Mac's Problem

  It hurts to think this when I’m so far from my past and my city, but sitting here with Africa lying before me, at least this notebook and the act of setting down words beyond the safety of my study walls allow me to feel that something is restoring that pure substance to me, bringing me closer to the familiar things I’ve now lost, but which are perhaps recoverable beneath today’s strangely ancient light, the light which, they say, always falls on these straits.

  51

  I had heard people talk about the voices of Marrakech, but had no idea what was so special about them. Perhaps they’re different from all the other voices in the world, I thought as I sat down here, outside this bar, from which you can observe everything going on in Jemaa el-Fnaa, the square where, for centuries, and still today, storytelling is actively cultivated, and you can hear all kinds of stories told out loud, in the midst of all the haggling and the hubbub, the blinding North African light, and the faded awnings. On the square I can see storytellers, Berber musicians, and snake charmers. I realize that no one ever talks about the color of voices, but Marrakech is the perfect place to do so. A voice the color of Petrarch’s Siena, a voice the color of a Hindu fakir’s robes, the deep, dark voice of New Orleans. It was no surprise, then, that when the Moroccan waiter came over to me, I heard in his voice the sonorous depths of the muezzins when they issue the call to prayer from the minarets.

  Then a lunatic suddenly appeared, his skin dark against his white djellaba. And I focused all my attention on him and his weightless voice. I had never seen such violent gestures: they seemed to reproduce, in the faltering air, a whole life story, doubtless his. The autobiography of a sad, solitary tree trunk standing like a mast in the middle of this huge square. I assumed that he spoke only about himself, about his solitary life and the days when he loved adventures and traveled to strange lands, and, on his wanderings, picked up fragments of stories from other fellow solitaries, and from those scraps pieced together an invented memoir. A very skeletal one, which, with the skill of a mime artiste, he could sell every day like a dream to an ever-faithful public, here in Jemaa el-Fnaa. I imagine him selling the partial story of his life, a trajectory that could be reduced to a few clamorous gestures and the acoustic, rhythmic tones of a voice the color of the white tailcoat worn by a black jazz musician in Chicago.

  52

  I imagined that as I fled to the south of Tunis, among the tall palm trees of the oasis of Douz, I enlisted in the Foreign Legion and went on to see images that came from my oldest memories of action movies, or adventure books set in Africa — as if they were being projected on to the white dunes of the Grand Erg Oriental. I conjured memories of the sun glinting on the enemy’s swords, for example. And later, in the luminous desert night, I saw myself in the company of legionnaires and friendly Bedouins and a prisoner called Boj. And I watched this, with my veteran soldier’s eyes, as my identity softly, slowly, marvelously dissolved into anonymity. A luminous night after the sandstorm that battered us, a profoundly still night turned in on itself. Beside me, the prisoner Boj keeps endlessly summoning up stories and the voices of all kinds of characters, who, as they recount episodes from their lives, parade past me as if they were the peaceful nomads of a slow desert caravan. Tonight, to the south of Tunis, among the tall palm trees of the oasis of Douz, I have the tender, but also bitter sense that I am I, but that I’m also Boj and all the members of that slow caravan of stories told by anonymous voices and of anonymous fates, which all seems to confirm that certain stories appear in our lives, and the path they follow ends up merging with our own.

  53

  When it came to bidding farewell to the kind, friendly inhabitants of this village near the ruins of Berenice, something happened that was very similar to Robert Louis Stevenson in his account of saying goodbye to the inhabitants of one of the Gilbert Islands, where he disembarked on his way from Honolulu en route to Apia in Samoa.

  I had spent several days at Berenice, living alongside the fishermen and recounting to them, in a considerable variety of voices, the most important events of my life, or — what amounts to the same thing — the stories I’d heard others tell and which, during my travels, I’d gradually appropriated. When the time came to say farewell, having embraced all those dear people, I was obliged, because there was no wind, to wait for a few hours in the small port. During that time, the islanders remained hidden behind the trees and gave no sign of life, because we had already said our farewells.

  54

  I am one and many and yet I do not know who I am. I don’t recognize this voice, I only know that I passed through Aden and organized a caravan of tireless, anonymous voices that I led to the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait. And I only know that yesterday, I set off again, retracing my steps from the other day. Beyond the devastated hills lay darkness and dust. From the road, I saw my own room with the light on. The faded light from the small window, next to which I’ve spent some hours writing. There is nothing quite like walking. Things happen, and sometimes there are coincidences and chance events you could die laughing about, and then there are coincidences and chance events you die as a result of. You get the feeling that, the more we travel the earth and plow it in every sense of the word, the more bound we become to the ghost of the familiar, which we hope one day to recover, because, in truth, that is the only thing we can truly claim to be ours. A glimpse of some unremarkable piece of writing, of a world we’d forgotten we had written. Along the way, you might recall or stumble over something you’d forgotten. For example, I’ve just remembered those Cherry Cokes.

  * * *

  * There, in that once fortunate land of Arabia where it might just be possible to trace the origins of the story, the ventriloquist — as my neighbor recounts in the final lines of Walter’s Problem — practices as a storyteller, fulfilling his dream of traveling toward the world’s first story, the original story, the very first story: “I live near Saba four leagues from the city of Sana’a, where each night I go to tell stories to people who are unswervingly respectful and loyal — the ideal audience. The Europeans no longer listen to stories told aloud. They become restless, or they fall asleep. But here, close to Saba, everyone who comes and listens stays to hear me out. I tell story after story to people who, armed with the janbiya — the dagger symbolizing their fighting spirit — gather around me each day in warm, welcoming semicircles and give me their undivided attention. There are days when, as I tell my stories, I feel as if I were creating the world.”

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