The Arch and the Butterfly

1

Yacine, simply by being killed, became an eternal child. He transformed into a being who would accompany me, emerging from his dark world whenever he wanted, and with whom I would share the details of my daily life. He would sit at my table or on my shoulders, or he would nudge me unexpectedly to pass on a piece of news or a comment in confidence. Sometimes he would sit on the edge of my bed to greet me with a rowdy discussion as I woke up. In his daily appearances Yacine was no more than one year old, yet his voice was that of the young man who had bid me goodbye at the railway station. I would talk with him for hours as I crossed Rabat from Bab Tamesna to the edge of the river, passing through Al-Nasr Street, Moulay Youssef Street, Alawite Square, and then the flower market, all the way to Al-Jazaïr Street and the offices of the newspaper where I worked.

Lots of people — who obviously could not see him — noticed me caught up in conversation and spread the rumour that I had begun talking to myself, and that it must have been because of Yacine. They did not know how right they were. Together Yacine and I commented on the roadworks we came across as we walked, or the demonstrations, or the beautiful women. Sometimes we delved into our old issues and talked about revolutions, betrayals and the death of illusions.

I sat down in the Garden Café an hour before my appointment with Layla. I told Yacine that I wanted to jot down some ideas for my weekly piece. He laughed at this and made fun of my belated attention to the importance of love, but I did not respond to his sarcasm. I noted down that in the next column I had to talk about a film I could no longer remember apart from a dance connected to it that I imagined I had danced with Layla. I could not remember whether it had been in a dream or at a noisy nightclub on the beach. I also wanted to mention a violent incident I witnessed that conveyed the nature of the film. Once near the Alhambra cinema, on the outskirts of Yacoub al-Mansour neighbourhood, I had seen a man in a white car running someone over and killing him. Though I remembered the brutal nature of the accident, I didn’t recall the specific details.

Huge cranes, bulldozers and cement mixers passed in front of the café, blocking the street and filling it with a buzz of activity. Yacine wondered if they were looking for buried treasure beneath the capital. I explained to him why large projects were underway in Rabat, why new neighbourhoods, plazas, tourist areas, museums and galleries were being built. This sudden change, I said, might be because the new king felt he was a native of this city and he had to rid it of the bleakness of a rustic suburb. Yacine argued that people needed food and medicine, not a beautiful capital.

I blamed the Taliban for his comment and tried to rectify the matter by stressing the need to produce as much beauty as possible, that being the only way to overcome despair. He laughed again and reminded me of the long soirées at the homes of Ibrahim al-Khayati, Ahmad Majd and others, with their overwrought discussions that held out no hope for the future without a break from the past.

‘What’s happened to you lot?’ Yacine wondered.

I repeated the question as if asking myself, ‘What’s happened to us?’

Yacine asked again, ‘How did you come to believe that the future would be like a tramp’s trousers, made up of different coloured patches from various times?’

I told him, ‘We were talking about this city, not a utopia!’

Yacine believed that once the amusement park, the new roads, the furnished flats, the up-market hotels, the restaurants, the cafés, the cinemas and arcades were ready, Bou Regreg Park would be raided by the Zuhair and Zamur tribes, just like in the past. People would shut up their shops after the late afternoon prayer, as they had done in those far-off days in fear of incursions.

I laughed at the idea, but then replied seriously. ‘On the contrary, the park will become a source of not-so-tragic stories, a hotbed for love, adventure, wealth and bankruptcy, nights out for celebrities and parties for high society, a hiding place for wasters and drifters, and those in search of something known or unknown. The river itself will be transformed into a fish that goes to sleep at the crack of dawn!’

‘In that case,’ said Yacine, ‘the inhabitants of Rabat won’t need to go to Marrakech in pursuit of a fleeting moment of freedom.’

‘Not to Marrakech or Casablanca. We’ll put a final stop to Ibrahim al-Khayati’s claim that having dinner in Rabat is like having dinner at a bus station.’

‘But all the inhabitants of Rabat — I mean the rich ones — have bought houses in Marrakech,’ remarked Yacine.

‘They will sell them when they receive orders to move straight back to the capital.’

‘Even that is by order!’ Yacine exclaimed.

‘Yes. And all the gossip will also be instructed to migrate to the capital.’

‘Never. That’s impossible. Marrakech couldn’t survive without gossip. You know what? I had a friend in Paris who said that once the tales of Jemaa al-Fnaa had almost faded into oblivion, Marrakech devised modern stories, a kind of One Thousand and One Nights played out in sports centres, nightclubs and discos. So with or without orders, Marrakech will never relinquish her throne, even if you were to rebuild Baghdad on the bank of the river!’

‘I didn’t know you were such a fanatic.’

‘Between you and me,’ he said, ‘Rabat is nothing but an old Andalusian hag, extremely fair skinned but sagging. No amount of embellishment can help her.’

‘Do you hate her so much?’

‘I neither love her nor hate her. I only find her “forward”, as my mother would say.’

‘As for me,’ I explained, ‘I find her fascinating, mysterious and dreamy, and she also has a river. I don’t like cities without rivers, as if they were cities that don’t cry. I don’t like Marrakech: always acting like a child and laughing for no reason!’

‘Shame! How can a writer dislike Marrakech?’ wondered Yacine.

‘Guess what? The writer Abu Idris has a theory on the subject. He says that Marrakech is anti-writing, that she’s a city for old people.’

‘I’m going to tell you something that might upset you,’ said Yacine.

‘Say it, anyway.’

‘It seems to me that you’ve changed for the worse.’

‘What does that mean?’ I asked.

‘It means you’re brimming with a harsh bitterness. You’re not fooled by any of life’s tricks any more. Don’t you expect anything miraculous? How can you bear life in such clarity?’

‘I don’t make any special effort. It’s life that puts up with me!’ I said.

‘But you’ve always lived with troubles, doubts, mistakes and blind conviction. I mean, weren’t all those things just masks?’

‘Yes, most of the time. Back then, I believed we had to resist despair by any means.’

‘And now?’ he asked.

‘Now, to some extent, I’ve become reconciled to despair. Those who have boundless hopes make me more despairing than those in despair.’

‘It seems like I’ll never understand you,’ said Yacine.

‘No one can understand anyone,’ I replied.

