Naked Lunch, without success, aside from a few pages at random, nor did Tennessee Williams inspire me, or Bowles the tea-drinker, Genet’s grave was in Larache quite far from there, I sat at the Baba Café with a newspaper to make myself look busy, I had put up at the Fuentes pension, on a tiny square in the old city, a tourist for tourist’s sake might as well go all the way, I was playing for time, I was playing for time before going back to Paris to see Stéphanie again and that obscure boulevard where I buried myself in papers and the commentaries of Lebihan the bicycle king, he was quite close to retirement, in limbo between active life and the house in Normandy, and he realized that himself: ah, Francis, I’m not into what I do anymore, my heart isn’t in my work, you understand? he’d spend hours looking off into space, until he was overcome with guilt and began running every which way looking desperately for something to do, something that would give him the feeling of being one of us again, indispensable, thereby wasting a huge amount of energy like La Fontaine’s fly around the coach horses, Lebihan who was usually so long-suffering no longer knew how to approach a mountain pass, that bike fanatic was pedaling in the void, trying to pass everyone on the false flats, Francis you have to go to Morocco, I knew my Lebihan so well the man with the incurable alopecia, I’d pretend not to hear, go where, why, I have a lot of work right now, then I’d see him stand up on the pedals immediately, Francis I’m getting a mission together right away, it’s vital, you can try to find out the name we’re missing in file Z., try to get them to agree to an exchange for file Y., pay attention, read the prospectus, Francis, the A. file is going to gain a lot of importance, the economic situation is pressuring us every day, Francis, the job is floundering, the drainpipe’s leaking go over there at least they’ll get the impression that we’re interested in them, Francis show them we can do more than those computer geeks, there Lebihan was unfair, in fact by complete chance we were responsible for a magnificent memo on The Methods of Communication of Q. on the Internet, Lebihan didn’t know a thing about computer science and he was very proud of it, of that memo, the quantity of information to deal with made Internet specialists almost inoperative, unless some madman sent an e-mail in Braille to ask for news about Bin Laden’s health: in the era of the Web human ways of getting information were finding their hour of glory and Lebihan, about to go into retirement, was going slightly off his rocker, the man trained during the Cold War was regaining some strength for a fresh onslaught, from time to time he’d shout as he scratched himself Francis, Francis, you haven’t made any progress on the K. affair, and Francis huffed, Francis spent hours checking vague memos from incongruous posts to make progress on K., as he dreamt about Croatia, Bosnia, action and the sounds of bombs, Francis thought about his dead comrades, about Stéphanie’s ass, about thousands of buttocks swaying in provocative panties, all hidden by the grey flannel slacks that are the daily lot of civil servants, but our specialty, information, made us capable of deciphering, of seeing the thong of this one or that one and so feeding our desire, day after day, for those administrative secret underthings — in Tangier there was no question of underwear, quite the contrary, I was stunned by the absence of women, replaced by African men, Saharan men, Sub-saharan men, all hoping for a quick passage to Europe and its glories, the city seemed full of hunted, waiting men, their eyes lowered, the whole Kasbah harbored timorous illegal immigrants and obese smugglers, a whole country waiting, Tangier stopover city where human trafficking replaced the contraband of drugs weapons and influences, all those poor guys in limbo had to survive waiting for their passage to Spain, the Fuentes pension looked like dozens of others, the more or less friendly staff appreciated Western tourists, as for me I was tempted to set off for Algeciras with a load of illegal immigrants, to become illegal myself, to disappear, to forget Francis the ex-warrior low-level spy Stéphanie the great strategist Lebihan the bicyclist and the whole works, I should have, I should have, if I think about it I was on the point of changing my life three times, once in Venice in the black water of a canal, once in Tangier in a sleazy hotel, once more today, done, that’s it, my name is Yvan Deroy the mad, every time an angel appeared, every time there was a divine intervention a miracle like they say to put me back on the rails that are guiding me now to Rome, in Tangier I was wandering through the alleyways of the Medina or by the sea, between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, haunted by Burroughs drugs and death, pursued by Stéphanie and our relationship that was becoming more difficult by the day, by the suitcase that was getting heavier and that I imagined would sink me in a boat in the middle of the Strait of Gibraltar: in Tingis the Phoenician the saint turned out to be an old Riffian with thick grey curly hair, his mustache almost white, who was drinking beer in a crowded noisy café, as I was killing time leafing through Naked Lunch without understanding a word at the next table over, he spoke to me first, he asked me you are French? and after I absentmindedly agreed he went on I don’t like the French, with a big smile, I immediately took to him, I said me neither, me neither I don’t specially like the French, or anyone else for that matter, the old man’s name was Mohamed Choukri