Abdel Halim Hafez starts the last verse of his song again and the audience is delirious. Two, three, four times, herepeats what the girl told him: “It’s you, my handsomedark-haired man, that I was smiling at.”

The unthinkable: Abdelkébir is crying. He gets up and heads for the bathroom.

I close my eyes. Where does it come from, the darkness of the world?

Tuesday

It’s simple.

Abdelkébir is in love, for real.

On the train heading back to Salé this morning he told us her name: Salma. He’s made up his mind, he wants to marryher. This afternoon, the minute we get in, he’s going to tellmy mother.

Yesterday evening, he dragged us off to the souk where they sell jewelry. We spent hours there, looking at all kinds ofrings. Engagement rings, obviously. Abdelkébir took a longtime before deciding. Mustapha and I had enough. I mean,really, do guys care about rings? We would have pretended ifAbdelkébir had explained why he absolutely had to buy oneof those stupid rings in Tangiers and not someplace else. But,then he went mute again, as usual.

Yesterday I understood how selfish love can be.

Salma. No point writing down how much I don’t like this name. I detest it. I hate it. I loathe it. I abhor it.

How can anybody decide to get married so fast? Has Abdelkébir turned into some kind of idiot now? The firstgirl who spreads her legs for him is the one he wants tomarry! Even I wouldn’t do that and I’m seventeen yearsyounger than he is. I thought he was smarter than that,more open-minded, modern. Now I find out, he’s not evenold-fashioned. What a letdown!

I don’t understand any of it.

What can I do?

I want to grab him by the shoulders, shake him good and hard, slap him twice, really loud, and finally kiss him,tenderly, on both cheeks.

I stay put. I don’t move. It’s enough just to be sad, watching him.

He still seems happy. I’m ashamed to admit it, to write it in my journal, but I feel like he’s become a fool, a puppet, like someone’s put a spell on him or something. He’smaking a big mistake: he’s closing all the doors built intohis future so that he can rush through the one that bitchSalma is holding half-open for him. He needs someone tosave him, reroute him, to spring him from this trap.

When you’re 30 years old, a Moroccan woman is inevitably a trap.