The Sand Child

With the storyteller having disappeared nearly nine months previously, his listeners have dispersed. Since then, Marrakesh’s young urban planners, eager to modernize the city, have emptied the town square of its historic local color to construct a fountain emitting jets of water to the mechanized accompaniment of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

Eventually the storyteller’s dead body was found on the banks of a dried-up spring, his stiffened hands clutching Ahmed/Zahra’s journal to his breast. Having donated his body to the national medical school, the police burned the storyteller’s clothes, along with the journal. Despite the “official” story’s death, the sentiment that tales must be told until their dénouement is shared by Salem, Amar, and Fatuma, three elderly locals who have been arranging meetings with the storyteller’s followers in a nearby café.

Salem, the son of a Senegalese slave, first offers to continue the story, claiming that, having lived and worked in a big house like Ahmed’s, he is best suited to recount the tale. He conjectures that the brutal Abbas repeatedly handcuffed Lalla Zahra and sodomized her, robbing her of her identity as the dancing Princess of Love and relegating her to a cage from which, bearded, crying, and henceforth silent, she earned Abbas and his mother a great deal of money as the circus’s object of disgusted curiosity.