he was a writer, known as the White Wolf in Tangier which he had been crisscrossing for forty years, he knew all the taverns all the whores with the suppurating wombs all the foreigners drawn by exoticism by the troubling delicacy of those morbid lands he had known Bowles and Genet he was a little pitiful with his hobo’s soft plastic bag in which he lugged around his complete works to sell to tourists, aware of being a living legend, a piece of the city, gnawed like it by the Crab, Choukri said to me I have three distinct and independent cancers, believe it or not, they could have been named like the nails that crucified Christ, poverty, violence, and corruption, he had the three cancers of Tangier old Mohamed with the first name of the Prophet, he was dying, I bought his novels from him For Bread Alone and Time of Errors, whose titles seemed to me wonderfully appropriate, Choukri asked me if I had come for the kif, the boys, or the nostalgia and I was hard put to reply, what could I have said, I came because Burroughs killed his wife, or something like that, that didn’t hold up, I came because Burroughs almost died asphyxiated jacking off with a plastic bag over his head, I came because I was trying to cure myself of my own cancer, I ended up muttering I came to take a patera to Andalusia, he smiled, ah you’re a journalist, there are a lot who make the trip, it’s the latest fashionable subject, I wanted to say no, I wasn’t a journalist but a spy, Choukri the dying asked me to buy him a beer, I ordered two, don’t worry, your paper will pay, he was always smiling with caustic irony, every five minutes someone came over to him to shake his hand, he who had eaten his own mother’s heart during the famines of the 1940s in the Rif, he was so hungry, he who had gotten lost in the big city just before independence, who had followed Jean Genet and sought his friendship out of self-interest, as Genet himself would have done with others twenty years earlier, Choukri his youth spoiled by poverty and the ignorant stupidity of his family redeemed himself, he became a writer by sucking the talent of Genet, Williams, and Bowles, who didn’t ask for anything better, Choukri hoisted himself up to the light by walking on those famous old men for whom he didn’t really hide his scorn, or at least his reservations, Saint Genet got angry at him when he learned about the publication of Jean Genet in Tangier, and now Mohamed Choukri the man of resentment eaten away by cancer was drinking his final beers and telling me about the riots of 1952, the international authorities harshly repressed the demonstrations for independence, Mohamed was seventeen, at the Grand Souk Square the army set up a machine gun battery and began firing at the crowd, Choukri said that he had seen his first corpse killed by a bullet there, he had seen people dead before from hunger disease or stabbing but never anyone killed by firearms, a large-caliber one at that, and he had been strongly impressed by the power of the projectile, the way men were killed in mid-flight he said, bullet-riddled dead even before they hit the ground, leaving bodies that were seemingly free of violence, face to the ground, the blood that was slowly spreading over the clothes contrasted with the panic of the crowd running in all directions to the rhythm of the machine gun, I thought about Burroughs shooting a bullet point-blank into his wife’s head, of Lowry strangling Margerie, of Cervantes three times bested, in Barcelona, in Lepanto, in Algiers, maybe Choukri too became a writer at that exact instant, when his father beat his submissive mother more out of habit than for pleasure, when he was forced to steal to eat and finally when he ran to take refuge in the Kasbah to escape the gunfire, humiliated by the three powers, familial, economic, and political, I looked at Mohamed the grey in that cheap bar in Tangier next to the smoke-yellowed poster for the Barcelona soccer club, Choukri with his air of a celestial tramp, pretentious and humble at the same time, close to the end, maybe already blind to the world around him, turned towards himself his story his tragedies his masks without ever emerging from them, he will always be the haggard emaciated abused child of the Rif, he will always be the teenager running to escape the French and Spanish bullets, and I tell myself that even if I took a boat headed for Europe as an illegal immigrant I’d still be myself, Francis son of his parents, son of the Croatian woman and the Frenchman, of the pianist and the engineer, the way they say Achilles son of Peleus, Ajax son of Telamon, Antilochus son of Nestor, we’re all going to rest on Leuke the White Island in the mouth of the Danube, all the sons of their fathers’ fate, whether they’re called Hunger, Courage, or Pain, we will not become immortal like Diomedes son of Tydeus changed into a peacock, we’re all going to conk out, kick the bucket, and find a pretty resting-place, Mohamed Choukri the greedy generous down-and-out is already in the ground, Burroughs the elite marksman and Lowry the drunkard too, even the Pope is going to drop the crozier any minute now, me too, maybe I should give up the fight and give in to death and defeat, admit I’m beaten and go back to irony and to the black galleys like Cervantes, but to where, it’s too late, I could have gotten out in Florence now it’s too late, no more stops before the final destination, I’ll have to follow it through to the end, I’ll have to let myself be carried to Rome and continue the battle, the fight against the Trojans great tamers of mares, against myself my memories and my dead who are watching me, making faces