The narrative opens with the words of a storyteller speaking to an audience gathered around him in a public square in Marrakesh, Morocco, in the 1950s. The storyteller-narrator evokes an unnamed elderly Moroccan character’s lined, scarred, pain-ridden face. Later revealed to be a woman, this female protagonist raised as a male lives out the end of his days secluded in the upper room of a large house, welcoming only the perfunctory visits of Malika, his family’s kindly old servant, bringing him food and mail. Avoiding any form of light, the protagonist likewise displays hypersensitivity in most of his sensorial organs: Noise disturbs him; his skin absorbs and reacts to everything in around him; his nose, that “of a blind man” (2), detects any smell. He whiles away his time preparing for death, which entails arranging his lengthy personal journal carrying his secrets.

Stooped with age and pain, he no longer has the dictatorial man’s gait that he acquired after taking over the household upon his father’s death. Though exhibiting signs of physical deterioration, he knows that ultimately the sense of deep melancholy that has pervaded his existence will devour him.