Calle del Perdón

The street of Forgiveness is a small street in Marrakech and it is in it where the narrator of this story, Hayat ("life", in Arabic) grows. The neighborhood is poor and only meanness thrives, as if it were a sordid jungle, something that Hayat suffers in the first person: everyone makes poisoned comments about her blond hair, her mother does not hide her shame and her father always looks at her with a devilish gesture. Although all these difficulties should have taken their toll on this girl, life ends up being indestructible. Hayat runs away from home and meets Mamyta, the kingdom's most important oriental dancer, a kind of geisha from Marrakech. A woman so denigrated as she is admired that she is supposedly free in a country anchored in taboo and prohibition and that she is present in all religious festivals and celebrations, but also in the most unknown popular cabarets. Together with her, Hayat discovers that with her singing and dancing she can make melancholy disappear, drive men crazy, impose grace on hostility and, ultimately, forge a destiny of her own.