The Arch and the Butterfly

1

I stopped writing Letters to My Beloved.

One morning I sat at my desk and became aware, even before thinking about the matter, that I wouldn’t be able to write another letter to the woman I had loved and forgotten, even though I hadn’t forgotten I was still in love with her. Nearly every love story encompasses an expansion in time, for many are the lovers who tell each other: ‘I loved you before I loved you’ or ‘I loved you ever since I was no more than an idea in the universe’ or ‘I love you outside the time that brings us together’ or ‘I love you at a time that does not belong to us any more’ or ‘I will love you for ever’. And many other words that lovers use to give their overflowing love an impossible infinity.

The story of the lover who loses his memory and is unable to find his beloved in a defined form is, to some extent, the story of our relationship with everything we build in our lives and one that we confuse with our delusions and doubts. Over time we are unable to confirm which are the material and concrete aspects of this construction and which are nothing but defeated dreams. We wonder what is truly fulfilled in this blend. What is it that we call our life? Is it the things that were or those that could have been?

As I asked those questions, some confusion developed between me and the personality I had invented. I had the impression that what I had endured for years while writing those letters was a loss of memory. I had considered the letters emotional compensation or a presentiment of the memory loss that I would later succumb to. Perhaps in some fashion I projected on to Layla when I met her and found in my relationship with her a sort of substitution between what was and what never existed. But in my relationship with her, paradoxically, it was she who anchored me forcefully in the present. She surrounded me with a wall of reality that made me recover all at once important details in my relationship with people and places, not as a form of recollection, but as multiple and real possibilities.

Fatima was the first person to celebrate the end of my letter writing. She told me it was grounds for optimism and considered it an announcement that a new life would begin. She asked about Layla, and I told her that we lived totally connected but at a distance. Layla herself showed no interest in my stopping, just as she had shown no interest in the writing. She had her own theory about the matter, as she believed I was wasting real talent in writing unreal texts. She would tell me that if she had a similar talent, she would write immortal literary texts rather than wasting it writing essays that died the moment they were born.

While I gradually restored some of my forgotten desires and got used to a simple life, without giving in to the bitterness all around, Ibrahim al-Khayati was fighting heated battles in the jungle that was Casablanca. He was drowning us with him in cases that did not impinge on us, and Ahmad Majd found in them fertile material for his mockery. He called this period the time of biological struggle, because of its close connection with most people’s sexual lives.

I used to spend some of my weekends in Marrakech with Layla, until she told me during one of our return trips that she would never go back with me to that city. I tried to convince her that the big house, Ghaliya, Ahmad Majd, and even Bahia and her daughter, were all a major part of my life and people I relied on as a harbour where I could find peace from life’s storms. But she said that she hated the city precisely because of its role as a harbour, and that she would end up hating me if the disgusting place continued to control my life. She explained that she hadn’t severed her ties with many things in life in order to throw herself into a combination of the remnants of a remote past and a present detached from its surroundings. I told her Marrakech was only a city, not a legend or a lie, just a place that made it possible to choose various paths that no one controlled. She said that she did not want a city that required all those linguistic tricks to define it.

She then settled the problem by saying, ‘Do you know what it means to impose on me a city I hate? You’re inviting me to hate you!’

As she was talking I saw her face ablaze, not in anger or out of stubbornness, but simply in mortal perplexity, akin to the expression of a person lost in a maze. I hugged her with all my force and said, ‘To hell with Marrakech and pleasure. I’ll go there by myself every now and then just to watch its hidden disintegration. You’re right, it’s a city unfit for our story. It’s nothing but heavy ornamentation and accumulated layers of paint. As for us, we are living a white story, like a Japanese garden devoid of plants and colours, studded only with bits of rock, and millions of pure pulses dancing in its darkness.’

I knew she was the woman of my life. When a woman can make a city drop from your life like a dead leaf, it means that she has built countless cities inside you. I almost told her that, but the emptiness haunting me returned and nipped the blossom in the bud.

I accompanied Ibrahim al-Khayati to Zarhoun to help him gather information for the gay marriage case he was handling in the village of Sidi Ali. On the way I rang my father and apologised to him for what I had said in my previous phone call. He was calm at first and then burst into tears. I was annoyed that he was so upset by our disagreement. I repeated my apologies and told him I regretted every word I had said. But he went on crying, and I thought he had been hit by a new bout of depression, one of those that had become part of his life ever since he lost his eyesight. I began joking with him, putting on a show of meaningless levity, until he stopped me with a bald statement: ‘The hotel mosaics have been stolen.’

I told him I would come immediately and ended the conversation.

Al-Firsiwi was standing in the hotel lobby, in the middle of the ruin left behind by time and thieves. For the first time in years I was moved, and I felt injustice, anger, bitterness and love, all at once, for this blind man struggling alone against a tragic stubbornness that was intent on breaking him every time he raised his head. Al-Firsiwi told me that he knew the thief, it could not be anyone else. Ever since the man had come to the area, he had wanted nothing more than to acquire what was left of the Roman heritage.

Ibrahim al-Khayati said, ‘But this is not Roman heritage, it’s private property!’

My father took me by the arm and led me to the old lobby, where he asked, ‘Who is this man?’

‘An old friend. Ibrahim, you know him.’

‘I don’t want to talk to someone of Ahmad Majd’s sort, or others like him,’ he said.

‘He’s not like him.’

‘All right. He must understand that the thief knows that the hotel mosaics contain Roman pieces. Even the most novice expert would know how to pick them out of a pile of new tesserae!’

‘But why do you insist on saying that this man is the thief?’ I asked.

‘I know because he would benefit from the destruction of the hotel and putting pressure on me to sell. He was the one who stole the lanterns from the site storehouse two years ago. He also stole the gold ring the British found a year ago.’

‘Forget about those things,’ I said. ‘You must calm down and think what should be done about it. Plus, there are very few stolen pieces compared to what’s left.’

We talked with Ibrahim, who advised us to report the crime without saying who we thought had done it, rather than accusing a man in authority without any damning evidence. He advised against saying that the mosaics contained authentic Roman pieces, because that would mean that the only recognised and self-confessed thief would be Al-Firsiwi. We all agreed on the matter and went to the city centre to eat grilled kofta, for which the city was renowned in the East and the West, although Al-Firsiwi insisted that its only distinguishing features were the dirt and the flies.

Ibrahim and I then left for the village of Sidi Ali. Ibrahim was representing several men who had been arrested during the town’s annual festival held around the tomb of Sidi Ali, a grandson of Al-Hadi Benissa, one of Morocco’s famous Sufis. According to legend, a woman named Aisha was brought from the East by Sidi Ahmad al-Daghughi, a pupil and a disciple of Sidi Ali, for his sheikh to marry and thereby to put an end to his prolonged celibacy. But the marriage did not happen.

I wondered about the mysterious chemistry that made contradictory things arise from the same source. The Sidi Ali festivities drew large numbers of homosexuals, fortune-tellers and worshippers. In the same location and out of the same spiritual feelings, the supplications of the worshippers encountered the throng of agitated bodies. Why did Sidi Ali never marry and why did queers gather around his tomb? No one knew.

The alleged gay marriages and arrests had made a scandal in the press. But when we arrived at the village, we could not find anyone who had attended any of the weddings. We could not even get an exact description of events organised for the festival. Visitors behaved according to their own norms, people said. Some of them adhered to the order of the Hamadchas and shared their famous mystical possession. Others watched the blood ritual, when some of the possessed broke clay water jugs over their shaved heads, or beat sharp hammers on their heads as they swayed to the Hamdouchi beat. Some cared for their deep wounds by passing a piece of bread over them, while others slaughtered a goat in the throng around Aisha’s grave, or hung a piece of clothing on her holy tree, believing she could help them find a spouse. Some people spent long hours waiting in front of the booths of the fortune-tellers.

The inhabitants of the village gave thanks to God and called for God’s mercy on the holy Wali, grateful for all the additional income they got from the slaughtered animals, the stall and room rentals during the festival and other business. No one asked questions in this mountainous village that stood peacefully under the shade of olive and carob trees. No one interfered in what did not concern him and no one could tell exactly what would happen behind closed doors at nightfall, when the Hamdouchi whirling settled into its entrancing monotony. No one knew who would marry whom and who would sleep with whom. No one knew and no one wanted to know. If such things happened, they happened with the knowledge of authorities. If homosexuals attended the festival, no one knew them or disavowed them: they melted into the hubbub of the festivities. Perhaps only the secret police knew, and maybe some of the phoney therapists who confused Freud with the miracles of Sidi Ahmad al-Daghughi, or journalists whose imaginations were fired by lurid stories.

