The Arch and the Butterfly (6 page)

I write to you full of sadness, because of the letter you sent me last year that I found in my desk and had not read. That was because I could not remember your name which was written on the back of the envelope, or the city from which you sent the letter. I slipped it between the pages of a book and forgot where I had put it. When I came across it months later and recognised its origin, I feared it would contain news that would make me die of sadness because I had not read it. So I threw it in the fireplace without regret, because I forgot what I did with it. Now I do remember it in a way I cannot fathom. I remember the whole story linked somehow with you standing wet under the bare willow tree! If you do read my letter today, I beg you to send me a sign, telling me that you do not bear a grudge against me for burning the letter.

The morning after my dinner with Layla, I woke up exhausted and spent a long time in a haze looking for the day’s schedule. When I found it, I pulled myself together and went straight to the shower.

As I was leaving the room I found an envelope slipped under the door. There was a blank sheet of paper in it. My heart beat hard and I understood that the matter was related to something I was expecting, but no longer knew what. When I saw Layla and her guest at the breakfast table, I wished to separate them as soon as possible in order to free her from this legendary companion. Layla was cheery and unruffled while our eminent guest had his face in a bowl of fruit, which he chewed with deliberation while his teary eyes scanned the faces and furniture in the restaurant, as if he were expecting to meet someone.

I exchanged an intense look with Layla and felt an inner lucidity, the lucidity of a person not bothered by anything any more. I told myself as I submitted to the serenity that came from this lucidity that I might have reached the last station of my life, where I would put my suitcase down on the platform like any traveller, not knowing, out of extreme fatigue, whether I had arrived or was about to depart.

At a certain moment in life a person gets detached from his path and becomes a scrap of paper hanging in the air. At that moment he rids himself of the pressures of the path and is able to join any adventure wholeheartedly, because he is not required to justify anything any more or to provide any conclusive evidence of anything. He has freed himself of the future, as if he had died a very long time ago. What he experiences now is nothing except what his immaculate corpse remembers of that shoreless future.

Layla stood up suddenly and startled me. She apologised, saying, ‘Were you lost in thought?’

‘I was sitting on my suitcase on this vast platform.’

We were on our way to the historical city of Walili when Layla announced that she hated ruins. I told her that ruins had a soul, contrary to buildings. But she stood her ground and claimed that the most beautiful ruins were those we saw around us every day in the form of fallen dreams.

I told her, ‘But what you’re saying is only a poetic image. Ruins are ossified souls we extract from the bowels of the earth.’

She replied sarcastically, ‘And what you’re saying now is an exact science and not a poetic image!’

Saramago laughed for the first time since the start of our trip, which annoyed me. We spent the distance between Fes and Zarhun via Zakkutah each absorbed in our own world.

I was thinking about my father, Al-Firsiwi, who, in the waning years of his life, was working as a blind guide among the ruins of Walili. How would I introduce him? How would he receive Layla, and how could I escape his raving if he decided once more to play his favourite game?

Layla was in the back seat, talking about Jesus’s adventure in the boat during the storm on the waters. She seemed to be making an affected effort to separate holy genius from literary genius, insisting once more that the miraculous in its literary form had a realistic dimension that gave it an astonishing beauty which was absent from the religious version. It was probably due to the fact that religious faith was the basis for experiencing the miracle, an aspect that was not derived from the text. Layla, despite her insistence, did not succeed in pulling the writer out of his silence, which gave me the impression that she was talking to herself and that the writer had not come with us in the first place, but only his novel, for us to use as a pretext to weave a text according to our own narrative.

I was thinking about the ruins that my father roamed every day, ruins that had nothing to do with the Romans but concerned him personally. I thought about how he endured the humiliation of this end. He would show off his fluent German, deliberately pronouncing every letter separately and stressing their tonal variations. He would introduce biting comments about the city that had led him to these ruins, in cruel revenge for his glory days. He would be in his rickety boat, facing storms he could not see that pulled him into a crushing tornado which he rowed towards with his voice.

