3

A man is cutting a tree. He’s striking the final blows, three, two, one. He stops. Steps away. The tree is big, very big. You see it. You couldn’t before, it was out of the camera’s field. You can see it now, this falling tree that will fall completely. But first it has to detach from itself, from the rest of its body, its roots deep, deep in the ground. It does. The tree decides to do it. To fall. It’s no longer standing. The long body with its roots in the sky, hurls itself and falls little by little, in slow motion, then very, very quickly. Separation occurs. Detachment. One body with two roots. An old body from long ago, which would have lived a long time more, hundreds of years, more than any man. An eternal body is dying, cut in two, divided, no longer in or of the earth. The tree collapses. The speed of the fall, at the very end, accelerates. It is violent, breathtaking. It doesn’t look like anything human, it is a speed outside of us in a reality unknown to us, black and strange.

The tree is in pain. I ache for it. For its branches. Each time.

I’m in front of the television set. I devour the images from the movie. My mother Slima is working. I hear her in the next room.

I don’t know the name of the tree that just fell. What kind it is.

It’s alone now. You know that by sight.

Our tree is lying down, it is dying. Around it are other trees. They look like our tree. Not exactly, to tell the truth. They all have the same mother, probably. Not the same father. Anyway, fathers don’t count. Are they brothers? All brothers? Sisters? All sisters? Nephews? Nieces? We don’t know. But we see that all the trees on the screen are the same age as our tree on the ground, they have the same green in their branches, the same ocher color down the sides of the body. It’s obvious. It’s meant to be obvious, the separation and the resemblance. A tree was just cut from the earth. And sky. Its fall has caused a tremor of signs and stars. It is invisible. We imagine it. And it is very real.

We’re not going to mourn this tree?

Why not?

What is the point of this murder? And what will become of its roots in the earth? Will they give life to another tree? Will they dare to betray our tree, its body still warm, not completely dead?

And the man, cruel man, what is he doing?

He saw the same thing as us, as me. He didn’t miss a moment of this scene, this degradation. He relished the tragic spectacle of his own cruelty. An ax in his hand, he recorded it all. He remained calm. Neutral. He said nothing, expressed nothing.

The man is tall.

He’s wearing jeans, a shirt, a belt, cowboy boots.

He’s a cowboy.

We’re sad.

He’s not sad.

It’s strange, he’s moving away. He doesn’t look at the tree. He doesn’t touch it. He leaves, just like that. He straightens up, keeps hold of the ax. And he leaves the frame.

It’s cruel.

It’s frightening.

We don’t understand the man. We judge him. I judge him. Mercilessly.

He’s a cold man. For the moment, let’s not make excuses for him.

He leaves the scene.

We’re with the tree. We’re on the ground with it. We look at it and don’t know what to do. The other trees turn away. They’re afraid to look. You can understand why. Death is hard to look at. We close our eyes. We see the trees all slowly closing their eyes. But we’re fascinated, enthralled, and we keep looking. Looking without knowing when we too should close our eyes.

Sadness rules the world. The set. And yet the colors are warm, brilliant, violently alive. They always will be. Call it a scandal all you like, these colors won’t change, won’t vary. We know they are beautiful, a celebration of life. We know. We understand and we are sad. God hears us and joins us in our infinite sadness for this tree cut down, ripped out, its feet severed. God has mercy on us and the tree.

The next three scenes show the beauty of the world’s grief for the tree that just departed. Forest. River. Mountain. Grandiose Space. Earth and Sky, united and singing.

There are no men, there is only the world. Only sounds. Another language that we don’t understand.

It lasts maybe a minute, the funeral. The world without the tree.

And the man reappears in the middle of it all. He’s short and rides a beautiful horse. They both go. They go. They don’t explain anything for now. Will God punish the man? Judge him for this crime, for the sadness he’s caused? Punish him and throw him in hell for the soul he took in cold blood? Or at least ask him to justify what he did? For our sake, ask him why?

The man and the horse ride away, dissolve into Nature. The credits roll.

My mother’s alone in the next room now, resting between two tricks. I’m watching this movie for the tenth time. The credits scroll over music and a song. I don’t understand English, but I know almost all the words to the song, River of No Return.

