The Last Laughter
John Bawles
He, our narrator, had awakened tired. He slowly got down to the kitchen, prepared a coffee, made himself as comfortable as he could on a sofa, and slowly sipped about three cups as if he wanted the moment to last until some unexpected event obliges him to get up, dress, and go out. He lazily went through his mobile phone for WhatsApp messages without reading them. He just sent a few good mornings to his closest friends. He turned to ‘’Spotify’’, and pushed on the so-called ‘’ discoveries of the day’’, closed his eyes, and started to listen to the 1980s songs. He suddenly burst into a laugh.
The music he was supposedly ‘’ discovering’’, listening to for the first time, was a piece of guitar that had an air de déjà vu (‘’Déjà entendu’’; already heard). Indeed, one cannot always listen to something completely original. Musicians have been, through the history of music, inspired by, or copied, their predecessors. Beethoven copied Mozart, the former copied Haydn. However, nowadays, copying occurs too often, and the already heard becomes annoying.
He remembered he had promised himself to buy a good guitar and resume his ‘’practicing’’ he had given up for so many years because of workload, social obligations, and primarily because of his two kids. But that was not what made him laugh.
He dug into the depths of his mind.
Images from last night’s dreams came to the fore. His cousin and three years or so, when they were adolescents, his best friend Muhammad Si-Rabah, deceased in the mid-seventies, had visited him, as cheerful, joyful, and talkative as when he was alive. Still, it was for what he estimated had been only a few seconds. There had been no dialogue. Usually, when a dead person you had cherished had come to you in a dream, that meant either you were going to join him, if he had told you to follow him, or that you were not going to die soon if he had talked to you, walked with you. None of these two hypotheses was a reason to burst into a laugh.
In another dream, he saw himself lying on the grass, somewhere in the countryside. Which countryside, he could not tell, probably because he generally loved nature. He was thinking of something, but he could not say what either. He asked himself whether thinking of nothing was possible. In real life, not in the dream, his wife had told him many times yogis could do that. To reach such a state of mind, one must train through meditation for a long time, probably several years. He had been meditating each morning when he woke up, and each evening before going to sleep, for more than three months now. He was far from it. Ideas and images associated with them had kept intruding, and he had to come back to concentrate on breathing, serenely, regularly, making expiration last a bit more than inspiration: inhale! Exhale! Inhale! Exhale! In his dream, too, he was trying to think of nothing. Again, nothing to provoke such a burst of laughter.
In a third dream, he went to a peculiar musical instruments market. He bought a classical guitar, but the sound he got when he played was more beautiful, and the strings were smoother. He cheered, exchanged nice words with the vendor, and explained to him that he had given up playing about six months after his first son was born, more than thirty years ago. The kid wanted all his attention and rushed to pull the strings of the guitar. ‘’I got scared a string would break and severely injure him. A string force is equivalent to 15-20 lbs or 7-9 kgs; I do not remember ’’, he said, confused. ‘’My second son came to life three years afterward and did the same whenever I tried to resume playing’’, he added. He feared telling the whole story, but he continued to think about it as if he still talked to the vendor. ‘’While they grew up, I had been so busy I had not enough time for my guitar or any of my hobbies. Today, I find it too challenging to resume practicing; I also have become slow at reading partitions’’. The vendor, who seemed to be a connoisseur, a musician himself, and probably the business owner, burst into laughter. Here is a common thread between us, he thought. The vendor then, smiling yet, assured him this guitar would greatly facilitate resuming playing. He did not remember how much he had paid, or he had paid for it at all. He only remembered he had had a good time and had been happy, even if he had not laughed that much.
But this was not a reason behind that burst in laughing so much, so long, so loud.
Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam’s Father and Son came on Spotify Radio. He spontaneously gave up his mind’s depths and let the song take over his mood. It did him right. He still could go back to search again what made him laugh that way, that morning, later.
Accompanying ‘’Cat-Yusuf’’ –he named him thus for the singer performed before his conversion to Islam. Calling him only Yusuf would have been unfair-; his memory roamed through the 1970s, the night clubs, the Irish pubs he frequented, the parties he organized with his friends, and the nights he spent with girlfriends in Paris, Barcelona, and different Italian cities. Oh, Italy, the open-air museum!
Paris! The long walks of July 1971, looking for a job, with his friend Ya’la, stopping only between 12:45 am and 2 pm, to hurry before all bakeries would close so they could buy one baguette and one liter of milk each for lunch, finishing by 7 pm, when exhausted to go back home. Ya’la had been nicely nicknamed Yaya, for French buddies and University mates could not pronounce the ‘’h’’. Also nicknamed Jean, after the Apostle Jean, also cited in the Koran. Ya’la was generous, helpful, not much talkative, with a smart look giving the impression it was trying to read in your mind, subtly cynical with himself and with life. With himself and politicians above all. Never with people. Ya’la’s cynicism made him laugh.
There was a reason for this cynicism: disillusionment. And there was a story behind disillusionment.
‘’It is about twilight; the Muezzin had just finished calling to the fourth prayer of a cold winter day.
Toc, toc! Two short and heavy knocks on a door. Ya’la, the eldest of five brothers and sisters, gets to the window of the room upstairs that he shares with his cadet. He thinks the knocks are on their door. He sees two men standing by the door of the house in front of theirs. The men had not heard him. One minute later, the neighbor gets out. The two men cease him, each from one side. He does not resist them. They walk him toward the vast space, attached to his house, an area that, over the years, had become a garbage dump. The three men exchange some words Ya’la cannot hear enough to understand what all this is. They walk about fifty meters. One of the two men takes a gun from under his jacket, shoots the neighbor dead, right in the right temple, and pushes him on a pile of filth. The two men walk away as if nothing had happened. Ya’la suspects they are from the secret police. Appalled, he shivers, gets cold from fear, carefully closes what has remained open of the window, gets into his ‘’bed’’ (a thin wool mattress and a pillow), puts his head under the heavy blanket, and waits for sleep, swearing he will not tell anyone.’’
Ya’la was fourteen-fifteen years old. It marked him all his life. He told his friend the story one of these memorable days they were looking for a job when he turned sarcastic about their chance to get one.
Since then, he sometimes wondered how Ya’la could laugh that much after what he had witnessed. Maybe life had become so insignificant -long before Kundera wrote his ‘’The Festival of Insignificance’’-, not worth a single instant of sorrow, a single tear or sigh. Ya’la swore and respected his sermon not to have children and not return to his mother country. However, he made an exception to please his wife. They both visited the best tourist places in Morocco once. During their voyage, they skipped his native city of Wajda.
In July 1971, when both friends thought they would never find a decent place where to work, they were sometimes both inspired enough to change a sad situation or event into something laughable; and they laughed. His friend’s laughter was kind of a smile and a half. You could hardly hear it one meter around. His was hilarious. Some passers-by had looked at them out of the corner of their eyes, disapproving. Others had kept indifferent or faked, so—this prolonged his laugh. What pleased him were smiles, which had mostly come from women, young women. Evidence his laughter was contagious, with a hint of sex-appeal.
Back ‘’home’’, in fact, Ya’la’s aunt house, a room and a makeshift kitchenette on the last floor, just under the roofs of an old Strasbourg Saint-Denis building, 300 meters from Les Halles (the ancient), the biggest market of Paris, we had to prepare something light for dinner and fall asleep early, hastily. It was imperative to get up at 8 am and start our job search again by 9 am.
On Sundays, the two friends could have more rest and afford copious meals with spaghetti or macaroni with mere butter, or butter and tomato sauce for both lunch and dinner. They divided tasks. Alternately: clean-up/do the dishes/cook.
One Sunday, around midday, Ya’la went on shopping. He came back after half an hour, smiling to show his teeth, happy as a kid. He did not wait until his friend questions him.
I bought one whole kilogram of the veal liver and some beer too. We are going to celebrate!
Celebrate what?
The liver. Lunch and dinner.
That is expensive!
Not this one. It costs only 7 Francs per kilo.
How come?
Look. I went to the butcher, saw this liver, and asked him how much. He said, ‘’liver for cats?’’. I said, ‘’yes, for my cat. One kilo, please!’’ Can you imagine? The same liver we eat in Wajda, except that it is in smaller slices. They do not eat it, the schmucks! They have it feed cats.
Schmucks!
They laughed, heartily, openly.
At lunch, Ya’la asked:
How is it? How does it taste?
Super! I like it. I am a cat. Miaow! Miaow! He responded.
Laughter.
No, seriously. Said Ya’la.
Seriously? I feel it now. I am a cat. I did not know until I swallowed the first bite.
Laughter.