The people said forgetfulness had enfolded them for centuries. They had endured wars and famines, given birth to scholars, leaders and walis, but no one had been interested in them, published their news, or made a comment. Anyway, who were these gays? Was even one of them from Sidi Ali or nearby villages? Of course not! They did not know the face or name of anyone like that. If there really were any, they must have come on the heels of sustainable development. They came to make the region prosper and encourage cultural tourism. Had they come that year for the first time? Was it conceivable that such a defined ritual could spring up overnight? In that case, Aisha’s site with its almost dried-up spring, its mud, its tree and its slaughtered animals would all have been improvised that year as well. That also went for the male and female fortune-tellers who were visited by the wealthy grandees of Casablanca, Rabat, Fes, Meknes, Marrakech, Tangier and the Gulf countries. The residents told Youssef and Ibrahim that they were being lied to and that everything that went on in the village, especially during its festival, was with the knowledge of the authorities.

When we left the village on our way to Meknes, Ibrahim al-Khayati wondered whether the commotion hadn’t been created by a specific group to serve a specific purpose.

‘What should I say to defend the young men who have appointed me?’ he asked.

‘Say what some newspapers have said: it’s their sex lives and they’re free to do as they please!’ I said.

He did not reply.

I was saddened by what had happened to my father at the hotel and by his condition in general. I remembered his rigour, his sharpness and his bright mind too. I compared all that to his present frailty and his bewilderment as he felt his personal world crumbling under his feet. I said to myself that I might be able to forgive him one day, and if that happened I did not want it to be due to his physical collapse and the end of his power, as demonstrated in his lost eyesight. We are all defeated by death, but nothing is worse than to be defeated by life.

My mother struggled with my father and loved him at the same time. It seemed she wanted to put a raging camel inside a bottle. I never saw her cry; silence was the expression she excelled in. She was a genius in devising horrible forms of silence that drove my father mad. He would fume and froth with rage and threaten to cut out her tongue, saying she was not using it to talk as God had intended when he elevated human beings above beasts.

Neither of them helped me understand the other. Diotima did not explain my father to me and Al-Firsiwi did not reveal who Diotima was. Each one painted the other as a dark abyss that totally engulfed them. Whenever I saw my father now, lost in the ruins of Walili and his memory, I visualised a poet who sprang from the belly of the earth to decorate a forgotten city with his inner mosaics, always trying to point out the tragic fate of every poetic experience in this world.

I talked with Ibrahim al-Khayati about Al-Firsiwi on our way back, and I said that I would return to help him look for Bacchus. He told me that investigating an antiquity theft would not interest anyone. People had got so used to stories of theft that they had become part of protected heritage. Try to announce, for example, that Morocco had not seen a single theft for three months, and you would see people demonstrating in the streets, denouncing this obvious failure in public life.

A few weeks earlier the French police had found seventeen thousand discarded archaeological and geological pieces that had been smuggled from Mali, Mauritania and Morocco. The news only preoccupied an ordinary civil servant close to retirement, who wrote a letter to a local paper wondering where those thousands of pieces could have been, since there wasn’t such a number in all of Africa.

‘Suppose you follow Bacchus’s trail till you find him in the collection of a rich local or foreigner,’ Ibrahim said. ‘What would happen then?’

‘Nothing would happen, but I might be able to draw attention to the fact that if we continue on this path, we will soon find our whole country in other countries!’

We also talked about his twins, as he referred to them. Both loved pop music, rap, hip-hop and heavy metal. One of them had spent a few weeks in prison, in a case involving alleged devil worship. I said I admired the two young men, who were completing their foundation courses very successfully and had a band known throughout Casablanca. As we approached the last toll in Casablanca, Ibrahim al-Khayati’s face darkened suddenly, and he told me with great emotion that the two young men might be aware of the true nature of his relationship with their father. They might have a permanent aversion to him.

‘Can’t you discuss the matter openly with them?’ I asked.

‘Impossible. Do you think they would show any understanding of the matter?’

‘Why not? Wouldn’t they understand that you are what you are, and that everything you’ve done, you did for them? Do they understand that the luxury they’re living in and that all they’ve accomplished is thanks to you? Yet they don’t understand that you are what you are before they were born and had an opinion?’

I was angry because I had suddenly become aware of the injustice that underlined our hypocritical social relations. None of us had any scruples about wolfing down everything in sight, without pausing to criticise the way the dishes had reached our mouths. In our heads, we all lived in a system of forced labour that made others — all others — servants at our disposal.

As a result of my anger, I said to Ibrahim, ‘Listen, you must tell them the truth, and tell them also that if they don’t want to be your children because of that old story, all they have to do is leave your house and disappear from your life. Then you will see what direction their aversion takes!’

‘But if they choose to stay with me only because I’m providing for them, it would be a real tragedy!’ he said.

‘In that case you must make them say they’re proud of you and, if they want to continue living with you, ask them to love you openly and fully.’

We both laughed to break this sudden tension, and then talked about the new restaurants in Casablanca. Ibrahim told me that the ’aytah was losing its place in the city. I told him that I would not have gone with him to those places even if they were still there. ‘Frankly,’ I said, ‘I don’t know what you like about all that ugly shouting.’

Ibrahim would not shut up, and we spent hours arguing back and forth about the subject, until we finally sat facing a tired waiter and ordered two cold drinks.

I said to him, ‘Forget the subject completely. The ’aytah is the most sublime art this people has produced. Can we talk about something else now?’

Ibrahim smiled and said, ‘We are an incomparably fanatical country. Consider the way they deal with music, dance and song. There is no such art form that has not suffered condemnation and discrimination, from ’aytah to hip-hop!’

‘You’re exaggerating. All artistic expressions were natural and spontaneous until the plague of darkness arrived. It forbade and allowed whatever it liked. It was unable to defeat dancing and singing, but managed to impose the hijab and the umra on the libertines of our women’s bands!’

2

Layla returned from a quick trip to Madrid and I went to meet her at Casablanca airport. I suggested we celebrate her return at Ibrahim’s house. She seemed happy at the idea, saying, ‘I like that man.’

‘You either like him or we go to Marrakech,’ I said. She made a face of teasing indignation and said that she loved me, and that, for the first time, this was happening in a completely different way, a calm, relaxed and cheerful way, like slow, effortless breathing. I held her small hand in mine, took a deep breath, and said to her, ‘Me too.’

‘You too, what?’ she asked.

‘It’s also happening to me in a completely different way!’ I explained.

We had a lovely time with Ibrahim and his twins. Layla was excited and talked about everything with great enthusiasm. But when the conversation turned to the songs of new bands, there was a serious disagreement between Layla, Essam and Mahdi. Layla thought the songs, aside from their occasional sarcastic and rebellious spirit, were abominable. Their lyrics were vulgar and devoid of imagination, their music was primitive and incomplete. Essam, who had spent time in prison in the case of the devil worshippers, considered this music and rap, hip-hop and hard rock an expression of a new identity, that of the modern cities sinking under the weight of contradictions and living with the threat of terrorism — yet still staging astonishing popular festivals.

‘Despite all that,’ said Mahdi, ‘we love our country, but your generation doesn’t understand us and doesn’t understand this love. Then again, we don’t want to be philosophers or politicians. All we want to do is sing and dance and love this country in our own way.’

When we went to our room I teased Layla with an H Kayne rap tune based on the melody of ‘So What, We Are Moroccans’. I told her, ‘This is an explosive Aissawi rhythm: “It’s going boom, it’s going boom, so let’s go boom too.” ’

She laughed wholeheartedly and said, ‘This is not an Aissawi song but a Buddhist prayer. Move a little, like this, with your shoulders and your feet. Don’t move your arms. Jump up with your body, not your feet. No, no, without bending your knees and without moving your head. Leave your head pointing at the sky and follow it with your body as if you are about to spring out of a cloud. God is Magnificent! God is Magnificent! Yes, yes, like this. Why are you looking at me like that? As if you wanted to jump into an abyss, or have already jumped?’

‘Yacine says something scary is being organised in Marrakech.’

‘Who’s Yacine?’