The whole movie is in French. Other voices take possession of the actors’ bodies, the characters’ bodies. It took a while to understand this. One of my mother Slima’s customers helped me. He gave me two tapes of the same movie, one in French and the other the original, in English. And he explained the title. River of No Return.

Later, just before this customer left for the war, after he’d started calling me “son,” we studied all the words of the song together.

Here it is:

Ummmhhhhh

If you listen, you can hear it call

Wail-a-ree

Wail-a-ree

There’s a river called the River of No Return

Sometimes it’s peaceful and sometimes wild and free

Love is a traveler on the River of No Return

Swept on forever to be lost in the stormy sea

Wail-a-ree

I can hear the river call

No return, no return

Wail-a-ree

I can hear my lover call: Come to me

No return, no return

I lost my love on the river and forever my heart will yearn

Gone, gone forever down the River of No Return

Wail-a-ree

Wail-a-ree

Wail-a-ree

He’ll never return to me

No return, no return

Never

My mother’s customer really understood those lyrics, those words. I felt them inside, I grasped them in my own way. With my heart. They spoke of love, of course. Lost love. My mother’s man didn’t need to tell me that. Sad love on a river without end.

One early morning, he told me he was leaving. My mother wasn’t awake yet.

“I’m going tomorrow. I want you to sing this song for me tonight. You have all day to memorize the words. You can read, of course. Right? You’re twelve. You go to school. Don’t you? Will you do it? I’ll do the chorus. I’ll do the Wail-a-ree. Okay? What do you say? Give me this little gift . . .”

How could I refuse?

He was the most handsome of the soldiers who came to our house to sleep with my mother for a while. To play with me. Talk with me.

He was handsome like an imaginary father. He didn’t exist. My mother’s job had made him exist. The dream, the impossible fantasy had become reality. Twice a week, this soldier was our father in our new house.

My mother Slima had finally listened to me.

We’d left the terrible neighborhood of Hay al-Inbiâth. As I’d wanted, we moved to the neighborhood of Hay Salam. For as long as possible, we pretended to be just like everyone else. The neighbors finally realized, of course. After only a month. It didn’t take long for frustrated men, married or single, to learn the way to our house and my mother’s naked body.

I never slept when they were there. I was in the other room. I listened so as not to feel ashamed or overwhelmed by panic.

I know everything. Everything. Everything about sex.

Nothing embarrasses me. It’s only sex. Everyone needs it. My mother provides it. Sometimes free. She gives herself to others. And we eat. You have to eat.

We’ve been in Hay Salam for two years. I don’t go to the hammam now. I don’t like hammams anymore.

I’m watching the movie again. River of No Return. I have to memorize the words of the song. Make sure I have them down perfectly inside me.

I thought I knew the movie, every detail, every color. I was wrong. The movie begins with a tree that is killed. That means something. It must mean something. But what?

Now all I can see is this tree that falls.

River of No Return is the story of a tree.

Why sacrifice a tree?

I watch the movie again. I sing along. I understand and don’t understand. Suddenly there’s another story, another key.

I turn the key.

The tree is dead, its soul rising.

People mourn it.

I mourn it.

We say a prayer together. River of No Return.

The words enter me in a different way tonight. A powerful deadly way. I want to reach my hand out. I do. I hold my breath. I leave my soul. I unite with the soul of the tree. We’re friends. Our souls run ahead of us. They look at me, urging me on. My body stays with the tree.

I’m in heaven. I learn the song again.

My mother closes the door of her room. A new customer. Another soldier, no doubt.

I close my eyes. My soul no longer belongs to me. The movie keeps playing on our television set. I see it. I listen to it. I stop it. I focus on the first moment.

They cut. They kill. They fell and do not bury. The earth will eventually cover everything.

The song. Again. It returns to my troubled mind. Comes before my blind eyes.

I accompany it. I say the words that carry me along, without fully understanding.

I sing like the song. In rhythm with the song. In another language.

I sing with my man’s voice.

I sing and repeat.

First there are voices of women, of angels, who softly sing “woooohh.” Men’s voices join in. They say, “No return, no return, no return.” Then the lone voice of a man takes over, takes control of the song. The credits are on but the song began well before them, just as the soul left the tree.

