In the end his brothers realized what was happening and they threatened, in voices rusty from constant colds, to tell their parents if he didn’t let them take a turn. At first Mehdi hated the idea of sharing his secret and would shake with rage when his brothers giggled or made vulgar remarks about actresses he revered. But it wasn’t long before his brothers had learned the films’ dialog by heart, and the three boys would have fun reciting lines together. In the living room where Farida gave them their dinner they would sometimes suddenly start acting out one of those scenes. Mehdi would be Humphrey Bogart or Fred Astaire; he always took the lead role. Whenever their mother caught them, laughing and squawking in French, she would blow her top, screaming at them: “Stop speaking French in my home!” They would burst out laughing, despite their fear of her. “Aren’t you ashamed, mocking your own mother?” And she would slap them. If he really wanted to enrage her, Mehdi would recite poems by Pierre de Ronsard. In a quavering voice he would declaim “Sweetheart, come let us see if the rose . . . ,” and Farida would run after him down the stairs. The sounds of that language disgusted her. Those incomprehensible syllables spoke of her misfortune, her powerlessness. They betrayed the oppression of her people, her lack of education as a woman.

  Once, when Mehdi had spent almost an hour inside the bathroom, Farida lost her temper and hammered her hands against the wooden door. In French, Mehdi shouted: “Leave me alone,” then started to laugh. Farida punched and kicked that damp-rotted door as hard as she could, until finally it gave way. She grabbed Mehdi by the collar, threw him to the floor, and slowly bent down to peer through the hole. Startled, she jumped back from it, intoning “May God protect us from Satan. Ya Latif, ya Latif.” Through the spyhole she had seen a blond woman with a painted mouth. A woman sitting on a chair in a very dark house, crossing her naked legs. She was aiming a revolver at a man in a raincoat and hat. Farida would never have admitted this to anyone, but had it not been for the presence of her son, her idiot son lying on the floor right next to her, she would have kept her eye to the hole a little longer, just to find out what was about to happen to that woman. Instead, she turned around and began hitting Mehdi, who shielded his face with his arms. There was the sound of laughter, then a gunshot.

  * * *

  Even now, at twenty-four, Mehdi would still sometimes wake with a start, his forehead covered in sweat, after dreaming of his mother. He remembered her as a woman with dazed-looking eyes sunk deep in her tobacco-colored face. Black rages would engulf her at the slightest provocation and she would lash out, so as not to hear, not to feel pain. She beat her children. Since breaking several bones in an accident, Farida had been addicted to morphine, a fact that everyone pretended not to know. At night she would slip away over the roof terraces. Often she would be seen up there, walking in her brightly colored djellabas, her hair loose. In those streets, lit by the big candles each family kept outside its front door, she would pass men coming back from the hammam, white towels wrapped around their heads, their skin still steaming. Farida didn’t notice them. She walked faster and faster, frantically wiping her hands over her djellaba, desperate to reach the pharmacist who dreaded her arrival. He had even started closing his shop earlier than usual in the hope that she would find another pharmacist outside the old town. “Let her find some charlatan to supply her,” the old man wished. “Let her forget me.” But Farida kept coming back, sweaty and determined. She knocked at his window and she knew the pharmacist could hear her because he lived above the dispensary. She also knew the old man would open the door for her because he feared a scandal and felt some pity for her. In the end he would always come downstairs, grumbling to himself, and he would open the shutters even while swearing this was the last time. Invoking Allah, he begged Farida to pull herself together in the name of decency, for her own salvation, for her children. Farida didn’t hear him. The shutters were raised now, she was close to her goal. Soon the pharmacist would head toward the back room. She heard the sound of little metal tubes and felt a wave of relief sweep through her. He spoke and all she was aware of was her slimy mouth, her mouth which felt as if it were full of sweat.

  * * *

  • • •

  Mehdi was a lively, curious child, adored by his father. Old Mohamed, who worked as a butler for a rich Frenchman, decided he wanted to send his son to the European school. He asked his employer for help and the Frenchman, after meeting the young prodigy, agreed. Farida never forgave her husband for pushing their son into the arms of the French. “You’ll make him a stranger in his own home.” Years later Mehdi had to admit that she had been right.

  Mehdi was eleven when Morocco achieved independence. Like the other students, he had watched the crowds gather, had witnessed the explosion of joy that followed the return of the king, and he had felt proud of his country, its regained sovereignty. He had ambivalent feelings toward the French. In front of his classmates he would pretend to hate white people, Christians, those horrible imperialists. He insulted them and said that the only reason he was learning their language, their laws, and their history was to help free himself from them. To play them at their own game, as the nationalists said at the time. In reality what he felt for them was admiration mixed with jealousy, and he believed he had only one ambition in life: to become like them.

