The Arch and the Butterfly (29 page)

I jumped into the house through the collapsing window and ran in all directions, entering rooms without doors and ceilings and making formless birds fly away in fright. I asked him again, ‘Where are you, are you here?’

His voice reached me from afar, through the phone held tight to my ear. It said, ‘I’m in the courtyard of the mosque where Bacchus is hiding, lying down after having spent a long time standing on hard stone. One day my remains will be mixed with his: me, a representative of the human race in its eloquent rags, and him a representative of forgotten imagination, of the relationship between dreams and granite. Don’t forget to visit me from time to time. Not for my sake but yours, for the sake of the frail thread that mocks us.’

When the call cut off, I was in the middle of the ruined house. I was overcome by a feeling of fear and desolation that compelled me to quickly head out to the nearby field, to collect my strength and get away from the place as fast as pos­­sible. I wanted to get rid of the phone, but I felt as if it were stuck to my ear and had become part of my facial features.

I walked in the road that ran through the village all the way to the cemetery. As I got in my car, I felt I was looking at this place for the last time.

When the storm surrounding the manhunt for Al-Firsiwi abated, I was able to see things somewhat realistically. He had put an end to a period of struggle and violence, both overt and covert, replacing it with a period of calm that was suitable for a time when so many people were scheming and profiting silently, with a kind of belittling indifference.

The Zaytoun Hotel reopened during the tourist revival when it did not matter who benefited behind the scenes. What counted were the newly opened roads around, outside and within the city. Guesthouses multiplied, as did business in traditional crafts. Buying power grew and property revived. Troupes to perform religious songs and chants were formed in this forgotten city. There might have also been some hidden scandals that made people pronounce the
hawqala
, appealing for God’s help, without the sparks of anger in their eyes disappearing. Eventually, Al-Firsiwi’s disappearance marked the withdrawal of the tragic from public life. There was also a large-scale movement in the city to please those who whimpered and whined. Yet I was not tempted to return to the hotel, despite my half-sister and her husband’s insistence. I could not forget the sight of my mother sitting in the hotel lobby nor get rid of the sense of Al-Firsiwi’s spirit controlling the place. It seemed to me that a return to the hotel under its new direction would put me in direct confrontation with two gigantic beings I would be unable to face.

Reality, however, is not always as simple as expected. In this flood of changes that brooked no challenge or opposition, the state saw fit to submit Al-Firsiwi’s mosaics to forensic examination in Italy. A delegation of well-known archaeologists travelled to Rome, taking Al-Firsiwi’s bag with them. There the pieces were individually examined, and the final report categorically concluded that each of the 13,624 pieces was from a genuine Roman mosaic that had originally represented Hylas, the companion of Hercules. It was different from the mosaic currently located in Walili, which showed Hylas in a struggle with two nymphs, one holding his chin and the other his wrist. In this mosaic, one nymph gave him a drink from a decorated cup while he embraced the other and looked angrily at a tiger about to pounce on the two nymphs. The design also showed a scene similar to the mosaic visible to this day: the creeping hunter, the dead bird, the trial, and the hungry tigers savaging the guilty hunter. About 2,000 pieces were missing to complete the design and assemble it again.

I called my father many times on his mobile phone in a desperate effort to talk to him. My purpose was not to inform him about the report, nor to express my tremendous happiness at this miraculous achievement, but to beg him to reveal to me the unique personality that extracted from Hylas’s mosaic, the mosaic of Abd al-Karim al-Khattabi and Al-Firsiwi struggling against the serpent of the Valley of Death, as well as all the other designs he used to decorate the Zaytoun Hotel. If he was that unique person, why did he not tell me? Why did he spend years changing the course of this archaeological imagination to direct it into his own personal legends, without ever saying anything about it?

