The Arch and the Butterfly (20 page)

‘I am the only nation whose founder saw it as workshops and ruins during the same era.

‘In all the mosaics of the hotel, there are Roman tesserae that I took from bags in the storerooms, where they were piled up for decades without anyone aware of the scenes that were destroyed in the haphazard gathering at the hands of your blessed ancestors. No one is able to recognise them nowadays. In return, you will easily recognise the new style, characterised by a mocking cubism that cost me next to nothing. The work was done by a painter from Asila, called Abd al-Wahhab al-Andalusi. He used to drink in the hotel lobby and tessellated me and my great ancestors while he talked at length about his aversion to Andalusian mosaics, which were imprisoned by blind geometric squares and devoid of features and movement.

‘To return to our subject, the labours of Hercules are simply a metaphor for the unattainable that clings to the human. Since, as a professional guide, I am required to present you the information in complete neutrality, I will spare you my opinion about the possible and the impossible. We had a teacher at the night university who used to say, “The most widespread possibility in our lives is the impossible!” This is, however, just German philosophising that neither suits us nor for which are we suitable!

‘After the public fountain on your left, you will find the northern baths which I will let you visit on your own, the bath being the only place I can’t enter dead or alive!

‘What a bore having to repeat the same thing every day while trying to make it exciting and enjoyable, as though it were being said for the first time. If Bacchus, Orpheus and Hercules knew how much I talked about them and celebrated their life his­­tories, they would make me king of their stupid tales.

‘Let them all go to hell, them and their northern baths, and all Romans as well. I will wait for my Myrmidons in this wasteland whose only shade is my own. I am the tree and the man resting in its shade. There is no hope of a breeze and no need for one. No one has died of the heat in these places. If they take too long visiting the baths, I will have to occupy myself by thinking about my tragedies. Then they might find me crying like a child whose mother has forgotten him in these ruins.

‘Come along. Didn’t you like the baths? You say you did? You must admit, however, that the tour of the mosaics that I have devised is the most beautiful tour of all.

‘Good, I am flattered by your admiration. It is rare for anyone to win the approval of the German people! I have to tell you a secret, though. I conceived the tour of the mosaics for myself, because in this darkness that surrounds me, the mosaics are like an inner vision bursting with colour and movement. Blindness has helped me become part of a magnificent mosaic for all time. Whenever I think about that I feel better and sense that I am close to the logic of life.

‘During this tour we have to visit the house of the knight, where the bronze of the horseman was found – one of the most beautiful pieces in the collection of bronzes. It also houses the mosaic I told you about where Bacchus finds Ariadne.

‘If you insist on learning about Roman daily life, on your way back you may visit some shops, oil presses, houses and the modest districts. My advice to you, however, is to leave all that to the experts who see the wonder of the age in every stone, and only take away with you the myths of the big houses.

‘Now, we are descending once again towards the small bridge on the River Fertassa. I would like you to take one last look at the chain of green hills, which at this time of the afternoon will have a light-green hue under the glossy veil of a blue sky. Does anyone remember the sea-blue colour of the mountain at nine in the morning? Of course no one does. We all see the wonders of nature once or twice and then forget them. In spite of the eternal inherent in these wonders, the most awesome thing we remember is the forgotten and the fleeting. The mountain does not care about us. It does not see that we see it and love it passionately, it neither expects nor wishes that, and it does not worry about that never happening. It is like a rose described by an ancient poet in these words:

The rose does not ask why

It blooms because it blooms

Not caring about itself

Not anxious to be seen.

‘Yes, yes, it is the teacher I told you about who recited those verses, expecting us to be transported in rapture, the way you were now. But instead, we roared with laughter, and he was upset with us and declared that the older humanity gets, the more it loses its poetic inclination.

‘I do not know what devil made me say to him, “It is people who age. Humanity is ageless.”

‘He asked me, “Where are you from?”

‘ “From Greco-Roman civilisation,” I replied.

‘ “I am not surprised,” he said.

‘I do not know how to recover the sense of humour I appreciated at once in those verses. Do you think they are funny?

