The Arch and the Butterfly

1

When I returned home one evening, I found Bahia lying on the couch facing the TV. She sat up and told me, hesitantly, that we needed to talk. I sat, apprehensive, as she handed me an envelope. I recognised the name of the medical lab located at the entrance of our apartment building. I reluctantly took hold of it, and she asked me to read it carefully, which I did, extremely quickly, expecting one of those catastrophes that only laboratories can cause. I read through it once and then again, but I understood nothing. I looked at her and asked, hardly able to speak, ‘What is this?’

‘Tests the doctor ordered to check my fertility,’ she explained.

‘What are the results?’

‘Can you believe that I’m as fertile as ever!’

My nerves settled, now that I knew it was not about terminal cancer. ‘And?’ I asked.

‘We can make a new baby!’

I shivered and relived in one second the hell I would have to go through, starting with the maternity ward and ending in the wilds of Kandahar. I got up, nervous, and said decisively and unequivocally, ‘That will never happen.’

For almost four weeks we hardly talked to each other, and then only about simple day-to-day matters. I would spend the whole day out of the house and when I returned in the evening, I went directly to the TV set. I avoided the slightest physical contact with my wife lest she use it as a way to achieve her foolish plan. Fatima visited us every now and then, telling us about her imminent transfer to Madrid, where she had been assigned by her news agency. Her visits lightened the tense atmosphere at home.

One day I told Bahia, for no special reason, that I was grateful to her for having discussed with me the issue of a new baby. She could have obtained what she wanted without my knowledge, though we had not had sex for years. She explained that she had thought about it, but did not consider it an elegant way to resume our relationship, and somewhat demeaning to both of us. I assured her that I understood her longing to have a child, but she had to understand that the matter terrified me. It wasn’t a disagreement that could be resolved, but rather something impossible to overcome.

She said very simply, ‘If that’s the case, we must separate.’

We did. We appeared before a judge and explained our situation to him without embellishment. He first said it was impossible to use my refusal to have a child as a cause for divorce, because having children was the only legal justification for marriage. He said marriage was not like shooting a film on love. He made a feigned effort to convince Bahia to reconcile, and found it appropriate to remind me of the joys of having children, our greatest blessing. He added, ‘If God grants you another child, you yourself would be reborn!’ When he realised that his words would not change our minds, he completed the procedure in silence, noting down very carefully our monetary agreement without further comment.

I caught up with Bahia after we left the court building as she was getting ready to drive away in her car. I suggested through the car window that we have a cup of coffee somewhere.

We sat down in the garden of the Hassan Hotel and, for the first time in years, talked with pure affection, as if something in the papers we had just signed had helped end our little wars. As if it had placed us on the path of regular people who did not see a mountain of hidden meaning in every word, or get upset when the other splashes water on the newspaper when filling a glass, or chain smoked. We were no longer people who made their lives a succession of nerve-racking moments because, even if they did not say it aloud, they were sick of living together.

Bahia told me that she had thought a lot about the matter, explaining that it was not nostalgia for motherhood. ‘You know that I’m not attached to such things, and I wouldn’t blame you, on that basis, if you accused me again of being a bad mother. It seemed to me that the best way to avenge this tragedy was to repeat the experience: become pregnant, have cravings, give birth, breastfeed, climb this mountain all over again. You know that pain can sometimes drive you to imagine magic solutions. For many months, every time the telephone rang I expected to be told that the letter was a terrible mistake and that Yacine would be back on the nine o’clock flight! Then the delusion evaporated. So when the lab confirmed that my fertility was still normal despite my age, I took it as a clear sign from fate, and one that I had to seize. When you objected so forcefully, I understood that our remaining together would kill this new baby.’

In turn, I tried to explain to Bahia that the baby would not save me or our relationship. I did not want to chase after something that did not exist. I did not want the child she talked about to see me so exhausted. I did not want to avenge anything. All I wanted was my share of calm, nothing more, nothing less. I wanted to chat in a café on the pavement of life, to comment on the weather, to talk about crimes and football matches. I wanted to go out at night to celebrate something beautiful I had read or seen. I wanted to travel without a reason, aimlessly, to travel for travelling’s sake.

Bahia cried in silence and then asked me, ‘Can’t you do that while being a dad over again?’

‘I couldn’t do it at all!’ I said.

At that moment she stood up and, without looking at me, grabbed her handbag with both hands. She put her sunglasses over her teary eyes, and asked as she was leaving what I would like to keep of Yacine’s things.

Distraught, I told her, ‘An item of clothing, a T-shirt, for example, or one of his shirts.’

She left, but I did not move.

Yacine appeared, coming to the table and asking if I had just returned from a funeral. I said, ‘Something like that.’

‘You must feel very light now. Weren’t you carrying this relationship like a huge mountain on your shoulders?’

‘It’s not so simple. What appears like salvation at first sight, once we’ve done it, makes us feel that we’ve buried part of ourselves.’

‘You always look for the drama in every story,’ he replied.

‘You’re right! Really I should be celebrating the happy event.’

‘Or at least you should admit that you’re relatively lucky compared to Al-Firsiwi, who is still carrying my grandmother’s corpse on his back.’

‘We all carry a corpse of sorts on our backs.’

‘I hope you’re not alluding to me,’ objected Yacine.

I was overcome by a sudden fear, so I rushed to explain, ‘You’re not a corpse, as you well know.’

‘What will you do now? Tell me,’ he said.

‘I’ll make space for myself.’

‘Before you do, I want to involve you in an important matter,’ he said.

‘I hope it has nothing to do with preaching and guidance.’

‘No, but it’s a question of life and death.’

I left the café and Yacine went off without his last sentence provoking me. I was busy digesting my new circumstances, which obliged me to take care of a large number of formalities, not least among them finding an apartment where I could move my occasional dreams. Before doing anything else, however, I had to spend most of that day transferring myself, one piece at a time, from the material and the symbolic spheres, where I had spent a quarter of a century, to a sphere I would have to navigate in an unfamiliar boat. At the end of the day I left my office at the newspaper with the same feeling that I had experienced when I came to Rabat for the first time. I had told myself then that if I could spend a whole night in this city, I could remain here for ever.

I was still walking aimlessly when I called Fatima. I hung on to her voice with all my force. I told her, ‘If you can remain on the line until we meet at a restaurant, you’ll save me.’ But she didn’t, and we met half an hour later, during which time I felt I had aged a little.

I told Fatima what Bahia and I had done that day. Her eyes bulged but she did not comment. When I returned to the subject while we were eating, she begged me to talk about something else, because, as she put it, she did not want to say something harsh that evening. She talked at length about her anxieties over moving to Madrid. While I considered this reassignment a way to pull her out of a demoralising situation, she explained to me that it would open the door to numerous fears: fear of the new world, fear of return, fear of separation, fear of adventure, fear of accidents and the fear of dying all alone in her apartment.

I told her that there was no connection between all those risks and where we were. Then she told me that she sometimes wished she had emigrated twenty years ago. ‘There are things that we do badly, if we do not do them early in life.’

I asked her to help me with some of the arrangements I needed to make for Bahia, and we agreed to meet the following day in the office of our lawyer friend, Ahmad Majd.

