The Hospital

by Ahmed Bouanani

  I congratulate him like an idiot.

  “It’s nothing. They granted me one day to attend my mother’s funeral.”

  No trace of sadness or grief in his eyes. He’s watching curls of smoke rise from his cigarette.

  “You’re surprised that I don’t look upset?” — I remain silent because I can’t find anything to say — “I cried a long time ago when I was six or seven years old. Back then, my old man was drinking himself to death. The last time, he didn’t get a chance to sober up. A truck ran him over. My mother didn’t even respect the obligatory forty-day mourning period . . .”

  As he talks, I remember the dream where he crumbled like dried clay.

  “You’re not pulling my leg, I hope?”

  He shakes his head no, several times.

  “Swear on the Quran,” I insist.

  “A pile of Qurans won’t bring her back this time. I admit, on a few occasions I’ve killed an imaginary aunt, an uncle, and my mother once or twice, just to get out of here. But today, I had nothing to do with it . . .”

  “How did you find out?”

  “From a nurse who lives in our neighborhood.”

  He stands up, makes as if to leave, doubles back, and asks me if I need anything from town.

  I suddenly realize that I no longer need anything at all from the outside world.

  He lifts the wet newspaper above his head. In the doorway, he turns back toward me.

  “She really is dead and I don’t feel anything. I buried the woman who was my mother on the day she remarried. An old friend of my dad’s was the one who took care of me when I got sick. I haven’t seen her since.”

  He disappears behind the curtain of rain.

  it rained all day long barring a few brief moments of sunshine, respites when the daylight became glaring, so bright and colorless that it was almost blinding. In the far distance, a muffled ambulance siren rose into a metallic sky before being diluted by the echoes in a vast silence that accentuated, in periodic waves, the ephemeral signs of urban life, the intermingling of passing cars, beeping horns, crying children, and roosters crowing well after the day’s first call to prayer. So, I told myself, somewhere there still exists a city with bistros, with crowded boulevards, with inhabitants obstinately playing the lotto or betting on horses. Nervous laughter drew me back to the room; someone with a falsetto voice asked if it was winter or spring, to which someone else responded, from the other side of the room: “Don’t worry about it, kid, we’ll send you a telegram!” Then, in the commotion that followed, another voice answered in all seriousness: “There’s only a few days left before Ramadan.”

  “So, my good man, would you like us to start preparing you a nice little soup?!”

  “Oh yeah! Would you like chicken giblets or maybe . . . ?”

  “Patience, gentlemen, the cook’s not back from the market yet.”

  “Hey, guys, joking aside, it’s already past noon.”

  There were volunteers that day — Guzzler, some members of his gang, and the Arabic teacher-lookalike — who jumped out of their beds, perked up all of a sudden. The idea of fasting at lunchtime didn’t appeal to them. After trading insults about the hospital treasurer — “corpse eater, orphan robber, no-good scavenger of the people” — the group set out on a mission. The table was set on the veranda with uncustomary enthusiasm, a joyful celebration in response to the morning’s lethargy, a general feeling of abandon and of being forgotten during an unusually violent storm, which had transformed the wing into a small island full of shipwrecks within a hospital outside of time. They whistled, they sang, they coughed, they joked, they helped a few of the elderly patients stand up, wrapping them in dark coats, they told the others not to move: “You’ll be served like at a hotel!”

  It was incredible. Not so long ago an atmosphere of despair and degradation had reigned, where I saw nothing around me but sick, motionless men huddled up in the cold, doomed to misery and a niggling death; but now I too felt myself come alive as if I were in a village of trappers and miners, on the summit of an Oregon mountain transplanted to the High Atlas, populated by Berbers and penned in by a rude winter. Instinctively, survival became organized. Some of the residents — the ones from the country — promised to collect wood and light a bonfire. Add violins and tambourines to the mix and the illusion of a lively celebration would have been complete. Even the storm obliged, diminishing in intensity. It was during a tolerable drizzle that Guzzler and his companions reappeared with a large cooking pot and place settings; the teacher-lookalike carried a breadbasket protected under a plastic tablecloth. They were welcomed by heartfelt applause and cheering, in honor of the courageous explorers who had braved the bad weather and defied the hospital staff’s indifference. I barely ate. Guzzler emptied my plate onto his own. “You got dinner reservations tonight?” His mouth full, he laughed and jeered. Someone was soliloquizing about the benefits of the rain — it was the man who had been talking about Ramadan, a tall, thin guy with a dubious-looking turban knotted around his watermelon-shaped head. Guzzler, annoyed, turned toward him.

