Marrakech Noir

by Yasin Adnan

  Nobody paused when Patti died. She had gone back to New York to supervise the transfer of her museum collection to Marrakech, when her heart had stopped. Al-Sharqawi shed only two tears—one for her, and the other for the apartment that she had not lived in till it was too late!

  No one in Marrakech thought that Jemaa el-Fnaa would ever revert back to the days of old—the square where people used to gather around performers and storytellers, in clusters or alone, spinning in a circle around flute and cymbal players, magicians, and fortune-tellers. UNESCO did designate the square a nonmaterial World Heritage Site, but it was brought back to life because people liked to blend the serious and frivolous. Marrakech people liked to play jokes: they put harmless snakes around tourists’ necks, hid fortune-tellers under Coca-Cola umbrellas, and performed wild dances every time Scorsese, Spielberg, Coppola, or Rampling walked by. They were now doing things they had never done before—leaving behind the old atmosphere of turmoil and perdition and instead surrendering its spirit to globalization. So here they were, stuttering their way through disjointed tales, trying to mix accounts of Antar, the pre-Islamic poet-hero, with the movie Cotton Club—all to please UNESCO. No one had the slightest desire to sit in a dreary circle and listen to these phony narratives, of course, because any storyteller had a thousand more interesting tales crowding inside their head, which could turn into a river of laughter at any moment.

  Marrakech was a truly magical city, painted by great foreigners, with rich people both old and new. However, with nightfall, the city opened its ten gates to the simple folk of the Amazigh and Hauz, to the Rehemna Bedouin and desert nomads, so that it could be reborn every day.

  Jemaa el-Fnaa was a square that slept alongside its food carts. Then came the winter, when it woke up to notice the circles that had come back and clustered around experts. In a distant corner of the square, people were amazed to discover a circle they recognized, just as they did its convener, with his Meccan-style turban and camel-hair burnoose. Nothing had changed except that al-Sharqawi was no longer telling stories to an eager audience. They were there merely because of the nice lamp that the government had given him.

  He was telling the story of the British girl who was a friend of the pasha, the one who used to play golf and ride horses with him. She sat down with him for hours, chatting about music, horses, women, violence, and fear. Every time the conversation became more serious, she would disappear. He desired her without touching her. This all-powerful pasha who could seize the entire world by force found himself overcome by a powerful feeling of timidity every time he wanted to touch her. This girl would be intoxicated in his presence and turn into a ruthless prison guard, one who was enraptured by his stories. She listened modestly while he unloaded all his fears and sorrows and confessed to her what he used to do to himself during his daily encounters with terror in his dark quarters. The pasha—who’d been thrilled when the Krupp gun destroyed the tribesmen’s bodies—almost prostrated himself when faced by her smile. He admitted to her how much hatred possessed him when he remembered his brother and the subtle way he could entrance people. Whenever he remembered Hmmu he would stare at her features and come to the inevitable conclusion that the English would make excellent colonialists, much nicer than the French. The British girl would blush modestly at his flirtatious efforts. The pasha drank in the sudden blush on her cheeks. But he was still unable to reach out and touch her. At this point, the pasha had bedded over two hundred women. He couldn’t even remember the features of some of them, but here was this British woman whose face had captivated him—yet he couldn’t make love to her in his bed. She spent all her time with him, and then left him wandering around his huge harem in search of someone who resembled her. Eventually he would collapse in bed with no heart. She traveled and returned. While she traveled, the pasha would become sick and go to Telouet to immerse himself in the rigors of the ascetic life in the mountains. With cloudy eyes, he observed what his successor and rival was doing with hundreds of prisoners who were crammed into cells and tethered in chains. They had all lost their minds, hearing, and sight. Some had died in his custody and fallen to pieces, with no one even aware.

  In Telouet, the pasha watched the horses and fighters, and tried to read into Hmmu’s movements for signs of a secret conspiracy. Returning to Marrakech, he tried to come up with a way of removing this thorn from his foot and that of France as well. He was consumed by a sense of frustration at what was happening to him in general, and more specifically with the British girl—not to mention this foul caid who had managed to build his tiny kingdom using iron and fire. He may have been pretending to stand up to the foreigners, but all he got was a reputation as a double agent!

  When the girl returned to the pasha’s palace, a set of enigmatic candles were lit inside him. He spent long hours chatting with her again, discussing the paintings he had to acquire and the interior construction, decoration, and furnishing needed at the Telouet palace. He told her what he needed to do about the Mas newspaper, which he had just taken over. The pasha’s remarks were bursting with hints, allusions, doubts, and expressions of authority. He was not by any means lacking in concubines, but he never spoke to any of them either before, during, or after intercourse. Shockingly, a thin but forceful blond girl had deeply affected this tyrant. She knew how to deal with his tongue, but only his tongue. He took her on a tour of various parts of the palace, but when she decided to leave, he said farewell with only a handshake. In a fit of uncontrollable fury, he then sent an army of spies to follow her. He was anxious to find out whether their conversations were going in a particular direction and, if so, which one. Day after day he dispatched these spies, and became sheepish when they came back with nothing worth mentioning. Until one day, when finally there was definite information: the girl had gone out in all her finery with an Italian pianist and attended a reception at the Italian Embassy. The pasha didn’t like Italy, let alone the pianist—and he didn’t like how the Italian government had occupied Ethiopia several years ago. Ethiopia was the homeland of his mother al-Zahra Umm al-Khair. The Italians had killed her family. He could never forgive Italy for the evil things it did to his mother. He couldn’t forgive Italy for coming between himself and his English girl, nor could he forgive her for going out with this entrancing pianist, who would come to lose his fingers a couple of days later.