  When he started secondary school in the late 1950s he would sometimes earn a bit of pocket money by acting as a guide for tourists in search of exoticism. They thought he was funny, this little Arab with his bulging forehead, his thick-lensed glasses, who knew the alleys of the old town like the back of his hand. In a knowledgeable tone he would warn them: “Without a guide, you will soon get lost. The city was designed that way: to close like a trap around foreigners, invaders.” The tourists followed his every footstep. They were startled by the sight of the artisans’ ravaged faces, were frightened by the yells of the men pulling donkeys or rickety carts who would shove them roughly against a wall. They were horrified by all the legless cripples, the dwarves, the blind men in their gray woolen djellabas, holding a knotty stick and a little metal cup in which a coin would occasionally rattle. Few of them knew how to be silent in the face of the beauty of this swarming crowd, knew how to let pass the mules carrying piles of pink- or indigo-dyed wool. Mehdi ran. He leaped over puddles and cowpats, slipped out of the tourists’ sight and took delight in the scent of terror that reached him in his hiding place. He wanted to give them the impression that the town belonged to him, that he was known and loved by all its inhabitants. He feigned friendliness with the men selling vegetables and olives. He told tall tales, recounted legends, never caring about the truth. They got their money’s worth, those tourists sweating in their woolen coats who walked around staring at their shoes, afraid of stepping in shit.

  Mehdi knew more about French history and geography than any of those French people from Limoges or Orléans. And for them he invented extraordinary myths. To start with, the old Fès shopkeepers had snarled at this ugly child with his skinny calves who made them unroll their rugs or show their leather poufs. They didn’t like being interrupted in the middle of a sales patter they had spent their whole lives perfecting, a patter that had worked for them again and again. But little Mehdi turned out to be an extraordinary salesman. He demonstrated to them something that they had not understood before: that it was not enough to boast about the quality of their wool, the softness of their leather, the subtlety of their embroideries. They had to tell a story. “This is no simple rug,” Mehdi would tell the open-mouthed tourists. “It is all that remains of the home of an old pasha who died in a tribal war.” And soon, in their living rooms in Limoges or Orléans, those delighted travelers would invite friends round to share a glass of wine and tell them the tale of that rug and the defeated pasha.

  The tourists asked him questions. They wanted to know more about him, to understand why he had no accent (“If I closed my eyes, I would swear you were French”), how he knew all these extraordinary stories. Mehdi answered them with more stories, stories in which he was the hero, the kinds of stories that these tourists, the women especially, were expecting to hear. The story of a little savage who becomes civilized in the warming presence of enlightened foreigners. The story of a gifted child lost in a limbo of mediocrity and barbarism. The women, after a tearful glance at their husbands, would lean toward him. They would make him promises. That they would write to him, send him books and money, take care of him when he was old enough to escape this place and—why not?—go to university in France. They told him there were other Arabs, young people of exceptional intelligence, who were studying at the best institutions in the country. That he must be a good boy, well behaved and studious, if he wanted this dream to come true. He said “Thank you” without ever feeling that he owed them anything. From beneath his disguise of poverty and childhood—which were, to him, one and the same—he observed them through the eyes of the man he would later become, never fooled into thinking them anything more than mediocre.

  Sometimes, however, he did not manage to smile, to play along. The tourists’ condescension would irritate him and he would answer their questions coldly. Biting his tongue, he would listen to their idiotic commentaries, their remarks about the filth and poverty, about the stupidity of his people. When that happened, he would nurture a desire to disappoint them, or rather to confirm—with his hate, his violence, his rudeness—that he was exactly what they thought he would be. He wanted their nightmares to come true. To a little girl with braided hair, in a bottle-green woolen coat, who was wrinkling her nose at the tanners’ stinking vats, he whispered: “You’d better watch out, or an Arab might come and eat you!” The girl cried out and hid in her mother’s skirts, the mother concluding: “This isn’t for children. She’s far too impressionable.” The mother did not seem to have noticed that Mehdi wasn’t much older than her daughter, and that he was sitting and laughing on the guardrail of a balcony just above those vats full of pigeon shit.

  There, along the fifty miles of coastline between Casablanca and Rabat, Marshal Lyautey had dreamed of building a French California. He believed it was the ocean that would give this country its strength, its fortune, and he was bewildered that its inhabitants had lived for so long with their backs turned to its potential. He made Rabat his capital, relegating the once-great city of Fès to the past. And in the small port town of Casablanca he intended to construct a symbol of modern Morocco. A land whose inhabitants would work hard to earn money and enjoy the pleasures of life. A land very different from those imperial cities, those stifling medinas, those riads with their windowless walls behind which whole families were preserved in the old traditions. No, it was here, by the sea, that he would build a city for the conquerors, the pioneers, the businessmen, the party girls, and the tourists in search of exoticism. A city of laborers and billionaires, its broad avenues shaded by palm trees, lined with restaurants and movie theaters, with immaculately white art deco buildings. Here, the city’s best architects would raise concrete towers fitted with elevators, central heating, and underground parking. A city like a film set, bathed in golden sunlight, where passersby would play the roles assigned to them. No more plump pashas, no more yawning sultans, no more veiled women imprisoned in humid palaces. No more tribal wars, no more peasant famines, no more of that prudishness and backwardness that had flourished in the shadow of the mountains. The coastline was the new frontier, and all men with ambition would dream of conquering the West.