‘My son. Have you forgotten?’

‘Youssef, please leave your hand where it is. I don’t want to know. Don’t say anything.’

‘Do you think he’s still in touch with them?’

‘I don’t know how you can want to do that.’

‘It seems that he meets with them and supervises their projects.’

‘Look at your feet. I’ve never seen a man with more beautiful feet. I want you to tease me with your toes. Let me show you how to do it. Like this. Do you like that?’

‘Yes, and I love the idea of you finding pleasure in my feet. In all honesty, I’ve never done this before. It’s great when a woman likes your feet. Truly amazing.’

‘What?’

‘I feel as if it’s me doing it.’

‘Yes, yes, it’s really like that, not as if. Please don’t stop.’

‘Do you think Yacine is deceiving me?’

‘I want you to ask me to do something you like.’ Layla said.

‘I will, and I know you will do it without me even asking,’ I said.

‘I know that this arouses you a great deal.’

‘It does. I love it when you’re like this, when you’re looking at me as if you were about to jump out of the window. Do you want me to turn around? I want to hear your voice and imagine your look while you’re falling from the window.’

‘I love you. I love you,’ she said.

‘Layla.’

‘Mmm!’

‘Layla!’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you think Yacine would dare involve me in something bad?’

‘Are you serious?’ asked Layla.

‘Of course I am. Do you think this is a joking matter?’

Layla jumped up and said, ‘I thought you had invented a crazy story to increase the thrill.’

I pulled her towards me and said, laughing, ‘I thought you didn’t understand the ploy.’

At breakfast, before the others woke up, Layla told me that even though we didn’t live under the same roof, we had to make vows, even if only between the two of us, to announce to ourselves that we were bound to each other for eternity.

I agreed and started organising a ceremony in my mind.

Mahdi and Essam appeared. They obviously liked Layla, enjoyed her company and did not hesitate to shower her with special attention. Layla had a magical influence on them that gave them a certain precocious maturity. Mahdi asked us both to attend a performance organised by their band, Arthritis. I smiled as I always did when I heard the name. Essam got upset once again and asked me if I wanted them to call it Blossom or Harmony, for example. I told him Arthritis was an appropriate name, particularly since the whole country was lame because of arthritis.

‘Of course we’ll come,’ I said. ‘I don’t like the music, let’s be clear about that, but I like the spirit in these concerts. I especially like the total conviction visible on the faces of the musicians, the singers and the dancers. It’s an almost ideological belief stating that they have found their way.’

I took the train from Casablanca to Rabat. During the trip I felt semiconscious, repeating to myself Layla’s name with the strong feeling that I was calling her, that she had just left the carriage and would return at any moment to bring me back from this state of unconsciousness. But she did not return and I kept calling her, mumbling every now and then, ‘Call me please. Do not stop talking to me.’ I had the express feeling that her words, even meaningless words, would keep me connected to life, and if she stopped, she would interrupt the electric current feeding my existence and I would inevitably descend into darkness. I felt her hand stroking my cheek, but the voice I heard was not hers. I heard her say, ‘I am here.’ Then I heard a stranger’s voice say, ‘He’s coming to’ and then a sharp voice say, ‘No use, he’s dead.’

As if challenged by this ridiculous statement, I suddenly shook myself and sat up. Before me were an astounded woman and a man who greeted me warmly and said, ‘I’ve had a similar reaction on the fast train many times. Don’t worry. There might be a magnetic field that causes certain people to have these fits. Who knows what will happen when fast trains start running everywhere in the country. Half of Morocco might faint!’

But the man’s words did not help me, and I found myself once again the victim of a post-seizure depression.

Lately I had been able to overcome this depression by returning to the box, as Layla called it. The box was the store of feelings, images and words where we spontaneously put all that happened to us in moments of intense love. In the box I would meet a person who was almost the me I longed for: outgoing, authentic, relishing life and, even better than that, capable of making someone else happy. There I would meet a body that I did not control, one that lay in the shadow of its desires. I would meet a woman with the extraordinary ability to make words and things equal in density, fragility and temporality. I would meet her in her overwhelming desire and its precise gratification, in the rapidity of her arousal and its subsidence, in her ability to pre-empt everything and capture all that crossed the vital space of our anxiety: visions, dreams, repressed fantasies, smells, colours, crazy words and signals. I would meet her in the stories, since the box was in essence a box of stories, a pile of unlimited possibilities for what happened and did not happen. This multiplicity might be a way for me to get over my depressions. What I needed was a first breach; in other words, a thread of light that made it suddenly possible to break through a wall.

I called Layla as I left the train and told her that I was going back to look for Bacchus. She asked me if this would help me find some peace, and I told her that it would and I would at least be close to Al-Firsiwi. I didn’t like to see him forgotten and ostracised. She liked the idea, and then said unexpectedly, ‘Why not write a story about Ibrahim al-Khayati?’ I told her we would have to discuss that some other time.

In the days that followed I thought of preparing an outline for a possible novel about Ibrahim. In the end I found myself reviewing the landmarks of his life: his idealism, his professional success, his lover’s suicide, his marriage to his lover’s widow, his relationship with his mother and with the twins Essam and Mahdi, his involvement in thorny cases such as the young musicians and gay marriage, the attempt on his life and his overall emergence from the rubble of the 1970s without convictions or bitterness. Finally, his appearance at the end of the century as an eloquent expression of a struggle that defied definition. When I finished writing this preliminary outline, I realised it was not a novel. It was simply Ibrahim’s life, the story etched on his face, and did not require someone to write it anew. If I wanted to write a novel about Ibrahim, I would have to invent another life for him, a life closer to the realistic scenario of a man without miracles. This would be a huge endeavour and would require energy that I did not have. It would also be a venture without guaranteed success.

I asked Al-Firsiwi to tell me, frankly, who stole Bacchus.

He settled himself comfortably in his seat and said, ‘Listen, Youssef, son of Diotima, this weak man was strung up by his feet and flogged night and day for two months. Do you think that if I knew, I would have gone on enjoying the beatings, for the love of God?’

‘But you have been saying many things ever since,’ I replied.

‘I say what I like!’

‘Among the things you say is that you buried Bacchus in the courtyard of a mosque in one of the mountain villages.’

‘Very likely! One possibility among many others.’

‘I know you have many accounts you’d like to settle. You probably want to punish this region by destroying one of its timeless antiquities.’

‘It’s not worth so much fuss. It’s an ordinary statue of the god of wine posing as a dusky adolescent. Even from an artistic perspective, it’s not a masterpiece. The Prado in Madrid and a museum in Florence have wonderful white marble statues of Bacchus. One of them, I can’t remember which, has the shadow cast by the bunch of grapes sculpted on Bacchus’s shoulder. How can one compare this with the dull appearance of the granite adolescent? Please! Spare me! He’s standing as if he had just come out of Jupiter’s thigh. Every land inherits what God granted it in intelligence and kindness. All this commotion, including some stupid people crying over a stolen memory. Let it go. What nonsense!’

‘All right, all right. No need to get all worked up about it. I said maybe. It might be one possibility among others, regardless of the value of Walili’s Bacchus. He disappeared in mysterious circumstances. Can you help me find an avenue to search for him?’

‘I haven’t the slightest idea,’ he replied.

I opened my briefcase and took out a book of poetry published a few weeks earlier in Frankfurt and titled Elegies. I said to Al-Firsiwi, ‘You know, an interesting book of poetry titled Elegies written by an obscure poet called Hans Roeder has been published in Frankfurt.’

He turned his face as he did when he wanted to listen carefully. I waited for him to say something, but he did not open his mouth. His features remained stiff as he sat listening in agitated silence before he asked me, ‘Can I touch it?’

I handed him the book. He spent a long time feeling it with his slender dirty fingers, then he opened it and buried his face between the pages, breathing in the smell of the paper, the letters and the printing press. Then he said, ‘I have no doubt it is a good book!’

‘It is the literary event of the season in Germany,’ I said.

‘Germany is a great poetic nation.’

‘That’s not what it’s best known for,’ I said.

‘It doesn’t matter. It knows itself and so does poetry.’

‘People say you have something to do with this book,’ I told him.

Al-Firsiwi laughed nervously. ‘Is there anything in this world I’m not connected with?’

‘People say this is the poetry book that Hans, Diotima’s grandfather, buried in the ruins of Walili.’