No. Seriously, either we are cats for them; the butcher knew, but he did not want to offend you, and that is why our country had been their Protectorate for half a century. They protected us as if we were their cats, or they thought, and still think their cats are our equals.
Laughter. Both friends had tears flowing so much had they laughed. Finally, he turned to Ya’la and said:
Really? There is no difference; this is the liver we eat in Wajda. I assure you it is the veal’s liver. Lamb’s liver is less reddish. Kind of pinky grey. It tastes different too. Kind of more dry; that is why we wrap it with fat and call it ‘’boulfaf’’.
They went out for a promenade, walking as accustomed. From nearby Les Halles (the ancient) to the Champs-Elysées, Etoile, the Arch of Triumph.
By the end of July, they finally found jobs, and that helped them register at the University of Paris II-Assas, where they had planned to get their Law degree after four years of hard studies.
***
Last time he had called Ya’la, he was in Paris for two days, on his way to New York. It was Barbara who had answered the phone. He always called her Barbara because she never changed that Barbara Streisand’s hairstyle she got since he first saw her the first time at the Faculty of Assas. That was in 1972 or 1973. He asked her how they were doing. She told him her husband had become deaf. She had been taking him to excellent public hospitals as well as to a private clinic. Great professors had been trying to find a solution, but they had been cautious not to give her false hopes. She was very anxious. Ya’la and herself had nothing more to do but wait. He asked her whether he could see them. She informed she was taking his friend to the hospital. And, Ya’la would not hear him. He was sure she was sincere. If what she said was a thoughtful way to turn down his demand, it was most likely his friend’s will. He felt so sad for his best friend ever he could hardly continue to talk to her without crying. He offered Barbara to help, hinting at giving some money. She said everything was all right. He told her to kiss his friend on his behalf, he was leaving the day after, and he will call her on his way back. They said goodbye.
‘’This is Ya’la’s will’’, he thought, insistently. He had always known him as proud, too proud to complain or show in a bad situation. Indeed, all those many years they had been friends, he had not heard him complain, not even when he was sick or when he lacked money. He also wondered whether he had not been guilty, not calling his friend more often. He had forgotten the latter seldom took the initiative to phone. Was it because of hardship? Was it because of a habit that had become his friend’s ‘’nature’’? He could not tell. But he remembered his friend reproaching to another friend, not calling him. He had not paid much attention. But why this souvenir? It would not make any difference. Then he remembered Ya’la, for he would never go back to Wajda, would it be for a ‘’visite éclair’’, a short visit, had suggested to him to buy a small house in Southern Morocco. He meant they could meet there, greet their friends, explore the countryside, simply be together, eat, drink and laugh, make those days in Paris continue elsewhere. Now that he felt he would probably not see Ya’la anymore, our narrator regretted he did not follow his friend’s advice. He laughed again, a sour laugh of disillusion. This one laugh was at his silliness. He had thought buying a ‘’Pied-à-Terre’’, a vacation home, would be worthless since they would occupy it one month a year, for the suggested location was too far from Wajda and would take at least a four days roundtrip given the state of the national ways, the horrible hot weather. And, especially, dangerous trucks’ drivers.
He smiled. A smile of sorrow. A little bit of regret. Then, the smile grew, stretching his mouth bit by bit, continuously, became a silent and sad laughter, mixed with two tears which coldly flowing on his cheeks, though it was hot. For a second, he thought why people talked of ‘’crying at warm tears’’. Then, all of a sudden, he realized it was on another July, some forty years earlier, that he had walked this same Champs-Elysées avenue, one Sunday, for the first time. Ya’la wanted to show him a pair of shoes, which cost 1,440 French Francs. He walked towards the famous Weston shoe shop, at the corner of Washington street, to look at the shoes, not buy any. Exactly as he had done before, in his friend’s company, laughing at the prices. He remembered Ya’la had commented laughing:
Well, I know why this pair of shoes is mainly so expensive. It is because it will wear you and walk you where you want. You will not wear it, boy.
1,440 FF? The merchant does not know I can buy a piece of land to build a house. He had replied, grinning, as if to ridicule the situation.
No one in Wajda would believe you if you told them about this.
***
Ya’la was right. Two years after he had made this remark, his friend went to Wajda on sickness leave. He met with Marmar in a café. While chattering, Marmar told him his shoes were pretty and asked how much he had bought them.
220 Francs.
Come on! You are kidding me. Marmar answered, laughing at him.
Not at all. Why?
I see. You have settled there and learned how to lie—still laughing.
Really? He said, laughing too. Loudly.
It was a strange situation. Each laughed at the other for a different reason, yet about the same trivial thing—a pair of shoe price. One could not imagine such shoes could cost ‘’so much’’, hence thinking of his friend a bluffer, a liar. The other hardly imagining his friend could not think of a pair of shoes costing ‘’only’’ 220 FF. What would have happened had he told him about the ones Ya’la had shown him? The good thing was that both felt this disagreement was no big deal. The misunderstanding had not spoiled their relation in the least. A few minutes later, they passed to other amusing topics.
Their humoristic dialogue had continued for a while during the Saturday promenade along ‘’the best avenue of the world’’. They had laughed at each phrase. When they had run out of inspiration, they tried to tell funny stories picked up from cartoons or storytellers whom they had listened to, seated on the asphalt of Bab Sidi Abdelwahab, in Wajda.
Back to Paris, he had called as promised to Barbara. The telephone company operator’s melodious voice sent into his ears: ‘’ The telephone number you have dialed is not assigned anymore. Please check the phonebook or the information service.’’
The idea of his friend’s will to cut any link with him and all acquaintances jumped to his mind. He knew Ya’la was somehow a bit of a Steppenwolf as in Hermann Hesse novel: he had abruptly severed all relations with two friends some years ago, for more futile reasons than the Steppenwolf’s main character. Our narrator then remembered what he had refused to admit. He had called some time ago from home. It seemed to him then that Ya’la had picked up the phone, said ‘’Allo?’’ and as soon as he told him good morning, another person had taken the phone to answer. When he asked to talk to his friend, this person responded:
There is no Ya’la here. You must have dialed the wrong number.
Is this number 33145…?
Yes, but there is no Ya’la here.
He had excused, and they both hang up.
That was it. Time had worked out its way. It had driven the two far away from each other, to where their paths would never join, like parallels on a scrap of paper, in Euclidian geometry. The only hope he could hold on was the possibility they would meet by chance. Life is not exclusively Euclidian. Artists, painters, and other people know that parallels meet at the horizon’s points on a canvas.
Wasn’t it by chance that he became real friends with Ya’la? Before, they had been mere Lycée mates.
Ya’la was a habitué of ‘’ the Jackson’’ on boulevard Muhammad V in Wajda. The place had been initially an American Bar, named after his owner. And converted into a café, one of the best, which meant correct, or clean, frequented by ‘’intellectuals’’, an adjective that applied then to teachers, professors, pupils preparing their Baccalaureate, and students of Rabat University, the only one in Morocco at the time, who happened to be there during holidays. Three main topics used to be of interest to everyone: lessons, politics, and anecdotes, jokes, teasing each other for a blunder he had made, mainly if he had made it while attending classroom courses.
Unlike Ya’la, he went to ‘’the Jackson’’ now and then. Most of the time, he accompanied his friends Kata and Bubu to play baby-foot. Once their two or three rounds of play were over, they sat around the same table to have coffee, tea, or lemonade with other class and Lycée mates. Among the latter, there was Ya’la. He discovered how his company was pleasant. Ya’la always greeted them with a smile that did not dare to be complete, like a sentence suspended for some hidden reason. He then invited them to sit down ‘’ to hear the last’’ mishap done by one or another member of the ‘’clique’’; in other words, those who had preceded and were then surrounding him, be it in the Lycée or elsewhere, mainly in the boulevard. For he always sat his back to the café window so he could see passers-by, particularly young girls and those mates who courted them. He then made the company laugh. He made it laugh a lot, exaggerating the whereabouts of the story. Sometimes, he recounted a joke he had learned from cartoons, such as Tom and Jerry, or ‘’10 000 blagues’’, a booklet-compilation of short anecdotes, and transposed them. Sometimes, the concerned guy had committed such big blunder Ya’la could not refrain from gently, softly teasing him. Everybody laughed, including the ‘’victim’’.
For instance, Dizzy, an absent-minded, two meters tall guy, as strong as a bull – he once terraced a calf -, but always smiling and incapable of harming a fly, complained to their professor of French about the government’s project of ‘’ Arabizing’’ all disciplines, including French, English...The clique kept teasing and laughing at him a week or so, and he kept smiling yet.
