The Storyteller of Marrakesh (18 page)

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 shutters 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.

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.

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.

And I think it's wonderful that you should remember these facts with such clarity, I said admiringly.

It's an occupational hazard, he replied, and laughed, clearly pleased.

He turned to Nabil, who'd been listening to him attentively.

And what of the two foreigners who form the basis of our story? he asked. The last we left them, they were in the Argana, gazing arm in arm at the darkness of the square through the fogged-over windows of your restaurant.

I wanted them to fly away, Nabil answered in a slightly dreamy voice, but, alas, it was not to be. I knew their time had come. They stood up and the husband put down some change next to the pitcher of water. I watched them leave their table and hesitate before they stepped out of the doors of the Argana.

Come, I heard him say as he took her hand. It is time.

She followed him out.

They advanced with great composure and gravity. She walked slowly, her head leaning against his shoulder. He scanned the square with watchful eyes. Their shadows seemed to lengthen.

I want you to know, she said softly, that I will love you for the rest of my life as much as I love you now. I love you. I love you. She put all her tenderness into her voice.

I have never been as happy as I am today, she said.

It's been like a dream, he agreed. I could be here with you every night without ever growing tired of it, my love.

He looked at her and breathed more quickly.

Free? he asked.

Yes.

The shadows began to detach from the darkness and approach them one by one.

At this point, I cleared my throat and stepped into the middle of the circle. With an eye to my audience, I placed myself before the fire. Raising my gaze over their heads, I said:

I sent my eyes scouring all over the square, and when I saw them emerging from the Argana, I plucked them and inserted them back into the circle of
rwai
musicians. They seemed surprised, and reassured, to find themselves there.

I paused and smiled in response to the sighs of relief from my listeners.

To make the story even better, I said, I will place them next to each other in the circle, with their hands tightly linked.

I was about to continue when a voice interrupted me:

But before they got there, Hassan, I presented her with a bouquet of roses. You forgot to mention that, or perhaps you were unaware. But it's important for the veracity of your story. After all, it must have been one of their final encounters in the Jemaa.

So saying, a slim man in a voluminous burnous stepped forward and pantomimed that long-ago meeting. It was Marouane, the juggler, who was famous in the Jemaa for having mastered the art of making a ball stand still in the air.

This is how it went, he said. She was walking there, and I was standing here. I stepped across their path and held out the roses.

He thrust back his
hanbel
and extended his hand in imitation of his gesture.

This bouquet is for you, I said to her in my schoolboy English. A token of your visit to our beautiful city, Marrakesh. The City of Roses.

I don't want it, she said, surprised.

I picked them for you, Madame, from the Agdal Gardens. It is a garden that smells of the sun in the morning, and roses at night. Take them, please. They are a tribute to your beauty. As Muslims, we know that such beauty belongs in paradise.

Who are you? her husband asked warily, inserting himself between the two of us.

There is no cause for concern, I replied. My name is Marouane. I am a juggler who performs here. I've been watching the two of you since the early hours of the evening. Your wife's beauty moved me, so I went to the Agdal and picked this little bouquet. The language of flowers is universal. Take it, please. It's a trifle. It is nothing.

And everything, the man said, as he took the bouquet from my hand and gave it to his wife.

They're beautiful, she agreed, and smiled.

For your pleasure, I said.

You've no idea what this means to us, she added, pressing her face to the blossoms. Thank you very much. You have brought us happiness.

Your happiness is mine, I said.

You've altered our perception of the square, her husband said warmly, and for this as well we are grateful to you. We had an unpleasant experience earlier this evening. It left a bad taste in the mouth.

May I apologize on behalf of my compatriots? There are many sinful men here. They live inside cocoons, divided against themselves. It leads them to behave in ways that are depraved.

You give us hope, he said, and, to my great surprise, he took off his watch and gave it to me. That's for you, he said, in exchange for the gift of roses. You can unscrew the back and insert a picture of your beloved.

I handed the watch back to him in alarm.

No, no, Monsieur! I cannot take your watch! It is too valuable! And all for a few modest roses!

But he insisted upon his gift, pressing it into my hand.

I have no more need for it, he said.

How is that possible? Do you no longer need to tell the time?

He laughed.

Can you tell us what day is it? Is it yesterday, today or tomorrow? You see – you don't know. And what does it matter?

Ah, so you are a philosopher. You remind me of my late father, who was a hajji, may Heaven rest his soul.

She touched his arm.

We have to go now, she said, and smiled at me apologetically. Thank you again for the roses. I will treasure them.

Where are you bound, Madame?

We are going to listen to the
rwai
musicians. We were there earlier. They're marvellous; they've so much life!

