Chapter 4 -continued

Today however, as I walk home, I don’t look up. I know he’s gone, and all that remains is vanishing memories, as I pass the grocer’s and butcher’s where I spent quite some time during my innocent years. The butcher a wealthy Berber, kept an eye on me while my mom had gone to run errands. He was, indeed, one of my many potential and alternating babysitters along with the Italian wood sculptor who owned a store next to the French daycare center, out of which music would come out blasting, every week day morning, right across the street from our home.

Those were the trusted men I spent time with: An old Italian artist covered in saw dust, who with pencils, chisels, and many other measuring and cutting tools, transformed simple blocks of wood into incredible religiously inspired portraits and amazingly detailed ecclesiastical scenes. A Berber, always dressed in a white coat and a leather apron, who spent his days handling dangerously sharp objects, skillfully cutting, carving, chopping up meat he’d weigh it up, before wrapping it in both paper and plastic, and hand it to a customer standing on the other side of a marble stone counter –otherwise he’d be fattening the neighborhood stray cats.

They’re both gone now. The artist, too old, closed shop and went to live with his grandchildren. The Berber retired and turned his apron to his eldest son. Leaving nothing but memories for me to walk past, before I cross the street, reach 14 Rue Halab –which used to be 14 Rue Condorcet, until all street were stripped out of their French names and replaced by inspiring Arab one -what I always saw as another useless reform aimed at erasing all signs of colonialism, that shameful episode of a not too distant period of the national history.

Not only that, but 14 Rue Halab, another proof of the independent Moroccan spirit, makes me feel unwanted. 14 Rue condorcet, of French architectural design, falling apart, since the Jewish owner died, since no one claimed it because of years of unpaid property taxes, has become a case amongst hundreds of thousands of other cases, kept in an alphabetical order -whose only purpose appears to be providing a false sense of organization and efficiency, in a file cabinet laying against some dusty wall in some messy office, somewhere in one of those frightening administrative buildings, whose doors are usually guarded by poor –but, highly proud of their moustaches, armed, and frustrated men in green uniforms.