It was difficult to believe all of these stories. The places where Aldomar was seen were as diverse as Marrakech itself. He appeared, according to eyewitness accounts, in Hay Hassani, Unité Quatre in Daoudiate, and even Avenue el-Mssalla in Sidi Youssef Ben Ali. The times of his appearance were just as varied — at midnight, at dawn, in the afternoon, at dusk. A myth was quickly established about the director, a man who appeared and then vanished. People had fun with his game of hide-and-seek, and they began to weave tales for one another of Aldomar’s visits to their homes, how they had shared food and drink with him, only for him to vanish all over again.
A reporter for the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, which had been following the story from the beginning, used the expression the wandering specter of Enrique Aldomar in one of its articles, and published reports of his appearances and disappearances. Despite that, not one person on the Spanish shore could definitively confirm that the man was still alive. As for the Moroccan side, the ones calling the shots remained cautious, and this was the word that was repeated endlessly in news reports.
For reasons only he knew, Enrique Aldomar decided to reappear without warning in the infamous Derb Sidi Bouloukat neighborhood. He was in the lobby of the Hotel Kenz, sitting in a director’s chair, with an innocent look on his face, his lips drawn into a sly smile. There was a large crowd of photographers surrounding him, as well as newspaper and television reporters from around the world. A few special investigators came along with aides. It was apparent that most of these people had been informed of the director’s return ahead of time.
They all stood there without speaking, waiting to find out who was responsible for the director’s disappearance — the cameras flashed and clicked. Then Enrique Aldomar’s voice flowed low and soft. He praised cinema and children and their imaginative energy, and spoke about Spain, struggling with its immigrants and its Arab heritage; he spoke about misunderstandings being like an engine of history, and about literature as the twin brother of cinema. The director also spoke about fantasy being intertwined with reality, and about how all it takes to see fantasy in full relief is to lightly scrape reality’s surface. He spoke about his upcoming film, which would examine the fallout from the disappearance of a famous foreigner in one of Marrakech’s shabbiest alleys.
That afternoon, Aldomar talked about many other things — but he wouldn’t say a word about the story of his kidnapping by the Band of Merry Men, where he’d been hidden, or the circumstances surrounding his disappearance in Marrakech.
Translated from Arabic by Alexander E. Elinsosn
Looking at Mars in Marrakech
by Abdelkader Benali
La Mamounia
1.
Marcel had bad memories of Marrakech. But it hadn’t always been that way. The first time he saw the city it took his breath away. The red light sliding over the walls, the snowcapped mountains of the Atlas in the background, the swallows that wove through the palm trees, and the three gleaming balls on top of the Koutoubia Mosque that storks flew around like satellites. The long, wide streets seemed to be endless. Everything looked as if it had been made for another time, perhaps another planet; a city that had been built for the inhabitants of the future.
One day, Marrakech’s beautiful curtain was drawn back and revealed another face — indifferent, aloof, and criminal. Marcel had been ripped off, robbed of something dear to him, and he had left with his tail between his legs, never to return.
Once home, he never spoke to anyone about it. It lay stowed away in a place that never saw daylight.
“It’ll be different this time,” his agent said. “And you do have to start working again, don’t you? A broke writer can’t write. The imagination won’t work.”
The hopeless financial situation he had ended up in had come as a complete surprise. With the money he had earned from extracting oil on Mars, he had hoped to buy time to write.
Mars had been good to him. The vast quantities of oil that had been discovered there ten years before had created a boom. When they devised an ingenious system that made traveling to Mars take only a couple of months, the amount of traffic back and forth increased exponentially. The shuttles went faster and faster, and he received a job offer that made use of his analytical abilities. The remuneration persuaded him, not Mars. He supported a drilling team on the red planet, which creamed off the oil fields by setting up a system to find buyers within a couple of hours of the source being discovered. The first to make an offer benefited from the small margins. It wasn’t difficult work, but it was intense. The drilling team worked twenty-four hours a day, which meant that he hardly got any sleep. He had to be on alert in case of new discoveries. But the money compensated for everything. When he lay in bed, he made the most wonderful financial calculations, involving acquisitions and investments, and had money left over to go traveling. He even returned to Earth with an extra bonus. The red planet had made him happy.
When he did get back, however, he discovered that inflation had evaporated the capital he’d built up. The oil boom had flooded the markets with cheap money, which had pushed up prices. The cost of a good television — one he’d had his eye on — had gone up so much that it was beyond his budget. Only six months after his return, and he had to start over again. Now he cursed his time on the red planet. And to make matters worse, his wife had lost her job as well, a blow she took without concern, because she had become devoted to a charismatic guru who had convinced his disciples that the only real capital was the “courage to let go.” She had started to let go of things, and she did that so well that her nonattachment led to her being able to levitate above a mat.
“I’m the only one in the group,” his wife said proudly. And she parried his requests to think about the future with: “The future is now.”
There is something in that, he thought. The future is always now. Amid the male company on Mars, he had forgotten how to talk to a woman. After a few days, he had a riposte for her, particularly because the bills had started to arrive. “If the future is now then it’s still a shitty situation we’re in.”
“Everything is just a question of perception,” she reasoned. “You’re only seeing it with one eye.”
“Only seeing it with one eye?” Marcel put his palm over his left eye and examined the bills. “Even if I do look at it with one eye, I can still see that we’ve got a problem. The bills haven’t been halved.” He turned to her; yoga had kept her fit and healthy. It had made her younger. Her calves were hard, but he knew that if he touched them, they would feel warm and soft. When they got bored, they had sex. It was never a disappointment and he forgot his financial problems for a little while. In bed, even he had the courage to let go.
“If you close your eyes, you can see a new universe,” she said.
He’d had enough of new worlds for now. “The universe is empty and indifferent. You make more of it than it is.”