As we approached the city, Layla was narrating the scene of the boat caught in the divine presence, while Jesus rowed, as if this action still had meaning compared with the gravity of the encounter. Man remains bound to his body even when that body becomes meaningless, having just met God at the height of his loss and despair.

This preoccupation with the novel had driven me to despair. I suddenly turned to the back seat and said, ‘Mr Saramago, would you like to know my humble opinion of your novel?’

He replied immediately, ‘No, no, no. Not at all. Don’t bother yourself. I absolutely don’t want to know your opinion.’

At that point I pulled myself together, took my mobile out of my jacket pocket and called Fatima. I told her that I was in my old ruins, in the house of Juba and Bacchus and others, amid the earthy scent that no longer welcomed me, part of the cloudy landscape of all those forgotten columns, arches, temples, olive presses and houses.

She responded every now and then with ‘Oh’ and whenever she was about to start talking, I would interrupt her with something similar to my father’s delirium. ‘I will once again enter the palace of ruins,’ I told her. ‘Everyone in this world imagines he can rescue something under the ruins.’

‘I imagine that too. Do you want me to join you there?’ she asked.

‘No, no, I’ll be back this evening. If you want, we’ll start a new dig together!’

‘I’ll prepare the site,’ she replied.

When I ended the call a heavy silence reigned in the car. The avenue of olive trees that led to Wadi Khumman welcomed us as it had invaders and transients, without emotion or any particular disposition.

At the outhouse to the historical site, my father was saying goodbye to a mass of German tourists amidst roars of laughter and warm handshakes. As soon as we stepped out of the car, speaking in our soft voices, he came over, perceiving that we were a new group. When he got close to us he recited his favourite line from the Qur’an: ‘Do not think me senile, I do indeed scent the presence of Youssef.’

Fighting back my emotions, I said, ‘I’m Youssef, this is Layla, and this is José Saramago. You are still alive and kicking I see.’

‘Of course, of course! Who can escape life? You cannot go backwards and you cannot flee forwards. Life – as you know, my son – is a real dilemma. Is that not so, Mr?. . . ? Who did you say he was, Youssef?’

‘Saramago.’

Listening to Layla’s translation and showing true engagement for the first time, Saramago said, ‘Yes, yes, it’s a real dilemma!’

The Cornerstone of the Sacred Mausoleum

1

On a cold, dry October morning in the early 1970s, two months after returning from Germany, Mohammed al-Firsiwi visited the holy shrine of Moulay Idriss I. He was accompanied by three
faqihs
from the village of Bu Mandara, but Al-Firsiwi himself supervised the recitation of the Qur’anic verses for the repose of the moulay’s soul and sought his blessings before he left with his small retinue. Al-Firsiwi then went straight to the old quarter’s central market, where an auction was being held for the rental contract on the Hall of Oil, which everybody was convinced would go, as it did every year, to someone connected to the Idriss dynasty.

By noon, however, to the shock of those present and absent, it had gone to Al-Firsiwi, son of Bu Mandara and scion of the rural folk, whose individual and collective submission to the contempt of the Idriss dynasty had lasted since their arrival in the region. This historic event was merely a prelude: hardly a week after that earth-shattering deal, Al-Firsiwi bought the city’s only petrol station (manually pumped), the Al-Ghali mansion, Qatirah’s house, and seven rundown houses in the Hufra, Tazka and Khaybar quarters. He was paving the way for his rural kin to enter the city as conquerors.

Barely a year had passed before the Idrissis and those referred to as the wealthy burghers of Fes – traders in cloth, foodstuffs and grain – had become mere servants in the nouveau-riche network led by Mohammed al-Firsiwi. According to his admirers, he spoke seven languages. He owned an impressive Mercedes, and argued sharply with his German wife when they drove through the city. The young boys who watched this amazing sight wondered whether the Christian woman, in spite of her blue eyes, went to the toilet and performed her bodily functions like other human beings.

