Al-Sharqawi confirmed that the group of delegators headed straight for the crumbling wall in the lounge, the one being rebuilt by craftsmen, since more mosaic pieces from Turkey were being imported. Inside the hole — which made itself evident as soon as they started removing the debris from the wall — was a coffin made of fine wood. The senior craftsman announced that a perfectly mummified body, still wrapped in its shroud, was inside the coffin. When the foreman asked that the coffin be brought out of the wall and opened in front of everyone so that a report could be filed on the mummy’s discovery, the workers refused to do so.
The foreman had then been forced to open his shirt, displaying to the members of the delegation the painful wounds he had suffered after opening the coffin himself. Through his sobs, he insisted that the gaping wounds on his body were the result of a savage beating, although there had been no one there to hurt him and no whip to administer such damage.
The foreman had been compelled to bring in helpers from the department of national restoration to undertake the task of transferring the coffin. They moved the casket from the wall to the police vehicle, preparing to show it to the archaeological experts whom the government had brought in from France and Egypt — these experts would examine the mummy and probe its shriveled entrails.
The next day, a helicopter transferred the foreman to a university hospital in Rabat, where they would examine the severe wounds caused by the inexplicable beating, which apparently had no human source.
Patti loved al-Sharqawi’s stories. Even though he didn’t have a regular group of listeners in Jemaa el-Fnaa Square, to whom he could hold out his skullcap to receive donations after every tall tale, Patti still considered him to be the quintessential modern storyteller. She believed he was someone who deserved all sorts of gifts and recognition. Patti usually gave him something when he came to narrate one of his wonderful stories — stories that remained fresh from his time at the Mamounia Hotel, where al-Sharqawi had been a doorman ever since the seventies.
At first, al-Sharqawi had latched onto the legendary tales of the hotel itself, with its world-famous visitors: Churchill, Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Marlene Dietrich, and de Gaulle (in his case, for just a single night, and they had to make a special bed that was long enough for him). Soon enough, al-Sharqawi had complete command of all the secret worlds inside the hotel — scandals, spectacular soirées, and many love affairs. From all these intimate threads he would weave his stories; he always had a role to play in their construction, even if that required him to skip or blend time frames or to mix facts with nebulous claims. Then he organized a network of hotel workers, suppliers, and taxi drivers to provide him with news about the city as a whole — sporting events, lavish weddings, Don Quixote — like confrontations, newly opened restaurants, and swank apartments. News of prostitutes, demons, gay people, sex clubs, hideaways for disobedient minors, and pornographic shoots were also welcome. He would fuse all these true details together and end up with tales about the city as it really was, and as it might be — cloaked in legend.
He had no qualms about raising the dead and dispatching them to the city’s markets and quarters; his sole purpose in doing so being that he got to meet them himself and put them willingly or unwillingly into his stories, which he wove together using dreams and illusions. Patti loved it all, and her weary eyes would tear up — her whole body would laugh with gusto. She told herself that the best thing she could do in her own life was to place her destiny into the hands of this magician. He could then incorporate it into the city’s very soil, till it became part of its reddish clay or the dark green of its palm trees. After all, the best way to be integrated into a recalcitrant city is through wonderful tales.
There was no one else in the world that al-Sharqawi loved as much as Patti. He loved her more than his own mother, who it was said gave birth to him twenty months after his father’s death. With the innate intelligence of an embryo born into sorrow, he’d sensed that life in the dusky old city without a father would be unbearable. So he’d decided to remain inside his mother’s womb till he almost turned into a piece of stone.
He didn’t love the old American woman just because she was so generous with him (she had even been thinking about buying him a house in one of the Imran Company quarters), but also because she listened to his tales so meekly. When he finished a story, she’d shed a few tears before her entire face lit up with a burst of laughter. Once in a while, he would think about the charitable acts that this good American woman did for the street kids — and she wasn’t even a Muslim. Patti also took time to teach the suburban girls. This woman has to be a Muslim, he would tell himself. If it were up to me, I would make her head of the Scientific Council of Marrakech and its precincts. Patti was unmarried, but with her good heart, she was the one who paid attention to the ancient pulpit at the Koutoubia Mosque. It was originally made in Cordoba in the eleventh century, then was transported in pieces over the sea and by camel from the north of Morocco to the south. For centuries, the Friday sermon would ring out from its iconic tower, but then, inevitably, its engraved woodwork began to fall apart. It was pushed to a remote corner of the Koutoubia Mosque, with a disconsolate jurist seated alongside it. He chipped off small bits of tracery and claimed that they were effective treatments for people who had migraines and toothaches. Patti was the one who saved it from turning into a false sort of aspirin.
She, along with the Metropolitan Museum, made a very generous donation which saved the woodwork and gave it new life — as a one-of-a-kind example of Islamic art. So, here was this sensitive lady, who continued to lay a place at her table for her life companion, who had died a quarter of a century ago. She always included his favorite meat and a glass of his most-cherished wine. She would ask, with a smile, if he was going to eat his lunch, because these days he ate hardly anything at all! Al-Sharqawi loved all this — and Patti too. And he loved Marrakech, the city that gave its inhabitants such wonderful stories and provided for its citizens, who were so sincere.
Al-Sharqawi could not believe the stories about the mummy. If it were one of the pasha’s enemies, as the gossips claimed, or one of his soldiers, or even a runaway slave, then the pasha would certainly not have gone to all the trouble of wrapping up the corpse, embalming it, and putting it in a coffin of stained wood — just to make sure that worms didn’t eat away at it inside the wall. The pasha would simply have done what Moulay Ismail did when constructing his capital city of Meknes: bury the exhausted construction workers alive inside the building itself to make them an intrinsic part of the structure’s defenses.
It was basically impossible to fabricate a mummy out of anything but the distant past, and the whole idea of murder was ridiculous. That at least was the conviction that led al-Sharqawi to make use of every means possible to get information from the research team that was examining the mummy. He even abandoned his post at the Mamounia for the first time since he had started working there to hurry over to Patti’s place in order to tell her the story of the mummy.
Patti was still in the Jacuzzi, bubbling water soothing her limbs. She immediately realized that al-Sharqawi’s early arrival implied that some urgent matter had come up, something that could not be delayed for a single instant. Much to the astonishment of her servants, she gave instructions that al-Sharqawi was to be admitted without delay. She was completely naked as she welcomed him, her aging body sagging somewhat. She paid no attention whatsoever to his total shock.