Alexandra Singer (15 page)

There was a struggle, but between whom exactly, Maia was unable to see. Her view was blocked by two large men who had come rushing through from the kitchen.

Yasser was shouting. “How can you go from here? I am too drunk to drive. And the buses have all stopped now. No more, no more. You must all stay the night here.” Mariam and the fat
wife both stood at the door to the kitchen, watching the scenario unfold with unabashed delight.

Maia ran for the door and opened it, as each member of the group filtered out.

Now Yasser was pleading with them. “Please, my friends do not leave.”

Stumbling down the collapsing staircase they found themselves staring at one another in the empty street. For a moment they waited, but by some miracle, they were not being chased. Maia spoke
first. She was furious and could not contain her anger a moment longer. “So Rupert, do you think he is interested in you?”

“Shut up, you bitch,” he said, and began to giggle. The street was empty, but like an apparition, a taxi appeared and they managed to persuade the driver to take them back to the
medina.

As the taxi began to move, they were all quiet. Looking back, Maia could see two men standing in the road, watching them go.

It was a clear morning when Maia awoke to find the Historian still gone. She steadily rose from the bed, wrapping a shawl about her shoulders. She passed Ina in the hallway,
“Has the Historian telephoned to let us know when he may be returning?”

Ina merely grunted at her and turned away.

“As helpful as always, Ina.” said Maia.

Ina turned and stared, her eyes flashing, but she remained silent.

Maia executed the Historian’s tasks, and spent more and more of her free time painting, convinced that the images she was portraying were bland, with none of the vivacity that she had
originally sought. She worried that the mediocre paintings she produced were replicating her state of mind. Maia was convinced that the images that she so studiously portrayed of the city and its
inhabitants were featureless, useless and interchangeable works which would never be appreciated. She found corners in which she was able to sit for hours and observe the people who passed by,
sketching the expressions upon the faces of young children, of merchants, and of the slippery entrails of slaughtered animals which lay sprawled across the ground, but still she felt that she
lacked a true insight into the lives of the people around her. She became convinced that life here was too impenetrable for an outsider to portray it as it genuinely was. She spent whole nights
painting, attempting to catch the vibrancy of colours and atmosphere.

In this way, her obsession with portraying the lives and position of women in the city grew, and she began to take photographs from a distance, but she was never able to get close enough to see
their faces. The Historian had been right. These women were devoted to the creation of spectacles, and she was finding it impossible to penetrate their façades. They were hard, and when she
looked at them, their bodies refused to offer themselves up for speculation. When she spoke to them, she found they kept their softer selves hidden.

Frustrated by her attempts to reach these women, Maia concentrated her efforts on the study of the inhabitant’s backgrounds. The glowing bright and earthy tones, the quartz pink and vivid
red pigments of natural earth, all the varying colours of the iron and wood stirred her. Against the mud coloured buildings, she used varying hues; the way the sun danced upon people and buildings
seemed to turn them blue and flashes of cobalt lit up the sky.

The sunlight was so strong that it cast dark shadows, but she did not want to use black. Black was too harsh; instead she found that indigo could make the scene take on a sinister effect.
Sometimes the effect was to make her subjects look as if they were hovering in the sunlight. In her art Maia sought to capture all the tension and ambiguity that she saw everywhere in the streets,
in the fraught relations between men and women. She painted absorbedly, trying to depict shapes and colours from varying viewpoints, with different degrees of clarity.

Starved of company, Maia found that the heat began to carve away all the self-consciousness that she had carried with her from London. She drifted from day to day, no longer striving to improve
nor monitoring her progress, losing herself in paint and sleep. In the evenings she returned to the bar at the Grand Tazi, but she did not wish to see those people again. She wanted to force all
thoughts of Armand from her mind, and after a while she believed that they had all left. She drank at the bar whilst Tariq prepared her more concoctions, and she wondered what Mahmoud desired from
her company, until one evening he told her.

“Will you paint for me? I hear you’re very good.”

