The Arch and the Butterfly (11 page)

As for me, if there was anything that put me off and put an end to any desire I might have had to argue, it was talk of ‘effectuality’ and ‘implementality’. As soon as anyone uttered them, I headed to the balcony. I then heard Bahia declare, quite movingly, that Yacine had dreamed of placing a giant steel arch across the river at its mouth. He thought the arch would give the impression that the river ran through the fingers of the two cities.

As if feeling the approach of a poetic diversion he would not be able to handle, Ahmad Majd returned quickly to the subject and insisted on a reconciliation based on his earlier suggestion, which had been turned down by Bahia and her siblings. This consisted of compensation for the lands that had become registered property, and delaying the decision regarding the other lands until the completion of the registration process. The compensation would be of two types: one monetary, the amount to be agreed upon with the specialist bureau delegated by the Agency; and one in kind, in the form of concessions in the commercial and entertainment zones.

Bahia and her siblings insisted on completing the sale of all the confiscated land at market price. Every time Bahia repeated this opinion, Ahmad Majd became upset and, after a staged pause, begged her to consider the matter carefully. ‘Think with me, Bahia. How can the Agency buy your land at market price when it distributes the plots for free to foreign investors to encourage them to invest on the land of your fortune-blessed ancestors?’

Ahmad Majd managed to breech the united front of the heirs when he convinced the youngest brother to agree to his solution. He continued to work on the matter, offering enticing advantages and highlighting the risks in getting involved in legal procedures of unpredictable outcome.

Debate over procedures and solutions went on for more than a year without any significant result. Work was in full swing to finish the harbours, the pavements, the tourist and leisure facilities, the new lagoon and the artificial island. The hoardings announcing those projects lined the roads that surrounded the river. Every time a new phase of the project was launched, the press conferences multiplied. Television promoted the projects with amazing computer-generated images that fired the imagination of the inhabitants of the two banks, thus feeding their historical disputes with modern ammunition.

Which of the two banks of the river would reap the proceeds of this historic change? Would the project exact revenge for the centuries of Salé’s decline? Would it save Rabat from turning into a village at night? Ahmad Majd brought many such questions from his private late-night meetings with the elite to our tense lunchtime gatherings. He frequently took advantage of our curiosity to advocate his theories regarding the symbolic significance of a tunnel for cars under the Qasbah of the Udayas and the preparations for a concourse linking the Grand Gate, La
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lu prison, and the Arcade of the Consuls, so creating the Montmartre of the capital. But he sighed over the cemetery nestled in the heart of the area. He wondered how a nation could choose to bury its dead in the most beautiful spot worthy of the living.

I said with exaggerated anger, ‘Let me remind you that it is the martyrs’ cemetery. There lie Allal ben Abdallah, Allal al-Fassi, Abderrahim Bouabid, Al-Hussain al-Khadar, Abdelfattah Sabatah, and thousands of people, great and small.’

Ahmad Majd added, ‘Al-Dulaimi, Al-Basri, and hundreds of killers like them are also buried there!’

I objected, saying, ‘You have no right to mix them in this way. The dead cannot be jumbled, even when buried in the same grave. Only the dead deserve this spot, one that overlooks the beach and allows a direct connection between their darkness and the
Mare Tenebrosum
, the Atlantic.’

I then felt that I had better get away from this painful issue and I withdrew within myself. Still I listened, amused by the lengthy discussions over the issue of uniting the two banks with a tramway. The lines would transport more than fifty million passengers a year and seed the two cities with more than fifty stations.

I liked the idea of the stations and said to myself that a city did not truly become a city until it had many stations where appointments, relationships and faces (feasible and impossible) could multiply. At that moment I heard Fatima ask loudly, ‘Do you think that the tram will unite the two banks?’

‘Yes, among other things,’ I said.

‘How strange. You all think about inclusion with the mentality of a seamstress.’

