I reminded him that he hadn’t yet named a price. This time I said it to annoy him. His eyes glowed viciously. He took a violent drag on the cigar, blew the smoke off to the side, threw Zineb a look of reproach, and walked off.
That’s how it goes. They praise you for an hour, saying in front of everyone that you perform committed sketches, but as soon as the issue of compensation comes up, everyone goes silent. “What’s that guy saying? He wants to be paid a fee?” They open their eyes wide and are amazed that you’ve requested compensation, as if you had asked one of them to strip naked. As if Zineb and I didn’t eat anything but bread and didn’t drink anything but water, as if we didn’t have expenses like everyone else. Zineb doesn’t smoke or drink, and I don’t smoke Davidoffs, but I do pay the rent and the electricity and water bills, and I buy medicine for the headaches caused by people like this official. It is true that sometimes we eat eggs and tomatoes for lunch, but that doesn’t mean we can be belittled when we ask for payment for services rendered.
Sometimes, especially on Sundays when Zineb doesn’t go to the cinema club and when there isn’t a communist or socialist conference, we are struck with the desire to buy some veal or lamb cutlets just like everyone else (we haven’t yet gotten to gazelle or ostrich meat). As for the monarchists, I haven’t attended any of their conferences, but I don’t think things would be that different there. Perhaps they’d be worse. The monarchy isn’t a person or a group of people. It’s a system, like a dragon that knows neither friends nor enemies, with a large belly that is never satisfied, never full. It devours everything and then demands more—men and rocks, the sickly and the fat, those who possess something and those who don’t. It devours everything—the present and the past, the ancient and the modern. It leaves nothing behind—neither distance nor space. As long as it continues to devour everything, all is fine. As long as it continues to devour, you just have to wait until it has eaten its fill. But can a dragon ever be satisfied?
16
I began my work in the Djemaa El-Fna with an old basket made of straw and a small teapot. When I stood out in the square, there was nothing but the djellaba on my back, a basket made of straw, and a small teapot. After meeting Drissiya, the fat woman who sold amulets and herbs that she said she had brought from the Hijaz, I married her and went around the country with her in her Mercedes-Benz that she wouldn’t drive without her black sunglasses. I learned a lot during that year with her, and then with her husband as well, whose sudden appearance hadn’t surprised her at all. After that, I began to wander around the markets and set up shop at the gates of military barracks on my own dime. I told people I had brought the herbs I was selling from the Hijaz, just like Drissiya did, and they snatched them up. At least the year I spent with her wasn’t for nothing, thank God. But the commander of one of the barracks had me arrested because I (with my made-up recipes) had allegedly caused the death of three of his soldiers who were looking for something to enhance their virility before going to the bordello.
“Three soldiers at the same time!” The commander walked around me screaming, “Three soldiers at the same time, you infidel!”
His neck muscles tightened and his thin moustache quivered. I didn’t know how to respond. He seemed to be overplaying how agitated he was, as if to prevent me from getting worked up too. He circled me, threatening to shoot me without a trial. In the end, his soldiers threw me safe and sound into a narrow cell, but the firing squad was waiting for me, or I was waiting for it—no difference, really. I was not at all expecting to wind up where I was. I was over forty, and rather than God decreeing a happy ending for me, I found myself closer to nothing at all—no money, no family, and my final home a dark cell deep inside a military barracks in the middle of nowhere. Every once in a while the guard (a man with a thick moustache) would look in on me and say he would have been the fourth victim. He said it sarcastically and sometimes with an angry fire burning in his eyes. The soldier with the thick moustache had not yet gotten over his surprise, was still amazed at his luck. He would have been the fourth victim had he not decided, at the last moment, to stay in the barracks, for no clear reason. He hadn’t taken those herbs because he had chosen to stay in the barracks rather than go with his friends to the bordello.
