away from the foul banquet. In truth, it was fear that overcame my reluctance. “It’s the beginning of the end” is what they always said when a patient could no longer leave his bed. I would see the frightening pity in my companions’ eyes, deference for someone already possessed by death, who will waste little time in showing that his place is no longer among the living. Yet that day, I didn’t have to rely on my imagination. I was thinking about Rover’s story. I was among the small group gathered near the doors to the Moorish baths. It was dawn, the mist hadn’t yet dissipated, the first birds were bursting into morning song. Everyone’s patience gradually gave way to exasperation, then concern, because Al-Haj was always the first to wake in Salé. “The rest of us, to make the time pass,” Rover said, “told ourselves that the old patriarch barely had time to go from one warm body to another — and there were three of them! — before the voice of the jealous muezzin would remind him of his Muslim duties.” Nothing in this neighborhood went unnoticed. Soon curious passersby, neighbors, and gawkers with their habitual purchases of beignets and tufts of fresh mint joined the
small group of people who had come to take their weekly bath or purify themselves after a night of matrimonial lovemaking. A tall, muscular guy, moving away from the crowd, began to call toward the closed windows on the second floor — the old man and his family lived above the baths — but his powerful voice had no effect. “We should call the police!” someone suggested. “Since when do the police take care of us?” came the terse retort. The door to the house wasn’t locked. A young baker, accustomed to entering everyone’s homes, walked upstairs. He reappeared a minute later, looking confused, and told the crowd that there was nobody on the upper floor. “It’s empty, as if the tenants had moved out during the night,” explained Rover. “But, in Salé, nobody can move out without the whole town knowing about it, especially when it’s not just any old family! Once alerted, the police turned up immediately and didn’t waste any time — they smashed open the heavy door to the Moorish bathhouse . . .” This was the part of the story where Rover had stopped and disappeared. He had already greedily started into his ration of rice and fish when I sat down next to him. Guzzler and his gang were making an infernal racket, drumming on their plates with knives and forks. The same scene — or nearly — played out every day with the Machiavellian goal of stopping the “timid souls” from eating in order to hog their rations. Guzzler would impose silence around him, declining the honor of making a special speech (“Not today, fellows, inspiration has left the building through the toilets, it went down the drain with a ton of wormy diarrhea mixed with a couple pounds of solid suppositories ill-digested by our poor intestines”) and propose — for a change — a riddle. (“The happy winner will enjoy a free special dessert composed of a scoop of seasonal fruit and fresh cream seasoned with yellowing pus, turds, gangrenous bedsores, expectorations, and frothy syphilitic sperm!”) It goes without saying that, in the beginning, my appetite, seriously tested, would leave me at a gallop. And Rover, between two mouthfuls: “Make do with a glass of water, good idea, and when you’re reduced to a corpse-like state, it will be our pleasure to bring you to the morgue accompanied by flutes and tambourines!” All that was in a distant past, when another version of myself would watch as his pride was washed away every day, another version of myself completely foreign to the man who, chewing on cold fish and rice, now managed to maintain the same rhythm as Rover while Guzzler loudly asked: “Do you know why the Slaouis lose their minds after four o’clock in the afternoon?”

  Bursts of laughter everywhere.

  “Well, I’ll tell you.”

  The owner of the food stand interrupted, the one who hunted cats, and since he hardly ever talked during meals, his voice shut the whole room up: “Well, we don’t give a fuck!”

  “Who doesn’t give a fuck?” Guzzler stuck out his chest, but his confidence had already been whittled down.

  “Me to start with. And I’m laughing my ass off ahead of time because I eat losers like you by for breakfast. By the dozen. Furthermore, wise guy, I’ll ask you another question: while we, the Slaouis, are fornicating with your mother, what are you doing, exactly, at four o’clock in the afternoon?”

  Unexpectedly, Guzzler didn’t react. The members of his gang stopped laughing. One of them added, in a conciliatory tone: “Uncle Ali, we’re just having fun, we’re not hurting anyone.”

  “I’m not your uncle and I don’t like your idea of fun.”

  The final moments of the day passed by quickly. All the electrified air was diluted in the dying light. The boredom, the intolerable idleness — and with it, the desire to yell or laugh for no reason — all of it disappeared, the hospital transformed into a serene ghetto: the patients prepared their tea themselves, others went to the common room to watch television or play cards, and others walked in small groups under the trees, smoking cigarettes or looking at the sky. Rover was seated on the last step of the stairs leading to the veranda, peeling an orange.

  “What did they find inside?” I asked him.

  “Inside what?”

  “The Moorish bathhouse.”

  He tossed the peel far away. After a while, he remembered, he remembered the old patriarch, a Moorish bathhouse buried in his childhood past, and a gray dawn when the police burst into the back room, next to a basin of boiling water in front of which stood Al-Haj, naked, face haggard, covered with blood.

