Tahar Ben Jelloun - A Palace in the Old Village

Time. When very young, Mohammed had had problems with time. He didn’t know what it stood for, and he anchored it on important events during the year, but living to the rhythm of a wristwatch proved difficult because he didn’t have one. The day was divided up by the five prescribed prayers. His wristwatch was the sun and its shadow. Mohammed was sometimes able, however, to feel the real weight of time, to imagine it as a load on the back of a hobbling old man. To kill time, Mohammed would take that imaginary burden and kick it around. He’d till the soil especially slowly, and when he went to the mosque, he’d repeat the same prayer a few times. Animals had a better relationship with time, or at least with the rising and setting of the sun. Using the five daily prayers as reference points, Mohammed tried to fill the emptiness around them. Like everyone else in his village, he saw time as little more than something thought up by people in a hurry. He couldn’t figure out why they said, Time is money. On that score, he counted himself rich!

One day his cousin, the one who limped because of a work accident in Belgium, suggested they open a shop on the road to Marrakech and sell time. How’re you going to do that? asked Mohammed. Simple: I sell tourists all the time we’ve got too much of around here! I know them — I’ve been around them in Europe. I’ll tell them, Come to our country; you’ll find lots of time available. There’s nothing to do: you’ll rest, you won’t check your watches anymore, and at day’s end you’ll wonder where the time went. Clever, no? And he told Mohammed, If you help me, we’ll make a fortune! Mohammed replied, Time is wind, the dust in the air, the sun, the moon, the stars, and Joha. You remember Joha — the guy who pretended to be an idiot when we were kids, to make us laugh?

Another time the cousin proposed they sell ready-made memories to tourists. When Mohammed asked him what he meant, the cousin replied, It’s simple. (Everything’s always simple with him.)

We bring the tourists to the village, invite them to tea, pass a bit of time with them, bring in our centenarian, old Hajji, who’ll read their palms while I translate, and then they’ll give us a little money for a small piece of sheepskin that will remind them of their visit. That’s the memory, the souvenir. The bigger the sheepskin, the more important the memory, hey? … You know, Mohammed, you’re a real wet blanket; you never believe in anything! It’s just impossible to get a business deal going with you. Hey, I’ve got another idea. You can’t disagree with this one, listen: I saw some rich people on the TV, Frenchies or Spanioolies who come to live with poor peasants. It gives them a change from their big buildings, cars, everything we haven’t got, so we’re going to sell the countryside. It’ll be a vacation village for rich people tired of being rich: they’ll come to us for the experience of nothing. Us, we’ve got nothing, no water, no electricity, big nothing, so they’ll come to live the way their really ancient ancestors did, going to the well, using candles; they’ll eat whatever there is without being allowed to complain, and they’ll pay us for it! More and more retirees are settling in Morocco, so a married couple … that means two retirees, two monthly checks, enough to live like a government minister — no, better … so we’ll go looking for clients among these carefree retirees. Isn’t that a great plan? We’ll have to go to Marrakech or Agadir to put the ad in their papers.

When I was in the city of Mons, I knew some Belgians who retired and went off to India to be with a flimflam guru — you know, the real skinny kind of guy with a long beard, who sits cross-legged on a seriously uncomfortable mat, gazing into the distance while the Europeans at his feet soak up his silence as if it were a prophet’s blessing. Can you imagine, they’re ready to swallow just about anything, so I’ll take hundred-year-old Hajji, dress him up in a lovely white silk robe, dye his long beard with henna, hand him some prayer beads, and introduce him as the master of patience and silence, and it’ll work: they’ll come by the hundreds just to smell his perfume and venerate his serenity, plus we’ll tell them that Hajji is in communication with what awaits us on the other side, but he also knows how to prepare us to enter that other world, and then you toss in a few verses of the Koran, you burn the herbal incense Pa Brahim sells on the Jamaa al-Fna square in Marrakech, and it’s in the bag!*

No? You’re not interested? You’re making a face. Too bad for you! I’ll go peddle my idea to one of those bandits in Marrakech, you know, like that guy who managed to sell the neighbourhood mosque to an American tourist by showing it to her between prayers, making her believe it was a ryad , so she took the bait, handed over a fat advance in dollars — not a check, oh no, wads of greenbacks.* When she came back six months later, she was so ashamed of having fallen for this scam that she burst out laughing with rage and left the city, saying Moroccans were the champions of cheating! The story made the rounds of Marrakech, to the crook’s despair, because he had other projects in mind as juicy as the mosque deal. He’d already sold the same property a few times, a real cash cow, like that parking metre he’d installed downtown for a little steady income. One day he even managed to palm off one of his wife’s caftans as an antique robe from the nineteenth century. He always manages to find suckers to swindle.

Mohammed laughed for a good long while, then forgot about his cousin and his fantastic schemes.

ON SEPTEMBER 5, 1962, when the chief administrator of the village, the mokaddem , dressed all in white, arrived at Mohammed’s house to bring him his passport and inform him with solemn ceremony that in forty-eight hours he would set sail on his great journey, Mohammed found it hard to grasp how much time remained before he had to leave the village. The two men drank tea, ate a few honey crêpes, then took formal leave of each other as if that day were the most important one in Mohammed’s life. He showed his wife the precious document: With this, I’ll make you a queen and our son a prince! When she asked him the date of his departure, he stammered, Early in the morning. No one slept that night. The women prepared honey crêpes, some dried meat, figs, and dates. Mohammed and the other men who were leaving spent much of the evening in the baths, as if they were getting ready to be married or make a pilgrimage to Mecca. After the dawn prayer, they left the village on foot, then travelled in a rattletrap van to Marrakech, where they took a bus operated by the CTM, the state-run transportation company.

There were twenty men, some of whom came from neighbouring villages. Time was passing so quickly now that Mohammed no longer gave it a thought. He had become light, agile, and indifferent to time, even though a faint fear of the unknown was peeking over the horizon. Actually, Mohammed had lost his bearings. A veteran was in charge of the group, an old hand at making this trip.

Remember this carefully, he told them: Wherever you go, whatever work you do, you can count on one thing, that Morocco will never let you go, will always be with you, impossible to forget, because Morocco is emigrating with you, following you, guiding and protecting you, sticking to your skin, so you must never get discouraged, never hesitate to talk to your compatriots when you feel homesick, and you’ll see, it’s very nice of LaFrance — I say Lalla França and yes , I know LaFrance is no princess or sherifa —to give us work and thus contentment. It’s cold there, but it’s cold back home in the winter too; over there, no friends, we’ll always be off by ourselves together, because we’re just guests, people invited in to do the hard work they don’t do anymore, but us, we’re strong, in good health, and we’ll show them that a Berber doesn’t fear cold or snow or fatigue because over there, you’ll see, there’s no time to be tired, and although you’ll hear things from other old hands, don’t listen to them; do your job and stick to that.