The Arch and the Butterfly (32 page)

I nodded, so he said, ‘Let’s do a DNA test. If it confirms that I’m your son, everything will be clear. You’ll have to pass by the club as soon as possible and pay my monthly membership!’

He walked away and then turned to look at me and laughed, his face joyful. I did not think then that he resembled Yacine or me to the degree I had imagined when I first met him. But I said to myself that he probably looked like Zulikha, whom I didn’t remember then, and never would.

On the way home I thought long and hard about what was happening to me, and I told myself that this was also one possibility among many others that could come along. Devastated by the loss of an only son, we suddenly find ourselves a father in a different story. We await the birth of a baby girl with great joy, and then she is born with a handicap; we think our life is over with the arrival of this baby, only to discover that life has become meaningful. No one could know which possibility might bring the greatest comfort. I told myself this because I felt calmer about the tragedy of Yacine’s loss than about this new story.

I shared my thoughts with Fatima, and she suggested that we adopt a child together. I tried to avoid the subject but she insisted. ‘The baby would only need you to be a father from a distance. You’d see, helping to shape a human being would only require a few years – perhaps less time than would be needed for a tree. That person would then become your heart’s delight.’ She also said, ‘Just imagine how many things we would put right with such a venture, even those things that time has spoiled.’

I told Fatima that I did not have the energy for such things any more. Her silence on the phone made me feel guilty, because I realised that her suggestion was a desperate cry for help.

At the end of the day I was walking in the crowded Al-Akary market, where all the activity connected to food reduced my anxiety, when I found myself face to face with the young man who resembled me. The first thing I saw was his wide smile, his happy expression. He surprised me with an exaggerated greeting. With a generous sweep of his arm, he stretched to embrace an embarrassed man walking past him.

He said, laughing, ‘This is my father, the one and only person legally responsible for this calamity,’ and pointed to himself proudly.

I too felt like laughing, but I controlled myself and said reproachfully, ‘That’s a cruel joke!’

He tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Let go. Life is good. Let’s laugh.’

I lowered my head and left defeated, unable to pinpoint the nature of my feelings, which were a mixture of disappointment and boundless joy at my escape.

I told Layla part of the story in a somewhat humorous manner, but she found it very moving. She said she loved the young man as if he were my son or our son from a past relationship that had happened years ago. She liked the light-heartedness of the young man, who should have been burdened by the responsibilities of beginnings. When she asked me his name, I was surprised to realise I had neglected to ask him, as if I wanted the matter to remain a mere possibility. Layla – God knows what her feelings were – burst into tears and said she was very sad because we could not have a baby together. At that point, unaware of what made the issue so easy for me, I perpetrated the worst theft imaginable. I suggested to Layla, very simply, that we adopt a baby, with me as a hands-off father. I told her with neurotic insistence to keep the matter a secret, as if hoping secrecy would be tantamount to revoking the suggestion completely. She immediately busied herself with the most minute details of adoption, its rules and regulations and institutions, all the while asking the reason for my insistence on keeping it a secret, and wondering if I thought that revealing it would matter to her.

That was how Mai came into our life. We did not tell anybody that she was our daughter, but all our friends, including Fatima, understood. They refrained from commenting, except Bahia. She broached the subject indirectly with me two or three times, talking about Layla, expressing her strong ad­­­miration for her. She said that Layla had a certain purity that freed her of any doubt and that Mai was a symbol of that deep purity. On another occasion she asked me if I was convinced that a child could play a constructive role in a relationship. I told her that this might happen in reaction: when two people form a human being together, they indirectly re-form themselves. She told me that she had never felt that way either with me when we had Yacine or with Ahmad Majd and their baby daughter, Ghaliya. On another occasion she asked me if Mai had filled some of Yacine’s void.

‘No, never,’ I said, and I confessed to her that Yacine had not disappeared totally from my life. He had stayed with me for many years, taking part in some of my daily activities. When I saw her dumbfounded expression, I told her I did not mean it metaphorically, but that I really used to see and talk to him, before he disappeared again for good.

During this period of her life Bahia had settled into her new persona, a calm, relaxed woman who gradually put on weight until her body matched her new status. She put up a barrier of carefully studied interests, all dealing with charitable work, social ventures, and conservation of the
malhoun
heritage. There were also all the related social events, consisting of soirées in friends’ houses, in
riyadhs
and hotels, and everything else that burnished the halo around Ahmad Majd. Bahia did not seem enthusiastic about what she was doing, although she defended her husband and the real-estate boom that reflected the country’s excellent health. I saw her once adopt that position in her new house in Marrakech, and I was struck by how stridently she backed him. After the guests departed, I told her that nothing had called for such a response, especially seeing that Ahmad Majd was, as usual, countering the arguments with his usual caustic wit and sneering at his adversaries’ intellects. She nervously explained to me that she was not doing it for him but for herself.

Meanwhile, all Marrakech was talking about Ahmad Majd’s relationship with his private secretary. Going with her to hotels and restaurants was not enough any more, and she had started to accompany him on long trips to the UAE and Saudi
Arabia. She had returned veiled from her last trip to Saudi
Arabia and had described at length and in a pious tone her
umra
with Hajj Ahmad.

Some of our friends were convinced that she was a second wife and that the concerned parties were keeping it secret. But Bahia did not reveal, either in her conversation or comportment, anything to confirm the existence of another marriage. Every now and again, all the players in the story – with its real and imagined aspects, the open and the hidden – would meet over couscous for Friday lunch, but no one seemed to know any more than anyone else.

