Is it merely an intellectual indulgence, Nabil? I interjected.
Well, yes, naturally, he said.
Then he paused and thought some more, before qualifying himself. No, he said, perhaps you’re right, it isn’t purely intellectual. I marvel that every time I myself listen to this story, I am moved anew. It speaks to me and serves as a reminder that my life is not yet over, and that, in itself, must be some kind of miracle.
The air was getting chilly, and he paused and adjusted his sheepskin cloak around his shoulders. His hood slid back from his head. The moon lit up his sightless eyes. As he stood there, with his head raised, I had the feeling that he could see the sky. It prompted me to move closer to him, link my arms with his, and stand shoulder to shoulder gazing up at the stars.
After a few minutes, he lowered his head and spoke to me in his soft baritone.
Why do you think those two came here, Hassan? Why did they come to the Maghreb, to Marrakesh, to the Jemaa? Were they seeking oblivion? There was certainly that element to them of wanting to forget. But to forget what exactly?
Perhaps the world they came from? I speculated. Modernity? The West? These are the things we will never know, I suppose, things to which there are no clear answers.
I wonder, he said, shaking his head slowly, but whether in agreement or disagreement I couldn’t tell. He seemed content to limit himself to that cryptic response.
What else could it be? I persisted. The Westerners are losing confidence in their ability to shape their futures, and they’ve been trickling down here in their tens and dozens looking for solutions to the dead end in which they find themselves. We see it every day. Their world carries within itself its lack of soul like a disease. And they are unable to purge it because it is inherent in the law that governs them. They’ve replaced spiritual values with material dross, and the result is the reign of nothingness. Theirs is not a world of faith, nor is it a world of scepticism. It is a world of bad faith, of dogmas sustained in the absence of genuine convictions.
I hear what you are saying, Hassan, and I think there is some truth to it, but I don’t think that that was their particular crisis. I think it was somewhat different.
What was it, then, in your opinion?
Turning in my direction and stroking his toothbrush moustache, he said: As much as you, I have thought long and hard about this, and it is my conjecture that the answer, if there is one, lies in the mystery of the effect the Jemaa had on them. I am convinced that somehow, during their time spent in and around the Jemaa, in the course of their many interactions, they experienced a slow but genuine and profound enlightenment. It took them a while to come to terms with it, but when they did, it was life-transforming in its impact on them. I think I witnessed some of it – albeit unknowingly at the time – when they were in the Argana. What was it, you may ask? Put simply, I think it was something along the lines of a liberation, a coming to terms with the immeasurable disproportion between the reality of their lives and the immensity of the universe. It lay in their realization that there are no certitudes in life apart from the absolute unimportance of what is known, compared to the greatness of the unknown, which is nevertheless the only thing that matters. In my opinion, this is the truth that is infinitely superior to any factual truth about their lives.
What would you call this truth?
I would call it fate; others have called it destiny. It’s the moment of the rediscovery of the wisdom that life is governed by everything that is unknown and that cannot be known. Man is part of an infinitely fluid and intangible whole, and the part can never comprehend or regulate the whole. The great error is to search for truth in temporal events, because time is both fleeting and irrecoverable. And the more you interrogate memory, which is nothing other than the search for certainty in time, the more you increase your dependence on chance. Do you understand now why I attach less importance than you to the specific equations of their individual lives than to the larger movement that carried them to the meeting with their fate?
I think I do, I replied, reassuring him with my concurrence. He appeared contented, but also tired.
By the way, Hassan, he said in a low voice, which way am I facing now? I’ve lost my bearings.
You are looking at the Koutoubia, I answered.
Excellent, he said, and smiled. Since the onset of my blindness, I’ve often browsed among the bookstalls that stand outside its walls.
I stared at him.
The manuscript market ceased to exist long before our lifetimes, Nabil, I pointed out.
Oh, I know, he replied serenely. It makes my browsing all the more worthwhile. You see, it is one of the peculiar advantages of my condition that I can live on the verge of the desert and still spend all my time here, in the environs of the Jemaa. After all, what else is this place but a vast library, where each person is like a book, if you will? I browse here to gather raw material for my thoughts, and when I return home I spend the rest of the year reading what I have collected.
Do you read me? I asked, intrigued.
He turned his perfectly white eyes in my direction.
All the time, he replied. I see the lamp of your body, I see many other lamps in the darkness. I see the presence of the dead manifesting themselves in any number of telling details. That is why, increasingly, I believe that it isn’t the reality that you see but the other kind that matters.
Do you fear what you see?
Why should I be afraid? Fear is a moment of solitude wasted. Besides, fear arises from an inordinate apprehension of death, and that has long ago ceased to hold any terror for me.
I reflected on his words and, during that interval, I also ruminated upon a theme that had long been on my mind. Giving voice to it, I asked: Why do you isolate yourself in the desert, Nabil? What demons have exiled you there?
He gave me a shy smile.
Isn’t it clear? There are no demons. Rather, I have finally found a place for myself.
