THE CHILD WHO opens his eyes on the house in the Spring of Horses must be around the age of six and has already been saddled with a nickname. His playmates called him Namouss (or Mosquito), not because he was smaller than the kids his age (Fezzis, people from Fez, generally have short legs) but because, aside from being rather frail, he was also a bit of a flighty creature who was unable to keep still. Bordering on recklessness, this sprightliness had earned him plenty of boo-boos (torn toenails, a head crisscrossed with scars) and was above all the reason Ghita had designated him as her emissary, charging him with relaying communications between her and Driss. Whenever the slightest problem arose – and something went wrong each God-given day – Ghita would bid him: “Namouss, go and tell your father to come daba daba” (immediately).
At the speed of lightning, Namouss would run straight through the Sekkatine souk, and once Driss had received the message, he would forget customers and merchandise, adjust his tarboosh, slip on his balghas, and head home pronto.
As far as Namouss’s sprightliness was concerned, the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree. In another time or place, Driss might have been a track champion. His sure-footedness made each obstacle in his path a fait accompli. Catlike, Driss snaked through the crowd, dodging the heavily loaded donkeys and mules coming from the opposite direction, all without failing to stop and exchange pleasantries with the shopkeepers and passersby he was acquainted with.
Trying to keep pace, Namouss followed in his slipstream. Little by little, he began to acquire the same stride that would later make him such an experienced surveyor of that gigantic open-air theater that is the Medina.
THAT DAY, GHITA had gotten up on the wrong side of the bed. The previous day, she had dismissed the young girl who helped with the daily chores. When faced with the work that lay ahead of her, Ghita’s spirit had sunk.
Ghita’s track record with the help would make for an interminably long book and the conclusion of each chapter would come as no surprise. After a handful of incidents – always brief and stormy – the young girl or woman in question would be shown the door. The reasons for these terminations were always bountiful, as were the number of times Ghita contradicted herself. It was like squaring the circle, what else? Also the identikit of her ideal employee wasn’t easy to fulfill. The first criteria: age. The candidate in question shouldn’t be too young, as they would have to be taught from scratch; neither should they be too old, as they would lack the stamina to carry out their duties to Ghita’s satisfaction. The second criteria: physical appearance. Ghita didn’t want someone that “a brief glimpse of would cut one’s life short.” That meant no hunchbacks, eye patches, or skin infections, since any physical oddities were considered, according to widely held popular beliefs, retribution for past misdeeds. But neither should they be too good-looking, which might arouse the passions of Driss and the teenage boys whom Ghita kept under strict surveillance. “I can’t very well invite the devil into my own home. As soon as you introduced a piece of fresh meat, the men wouldn’t be able to keep their eyes off it.” The third criteria: manner of dress. Ghita wanted neither someone decked out in rags nor stylish flirts, who as Ghita put it, dressed like the dancers at the Circus Amar. The fourth criteria: honesty. That prerequisite proved impossible to fulfill since, according to deep-set beliefs found in modest and affluent families alike, by their very definition, servants were invariably thieves.
The result: Except for short periods of time, Ghita could therefore only count on herself, and – temporarily – on her daughter Zhor who, as she was well aware, would soon “run off” to her husband’s house to go “clean up after strangers.”
Before making a start on her day’s work, Ghita began by launching into one of her litanies, whose set themes were subject to periodic inflections.
“Oh dear Mother, my beloved, you have gone away to be with God now and I am bereft of everything. There’s no one now to push open my door and look in on me. I am alone, a stranger in my own family. Neither my husband nor my children take pity on me. I am everyone’s servant, a slave with scars carved into her cheeks. The housework is mine; the kneading of the bread, mine; the dishes and laundry, all mine. Even everyone else’s shit belongs to me, I’m the one who pushes it down the hole and rinses it with water. I feel like I might suffocate. The others come and go as they please, they’re off to the Kissarya, to Batha Square, to the Boujeloud cinema, while I remain a prisoner behind these four walls. I have to wait until my skin groans under the weight of its filth before I can go to the hammam. Have I ever stolen, murdered, or sinned? I am condemned to duck my head in shame, swallow my anxieties. Heart, oh heart of mine, you’re going to burst. Marriage is a cursed thing. Had I been an old maid, I might have at least had some peace. And who cares what they would have said. May those who know my father bring him to justice.
