The Storyteller of Marrakesh (2 page)

Aziz sighed and looked about the square as if trying to find some escape from the memory. He moved his shoulders uneasily, glancing at me in the hope that I would offer some explanation. But I said nothing. What could I have said? His experience had been of the same order as everything else that evening.

Aziz sighed again. Without trying to convey the association of the ideas behind the words, he said: I suppose there is always the expectation that telling others will help in understanding.

Understanding what? I asked, and he flushed as if I had posed a particularly obtuse query. Why, what happened to them, of course, he said.

I felt the need to reassure him. I hadn't realized the memory of his encounter was so fraught with misgivings. Rising to my feet, I walked over and embraced him. In a reassuring tone of voice, I said: Those two young unfortunates weren't visitors from the netherworld, my dear Aziz, they were human in every sense. To contend otherwise would be to give way to errant superstition, and there's been enough of that already concerning the events of that evening.

Aziz shook his head and said mournfully: What you fail to see, and what I have probably failed to communicate adequately, is the great distraction those two strangers have been for me. Unlike you, I'm no teacher of life; I'm a humble man, a waiter in a café, and a modest devotion to duty is all I can offer to complement your storytelling expertise. When something happens for which there is no explanation, it unmoors me.

I understand, I said.

He cast a despondent glance at me. Do you, really? Perhaps you do. After all, you're a master of memory. More than most, you know about these things. All the same, can anyone truly know what it means to be human in this day and age? Is it possible to know what darkness resides in the heart of man? I ask these questions because it seems to me that there are times when the truth hardly matters any more, though of course one cannot dispense with it. It's what makes sense – what really makes sense to oneself – that counts for me.

I'd been standing next to him; now I moved away and addressed my circle of listeners. I didn't speak to any particular member of the group, but my gaze fell on each in turn as they sat cloaked in their blankets and
hanbels
, rapt absorption in every line of their faces. Speaking slowly, in an even, unhesitating tone, I said:

Certainly it is possible to know what elements constitute a man. Consider me, for instance. You know me as Hassan, the storyteller, for that is how I've chosen to introduce myself. I come from the highlands, and I am here to entertain you, because that is my calling, as it was my father's and his ancestors' before him. All around me the city spreads out its wares – its many narratives – and I survey them as if from a high place and determine which are worth the telling and which must remain untold, consigned, perhaps with good reason, to the darkness of oblivion. You have gathered around me in the expectation that my imagination is what it used to be, that you can rely on it and on my powers of narration. Tonight, however, I have set up things differently. Tonight I invite you to marry your memories with mine and trace an event altogether unlike any other in our experience. What will that entail? More than anything else, our trusting one another, because it is this element of trust that will give our investigation its freedom, its boldness and tenacity. But who can be the guarantor of its truth? And who among you will stand up and testify that there was indeed a story such as the one that we are now engaged in telling? For each of us carries deep within ourselves a chamber filled with secret memories, and it is a place we would rather not reveal.

I paused for a moment to catch my breath, and as I did the moon crested the ramparts of the medina, its light bringing the houses surrounding the Jemaa into relief. A chill came with its ascent. I put on my cloak, and some of my listeners, loosening the blankets tied around their jellabas, drew them over their heads. One of them, a heavily bearded cleric, now raised his hand and spoke quickly and with an intensity that commanded attention. He was a swarthy man of middle age. Although he wore rustic clothing, his voice was remarkably sophisticated, and I felt in him a keen and discriminating intelligence.

Of course what you say sounds reasonable, he said quizzically, but there's a plan behind it. It's patterned to a particular end, and that is the absolution of your brother from the crime he freely admitted to committing.

I gazed calmly at him.

If a pattern does exist, I replied, it is aimed at one thing only: the investigation of the truth – the simple, vital truth at the bottom of all experience. As for my brother, I will not conceal my hope that if each of us can be true to our memories of that evening, if we spare no pains and recount everything thoroughly, we will end by lighting on what now lies concealed. And we'll do much better work if we return to the same starting point, if we dig deeper every time and go a bit further in understanding.

My interlocutor remarked politely and non-committally that he found my faith in imagination touching.

It isn't as much imagination as memory, I answered.

Which is nothing but imagination, he countered, isn't it? Our imagination spins dreams; memory hides in them. Memory releases rivers of longing; the imagination waters the rivers with rain. They feed each other.

I refused to be provoked.

I am driven by the need for truth, I replied firmly. My brother is in prison for a crime he did not commit. I want to find out what put him there. It is a difficult task, I agree, but it isn't impossible.

His smile was sceptical.

You don't seem to realize that your truth is a paradox, because memories can be imagined, he said. Armed with your arsenal of intentions, you are setting out to explore the events of that evening – but as fiction, not as remembered fact. Where is the centre, the point of orientation, in this game of shadows?

The centre is where the heart is, I replied determinedly.

His mouth turned down. He drew his blanket around himself.

You're weaving a mythology around a crime. I'm sorry to be so blunt, but that is how it seems to me. Faced with the terrible fact of your brother's guilt, you are attempting to spin a web between yourself and reality. When the memory is indistinct, the imagination becomes infinite – and the beautiful illusion is always preferable to the truth, especially if it is ugly.

I am not weaving anything, I responded. If it is a spider's web, it isn't one of my making. My endeavour is different. I want to unravel it.

For a moment he stared at me with a disconcerting intensity. The rest of my audience might not have existed for all the sign he gave of acknowledging their presence. Abruptly he bent his body in a stiff bow and a faint smile of irony seemed to crease his lips. When he straightened up, he waved his hand and said coolly: You have great faith in language and its ability to communicate.

One must believe in something, I said quietly.

But what if the narrator is flawed and his motives unreliable?

