It was noon when he found himself close to the Jardin des Sultanes, where his mother used to take him when he was a child to see the monkeys in their cages. Just then he heard a voice calling him—“Hey, you!”—and when he turned around he saw Nilsa’s naked belly. She was lying in the grass, surrounded by three boys sitting cross-legged and smoking cigarettes. One of them was languidly playing a guitar. Nilsa stood up and jumped into Selim’s arms so excitedly that he felt embarrassed. “It’s my Moroccan friend!” she told her companions. The three boys were Germans who had decided to flee their families and capitalist society and who had spent the last two years living in a commune. “They’re all Nazis,” explained Simon, the boy with the guitar. Selim sat facing him and noticed his red eyes, the dilated pupils. He realized they had not needed him to find hashish. They all had long hair which fell down to their waists. Nilsa handed him a cigarette and Selim took it. “Why don’t you come with us? There’s nothing keeping you here, is there?”

  All Selim would remember afterward of those three days spent traveling were a few hallucinatory images, like fragments from an endless dream. He smoked hashish and drank huge gulps of a bitter eau-de-vie that Nilsa had brought with her. In her suitcase she also had some tabs of LSD, a transistor radio, and records by Pink Floyd and Janis Joplin. Several times Selim had to ask Simon to stop by the roadside near some field or village so he could throw up. Through the car’s windows he saw landscapes he could not believe, landscapes that must, he thought, be the product of his imagination. He barely spoke a word. The others talked in German or English and the sounds of those foreign languages added to his sense of unreality. He kept thinking: I’m not really here, nobody can see me. To soothe his nausea he would close his eyes, and occasionally he would fall asleep with his head on Nilsa’s shoulder. Then he no longer knew if he was in a car, in the carriage of a train, or in the hold of a ship, sailing toward some unknown destination. His organs felt as if they had been swapped around. He ached all over his body: his lower back, his heart, his stomach. When the pain in his belly grew unbearable, he would sink his fist into it. This was the only thing that brought him any relief. His body was rotting from within, he thought. Inside him there was one of those massive piles of black manure that were always left by the edges of fields at the farm, their fetid odor spreading for miles around.

  One day Selim woke up in the middle of nowhere. Some tiny village, a stop-off point for truck drivers, with a main street lined by a series of butchers’ stalls. A crowd gathered to stare at these hippies, who seemed unperturbed by all the attention. Animal carcasses were hung from hooks and on a white enamel counter there sat a sheep’s head, its eyes closed, its fleece grayish, tongue hanging from the side of its mouth. On the ground was a pink bowl full of tripe. Selim closed his eyes again. He turned his face to the other side. Droplets of cold sweat ran down the back of his neck. He pretended to be asleep because he didn’t want anyone to call him over, to ask him to act as an interpreter. He wanted to be forgotten, to no longer be part of this world, this country that, the farther south they went, seemed to him ever more implacably foreign. They had been sleeping on beaches under ominous starry skies. Nilsa and the others would go swimming naked and wash their hair in the sea while he lay on the sand, his knees pressed tight to his chest. All night he would be attacked by mosquitoes and when he woke in the mornings his eyelids and hands were swollen from all the bites. The hippies wanted to shove him in the water. They said that he stank, that they couldn’t stand the smell of his sweat, his vomit breath. But Selim would not give in. In reality he was afraid of being abandoned and in his rare moments of lucidity, when the effects of the drug waned a little, he held on tight to his bag, in which he kept his clothes, his revolver, and some cash stolen from his mother.

  Several times they got lost and Simon could not understand why Selim refused to help them question a passerby. Then, after a while, there were no more passersby. There was nobody at all. Nothing but a road in the middle of a rocky desert where all that grew were some thorny trees deformed by the wind, with goats perched on their branches. Selim burst out laughing. A maniacal laugh that sounded like a hyena or a lunatic and made the others feel uncomfortable. His laughter grew louder, and even more chilling, when a white horse, skinny and filthy, appeared in the beam of the car’s headlights before vanishing into the darkness. Selim was the prisoner of a sticky, slimy dream, deep as a swamp, and he could not pull himself out of it. He was like those characters in fairy tales who dream that they are dreaming that they are dreaming.