“But who’s going to listen to me? I’m talking to myself, as if I were a madwoman. Everything in the house is topsy-turvy. And that harlot maid of mine – whom I’ve treated like a daughter, and to whom I taught everything she knows – she couldn’t find her own ass with both hands! Couldn’t even tell the difference between an alif and a cudgel. A swindler, just like all the others. Shameless and from a shady background. A sinner through and through, always jiggling suggestively and emitting those peals of laughter when serving the men. Even Namouss isn’t safe from her covetous glances. Let her go ply her charms in the brothels of Moulay Abdallah! What takes her a whole day, I can do in the blink of an eye without hardly lifting a finger. I can only count on myself. My eldest daughter, the only one who doesn’t shirk her duties, is away all day at school. Big deal. What is she going to learn anyway? Magic tricks and little else aside from laziness. Oh dear Mother, my beloved, watch over me. I place my trust in God and our patron saint, Moulay Idriss. May he take pity on this small orphan girl, little bread crumb that I am, doomed to misfortune.
“All right, Ghita, you need to get going. Time flies and you haven’t even aired out the bedsheets yet.”
HAVING THUS EMPTIED her heart, she cheered up. Rolling up her sleeves and fixing them around her upper arms with an elastic band, and tucking the hem of her dress into her belt, she got down to work, from time to time cursing and ranting about invisible devils. She hung out the sheets, made the beds, beat the cushions, then swept the tiled floor before sloshing water over it and mopping three times rather than just one. Next, she moved on to the stairs, which she cleaned from top to bottom.
She’d barely had the time to take a breather when she heard a knock on the door. It was the porter Driss had sent with a basket full of the day’s provisions. “It’s about time!” she said before casting a suspicious glance over the contents: beef, cardoons, and watermelon. She sat on little stool and began peeling the spines off the cardoons, before chopping one stalk into chunks, and then a second. As she was about to cut into the third, she stopped and threw the knife on the floor.
“Is that all, cardoons? And to top it off they’re tough as wood, only fit for donkeys. Into the garbage, that’s where I’ll throw them, I swear to God. He calls himself a man and isn’t even capable of picking out a few vegetables! And just look at this meat, I knew it! It’s all fat, cartilage, and nerve endings glued to a piece of bone. That’s what I’m supposed to feed the barrack’s worth of soldiers that come swarming in here at lunchtime? Maybe he thinks that the watermelon’s going to fill them up! What’s in a watermelon anyway? Air and water – nothing else. By God, I can’t call myself a woman if I make a meal out of this chiata. And where is that little rascal Namouss? Namouss!”
“Yes, Yemma.”
“What are you doing on the roof? Get down here!”
“The floor’s still wet, Yemma.”
“Take your sandals off and get down here I said!”
“Here I am, Yemma.”
“Go tell your father to come here daba daba.”
Driss was a confident man by nature, who didn’t spend much time lingering over small details. He was quick to lose his cool at the butcher’s, for example, whenever he noticed a customer fussing over the piece of meat he was after, nitpicking over the way it was cut, whether it should be attached to a bone or how much fat should be left on it. All that quibbling about half a pound of meat. When his turn came, Driss only told the butcher the amount he wanted – usually a kilo – and left the rest up to him. He’d obviously never been sufficiently struck by the wise warning imparted by Houcine Slaoui’s song:
Better watch out
Sonny boy
Or you’re gonna get swindled
Butchers are crafty
Oh Lord they are nasty
A morsel o’meat
Hides a mountain o’bones
Now the joke is on you
Better watch out
Sonny boy
Or you’re gonna get swindled . . .
Neither did Driss watch out at the market, where he chose to place his faith in his long-standing friendship with the shopkeeper. But when you take into account that the old fellow was half blind, you can at least understand the occasional mistakes weren’t made out of malice.
Followed by Namouss, Driss rushed back to the house. He quickly assessed the situation. He was used to it by now, and thanks to experience, knew how to turn the tide in his favor. Taking Ghita by surprise, he shifted the focus to another matter.
“Don’t worry, Lalla, you will have another maid soon. The sharif of the Idriss promised me. He has found us someone suitable. You’ll find nothing to fault her on, I promise.”
Taken aback by the news, Ghita almost completely forgot about the real matter at hand.
“And when is she getting here?” she asked.
“Tomorrow, or the day after, just enough time to make the necessary arrangements.”
“From your lips to God’s ears,” Ghita countered, regaining her composure and readying herself to switch the conversation back to the spoiled ingredients.
Yet Driss – whose reflexes had sharpened over time – was already one step ahead of her and put forward a compromise.
“You’re right, the cardoons are almost out of season. Throw them away if you like. You can put the meat into some harira soup and that will do for tonight’s meal. I’m going to go buy some kofta and have it sent over. That way, you won’t even need to cook anything. Now I really need to go back. I left a crowd of customers waiting in front of the shop,” he concluded, exaggerating so wildly that even Namouss, a skeptic, found it all perfectly believable.
Ghita was left speechless. Her fury had abated. Now that she didn’t need to make dinner, she suddenly felt lazy. She roamed around the courtyard for a moment or two contemplating what task she should set herself to.
“Hmm! There’s that pile of washing I need to get through. If I don’t do it, who will?”
There followed another litany. But Namouss had already vanished into thin air.