The Storyteller of Marrakesh

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The Storyteller of Marrakesh Page 16

by Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya


  I said: Here on the Jemaa we open when we like and close when we like. It isn’t like London or Paris; there are no fixed hours. The Jemaa has its own rhythms and they change from day to day. Nothing is set in stone and everything is open to negotiation. Otherwise what pleasure would there be to being here? So: welcome to the Argana, and I hope we can make up for whatever it was that you experienced on the square.

  My words seemed to provoke a reaction from his motionless companion. She tilted her head to one side and stared at me for a long time without saying anything. Her smoke-coloured eyes shocked me with their intensity. It made me uncomfortable and, unable to hold her gaze, I looked away.

  When she finally spoke, her voice was pitched so low that I had to ask her to repeat herself.

  I had expected more of Maghrebin chivalry, if not hospitality, she said.

  That struck close to the bone, and I flushed fiercely.

  There are people out there on the square who are hopelessly confused, Madame. It causes them to act in shameful ways. I hope you will not see them as representative of our culture, which is very different.

  She studied me closely. I could tell that she was making up her mind about whether or not to trust me. At length, she said:

  What confuses them?

  I mulled over an appropriate response, then decided to be blunt, if only to help her comprehend what had happened and thereby avoid a recurrence of the incident.

  I said: What confuses them is your beauty. To them it is a temptation, but also terrifying.

  Terrifying?

  Yes, terrifying in its totality, its nakedness. Forgive me if I am too frank, but against the night you are aryana, as naked as the sun, and those who seek out the darkness will be attracted to you almost despite themselves.

  Her face grew sad, then hard, with a bitter line to the mouth. A vertical furrow appeared between her brows.

  That is elegantly put, she said, but it doesn’t take away from what was done to me this evening. And it doesn’t take away from the hundred pairs of eyes that were trained on us like guns, tracking our every move across the square.

  She paused and, in a gentler voice, said:

  Do you have anything more to add?

  Nothing, Madame, except to caution you against visiting the Jemaa this late at night. Come back in the daytime. There, in the middle of the sun-drenched square, you can experience all the deep memories of the place, its magical gestures, simple and at the same time majestic, immemorial. But not after dark, never after dark.

  She was silent for a while. Then she looked at me with composure and straightened her back.

  That is unfortunate, she said calmly, because I do intend to return there tonight. The music moves me, and I want to hear it in its natural surroundings. It’s why we are here. There is no equivalent in the daytime. So there you have it. We are going back.

  I lowered my eyes and turned away. I feared for her safety and, clearly, it showed on my face. I also wondered if she sensed how beautiful I thought she was. For the first time in my life, I cursed the twisted nature of the Jemaa, its Janus face.

  Her husband shifted in his chair, staring past us in the direction of the square. I followed his gaze. Quick shadows crossed the window panes. The Jemaa was speckled with bonfires and torches.

  There was absolute silence inside the restaurant. Outside, we could hear the sounds of the drums, along with the usual medley of cheers, clapping, catcalls.

  Her husband stirred and looked away from the windows.

  Speaking almost to himself, he said: Sometimes one is grateful when a new crisis occurs; it takes the attention off the previous one, which may be preying unhealthily on the mind.

  I couldn’t tell if his words were addressed to me. I was about to ask, when he reached across the table and held his wife’s hand. Slowly he stroked her long fingers, her palm, her wrist. This time quite clearly speaking to her, he said: When the big things in life seem out of control, then control over the smaller things assumes inordinate importance.

  She looked calmly and steadily at him. Though she had her profile to me, I could see that her eyes and thick lashes were clouded with tears.

  We must go back, I heard her say.

  He drew her near him and continued to stroke her hand. She sat with her legs crossed, motionless, her head resting on his shoulder. They both gazed straight ahead of them at the darkness of the square. Their absorption was so complete that I had the sense they had forgotten my presence.

  She snuggled closer to him.

  How far is the desert from here? she asked.