At that moment, Layla arrived, her voice preceding her physical presence.

‘It looks like you’re talking to yourself!’ she said.

‘No, I was talking to Yacine!’

Her face darkened and she mumbled, ‘I’m sorry for interrupting you.’

She sat facing me. We looked at each other as if waiting for Yacine to leave. Once he had left, Layla began talking on the phone. I studied her face as she gave curt answers to end the conversation. Her whole face beamed with an inward smile, causing me unbearable pain because I would be unable to make her feel that way. Perhaps that pain cast its shadows over my gaze, for she asked me anxiously, ‘What’s wrong? Is everything all right?’

‘Yes, almost everything.’

Then I talked to her about the inner smile, and we came up with an amusing theory about having to create a sort of sieve in our internal spiritual space to sift the necessary in life (even if painful) from the useless (even if highly tempting). This process of sifting was the most eloquent expression of our balance, our strength and our mental and physical health. Without consulting us or even our being aware, our ultimate gratification, our most refined pleasure and our secret chemistry produced this inner smile. As the product of this marvellous sieve, this smile would be an aura around our bodies and souls, granting us luminous protection and invincibility in the face of life’s obstacles.

We talked at length about this subject in a kind of race for words and thoughts. We hardly knew who was saying what. Layla was directing this exercise in order to make me feel the need to arrange a space I controlled all by myself, without leaving any margin, however small, for others’ interference. That space, like the living space of any creature in this world, would allow me to differentiate between need and desire, because, according to Layla, the matter depended on this particular capacity.

‘Look at yourself,’ she told me. ‘You’re a perfectly healthy machine! All the mechanisms necessary for you to function are working. There’s nothing wrong with any of your systems, yet you’ve broken down and are in paralysis.’

We also talked about Bahia. I gave her an idea of our situation following Yacine’s death. I told her that deep down Bahia considered me responsible for what had happened and hated me for it. I hated her, too, for thinking that. Bahia believed Yacine had inherited the germ of rebellion from me and paid the price vicariously for my own political involvement and my neglect of the organisation. She would have preferred to see me settle this account personally, rather than making Yacine believe in my dreams, only to then find himself obliged to save me from the humiliation of my dreams’ disintegration by convincing me that extremism was the solution and that getting into bed with the enemy was not an option.

‘My God, it really is complicated!’ said Layla. ‘How is it possible to think like that? Life isn’t a succession of acts of revenge and the settling of scores. No generation can live the illusions of another generation. Plus, in the end, Yacine isn’t the tragic hero his mother claims. He’s just an extremist who met his death. And with the Taliban to top it off!’

Hurt, I said to her, ‘Please. Don’t talk about him like that.’

She squeezed my hand in apology, and looked closely into my eyes. ‘This relationship will destroy you — if it didn’t do so already ages ago. Save your skin! You can’t stake what’s left of your life on reckless hatred. Do you understand?’

To qualify matters, I said, ‘No, no, no. It is not as dangerous as all that. I’m at sufficient remove from all those things. The hatred I talked to you about doesn’t touch me from within. To tell you the truth, I’m not interested in what’s happening, or what will or won’t ever happen. I live totally detached from those things, even when I say that I hate her. I’m only using a word that suits the situation but does not express something I feel.’ I then seized this opportunity to tell Layla that I felt nothing, absolutely nothing.

She fell silent for a short while and then suggested we go to a Japanese restaurant. I agreed immediately. There, using a plate of sushi, I was able to explain what I meant. Raw flesh in particular eloquently embodied my non-feeling for things. Raw meat did not suggest food with a fabricated identity, but rather was an authentic food in its primitive form, before culture interfered to suggest it be used in a certain way and with accompanying substances. Cooked dishes were, first and foremost, a creation of scent. Raw dishes, however, were a liberation from history for the benefit of the ingredient. As a result, eating became a relationship with elements that were independent of each other, and not a relationship with flavour, as centuries of culture’s trickery had made it.

Layla did not seem interested by the topic and preferred to confront me firmly. She insisted that sushi was not something primitive, as I claimed, and that there was a huge difference between a man devouring a fish he had just pulled out of a river and a man enjoying sushi in a Japanese restaurant. ‘What you are devouring now is called sushi, not fish,’ she said.

I busied myself finishing off what was left on my plate, avoiding further discussion of the subject until her voice broke my concentration.

‘When you say you don’t feel anything, do you mean, for example, that you can’t fall in love?’ she asked.

‘The issue is probably more complicated than that.’

‘Can you or can’t you?’

‘Yes and no,’ I said.

‘How?’

‘There are many elements to love that I only know about through memory. Everything related to emotions, passion, fear, yearning, regret, guilt, seduction and tenderness.’

‘What about desire?’ Layla asked.

‘Desire in its actual form, yes, but not its course. For example, I am totally incapable of feeling the onset of desire, and its subsequent progress by means of words, movements and suggestions. I just know in my brain that the time has come. At that point I resort to memory to enjoy the culmination of desire.’

‘Do you mean to say that pleasure is unrelated to what your body’s doing?’ she asked.

‘No, not at all. I mean that in order for me to enjoy what my body’s doing, I must connect its hardware — in operation at that moment — with the bank of emotions found in the hard disk.’

Her eyes welled with tears. ‘That’s so horrible! What kind of pain is that? What an ordeal!’

I tried to make light of the situation and pretended that the matter required only additional effort on my part for me to obtain some pleasure; and I might, after all, achieve better results due to this effort.

She smiled through her tears and asked suddenly, ‘And us?’

‘What?’

‘What shall we do with our life?’

‘In the immediate future, we go to your flat and lock ourselves in until we find an exceptional love story.’

‘No, no. You’re mixing up the immediate and the long term. We can only lock ourselves in until my daughter returns from school!’

And so it was.

We went straight to her bedroom, and when I paused to look at the titles of the books carefully arranged on black shelves near the bed, she pulled me away, saying, ‘Forget the books. We don’t have much time.’