The singer sings. The chorus backs him up. And I imitate him. I whisper his English words. I say them just after he does.

I invented it all. I think I was singing the first time I wrote something. Awake and unconscious at once, somehow, inspired, possessed by a passing jinn. I wrote a strange poem that I’ve since lost. Forgotten. But I can still taste that inspiration, that unexpected meeting.

I’ll have to write again one day. Before I die for good. With that same taste. The trace it left. Searching for heaven in another way. With English words. English, in appearance. Deep inside me, words will always be Arabic. That’s the language inside me, there long before me. It sticks to my skin, goes far beyond me, speaks to me in spite of myself. Records our destiny, our days, our nights, my mother’s stifled cries, her solitude, her distress, and sometimes her happiness.

I continued learning the song, bringing it gently into myself. My mother’s soldier had challenged me. He wanted proof, he believed in me. I had to be a man. Like him, a man. Little soldier. Big soldier.

Not far from the neighborhood of Hay Salam, there was a huge military base. A vast and terrifying wasteland lay between us. I never dared to cross it. It was a land of bandits, real ones, of drunkards cast out by everyone, killers, and drug addicts. A lawless zone next to the largest military base in Morocco. I never understood how that was possible. I once asked our soldier. He didn’t have an answer. He simply said:

“That’s Morocco!”

That’s Morocco?

Another enigma.

After work, the soldier passed through this zone to get to Hay Salam, where he lived, like us. He was never afraid. Probably his military dress and his mother’s prayers protected him.

Hay Salam belonged to him.

It was the mid-eighties.

Morocco suddenly needed more soldiers. They were trained in Salé, Kenitra, Meknes, and then sent south, into the Sahara, to defend a desert that had suddenly become a national territory, a sacred cause. A taboo. A mystery. A piece of fiction. Science fiction.

Our soldier was about to finish his two years of training.

He had first arrived when I was eleven. That day I was almost thirteen.

I got used to him very quickly. The room he rented at the home of a Berber from the Sous was not far from our house. He came to see my mother at least twice a week. And I went to see him in his messy bachelor’s room four to five times a week. He never complained about my too-invasive presence, my too-naive songs, and my too-skinny butt. To make him love me a little more, I invented a role for myself. Maid. I tidied the mess in his room. Did his laundry. Washed his dishes. The odor of musk in the air at his place was mine. Musk was a link between our two rooms. Our two lives.

Two years of coming and going.

Two years of knowing a man inside and out; a human being, a male sex.

Two years of knowing all there was to know about his words and silences. His quickening breath, his heart going wild from pleasure. His moan, his body’s violent fall from heaven.

Two years of being inspired by a man. Copying him, walking like him, standing and falling like him. Inventing a place in the world near his, a parallel path.

Two years.

I saw nothing but him. Him, and my mother Slima. Him, my mother, and the movie, River of No Return.

Two years that were ending that evening.

He was being sent to fight in the south for Moroccan honor, Moroccan pride.

He was so dignified next to me, to us.

Now he was going to enter more deeply into the submission forced upon all of us, all Moroccans.

“The Polisario. That’s the name of our enemy. They want to steal our Western Sahara.”

The soldier said this and laughed.

Later, years later, I understood the meaning of that laugh, its irony and transgression. Its sadness.

I had nothing against the Polisario. I didn’t know the Moroccan Sahara.

I knew the soldier.

He was leaving that night.

He was marching toward death.

He knew it.

I knew it.

No one could force this fate to change. Divert, cancel, fight it or get around it.

The Sahara was Moroccan, King Hassan II had decided. In 1975, after the Spanish left, he organized a big march to recover it, make it Moroccan. The Green March.

The soldier had packed his suitcase. I helped. He really wanted me to.

The soldier was going to cry.

My mother didn’t care. For her, he was just another customer among so many others.

I had learned the song from the movie. There was no way I was going to betray him. Break down in front of him. Joy was what he came to us for. Joy was my last gift to him.

A song. A little dance. A refrain. A language we made our own at last.

Through the long night we were going to rewrite everything. Never to sleep again.

My name is Jallal.

As soon as we moved to Hay Salam, my mother Slima bought a television set. Color. Rare at the time, the mid-eighties.

