The Arch and the Butterfly

1

Al-Firsiwi sank into a state of despair. When my half-sister and her husband returned from overseas, he quickly sold them the hotel. His only condition was that he be allowed to recover the blue Roman pieces of mosaic remaining in the halls and on the walls. To that end, he spent almost six months sitting in the lobby of the hotel passing the pieces of mosaic between his fingers. He would place the pieces he believed to be of genuine Roman origin in a bag beside him. His actions provoked the pity and scorn of the employees and the new owners. During that time he overheard all the plans for repairs, extensions, additions and alterations around the hotel. He wished he had the right and the energy to come up with different ideas; he could have made a thousand suggestions for changes and replacements. His son-in-law had entered into a partnership with the wife of a well-known government official. He heard the wife’s voice one day as she talked to the contractor about using the mosaic. He did not say a thing, but sang for more than one hour and in all dialects and keys, ‘Read the contract, my cousin.’

When he had finished collecting the tiles from the Roman mosaic, he put the bag on the back of a donkey and descended from the top of the hill in a noisy procession with villagers he had brought along. The procession entered Walili from the side of the Tangier Gate, then continued down the main street in the direction of Caracalla’s Arch, as if it were in a victory parade, returning from war. As he went, Al-Firsiwi reminded people of every twist and turn of his personal epic, from the day he took over the market with his German wife on his arm to the moment he returned the mosaic to the state, the very entity that had abandoned Juba’s kingdom. However the state did not stop at neglect and turning a blind eye to thieves, Al-Firsiwi said, but gave the governor free rein to plough corruption and reap the fruits. The wife of the genius wanted to decorate her swimming pool with the Roman mosaics, but Al-Firsiwi swore to God that she would never do it.

‘It is not enough to be a thief, my dears,’ he said. ‘You must have brains enough to differentiate between Roman mosaic and the tesserae of Bab Bardayin. Old man Firsiwi can do it by touch. When you tried to rob me last year, I made a point of crying over what I had lost in front of rich and poor. In reality, as soon as I touched the empty spots you left after the theft, my gloating heart danced with joy. You had taken nothing but the mud of the region covered with Fes blue.

‘How stupid that was. They are not coins that you would recognise easily, though your honourable husband has often mistaken a glob of spit for a silver coin from the Saadi period. It is mosaic, in other words, the splinters of the human soul scattered in God’s earth. It is the meeting point between water, clay and fire. It is the creative power of the imagination that transforms inert matter into the light that glows in the faces of water nymphs. You don’t get it? I will pay you a day’s wages simply for making up this parade and testifying that I turned over to the Moroccan state a part of the great heritage it has neglected.

‘This bag is full of broken faces, those of warriors, heroes, gods, women and beasts. It will soon be added to other bags and boxes also filled with faces and fragmentary bodies, abandoned in storage rooms where rats and grasshoppers play. See how great civilisations with their brilliant shapes, colours and beauty end up in the dark corners of those sons of bitches. So will be Al-Firsiwi’s civilisation, my brother, “yamis oma”, in the Berber tongue of eloquent ignorance. Behold the State of Al-Firsiwi, the state that gave this land the electric olive press and petrol pump, sulphur to treat the pox, the carob trade, the Zaytoun Hotel, the Cantina of the esteemed Bacchanalians, the war on plastic, the treatment of solid waste, beekeeping and the condom. This will all end up in fathomless darkness. The state that made you, riff-raff of forgotten tribes, a people to be reckoned with, the great State of Al-Firsiwi is today undertaking its last official act in this region. It is preceded by a magnificent donkey with a bag of another civilisation and another state on its back. To hell, O defeated state. Diotima’s smile in her final resting place bids you farewell.’

People listened and exchanged complicit smiles, and they proceeded scared and surprised. All the while Al-Firsiwi was immersed in his hallucination, holding the tightly closed bag with care. He headed in the direction of the blue mountain until he reached the governorate building, where the informal handing over of the bag took place, as if it were a passing joke. The joke did not stop the governor handing Al-Firsiwi the receipt he requested, one that included the number of pieces after they had been counted. The governor asked Al-Firsiwi to specify the number of pieces, and he said 13,624. The governor wrote the number down on the receipt and loudly stamped it, and Al-Firsiwi left totally satisfied with the procedure.

After Al-Firsiwi surrendered and placed his treasure of Roman mosaics in the hands of the governor, things began to happen quickly. Authorities ordered Al-Firsiwi’s arrest. But Al-Firsiwi had left the city — people saw him though he did not see them — after eating breakfast at the marketplace café. The man seemed to melt into the blue mountain, as he used to call it. He left unconcerned by anything, while the police were quick to announce their failure to find him, as if the inability to find a blind man were a remarkable success. All the TV news bulletins showed the face of an officer announcing with a smile that his forces had looked for the fugitive from justice in every fold of the mountain without finding a trace of him.

When matters had gone that far, I decided to get involved in the search for my father, fearful that his disappearance was due to a fatal accident rather than exceptional cunning. The day I arrived in Bu Mandara, expecting to hear news about his disappearance, Al-Firsiwi contacted me from a mobile phone number I did not recognise. He told me that he did not want me to look for him or rescue him from oblivion. He said that the warrant for his arrest had no foundation because the pieces of mosaic were nothing but soil, and he was the only one who had declared that they were Roman. Think about this great country, he said. A blind man sitting in the lobby of a ruined hotel, passing the pieces of mosaic between his fingers and then declaring that this one was a pre-Christian Roman piece, and that one was the work of potters from the dawn of the third millennium, while those were from the ovens of Tajmouati in Fes and dated back to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Those imbeciles believed that and issued arrest warrants, he said. Confession was the best evidence, and as long as Al-Firsiwi himself believed that, he had no fear that the most modern labs would prove he was making fun of all of them.

‘Why wage these fake wars then?’ I asked.