When I arrived for our appointment the next morning, Ahmad was not as cheerful as usual. Fatima sat on the sofa facing his desk, and it looked like she had been crying. As soon as I began talking, Ahmad assailed me with criticism and sanctimony, and ended up telling me that my relationship with Fatima shouldn’t have destroyed such a major thing in my life.

‘What does Fatima have to do with the situation?’ I asked.

‘You certainly know that Bahia never considered your relationship with Fatima to be innocent,’ he explained.

‘And what do you know about all this? What do you know about my private life that gives you the right to make judgments about innocence and guilt?’

I said that in a state of great anger, as I was struck by a pernicious idea regarding Ahmad. When I calmed down I explained to him, while Fatima listened without looking at us, the essence of my relationship with Fatima. I told him, since he wanted to interfere, that our relationship existed in the narrow border between love and other emotions, that neither of us was ever able to cross that line and that we did not regret it. This might have been because at heart we did not need a love affair, but only this liberated bond that allowed us to understand each other in a sea of misunderstanding, where everybody appeared to be right and wrong at the same time.

At that moment Ahmad stood up behind his desk, adopting the stance of an intellectual about to issue a final word of wisdom, and said, ‘Do you understand now why I prefer prostitutes?’

I looked at Fatima and saw her mouth wide open, like mine. As our silence persisted, Ahmad added, ‘Because they are real beings, not literary creations like you two!’

This joke alleviated, somewhat, the meeting’s prevailing tension. We started discussing the separation and the material arrangements and their impact with as little emotion as possible. I gave Ahmad all the documents he needed to deal with the situation and then left to rent an apartment, since I had to leave our shared dwelling. The obvious place for me was the Ibn Sina district, and I went directly there. I found an empty apartment through an estate agent, in the very same building where I had lived years earlier. As soon as I entered one of the rooms and opened the window, I saw the garden fence and the body lit by the streetlamp that had crossed my imagination.

When I told Layla that evening about all these events, she expressed deep concern at what had happened. She was not interested in my return to the neighbourhood; she was concerned about my new life and how I would manage it and whether I would be psychologically affected by the end of my marriage. She was worried whether I would fall into the trap of guilt and self-reproach and would be depressed as a result of the loneliness that would hit me. I assured her that loneliness would not be anything unusual for me, and that I was not heading for a breakdown.

‘But you’ll have to organise yourself in a different way and take care of things you haven’t done before. Listen to me. You must hire a housekeeper to look after the household. I’ll look for someone to do that. This new situation shouldn’t be a reason for your health, your appearance or your spirits to deteriorate. Do you understand? I won’t allow you to turn into a slovenly bachelor, living in a filthy house and wearing creased shirts!’

I tried to point out the romantic aspect of my return to the building. But she did not give up and preferred to list the things the new apartment needed. Half an hour later she gave me another list, and a third one while we ate dinner.

As we were leaving the restaurant, Layla said she wished I could have fulfilled Bahia’s wish to give her a new baby.

Upset, I said, ‘What the heck? Do you also think I’m just a mechanism for impregnation?’

She rushed to catch a taxi and waved her hand in a cold farewell.

2

My acquaintance with Ahmad Majd dated back to the time I was living in Germany. One of the members of the organisation introduced him to me during an exploratory trip back to Morocco in preparation for my final return. He was a first-year law student then and lived with his Marrakech group in a small apartment in the Qubaybat district. He spent the whole night making fun of my rural German accent, and I was convinced that he had invited me merely for his friends’ entertainment. We nevertheless became friends, although politics and life sent us in different directions. Our relationship remained strong, despite being soiled by a single dark spot — the passing and flimsy connection he had with Bahia before our marriage. It bothered me once in a while, but I bore it with a candid patience until I could ignore it completely. I did not think he held a grudge towards me as a result.

He and others were imprisoned at the same time as I. While there, we interacted, dealing with whatever the place imposed upon us in the form of break-ups and contradictory feelings. I was among the first group to leave prison after three years of incarceration. I went back to visit him with our other friends, and we did all the small assignments he entrusted us with.

Ahmad was a conciliatory, balancing element in the group, until he experienced a severe shock: his girlfriend had started dating someone else. The new boyfriend worked on human rights cases and continued to visit him regularly with her. We did our best to get him through the betrayal, but while in prison he was unable to form an emotional relationship that could have helped him get out of that wilderness, despite his meeting many women who visited the prison regularly as members of the organisation, which remained active despite being proscribed and under tabs.

In prison Ahmad completed his graduate studies and built his political life. He had no literary inclinations — though he was mad about opera and classical music — and paid no attention to his comrades’ published creative writings, which they considered gems of world literature. So he surprised everybody with a beautiful text he had written. It consisted of sarcastic dialogues between the prisoners and their visitors. It was brought out by a small publishing house and achieved great success under the title The Visiting Room. An insensitive film-maker adapted the book for the cinema and called it In a Headscarf in the Visiting Room, a title he considered funny. One critic described it as ‘the worst film in the history of Moroccan cinema’. Whenever the subject was mentioned, Ahmad would say, ‘Thank God it happened to the film and not the book.’

When he left prison Ahmad spent three years lost, like all prisoners who are stripped of the best years of their life. He opened an office to practise law which was neither a great success nor an abject failure. At the same time he exploited some land he had inherited from his father in Marrakech. He used the plots of land to establish a construction company that expanded amazingly fast. He renovated his father’s house in the old city, spending a great deal of money and time to transform it into the house of his dreams, the way he had imagined it since his childhood.

As soon as the house was at its most splendid and had become the weekly meeting place for our group, one of the city’s big-shots developed a taste for it and devised a number of reasons why Ahmad should sell it to him, either by force or voluntarily. He put pressure on Ahmad through his business acquaintances and his friends, using incitement and intimidation, as well as suggestions of attractive partnerships. He involved foreigners and people with power in these manoeuvres. Ahmad, who had never been scared of such underhand dealings, held out, sticking to his rights, manoeuvring and delaying, promising and temporising.

One day he went to the powerful man and said to him, ‘I won’t sell you the house even if you return to your mother’s womb.’

‘I’m not buying it for myself,’ the strong man replied.

‘Even if you were buying it for the Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him, I won’t sell it!’

‘Do you know that we have porn films that were shot in this house?’

‘You have nothing of the sort. No porn film has been shot in my house, as you pretend. As for pornography, say what you want and don’t hold back.’

‘We filmed it!’

‘You?’ asked Ahmad.

‘Yes, us. Through special means,’ he confirmed.

‘What did you think of our arses while undertaking this noble mission?’ asked Ahmad.

‘It was a mixed bag,’ he said, laughing, and then left.

When Ahmad returned from this strange meeting, he said to us in all seriousness that he would donate the house as an endowment for the Marxist-Leninists of Morocco and their descendants, from one generation to the other until doomsday.

I said, ‘The Sharia does not permit endowing a habous for the benefit of infidels and heretics. It would be better to assign it to us.’

He replied sarcastically, ‘That way we would guarantee its loss, sooner or later!’

‘Why would we lose it?’ I asked.

‘Tell me the case we’ve won so far.’

I replied, absent-minded, ‘We probably saved our souls.’