She did her work. Men. More men. White. Sometimes, but rarely, black. She had a lot of success.

After school, in my blue bedroom, I watched television.

In the green bedroom, my mother sweated it out.

I was never bored.

I did the housework and cooked. My mother took care of the rest.

The Hay Salam years were the time when everything was going to be redefined. My role. Hers. What we would do together and separately, communicating through the wall that linked my room to hers.

I never woke my mother when she was sleeping. Her body had another rhythm from mine, other experiences.

I knew everything.

I sometimes asked a question.

“That’s the way it is, my son. I was born for this. For living naked and unafraid of being naked for others. I’m not ashamed.”

I still didn’t understand.

I watched television. That was where I learned to see things more clearly. The connections between people. Evil. Good. Masks. Languages. Illusions.

We couldn’t tell anyone we had a color television. Not the neighbors or the kids at school. Jealousy—again, still, was everywhere. We had to beware of other people, all people. Nakedness does not mean revealing your soul and your secrets to everyone.

“People don’t understand the earth. We don’t know how to be real anymore. You must never completely open up to others, my son, not even to people who love you. Resist. Resist. Never tell everything about yourself, your story, your heart. Never give yourself completely. Nobody deserves that honor. Do you understand?”

The color television symbolized that attitude, that way of thinking. That strategy. Of hiding the essential. Hiding the truth. Learning to cast spells. Cancelling out the spells of others. Going along in life, permanently on your guard.

Nobody knew. Nobody got it right about me. Except maybe the soldier. He knew about the color television. He knew it had been invented to speak for us, write our stories for us. “It’s our memory,” he often said. “It’s our friend,” I replied. “My friend.”

Television showed me another way of thinking about the world and myself.

It gave us movies.

Westerns were my favorites by far. All westerns. One especially, River of No Return, of course.

Here’s how I discovered it.

It was Sunday, my mother’s busiest day. From 10:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., it was a parade. Men of all ages. Regulars and new arrivals alike knew they had to behave at our house. Mind their manners. Wait their turn in silence. Not smoke. Not ask for tea—we only served coffee. And, most importantly, never cry out when they came.

Mute, the customers sometimes played cards.

“Everyone knows I’m a prostitute but that’s no reason to turn my house into a souk. Rules are rules.”

That’s what she told them again and again, incessantly.

They waited their turn like good schoolboys. The exam looked as if it was going to be tough. And that excited them. Their eyes betrayed their wildest erotic dreams. They were no longer of this world. Their heads were already with my mother, plunged in her generous body.

“The warmth of your thighs melts my worries away.”

One of my mother’s soldiers returned only for that. To sleep on my mother’s thighs. Thirty minutes. No more. Wake up. Repeat the phrase. And leave.

He was the oldest. Forty-five. He always went last.

That Sunday, he told my mother that we absolutely had to watch television around 8:30. His favorite Western was going to be on.

My mother took a quick shower in the Turkish toilets.

Dinner was ready. Bissara (beans) with olive oil and cumin. Without tomatoes.

It was very cold. Winter no longer wanted to leave, to end.

My mother joined me in my little bed.

We were under the same blanket.

In the same heat.

The rain fell. Hard.

On color television, the movie had already started.

A blond woman sang. Danced and sang. Around her, only men, cowboys happy as children.

I didn’t know who she was.

But my mother knew her well.

With sincere adoration, she said:

“That’s Marilyn! Marilyn Monroe!”

It was as if she had found a lost sister, passionately loved in another life. Here was proof that love was right to exist and impose its divine law upon us. To leave for no reason and return some quiet day, with no particular event.

A love that went beyond my mother, her gender, her sex, her history. Beyond her circumstances and reality. Movies and Marilyn Monroe drew my mother out of her silence, her constant refusal to exist in words that were said and said again.

“That’s Marilyn! That’s her! That’s her!”

I would have liked to agree with her. But I didn’t know the American actress. A blond woman. Very blond. On her head—fire.

Later that night, my mother told me what she knew about her. About her loves.