I sent Fatima an e-mail and attached that story with the relevant questions. She replied that Al-Firsiwi had done nothing but repeat what humanity had been doing since time imme­morial – reproduce a single creation in different scenarios and personalities. I considered her answer a philosophical ploy to be done with a topic that did not interest her. I began having nightmares in which I was standing in the middle of the crumbling house, surrounded by dust, smashed ceilings and frightened birds, while Al-Firsiwi’s face kept appearing and disappearing in the midst of the ruins, his voice getting louder and then weaker. In the distance I could hear the sound of collapsing buildings or explosions, I could not say exactly which. Every time I woke from this repeated nightmare, I felt immense regret for having failed to get close to Al-Firsiwi and understand him. I was sorry for merely considering him a colourful persona, a callous acrobat who knew how to step on words and emotions while maintaining his own balance and calculated chaos. Then I saw the paradox in a journey like Al-Firsiwi’s. I had considered it confused and disconnected, while in reality it was extremely coherent and methodical, its links connected by flawless logic. I came to the conclusion that the true meaning of any life was this mysterious logic and nothing else.

In an effort to put an end to the confusion that overwhelmed me, I went to Al-Firsiwi’s house and tried with my sister’s help to find something there: papers, poems, a will. We found nothing but an open box with a single piece of mosaic inside it and a copy of the poetry book published in Frankfurt. In another room we found one of the letters I had sent to him from Germany, in which I accused him again of having killed my mother. In the wardrobe we found nothing but a rustic
djellaba
he had kept from his teenage years. As I pushed the
djellaba
aside, I felt a solid object behind it. When I took the
djellaba
out of the empty cupboard, the statue of Bacchus, as I had known it, was clearly visible, with his dull gaze and the bunch of grapes hanging over his shoulder.

My amazement and joy did not last long since I soon discovered that the statue was a copy made of brittle pottery and barely strong enough to move. It was impossible to know under what conditions it had been made, or by whom, with this amazing degree of accuracy. It consisted of a hollow clay body, its redness blackened by firing. When I examined it closely, I realised that Al-Firsiwi’s obsession had gone as far as his making a replica with a broken foot to resemble the original statue after it had been removed from its plinth. I wrapped the copy in a white robe, as if I were placing it in a shroud, and carried it, in a kind of determined ceremonial, to the old abandoned house in Bu Mandara inhabited by forlorn birds and scorpions. I dug near the foundation of the western wall that was all that remained of the impressive room where the great Al-Firsiwi, the father of the first immigration, had stayed. There I buried the clay Bacchus, the statue remaining from mysterious thefts, itself considered in its clay condition an exemplary theft, in perfect harmony with this eternal wasteland.

On our way back from Bu Mandara, my sister asked, ‘Why did you bury the statue?’

‘I don’t know really. I didn’t know what else to do with it.’

When I got out of the car at the entrance to the Zaytoun Hotel, she turned suddenly before closing the car door and pushed into my hand the piece of mosaic, the only one left from all the chaos. I was moved by this gesture, but I did not know why. I was elated to have this tessera in my life, and I felt for the first time that the woman who had showered me with this happiness was not only Al-Firsiwi’s daughter but my sister as well. Even though I was certain that I was leaving the city for good and without regrets, I knew we would remain attached to it by the strong bond of gratitude and brotherhood.

2

I went down the road covered by shade and silence, and then I saw the blue hills stretching like lazy animals and the buildings that began to crawl from the Sidi Mohammed ben Qasem neighbourhood towards the mountain. The buildings, like their people, were crowded together and mysterious, and only characterised by their provocative white colour. When I turned left towards Meknes, I cast a cold look at Walili, as if I wanted to be sure there was not another car in the parking lot. I again felt depressed, as if the difficulty I found being nostalgic about places triggered it anew. I fought that black moment by thinking about Havana, about the seaside and nightclubs, about words that cropped up in the dark not because we needed them, but because the main street, the anxious souls and the song rising from the depths of the sea all needed fleeting words, words that flared like a match. We did not express anything with them, but we used them to build stairs towards rapture.