‘’Marmar’’ had been nicknamed ‘’le bourgeois’’ by Ya’la. The reason was he many times arrived late to the café Jackson, caressing his tiny belly and boasting he had eaten like Gargantua at some dinner the night before. To which, Ya’la responded with a broad smile, pointing his index toward his ‘’victim’’ of the day:
Really? With this stomach? that is as big as a chickpea?
He continued teasing him, asking questions about the meals, and commenting in a sarcastic way witness could not refrain from laughing. Marmar happily joined what he stoically considered a great outdoors’ play.
Certain Fridays, Muha walked on the opposite sidewalk, wearing Fassi white djellaba and slippers, Al Alam (The flag) newspaper under his arm, not looking in the clique’s direction, so to fake ignoring them, nervously making his cigarette jolt from hand to mouth. Ya’la was always the first to draw attention, telling the others to look at their friend Momo the ‘’Alim and future politician’’ of the Independence Party (Istiqlal). Everyone guffawed, guffawed until Muha had turned on the next street and was not anymore in their eyes’ reach.
Out of sight, out of mind. The clique exclaimed in unison the expression they had learned from their English teachers.
Ya’la never talked of his humoristic accomplishments. Here is one told by one of his classmates.
‘’Ya’la, and Abadh, another classmate, hid a radio transistor in a kind of cables mantle of their classroom, switched on. When the professor came in, he could not begin his lesson. He searched where the radio was; in vain. He appealed to the general custodian and censor. By chance, the minute they arrived, the national broadcast shifted to the local one, beginning to air the national anthem. Everyone stood still. The pupils hardly retained their laughs.
Big laughs surged during recreation. All the Lycée pupils who heard the story that day got cheered up.’’
Here is another achievement reported to our narrator by Dizzy.
‘’On a few occasions, Ya’la invited two or three friends to show them how soldiers learned to ride bicycles nearby Lycée Abdel Moumen. He accompanied them to a street, a slope that formed a T with another at their intersection. The group sat on the sidewalk at the high side and waited. After a while, some recruit came out of the armed forces barrack there, with a bicycle. He put it close to a brick, mounted it, and let it descend the slope. Getting near the intersection, he began to use his feet to stop it, not knowing how to use the breaks, failing to turn right or left because of the speed, finally hitting the wall in front of him. The group burst into a laugh and went back to the Lycée to relate the scene to their mates.’’
***
During ten years in Paris, the two friends invited each other to organized parties, went together to ‘’cinema d’art’’ movies, music festivals, theater, piano bars, one-person shows, etc. Our narrator now recalled few, such as ‘’Alexandre le bienheureux’’(Alexandre the Blissful; Philippe Noiret), ‘’Hook, Line and Sinker’’ (Jerry Lewis), Guy Bedos, Raymond Devos, Popeck, Bob Marley, and ‘’The Moroccan Beetles’’: Nass El Ghiwan.
During those parties, Muha committed his ‘’best’’ mishaps, allowing Ya’la to make fun of him, making everyone laugh hysterically.
An unforgettable dinner took place in 1974-75. Meed had prepared a succulent Couscous with plenty of lambs meat and vegetables, preceded by appetizers, that is, olives prepared the Moroccan way -with garlic, pimento, coriander, parsley …-, peanuts, almonds, and beer; accompanied by good red wine, plus fruits for dessert. During hours, there was no talk but humoristic, enthusiastic, loud. Fortunately, on Saturdays, the neighbors were not upset, neither by the music nor by the brawl. At dessert, the wine having made everybody more joyful than he should, Muha did something entirely odd for the Moroccans. Possibly to impress a girl he wanted to court. He took a knife and began to peel a tangerine instead of using his fingers. One would say Ya’la was precisely waiting for this gesture. He guffawed, pointed his finger at him, and exclaimed:
Look at him. The civilized man. How classy!
Glad to hear you admit it. I am a civilized man, not like you, peasant. Came the answer from Muha.
Who spent more than an hour chewing a plastic date, not recognizing it was a prank? You made us laugh, Meed and I.
Laughs burst from everyone. Palms of few individual hands to hide them –or hide teeth corroded by alcohol and cigarettes- were of no help. They added to the comic spectacle and made those with healthy mouths exchange glances and laugh even more.
I knew it was a date made of plastic, for it was not sweet. I faked I was chewing it to make you believe I had fallen in the trap. I was fooling you and chuckling. You were so busy you did not even notice.
Muha tried hard to with a forced, faked laughter to convince them he was sincere. His trick did only trigger more laughter.
In his absent-minded situation, he took a small round piece of ‘’Bombel’’ cheese and put it in his mouth without removing the wax. Our narrator whispered in his ear, not to chew it. The ‘’victim’’ of that night did not dare take out the cheese from his mouth, considering he would worsen his situation. Everybody had seen Muha’s gesture and started to laugh, faking they were continuing on the date chewing gaffe. Ya’la resumed:
And what about the spicy candy? Added Ya’la.
I like them spicy candies. I do not like sugar that much!
Except sweet dates, of course. Right?
Chortles; this time, Muha’s face showed he was about to get angry. Ya’la stood up, seeming eager to talk all night, went to him, kissed him twice to signify he did not mean to offend him, and that was for a laugh as usual. Proud, and dubious, Muha tittered and said:
I know my friend. Next time it will be my honor to make fun of you, as I did on past occasions. Don’t you remember?
I do, I do, Muha. In this case, would you allow me to tell the last one; about Marie and you?
Go ahead.
Ya’la stood up, raised his glass of wine, and addressed the company, faking to be solemn:
Our dear friend here was courted once by a faculty mate, Marie. She managed that he accompanied her to her apartment. They drank a few glasses of Ricard, and then she invited him to share her dinner. The drink moved her. She went to the fridge, took some canned food, olives, and cheese, and brought them with some bread. They dined. I pass what happened after that. The first thing she did the next morning was hurry toward me and tell me the blunder she had made with Muha: the canned food was her cat’s. So my friends ‘’cheers’’ to cats’ food.
Guffaws! Giggles! ‘’Non-stop’’ laughs, tears, coughs, and hands pressed against bellies that had started to ache.
Muha wanted to laugh off the story. He said out loud, standing up in his turn :
Do not believe him. This story has come right now, straight from his imagination, the wine has done his effect on him.
No one was listening to him. As he might have known, ‘’ … our mood changes more often than our fortune’’, he resigned to ‘’ make against bad fortune good heart’’, let himself contaminated, joined the ‘’ laughter festival’’.
Ya’la did not spare opportunities to gently mock his best friend, our narrator. On one of the numerous occasions the latter invited to dinner at the apartment he shared with Meed, at rue Cail, close to the Gare du Nord, he ventured to prepare some spaghetti à la bolognese. The result was catastrophic. He had put too much spaghetti in the cooking pot. Long before they got ready, they began to overflow under the amused looks and sarcastic laughs of Ya’la, who, when all guests had arrived, told them about it, depicting with exaggeration his friend’s ‘’panic, shame, and mishandling’’.
Our friend here thought he was preparing spaghetti for an entire regiment. You should have seen them overflowing like snakes toward the sink. He said.
Come on!
You could not realize how much spaghetti there was, for you have not enrolled in military service, hence never cooked for soldiers. I did -he did not either-; so I know there was spaghetti for at least thirty people. We are only ten, buddy.
Guffaws. The ‘’victim’’ of that night wanted to sweep away his best friend’s argument:
Well, I was afraid you would stay here for three nights, so I prepared for three dinners.
You are right; we stay that long, but we refuse you to feed us on spaghetti. You will have to seriously think about what you will provide us for three days and three nights; do not forget about breakfast.
Guffaws triggered again.
Ya’la’s storytelling and laughs it triggered took quite a long time during dinner, then turned to other funny topics, Muha’s and Meed’s blunders.
Ya’la loved making fun of rightist politicians. Socialists like former president François Mitterand were genuine rightists who had nothing to do with socialism. They pretended. They used the road roller that was socialist ideology to grab power and carry on capitalist policies, which he was quick to denounce with sarcasm and humor. He despised what he called petty philosophers such as Bernard Henri Levy (BHL), whom he had nicknamed Bêtise Humaine Lancinante (Human Haunting Stupidity). He admired above all the former French communist party’s Secretary Georges Marchais for his TV performances. Marchais drained a broad audience; he represented the second political party of France; he had tens of thousands of sympathizers; and he did not hesitate to cast crudely certain ‘’truths’’ to the face of his interlocutors, politicians they were, or journalists. He sometimes ridiculed them, which made his ‘’shows’’ all the more exciting, and the audience laugh. One would think he has inspired Donald Trump, seeing the way the American President treats journalists now. Ya’la longed to watch emissions where he participated and never let the event pass without telling his ‘’best friend ever’’. When the latter could not share those memorable moments, he related them to him afterward, with all details, he made a great deal not to forget.