I imagined her body’s fragrance, or I remembered it, I don’t exactly know, right at the moment our lips met and I took in her tongue, reluctantly at first and then compliantly. I imagined her scent when she raised her arms to free her breasts, and as I explored the details of her pale skin, moving from cold, shivering areas to warm, pulsating ones. I imagined her smell as I pulled her to me and released her, when she lay prone, when she turned over, when she spread open and when she curled up, when she turned away and drew back, when she resisted and then yielded and shuddered. I imagined her fragrance in the movement of her fingers, and when she quieted, swooned, moaned and said, ‘Yes, like that, yes. Exactly what you did, never do it with another woman, I beg of you. I forbid you to do it with another woman.’ She was silent, and then burst out, ‘Yes. Now. Please say you love me.’ She cried and then was spent.

At every moment, I imagined her body’s fragrance — or recalled its memory. I did not say ‘I love you’. I remembered the fence of the garden leading to the Ibn Sina apartment, the acacia tree, the scent of a summer night, and the advent of dawn after a silent return from the Beach nightclub. I remembered the woman and the short black dress around her feet, her hands holding the garden fence and the magic of her back illuminated by lamplight. I remembered her fragrance, hers out of all the sleeping or vigilant, seen or unseen creatures that surrounded us; a fragrance redolent of water, vegetation, soil and fruit; the fragrance of her face, the expression of her face that in a flash of anger turned it into a metallic scent, dry and stinging. For she had bent down and pulled up her dress from around her feet up the length of her legs, her thighs and her chest, all the way to the curve of her shoulders. Then she turned around and told me, through her angry expression and her messy hair, ‘You must leave at once. I never want to see you again.’

In such way, a fragrance cached in the box of miracles leads us to a timeless pleasure that moves through our body, shaking its withered branches and scattering their leaves to the wind. But we know neither who enjoys what nor who seduces whom.

I asked her, ‘Can I stay a little?’

‘Of course, you have to stay, even if you didn’t say I love you!’

‘But you asked me to leave immediately.’

Panic stricken she continued, ‘Impossible! Did I really say that?’

‘Yes you did, and you also said: “I never want to see you again!” ’

‘They seem like my words, but I was in no state to say them.’

‘Perhaps you said them at another time or in another life. To me or, hopefully, to another man.’

‘You could have said I love you even without feeling it.’ she said, ‘Just like you would say anything else. Would it have hurt you to say it?’

‘I did not see a need for it. I figured that such a powerful sentence ought to be said in a different setting.’

She explained herself. ‘You should know that I feel insulted if it is not said to me while making love.’

‘You’re exaggerating.’

‘Anyhow, given you’re a man who claims not to feel, the sex was still the best thing to have happened to me in years.’

‘It’s worthy of two persons living a great love story,’ I said.

‘True!’ she said pensively.

She then stretched her body over mine, took my face between her hands and said, ‘I like the way you do it!’

I was absorbed in contemplating her face, with the attitude of someone without a care in the world, when she suddenly got up in a panic. ‘My daughter’s school has ended! You must leave right now.’

I got up ponderously, but she pounced on me with my clothes. She tidied up the room, got dressed, helped me get dressed and leapt around until I found myself at the lift door. She was laughing and told me, having calmed down a little, ‘What a miracle! A charming man!’

I walked slowly down the street on my way to the bus stop, then it occurred to me to keep walking. When I left Bourgogne Square and turned right to enter the dreamy street housing the Ecole Normale Supérieur, Yacine poked me with his little finger and asked, ‘Is she a new love story?’

‘I love no one,’ I replied sharply.

He answered immediately, ‘Easy, easy now. I’m not partisan here. You could even consider me a neutral bystander. In the best case scenario, I can help you ask good questions.’

‘What I need most is good answers,’ I said.

‘I know, but the dead don’t have answers!’

‘Too bad. Tell me, how did you figure out it was a new love story?’

‘When a man is on his way to the bus stop, then decides to walk, and does this as if he were compressing the distance between him and a woman he was just with, there are grounds to ask whether he hasn’t fallen in love!’

‘What definitive proofs!’

‘You’re making fun of the matter to cover it up.’ he said, ‘But as you were walking, I heard you say, “Me too, I like the way you do it.” ’

‘I said that while I was alone?’

‘Yes, quite a few times!’

‘I think I’m suffering from a kind of asynchronicity. I should have said that in reply to something that was said to me fifteen minutes before — not because that’s what I feel, but only to provide a decent answer.’

‘I don’t know an illness with that name, but you have strange illnesses. Who knows? Since there was a space of time between what was said to you and what you said in reply, there might be an interval between your falling in love and your being aware that you’ve fallen in love.’

‘You’ve either said more than necessary or you haven’t said enough!’

‘I’m only trying to understand what you called asynchronicity,’ he explained.

‘But you’ve put your finger on something that tortures me.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as the feeling that I’m belatedly living the scenes of an old affair.’

‘Do you mean that you loved this woman in another life?’

‘Don’t be stupid. It’s just an affair set in two times.’

‘Love in instalments!’

‘Or something like that.’

That evening I wrote in Letters to My Beloved:

I am waiting for you. All I do is wait for you. I am neither in a hurry nor discouraged. I am not sure of anything and I am neither suspicious nor in despair. The fact is that I am waiting for you and I feel that this gives my life meaning, though I do not know what it means to give one’s life meaning. I waited for you as if you were still in the summer nightclub, while I was in the desolate square. Why did you stay there and why did I leave? Are you still dancing with someone we met there? You were extremely moved to see him and you said that he was one of your dearest friends. I imagine that you are still angry with me because of the funny way I danced to the soundtrack of Pulp Fiction. I intended it to be an awful, funny dance to spoil the artistry of your dance. But you insisted that we do it perfectly, the way Travolta and Uma Thurman did it in the film, including maintaining the right distance to allow you to pass your fingers before your eyes and face. It was the other person who provoked me, his muscles moving in a blind mirroring. Only you were close to the soul of the dance, even if I was busy performing that insolent mockery. There was something sarcastic in the film as well, but I can’t remember it any more. Travolta only danced with his body, but you — I mean Uma Thurman — danced with her soul. She was saying, ‘I want to win a prize this evening!’ But what she meant was, ‘I want to win you.’ And you, to whom were you saying that?

Here we are now, in the desolate square, in the garden adjacent to the entrance of the building. Here we are storming the dawn with our nudity; here you are taking away what is left of my caution and placing it on the stones of the wall where you press your open hands and form with the white contours of your body a wound in the night. Then you vanish, leaving no trace of you in the ashes surrounding me.