‘Well, say then that we won nothing but the wind!’

We laughed a lot, and Ahmad Majd remembered his father, who had died before seeing his son freed from prison. He said that the house was his way of asking for God’s mercy on his father’s soul. Then he said, as if continuing a previous conversation, ‘All the money in the world cannot bring back the lost years of our lives. Years are not sold in big or small markets. Such deceit! When I think about the years that were robbed from us, simply because one of us had forgotten a stupid book by Lenin in his luggage. Nowadays, terrorists in sleeper cells, with their belts and their explosives, spend only a few months in prison, during which time they enjoy multiple conjugal visits. It’s enough to drive one crazy!’

I said in consolation, ‘And all for the sake of Marrakechist-Leninism, we can’t even say for the sake of God!’

Ever since the old house was renovated, Marrakech became the city of our dreams the way Casablanca had been the city of our awakening. In the former we encountered fleeting pleasures and a cover to hide under. It put miles between us and the facts all around us. In the latter we encountered numerous probabilities and moments of illumination that helped us understand, in the blink of an eye, how things happened, before we lost the thread again and became unable to understand why or how they happened.

I got used to spending weekends in that house, and Ibrahim al-Khayati joined us at times. He did not spend the night there because he felt that old houses resembled tombs and he was afraid to sleep in a tomb.

The upper floor of the house was occupied by Ahmad’s sister, who had devoted herself to serving her brother before, during and after his imprisonment. She was a woman whose feelings had been purified by time and who had become a source of serenity. As soon as you met her, her embrace and smile erased any trace of the world’s claws, which might have touched you recently or long ago. She spoke laconically, one hand resting on the other, staring at you with two large black eyes, and you immediately felt sorry for those who did not know her. She was fifteen years older than her brother Ahmad, but she addressed him as ‘my dear’, as if he were older than her. She did it out of affection for him and, as she used to say, in consideration for him, because he was the only brother among seven sisters. Her name was Ghaliya, but among us, for our families, our lawyers and our rights groups, she was known as ‘Mother Ghaliya’. She had acquired the name for the many times she had stood at the gates of courthouses and prisons, for all that she endured on the roads and in trains and waiting-rooms, until she became one of those miracle women who, due to arbitrary detentions, were cast into the furnace of a world they never suspected existed. They then domesticated it until it became a fluffy cat playing at their feet. Because this was how she was, Ahmad would say, ‘She’s al-ghaliya, the precious one, neither selling nor buying.’ I think she liked the phrase which was taken from Al-Bidaoui’s ’aytah. Whenever anyone joked with her about it, she blushed.

Ghaliya lived peacefully in the house until we arrived. She would then supervise the business of the kitchen, and cook so many dishes it seemed it was the last meal of our lives. Afterwards, she would retreat upstairs or go to visit one of her sisters, depending on the evening’s mood. At age sixty-five she did not appear to have totally despaired of trying her luck at building a home of her own. She did not seem to regret anything and lived her life believing that, in any case, only the best would happen to her. If Ahmad married and had children, she would devote her life to raising them, and this would be the best that could happen to her.

Ahmad, though, only ever got as far as the first few pages of his love stories, just like the books he read. We, on the other hand, watched every affair intensely fearful that a woman would appear at the house, thereby causing us to lose it, or even lose Marrakech completely. Whenever we joked with Ahmad about this, he claimed that the house was among the few liberated areas in a city that rich French people had reoccupied without colonisation or a protectorate.

Marrakech had, in fact, literally and figuratively lost its authenticity over the last ten years. Property prices shot sky-high; the old houses, the riyadhs and the hotels were lost to their original owners. An earthquake shook the city, wiping away historic lanes, alleyways and neighbourhoods, for palaces, restaurants, residences and guesthouses to sprout in their place. A property war broke out among the new owners, pushing them to compete in building amazing edifices suitable for their exotic dreams. They pulled ceilings, doors and mosaics from here and there, spreading fever in the joints of the old houses, which had to endure the sawing, chopping and extracting of their parts, which were then aggressively transplanted in palaces and riyadhs that remained hermetically closed to the city’s clandestine nights. The palaces mixed architectural styles that had no connection with Marrakech. These styles and forms were imported by the newcomers, collected during their trips and from films and paintings discovered in India, Turkey, Iran, Mongolia, China, Yemen and Zanzibar. In this jumble, for which they received official permits as a way to restore the memory of the city, that memory was totally and permanently obliterated.

At the heart of this new style, the wealthy piled up the objets d’art they had collected all over the world: glassware, mosaics, carvings, vessels, rugs, musical instruments and even columns, marble and pottery from archaeological sites across the globe. Had all this been subjected to an investigation, it would have been the largest collection of stolen memory. The external layout of the city remained the way it had been, consisting of alleys and lanes bearing the names of the city’s saints, scholars and tribes. A secret city sprang up in its midst, selling the one thousand and one nights packaged in size and quantity to order. Marrakech disappeared and another Marrakech took its place that hid the loss.

Marrakech lived, grew, built and expanded; it attracted millions of tourists and hundreds of hotels, restaurants and nightclubs. It ate, drank, sold, bought and danced until the dawn call to prayer was heard from the Koutoubia. Everyone found their needs met in the revival; simple people found their subsistence, property tycoons found the fortune they dreamed of and white-slave traders found their clients. We too found our needs in a city years younger than us that accepted us and gave us protection and illusions of safety.

I found in Marrakech the elements that helped me quickly cover the distance between things, a significant achievement for someone like me who needed to exert a superhuman effort, like rowing against the current, to move from one condition to another. In Marrakech, I could put myself at the disposal of the city’s whims to do with me whatever it pleased. The city could decide what I did and did not deserve. When I scored an achievement, I told myself that this was what I deserved. At that point I was able to travel vast distances without feeling extreme fatigue, because it was not the distances that exhausted me but rather my burdens. I also found the remains of something alive that moved within me from time to time like a smouldering ember. I experienced that while walking and unexpectedly encountering faces that had not yet lost their primitive quality, faces that came from modest neighbourhoods within the city limits of Marrakech. They crossed the souqs carrying merchandise that would help them survive and keep them at the margins of life and at the margins of people who consume tons of costly things. When I saw the food carts, the spice and perfume shops, the vendors of medicinal herbs, vegetables and fruit, I remembered that all those things had a scent. Places were broken when they had no smell.

Whenever I visited Marrakech, Ghaliya took advantage of my presence alone in the house to talk at length about our childhoods. I never knew why she did it. I talked about my mother and she talked about her mother; we recalled our fear of amulets and saints’ tombs. She remembered something akin to a love story that she experienced with a maternal cousin, and I remembered my maternal cousin, an employee at the German embassy, with whom I exchanged passionate kisses on the roof. We remembered dishes we liked and others we hated. We concluded with the conviction that leaving childhood was the eternal repetition of the exit from paradise.

On one such visit I was getting ready to go out, pleased with this exchange, when Ahmad Majd called, asking to see me immediately. After a nervous discussion we agreed to meet in Ibrahim al-Khayati’s house in Casablanca the following evening.

Ibrahim was standing in the living room, which overlooked the garden and the swimming pool. He looked like someone about to announce the results of a TV competition. Ahmad and Bahia, on the other hand, were slumped in armchairs, but as soon as I entered they stood up with unusual enthusiasm and kissed me warmly.

