It was clear that whoever was following him had slipped through Spanish customs. The smugglers did it all the time; everyone knew it. It had been a mistake to accept Rashid’s proposition. Even if he had been offered ten percent of the money, it would have been a mistake.
He was almost sure it was one of the Moroccans he had seen filling out the betting cards with Rashid. Now, while the Spanish recruits were getting noisily drunk on beer and homesickness, the Moroccan was playing pinball at the other end of the Bodegas Melilla.
He picked up his beer from the bar and turned to look at a Moroccan girl. She was truly beautiful. She had fair hair and gray eyes. She was talking to a Spaniard with thick skin and deep wrinkles and the hoarse, almost metallic voice of an inveterate smoker. The girl was either a smuggler or a prostitute—or both, he thought.
He turned toward the large mirror behind the bar. Rashid had trusted him; now he distrusted Rashid. But that wouldn’t justify his disappearing after collecting the money instead of returning to Tangier. If they were following him, it was to prevent that. He slipped two fingers in the hidden pocket of his pants and felt the edge of the ticket. Fifty million pesetas was too much money.
Where did he catch up with me? he wondered. Foreseeing just such a ploy, he had changed his plans at the last minute. Instead of catching the ferry from Tangier to Algeciras, as he had told Rashid he would do, he took a bus to Melilla. He had left the pension at dawn, three hours earlier than planned, and he was sure no one had followed him to the station. But Attup could have alerted them.
After ordering another beer, and touching his chest pocket where he kept his new passport, he looked again at the beautiful Moroccan girl. She became aware of him and gave him a furtive smile. The Spaniard was explaining something to her, eyes fixed on the floor covered with sawdust and cigarette butts.
It would be absurd to die in Melilla, he thought.
He didn’t want to get drunk, and it was too early to sleep. He left the Bodegas Melilla and turned the corner at Juan Carlos I, instead of returning toward Primo de Rivera and his hotel.
He walked as far as the Plaza de España, looking back from time to time, but he didn’t see the Moroccan. The streets began to get livelier; the siesta hour was past. As in Tangier, human activity here was cheered by the cries and twitters of birds.
The Plaza de España had a Catalán flavor, but the tiles and stucco facades couldn’t offset the ugliness of the garish advertisements for travel agencies and other businesses. Although he had already bought a ticket for the ferry to Almería, at that moment he decided to change it for one to Málaga. He went into an agency on Pablo Valesca Street and, confirming that the difference in price between the ferry and the plane was negligible, decided to fly to Málaga. It would be more difficult to follow him, he thought—if in fact someone was following him.
But it was absurd to keep thinking this, he told himself, as he came out onto the street and looked in all directions, trying to spot the Moroccan among the Spanish crowd. He walked up the esplanade of General Macías toward Medina Sidonia, drawn by an unaccountable nostalgia, that sense of loss that he had felt only in Tangier.
He turned up a winding street toward the chapel of Santiago el Matamoros, until he came to a small fort that reminded him of the fort of Xáuen but that turned out to be the municipal museum. It was closed, so he walked the length of the rampart and found a little Moroccan market. He remembered the day he’d gone with Julie to Xáuen. A little after that, the Frenchwomen had gone back to Paris, practically leaving him in the street. He could understand that Mme. Choiseul wouldn’t invite him to stay in her house. Still, he had entertained the fantasy. Afterward, he spent several weeks waiting for news from Julie, and one day he finally got some: she had a new boyfriend in Paris. Would he still be in Tangier in the spring when she planned to come back? Probably not, he answered; he didn’t hear from her again.
To avoid the stairs he’d taken on the way up, he walked down to the Plaza de la Avanzadilla by a dark lane that came to a fork; the branch he chose, the wider, like so many lanes in the Tangier Medina, went on narrowing little by little, until it turned into a kind of family courtyard. A black cat was chewing noisily on a piece of fish. Shouts came from a window, then a child’s laughter.
He turned to go back up the lane, when the Moroccan, who must have been following him at a distance all this time, blocked the way.
“Excuse me,” he said in panic. His gut clenched.
The other didn’t move.
“Do we know each other?” His voice sounded broken. He swallowed acid saliva.
“You bet I know you, hombre.” An unexpected accent.
“Really?” He inhaled. “Sorry, I don’t remember. What was your name?”