2

I jolted Bahia out of her afternoon nap, jeopardising the quiet of the afternoon. Ahmad Majd wanted to talk to her about an urgent matter related to a lawsuit her family had initiated over land near the capital. She sat up in bed and, after much grumbling, snatched the telephone from my hand — as if we were fighting over it — and placed it directly to her ear.

Whenever conversation revolved around the land whose ownership the government had expropriated from my wife and her brothers, the atmosphere became charged. Dialogue among the siblings, between the lawyer and the siblings, and among all those involved in the matter, became impossible. No one had a solution for it.

For more than fifty years, successive generations of my wife’s family had lived with dreams of the unexploited wealth lying in a piece of real estate that stretched along the bank of the Bou Regreg, from its mouth to the edge of Akkrach. They had no rivals except the awqaf with their huge properties and a few old-established families from Salé who owned scattered lots.

When the Akkrach rubbish dump settled in that romantic spot of the neglected capital, with its waste, its fires, its smoke and its foul smells, the value of the land went through the floor. The only ones who endured in this rotten hell that stretched along the river were potters with their kilns, a few farmers who grew contaminated vegetables and, slightly later, some villages that sprang up around the dump. Their inhabitants came from the wasteland of Zaeer, the village of Oulad Moussa and the hills of Akkrach, and from the slums along the river. All this happened in an area of Rabat with the most unique and natural beauty. Meanwhile, Rabat’s middle classes, with their lack of imagination, expanded on the plain leading to Zaeer Road and fought a stupid war over the sea and the river at the same time.

Then came the new era, and in the stream of token projects launched under its banner, the government created the Bou Regreg Basin Development Agency, which quickly became the aesthetic branch of plans to restructure the capital. Dreams of unexploited treasure came to life for a new generation: that of my wife and her siblings. They carefully calculated their acres and the anticipated price of a single square foot, and found that their family, which had survived for decades on the breadline, living off the respectability and superiority of old-established families, had become rich under the new dispensation. But the prices did not move up or down because, in the blink of an eye, the self-same land completely evaporated. The Agency seized it, just as it had all other plots of land, to use for a city of dreams.

After every telephone conversation with our friend Ahmad Majd, my wife would speak angrily about how she failed to understand all the bragging over democracy and modernity in a country that did not have the slightest respect for the individual and his property. I would tell her, for the sake of bickering, ‘Your family slept on top of this treasure for decades without ever offering any of it to its children or its country. Now that the nation has decided to revive this wealth and lavish it on the people, you suddenly see flaws in the rule of justice and law.’

Bahia would reply by blaming this presumed modernity first and foremost. Then, veering off the point, she would hint at the plaudits for absolute power with which we on the traditional left intoxicated ourselves while collectively humiliating the nation.

I would reply sarcastically. ‘Why are you singling out the traditional left, my dear? Is there any louder cheering than that of the new left?’

Mostly, she did not reply, lest her words reach our friend Ahmad Majd, who, after gradually infiltrating into public life, did not miss an opportunity to tout his decisive role in taking major decisions in the highest circles, especially those concerning sensitive subjects related to human rights and secret talks with the Polisario. All that generated an energy for cynicism in me, and I fell victim to its dark side for several weeks.

I had not talked with Bahia about the disputed land during the years of our relationship. I had vaguely understood from her father, who died suddenly, that he owned swathes of the banks of the Bou Regreg, like many other families who considered these marshlands as nominal riches that meant little to them. But after the formation of the Agency and the ensuing conflict, we nervously broached the subject, because the expedited expropriation made Bahia feel she was the victim of an injustice. It made her believe she was pursued by a strange destiny, and if she won this battle something fundamental in her life would change. When I would tell her that the worst thing was that the question of this wealth — the real estate, potential income and endless speculation — would end her life, she would snap that the worst that could happen at the end of a person’s life was that they would settle for so little. In other words, accepting that what we had obtained was the best we could get. She would then add, ‘Who told you that I want to end my life?’

My wife’s family had lived in Salé for generations. None of them left its walls and it never occurred to one of them to go and live somewhere else, far from the city’s holy tombs and great mosque. Only one member of the family — no one knew what had got into him — decided to repeat the experience of paradise lost in the family history. In the midst of unprecedented emotional uproar, he emigrated to the opposite bank of the Bou Regreg, a mere fifteen minutes away from his paradise. As soon as evening fell he would set the table of nostalgia in his house of exile and lament Salé and its people, bewailing its ephemeral blessings. With every drink, his nostalgia grew more intense and he vented his anger on the parasitic growth of neighbourhoods around the city. The scion of Andalusia was reduced to a minority lost among the riff-raff, like a single tidy strand in the midst of tousled hair. That man was my wife’s father, a professor of modern linguistics at Mohammed V University, whose fear of poverty, nostalgia for Salé and grief over the decline of the Arabic language cost him his life.

At night he used to ask his wife to set the table and then he would take a very formal tour in his car, in the end turning his back to the lights of his tranquil city beyond the river. When he entered his house he always recited half a line from Al-Mutanabbi: Seeing is a vexation to the life of man.

When I told him once that the meaning was incomplete without the second half of the line, he replied immediately, ‘It’s more than complete!’

‘Just like that, without explanation?’

‘Yes, absolutely like that, because the whole of vexation is to see,’ he replied.

This elegant man who studied in Paris and contributed to the modernisation of the Moroccan university could not accept what he referred to as the downfall of independent Morocco. He could not stomach the mismatched construction in his historical city, the deterioration of the Moroccan teaching system, the change of values and the overarching race for wealth. He could not tolerate the disintegration of the Arabic language and the rise of the nouveaux riche, the retailers, the alcohol sellers and the speculators who had become the city’s notables and big-shots. He could not stand the fact that Salé had become a mere drop in the ocean, an eloquent symbol of the tragic eclipse and waning away that had taken his generation by surprise.

Hajj al-Touhami would spend the whole day shouting nonstop, as if he wanted to organise through shouting the chaos unfolding around him. Only then would he sleep soundly, satisfied with himself because he had done his duty. Until one day he went to sleep and never woke up.

