The commander was laughing with tears in his eyes.
That night, he took me to his village to meet his mother and the family. After we had a delicious meal, the mother asked if I could carry some good olive oil from the village to her son overseas. I said, My bag is full but, for Mansour’s eyes, I’ll carry the world.
Three days before my departure from Tunisia, I visited Mahmoud in his office again. Commander, I said, I am part of the family now, and Mansour is a brother to me. Before I leave, I have a small favour to ask.
If anyone is bothering you, if there is anything you need done in this town, just say the word! the commander said.
I handed him the business card and the receipt the lady had given me and I told him the story of the carpet merchant. I said, Small, thieving merchants like this man make me and your brother look bad in those foreign lands. They throw our names and the reputation of our country in the dirt. Before long, all these foreigners will be telling each other, Don’t go to Tunisia, those Tunisians are thieves. In the name of this glorious country and of our friendship, I am asking if there is anything you can do, Commander.
The commander stood up, banged his fist on the metal desk, and shouted through the door to his assistant. Ten minutes later, I was riding in a convoy of five Jeeps with twenty police in them, heading to the old souk. I sat next to the commander and, once we arrived, I saw all these policemen running through the streets and closing all the shops except one. I tell you, the whole souk was closed in minutes! I walked down the middle of the souk, right beside the commander. Someone called the owner. I saw this old man in a suit coming out from behind a stack of carpets and bowing his head like a dog.
The commander showed him the card and the receipt for the carpet. First he slapped him and then he gave him a lecture on cheating and dragging the country’s name down the drain. He slapped him in front of all his employees and his whole family. His wife was wailing and his grandkids were crying. Two minutes, I am telling you, it took two minutes, and the owner of the store came back with the eight hundred dollars. The commander asked the carpet merchant to write a letter of apology to the lady. I said to the commander, Let him write it in English if he is truly what he says he is, a big shot from England. Liar, he was a liar. He probably couldn’t even write it in Arabic.
The first thing I did when I came back here was call the lady. She was so impressed that she gave me an extra hundred. I made three hundred dollars, just like that.
WHEN NUMBER 67 had finished his tale, he leaned back and gloated, and I thought that his posture looked pathetic. I looked at the table and saw that his plate was empty, with only a few crumbs lingering on the surface. And now this admirer of dictators and petty tyrants was picking his teeth.
So I turned my face towards him and said, The only person in that story who should write a letter of apology is the banana republic commander of that police state.
What banana are you talking about? 67 replied. You think we are bananas? The only banana I see is the one you are sitting on. And a few of the spiders laughed at me.
That’s okay, I said, I don’t mind a banana up my ass, because I am just warming it up for your virgin sister. And calmly I took a sip of my coffee.
Motherfucker, faggot! He stood up and shouted, I will show you, motherfucker!
I stood up calmly and went outside. I grabbed the car keys from my pocket, lit a cigarette, and waited.
As soon as Number 67 came out of the café, I surprised him and grabbed him by the collar and started to hit him in the face with my car keys. I landed a good punch on his nose and it burst red. Two other drivers ran out and held me back. One of them got a good grip on my throat. I grabbed his index finger and forced it up until I heard it crack, and then I heard the man letting out brief, devastating moans and he let me loose. The others, seeing the bigger driver holding his hand and crumpled on the sidewalk, pulled back and started to threaten me from behind the hoods of taxis. I walked away and headed straight towards my car, but then I decided to leave it there and walk away. My knuckles, my nails, and my sleeves were covered in blood.
I walked away from the Bolero and took to the streets, aimless, until I reached a bridge. It started to rain again, and I took the stairs up and began to cross over the highway. The cars slid below me, and I watched the city expanding and contracting under the fluctuation of the torrential rain and light. I stood under the water of the god of the seas, the water buffalo’s drooling on the world, the thunder of the son of Cronus, the weeping of mother earth, the slippery love of Yahweh for his tribe, the cleansing of prisoners on the ships crossing the Atlantic, the tattooed hands of Rama scrubbing the untouchables at the edge of the river, the offering of virgins to the surging, dripping, splashing crocodiles, and I let the rain wash my bloody hands and bring back the whiteness to my sleeves.
When I arrived on the east side of the city I took cover under the roof of a bus shelter. I watched the buses leave and the rain fall harder, with the thickness of curtains and the opacity of veils. Then I walked again under the rain. My hair was wet and my clothes nestled against the erection of my nipples and the inward curve of my belly. To the drivers who passed me on the highway I must have looked like a grey ghost, hunched, defeated by the damnation of water and floods. But what do those carcasses of metal and glass, those burners of oil and makers of black rain, know about the pleasures of water, the heaviness of drenched bodies, and the flight of the insane.
In my youth, when it rained, the ringmaster would shout to summon us and we would all take off our clothes and run outside to the elephants with our brushes and buckets. We let the horses and the dogs loose in the circles of mud, and then we sheltered the lions, the monkey, and the birds from the cloudbursts and the pouring sky. We monkeyed around, oinked like pigs in the dirt, and clapped for the seals to come and join us under the grey sky. When the rain stopped, we would all go inside the biggest tent and make a fire, and we would play music and dance among the empty benches. But once, after the rain, I walked along beside the soaking tents and below the wet flags of the circus and I went to our trailer and took off my clothes. I was alone, and my thin, boyish body was shivering from cold and happiness. A few minutes later, my mother came in. Her eyes were vacant, her hair was soaked, and her face was painted with makeup that was dripping down her face. She called me some other name. And she laughed when she saw me naked and stared at me. Flying man, she kept on saying, flying man, let me please you. And she drew me close to her bosom and kissed my neck and her hand swept across my skin and touched me and held my erection and stroked me until I came. There you go, she said, now you can leave and march towards your desert and your stone.
TAMMER
AT TIMES, WHEN the traffic lights turn red and all the engines stop, wait, and release the poisonous fumes from behind the drivers’ asses, little unexpected sprinkles of water fall on your windshield from the squirts of plastic bottles, squeezed by the dirty fingers of street kids who make you want to call out to the world and scream, Injustice! It is the waste of this clean water that the poor depend on that I object to most. I scream in the face of these squeegee kids and say, I’ll give you change but do not obstruct my horizon with your soaked, stained histories of needle-armed mothers and guess-who-done-it fathers.
The next evening, I took the the bus to Café Bolero but I didn’t go in. I claimed my car and drove it through the streets of the city. At a light, I saw a harlequin coming my way with a bottle, ready to spray water on my windshield. But before I could wave my hand and tell him not to carry on with his squirting act, the harlequin started to shout my name, saying, Fly, hey, Fly! It’s me, Tammer. And he rushed to the driver’s side and called to his friend, who was wearing what must have been the worst insect costume I had ever seen.