“That’s all there is to it, you heathen!” Then, peering at me through a little window in the door, he said, “You thought you’d be able to do it again, you son of a bitch?” As if to remind me of the bullets waiting to pierce my trembling heart in the barracks courtyard at some soon-to-arrive dawn. In my head my entire wasted life spooled out before me. I was hoping for a fate other than this one. My friend Si Hussein the barber had once predicted fame and fortune for me. How funny his prediction seemed then, as I looked around my foul-smelling cell. I thought about crying but pulled myself together. I remembered that I was alone in my cell and thought to myself, “What’s the use of crying when there are no witnesses to my tears?”
It just so happened that the king was taking a tour of the provinces to inspect his troops, and while passing through Marrakech he heard about the crimes of a person named Balloute who had been tossed into a prison cell in one of the barracks. When His Majesty arrived, the commander told him that yes, within the walls of his barracks he had imprisoned a dangerous criminal who had killed three of his best soldiers in a single swoop and that he was waiting for permission from His Majesty to fill the perpetrator with bullets. The king ordered that I be brought before him.
I asked the soldier with the thick moustache, “What does your king want with me?”
“Either the day of your death has arrived, or the day of your deliverance, you wretch. He’ll either strangle you with his own hands, or he’ll release you. It all depends on his mood. He’s the king. Do you know what that means, you infidel? The king does what he wishes in his dominion.”
But the king was in a good mood that day.
The king stood there examining my face for a long time, while I wondered how my face looked to him. I left the king to study my unflattering form at his leisure: a round face with two small eyes, two flared nostrils, and a small mouth resembling a hole. Si Hussein the barber always said that my face had the look of someone who was permanently shell-shocked, or like someone expecting the roof to fall in on him at any moment. Did the king see the same thing as the barber? Yes he did, and in order to hide the urge to laugh that suddenly struck him, His Majesty put his hand over his mouth and addressed me with false sternness.
“You criminal! It seems that you have killed more of my soldiers than you have treated.”
I answered him right away, as if I were responding to the local grocer. “Has even one of them complained of a fever or headache? Does Your Majesty not see that I have treated them completely and definitively?”
If one of his officers had responded to him with such impudence he would have met a very bad ending, but I was created to be funny—with my words, with my silence, with my body, with my whole being—and I was absolutely certain that this was my chance.
His Majesty asked me, “Do you realize that the commander wishes to put you in front of the firing squad?”
I replied that most people in this day and age are dying, and most of the time without any reason whatsoever. Then I added that this man’s soldiers died because they didn’t follow the medication’s instructions, and that they would have died of syphilis in any case because they frequented Oum Habiba’s bordello in the Ursa part of town. The word “bordello” made the king laugh. Of course he knew it in French, but coming off my tongue in Arabic, the word acquired a new strangeness, an original peculiarity. The king continued to stroke his chin while studying this creature standing before him.
“What’s your name?”
“Balloute.”
It was that he was still hesitating and had not yet decided what to do. Would he send me to the barracks courtyard so one of the firing squad’s bullets could pierce my heart, or would he leave me to continue liquidating his soldiers?
The king asked me, “Do you have a story to tell us?”
The commander was disgusted by this whole circus, angry with the attention His Majesty was giving me and the time he was wasting on me. He chewed on his upper lip and his thin moustache, waiting. As for the king, he hadn’t yet decided whether he was going to send me to be executed or wait for the end of the story that I was about to narrate to His Majesty.
I told the fart story, that always gets people to like me:
“There once was a king who was hopelessly sick. He was a devout and religious man. One day, his private physician visited him and, after examining him, told him that one fart would be all it took to get rid of his illness. The king appealed to God to consider his condition and grant him the fart that would save his life, but God did not answer his prayers. When the king’s entourage and servants saw his condition deteriorate and became sure that the king’s cure was all but impossible, they grabbed what they could from the palace and fled. No one remained at his side except for his companion and jester, Messoud. He cared for him and consoled him, but with no hope of a cure. One day, on the edge of death, the king appealed to God to grant him a seat in heaven, to which Messoud said, ‘How can you ask God to grant you a seat in heaven when he doesn’t even deign to grant you one small fart?’ The king exploded in laughter—a loud laugh that filled his mouth, his eyes and veins and every part of his body, and with it, his belly exploded with a resounding fart that restored him immediately to health. The end.”