Marchais had a peculiar French accent, close to the southern, but more articulated with an emphasis on individual syllables and grimaces. Certain exclamations, ‘’ it is scandalous’’ (‘’c’est un scandale!’’) and ‘’Shut up El Kabach!’’ (‘Taisez-Vous El Kabach’’ – addressing the famous journalist), contributed to his popularity. That made many laugh and mimick him. Ya’la indeed mimicked him when relating to his friend, and both laughed.
***
Now that he had retired and seen many of his friends and acquaintances pass away one after the other, he did not want his wife to ‘’leave’’ before him. It would be insufferable, unjust for she was younger.
Now that his sons did not visit him, but rarely, our narrator missed them. He felt somehow lonely. Fortunately, he had kept in touch with a few old friends and colleagues with whom he could chat, talk, and laugh. Though laughing as he was accustomed to, hilariously, had become a bit painful. His old bones, particularly his chops, were aching, his articulations crackling. He thought his body in terms of an engine whose spare parts were in severe need of lubricants and gaskets (joints).
At times his friends were unreachable; at others, he could drive from his house to the café where they used to meet. He then went out to the nearby square, sat on a bench in the shade of a skinny olive tree. Recollections popped in his mind. They made him smile or laugh. He cautioned not to do it loudly, so people would not believe him nuts.
He knew for years now, long before the fatal moment, times had changed. Almost nobody talked to anybody. Not even to neighbors. No one dared smile at anyone or tell a joke to share laughter with him. Doing so would make the latter think the former was familiar, strange, or nuts.
He found it strange that people thought and behaved this way while he smiled at birds and stopped moving, fearing to disturb them.
He smiled at them while having his breakfast in his garden and admiring the landscape which unfolded before him.
He smiled to them when the sky had suddenly changed colors between the clouds in the early rising mornings when they were awakening, and at sunsets when they came back to their nets.
He also found it strange people behaved this way when he laughed at jokes told by youngsters, at café terraces, supermarkets, or any other public place!
So, he appealed to his souvenirs to talk to the deceased friends or those whose phone numbers and addresses he had lost, and to laugh, imaginatively with them, or alone, silently, in his deepest soul. But his touches of laughter were most of the time tainted with sorrow, regret, mounting tears he struggled to stop before they could show in his tired eyes. His throat and ears ached; he painfully swallowed his saliva; he felt his heart weakening and his knees shivering.
For years he had asked himself why he should continue to live in a world like this. His small world, not the one he traveled for more than half a century. This small world that is his country, his city, his neighborhood, had become within less than two decades. A world where Moroccan kids of well-educated people speak foreign languages but not their own, but those of poor and uneducated people hardly speak theirs and struggle to utter a single correct phrase when asked at school. He knew why in this ‘’new’’ world, kids of the former do not mix with those of the latter. He had heard from persons who consider themselves the elite why they do not put their children in the same schools as the rest of the population, why they shop with them in luxurious malls and boutiques, do not take them to the medina markets, etc.
He found all this weird and revolting. But he did not like to talk about it, for his acquaintances had misjudged him when he had opined differently during a discussion thereof. Whenever he thought the matter alone, in his solitude, he smiled, then laughed of himself. ‘’After all, I might be the fool for not doing like them!’’ He told himself. ‘’No, I am not the fool. My friends, who constitute the other part of the elite, whom I see here from time to time and those whom I see during summer vacations, think like me.’’ He added. ‘’Oh! Maybe we both are fools; our foolishness is different. But where does wisdom lie? Where does the future of the country reside?’’ He finished his monologue with a feeling of undepictable fatigue.
That last morning, one of the hottest since he got interested in global warming denied by Trump & Co., he went on an interior dialogue with his best friend ever, Ya’la, even if they had not got in touch for more than twenty-five years. He knew he had had many good and loyal friends overtime, at primary and high schools, at the university as a student then as a professor, but the friendship did not last as long as the one that existed with Ya’la. Ten years in Paris alone. Three in Morocco. Several, after he returned home and visited France now and then.
He saw his friend in his thirties, handsome, wearing grey chic flannel trousers, a blue shirt under a night-blue blazer, a Bordeaux silk scarf around his neck, letting his smile to illuminate his healthy teeth, his VanGogh pipe pending from his mouth’s left corner. His eyes were sparkling with joy for the pleasure of their encounter.
Good morning my friend. It’s been a long absence; I thought you dead and grilling on the embers of God’s Gehenna. I remember you have always been frightened at the idea of displeasing your ‘’God the Almighty’’ as you always called him. Ya’la said, gently removing the pipe from between his lip after sucking it, then laughing out loud.
Good morning my best miscreant friend ever. I thought you would come to me avowing your repentance to God the Almighty, so since life’s a bitch, I finally can leave it, knowing you will not go straight to that same Gehenna for eternity.
Why? I am still young, not like you. Look at what you have become in such a short time during which life had separated us. You look like someone who is more than eighty years old. What happened to you in this country? You should have stayed in Paris. Together, we were happy with our wives, always having good food and excellent wine, and laughing. You used to say ‘’laughing makes you live longer’’. Did you forget, my good traitor? Ya’la replied, laughing.
That is why I do not merely look, but I am more than eighty. And I do not intend to die soon. Though people here, in my small world, do not laugh, nor even smile, I do laugh when I meet some ‘’new’’ friends. I tell you something you might find weird, I silently laugh deep in my mind, because if I do loudly, people would think I am crazy. Is it not a laughable situation?
It is indeed. I think these people would be right if they knew your past and you left Paris, a paradise nowadays, and came here to live amongst them, narrow-minded people, plenty of money but no Savoir-Vivre! Ya’la exclaimed, laughing out loud, the same way he used to in the seventies when he criticized the Bourgeois-comprador in third world countries.
Do you still read comics?
Yes, and you?
Not anymore, but I read or read again lots of funny books of Mark Twain (Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Fin), Sinclair Lewis (Babbitt), Oyinkan Braithwaite (My Sister, the Serial Killer), Bob Servant (Delete At Your Peril), and others. Otherwise, how could I make it through without laughing and live until now? There is no chance narrow-minded here see me laugh when reading and laugh at me.
You have not changed, my friend; those Yankees I despise above all still attract you. Ya’la said, sketching an ironic smile.
Back to your contradictions, eh? My dear. Who was fond of, I would say addict, to Jerry Lewis, Woody Allen, Eddy Murphy, and hurried up to watch each of their movies? Not me, haha!
You are right, for you are stubborn. Look, I came to see you for a more ‘’hilarious’’ reason.
What is it?
I am here to take you with me. We have a long, eternal journey to go together. Said Ya’la, grinning a smile.
But I am much older than you now; who knows if we will be as before?
Do not worry. Your soul, mood, and mind are as young as when we were in Paris. You just passed the exam. Congratulations.
Our narrator started to laugh out loud. He could not resist the joy Ya’la’s words have given him. His laughter became louder when his friend begun to tickle him under his arms, then slowly faded away until it died:
Haha, haha, ha.ha, ha..ha, ha...ha....haaaaaaaaaaaaaaa…
Nobody would have imagined such a dramatic end of such a nice guy. He died from a non-stop-laughter that progressively lead his heart to slow down like a tiny engine running out of fuel or any other energy. Nobody ever knew which damned joke had provoked the laughter. Nobody was nearby enough. He had been sitting alone for quite a while, staring at the sky, his legs moving on an inaudible music’s rhythm he seemed to appreciate very much. Chess and dames players were busy, each one trying its best to win the party. Few of them paid attention to his laughter. But it was too late to reach him, see what was going on, and call an ambulance or dispense him first help.
One after the other, onlookers gathered around him in a perfect circle. They were the kind of people accustomed to storytellers, ancient Raï singers, medicinal herbs, dead lizards, ostriches’ eggs, amulets, and other such ‘’ magic’’ things merchants, in the medina squares attached to old ramparts.
I saw he was talking alone. It seems to me. Said a teenager.
He was fixing something in the sky. Said an adult who looked like some laborer on a nearby worksite. His clothes resembled a mason’s.
Call an ambulance. Who has got a mobile phone? Said a man in his sixties.
Does anybody know him? A skinny woman bowing under the heavyweight of her age asked, shyly, with pity.
A young ambulant fruits merchant left his Triporteur and approached the crowd. He looked at him over another teenager’s shoulders and said.
Allahu Akbar (Allah is Great). To ‘’ Allah we belong; to Him, we return’’. I know where this poor man lives. May Allah have mercy on him. I am hurrying to tell his family or whoever I find in his house.
