The Flower-Seller

The flower-seller was killed by her servant-woman. She was so old, she could not defend herself.

Before the servant-woman killed the flower-seller, she had already locked the door and started pilfering whatever she could. Then she tried to escape out the third floor window, hoping she could gain access to the apartment next door. But she fell to the ground; she died, as well. Scattered alongside her body on the sidewalk were all the things she had managed to steal. So the flower-seller and the other woman had both died, one in the apartment, the other on the sidewalk.

People clustered around the corpse on the sidewalk. Some of them stared up at the apartment. No one knows if any of them stole what was there to be taken.

Of course, the emergency services all came—firefighters, police, and ambulance. They removed both corpses, one from the apartment, the other from the sidewalk, and took them away to the morgue, where autopsies could be performed if needed. But even though they took both corpses away, the crowd of people still did not disperse; maybe they had nothing else to worry about.

“The flower-seller was from Senegal,” one of the men said. “She grew up in a convent. That’s why she only spoke French.”

“No, that’s wrong,” said another. “She spoke Arabic. Even though she was black, she wasn’t Senegalese. Her mother was a Moroccan from Ouarzazate. After her mother gave birth, she left the baby girl with a nun at the convent. She was older than me, true enough, but I’ve heard about her. Her mother worked as a housekeeper in foreigners’ houses. No one ever found out who made her pregnant.”

“Blacks are everywhere,” said another. “They work as masons and gardeners in villas. Maybe one of them got her pregnant.”

In fact, no one knows anything about the flower-seller. She was a withdrawn, chic woman, who used to walk her dog on Sundays and talk to it.

She owned a flower shop opposite the church that had been abandoned by its worshippers; a solitary monk still occupied one part of it. The monk knew the Qur’an by heart and did bad things with young Moroccan men in exchange for helping them get passports and work contracts in France.

The black flower-seller lived on the third floor over her shop. Her window overlooked the now-deserted church. Sometimes you could see a cross on a golden chain dangling from her neck. She did her best to keep it hidden; she may have been afraid someone might steal it, or else she was worried that she might be called a Christian. Nobody knew whether she was Muslim or Christian; she never discussed such things. She was black, and that was it. She used to walk her dog and give alms to beggars, even when they did not even ask her. She seemed to know the real significance of almsgiving, just like her mother when she had handed her over to a nun, and the monk handing out passports and other things. The church’s door, it seems, was not narrow, so alms would emerge from within.

The flower-seller’s door was open, too, but it was narrow. It was not open to everybody, only some old foreign women from Spain, Italy, and France, and some Moroccan women married to Europeans. Their husbands were all dead, but the women all stayed in this neighborhood, visiting each other and bitching. Not only that, but they would frequently change servants as though they were changing their underwear—and all out of an irrational fear of some imaginary disease usually associated with old age.

They are all as keen on cleanliness as they are on changing servants. The servants are keen on stealing, too, but some of the really crazy ones go so far as to kill. That is how the servant came to kill the flower-seller. She may well have stolen from her many times before she actually killed her.

So, the black florist is dead, and the servant-woman as well. Before the two of them, a Spaniard had also died. He used to buy flowers from the shop once a week. He was in his seventies and had never married. He used to drink all day long and pass by the florist’s shop almost every morning. He would talk to her for about half an hour, but never ask her if she had been married before. No one asked her about that. However, she used to talk about a deceased male person, but nobody ever knew if that person was her friend, husband, brother, or one of her relatives. What is significant is that whenever women talked about men, she always mentioned this deceased male person. He seemed to have been both elegant and polite and to have had a government post during the French colonial period. From such conversations, it emerged that the deceased used to drink a kind of light wine, adored dogs, and loved bowling, especially in the evening or on weekends. The florist did not like changing servant-women the way her old-lady friends did, to such an extent that she even pretended to forget other household expenses. Even so, servants would decide to leave, some of them to get married, only to be divorced later on, while others would completely disappear. Apart from that, prison was always open to all comers. So were mental asylums, if there were any. Speaking of which, no one knows for certain whether they took the bodies of the florist and the servant-woman to the hospital or somewhere else. However, everyone knows there’s a place in ‘Ayn Chuq where they regularly perform autopsies.

It is a Frenchman who is in charge of opening up dead people’s skulls and doing autopsies. He’s always getting drunk at the Capitol Bar. He drinks alone, as though he can vividly recall all the skulls he has opened up and the body parts he has dissected and abused. The florist died; so did the servant-woman. The other deceased male had died, as well, but he was elegant and polite, and loved this and that. Of course, everybody loved this and that, and then either died or was killed, just like the black woman and the servant-woman. In death there is no real difference between being killed or dying a natural death. Humans die so that others may come after them. For example, someone will buy the florist’s shop, and someone else will either rent or buy her apartment. Another servant-woman will certainly come to clean the house again. The flower shop will be reorganized; other flowers will be displayed instead of the ones the black florist used to buy.

