The Arch and the Butterfly (14 page)

When he left prison Ahmad spent three years lost, like all prisoners who are stripped of the best years of their life. He opened an office to practise law which was neither a great success nor an abject failure. At the same time he exploited some land he had inherited from his father in Marrakech. He used the plots of land to establish a construction company that expanded amazingly fast. He renovated his father’s house in the old city, spending a great deal of money and time to transform it into the house of his dreams, the way he had imagined it since his childhood.

As soon as the house was at its most splendid and had become the weekly meeting place for our group, one of the city’s big-shots developed a taste for it and devised a number of reasons why Ahmad should sell it to him, either by force or voluntarily. He put pressure on Ahmad through his business acquaintances and his friends, using incitement and intimidation, as well as suggestions of attractive partnerships. He involved foreigners and people with power in these manoeuvres. Ahmad, who had never been scared of such underhand dealings, held out, sticking to his rights, manoeuvring and delaying, promising and temporising.

One day he went to the powerful man and said to him, ‘I won’t sell you the house even if you return to your mother’s womb.’

‘I’m not buying it for myself,’ the strong man replied.

‘Even if you were buying it for the Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him, I won’t sell it!’

‘Do you know that we have porn films that were shot in this house?’

‘You have nothing of the sort. No porn film has been shot in my house, as you pretend. As for pornography, say what you want and don’t hold back.’

‘
We
filmed it!’

‘You?’ asked Ahmad.

‘Yes, us. Through special means,’ he confirmed.

‘What did you think of our arses while undertaking this noble mission?’ asked Ahmad.

‘It was a mixed bag,’ he said, laughing, and then left.

When Ahmad returned from this strange meeting, he said to us in all seriousness that he would donate the house as an endowment for the Marxist-Leninists of Morocco and their descendants, from one generation to the other until doomsday.

I said, ‘The Sharia does not permit endowing a
habous
for the benefit of infidels and heretics. It would be better to assign it to us.’

He replied sarcastically, ‘That way we would guarantee its loss, sooner or later!’

‘Why would we lose it?’ I asked.

‘Tell me the case we’ve won so far.’

I replied, absent-minded, ‘We probably saved our souls.’

‘Well, say then that we won nothing but the wind!’

We laughed a lot, and Ahmad Majd remembered his father, who had died before seeing his son freed from prison. He said that the house was his way of asking for God’s mercy on his father’s soul. Then he said, as if continuing a previous conversation, ‘All the money in the world cannot bring back the lost years of our lives. Years are not sold in big or small markets. Such deceit! When I think about the years that were robbed from us, simply because one of us had forgotten a stupid book by Lenin in his luggage. Nowadays, terrorists in sleeper cells, with their belts and their explosives, spend only a few months in prison, during which time they enjoy multiple conjugal visits. It’s enough to drive one crazy!’

I said in consolation, ‘And all for the sake of Marrakechist-Leninism, we can’t even say for the sake of God!’

Ever since the old house was renovated, Marrakech became the city of our dreams the way Casablanca had been the city of our awakening. In the former we encountered fleeting pleasures and a cover to hide under. It put miles between us and the facts all around us. In the latter we encountered numerous probabilities and moments of illumination that helped us understand, in the blink of an eye, how things happened, before we lost the thread again and became unable to understand why or how they happened.

I got used to spending weekends in that house, and Ibrahim al-Khayati joined us at times. He did not spend the night there because he felt that old houses resembled tombs and he was afraid to sleep in a tomb.

The upper floor of the house was occupied by Ahmad’s sister, who had devoted herself to serving her brother before, during and after his imprisonment. She was a woman whose feelings had been purified by time and who had become a source of serenity. As soon as you met her, her embrace and smile erased any trace of the world’s claws, which might have touched you recently or long ago. She spoke laconically, one hand resting on the other, staring at you with two large black eyes, and you immediately felt sorry for those who did not know her. She was fifteen years older than her brother Ahmad, but she addressed him as ‘my dear’, as if he were older than her. She did it out of affection for him and, as she used to say, in consideration for him, because he was the only brother among seven sisters. Her name was Ghaliya, but among us, for our families, our lawyers and our rights groups, she was known as ‘Mother Ghaliya’. She had acquired the name for the many times she had stood at the gates of courthouses and prisons, for all that she endured on the roads and in trains and waiting-rooms, until she became one of those miracle women who, due to arbitrary detentions, were cast into the furnace of a world they never suspected existed. They then domesticated it until it became a fluffy cat playing at their feet. Because this was how she was, Ahmad would say, ‘She’s
al-ghaliya
, the precious one, neither selling nor buying.’ I think she liked the phrase which was taken from Al-Bidaoui’s
’aytah
. Whenever anyone joked with her about it, she blushed.

Ghaliya lived peacefully in the house until we arrived. She would then supervise the business of the kitchen, and cook so many dishes it seemed it was the last meal of our lives. Afterwards, she would retreat upstairs or go to visit one of her sisters, depending on the evening’s mood. At age sixty-five she did not appear to have totally despaired of trying her luck at building a home of her own. She did not seem to regret anything and lived her life believing that, in any case, only the best would happen to her. If Ahmad married and had children, she would devote her life to raising them, and this would be the best that could happen to her.

Ahmad, though, only ever got as far as the first few pages of his love stories, just like the books he read. We, on the other hand, watched every affair intensely fearful that a woman would appear at the house, thereby causing us to lose it, or even lose Marrakech completely. Whenever we joked with Ahmad about this, he claimed that the house was among the few liberated areas in a city that rich French people had reoccupied without colonisation or a protectorate.

