Oh really? he yelled. Clear off now, or else I’ll…
The unspoken threat had its desired effect, for Youssef backed away hastily from the ring of listeners, his retreating form shrinking to a black dot across the vast expanse of the square.
Well then, that’s that, the bodybuilder announced with characteristic eloquence. He turned to me with a grin. I don’t like my stories ruined. You can depend on me the next time you have killjoys. I’m Hocine, from Zagora, in the far south. I’m new here. I’m a weightlifter. I can do a hundred bench presses with one hand. I’ve set up my stall on the western edge of the square, in front of the Café de France.
I smiled, grateful for his swift and effective intervention. He had recognized the danger posed by Youssef and restored to my story its necessary mystery.
All of a sudden a young boy in a tattered smock came running up to Hocine and whispered something in his ear. He reacted as if struck by a whip.
Someone’s made off with my barbells! he exclaimed, swivelling to scan the four corners of the Jemaa. I’m off!
He turned and followed on the heels of the young boy with all of the determination of a hound chasing hares. We watched him leave and I’m certain that I wasn’t the only one in our circle to wonder if the culprit was the recently departed Youssef.
The Moors Invading Spain
Hocine’s rough-and-ready intrusion had acted like a tonic on my spirit. He’d spoken excitedly, artlessly, but straight from the heart, and his confidence in me gave me hope for the evening. I prepared to resume speaking, taking up the thread of the narrative from where Youssef had left off, but with a very different energy. I stroked my beard and surveyed my audience, my gaze lingering on their faces – now alert and intent, now dormant and secretive – and it was as if I could not feast my eyes enough on their countenances.
Their thoughts crowded the air. I could hear them, and I closed my eyes to listen so that I could decipher their meaning. That is the storyteller’s way, and it has taken me a long time to train myself accordingly. It was easier in the village, where the silent quilt of air made listening simpler. All you had to do was to distinguish words from the surrounding sounds – the chirping of insects, the burbling of the streams, the whisper of the wind – and the rest came naturally. The stories formed themselves out of slow, slumbering daydreams.
It was different in the city. The sounds were louder, shriller, and the effort it took to separate the words from the surrounding cacophony made my head spin.
My first visit to Marrakesh was with my father. I was six, and he’d decided that I should accompany him from our village so that I could get my first taste of our trade by watching him tell his stories. We’d set up on the Jemaa in the late afternoon and remain there till well after midnight, when we’d leave to sleep in my uncle Mohand’s shack in the Berrima quarter, outside the walls of the medina. I was allowed to sleep in most mornings while he left for the souks. On other days we’d take shelter from the blazing sun by visiting the cool and shadowy palaces in the medina. He seemed to know all the attendants, who respected him as a learned man, and we were often – though not always – allowed to enter without having to pay the usual fees.
The palaces contained many historical paintings and my father explained them to me with his usual patience. My favourites were the battle scenes, especially the spectacular painting in the Bahia Palace entitled The Moors Invading Spain. It depicted the Battle of Badajoz in which our Almoravid king, Youssef ben Tachfine, the founder of Marrakesh, routed the Christian forces. The painting, done in the European style, depicted the battle from the Spanish point of view. A brass plate at the bottom of the frame, translated into Arabic, explained that the painter had been influenced by someone called El Greco.
I was fascinated by that painting because the Spaniards, who occupied the foreground, had peculiarly elongated bodies and heads. They looked like weaklings – decidedly effeminate – and it didn’t surprise me that they hadn’t been able to stand up to our tough Moorish troops, who formed a disappointingly amorphous black mass on the horizon.
A few years later, when I was nine, I came across a tattered Spanish novel lying on the pavement in the Jemaa and the picture on the cover once again depicted a scandalously skinny Spanish knight charging some windmills. From that point on, for the rest of my childhood, I possessed a healthy contempt for Spaniards.