‘No, you do not find them amusing. Good, let’s drop the subject.

‘I have a last comment to make before we bid the mountain goodbye. I always found the streams of water rushing out of your German mountains amazing. Do you see any water connected to this mountain? Do you see waterfalls, the expanse of a lake, or flowing springs? Nothing at all? Yet right at the foot of this mountain, cold springs flow, some profuse, others scarce. No one hears them, and their charm is only visible in the gardens and through the birds living in the valley. These mountains cry or laugh in silence. Who knows what goes on in the mind of a mountain!

‘The tour ends here! Sorry, but before we close the book of mosaics for good – with you at least – allow me to draw your attention to this tableau that represents Medusa’s head. It is the only mosaic at this site used like a painting. According to mythology, Medusa defied the goddess Minerva with her beauty. Minerva punished her by changing her beautiful hair into terrifying serpents and gave her eyes that could turn everything she looked at into stone. You can examine Medusa’s face at length; her gaze will not turn you to stone. I tell you that from experience, as I have often sat before her hoping it would happen to me. How many stones have I piled up inside me while staring into her eyes. It looks like I will go on wandering for a long time, a living body among the stones of this city.

‘Thank you. Go back to your homes with Bacchus’s blessings and my own. As for me, I will drink my afternoon tea here under the fig tree, whose shade covers the whole café.’

2

‘Yes, tea, as usual.’

What a difficult day it has been, selling people laughable legends, as well as your own ones, while you have nothing to do with it. You search the tones of their voices for a comforting yearning, but nothing, nothing at all of their own lives filters into you, and nothing of your life penetrates them. It is as if they, these stones, you and everything else in these sites had been thrown up by a hasty archaeological dig to deny a time outside of time, and a place outside of place. And then there is this heat, this heavy dumb heat. Why do trees not grow in ruins? Why does no one dare plant an olive tree in this wasteland?

Then you start your day with a pointless discussion about the end of your lineage. What if they come to an end and vanish for ever? What would humanity lose by shutting up the wombs of the Al-Firsiwi family and throwing the keys into the sea?

Lineage. What a heavy word. As if we are able to give birth again to Mohammed ben Abd al-Karim al-Khattabi and those who were with him. The springs of the fighters have dried up, and all we produce nowadays are merchants, smugglers, middlemen and estate agents, plus a few acrobats gifted in the parody of war and joyfully riding donkeys backwards. The only fighter that the lineage gave birth to was Yacine, but he was lost without a legend and without glory.

Youssef must understand that he was talking to his father. He’s unconcerned with what will happen in the centuries to come because he lives in the present, in restaurants, bars and airports and sleeps with an assortment of women. But this furious blind man spends his days chasing Hercules, Antaeus, Bacchus, Orpheus, Hylas, Venus, Medusa, Ariadne, Juba and Ptolemy. He drives this mythic flock from century to century, all the way to the banks of the Khumman, leaving it there to ruminate in the shade of the laurels. Youssef works on fleeting stories and novels that wilt as soon as they are picked up. I, on the other hand, work for eternity. What interests me professionally is knowing where such pimping will have led after five hundred years.

I know that he will never accept his mother’s suicide, but what can I do to convince him that I did not kill her? Regardless, we killed each other. Over time, everything we do to the other half of our relationship becomes a grave mistake. Who can pretend they have never deliberately and repeatedly murdered someone they no longer love?

I did not kill Diotima with a bullet, but I might have killed her with twelve years of live ammunition, if only for not doing anything extraordinary for her. I did not tame the country of the barbarians for her sake, I did not find her grandfather’s poetry book and I did seek her after I came out of the labyrinth.

I must admit, though, that Youssef’s suffering is unlike any mortal suffering. Between his mother’s suicide and his son’s death, his life resembles an unfair slap in the face. But why do I have to pay the price? To hell with Youssef’s minor pain! It cannot compare to Medusa’s agony when she saw her hair change into terrifying serpents, or when she met an enchanting man she thought would be the love of her life but who turned to stone as soon as she looked at him.

