The Arch and the Butterfly

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.

Al-Firsiwi’s bad luck began with years of drought, which stopped the olive trees from bearing fruit for successive seasons. Then the price of carob collapsed, making the cost of gathering it more than the proceeds of selling it. And finally came the years of pox.

To this day no one knows how it happened. One morning the customers of an ancient bath-house in the old quarter saw a man squatting near the hot water cistern, howling and writhing hysterically from the pain of the inflamed pustules covering his body. Someone volunteered to pour hot water over him. The man went on his way, and a day later small pustules filled with a colourless liquid began to appear on the bodies of men, women and children from different quarters. As soon as the pustules appeared on the skin, more followed. Hardly a week had passed before the markets, schools and mosques of the city and surrounding villages were filled with alarming groups of distraught people. Not talking to one another and not knowing where they were going, they walked with their hands inside their clothing, scratching their skin, which was covered with a hard inflamed crust, their mouths open wide in pain and pleasure.

Men, women and children would go on to the streets and the alleys, uncover their backs and scratch them against the walls of the city until they bled; or they would use implements such as vegetable peelers, washing-up scourers, wool carders or door scrubbers, and sit, one behind the other, and begin a dismal collective scratch that brought tears to their eyes.

Almost every day, hordes of the poxed left their neighbourhoods and crossed the inner market, not distracted by anything, heading straight towards Khaybar Plaza, where authorities had installed large pumps to spray their bodies as they stood behind plastic shower curtains. They returned reeking of sulphur and went to sleep until the relentless inflammation of the pustules stabbed them with pain yet again.

The city was officially quarantined. Foreign tourists stopped coming to stay at the Zaytoun Hotel, which turned the Cantina into a cheap bar frequented every night by the legions of the poxed, who drank and chatted till the break of dawn. They fell asleep to the collective moans of pleasure and pain from the nonstop scratching, which opened the door to exquisite intoxication, until, from the depths of this rapture, rose the agony caused by nails digging into pustular skin.

During this period the inhabitants of the nearby village of Fertassa took advantage of the misfortune that had befallen Al-Firsiwi — especially after his wife Diotima’s suicide and the bankruptcy of a number of his projects — and damaged some of the canals that carried water from the spring to the Zaytoun Hotel. A legal battle ensued and Al-Firsiwi was forced to sell much of his property to pay off those willing to side with him in the dispute.

Then suddenly and much to everyone’s surprise, Al-Firsiwi married one of the hotel maids. She had rough brothers who terrorised the inhabitants of Fertassa. Things calmed down and people understood that Al-Firsiwi had put the hotel in his new wife’s name. Though this news spread, he did not comment, content with beaming sarcastic smiles at the drunks chatting about him.

Then Al-Firsiwi sold the petrol station and announced the bankruptcy of the modern mills of al-Mishkah. One Friday morning in May 1982, the authorities closed the Zaytoun Hotel, while a mass demonstration of thousands of the poxed shouted anti-government slogans, criticising the authorities for doing nothing to alleviate their suffering except spraying them with burning yellow liquid. The demonstration turned violent, with the trashing of shops and public buildings, before heading for the tomb complex where a protest sit-in was declared.

People wondered whether all this was to protest against the closing of the Cantina, that infested place, by the authorities. The answer they received from the victims was that they objected to the closing down of the city, not the Cantina.

On 9 May 1982, the statue of Bacchus was stolen from the entrance to Walili, where it had stood for decades. The figure was small with a lightly tanned complexion, an adolescent posed standing with his weight on his right leg and his left leg stretched slightly behind, and his left arm, broken at the wrist, slightly away from his body. The thieves had had to pull the statue off its plinth, leaving some of the toes of the right foot behind, which was all that remained of the beautiful sculpture.

Contrary to all expectations, the investigation into the crime led to the arrest of the director of the site, then two tourist guides, and finally Mohammed al-Firsiwi, who everyone had seen constantly excavating the site for something, though no one knew what.

2

I am Youssef al-Firsiwi and that is my father. My mother was a refined German woman who found no better end to her stormy life than suicide. It happened on a day spent hunting quail and rabbit in the woods with my father. Close to sundown, she packed away the game, the gear, the clothes, the picnic basket and the cans of drink with the careful attention that drove my father crazy. She then sat in the front seat, put on her safety belt and turned on her tape recorder to listen to Beethoven.

