The images rolled on, too jumpy for my taste. Driss was seated at the place of honor in the middle of the garden. He was wearing traditional garb and emanating an air of self-importance out of keeping with his character. He was holding his hands out in a dramatic way. Each of us then presented ourselves in front of him and congratulated him on his journey by loudly pronouncing his new title of haji and then kissing both sides of his hands. Ghita did the same and then seized the opportunity to slip in a humble request: “What about me, haji? When will you send me to see the Prophet’s grave?”
“Soon, soon,” Driss replied in a lordly tone. “I won’t forget you.”
All this unfolded under the brightness of a. . lune de plomb. The image was fleeting but its materiality left not a shadow of a doubt in the dreamer’s mind.
Click click. The master of visions proceeded to the next slide. The whole gathering was seized with hysterical laughter. The reason? Me, sitting on a table with a watani on my head, reciting in an affected manner the nursery rhyme I had been taught by my brother Si Mohammed:
Tonio and Cabeza
And their accomplice, the bald one
Surrounded by woods. .
Click click. A bunch of us were shaking the branches of a tree. Heavy golden fruit fell down. I tried to bite into one, and my teeth encountered nothing but metal.
Click click. Ghita dashed toward the corner where the food was being prepared, shouting, “I smell something burning. What is that cook up to? May fever strike her down!”
Click Click. The khatib who had been murdered in front of our house was there, as if he’d been invited, and he addressed us: “I have brought you a sugarloaf and some good Meknes mint.”
Click click and knock knock. Someone knocked at the door of the garden. A commotion stirred outside, and Ben Youssef himself came in, flanked by two rows of dignitaries. His face looked exactly like it had on the moon. He stepped forward and we rushed over to kiss his hand. He took his seat at the place of honor and leaned over to Driss, asking him with a lisp: “Lithen up and tell me vere have I come from?”
“From Madame Cascar, Sidi, and Moulay.”
Ben Youssef broke into heartfelt laughter, and we joined in. My chuckle rose above all the others.
It was the laughter that woke me up in a start. Alas, the only thing I’d savored at the zerda were the enticing smells in the air.
THE SUN HAD risen on our city, which was in the grips of an altogether different dream. Dispatched by Ghita to buy some fritters — she made up for dinner by preparing us a kingly breakfast — I found everyone out on the street. People kept stopping — trying to outdo one another with eloquent greetings — to reminisce and delight in the vision they’d witnessed the previous night. Their faces were beaming, their breasts filled with a newfound pride. There was a crowd in front of the fritter vendor. Ghita hadn’t been the only one to have such an idea. I had to elbow my way through a little and stay alert so I wouldn’t miss my turn, while trying not to forget the orders I’d been given. I was to ask for a kilo of regular-size fritters, half a kilo of smaller ones, and three kilos of the ones glazed with eggs. It was all getting muddled up in my head when two kids approached the crowd and announced to whoever could hear: “Buy Ben Youssef on the moon!”
I thought they were talking about a newspaper that related the story. Prompted by curiosity, I foolishly gave up my place in the queue so as to get a closer look. Other dupes did the same. We then discovered what all the fuss was about, the object clearly spoke for itself.
SPEND APPROXIMATELY A minute looking closely at the three white dots at the center of the print. Then turn your gaze to a wall or even lift your eyes toward the sky, and if you look hard enough you will see His Majesty the Sultan.
All of the effigies sold out in the blink of an eye. I managed to secure one and immediately set myself to the task. The results were undeniable. Lifting my eyes to the sky, I was certain that the image I’d had so much trouble discerning the previous night exactly matched the descriptions of the face that the others had convinced me had been there all along. Any lingering doubts I might have entertained were definitely brushed aside. The scientific approach I had acquired at school had been useful after all. As far as I was concerned, Ben Youssef’s appearance on the moon was now a proven fact.
ABSORBED BY THESE scholarly experiments, I found myself pushed to the back of the queue and was obliged to cool my heels, while I was increasingly tortured by the enticing smell and sight of the crispy fritters that the vendor was stacking one after the other on a bunch of palm fronds that had been tied together.
Once back at the house, of the two trophies I was brandishing, the most popular by far — against my expectations — were the fritters. The familial atmosphere had cooled down. The adults thought only of stuffing themselves. Only my little sisters deigned to dart a glance at what I deemed the biggest prize, and out of sheer goodwill they consented to take part in the experiment, whose clear results had turned me into a believer.
The conversation that took place after the meal clarified why the family mood had shifted. I was stunned to learn that the radio, which they had tuned into early in the morning, hadn’t breathed a word about the miracle that the whole of Fez had witnessed the previous night. While one could overlook the fact that Rabat and Tangiers hadn’t said anything, the fact that the event hadn’t been reported by Cairo, Moscow, the BBC, Prague, or Voice of America had shocked us to the very foundations of our being. Had the entire world turned a blind eye to our future and the eloquent manifestations of our faith? Had they turned a deaf ear to the widely attested messages delivered by the sky? The same blackout extended to the official press. The morning papers that Si Mohammed had bought were still spouting the usual bile in regard to our fedayeen and the headlines glorified the deeds of the protectorate: a new road had been built, a dock had been enlarged, a free clinic opened, ten new police stations, a shantytown had been razed, free sacks of flour had been handed out to the needy, caids had been rewarded for their loyal service. Who could top that? We only found an allusion to the events that had so radically turned our lives upside down buried deep in the back pages. There was a humor column with a heading that read “A Race of Lunatics,” where the journalist, who’d only signed the piece with his initials — the coward! — addressed the issue in the following manner:
The ungrateful opponents of France’s civilizing mission have attempted to deceive their fellow citizens by propagating the preposterous idea that the old sultan, who was legitimately deposed — thanks to widespread support across the country and the efforts of its elite allied to our cause — made an appearance, hold on to your seats, on the moon! It seems this tactic of psychological manipulation, which these agitators learned from their puppet masters in Moscow, had an impact on some uncultivated, simpleminded souls. Instead of helping these people gain insight into the virtues of reason, which we brought into this country, the agents of this pointless and narrow-minded nationalism want to make even bigger fools out of them by pushing them into the arms of a collective hallucination, thereby transforming them into a race of lunatics. What a dirty trick! In light of this, it’s difficult not to be swayed by the argument put forward by one of our illustrious administrators (White Urbanite, no need to give him a name) who had once said in his time: “We’ll get nothing out of these Arabs so long as they write from right to left and piss sitting down.”