  Rover, staring at me with an almost absent look, swallowed a wedge of his orange, savoring it as if it were a madeleine. It was pointless to ask him to finish the story. I was preparing to return to my bed when he said, in a low voice, as if the memory was still fresh: “The entire family, all of them. With an axe. His three wives, the children, and the maid who had served them for years. Their mutilated bodies were marinating in the basin of boiling water.”

  until now I haven’t had the chance to describe the hospital. I told myself that I would have plenty of time, it’s not a place you figure out at first glance. To trace its outlines with even the broadest strokes, I would need to find out what lies beyond the trees, beyond our wing; the wings themselves (how many are there?) loom in a space that seems more indefinite and intangible to me with each passing day — space itself is being distorted in my mind because my eyes no longer perceive it in the same way. The iron gate at the main entrance was once visible at the end of the central path, between rows of ancient oaks. Now, I sometimes find myself searching for the gate from whatever spot I find myself in, as if the distance had secretly expanded during the night. Rover, who’s been here so long that he’s incapable of providing an exact date, only knows Wings A and B, which neighbor our own. The idea of going off to explore never occurred to him. “What’s the point? There are patients everywhere, they all look the same, they all hope to one day recover and rejoin their loved ones beyond these damned high walls, but there it is, death is at the end of every road, ready to gobble us up like common flies!” Without knowing why, I convinced myself that the hospital is a trompe l’oeil, and this strange and inexplicable impression, born of a nightmare or a delirium, has yet to leave me. But whenever it becomes stubborn and intolerable in its absurdity, I chase the idea away with a torrent of logic: “So, what? Instead of healing your sad little rotting body, you’re gonna abandon ship?! One of these days, you’ll wake up with your brain turned completely upside down — goodbye and good night everyone, you’ll go keep the jackals company, alongside the cannibals and all the other miserable devils slobbering, begging, and screaming like damned, enslaved men beaten down with clubs!”

  “Okay, okay,” I tell myself, “better to die on the spot than lose it little by little, but come on — this garden?”

  “What garden?”

  “All this vegetation around us! A caprice of a mad gardener, untroubled by aesthetics or harmony, who, on a whim of his imagination, assembled a collection of plants that have absolutely nothing in common! Look around, we’re not just talking oaks, pines, palms, or harmless poplars. There’s also calabash, rubber, sumac, jackfruit, manchineel, sequoia, and baobab trees, and God knows what else! Not to mention the thousands of exotic flowers that have no business in a hospital. And what’s even more incredible — or don’t you hear them at night? — are the countless birds everywhere, their beating wings rattling the air above our heads. And ever since (but since when?) my ears stopped capturing anything but silence, a vague buzzing of insects. Apparently streptomycin turns you deaf in the end.”

  “Well, better deaf than dead!”

  Try as I might to concentrate, all I can hear is the faraway murmur of a town, now hostile and indifferent, and the farther still murmur of an ocean, whose heady fragrance at high tide reaches all the way to Wing C. “Today, the waves are tossing back their algae,” announces Guzzler as he smells the air. “The beach is a dumping ground full of dead starfish, shells, sometimes jellyfish, I bet there’ll even be a beautiful drowned body on the sand tonight!” What an odd fellow, I think. When Guzzler’s not with his gang, he’s a fragile, pitiful teenager, a poor ki
d who’s never, I’m sure of it, experienced, except in his imagination, any exploits in the no man’s land near the city slums. He leans against one of the veranda walls, spits with force and spite. “Guys like us don’t get better! No way, guys like us do not get better. They resuscitate our small, miserable spark of life just enough that people don’t quite mistake us for human beings. They tell us, hey, see you next time, and we go back to our daily bullshit, we try to return to the thick of things, we slip, we fall flat on our faces on the sidewalk, it’s always too late to start living, always . . .” I stand up. I feel like walking. Guzzler asks me for a cigarette. “You’re right to leave,” he tells me. “When I’m depressed, I’m contagious.” I hand him my pack of Casa Sport Olympics, he looks at it, disappointed, and scowls: “No thanks, I’m allergic to crappy smokes.” He rolls downs one of his socks, takes out a pack of Marlboros. He looks at me and starts to chuckle for no reason. “Do you know why I’m laughing?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a completely idiotic memory. One time this quack came to our neighborhood to sell some pills, which, according to him, could heal every ailment, especially impotence. A single pill, he used to say, could give a dead man a hard-on for twenty-four hours, and he’d flex his arm up to his elbow. Once, we pushed him into a corner and forced him to swallow every one of his pills. He must be pissing blood to this day!” Then he adds as he lights his cigarette: “We should stuff all these bullshit shots up the doctor’s ass, we’ll see if he can walk after that!” I move away. Vertigo takes me. I shouldn’t stay in the sun. I backtrack. Guzzler is sniffing something blackish wrapped in a piece of paper.