The Butterfly

1

Ahmad Majd told me about a real-estate scandal engulfing a luxury housing project in Tétouan built by the Sour al-Watani Group on land they had bought from a known drug dealer. After the project was inaugurated amid much fanfare, it was discovered that the land belonged to the state and had been sold using fake title deeds. This led to sweeping arrests in the ranks of the administration and courts ruled in favour of the state. The property developer had to pay for the land twice. That the elite inaugurated a project based on stolen land, as well as the involvement of numerous parties in underhand dealing, fraud and forgery, made the scandal blow up in public.

I said to Ahmad Majd that he must be happy with this turn of events, since the scandal involved his biggest competitor. He said quietly that he was not in competition with anyone, and added that his life and that of generations to follow him would not be enough to manage the success he had achieved. He said he had mentioned the issue because he was aware of the danger such corrupt deals posed to the future of democracy in Morocco. I could not help but bring up, laughing, the four hectares in the centre of Marrakech that he had bought from the state at a very low price, on the understanding that in return he would cover the cost of removing the inhabitants living on it. Once it was cleared, he sold the land at a price five times lower than the market value to a powerful group that did not dare acquire the land directly from the state. He did that in return for other sites in Marrakech and other cities at a token price. Was that not also a fraudulent deal? I asked him.

Nothing made him flinch. ‘In this arrangement,’ he responded, ‘is there a hint of forged contracts, legal skulduggery or hush money? Do you want to criminalise buying and selling for obscure political purposes, or stop human intelligence from breaking into the property market?’

I said, despondent, ‘I don’t want anything of the sort. I only want to save my skin!’ He laughed from his belly and said that I was the last person in this town who thought all that was done or not done aimed only at getting his skin.

I told him that I was not like that, but I understood that I could be that way, because this general mood of confidence disturbed me. The feeling that we had all made it to safety and that nothing threatened our negligence was a stupid feeling with nothing human about it.

Around this time Ahmad Majd was finishing what he said was the apartment building of his life. It was a huge structure close to the new main road, where buildings were not supposed to be higher than four floors to avoid blocking what was left of the view of the High Atlas mountains from inside the medina. But Ahmad Majd had fought a bitter war to go up nine floors. That battle forced him to buy, at market price, a nearby lot that allowed him to move his apartment building a few metres away from the first location, which would have blocked the view of the Atlas entirely.

Ahmad Majd used to say that the city was a city and the mountain a mountain, so why did anyone want to drink their coffee in the street as their sleepy eyes roamed over the High Atlas? ‘Plus, my brother,’ he would continue, ‘no one looks at the mountains when they’re walking or driving in the street. That’s just tourist nonsense summed up in that stupid photo of someone lying under a luxuriant palm tree, smelling the orange blossom and gazing at the snow on the Atlas. Bullshit! All that’s left to do is add a Tanjia pot to the scene to conjure up stewed kidney from under the ground.’

Despite all that was said about the apartment building, Ahmad Majd pushed ahead with the project. He said that what Marrakech needed was a building that would free it of the spirit of the distant past and bring a bit of frivolity into the city, to break the grip of the ubiquitous brick colour, the palm trees and the general appearance of a stop for desert caravans. He shaped his building in the form of a giant butterfly, with a nightclub below the ground floor and restaurants at ground level. A vast banquet hall and shops were located on the first five floors, while luxury apartments occupied the remaining floors. An amazing apartment would take up the whole of the ninth floor, where the residents would have the Koutoubia in the palm of their hands.

Foreign companies competed to be awarded the interior design on all the floors. Ahmad Majd did not specify any features for the interior except for materials and shapes. The external decor consisted of a soaring butterfly, and the inhabitants of Marrakech did not wait long to nickname the building the Butterfly, which became the official name used by city residents as a reference point for appointments and on maps.

People were struck by this building with its provocative shape, located in the heart of the medina, whose ancient character was protected by an army of conservatives, informants and the curious. But few of them knew that the apartments on the top four floors were the ones that had allowed the building to sprout without anyone seeing it. Whenever I asked Ahmad Majd in total innocence about the owners of those luxury apartments, he would mention a number of rich Gulf Arabs, and a world-renowned French perfume maker on the top floor. He did not mention the name of a single Moroccan. I would smile at that, and he would smile back and say, ‘The building will remain a mystery. There’s no point in insisting.’

On the ninth of May that year, Ahmad Majd organised the opening of the Butterfly. It was a celebration exactly as he had planned for many years and it surpassed everything people had imagined about celebrations, even the reopening of the Hotel La Mamounia in the 1980s. The echoes of those festivities had reached the landings of Kenitra central prison where Ahmad Majd had been incarcerated. He had never suspected then what would happen less than a quarter of a century later. Even those celebrations with all their splendour did not amount to one tenth of what Ahmad Majd designed for the inauguration of his new building.

At the opening of the Butterfly, hundreds of young men wearing the same traditional red costume and the same striped Marrakechi hat stood on both sides of the building. Thousands of butterflies, guided by invisible threads, and thousands of multicoloured birds, pigeons and doves invaded the Marrakech sky. Hundreds of guests were transported from their respective hotels to the Butterfly on the backs of white camels. A waterfall gushed from the top of the building to its marble courtyard. For years to come people would remember the philharmonic orchestra that came all the way from Berlin and the dozens of male and female singers who performed. Behind the stage where they were singing was the largest butterfly, revealing the colourful and brightly lit balconies of the building. People would especially remember that for the first time since Marrakech started having festivities, dancing and partying till late at night, hundreds of men and women roamed the city from one end to the other, carrying plates of dates and glasses of milk. Ahmad Majd had had the drink glasses made especially for the occasion. He’d engraved the name of the building and the date of the opening of its huge shopping mall on the glasses, along with a picture of baby Ghaliya with a sentence below it reading: ‘
This is by the grace of God
.’ The crowd partied to the early hours of the morning.