  Not far at all, my love. It’s always present here, he said.

  Some say it is fathomless, like the bottom of an ocean.

  Desert sunrises and sunsets are the most beautiful in the world, or so I’ve heard, when the crimson light washes over the dunes, the white rock faces.

  She gazed steadily at him.

  It’s certainly a temptation, isn’t it?

  He appeared to concur by inclining his head.

  Perhaps over time one becomes part of the desert itself, he said, a mere shadow, without substance.

  They continued to gaze out. He turned her wrist over and I glimpsed the angry weal of a scar across her veins.

  At length, as if recalling that they were not alone, he glanced at me and smiled apologetically.

  Thank you for caring about what becomes of us, he said. But don’t worry, we are capable of taking care of ourselves. We’ll be leaving in a moment.

  I realized that I’d been dismissed. I bowed my head in acknowledgement and withdrew with sadness. My last sight of them was of their sitting at that table side by side, not as if they were two separate worlds but as if they were fused into a single entity, indivisible.

  ‌Nabil

  I stared at Nabil incredulously.

  So you’re telling me that you allowed her to go back to the square, despite everything, and that even her husband didn’t counsel her otherwise?

  Yes, my dear storyteller, she did. Why do you find that so difficult to believe? It was her explicit desire, and, personally, I don’t believe that either her husband or I could have changed her mind. She would have gone whether or not I advised against it. As for her husband, I think he simply recognized the inevitable and went along to avoid conflict.

  Somehow I found that difficult to swallow and said as much.

  Why do you find it shocking? Nabil asked. It is in the nature of women to desire what’s forbidden.

  No, I said stubbornly. That isn’t right. I cannot agree with your assessment.

  But of course you can’t, because you are a hopeless romantic.

  He glanced at me with a troubled look.

  Which brings me to an entirely different question, he said. There was something about them – about him, especially – that reminded me of you. You share a particular quality.

  What is it, do you think?

  I have often asked myself that question, Hassan, but have yet to come up with a satisfactory answer. It could be as simple as your belonging to the same tribe: that of storytellers. Or it could be something else altogether, something much more complicated.

  Much more complicated? How so, my friend?

  I’ve often thought about it, he said pensively, and dismissed as outrageous the question that arose foremost in my mind.

  What question?

  I was hoping you wouldn’t ask me that, Hassan.

  I am.

  Then you will see, as soon as I articulate it, why I termed it outrageous. And that would embarrass me as much as it would you.

  It doesn’t matter. Go on.

  All right. Were you their accomplice that night, or their antagonist?

  I laughed. You’re right. That is outrageous.

  I told you.

  And, in any case, I added, I wouldn’t tell you if I were either one of those things. I wouldn’t betray them.

  ‌The Blacksmith

  It is perhaps time now to talk a litt
le about my friend Nabil, who is closer to me than almost anyone else. So, with your leave, my dear listeners, I will do precisely that.

  Somewhat unexpectedly, I heard murmurings of discontent from my circle of listeners and paused, surprised. A rough voice spoke up. It came from a man built like a blacksmith, burly and beetle-browed.

  Enough of these asides! he said. We don’t want to hear about your friend Nabil. We want to find out what happened to the foreign woman and her husband. Get on with the story.

  Forgive me, I replied, trying hard to keep my voice under control, but my friend Nabil is here amongst you tonight, and since he was closer to finding out the truth than anyone else, I must acknowledge his provenance. It’s the way we do things here.

  What is the truth? the blacksmith demanded.

  If only you will exercise some patience, I said with acerbity, then perhaps you’ll be closer to it than you are now with your interruptions.

  You are indulging in perfectly unnecessary digressions! he insisted.

  I spread my arms in amazement.

  Did you expect it to be any different? After all, I am a storyteller and a very traditional one at that. If you want quick entertainment, go to the nearest movie theatre and enjoy the show to your heart’s content. Patience is not only your duty as a listener, it is your exercise of freedom in the face of the rush of time and the stream of necessities. To listen to a story without raising objections, without even the compulsion to understand but simply to be familiar, should always suffice. A story is a work of contemplation and you must accept responsibility for it inasmuch as your attention contributes to its vitality and its life.