  By the roadside tall thistle bushes grew, covered with grayish dust. Inside the car, nobody talked anymore. The wind carried an odor of iodine and walnut, which made them think that they weren’t far from their destination. Hundreds of seagulls shrieked and wailed. They filled the sky like a battalion of scavengers and it was impossible to tell if they were mourning their dead or plotting against the humans. Ahead of them they saw Essaouira.

  The city itself was part of a dream. At its entrance, near the Porte du Lion, stood a large sign: “Town For Sale.” Nilsa was afraid that Selim would start laughing again, sending Simon into a rage. But Selim did not laugh. He was slumped on the back seat. His face was the color of earth, his shirt drenched with sweat. He was shivering with cold. “He looks ill,” the girl said. They parked the car at the port. Night had fallen and there was no one around. Not a single living soul, just the howling of the wind and the creaking wooden hulls of the trawlers in dry dock. The city looked like one of those medieval cities depopulated by plague, its streets deserted except for a few skinny cats and half-crazed survivors. Some disaster must have driven the entire population into exile; perhaps a tidal wave had carried them away or a corsair raid had left them all bleeding to death or abducted. The hippies wondered if they had come to the wrong place. This gloomy, torpid town could not be the famous hippie hotbed that they had heard so much about. Later they would find out the reasons for this desertion. Because there had been no plague in Essaouira, no witch’s curse; its silent and empty streets had a more prosaic cause. The factories had closed and the high rate of unemployment had driven the city’s youth to other, more prosperous and welcoming places. But, most importantly, the news of Israel’s victory over Nasser’s Egypt in June 1967 had finally reached this outpost at the edge of the world. Most of the Jewish families had fled, taking with them part of the city’s soul.

  * * *

  “When the Jews leave a town, it brings misfortune, and ruin is not far off.” This was what Lalla Amina would tell Selim during one of their long conversations on the terrace of her house in the medina. Two days after his arrival in Essaouira, Selim woke up in a room he had never seen before. He had no memory of how he had gotten there, no idea how much time had passed. Only his body remembered: the violent stomach cramps that had prevented him from sleeping and the endless vomiting that had drained him of all strength. He threw up everything he swallowed, even the water that some gentle, maternal hand brought to his lips. Several times he had called for his mother and Lalla Amina had held him between her flaccid breasts and reflected on how all men were like this, tied to their mothers like dogs tied to their kennels.

  His benefactor was a tall, bony woman with black skin and white curly hair that she sometimes covered with a square of colored cloth. There was a large wart on her chin, with a few thick gray hairs sprouting from it. With her dry thin lips, her small myopic eyes, and her high cheekbones, there was a hardness, an air of authority in her appearance. Lalla Amina, however, turned out to be a good-humored and touchingly hospitable woman. When this handsome blond boy, lost in the delirium of a fever, was handed over to her care, she first thought he must be one of those hippies who came here from the other end of the world in search of God knows what. She communicated with him through mime, joining her hands together and placing them under her cheek to invite him to sleep. She buttered slices of bread and brought her fingers to her mouth when she wanted him to eat. For two nights he was delirious and in his dreams he saw the white horse again, the trees deformed by the wind, and that woman whose face became mixed up with that of Aïcha Kandicha, the sorceress with goat’s hooves who picked her teeth with the bones of children. He dreamed of Selma. He buried his head between her breasts, breathed in the smell of her skin, and he felt himself dying.