According to the eyewitnesses who ventured as far as the Apollo cinema in the city of Meknes, whenever Al-Firsiwi and his wife sat in a café and ordered tea, a large number of women wrapped in their woollen gowns, indolent men and nervous children would crowd the pavement opposite. They would push and shove, making a terrible noise just to watch the bumpkin who combed his hair with brilliantine and his wife with painted lips and bare legs.

Over time public curiosity waned, replaced by stories about the dazzling rise of this strongly built man with the piercing look who did not leave his enemies even a tiny margin for manoeuvre. After only three years, Al-Firsiwi was able to add to his regional empire the olive groves that extended from the foot of the Bani Ammar hills to the edge of the Bu Riyah plain. Only the
waqf
lands escaped his control, though he rented many acres, acquiring them annually through auctions in which no one dared compete with him. Nearly everyone with a cow, a sheep or a goat in Bu Mandara and every other village in the area went into partnership with him. He intuited the future importance of carob – which at that time had no value on the market – and bought up the lands where it grew, which spread over Bab al-Rumela and the whole of the Zarhoun Mountain. He and a partner set up a carob processing plant in Fes and he was given the nickname of ‘Carob Hajj’.

The country folk who had been an oppressed minority became masters of the region. Some of their notables even married noble Idrissi women, and began to receive visitors and the official delegation for the festivities of Moulay Idriss I. They cornered the market in animals for sacrifice, candles and sweets. Some of those who extended their building activities also expanded their control to supervise the chanting and spinning sessions of the dervishes, despite all the worries they would endure as a result. They would implore their Creator to put a quick end to the howling of those soft-headed creatures who repeated poems and songs whose only intelligible words were ‘Praise to the Prophet’.

Then it occurred to Al-Firsiwi to embark on a new adventure: he founded the Zaytoun Hotel on the plateau overlooking the ruins of Walili. He spent almost five years building this spectacular landmark; he fought fierce battles for the land, then for water and electricity, and finally to pave the road that led to the plateau, until the hotel became like a balcony overlooking the monumental ruins of Walili, where every day the sun set behind the columns of the temple and the triumphal arch of Caracalla.

At this point of his achievements, his wife Diotima sat on the throne of the reception desk located in a legendary hall, decorated with mosaics in Roman style portraying Al-Firsiwi’s grandfather among the nymphs of Al-Ain al-Tahiya; Ben Abd al-Karim surrendering to the French officers; and Al-Firsiwi himself struggling with scaly forest snakes. The corners of the mosaic were decorated with carvings that imitated in a naïve fashion Juba II, Bacchus and others.

Al-Firsiwi had to fight with the authorities for five more years to obtain a licence to sell alcohol despite the hotel’s proximity to the tomb of the founder of the Moroccan state. He got what he wanted in exchange for sweeteners and bribes that surpassed the cost of the hotel itself.

Once the consumption of alcohol was no longer confined to foreign guests, but spread to the local people, their tongues started to tell endless stories, the likes of which this meek country had never heard before. Thus began the ill-fated phase of Al-Firsiwi’s life. Public opinion never doubted that the main reason for this rapid and total decline was the Cantina bar and the depravity and debauchery that came with it, all at the feet of the holy leader. The folk imagination invented stories about foreign and Muslim drunkards who ended their soirées in the Roman baths where they swapped female partners and practised sodomy in the moonlight. There was talk about the smuggling of various kinds of drink from the Cantina to surrounding villages. And people soon devised a miracle fit for the situation. They made Moulay Rashid, Idriss’s faithful ser­­vant, go out at night and obstruct the path of the drunks as they crossed the cemetery on their way from the hotel bar to the town. He whipped them severely with jagged branches from wild olive trees, leaving permanent marks on their backs, their sides and their legs.