“Ángel Tejedor,” said the other very clearly.
“How’s that?” Something strange happened inside him. The burning he felt in all his pores was adrenalin from the shock. His legs began to tremble, slightly but uncontrollably. This, Ángel Tejedor, was his own name. “Is this a joke?” he managed to say.
“No joke.”
He backed up two paces. He felt a sharp cramp in his stomach.
“What do you want?”
“Nothing.”
“Rashid sent you?”
The other shook his head. He took a long knife from under his jacket.
“Let’s have it,” he said. “The passport and the ticket.”
He took the ticket out first; then, reluctantly, his passport.
“Put the ticket inside the passport and throw it on the ground here beside me. Right here beside me.”
Then he told him to take off his shoes. Curiously, this calmed him. The Moroccan took his shoes and threw them high in the air. He could hear them fall on a rooftop.
“Get down on your stomach.”
He started to obey, bending forward, but all at once he understood that the man was going to kill him, that he had to kill him if he was going to become him. He flung himself forward against him, and they fell to the ground in each other’s arms. An unknown, unpleasant odor. But there was something liberating, almost pleasurable in the elemental struggle: his fear dissolved. The black cat shot up the alley. His hands turned into claws, and his enemy’s long hair into an advantage as he seized it hard and yanked it, knocking the man’s skull against the street—twice, with a crack. He was a crossroads of colors and pulsations, and perhaps the thread of blood he saw oozing between the uneven cobblestones toward the bottom of the alley was not his own.
His hand came up against a bland, rectangular object. The passport. Without quite believing it, he jumped up and went running up the alley. Only once did he look back, before turning the first corner. The man seemed to move.
In reality it was Ismail who cured the owl, which he called Sarsara. First he covered its wing with a poultice of sheep dung. Later, removing the poultice, he gently grasped the broken part of the wing and tied two ribbons around it, one red and one blue, from which he hung a porcupine jawbone. And while Hamsa was away taking care of the sheep, he sang it healing songs, which he had learned from his mother, or which he invented:
“The day that you had twins,
they broke your wing.”
“But I never had twins!”
“And they never broke your wing.”
Now the owl could fly. Ismail took it out of the hut in the evening, tied by a fishing line around one of its feet. Little by little, he gave it more line, and the owl circled around him, close to the ground, in its silent great-winged flight.
“If it gets away,” Hamsa told him, “you’re going to pay for it. I’ll cut out your eyes!”
Once, the owl perched in the branches of an old olive tree, and Ismail let it stay there. Suddenly, the owl flew a few meters away, veered and dived onto the ground, which was covered with dead leaves. Then it returned to its olive bough, with a little mouse in its claws, which, Ismail could see from a distance, it swallowed in one gulp.
Seven months had passed since the theft of the owl. It was the time of nissan, in May, the propitious time when everyone is supposed to be happy, but this year no rain had fallen. There were no storks on the roofs, and the snakes had not come out of their holes. The fields were dry, the animals sickly.
Ismail was growing up and beginning to rebel against Hamsa. One afternoon, after tying the owl to its stake inside the hut, Hamsa had thrown himself upon him and Ismail had slipped out from under his casheb and gone running out of the hut. Hamsa had not followed him. He had stayed on the ground smiling, hearing the boy scream and hurl insults at him from high in the rocks.
The owl didn’t bother Hamsa. He was used to its insistent gaze and even to its song which, people said, brought death. He was just waiting for word from his uncle to carry out the sacrifice, since he was afraid the amulet might lose its power with time. A year might pass before he was back—his uncle had said when he left—and now the year had gone by.
On the afternoon that the Christian woman visited him, Hamsa was sitting alone eating a plate of ground almonds with honey and cinnamon.
“Salaam aleikum,” she called from outside.
Hamsa came out of the hut.
“Aleikum salaam,” he said.
“Do you remember me?” the woman asked in Maghrebi.
Hamsa said yes with surprise, and since she didn’t say anything more, added:
“You came to see me with my grandfather and another Nazarene.”
The Christian woman smiled. The sun was falling on the edge of Monte Viejo, casting its rays between the black cedar trunks.
“You live in a beautiful place,” she said.
An oil tanker disappeared in the thick fog of the strait. Hamsa said:
“I was going to have tea. Do you want to come in?”
