Translating Nouzha Fassi Fihri's La Baroudeuse: A Case Study in ...

eturn. Most of them only knew of him through hearsay. Their fathers or members
of their families had told them about the unexplainable departure of El Amine's
grandson and of the preceding divorce. His uncle, Moulay Larbi, had not chosen
to clarify the situation.
Moulay Ali walked up and down the sloping streets strewn with rubbish.
"These people of Fez," he said to himself. "They sweep their houses until
they wear the broom down to the stick, but they aren't bothered in the least by the
piles of trash polluting the air of the city."
He remembered that when he was young, it took weeks and sometimes
months for them to decide to clean the streets and remove the dead animal
carcasses. When the odor of rotting cadavers became unbearable, the authorities
cleaned it up. To do this, they would open floodgates in the high parts of the city
and water would surge down, sweeping away everything in its path. He and his
friends would hang onto a precarious wooden beam, expecting at any moment to
fall into the roiling water, or they would climb a wall to escape the flood, scraping
their hands on bare rock. From their perch, they saw the turbid water carry away
the trash of the city. They also saw, and especially heard, frantic, living animals, a
cat meowing in distress, a howling dog, rats scuttling up drainpipes, knocked half-
senseless by the water that had surprised the city in its everyday carelessness.
Moulay Ali stopped at each sanctuary, visited each mausoleum, and said a
short prayer at each house of worship built in honor of the local saint. He saw the
city as a large tomb where death rested like a hecatomb, where the last musty
odors of a long celebration were fading away, a city of memories in which each
monument and building was a silent witness to the long, winding march of
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