He replied angrily, ‘Give me an honest war to end my life with. Do you want me to die in peace like any other dog?’

I talked with Al-Firsiwi for more than an hour, as if I were meeting him in a dream. Every now and then he pointed out events that linked me to him, as if everything had ended a long time ago, as if he had really disappeared for good. I was listening to a voice talking to me about the Firsiwi who did not kill Diotima, the Firsiwi who had mysterious love affairs and wrote poems about the death of love, the Firsiwi who buried Bacchus in the courtyard of an obscure mosque in the blueness of the mountain. He talked about the Firsiwi who did not like his life at all.

‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘I don’t like the name or the family it connects me to or the village where you’re looking for me. I don’t like the Rif, which is supposed to be a lost Eden but is nothing more than a passage for wind. I don’t love Diotima who stole her means of death from me, or Hans Roeder who swallowed my poems. I only like this blindness that protects me, this darkness that resembles a huge gate that the Creator closed on me to make it possible for me to do as I please, far from spies and the curious.’

At some point I ended the conversation, but the voice stayed close by, as if Al-Firsiwi were standing behind the disintegrating wall of his old family home.

‘Are you here?’ I asked him.

After a moment’s silence he replied, ‘Yes, I am here in the heart of darkness.’

I jumped into the house through the collapsing window and ran in all directions, entering rooms without doors and ceilings and making formless birds fly away in fright. I asked him again, ‘Where are you, are you here?’

His voice reached me from afar, through the phone held tight to my ear. It said, ‘I’m in the courtyard of the mosque where Bacchus is hiding, lying down after having spent a long time standing on hard stone. One day my remains will be mixed with his: me, a representative of the human race in its eloquent rags, and him a representative of forgotten imagination, of the relationship between dreams and granite. Don’t forget to visit me from time to time. Not for my sake but yours, for the sake of the frail thread that mocks us.’

When the call cut off, I was in the middle of the ruined house. I was overcome by a feeling of fear and desolation that compelled me to quickly head out to the nearby field, to collect my strength and get away from the place as fast as possible. I wanted to get rid of the phone, but I felt as if it were stuck to my ear and had become part of my facial features.

I walked in the road that ran through the village all the way to the cemetery. As I got in my car, I felt I was looking at this place for the last time.

When the storm surrounding the manhunt for Al-Firsiwi abated, I was able to see things somewhat realistically. He had put an end to a period of struggle and violence, both overt and covert, replacing it with a period of calm that was suitable for a time when so many people were scheming and profiting silently, with a kind of belittling indifference.

The Zaytoun Hotel reopened during the tourist revival when it did not matter who benefited behind the scenes. What counted were the newly opened roads around, outside and within the city. Guesthouses multiplied, as did business in traditional crafts. Buying power grew and property revived. Troupes to perform religious songs and chants were formed in this forgotten city. There might have also been some hidden scandals that made people pronounce the hawqala, appealing for God’s help, without the sparks of anger in their eyes disappearing. Eventually, Al-Firsiwi’s disappearance marked the withdrawal of the tragic from public life. There was also a large-scale movement in the city to please those who whimpered and whined. Yet I was not tempted to return to the hotel, despite my half-sister and her husband’s insistence. I could not forget the sight of my mother sitting in the hotel lobby nor get rid of the sense of Al-Firsiwi’s spirit controlling the place. It seemed to me that a return to the hotel under its new direction would put me in direct confrontation with two gigantic beings I would be unable to face.

Reality, however, is not always as simple as expected. In this flood of changes that brooked no challenge or opposition, the state saw fit to submit Al-Firsiwi’s mosaics to forensic examination in Italy. A delegation of well-known archaeologists travelled to Rome, taking Al-Firsiwi’s bag with them. There the pieces were individually examined, and the final report categorically concluded that each of the 13,624 pieces was from a genuine Roman mosaic that had originally represented Hylas, the companion of Hercules. It was different from the mosaic currently located in Walili, which showed Hylas in a struggle with two nymphs, one holding his chin and the other his wrist. In this mosaic, one nymph gave him a drink from a decorated cup while he embraced the other and looked angrily at a tiger about to pounce on the two nymphs. The design also showed a scene similar to the mosaic visible to this day: the creeping hunter, the dead bird, the trial, and the hungry tigers savaging the guilty hunter. About 2,000 pieces were missing to complete the design and assemble it again.

I called my father many times on his mobile phone in a desperate effort to talk to him. My purpose was not to inform him about the report, nor to express my tremendous happiness at this miraculous achievement, but to beg him to reveal to me the unique personality that extracted from Hylas’s mosaic, the mosaic of Abd al-Karim al-Khattabi and Al-Firsiwi struggling against the serpent of the Valley of Death, as well as all the other designs he used to decorate the Zaytoun Hotel. If he was that unique person, why did he not tell me? Why did he spend years changing the course of this archaeological imagination to direct it into his own personal legends, without ever saying anything about it?

I sent Fatima an e-mail and attached that story with the relevant questions. She replied that Al-Firsiwi had done nothing but repeat what humanity had been doing since time immemorial — reproduce a single creation in different scenarios and personalities. I considered her answer a philosophical ploy to be done with a topic that did not interest her. I began having nightmares in which I was standing in the middle of the crumbling house, surrounded by dust, smashed ceilings and frightened birds, while Al-Firsiwi’s face kept appearing and disappearing in the midst of the ruins, his voice getting louder and then weaker. In the distance I could hear the sound of collapsing buildings or explosions, I could not say exactly which. Every time I woke from this repeated nightmare, I felt immense regret for having failed to get close to Al-Firsiwi and understand him. I was sorry for merely considering him a colourful persona, a callous acrobat who knew how to step on words and emotions while maintaining his own balance and calculated chaos. Then I saw the paradox in a journey like Al-Firsiwi’s. I had considered it confused and disconnected, while in reality it was extremely coherent and methodical, its links connected by flawless logic. I came to the conclusion that the true meaning of any life was this mysterious logic and nothing else.