And a companion as well?
He inclined his head in agreement. That too, he said.
Amydaz
At this juncture, with an air of some considerable embarrassment, the indefatigable blacksmith spoke up.
I still don’t understand why they returned to the square that night. Were they tempting fate?
Nabil considered him with a languid and indifferent smile. Then he turned away from him and gazed in the direction of the Koutoubia.
Perhaps, he replied.
A shadow passed over his face.
A lengthy silence followed. Nabil continued gazing at the mosque. Finally, I asked him what he was thinking of.
I was thinking that the most important thing in life is a meaningful death; in the end, nothing else matters.
How so? I asked.
He thought about it for a moment.
Consider my grandfather, for instance, he replied. By all accounts, he lived a life that was meagre in its achievements, and yet, in my mind, in the manner of his death he more than redeemed himself.
Then he added, his voice heavy with sadness:
Perhaps that is why I was also reminded of my old home in the Oued Ziz Valley. I was thinking about watching the desert wind furrow the date-palm oases. I left my home when I was eight years old. It was a place of love and joy.
He kept on looking at the mosque.
What do you see there, my friend? I asked.
I see days of heat. I see beards of yellow grain in the shadow of the palms. The tallest trees stand more than thirty metres high. The region of the Tafilalt is immensely fertile. They call it the Mesopotamia of North Africa with good reason. It floats like an enchanted garden above the face of the desert.
I would like to go there with you one day, I said with a smile. I would like to see your old home and talk about your grandfather.
There is nothing left, Hassan. The roof of the house collapsed two years ago. The beams are rotting between the red pisé walls, which the wind devours day and night. The shutter
s of the triangular windows hang from broken hinges; the lintels dyed with indigo have turned to dust. There is a hole in the ceiling through which sand has entered. The fountain in the courtyard is filled with mud and dirt and choked with vines. It is a house fallen to decay. A dead house. And I am to blame. I ought to have devoted my life to rescuing my inheritance, but, instead, I emulated my father and fled the Tafilalt. I spent the better part far away, in Marrakesh, while the home of my ancestors collapsed into decay out of neglect.
No one is to blame, I said staunchly. You had your own life to live; you followed your own dreams.
Nabil bent forward and his face was lit up by the fire.
You are a good friend, he said, but even you cannot absolve me of the dead weight of the past. These are questions of fate and destiny. It is the way of the world. Meanwhile, this blindness is a blessing. I can be here, there, and everywhere at the same time.
He straightened up and stared off unseeingly into space.
My childhood was a gift. Now I look back and am grateful. Perhaps that is why I like to imagine visiting there. There are lots of details that I hadn’t noticed before. I take early-morning walks with the wind as my companion. We go down to the banks of the Oued Ziz that have always been maintained as meadows. In the wake of the sun the damp soil is steaming. We walk through the tall grass fields that surround the house. The orange groves are interspersed with pomegranates and figs. The mules flip their tails at swarms of black flies. A procession of ants climbs the long brown datura stems. Little drops of water dampen the red mud walls. We listen to the echoes made by the dawn fog.
He heaved a sigh. His eyes were blinking like those of a person staring into the sun.
In the evening, he went on, the shadows are silent and thick, and the burning day seeks repose on the verge of the river. The smell of water and wet earth lies heavy over the darkness. The air is cool and light. Stars fill the sky. The tallest palm trees are black strokes in the night.
He smiled, passing his tongue over his mouth as if to taste the damp air, but his lips, I noticed, were dry and chapped.
These are some of the things I hadn’t observed before, he said. I like to dwell on the details. There is a great joy to be derived from the simplest things.
And all this from gazing at the mosque?
There is truth in prayer, and meaning in mysticism, he said. Or so the greatest poets, in the guise of Nature – river, mountain, ocean and breeze – tell us.
I’m in agreement with you there, I replied.
Good, because I have often wondered if that is how you dream your stories, in the same way that I dream of stones along the trembling perimeter of the world.
I do, I replied.
I see. Isn’t it beautiful then? It’s just as it is, for pleasure.
He got down on his knees before the fire.
Have I told you of the eagle that crashed into my room when I was a child? It was a massive bird. Its wingspan exceeded the width of my grandfather’s arms. It was chasing a pigeon that got away at the last moment. But the eagle lay without stirring on the floor of the room. Only its eyes moved. They reflected every colour in the world.
He extended his arms and held them out. Then he began moving them slowly. He became the eagle. We watched him stagger to his feet and stretch his talons. Calmly, deliberately, he flexed his wings, and then he launched into the air and sailed out of the window.
He held up his hand.
Listen! he said. The wind is speaking.
What is it saying, Nabil?
Softly, he cautioned, speak softly! The wind is making a hole in the sky, and through the hole the years are pouring backwards. Now the days are not pressed together but made up of distinct images like clouds, and across these the wind must traverse in order to become the sleek, sharp scimitar of time.
The Witness of Poetry
It was the midnight hour, when time stops in the Jemaa.