  * * *

  In July 1969 Aïcha went to stay with Henri and Monette in the beach hut they were renting at Sable d’Or. The house was surrounded by a small sun-yellowed lawn. At the back, a wide terrace led down to the sand. The incredibly messy living room adjoined a narrow kitchen. Near the always-open front door there were piles of sandy shoes, raffia baskets, wet towels that smelled of mold. Between the two sofas stood a coffee table littered with newspapers, books, and seashells. A cat slept on an armchair. Another, which Monette had found at the local shop, was sitting on a windowsill. “I wouldn’t get too close if I were you,” she warned Aïcha on her first day. “They’re both wild. They’ll scratch you if you try to stroke them.” Despite, or perhaps because of, the hut’s chaotic appearance, there was something pleasant and welcoming about it, and everyone who entered it immediately shed the suffocating corset of social etiquette. This was a place of pleasure and relaxation, where you could let it all hang out. Behind the kitchen a concrete staircase led up to the first floor, which contained Henri and Monette’s large bedroom and a smaller guest room where Aïcha would sleep. It was a cramped little room with only a simple bench for a bed. “But don’t worry,” Monette told her. “We basically live outside here.”

  When she awoke on the first morning, Aïcha sat up in bed and looked out the window. A white sun was shining through thick mist. The beach looked as though it was caught in a vast spiderweb, where vague, frightening figures would sometimes move, dragging behind them boats with peeling paintwork. Monette knocked softly at the door. “Are you awake? I heard a noise.” She was wearing only a flimsy nightshirt and she got in bed with Aïcha, pressing her frozen feet against her friend’s calves. “We can’t both fit in here!” Aïcha protested. “It’s much too small.” But they stayed there, huddled together, whispering as they had once done at the back of the class when they used to share secrets and fear the teacher’s cane. Monette talked about Henri in such glowing terms that Aïcha felt moved. She also described her job at the secondary school. The girls who hid so they could smoke and who learned the French dictionary by heart. “The police tell us to keep them under surveillance, to take their photographs. But they’re only kids. Who are they going to hurt?”

  That morning they hung around the living room, drinking coffee and tossing their dirty cups into the overflowing sink. Then the fog dispersed and the impossibly blue sky appeared, like the first sky ever seen. It seemed to have absorbed all the blue in the world, leaving the ocean nothing but green and gray. Aïcha went out onto the terrace and the light hurt her eyes. The sand appeared to consist of tiny copper sparkles that reflected the sun in a never-ending dazzle. Around noon a fisherman knocked at their door and showed them his day’s catch: sardines, mullet, a handsome sea bream that Monette grilled on the terrace barbecue. They ate lunch at three in the afternoon, on the terrace, looking out over the deserted beach. Henri watched them as they ate the fish with their fingers and giggled like schoolgirls. “This must make a nice change from boarding school.”

  * * *

  • • •

  In the first few days they saw nobody. The nearby houses were empty during the week and their wooden walls creaked in the wind. A few streets away there was a local shop that stocked vegetables and canned food, and several vendors selling kebabs and koftas. In the afternoons, while Henri worked on the terrace, the two women would go swimming in the cold sea. They would lie on the sand, smoking salty cigarettes, then fall asleep like children, heads buried in their arms. In the neighborhood the rumor spread that there was a doctor vacationing at the hut, and the day after Aïcha’s arrival people began coming to her with their medical problems. The grocer brought his daughter, who had an earache. The man who ran the parking lot asked for medicine for his asthma. But it was Aïcha herself who insisted on examining the wound that the fisherman had on his foot, which wasn’t healing. She disinfected and bandaged it and told him that he must not get it wet for at least a week. The fisherman clapped his hands and laughed. “And how am I supposed to work if I can’t get my feet wet?”

  At the end of the day the sky turned orange and mauve. The sea grew calm, ready to swallow the sun. The waves no longer crashed onto the beach but died softly, in near silence, stroking the sand like the hem of a silk dress. Dusk was a magic spell, enchanting the elements and the population alike. Children began to yawn. Some fell asleep on their mothers’ bare thighs. Young women nestled in their lovers’ arms and together they contemplated the horizon, their faces bathed in the reddening light, as if watching a fire. At that time of day the wind blew more strongly, drowning out laughter and voices and making swimmers shiver. The sand took on the color of melted gold and blond strands appeared in the hair of the languid girls. The light made everything more beautiful. It erased fatigue and worry from people’s features and even the most sinister faces seemed sweet in its embrace. It was during this hour, the most splendid of all, that some friends arrived from Rabat and Casablanca. All weekend the house was full of people, abuzz with laughter and music and passionate discussions. On the coast the traffic was bumper to bumper and the local peasants gaped in astonishment at this ballet of cars heading for the beaches, parasols poking from open windows.