Mahmoud was a jovial man, laughing immoderately at everyone and everything around him. It was impossible not to warm to him, and she enjoyed his presence.

“What would you like me to paint for you, Mahmoud?”

“I want paintings of all this!” He exulted in his empire; the hotel was his pride and joy.

“Of the hotel, you mean?”

“You are my guest; you would be doing a great favour for me. With your help, Maia, the hotel will be everywhere! It will feature in all the guidebooks. Tourists will flock here!”

“Like sheep?” Maia was unable to resist a slight laugh at his expense; his plans were so unrealistic. She knew that foreigners would never throng the long and dark, dusty corridors
of the Grand Tazi.

“No, no, not like sheep! Why do you say like sheep! My clients are not sheep!”

Maia was amused at Mahmoud’s use of English; he often spoke as if he were repeating some loved phrases he remembered from an old English textbook.

“What do you want me to paint?”

“I tell you what I like,” he said, leaning forward. “I like you to paint my clientele. Especially the women. Pretty, pretty women for the walls of the bar.”

“I don’t think that is going to lure in the foreigners you are hoping for, Mahmoud.”

Mahmoud slapped his thigh and laughed heartily. “Ah, you think they see too much female flesh at home, do you? Well, they haven’t seen our women, have they? You watch, they will love
it!” He lowered his voice and leaned even closer towards her, so that his lips were almost brushing her cheek. “I think you are too negative, Maia. I think you will not give things a
chance. You will not let things happen naturally. And this is the ethos of my hotel. To let things happen naturally!” he said, and sat back in triumph. “It is very popular now, this
country, no?”

“Very popular, Mahmoud. But perhaps the tourists will be expecting a different experience from the one they will find here.”

“What do you mean? This is very good experience.”

“I don’t know, Mahmoud.”

Suddenly he became very serious, “Your job is to paint, my job is to please my guests.” She saw then that Mahmoud did indeed care about his guests, for his hotel, for its very
reputation as the focal point for a certain sector of the city’s nightlife. Quietly he masked his true character. He was a sly man hiding behind a jovial façade. But he did care. Not
for money, but something else.

“Please, Maia. Everything is starting to fade away. There is competition now. Things are not the same, I need to keep them coming back. Will you help me?”

“Of course, Mahmoud. I will paint you something,” she relented under the pressure.

“I pay you!” he said. “I can give you only a little, but still I pay you. I am very honest.” Mahmoud stretched out his arms, to show her the extent of his sincerity.

Maia laughed at him.

“Do you not trust me?”

“I don’t trust anyone.”

“Oh, you are too harsh to your old friend!” said Mahmoud.

“We are not old friends.”

“But I am old!” shouted Mahmoud, and heartily he slapped her thigh.

Maia sighed, and smiled at him, but as he revealed to her the extent of his financial difficulties and the huge debts that he owed, as he complained to her about the extortionate cost of the
renovations and she observed his laziness in the sun, she became aware that his ambitions for the Grand Tazi would never come to fruition. But still, in the empty afternoons and evenings, the
atmosphere, the drinks, the people of the Grand Tazi drew her in.

Now when Maia visited, she often went directly upstairs to sit in the rooftop terrace café, where she had first come to meet the Historian. Up here, she relished her afternoons. She was
able to observe the Moroccan people rather than the familiar expatriates and tourists she met by the bar at the pool.

“My artist in residence!” Mahmoud would shout. When he came to watch her work, he stood behind her, clasping her shoulder, and his huge presence loomed and made her nervous. Maia
watched out for the crying woman who had smashed the glass on her first meeting with the Historian, but she never saw her again. Deprived of women to paint outside the hotel, Maia went back again
and again to the Grand Tazi.

“You know I want portraits! Real portraits,” Mahmoud boomed at her. “Who are you painting now? Paint her! No, paint her! You are too cut off, Maia. Your imagination is indeed
very vivid, but I want you to understand that you must paint my customers as they are.”