  The pasha was heated with rage like never before, not even on that day when Anais had told him: You’re just a beast. My friend knows better than you!

  And what happened had happened.

  Passion toppled the warrior from atop his steed and dumped him into a hellish castration from which there was no escape. The pasha was drinking alone, naked in the palace bathhouse, when he spread his huge hand over the wall where the beautiful woman had slept.

  * * *

  People in Jemaa el-Fnaa Square despised spicy food. They listened in confusion to a new storyteller, who used exaggerated gestures to tell the remarkable tale of Ibn Rushd. All the while, they were thinking about the mummy that restorers had removed from the palace bathhouse. Amid its shrouds, the archaeologists had found no trace of the love story that the pasha forgot to bury there.

  Translated from Arabic by Roger Allen

  PART II

  The Red and the Black

  A Way to Mecca

  by Hanane Derkaoui

  Riad Zitoun

  It was five a.m. in the old neighborhood of Riad Zitoun, in the ancient city. The first Friday in the month of June. The voice of the muezzin chanted the call to prayer; two young men from the neighborhood were on their way to the mosque, when they encountered Hmad returning late from work. Their neighborhood was small, but Hmad didn’t speak to anyone. All that anyone in the neighborhood knew about him was that he had moved from an Amazigh village close to Ouarzazate, and that he worked as a waiter for a Christian in one of the ritzy neighborhoods in Gueliz.

  “Listen, Ali, this serving job of Hmad the Chelh’s is really weird, ’cause every
day he comes back at five in the morning.”

  “It’s true, Brother Ibrahim, every morning we run into him when we’re on our way to dawn prayer.”

  “But we don’t go to the dawn prayer every morning,” Ibrahim said.

  “I know, I just mean that we see him whenever we do go to morning prayer.”

  The two young men were late for the prayer, so they hurried their steps toward the mosque. Since their vigilance in matters of faith was only recently acquired, they were earnestly trying to project the appearance of being genuine believers who go to the dawn prayer every day, and who sit afterward with the faqih, debating aspects of the hadith with him, and asking innumerable religious questions. After the prayer, they were sitting far from the mosque smoking the only cigarette they had left after going completely broke.

  “Why don’t we follow Hmad?” Ali suggested. “We could con him and get some money out of him.”

  “Didn’t we say that we’ve repented getting money like that?” Ibrahim replied.

  “We’ve been diligent about going to prayer for a month now and nothing has changed; besides, we’ve squandered the last of our money.”

  “But we’ve repented, my friend,” Ibrahim repeated. “Stealing is forbidden. The faqih said that God will open the way for us and guide our steps.”

  “God guides the steps of those who are educated and who have a university degree, or at the very least those who have a trade. As for us, what will He guide our steps toward?” Ali lamented. “There’s no diploma in picking safes or five-finger discounts . . . we have no experience except for stealing.”

  Back before the tourist police proliferated, Ali and Ibrahim had worked as unlicensed tour guides. The license that allowed you to practice the trade with your head held high was only issued to people who paid a bribe at the new Institute of Tourist Guiding. This option was financially out of reach for them. Undeterred, they had wandered around Jemaa el-Fnaa and other historical monuments ambushing tourists. However, the tourist police kept a close eye out for them, harassing them and their peers. They were each arrested as many as forty times over the course of five years. They ended up abandoning the tourist trade and entering into the world of delinquency through its wide and welcoming door, by working on their burglary skills and organizing a few petty fraud operations.

  Two months ago, they had both been overcome by a sudden religious impulse that shook their world. Their life was racked with turmoil, and they wavered in an ambiguous place between following the right path and straying from it. For they truly did want to be sincere, submissive Muslims like the ones the imam described. However, in the moment of temptation itself, they knew only too intimately about the bottomless depths of the city: its licentious underworlds, prostitutes, nightlife, and hashish establishments. But the explosive change came after they had robbed the house of an old lady in Sidi Youssef Ben Ali, and the old woman had said to them: “Take everything in the house and just leave me alive.”

  Ali was the first one to be affected by the incident. He tried to talk to his friend about it while they were returning with the day’s loot on the back of a motorcycle: five hundred dirhams and a gold signet ring. When they got back to their room, Ali wanted to talk to his friend about this lady who reminded him of his grandmother. She had raised him in a village called Smimou near Essaouira before he left for Marrakech fifteen years ago. After splitting the loot, Ali had told Ibrahim with pain in his voice: “That lady really broke my heart. I don’t want to do this to old people anymore.”

  “But who will we rob if not the old and weak? That’s the nature of the beast. We don’t have a choice,” Ibrahim had reminded him.