‘It’s possible,’ he said. ‘Why not? Though it’s a matter that would make Diotima turn in her grave!’

‘The introduction states that the publisher received the book from an anonymous sender, and that the poems are those of a German soldier who was held prisoner in Africa and participated in excavating a Roman site. Don’t you think that is more than enough proof that you found and sent the book?’

‘Does the book include two elegies, one addressed to Juba II and the other to Diotima?’

‘Yes, yes it does,’ I said enthusiastically. ‘And the introduction says that they are the best poems in the collection!’

‘Then I’ve screwed Hans Roeder with those two poems!’

‘But why didn’t you publish them under your own name?’

‘I’m not interested in that. He buried his poems in Walili and I buried my poems between his poems. No one will ever know what lies under the rubble and what comes to the surface. Plus, I did it for Diotima’s sake, as a final salute to her restless soul.’

I opened the book to the page where Diotima’s elegy began. I read two lines, but Al-Firsiwi stopped me with a sign of the hand as he stood up. His face had bloomed as a result of this story; he was proud of himself and looked somewhat happy. He went to his safe at the far end of the room and took out a big envelope.

He handed it to me, saying, ‘Here’s the manuscript of your great-grandfather’s poetry. I only found it after losing my eyesight. One evening I became very depressed, and the hopelessness of being blind pushed me to wander among the ruins, where I found a pile of dusty papers and a worn-out hat. They were in a room in a ruin, not far from the house of the handsome youth and close to the statue of a prone male, a symbol of fertility that did not last long in these halls. I slipped into the manuscript two poems that were not part of the savage intensity of Hans Roeder’s poems. I had written them as elegies for two important people in my life who did not live at the same time, but they both lived long in my heart, and at the same time.’

‘What about Bacchus?’ I asked.

‘Listen, when you begin digging, there’s only one chance in a million that you’ll find what you’re looking for and countless chances that you’ll find things you haven’t even dreamed of. You’ve found the manuscript, now forget about the worthless adolescent.’

3

Fatima sent me a text message saying that she had travelled to Havana with her partner. She said she was doing it for both our sakes. The following day I felt a mysterious apprehension that something might happen to Fatima and was haunted by the idea that I should travel to Havana. Before dawn the next morning I awoke sad and exhausted, and called her, unaware of the time difference. Her voice came from deep sleep as she tried to calm me, while I was delirious, repeating that Havana was not suitable to be a dream. It was nothing but a prison that looked like Al-Firsiwi’s bar, where illusions from different time periods stood side by side.

‘What’s happened to you?’ asked Fatima. ‘Havana is a real city. There are dreamers and malingerers, drunks and people who struggle to feed themselves, and once in a while, they dance. Listen to me, this city has a night, it only has night, a quick, thick and amazing night.’

I told her about the poetry book, and she said that I was lucky to have such an intense father. I was saying that I felt a dense fog was covering me, when she yawned and begged me to tell her what to do with the man sleeping in her bed. I told her, half-joking, ‘Smother him with a big pillow.’ I sent her a kiss, hung up and turned off the light to go back to sleep.

I went back to sleep, and dreamed that I was in Havana and the world of Cabrera Infante. I was walking down Calle O, leaving the Hotel Nacional, then crossing Avenida 23, passing in front of the Maraka, and returning quickly to the Nacional, where I had recently left Fatima. I told myself that if Arsenio Cué arrived before me, he would undoubtedly sleep with her. That explained my unexpected aggressive attitude with her when I saw her in the lobby reading the schedule of night parties. I dragged her violently to a corner in the garden where it was extremely hot and humid, and began to devour her. She put up languid resistance, interspersed occasionally with fast, savage parries. I had the feeling I would ejaculate before she reached her climax and decided to slow down, but when I needed to get it back to the same level, it escaped me. I would get close to ejaculating but fail to reach my aim, despite trying a few times. I was swimming in sweat and woke up startled, surrounded by unbearable heat. Then I dreamed that I was with Fatima, Silvestre and Cué, spending the evening in the Sky Club listening to Estrella Rodriguez. I sneaked out of that place and stood at the end of the street under a foggy lamp, listening to Bustrofedon talking about Cuban women and singing an old song, that went something like, ‘Girls without charm, without a proud stroll, without the queens’ lure, cannot be Cubans.’

As my dream continued I found myself in a noisy street following a fast-walking man who I would soon discover to be Yacine. What are you doing here, Taliban? Are you, like me, looking for Guevara’s face to stuff it in an old suitcase? I ran behind Yacine with a great effort that made me hear my quickened breathing. Then I noticed Guevara pushing a vegetable cart in the middle of the street. I stopped to tell him that it might be dangerous to drive his cart between the crazy cars. Never mind. Yacine too thought that Fatima was in danger. For some reason, she would find herself in hospital or in a morgue and not at the bar of the Nacional.

I was awakened by Layla’s phone call, her voice asking, ‘Where are you?’

‘I’m in Havana.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘Almost, but why don’t we run away to Cuba?’

‘Have you gone mad? Even our favourite Cuban writer is in London!’

‘True! Let’s run away to London then!’

I was unable to leave my bed. I was thinking about Layla, Havana, Yacine, Marrakech and Ibrahim al-Khayati. I was thinking about the suffering of Al-Firsiwi and Bahia and about Ahmad Majd and his big house. I was thinking about obscure sexual adventures and a large swimming pool where I could dive in and breathe deeply under the water. I was thinking about all that at once and could not concentrate on one specific detail. When I tried, I was assailed by various details from contradictory topics. When I finally pulled myself out of this swamp, I had no strength left and found nothing better to do than lie on the couch and fall again into a troubled sleep.

Over the weekend Layla and I went to Casablanca. We attended Essam and Mahdi’s performance; we drowned in the racket of Arthritis and laughed at the innocent words the boys in the group uttered to express an anger lacking any seriousness. Layla noticed that most of the songs had a religious flavour as a result of the traditional expressions found in the lyrics of the Gnawa, the Aissawa and the Rawayes orders. I told her that most of them had been tried in the devil worship case because of the T-shirts they wore and not because of the songs they sang. When the noise reached its peak, we left. We lingered a little in the Casablanca night before meeting Ibrahim al-Khayati and some of his friends at a restaurant. Ahmad Majd was there and he teased Layla for boycotting Marrakech.

Layla and Ahmad Majd got into an argument about the city, which ended with Layla shouting, ‘Do you want the truth? I hate Marrakech and I hate that stupid house of yours that you call Al-Andalous. I shit on all those tacky ornaments you boast about to foreigners. And I hate you, you more than everything else I’ve mentioned.’

Ahmad responded with some allusion to his years in prison.

Layla exploded. ‘No one has the right to feel superior to us because of his years in prison, especially if he was rewarded for them. Didn’t you all say that you were reconciled? But I don’t know with whom. Whoever’s been getting drunk tonight with the reconciliation money should keep his tongue under wraps. I don’t owe any madman anything! If you can’t be proud of the price you paid, it means that you loaned the system a few years of your life and got them back later with hefty interest!’

I pulled Layla back by her waist and told her, ‘We must leave immediately.’

She did not object, and on the way home I told her I did not understand her antagonism towards Ahmad. She said that she could not fathom why I had such horrible friends and that she hated them all.

‘Didn’t you say you liked Ibrahim al-Khayati?’

‘I take it back,’ she said. ‘I hate you all.’

When I held her hand she did not pull away, and after a period of silence she said, crying, ‘I was horrible to Ahmad Majd. I must apologise to him.’

I tried to undo some of the damage by inviting everyone back to Ibrahim’s house. Layla apologised, and Ahmad somehow transformed her apology into a collective, public admission of his countless virtues. As the evening progressed I enjoyed listening, for the first time, to the chattering of the men and women Ibrahim had invited. They did not seem to have any of the pretensions or overblown professionalism we normally encountered in Casablanca. They were a new generation of officials, contractors and liberal professionals who led a very pleasant life. They talked about big business deals and stock exchange listings, about foreign investment and the property market. They discussed Casablanca’s new hotels, restaurants and dance clubs. They talked about all that without any bitterness, disapproval or affected regrets, and were pleased with the city’s new entertainment options. It seemed to me then that success and wealth had become agreeable beings, as if a sweet breeze had pushed the ogre that they once symbolised into a far corner.