What can we call Orpheus’s suffering as he turned to look at his beloved, knowing very well that he would lose her because of that hasty look? Now that’s suffering, not the shedding of an orphan tear after drinking a glass of fine wine!

He shouts at me as if I were a servant who had renounced his allegiance. What a disgrace! It would have been better for him to come to my aid and save me during the ordeal with the hotel, instead of following the news from afar and dumping his miserable advice on me. No one will decide for me. Let him wait until I’m dead and gone and then he can do whatever he wants. As long as I’m alive, no one decides behind my back.

I said I would not sell the hotel, and I meant it. I sold everything to pay the debts. Now I have nothing but ruins. But I am happy with that, happy to rival the ruins of Walili. I am happy to stop by the Cantina on my way back from the site and listen to the babbling of drunk customers, the way it happened a long time ago. With my exhausted vision I see Diotima sitting on the throne in the lobby, protected by my eternal mosaic, in my house, the house of the handsome young man.

This is the only war that resembles the Rif’s war of liberation, because it is fraught with pride, malice, stubbornness and resistance. The ‘genius’, that government official, says that patriotism nowadays is having a development project! God Almighty, what’s the connection between this philosophy and your insistence on sequestering the hotel and offering it as a gift to your wife and your brother-in-law? Do you mean to say that the bankrupt are the traitors of the age? Fine. Why don’t you erect a gallows to speed up growth then?

Youssef and his lawyer friend insist that I end the story in an elegant way. What does elegance have to do with it? Are we doing business with Yves Saint Laurent? If the issue is basically dirty, why do we insist on making it look good with ridiculous reasoning?

I had planned to put the hotel in my wife’s name, which would only have been fair. This is where we wove the fabric of our relationship, in one of its rooms we found our path, and through its complex lawsuits over debt, water and the bar we built our life. But I had an intuition that it would fall into their hands, and a mysterious presentiment made me change my mind at the last minute. She was neither angry nor sad, as if she expected it and secretly wished for it. She told me in a moment of harmony that the genius’s wife visited her and engaged her in a discussion about the brilliant future of the hotel, casting allusions that would have made an ascetic’s mouth water. Well, well, the story is suspicious. Otherwise, why this insistence from my son, my own blood!

He shouts in my face without shame, but forgets that I am right. Having children is not a secondary issue, otherwise God would have ended it with Adam and Eve. Life gives birth to life and death gives birth to death, in perpetuity. I can imagine his anger when he learns that it was my idea. Yes, I was the one who told Bahia, ‘Why don’t you try for another child? If you want to stay alive despite Yacine’s death, you must listen to the laws of nature. Otherwise death will swallow you, because death gives birth to death and life begets eternal life!’

He wanted to die in a state of sadness, that’s his problem. Why does he shout in my face? OK, let’s drop the subject. He’ll soon return to his senses and understand that lineage is not an insignificant matter. Just think about the number of wars we averted, the plagues, the famines and the accidents we were spared, from the Rif to Bu Mandara, from Bu Mandara to Germany, and from Germany to Zarhoun. We faced the year of the war, the year of famine, the year of typhus, the year of perdition and the year of pox. There was also the war with Spain, the war with France, the war with thieves and bandits, the war with Oufkir, with Dulaymi and with Al-Basri. We even fought wars against windmills, against the years of immigration, the ‘Years of Lead’ and the years of Al-Bu Kalib. We crossed all those deserts without ever giving up the perpetuation of the descendants. This weak being was born half dead and endured smallpox at the age of five. He fell in a well when he was hardly six, and aged seven Bu Habbah’s gun exploded in his hands. He memorised the Qur’an at nine and his mother, may her soul rest in peace, slaughtered a rooster at the tomb of Sidi Abdallah on the last Friday of every month. She did not do it for him to succeed and to win the endless battles and wars he fought, but for his mere survival. After all that, we want to wipe out this nation! What for? Because Sidi Moulay Youssef can’t stand the sight of a pregnant woman? By God, if the situation were only a matter of exceptional energy and strength, I would have married a beautiful and fertile woman and would have given birth to a new generation. I would have filled this lazy country with descendants from the geniuses of the Rif!