“The secret was there, in those pages, woven out of syllables and images.” 

In the first chapter of the novel, the storyteller/narrator, having provided his audience with details about the melancholic protagonist’s final days, evokes the journal in which the latter deemed it necessary—following the lineage of an Egyptian poet—to record his life and death. Focusing on the journal’s building blocks—the syllables and images of the words that compose it—the storyteller asserts that the secret of Ahmed’s life lies therein.

“The father had no luck. He was convinced that some distant, heavy curse weighed on his life: out of seven births, he had had seven daughters. The house was occupied by ten women—the seven daughters, the mother, Aunt Aysha, and Malika, the old servant woman. The curse was spread over time. The father thought that one daughter would have been enough. Seven was too many; tragic, even.” 

Here, the narrator expresses lament surrounding Ahmed’s father’s situation. Having sired only girls and living solely with his wife, her sister, and their family servant, he is surrounded by women, a situation that in the Moroccan society of his time is considered humiliating and emasculating. This passage thus demonstrates the misogynist views of early-20th-century Maghreb culture.

“I saw some words slowly rise and hit the damp ceiling. There they melted in contact with the stone and fell back on my face as drops of water. It amused me. The ceiling was like a writing table.” 

For the first time in the narrative, the storyteller reads directly from Ahmed’s journal. In this passage, the protagonist speaks of a childhood visit to the female hammam, where he sits in boredom as his mother and her cohort engage in animated chatter. Not only does his mention of visible, traveling words serve as an example of magical realism, but it also underscores the primacy of language in Ahmed’s life and in the novel.