Fighting back my emotions, I said, ‘I’m Youssef, this is Layla, and this is José Saramago. You are still alive and kicking I see.’
‘Of course, of course! Who can escape life? You cannot go backwards and you cannot flee forwards. Life – as you know, my son – is a real dilemma. Is that not so, Mr?. . . ? Who did you say he was, Youssef?’
‘Saramago.’
Listening to Layla’s translation and showing true engagement for the first time, Saramago said, ‘Yes, yes, it’s a real dilemma!’
The Cornerstone of the Sacred Mausoleum
1
On a cold, dry October morning in the early 1970s, two months after returning from Germany, Mohammed al-Firsiwi visited the holy shrine of Moulay Idriss I. He was accompanied by three faqihs from the village of Bu Mandara, but Al-Firsiwi himself supervised the recitation of the Qur’anic verses for the repose of the moulay’s soul and sought his blessings before he left with his small retinue. Al-Firsiwi then went straight to the old quarter’s central market, where an auction was being held for the rental contract on the Hall of Oil, which everybody was convinced would go, as it did every year, to someone connected to the Idriss dynasty.
By noon, however, to the shock of those present and absent, it had gone to Al-Firsiwi, son of Bu Mandara and scion of the rural folk, whose individual and collective submission to the contempt of the Idriss dynasty had lasted since their arrival in the region. This historic event was merely a prelude: hardly a week after that earth-shattering deal, Al-Firsiwi bought the city’s only petrol station (manually pumped), the Al-Ghali mansion, Qatirah’s house, and seven rundown houses in the Hufra, Tazka and Khaybar quarters. He was paving the way for his rural kin to enter the city as conquerors.
Barely a year had passed before the Idrissis and those referred to as the wealthy burghers of Fes – traders in cloth, foodstuffs and grain – had become mere servants in the nouveau-riche network led by Mohammed al-Firsiwi. According to his admirers, he spoke seven languages. He owned an impressive Mercedes, and argued sharply with his German wife when they drove through the city. The young boys who watched this amazing sight wondered whether the Christian woman, in spite of her blue eyes, went to the toilet and performed her bodily functions like other human beings.
According to the eyewitnesses who ventured as far as the Apollo cinema in the city of Meknes, whenever Al-Firsiwi and his wife sat in a café and ordered tea, a large number of women wrapped in their woollen gowns, indolent men and nervous children would crowd the pavement opposite. They would push and shove, making a terrible noise just to watch the bumpkin who combed his hair with brilliantine and his wife with painted lips and bare legs.
Over time public curiosity waned, replaced by stories about the dazzling rise of this strongly built man with the piercing look who did not leave his enemies even a tiny margin for manoeuvre. After only three years, Al-Firsiwi was able to add to his regional empire the olive groves that extended from the foot of the Bani Ammar hills to the edge of the Bu Riyah plain. Only the waqf lands escaped his control, though he rented many acres, acquiring them annually through auctions in which no one dared compete with him. Nearly everyone with a cow, a sheep or a goat in Bu Mandara and every other village in the area went into partnership with him. He intuited the future importance of carob – which at that time had no value on the market – and bought up the lands where it grew, which spread over Bab al-Rumela and the whole of the Zarhoun Mountain. He and a partner set up a carob processing plant in Fes and he was given the nickname of ‘Carob Hajj’.
The country folk who had been an oppressed minority became masters of the region. Some of their notables even married noble Idrissi women, and began to receive visitors and the official delegation for the festivities of Moulay Idriss I. They cornered the market in animals for sacrifice, candles and sweets. Some of those who extended their building activities also expanded their control to supervise the chanting and spinning sessions of the dervishes, despite all the worries they would endure as a result. They would implore their Creator to put a quick end to the howling of those soft-headed creatures who repeated poems and songs whose only intelligible words were ‘Praise to the Prophet’.
Then it occurred to Al-Firsiwi to embark on a new adventure: he founded the Zaytoun Hotel on the plateau overlooking the ruins of Walili. He spent almost five years building this spectacular landmark; he fought fierce battles for the land, then for water and electricity, and finally to pave the road that led to the plateau, until the hotel became like a balcony overlooking the monumental ruins of Walili, where every day the sun set behind the columns of the temple and the triumphal arch of Caracalla.
