by Mhani Alaoui
Hamza held the orange-blossom branch up with his ashen hand and moved around the room as though sprinkling its fragrant water into the air. His hair stood on end like a treetop stretching toward the cool breeze as he breathed in and out with frenzied cadence. He then knelt at Leila’s bedside and slipped the orange-blossom branch under her pillow. With his green hand, he used the curved sword engraved with stars, moons, and calligraphy to conjure the night sky above the bed. It was a dark, deep night with soft stars, a faraway moon, and a universe of calligraphic poetry. In his voice of thunder and leaves, he recited the story of a flood that divided the world in two halves with boxed compartments and hierarchical belongings, and of a vast arch.
Then he added:
“But the flood has not yet happened in this millennial time that is ours, and the arch has not yet been built. For the trees and the will to build it are still dreams in the mind of their maker. Tonight, the world is a luminous night sky with crescent and full moons, lingering planets, and cooling stars. On its jet black tapestry, inscriptions of timelessness and light have been carved.”
Hamza called forth:
She who is not named
She who should not be named
Expelled outside the circle of light and words
She is here
She has been brought back in.
Then he vowed, “I use my sword Zulkitab to carve words and worlds into the night and the branch of orange blossom to illuminate it with delight. It is the beginning of utterance. The name will soon appear.”
Zulkitab trembled with anticipation in Hamza’s hand.
Leila opened her dark, fiery eyes. She was both Leila and Lilith, a young, forlorn mother and an ancestral being of power and resistance. She was thousands of years old and the product of a generation and its contradictory codes. “I am here,” she said. Hamza took her hands in his.
“This is the beginning of the naming, of the uttered word. What name will your daughter carry, Leila of the Night?”
“Maryam.”
“Maryam. That is a good name: plucked out of the emptiness of night, it will wrap itself around your daughter and infuse passion into her being. This naming must remain a secret. Do not reveal her name to anyone. In seven days and nights, the name will be chosen for the naming ceremony. Only then will she be known.”
Hamza left the room and with him departed the crisp, green forest air and ancient innocence.
Three Gifts and a Curse
On the seventh day after Maryam’s birth, the family arrived with their hands full of gifts: kaftans, linens and embroideries, a gold necklace, saffron, incense and sweets. First came the patriarch’s brother and sister. Mehdi came alone, as he always did. Then came Yasmine with her businessman husband, Mohamed Afrah, and their three children. Leila’s brother, Driss, also came. He was with a woman no one had seen before and who made Aisha gasp and the ghosts whoop.
Andalusian music played, lanterns lined the entrance, and thick, waist-high sticks of sugar were placed in the hallway. Dates and milk were offered to the guests, and musk mixed with Indonesian incense, a rare treat, was passed around in a bronze coal burner. Ibrahim, dressed in an immaculate white djellaba and yellow leather blaghi, welcomed his family. He sat on the brocaded sofa lining the rectangular Moroccan room—the heart of his house. He was surrounded by silver teapots and coffeepots and almond and honey treats. On a perfectly polished silver tray, there stood five silver rose water sprinklers filled to the brim. On a raised wooden dais above them, as only traditional houses still cared to do, the Andalusian musicians strummed their ‘ouds and sang the Ala Andalusia and the Gharnati.
Ibrahim greeted them with a complex mix of pride and pious sentiment he had not experienced since the launch of his first successful factory production. He remembered the joy he had felt when the first round of plastic combs were produced to appear shiny and perfect. Soon, a voice in his head tempered that exuberance. “Lhamdullah, thanks to God who has allowed for this moment,” he had reminded himself. “I must be humble before the will of God.” Today, Ibrahim felt a respite from the anxiety and shame of the past years and remembered that his was a great family, one of the greatest in the land. Beyond all their ill-fortune, their cultural heritage could still be wound up and deployed like an old music box playing a forgotten childhood melody on a cold day when all dreams seem to have passed. He kissed his wife on her forehead and greeted them all once more with the usual formulae and their unique blend of poetry, sayings, and religion.