I stood staring at His Majesty, waiting. Then I said, “Okay, so let me laugh first,” and I did, and the king followed suit.
I knew very well why I was laughing. I had been saved in spite of the commander. As for the king, no one knew if he was laughing because of the joke or because of the happy ending with the king or because of my laughter. Or was he laughing on account of the fact that God heard the much-repeated prayers of the sick and responded to them? The commander, who had not yet swallowed his disappointment, did not say a word. He was seething inside, marveling to himself that His Majesty had pitied a trickster such as me. When the king asked me to honor him in his palace and to entertain him, I responded immediately, as I always do. I earned almost nothing from my work as a serious and responsible doctor, so why not try my luck as a jester in the king’s court?
Rather than being imprisoned in a military barracks for the rest of my life, rather than a firing squad riddling my chest with bullets in the barracks courtyard, I spent close to fifteen years in the king’s palace as a jester. I came and went as I pleased. I sat next to His Majesty. I ate at his table. I even entered his bedroom. People in the street bowed when I passed by, moving to the side and begging my pardon for being there in the first place. They’d kiss my hand, apologizing for not being able to do more. They’d send me letters that included their complaints, desires, and buried passions. In the market they filled my basket free of charge, and in the shops of the bazaar they begged me to honor them by receiving their humble gifts. Wearing a short djellaba and a red tarboosh, I’d sit in the Renaissance Café looking down over Marrakech, as the waiter whispered into the ear of someone going up the stairs that he was sitting upstairs. “Who?” “Balloute, the king’s private jester.”
And what does Balloute say now? This requires no comment. God destines wealth and he destines poverty. He destines greatness and he destines lowliness. He destines that you appear before the firing squad, and here you are in the sultan’s palace. He destines what He pleases. He destines that you to go in and out of the palace as if it were your own home, and He destines you to find the door closed in your face with no one remembering who you are. He destines greatness for whomever He pleases, and He destines lowliness for whomever He pleases.
I am nothing but a jester, but what’s the difference between a jester and a minister or a general when you’re in the shadow of His Majesty? All of them pray behind His Majesty and pray to God to prolong their time there for as long as possible. They all walk in the same entourage and together they fear the day that they will be thrown from it. “Last stop. Everybody off!” This is the nightmare scenario. To them that day seems far off, but they think about it nonetheless. Nothing else preoccupies them. They are kept awake at night and during the day their bodies are stricken with a weakness that makes them unable to do anything. Their minds are stricken with something resembling paralysis, where not even the smallest thought can enter their heads, as if they came here only to be tortured as they wait for the day when they’ll leave the king’s retinue. God is all powerful. He destines greatness and He destines lowliness to whomever He pleases. He alone determines who He wants in the palace, and here you are outside of it. Here you are wondering what other end awaits you. But you haven’t got to the worst of it yet. This is just the beginning.
17
Day Seven
We set off into the arid and wild expanse spread out before us. We left for the desert, Mohamed Ali and I, to explore a location that Captain Hammouda said the enemy was thinking about taking from us if we didn’t beat them to it. Brigadier Omar was the third man in our party, something we never would have foreseen. He hadn’t yet come round from his drunken stupor as he stood in the fort’s yard waiting for us. He wasn’t laughing. We walked into absolute desert, the purity of which was unsullied by mountain, gorge, or hill. Brigadier Omar was behind us. We walked without expecting anything in particular. We didn’t know what we were supposed to expect. Brigadier Omar was behind us, and from time to time he spoke into the radio to receive orders from the general himself. Did he know why we were here? Did he know that his precious daughter was punishing us? Was there any doubt? The general guided our procession from his farm, and at the same time he pressed olives, surrounded by a group of his officers. He explained to them the benefits of olives against constipation.