‘What’s strange is your inability to grasp the meaning of these great transformations,’ I told her.

‘Grasp all you want, my boy. Grasp, and good health to you,’ she said. After a short period of silence, she added, as if talking to herself, ‘There was a time when Sidi ben Achir, Sidi al-Arabi ben Assayeh and Sidi Abdallah ben Hassoun could unite sixty tribes in a heartbeat!’

I neither disagreed with her words nor expressed enthusiasm for them. I went back to reflecting on what Ahmad Majd had said about the tunnel. He was right about the hill having witnessed the first surge of the Moors into the region; tunnelling under it would be like tunnelling under the region’s origins.

We would reclaim the sea from the fear that had clung to us for centuries. We would head straight to it, without climbing up to look down on it. We would break the habit of going around the mountain whenever it stood in the way. Now, we would not circumvent it nor would it circumvent us. We would pass under its dense body and then raise it above the headlights of our cars. We would leave the Qasbah suspended above the beach with no defensive role or task, an elevation with no meaning except for the smells and stories swirling in its alleyways. It would observe from on high the queues of cars entering the tunnel and then coming out at the other end. Gone was the Qasbah that Rabat long shrouded in its memory, preferring to relinquish it to the poor and foreigners who did not fear humidity and considered the stench of the sea a gift from heaven. Now, another hill would rise like an icon over the hubbub of the city; it would overlook amusement parks, hotels and nightclubs; it would forget there was a time when it saw only pirates.

Fatima said, ‘Imagine the Qasbah collapsing during the digging of the tunnel!’

Ahmad laughed. ‘Do you think cowboys will be digging the tunnel? A multinational company will execute the project, backed by a consulting firm run by a world-famous engineer.’

‘Even so, accidents of this kind can happen to the biggest companies and the best engineers!’

‘I bet you’re wishing for the Qasbah to fall.’

‘That’s not fair,’ she said. ‘I just expect the worst from anything surrounded by great enthusiasm.’ She fell silent, perhaps hurt by Ahmad’s sarcasm. It reminded me of the game of musical chairs we played in our youth. Whenever Fatima, myself and some of our friends called for a certain realism in the activities of the left, Ahmad Majd and his friends in the new left made fun of what they called our reformist tendencies, which turned their back on radical revolutionary solutions and accepted halfway ones. They would repeat to us Guevara’s words: ‘Be realistic, demand the impossible!’ But when Ahmad and his friends became super realists, believing in the ability of enlightened modern powers to change the world without wasting time on political games, we were the ones to accuse them of weakness and making humiliating concessions. For years we traded recriminations, unaware of the huge losses we all incurred as a result.

For a few months Bahia persisted in her stubborn efforts to be involved in the heart of the project. She hoped to receive a parcel of the developed land. Ahmad Majd, on the other hand, kept trying hard to convince her to accept compensation that would put an end to the dispute. But Bahia, for various reasons, considered her involvement in this venture an exceptional opportunity to return in some way to life. She might have been inwardly convinced that the years lost searching for ambiguous dreams and the agony caused by Yacine’s death would all be rewarded by her involvement in a project that would transform the city and pump life back into its arteries. The material real­isation of this transformation would provide her with the opportunity to tell herself and the world: ‘You know what? The new face of the city is also my face!’

3

One day Bahia woke up smiling and favourably disposed, for reasons unknown to me. While I was making coffee she surprised me with a question she had never asked before.

‘Can I ask your opinion on an idea that crossed my mind last night?’

‘Since when did you trust my judgement?’ I asked her.

‘I don’t trust your judgement, but I know how much you love crazy ideas. So I thought you might be able to help me.’

I put my cup of coffee on the table and looked at her for the first time since she had started talking.

Her face was radiant, a touch pale but filled with kindness. I felt I was scrutinising her features for the first time in years and rediscovering that she had them. I felt a certain tenderness towards her. I was probably moved by my awareness of the heartlessness of the situation of living permanently with someone unseen or not even looked at.