Bahia never understood the state’s motive for punishing this gentle-hearted man by depriving his children of their lawful inheritance. With all the strength she possessed, she tried to make me embrace the cause at a time when I had no enthusiasm whatsoever for any cause. I used to answer her in exaggerated fashion, ‘Don’t you see that even Palestine doesn’t move me any more? Not that, not the fall of Baghdad, not Hezbollah; not a usurped land or a downtrodden people. All that and more no longer inspires me to take to the street and raise my voice! So, my dear, how do you expect me to make your stolen land on the banks of the Bou Regreg a cause for which I would rally support?’

My reply undoubtedly hurt her. She would remain silent for a long time, as if suppressing her voice was a sign of everything else being blocked.

One day she said to me, as if talking to herself, ‘You don’t know that I spent a whole day with Yacine before he left. We roamed over this piece of land and imagined building stables for horses, swimming pools, moorings, small white rooms and playgrounds for children.’

‘But he preferred to do that in Paradise, on riverbanks that no one can expropriate!’ I replied.

Then something terrible, and unexpected, happened. She started shouting, slapping her face, tearing her clothes and pulling her hair until her hands were full of it. In this dreadful display of grief, her voice came loud, sharp and deranged.

‘I’m talking to you about Yacine, my son, my soul, my own flesh and blood, my son, your son. Your son, not a cat run over by a car. Why do you kill him like that? Why do you tear him away from me with your sarcasm? Go, go away. I don’t want anything from you. I don’t want a lawsuit. I don’t want the land. I don’t want, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t?. .’

I was pacing the room, not knowing what to do. I did not approach her. I was gripped by a dread that paralysed my ability to act. I could not speak, get upset or ask forgiveness. I submitted to a kind of bemusement that made me look in equanimity at all that was collapsing around me. I considered my condition, which had become a means to cause pain, making it possible for me to provoke unbearable suffering in my wife with lethal spontaneity. It was also possible for her, in her agony, to torture me without any guilt feelings, as if by inflicting on me the most grievous losses, anticipated or not, she were only fulfilling my wishes.

Every Saturday for months after this incident Bahia hosted her siblings, Ahmad Majd and Fatima for a family lunch, during which they discussed the court case and the conciliation sessions that the lawyer organised with a great deal of political savvy. I participated in body, but did not utter a word. Whenever Bahia noticed my presence, she motioned to me with a delicate movement of her head as a sign that she had forgotten what had occurred and that I could contribute. But that was like stuffing a snowball down my throat. I would blush, my vision would blur, and I would end up in the bathroom, where I would spend a long time getting rid of my stomach cramps.

During one of those ‘land luncheons’, as we called them, Ahmad Majd talked at length about the project that would take more than ten years to complete. It included a tourism zone, piers for entertainment, a tunnel under the Qasbah of the Udayas and the renovation of Chella. This would be in addition to shopping areas, up-market residential neighbourhoods, major hotels, restaurants, amusement parks, cafés, cultural and artistic organisations and sports grounds. All this would transform the river and its mouth into a new lively focal point for the capital.

Bahia said that she hoped the project would help integrate the two banks and put an end to decades of imbalance between them. Ahmad Majd confirmed, with the assurance of someone who knew the ins and outs of things, that this would be the case, and that the project philosophy rested on a vision to turn the river into a means for integration rather than a barrier dividing Salé and Rabat. At this point a verbal battle broke out between Fatima and Ahmad Majd about the management of the project and how political authorities had imposed it on the city. Fatima argued that huge interests had grown around the project even before it had begun, and that the land confiscation was a true scandal. But Ahmad Majd affirmed that the matter depended on a policy of ‘voluntaryism’ that stepped over traditional obstacles and points of resistance.

As for me, if there was anything that put me off and put an end to any desire I might have had to argue, it was talk of ‘effectuality’ and ‘implementality’. As soon as anyone uttered them, I headed to the balcony. I then heard Bahia declare, quite movingly, that Yacine had dreamed of placing a giant steel arch across the river at its mouth. He thought the arch would give the impression that the river ran through the fingers of the two cities.

As if feeling the approach of a poetic diversion he would not be able to handle, Ahmad Majd returned quickly to the subject and insisted on a reconciliation based on his earlier suggestion, which had been turned down by Bahia and her siblings. This consisted of compensation for the lands that had become registered property, and delaying the decision regarding the other lands until the completion of the registration process. The compensation would be of two types: one monetary, the amount to be agreed upon with the specialist bureau delegated by the Agency; and one in kind, in the form of concessions in the commercial and entertainment zones.

Bahia and her siblings insisted on completing the sale of all the confiscated land at market price. Every time Bahia repeated this opinion, Ahmad Majd became upset and, after a staged pause, begged her to consider the matter carefully. ‘Think with me, Bahia. How can the Agency buy your land at market price when it distributes the plots for free to foreign investors to encourage them to invest on the land of your fortune-blessed ancestors?’

Ahmad Majd managed to breech the united front of the heirs when he convinced the youngest brother to agree to his solution. He continued to work on the matter, offering enticing advantages and highlighting the risks in getting involved in legal procedures of unpredictable outcome.

Debate over procedures and solutions went on for more than a year without any significant result. Work was in full swing to finish the harbours, the pavements, the tourist and leisure facilities, the new lagoon and the artificial island. The hoardings announcing those projects lined the roads that surrounded the river. Every time a new phase of the project was launched, the press conferences multiplied. Television promoted the projects with amazing computer-generated images that fired the imagination of the inhabitants of the two banks, thus feeding their historical disputes with modern ammunition.

Which of the two banks of the river would reap the proceeds of this historic change? Would the project exact revenge for the centuries of Salé’s decline? Would it save Rabat from turning into a village at night? Ahmad Majd brought many such questions from his private late-night meetings with the elite to our tense lunchtime gatherings. He frequently took advantage of our curiosity to advocate his theories regarding the symbolic significance of a tunnel for cars under the Qasbah of the Udayas and the preparations for a concourse linking the Grand Gate, La?lu prison, and the Arcade of the Consuls, so creating the Montmartre of the capital. But he sighed over the cemetery nestled in the heart of the area. He wondered how a nation could choose to bury its dead in the most beautiful spot worthy of the living.

I said with exaggerated anger, ‘Let me remind you that it is the martyrs’ cemetery. There lie Allal ben Abdallah, Allal al-Fassi, Abderrahim Bouabid, Al-Hussain al-Khadar, Abdelfattah Sabatah, and thousands of people, great and small.’