  “Fine, Grandpa, the rain may be a blessing from God, but explain to me why fruits and vegetables are getting more and more expensive!”

  “Maybe because now they’re imported from faraway in America!” hammed up one patient, prompting his neighbor to raise his voice to the same level.

  “Well, I think it’s the rain’s fault! It falls where it shouldn’t, here for example, solely to bug the hell out of us.”

  “Thanks be to God and be careful about insulting the rain!”

  Across from me, the food-stand owner lifted his head. He pushed his empty plate aside and said in a categorical tone, without addressing anyone in particular, that it was a question of politics.

  “Which politics?” asked Guzzler without looking at him. “Now potatoes and fava beans are political?”

  “Political or not,” interjected a guy from Wing A, “I haven’t had a banana or apricot in so long that I’ve forgotten how they taste!”

  Everyone around the table lost it, gesticulating, sputtering, lips rolled back from their toothless mouths, eyes yellow and gleaming, Adam’s apples twitching in their frenzied throats, furiously evoking the fruits of their childhoods: cherries, raspberries, peaches, mangoes, Muscat grapes, apples, pears, plums, currants, pineapples . . .

  “What the hell do you know about pineapples? You’ve never even eaten one!”

  “Exactly! That’s why I mentioned it.”

  “There’s nothing but pumpkins where you come from!”

  “Better a pumpkin than esparto grass!”

  “Even prickly pears, which used to be free, are sold like pastries now — one at a time!”

  A high voice rang out above the fray. Guzzler leaned toward me to murmur that “the Brother” was going to deliver his sermon reserved for special occasions.

  “Why do you call him the Brother?”

  “Because he’s always got his nose stuck in some journal from the Middle East, but don’t kid yourself, he reads Arabic about as well as I read Chinese.”

  I listened to the sermon for a moment. If the Brother was to be believed as he thundered before this tribe of pagans, we should have been thanking God every second of every day and night, for each breath, each burp, each fart.

  “Hold on, Brother!” Guzzler interrupted abruptly. “Turn down your dial a little, you’re keeping me from digesting in peace.”

  The tall, bearded guy shot him a look charged with at least two hundred volts, followed by a diatribe that covered, haphazardly, Sodom and Gomorrah, the lost people of Lot, and the Second World War when Europeans fed themselves on maggots and rats, “because they lost the faith a long time ago and they’re doomed to the eternal flames of Gehenna!” This prompted Guzzler to cry out like a damned man: “Here’s to hell then!” As everyone shouted themselves hoarse, laughin
g until they cried, and after the Brother cursed us all before slipping out, Guzzler said, looking to me for support: “Well shit! Ever since we first set eyes on this world, without even enough time to cut the umbilical cord, they’ve been drumming all the worst calamities into us, day and night. Don’t do this, Mohamed! Don’t do that, Mohamed! Not in public! Get on your knees and pray, even if it means cracking your spine. Enough! Fuck it. Somebody bring me a barrel of wine, some sliced meat and cheese, and a glass of mahia liquor on the double! There’s only one hell, the true one, and it’s where we spend all our days — here. It’s right here!”

  “May God bless the hell where we spend all our days — here!” chanted the members of his gang in unison, pounding their fists on the table; others kept the beat with knives and forks, and the rest, leaning their chairs against the wall, danced to exhaustion. A clap of thunder suddenly rang out, then a downpour fell from the sky, drenching the revelers on the veranda, who scattered like a herd of bison. A few seconds later, nothing remained of the celebration: the rain pounded down on the large table strewn with litter and breadcrumbs, which were dispersed pitifully across the tiles by pellets of water. Around four o’clock, I took advantage of a lull and rejoined Guzzler and his gang in one of the bedrooms. Fartface, kneeling on his bed like an officiant, was singing the final verses of El Marikane, playing along with his lute.