In an effort to put an end to the confusion that overwhelmed me, I went to Al-Firsiwi’s house and tried with my sister’s help to find something there: papers, poems, a will. We found nothing but an open box with a single piece of mosaic inside it and a copy of the poetry book published in Frankfurt. In another room we found one of the letters I had sent to him from Germany, in which I accused him again of having killed my mother. In the wardrobe we found nothing but a rustic djellaba he had kept from his teenage years. As I pushed the djellaba aside, I felt a solid object behind it. When I took the djellaba out of the empty cupboard, the statue of Bacchus, as I had known it, was clearly visible, with his dull gaze and the bunch of grapes hanging over his shoulder.

My amazement and joy did not last long since I soon discovered that the statue was a copy made of brittle pottery and barely strong enough to move. It was impossible to know under what conditions it had been made, or by whom, with this amazing degree of accuracy. It consisted of a hollow clay body, its redness blackened by firing. When I examined it closely, I realised that Al-Firsiwi’s obsession had gone as far as his making a replica with a broken foot to resemble the original statue after it had been removed from its plinth. I wrapped the copy in a white robe, as if I were placing it in a shroud, and carried it, in a kind of determined ceremonial, to the old abandoned house in Bu Mandara inhabited by forlorn birds and scorpions. I dug near the foundation of the western wall that was all that remained of the impressive room where the great Al-Firsiwi, the father of the first immigration, had stayed. There I buried the clay Bacchus, the statue remaining from mysterious thefts, itself considered in its clay condition an exemplary theft, in perfect harmony with this eternal wasteland.

On our way back from Bu Mandara, my sister asked, ‘Why did you bury the statue?’

‘I don’t know really. I didn’t know what else to do with it.’

When I got out of the car at the entrance to the Zaytoun Hotel, she turned suddenly before closing the car door and pushed into my hand the piece of mosaic, the only one left from all the chaos. I was moved by this gesture, but I did not know why. I was elated to have this tessera in my life, and I felt for the first time that the woman who had showered me with this happiness was not only Al-Firsiwi’s daughter but my sister as well. Even though I was certain that I was leaving the city for good and without regrets, I knew we would remain attached to it by the strong bond of gratitude and brotherhood.

2

I went down the road covered by shade and silence, and then I saw the blue hills stretching like lazy animals and the buildings that began to crawl from the Sidi Mohammed ben Qasem neighbourhood towards the mountain. The buildings, like their people, were crowded together and mysterious, and only characterised by their provocative white colour. When I turned left towards Meknes, I cast a cold look at Walili, as if I wanted to be sure there was not another car in the parking lot. I again felt depressed, as if the difficulty I found being nostalgic about places triggered it anew. I fought that black moment by thinking about Havana, about the seaside and nightclubs, about words that cropped up in the dark not because we needed them, but because the main street, the anxious souls and the song rising from the depths of the sea all needed fleeting words, words that flared like a match. We did not express anything with them, but we used them to build stairs towards rapture.

This thinking saved me from the onset of depression. I felt I would do something wonderful and exceptional if I went to Havana and shared a funny chat about Hamuniya with Bustrofedon. Why not? We could consider Hamuniya a variation on Estrella Rodriguez. The former collapsed with her weepy ’aytah in Casablanca and the second was swallowed by the night of Havana?. .?Here I am here, where am I from? Where are you from? Ah, where. Let’s go Havana, hava, here I am, here she is, hava. I am a mouth, he is a mouth, hafah, hafaha, Havana, Havana all of us, fahani, fahuni, hafuni, hafac, hafac, ha, ha, ha, nana, fana, Havana, ha, ha.

I called Fatima, who had returned to Madrid, but she was busy talking on another line. She asked me to call her later, but I insisted we talk then and told her, ‘We have to travel together to Cuba.’

She exclaimed, ‘Do you know what the weather is like there at this time of year?’

I had no idea, but she told me. ‘It’s simply a watery hell!’

‘What about the idea?’ I asked.

She replied, ‘It belongs to a time in the past. It would have been a beautiful idea if it had happened before, but it’s too late now. I went to Havana without you, or rather with someone else, and my illusions about it are over. Can we talk later?’

‘Yes, yes, we’ll talk later,’ I said, and then put the phone down. As I drove I thought about ‘before’ and ‘after’, about the right time that no one had succeeded in setting since the beginning of creation.

In the days that followed that phone conversation, Fatima would talk to me in a somewhat rude manner, as if she were settling a score. I could not find a positive sentence to include in our phone calls or a pleasant way to end them. One evening she left a message on my answering machine, telling me she would accompany a Spanish journalist on a two-week visit to Morocco to investigate the case of the devil worshippers and Essam al-Khayati’s disappearance. She did not include a single affectionate word, as she used to do, which I considered a virtual declaration of war. When I told her that later, she laughed and said she had stopped fighting years ago. But she remained aloof during her whole visit, which gave a sharp edge to all her comments and reactions. This upset Layla and led her to make some rash assumptions, most significantly that Fatima was expressing repressed jealousy and was unable to recover from her failure to have a relationship with me. Layla yet again asked about the true nature of my friendship with Fatima. I repeated to her the details of the story, including the feeling of loss that sometimes overcame me when I realised how important Fatima was in my life, yet there was no possibility of a sexual relationship between us. Once again Layla was upset because of my feeling of loss, and she considered it a lurking danger that might surface in our relationship one day. She also interpreted Fatima’s present anxiety as a sign of the imminent eruption of that volcano.