I had only seen Bahia twice since our divorce, once to settle some legal questions and the second time when we visited my father at her request. I had the strange feeling that she had come from a distant past. I told her, sincerely, that I missed her, unaware of the awkwardness of the situation. She was moved and replied in a polite manner that seemed funny to me. Ahmad, on the other hand, appeared restless.

I asked him, ‘What’s this new catastrophe that you want to see me about so urgently?’

He jumped to his feet trying to control a situation I had not discerned. There was an incomprehensible nervousness in the air, causing Ibrahim to pour tea for ten when there were only four of us. Ahmad was waving his hands and arms with an abruptness that surpassed any verbal construction. He spoke like someone throwing away something he wanted to get rid of.

‘Bahia and I have decided to get married.’

The sentence felt cold and heavy when I first heard it, then it became complex as silence surrounded it. I remembered a malicious idea that had crossed my mind when I had been in Ahmad’s office, listening to him trying to dissuade me from destroying something essential in my life. I remembered as well the passing relationship he and Bahia had had before our marriage, one that had bothered me from time to time. At this moment, that insignificant sentence transformed into something hurtful, humiliating and difficult to swallow. I stood up, wishing only to get away from the situation. I had no special feelings towards him, and I was neither angry nor resentful. I was simply disgusted.

So when Ibrahim led me to the garden, looking for words to ease the shock he thought I had experienced, I explained to him that I had no need for consolation and couldn’t care less about what had happened. All I wanted to know, if possible, was when it had happened, when had the idea been born — if, that is, the original idea had truly died. When and where had the decision been taken? Was it during those years when we all ate and drank around one table? Was it before Yacine’s death or after? Was it when Ahmad was handling the land case or when he was handling our divorce? When and how? Why was it that every time something happened to me, I did not see it coming?

I heard Bahia’s voice behind me, saying, ‘Please don’t bother yourself with useless questions. When Ahmad insisted on knowing the direct reason for our divorce, I had to tell him the story of the baby I wanted and you did not. That is all there is to it. If it will upset you, I won’t do it, I swear I won’t.’

I told her that it did not matter to me or hurt me. I headed straight out of the garden on to the deserted street on that bizarre Sunday evening. I realised once more that what had happened and the way it had happened, with the words and emotions it had provoked, wouldn’t have happened to me had I left at the right time. Why hadn’t I left every time it had seemed obvious to leave? Why had I squandered so much existence during a quarter of a century of procrastination and waiting?

I walked for a long time and then got on the seven o’clock train to Rabat. As I arrived in the capital, I imagined Ahmad with his short stature sleeping with Bahia and whispering words of love to her in a Marrakech accent. I imagined telling him angrily that even if he stole every woman in the world, he would never get over the humiliation of the woman who dumped him for his lawyer while he was in prison.

I regretted the cruel thoughts, and thanked God that I had not actually said any of it. I read the day’s newspapers before I went up to my apartment, where I slept for a whole day without dreams.

When I woke up I found my voicemail full of anxious messages about my disappearance. I also found text messages from my colleagues at the paper informing me about the recent break up of a sleeper cell. I was reading those messages when another arrived from Fatima asking me to call her. I dialled her number and heard her joyful voice immediately on the line.

‘You sound very happy!’ I said.

‘Not at all. I talked to Ahmad Majd and guess what his comment was on the happy marriage?’ she asked.

‘You’re invited?’

‘No, he said to me: what do you expect me to do? I have devoted my life to correcting the mistakes of the left!’

I told her, ‘I’m afraid that is going to be the last sarcastic sentence he will utter.’

‘Why?’ she asked.

‘Because he’s entering the sea of darkness.’

‘Don’t be a bird of ill omen. Watch out for yourself. Do you have any new information about the cell?’

‘Not yet. I’m meeting my colleagues shortly.’

‘It seems it’s linked to the Madrid group.’

‘We’ll see. I’ll call you later.’

‘Kisses,’ she replied.

On my way to meet colleagues at the Beach restaurant, Yacine nudged me and asked, ‘What happened to you? Where did you disappear?’

‘Do you know that your mother is getting married?’

‘Really?’ he said. ‘Wonders never cease, for the living.’

‘Is this your only reaction to the news?’ I asked.

‘We are not surprised by anything, as you know.’

‘I expected you at least to be embarrassed by what happened!’

‘Listen, death is no joke. We don’t go through all this terror to remain subject to emotions and shyness.’

‘Regardless, I must tell you that the main reason for our divorce and the door being flung wide open to this marriage is you.’

‘I know, but don’t expect me to develop a guilt complex.’

‘You also know, don’t you, that the idea of the new baby is just compensating for you?’

‘No one compensates for anyone. The baby won’t replace me; Ahmad Majd won’t take your place; and no other woman will replace Bahia. Whenever you get attached to human beings, they become an eternal curse, like the colour of your eyes.’

‘I’m surprised to hear you say that,’ I said.

‘Let it go. Can I ask you to do something for me?’

‘Go ahead, ask.’

‘Don’t be harsh with Bahia. She’s a very sad woman.’

3

I spent the evening with work colleagues at the Beach restaurant, and stayed late talking about terrorism. One of my colleagues remarked that terrorism had truly succeeded when it took up so much of our time. He also said that, in the end, terrorism was one of the dangers of modern life, no less and no more. It claimed far fewer people than traffic accidents, smoking, drugs or illness. Life itself was more fatal than terrorism. We were unnecessarily panicked, he said, and Moroccans in particular were scared of everything.

Some of my other colleagues were convinced that the largest powers would succeed in formulating effective and extremely expensive security policies, leaving only our cities hostage and easy prey for terrorism. Each one of us would then adopt a personal security policy. We would all wear Pakistani clothes and denounce to the sheikhs those who drank alcohol in our buildings and the women who displayed their charms. If one of them wanted to add a young girl from our family to his harem, we would help him fulfil his wish.

‘Everything terrorism does has to do with women,’ Abbas, a colleague, said. ‘Women are terrorism’s only concern.’

‘Everything we do or don’t do is for the sake of women,’ another responded.Gradually the conversation became knotty as it touched on political Islam, its ties to terrorist organisations, and who benefited from whom. The disagreements increased and our voices grew strident, until we suddenly became aware of the silence in the restaurant. Someone said as we were leaving, ‘It’s very late.’

Abbas said loudly as he was opening his car door, ‘Who would like to join me at a last stop?’

‘Have pity on yourself!’ I said.

He replied, with a phrase attributed to Saadi Youssef, ‘The nation is perishing, let’s perish with it.’

On my way back home I called Layla and talked with her at length about people who entered our lives by coincidence, became predatory beings and devoured our existence one portion at a time, while we were unable to stop them.

‘This situation has a clear, precise name. It’s called cowardice,’ Layla said.

‘Not exactly,’ I said, ‘because the victim might be courageous in other situations.’

‘It’s still cowardice, because cowardice also means being selective in your courage. There’s no greater cowardice than not resisting someone who is eating you up.’

‘Well I’m a coward then. That’s all there is to it!’