  During every chorus, he lifted up his chin — with its thin, salt-and-pepper goatee — and everyone repeated in unison: “zee Americans,” placing heavy emphasis on the “z.” Tea was handed out around the circle. Fartface delicately placed his lute against the wall and demanded a cigarette, which was immediately handed to him, already lit. He took one, two long drags, which he exhaled through his nostrils, then said, as if he was continuing a speech that had been interrupted: “Last night I thought that was it. I was stretched out as stiff as a board, I was even cursing myself for having forgotten the candles, yeah, I know, it’s hard to believe but I’m attached to the candles, you can’t deny there’s a certain panache to a dead body surrounded by flames. Then I recited the profession of faith — one, two, three, four, five times, you never know — and I closed my eyes, and I waited. After a while, I glanced at my watch, then closed my eyes again, and waited, on and on.”

  “And he came?” asked Guzzler, flopped on the ground.

  “Things like this only ever happen to me! So I’m waiting to meet the Big Boss, happily imagining the scene here, when you all discover my lifeless body and tear at the skin on your faces, sobbing like grieving mothers-in-law, and that’s when I hear a rumbling, then something like toads croaking in a pond; I lift up my head one more time, wondering if the storm didn’t leave some of the nasty creatures near the veranda. But I had to face the facts, it was my insides gurgling like crappily assembled pipework. Worse! Me, who had taken the trouble to perform the necessary ablutions, well, I couldn’t hold it back any longer, a fart as big as a juicy melon rang out, followed by a shit I could barely restrain. I ran to the toilet like a maniac and nearly fell flat on my back in the dark — and there you have it! Something like this had to happen to me, of all people: while waiting in a religious fervor, what falls into my lap but raging diarrhea! So now I’m asking you, my friends, my only brothers in this lowly world, what do I have to do?”

  “Eat lots of rice,” said a young teenager we had christened Argan because he was originally from Sous.

  “Asshole!” replied Fartface. “I’m not talking about my diarrhea. When I need a remedy I’ll ask you for one.”

  Someone asked, credulously, if angels were like civil servants.

  “What’s your point?” said Fartface. “Everyone knows angels are the civil servants of heaven.”

  “And death, isn’t he an angel sent from heaven too?”

  “What are you getting at, runt?”

  “I’m getting at this: you performed your ablutions, your nightly prayer, you recited the profession of faith, but you forgot the most important part.”

  “And what, according to you, is the most important part? The rest of you shut the hell up, let the runt answer.”

  And the runt said: “You forgot to bribe him.”

  Fartface, caught off guard, finally burst into laughter, so loud, so deep, so contagious, that no one could resist the desire to roll on the floor laughing, too. Guzzler, in tears, legs in the air, was kicking like a mule whose ass had been rubbed with Sudanese hot peppers. A second later, everybody was drying their eyes, hiccuping, breathing noisily like punctured bellows.

  Fartface, very serious, asked: “And how much should I give him, in your opinion?”

  “Twenty francs!”

  “Fifty!”

  “A hundred!”

  “A thousand!”

  “More,” said Guzzler, even more serious. “In my opinion, he won’t accept less than one million, given the subject isn’t worth anything.”

  “And where am I supposed to dig up that kind of money, huh?” — Fartface pretended to look sad — “It’s not by chance that I got stuck with this nickname. First off, my birth was tainted by the seal of catastrophe: food shortages, epidemics, rationing, Hitler . . .”

  “Ha! Now you want us to believe that you were born during the Second World War?”

  “Him?! He’s old as dirt!”

  “Come to think of it, how old are you?”

  “Yeah, really, how old are you?”