Marrakech had, in fact, literally and figuratively lost its authenticity over the last ten years. Property prices shot sky-high; the old houses, the
riyadhs
and the hotels were lost to their original owners. An earthquake shook the city, wiping away historic lanes, alleyways and neighbourhoods, for palaces, restaurants, residences and guesthouses to sprout in their place. A property war broke out among the new owners, pushing them to compete in building amazing edifices suitable for their exotic dreams. They pulled ceilings, doors and mosaics from here and there, spreading fever in the joints of the old houses, which had to endure the sawing, chopping and extracting of their parts, which were then aggressively transplanted in palaces and
riyadhs
that remained hermetically closed to the city’s clandestine nights. The palaces mixed architectural styles that had no connection with Marrakech. These styles and forms were imported by the newcomers, collected during their trips and from films and paintings discovered in India, Turkey, Iran, Mongolia, China, Yemen and Zanzibar. In this jumble, for which they received official permits as a way to restore the memory of the city, that memory was totally and permanently obliterated.

At the heart of this new style, the wealthy piled up the
objets d’art
they had collected all over the world: glassware, mosaics, carvings, vessels, rugs, musical instruments and even columns, marble and pottery from archaeological sites across the globe. Had all this been subjected to an investigation, it would have been the largest collection of stolen memory. The external layout of the city remained the way it had been, consisting of alleys and lanes bearing the names of the city’s saints, scholars and tribes. A secret city sprang up in its midst, selling the one thousand and one nights packaged in size and quantity to order. Marrakech disappeared and another Marrakech took its place that hid the loss.

Marrakech lived, grew, built and expanded; it attracted millions of tourists and hundreds of hotels, restaurants and nightclubs. It ate, drank, sold, bought and danced until the dawn call to prayer was heard from the Koutoubia. Everyone found their needs met in the revival; simple people found their subsistence, property tycoons found the fortune they dreamed of and white-slave traders found their clients. We too found our needs in a city years younger than us that accepted us and gave us protection and illusions of safety.

I found in Marrakech the elements that helped me quickly cover the distance between things, a significant achievement for someone like me who needed to exert a superhuman effort, like rowing against the current, to move from one condition to another. In Marrakech, I could put myself at the disposal of the city’s whims to do with me whatever it pleased. The city could decide what I did and did not deserve. When I scored an achievement, I told myself that this was what I deserved. At that point I was able to travel vast distances without feeling extreme fatigue, because it was not the distances that exhausted me but rather my burdens. I also found the remains of something alive that moved within me from time to time like a smouldering ember. I experienced that while walking and unexpectedly encountering faces that had not yet lost their primitive quality, faces that came from modest neighbourhoods within the city limits of Marrakech. They crossed the souqs carrying merchandise that would help them survive and keep them at the margins of life and at the margins of people who consume tons of costly things. When I saw the food carts, the spice and perfume shops, the vendors of medicinal herbs, vegetables and fruit, I remembered that all those things had a scent. Places were broken when they had no smell.

Whenever I visited Marrakech, Ghaliya took advantage of my presence alone in the house to talk at length about our childhoods. I never knew why she did it. I talked about my mother and she talked about her mother; we recalled our fear of amulets and saints’ tombs. She remembered something akin to a love story that she experienced with a maternal cousin, and I remembered my maternal cousin, an employee at the German embassy, with whom I exchanged passionate kisses on the roof. We remembered dishes we liked and others we hated. We concluded with the conviction that leaving childhood was the eternal repetition of the exit from paradise.

On one such visit I was getting ready to go out, pleased with this exchange, when Ahmad Majd called, asking to see me immediately. After a nervous discussion we agreed to meet in Ibrahim al-Khayati’s house in Casablanca the following evening.

Ibrahim was standing in the living room, which overlooked the garden and the swimming pool. He looked like someone about to announce the results of a TV competition. Ahmad and Bahia, on the other hand, were slumped in armchairs, but as soon as I entered they stood up with unusual enthusiasm and kissed me warmly.

I had only seen Bahia twice since our divorce, once to settle some legal questions and the second time when we visited my father at her request. I had the strange feeling that she had come from a distant past. I told her, sincerely, that I missed her, unaware of the awkwardness of the situation. She was moved and replied in a polite manner that seemed funny to me. Ahmad, on the other hand, appeared restless.

I asked him, ‘What’s this new catastrophe that you want to see me about so urgently?’

He jumped to his feet trying to control a situation I had not discerned. There was an incomprehensible nervousness in the air, causing Ibrahim to pour tea for ten when there were only four of us. Ahmad was waving his hands and arms with an abruptness that surpassed any verbal construction. He spoke like someone throwing away something he wanted to get rid of.

‘Bahia and I have decided to get married.’

The sentence felt cold and heavy when I first heard it, then it became complex as silence surrounded it. I remembered a malicious idea that had crossed my mind when I had been in Ahmad’s office, listening to him trying to dissuade me from destroying something essential in my life. I remembered as well the passing relationship he and Bahia had had before our marriage, one that had bothered me from time to time. At this moment, that insignificant sentence transformed into something hurtful, humiliating and difficult to swallow. I stood up, wishing only to get away from the situation. I had no special feelings towards him, and I was neither angry nor resentful. I was simply disgusted.

So when Ibrahim led me to the garden, looking for words to ease the shock he thought I had experienced, I explained to him that I had no need for consolation and couldn’t care less about what had happened. All I wanted to know, if possible, was when it had happened, when had the idea been born – if, that is, the original idea had truly died. When and where had the decision been taken? Was it during those years when we all ate and drank around one table? Was it before Yacine’s death or after? Was it when Ahmad was handling the land case or when he was handling our divorce? When and how? Why was it that every time something happened to me, I did not see it coming?