‘Listen carefully. Jamaa al-Fna, the Mediterranean Press Club, the medina entrance from the side of the seller of smoked heads, near the olive and falafel shop. Free yourself from the balcony of the café. Nothing deserves all this attention on your part. Listen to the call of someone looking from the narrow window of an old house. He is talking to another person on the roof of a nearby house, and asking, “Has the person concerned arrived?” The other replies at the top of his voice that he does not know. You, however, must stand exactly under the spot where the call originates or under the window. Look closely in the direction of those who leave the alley and melt into the throng of the square. You should not concern yourself with those entering the medina. You should know that in this narrow place it is difficult to distinguish between those entering and those leaving, but everything depends on this distinction. You will see a billboard that shades the alleyway with its dull glimmer. You will incidentally read on it that Marrakech welcomes cinema lovers. You will then see a large poster that covers a large area of the wall, and if you read it you will know the whole programme of the film festival. I beg you, do not read it. If you busy yourself reading it — and I know that an overwhelming temptation will push you to do so — you will miss the critical moment.
‘Why am I telling you all this? Why do I run to you specifically? It is either your fate or mine, we can’t escape it. The face is that of a child who grew up very quickly. His cheeks are those of a healthy baby and his eyes are the eyes of a tired man. It is a face that looks like many others, like the face of the greengrocer located near the fuel station in Al-Zizafon Street, the face of the teacher at the private school located behind the general’s house, or the face of your brother-in-law who lives in Germany, whom you haven’t seen in years. Look at his hands next. Why is there a blackness creeping up all his nails? Why does the silver wedding ring sit so lightly on his thick little finger, making the hand look dead? Where has the man sprung from? From Sidi Youssef Ben Ali? From Daoudiate? From a vault in the old medina? From the enclosure of Marrakech or from the night of Casablanca? Or from the nameless margins?
‘You told me once that you recognised people’s origins from their walk. Pay careful attention then to this unhurried gait, slightly off-centre as if the person were trying to avoid an unexpected obstacle. Can you tell where people are heading from the way they walk? No. No, you can’t know. No one can tell whether a person is going towards the centre of the square or to the Conference Hall, or the Hotel La Mamounia. His body stretches towards all those places without taking the direction it points to. It is the camouflage of a person who knows what he wants.
‘The sleek buses are lined up in the square, unloading hundreds of weary tourists. The sun covers this city like a tanjiya dish cooked over high heat. This is the end of the tour, after the tombs of the Saadis, Badie palace, Bahia palace, the Koutoubia, the house of Si Said, the Pasha’s house, the lighthouse, and the Almoravid Dome. Here, the scalded faces take a break before they are split among the hotels of the city. Do you think he is here, hiding in an obscure corner, waiting for the gathering of foreigners near the buses? Do you think he is observing the situation carefully from behind the cart of an itinerant vendor? Scrutinise his features closely, if you can get near him. If the designated moment has arrived, a vivid yellow colour will cover his face. In that case do not leave him at all. But if the time is still far off, the burning sun will turn his face bluish. So stay close to him but only look at his face occasionally. It would be better to look at his feet, the feet of a duck in a hurry wearing impromptu socks and knock-off trainers.
‘If he is not there? You will ask yourself if he wasn’t just an apparition that sprang from the fear present in each one of us. If, despite his socks, his Pakistani shirt and his uneasy look, he wasn’t just a simple construction worker on his day off, or a cleaner in foreigners’ houses who has just taken a quick shower before noon, for fear of being surprised in a state of impurity? At the exact moment when you ask that kind of question, a person’s colour might change from blue to yellow, the colour of death. Beware of falling victim to this suspicion when you can’t see him. If he is not where we left him a short while before, he is now at the entrance to the Mamounia, which is packed with cars, buses and taxis, and where the smoke of Cuban cigars extends from the restaurants to the Churchill Suite or Orson Welles Rooms. Do not take the risk of leaving this golden square. There, in the same square metre, huge fortunes compete and our friend can raise the pillars of paradise.
‘Why are you looking at me like that? You have not been assigned a mission and you are not anybody’s messenger. You just gave birth to a naïve angel who flew from the Trocadero to Kandahar, certain of his return.
‘Tell me, you who understand everything, what are twenty years? Almost nothing! Why don’t we start from zero?’
I wanted to touch his cheeks, but I only caught the smile that accompanied the movement of my hands. I opened my eyes to the darkness of the room and distant voices coming from the ground floor. I forced myself to get up and go downstairs, but I was not able to answer my mobile phone, which had been ringing for more than an hour.
I drank a lot of water, then I asked Fatima and Ahmad if they had been talking from the moment we arrived. They said they had been.
Layla called at the same moment.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked tersely.
She replied meekly, ‘I’m just seeing how you are. Does that annoy you so much?’
I told her that I was very anxious because of the strange things happening to me with Yacine. She returned to the subject of Fatima and said she would like us all to meet in Rabat. I agreed and told her that I would have loved to be with her at that exact moment. I told her I missed her and I asked if she looked beautiful that day; she said she had done everything she could to look lovely. Then we said superficial things to each other that are usually said by teenagers. Before we even ended the call, I felt a heavy weight on my chest, as if I had failed to say or do something I should have. I found myself going towards the door, opening it and looking at the alleyway, which was filling up with new voices speaking various languages.
I looked at the wall opposite the big house and saw that the pigeon that had been agonising when we arrived had died. There was a green patch around its head from the fluid still oozing from its beak. I closed the door, and when I went through the kitchen I said to Ghaliya, ‘The pigeon has died!’ She told me that it had been folded in upon itself since the day before. I shook my shoulders and said, ‘At least it didn’t die by having its throat cut!’
She thought I was making a joke and replied, joking herself, ‘Unlike the pigeons I’m preparing for dinner. Sidi Ahmad spent the whole morning cutting their throats. They were flapping their wings and squawking, thinking he was about to feed them. Poor birds. Nothing frees them from the human except death.’
I collapsed on the sofa. I was about to ask Ahmad about his new property development projects when my phone rang again. It was Ibrahim al-Khayati, who told me in a shaky voice with a weepy tone that Essam had been missing for two days. I asked some questions and then shut up. Ibrahim said Mahdi was almost deranged and that he did not know what to do. I was upset by the news and told him that I would come either that same day or early the next.