Ahmad Majd added, ‘Al-Dulaimi, Al-Basri, and hundreds of killers like them are also buried there!’

I objected, saying, ‘You have no right to mix them in this way. The dead cannot be jumbled, even when buried in the same grave. Only the dead deserve this spot, one that overlooks the beach and allows a direct connection between their darkness and the Mare Tenebrosum, the Atlantic.’

I then felt that I had better get away from this painful issue and I withdrew within myself. Still I listened, amused by the lengthy discussions over the issue of uniting the two banks with a tramway. The lines would transport more than fifty million passengers a year and seed the two cities with more than fifty stations.

I liked the idea of the stations and said to myself that a city did not truly become a city until it had many stations where appointments, relationships and faces (feasible and impossible) could multiply. At that moment I heard Fatima ask loudly, ‘Do you think that the tram will unite the two banks?’

‘Yes, among other things,’ I said.

‘How strange. You all think about inclusion with the mentality of a seamstress.’

‘What’s strange is your inability to grasp the meaning of these great transformations,’ I told her.

‘Grasp all you want, my boy. Grasp, and good health to you,’ she said. After a short period of silence, she added, as if talking to herself, ‘There was a time when Sidi ben Achir, Sidi al-Arabi ben Assayeh and Sidi Abdallah ben Hassoun could unite sixty tribes in a heartbeat!’

I neither disagreed with her words nor expressed enthusiasm for them. I went back to reflecting on what Ahmad Majd had said about the tunnel. He was right about the hill having witnessed the first surge of the Moors into the region; tunnelling under it would be like tunnelling under the region’s origins.

We would reclaim the sea from the fear that had clung to us for centuries. We would head straight to it, without climbing up to look down on it. We would break the habit of going around the mountain whenever it stood in the way. Now, we would not circumvent it nor would it circumvent us. We would pass under its dense body and then raise it above the headlights of our cars. We would leave the Qasbah suspended above the beach with no defensive role or task, an elevation with no meaning except for the smells and stories swirling in its alleyways. It would observe from on high the queues of cars entering the tunnel and then coming out at the other end. Gone was the Qasbah that Rabat long shrouded in its memory, preferring to relinquish it to the poor and foreigners who did not fear humidity and considered the stench of the sea a gift from heaven. Now, another hill would rise like an icon over the hubbub of the city; it would overlook amusement parks, hotels and nightclubs; it would forget there was a time when it saw only pirates.

Fatima said, ‘Imagine the Qasbah collapsing during the digging of the tunnel!’

Ahmad laughed. ‘Do you think cowboys will be digging the tunnel? A multinational company will execute the project, backed by a consulting firm run by a world-famous engineer.’

‘Even so, accidents of this kind can happen to the biggest companies and the best engineers!’

‘I bet you’re wishing for the Qasbah to fall.’

‘That’s not fair,’ she said. ‘I just expect the worst from anything surrounded by great enthusiasm.’ She fell silent, perhaps hurt by Ahmad’s sarcasm. It reminded me of the game of musical chairs we played in our youth. Whenever Fatima, myself and some of our friends called for a certain realism in the activities of the left, Ahmad Majd and his friends in the new left made fun of what they called our reformist tendencies, which turned their back on radical revolutionary solutions and accepted halfway ones. They would repeat to us Guevara’s words: ‘Be realistic, demand the impossible!’ But when Ahmad and his friends became super realists, believing in the ability of enlightened modern powers to change the world without wasting time on political games, we were the ones to accuse them of weakness and making humiliating concessions. For years we traded recriminations, unaware of the huge losses we all incurred as a result.

For a few months Bahia persisted in her stubborn efforts to be involved in the heart of the project. She hoped to receive a parcel of the developed land. Ahmad Majd, on the other hand, kept trying hard to convince her to accept compensation that would put an end to the dispute. But Bahia, for various reasons, considered her involvement in this venture an exceptional opportunity to return in some way to life. She might have been inwardly convinced that the years lost searching for ambiguous dreams and the agony caused by Yacine’s death would all be rewarded by her involvement in a project that would transform the city and pump life back into its arteries. The material realisation of this transformation would provide her with the opportunity to tell herself and the world: ‘You know what? The new face of the city is also my face!’

3

One day Bahia woke up smiling and favourably disposed, for reasons unknown to me. While I was making coffee she surprised me with a question she had never asked before.

‘Can I ask your opinion on an idea that crossed my mind last night?’

‘Since when did you trust my judgement?’ I asked her.

‘I don’t trust your judgement, but I know how much you love crazy ideas. So I thought you might be able to help me.’

I put my cup of coffee on the table and looked at her for the first time since she had started talking.

Her face was radiant, a touch pale but filled with kindness. I felt I was scrutinising her features for the first time in years and rediscovering that she had them. I felt a certain tenderness towards her. I was probably moved by my awareness of the heartlessness of the situation of living permanently with someone unseen or not even looked at.

‘So what is this idea that has woken us up today in this strange mood?’ I asked her.

She replied impetuously, ‘I’m thinking of devoting part of the land to a humanitarian and artistic project!’

She spread the plans on the table and started explaining. ‘Leave aside the main part of the project, the quays, the lagoon, the island, the amusement park and so on. All of those are, if you like, the aristocratic elements of the new space. Let’s leave the façade, the part for show, to them. We’ll only ask for limited plots in those parts. But here, far from all that noise, at the far end of the bank, near where the Akkrach rubbish dump used to be, we’ll ask for whatever is left of our share in the land.’

‘What will you do in that blighted area?’ I asked.

‘We’ll resettle the people who lived off the rubbish.’

‘Then what?’ I asked.

‘Rehabilitate the dump.’

‘Rehabilitate what?’ I asked.

‘The dump, yes, the dump,’ she insisted.

I laughed like I had not laughed in years. But Bahia did not move. She carried on poring over the plans and proceeded matter-of-factly to say, ‘Yes, give the landfill its dignity back. Why are you laughing like that? Don’t you know that millions of tons of garbage have been piled up in this beautiful place over the years, turning it into one of Akkrach’s hills? It has poisoned the ground water and the river. The smoke of its fires, intended or accidental, blanketed the banks of the two cities. It has ruined the health of generations of Salé’s inhabitants, causing asthma, rashes and chronic infections. It’s a record of the events and transformations having to do with what the city spews out.’