“You do not understand, Mahmoud. I am painting them exactly as they are. I can only paint them as I see them. Do you see the tired eyes, the pain, the laughter lines, the age spots? I
cannot paint people perfectly.”

He looked at her thoughtfully. “You are too honest, I think! People do not want to see those things.” But for once, he gave in. “Well I suppose that we must see something
different in them.”

Mahmoud wanted Maia to paint everyone as beautiful, the surroundings as glamorous. But Maia saw the dirt, the cracks in the walls, the mismatching colours and the character in the faces. And
still she found the women she painted in the café too open, too provocative. They were too self-aware. Instead she wanted to attempt to reach below the veneer of Marrakech and reveal the
skin of the women who lived underneath it.

She was becoming desperate to paint not just women but also the naked form of women. A woman’s body was constantly changing, dependent on the unremitting rhythms of nature. So she began to
paint herself, using the cracked mirror in the bathroom. At first she was nervous and tentative, but then as she felt her curves she relaxed. She mixed the colours of flesh tone for her skin; she
factored in the shades where the rays of sunlight fell in through the shuttered windows against the afternoon heat and made her skin translucent. Faithfully she illustrated the shadows, the curve
of her stomach and the shape of her thighs.

Only one particular painting that took her weeks to complete managed to please her. She left the face blank because she felt that the faceless woman gazed back at her, turning her back on the
male viewer. She thought that by not painting her features, she might be able to escape the eyes of men.

As the Historian stayed away from the house, the apprehension she felt at his presence dissolved. But her comfort did not last long. By now, painting had totally consumed her. She became used to
living alone, attempting to develop her own understanding of life, and resenting any intrusions upon her solitude. She was unable to sleep at night, suffering flashes of nocturnal brilliance that
lasted for hours. When she tried to sleep she suffered a now familiar, terrible groaning before dawn. When she would reawaken in the afternoons she was unable to see what had so inspired her in the
night. Maia considered when she looked at her nude self in the mirror that perhaps by depicting her naked body, she was only further imprisoning herself. Surely viewers of this painting would be
viewing her only through the lascivious eyes of men?

Maia did not want to reveal the facial features of the painted woman; it was a feeling she could not articulate but she wanted to leave the faces of all her women blank. A man would always
project his own fantasies onto the feminine, regardless of the woman’s identity. She had the idea that this technique would be somehow less voyeuristic. However, when she painted
Mahmoud’s customers, she did not shy from the faithful representation of their faces.

In the late afternoons, when a cool breeze was beginning to take the edge off the heat, Maia wandered the streets. One evening, at the end of an alley on the edge of the medina, she stepped into
a jewellery shop. It was a dark place selling religious artefacts, and it was swathed from floor to ceiling in cedar and thuya wood, cartouches and symbols smothering the walls. It was a cavernous
bazaar, filled with antiques of obvious falsity, with battered copper pots and sabres encrusted with semi-precious stones hanging along the back wall. The old man at the counter watched her,
sitting silently upon his stool. He was a tall, thin man with a short beard and a mournful face, dressed in a sharply cut suit of olive tweed which had become somewhat shabby with age; the elbows
were patched up but his shirt beneath was starched and white. The entire outfit lent him the reassuring air of a European intellectual. His only flaw was his cracked, beige teeth. He had evidently
profited from the fascination foreigners had with the town. She looked around, admiring the beauty of the craftwork. He followed her around the shop.

“They are all antiques, my dear.”

“I doubt it,” Maia smiled drily. She looked around the shop. A necklace caught her attention. The silver chain led down to a carved eye.

Immediately the owner appeared at her side. “The Hand of Fatima,” he whispered, fastening it around her neck. “I am happy you didn’t choose gold.”

“Why, what does it matter?”

“Because we Berbers believe gold to be the source of all evil.”

“I am not a Berber.” Maia laughed as she handed him the money for the necklace.

“Why are you laughing, girl?”

“Because you say that you don’t like gold, and yet you are happy to take mine.”

The old man looked her straight in the eye. “I believe, daughter, that you already have
al’ayn
upon you.”