John Bawles
He, our narrator, had awakened tired. He slowly got down to the kitchen, prepared a coffee, made himself as comfortable as he could on a sofa, and slowly sipped about three cups as if he wanted the moment to last until some unexpected event obliges him to get up, dress, and go out. He lazily went through his mobile phone for WhatsApp messages without reading them. He just sent a few good mornings to his closest friends. He turned to ‘’Spotify’’, and pushed on the so-called ‘’ discoveries of the day’’, closed his eyes, and started to listen to the 1980s songs. He suddenly burst into a laugh.
The music he was supposedly ‘’ discovering’’, listening to for the first time, was a piece of guitar that had an air de déjà vu (‘’Déjà entendu’’; already heard). Indeed, one cannot always listen to something completely original. Musicians have been, through the history of music, inspired by, or copied, their predecessors. Beethoven copied Mozart, the former copied Haydn. However, nowadays, copying occurs too often, and the already heard becomes annoying.
He remembered he had promised himself to buy a good guitar and resume his ‘’practicing’’ he had given up for so many years because of workload, social obligations, and primarily because of his two kids. But that was not what made him laugh.
He dug into the depths of his mind.
Images from last night’s dreams came to the fore. His cousin and three years or so, when they were adolescents, his best friend Muhammad Si-Rabah, deceased in the mid-seventies, had visited him, as cheerful, joyful, and talkative as when he was alive. Still, it was for what he estimated had been only a few seconds. There had been no dialogue. Usually, when a dead person you had cherished had come to you in a dream, that meant either you were going to join him, if he had told you to follow him, or that you were not going to die soon if he had talked to you, walked with you. None of these two hypotheses was a reason to burst into a laugh.
In another dream, he saw himself lying on the grass, somewhere in the countryside. Which countryside, he could not tell, probably because he generally loved nature. He was thinking of something, but he could not say what either. He asked himself whether thinking of nothing was possible. In real life, not in the dream, his wife had told him many times yogis could do that. To reach such a state of mind, one must train through meditation for a long time, probably several years. He had been meditating each morning when he woke up, and each evening before going to sleep, for more than three months now. He was far from it. Ideas and images associated with them had kept intruding, and he had to come back to concentrate on breathing, serenely, regularly, making expiration last a bit more than inspiration: inhale! Exhale! Inhale! Exhale! In his dream, too, he was trying to think of nothing. Again, nothing to provoke such a burst of laughter.
In a third dream, he went to a peculiar musical instruments market. He bought a classical guitar, but the sound he got when he played was more beautiful, and the strings were smoother. He cheered, exchanged nice words with the vendor, and explained to him that he had given up playing about six months after his first son was born, more than thirty years ago. The kid wanted all his attention and rushed to pull the strings of the guitar. ‘’I got scared a string would break and severely injure him. A string force is equivalent to 15-20 lbs or 7-9 kgs; I do not remember ’’, he said, confused. ‘’My second son came to life three years afterward and did the same whenever I tried to resume playing’’, he added. He feared telling the whole story, but he continued to think about it as if he still talked to the vendor. ‘’While they grew up, I had been so busy I had not enough time for my guitar or any of my hobbies. Today, I find it too challenging to resume practicing; I also have become slow at reading partitions’’. The vendor, who seemed to be a connoisseur, a musician himself, and probably the business owner, burst into laughter. Here is a common thread between us, he thought. The vendor then, smiling yet, assured him this guitar would greatly facilitate resuming playing. He did not remember how much he had paid, or he had paid for it at all. He only remembered he had had a good time and had been happy, even if he had not laughed that much.
But this was not a reason behind that burst in laughing so much, so long, so loud.
Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam’s Father and Son came on Spotify Radio. He spontaneously gave up his mind’s depths and let the song take over his mood. It did him right. He still could go back to search again what made him laugh that way, that morning, later.
Accompanying ‘’Cat-Yusuf’’ –he named him thus for the singer performed before his conversion to Islam. Calling him only Yusuf would have been unfair-; his memory roamed through the 1970s, the night clubs, the Irish pubs he frequented, the parties he organized with his friends, and the nights he spent with girlfriends in Paris, Barcelona, and different Italian cities. Oh, Italy, the open-air museum!
Paris! The long walks of July 1971, looking for a job, with his friend Ya’la, stopping only between 12:45 am and 2 pm, to hurry before all bakeries would close so they could buy one baguette and one liter of milk each for lunch, finishing by 7 pm, when exhausted to go back home. Ya’la had been nicely nicknamed Yaya, for French buddies and University mates could not pronounce the ‘’h’’. Also nicknamed Jean, after the Apostle Jean, also cited in the Koran. Ya’la was generous, helpful, not much talkative, with a smart look giving the impression it was trying to read in your mind, subtly cynical with himself and with life. With himself and politicians above all. Never with people. Ya’la’s cynicism made him laugh.
There was a reason for this cynicism: disillusionment. And there was a story behind disillusionment.
‘’It is about twilight; the Muezzin had just finished calling to the fourth prayer of a cold winter day.
Toc, toc! Two short and heavy knocks on a door. Ya’la, the eldest of five brothers and sisters, gets to the window of the room upstairs that he shares with his cadet. He thinks the knocks are on their door. He sees two men standing by the door of the house in front of theirs. The men had not heard him. One minute later, the neighbor gets out. The two men cease him, each from one side. He does not resist them. They walk him toward the vast space, attached to his house, an area that, over the years, had become a garbage dump. The three men exchange some words Ya’la cannot hear enough to understand what all this is. They walk about fifty meters. One of the two men takes a gun from under his jacket, shoots the neighbor dead, right in the right temple, and pushes him on a pile of filth. The two men walk away as if nothing had happened. Ya’la suspects they are from the secret police. Appalled, he shivers, gets cold from fear, carefully closes what has remained open of the window, gets into his ‘’bed’’ (a thin wool mattress and a pillow), puts his head under the heavy blanket, and waits for sleep, swearing he will not tell anyone.’’
Ya’la was fourteen-fifteen years old. It marked him all his life. He told his friend the story one of these memorable days they were looking for a job when he turned sarcastic about their chance to get one.
Since then, he sometimes wondered how Ya’la could laugh that much after what he had witnessed. Maybe life had become so insignificant -long before Kundera wrote his ‘’The Festival of Insignificance’’-, not worth a single instant of sorrow, a single tear or sigh. Ya’la swore and respected his sermon not to have children and not return to his mother country. However, he made an exception to please his wife. They both visited the best tourist places in Morocco once. During their voyage, they skipped his native city of Wajda.
In July 1971, when both friends thought they would never find a decent place where to work, they were sometimes both inspired enough to change a sad situation or event into something laughable; and they laughed. His friend’s laughter was kind of a smile and a half. You could hardly hear it one meter around. His was hilarious. Some passers-by had looked at them out of the corner of their eyes, disapproving. Others had kept indifferent or faked, so—this prolonged his laugh. What pleased him were smiles, which had mostly come from women, young women. Evidence his laughter was contagious, with a hint of sex-appeal.
Back ‘’home’’, in fact, Ya’la’s aunt house, a room and a makeshift kitchenette on the last floor, just under the roofs of an old Strasbourg Saint-Denis building, 300 meters from Les Halles (the ancient), the biggest market of Paris, we had to prepare something light for dinner and fall asleep early, hastily. It was imperative to get up at 8 am and start our job search again by 9 am.
On Sundays, the two friends could have more rest and afford copious meals with spaghetti or macaroni with mere butter, or butter and tomato sauce for both lunch and dinner. They divided tasks. Alternately: clean-up/do the dishes/cook.
One Sunday, around midday, Ya’la went on shopping. He came back after half an hour, smiling to show his teeth, happy as a kid. He did not wait until his friend questions him.
I bought one whole kilogram of the veal liver and some beer too. We are going to celebrate!
Celebrate what?
The liver. Lunch and dinner.
That is expensive!
Not this one. It costs only 7 Francs per kilo.
How come?
Look. I went to the butcher, saw this liver, and asked him how much. He said, ‘’liver for cats?’’. I said, ‘’yes, for my cat. One kilo, please!’’ Can you imagine? The same liver we eat in Wajda, except that it is in smaller slices. They do not eat it, the schmucks! They have it feed cats.
Schmucks!
They laughed, heartily, openly.
At lunch, Ya’la asked:
How is it? How does it taste?
Super! I like it. I am a cat. Miaow! Miaow! He responded.
Laughter.
No, seriously. Said Ya’la.
Seriously? I feel it now. I am a cat. I did not know until I swallowed the first bite.
Laughter.