“Thank you,” she answered, hesitating. “The bird—do you still have it?”
“The yuca? It’s inside,” he said. He closed his eyes and turned his head toward the little half-open door.
“Have you cured it?”
Hamsa nodded his head.
“Really?”
“It can fly now.”
“Can I see it?”
“Come in.”
He turned, pushed the door open, and with one hand lifted the black cloth of the doorway.
“Tu-uit tu-hu,” said the owl. It turned its head and looked at the woman, who drew near slowly so as not to startle it.
“How are you?”
The owl raised its wings as if to demonstrate that it was cured. It opened its beak.
“Bravo,” said the woman to Hamsa with an admiring look.
Hamsa smiled.
“Báraca,” he said. “Do you want to drink tea?”
“Thanks.”
Hamsa pointed to the skins where the Christian woman could sit. He lit a gas burner.
“Your grandfather asked me to bring you some news,” she said.
Hamsa looked at her suspiciously. No Moroccan wants to be the bearer of bad tidings, so the fact that Artifo was sending news by means of this woman disturbed him.
“It’s about your uncle Jalid.”
Hamsa’s eyes widened.
“Is he coming?” he asked.
“He would come,” the Christian woman said. “He would come—if he weren’t under arrest in Algeciras.”
“In jail?”
“That’s what your grandfather said.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you know when he’ll get out?”
“He didn’t tell me. But I don’t think it will be soon.”
Hamsa put fresh mint in a brass teapot, added sugar, took two glasses and put them on the small round table.
“Hamdul-láh,” he said at last; there was nothing he could do. “Are you Spanish?” he asked.
“No. I’m French.”
Hamsa turned his face toward Spain.
“Hijos de puta!” he said between his teeth.
He lifted the kettle of boiling water and poured it over the tea. The smell of mint rose up with the steam.
“When will you let the owl go?”
“I don’t know.”
“Have you grown fond of it?”
Hamsa laughed.
“No, not at all.”
“So, why don’t you let it go?”
“I might need it,” he said.
“What for?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“A secret?” she said in French; she didn’t know the Maghrebi word.
Hamsa mentally calculated the likely price of an owl, and he wondered how much he would have to pay for a woman like her. Would she go to bed with him in exchange for the yuca? But it was not an easy proposition to make. If she desired him, there would be no problem. If he could manage to put a little saliva on her glass, maybe he could get what he wanted.
“Yes.”
“It’s very nice here,” she said, and looked around her. She took off her pullover.
Hamsa tried the tea, smacking his lips, then put it back on the table.
“I need a few things,” he said. “Someday I’ll have a real house. That will be better.”
“Of course.”
Hamsa crouched in front of the table and, hiding the glasses for an instant with his body, let a drop of spit fall into the glass that would be hers. Then he lifted the steaming teapot and served the tea, which made a little foam as it poured into the glasses.
“Here,” he said, handing her the glass.
“Don’t you want to sell me the owl?”
Hamsa moved his head ambiguously, not saying yes or no.
“What do you say?” insisted the woman.
“How much would you pay?”
“I don’t know, you’d better tell me how much you want.”
“I would like to kiss you,” he said.
Hamsa felt himself blush, and the woman’s nostrils flared.
“Kiss me?” she exclaimed, confused, pointing to herself with her forefinger. “You’re crazy.”
“Excuse me, excuse me. That’s what I want, that’s all,” Hamsa said, noticing her small but erect breasts covered only by her cotton undershirt.
“Forget it,” said the woman, shaking her head slightly.
Hamsa looked down at his feet. He was wearing his Nikes, now very battered.
“Two hundred dirhams,” she persisted.
Hamsa, without taking his eyes from the ground, shook his head no.
“Are you sure? Who else will buy it?”
“I don’t want money,” he assured her, staring at her. “I don’t care about money.” He poured more tea.
The Christian woman drank silently, observing him with curiosity.
“Three hundred?”
If she weren’t interested, if she were angry, she’d have left by now, Hamsa thought. The spell of the saliva was working. She’s giving me another chance, he reasoned.
“For each feather in the owl,” he said, encouraged, “I want a kiss.”
The Christian woman laughed.
“It is a tempting offer, I’m sure,” she said, smiling nervously. “That’s a lot of kisses.”
