Махи Бинбин - Marrakech Noir

As Omar wrote the mayor’s statement, trying to craft the right tone, he realized his mission was no less than delivering the city from disaster. The statement was brief and resolute in tone. The words declared war on the enemies of cinema who had taken aim at Marrakech.

Omar was certain that the city would inevitably emerge from this mess, but in an ironic way, he was also convinced that the conspirators’ plan wouldn’t be thwarted so long as Marrakech attempted to transform itself into a city for the international elite at any cost, as the hovels of Massira, Daoudiate, Socoma, and M’hamid continued to fester. Perhaps the enemies of cinema would one day prompt people to burn the city to the ground.

He lamented the mayor’s condition, and that of Marrakech too. The disappearance had become stranger than strange. Omar was convinced that the disappearance of the director would not have had the same impact in a city such as Casablanca or Tangier or Fes.

In the days that followed, every inch of Derb Sidi Bouloukat was searched, but the police didn’t find a trace of Aldomar. People who were following the case began to doubt that he had even been in Marrakech recently — they believed that it was all a Spanish ploy to twist Morocco’s arm after Morocco had been accused of cutting off the livelihoods of Spanish fishermen. But Aldomar did not emerge from wherever he was in order to refute these charges.

Then, one morning, the people of Marrakech discovered a communiqué — copies were plastered on walls and doors, and left on the streets. The communiqué — written by a group that called itself the Band of Merry Men — claimed that they had kidnapped the director and they were now demanding a ransom. The communiqué didn’t say whether they were motivated by political or religious ideology, or whether they were a traveling circus troupe or a band of highway robbers; nor was the communiqué directed toward anyone in particular.

Investigators spent hours coming up with endless hypotheses about the nature of the kidnappers and their reasons for choosing Aldomar as a target. The police raided shops and houses throughout Sidi Youssef Ben Ali, Bab Ghmat, and Bab Aylan. People with prior convictions were yanked from their beds before daybreak and dragged out in full sight of their relatives and neighbors. Families were intimidated in order to extract any information that might lead to the kidnappers. As the hours wore on, the authorities even recruited the services of a popular private investigator who ran Revealing the Hidden, a renowned detective agency.

As the operation continued without any notable results, the pressure increased, the police became more frenzied, and the suspects were shipped out in trucks to unknown places, despairing at the thought of the torture that awaited them. Many fled Marrakech for the relative calm of the capital. As all of this was going on, merchants’ stalls were packed with pirated Aldomar films. People were snatching them up as if they would provide hidden clues as to the director’s whereabouts.

For the residents of back alleys and poor neighborhoods, where crime, unemployment, prostitution, and theft were rampant, the frenzy felt like an earthquake. Everything made the residents of these hovels look guilty — their hostile bronze-colored faces, their large hands, and their haggard appearances.

The police cordoned off these neighborhoods for days, until the people who lived there believed that the authorities were intending to send them en masse to another location, like they usually did with beggars before each royal visit to Marrakech. The people in these quarantined neighborhoods heard rumors about another city that was in the process of being built for them, about surveyors inspecting some barren land on the outskirts of Marrakech. Theories circulated that a Chinese company had been brought to Marrakech to replicate a part of the city in the empty wastes. People in the know confirmed that it was actually an old project which had been kept under wraps until the authorities saw that the time had come to execute it. This fate seemed sealed when a newspaper published a photograph of the Chinese company’s previous city-replicating work — the Austrian village of Hallstatt.

These devilish Chinese imitated small and large architectural designs with equal skill, from colorful houses to windmills, lakes, streams, and churches. They would be able to create another Marrakech entirely — duplicating Jemaa el-Fnaa, the Koutoubia Mosque, the Bahia and Badia palaces, the mausoleums, the historic gates, Majorelle Garden, and even the Old Medina’s alleys. They could replicate anything, except for the actual inhabitants. So people told each other what they wanted to believe in their customarily cheerful way, and they made fun of the proposed city.

It was in this atmosphere that Pedro Soldato — a Spanish writer who had been living in the Old Medina for over thirty years — emerged seemingly from out of nowhere. He appeared on the seventh day of Aldomar’s disappearance. He wandered aimlessly through the city, as if he wanted to join the search for the missing director. The intelligentsia knew, as did some laymen, that Soldato had previously experienced his own disappearance. The story became well-known. It was said that when he’d returned from a trip abroad, he made his way to his favorite café overlooking Jemaa el-Fnaa Square — but he didn’t find it there. The missing café alarmed him, so he had walked over to the cell phone store that had taken its place. The spirit of the old café, now effaced but still trapped within the new space, hit him hard. Horrified, Soldato left. He turned around again toward the lost café in disbelief. Then he walked toward the square, stumbling along in his disappointment. He asked himself a terrifying question: What if Jemaa el-Fnaa Square were to disappear too?

That evening, Soldato drafted a long letter to the director-general of UNESCO about the café that had disappeared and the tremendous fear this startling discovery had borne inside him. He really believed that Jemaa el-Fnaa would disappear too. He implored the director-general to designate it as a World Heritage Site.

Soldato was reliving that time as he thought about the state of the city he loved. Going out for a walk was his usual way of coming up with ideas. After what seemed like many long days since the director’s disappearance, and after gathering enough information to form an opinion on the matter, Soldato was ready to say his piece. He thought about writing an article in which he would talk about his relationship with Aldomar — they’d met several years before, shortly after the release of the film Palace of Desire . Soldato had learned about Aldomar’s artistry, and the poisoning of the relationship between his native country and the city he was born for (his words). Soldato decided to draft an emotional essay about the director’s disappearance rather than an investigative one, for it wasn’t within his abilities to put forth answers about how, when, and why Aldomar had vanished.

A second communiqué from the Band of Merry Men arrived one morning at the apartment of Souad Laamari, a thirty-two-year-old malhun singer and the mayor’s paramour of three years. It terrified her that the communiqué had found its way to her inconspicuous apartment on Avenue Khalid Ibn el-Oualid, close to Marrakech Plaza, as she strove to keep her intimate relationship with the mayor discreet. She read the brief communiqué with astonishment. When she finished, the paper fell from her trembling hand. She called the mayor’s private line, but there was no answer. She tried his other number without any success. The mayor was cut off, for the first time, from her world. She recalled that she had only been in contact with him once since the announcement of the director’s disappearance. It was a quick call that had ended badly. The mayor had asked her not to call him until the crisis was over. But the Band of Merry Men’s communiqué had forced her hand. She continued to call the mayor for hours without result, until she finally decided to go to city hall herself.