‘I don’t know why you say that. We’re talking in the absolute,’ Layla said.

When we ended our telephone conversation, I felt oppressed. I wondered why I asked questions that led me to humiliating diagnoses. Why did I insist on going around in circles on the same spot, raising all the dust of the world around me?

When I arrived home I found a voice message from Ahmad telling me, ‘Call me even if you get home at dawn.’ There was another message from Bahia inviting me to have lunch with her any day I liked, and a third message from Layla in which she apologised for having been rude. I only returned Layla’s call to tell her, ‘Yes, very rude.’ As soon as I hung up, she called me back and said, ‘Why don’t you come round?’

I took a quick shower and went to her place.

As I was getting ready to leave her, she said, ‘I want to see you sleeping.’

‘If I stay another minute, I will fall asleep,’ I replied.

She rushed to the alarm clock and set it for five a.m.

‘Why the alarm clock?’ I asked. ‘You’ll wake me up when you’re tired of watching me sleep.’

‘I’ll also go to sleep,’ she said. ‘I want to sense you. I don’t mean watching you asleep. I just want to feel that you’re here and that you’ll fall asleep and wake up like you do normally.’

The alarm clock rang. I got up, dressed and returned home sleepy, half dreaming of Layla standing shivering in front of the lift door, begging me to open my eyes and send her a message as soon as I arrived home.

‘I’ve arrived!’

Ahmad pulled me back out of the clouds of sleep at seven a.m., when he appeared at my door saying, ‘Ghaliya packed her bags and left.’

‘Why did she do that? What happened?’ I asked.

‘She’s dead set against my marriage. She said, “If Youssef had done the same to you, I would have been equally upset.’’’

‘What did you tell her?’

‘I told her that you consented and did not see anything wrong with it.’

‘But that’s not true.’

‘God Almighty, it’s true. You consent and deep down you thank God for this divine arrangement that suits you and suits us.’

I begged him to let me sleep, as I needed to be fit to work in the afternoon, but after he left I was unable to go back to sleep. I wrote an article entitled ‘Terrorism As I Do Not Understand It’ which included some of what my colleagues and I had discussed the previous evening and other ideas that occurred to me as I thought about the explosions of 16 May 2003 in Casablanca. This deadly violence was blamed on social injustice, poverty, inadequate housing, Zionist aggression and the war on Iraq. Some blamed the events on the lack of political solutions. Could we ever comprehend a person’s decision to detonate himself in a restaurant, in a mosque, in front of a school or in a funeral procession? How can slitting the throats of children from ear to ear in an Algerian village be a kind of expression? How did we ever give birth to such creatures?

After writing that essay I wrote, without much enthusiasm, another instalment for Letters to My Beloved. I discussed how relationships transform us into nourishment to be gulped down. I reflected on the shocks contained in every new relationship, the shocks we feel when we consider objectively what we have become in the eyes of this incredible being. I wrote about how, when we consider the way our emotions are generated, different words fill our mouths, how we walk the city with steps that do not seem to be ours, and how our body awakens near us yet far from us, how we insist it is for us while it insists it is against us.

I then wrote about something I had dreamed, but it was not in a dream: I recognised you from your walk and your hairdo. I was a few steps behind you and I decided to get ahead of you to be sure, but you quickened your pace and I could not catch up with you. Your face appeared and disappeared depending on whether I got closer or farther away from you. I was exhausted and decided to call your name, but I could not remember it or your facial features. I kept following you even when I no longer knew why, or why I wanted to get ahead of you and examine your face. I had the impression that you asked me, ‘What?’ Exhausted, I replied, ‘I do not know.’ My mouth was dry, so I entered the first café I found and drank lots of water without quenching my thirst.

When I sat behind the glass wall in the café I felt a heavy weight crumble inside me, but it was not inside me. The front of the café, its glass doors and windows, were reduced to thick debris that separated me from the world, but when it obstructed my view totally, I remembered you once again. I stood ready to catch up with you. ‘Listen, I can’t get out of the café, it’s called the Majes?. .?the Majestique, in front of the garden and close to the Grand Hotel. Call the fire brigade and civil defence. Come and save me.’

*

I went to Marrakech for Ghaliya’s sake. She received me in floods of tears at her sister’s house. I told her the truth: ‘I don’t like this marriage. There’s something ugly about it I can’t pinpoint, but my gut feeling is that it will give Ahmad some peace and save Bahia.’ She kept raising and lowering her hands, opening and closing them, as if she wanted her hands to say what her tongue could not express. Then she told me that she was concerned about our friendship, but I reassured her that nothing would ruin it. She smiled and said everything around us had changed and we couldn’t understand anything any more. I was about to tell her that the only thing that had changed was our tolerance, but I refrained, lest I add to her confusion.

We returned together to the old house. Ahmad had opened it up for the evening gathering and had filled a large straw basket at the entrance of the main hall with fragrant rose petals. As soon as Ghaliya crossed the threshold, he filled his hands with petals and threw them wherever she went, in front of her, behind her, and over her head, while she tried to stop him, embarrassed and tearful. But he continued to shower her, mumbling mysterious supplications. I thought that it would be difficult to erase from our life someone capable of dousing Ghaliya’s anger with rose petals. Ahmad could transition smoothly between sitting on a moped flitting through rain, and the position of a holy man comfortable in his eternal pose. He went effortlessly from praying at Sidi Bel-Abbas Mausoleum to an evening at the Pasha Club, without incurring any split in his personality. He was permanently in control and forever brittle.

The following day Ahmad and I were returning to the house from a long dinner, when suddenly, a few steps from the house, our heads and bodies were assailed by a barrage of sticks and chains. As I fell to the ground, holding my hand to a bleeding wound on my forehead, I heard Ahmad call Ghaliya and all his neighbours by their full names and at the top of his voice. Then I heard him collapse amidst the sound of escaping footsteps while windows and doors were being opened as people woke up and rushed us to the emergency room.

I ended up with ten stitches in my head while Ahmad suffered a broken left hand, along with many other minor wounds of various hues. I was lying on my hospital bed when Ahmad was brought in — his moans preceding him — and laid in the bed opposite, his broken arm resting on his chest in a sling around his neck.

As soon as he was leaning comfortably on a large pillow, he turned to me and lamented, ‘They slaughtered us.’

‘If you don’t sell them the house, they’ll kill you!’ I said.

He replied angrily, ‘By God, never, even if they stick the Koutoubia minaret up my arse!’

I burst out laughing just as Ghaliya entered the room. At first and because of our laughter she thought she had entered the wrong room. Once she had made sure, she rushed in, exclaiming, ‘Is this a time for laughter?’

Ahmad joked with her to help her get over her fright. Once she had calmed down and was responding to his words with broken laughter, I beckoned her over, and when she came close I whispered in her ear, ‘The bride brought him good luck and happiness!’

All her resistance melted away and she gave in to laughter that made her whole body shake.

The police visited us at the hospital. Ahmad assured them that he was not aware of anyone who had a score to settle with him that would have led to such an assault. When the detective inspector turned to me, I lowered my gaze and assured him that Ahmad knew a specific party and person who had previously threatened him for refusing to sell him his house. I assured the officer that although I had nothing to do with the matter, I declared, on my own responsibility, that the only party that would benefit from this attack was the one I had mentioned. Ahmad shouted and swore at me, but I maintained my accusation each time he calmed down.