On the way back she asked my father to go via the mountain road, the first section of which overlooks the city while the rest overlooks the ruins. She said meekly that she wanted to watch the sunset. Contrary to habit, Al-Firsiwi complied without arguing or bickering. More than once after the incident, he would say that only divine will could have so blinded him that he failed to notice that this was the first time in her life she had made such a request. He had never stood with her on a peak or in a valley to watch God’s sun rise, set or do anything else, he would say.

My mother asked Al-Firsiwi to stop the car at the last bend before the descent to Walili. They both got out, and she said, ‘The sun’s going.’

‘One day it will go and never come back, or it will rise in the west and never set,’ Al-Firsiwi said.

‘Why are you talking nonsense?’ my mother asked as she walked to the back of the car.

‘Because that will be the day the world ends! When we won’t need money, energy or weapons. All of us, regardless of who we are, will need only one thing.’

My mother was opening the boot of the car, so he repeated his last sentence without looking at her. ‘We will need only one thing!’

‘Which would be what?’

‘Shade, my dear. Shade!’ said my father.

There was total silence, and Al-Firsiwi thought he had dumbfounded my mother with his unbeatable peasant genius. At that moment he relived his relationship with Diotima, from their first encounter in a Düsseldorf post office, in its smallest details. He thought of confessing his love for her, there and then, because, as he later admitted, ‘I had never said those words to her. It’s not our habit, us peasants, to pay attention to such nonsense.’

When my father turned around to proclaim this welling up of feeling, Diotima was not where he expected. He heard the gunshot as if it came from underneath the car. In a panic, he rushed towards the sound and found my almost headless mother stretched out opposite the tomb of Moulay Idriss I, not far from the Roman ruins where a desolate sun had set moments before. Despite all I observed of my father’s breakdown, despair, suffering and anger, to this day I do not know why I imagine with great conviction and in anguish that he had killed her. To this day I cannot recall that event without being inclined to maintain that Al-Firsiwi had planned his crime with a devilish attention to detail that made it possible for him to escape human justice. As for divine punishment, according to my maternal uncle, he incurred it in this life. His huge material losses kept accumulating, and he descended into bankruptcy and vindictiveness before drowning in total obscurity.

I was greatly distressed by the incident that took my mother’s life, and I haven’t gotten over it to this day. I lived for over a year with a maternal uncle who worked at the German embassy in Rabat, and I shared my doubts with him. I told him that Al-Firsiwi hated my mother, and might even have killed her. He, in turn, informed the German authorities of all the details I gave him, and a long investigation ensued. It did not lead to anything, but it made my father believe that I had, without any doubt, inherited the seed of evil from the Germanic blood that infected my pure Moroccan blood. I ended up living in a care home in Frankfurt, where I spent my drab adolescent years convinced that I would never be able to restore my relationship with my father and his country.

But being categorical about anything related to human nature is always reckless. As the years sped by, the sharp impetuosity that made me believe that my mother’s blood — contrary to Al-Firsiwi’s claim — was a gift from heaven melted away. Deep inside I had been ashamed of my peasant blood, which would undoubtedly corrupt the accumulated genetic capital that the German nation had spent long centuries investing in before I received my miraculous share.

It was my discovery of the Rif, its language, its places, its history and its people, in the heart of Frankfurt that took me back to the country I had left. I returned overflowing with forgiveness for Al-Firsiwi, his new wife and a half-sister who loved nothing more than contemplating my blue eyes and declaring them a glorious link with the civilised world. But after months in prison, the closure of his hotel and the myriad court cases, Al-Firsiwi had become a difficult man to deal with. After he went almost totally blind, he grew hot tempered, ready to engage in violent fights for the simplest of reasons. This made me consider him an integral part of my difficult return. I tried to spare him from becoming engaged in a new, tragic role, and I attempted to immerse myself gradually into his world without receiving from him the keys to that world.

Of all his ordeals, Al-Firsiwi’s arrest in what became known as the Bacchus case was the nearest thing to a personal mythology. On its account, he spent six months in prison and was subjected to torture during interrogation (which he could never face talking about) before the court acquitted him.

My father said that being found innocent was prima facie evidence of the justice system’s stupidity. He backed those words with a thousand arguments that incriminated him and proved his amazing success in pulling off a masterful theft that no one could solve. It was an honest robbery which he had not undertaken for monetary gain, but simply to humiliate the Romans and their modern allies.

‘So,’ I said, ‘what people say about you having stolen Bacchus and selling it to a rich German to ward off bankruptcy is a plausible explanation?’