The events that ensued put an end to Layla’s sedition. It so happened that we spent an evening at my house a week after the arrival of Fatima and Joaquin, the Spanish journalist. There was an ambiguous rejoicing during our get-together that clearly reflected a waning in Fatima’s ire and an increase in her affection for me, and for Layla as well. But I soon understood that the reason for this change was the visit she had paid to Ibrahim al-Khayati in Salé prison, particularly something Ibrahim had said. When the conversation turned to that visit at the end of the evening, Fatima admitted that she was very angry with the way we had given up on Ibrahim’s innocence, or at least his presumed innocence, and the ease with which we had eliminated this important man from our lives. Layla said that the matter had nothing to do with innocence or guilt, and that even if we assumed that Ibrahim had in fact killed Essam, that did not make him a different person. ‘He’s still the same man who inundated our lives, yours in particular, with unusual feelings.’ The forgetfulness surrounding Ibrahim, his wife and his son Mahdi, and his friends and acquaintances, was painful. ‘He feels like it’s a miracle that you remember him from time to time,’ Fatima said.

After we dropped Fatima and Joaquin at their hotel, Layla said that the journalist seemed pleasant enough and wished that something would happen between him and Fatima. I said that what mattered was for Fatima to wish it, which made Layla say, ‘I feel that she is searching for him but she probably does not dare desire him.’

I replied, just for the sake of bickering, that she was a few years older than him.

‘Don’t worry,’ Layla said joyfully. ‘He will grow old very quickly and then she will be younger than him.’

Fatima and Joaquin’s investigation concluded that the musicians in the groups that were considered devil worshippers were simply budding amateurs. Not one of them was a professional musician or had a true understanding of song and dance. Most of them were university or school students who liked hard rock, heavy metal, death metal, black metal and grunge. Although many named their groups in imitation of international bands, especially those from the Scandinavian countries, such as Arthritis, Busted Eye, Polluted Mind, Cemetery Air, Orgasm and Snake Blood, they had never travelled abroad or participated in any international music festival. They only performed their work in the hall of the Secular Institute, FOL, located in Ibn Nussair Alley, and in other fringe venues in Casablanca. Most members of these bands lived their passion on the TV channels VIVA, MTV and HCM. Their role models were some of the groups that had preceded them, such as Total Eclipse, Immortal Spirit and Carpe Diem.

Despite the state of high alert that accompanied the arrest of these musicians, the police only confiscated some hard rock and black metal CDs and some black T-shirts with pentagrams, skulls and inverted crosses. They also took some magazines such as Hard Rock, and posters for Western bands. The young men mostly did not understand the meaning of the English lyrics they sang. The songs they composed were about issues such as Palestine, the chaos of Casablanca and the difficulty of living on a low income.

One thing stood out in the information gathered here and there: all the young men, including Essam and Mahdi, frequented the same clubs as a group called the Ravens, so named because their members dressed all in black, including black leather overcoats and black combat boots. The Ravens wore metal sleeves around their wrists and rings with pointed claws, and had their ears, noses and eyebrows pierced. They adopted sullen expressions and went to all the clubs and cafés high on drugs or alcohol, accompanied by young women with strange names and who wore low-slung pants that revealed their navels and a large part of their hips.

The leader of the Ravens was a man called the Vampire. He organised parties at his house, where he reiterated some of the ideas found in black metal songs, such as mocking Jesus, encouraging sexual freedom, and advocating pleasure, violence and death. But that was not a call for anybody to join in devil worship. It was simply a form of exhibitionism that sometimes prompted him to take his friends to a nearby cemetery and organise a drinking session around a plastic skull with a candle stuck in it. He was once accompanied by a girl called Bish Bish, and he encouraged her to kiss Essam in the presence of his friends and then lie with him on a grave and move in time to a noisy song in imitation of sexual intercourse.

Mahdi avoided talking about this time, probably because he was not fully involved in the groups’ activities then, and possibly because he knew things he did not want to reveal. Fatima believed that the developments no one knew about were those that took place during Essam’s friendship with the Vampire. No one knew how far the cemetery nights went, or the nature of the relationships between Bish Bish and Essam, and Bish Bish and the Vampire.

Joaquin concluded that it was not inconceivable that Essam had been the victim of one of the devil worshippers’ rituals, thanks to direct instigation by the Vampire. It was also possible that this ritual had combined with a settlement of scores based on jealousy, revenge and even simple goading under the influence of alcohol and music. I tried to address those assumptions by eliminating the elements of prurience and exaggeration that were normal in this case. My words upset Fatima once more, and she answered me nervously, claiming that the fixation with incriminating Ibrahim al-Khayati was a political solution.

When I smiled at her, she said grimly, ‘Yes, like I’m saying. The decision to downplay the seriousness of the case and release the guys who were arrested came after the media frenzy, the questions in parliament and the solidarity demonstrations. This explains why they couldn’t go back and make it serious again by putting a murder at the heart of it. True? Right?’

‘If you say so,’ I replied.

That same evening we went back to the subject in Layla’s presence. She poked fun at Fatima and Joaquin’s theory, stressing — somewhat hastily I thought — that it was preferable for Essam to have been killed by Ibrahim and possibly buried in the garden, as the police believed.

I didn’t know how it happened, but later I found Fatima crying bitterly. Anxiety had settled in our midst and controlled everything. I could not calm Fatima. Her crying fit took over her whole body and reached such a pitch that she paralysed us all; we could not do a thing for her. Layla convinced us, with unusual calm, that the best thing to do was to let the fit run its course.

Once we got in the car Fatima had regained her composure. She sat next to me and apologised for what had happened, saying, ‘I don’t usually collapse like a child. The point is that I find Ibrahim al-Khayati’s case painful. It hurts me if he did it and it hurts me if he did not. It hurts me because he smiles like an idiot and asks me if I visited Mahdi and whether he has said anything, and why no one visits him and why Ghaliya does not visit him the way she did with the others in the old days. It hurts me that we accepted what happened as if it had to happen and moved on to something else as if we were not ourselves or as if the others were not themselves. Then what? What next? I return to a city that I know but find insipid; I find myself in an apartment like a teenager’s. I feed a colleague, just a colleague who won’t become anything more. There’s friction with Layla, so sure of herself, happy with what she does, and you, I put you especially in the position of bringing me back to reason. What a shame. Why don’t we run away to Havana?’