  A little more conciliatorily, I added:

  If there were only answers to questions, there wouldn’t be anything to relate. So far as a storyteller offers only answers, he offers nothing that is real. His art has life only as long as the blood of mystery circulates. That is why the intelligence of the ideal listener observes, it discovers, but it does not seek revelation. The elements of a story are not absolutes in themselves, they are a way station, a means to an end.

  What is that end? the blacksmith asked, still obdurate.

  I studied his face and took my time formulating an answer. At length, I said, as politely as I could under the circumstances:

  The freedom of the story to wander and escape.

  That appeared to silence him, and I heard no more disaffected mutterings from my audience. I linked my fingers and waited for a moment; then I resumed speaking, calmly picking up the thread from where I had earlier left it off.

  ‌Fantasia

  Like me, I began, my friend Nabil is a traditionalist. This may have something to do with the fact that he is from one of the oldest families in the Oued Ziz Valley, where his grandfather once owned one of the finest date-palm oases in the Tafilalt.

  To a certain extent, I went on, I model myself after Nabil. For one, I would like to live as he does now, though under less tragic circumstances. A few years ago, Nabil lost his eyesight while cleaning his grandfather’s ancient rifle, and retired with his life’s savings to Taouz, a village on the verge of the Sahara. There, at the edge of the Hamada du Guir, the stony wasteland notorious for its violent sandstorms, he lives in isolation with his French-born wife, Isabelle, whom he met in Marrakesh, and who has since taken the veil. I have not had the pleasure of meeting her – Nabil is understandably protective of her privacy – but I have heard that she is very beautiful and a solace to my friend in his blindness. It may explain why Nabil is content with his desert existence. Only once a year, during the cold season, does he deign to leave his dwelling to visit Marrakesh, coinciding his stay with my own sojourn in the Jemaa. Inevitably, these visits are scheduled around the night I relate the story of the disappearance of the two strangers, for, as much as me, Nabil remains fascinated by the enigma of what happened to them.

  I paused and took Nabil by the arm affectionately.

  How am I doing so far? I asked.

  He merely smiled and shook his head, his natural modesty making him diffident at being the centre of attention.

  I paused for a while longer, giving him the opportunity to demur, but when he remained silent, I resumed speaking about him.

  Nabil’s grandfather was a gentleman farmer by inheritance and a falconer by choice, I said. Nabil relates how, at any one time, the old man kept as many as thirty falcons under his roof, attending to their upkeep and training all by himself. This was in the days when the family’s renowned date-palm holdings thrived under the generous bounty of nature, and little had to be done to look after them other than to attend to their annual harvest every October. Then, one year, without any warning, the dreaded Bayoud palm disease struck, and, in the course of the next twelve months, as many as two thousand of the magnificent trees perished. The next few years, the same story repeated itself, and Nabil’s ageing grandfather, incapable of dealing with the extent of the blight, retreated into the depths of his ksar and the darkness of an incipient and gradually encroaching madness. As Nabil tells the story, it was a while before members of the household – conditioned by tradition to blind obedience to the patriarch – realized that the old man was no longer in control of his faculties, and even then, the temptation towards denial proved too overwhelming to resist. Nabil’s father, the only son and heir, was away studying electrical engineering in Rabat, and the terrified women of the family did not dare question the old man’s increasingly erratic ways. It was only when they heard the thirty gunshots early one morning and ventured out of their quarters to find the still-warm corpses of the octogenarian’s beloved falcons, each one shot so cleanly through the head that the only evidence of violent death was the small drop or two of blood on the beaks, that they realized the full extent of the calamity that had befallen them. But by then, it was too late. The old man had already saddled his favourite horse, a jet-black Arabian cross-breed with flowing mane and tail, and ridden down to nearby Erfoud to take part in the moussem which crowns the three-day-long date festival there. At exactly noon, when the sun was at its zenith, he had ridden in formation with his fellow patriarchs at the fantasia, as he did every year, and, to the accompaniment of drumbeats and applause, at the very end of the performance, when the charging horsemen fired off their mokalhas – their prized, long-barrelled, silver-plated rifles – he’d keeled over off his horse and plummeted to the ground, dead.