“She died the year I was born. I know from the radio. They said it several times. The year she left. Suicide, they say. But that’s a lie. That woman cannot die. Death cannot catch her. Death is afraid of blonds. The fire on their heads scares death away, every kind of death. Marilyn was sad, very sad, deeply sad, it’s true. You see it all the time on her, in her gestures, her way of walking, singing. Laughing. Lowering her eyes for a second or two before she finally dares to look up at others, one other. She acts, play-acts joy and happiness. She believes in it. I believe it. Every time she lets herself be taken by the camera she manages to convince me that life is not only life, there’s something else. There is the body—hers, mine, yours, the body of the world. There is beauty. There are rules. Marilyn Monroe teaches me to go beyond appearances. She is the entire world, its origins, development, holes, dark matter, sky and volcanoes. She carries all that in herself. And of course it’s heavy. Heavy for a child rejected by everyone, from the beginning, from the first day.

Eternally wandering. Sad she was born and sad she will always be. Sad, because she knows everything, knows everything about men and women. With her, men lose their shame. They say dirty words and tell her everything—buried desires, everyday acts of cowardice, the secrets of the parents. She takes it all in. The smiles. The spit. Tears. Arrogance. Doubts. She travels the world for us. I follow her. I follow her right to the end. She’s not dead. She’s waiting for me in Paradise. She’s watching us too, from there. She sees everything. She knows that tonight, this movie she’s in is playing at our house. She’s not dead. She’s with us. Do you understand? She’s here. Do you see her? That is Marilyn Monroe. Repeat after me: Marilyn Monroe. Ma-ri-lyn Mon-roe. Marilyn Monroe. I love her. You have to love her. You have to love her, Jallal. You have to.”

My name is Jallal.

My mother Slima, before nightfall, at the very start of the night initiated me into the mystery of this woman on fire, in flames. An actress. A solitary being. Naked. Between earth and heaven. In transit. A prophetess. A poet. Ignorant. Inspired. A wanton woman surrounded by love. An actress who shows too much of herself and hides the essential, a pure soul, tears without end. She comes from America. But she isn’t only American. She speaks English and to my ears, my heart, it’s Arabic.

I haven’t seen any other movies she’s in.

That night, while River of No Return was playing on our television, my mother didn’t stop crying for a single second.

I understood the identification. It isn’t just blood that unites beings to one another. Souls meet, recognize each other and speak, even when gulfs, oceans lie between them.

They overcome these insignificant barriers. They walk on water. Fly up to the sky. Speak with the prophets. Suddenly recite sacred poems without ever having learned them, Sufi poems written centuries and centuries ago. Chant the Koran, the Bible, The Thousand and One Nights.

Souls gaze at each other. They are one.

My mother’s name, that night, was Marilyn. She was an infidel, like Marilyn. Like her, unhappy. A whore. A servant. A goddess. She hid herself. River of No Return revealed my mother to me in a different way. She wasn’t only my mother. She wasn’t only mine. She was the mother of others too. The mother and twin sister of Marilyn.

Cinema was invented for this. For making us see our mothers in a new light. Keep them forever. Share them with no reserve, no jealousy.

My name is Jallal.

I am the son of Marilyn Monroe.

In the end, the soldiers all left.

My soldier will disappear.

He gave me a gift. Two gifts.

An old Sony VHS player.

A movie. A VHS tape. A western. In two versions, original and dubbed in French.

The tree is not dead. I finally understood.

Without the soldier, without my mother, tirelessly, again and again, I watched River of No Return, where colors shatter, explode and caress us. A movie devoid of people, devoid of others. A movie that goes back to the very beginning. Where there is no one. Only danger. Only freedom and its dangers. Only temptations and their misunderstandings.

There are three people in that movie.

The man. The woman. And the little boy.

Tonight, the soldier will leave for the obscure war in southern Morocco. There will still be three on our color television.

My mother will be with a customer. The soldier will quickly say goodbye to her. He’ll come to see me. And I’ll sing.

The movie will start the same way. The tree that is cut down. It falls. It dies. It’s on the ground, takes its last breath. Will it resuscitate tonight?

The movie is that uprooted tree, soon transformed.

It took me a while to grasp it, put the signs into the same thought, the same sentence.

I don’t understand French.

I watch the movie and reinvent it my own way. Bodies speak better than languages. I’ve known that forever.