I hesitated for an instant, aware of the danger of alienating my audience before the evening had even begun. Deciding to qualify myself, I said conciliatorily: I'm sorry. Perhaps I haven't explained myself well. Surely the evening's narrative will assuage your suspicions?

He did not acknowledge the apology but said instead, all the while maintaining a stand-offish tone:
Inshallah
, we shall see.

I returned his courtesy, my head held high.

After a short pause, I resumed speaking:

Allow me, then, to take you back to that evening. Although it seems unlikely that we should lose our way on this journey, rest assured that, given the nature of the event, we will. Our varying recollections will erase every familiar landmark: the mosques and the minarets, the souks and the
qaysarias
, the square speckled with pigeon droppings and the maze of alleyways leading into it. Beneath our feet, the very ground will crumble to dust, while overhead, the red sky of Marrakesh will undergo so many metamorphoses that we will consider ourselves fortunate in the end to have any sense of orientation left.

But all that is in the future. For the moment, our point of departure is the needle of the Koutoubia Mosque as it casts its shadow in the direction of the Jemaa. We commence tentatively as in a dream, following the needle as it inches across the Avenue Mohammed V and past the row of calèches that wait patiently for customers through the heat of the day and the coolness of the evening. Between the seventh and eighth carriages, in the shadowy darkness of the Place Foucauld, a noble cypress dwarfs its neighbours, mirroring, as it were, the mosque's towering minaret. I call that cypress the Crow Tree, owing to the multitude of desert crows that nest in its branches. It was the latter that alerted me to the unusual nature of events that were to follow that evening, their agitation a sure sign that something was amiss.

There were other signs. The city smelt of ashes. The rose-carnelian moon was full, with a ring of light around it. An unnaturally damp wind blew down from the mountains, soaking the head in chill. Later, a red fork of lightning dried up the air, its splatter of light flaying the streets.

Despite all these omens on the evening of the strangers' disappearance, I set up in my usual place, with an obtuseness that still surprises me, and prepared to begin my session of storytelling.

Who was it that first drew my attention to the streak of lightning? Or to the disconnected clap of thunder at twilight which preceded the lightning rather than the other way around? Was it Tahar, the trapeze artist? Let me think; this imperfect memory will be my failing.

I remember now. It wasn't Tahar, who appeared on the scene much later on, and in ambiguous guise. It was the acrobat, Saïd, who lives in the small room with the sky-blue door that adjoins the Bab ed-Debbagh, perhaps the oldest of the gates piercing the ramparts around the city.

Saïd is unusual in more ways than one. It is rumoured that a dog ran away with his afterbirth before it could be buried, which might explain his preference for dwelling in the air rather than on the ground. More: he is an acrobat who wears glasses. You might have seen him performing around the square, his glasses fastened precariously with a string tied around his head. He is a dancer of the air, someone who has liberated himself from everyday constraints to give full rein to his imagination. When I watch him perform, I am always amazed by the ease with which he moves around his palace of dreams. My friend Driss says that Saïd, in the veracity and magnitude of his leaps, is the closest amongst us to God. He doesn't hesitate; he doesn't falter. He is a natural, gifted with grace. None of us who knows him has ever seen him angry or despondent. He is one of those whose elemental joy in living is manifested by an ever-present smile and, more often, laughter.

So when I tell you that it was this same Saïd who came to me with a look of great concern, speaking in distress about the unusual fork of lightning – shaped like a sand snake, he said, with a head at both ends – it caught my attention. He said that he had already folded away his trampoline and his ropes and poles, and, for the first time since his arrival in the Jemaa twelve years ago, had decided to stop performing before his usual hour of nine in the evening. There was something about that fork of fire, he said, that was worthy of fear; it signified pain and destruction.

And look at that orange moon with that perfect ring around it! he went on excitedly. It's like a visitation from Saturn, that baleful entity. You can almost taste its burn on your tongue. In its ochre light we've stopped casting shadows, or haven't you noticed? There's something wrong here! These are auguries that must not be ignored. That moon has robbed us of our traces! It has made us empty.

I tried to reassure him. I tried telling him that the Jemaa is like a field of smoke; it transforms everything, even the moon. As for the red fork of lightning, it signified fire, and the element of fire, even as it destroys, holds the key to purification. So he should linger and listen to the story that I was about to tell, for I would banish his fears with the cooling stream of my imagination.

If you delve into fear, I said soothingly, you can turn it around so that the predator becomes the prey. Have faith in yourself. Trust in my ability to transform what terrifies you.

But Saïd would have none of it. He said that, in the middle of a leap, he had glimpsed the ground where the lightning had struck. In the smoke and ashes he had read warnings that we were all in grave danger. He said that it was imperative that we leave immediately.

I watched him go. Then I waited as usual for my audience to gather, but my heart was uneasy.

Marrakesh, El Amara, imperial capital, red-walled oasis between the desert and the mountains. Here the ochre expanse of the sky is mirrored in the
tabia
bricks and façades, and, especially at dawn, when silence cloaks everything, there is no more satisfying way to greet the new day than to stroll along the ramparts and watch the camel trains arrive from the south and the east. In the distance lie the dark fringes of the Palmeraie. Beyond, hues of cinnabar, rust, crimson, vermilion settle on the snow-capped peaks of the High Atlas Mountains.

It is a landscape filled with allegories, where the imagination is law, and storytellers can spend entire days resuscitating mysteries. We sit cross-legged on our kilims and craft chronicles from the air in our sonorous voices. The kilim is our castle for the evening. It is our luminous heart, the crucible for our imagined histories. It is our winter in the Jemaa, our summer in the mountains, our perennially fruitful season that we carry everywhere we visit. It is our home, our kasbah, our
makhzen
, our sanctuary. The door is always open; we wait inside and also outside it, fitting all possible tales into chronicles of our making.