No. Seriously, either we are cats for them; the butcher knew, but he did not want to offend you, and that is why our country had been their Protectorate for half a century. They protected us as if we were their cats, or they thought, and still think their cats are our equals.
Laughter. Both friends had tears flowing so much had they laughed. Finally, he turned to Ya’la and said:
Really? There is no difference; this is the liver we eat in Wajda. I assure you it is the veal’s liver. Lamb’s liver is less reddish. Kind of pinky grey. It tastes different too. Kind of more dry; that is why we wrap it with fat and call it ‘’boulfaf’’.
They went out for a promenade, walking as accustomed. From nearby Les Halles (the ancient) to the Champs-Elysées, Etoile, the Arch of Triumph.
By the end of July, they finally found jobs, and that helped them register at the University of Paris II-Assas, where they had planned to get their Law degree after four years of hard studies.
***
Last time he had called Ya’la, he was in Paris for two days, on his way to New York. It was Barbara who had answered the phone. He always called her Barbara because she never changed that Barbara Streisand’s hairstyle she got since he first saw her the first time at the Faculty of Assas. That was in 1972 or 1973. He asked her how they were doing. She told him her husband had become deaf. She had been taking him to excellent public hospitals as well as to a private clinic. Great professors had been trying to find a solution, but they had been cautious not to give her false hopes. She was very anxious. Ya’la and herself had nothing more to do but wait. He asked her whether he could see them. She informed she was taking his friend to the hospital. And, Ya’la would not hear him. He was sure she was sincere. If what she said was a thoughtful way to turn down his demand, it was most likely his friend’s will. He felt so sad for his best friend ever he could hardly continue to talk to her without crying. He offered Barbara to help, hinting at giving some money. She said everything was all right. He told her to kiss his friend on his behalf, he was leaving the day after, and he will call her on his way back. They said goodbye.
‘’This is Ya’la’s will’’, he thought, insistently. He had always known him as proud, too proud to complain or show in a bad situation. Indeed, all those many years they had been friends, he had not heard him complain, not even when he was sick or when he lacked money. He also wondered whether he had not been guilty, not calling his friend more often. He had forgotten the latter seldom took the initiative to phone. Was it because of hardship? Was it because of a habit that had become his friend’s ‘’nature’’? He could not tell. But he remembered his friend reproaching to another friend, not calling him. He had not paid much attention. But why this souvenir? It would not make any difference. Then he remembered Ya’la, for he would never go back to Wajda, would it be for a ‘’visite éclair’’, a short visit, had suggested to him to buy a small house in Southern Morocco. He meant they could meet there, greet their friends, explore the countryside, simply be together, eat, drink and laugh, make those days in Paris continue elsewhere. Now that he felt he would probably not see Ya’la anymore, our narrator regretted he did not follow his friend’s advice. He laughed again, a sour laugh of disillusion. This one laugh was at his silliness. He had thought buying a ‘’Pied-à-Terre’’, a vacation home, would be worthless since they would occupy it one month a year, for the suggested location was too far from Wajda and would take at least a four days roundtrip given the state of the national ways, the horrible hot weather. And, especially, dangerous trucks’ drivers.
He smiled. A smile of sorrow. A little bit of regret. Then, the smile grew, stretching his mouth bit by bit, continuously, became a silent and sad laughter, mixed with two tears which coldly flowing on his cheeks, though it was hot. For a second, he thought why people talked of ‘’crying at warm tears’’. Then, all of a sudden, he realized it was on another July, some forty years earlier, that he had walked this same Champs-Elysées avenue, one Sunday, for the first time. Ya’la wanted to show him a pair of shoes, which cost 1,440 French Francs. He walked towards the famous Weston shoe shop, at the corner of Washington street, to look at the shoes, not buy any. Exactly as he had done before, in his friend’s company, laughing at the prices. He remembered Ya’la had commented laughing:
Well, I know why this pair of shoes is mainly so expensive. It is because it will wear you and walk you where you want. You will not wear it, boy.
1,440 FF? The merchant does not know I can buy a piece of land to build a house. He had replied, grinning, as if to ridicule the situation.
No one in Wajda would believe you if you told them about this.
***
Ya’la was right. Two years after he had made this remark, his friend went to Wajda on sickness leave. He met with Marmar in a café. While chattering, Marmar told him his shoes were pretty and asked how much he had bought them.
220 Francs.
Come on! You are kidding me. Marmar answered, laughing at him.
Not at all. Why?
I see. You have settled there and learned how to lie—still laughing.
Really? He said, laughing too. Loudly.
It was a strange situation. Each laughed at the other for a different reason, yet about the same trivial thing—a pair of shoe price. One could not imagine such shoes could cost ‘’so much’’, hence thinking of his friend a bluffer, a liar. The other hardly imagining his friend could not think of a pair of shoes costing ‘’only’’ 220 FF. What would have happened had he told him about the ones Ya’la had shown him? The good thing was that both felt this disagreement was no big deal. The misunderstanding had not spoiled their relation in the least. A few minutes later, they passed to other amusing topics.
Their humoristic dialogue had continued for a while during the Saturday promenade along ‘’the best avenue of the world’’. They had laughed at each phrase. When they had run out of inspiration, they tried to tell funny stories picked up from cartoons or storytellers whom they had listened to, seated on the asphalt of Bab Sidi Abdelwahab, in Wajda.
Back to Paris, he had called as promised to Barbara. The telephone company operator’s melodious voice sent into his ears: ‘’ The telephone number you have dialed is not assigned anymore. Please check the phonebook or the information service.’’
The idea of his friend’s will to cut any link with him and all acquaintances jumped to his mind. He knew Ya’la was somehow a bit of a Steppenwolf as in Hermann Hesse novel: he had abruptly severed all relations with two friends some years ago, for more futile reasons than the Steppenwolf’s main character. Our narrator then remembered what he had refused to admit. He had called some time ago from home. It seemed to him then that Ya’la had picked up the phone, said ‘’Allo?’’ and as soon as he told him good morning, another person had taken the phone to answer. When he asked to talk to his friend, this person responded:
There is no Ya’la here. You must have dialed the wrong number.
Is this number 33145…?
Yes, but there is no Ya’la here.
He had excused, and they both hang up.
That was it. Time had worked out its way. It had driven the two far away from each other, to where their paths would never join, like parallels on a scrap of paper, in Euclidian geometry. The only hope he could hold on was the possibility they would meet by chance. Life is not exclusively Euclidian. Artists, painters, and other people know that parallels meet at the horizon’s points on a canvas.
Wasn’t it by chance that he became real friends with Ya’la? Before, they had been mere Lycée mates.
Ya’la was a habitué of ‘’ the Jackson’’ on boulevard Muhammad V in Wajda. The place had been initially an American Bar, named after his owner. And converted into a café, one of the best, which meant correct, or clean, frequented by ‘’intellectuals’’, an adjective that applied then to teachers, professors, pupils preparing their Baccalaureate, and students of Rabat University, the only one in Morocco at the time, who happened to be there during holidays. Three main topics used to be of interest to everyone: lessons, politics, and anecdotes, jokes, teasing each other for a blunder he had made, mainly if he had made it while attending classroom courses.
Unlike Ya’la, he went to ‘’the Jackson’’ now and then. Most of the time, he accompanied his friends Kata and Bubu to play baby-foot. Once their two or three rounds of play were over, they sat around the same table to have coffee, tea, or lemonade with other class and Lycée mates. Among the latter, there was Ya’la. He discovered how his company was pleasant. Ya’la always greeted them with a smile that did not dare to be complete, like a sentence suspended for some hidden reason. He then invited them to sit down ‘’ to hear the last’’ mishap done by one or another member of the ‘’clique’’; in other words, those who had preceded and were then surrounding him, be it in the Lycée or elsewhere, mainly in the boulevard. For he always sat his back to the café window so he could see passers-by, particularly young girls and those mates who courted them. He then made the company laugh. He made it laugh a lot, exaggerating the whereabouts of the story. Sometimes, he recounted a joke he had learned from cartoons, such as Tom and Jerry, or ‘’10 000 blagues’’, a booklet-compilation of short anecdotes, and transposed them. Sometimes, the concerned guy had committed such big blunder Ya’la could not refrain from gently, softly teasing him. Everybody laughed, including the ‘’victim’’.
For instance, Dizzy, an absent-minded, two meters tall guy, as strong as a bull – he once terraced a calf -, but always smiling and incapable of harming a fly, complained to their professor of French about the government’s project of ‘’ Arabizing’’ all disciplines, including French, English...The clique kept teasing and laughing at him a week or so, and he kept smiling yet.