‘You said it was too late.’

‘I’m talking about the Havana nightclub in Casablanca. It was the last nightclub Essam went to before he disappeared.’

I told her I had been there once with Mahdi and I did not think it a suitable place for us, just a vast bubble of unmelodic noise performed by unattractive people.

I stood in the hotel doorway facing Fatima. Joaquin next to us was like a child past his bedtime. The night was desolate. I looked into Fatima’s eyes, transparent after the tears. Then I moved close to her and kissed her on the lips.

She said, laughing, ‘That’s nice, even if too late!’

Layla’s sharp voice and rapid sentences woke me up at three in the morning. She wanted to know if Fatima was with me.

‘Why would I do that?’ I asked her.

‘I don’t know. I either felt it or dreamed about it.’

I replied sleepily, ‘Check for yourself. Do you see how tiny I look in this large bed? There is no woman here.’

She asked angrily, ‘Did you wish there were?’

‘No. I just want to sleep actually.’

Layla felt sorry for me and said, ‘Sleep well and sweet dreams.’ She was sorry for her behaviour and asked me if I did not want her to appear out of the phone, and I said yes. She then said she loved me.

Fatima and Joaquin went on collecting news from various sources about Essam’s relationship with the Vampire. They wanted to know if he had seduced Essam into some kind of satanic relationship that had brought him back, even after the court case and what was considered the betrayal of Arthritis. According to Fatima, this suspect relationship might have created the sort of dramatic tension that could lead to a crime. But when, two days later, I took her and her Spanish colleague to the airport, she had distanced herself from the story. She considered Ibrahim’s arrest before the trial a sensible measure as it would protect him from any foolish act on the part of Mahdi or his mother. She added that Ibrahim was totally convinced Essam had crossed to the other side and might now be in a training camp somewhere, a member of a sleeper cell. I shuddered when I heard her talk so casually about the issue, as if engaging in this tragic destiny was a simple possibility among many others.

I wanted to ask her not to pay any attention to that possibility and to keep up her correspondence with Ibrahim, to help him remain strong. I wanted to convince her to abandon the idea of publishing her investigation in the Spanish press, because of the anxiety some Moroccan officials experienced whenever something was published in the foreign press. I told myself that, after all, the investigation only had limited importance because it did not go beyond the buzz generated by that kind of trial.

As if Fatima had heard what was going through my mind, she said unexpectedly, ‘What could create excitement in this kind of investigation is the possible relationship between black metal bands and the Islamist groups.’

‘That would be playing games with no connection to the truth,’ I said.

She then asked me to stop wasting the little time remaining before her departure talking shop. I did as she asked and dropped the subject. She urged me to take care of myself, to remember my yearly tests, especially my prostate exam, and to watch my blood pressure. She wondered why I didn’t devote more time to writing, and why I didn’t go and see her in Madrid. ‘You need a city that has real nightlife,’ she said.

She also asked why nothing in my relationship with Layla was clear.

‘What do you want to be clear about it?’ I asked.

‘I mean everything,’ she said. ‘And most of all, whether it’s a love story.’

‘How do you want me to know? I know there’s a story and I know more importantly that I am very comfortable in the relationship.’

She asked if I dyed my hair. ‘Never,’ I said angrily.

She adjusted her attitude and said, ‘You have some grey hairs here and there.’ She put her finger on the places she meant.

I said, ‘If I’m still alive and my hair hasn’t gone white, I will come to Madrid.’

She stood up to go to the boarding gate and hugged me quickly, as if she were getting rid of an annoyance. As she was collecting her things, she said nervously, ‘Don’t ever say “if I’m still alive”. It’s a phrase that upsets me.’

On my way back from the airport, I was anxious because of this lousy goodbye. I found myself engaged in a remote argument with Fatima, about the way she implicitly blamed me for something I had not done. What did she want me to have done? I should have betrayed my wife with her on the first day. Had I done so, our relationship would have ended perfectly many years ago. But we did not do that and left the matter open to missed opportunities. Meanwhile, for each of us this friendship grew stronger and even more complex. What did she want me to do? Was it possible to build something on top of ruins? Even Al-Firsiwi could not do that. I ended this angry monologue with a torrent of choice swearwords that I addressed to myself and Fatima for obvious reasons, and then to Al-Firsiwi for no obvious reason.

3

I called Ahmad Majd to ask him about an apartment Layla had bought in a project he was developing in Rabat. She had requested minor changes inside the apartment, but the work was not yet completed. While discussing this issue, Ahmad asked me if I was interested in valuable information regarding a new real-estate scandal.

I said jokingly, ‘Does it concern your group or the competition?’

He did not laugh and told me that he preferred to discuss the matter in person.

I went to Ahmad’s huge construction project in the suburbs of the capital. It comprised luxury apartment buildings, social housing — to justify the very low price he had paid for the land — and an area of villas. All of this was built on the site of the old hospital and the social work facilities of a number of ministries. The land was close to the city’s green belt, where building was forbidden. But the state went inside the green belt with its construction projects, citing their social role. Layla had bought a small apartment in one of those new buildings, putting all her savings into it. She would also be putting half her monthly salary into it for the next ten years.

I wondered whether I too should buy an apartment in the same building. This would bring us close to a semblance of family life without the restrictions of living under the same roof. I liked the idea and immediately discussed it with Layla. At first she seemed distracted, but then she showed an overwhelming enthusiasm that made me embark immediately on a property venture with unforeseen consequences.