The detective inspector asked me later if I had a legal connection to the house, and if I did, had I received a threat from anyone. I told him I did not. He gave a broad grin and then left with his team.

The following day, almost all the national press — the independents, the party newspapers and, according to Ahmad, those backed by powerful personalities — carried photographs of us lying side by side in hospital. Our faces revealed the traces of late-night partying more than they did the effects of the attack. There were various accounts of our ordeal: some concerned the familiar property dispute, others gave the attack a mysterious political dimension and others made crude allusions to immoral ventures.

Since we left hospital on the day these stories appeared, the old house started to heave with visitors from midday. By evening — and typically for Ahmad — the whole of Morocco was having its picture taken with his broken hand. There were journalists, politicians, artists, writers and celebrities from the left, the right, the centre and the margins; people from the political administration, royal circles and civil society. Ahmad was in full splendour as he held court, welcoming, bidding farewells and dispensing biting remarks. When the president of the Council of Ulema noticed that the break was, by God’s grace, to his left hand and would not interfere with his ability to write, Ahmad shouted at the top of his voice, ‘Eminent Faqih, once again the Left is broken!’

I wrote two articles about the incident focusing on the role of the real-estate mafia in Marrakech. These were followed by a rebuttal from the person accused of being behind the attack. This took the form of a verbatim copy of Ahmad’s statement to the police and a complete denial of the existence of a score to settle. The rebuttal concluded with the following sentence: ‘No one sells and no one buys in this story!’ All that had been concocted in the matter, he implied, was simply the product of the imagination of a journalist in search of fame.

Ahmad was ecstatic at this denial. He did not give a damn that I had been insulted, but kept repeating that what mattered most was the official, public and clear denial.

Ahmad and Bahia got married on a weekday without any celebration. The following week, however, they sent a card to all their friends and acquaintances informing them of the marriage. Before they left for Italy on their honeymoon, Bahia invited me to lunch at a restaurant overlooking the Bou Regreg. While we were sipping our coffee, she asked if I still suffered from those strange symptoms I’d had. I tried to explain to her that despite losing my sense of smell and the ability to respond to any concrete or abstract sensation, I believed I understood life better and did not experience any handicap as a result of what I endured.

Then we recalled our crazy plans, the rubbish dump monument and the arch at the mouth of the river, and we laughed until Bahia observed sadly that we now laughed at our projects no matter how important they were in our lives, whereas we used to cry for the smallest failure in Nicaragua. I said that the saddest thing was having cried in the past.

As she was getting ready to leave I secretly thanked her because she had not mentioned Ahmad. She handed me a carefully packed parcel and said, sobbing, ‘These are some of Yacine’s clothes.’

I walked her to her car and felt downhearted. As soon as she disappeared from view behind the restaurant’s fence, I was overcome with profound anxiety. If Yacine had not appeared right then, I would have thrown the parcel in the river because it resembled something bleeding.

He said, ‘You seem to be making the front page nowadays.’

‘Not to my credit though.’

‘You’re too modest. Your article on the real-estate mafia caused a big stir.’

‘I hope it won’t cause the sticks and chains to stir again.’

‘It might stir something more dangerous.’

‘Are you warning me?’

‘I’m not qualified to answer. Listen, I have information unrelated to that subject which I must reveal to you.’

‘What kind of information?’ I asked.

‘Something horrific is being cooked up in Marrakech.’

‘Like what?’

‘A terrible explosion!’

‘When?’ I asked.

‘No one knows.’

‘When you say information, do you mean specific information about the group, the people and the whole scenario, or is it only a prediction?’

‘A bit of both. If you take the fact that I am talking to you from the afterlife into account, it’s a prediction. But if you get rid of these imaginary boundaries, it is factual information with only the date and time missing.’

‘We must organise ourselves to face it then.’

‘Exactly. But take care, you absolutely cannot tell anyone about this,’ he insisted.

When I stepped out of the taxi, my hand was hurting. I realised that I was gripping the bundle of clothes tightly, and I was sweating heavily. I sat at my desk, opened one of the drawers, put the bundle in and then locked it shut, as if I would never open it again. For some obvious reasons, this simple and very quick ceremony led me to another ceremony, where I was surrounded by the voices of Qur’an reciters and a great deal of earth and stones poured over the drawer. Someone had placed a tombstone without a name or date on my desk near a photo of Yacine at age twenty.

I talked with Layla and she asked me out of the blue, ‘Do you think we might live under the same roof one day?’

‘I can imagine it, but I don’t believe it,’ I replied.

She then talked at length about her daughter, who was overawed by her stepmother. ‘Can you imagine that whenever she spends the weekend with her, she returns obsessed by everything to do with her. The way she laughs, her clothes, the way she eats. I listen to all this quietly and would put up with all the suffering in the world to keep her with me. Then I lock myself in the bathroom and cry.’

‘It’s a passing phase. Don’t worry about it,’ I said.

‘Passing. You call it passing? I wish! Regardless, I’m very scared. Scared of losing her. That would be the end of my life.’

‘She won’t leave you. No one leaves their mother!’

‘Two days ago she asked me if children should necessarily accept their biological parents!’

‘That’s a normal question for children.’

‘But she also asked if a daughter could replace her mother.’

‘Don’t worry too much about it. Remember that you hassle her every day with homework, washing up, her clothes, exercise and the like, while she lives with her father and his wife at the weekend, hassle free. But it will all come to an end.’

‘And you, why don’t you believe we will live together?’ she asked.

‘No particular reason.’

‘Spit it out! Otherwise you won’t be able to put up with me!’

‘How could you live with someone who’d never know if you’d changed your perfume?’

‘I won’t change it.’

I wanted to end the phone call, but she asked me, ‘Are you all right?’

‘Nearly.’

‘Take care of yourself. I don’t want anything to hurt you. Please stop playing the role of the fighter for justice. Do you promise?’

‘Yes, I promise, because I’m not fit for that role or any other.’

4

I spent the rest of the day in a state of anxiety. In the evening I went into work and found two e-mail messages, one from the director of the paper asking me to follow up on the Marrakech story and the other from Fatima telling me she was in a serious relationship with a man from Kosovo. She asked me to visit her in Madrid to give her my impressions of the man. This news cheered me up, and on my way back home I mentally planned another visit to Marrakech and a possible trip to Madrid.

In Marrakech I resumed my investigations into public land, foreign investments in tourism, the lobbies for property development and the power bases. One evening Ahmad contacted me from Rome. Extremely upset, he asked me to abandon the subject. I asked him how he knew what I was working on.

He told me nervously, ‘All of Marrakech knows. And everyone also knows that it will cost you your skin.’

I tried to convince Ahmad that my work had nothing to do with ideals in defence of justice and truth. ‘It’s just a game,’ I told him. ‘Do you understand? The whole country is full of games, and I’d also like to play. You’re saying it’s a risky business, but all games are risky. Life itself is a dangerous game!’

