She reaches the area where fabrics and argan oil are sold and decides to buy a hijab. In one of the stores she enters, countertop figures without breasts or facial features dominate the otherwise plain interior: half-finished mannequins wearing colorful headscarves.

She wants a black hijab. “You’re married to a Muslim,” says the man. It’s a statement not a question. “I’m a Berber,” he adds. She doesn’t answer, just tries to put on the hijab standing in front of the Berber, who by now has noticed her ear. The man jokes with a soap vendor across the street; she can’t work out how to wear the hijab and leaves the store without haggling over the price.

Back in the hotel, she mulls over how to fictionalize what has happened. She wants to leave an explanation, a trace of her process. But why? Aren’t the words themselves enough? She finds it difficult to hold her pencil, as if, instead of her hand, it’s the paw hanging from her ear that is attempting to write. It’s all happening too quickly.

That night, looking out over the bay, she’s surprised at how unmoved she is by the sight of the distant lights on the other shore, crystal clear after the fury of the storm. She feels nothing, not even the fear that might be expected given the uncertainty of the coming days or months. She has no idea how long her transformation will last. But what most astonishes her is that, even when she thinks about the people closest to her, it’s as though they belong in the memory of another person.

4

She wakes at eleven the following morning and notes that her ear feels heavy and painful; when she moves, she hears a squeaking noise. Repulsion is immediately displaced by the absolute precision of the things around her, which seem shinier than before and have a coarse, mobile texture that made her think they were covered in a layer of multicolored insects. The chair smells different from the tapestries on the wall. She identifies: dust, cat hair, ebony, tamarisk, dandruff, opium, and strychnine.