Slowly the atmosphere cleared and everybody lightened up, and people began telling risqué jokes and recounting the scandalous sex stories swelling the city. At this point Layla got upset and asked to leave the vulgar atmosphere. I walked her to our room in Ibrahim’s house, and there she wondered how I could have such crude friends. I told her that they were Ibrahim’s friends, but she objected, saying, ‘You too were laughing at their jokes.’ I tried to tease her but she recoiled. So I kissed her and returned to the vulgar soirée.

The evening came to a dreadful end when someone called Ibrahim and told him that there had been a huge explosion at a nightclub called Horses and Gunpowder, and that police cars and ambulances had been running nonstop for more than an hour, which meant there were a lot of victims.

We went to the beach area, but before we arrived at the nightclub we found security checkpoints that prevented us going any further. Ibrahim tried in vain to convince the security men of the need to let us pass, so we stood there amid a nervous and noisy crowd. We kept calling Mahdi and Essam, but all we got was their voicemails. I told Ibrahim nothing indicated that they had been at the nightclub, but he said nothing indicated that they had not. The voices of young men and women trying to get through the security cordon rose hysterically. One after another, ambulances passed by, the crowd wailing and crying at each one. Someone came from the other side and flung himself on to the barrier. He said that there were hundreds of victims and that their remains were spread over the area as far as the sea. The wailing got louder once more, until a security policeman informed us that the explosion had been caused by gas canisters and had only caused a few injuries. Through her wailing, a woman said to him, ‘May God send you good news.’ But another person came up to the security barrier and said two men had blown themselves up in the middle of the nightclub. Someone asked if there were dead people, and the man replied, ‘Ask if there are people still alive.’

I told Ibrahim it might be better to go back home, where we would hear less random news. But he thought we should go by the hospital to make sure Essam and Mahdi were not among the victims. The hospital had no news of any explosion, and had not received any warning that a large number of victims would be arriving at the emergency room. We went home broken. As we crossed the garden we heard the jittery sounds of a guitar, and as soon as we opened the door there were the voices of Essam, Mahdi and the members of their band. They were in the living room, which still showed traces of the earlier soirée.

Ibrahim shouted at them, ‘Stop this bloody mess!’

The room fell silent and Ibrahim collapsed on the closest sofa, shaking all over. I told everyone about the explosion at the Horses and Gunpowder. Mahdi said they had been there at the time and were told that a truck transporting gas had exploded in a parking lot near the beach.

‘What about the nightclub?’ I asked.

Essam said it had been evacuated, in case another explosion was part of the programme.

‘Then there were no victims?’ I asked.

‘We don’t know. There might have been. We’ll find out from the news bulletins.’

I said, ‘You don’t seem bothered by what’s happened, or by the fact that there might be dead and injured or terrorised people, Ibrahim among them, who almost lost his mind over worry for you. All that is mere detail?’

‘They are details, not mere detail,’ Mahdi said.

The others laughed, and one of them said with feigned seriousness, ‘The fact is that the explosion present in your head did not happen.’

I was gripped by a desire to slap the young man and controlled myself with difficulty. Then I walked over to Ibrahim, pulled him off the sofa, and led him to his room, shouting at them without looking back, ‘We don’t want to hear a sound from you.’

I heard Essam say in affected Arabic, ‘May you have a good night.’

The group responded with noisy laughter.

The next morning was the kind of morning I hated: Layla was in a rotten mood, the young men were asleep on the living room sofas, Ibrahim had gone to his office, the maid had yet to arrive, the kitchen was a mess and coffee was not at hand. The only thing I could do was put on my shoes and go back to Rabat. Just then Ahmad Majd called and asked about the previous night’s explosion.

When I told him it was just a gas explosion, he said, somewhat surprised, ‘Then nothing happened to Essam and Mahdi?’

‘No, nothing happened. If it had, we would now be in the funeral procession, while you are lying in bed waiting for detailed news about the incident.’

Layla and I went out, a sea breeze, moist and fresh, erasing the rotting smell of the closed house. I would need an entire day to get over this morning.

Layla was walking fast and crying. She said she was scared and wanted to see her daughter immediately. We went to the railway station, and since we had to wait for half an hour, I suggested drinking a cup of coffee.

Layla replied, upset, ‘I don’t want coffee or anything else. I want to see my daughter. I’m ashamed of myself. What would I tell her if I had been killed in the explosion? What would she have done? She has no one but me.’

I said, ‘But you were sleeping in a bed where nothing exploded.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I was sitting in a restaurant, then I was in the street and then at a silly party!’

I drank my coffee quickly, reading the newspapers’ banner headlines about the arrest of Al-Qaeda sleeper cells. This was for the second time in six months. I scrutinised the names carefully as if trying to see their faces; I had a vague feeling I would recognise one of them. I always had a premonition that I would recognise someone on the list, one of those confused people we never expected to find in a terrorist organisation, the kind of person who would eat and drink and laugh with us and visualise us as flying remains while staring at our faces.

We got on the train and sat silently side by side. When we reached Rabat, Layla took my hand and asked while squeezing it, ‘Do you hate me?’

‘Not yet!’

I did not see Layla for a week after that. We talked for hours on the phone about everything — her daughter, her little quarrels, domestic matters, funny incidents about her ex-husband and our own limited concerns, which we could cover in one minute. But whenever the conversation touched on the possibility of our seeing each other, she quickly changed the subject. It was as if the explosion had cast a dark shadow across our relationship.

Fatima returned from Havana and gave me a call. She was clearly quite anxious, so I assumed she was not on good terms with her Kosovar live-in boyfriend, but I did not ask. We talked about Ahmad Majd, Bahia and their daughter and about Ibrahim al-Khayati. She asked strange questions about everyone and wanted to know to what degree each one of us was in harmony with himself.

I said to her, joking, ‘The only person I know who has a good relationship with himself is you.’

‘I wish!’ she said firmly.

The following week she surprised me one morning, standing at my office door at the paper, greeting my colleagues, who welcomed her warmly. We went to the Beach restaurant, where I ordered a meal of crab and slices of salmon in cucumber sauce.

She said, laughing, ‘I know that you’ll smell nothing of this massacre!’

‘On the contrary, I’ll smell the most specific scents and the very weakest ones.’

She looked at me in surprise, and I explained that a miracle had restored my sense of smell.

She smiled affectionately at me and asked, after a moment of silence, ‘What was the first meal whose aroma surprised you?’

I said, defeated, ‘Yacine’s shirts, years after his death.’

I observed her face with its fine features, typical of the women of the Atlas. Her eyes had become a little larger, and their blackness was a transparent shade surrounding her whole face. Her lips jutted out as if they had grown fuller in reaction to the prominence of her cheekbones. I told her that her slimness was very becoming. She smiled without interrupting her fierce struggle with her crab. When she dipped her fingers into the bowl of lemon water, all the sadness in the world overwhelmed me, and all I wanted was to put an end to the meal as soon as possible.

We were leaving Al-Jazaïr Street, having first passed through the Udaya and talked about its planned tunnel, and proceeded along the wall of the Mellah and the bank of the Abou Regreg. We went by the grain market, which had been transformed into ateliers and was decorated with huge façades advertising the Emirati enterprise in charge of the building. There were beautiful drawings revealing blue water and happy children with rosy cheeks. Fatima asked me about the lofty building crowned with solid domes and facing the Sunni mosque on one side and the news agency where she worked on the other side. I told her it was the museum of contemporary art. She was amazed by the sudden changes in Rabat, but I suggested she hold her comments until she visited the Villa des Arts that faced the mosque on the other side, and awaited the transformations planned for the Lyautey residence to become another altar to art in the capital. She would then see how the ‘forbidden city’ had come out of its lair.

She asked me, joking, ‘Why do they surround this poor mosque with all these satanic spaces?’

I said, ‘Don’t exaggerate. There’s not a single devil in the capital.’

Fatima left me in front of the parliament building. I continued on my way behind the colonial building and wondered about the vulgar and provocative parallel building enlarging the parliament, using the same architecture as the old courthouse. I asked myself about this insistence on an imaginary harmony, when contrast was the best approach to obtaining sudden beauty. When I reached my apartment I was exhausted. I took a pain reliever and slept soundly.

Fatima told me that after spending time abroad, she found Moroccans optimistic and lovers of life. I asked her, ‘By God, where did you meet this wonderful species?’

She said everyone she met at parties and family gatherings, and even some people she encountered on the street and on the train, was like this.