The
rwais
are like fire, I said, and there is nothing like a good song to warm the heart. Very well, if that is your wish, I will accompany you there. Then we will go our separate ways. Perhaps we will meet tomorrow? You must come and watch me perform.

Marouane hesitated and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. He stared at the fire. He put his hand to his heart and looked at us.

This is the point where things took a strange turn, my brothers, he observed. I escorted them to the circle surrounding the
rwai
. The
ammussu
– the choreographed overture – had just begun. We were separated instantly as they worked their way to the front of the circle. I cast a quick glance around, but there was no one there that I recognized, which was unusual. There was something perturbing about this gathering of strangers, and I couldn't put my finger on it. But the music was heating up; it was hypnotic, and it grabbed me by the ears. I decided to stay and listen for a while. I looked across to where my erstwhile companions were standing, but they were already absorbed in the performance. The young man kept his arms protectively around his wife and his gaze was wary. Smoke from the bonfire had ignited the air and it cast a golden-red patina on her face. She stood erect and light; she looked very young.

The theme of the
ammussu
was true love, which, by its very nature, is doomed to remain stillborn. The
raïs
was putting his soul into the song, and the images he evoked were both melancholic and beautiful. He sang of a love that was radiant and pure, as immense as the sun and as inconceivable in real life as waterfalls in the desert. I listened as he mourned the fragility of this most exalted of emotions, and the lyrics brought tears to my eyes.

I glanced at the two foreigners and it was clear that she was following the meaning of the song. Her face was flushed, her expression had turned grave, and her lips involuntarily trembled. It was impossible not to identify with her distress and I felt my heart going out to her. Suddenly the Jemaa seemed cold and uninviting, and I shivered with the premonition that had arisen in me earlier. I wanted to go up to them and advise him to take her away from here, but I held back.

The song grew muted, the
raïs
expressing his yearning in bell-like, crystalline notes. One of the musicians extended a chair towards the girl, and she accepted, sitting down with crossed legs and gazing disconsolately at the fire. Her husband knelt next to her, keeping his eyes fixed on her face. The
raïs
's voice died down to a whisper. Just when the music was at its most sublime, with only the notes of a single lute sounding like a bell in the silence, dark figures appeared at the edge of the circle. Their voices – coarse, thick, loud – joined in with the song, instantly altering the mood. They were hooded, their faces swathed in black cloth, and I wondered where they had come from. There was a heavy, malignant intentness to their movements, and I think the musicians sensed the danger, because they paused and looked irresolutely at them. Trying to preserve a demeanour of calm, the
raïs
began to say something, when a mocking whistle from the back cut him off and I saw a couple of shadows lunge at the girl. Her husband rose instantly to fend them off, but someone tripped him from behind and sent him sprawling. The next moment, the unity of the circle had disintegrated into pandemonium. The musicians scrambled out of the way, intent on saving their instruments. I heard screams and shouts. The light from the bonfire flitted across faces. People began to run. I scrambled towards the girl but a hand descended on my shoulder. I attempted to resist, striking out with my arms, but a cuff on my head knocked me senseless.

When I came to, the ground was littered with ashes from the fire, which had gone out. A ring of police cars with flashing lights lit up the square, and there were uniformed policemen everywhere. Next to me, a man lay unconscious, his hands and arms bruised and scratched. I staggered to my feet and was instantly surrounded by officers asking questions. I glimpsed the husband leaning against an ambulance, his clothes in tatters. A medic was attending to him, but he was sobbing like a madman. I turned away in distress and answered the officers' questions the best I could. They took down my name and address when they were finished and let me go with the caution that they would be in touch with me again.

When I returned to the Jemaa the next morning, parts of the square had been cordoned off. Some of the stalls had opened for the day, but the overall mood was subdued and dark. I walked over to the place where the
rwai
had played and found a single rose lying on the ground. It had turned black, and some of the petals were charred. Wondering if it could be from my bouquet, I picked it up, but it smelt burnt and I tossed it away with a sense of despair.

Marouane paused for a moment, crouching before the fire. Then he turned away from it and looked at us one by one. His gaze was troubled and withdrawn.

That is the way I remember that accursed evening, my brothers and sisters, he said in a low voice. My heart broke at the sight of her husband, whom I have since seen many times over the years, as, I'm sure, have many of you, wandering the square like a lunatic, searching every face for traces of his beloved. They say that, bereft at his loss, he abandoned his home and livelihood and now lives somewhere in Marrakesh. They say he talks to himself and his face is all tics and grimaces. But I don't know that for certain. All I know is that I will never forget his face that night. May I never witness such grief again. It is enough to disturb a man's peace of mind for an entire lifetime.

That is the truth, he said.