The Last Friend Read Online Free PDF

seemed to bother him that I was still a bachelor.
    I had no desire to settle down and marry a nice girl just to avoid being alone. When I met Soraya, it was love at first sight, an earthquake, a tempest in my heart, an avalanche of light and stars. Unlike Mamed, I chose beauty, which came with both arrogance and fickleness. Mamed refused to voice his opinion, claiming the issue was too personal to be discussed, even between close friends. Against the advice of my parents, I married Soraya. Her mere presence made me deliriously happy. She was intelligent and shrewd, volatile and vivacious. I had one year of peace and happiness with Soraya. She never argued with me, and she was good to my elderly parents. She was sweet and loving in public, and even became friends with Ghita, which pleased Mamed. He wanted to hire Soraya as an assistant in his clinic. I refused, thinking this might someday jeopardize our friendship. Mamed finally agreed with me, and instead hired a young nurse who wasn't particularly gracious but very efficient.
    After finishing my degree, I was appointed professor of history and geography in Larache, a small coastal fishing town eighty kilometers south of Tangier. I commuted to work, as Soraya's parents had lent us an apartment in a building they owned. They refused to rent it, claiming that Moroccans were unreliable tenants. My wife worked as a nurse in the local Red Cross Society. We lived a petit-bourgeois existence, with limited horizons and limited ambitions. Once in a while, Ramon came to visit. He had married a Moroccan woman and converted to Islam. He now called himself Ab-derrahim, and he spoke Arabic. He said, "Ramon, Rahim- it's practically the same thing." But to us, he was still Ramon.

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    Mamed and I had a weekly ritual: we met in a cafe every Sunday morning between eight and nine. First we discussed current events, then turned to gossip. From time to time, some of our old high school classmates or teachers would join us. We always avoided making political observations. We knew that police informants lurked among the cafegoers. Those were the days when Morocco lived under a sort of martial law, under which opponents of the government were arrested. Some disappeared forever. Faced with their families, the police would pretend to look for them, knowing, of course, that another branch of the police had taken care of them for good. We were haunted by this idea of disappearing forever, vanishing into thin air, reduced to a mound of earth without being officially declared dead. Lost and never found. Lost and never buried. I remember a woman who went crazy, wandering the streets with a photo of her son, refusing to go home until she found him. She slept on the sidewalk in front of the police headquarters. One day she vanished. People said the police had made her disappear, just like her son. We lived with this fear in our guts, but we never talked about it.
    Mamed and I shared books and records. Some evenings we would have a drink together, either at his place or mine. Mamed liked only cheap whisky, which he drowned in soda water. These days he smoked brown-tobacco Casa-Sport cigarettes. His famous Favorites had been taken off the market, due to a documentable increase in lung cancer among those who smoked them. 1 got by with a little bit of Galavuiline, a pure malt whisky I bought under the table from a Jewish grocer who got it from Ceuta.When Ramon joined us, he drank Coke. Like a lot of converts, he was serious about his religion. He no longer drank rioja or ate Spanish ham. We teased him about it, and he laughed.
    Mamed and I talked, argued, criticized each other, engaged in wordplay and dark humor. He was much better than I was at verbal banter, but I knew more about film and poetry. These exchanges were supposed to keep our minds active so we wouldn't fall into the lethargy most people in Tangier suffered from. Especially in those days, when everybody lived in wariness and fear. A diffuse fear,