Махи Бинбин - Marrakech Noir

Al-Sharqawi was convinced that the pasha was one of Marrakech’s greatest miracles. He spared nothing in providing details of the huge parade, one in which Hmmu played a leading role in order to scare the newly arrived official, while the pasha’s goal was to impress him. He described the way the procession set out from Marrakech toward Mount Tichka, amid crowds of tribesmen who lined both sides of the road of melted ice. They were ready at any moment to pick up and carry the cars in the official procession across the valleys and muddy roadways. Once the French delegation reached the Tichka crossing, they found white goat-hair tents set up to receive them. Thousands of horsemen surrounded them, firing dozens of continuous shots under instructions from the pasha, as a way of greeting the newly arrived French official. The 200,000 shots fired left a cloud of smoke that lingered in the Tichka sky for a considerable time.

Al-Sharqawi used to bind the people listening to him to what he referred to as the new eternity, and yet the level of fear associated with the pasha’s name led people to ask themselves whether the authorities supported his remarkable tale.

Then one evening the authorities arrived and grabbed al-Sharqawi from the middle of his circle. For several months, he was gone. When he finally came back to Marrakech, he was a broken man — and once again the doorman at the Mamounia Hotel.

On the very first day back at his job, a shy passerby approached and asked, “Wasn’t it the pasha who killed Hmmu so the entire scenario with the French could be cleaned up?”

“Yes,” al-Sharqawi replied. “He’s the one who killed him. There’s no doubt about that. But it had nothing to do with the French. He wanted to marry Halima, the caid’s wife, and get ahold of Hmmu’s harem, which included the gorgeous Mina, al-Haddad’s daughter!”

Before the passerby moved on, al-Sharqawi stopped him. “Make very sure,” he cautioned the man, “that you don’t tell that to any other human being!”

Other stories later took over and replaced the tale of the mummy. But Marrakech never forgot stories, even though it may have pretended to do so. It left them burning in the ashes, but only in order to bring them out again at the right moment, to use them to provide warmth on chilly nights.

Work began again on the restoration of the pasha’s palace and people went back to the old stories; and, indeed, the old stories returned to the old square.

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.