With this in mind, I seized an opportunity and invited her to Philip’s office one afternoon. I told her: “We are women and we know about each other. This is why I want to tell you that Saeed is like my brother, and I know what’s going on between you... I want you to put an end to your relationship with him or I’ll kick you out of the riad.”
I was surprised at her reaction. She burst into laughter and looked at me with insolence. She brought her face closer to mine and whispered mockingly: “Keep your lies for your Nazarene husband. I know everything about you. I know how jealousy is ravaging your heart.”
I fumed with rage and couldn’t control myself; I raised my hand to slap her in the face. “Respect your mistress, slut,” I hissed.
Leila returned the slap with similar violence. “You’re nobody’s mistress, you idiot,” she tossed back defiantly.
I lunged at her and we started punching and pulling each other’s hair while exchanging vile curses and insults like bullets. Suddenly, Saeed rushed into the office and tried to separate us.
“What’s your problem? Everyone can hear your screams across the riad!” Saeed shouted. “Enough!”
I could feel my lower lip bleeding as he pulled us apart. “Do you see what you’ve done?” I yelled back.
Saeed turned to Leila, held her hands, and said almost soothingly: “Don’t be silly.”
“It’s you who are silly!” I growled. “Don’t defend her.”
My limbs froze when I saw him hug her. “Calm down,” he whispered to her. “It’s not the right time yet.”
“What do you mean by that, you traitors?” I demanded.
At that very moment, Philip entered as the room, anger illuminating his pale face. He took hold of Saeed and cried out: “How dare you do this to me? You robbed me, you son of a bitch!”
Saeed pushed him and Philip fell down. From the floor, he lifted his eyes to me. “And you, were you his accomplice?”
I didn’t understand what was happening, so I asked: “What’s the matter? What did you do, Saeed?”
“You see, it is the right time,” Leila jumped in, as she ran a hand through her disheveled hair. She walked toward me. “The game ends here. Didn’t I tell you that you were nobody’s mistress? The riad is no longer his. It now belongs to someone else.”
I asked for an explanation as I helped Philip to his feet.
“You’ve been outsmarted,” Leila gloated. Then she turned to Philip. “What good is money to you when you’re about to kick the bucket? Come along, Saeed, let’s get out of here — we have what we need.”
Saeed followed her to the door and Philip rushed after them. “You can’t get away from me so easily!” he barked. He grabbed Saeed’s shoulder, but Saeed turned around and shoved him hard. Philip fell to the ground again and Saeed unleashed on him, punching and kicking him while he was down.
I screamed and tried to pull him away. “Stay away from him! You’ll kill him!”
Saeed pushed me as well, and I fell to the floor as he turned his attention back to Philip.
Leila stood by the door, smiling maliciously. “Enough, darling. Let’s go,” she said.
Saeed got up, leaving Philip listless on the floor, and headed toward the door, his back turned on me. Shaking with rage and hatred, I jumped up, grabbed an iron statue from the desk, and hurled it at Saeed with all my strength. It hit the back of his head. Blood immediately gushed out of his skull and he fell to the ground.
Leila shrieked: “You killed him, bitch!”
At the sight of so much blood covering the floor, I lost consciousness.
I opened my eyes to the sight of a paramedic.
“Wake up. Are you okay?” he asked.
The room was crowded with policemen. The ambulance took Saeed to the hospital while Leila and I were arrested.
Leila turned out to be a fugitive from Belgium, where she was involved in a drug-trafficking ring. She confessed to the police that she was the one who had planned everything. Leila had known Saeed before he’d employed her. Together, they had sold the riad and its contents using the proxy that I made Philip sign, and were about to flee abroad with the money. They were each sentenced to ten years in prison.
Saeed was transferred to jail after spending several weeks in the hospital. Some police informants who used to protect him now revealed his involvement in prior criminal cases, which increased his sentence to fifteen years.
I myself spent a few months in custody before I was released on bail that Philip paid. He also forgave me. “Behaving badly once does not make someone a bad person,” he told me. He did his best to save me from any further trouble.
I must say that during the time Saeed was in the recovery room, I oscillated between two contradictory attitudes: on the one hand, I wished for his death so that Leila would be deprived of her lover forever; and on the other hand, I prayed for his safety so that I wouldn’t be deprived of my freedom. Luckily he didn’t die, because freedom was far more meaningful than love.
I am now living at Riad Scheherazade as the undisputed lady there, taking care of Philip (my fortune come from afar). He recently suffered a stroke. I massage him with tenderness, using my painstakingly acquired methods. Who knows? He may recover from his hemiplegia. Isn’t the secret in the fingertips?
Translated from Arabic by Norddine Zouitni
Delirium
by Mahi Binebine
Souk Semmarine
To share the same body with a wayward being is no easy feat. Kamal and I were in constant conflict, most often over nothing. We argued day in and day out, and our fights sometimes grew so heated that passersby, ignorant of our history, would take us for fools. We spoke as one on a single matter: our love for Mama Rosalie — an intense, unconditional love.
It would be hard for me to give you an accurate account of my companion, as we can only know ourselves subjectively. Mama Rosalie had drummed into us an old story her mother used to telclass="underline" A rock suspended in the heavens is fated to fall on the head of the man who disparages himself on earth. Since the dawn of time, this meteorite has been floating in the firmament. And so I can only speak well to you of Kamal because, whatever people might say, we have a certain affection for each other. He’s a little bit of me, and I’m a little bit of him. We are, then, rather handsome young men: well-built, baby-faced, with those dull eyes — bloodshot, but kind — particular to men who’ve ceased to dream, who’ve thrown in the towel and no longer expect anything of anyone.
Our greatest asset was the language of Goethe. In all of Marrakech, we were the only tour guides fluent in German. We might as well have been oil barons. Not a Kraut in the land of the Moors escaped our nets. We were the rightful rulers of the coach buses crammed with white bodies, hormone-fed, laughing and avid, ready to spend a fortune at the Semmarine, the grandest souk in town. We would lead them into our friends’ bazaars, singing the praises of our ancestral handicrafts, so elegant and refined, the work of a gifted people living in the most beautiful country in the world: This carpet here belonged to the mistress of King Moulay Ismail, who took tea at her home on a hilltop overlooking Meknes all throughout his reign; that sculpture there was custom-made for the regent Ba Ahmed, who commissioned the Bahia palace with its 156 rooms in the Old Medina of Marrakech; this dagger, once belonging to Tashfin Ibn Ali, son of the founder of the Red City, served to cut the throat of an Andalusian rebel who’d come with his compatriots to build the wall encircling the old town; and this box before your eyes is an extremely rare piece: the bones of a mythical camel that crossed the Sahara a hundred times, encrusted in thuya wood by the chief of the Jewish artisans of Mogador. We rattled off our string of lies without blinking an eye, with remarkable eloquence, a penchant for anecdote, and absolute conviction. Thomas Mann, Stephan Zweig, and Herman Hesse lent their music to our hoaxes; they were, so to speak, our accomplices. Their words peppered our speeches, helping us to justify the exorbitant prices that we charged with reassuring nods of the head. A good share of the booty was paid to us afterward.