  * * *

  Selim woke with a start. It was not yet daytime. A violet glow came through the little window in his bedroom. Instantly he thought about his bag, about the money it contained, and the revolver. He looked for it in that tiny room and tears rose to his eyes. He banged his forehead against the wall. How stupid he was, what a stupid idiot—his father had been right when he called him all those names. He had been robbed, he had been betrayed, and somewhere someone must be bragging about that stolen treasure. He stayed where he was for a long time, his forehead pressed against the wall, incapable of thinking straight or making a decision. There was nothing he could do, no way out of this mess. He wanted to shout “Maman!” Then Lalla Amina appeared. She approached him cautiously, as if he were a wild animal. She stroked his back, his hair. “It’s a beautiful day,” she said, “and since you’re feeling better you’ll be able to explore the town. But first, you should go to the hammam.” The old woman stood on tiptoe then and from the top of the wardrobe she pulled down Selim’s leather bag. “Here are your things. Pick out a change of clothes and then I’ll take you.”

  Selim followed Lalla Amina through the streets of the medina. He told her it was nothing like the town he was from. In Meknes the alleys were narrow and winding, shaded from the sun, whereas here, between those high ramparts, everything seemed open to the sea and the sky. The old woman started to laugh. “You’re as white as I am black. And yet we’re the same, you and me.” Selim did not understand what she meant. She spoke strangely, in an Arabic that was unfamiliar to him and in an accent that confused him. But he enjoyed listening to her and he thought she was funny with her vulgar expressions, the way she told everyone to go fuck themselves, and her hands, wide and dark and thin, which she waved about in the air whenever she told stories. She said there had been signs that the world was ending, signs that were never wrong, and of which those odd birds, the hippies, were the heralds. She had grown up here, in this city whose glorious past she liked to remember, the city at the height of its elegance, and she was sorry to see it now in such a state. “But you’ll see, my boy. Essaouira is not so easily invaded. With its gray skies and this wind, it ends up spitting out those without a soul solid enough to put down roots here.”

  * * *

  • • •

  One evening, during dinner, they heard a knock at the door. A young boy came into the living room and kissed Lalla Amina’s shoulder.

  “I won’t stay long,” he promised. “Just a night or two and then I’ll find another solution.”

  Karim was Lalla Amina’s nephew and he lived in Marrakech, where he was still in school. He stayed with his aunt whenever he had an argument with his father and ran away from home.

  “What happened this time?” she asked while Karim sat down at the table, next to Selim.

  “He tried to cut my hair while I was asleep!” he shouted. “I opened my eyes and there he was, above me, holding his razor. He can go screw himself if he wants me to have short hair.”

  Selim watched as Karim dipped a piece of bread into the fish tajine. The boy’s brown curly hair hung down to his shoulders, and he was so slim that from behind it would have been easy to mistake him for a girl. He was wearing a blue linen shirt and a big orange scarf around his neck.

  “Say what you want,” mumbled Karim, his mouth full of bread, “but your brother is a fascist. He’s an animal. I’m not going back this time, believe me.”

  Karim knew the hippies. And he couldn’t stop wondering what strange miracle had brought them here. By that summer of 1969 Essaouira had become a gathering place for their kind. The port was full of parked Volkswagen vans decorated with flowers and peace symbols. On the walls of houses, and on horse-drawn carriages for tourists, the locals saw garish murals appear. They got used to the sight of girls in long dresses selling flower necklaces or knitted clothing in the alleys of the medina. With pearls from Guelmim they made shimmering necklaces that were all the rage. Thickly bearded young men strummed guitars in the city’s squares, begging for money.

  The day after his arrival, Karim took Selim to the Hippie Café, a former judge’s house converted into a café. The patio was littered with benches, cushions, and rugs on which boys and girls lay. On wooden tables there were stacks of books stained with mint tea. The café did not serve alcohol but everyone there appeared drunk. At the back of the room the clouds of smoke were so thick that you could hardly see the outlines of the smokers. The hippies passed around long sebsi pipes or animal-shaped chillum pipes. One young man was playing the guitar while another tapped softly on a drum that he held between his thighs.

