Marrakech was a truly magical city, painted by great foreigners, with rich people both old and new. However, with nightfall, the city opened its ten gates to the simple folk of the Amazigh and Hauz, to the Rehemna Bedouin and desert nomads, so that it could be reborn every day.
Jemaa el-Fnaa was a square that slept alongside its food carts. Then came the winter, when it woke up to notice the circles that had come back and clustered around experts. In a distant corner of the square, people were amazed to discover a circle they recognized, just as they did its convener, with his Meccan-style turban and camel-hair burnoose. Nothing had changed except that al-Sharqawi was no longer telling stories to an eager audience. They were there merely because of the nice lamp that the government had given him.
He was telling the story of the British girl who was a friend of the pasha, the one who used to play golf and ride horses with him. She sat down with him for hours, chatting about music, horses, women, violence, and fear. Every time the conversation became more serious, she would disappear. He desired her without touching her. This all-powerful pasha who could seize the entire world by force found himself overcome by a powerful feeling of timidity every time he wanted to touch her. This girl would be intoxicated in his presence and turn into a ruthless prison guard, one who was enraptured by his stories. She listened modestly while he unloaded all his fears and sorrows and confessed to her what he used to do to himself during his daily encounters with terror in his dark quarters. The pasha — who’d been thrilled when the Krupp gun destroyed the tribesmen’s bodies — almost prostrated himself when faced by her smile. He admitted to her how much hatred possessed him when he remembered his brother and the subtle way he could entrance people. Whenever he remembered Hmmu he would stare at her features and come to the inevitable conclusion that the English would make excellent colonialists, much nicer than the French. The British girl would blush modestly at his flirtatious efforts. The pasha drank in the sudden blush on her cheeks. But he was still unable to reach out and touch her. At this point, the pasha had bedded over two hundred women. He couldn’t even remember the features of some of them, but here was this British woman whose face had captivated him — yet he couldn’t make love to her in his bed. She spent all her time with him, and then left him wandering around his huge harem in search of someone who resembled her. Eventually he would collapse in bed with no heart. She traveled and returned. While she traveled, the pasha would become sick and go to Telouet to immerse himself in the rigors of the ascetic life in the mountains. With cloudy eyes, he observed what his successor and rival was doing with hundreds of prisoners who were crammed into cells and tethered in chains. They had all lost their minds, hearing, and sight. Some had died in his custody and fallen to pieces, with no one even aware.
In Telouet, the pasha watched the horses and fighters, and tried to read into Hmmu’s movements for signs of a secret conspiracy. Returning to Marrakech, he tried to come up with a way of removing this thorn from his foot and that of France as well. He was consumed by a sense of frustration at what was happening to him in general, and more specifically with the British girl — not to mention this foul caid who had managed to build his tiny kingdom using iron and fire. He may have been pretending to stand up to the foreigners, but all he got was a reputation as a double agent!
When the girl returned to the pasha’s palace, a set of enigmatic candles were lit inside him. He spent long hours chatting with her again, discussing the paintings he had to acquire and the interior construction, decoration, and furnishing needed at the Telouet palace. He told her what he needed to do about the Mas newspaper, which he had just taken over. The pasha’s remarks were bursting with hints, allusions, doubts, and expressions of authority. He was not by any means lacking in concubines, but he never spoke to any of them either before, during, or after intercourse. Shockingly, a thin but forceful blond girl had deeply affected this tyrant. She knew how to deal with his tongue, but only his tongue. He took her on a tour of various parts of the palace, but when she decided to leave, he said farewell with only a handshake. In a fit of uncontrollable fury, he then sent an army of spies to follow her. He was anxious to find out whether their conversations were going in a particular direction and, if so, which one. Day after day he dispatched these spies, and became sheepish when they came back with nothing worth mentioning. Until one day, when finally there was definite information: the girl had gone out in all her finery with an Italian pianist and attended a reception at the Italian Embassy. The pasha didn’t like Italy, let alone the pianist — and he didn’t like how the Italian government had occupied Ethiopia several years ago. Ethiopia was the homeland of his mother al-Zahra Umm al-Khair. The Italians had killed her family. He could never forgive Italy for the evil things it did to his mother. He couldn’t forgive Italy for coming between himself and his English girl, nor could he forgive her for going out with this entrancing pianist, who would come to lose his fingers a couple of days later.
The pasha was heated with rage like never before, not even on that day when Anais had told him: You’re just a beast. My friend knows better than you!
And what happened had happened.
Passion toppled the warrior from atop his steed and dumped him into a hellish castration from which there was no escape. The pasha was drinking alone, naked in the palace bathhouse, when he spread his huge hand over the wall where the beautiful woman had slept.
People in Jemaa el-Fnaa Square despised spicy food. They listened in confusion to a new storyteller, who used exaggerated gestures to tell the remarkable tale of Ibn Rushd. All the while, they were thinking about the mummy that restorers had removed from the palace bathhouse. Amid its shrouds, the archaeologists had found no trace of the love story that the pasha forgot to bury there.
Translated from Arabic by Roger Allen
Part II
The Red and the Black
A Way to Mecca
by Hanane Derkaoui
Riad Zitoun
It was five a.m. in the old neighborhood of Riad Zitoun, in the ancient city. The first Friday in the month of June. The voice of the muezzin chanted the call to prayer; two young men from the neighborhood were on their way to the mosque, when they encountered Hmad returning late from work. Their neighborhood was small, but Hmad didn’t speak to anyone. All that anyone in the neighborhood knew about him was that he had moved from an Amazigh village close to Ouarzazate, and that he worked as a waiter for a Christian in one of the ritzy neighborhoods in Gueliz.