The Storyteller of Marrakesh Read Online Free Page B

It was unnatural, and it made us uneasy. It seemed to cast a glow as they made their way across the square, and, as if in homage, the crowds fell silent and parted before them. As my brother Mustafa later recalled, it was a beauty possessing the purest intimation of grace. My own sense was that such beauty was worthy of respect, but from a guarded distance. One had to have courage when faced with it. But one also had to have probity. Mustafa did not agree with me, and this discord would come to weigh heavily on my mind in judging his future actions.

‌ Mustafa
    Mustafa was not an inhabitant of Marrakesh. He lived in the small fishing port of Essaouira on the Atlantic coast. He owned a shop in the medina where he sold lanterns he’d made. Every month, on the fifteenth, he would supplement his earnings by taking the bus to Marrakesh to sell his wares and, flush with cash, visit the whores who waited for him. He was young and handsome – and incorrigibly hot-blooded. A stranger to despair, incapable of being a spectator in the game of life, he usually enacted his desires in the most impulsive and yet perfectly natural ways. His vision was energy, his poetry was genuine, and true poetry is all-consuming.
    When he was young, I once saw him rising naked from the lake near our village, the water streaming off his back as he paraded before the girls who had gathered to admire him. He let them touch him one by one. I caught up with him on the outskirts of the village and gave him a hiding. It wasn’t as if I was a puritan, but his vanity astounded me.
    I didn’t speak of the incident to our father, nor did either one of us refer to it again. But deep in my heart I knew that Mustafa would always hold it against me. I had injured his pride, and I think that he attributed my actions to jealousy. From that day onwards a wall descended between us, a mutual reserve. Until his departure from our village at the age of eighteen, I was determined to keep my peace and look the other way if such a thing should recur, but he was careful never to let me catch him in a compromising situation again.
    When we first heard that he, a child of the mountains, had decided to settle in seaside Essaouira, far from his native environs, I took the initiative to reassure my parents about him. Let him be, I said with equanimity. The salt air will calm him. Meanwhile, you have two other sons who will look after you in your old age and tend to your needs.
    A year later, Mustafa and I met in Marrakesh, and he informed me, with an air of defiance, that he was living with a woman but had decided not to marry. I didn’t think it my place to comment but merely wished him happiness. At our next meeting, a few months later, he said with a smile, as if as an aside, that he’d left his companion, whose importunate demands on his time and affection had begun to annoy him. Instead, he was living on his own in the heart of the medina, where his bronzed skin, curly hair and easy-going ways had made him popular with the tourists. He’d taken up a sport called windsurfing. Some Frenchwoman named Sandrine had taught him. She lived on the beach; she was a free spirit like him. Once again, I refrained from commenting.
    That’s why, when I saw Mustafa rising to his feet from the edge of our circle that evening in the Jemaa, it attracted my attention. His face was a conversation without words: it betrayed the ardent and disconsolate thoughts that permeated it. His eyes glittered; they told a story where the strangers were already distillations of the desire barely contained within. It was as if, in a matter of seconds, my brother’s lust had mastered him.
    Mustafa! I cautioned, don’t act in haste. Our religion is gentle. It does not permit transgressions and vice. It has strong conventions of hospitality. It emphasizes modesty.
    He glanced at me with scorn. Scared of losing your tourist trade, Hassan? When I declined to dignify his