‘Bullshit!’ replied my father. ‘Did I steal it? Yes I did. But sell it? No! I’m not a dealer in idols.’

‘What did you do with it?’

‘I buried it!’

‘Oh, Firsiwi, there’s no bigger idiot than you. Bacchus had been buried for centuries until French archaeologists and German prisoners of war came and excavated the city from the depths of the earth, and excavated Bacchus from the depths of the city. Then you come and steal it only to bury it again!’

‘Yes. And if I could have, I would have buried all of Walili and Zarhoun too!’ He added, laughing, ‘I buried it in the courtyard of an obscure mosque. I can just imagine the puzzlement of archaeologists in a few centuries’ time asking themselves what Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, was doing in the courtyard of the twenty-first century mosque of the Muslims of Zarhoun!’

Al-Firsiwi obtained a permit to work as an accredited tour guide for the ancient city of Walili thanks to his being found innocent of the Bacchus theft and his profound knowledge of Walili’s history and archaeology. He had painstakingly read ancient and modern texts and dig reports in search of — or so he claimed — a direct or indirect cause, foreknown to God, that had pushed him to undertake the robbery. Or to be unjustly and vindictively accused of having committed the robbery, as stated in the court’s verdict of innocence.

Al-Firsiwi’s personal path — the lives of his ancestors, the catastrophic years of Bu Mandara, the German period that culminated in his marriage to the beautiful post-office employee and his recent glories in the city of the founder of the Moroccan dynasty — did not qualify him to encounter the people and places of the site. How had it been possible for a person who witnessed the downfall of the Rif during war and famine and the death of Bu Mandara from poverty and immigration to end up in the ruins of Walili as a guide to a place that had died centuries ago?

Based on those questions, Al-Firsiwi had developed a theory that immigration was a worm that gnawed at the soul. Ever since he had opened his eyes in Bu Mandara, he had witnessed people tortured by the place they had left behind in the countryside, tortured by the place that was dying in their arms and tortured by the places they dreamed about emigrating to. He himself had spent ten years digging in the rock to immigrate to Germany, and when he finally arrived one snowy morning, he sat on a bench at the railway station trying to recall for the thousandth time the name of the city he was heading for. Disslutet, Disselcorf, Disselboot, Disselcokhat, Dissel, Düsseldorf. By God, it was Düsseldorf where Hamady Burro would receive him with the intention of marrying him to his spinster sister whose bones had dried out from the cold. He could wait, Al-Firsiwi thought suddenly. When he got his papers and hid them safely in his military coat, everyone would hear about the escapades of Al-Firsiwi resounding in the skies of Disselbone, Dissoltozt, Dissolbuf, Düsseldorf, yes Düsseldorf! It was enough for him to pronounce the name of that city three times to give him a monstrous erection.

Immigration was a dormant worm; it sucked and slept. When did it awaken? Al-Firsiwi believed it awakened when things settled down, when the winds were favourable, when the sails were full and the boat was gliding along. When Al-Firsiwi reached the highest heights, buying and selling and, after spending ten years at night-school, translating in the courts, buying property and earning as much as he could, and married the German Shajarat al-Durr!

That was when the worm awakened and whispered in his ear: Do you want to ruin your health for the sake of this race? Do you want your son to grow up as a Christian while all his ancestors, as far back as Abraham, carry the Qur’an in their hearts? Do you want to let the Sherifs humiliate the remaining members of your tribe? Do you want the city that contains relics of the prophets to become a den of sodomites, drug addicts and beggars?

The worm kept on whispering to him, day after day, and Al-Firsiwi put his trust in God and organised his reverse immigration. Diotima, who had kept the notebook of her grandfather who participated in Walili’s excavations with other German prisoners, also embraced the worm.

There they were, my friend, in the vastness of the zawiya, climbing from the courtyard of the tomb in the inner market to the courtyard of Khaybar where the municipal office was located. They went from one to the other, writing contracts, training brokers, bribing the weak and distracting the malicious.

