Free The Bottom of the Jar by Abdellatif Laabi Page A

dwarf beside him. He had a funny protuberance on his forehead, not in the middle, like the prayer bump that regular mosque-goers took pride in, but on the left side, which meant it’d been there from the time was he born. Furthermore, he was as deaf as a doorknob. How had that come about? It was just one of the many mysteries about him.
    He had also been saddled with a nickname, to the point that most people who knew him had forgotten his real name was Abdelkader. To them, he was Touissa and nothing else. But why Touissa, diminutive of tassa (cup)? When one said tassa , the first thing that came to mindwas the expression “hitting the cup,” which in popular parlance in Morocco was equivalent to draining a glass (or rather many), hitting the bottle, getting hammered, going on a bender, or to put it plainly, getting drunk. What? Did Uncle Abdelkader drink alcohol? Once the feeling of indignation had passed, we listened to Radio Medina, which let nothing slip past it and had the habit of making a mountain out of a molehill. They would tell of how people usually beyond all suspicion, whether or not they were of some standing, would find any pretext to slip out of the Medina and go to the mellah, where they would frequent cafés called “cantinas,” where they served kosher wine and mahia , which was made by Jews from the Sefrou or the Demnate. Besides the profits they were reaping, the publicans took pride – and delight – in seeing the faithful of the dominant religion partaking in the pleasures that were permitted under their own religion. The radio also said that one didn’t need to go as far as the mellah since there was a cantina in the immediate vicinity of the old city, not far from Bab Boujeloud, where very respectable fellow Muslims could “hit the tassa ” with the most exquisite brews. Ah, those Nazarenes, taking over the country and running it as they liked wasn’t enough for them, they had to go ahead and corrupt the souls of the faithful and damn them to the torments of hell!
    Was Touissa mixed up in all that? It was all well and good for those with full choukaras , for whom such extravagances were only a trifle. But how could Touissa, who was poorer than Job, afford it?
    Another mystery surrounding this good-natured man was his eternal bachelorhood, which at his age – he was well into his thirties – stood out as an anomaly. Hence the stories about him circulating in the family. Though only God is all-knowing, it seemed Touissa had disappeared from Fez for more than a year. Some eyewitness accounts placed him in Marrakech, where he had gotten married and even fathered a child. Then one day he’d reappeared, empty-handed, filthy, dressed inrags, and infested with lice. When pressed on the subject of his adventures, he made out as if he hadn’t understood the question. Whenever someone wanted to extract some detail or other, Abdelkader broke out in hysterical laughter as if he’d just been tickled – he was extremely sensitive to tickling, and knowing his weak point, the children took great pleasure in exploiting it. Basically there was no pinning him down on the subject.
    Afterward Abdelkader continued to run away, but for shorter periods at a time. He always came back in the same sorry state, at which point Ghita would look after him as if he were one of her children. She’d clean him up, clothe him, and let him stay at the house until he got on his feet and was ready to go back to work.
    Touissa’s activities were yet another bizarre facet of his character. Unlike his two brothers, he hadn’t followed in his ancestors’ footsteps and become a saddlemaker, a trade that had been passed down from father to son for many generations. Instead, after who knows what byway, he had taken up the craft of making slippers. A profession he only practiced in an amateurish way since at any given time this champion of laziness contented himself