At that time I was working as a waitress in one of the guesthouses that had sprung up like mushrooms in the alleys of the Old Medina. The pay was low. But I was also giving lessons in French and English at a private school, and the salaries combined were enough to get by on, even with a child. I was determined to do this, as I had never been determined about anything in my life; I even seriously considered ending my studies. My mother only said, This is God’s will, and we’ll pay for it. My sister was silent — a speaking silence.
He visited me once, my partisan comrade, when I was three months pregnant. He called ahead to tell me he was at the Café de France in Jemaa el-Fnaa. I went to meet him still clutching a shred of hope, trying to tell myself he had been rash, that he regretted it. It doesn’t matter now. We drank our black coffee in near silence and then I took him to the Koutoubia Mosque. We smoked hash in the garden there and talked about mundane things, each of us evading a direct glance at the other, trying to dodge any mention of the pregnancy. When lunchtime came we went to Babylon Star Bar in Gueliz, not far from the Dawiya Bar. Babylon Star was one of those places that was difficult to comprehend — exactly what the situation required.
While I was on my fourth beer, I asked him drily, and without preamble: “Why did you come?” Later, upon leaving the bar, I realized I was stronger than this faltering comrade, who had stuttered as he searched for reasons to convince me to get rid of it, with, as he called it, a simple procedure. He’ll be biting his nails for years, I thought. Life would rattle and batter him, and guilt would deprive him of sleep.
During the months before the birth we slipped back into harmony with Marrakech, my fetus and I. I abandoned drinking and hash, and swapped my cafés for walking. Long, pondering walks. I wandered through Mowqaf Alley and Mouassine, Ksour and Riad Zitoun, and the little mass inside me each day came closer to life. I spoke to it a lot, telling it of my childhood and my adolescence, unfolding my dreams and desires. Once, as I passed by Arset el-Houta, memories of a spring day in 2000 came back to me like a dream. I’d snuck away from middle school that day, just for a while, with Yusuf, Ahmed, Fawzi, Hisham, and Said. I had always made friends with boys, they were better company. We took a trip to the Old Medina and ambled through its damp narrow alleys, shirking the sun that had dared to encroach on our spring. The smell of sewage was overpowering on the streets of Mellah, long since abandoned by its Jewish residents. And from Jinan Binshaqra we took the shortcut to Arset el-Houta, passing through Ba Ahmed Middle School and al-Farabi High School and the carpentry shops. In the midst of the vendors who rule the rest of that narrow space, we squeezed into an alley barely wide enough to fit a person. Fawzi pushed the door of one of the houses open and went in without knocking. Said and Hisham and the others followed. I wanted to go too, but Ahmed asked me to wait for them awhile, or to go back. This place was just for men.
They called the place Madam Kabora’s house, and would be received there in succession, to put their little pricks between the thighs of prostitutes their mothers’ ages in exchange for the dirhams extracted from them beforehand. I grew bored of waiting outside, so I went up. I found myself in a small hallway. There was a dirty table with a radio on it tuned to Radio Rabat, and I was taking in the vulgarity of the place when a voice, more vulgar still, addressed me: “What d’you want?”
I turned to see an obese woman waiting behind me, swathed in a kaftan and scarves. Her fingers were bare aside from a large gold ring. Unnerved, I approached the massive creature. I sat down beside her and told her, in a confused way, that I had come with my friends, and that I had to wait for them because I didn’t know the way back. In fact I was burning with curiosity. What was this place? Where were the boys? She said her name was Kabora and poured me a glass of tea. Without further introductions, and as naturally as if she were speaking with a grown woman, she began telling me about the troublesome police and the various other hardships of her life. I didn’t understand everything she said and I was baffled by that gruff voice, vibrating on like a tambourine.
After a few minutes the boys came running down. I smiled at Kabora and watched them without a word. They turned to me, perplexed. “What are you doing!?” they asked as one.
Cheerfully, I answered. “I met Kabora!”
Four years later, Hisham, my boyfriend through college, would tell me stories about Kabora, who lived next to his grandfather in Arset el-Houta. His aunt Safia hated her, claiming she brought disgrace to the whole neighborhood. He told me that Kabora housed girls from the Atlas Mountains and from Agadir and Safi, giving them food, shelter, and clothing, and putting them to work as prostitutes. Hisham also said he heard his father once tell his mother that Kabora had inherited the brothel from a glamorous aunt of hers who had, in the 1930s, been a concubine of Pasha el-Glaoui.
There were so many places I missed. As a child my father would take me around the ancient city on the back of his motorbike. I then infiltrated many of these places as a teenager, driven by a passion for discovery. The Sirsar Inn! I had heard my father telling my uncle its history. It had been a garage for cattle and trucks before it was sold by the guard employed by Sirsar’s son, Moulay Walid. The guard sold off the inn piece by piece for bottles of red wine and hash. Other times for dinner, or for someone to share his bed. After that, the place was colonized by carpentry workshops, metalworkers, bone carvers. Since most of the workmen were from another district, after using the workshops in the daytime they would often sleep there at night. Some of them married and had children, so the tight space grew even tighter and the inn gained another floor, creating conditions that perfectly defined the word slum. Cafés and grocery shops sprung up too. At six years old, I would travel with my father through the winding corridors of its lower level, dug out in all directions like dancing snakes, trailing behind him until we heard the sounds from the workshop growing louder.
Mr. Alal would always sit in a chair in front of his shop, his body draped in brown trousers, hands covered by the sleeves of a woolen robe that reached his knees. Mr. Alal had been a carpentry teacher. But after years of work, piling one rial on top of another, he got together enough to buy two more shops in the building. And then there were his two sons, who worked under his supervision. But his hands stayed perpetually busy, whether filling smoking pipes from a baggie or preparing a mashmouma, or bong. My father jokingly nicknamed him The Machine. Mr. Alal would greet us from his seat in his hoarse voice and would gesture at one of his sons to bring two chairs. We would sit, my father and I, in front of the shop and pull out a low wooden drum, upon which they would place the requisite teapot, a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes, and spare pipes. My father was always telling me what a healthy weed kif was for adults.
Mr. Alal was a round-faced man, thin, dark-skinned, with a thick beard, shaggy black hair, and bulging eyes. Pouring us tea, he would get up to call for donuts from Café Rubio in the alley. Inside the shop thrummed the harmonious rhythms of sawmill and hammer, along with music from the radio. It remains anchored in my memory like a first love, emerging and living still inside me years later: The leaf enchants its blowing or Tonight wine and desires sing around us / A sail that swims in the light watches over our shade — how could my young self have known the meaning of such lines? But I loved those songs. I was as used to hearing them as I was to smelling the smoke from that salutary plant.