At this point of his achievements, his wife Diotima sat on the throne of the reception desk located in a legendary hall, decorated with mosaics in Roman style portraying Al-Firsiwi’s grandfather among the nymphs of Al-Ain al-Tahiya; Ben Abd al-Karim surrendering to the French officers; and Al-Firsiwi himself struggling with scaly forest snakes. The corners of the mosaic were decorated with carvings that imitated in a naïve fashion Juba II, Bacchus and others.
Al-Firsiwi had to fight with the authorities for five more years to obtain a licence to sell alcohol despite the hotel’s proximity to the tomb of the founder of the Moroccan state. He got what he wanted in exchange for sweeteners and bribes that surpassed the cost of the hotel itself.
Once the consumption of alcohol was no longer confined to foreign guests, but spread to the local people, their tongues started to tell endless stories, the likes of which this meek country had never heard before. Thus began the ill-fated phase of Al-Firsiwi’s life. Public opinion never doubted that the main reason for this rapid and total decline was the Cantina bar and the depravity and debauchery that came with it, all at the feet of the holy leader. The folk imagination invented stories about foreign and Muslim drunkards who ended their soirées in the Roman baths where they swapped female partners and practised sodomy in the moonlight. There was talk about the smuggling of various kinds of drink from the Cantina to surrounding villages. And people soon devised a miracle fit for the situation. They made Moulay Rashid, Idriss’s faithful servant, go out at night and obstruct the path of the drunks as they crossed the cemetery on their way from the hotel bar to the town. He whipped them severely with jagged branches from wild olive trees, leaving permanent marks on their backs, their sides and their legs.
Al-Firsiwi’s bad luck began with years of drought, which stopped the olive trees from bearing fruit for successive seasons. Then the price of carob collapsed, making the cost of gathering it more than the proceeds of selling it. And finally came the years of pox.
To this day no one knows how it happened. One morning the customers of an ancient bath-house in the old quarter saw a man squatting near the hot water cistern, howling and writhing hysterically from the pain of the inflamed pustules covering his body. Someone volunteered to pour hot water over him. The man went on his way, and a day later small pustules filled with a colourless liquid began to appear on the bodies of men, women and children from different quarters. As soon as the pustules appeared on the skin, more followed. Hardly a week had passed before the markets, schools and mosques of the city and surrounding villages were filled with alarming groups of distraught people. Not talking to one another and not knowing where they were going, they walked with their hands inside their clothing, scratching their skin, which was covered with a hard inflamed crust, their mouths open wide in pain and pleasure.
Men, women and children would go on to the streets and the alleys, uncover their backs and scratch them against the walls of the city until they bled; or they would use implements such as vegetable peelers, washing-up scourers, wool carders or door scrubbers, and sit, one behind the other, and begin a dismal collective scratch that brought tears to their eyes.
Almost every day, hordes of the poxed left their neighbourhoods and crossed the inner market, not distracted by anything, heading straight towards Khaybar Plaza, where authorities had installed large pumps to sp
ray their bodies as they stood behind plastic shower curtains. They returned reeking of sulphur and went to sleep until the relentless inflammation of the pustules stabbed them with pain yet again.
The city was officially quarantined. Foreign tourists stopped coming to stay at the Zaytoun Hotel, which turned the Cantina into a cheap bar frequented every night by the legions of the poxed, who drank and chatted till the break of dawn. They fell asleep to the collective moans of pleasure and pain from the nonstop scratching, which opened the door to exquisite intoxication, until, from the depths of this rapture, rose the agony caused by nails digging into pustular skin.
During this period the inhabitants of the nearby village of Fertassa took advantage of the misfortune that had befallen Al-Firsiwi – especially after his wife Diotima’s suicide and the bankruptcy of a number of his projects – and damaged some of the canals that carried water from the spring to the Zaytoun Hotel. A legal battle ensued and Al-Firsiwi was forced to sell much of his property to pay off those willing to side with him in the dispute.
Then suddenly and much to everyone’s surprise, Al-Firsiwi married one of the hotel maids. She had rough brothers who terrorised the inhabitants of Fertassa. Things calmed down and people understood that Al-Firsiwi had put the hotel in his new wife’s name. Though this news spread, he did not comment, content with beaming sarcastic smiles at the drunks chatting about him.