The women trilled to dispel the evil spirits, and the men washed their hands with the rose water to purify their souls, while Mehdi smoked from a golden cigarette holder held casually between two fingers. The music suddenly stopped, and Ibrahim called the assembly to prayer. Mehdi put down the cigarette on the small wooden table set in one brocaded corner and took his place behind his mighty older brother. The women left the room, and Ibrahim began the prayer. Mehdi put his head down on the floor as fervently as every other man and opened his palms to his Lord in submission.
When the prayer ended, Yasmine walked to Mehdi and stood next to him. She was a tall, angular, haughty woman in her late fifties. Her skin was white and pulled against her cheekbones to reveal a hawkish nose and lined mouth. She was wearing her usual black suit, white shirt, and black tie. Her short hair was stylishly curled. “I am Greta Garbo,” she would provoke. She had been trained as a lawyer but stopped practicing law a while back and now spent most of her time in women’s rights’ associations. Her husband called it “her charity work,” but she didn’t care. She had never cared what others thought of her. They would all probably faint if they were in her head or walked in her queer shoes. The other women had donned the Moroccan kaftan with large gold belt and long double robes of silk and satin. But Yasmine was, and always had been, “the Garbo,” and was known to flaunt and enjoy that androgyny tremendously.
Yasmine did not speak a word to Mehdi, but her mouth was curved up in irony and contained bile. Mehdi could see the flash of a white tooth from the corner of his eye, and he could not help the stiffening of his body. She was standing too close to him. It must be said that, in the privacy of his late night musings, Mehdi had become convinced that his sister was a blood-sucking predator. During flashes of paranoid questionings, he clearly saw her sinking her teeth into his masculinity and taking it in for her own nourishment.
Mehdi lit another cigarette and, for reasons only he knew, blew smoke into Yasmine’s face: “Here’s to our deadly blue angel, whose cruelty taints the world” he breathed and walked away. He passed in front of her husband, Mohamed Afrah, and thought how he was an affront to the decrepit old household with his air of affluence and quiet power.
Mehdi had long hesitated before accepting his brother’s invitation to the naming of Leila’s child. He had always felt oddly off in this house. He had spent his childhood and youth in Ibrahim’s shadow. His growth had been stifled, choked behind blue trousers and masculine sobriety.
Ibrahim was domination itself, shedding darkness on everything that was not him. Ibrahim instinctively knew how to take what he wanted and, as he grew older and stronger, learned the subtle art of bending others to his will. That is, until the dark years fell on his house. As children, Mehdi and Yasmine were never able to fully emerge from their brother’s shadow. Yasmine gravitated around Ibrahim like planetary dust, while Mehdi chose to claim the margins as his blackened territory. They lived their lives in pale imitation and fearful avoidance of a charismatic Ibrahim. The future patriarch required his human sacrifices. They became emaciated and succumbed to bitterness. Their lives lost their sweetness, and their eyes their luster. They were the martyrs of their brother’s potential. They were victims yearning to be Ibrahim, longing for their mother’s touch and their father’s pride. Ibrahim was oblivious to their suffering and behaved as though, one day soon, they would work for him. Inheritance became a matter of callousness and power, and no one was surprised when Ibrahim took over the family busine
ss, promising his weaker siblings to take care of them always. That, of course, would not be the case.
Yasmine eventually found a way to save herself. She became lean and tough, blase and inconsiderate. She gave up social conventions and ladylike propriety. She enjoyed wearing suits, straight pants, and ties hung loosely around her neck. She smoked and jutted her pelvis forward when she walked. Mehdi envied, hated, and adored Yasmine. She was an odd, inverted version of himself. She was his Alice stepping through the looking glass. She was the cat grinning in front of his introverted misery, the wild tea party crashing on his carefully honed analyses. He cringed at what she did with her native gift of femininity, but inwardly he admired her decision not to be sweet and gentle. She became the mirror image of Mehdi’s queerness and the stamp of his awful difference. And like Mehdi, she had spent the first eighteen years of her life planning an escape from their stifling home as fast and as irrevocably as possible.