Whenever I had this sort of discussion, I felt depressed. I sensed a huge gap separated me from the reality that surrounded me, and I wouldn’t ever truly understand what was happening. I saw from my vantage point that people appeared amazed by the new things that occurred around them and were eager to get involved in this fast-paced life. I saw them as having lost any possibility of escape from the trap, and I couldn’t predict what would happen to them when they awakened. I saw in the image projected by other sources of observation a country forging ahead heedless, even of those who fall off its open carts.

I talked with Layla about the subject and she said in a decisive manner, ‘You’re right, you have no reason to be optimistic. Don’t pay attention to the gold-plated superficialities. If you scratch below the surface, you will find layers of rust and emptiness.’

I said, ‘Fatima is back from Madrid.’

She was not happy with the news. ‘I don’t want to have anything at all to do with that woman!’

‘But we have to go with her to Marrakech,’ I explained.

‘You must definitely forget that,’ Layla said.

When my silence lasted too long, she added, ‘If this annoys you, you can just cancel the idea of going to Marrakech.’

‘It’s impossible.’

‘Of course it’s impossible. I know that you would prefer to get rid of me rather than give up Marrakech.’

Later, I repeatedly tried to convince her that my interest in Fatima and joining her on her Marrakech trip was an essential matter, and had nothing to do with a possible physical relationship. For me Fatima was not a woman in a sexual or amorous way. She was more than that. She was a geographical phenomenon in my life.

I tried to pull Layla out of an ingrained cycle of enmity towards Fatima, but I failed. She was overcome by jealousy and decided, with no possibility for retraction, that I had to choose between travelling with Fatima and our relationship.

This upset me very much and made me tell her angrily, ‘I choose to go with Fatima!’

In the train that took us to Marrakech, Fatima talked in a terse manner about her Kosovar lover. He had suddenly revealed a mean streak in Havana, something that made her realise, with great concern, that he did not have an iota of dignity.

‘And then what happened?’ I asked.

‘When we returned to Madrid, we arrived at six in the morning. I put my suitcase on the luggage cart and went to the exit without waiting for him. An hour later I was in my apartment, getting ready to go to bed alone, as I have always been.’

I asked her if she regretted anything. She said she was upset for not having understood at the right time, and then she asked me about Layla. I told her that I could unmistakably say that she was the best thing that had happened to me in the last few years, but I did not know how to organise my life with her.

‘It’s a true love story,’ Fatima said. ‘That’s why you can’t organise anything. All you have to do is let your imagination run freely and write an unprecedented love story.’

Her reply annoyed me. I heard in it an allusion to the fact that I wouldn’t live with Layla in a true love story, but would rather experience a kind of literary fantasy. I replied somewhat harshly, ‘But Layla is real. She is not the product of my imagination.’

‘What happened to you in reality was that you occasionally went to bed with a woman who was able to reconcile you with pleasure. But look at the story you wove around the subject!’

I felt suddenly blocked and remained silent. I watched the red fields devoid of vegetation, except for clumps of dispersed cactus trees. There on the nearby horizon was the road leading to Marrakech, which would soon expand to Agadir. In a few years the country would be connected by those empty roads, praised in anthems for uniting people and putting an end to isolation. Fatima loved roads, arched bridges and major highway projects. She said that they suited Hercules’s soul very well. They complied with the idea of the bare land from which adventurers extract new features.

We arrived at the big house and found Ghaliya busy preparing dinner, and Bahia overwhelmed by the commotion of baby Ghaliya, while Ahmad Majd was talking on the phone with the calm of someone who has awakened on a deserted island. I left Fatima to reconnect with this lively ambiance and went straight to my room, intent on napping until night-time.

4

Yacine placed his hand on my cheek as he used to do when he was a baby. I opened my eyes, inhaling the scent of a distant childhood. I smiled at him. He told me that this was his last appearance in my life. He would then disappear for good.

‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you to misunderstand me. I’m not anybody’s messenger. I have no connection with anyone, and there is no connection between what happened to me and what is happening to you. There is no connection between what I was and what I am able to read in tomorrow’s paper. You will be obsessed for a long time trying to understand how this happened. There is no “how” in the matter. An idea does not survive long as an idea. Try to jump one metre. Then try to think about it for more than one second, and you will be unable to jump for good. All there is in the matter is the fact that a spark passes through your brain and says to you, “Why not?” and then you jump. This is how I found myself over there. I did not know whether it was a beginning or an end. I only knew that if I did not do it I would remain suspended, all the way to eternity, at that point on the pavement where I allowed the idea to survive more than necessary. I say this to put an end to the matter. I mean, in order for me to put an end to it. As far as you are concerned, you won’t stop digging in this grave. You will follow in the footsteps of your ancestors, the diggers. Will you find anything? I don’t know. You might be able to extract a city from inside you, a combination of Zarhoun, Du? sseldorf, Rabat, Bu Mandara, Frankfurt, Bu Dayrab and Marrakech. You might find poetry in the prosaic ruins that surround you. None of that concerns me! You must know that I will always manage to escape the control of the descendants. I will soar alone and fall alone as I always did.

‘Listen carefully. Jamaa al-Fna, the Mediterranean Press Club, the medina entrance from the side of the seller of smoked heads, near the olive and falafel shop. Free yourself from the balcony of the café. Nothing deserves all this attention on your part. Listen to the call of someone looking from the narrow window of an old house. He is talking to another person on the roof of a nearby house, and asking, “Has the person concerned arrived?” The other replies at the top of his voice that he does not know. You, however, must stand exactly under the spot where the call originates or under the window. Look closely in the direction of those who leave the alley and melt into the throng of the square. You should not concern yourself with those entering the medina. You should know that in this narrow place it is difficult to distinguish between those entering and those leaving, but everything depends on this distinction. You will see a billboard that shades the alleyway with its dull glimmer. You will incidentally read on it that Marrakech welcomes cinema lovers. You will then see a large poster that covers a large area of the wall, and if you read it you will know the whole programme of the film festival. I beg you, do not read it. If you busy yourself reading it — and I know that an overwhelming temptation will push you to do so — you will miss the critical moment.

‘Why am I telling you all this? Why do I run to you specifically? It is either your fate or mine, we can’t escape it. The face is that of a child who grew up very quickly. His cheeks are those of a healthy baby and his eyes are the eyes of a tired man. It is a face that looks like many others, like the face of the greengrocer located near the fuel station in Al-Zizafon Street, the face of the teacher at the private school located behind the general’s house, or the face of your brother-in-law who lives in Germany, whom you haven’t seen in years. Look at his hands next. Why is there a blackness creeping up all his nails? Why does the silver wedding ring sit so lightly on his thick little finger, making the hand look dead? Where has the man sprung from? From Sidi Youssef Ben Ali? From Daoudiate? From a vault in the old medina? From the enclosure of Marrakech or from the night of Casablanca? Or from the nameless margins?

‘You told me once that you recognised people’s origins from their walk. Pay careful attention then to this unhurried gait, slightly off-centre as if the person were trying to avoid an unexpected obstacle. Can you tell where people are heading from the way they walk? No. No, you can’t know. No one can tell whether a person is going towards the centre of the square or to the Conference Hall, or the Hotel La Mamounia. His body stretches towards all those places without taking the direction it points to. It is the camouflage of a person who knows what he wants.

‘The sleek buses are lined up in the square, unloading hundreds of weary tourists. The sun covers this city like a tanjiya dish cooked over high heat. This is the end of the tour, after the tombs of the Saadis, Badie palace, Bahia palace, the Koutoubia, the house of Si Said, the Pasha’s house, the lighthouse, and the Almoravid Dome. Here, the scalded faces take a break before they are split among the hotels of the city. Do you think he is here, hiding in an obscure corner, waiting for the gathering of foreigners near the buses? Do you think he is observing the situation carefully from behind the cart of an itinerant vendor? Scrutinise his features closely, if you can get near him. If the designated moment has arrived, a vivid yellow colour will cover his face. In that case do not leave him at all. But if the time is still far off, the burning sun will turn his face bluish. So stay close to him but only look at his face occasionally. It would be better to look at his feet, the feet of a duck in a hurry wearing impromptu socks and knock-off trainers.