It was the first decision I had taken for Layla’s sake. Previously, we had talked about the things that would help us build a relationship, when Layla had admitted she missed terribly some elements of daily life in our liaison, for example bringing a gas cylinder and installing it nervously like someone not handy in such things; or my preparing breakfast or using the wrong toothbrush by mistake; or her shouting at me because I had left a wet towel on the bed, knowing very well that that upset her. There was also the issue of socks. She hated men’s socks even if they were clean, in fact, even if they were brand new.

‘Do you sometimes leave the fridge door open?’ she asked me.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And the wardrobe door and the kitchen tap.’

‘My God, those are things I could kill over!’

I told her that we’d better avoid sharing anything that might lead us to a bloody end. She then said something that surprised me. She said that what delighted her in our relationship was that it had been a source of amazement from the first day. She wondered how she had met me and how we could continue to be together. She was surprised how we hadn’t met for years and then how we hadn’t missed each other on the way, although everything around us called for that. She was particularly surprised how we lived a love that we did not declare, that we did not expect and that we did not need to manage.

My heart pounded when she talked about love, like a teenager thinking about it for the first time. It was the way I had felt when I regained my sense of smell, my face buried in Yacine’s shirt. I had the impression that Layla was pouring over me all at once, as if she were water that had been dammed for a long time behind a huge boulder, but had finally managed to displace the boulder and come streaming over me. I had no choice but to put myself at the mercy of the raging water and let it carry me, not knowing where I would surface or go under as I released myself from time, since time was condensed in this torrent.

That evening as we were leaving Layla’s house I told her that I loved her. She said simply, ‘I know.’

Quite disappointed, I said, ‘But I never told you that before.’

She insisted, ‘Yes you did. A million times without uttering the words.’

‘No, no, no,’ I said. ‘There’s a terrible misunderstanding here. The feeling itself, I mean the feeling of love, never occurred to me. You know, I felt that the person I am, who does not experience the feeling of love, does, in fact, love you. But this feeling was nothing but a cold awareness. It has nothing to do with what I feel today.’

We got into the car, and when I started speaking again, she stopped me and said that the subject did not interest her at all. She then took my hand, placed it on her chest and said that she wanted to sleep a little while I drove to the Japanese restaurant. Then she said, ‘Look how beautiful the sky is, the clouds, the melting colours. And the light, oh my God, do you see the light?’

‘I do, I do.’

‘It’s a sky just for us.’

I laughed, surprised, but she insisted, saying, ‘Really, it’s a sky for us. Every time we make love, it gives us this gift.’

I drove in silence while she held my hand and I felt her breathing. When I stopped near our restaurant, Layla was fast asleep. I switched off our mobiles and lay down without removing my hand, unconcerned by the curiosity of the passers-by.

Layla had told me many times that all her life she had looked for an easy-going man and that I could be that man. I attributed that to my total inability to ask her for anything. And the pain I had endured liberated me from many aspects of myself without my planning it or making an exceptional effort to that end. Therefore I began watching what was happening to me as if it were happening to somebody else. This distance gave me the capacity to act with a satisfying generosity that I did not clearly understand until I sensed its delightful impact on my surroundings.

Layla, however, understood everything. She knew how I worked and exactly what my weaknesses were. She knew that at a certain moment in my journey, which resembled the steps of an acrobat, there would be a momentary loss of balance that could push me into a precipitous fall. She was very concerned that this moment would take me by surprise in a dangerous place or that my fall would dent my dignity. I, on the other hand, dreaded having one of my fits while with her. I didn’t care at all whether it happened on the train or in the street. But not with her. Then one day it happened. I begged her to keep talking to me, not about anything in particular, but with unchecked words as if I would breathe with those words. She did that with amazing skill, as if she had trained for it for years. After that I never needed to suggest to her what she had to do. She would know the fit was approaching before I felt it myself. She would take my hand and help me get over the dark moments, as if leading me to a comfortable chair.

Layla also knew that I loved her and clutched her back from the talons of savage loss. I ran after her absent face in details that happened in my life, or did not happen. She became an unalloyed possibility from the first day. She was always possible, and if she did not materialise at a specific moment, it was not because she was not there but because the moment was not the one, and now she was at an infinite moment and so was I. There was a desert that I had to cross, and I knew that paradise was at a certain turn in this immensity. She knew that, too, and responded to every situation that upset us by saying, ‘It’s a matter that does not concern us, it’s happening to other people.’ In so doing she borrowed an image that she knew represented precisely my relationship with the world.

We received our apartments the same week. But I spent a whole week getting rid of my belongings in my old home. I had told Layla that this apartment would be meaningless if I did not use it to fulfil a wish going back to my adolescence of an empty white house with hardly any internal walls. And so it was. One of Ahmad’s contractors helped me realise my dream.

I reserved the space for the bedroom and the bathroom and left all the rest open with a huge balcony that ran along the side that faced west. The kitchen was on the right from the entrance, and the remaining space extended to the blueness of the ocean. All this white expanse would be filled with nothing but white curtains, a large low black table, and four white poufs for sitting on. In the kitchen I placed all the utensils in a wooden black frame made to measure, which turned them into a neutral barrier that did not disrupt the sense of emptiness. I had a single bookcase with very few books that I had kept from my desert days, which I put in the kitchen out of a conviction that books belonged to the realm of spices, oils and preserves. In the lower drawers of the kitchen I stashed the documents and photos that I did not have the courage to burn. Two days before I moved into my new apartment I sold all my paintings, taking advantage of the huge rise in their value, and I donated my library to an association in the Yacoub El Mansour district in Rabat. I gave my furniture to the first old friend willing to take it. I had a single large key for the apartment made out of pure red copper.

No one liked my home. All my friends found it cold and desolate, and made fun of the minimalist decor. Even Layla said that I had imported Japanese emptiness to a culture that finds itself only in clutter. Despite all that I stood my ground for fear I would relapse if I went back on my decision. I later realised that I mainly used the bedroom, while the white void was inhabited by mysterious souls.