‘’Marmar’’ had been nicknamed ‘’le bourgeois’’ by Ya’la. The reason was he many times arrived late to the café Jackson, caressing his tiny belly and boasting he had eaten like Gargantua at some dinner the night before. To which, Ya’la responded with a broad smile, pointing his index toward his ‘’victim’’ of the day:
Really? With this stomach? that is as big as a chickpea?
He continued teasing him, asking questions about the meals, and commenting in a sarcastic way witness could not refrain from laughing. Marmar happily joined what he stoically considered a great outdoors’ play.
Certain Fridays, Muha walked on the opposite sidewalk, wearing Fassi white djellaba and slippers, Al Alam (The flag) newspaper under his arm, not looking in the clique’s direction, so to fake ignoring them, nervously making his cigarette jolt from hand to mouth. Ya’la was always the first to draw attention, telling the others to look at their friend Momo the ‘’Alim and future politician’’ of the Independence Party (Istiqlal). Everyone guffawed, guffawed until Muha had turned on the next street and was not anymore in their eyes’ reach.
Out of sight, out of mind. The clique exclaimed in unison the expression they had learned from their English teachers.
Ya’la never talked of his humoristic accomplishments. Here is one told by one of his classmates.
‘’Ya’la, and Abadh, another classmate, hid a radio transistor in a kind of cables mantle of their classroom, switched on. When the professor came in, he could not begin his lesson. He searched where the radio was; in vain. He appealed to the general custodian and censor. By chance, the minute they arrived, the national broadcast shifted to the local one, beginning to air the national anthem. Everyone stood still. The pupils hardly retained their laughs.
Big laughs surged during recreation. All the Lycée pupils who heard the story that day got cheered up.’’
Here is another achievement reported to our narrator by Dizzy.
‘’On a few occasions, Ya’la invited two or three friends to show them how soldiers learned to ride bicycles nearby Lycée Abdel Moumen. He accompanied them to a street, a slope that formed a T with another at their intersection. The group sat on the sidewalk at the high side and waited. After a while, some recruit came out of the armed forces barrack there, with a bicycle. He put it close to a brick, mounted it, and let it descend the slope. Getting near the intersection, he began to use his feet to stop it, not knowing how to use the breaks, failing to turn right or left because of the speed, finally hitting the wall in front of him. The group burst into a laugh and went back to the Lycée to relate the scene to their mates.’’
***
During ten years in Paris, the two friends invited each other to organized parties, went together to ‘’cinema d’art’’ movies, music festivals, theater, piano bars, one-person shows, etc. Our narrator now recalled few, such as ‘’Alexandre le bienheureux’’(Alexandre the Blissful; Philippe Noiret), ‘’Hook, Line and Sinker’’ (Jerry Lewis), Guy Bedos, Raymond Devos, Popeck, Bob Marley, and ‘’The Moroccan Beetles’’: Nass El Ghiwan.
During those parties, Muha committed his ‘’best’’ mishaps, allowing Ya’la to make fun of him, making everyone laugh hysterically.
An unforgettable dinner took place in 1974-75. Meed had prepared a succulent Couscous with plenty of lambs meat and vegetables, preceded by appetizers, that is, olives prepared the Moroccan way -with garlic, pimento, coriander, parsley …-, peanuts, almonds, and beer; accompanied by good red wine, plus fruits for dessert. During hours, there was no talk but humoristic, enthusiastic, loud. Fortunately, on Saturdays, the neighbors were not upset, neither by the music nor by the brawl. At dessert, the wine having made everybody more joyful than he should, Muha did something entirely odd for the Moroccans. Possibly to impress a girl he wanted to court. He took a knife and began to peel a tangerine instead of using his fingers. One would say Ya’la was precisely waiting for this gesture. He guffawed, pointed his finger at him, and exclaimed:
Look at him. The civilized man. How classy!
Glad to hear you admit it. I am a civilized man, not like you, peasant. Came the answer from Muha.
Who spent more than an hour chewing a plastic date, not recognizing it was a prank? You made us laugh, Meed and I.
Laughs burst from everyone. Palms of few individual hands to hide them –or hide teeth corroded by alcohol and cigarettes- were of no help. They added to the comic spectacle and made those with healthy mouths exchange glances and laugh even more.
I knew it was a date made of plastic, for it was not sweet. I faked I was chewing it to make you believe I had fallen in the trap. I was fooling you and chuckling. You were so busy you did not even notice.
Muha tried hard to with a forced, faked laughter to convince them he was sincere. His trick did only trigger more laughter.
In his absent-minded situation, he took a small round piece of ‘’Bombel’’ cheese and put it in his mouth without removing the wax. Our narrator whispered in his ear, not to chew it. The ‘’victim’’ of that night did not dare take out the cheese from his mouth, considering he would worsen his situation. Everybody had seen Muha’s gesture and started to laugh, faking they were continuing on the date chewing gaffe. Ya’la resumed:
And what about the spicy candy? Added Ya’la.
I like them spicy candies. I do not like sugar that much!
Except sweet dates, of course. Right?
Chortles; this time, Muha’s face showed he was about to get angry. Ya’la stood up, seeming eager to talk all night, went to him, kissed him twice to signify he did not mean to offend him, and that was for a laugh as usual. Proud, and dubious, Muha tittered and said:
I know my friend. Next time it will be my honor to make fun of you, as I did on past occasions. Don’t you remember?
I do, I do, Muha. In this case, would you allow me to tell the last one; about Marie and you?
Go ahead.
Ya’la stood up, raised his glass of wine, and addressed the company, faking to be solemn:
Our dear friend here was courted once by a faculty mate, Marie. She managed that he accompanied her to her apartment. They drank a few glasses of Ricard, and then she invited him to share her dinner. The drink moved her. She went to the fridge, took some canned food, olives, and cheese, and brought them with some bread. They dined. I pass what happened after that. The first thing she did the next morning was hurry toward me and tell me the blunder she had made with Muha: the canned food was her cat’s. So my friends ‘’cheers’’ to cats’ food.
Guffaws! Giggles! ‘’Non-stop’’ laughs, tears, coughs, and hands pressed against bellies that had started to ache.
Muha wanted to laugh off the story. He said out loud, standing up in his turn :
Do not believe him. This story has come right now, straight from his imagination, the wine has done his effect on him.
No one was listening to him. As he might have known, ‘’ … our mood changes more often than our fortune’’, he resigned to ‘’ make against bad fortune good heart’’, let himself contaminated, joined the ‘’ laughter festival’’.
Ya’la did not spare opportunities to gently mock his best friend, our narrator. On one of the numerous occasions the latter invited to dinner at the apartment he shared with Meed, at rue Cail, close to the Gare du Nord, he ventured to prepare some spaghetti à la bolognese. The result was catastrophic. He had put too much spaghetti in the cooking pot. Long before they got ready, they began to overflow under the amused looks and sarcastic laughs of Ya’la, who, when all guests had arrived, told them about it, depicting with exaggeration his friend’s ‘’panic, shame, and mishandling’’.
Our friend here thought he was preparing spaghetti for an entire regiment. You should have seen them overflowing like snakes toward the sink. He said.
Come on!
You could not realize how much spaghetti there was, for you have not enrolled in military service, hence never cooked for soldiers. I did -he did not either-; so I know there was spaghetti for at least thirty people. We are only ten, buddy.
Guffaws. The ‘’victim’’ of that night wanted to sweep away his best friend’s argument:
Well, I was afraid you would stay here for three nights, so I prepared for three dinners.
You are right; we stay that long, but we refuse you to feed us on spaghetti. You will have to seriously think about what you will provide us for three days and three nights; do not forget about breakfast.
Guffaws triggered again.
Ya’la’s storytelling and laughs it triggered took quite a long time during dinner, then turned to other funny topics, Muha’s and Meed’s blunders.
Ya’la loved making fun of rightist politicians. Socialists like former president François Mitterand were genuine rightists who had nothing to do with socialism. They pretended. They used the road roller that was socialist ideology to grab power and carry on capitalist policies, which he was quick to denounce with sarcasm and humor. He despised what he called petty philosophers such as Bernard Henri Levy (BHL), whom he had nicknamed Bêtise Humaine Lancinante (Human Haunting Stupidity). He admired above all the former French communist party’s Secretary Georges Marchais for his TV performances. Marchais drained a broad audience; he represented the second political party of France; he had tens of thousands of sympathizers; and he did not hesitate to cast crudely certain ‘’truths’’ to the face of his interlocutors, politicians they were, or journalists. He sometimes ridiculed them, which made his ‘’shows’’ all the more exciting, and the audience laugh. One would think he has inspired Donald Trump, seeing the way the American President treats journalists now. Ya’la longed to watch emissions where he participated and never let the event pass without telling his ‘’best friend ever’’. When the latter could not share those memorable moments, he related them to him afterward, with all details, he made a great deal not to forget.