My father was a traditional storyteller, well versed in folklore, but he was also unusually erudite for someone raised in a mountain village without any formal education. He knew several Berber dialects, he spoke classical Arabic fluently, and he even used a few words from French and other foreign languages in his stories when it suited his purpose. He had a keen eye for physical detail and peopled his tales with unforgettable characters. His best stories were composed of a series of episodes where the promised closure stretched out for weeks before the hair-raising ending.
He was a tall man with close-cropped hair, courteous and reserved, but there was a dark energy about him. Every spring, with the melting of the snows, he would give in to black moods that would last for days during which we all kept away from him. It was rumoured that in his youth he had killed a woman who’d been unfaithful and that her spirit returned year after year to haunt him. One had only to be near him to sense the taut quality beneath his reticence, the knife edge of bitterness arising from that old betrayal. Looking back now, I realize that it was no wonder that his favourite theme was “longing”.
Outside of his storytelling sessions, he wasn’t given to speaking much. Life’s vicissitudes had carved a permanent ridge between his eyes so that he always looked troubled and aggrieved. Sometimes I wondered if his bitterness was exaggerated – an outlet for some other, unknown, malady – but I did not hold it against him. It gave him character, and I respected him for it. He was kind to me and exercised great patience when we came down to Marrakesh from the mountains.
Badajoz
My uncle Mohand, who put us up in Marrakesh, was a day labourer, and the black sheep of the family, but he worshipped my father, who could do no wrong in his eyes. Although his ramshackle home comprised only two rooms, he would insist on sleeping outside and giving one of the rooms to his elder brother and nephew, a point of some considerable contention with his wife, who was a regular harridan. She resented the fact that her husband refused to take money from his brother for the duration of our stay, and berated him bitterly when Father was not around. But my uncle remained unmoved and would not hear of any change in the arrangements.
For the first two years, my father kept me at his side while he told his stories, training me to listen and to keep my eyes and ears open. He knew that the Jemaa was a whetstone for the imagination, its shifting cast of characters a veritable library for an apprentice to browse in while developing the subtle tools of the trade. But I was a restless child, and my mind often wandered from my father’s complex narratives. Even though I usually caught myself with a guilty start, once I lost the thread binding the tales it was all over for me for the day. Father often caught me daydreaming, but he never chastised me. Rather, he encouraged me to keep myself busy with my own narratives.
So it was that after that first exposure to The Moors Invading Spain, I spent hours at his side replaying the battle, imagining numerous gruesome encounters in which the Muslim army inevitably triumphed. I would sit behind him, taking over a corner of his kilim and using its geometric patterns to demarcate the positions of the two armies. Shaping the contours of the kilim into valleys and hills, I spent hours painstakingly carving hundreds of soldiers from wood chips and organizing them into regiments. The brave Muslim squadrons I named after the elements: Smoke, Fire, Water, Earth, Air. The skinny Spaniards were more crudely carved and constituted nothing more than a black mass that took to its heels every time I unleashed the invincible force of the elements. It was my revenge on the painter of the canvas, and I gained tremendous satisfaction in thus restoring fidelity to facts.
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p; I kept busy for two seasons with my re-enactment of Badajoz, and then one day a German tourist, portly and good-natured, offered me what seemed like a princely sum of money to part with my elaborately crafted Almoravids. I turned him down outright the first time, but when he returned the next day, I accepted the loose change in a moment of folly and betrayed my obligation as custodian of history.
I broke down that night and remained despondent for days. My uncle encouraged me to recreate my armies, but the spirit had gone out of me. Appalled by my greed, I could no longer trust myself to safeguard the Muslim cause.
My father laughed at my retrospective disappointment.
He ruffled my hair as we lay down to sleep one night.
Never sell your dreams, he said.
The Disembodied Eye
During my third season on the Jemaa, I worked in one of its many food booths to supplement our income. The owner of the booth was Abdeslam, a native of Marrakesh. He was short, skinny and pale, he came from a poor family and had worked very hard to save the money to buy the permit for his stall. All his energies were devoted to the stall: he worked from dawn to dusk like a dog and expected his helpers to do likewise. Sometimes he chased after them with a stick when he felt they weren’t doing their share, but he left me alone because he was afraid of my father. I think he believed him to be possessed of necromantic powers.
