A Tunisian Tale. Hassouna Mosbahi

that he died on the spot. At this point, Kaboura’s eyes were bathed in tears as he said in a quavering voice that he was among those who accompanied Sidi Ali to his final resting place. The state-run press confirmed that more than one-third of the inhabitants of the capital were there, describing him as if he were a genuine national hero. I would laugh in secret whenever I heard talk like that out of the mouth of someone like Kaboura, because Ali Chwerreb, as several stories I heard about him both inside and outside of prison confirmed, was one of the most hardened, unscrupulous criminals. Up until that fatal whack on the pavement, Kaboura had never been good at anything in his gap-filled life except using his fists and drinking until he passed out. Nevertheless, many people in and out of the capital began talking about him as if he were in fact a genuine national hero who participated in building the new republic. It was clear from the scars and scratches that split open his pallid and malevolent face that Kaboura was what people call a “prison rat.” Maybe he was like that ever since he came of age. He always likes to talk about the big-time criminals he came to know in his life, and with whom he had shared cells in the “European Tower” jail and the municipal prison in the capital, with great respect and esteem, placing above them a halo of glory, as if they were rebels who resisted French colonialism. He was very interested in the crimes committed by others, large or small, devoting lots of time to discussing them, stopping at their precise details, in the end handing down his own judicial opinions on their perpetrators in an attempt to make certain that his continuous frequenting of courtrooms and prisons had acquired for him some kind of unassailable expertise in the field of law. As for the crime that had finally brought him to death row, Kaboura wouldn’t talk to anybody about it, that is, he wouldn’t even mention it in passing. I learned about its details and circumstances from the others, and they used to do that out of his sight, avoiding his wrath. They say that Kaboura was close friends with another neighborhood kid who used to be a lot like him—stealing, beating people up, and mugging, strutting around Bab al-Bahr with a knife in his belt. But all of a sudden, that boy repented to God, and started to implement the recommendations of his mother, the Hajjeh, and started behaving respectably, beginning to earn a living from the sweat of his brow. With his hard-earned money, he built a house in one of those new neighborhoods connected to the Metro. He married a young lady from a wealthy family and they had two daughters and a son. Despite the fact that he had cut his connections with all his old wicked friends, he stayed in touch with Kaboura for some unfathomable reason. He used to invite him over to his house not only on harvests and holidays, but every other day and night as well, and together they stayed up late into the night. During times of hardship and difficulty, this friend didn’t fail to help Kaboura or hesitate in doing so. When Kaboura went to jail, he would send a large gift basket along with his divorced sister. And with a decent amount of money, he would chip in for the cost of a defense lawyer, calling on his old friend to repent and reform himself. In spite of all that, Kaboura, who had suckled evil with his mother’s milk, forgot about all of his friend’s virtues and committed the monstrous deed that brought him to death row. One summer night, Kaboura wanted to stay up late with his friend, so he headed over to his house but he didn’t find him there because his friend had gone away, his wife told him, to his hometown of Beja, to take care of something. On his way home, after polishing off two bottles of Koudia red wine in the Bab al-Khadra bar, Kaboura ran into his friend’s son playing in the street, hugged him and kissed him as he always did, and then took his hand and told him, “Come walk around with your uncle Kaboura in Bab Suwayqa, where he’ll buy you a cold drink and then take you home in a taxi.” The ten-year-old little boy agreed because Kaboura had been like an uncle to him, but the devil had spat his venom in Kaboura’s soul, so he didn’t want to back down from what he had planned to do ever since his lips touched the little boy’s cheek. Instead of taking him to Bab Suwayqa, he led the little boy to a deserted shadowy place and, after gagging his mouth, raped him repeatedly. In the end, he strangled him to death, then dumped his body out in the open and went home and slept as though nothing had happened. The next morning, a municipal worker stumbled across the small boy’s corpse and everyone rushed over to take a look, as the poor father wailed in horror. As for the mother, she passed out from the terror of shock and was immediately taken to the al-Rabita Hospital. That very same day, the security forces began their searches and investigations. It didn’t take long. They gathered information from neighborhood children who saw the murdered boy on the night of the incident walking with a man whose description fit that of Kaboura. When the poor father learned that it was his old friend, whom he had treated with nothing but charity, who had tortured his child, he lost his mind and, barking like a dog, was taken to Manouba, where he spent half a year and came out afterward as though he had been stripped of his reason and his memory. When the judge handed down his ruling in the case, Kaboura fell apart, lost his swagger, his self-inflation, and his braggadocio to become a pathetic creature in the blink of an eye, sobbing almost all the time, not because he had murdered his friend’s son in cold blood, but because he wasn’t going to get out of jail this time around, to strut in front of the neighborhood children boasting how he was the rightful successor to Ali Chwerreb, and to show up at the Mezoued parties and dance until dawn to the beat of songs by Hedi Habbouba and Salah el Farzit, or to wander around the old and new neighborhoods in the capital with a knife in his belt, making a living off his girlfriend Houriya, whom he used to pimp out back in the good old days.