‘So what is this idea that has woken us up today in this strange mood?’ I asked her.

She replied impetuously, ‘I’m thinking of devoting part of the land to a humanitarian and artistic project!’

She spread the plans on the table and started explaining. ‘Leave aside the main part of the project, the quays, the lagoon, the island, the amusement park and so on. All of those are, if you like, the aristocratic elements of the new space. Let’s leave the façade, the part for show, to them. We’ll only ask for limited plots in those parts. But here, far from all that noise, at the far end of the bank, near where the Akkrach rubbish dump used to be, we’ll ask for whatever is left of our share in the land.’

‘What will you do in that blighted area?’ I asked.

‘We’ll resettle the people who lived off the rubbish.’

‘Then what?’ I asked.

‘Rehabilitate the dump.’

‘Rehabilitate what?’ I asked.

‘The dump, yes, the dump,’ she insisted.

I laughed like I had not laughed in years. But Bahia did not move. She carried on poring over the plans and proceeded matter-of-factly to say, ‘Yes, give the landfill its dignity back. Why are you laughing like that? Don’t you know that millions of tons of garbage have been piled up in this beautiful place over the years, turning it into one of Akkrach’s hills? It has poisoned the ground water and the river. The smoke of its fires, intended or accidental, blanketed the banks of the two cities. It has ruined the health of generations of Salé’s inhabitants, causing asthma, rashes and chronic infections. It’s a record of the events and transformations having to do with what the city spews out.’

‘And that’s why you want to rehabilitate the dump?’ I asked her.

‘It’s not for the concept of the dump,’ she explained, ‘but for its concrete body. It would be unnatural if we erased this hill from geography and memory in a kind of naïve clean up. It wasn’t just a rubbish dump, but a source of life, a way of life. Imagine the number of men, women and children who have spent their entire lives searching through its entrails for something to survive on. Imagine all the people for whom the dump was the first thing they saw and the first thing they heard, and whose nostrils were never filled with another smell. All those who collected their toys from there, playing with obvious things and others less obvious: rusting computers, dismantled objects, remnants of things, medical waste, human limbs dumped by the university hospital; then the surprise of a complete doll, and cars and toys still in their boxes, because the city rejects its surplus and, at times, cannot distinguish between what it throws into its forgotten cupboards or into its rubbish dumps.

‘Imagine all this crowd tanned by the sun and the grime, those who were born there and spent all their lives on, under or inside the dump. They don’t know any other space and think that life can only exist in a dump, and that the rubbish piling up around them comes from another planet. Imagine all the people who built their huts and their dreams there. Imagine the situation when they are told, “The dump has moved. Follow it to the new location.”

‘But the dump wasn’t just a rubbish dump. It was a hill and a bank on a river. OK, a stinking bank, but still a bank by a river in flow covered with reeds blown by the wind, and a large market for vegetables, fruit and meat. It was also home to love stories, good and bad marriages, grudges, small tortures, the dead and the buried. They cannot be told to go away because we have decided that the banks of the Bou Regreg will become the most beautiful spot in the city. You may look from afar and remember the ugliness in which you lived. What I mean by rehabilitating is us finding them a place among us, a place in this beautiful game. As if we were saying thank you to them for implanting so much life in this place, which for years we tried to kill, before suddenly deciding to save.

‘I believe that settling them at the heart of this architectural showpiece would not diminish its splendour, but might even add a certain naïve kindness. It won’t hurt anybody. We could add to that a giant memorial for the dump, consisting of an artificial hill of various shapes and colours, where children could play without harm. It would be an expression of an emancipated sense of the beautiful, one not controlled by rigid guidelines and hollow considerations. Add to this the pedagogical gain that might result from it, its ability to open people’s eyes to the importance of establishing a human relationship with rubbish. I bet people would respect water more as a result of this landmark than for the sake of the beautiful lagoon.’