‘If he is not there? You will ask yourself if he wasn’t just an apparition that sprang from the fear present in each one of us. If, despite his socks, his Pakistani shirt and his uneasy look, he wasn’t just a simple construction worker on his day off, or a cleaner in foreigners’ houses who has just taken a quick shower before noon, for fear of being surprised in a state of impurity? At the exact moment when you ask that kind of question, a person’s colour might change from blue to yellow, the colour of death. Beware of falling victim to this suspicion when you can’t see him. If he is not where we left him a short while before, he is now at the entrance to the Mamounia, which is packed with cars, buses and taxis, and where the smoke of Cuban cigars extends from the restaurants to the Churchill Suite or Orson Welles Rooms. Do not take the risk of leaving this golden square. There, in the same square metre, huge fortunes compete and our friend can raise the pillars of paradise.

‘Why are you looking at me like that? You have not been assigned a mission and you are not anybody’s messenger. You just gave birth to a naïve angel who flew from the Trocadero to Kandahar, certain of his return.

‘Tell me, you who understand everything, what are twenty years? Almost nothing! Why don’t we start from zero?’

I wanted to touch his cheeks, but I only caught the smile that accompanied the movement of my hands. I opened my eyes to the darkness of the room and distant voices coming from the ground floor. I forced myself to get up and go downstairs, but I was not able to answer my mobile phone, which had been ringing for more than an hour.

I drank a lot of water, then I asked Fatima and Ahmad if they had been talking from the moment we arrived. They said they had been.

Layla called at the same moment.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked tersely.

She replied meekly, ‘I’m just seeing how you are. Does that annoy you so much?’

I told her that I was very anxious because of the strange things happening to me with Yacine. She returned to the subject of Fatima and said she would like us all to meet in Rabat. I agreed and told her that I would have loved to be with her at that exact moment. I told her I missed her and I asked if she looked beautiful that day; she said she had done everything she could to look lovely. Then we said superficial things to each other that are usually said by teenagers. Before we even ended the call, I felt a heavy weight on my chest, as if I had failed to say or do something I should have. I found myself going towards the door, opening it and looking at the alleyway, which was filling up with new voices speaking various languages.

I looked at the wall opposite the big house and saw that the pigeon that had been agonising when we arrived had died. There was a green patch around its head from the fluid still oozing from its beak. I closed the door, and when I went through the kitchen I said to Ghaliya, ‘The pigeon has died!’ She told me that it had been folded in upon itself since the day before. I shook my shoulders and said, ‘At least it didn’t die by having its throat cut!’

She thought I was making a joke and replied, joking herself, ‘Unlike the pigeons I’m preparing for dinner. Sidi Ahmad spent the whole morning cutting their throats. They were flapping their wings and squawking, thinking he was about to feed them. Poor birds. Nothing frees them from the human except death.’

I collapsed on the sofa. I was about to ask Ahmad about his new property development projects when my phone rang again. It was Ibrahim al-Khayati, who told me in a shaky voice with a weepy tone that Essam had been missing for two days. I asked some questions and then shut up. Ibrahim said Mahdi was almost deranged and that he did not know what to do. I was upset by the news and told him that I would come either that same day or early the next.

Dinner was chilly. We talked in subdued voices as if we were afraid of waking someone up. After dinner we split into two groups: Ahmad Majd’s guests, who loudly discussed the fate of the land in the city centre that had been bought by the Jawhara Group, and a small group consisting of Fatima, Ahmad Majd and me, who briefly discussed various scenarios for Essam’s disappearance, including the more tragic ones. But Ahmad scolded us, saying we were the kind of people who would bury a person before he was dead. We did not disagree.

On her way to her room, Fatima said, ‘There’s no need to panic. Bad news always travels fast.’

We took the six a.m. train to Casablanca, and when it started off Fatima said she had not slept a wink the previous night. I told her, ‘Try to sleep. We have a long day ahead of us.’

I picked up the newspapers and saw Essam’s picture on the front page of the paper I worked for. I raced through the article and learned some details about the various possibilities the police were considering. Among them were kidnapping by a fundamentalist Islamic group, a settling of scores among alleged devil worshippers, or an escape abroad following a period of psychological instability. Then I read Ibrahim al-Khayati’s appeal to Essam, asking him to think about his mother, who had lost her ability to speak since hearing the news of his disappearance. I shared all this with Fatima, whose eyes were closed, but she did not react.

I was engrossed in reading an article about a property developer’s denial of reports he had bought state-owned land for a nominal price, when Fatima said, ‘I find Ibrahim’s appeal in the paper strange.’

I waited for her to elaborate but she did not. I said, ‘If Essam learns that his mother is in a critical condition because of him, he will return quickly.’

‘And if he doesn’t know?’

‘It would mean that something has happened to him.’

‘Or that he didn’t read the papers,’ she added.

‘Do you think Ibrahim concocted this on his own?’

‘I don’t think anything. It’s as if I were in a movie!’

‘But you’re right about there being something strange in Ibrahim’s appeal. Why does he say Haniya lost the ability to speak after her son’s disappearance? Have you ever heard her talk to anyone?’

‘Of course she spoke, gossiped, joked and laughed. She just didn’t do it with everybody or in a group.’

I wondered if the allusion to Essam’s psychological instability was not in fact a reference to the uneasy relationship between Ibrahim and the children of his former lover. Fatima said that people’s gossip would tear everything to pieces.

She then sat up, refusing to sleep, and said, ‘My problems seem so trivial compared to what happens to others!’

I smiled in an effort to encourage her to speak, but she digressed. She explained that her separation from her Kosovar lover was unbearably painful, even though she was determined and convinced, and her decision was final. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever get over this hurt,’ she said. ‘It’s a feeling of profound loss that will mark all my life. Imagine, I got pregnant twice in succession. The first time I lost the baby ten weeks before the due date. There was no sign of anything unusual until I woke up one night, swimming in my waters. I visited the doctor ten times a month and everything was as it should be. There were no signs of anything being wrong, and the baby was fine. Then I suddenly went into labour and the baby was born alive and died before my very eyes. It was stretched out to its full length in that illuminated unit, awash with all the tears in my body.

‘You know what? My body rejected that baby of its own accord, without any interference from me, as if it knew the violence of this stupid impregnation.

‘Then one day I knew I had been wrong from the outset. It was as if I had gone down, very fast, from the seventh floor to meet a man I was waiting for. I went with him. I ate and drank with him and made love with him. Then I became pregnant and I had an abortion. I read, stayed out late, danced, travelled and then I suddenly discovered that he wasn’t the one!’

‘But where’s the man you have been waiting for?’ I asked her.

She looked long into my eyes and smiled. ‘You?. .?One day I will kill you!’ she said. We laughed for the first time in a day.

We entered Ibrahim al-Khayati’s house hoping that Essam had returned, ending the ordeal. But when we walked into the living room, we were overwhelmed by the gloomy atmosphere and abandoned our hopes. Layla was the first to greet us; her eyes were red and swollen. Ibrahim on the other hand remained in his seat, absent-minded, staring at the empty space of the room. When we greeted him, he did not seem to recognise us.

We spent the rest of the morning in anxious conversations with Mahdi and Ibrahim and some of the young men of the band who had not stopped visiting the family. As for Haniya, she remained in bed as if in a coma. The only time she lost her temper was when Ibrahim touched her cheek in an attempt to rouse her from her despondency.

At two in the afternoon I took Fatima and Layla out to lunch. As we walked through the garden, we crossed paths with the police team investigating the disappearance. They engaged us in a casual conversation that ended with them checking our identities. They pointed out that the investigation would benefit from every piece of information, big or small, we could provide.

Once out in the street, Layla abandoned her unnatural calm and began discussing the disappearance, unconcerned by our search for a nearby restaurant. Her verbosity seemed to be her way of dealing with Fatima’s presence and controlling it. I took her by the arm and told her that I felt like I had not seen her for months. She said that there was no need for me to imagine as it had been ages since I’d last seen her. We entered an Italian restaurant hungry and agitated.

The investigation was going in various directions. Essam and his band were in an ambiguous position. On the one hand, there was their entrenched conflict with various Islamist movements, because their songs poked fun at religious dress, beards and language. The matter had gone all the way to parliament, where the government was asked what it intended to do to put an end to this trivialisation of expressions like ‘in the name of God’, ‘there is no power but in God’ and ‘God suffices’ and their being used as terms of scorn and sarcasm.