Hamsa crouched a little, looking anxiously at the foreigner’s feet. She had taken off her slippers before sitting on the sheepskin rug. Her feet were delicate and very white. Hamsa leaned over further, as if to kiss them; she didn’t move them.
“No, no, Hamsa,” she protested, when his lips touched the cold skin of her foot. She drew them back then, hugging her knees. “That’s enough, now.”
Her body was trembling slightly, Hamsa realized. He served a bit more tea, then stretched out one hand to reach his motui, which hung on a hook over his head. He assembled his kif pipe in silence, filled it, and smoked.
“Do you smoke?” He offered it to the Christian woman.
“Thanks, yes.” She took the pipe, smoked, and began to cough. “It has tobacco,” she protested.
“It has to have it,” said Hamsa, surprised, and smoked again.
“Let’s see, I’ll try it again,” said the Christian. Hamsa gave her the pipe. This time she drew on it slowly and didn’t choke. “It’s good kif,” she acknowledged. She took a sip of tea.
“I wonder,” she said a few minutes later, lying back on the skins, “how many feathers an owl would have.”
That was a good sign, Hamsa said to himself. The Christian woman desired him. He stretched out his hand to stroke her foot, and she let him. Hamsa said,
“How many kisses do you think I can give you?”
“Quite a few, I imagine,” she said.
“Two hundred?”
“I don’t know. I stopped counting.”
Hamsa made her lie down on the skins.
“Wait,” she said firmly. “First, set the owl free.”
“Uaja, uaja.” He got up and went over to crouch down in front of the bird, whose head turned to look at the woman, stretched out on the sheepskins, while Hamsa’s nervous hands untied the knot that held it.
When it was free, it flew toward a corner of the hut and perched on a wooden sawhorse, out of the shepherd’s reach. It hooted.
The Christian woman said:
“Open the door.”
Hamsa said no. “You will open it. Afterward.”
The owl flew from the sawhorse to the door, always out of the shepherd’s reach, then spun rapidly back to its stake. The Christian woman looked at Hamsa, who was kneeling next to her. Hamsa took off his gandura and unbuttoned his baggy breeches.
“Oh, Hamsa,” she said and sat up on the sheepskin. She looked with surprise at the shepherd’s circumcised member, which was enormous.
Hamsa went on undressing.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
She had drawn back and looked alarmed.
There was a stain the size of a pea, of a ruddy grayish color, on one of his swarthy little sacks that seemed to breathe with its own life. In the center, where a hair was growing, was something that looked like pus.
Hamsa looked at it himself.
“That’s nothing,” he asserted, gruffly. “Come on, take off your clothes.”
“Hamsa, I’m sorry, really. You’ll hurt me with that.” In one jump, she had stood up.
“Come here,” said Hamsa, trying to grab her by the arm.
“Hamsa, I’m sorry, it’s not going to happen. Keep the owl. Excuse me, I’m going.”
“No!” Hamsa tried to grab her, but she slipped by.
At that moment the owl flew up and crashed through the cloth cover of the doorway, and the woman ran behind it, snatching her pullover and slippers as she moved.
Hamsa took a few steps outside the hut, half naked as he was, before stopping, clenching his fists, bitten with carnal pain.
The owl flew in a low circle around the corral and the shepherd’s hut, before heading toward the cliffs. It flew against a strong wind, skirting the crags, toward the darkest part of the afternoon. It saw two falcons at the entrance of their nests in the crevice of the rock face. It stopped to rest on the roof of a small pink cottage that perched on a cliff over the sea. The wind was too strong to keep flying against it. There were people in the cottage. The owl launched itself into the emptiness and flew with the wind toward the light, dying now where the earth ended and there was only sea. It retraced its flight past the shepherd’s hut, and, from on high, it could see the woman, who had put on her slippers and was walking hurriedly along the strip of grass bordering the asphalt road between the walls. The owl flew up as far as the summit and saw, in the distance, the glassy lights that lit up the hills, covered in a mantle of white houses fading into the folds of the parched and fissured countryside. It dipped down then, flying over the treetops toward a large abandoned house in the middle of a thick grove. It flew in through a window, greeted by the cries of the birds nesting there. It crossed through the house, flying from room to room through the hallways until it found an attic, with some roof tiles missing, the floorboards broken or completely rotten and a convenient cleft in the rough, dark wall.