Some things disappear, others remain. Some things replace others. Flowers fade; so do souls inside human bodies, migrating perhaps to other bodies, whether white, black, or yellow. Now the black woman has died; so has the servant-woman, the deceased man, the Spaniard, and the others as well. Their souls have wilted like flower blossoms. When flowers and souls dissolve, they will first have wilted, then died. But they all look for a successor. No one knows if the black florist’s soul was looking for a successor. She used to live with the flowers, her dog, the deserted church, the old women, and the deceased soul. Has her soul now met his?! No one knows. Everybody clings to the idea of staying in this world; that is their absolute right, because they have no idea of what lies beyond that curtain. If they found out, they would surely all commit collective suicide in order to escape the murder, starvation, mocking looks, and scorn.

“I wish we didn’t have eyes and ears!” the black florist once told one of her friends.

“With eyes we see,” replied the old Italian woman. “And with ears we hear.”

“Not only that,” commented an old Moroccan woman who was married to an Austrian Second World War veteran. “But we also have noses so we can smell fragrant scents, rotten odors, and other things, too.”

Even so, the florist did make an effort to examine, smell, and listen to her own flowers. Although she often heard things that interested her, she would never make any comment. She was always silent and never said much. Maybe the servant-woman who killed her took her silence to be a kind of stupidity or dullness. But she was by no means as stupid as people imagined. The nicely displayed flowers in her shop window were an apt reflection of her personality.

She did not like to talk much. When the women started talking about men, she would speak about the elegant, polite deceased man, or about her dog and flowers. She knew the names of so many flowers. Actually, she was not as good at remembering her friends’ names as she was the names of the flowers she sold. She never mentioned the deceased man’s name. Once, one of her friends heard her say “Pedro,” so the old woman told her friends that the florist had been married to a man called Pedro. They all had comments to make.

“Maybe her father was a black man from a Spanish colony.”

“From Latin America. My poor husband was born in Andalusia, but spent his childhood in Honduras. When his father died, he returned to Spain and joined the Rojos Army, then fled the war and married me. His name was Pedro, Pedro Gonzalez.”

“Was he black?” another woman asked.

“No. Not at all. He was dark and handsome. His only fault was that he was a womanizer. Even so, I loved him. He was a courageous man, but he loved women. I believe that any courageous man must love women.”

“The deceased was a brave man, too,” the florist had said on one occasion before she died, “but he did not like women too much. He loved light wine, bowling, and hunting boar. He stayed that way till he died.”

“Was he your husband?”

She would fall silent and start trimming the flowers, looking out the window at a few passers-by. She let her eyes wander far away toward a strange world that only she knew. A tear might fall from behind her spectacles. Anyway, to all those nosy women who did their best to find out all they could about her, the identity of the deceased man remained a mystery. She died without anyone knowing anything about Pedro. Nobody ever saw Pedro. Even though they had known her for a long time, nobody had ever entered her house. She once said that he was good at cooking boar’s meat; the meat was so good, especially the piglets. Pedro was a master-chef.

When the florist died, none of her relatives came to visit her house, nor did anyone pretend to be interested. What is strange is that no black man, child, or woman came by her shop. A few days ago, four people arrived and opened it up. Some of the flowers had wilted. The people closed the iron grill, locked it, sealed it with wax, wrote something down on a set of forms, had a brief discussion, then left.

Is this the way life begins and ends? A teacher who lived on the same street had such a thought, but he had no connection with either flowers or animals. No one went to the florist’s funeral. No one found out how or where she was buried. What matters is that they took her away in an ambulance and came back later to seal the shop. No one knows if they buried her in a Muslim, Christian, or Jewish cemetery. From a distance the teacher told himself that the important thing is that death is one and the same. Some people are buried, others are cremated, and still others are consumed inside the fish’s belly. But death is one and the same. Who cries for whom? Those who cry for the dead today will die tomorrow. If anyone leaves something behind after his death, someone else will come along and adopt it without any effort.

“I’m not going to leave anything for heirs,” the teacher told himself. “But then, what can a teacher leave behind, if he refuses to take bribes?!”

Now that the black florist has died, something about the street has changed. In spite of that, her shop was reopened later on. Another woman may have bought it. She talked in a Fassi accent and kept looking up at the sky as though there were no ground under her feet, the very ground where she herself might well be buried at some point in time.

The shop will probably be closed and sealed again, at least temporarily. That is the end for all of you.