‘And that’s why you want to rehabilitate the dump?’ I asked her.

‘It’s not for the concept of the dump,’ she explained, ‘but for its concrete body. It would be unnatural if we erased this hill from geography and memory in a kind of naïve clean up. It wasn’t just a rubbish dump, but a source of life, a way of life. Imagine the number of men, women and children who have spent their entire lives searching through its entrails for something to survive on. Imagine all the people for whom the dump was the first thing they saw and the first thing they heard, and whose nostrils were never filled with another smell. All those who collected their toys from there, playing with obvious things and others less obvious: rusting computers, dismantled objects, remnants of things, medical waste, human limbs dumped by the university hospital; then the surprise of a complete doll, and cars and toys still in their boxes, because the city rejects its surplus and, at times, cannot distinguish between what it throws into its forgotten cupboards or into its rubbish dumps.

‘Imagine all this crowd tanned by the sun and the grime, those who were born there and spent all their lives on, under or inside the dump. They don’t know any other space and think that life can only exist in a dump, and that the rubbish piling up around them comes from another planet. Imagine all the people who built their huts and their dreams there. Imagine the situation when they are told, “The dump has moved. Follow it to the new location.”

‘But the dump wasn’t just a rubbish dump. It was a hill and a bank on a river. OK, a stinking bank, but still a bank by a river in flow covered with reeds blown by the wind, and a large market for vegetables, fruit and meat. It was also home to love stories, good and bad marriages, grudges, small tortures, the dead and the buried. They cannot be told to go away because we have decided that the banks of the Bou Regreg will become the most beautiful spot in the city. You may look from afar and remember the ugliness in which you lived. What I mean by rehabilitating is us finding them a place among us, a place in this beautiful game. As if we were saying thank you to them for implanting so much life in this place, which for years we tried to kill, before suddenly deciding to save.

‘I believe that settling them at the heart of this architectural showpiece would not diminish its splendour, but might even add a certain naïve kindness. It won’t hurt anybody. We could add to that a giant memorial for the dump, consisting of an artificial hill of various shapes and colours, where children could play without harm. It would be an expression of an emancipated sense of the beautiful, one not controlled by rigid guidelines and hollow considerations. Add to this the pedagogical gain that might result from it, its ability to open people’s eyes to the importance of establishing a human relationship with rubbish. I bet people would respect water more as a result of this landmark than for the sake of the beautiful lagoon.’

I listened to Bahia, amazed. When she finished, my first reaction was to ask for her forgiveness, because I had made fun of her idea and attributed it to the depression that she suffered because of the lawsuit.

I told her that it was a truly wonderful idea, but I shared my fears with her, in case her project raised objections for various reasons, which would render its fulfilment impossible. She, on the other hand, demonstrated huge willingness to follow up on the project regardless of the outcome. I felt better about her spirits. Bahia’s good mood gave me the opportunity to ask her about the idea, suggested by our son, for an arch spanning the mouth of the river. She repeated that he had told her about it when they went together to see the confiscated land, the day before his departure.

She had wanted to give him a chance to think about a solution for it.

‘On our way back,’ she said, ‘we stopped at the mouth of the river, and there he expressed his lack of interest in the land and the projects surrounding it, but he said that if he could do something, he would install a giant rainbow-like arch that would connect the two banks; a huge, irregular arch, unlike any other. It would be taller than the Qasbah of the Udayas. One foundation would be on the Rabat side, then it would rise to its apex before dropping away towards the second foundation on the opposite bank. A steel arch painted blue to look like a thread of water frolicking over the ocean.’

I asked if Yacine had left anything about the idea in his papers or drawings, but Bahia said no. She thought it was a spur-of-the-moment idea, and he had probably made fun of these projects. He used to say that absurdity was the only thing that could save the city. I did not comment and left the house deflated. I walked for a long time in the alleyways of the old city in the direction of the river, recalling all the simple things I had not achieved. I had wanted to build a small house by the sea, it didn’t matter where, but hadn’t been able to.

I had wished to visit Havana. Why? I didn’t know for certain. Perhaps because of the music and Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s novels, or just because an old friend of mine went there on a journalistic assignment and did not return for a year. I always dreamed of getting caught in the net of a city whose embrace would not release me to another city; a city that hugs, breastfeeds, reprimands and licks your wounds, a city where you could live with the impression of building it, one stone at a time, and think of it when getting ready for bed, as if it were a woman awaiting you. Now, however, I had no energy to undertake such a trip. I did not feel like packing my suitcase and going to the airport. The most I could do was stand in the street on the side facing Havana’s seafront, awaiting the three tigers to pass, and go with them to the night of the city, opening the box of the language that sprang from the depths of night. How wonderful the city that stripped off the language of day at sunset and donned a different language for night.

I had less glorious wishes as well: losing weight, for example, or mastering the tango, but I had given up everything and was content to keep up an understated elegance that I had learned from my mother.

When I remembered all the things I had failed to achieve, I felt cheated. This often prompted me to compare the effort I exerted when I adopted big causes and the effort I made to fulfil my little wishes. Whenever I made such a comparison, I realised that if I had exerted a small effort to fulfil my modest wishes, compared to the huge effort I devoted to those great causes, I would have been another person today. I admitted to myself, based on this truth, that the fulfilment of all the aims in the world would be meaningless if it resulted, on the personal level, in putting a person’s remains in a plastic bag and forgetting it on the side of the road.

I sat down at a café near the river, exhausted from my walk and my black thoughts. I called Fatima and told her I was waiting for her there. At that instant, Yacine appeared.

‘Why this serious concern for the arch?’ he asked.

‘For no reason, I just liked the idea,’ I said.

‘I don’t want you to adopt it. Your projects and mine have nothing to do with each other, do you understand?’

‘I do understand, but you’re not here any more,’ I replied.

‘It’s you who’s not here any more.’

‘Listen to me, Yacine. No one needs this arch, not you, me or anyone else. The new project, however, does need it. Among all the material components the new city requires, there isn’t a single whimsical element. The arch could be that element, and might be able to break down the meticulous calculations of profit and loss. It might move the city from a path of pure construction to a path of pure imagination. Can you understand that?’