Yasmine loathed the Nassiri house. She could not stand the scent of naphthalene and lavender emanating from the grand cabinets filled with threadbare sheets, blankets, and tablecloths. She despised their new-found poverty and looked down upon her sister-in-law for losing her husband so completely. She herself had married a man for his money, and he had married her for two reasons: her name, and her disgust with it. “More Scarlett O’Hara than Greta Garbo,” Mehdi had sneered at her during her lavish wedding ceremony. She shrugged an angular shoulder and pushed through the crowd toward the path she had so deliberately chosen for herself. It was no coincidence that she had chosen law—a complex, tortuous, and unpredictable discipline in a country like Morocco. It gave her a labyrinthine power that few people could master, let alone assail.
Unlike Yasmine, Mehdi was not a survivor. He was a hedonist. He was a navigator of seams, seeking pleasure where few believed it could be found. As a child, he learned to be an unobtrusive observer of others, and soon people began to forget he was even there. His quirks and queerness faded in the semidarkness of others’ subconscious, and with time, he started to feel safe. He watched, analyzed, learned. His childhood and his youth in the familial house were long incursions in human nature and in the acquisition of a worldly, cynical acceptance of others’ foibles. Mehdi became the crucible holding his family’s stories. They boiled and bubbled in his overactive imagination, while easing his solitude with his family’s torments and desires.
He was like the turtle retreating into its shell at any ominous sign of danger. This allowed him to study hard, excel, and in secret, parade in front of his mirror with items he had gleaned from his mother’s and sister’s discarded clothes. He was also the first member of the Nassiri family to acquire an advanced professional degree from abroad and, by age twenty-eight, he was commonly referred to as “Doctor,” or its Arabic equivalent, “Hakim.” He bore his medical profession like a camouflage for his peculiar nature. He chose to heal others so that his internal fissures remained out of harm’s way. His passions and desires were hidden behind a white uniform and grey glasses, and this to his greatest pleasure. He walked out into the garden and inhaled its golden dust.
Here was his childhood home with its many, ugly secrets brushed under a Persian carpet and a closed door. He thought of all the shameful doings in darkened hallways and behind crooked trees: the gasp, the trembling release, and the unbearable shame that followed. Mehdi had long, strong hands, which he washed carefully and often. His fingernails were always clean and cut short, and a vintage gold watch adorned his right wrist. He had a respected medical practice, and his patients enjoyed his calm, professional manner and capable hands. He was known to be a good, pious man who took the poor and impoverished at a minimal fee, or even at no fee at all. His office and desk were of rosewood, and the rich smell of American cigarettes suffused the air.
Mehdi used his hands in an efficient and experienced manner. They prodded, touched, and felt patients dexterously, and threw light where previously there was only shadow and pain. But Mehdi’s hands had secrets and shadows of their own. They felt, caressed, and moved upon skin forbidden to their touch. They gave and took pleasure in terrified disguise. His body had mechanistic urges beyond his control. Yet deep beneath the fear and shame, in that part of him where there was only quiet and calm, he felt pure joy. He was as crystalline as the flawless diamond no one dare violate, in perfect synchrony with the truth of his primary self.
Mehdi believed that the wall he had put up between his public front and his inner atelier of sensual deviations was unscalable. He believed his secret was safe. But one day many years from now, at the age where men and women begin to think of peace, Mehdi’s secret will be discovered. The demons will take him to the mental asylum of Birsoukout in the Casablanca countryside, and the world will forget about him. But, dearest darling, there is no need to rush into that story, for now here he was, breathing in the golden flower dust of his childhood.