Diotima embraced the new place like a forsaken paradise, sleeping with her grandfather’s secrets near the earth that he turned with his fingers, quietly cajoling the buried secrets, as if he had never crawled on his stomach in combat. Diotima wanted to take root in the blue mountain, and nurtured institutions in the city to help women, vaccinate children, improve education for girls and raise health awareness. She would go to the nearby villages and spend all her day visiting clusters of houses, where the inhabitants slept with their cows and goats and defecated behind their brick ovens while dogs and giant rats stole away the still-warm excrement from under them. There she supported projects for waste processing, fighting epidemics, treating spring water, collecting plastic and preserving the region’s orchards. Year after year, projects were born and died: new goat stock would arrive from the Iberian Peninsula, solar energy from charitable organisations in Germany, compost pits for waste that decomposed naturally. No matter who benefited, no matter who vandalised, no matter who resisted, Diotima failed to understand that this land would never accept the transplantation of her roots.

Finally she gave up and sat cross-legged on the throne in the reception hall of the Zaytoun Hotel, succumbing to a crushing sadness that erased all signs of benevolence from her face. The ardour she had lavished on the geography of the place, its produce and its crippled people had not provided her with so much as one drop of human affection. Whether recipients of her bounty or not, not a single heart held a trace of fondness, gratitude, recognition or appreciation for her. She was rowing upstream in a river of disgust and hatred that people expressed in various ways, from turning their heads away to invoking God’s help. Even when she was helping the civil protection teams in the city during the campaign to cure the pox that had spread in the region, some of the afflicted deliberately shook hands with her with excessive warmth, having scratched their skin for hours until their fingers and nails were covered with pus and scabs, in the hope of seeing this Christian woman contaminated. Whenever they saw her safe and healthy, mixing the powder with water and helping to treat the women, their anger grew, and they poured all their rage on the Germanic race that had produced both exceptionally resistant human beings and steel.

Even Al-Firsiwi, who revealed a kind of human purity that was almost romantic at the beginning of his relationship with Diotima, very quickly lost that purity as he pursued deals and projects, and planned tricks for the honest people and their allies. He would comment on the matter whenever he saw pity in his wife’s eyes for the spite that had being growing within him for ages. ‘Don’t worry,’ he would say. ‘We engage in the exchange of hatred necessary for our psychological and physical wellbeing! If you encounter a Rifi who doesn’t hate the Sherifs, it’s a sure sign that he’s from a long line of bastards, and vice versa! Despite that there are no dead, injured or war wounded among us!’

At the start of their relationship, Al-Firsiwi was still capable of upholding the virtues of uprightness, seriousness, honesty and devotion as basic dimensions in his life. They gave his personality a certain gallantry, a mixture of haughtiness, shyness and modesty. He even made love with a certain distance and strictness, with a concern for perfection, accuracy and precision. It became a source of confused pleasure where there was no room for play, seduction or adventure. They were fast, trembling pleasures that almost resembled incestuous love.

But after Al-Firsiwi and Diotima spent time in this storm, it all disappeared to be replaced by a pure aversion that rejected the needs of the body and the impetuosity of the soul. It was an aversion that combined regret and despair, and a feeling that they were bound together in a downward spiral. Whenever one sought safety, his or her nerves and random actions quickened the rapid push to the very bottom.

This repressed aversion gave them immense energy that made it possible for them to go on living together, with a daily concern for improvising something that united them and led them to the end of the day in such an extreme state of fatigue that they were unable to even look at each other.

My mother made sure to teach me everything she knew: the German language, the difference between poisonous and edible mushrooms and the basics of music and watercolours, but she never talked to me about Al-Firsiwi. Therefore, everything I said or will say about their relationship is solely my personal assumption and does not implicate anyone but me.

Our family consisted of closed squares. One included my mother and me; another, tightly closed, included Al-Firsiwi and Diotima, and another, looser square was where we all gathered, or where I met Al-Firsiwi face to face.

As far as I was concerned, my mother largely succeeded in purifying our relationship of all surplus emotional contaminants. Her maternal attitude had almost no external demonstration; the most she manifested was a minimal smile and a quick touch of the hand. This sensory remove never involved a feeling of abandonment or neglect. Her daily presence and her eagerness to reach the best in me embodied the depth of her maternal feelings and reinforced my conviction that she was an exceptional mother.

When I went to Germany I hated my father and the country that had killed my mother. I longed to establish a life as far away as possible from an atmosphere charged with mystery and dormant intrigues. I spent the first years delighted by this accommodation, free of all nostalgia for any person or place, until I met a Rifi association and found through them another connection that led me to the left-wing group. One day, as I was thinking about the future of the revolution, I decided that my true place was in the field, in the midst of the people who would rise from their ashes and get rid of the thieves and the murderers.

And so it went, at least as far as I was concerned.