While tourists and art lovers walk through the rooms of the Prado Museum with their eyes flitting between sumptuous baroque paintings and unusual medieval frescoes, admiring the slender bodies of the neoclassical sculptures or appreciating the vessels and chalices that make up the treasures of ancient monarchs, the omnipresent gaze of Mohamed el Morabet (Al Hoceima, 42 years old) scrutinizes them, the visitors. Stationed in the art gallery in morning or afternoon shifts, the guard rotates between rooms in unison with the rest of his dozens of colleagues, exposed at each step to a new, changing wonder.
Attentive to the flashes that disband, the hands that lengthen and the voices that are raised, El Morabet takes advantage of the mental space that his work gives him – despite everything, silent – to fill his head and “give shape” to ideas that, in waves, he transfers to the paper installed in his house, almost always “very early in the morning” before putting on his uniform, “because at night I arrive very tired.” From this work parallel to his work with payroll, echoes in the snow (Galaxia Gutenberg), the third novel of an increasingly established career as a writer, where he narrates with a poetic voice the heartbreaking story of a day in the life of a pregnant woman who takes refuge in a cabin lost in the middle of an inhospitable nature.
Of all the museum’s rooms, El Morabet chooses the 19th century painting rooms to take the portraits that accompany this text. Praise the majesty of El Cid, the Atlas lion portrayed in 1879 by Rosa Bonheur, and is placed next to the Old man naked in the sun by Fortuny, a luminous oil painting from around 1871 inspired by the Saint Andrew Ribera tenebrist, from the Baroque period and hanging next to it for comparison. “It’s an endearing image, and I see myself a little like that,” he says of that exultant old man with whom he briefly poses after a couple of guards, who are on duty, greet him and congratulate him on the launch of his book. “I think most of my classmates have just found out that I am a writer with this third novel,” he will say later. “We have a WhatsApp group of 500 people where we change shifts, and this time I decided to publish it there, because I felt like it,” he smiles.
Psen a day invisibility which he enjoyed until now in his work environment, with his second novel, The winter of the goldfinches (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2022), won the Málaga Prize; and with the first, An abandoned lot (Sitara, 2018), was part of a choral cover by Babelia around “hybrid literature”, that created by immigrants. Morabet, who ended up in Spain to study his degree, is originally from the Moroccan Rif. “Where I come from, the natural thing is to finish my studies in Spain, normally in Granada, but I came to Madrid because I knew that I would not be able to work in Granada; I had no money, just enough to spend three or four months,” he reviews. His intuition was confirmed to be good and, since his arrival in the capital, his jobs continued: as a mediator in social services, in the hospitality industry or as a teleoperator, a position “where I learned to vocalize better,” as he now states in perfect Spanish.
In his native Al Hoceima, “a young city, from a century ago, where Rabat is further away than Granada”, everyone has access to Spanish television, so that the language floats in the air and there are many who know it. But El Morabet’s mother tongues are Arabic and, mainly, Berber (Amazigh), which he speaks although he does not know how to read, although lately he has been encouraged to translate some texts with the help of his brother. In addition to being an occasional translator, especially from Arabic, El Morabet was accumulating experience in the profession of writing as a political analyst on Maghreb issues, first in the magazine Morocco 21st century (where he did “everything”, from interviews to cooking recipes) and, when it closed, alternating different media. “At one point I got tired of writing about foreign policy, I wanted to write fiction, and around 2015 or 2016 I already had a novel in the drawer, but it took three years to be published,” he recalls.
Love from reading
The literature bug grew through reading. Since he almost always reads in Spanish, writing in his adopted language was in practice a “natural process.” “I had already been living in Spain for 15 years, and if I had wanted to write in Arabic I would have had to make a foray into the Moroccan publishing world, which I see as very distant,” he points out. “In addition, as Joan Margarit says, one becomes strong in the language in which one reads poetry. And it was urgent for me to write in Spanish. In fact, now I would not see myself capable of writing in Arabic or Amazigh, or even translating into those languages.” While the readings and work were going on, the opportunity arose to join the Prado as a security guard through an opposition. The salary, the hours and the stability seemed attractive to him and to this was added, once inside, the ability to spend time in an environment conducive to inspiration, a secluded cosmos where he has also forged friendships such as that of the playwright Juan Mayorga, whom he met under the gaze of the Christ of the Noli and Tangere de Correggio.
The germ of his previous novel, The winter of the goldfincheswas created specifically inside the museum. “I start with the phrase ‘One foot after the other’, which is a phrase that occurred to me in a room where I was taking steps and I said to myself: ‘Why don’t I start like this?’ That the character is taking steps and counting them, because I count them when I’m bored in the museum,” he details. “That day, I endured the euphoria until I got home and wrote that beginning almost at once at night. That’s when I thought: ‘I now have a voice; I now have a novel.’ The story of echoes in the snowalso meditated between walks and works of art, does not, however, have a direct correlation with the Prado. Because it doesn’t have, it doesn’t even have to do with El Morabet himself, who puts himself in the shoes of a woman in the final stretch of her pregnancy. It is a hard and dense story, where nature acquires a tacit role, and in which, from a lyrical perspective, a political demand is projected that we will not reveal.
Between tourists and paintings, the author is already thinking about what will be his next creation. “I hope to be able to sit down and collect my thoughts after Christmas,” he says. Meanwhile, he will continue taking one step after another.