He did not sound convinced when the call ended. I told myself I would call him back later. At a minimum, I needed to know who was trying to bury the story. The city was abuzz with talk of property scandals. At parties, in cafés and on the street, there was nonstop discussion of deals and bribes and fortunes made in the blink of an eye. Yet there were no signs of anger or any sense of shame in those conversations, and the word on the street never reached the corridors of justice or even aroused the curiosity of the investigative bodies.

To a great extent the situation resembled a staged spectacle that amazed and amused people as they watched the scenes, not suspecting that the show might one day turn tragic. This was also the predominant attitude towards the endless stories about sex, crime and the so-called secrets of the old regime. Peeking through keyholes seemed to have become a way to manage public affairs. Because I liked this observation, I hastened to use it as a caption for the investigation I had completed. In so doing I gave the impression that I was not at all suggesting that the information I was providing would amount to anything, but would merely add another brick to the edifice of the nation’s snooping.

In my investigation I listed all the areas that had been incorporated within the urban zone. I provided the names of their owners, the dates of purchase, and the way they had been incorporated. I identified the plots where construction was allowed and who benefited from the process. I listed dangerous violations regarding the legally permitted number of storeys and the construction and design plans that related to them. I wrote how Marrakech’s palm trees had been killed, its public parks uprooted, and its oases springs dried up for the city to be secretly divided into parcels and plots that benefited the big fish. I listed the networks of middlemen in the medina, those with the demolition and construction permits and the dealers in organised ruins. I provided the names of the nouveaux riches who had sniffed out where the action and the permits were and took control of them directly or indirectly. I mentioned prominent personalities who provided protection and the authorities who eased the way, as well as the new faces who with one hand pulled the strings of the land, the nightclubs and prostitution. I wrote about the speculative practices and the networks of foreigners selling Marrakech beyond its borders. I revealed the rings of smuggling, money laundering, child prostitution, hashish, paste and powder, and everything else related to the miraculous flourishing of an insomniac, fearless, unabashed city.

When the investigation was published, Layla called me very early in the morning to tell me that I had lost my mind and that she hated me because I wanted to play the role of fighter for justice. Then Fatima called to say that the Spanish press was interested in the subject and wanted to carry the investigation. Ahmad called to tell me that a very important person who liked what I had written wanted to contact me.

‘I won’t lose my skin because of the story then?’ I asked.

‘If it were up to me I’d take your skin and your bones. But who understands better than the palace?’ he replied.

After this intriguing conversation, the trail went cold. Days passed without any trace of the investigation appearing in another newspaper. The street was not in uproar and no legal procedure was set in motion. A total and oppressive silence prevailed over the issue. The only comment was two sentences published in a semi-official newspaper, which read: ‘This happens only in our country. No sooner do we succeed in achieving something, as we did in Marrakech, than a raven hastens to drop a fly in the milk!’

Though I received timid and secretive encouragement from some of Marrakech’s marginal figures — old freedom fighters, forgotten writers and malhoun singers — it became impossible for me to spend evenings in some of the restaurants and nightclubs mentioned in my investigation. I was subjected to vicious attacks and puerile aggravations in those places; once, in a nightclub, a person went so far as to pee in my drink. I would have drunk fluids meant for the sewers if not for the warning I received from a woman I knew.

As for the important personality, I was indeed contacted by him and invited for a memorable cup of coffee at his lovely home. While there I listened to his analysis of the situation and received a fresh piece of news, one that I kept to myself, as befitting a civilised human being. A few days following that astounding meeting, the authorities demolished two floors that had been added to a building without, as it was rumoured, a permit. The demolition was surrounded by huge security measures and received wide press coverage and shook public opinion. A few minor scandals surfaced in connection to the exceptional permits that had allowed some restaurants in the old city to raise their roofs to rival the Koutoubia. But the whole matter did not last more than a few hours in a press that knew how to turn the page extremely quickly, even when it gave the strong impression that nothing, no matter how big or small, was beyond its control.

While property remained the focus of money and business in the city, many were convinced that Marrakech’s huge success in the field of tourism was the beginning and end of wealth. Ahmad, on the other hand, developed the theory that the North laundered drug money in real estate, the South laundered bribes in real estate, and real estate laundered itself with time.

I said to Ahmad one day, ‘You are a man of the law. Tell us what can we do with that knowledge.’

He replied quite seriously, ‘Write about it in the papers!’

‘And leave all those unpunished?’ I said.

‘Defamation is the only possible punishment these days,’ he replied.

*

Laissez faire, laissez passer! I left Marrakech determined to remove myself completely from the issues of the moment and return to those of my childhood. I wanted to go where my father was living the last chapter of his life, a prisoner of his blindness and the tourist circuit of the city of Walili. Every day he constructed an opulent palace out of Roman stones, the stones of the Rif and Bu Mandara, and through the fabric of his narration to foreign visitors took revenge on centuries of absolute truth. I would revisit the theft of Bacchus after a quarter of a century, just to revive that story in a country where stories do not last long. We could compare today’s thefts and see that in the past we had nothing like the impudence of today’s thieves, preening peacocks who showed off their cars, their djellabas and their yearly umra.

I imagined a child who grew up at the statue’s feet and filled his eyes with Bacchus’s stony complexion. While the statue remained an adolescent, the way it had come out from under the chisel centuries ago, the boy became a man eking out a living in a bleak windblown expanse. I too wanted to step down from the pedestal to which I had been pinned for years. I wanted to walk and get away, as befitted a stolen statue.

After I returned from Marrakech I suffered more severe anxiety attacks and had to go to hospital and submit to a series of frightening tests. During this, Fatima contacted me a few times from Madrid and said she would not allow me to die. Once I was able to joke, I told her that I had not died out of respect for her wishes. She then filled me in on the latest developments in her relationship with the Kosovar.

‘I’ve moved in with him, but haven’t given up my apartment. I don’t want to take uncalculated risks.’

I told her that she had made a wise decision, because there was nothing better for our spirits than having a place to ourselves.

When I left hospital I knew that I was quite healthy in body — as shown by the medical equipment — but I also knew that I was not all right. My body carried me with difficulty, while I carried it with difficulty too. Layla visited me a few times in the hospital, and when I left it I tried hard to feel her presence. In the taxi we looked at each other and I knew from her expression that she was worried about me, but I could not make that connection internally and did not feel that she was doing it for my sake. I was not afraid that she might suddenly get out of the taxi and disappear for good. Had she done so, I am not sure I would have been saddened by it. I lived as if walking were my only activity, in the expectation of arriving at a specific place, or of not arriving. I simply did not care what would happen, except that in order to walk I had to remain standing and actually walk.

When we arrived at my apartment I was flabbergasted to find an entirely different space. Layla had transformed a colourless, almost dead apartment into a spacious, light-filled, dynamic place. As soon as I entered I felt something both dense and delicate within me, something I had not experienced for years. I realised, at that moment, that people who were able to tame places and give them new life were endowed with a special magic that gave them keys to the human soul and made them capable of growing spacious gardens within it. I extended my arm towards Layla and I walked, mesmerised, until I reached her body. I felt as if I understood something very deep, connected somehow to the transformation she had wrought upon the apartment. It was as if by choosing colours and pieces of furniture, by filling some spots and leaving others empty, she had drawn a map of her own body. This map had no connection whatsoever with the trajectory of a thinker or a visionary, but was the result of an instinctive interaction between bodies and places.