Abdeslam liked to recite verses from the Qur’an, which he alternated with Raï songs from Algeria and the Rif. He had an active clientele and made good money, but my own work was tedious and boring. I was an odd-job boy, helping out in a medley of tasks that ranged from slicing vegetables to hosing down the long wooden tables and benches that fronted the stall. We sold brochettes, olive salads, fish sandwiches, kefta, habra, mechoui, b’stilla, fekkas, dellahs, almond milk and a tart ginseng drink called khendenjal reputed to be an aphrodisiac. Our most popular item was the blood-red merguez sausage, which my employer spiced with a piquant harissa sauce of his own making. He was immensely proud of his harissa. His favourite saying was: The mark of a real man is his ability to handle my harissa!
I worked there from nine in the morning to four in the afternoon before joining my father at the other end of the square. The hours between meals were the most wearisome, especially in the late afternoon, and I whiled the time away by imagining myself to be a disembodied eye that travelled the square. It was a trick Father had taught me to improve my imagination and memory. Off I’d send my roving eye, making detailed inventories of the things I saw so that I could reproduce them in ever-longer lists to him. He set me a target of a hundred different objects and the day I was able to list them was my proudest moment.
To me these lists were like trails of smoke that I could conjure out of thin air. Trapped in my cycle of menial tasks, they provided a necessary escape and also gave me a growing sense of confidence. At first, the lists were random: a caged nightingale, hand-woven baskets, Berber jewellery, brightly coloured Rahalia – large decorative plates from Fès – in shades of glossy blue and green and yellow, delicately ornamented terracotta oil lamps, copper water jugs and silver teapots, a brass hand of Fatima to ward off the evil eye, wrought-iron chairs, ill-tempered geese and hens, silk tassels, leather slippers, jellabas and burnouses, mounds of dried mint leaves, plastic spice jars filled with jujuba, caba caba, indigo, rose sable, fenugreek, ambergris. Later, I set my memory more challenging tasks, confining myself to lists of particular things, like sweetmeats, or hand-painted boxes, or camel saddles. One day, I found myself sated with lists and set my roving eye more challenging tasks. I sought to see through doors and walls, or I peeled away the pavement of the Jemaa to reveal tens of dozens of pickled heads of desperadoes from centuries past, their bleary-eyed visages impaled on spikes. In another spot beneath the pavement I uncovered acre after acre of plucked jasmine flowers.
I began to call myself the Master of the Disembodied Eye. No one, and nothing, was safe from my probing gaze. I put the fear of God into the most hardened criminals. When I told my father, he warned me against arrogance.
Zouaq
Deep inside the medina, on the second floor of the Dar Si Said palace, there is a wedding chamber covered from floor to ceiling with zouaqs, floral and geometric motifs painted on Atlas cedar wood. In a corner of that chamber, on a small panel different from the ones surrounding it, a stylized engraving depicts a storyteller in the Jemaa, with his small son sitting next to him. Although the engraving, unique in being figurative, is more than a hundred years old, I like to think it portrays my father and me. It makes me smile: this immortalization in painted wood that somehow escaped the Islamic prohibition on images.
In the past, when I sat in the shadow of my father on his kilim, I would think about that engraving and try to remain perfectly still, feigning its immobility. Impressed by my ability to remain motionless, a woman in a veil once gave me five dirhams and a piece of sticky candy. My father frowned at the coin, clearly bothered by its unorthodox provenance.
He said: I believe in the immortality of wordcraft. I do not believe in subterfuge. Reality must never be confused with the purity of the imagination.
