Not even a week went by after the discovery of the remains before amazing things started to happen across town. They all emerged from stories told by al-Sharqawi. He insisted that they were fresh and came from sources whose veracity could not be doubted.
The story of the savage beating with no known assailant had now extended, and had claimed some new victims among the archaeologists and local authorities. Then the mummy escaped, and people started to see the dead corpse roaming the pasha’s palace, still wrapped in its shroud, by Bab Doukkala. The mummy vanished for a while then reappeared by the Telouet Kasbah. One of the restoration workers saw it playing golf without a club or ball at the course where dirt and dead trees were piled up. Patti and al-Sharqawi saw it in the Jacuzzi, warming its decrepit bones. Each time the rumors initially amazed people, but before long, popular enthusiasm elevated them to a level of unadulterated truth.
As part of this general fever, al-Sharqawi grew moody and unpredictable, slamming doors at the Mamounia Hotel right in the face of visiting tourists, especially after people demanded to hear some of his amazing stories. These feelings grew more pronounced when Marrakech started preparing for the crowning of Jemaa el-Fnaa as a World Heritage Site. For many years, that square had been his square. As night fell, he would establish his circle of listeners, and they would grow and grow till they became a swarm of bees buzzing around his tales. At night’s end, he would send them all away. But what happened had happened, and he was no longer who he had been, and neither was the square itself.
He used to recite from The Thousand and One Nights, from the sagas of Abu Zayd al-Hilali, Antarah Ibn Shaddad, and Sayf Ibn Dhi-Yazan; about the tales of the jinn, sorcerers, and also pious men of God. Then, a nasty worm made its way into his little mind and urged him to start including contemporary tales into his evening sessions. He discovered that the pasha was a very dynamic subject, one that the people of Marrakech listened to carefully. They were secret stories that had never seen the light of day:
The pasha, alone at night in his palace, walking around his bed, using sweeping arm gestures to dispel the sounds of legions of people fleeing his fighters as they advanced in the High Atlas, while being fired at by a 77mm Krupp gun, the only one of its kind in the entire kingdom — the one that Hasan the First had given to al-Madani al-Klawi, so that he could exert complete control over the south, as far as the edges of the Sahara.
Then there’s the pasha, left on his own and scared out of his wits in his dark room, as he goes through his daily ritual of experiencing visions of precisely the same kind of terror that people felt when thinking about his own tyrannical behavior. There would be a grisly hour of panic, weeping, and groveling as he imagined his brother al-Madani coming through a crack in the door, even though he was dead, and yelling at him: “You’re no use to anyone! France is stronger than you are and so is the tribe! The only thing bigger than you is what’s between your legs!”
The pasha would listen, as his brother spoke to the French generaclass="underline" “It’s just a dagger. I’ll stab him and then put it back in its scabbard.”
The pasha would prostrate himself at al-Madani’s feet and beg him to let him have just a little bit of his cunning, so he could feel something other than raw fear.
The pasha used to dress the Syrian lute player in ten jewels, one for each toe. He would ask her to dance on his chest like Samia Gamal, as though she were dancing in a demon’s palm.
The pasha frothed at the mouth in rage because the caid, Hmmu, would put on a big show of opposing the French while he was actually biding his time, never missing an opportunity to show his contempt for the pasha as an agent of colonialism.
The pasha had dreams of liberating the Telouet Kasbah from the clutches of his brother and nasty brother-in-law who stuck in his craw.
The pasha’s enormous harem consisted of Egyptian and Syrian dancers, Turkish lute players, and Chinese masseuses.
Then the pasha was involved in a parade that he’d organized to welcome Theodore Staigh, Lyautey’s deputy, with the aim of providing proof that the deputy’s predecessors had been right about the pasha, and also to convince the people that the presence of France in this difficult country was something to which he was personally committed, no matter the cost. Up to that point, it had already cost France fifteen thousand deaths, while the number of Moroccan souls lost was 400,000.
Al-Sharqawi was convinced that the pasha was one of Marrakech’s greatest miracles. He spared nothing in providing details of the huge parade, one in which Hmmu played a leading role in order to scare the newly arrived official, while the pasha’s goal was to impress him. He described the way the procession set out from Marrakech toward Mount Tichka, amid crowds of tribesmen who lined both sides of the road of melted ice. They were ready at any moment to pick up and carry the cars in the official procession across the valleys and muddy roadways. Once the French delegation reached the Tichka crossing, they found white goat-hair tents set up to receive them. Thousands of horsemen surrounded them, firing dozens of continuous shots under instructions from the pasha, as a way of greeting the newly arrived French official. The 200,000 shots fired left a cloud of smoke that lingered in the Tichka sky for a considerable time.
Al-Sharqawi used to bind the people listening to him to what he referred to as the new eternity, and yet the level of fear associated with the pasha’s name led people to ask themselves whether the authorities supported his remarkable tale.
Then one evening the authorities arrived and grabbed al-Sharqawi from the middle of his circle. For several months, he was gone. When he finally came back to Marrakech, he was a broken man — and once again the doorman at the Mamounia Hotel.
On the very first day back at his job, a shy passerby approached and asked, “Wasn’t it the pasha who killed Hmmu so the entire scenario with the French could be cleaned up?”
“Yes,” al-Sharqawi replied. “He’s the one who killed him. There’s no doubt about that. But it had nothing to do with the French. He wanted to marry Halima, the caid’s wife, and get ahold of Hmmu’s harem, which included the gorgeous Mina, al-Haddad’s daughter!”
Before the passerby moved on, al-Sharqawi stopped him. “Make very sure,” he cautioned the man, “that you don’t tell that to any other human being!”
Other stories later took over and replaced the tale of the mummy. But Marrakech never forgot stories, even though it may have pretended to do so. It left them burning in the ashes, but only in order to bring them out again at the right moment, to use them to provide warmth on chilly nights.
Work began again on the restoration of the pasha’s palace and people went back to the old stories; and, indeed, the old stories returned to the old square.
Nobody paused when Patti died. She had gone back to New York to supervise the transfer of her museum collection to Marrakech, when her heart had stopped. Al-Sharqawi shed only two tears — one for her, and the other for the apartment that she had not lived in till it was too late!
No one in Marrakech thought that Jemaa el-Fnaa would ever revert back to the days of old — the square where people used to gather around performers and storytellers, in clusters or alone, spinning in a circle around flute and cymbal players, magicians, and fortune-tellers. UNESCO did designate the square a nonmaterial World Heritage Site, but it was brought back to life because people liked to blend the serious and frivolous. Marrakech people liked to play jokes: they put harmless snakes around tourists’ necks, hid fortune-tellers under Coca-Cola umbrellas, and performed wild dances every time Scorsese, Spielberg, Coppola, or Rampling walked by. They were now doing things they had never done before — leaving behind the old atmosphere of turmoil and perdition and instead surrendering its spirit to globalization. So here they were, stuttering their way through disjointed tales, trying to mix accounts of Antar, the pre-Islamic poet-hero, with the movie Cotton Club — all to please UNESCO. No one had the slightest desire to sit in a dreary circle and listen to these phony narratives, of course, because any storyteller had a thousand more interesting tales crowding inside their head, which could turn into a river of laughter at any moment.