It was a momentous week. Layla told me that she loved me, even if she could not live with me under the same roof, and even if we had to organise our lives in an unusual manner without room for the day-to-day. I was unable to say anything in response. She was hurt and did not contact me or answer my phone calls for three straight days.

That same week the Ministry of Justice announced that a number of prominent people had been arrested for corruption involving property deals in Marrakech. While my investigation had not mentioned any of the implicated persons or projects, people believed I had played a small role in this heroic action.

Back from Rome, Ahmad called me from the airport to announce, without introduction or show of emotion, that Bahia was pregnant. I said half joking, ‘One more Muslim!’

He replied haltingly, ‘Another of our generation’s miracles!’

In the midst of all these events, I thought seriously about my relationship with Layla. When I thought of her like a distant gleam from a vague past, I was overcome with confused emotions and was on the verge of declaring my love for her. But as soon as she stormed the present with her youthful body, her language and her delicate presence, everything went dark and I was left only with her critical importance for survival on this planet. But that was not enough to declare my love. We do not declare our love for water, the blue of the sky or the rays of the sun. When I understood the situation in this way, I decided to share it with her, to let her know the difficult position I was in and to let her know that the problem, in the long run, would be our ability to set the clock of our relationship to the right time.

She listened to me until the end, and I had the fleeting impression that she understood the situation more clearly than I had explained it and was happy with it. When she said that only I needed to reset the hands of my clock, we laughed and indulged in what she used to call a reconciliation with the world, which was nothing but an unruly hour or so during which we pretended to quarrel violently before enjoying each other with passion.

The arrest of the big-shots gave the press free rein to take a substantial bite at the subject of real-estate corruption and chew it gluttonously. Newspapers went so far as to issue condemnations even before the trial started, and when it did begin in the midst of endless procedural battles, people had already spent their anger by talking about the issue. The case was buried under a thick layer of dust within days. For a while, the inhabitants of Marrakech joked about the demolished storeys, the unfinished buildings and the plots of land abandoned until forgetfulness allowed new projects to begin on them. Conversations would stop completely when people saw a driver hastily open the door of a luxury car and one of the major figures of the lawsuit step out.

I thought it only decent to call Bahia and be among the first to congratulate her. I did this with an honest sympathy that surprised and pleased me. We talked about the expected baby with a certain complicity that prompted me to say that, after all, I agreed with its arrival. She was quick to say that in any case she was going to consider it our baby. Those words put an end to any hope that this innocent affection might continue. I ended the phone conversation, struck by the complexity and fragility of the human soul.

This period was filled with expectation and apprehension. Bahia spent the pregnancy lying on her back following doctor’s orders, while in Madrid Fatima had one miscarriage and one abortion before she gave up, once and for all, the idea of having children. All of us were concerned about news of failed explosions in Casablanca, the death of an engineer in a bomb blast in Meknes and ambiguous threats that no one could confirm as either real or imaginary.

At the same time, and for unknown reasons, issues of morality dominated the media. These were not related to politics, management of public funds, bribery, random favours and the nouveaux riches, but were limited to sex scandals. There was the case of sex tourism, where indecent pictures appeared on porn sites advocating gay and lesbian orgies and child prostitution, particularly in Marrakech and Agadir. There were reports on gay marriage in Sidi Ali Benhamdoush, a fancy-dress party for gays in Ksar al-Kebir, transsexual nights in Tetouan, and cases of incest and rape of minors. Not a week went by without these charged subjects appearing on the front page of a national paper. Ahmad Majd claimed Moroccans had become so disturbed that they had begun exposing their genitals, the way women in low-class neighbourhoods did after a serious altercation.

We followed the news closely because our friend Ibrahim al-Khayati acted as defence lawyer in many of these cases — not because, as malicious tongues put it, he was homosexual like his clients, but because he was a true fighter for justice, defending the need to respect the law, to ensure a fair trial without discrimination on grounds of race, religion or sexuality, and to protect the legal system from the pressures of public opinion. The cases dominated discussion at our evening gatherings in Marrakech, Casablanca and Rabat. We agreed or disagreed only about what was fabricated about the stories that caused ink to flow and spawned editorials and comments both at home and overseas. It was as if Moroccans’ only preoccupation was their desire to know who was banging whom.

There was no convincing answer to why the subject dominated our lives. Some people attributed it to confusion over values, due to easily acquired wealth and excessive emphasis on material success. Others attributed it to the atmosphere of freedom, which encouraged involvement in all topics. Others blamed it on a sort of tourist morality, since some of the practices were not furtive and covert any more, but open and visible like the billboards promoting visits to ‘the most beautiful country in the world’.

Alongside this was an overarching and inexplicable anxiety, despite the economic boom in some sectors and flourishing tourism. Although the country was emerging from years of stagnation, it was as if people had become more fearful of losing everything and more wary of the misery lurking behind surface success. We were trying to understand why we were anxious and calm at the same time. Ibrahim al-Khayati was the most anxious among us, and went so far as to say that the overall atmosphere was charged with something menacing, as if we were heading for a rupture or a storm that lay behind the calm.

Bahia gave birth to a baby girl. Ghaliya was the first to tell me. I did not feel anything special. I shut myself off from the news and tried to imagine what would happen to us with the arrival of this new being. As I tried to overcome my state of emptiness, I found nothing better to do than call Al-Firsiwi, who was very nice to me at the beginning until he exploded in rage.

‘The curse has struck!’ he shouted. ‘The Al-Firsiwi family line has been severed by our own doing. I knew that introducing new blood into the family would pollute it. It has fallen down a well, and we have buried it for good.’

‘Is that why you killed my mother then?’ I asked him. ‘To restore the line’s purity? You are nothing but a stupid, racist murderer!’

His voice reached me, hoarse with emotion. ‘You are talking to your father. Have you forgotten that you are talking to your father!’

He yelled like a deranged man, which forced me to end the call, leaving his gruff voice echoing in my ear.

When I put the phone down, I was trembling all over. I thought of one thing only, to call Layla and ask her to come round immediately, because something was about to happen to me. The more I thought about it, the weaker and more depressed I felt. My mobile phone was close to me, but I did not have the strength to pick it up. I felt a sudden regret for having failed to tell Layla that I loved her too and that it did not matter whether we lived under the same roof, since we did not need roofs and columns in order to live safe from the threat of collapse.

At that moment the scent reached me. I thought I was only remembering it, but it lingered in a distant and hidden way, before advancing as if someone were bearing it towards me. I felt something disperse before my whole being, and my pores opened to absorb the fragrance emanating from everything known or unknown to my life. As the scent invaded my body, it acquired an identity that I remembered and knew: it brought Yacine to his feet and pushed him towards me, as it had whenever he came through the door or walked down the hallway or jumped down the stairs. Here was the scent of his comings and goings, his presence and his absence, rising suddenly from everything that surrounded me.

I opened my desk drawer and pulled out the package Bahia had given me several months earlier. Trembling, I opened it, and the scent of his lost body reached me. I had found him or finished mourning him. I had mysteriously recovered my sense of smell. I placed his clothes over my face, inhaled deeply and wept.