Perhaps providentially, in that same room in the Dar Si Said palace, a candle stand made of beads also took my fancy. It was handcrafted of the finest wire mesh, through which the beads were laced, as if trapped in amber. I fell in love with that candle stand the very first time I saw it. It was evening, the setting sun had cast a crimson wash across the distant mountain peaks, and through a stained-glass window the dying light entered and sparked the candle. Every night thereafter I went to sleep dreaming about it. It was a calming empathy, a connective vibration that made me shiver every time I visualized it. I lay in bed with a smile of secret happiness.
One night my uncle Mohand asked me what I’d been dreaming about and burst out laughing when I told him.
Well, at least it’s a harmless obsession, he said, unlike many others. He blew his breath out of his mouth. Inanimate objects don’t bite back, he said, they don’t harass you without cease. He glanced tiredly over his shoulders in the direction of my aunt, who was in the kitchen.
Give me your daydream, he said. I can use it.
Then he said: Beware of women. They are dangerous.
The Hôtel Ali
But this woman was beautiful, Abdellah said with a sad smile, and I believed him. He glanced at me and I caught the gleam of wonder in his eyes.
Abdellah was a regular in my circle of listeners. He was a Berber from the Dadès Valley on the eastern slope of the Atlas Mountains. It was rumoured that he was the son of a qa’id, a tribal chief, who had fallen on hard times. Ever since I’d known him, he’d been working as a waiter at the popular Hôtel Ali, on the Rue Moulay Ismail, just off the Jemaa el Fna. My circle of listeners somehow never seemed complete until he joined it, his tall, stooped figure bestowing benediction on the proceedings.
Who’re you talking about, Abdellah? a voice called out rudely.
Gentle Abdellah shut his eyes as if in recollection.
The two strangers on the square, he said in a soft voice. The two outsiders. She had blue eyes, golden hair. I dream of her still.
The same voice interjected quite irascibly:
I thought she had dark eyes, dark hair.
You were mistaken, Abdellah replied, with a candour that made the sincerity of his remarks believable. Her image is imprinted in my mind’s eye. She was utterly and completely unforgettable.
He hesitated for an instant, his ears turning a bright shade of red, and then he went on: There is no reason for me to lie. I’ve just been diagnosed with cancer. I do not have much longer to live. But I will carry her memory with me to the grave.
There’s no need to be such a fatalist, I said gently.
Abdellah smiled. Actually, he replied, I’m being quite realistic.
He coughed softly and, in that muffled sound, we could already sense the disease working its poisonous way through him. As if aware of our scr
utiny, he lowered his head.
I am not the subject of the conversation here, he said awkwardly. Listen to my story. It is not without surprises.
With a quick gesture he pushed back the lock of hair that dangled over his forehead. He stared past us at the square and his eyes widened as though he were plunging headlong into some dark vortex of memory. With his eyes still fixed on the square, he described to us his night in the Jemaa, adding detail to detail with the attention to minutiae that was characteristic of him.
I was working the night shift. It was exactly nine o’clock because the antique clock in the restaurant chimed the hours and I counted them off as always. Like the clock, most of the objects in the restaurant were from another era. The divans and the sofas were from the time of the Sultan Moulay Abdel Aziz, the salt-shakers were rumoured to have belonged to the Pasha El Glaoui, the tiled floors and walls dated from the turn of the century, while the tajines and the teapots were from a medieval caravanserai in Mali.
It was warm inside. I had hung up my jacket on the clothes rack in the corridor and was waitering in my shirtsleeves. In his glass cubicle, my friend the accountant Idris was tallying the day’s earnings. The cooks played cards in the kitchen while tending to the tajines. At some point in the evening, a chair tilted over and fell, making the sound of a bird quarrelling. And over everything there rose the usual sounds of a busy restaurant: the clatter of crockery, of cutlery, the muted conversation in many languages, the sidelong glances. The special for the night was fig soup. I ladled its warm, limpid essence into bowls over and over again for tourists.
The two strangers materialized as if from thin air. I’d looked away from the tables one moment and in the next they had made their appearance. The sounds of the restaurant died down instantly. Glances riveted. Shadows filled the room. Then the young woman moved towards me with a gliding movement.
The Storyteller of Marrakesh Page 6