In the sixteenth-century storyteller Hassan el Mansour’s wonderfully evocative chronicle Plain Tales from the Jemaa, he describes midnight on the square:
The shadows of trees lay like lances across the Jemaa. The air was scented with frost; a light breeze tracked down from the mountains. The sky was clear, the moon was bright. The clouds had peeled back to reveal millions of stars. The Hunter was roaming there, along with the Great Dog, the Twins, the Crab and the Lion. The Milky Way filtered through their hearts, it warmed their skins and the grottos of their loins. Their blood pumped in time to the music of the Jemaa. The whole sky vibrated with the echoes of drums. We felt a throbbing vitality flowing down from the sky to the earth. The square began to swirl around us. It tilted and sloped up towards the stars. The roofs of the houses in the medina slid back. The Jemaa rose high above the black branches of the mountains. It passed Saturn, Jupiter, the outermost planets. Seven stars pinned it to its designated place in the sky. Then, abruptly, without warning, it collapsed into the space of a grain of sand.
Chronicle of a Disappearance
It’s curious that you should bring up Hassan el Mansour, a voice observed meditatively, before revealing its possessor to be a thin, dark man with a wispy beard.
What’s even more curious, he added after a pause, is that I should be present in this unlikely setting, on a stray visit to your city, when you should choose to make your allusion to his work.
I’m Farouk, he said. I’m a researcher in our nation’s history attached to the National Library in Rabat, and I wonder if I’m the only one here who has also read El Mansour’s Chronicle of a Disappearance, which was not, of course, part of the better-known Plain Tales from the Jemaa, but nevertheless should be of especial interest to this audience given that it concerns a case uncannily similar to the one being debated this evening, except that it took place nearly four hundred years ago, and the man involved in that instance was a Turkish nobleman, while the woman was a minor Italian princess from Salerno who eloped with her lover and sought refuge in the Moroccan court from both the wrath of her own relatives and the displeasure of the court of the Sublime Porte to which he was attached.
I only raise this, he added mildly, because I find the parallels between the two sets of disappearances to be rather remarkable.
What you probably do not know, I replied, and what you cannot possibly have surmised, is that El Mansour was an ancestor of mine. In fact, believing him to be related to us from my grandmother’s side of the family, my father named me after him, but I’m not certain that the claim holds up. For one, his Berber antecedents are unknown. For another, there is apparently a contemporary biography in the Qarawiyin Library in Fès that conclusively establishes that he was an Andalusian migrant born and brought up in Córdoba before he moved to the imperial court in Marrakesh. To settle the matter to my father’s satisfaction, one of these days I must remember to ask my brother Ahmed if he can get permission from the authorities to examine the manuscript.
In any case, I continued, I do know about the chronicle that you refer to, and am, in fact, rather pleasantly surprised by your knowledge of it, since I’d believed that only a single copy existed in the archives of the Glaoui Pasha of Marrakesh, from where a friend of my father’s got hold of the story, but that copy subsequently disappeared and was presumed to have been irretrievably lost.
It may have disappeared from the Glaoui Pasha’s holdings, the scholar from the National Library replied with a smile, but it found its way to Rabat a few years ago and passed therein into the safekeeping of the collection where it presently reposes.
How did that chronicle end? someone called out. Was that pair of lovers found?
Alas no, the scholar replied, and neither, in the end, was El Mansour.
What do you mean? I asked, taken aback.
The librarian rose to his feet and stepped out of the crowd.
May I?… he asked.
Yes, of course, I replied, as intrigued as anyone else in the circle.
It’s like this, he said. From what I’ve
been able to establish, El Mansour’s Chronicle of a Disappearance was not only based on fact, but strayed uncomfortably close to the involvement of a member of the imperial court in the affair. As a result, Mansour became – shall we say – a dangerous man to have around. When the Sultan Abu Yusuf Ya’qub al-Mansur subsequently decided to despatch a force of four thousand men to raid the Songhai strongholds of Gao, Timbuktu and Djenné on the far side of the Sahara, your ancestor was willy-nilly attached to the invading force despite being possessed of no martial experience whatsoever. As is well known, the raids destroyed the Songhai empire, enriched the Moroccan treasury beyond measure, and led to the Sultan’s assuming the title “the Golden One”, but of the storyteller El Mansour nothing more is heard. It’s assumed that he perished somewhere along the way in the unforgiving sands, although there is a single, intriguing mention in a different source of his having been poisoned and his body buried in an unmarked grave. This source is not the official biography in the Qarawiyin Library, by the way, which I have seen, and which contains no information about his final years. His bones have never been found.
I had no idea! I exclaimed. Here’s a story within a story!
Or rather, a story within a story within a story, a veritable cornucopia of fictions, so to speak, the scholar slyly remarked.
I couldn’t follow his learned allusion, but was content to nod in agreement while still bemused by the turn the tale had taken.
It’s extraordinary what one can stumble upon in the course of one’s researches, he concluded with a smile.
The Storyteller of Marrakesh Page 17