The Arch and the Butterfly (10 page)

‘Such as?’

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

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

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

‘Love in instalments!’

‘Or something like that.’

That evening I wrote in
Letters to My Beloved
:

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

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

2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Just like that, without explanation?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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