~
As Mehdi faded into the garden’s sunlight, the hosts and guests fell into the uneasy rhythm of family gatherings. Airs were mastered and conversations were honed to their cutting edge. Watches, shawls, and golden broaches were twirled expertly, and humid cigars were heated between palms. Driss, Leila’s brother, was heating one such cigar between such sweaty palms. At his side was the beautiful woman whose disruptive presence had rippled throughout the household. She was looking at the house with a strange expression in her eye that Driss mistakes for admiration.
“The house is all that is left of our family’s wealth.”
“The house is alive. It’s echoing your family’s sadness and secrets.”
“This family is cursed.”
“What kind of curse?”
“A curse on love. Love comes here to die.”
“What is love, really? Yearn instead for desire…”
“For our family, desire is nostalgia—a mysterious, aching need that can never be fulfilled. Love and desire come here for their burial.”
“If you don’t believe in curses, they will let you be.”
“Growing up here has made me want peace. Something I know I will have with you.”
Shawg smiled. Her black hair was twisted in a low chignon against her neck, and rings gleamed at her alabaster fingers. She was the kind of woman whose maturing femininity had managed to keep the usury of time at bay. Her breasts were full, and she had that heaviness of the hips that can be so moving in older women. She made men seem weak and vulnerable. Driss was completely under her spell—bemused by the depth in her eyes and her natural sensuality. She was his femme fatale, his childhood daydream, and his nightmare come to life. He knew he could forsake God and country for her, and yet he could never be sure of what she was thinking.
As can be expected in love stories like theirs, Shawg was bored. Seeing Driss in his family had definitely sealed their fate. Nevermore, nevermore, cawed the raven inside her. To be exact, “Shawg” was not even her real name. She had never liked her name. Do not say so, she was told by the women preening her for the men who would soon love her. Your name is beautiful, powerful. Your name is the name of the wife of the first man created by God. But she found it ugly, vulgar even, reminiscent of the brute sexual act, of fucking, “hwa” in Arabic. The wife of the primordial man, but oh how she hated that name and the destiny it would afford her.
So she chose the name “Shawg.” Shawg, the nostalgia and painfulness of desire, the decadence of craving and the poisonous gift of life itself...Today, Shawg no longer wanted her fiance, for she realized that she could only despise a man who settled for safety over excitement. And so it was that—during this brief moment of inner reckoning and as only beautiful and predatory women can do—she decided she must change her life and find another man. She turned from Driss, and her eyes fixed on Adam.
She looked at him long and hard. For reasons perhaps you will never understand, she saw something extraordinary in this broken man. He affected her in a way she did not think was possible. She saw his difference and suffering. S
he saw where he snapped and where his genius still survived. She thought an old thought: I could save him. In my hands, he could heal, he could even be great. She glowed and sizzled from this new perspective. She asked Driss:
“Who is that man over there, standing by himself?”
“That’s Adam Tair, my sister’s husband. He was a genius, a great intellectual. Something happened to him here. He didn’t amount to much. Pity...”
Shawg had grown up in a lower-middle-class household in a poor, industrial quarter of Casablanca. Her father had been a teacher and her mother a lowly clerk in a small textile unit down the street. She had enough education to believe in its importance and was hungry enough to understand the even greater value of money. She belonged to those families who tend to gradually fall into poverty and precariousness but who continue to dream that better days are right around the corner. At thirteen, she was already smarter, stronger, and more beautiful than most women in her neighborhood, than most people in the world. What had to happen happened. She became one of those women who take money in exchange of pleasure.
She walked the streets at night, let men fall at her feet, or bend her over a cold bed. She then gave her money to pimps, investors, and parents. She swallowed her pride and lowered her head. With time, she became a prized object of desire. She traveled North Africa and the Middle East, and her success was great. She had to admit that at times she had enjoyed being who she was, and she became cruel to others—just because she could. But now, at thirty-five, she was finally rich and free. After years of sacrifice and humbled soul, of keeping her mouth and her mind shut, she could finally choose for herself. Others had always chosen for her. Now, she decides for herself.
And today, she chooses him, Adam. This she decided as her skin gleamed in the light of day.
