‌Fantasia

Like me, I began, my friend Nabil is a traditionalist. This may have something to do with the fact that he is from one of the oldest families in the Oued Ziz Valley, where his grandfather once owned one of the finest date-palm oases in the Tafilalt.

To a certain extent, I went on, I model myself after Nabil. For one, I would like to live as he does now, though under less tragic circumstances. A few years ago, Nabil lost his eyesight while cleaning his grandfather’s ancient rifle, and retired with his life’s savings to Taouz, a village on the verge of the Sahara. There, at the edge of the Hamada du Guir, the stony wasteland notorious for its violent sandstorms, he lives in isolation with his French-born wife, Isabelle, whom he met in Marrakesh, and who has since taken the veil. I have not had the pleasure of meeting her – Nabil is understandably protective of her privacy – but I have heard that she is very beautiful and a solace to my friend in his blindness. It may explain why Nabil is content with his desert existence. Only once a year, during the cold season, does he deign to leave his dwelling to visit Marrakesh, coinciding his stay with my own sojourn in the Jemaa. Inevitably, these visits are scheduled around the night I relate the story of the disappearance of the two strangers, for, as much as me, Nabil remains fascinated by the enigma of what happened to them.

I paused and took Nabil by the arm affectionately.

How am I doing so far? I asked.

He merely smiled and shook his head, his natural modesty making him diffident at being the centre of attention.

I paused for a while longer, giving him the opportunity to demur, but when he remained silent, I resumed speaking about him.

Nabil’s grandfather was a gentleman farmer by inheritance and a falconer by choice, I said. Nabil relates how, at any one time, the old man kept as many as thirty falcons under his roof, attending to their upkeep and training all by himself. This was in the days when the family’s renowned date-palm holdings thrived under the generous bounty of nature, and little had to be done to look after them other than to attend to their annual harvest every October. Then, one year, without any warning, the dreaded Bayoud palm disease struck, and, in the course of the next twelve months, as many as two thousand of the magnificent trees perished. The next few years, the same story repeated itself, and Nabil’s ageing grandfather, incapable of dealing with the extent of the blight, retreated into the depths of his ksar and the darkness of an incipient and gradually encroaching madness. As Nabil tells the story, it was a while before members of the household – conditioned by tradition to blind obedience to the patriarch – realized that the old man was no longer in control of his faculties, and even then, the temptation towards denial proved too overwhelming to resist. Nabil’s father, the only son and heir, was away studying electrical engineering in Rabat, and the terrified women of the family did not dare question the old man’s increasingly erratic ways. It was only when they heard the thirty gunshots early one morning and ventured out of their quarters to find the still-warm corpses of the octogenarian’s beloved falcons, each one shot so cleanly through the head that the only evidence of violent death was the small drop or two of blood on the beaks, that they realized the full extent of the calamity that had befallen them. But by then, it was too late. The old man had already saddled his favourite horse, a jet-black Arabian cross-breed with flowing mane and tail, and ridden down to nearby Erfoud to take part in the moussem which crowns the three-day-long date festival there. At exactly noon, when the sun was at its zenith, he had ridden in formation with his fellow patriarchs at the fantasia, as he did every year, and, to the accompaniment of drumbeats and applause, at the very end of the performance, when the charging horsemen fired off their mokalhas – their prized, long-barrelled, silver-plated rifles – he’d keeled over off his horse and plummeted to the ground, dead.

It was in the course of cleaning this same accursed rifle that Nabil lost his own eyesight, but his pride in his ancestry is such that the gun still graces the mantel of his humble pisé dwelling in the desert.

To return to the story, Nabil’s thoroughly modern father refused to have anything to do with his tragic and problematic inheritance. Returning briefly to his father’s house to dispose of the remaining date-palm tracts at a fraction of their worth, he had gone back to Rabat and busied himself in his career as a manager in an electrical concern owned by the government. In this capacity, he had been responsible for the successful laying of electric cables along the steep Tizi n’Test and Tizi n’Tichka passes across the High Atlas Mountains. At the very height of his career, when he was tipped to go on to a ministerial position, he’d suddenly died at home at the age of forty from an accidental electrocution while building his son a toy railway set.

In Nabil’s telling, his father’s precipitous return to Rabat and subsequent turning his back on his inheritance can be explained only by a refusal to deal with the traumatic circumstances of his grandfather’s death. But that is pure speculation, as Nabil himself is the first to admit, and perhaps more part of his own attempt to come to terms with what happened than anything else. In the meantime, Nabil lives with the consequences of his blindness with a stoicism that is a matter of great admiration among all of us who know him, and we are glad to welcome him to Marrakesh during the one time of the year when he leaves his desert sanctuary and ventures into the outside world.