  Fartface turned toward me. “Hey, Smart-Ass! I get a kick out of you writing a book about us, but be careful, not a word about what I said earlier, and whatever you do, don’t mention my diarrhea, it won’t leave a good impression, and come on, what will future generations think of a guy like me, huh? Okay?”

  there’d never been so many seagulls in the sky. Hundreds, maybe a thousand, judging by the noise that filled the space stretching from one end of the horizon to the other. No one inside or out seemed surprised, impressed, or even worried about the incredible gathering of seagulls swarming so close to us, above the hospital, beyond the tall oaks and poplars. After multiple attempts to focus on at least a few of the particular birds that had strayed from the dense group to cross a piece of sky within my sight, I was forced to give up; on two occasions I had lost my balance on the muddy ground and nearly fallen flat on my face in the high grass that concealed treacherous puddles of rainwater. Once safely underneath my blankets, I closed my eyes and blindly tallied thousands of palmipeds as white as sea spray as they whirled above the tall silvery waves pounding the coastal roads, reaching as far as the cracked walls of the nearest houses; from the birds’ fierce cries, I imagined two of them battling up there in the sky, snapping at each other like hens; no doubt a skua on the attack, I thought, forcing another gull to cough up a recently-caught fish . . . “I bet there’ll even be a beautiful drowned body on the sand tonight!” Guzzler had said. What I saw was my own corpse, a younger one, from the old photographs no longer good for anything, not even to make me fleetingly relive the old terror of nights filtered through candles lit along back alleys to exorcise the “sea spirits,” to defend our piss-filled beds from the woman with long black hair capable of metamorphosing into someone you loved, living or dead, to lure you into her devilish traps. This time, the vision only lasted for the bat of an eyelash. Opening my eyes, all I saw were men as miserable as me, stretched out in clammy beds, clinging to their own childhoods or coughing, spitting, and moaning in a silence that wasn’t my own, a cavernous silence, out of the reach of the battles waged by my warlike seagulls as they used their beaks to frenetically tear apart the flesh of the kid I was happy to no longer be. This was when Rover materialized — in front of me, or maybe beside me, sometimes walking with an alert and rapid pace and sometimes with an awkward duck-like gait — and I laughed because he looked like a dolled-up shoeshine boy or, better yet, someone who’d been recently circumcised; he trotted along with calculated caution, avoiding the painful friction
of his injured member against the rough fabric of his tight pants, he grimaced with each step, and, a fake smile laboriously painted on his face, his cheeks stiff and pink, he repeated: “No point in accompanying me, I know the way better than you do!” He was wearing a short-sleeved beige jacket over a badly ironed shirt with a limp collar and a pair of pants that stopped short of his ankles; his damp black hair was plastered to his skull with a poorly done part on the left side — the splitting image of a guy ready to stand to attention before the camera lens of a photographer specializing in what we used to call “water pictures.” He’d tried to sneak out but hadn’t counted on our malicious curiosity. We were staked out along the main path, happy as hell to give him a stately escort up to the gate, dispensing our particular brand of advice: “Don’t get raped on the bus!” said Guzzler. “Say hi to the virgins in your neighborhood for us.”

  “That is if you can still find virgins over there!”

  “And bring us back some candy,” yelled Argan. “Sour balls, hard candy, caramels, and a few Ferrero Rochers would be nice.”

  “You’re crazy! He’s not going to Paris, he’s on his way to Amsterdam by way of the Bou Regreg, where the flies are as big as the sparrows!”

  “Come back to us in one piece, kid, but if you do get raped, we have Mercurochrome to patch you up!”

  Long after Rover left, I still hadn’t shaken my deep depression: I was fixated on the dumb idea that our goodbye had been permanent. “Will he be able to find his way back?” Argan and Guzzler looked at me blankly. “Here, I forgot,” said Guzzler as he took a wrinkled envelope out of his pocket and held it out to me. “Read what’s in it aloud.” Argan, impressed, barked his admiration. “It’s not mine, you idiot! Do I look like someone who gets letters in the mail? An old villager from Wing A asked me to figure it out for him . . .” I read it. Using a series of traditional, ready-made formulas written by the village fkih, a worried woman prayed for that old man’s quick recovery and spoke of her eldest, ungrateful son, who had sold their cow to travel to a distant country whose name was impossible to remember.