20h52
Finally warm! My friend Mathias drops off in the soft sofa and once my coat is off, I do the same. Nothing's changed since I last set foot here. The living room is always immersed in this western Kathmandu atmosphere. The subdued light soaked in the purple of the walls blends in with the ripples on the ceiling of the volutes of smoke from the candles and hashish that embalm the room. For the decoration it is a joyful but homogeneous brothel with, among others, hundreds of vinyl and yellow books on the shelves, reproductions of photographs of Diane Arbus or even Buddhist Thangka paintings. Ah, and there is also this little shop window filled with jewellery of all shapes and colours, each with a tiny piece of paper with a number or number on it. Prices, dates? It's impossible to find out more despite my questions, and it's not bad. In the middle of this cabinet of hippy curiosities, we could very well be in 2016,1989 or 1968 if it weren't for the latest flat screen set on the ground and still connected, mutely, to National Geographic Wild.
There are four of them living on the 12th floor of this huge 19th century Babel Tower. There is the father, the mother with her new boyfriend Toitoine, and finally the son Noé, 16 years old impassioned by poetry and absent tonight. As usual, a gasket circulates. While talking to them, I observe them: they have climbed the peak of their fifties, the hair turns grey, the faces are marked, the wrinkles are deepening. The fault of age but also of heroin, which was abused a long time ago, and a little more rarely today. The bedo comes into my hands, turns off. No lighter nearby, I grab a candle in a blue night earthenware base with Arabic inscriptions, approaching my face and re-ignites the joint in the crackle of the sheet that ignites. Three big puffs, the smoke flows down my throat before coming out in an opaque cloud, I turn it to Mathias. The bedave is not one of my habits but I smoked enough to know that if the weed makes me euphoric or erotic a bit like a champagne drunkenness, with hash it is rather the wave to the soul. After a few minutes I feel that yes, that's right, the effects happen. Every muscle of my body relaxes and my mind begins to wander, while Rooftop continues its history dancing in eternal jargon:
"Anyway I finally arrive at Orly airport, I show up in front of the check-in and here, shit! I'm burning up that I forgot my passport at the casa. So I make a phone call to warn the farm and I'm back here to pick up a ticket and my papelards."
The farm is this exploitation where they buy their supplies every two or three months in the north of Morocco, far from the sumptuous riads of Marrakech, in the poorest region of the country: The Rif. There, between the arid ochre mountains and the azure blue sky, flows the green sea of the cannabis fields whose waves extend over hundreds and hundreds of hectares. As a general rule, one of the producers picks them up in an old, somewhat run-down car, then they are left to work night and day on the farm to prepare the order; roll the hashish paste into thin three-gram stems and wrap it tightly. Speaking of which, I'm not going to go into the details of how they get him back, but... well, let's say the term "shit" has never taken on its full meaning. In total, the expedition takes four or five days.
While I feel in me the effects of hash at their maximum, a conversation with Abdel, an Algerian friend also during a time in the traffic, comes back to me. A guy from his village had been beaten in Tangier by customs and locked up at Satfilage, one of the worst prisons in Morocco. Once out he told her about his ordeal and it was fucking cold in the back. In this prison of 2400 prisoners for a capacity of 400, where killers are mixed with rapists or the simple smuggler of drugs without distinction, it is hell on earth. No hygiene, no food: everything has to be paid for by the prisoners themselves and, without money, we have to render services that go from beating up an enemy of our "patron" to cutting pipes. I remember the anecdotes of knife-kicking for a cigarette and, if you don't want to fight for fear of getting weighed down, you have to scarify yourself in front of the other to apologize. Ah and of course, the all-powerful guards who reign over the mob with torture and corruption.
I imagine Toitoine, he who always smiles with a smile on his lips, humming a cheerful tune, getting caught, and the abyssal fall of his little hippy dream bubble, a little faded in this bottomless pit of madness and despair... I look at him talking in front of me, I see his almost angelic youthful face despite his age and I see myself.