One evening Layla and I were sitting in this spiritual space, taking our time to eat dinner. We could see our shadows, the flame of the candle and the wild fish — as I called Al-Wazzani’s carving standing on the table — reflected in the glass of the balcony, while the sky was still lit by a soft sunset. I was coming and going to the kitchen without interrupting my conversation with Layla or going out of sight. She found this situation practical and appreciated having the whole kitchen open to the living room.

‘The surprise comes in how the food tastes, nothing else,’ she said. ‘I saw from the start that you were preparing fish, but that only doubled the surprise of tasting the tang of saffron in the slices of sea bream. Both the place and the meal will forever remain two sides of a single coin. The relationship between places and tastes is truly amazing.’

When the horizon turned totally dark, Layla asked me to draw the curtains because she always imagined that someone was watching us. I did as she asked, knowing that the flowing white drapes would give the glass façade a cottony dimension that would totally change the sensation of the inner space. As soon as the lights of the city disappeared and the white drapes fell over the transparency of the glass, something blossomed in the ambiance. The light and the emptiness became like a mad wind playing in the mind and planting a fiery desire in everything. Layla said that if she had not been so shy, she would have walked around naked in the space.

I got close to her and began seeking her nakedness, in submission to my fingers and a desire more powerful than I had felt in years. I felt as if I did not recognise my own movements, which seemed to be guided by something that rose freely within my body. The details of her body seized me by surprise, without passing through the mind’s filter that used to guide me to her. They reached me through her neck, her chest and the smoothness of her back. I closed my eyes and submitted to her fingertips exploring my features and prying inside every shudder that passed through me. I heard for the first time her innermost sounds rising between my hands, reaching me from a cavernous flow, not a language but a straining musical performance. Then I found myself inside her breath, her sweetness and a closed oyster, where I transformed into the scent of the sea scattered far by salt and seaweed. She resisted my incursion with nervous pushes, a mixture of rising and ebbing, until she succeeded in creating a small breach in our wave. She said she wanted to walk naked. I followed her gradual rise with my hands and lips until she placed her two small feet with long toes, the nails carefully painted, on the same marble that I was warming with two burning cheeks. I saw her toes move when I touched them with my lips, then I saw the feet move like glowing objects. I remained lying down and could not see her walk in the white space; I saw only her feet leaving the shiny surface of the marble and then returning to it in breathtaking harmony.

When the cold stung I sat up and asked Layla to stand against the curtains, which she did with exciting compliance. I saw her expression for the first time and I was enveloped with what looked like thick clouds as a result of what I saw. Her face had become filled with the emptiness she was walking in and had acquired a metaphysical dimension, as if the effort she had made and the secret dance she had performed had poured infinite distance into her expression. I stretched my arms to her for a long time. She did not move, but remained standing in front of the curtains in all her desire. I begged her to touch her body. She moved her hands in unison, starting with her face and then descending over all her body until she reached the bottom of her tummy with one hand. With her other hand she pulled part of the curtains over her body, covering movements that made the cloth ripple and her face fill with the glow of total pleasure.

I fell in love with my apartment that night. After that night I felt clearly that Layla would fill the place of the mysterious souls. She would live in this house the way she lived in my skin. She liked the idea of the books placed in the kitchen, and she would even help me get rid of books I used to consider essential in my life, such as the complete works of Hölderlin and Rilke, Henri Michaux and Pessoa. She said that poetry was not beautiful when it was easily accessible, and that when I wanted to read it, I should go to the library and read only one poem.

She developed a theory of minimalism and applied it to my music collection and my clothes. I was happy to find myself freed of the weight of the years that had made me attached to the insignificant things piled around me, in the belief that I was preserving the years themselves. I even felt that this renewal in the material domain gave objects a new soul. It was as if another person had come as reinforcements in the battle that I had been waging for survival.

4

My doctor noticed a general improvement in my condition, and recommended that to fully recover I take up a sport that would exercise body and soul. He suggested a yoga club that offered Pilates. I welcomed the advice with childlike enthusiasm. But I couldn’t stand the fact that the club was in the basement and that the regulars made fun of my jerky movements. I discreetly withdrew, but not without going through a transformational experience.

In the yoga club I met a young man who looked very much like me. He and Yacine were as alike as two droplets of water. When I told him that he said, smiling, ‘You might well be my father. I am the illegitimate child of a woman who died single. If twenty years ago you knew a young teacher from the city of Khenifra and you might have had a child with her, then I’m your long-lost son. From now on you have to make room in your life for me.’

When he noticed my anxiety and nervousness, he burst out laughing and said in a friendly tone, ‘Don’t worry, I won’t harass you. I don’t want a father that I’m supposed to kill in order to live at peace.’

His concise, joking sentences made it clear he was quite unaware of the bomb he was throwing into my life, for one summer, twenty-four years earlier, I had had a passionate affair with a woman called Zulikha. It ended, naturally enough, at the beginning of the new school year. There was nothing special about the story except that she looked like the French actress Romy Schneider.

Remembering her, it was almost like the only real tragedy in my life had been her disappearance one distant autumn, followed by her sudden death, which I knew nothing about. Then our potential son turned up — a broadcast engineer who liked yoga and comedies.

I was overcome with questions about whether Zulikha might have been the woman I had lost but could not remember. Perhaps news of her death had reached me without my realising. I charted all the accomplishments that might have been expected in her life and turned her into a vague object of loss. A suspicion tormented me: I had finally found an explanation for my being emotionally lost, yet I had not found the woman, not even as a distant memory.

Al-Firsiwi, if he were to reappear, could rest assured about his offspring. No matter how much we tried to get away from our seed, they plotted their own course, which, sooner or later, snared us in the net of paternity.

