The Arch and the Butterfly (23 page)

‘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?’