A secret in the wind.

• Author: Sanchez, Alberto Ruy
• Position: From Mogador: The Nantes of the Air - Book Review

One could almost see the dryness in the air. That afternoon on the Barbary Coast, autumn announced itself in the wind over the walled city of Mogador. Its unseen surges, long and dry, making their way through the reefs like frenzied snakes, wrestling from the scoured stones the sound of something being torn.

And, as happened every year when the season announced itself in this fashion, the birds of the port appeared to answer that sound with caws of alarm. The next morning, the most vulnerable of the birds migrated. That morning the small Moon Tail Gulls, the Sea Turkeys, the Red Crows, the Chilly Storks, and the Dwarf Fowl--those devoured by fish--flew in ever widening circles around the small boats and vanished. The boats continued knocking their hulls slowly against the dock pilings as the birds disappeared over the horizon, reappeared for an instant, hurriedly approached, then vanished once again.

The city was falling irresistibly before the new climate--cruel bird with cold, transparent feather--as Farina at her window heard the wind between the rocks, felt the dryness of the air on her lips, and let her eyes accompany the birds in their indecisive flight.

But Fatma's gaze, obstinate and removed, was a target in flight for thousands of rumors. It was pierced by the arrows of a small city's populace who saw in her fixity the fluttering form of an enigma: a possible secret whose shadow troubled the line of the horizon.

While a hundred rumors crisscrossed the city, the afternoon wind removed the sediments of salt deposited oil the wall over the course of the year, lifting large, delicate white leaves off the stone. The moment the leaves of salt were loosened from the wall, the children ran to catch them and then returned home, walking slowly with the fragile sheets in their hands. The sheets of salt never arrived, for the same wind that brought them would snatch them away, and as it sent them flying, reduced them to a dust so free as to be indistinguishable from the air itself.

Fatma saw the children sink their hands in the stone and gently lift several lengths of Free, spire cloth, which in the sun and from her window seemed splashed with shining stitches. These...