A Tunisian Tale. Hassouna Mosbahi
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in the world, with names and capitals and kings and presidents that were hard for us to pronounce. By and by, as those hideous wooden shops were abandoned by their owners to fill up with filth, they started to disappear and clean stores with white walls and blue doors sprang up in their place. Powerful state officials began visiting our village so they could lecture the people for a long time about something they called “mutual aid,” promising us a better life and a sunny future in which poverty and hunger and ignorance would disappear, in which the fortunes of the rich and poor would be leveled out. Perhaps because they felt that their time had passed and that there was no turning back and that the world to which they once belonged had begun to fall apart, wilting before their very eyes, the elderly seemed like they were hurrying to pass away before their fated time, as their faces had grown more wrinkled and more sorrowful with their frightened stares and their aversion to talking or even moving. Only my grandfather managed to retain some of his old dignity and that nimbleness he had been known for since he was a young man. He would continue to raise his voice, loud and defiant, cursing anyone who would refuse his orders or advice, and anyone who didn’t behave properly or who strayed from the straight path, as if he wanted to verify his existence in a world that no longer noticed him. As for my grandmother, she watched these new developments with a kind of childlike curiosity, and unlike other people of her age she struggled to keep up and adapt. She’d listen to the radio a lot even when she couldn’t understand what was being said. One time everybody had a long hard laugh when she asked, “But how can all those people who are always talking and singing and making speeches live inside the same little box?”
Although I was a lazy student who was hopeless in most subjects, especially math and spelling, I loved school from the very beginning. I loved it because it afforded me the opportunity to be freer than I was before and allowed me to hang out with boys all day long, to play the games we all wanted to play. Usually we’d do that when we got home from school at the end of the afternoon. During that time we’d forget everything around us, and continue playing and running around together through the dusty alleyways, singing and laughing loudly until we were stopped by the night. When I came home late, my grandmother punished me and my mother scolded me on more than one occasion, but I wasn’t bothered by that, and I kept on playing and hanging out with the boys while the other girls would hurry home as soon as classes let out.
As I said, I used to love being around boys, yearning for them to listen to me, to do my bidding, to take into account whatever I said and recommended, just like al-Jazya al-Hilaliya with her tribesmen. My grandmother never got tired of telling the story of al-Jazya al-Hilaliya and I used to dream of being like her when I grew up. Men would ferociously fight one another just to win me while I sat cross-legged in the tent with my female servants, and my coal-black hair cascaded down to my waist as my heart thumped with love for the victorious warrior who deserved to have me as his reward.
I was the favorite of all the boys, those who were my age and even those who were older than me. My hanging out with them tempted them, as did my participation with them in everything they did in private and in public. For the most part I showed great talent in the games that mattered to them. That strengthened my influence and power among them. It was clear that every one of them wanted me to be for him and him alone. And out of jealousy, fierce battles would break out between this one or that one from time to time. But as soon as I intervened it would die out as quickly as it had been sparked, except I rarely did that because it used to appease my arrogance and my vanity to see them brawling over me and because of me, before they had even reached legal age, while I was still a little girl playing in the sand, one who hadn’t even sprouted breasts yet.
But that night, I cried in anguish, and remained in pain and agony for days and nights on end because I had been forbidden from hanging out with the kids and attending the first screening of a movie in our village. I remember how we were coming back from school late in the afternoon when we saw a big olive-colored car advancing toward our village, and from it a loud voice could be heard announcing an evening screening that would begin at eight p.m. At that moment the kids got all excited and agitated, and something like a fever gripped the world all around us, to the point that I imagined that our village and all the farmyards around it had started to sway out of celebration for the happy event that was unlike anything the people had ever experienced before. In order to make sure that we would be on time, we ran home. I wolfed down my dinner, and ran for the door hurrying to get out as fast as I could, but my grandmother set up an obstacle in front of me. Brandishing a thick cane in my face, her face an angry expression like darkness in winter, she shouted at me, “And just where do you think you’re going, you little bitch?”
I was confused and unable to respond. My grandmother brandished the thick stick in my face again and shouted, “Come on, out with it, or else I’ll whip your hide with this stick!” “I want to go and see the movie!” I replied, nearly choking from the intensity of panic that gripped me because of the thick stick dangling in front of my face.
Without commenting, my grandmother shoved me back inside the house and called out to my mother, “Your daughter wants to go out and see a movie with boys tonight. We’ll become a scandal on the tongues of those who do such things and those who don’t!”
Anger consumed my mother and she slapped with me a strong blow that caused me to stagger backward as tears burned my eyes and cheeks. Suddenly, I found myself locked in a dark room and I broke down crying for a long time, even as the boys outside called everyone out into the village square. Afterward silence spread and I couldn’t hear anything but the sound of dogs barking from time to time.
Sleep eluded me like a skittish bird. I opened the small window and stared up at the sky studded with stars until the entire village trembled with the commotion of people leaving at the end of the film. After nearly an hour, I slept the sleep of the deprived and the wretched of the earth.
THE SON
Contrary to what you might expect, I wasn’t sad and didn’t despair when I was arrested and thrown in jail. That might be attributed to the fact that for three straight days I had been satisfying some of my previously restrained and repressed desires. People in my country say that it’s better for a person to live as a rooster for just one day than to be a chicken for an entire year. I was a virile rooster for three straight days, so now I can face the gallows at ease and at peace, without the slightest regret or sadness for the world I leave behind, with all its joys and sorrows, and without any remorse for the sins I have committed, quite the opposite of the two men who are with me on the cellblock who sob all the time because they received the same punishment. I know both of them very well because I shared the cells with them for many months.
The first one is named Ali, but his nickname is “Kaboura”—Knobby, probably because he’s so stout and short. Despite his small size, though, he is respected for his exceptional ability to deceive and betray, in combat as well as in his daily interactions with other people. He is as sly as a fox and can never be trusted. Those who know him will say that he can defeat an opponent even when the latter is physically stronger. During the months I spent in jail with him, he would always boast about how he became friends with the actor Ali Chwerreb when he was young and how he saw him more than once quarrelling with police officers in Bab al-Khadra and Bab Suwayqa and Halfaouine and elsewhere. And because Ali Chwerreb had become one of his favorite actors, alongside the most famous Western movie stars like Lee Van Cleef, Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood, and others, he would sometimes stay up very late at night, hidden out of his father’s sight, just to catch a glimpse of Ali falling-down drunk, bumping into the wall on his right only to slam into the wall on his left in that narrow alleyway leading to the dilapidated house where he used to live with his elderly mother. He feared her the way he feared God and would obey her, therefore, with blind allegiance and without ever refusing a single demand. She was the only person who could tell him to shut up and make do so at once, the only person who could get him to obey the policemen’s orders when their disputes were at their sharpest. Kaboura likes to give his lies free rein and claim that Sidi Ali (by which he meant Ali Chwerreb) used to reserve special affection for him, above all the other neighborhood kids, and would sometimes send him out to buy cigarettes and then once he had returned with them would stuff an entire week’s pay in his pocket. He even once put his hand on his head and said, “I’m sure you’re the only one who can take