Tree in Arabic is chajara, a feminine word.

Tonight, the chajara will fall again. Die again and again.

Tonight, with a song, with my raspy young teenage voice, I’ll save this chajara. She’ll change sex, orientation. Identity.

I’ll die with her.

We’ll fall together.

We’ll rise again. Through faith. My faith. My song. And this promise: Marilyn Monroe is waiting for us, she will never betray us.

This happens in a camp. Nobody but cowboys there. All looking for gold. In vain. They rest. They forget. It’s nighttime. A man has returned. He just got out of prison. He cut the tree. And did something else we don’t know about yet. He found himself a horse. And headed for the camp. Lost men are drunk. They wait. For a discovery. An apparition. An ending. The crowd is getting bigger and bigger. You can see it all over the screen. A wild crowd at breaking point in search of a fleeting moment of tenderness. They drink. And they drink. And they drink. In the middle of these men, a little boy, a little man. Ten years old. Maybe eleven. He’s at home in this dangerous crowd on the brink of despair. He serves them. He knows all of them, the men in this crowd. He wanders like they do. He waits like they do. He hasn’t begun to drink yet. He isn’t innocent anymore. He’s seen everything, here in this camp. The thirsty. The deranged. The mad. The saints. The prostitutes. The priests. The songstresses. The warriors. The dead. The survivors. The leaders. A mother. Marilyn Monroe. Fire on her head. She performs on the stage of the cabaret. In a tent.

The man quickly finds the child. He says: “I’m your father. I’ve come back to take you back. To find you.”

The child asks for proof.

The father pulls out a star. The child has the same one on him.

This doesn’t last a minute. They didn’t even know each other a moment ago. Now they proclaim themselves father and son.

And they go.

They leave the tender and dangerous crowd. The crowd in love with Marilyn Monroe. Kay. Her name in the movie is Kay. She’s on stage. She sings. She shows her legs, her shoulders, her arms. Her soul. She radiates gentleness. She isn’t vulgar. Her gestures are almost childlike. Her words are prayers. The men have opened their mouths. They no longer care about booze. With Kay, they rise very high. They aren’t greedy golddiggers anymore. They regress. They play like children.

Kay is mother to all.

Father and son have crossed the whole screen, the whole frame. They are now in Kay’s dressing room.

The son introduces his new father to the singer.

The father looks at her kindly, with an uneasy respect.

The singer and the son say goodbye to each other. Embrace. It doesn’t last long.

That’s the end of part one.

These three characters will not see each other again. There is no reason for that to happen.

Now the dream can begin and cinema show its true power. The impossible will become possible.

Outside of the world. Fleeing. On a fragile raft. A family. The son, the father and the singer survive a flood. They are being chased by Indians. Impending death forces them to drift on a raging river. The hope of another paradise compels them to stay together, to save their skin, their souls, their bodies. Try being a family. Reinvent family. Hatred. Betrayal. Love, in the end.

The tree wasn’t cut down for nothing. It has come back to life. It was used to build a raft, that simple and strong raft.

River of No Return is also the story of a raft that goes on and on . . . The intrepid river doesn’t stop it. Death will be its enemy but never break it.

The tree died that first time. At the very beginning.

It rose to heaven.

The movie takes place in another world. A Hereafter where the tree can live again, be transformed.

Resurrection is not a fiction. Cinema proves it. Marilyn Monroe is convinced of it. My mother and I, too.

We weep.

All three of us.

I run to the television and kiss it.

I want the blessing of Marilyn Monroe. I want her fire.

Just at that moment, the soldier returns.

My mother wipes her tears. She stands up. And silently leaves for the room next door.

The soldier says:

“See you in a while, kid. Don’t forget me . . .”

I stay glued to the television screen. I enter it.

I join the other family. On the raft.

I sing River of No Return.

And I understand that a little bit later, I will sing it just the way it should be sung, like Kay. The soldier will be proud of me.

I know that now.

The eyes and hair of Marilyn Monroe confirm my intuition: life doesn’t stop.

Something happens. I see it. I’m there now.

I change realities, really and truly enter fiction, cross the border, take on other colors.

Time stops.

I’m in the true.

In the song.

On a tree.