  The owner was a quietly efficient Moroccan man in his early forties who always wore a pair of sirwal pants that he pulled up over his knees, exposing his sinewy calf muscles. He wore a gray shirt and an elegant, foreign-made waistcoat. He spent his days wandering around the patio and the upstairs floor, serving glasses of tea and fresh orange juice, bowls of homemade yogurt drizzled with honey and sprinkled with crushed walnuts and pistachios. He seemed to pay no attention to his customers’ strange behavior. He cleaned the tables and stepped over the intertwined bodies, his face betraying no hint of shock at their moans of pleasure. Sometimes, and this was something Selim had seen with his own eyes, the owner would even unfurl his prayer mat in a corridor and prostrate himself, facing Mecca, while the hippies toasted the sexual revolution and universal copulation. Selim observed the praying man. He watched him kneel down, press his forehead to the floor, turn his head to one side and then the other. The owner’s lips moved. He seemed completely indifferent to the huge fresco that the hippies had painted on the wall facing him. It showed a naked woman, a siren or an ancient goddess, holding a drum in one hand and a reptile in the other.

  Selim returned to the café several times but never saw Nilsa. She had vanished into thin air. The hippies assumed Selim was one of them. They asked him about his story, but Selim began to stammer so badly that he couldn’t get the words out. There were lots of Americans there, from Montana, New York, Michigan. Two enormous young men with long red beards told him that they had left their country to avoid being drafted. They swore they would never cut their hair and said they preferred exile to killing innocent Vietnamese people, as poor and oppressed as the poor of this country. For some of them, Essaouira was just a stepping stone. After this they would go to Ibiza, Syria, Nepal. There they would buy cloth and embroidered shirts, brightly colored saris, and wool-lined coats that they could sell for a fortune in the boutiques of Manhattan or Amsterdam.

  Selim was greatly impressed by the intellectuals: the way they spoke, the books they kept in the pockets of their long woolen cardigans, the speeches they gave about the atomic bomb, Buddhism, or bourgeois morality. Among them was a French sociologist with old-fashioned manners who never looked you in the eye when he talked to you. He appeared to be scanning the horizon, as if you were merely ectoplasm pierced by his gaze. He was often accompanied by an American theater director, whose gaunt cheeks and white-blond hair made him look like a vampire. His troupe of actors, thirty-strong, rehearsed near the port in an abandoned warehouse that still smelled of sardines and brine. The gossip around town was that they had been involved in a scandal in Europe and had fled shame and opprobrium, ending up here. They were rumored to appear naked on stage, insult the spectators, even urinate on them. The governor had warned them: “Stay here if you like, but I don’t want any trouble. Don’t forget this is a Muslim country.”

  * * *

  • • •

  One day, however, trouble erupted. It was a Saturday and the café owner grabbed Karim by the collar and, surrounded by apathetic hippies, started slapping him. The sociologist stood up and defended the boy. He was horrified by violence, he said, and this was no way to treat someone so young. The owner, in pidgin French, called Karim a thief. He had seen him stealing a camera from another customer’s table. “I don’t want problems. No police,” he kept saying. Karim struggled free. The sociologist held him by the shoulder.

  “You wanted to sell it, did you? You need money?”

  Karim looked up at him with dark, insolent eyes.

  “No. I didn’t want to sell it. I want to take pictures of the girls on the beach.”

  The sociologist laughed with relief. The kid wasn’t a poor beggar, just a typical horny teenager.

  “Oh, take it, then. I’m sure whoever it belongs to wouldn’t blame you. You see, that’s why we need to free ourselves from all of this and choose a simple life, with no complications, in touch with nature. Ownership is war, you understand? Go on, go home. Just don’t let us catch you stealing again.”

  Selim and Karim met in the street. As they walked together, Karim looked through the camera lens.

  “Why did you steal that?” Selim asked.

  “You’re not going to lecture me too, are you? I know what hippies are like. They might be dirty and look like beggars, but the truth is that they’re all hypocritical mama’s boys. What do you think they do when they run out of money? They go to the post office and call their parents. Reversing the charges, of course. Then they queue to pick up their packages. Peanut butter—they can’t live without it. They start crying when they dip their finger into it.”