From time to time we saw Bedouin tents in the distance, with camels and small bunches of goats around them. That was how it was in the beginning, but after two hours of marching, the tents and camels had disappeared. In fact, all life had disappeared except for that of the sand and the rocks and the pebbles, and our threatened lives. I didn’t know which direction we were walking in—perhaps toward Las Palmas, where the houses that Mohamed Ali’s friend built were?—and I didn’t know why we were silent. A sort of premonition told me that silence wasn’t suitable in these sorts of circumstances. Should I remind him of the builders of Las Palmas just to make him laugh a little bit?
We talked about Naafi, whom we had left digging in search of his leg, and about Brahim and his potential wife. After that, we talked about the Sahrawis. Mohamed Ali knew a lot about them because he was from Zagoura. As for me, I had never seen a single Sahrawi in my life and had no idea why I was fighting them. Mohamed Ali said that the eyes of the Sahrawis were wide and black and weren’t suited to the desert’s heat, sand, and mirages.
“But why are we fighting them, Mohamed Ali?”
“They’re big, those eyes, despite the fact that nothing but sand fills them.”
“But, Mohamed Ali, answer my question. Why are we fighting the Sahrawis?”
“They’re big, those eyes, and wide, shining because of the copious light. Instead of blinding them, the light fills their eyes and they become wide and bright white. Their eyes are always happy, proud, never accepting darkness . . .”
Then we heard Brigadier Omar behind us start to narrate this story out of the blue: “There was a teacher in our neighborhood who wanted to see what war was like, and when they sent him to enlist, the first bullet shot at him lodged in his head. When they took him to the hospital, upon seeing his condition the doctor said, ‘If the bullet comes out, taking some of his brain with it, he’ll die.’ The teacher replied, ‘May God bring you good tidings, doctor, remove it and don’t be afraid. I don’t have a single brain cell in my head, for if I did, I wouldn’t be here in the first place.’”
The day before yesterday, after our return from the hunting trip, Joumana, who w
as happy with her outing and happy with the pictures of the gazelle that she had taken, said that after we got married I would become a beacon of civilian life because the general, her father, would take the necessary measures to end my deployment in the desert to allow his dear daughter and me to have beautiful children with black eyes. His exceptional offspring would enrich the military establishment. She delivered this happy news joyfully and cheerfully, dancing around me like a butterfly. No, that isn’t right. Rather, she danced around me like Satan dancing around someone sentenced to death with the noose tied around his neck.
Her dog had a black wool covering on his back and around his neck was a red leather collar that ended in a golden clasp. She was rubbing her eyes because she was tired and wanted to sleep, but before rushing off to bed she wanted to deliver the good news to me. Yesterday evening, after she had rested from her hunting trip, I remained a good distance away from her so she couldn’t pounce on me and dig her fingernails into my face. She petted the dog in her arms and ordered me, with an air of indifference, to get ready because we were going to visit the general on his farm to watch him press olives by hand. I told her, “I’m not going anywhere, not to see the general or his uncle!” It was as if she hadn’t heard what I had said, as if nothing but air had come out of my mouth. The creature paid no attention to my refusal to go. She continued to pet her worthless little dog. I continued, “I would rather commit suicide in the line of fire than go with you.” Then I headed to the tavern to say good-bye to my friends.
The tavern was practically empty. Our numbers had dwindled without us realizing it, both inside and outside the bar. Fifi was not optimistic. In the fort we had been one hundred and thirty conscripts and soldiers, but our numbers dwindled to half that in the space of a year, but who’s counting? The tavern was as it was before, except for the number of soldiers. Many of them had fled or died, or been thrown into prison, with no one expressing any heartbreak or sorrow over them.
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