The Last Friend by Tahar Ben Jelloun

away during his mother's illness. He started to confuse everything, drunk from all the whisky. Perhaps he was also suffering from depression. The next morning, he had no recollection of what had happened. He told me I had made the whole thing up to make him feel guilty, to destroy his mood. I said nothing.
    During his stay, he learned that an apartment on the fifth floor of our building was for sale. He went to see it, and decided to buy it then and there. He called his wife, who was less than enthusiastic about owning a place in Tangier, but she ended up agreeing. The apartment belonged to Soraya's parents. They sold it to Mamed for below market price. They knew he was my best friend. Mamed went back to Sweden, asking me to take care of the interior decoration and the furniture. Soraya and I worked to get the apartment ready, sending Mamed photos of rooms as they were finished, along with fabric swatches for the sofas and the curtains.
    The apartment would be finished by summer. I put up the money for the remodeling, which involved borrowing from my bank. Mamed did not know about this. I waited until several days after his arrival in Tangier to show him the bills. He coughed more and more these days, and his face had taken on a strange cast. His wife told me that Mamed had refused to stop smoking and drinking, despite the advice of a colleague, a professor of medicine who worked in the same hospital. When I presented Mamed with the bills for the work on the apartment, he pushed them away, indicating that this was not the right time.
    Our two families spent the summer together, sharing every meal. One evening, I arrived late; dinner was waiting. Mamed shot me a reproachful look. Even my wife never looked at me in such a cold, suspicious way. After dinner, he suggested we take a short walk on the Avenue d'Espagne. There was something dark about him. Something had changed in the way he spoke and thought. "I've studied the bills you gave me. I even showed them to Ramon. What you've done is wrong. It's unworthy of our relationship. For a long time I've felt that something like this might happen. I wasn't sure you were capable of abusing my trust this way. Don't interrupt me. Let me say what's on my mind."
    He paused, as if he were about to give up the idea of saying anything, and then he blurted out: "You took advantage of my being gone to cheat me. You did it as though I were some kind of idiot, probably telling yourself, 'He's far away, he's in Sweden. He's not even Moroccan anymore. He won't suspect anything. He'll swallow everything.' But I'm more Moroccan than you are. I'm suspicious of everything and everyone. Actually, in Sweden I learned that money is money, and there's no shame or hypocrisy in talking about it. It's not like our charming country: 'No, no, let me pay. I insist! Look, we're not going to be like Germans who split their restaurant bills.' No, in this country we're generous, hospitable. We'll even go into debt to avoid seeming poor. We sell our animals so we won't lose face in the village when it's time for a religious feast. Well, I'm not who you think I am. I've finally understood. Your friendship is worthless. You've always looked out for yourself. I've tried to tell you that friendship is not a series of profitable little calculations. But you and your wife and your in-laws had the nerve to sell me the apartment at thirty percent above the going rate, pretending to give me a good deal because we were friends. And you were an accomplice. You forgot to mention the commission you made on the deal."
    Mamed stopped talking, then continued hammering away. "Don't interrupt me. Don't say anything. I know what you'll say, that in the name of Allah and the prophets you're an honest man, that you even lost money on the whole deal, that I should thank you for taking care of everything. Well, I let you do it as long as I thought you were my friend, not a traitor or a thief. No, let me finish. You can talk later. Wait