‘Yes, I understand,’ he replied, ‘but your hijacking of the idea upsets me. I don’t want another kind of relationship between the two of us. The fact is, I know exactly what will happen: you’ll chase after the project to no avail, and then you’ll add a new loss to our stock of losses.’

‘What if I like the idea and the arch becomes a feature of the city?’

‘That’d be horrible too!’

‘Why?’

‘Because another, more complex relationship will emerge between us, and I don’t like that.’

‘We have to forget our past disagreements,’ I said. ‘You know, I don’t have the slightest enthusiasm for this or any other project. All I want is to get out of the pits.’

‘And the dump?’ he asked.

‘I don’t want to have anything to do with it. Imagine that after all the years I spent fighting imperialism and reactionaries, I end up as an activist for a dump!’

Yacine laughed and asked me, ‘And the arch? Do you think it could save the toiling masses?’

‘Yes, it would.’

‘From what?’

‘From getting used to killing imagination.’

He said, ‘You’re joking. The arch would only redeem a minor thing of concern to you, nothing else.’

Fatima arrived and Yacine withdrew, leaving a cruel sentence hanging in my mouth. She might have noticed its effect on my face, for she asked, ‘Are you just emerging from the heat of battle?’

‘No, not at all. I was only arguing with myself about a crazy project.’

She asked excitedly, ‘Going to Havana?’

‘No, Yacine’s arch at the mouth of the river.’

Her eyes twinkled, and she said that ever since hearing of the project she had not stopped thinking about it. She also said that building the arch would take our cities in a new direction that might break down the mould of traditions that weighed heavily on our chests.

That was how we began planning the arch. We established a group in charge of the project and identified the doors to knock on and the consultants to use. We said that even if we failed to complete the arch, we would get involved in an unusual cause, one with poetic dimensions that might succeed in moving something that was difficult to move.

A disagreement bloomed in the press between those who considered the arch an aggression against the historical fabric of the city and those who considered it a modern, artistic addition to a view frozen in the past. There were those who saw an arch overlooking the ocean as an invitation to adopt the absolute, and others who saw it as an expression of Moroccans’ phobia with any space not controlled by doors and locks. Some considered it a bold proposal to give expression to new needs in the urban environment; others deemed it an expression of the crisis of the traditional left, which did not conceive projects but rather invented the games that messed them up.

The strangest thing we read during this period was an article written by one of the new yes-men, who claimed that the idea was very old and already existed in the development plan for the riverbanks. He added that a naïve campaign based on that idea had been launched to suggest that only one party in the country was capable of visualising splendid things for our urban spaces.

When the Agency invited our association to a meeting on the subject, we understood that the article had been a preamble to the idea’s adoption. We were happy. Fatima, as president of the association, presented the elements of the project, its philosophy and its artistic and humanitarian dimensions. She offered a vision backed by a technical report prepared by a firm of consulting engineers and a declaration of support from a group of well-known artists. At the end of her presentation before a number of directors and engineers, there was a slow exchange of hesitant smiles before they all exploded in noisy laughter.

We tried a few times to intervene and resume the conversation. The laughter would subside, but as soon as one of us uttered a word or two, the laughter would resume, louder than before. We had to stop talking entirely and simply watched these eminent people — successful in everything and more refined than the rest of humanity — as they handed paper handkerchiefs to one another, some suppressing their laughter and others in fits. They looked at us every now and then and apologised with partial signs, as if they were blaming us for leading them into this embarrassing situation.

When matters reached a level of awkwardness that made it impossible for them to go on laughing, the director cleared his throat, arranged himself in his chair, and said in a low voice, ‘We’re sorry! We’ve been following the arch proposal in the papers, but never, for one moment, did we think that the matter would be so serious.’

‘There is nothing serious about it,’ I said. ‘We only want to make you see that games are also an architectural requirement.’

‘Yes, we understand that. While you are no doubt aware that this game would be highly expensive, and with the project in its current state we could not convince anyone to agree to this huge expenditure.’

‘We weren’t thinking in those terms,’ I said. ‘It occurred to us that the development project was so bold and so enormous, it might be considered the only project open to such games.’

Confusion pervaded the room, and we instinctively took advantage of it to collect our papers and get ready to leave. The director pushed his chair back and stood up, revealing his great height. ‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘I hope you did not consider our laughter rude or a way to avoid the issue.’

I said sincerely, ‘Laughter was right at the heart of the matter.’

Fatima was affected by the events of the meeting for a number of weeks. She said that what shocked her most was the amount of power those people had, power that gave them the right to turn a public domain like the city into a sphere for their sole, unrivalled intervention. They could decide to set an island in the heart of the river, create a lagoon and put up an amusement park, without seeing their plans as an assault on the space or an attack on the citizen. But they begrudged us for imagining setting an arch over the river, which would not require the confiscation of land or the displacement of inhabitants.

She calmed down after a while and regained her gift for sarcasm. She repeated that we deserved the lack of respect because we had thrown away our revolutionary demands, and our utmost ambition was reduced to acquiring for the Moroccan people a piece of steel to hang over the river.

Bahia, who haughtily watched us abandon her project, never let an opportunity slip without asking, ‘Where did the arch go?’ I replied most often, ‘To the landfill of history.’

Our disinterest did not stop her from revealing the latest news in the rehabilitation of the dump, especially after Ahmad Majd had used his friendship with people in high places and attracted some official sympathy for it. He also introduced many formal and substantive changes that stripped her idea of all its elements of surprise and turned it into a plain melody in the symphony of sustainable development. We did not, therefore, pay any attention to the news or to her arguments that the new design was a victory for the substance, though at the expense of the form. And all as a result of difficult negotiations, where cunning Ahmad Majd played the role of the unstoppable engineer.

It so happened that one evening as we sat discussing the details of our failed projects, the TV news began with two long reports, one dealing with the incorporation of the Akkrach region into a huge project for social housing and the creation of a new city on the ruins of the dump. The second report concerned the beginning of work to build the Gate of the Sea, exactly at the mouth of the river where Yacine, before his death in Afghanistan, had imagined it. It was a steel arch for the river to pass under as if it were flowing through the fingers of the city.