Marchais had a peculiar French accent, close to the southern, but more articulated with an emphasis on individual syllables and grimaces. Certain exclamations, ‘’ it is scandalous’’ (‘’c’est un scandale!’’) and ‘’Shut up El Kabach!’’ (‘Taisez-Vous El Kabach’’ – addressing the famous journalist), contributed to his popularity. That made many laugh and mimick him. Ya’la indeed mimicked him when relating to his friend, and both laughed.
***
Now that he had retired and seen many of his friends and acquaintances pass away one after the other, he did not want his wife to ‘’leave’’ before him. It would be insufferable, unjust for she was younger.
Now that his sons did not visit him, but rarely, our narrator missed them. He felt somehow lonely. Fortunately, he had kept in touch with a few old friends and colleagues with whom he could chat, talk, and laugh. Though laughing as he was accustomed to, hilariously, had become a bit painful. His old bones, particularly his chops, were aching, his articulations crackling. He thought his body in terms of an engine whose spare parts were in severe need of lubricants and gaskets (joints).
At times his friends were unreachable; at others, he could drive from his house to the café where they used to meet. He then went out to the nearby square, sat on a bench in the shade of a skinny olive tree. Recollections popped in his mind. They made him smile or laugh. He cautioned not to do it loudly, so people would not believe him nuts.
He knew for years now, long before the fatal moment, times had changed. Almost nobody talked to anybody. Not even to neighbors. No one dared smile at anyone or tell a joke to share laughter with him. Doing so would make the latter think the former was familiar, strange, or nuts.
He found it strange that people thought and behaved this way while he smiled at birds and stopped moving, fearing to disturb them.
He smiled at them while having his breakfast in his garden and admiring the landscape which unfolded before him.
He smiled to them when the sky had suddenly changed colors between the clouds in the early rising mornings when they were awakening, and at sunsets when they came back to their nets.
He also found it strange people behaved this way when he laughed at jokes told by youngsters, at café terraces, supermarkets, or any other public place!
So, he appealed to his souvenirs to talk to the deceased friends or those whose phone numbers and addresses he had lost, and to laugh, imaginatively with them, or alone, silently, in his deepest soul. But his touches of laughter were most of the time tainted with sorrow, regret, mounting tears he struggled to stop before they could show in his tired eyes. His throat and ears ached; he painfully swallowed his saliva; he felt his heart weakening and his knees shivering.
For years he had asked himself why he should continue to live in a world like this. His small world, not the one he traveled for more than half a century. This small world that is his country, his city, his neighborhood, had become within less than two decades. A world where Moroccan kids of well-educated people speak foreign languages but not their own, but those of poor and uneducated people hardly speak theirs and struggle to utter a single correct phrase when asked at school. He knew why in this ‘’new’’ world, kids of the former do not mix with those of the latter. He had heard from persons who consider themselves the elite why they do not put their children in the same schools as the rest of the population, why they shop with them in luxurious malls and boutiques, do not take them to the medina markets, etc.
He found all this weird and revolting. But he did not like to talk about it, for his acquaintances had misjudged him when he had opined differently during a discussion thereof. Whenever he thought the matter alone, in his solitude, he smiled, then laughed of himself. ‘’After all, I might be the fool for not doing like them!’’ He told himself. ‘’No, I am not the fool. My friends, who constitute the other part of the elite, whom I see here from time to time and those whom I see during summer vacations, think like me.’’ He added. ‘’Oh! Maybe we both are fools; our foolishness is different. But where does wisdom lie? Where does the future of the country reside?’’ He finished his monologue with a feeling of undepictable fatigue.
That last morning, one of the hottest since he got interested in global warming denied by Trump & Co., he went on an interior dialogue with his best friend ever, Ya’la, even if they had not got in touch for more than twenty-five years. He knew he had had many good and loyal friends overtime, at primary and high schools, at the university as a student then as a professor, but the friendship did not last as long as the one that existed with Ya’la. Ten years in Paris alone. Three in Morocco. Several, after he returned home and visited France now and then.
He saw his friend in his thirties, handsome, wearing grey chic flannel trousers, a blue shirt under a night-blue blazer, a Bordeaux silk scarf around his neck, letting his smile to illuminate his healthy teeth, his VanGogh pipe pending from his mouth’s left corner. His eyes were sparkling with joy for the pleasure of their encounter.
Good morning my friend. It’s been a long absence; I thought you dead and grilling on the embers of God’s Gehenna. I remember you have always been frightened at the idea of displeasing your ‘’God the Almighty’’ as you always called him. Ya’la said, gently removing the pipe from between his lip after sucking it, then laughing out loud.
Good morning my best miscreant friend ever. I thought you would come to me avowing your repentance to God the Almighty, so since life’s a bitch, I finally can leave it, knowing you will not go straight to that same Gehenna for eternity.
Why? I am still young, not like you. Look at what you have become in such a short time during which life had separated us. You look like someone who is more than eighty years old. What happened to you in this country? You should have stayed in Paris. Together, we were happy with our wives, always having good food and excellent wine, and laughing. You used to say ‘’laughing makes you live longer’’. Did you forget, my good traitor? Ya’la replied, laughing.
That is why I do not merely look, but I am more than eighty. And I do not intend to die soon. Though people here, in my small world, do not laugh, nor even smile, I do laugh when I meet some ‘’new’’ friends. I tell you something you might find weird, I silently laugh deep in my mind, because if I do loudly, people would think I am crazy. Is it not a laughable situation?
It is indeed. I think these people would be right if they knew your past and you left Paris, a paradise nowadays, and came here to live amongst them, narrow-minded people, plenty of money but no Savoir-Vivre! Ya’la exclaimed, laughing out loud, the same way he used to in the seventies when he criticized the Bourgeois-comprador in third world countries.
Do you still read comics?
Yes, and you?
Not anymore, but I read or read again lots of funny books of Mark Twain (Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Fin), Sinclair Lewis (Babbitt), Oyinkan Braithwaite (My Sister, the Serial Killer), Bob Servant (Delete At Your Peril), and others. Otherwise, how could I make it through without laughing and live until now? There is no chance narrow-minded here see me laugh when reading and laugh at me.
You have not changed, my friend; those Yankees I despise above all still attract you. Ya’la said, sketching an ironic smile.
Back to your contradictions, eh? My dear. Who was fond of, I would say addict, to Jerry Lewis, Woody Allen, Eddy Murphy, and hurried up to watch each of their movies? Not me, haha!
You are right, for you are stubborn. Look, I came to see you for a more ‘’hilarious’’ reason.
What is it?
I am here to take you with me. We have a long, eternal journey to go together. Said Ya’la, grinning a smile.
But I am much older than you now; who knows if we will be as before?
Do not worry. Your soul, mood, and mind are as young as when we were in Paris. You just passed the exam. Congratulations.
Our narrator started to laugh out loud. He could not resist the joy Ya’la’s words have given him. His laughter became louder when his friend begun to tickle him under his arms, then slowly faded away until it died:
Haha, haha, ha.ha, ha..ha, ha...ha....haaaaaaaaaaaaaaa…
Nobody would have imagined such a dramatic end of such a nice guy. He died from a non-stop-laughter that progressively lead his heart to slow down like a tiny engine running out of fuel or any other energy. Nobody ever knew which damned joke had provoked the laughter. Nobody was nearby enough. He had been sitting alone for quite a while, staring at the sky, his legs moving on an inaudible music’s rhythm he seemed to appreciate very much. Chess and dames players were busy, each one trying its best to win the party. Few of them paid attention to his laughter. But it was too late to reach him, see what was going on, and call an ambulance or dispense him first help.
One after the other, onlookers gathered around him in a perfect circle. They were the kind of people accustomed to storytellers, ancient Raï singers, medicinal herbs, dead lizards, ostriches’ eggs, amulets, and other such ‘’ magic’’ things merchants, in the medina squares attached to old ramparts.
I saw he was talking alone. It seems to me. Said a teenager.
He was fixing something in the sky. Said an adult who looked like some laborer on a nearby worksite. His clothes resembled a mason’s.
Call an ambulance. Who has got a mobile phone? Said a man in his sixties.
Does anybody know him? A skinny woman bowing under the heavyweight of her age asked, shyly, with pity.
A young ambulant fruits merchant left his Triporteur and approached the crowd. He looked at him over another teenager’s shoulders and said.
Allahu Akbar (Allah is Great). To ‘’ Allah we belong; to Him, we return’’. I know where this poor man lives. May Allah have mercy on him. I am hurrying to tell his family or whoever I find in his house.
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