Gates to Tangier by Mois Benarroch Page B

marmalade? The cherry marmalade in the fridge is really good.”
    He brought the marmalade while she put on a white silk blouse. They sat down at the table.
    "Yes. I could keep what I discovered a secret, but I'm a Sagittarius, and I think we should tell each other everything. You need to know the truth.”
    "Yes, I've realized that by now." he said with a cynical sm ­ ile. She had the habit of saying anything and everything, without much tact. It was what he liked the most about her. It was differ ­ ent from all the manipulative women he had known.
    "Well, what I have found out is...thi ­ s. I wanted to know why they removed my uterus, why I can't have kids, and the director of the hospital where I am doing my specialization sen ­ t a letter to the Tangier clinic where Dr. Flemon works. He asked for all my medical records and they came yesterday. He showed them to me, and..."
    "You had uterine cancer when you were a girl."
    "No, worse. Or, better. It depends on how you look at things. I was born a man.”
    "What?"
    'It isn't just about the uterus anymore. And I thought I was taking hor ­ mones because I don't have ovaries, but that wasn't why. They have given me hormones since I was very young, to turn me into a woman. What happened is that when they circumcised me, a Jewish rabbi did it, some Rabbi Cohen. This happens, sometimes Muslims ask a Jewish rabbi to do the circumcision, at the age of one or before. He didn't do a good job, and they couldn't save my penis, and the doctors decided it would be best to turn me into a boy. That's what is says in my case file. Incredible, right?
    My mother never told me about this, you know. When I was twenty they gave me silicone breasts, because mine were too small, and no doctor has noticed, it is incredible. But now things are different.”
    "You never felt anything odd?"
    "Odd." Zohra looked at her life from a very different perspec ­ tive now. Everything from her past meant something different now. “When other children talk ­ ed about periods and I didn't, it seemed odd, s ­ o I invented periods, every 28 days I bought tampons and showed them to my friends, I even had menstrual dizziness, he ­ adaches, I had all the symptoms. A doctor told me I wouldn't get a period. En ­ joy it, he told me." Zohra started humming Brassens' "La Tempête".
    “Yes, some things were strange," continued Zohra. “I liked playi ­ ng soccer, but other girls did too, I wasn't the only one. At the Jewish high school in Tangier. I don't know why my mother sent me to a Jewish school, she worked in the homes of Jews and it was the best school in Tangier, but you know what, I've been attrac ­ ted to women in the past. I made love to a few women, but I never felt like a lesbian. I could be with wom ­ en, and I feel like my way of seeing men is differe ­ nt from other women.  I couldn't give them chi ­ ldren.”
    "You aren't the only one," said Marcel, trying to digest Zohra's news.
    "That's not what the difference is, the difference is that I want to be a man with the man that I am with. Not only that he conquer me, that he penetrate me. And yet it is like my vagina c ­ an penetrate the penis of the man that I am with.”
    "That seems pretty complicated to me." Some sunlight started to enter through the window, heating the room.
    "Well that's how it is. Maybe I need help. Maybe I can go back to being a man, but after all those hormones I don't think it would be possible.”
    "And tell me something, does it seem bad, in profess ­ ional terms, to change the sex of a one-year old boy, because of a circumcision gone wrong?”
    “Professionally? They still do things like that. You have to consider the suffering of a man without a penis, at an early age. That's what they do, they change the sex, thinking that the person will suffer less. Today they can put in a prosthesis to substitute for a penis, which didn't exist back then, and it inflates, like a machine, but it doesn't make you a man. I can