I spent a few weeks in a spin at this striking discovery. When I told Layla about it, she commented sarcastically, ‘You’d be stupid to think that being a father is simply sowing your oats!’

Fatima, on the other hand, advised me to take it easy and ask the young man if his mother’s name was Zulikha. I returned to the club for that reason, and when he left the hall I went up to him and asked.

He replied, smiling, ‘Of course her name is Zulikha.’ Then he asked me quite seriously, ‘Do you want to put your doubts to rest?’

I nodded, so he said, ‘Let’s do a DNA test. If it confirms that I’m your son, everything will be clear. You’ll have to pass by the club as soon as possible and pay my monthly membership!’

He walked away and then turned to look at me and laughed, his face joyful. I did not think then that he resembled Yacine or me to the degree I had imagined when I first met him. But I said to myself that he probably looked like Zulikha, whom I didn’t remember then, and never would.

On the way home I thought long and hard about what was happening to me, and I told myself that this was also one possibility among many others that could come along. Devastated by the loss of an only son, we suddenly find ourselves a father in a different story. We await the birth of a baby girl with great joy, and then she is born with a handicap; we think our life is over with the arrival of this baby, only to discover that life has become meaningful. No one could know which possibility might bring the greatest comfort. I told myself this because I felt calmer about the tragedy of Yacine’s loss than about this new story.

I shared my thoughts with Fatima, and she suggested that we adopt a child together. I tried to avoid the subject but she insisted. ‘The baby would only need you to be a father from a distance. You’d see, helping to shape a human being would only require a few years — perhaps less time than would be needed for a tree. That person would then become your heart’s delight.’ She also said, ‘Just imagine how many things we would put right with such a venture, even those things that time has spoiled.’

I told Fatima that I did not have the energy for such things any more. Her silence on the phone made me feel guilty, because I realised that her suggestion was a desperate cry for help.

At the end of the day I was walking in the crowded Al-Akary market, where all the activity connected to food reduced my anxiety, when I found myself face to face with the young man who resembled me. The first thing I saw was his wide smile, his happy expression. He surprised me with an exaggerated greeting. With a generous sweep of his arm, he stretched to embrace an embarrassed man walking past him.

He said, laughing, ‘This is my father, the one and only person legally responsible for this calamity,’ and pointed to himself proudly.

I too felt like laughing, but I controlled myself and said reproachfully, ‘That’s a cruel joke!’

He tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Let go. Life is good. Let’s laugh.’

I lowered my head and left defeated, unable to pinpoint the nature of my feelings, which were a mixture of disappointment and boundless joy at my escape.

I told Layla part of the story in a somewhat humorous manner, but she found it very moving. She said she loved the young man as if he were my son or our son from a past relationship that had happened years ago. She liked the light-heartedness of the young man, who should have been burdened by the responsibilities of beginnings. When she asked me his name, I was surprised to realise I had neglected to ask him, as if I wanted the matter to remain a mere possibility. Layla — God knows what her feelings were — burst into tears and said she was very sad because we could not have a baby together. At that point, unaware of what made the issue so easy for me, I perpetrated the worst theft imaginable. I suggested to Layla, very simply, that we adopt a baby, with me as a hands-off father. I told her with neurotic insistence to keep the matter a secret, as if hoping secrecy would be tantamount to revoking the suggestion completely. She immediately busied herself with the most minute details of adoption, its rules and regulations and institutions, all the while asking the reason for my insistence on keeping it a secret, and wondering if I thought that revealing it would matter to her.

That was how Mai came into our life. We did not tell anybody that she was our daughter, but all our friends, including Fatima, understood. They refrained from commenting, except Bahia. She broached the subject indirectly with me two or three times, talking about Layla, expressing her strong admiration for her. She said that Layla had a certain purity that freed her of any doubt and that Mai was a symbol of that deep purity. On another occasion she asked me if I was convinced that a child could play a constructive role in a relationship. I told her that this might happen in reaction: when two people form a human being together, they indirectly re-form themselves. She told me that she had never felt that way either with me when we had Yacine or with Ahmad Majd and their baby daughter, Ghaliya. On another occasion she asked me if Mai had filled some of Yacine’s void.

‘No, never,’ I said, and I confessed to her that Yacine had not disappeared totally from my life. He had stayed with me for many years, taking part in some of my daily activities. When I saw her dumbfounded expression, I told her I did not mean it metaphorically, but that I really used to see and talk to him, before he disappeared again for good.

During this period of her life Bahia had settled into her new persona, a calm, relaxed woman who gradually put on weight until her body matched her new status. She put up a barrier of carefully studied interests, all dealing with charitable work, social ventures, and conservation of the malhoun heritage. There were also all the related social events, consisting of soirées in friends’ houses, in riyadhs and hotels, and everything else that burnished the halo around Ahmad Majd. Bahia did not seem enthusiastic about what she was doing, although she defended her husband and the real-estate boom that reflected the country’s excellent health. I saw her once adopt that position in her new house in Marrakech, and I was struck by how stridently she backed him. After the guests departed, I told her that nothing had called for such a response, especially seeing that Ahmad Majd was, as usual, countering the arguments with his usual caustic wit and sneering at his adversaries’ intellects. She nervously explained to me that she was not doing it for him but for herself.

Meanwhile, all Marrakech was talking about Ahmad Majd’s relationship with his private secretary. Going with her to hotels and restaurants was not enough any more, and she had started to accompany him on long trips to the UAE and Saudi Arabia. She had returned veiled from her last trip to Saudi Arabia and had described at length and in a pious tone her umra with Hajj Ahmad.

Some of our friends were convinced that she was a second wife and that the concerned parties were keeping it secret. But Bahia did not reveal, either in her conversation or comportment, anything to confirm the existence of another marriage. Every now and again, all the players in the story — with its real and imagined aspects, the open and the hidden — would meet over couscous for Friday lunch, but no one seemed to know any more than anyone else.