There was also pathological hostility between Arthritis and other bands associated with devil worship, not only because Essam and the others had denied the existence of any connection between them and the Satanist trend, but because they had gone so far as to dub themselves an Islamic singing group. This had led a local Muslim leader to invite Arthritis to perform in the city whose municipal council he headed. But the concert turned into a chair-throwing fight when the band gave in to the audience’s demands and sang provocative songs such as ‘Islam isn’t in beards and rags’. Despite all that, the Muslim leader had issued a statement condemning infiltrators at the concert who had provoked the fight and praising Arthritis for respecting the spirit of religion and rejecting its false façades. At the time, Essam thought of changing the name of the group from Arthritis to Lantern, but Mahdi and the rest of the group refused categorically, thus increasing the tensions among them.

Essam had been profoundly shocked by his arrest in the devil worship affair. He and other band members had been accused of belonging to a worldwide Satanist movement, and the prosecutor had read passages from various publications and slogans. Essam was not religious, but he would never have joined a movement that promoted such ideas and spread them recklessly. When the judge asked him whether he was convinced that Satan was a friend of humanity who connived with them and shared their desires, he nearly answered: ‘Who is this new Satan?’ But seeing the stern look in his lawyer’s eyes he had replied very calmly, ‘I believe in God and His Prophet.’ From that moment on Ahmad Majd had turned his defence of Essam and the others into a torrent of sarcastic remarks that shook the court. He had talked about Satan’s relationship with music, young people’s relationship to Satanism, and the phobia of conservatives regarding anything beyond their own tastes. He had referred to the state that feared its own shadow, and about the rap songs that began with praise of the Prophet. People in the know had understood that the presence of Ahmad Majd — a friend of those in high places — in court to defend such a case constituted official support for the young musicians. Ahmad attributed the flyers and posters distributed by the young men to the foolishness and irresponsibility of youth and as a way to undermine the overzealousness of the security agencies. Essam’s acquittal confirmed the intuition of the ‘smart’ ones, whether they were right or wrong.

Nobody knew for sure, but Essam’s extended period of isolation and his inclination for mixed-up, dervish-like practices that combined Sunni Sufi traditions and popular rituals, together with various other religions and spiritual movements, probably went back to the impact of that trial. Among the immediate results of this sudden change in him was the increasing sharpness in the discussions he had with Ibrahim al-Khayati, discussions that were more like severe judgements. He frequently confronted Ibrahim over his relationship with his biological father. According to Mahdi, Essam never missed an opportunity to bring it up. Essam also attacked his mother with a barrage of double entendres that revealed scorn and disdain for her relationship with Ibrahim. This dramatic development appeared to have ended Haniya’s reserved and timid comportment in public, and she unsheathed an unequalled ferocity that she first directed at Essam and Mahdi, and then forcefully at Ibrahim.

During those difficult months following the devil worship trial, things had kept happening, one stranger than the other. Essam had become openly religious, while remaining the main lyricist for Arthritis, which in turn went from success to success. Essam’s newfound religiosity had forced Ibrahim to submit, with a great deal of disguised depression, to a change in his private life, which until then had included enjoying festive dinners and Casablanca’s nightlife. He then crowned this house arrest with a quick umra. Upon his return, I had asked him if he had felt anything special while performing his umra. He had confessed the pilgrimage had not moved him in any way. On the contrary, whenever he tried to concentrate on the experience, it escaped him hopelessly. Haniya found strength in standing up to Essam’s attacks and decided to extend her control over the home. She was pitiful, though, despite her attempts to shout orders at everyone. She who had long lived submissively in the shadow of a tree called Ibrahim al-Khayati now appeared to be breaking the branches, picking the leaves and destroying the buds for no real reason.

Mahdi, on the other hand, had watched his world collapse with a great deal of patience and wisdom. At the time, he wrote his famous song, ‘Enter the Valley’.

If you are caught

And go to and fro

Without finding a way out

Enter the valley

Stay in the middle

And wreck their plan.

After Essam’s trial and new religious fervour, the media had portrayed him as a shining example of repentance. There had been further arrests of young musicians, amid persistent — though false — rumours that Essam had revealed the identity of one of the devil worshippers to the police. All of this had lit the fuse of hostility between Arthritis and most other Casablanca bands. As a result, the investigation into his disappearance veered in that direction, and we endured a whole week of contradictory reports about the arrest of a devil worship group that had kidnapped Essam, followed by the arrest of a terrorist cell that claimed to have abducted and murdered him. Ibrahim al-Khayati meanwhile received a phone call saying Essam was fine and needed some cash and medicine, but since the call was not repeated, all hope of finding a related lead evaporated.

Mahdi, meanwhile, was preparing to travel to Paris to begin his studies. We all thought, without knowing why, that he might find his twin brother there, in the city of miracles. We repeated this possibility so frequently that it almost became a certainty which eased the pain caused by the disappearance. We even began to find remnants of the old ambiance in Ibrahim al-Khayati’s house, a mixture of levity, joy and consolation.

One evening Layla began remembering how much Essam loved her and lamenting bitterly that the investigation had not achieved anything and that oblivion had gradually permeated the case. When I reminded her of the complexity of cases of kidnap, abduction or murder, she grew even more fearful, and admitted that she manically envisioned frightening possibilities.

‘Such as?’ I asked her.

‘I’m reluctant to say. I’m afraid a malignant worm has settled inside me and makes me smell foul things from a distance.’

We sat on the edge of her bed trying to organise our thoughts. Essam hated Ibrahim. He hated the idea of interacting with him as a father, and of Ibrahim interacting with Essam’s mother as a husband. He knew about Ibrahim’s homosexuality and about his relationship with his father, and this was unbearably embarrassing to him. His only outlet was showering Ibrahim with insults, curses and contempt. Layla said Essam had even slapped Ibrahim one day while they were in the swimming pool, and told him never to go in the pool while he was there. ‘I don’t want your body ever to get close to mine,’ Layla quoted Essam as telling Ibrahim. ‘You’re not a body but a moving brothel.’

‘Did he really say that? Did he actually slap him?’ I asked, stunned.

‘He did even more than that,’ Layla said. ‘Mahdi said one evening they were sitting in the garden with the rest of the band, practising a new song, when Ibrahim returned from an evening out. A bit tipsy, Ibrahim greeted the young men from behind the glass door of the living room before going to his room. At that moment Essam got up and walked towards him. Mahdi asked him what he was doing. He said casually, “I’m going to kill the bastard.” ’

‘So much hatred. As if Ibrahim had bred poisonous snakes in his bed and not innocent offspring,’ I said.

With frightening calm, Layla said, ‘That’s why I believe Ibrahim killed Essam in the swimming pool and buried him in the garden.’

I shivered with horror. What Layla was saying was consistent with the vague misgivings I had had for days that posed a possibility as horrific as it was unexpected. Ibrahim had enjoyed a calm life, removed from our anxious worlds, busy with the details of the life he loved, unassuming and without exhausting assumptions. I found myself visualising him burying his victim, then glumly sitting with us and deploring this disappearance. I imagined all the minor agonies that must have assailed him as he watched Essam grow hostile and Haniya come out of her shell. We used to meet and talk, and he may have mentioned once or twice issues with the twins, but we never had any idea of the fire that must have been consuming them. It seemed so easy for the beast to be born, and so simple to cross to the shores of hell.

I was overcome with a feeling of despair at how life found satisfaction only in destroying us, and had an overwhelming fear of being alone. I shared my thoughts with Layla, and she tried to console me by caressing my face and head, but I felt nothing.

She said without much enthusiasm, ‘You can stay here if you’re willing to get out of bed before six in the morning.’

I quickly undressed and lay down on her bed, certain she had saved me from unbearable suffering.

At work the following morning, I was busy writing a short article on how property and tourism funds were recovering debts owed by the property mafia, and was looking into the secret behind the ability of three big-shots to avoid repayment. Banks appeared to be negotiating easy terms for the debts of some of their clients, thanks to the sky-rocketing prices of the land mortgaged by the banks. I was embroiled in a heated discussion with the editor-in-chief, trying to convince him to publish the names of the three big-shots who refused to pay their debts in good times and bad, when I received a call from Ahmad Majd. Like a bucket of cold water being poured over my head, he told me that Ibrahim al-Khayati had been arrested and charged with killing Essam. I asked him, spontaneously, if the police had found the body in the garden.

‘There’s no corpse in this story,’ Ahmad Majd answered.