This thinking saved me from the onset of depression. I felt I would do something wonderful and exceptional if I went to Havana and shared a funny chat about Hamuniya with Bustrofedon. Why not? We could consider Hamuniya a vari­ation on Estrella Rodriguez. The former collapsed with her weepy
’aytah
in Casablanca and the second was swallowed by the night of Havana?. . .?Here I am here, where am I from? Where are you from? Ah, where. Let’s go Havana, hava, here I am, here she is, hava. I am a mouth, he is a mouth, hafah, hafaha, Havana, Havana all of us, fahani, fahuni, hafuni, hafac, hafac, ha, ha, ha, nana, fana, Havana, ha, ha.

I called Fatima, who had returned to Madrid, but she was busy talking on another line. She asked me to call her later, but I insisted we talk then and told her, ‘We have to travel together to Cuba.’

She exclaimed, ‘Do you know what the weather is like there at this time of year?’

I had no idea, but she told me. ‘It’s simply a watery hell!’

‘What about the idea?’ I asked.

She replied, ‘It belongs to a time in the past. It would have been a beautiful idea if it had happened before, but it’s too late now. I went to Havana without you, or rather with someone else, and my illusions about it are over. Can we talk later?’

‘Yes, yes, we’ll talk later,’ I said, and then put the phone down. As I drove I thought about ‘before’ and ‘after’, about the right time that no one had succeeded in setting since the beginning of creation.

In the days that followed that phone conversation, Fatima would talk to me in a somewhat rude manner, as if she were settling a score. I could not find a positive sentence to include in our phone calls or a pleasant way to end them. One evening she left a message on my answering machine, telling me she would accompany a Spanish journalist on a two-week visit to Morocco to investigate the case of the devil worshippers and Essam al-Khayati’s disappearance. She did not include a single affectionate word, as she used to do, which I considered a virtual declaration of war. When I told her that later, she laughed and said she had stopped fighting years ago. But she remained aloof during her whole visit, which gave a sharp edge to all her comments and reactions. This upset Layla and led her to make some rash assumptions, most significantly that Fatima was expressing repressed jealousy and was unable to recover from her failure to have a relationship with me. Layla yet again asked about the true nature of my friendship with Fatima. I repeated to her the details of the story, including the feeling of loss that sometimes overcame me when I realised how important Fatima was in my life, yet there was no possibility of a sexual relationship between us. Once again Layla was upset because of my feeling of loss, and she considered it a lurking danger that might surface in our relationship one day. She also interpreted Fatima’s present anxiety as a sign of the imminent eruption of that volcano.

The events that ensued put an end to Layla’s sedition. It so happened that we spent an evening at my house a week after the arrival of Fatima and Joaquin, the Spanish journalist. There was an ambiguous rejoicing during our get-together that clearly reflected a waning in Fatima’s ire and an increase in her affection for me, and for Layla as well. But I soon understood that the reason for this change was the visit she had paid to Ibrahim al-Khayati in Salé prison, particularly something Ibrahim had said. When the conversation turned to that visit at the end of the evening, Fatima admitted that she was very angry with the way we had given up on Ibrahim’s innocence, or at least his presumed innocence, and the ease with which we had eliminated this important man from our lives. Layla said that the matter had nothing to do with innocence or guilt, and that even if we assumed that Ibrahim had in fact killed Essam, that did not make him a different person. ‘He’s still the same man who inundated our lives, yours in particular, with unusual feelings.’ The forgetfulness surrounding Ibrahim, his wife and his son Mahdi, and his friends and acquaintances, was painful. ‘He feels like it’s a miracle that you remember him from time to time,’ Fatima said.

After we dropped Fatima and Joaquin at their hotel, Layla said that the journalist seemed pleasant enough and wished that something would happen between him and Fatima. I said that what mattered was for Fatima to wish it, which made Layla say, ‘I feel that she is searching for him but she probably does not dare desire him.’

I replied, just for the sake of bickering, that she was a few years older than him.

‘Don’t worry,’ Layla said joyfully. ‘He will grow old very quickly and then she will be younger than him.’