  “What if we switched professions, turned to God in repentance, and became like other people? What do you think about us going to pray with the congregation?”

  “Why not? This might be another way to stay clean and to find some peace of mind,” Ibrahim had replied, having felt the same shame as Ali.

  Going to prayer in the mosque was an idea that had never enticed them before this. It was an entirely unexpected proposition. The young men thought that only those who had a lawful profession could enter the mosque, and because of this, they’d always kept away from the kingdom of God and the world of the faithful.

  They had learned how to perform the prayer and the ritual ablution during their primary school lessons, and they had not forgotten. Ali and Ibrahim had not learned this at home because their families were poor Amazigh speakers in the Essaouira province who were not proficient in Arabic.

  Ibrahim and Ali started to frequent the mosque, warily and curiously at first, but eventually they began to enjoy the Friday sermon and to delight especially in the ambiance of the dawn prayer. However, throughout the rest of the day, they weren’t seriously tempted by the mosque. Dawn prayer with the congregation was sufficient to purify their hearts; they had not committed any burglary or break-in for more than a month now. But what could they do for work? The money had run out and they hadn’t found any respectable employment yet. In truth, they had not looked for any real work. With the onset of faith, an unaccustomed indolence descended upon them. During the nearly two months of visiting the mosque twice a day, they hadn’t much felt the desire for adrenaline that had driven them to their risky way of earning a living. Faith had succeeded in quieting that impulse, but had not eradicated it completely. Now they felt the craving for adrenaline return while they watched Hmad close the window of his room.

  “What exactly does he do for work?” Ali wondered.

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Maybe we can get some money from him, or from the Christian he works for,” Ali said. “Maybe we can find something to blackmail him with? You know, Christians are easy pickings.”

  “That seems complicated,” Ibrahim said. “We can’t even go into stores anymore. We’re complete outcasts in this city. All that’s left to us is old people in remote neighborhoods. We jump them, scare them a little with the knife, and take our share.”

  “I’m begging you, not the old people. Let’s follow Hmad to the Christian’s place.”

  The thieving duo finished their talk, and went back to the wretched room that their poverty confined them to.

  * * *

  Hmad was shedding his clothing so he could don his coral-colored silk robe, wrap his hair in a matching kerchief, and dab on a little perfume. He got into bed and tried to sleep while he thought over his night, which had been full of surprises. Important people had come to the party and he had earned a tidy sum of money. There had also been this man among the guests who had besieged him with stares all night long. He didn’t ask Hmad to join him in one of the rooms like the others did. He only gazed at him and looked into his eyes. The others didn’t usually look into his eyes. At these soirées, all of them only looked at his ass which he knew how to shimmy and shake so well.

  He thought about the first time that he’d noticed how different he was from the other boys. He was twelve years old, and the other boys had started to talk about the length of their penises and such. Hmad had wanted to talk to them about what happened in his backside, about the tingling sensation that spread through it sometimes. He didn’t know what was happening to him. When he stood close to his male friends, he wanted to move even closer. In time, the boys began to go to where the river grew large, and there they examined each other’s privates, which had started to grow bigger. Hmad wasn’t interested in scrutinizing his thing. But he did want to get closer to the other boys, to touch and lick their amazing things.

  He even used to play house with the girls, and considered himself an excellent housewife. He knew how to roast the birds that he’d caught, and how to make zamita from ground pearl barley. Sometimes he made the zamita from wari, which was a thorny plant that sprouted seeds; it was then made into flour. The zamita with wari was just like the zamita his mother made from time to time. Hmad had to live with his mother and his sister since his father had disappeared one year after he was born.
Many people said that they’d seen his father in the village of Tighassaline, living with a prostitute there. In any event, his mother raised him on her own. She used to work in other people’s fields until the drought years hit the crops and the livestock, and then she was without work for some time. Later, one of her former employers from the north hired her on as a servant in his house. Hmad remembered those days with the greatest tenderness. His mother was an affectionate woman. She often hugged and kissed him, and constantly spoke loving words to him, praising his beauty and charm.

  When he reached the age of fourteen, he didn’t go with the other boys to the one prostitute who remained in the village. The people of Tinejdad had driven all the other prostitutes from their village. Yamina had stayed despite their protests. She welcomed all the young men just becoming acquainted with their bodies for the first time. She taught them the fundamentals of desire and showed them sensual delights that were forbidden in the very conservative village.

  Hmad didn’t go with his buddies to visit Yamina, so his friends became suspicious, and news spread about him: He’s one of those. No doubt about it. He really is a bit off . . .

  It didn’t bother him that people alluded to this early and muddled manifestation of his femininity. He found freedom in it. He became more fastidious with his clothing, wore rings on his fingers, and sometimes painted his nails, delighting in his expressions of femininity. Ali Oukoubach paved the way for him in this department. Oukoubach was openly feminine even though he was forty years old. Oukoubach was Hmad’s beloved role model. The forty-year-old wore women’s clothing, painted his nails, and darkened his eyes with kohl. He performed at weddings and he had a pleasant singing voice that everyone admired. Everyone knew what Oukoubach did with the men that visited him every night, but no one expressed outrage.