Mama Aicha greeted me with a warm hug. She kissed me and kept kissing me as though I were a sweet child. Her eyes were shining. The house was just as it had been when I left it. Flowerpots still surrounded the courtyard. The mulberry tree was still ripening. Mama Aicha seemed younger than her son. She must have been around fifty-four by now. Were it not for the traces of sadness that lingered in the depths of her eyes, I would have said that she had not changed. She was as radiant and pure as she had been when I last saw her twenty years before.
I handed her my gift, wrapped in rose-colored cellophane paper. She removed the paper with a huge smile. “Cloth made from the purple silkworm. Organdy. My first dream. This is wonderful, Yusuf, my son. How fine and beautiful it is. This is cloth for a sultaness, Aziz. I’ll take it to the tailor tomorrow, and within a month at most he’ll make me a dress from it. When will you get married, Aziz? When will you get married, my son? I want to wear it in your honor.”
Translated from Arabic by Anna Ziajka Stanton
Part III
Outside the City’s Walls
Frankenstein’s Monster
by My Seddik Rabbaj
Sidi Youssef Ben Ali
Marrakech is known for its seven patrons; we call it the city of the Seven Saints. Devout visitors all make the same pilgrimage from one mausoleum to the next, exploring the most intimate corners of the medina. This peregrination begins with the shrine to Sidi Youssef Ben Ali, born Abou Yacoub Senhaji, the revered sage who chose to live outside the walls of the Red City until his death in the year of the hegira 593 — more than a century after the capital of the Almoravids was built. It was because he had leprosy that he secluded himself, even digging a deep cellar where he could pray in isolation. Little did the holy man know that a community would form around this place in his honor, growing with the centuries to become Sidi Youssef Ben Ali, a neighborhood defined not only by its borders — it’s situated in the zone between the city and its suburbs — but also by the character of its inhabitants. Anywhere in Marrakech, when you introduce yourself as a son of Sidi Youssef Ben Ali, people react with an odd mixture of admiration and suspicion. These “sons” are known for their street smarts: they are cunning almost to the point of crookedness.
Long after his death, the saint continued to watch over his children, preparing them for life by instilling in them a certain self-sufficiency. Here, especially to the north, near the sanctuary, we start to earn our keep at an early age. Several businesses have sprouted up around the marabout’s tomb and we all take part in them, we children of the neighborhood. We begin by selling candles in front of the sanctuary, around the age of nine. Poor women who can’t afford to buy a full packet as an offering to the saint are content to bargain for a few of the singles that M’kadma, the sanctuary guard, collects and gives us to resell. This business allows us kids — and our supplier — to go home at night with a bit of cash in our pockets. And just as in ancient Rome, when slaves gradually accumulated wages to put toward their emancipation, this modest savings lets us buy our freedom. Our parents leave us to our own devices. We look after ourselves from childhood — or, rather, the saint looks after us.
As we grow up we take on new responsibilities. We become porters, not of luggage but of children — two- and three-year-olds, usually — who we carry down to a sort of underground hovel. We lock the child in there alone for a long while, listening with satisfaction as their screams pierce the darkness. Our saint is known all over the city for his power to cure fitful babies. Mothers bring their little ones who suffer from this particular curse — toddlers who cry for no reason, to the point of seeming possessed — and leave them with one of us. Our task is to place the ailing child in the hands of the saint before bolting up the stairs like a cat, leaving him or her lost in the blackness of the narrow cellar as if at the bottom of a well. The child wails and wails with all its might, and soon rids itself of its affliction.
In the summer we sell jujubes to the tourists visiting the shrine. It’s the same fruit we give to children instead of candy, and we also use it to treat coughs. In almost all our families we make it into a jelly that we store for the winter. Summertime is the season we love the most. There’s the school vacation, and we also earn good money. We pick the fruit in the Bab Ghmat Cemetery and sell it near the sanctuary in the afternoon.
Our mornings aren’t without fun. The cemetery becomes our playground, the ideal setting for our favorite game: hide-and-seek. An endless number of hiding places offer themselves to the connoisseur of this place. There are wild plants and jujube trees sometimes as tall as men, graves exposed by erosion and deep craters of mysterious origin. You would think meteorites had carved them out.
We have a tacit agreement never to let pieces of the dead lie around outside their graves. As soon as we find a shoulder blade, a tibia, a fibula, a phalanx, a rib, a skull, or any bone of the human body, we bring it to a designated hole in the ground that must be either an emptied grave or one of those craters of the necropolis. We have no idea who left the first bone in this place, but we continue to repeat the gesture as if it were our duty, a religious act or a ludicrous rite of passage for frequenters of the cemetery.
Here, in the summer, we become freer than in any other place. We roam the cemetery’s overgrown pathways, doing things we can’t do anywhere else: chasing stray dogs, talking to birds, masturbating in groups. We indulge in secret eccentricities, no longer inhibited by traditions and rules we don’t understand.
This is also the time of the year when we go to el-Hilal cinema. After the mausoleum closes we return home for dinner, bringing a watermelon, a cantaloupe, some peaches, or any other seasonal fruit, or simply a few dirhams to slip into our mothers’ hands. This contribution is obligatory as soon as we start to earn money. What we give to the household is always proportional to what we’ve made. After dinner we’re free to come and go as we please. When you’re a son of Sidi Youssef Ben Ali, you can revel in your freedom day and night. Usually we go in groups to see the double feature — most often kung fu and Bollywood movies — but if we’re short on cash we can resell our ticket to some other penniless filmgoer after the first show, and go out and buy a snack.
Once I went with some friends to the late-night screening and, bizarrely, a different sort of film was showing that night. It was Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Stefano Massini, based on the Mary Shelley novel. The story tells of Dr. Frankenstein, who creates a grotesque monster without a name or a family, a being built from the parts of several corpses, one who revolts against his maker and becomes capable of terrible crimes.
We didn’t need much French in order to understand the film; the images were eloquent enough on their own. We watched the events unfold before us, hunching forward in our seats. At the moment when the monster runs straight toward the camera and seems to want to jump through the screen, the electricity cut out. Voices rang out from all around the room — cries of protest at first, but then of fear and panic. We had no idea what was happening. Had the monster in fact come out from behind the screen to spread all this chaos and confusion, or was it the terror the film had awoken in us that made it seem so? We were used to these prolonged blackouts in Sidi Youssef Ben Ali — they often happened at wedding ceremonies and other important occasions, but never had a blackout seemed as strange to me as at that moment. I clung to a friend and tried to follow the line of spectators weaving their way through the crowd to the exit. I jumped at the slightest contact with other people, and could sense that my friend did too.