  It was in the course of cleaning this same accursed rifle that Nabil lost his own eyesight, but his pride in his ancestry is such that the gun still graces the mantel of his humble pisé dwelling in the desert.

  To return to the story, Nabil’s thoroughly modern father refused to have anything to do with his tragic and problematic inheritance. Returning briefly to his father’s house to dispose of the remaining date-palm tracts at a fraction of their worth, he had gone back to Rabat and busied himself in his career as a manager in an electrical concern owned by the government. In this capacity, he had been responsible for the successful laying of electric cables along the steep Tizi n’Test and Tizi n’Tichka passes across the High Atlas Mountains. At the very height of his career, when he was tipped to go on to a ministerial position, he’d suddenly died at home at the age of forty from an accidental electrocution while building his son a toy railway set.

  In Nabil’s telling, his father’s precipitous return to Rabat and subsequent turning his back on his inheritance can be explained only by a refusal to deal with the traumatic circumstances of his grandfather’s death. But that is pure speculation, as Nabil himself is the first to admit, and perhaps more part of his own attempt to come to terms with what happened than anything else. In the meantime, Nabil lives with the consequences of his blindness with a stoicism that is a matter of great admiration among all of us who know him, and we are glad to welcome him to Marrakesh during the one time of the year when he leaves his desert sanctuary and ventures into the outside world.

  ‌Labyrinth

  All through my narrative, since th
e early hours of the evening, Nabil had been listening to me with his face hidden beneath the shadow shaped by the hood of his jellaba. Now, at my invitation, he stepped forward with a diffident smile, though he still kept his head modestly bent under the triangle of the brown woven cloth so that I couldn’t tell if he was hiding his emotion or underlining it in that way. But as I contemplated him, he stood up straight, his cheeks slightly flushed, his sightless eyes musing.

  Thank you, my dear Hassan, he said in his distinct, mellifluous voice. I recognize some of that introduction and am flattered by the rest. What manners are to the prince, the imperative to idealize is to the friend, or perhaps, as in this case, the friend who is a prince in his loyalty, but also a storyteller.

  He made his way slowly through the ring of onlookers and came and stood next to me, his cloak giving off the dusty aroma of the desert. I felt a rush of affection, but also of protectiveness as I surveyed his erect carriage. With the self-effacing manner which had become second nature to him since his accident, he spoke to me in an undertone.

  Which way are we facing, Hassan?

  You are looking at the souks, with the Koutoubia behind you, I answered.

  The Koutoubia, he repeated after me, and smiled. Does its minaret still rise like a golden brushstroke through the air, with the three great balls of copper crowning its summit?

  Indeed, my friend, it does.

  He smiled again. Good, then we are facing the Argana, where I used to work. On its terrace, I once saw the shadow of a horse with a steel-clad rider.

  Turning to my audience, he addressed them, a faint ironic expression on his lean face.

  As Hassan has already informed you, I come to Marrakesh once a year and time my visits to overlap with the night he talks about the disappearance. I continue to be intrigued by its consequences and like to indulge myself by eavesdropping on Hassan’s telling of it, which, remarkably, changes almost imperceptibly every time as he investigates new directions and explores novel alternatives. It is almost like a game we play, in which only he and I know the players involved and the stakes. What we are concerned with is the exploration of memory or, shall we say, more accurately, its approximation. We ask each other questions and, in so doing, challenge ourselves to reconstruct imaginatively what might have happened on that night of macabre interest to both of us. Call my own fascination the intellectual indulgence, if you will, of a blind man, but this storytelling is something I look forward to all year with great anticipation.

 

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