Then Al-Firsiwi sold the petrol station and announced the bankruptcy of the modern mills of al-Mishkah. One Friday morning in May 1982, the authorities closed the Zaytoun Hotel, while a mass demonstration of thousands of the poxed shouted anti-government slogans, criticising the authorities for doing nothing to alleviate their suffering except spraying them with burning yellow liquid. The demonstration turned violent, with the trashing of shops and public buildings, before heading for the tomb complex where a protest sit-in was declared.
People wondered whether all this was to protest against the closing of the Cantina, that infested place, by the authorities. The answer they received from the victims was that they objected to the closing down of the city, not the Cantina.
On 9 May 1982, the statue of Bacchus was stolen from the entrance to Walili, where it had stood for decades. The figure was small with a lightly tanned complexion, an adolescent posed standing with his weight on his right leg and his left leg stretched slightly behind, and his left arm, broken at the wrist, slightly away from his body. The thieves had had to pull the statue off its plinth, leaving some of the toes of the right foot behind, which was all that remained of the beautiful sculpture.
Contrary to all expectations, the investigation into the crime led to the arrest of the director of the site, then two tourist guides, and finally Mohammed al-Firsiwi, who everyone had seen constantly excavating the site for something, though no one knew what.
2
I am Youssef al-Firsiwi and that is my father. My mother was a refined German woman who found no better end to her stormy life than suicide. It happened on a day spent hunting quail and rabbit in the woods with my father. Close to sundown, she packed away the game, the gear, the clothes, the picnic basket and the cans of drink with the careful attention that drove my father crazy. She then sat in the front seat, put on her safety belt and turned on her tape recorder to listen to Beethoven.
On the way back she asked my father to go via the mountain road, the first section of which overlooks the city while the rest overlooks the ruins. She said meekly that she wanted to watch the sunset. Contrary to habit, Al-Firsiwi complied without arguing or bickering. More than once after the incident, he would say that only divine will could have so blinded him that he failed to notice that this was the first time in her life she had made such a request. He had never stood with her on a peak or in a valley to watch God’s sun rise, set or do anything else, he would say.
My mother asked Al-Firsiwi to stop the car at the last bend before the descent to Walili. They both got out, and she said, ‘The sun’s going.’
‘One day it will go and never come back, or it will rise in the west and never set,’ Al-Firsiwi said.
‘Why are you talking nonsense?’ my mother asked as she walked to the back of the car.
‘Because that will be the day the world ends! When we won’t need money, energy or weapons. All of us, regardless of who we are, will need only one thing.’
My mother was opening the boot of the car, so he repeated his last sentence without looking at her. ‘We will need only one thing!’
‘Which would be what?’
‘Shade, my dear. Shade!’ said my father.
There was total silence, and Al-Firsiwi thought he had dumbfounded my mother with his unbeatable peasant genius. At that moment he relived his relationship with Diotima, from their first encounter in a Düsseldorf post office, in its smallest details. He thought of confessing his love for her, there and then, because, as he later admitted, ‘I had never said those words to her. It’s not our habit, us peasants, to pay attention to such nonsense.’
When my father turned around to proclaim this welling up of feeling, Diotima was not where he expected. He heard the gunshot as if it came from underneath the car. In a panic, he rushed towards the sound and found my almost headless mother stretched out opposite the tomb of Moulay Idriss I, not far from the Roman ruins where a desolate sun had set moments before. Despite all I observed of my father’s breakdown, despair, suffering and anger, to this day I do not know why I imagine with great conviction and in anguish that he had killed her. To this day I cannot recall that event without being inclined to maintain that Al-Firsiwi had planned his crime with a devilish attention to detail that made it possible for him to escape human justice. As for divine punishment, according to my maternal uncle, he incurred it in this life. His huge material losses kept accumulating, and he descended into bankruptcy and vindictiveness before drowning in total obscurity.
I was greatly distressed by the incident that took my mother’s life, and I haven’t gotten over it to this day. I lived for over a year with a maternal uncle who worked at the German embassy in Rabat, and I shared my doubts with him. I told him that Al-Firsiwi hated my mother, and might even have killed her. He, in turn, informed the German authorities of all the details I gave him, and a long investigation ensued. It did not lead to anything, but it made my father believe that I had, without any doubt, inherited the seed of evil from the Germanic blood that infected my pure Moroccan blood. I ended up living in a care home in Frankfurt, where I spent my drab adolescent years convinced that I would never be able to restore my relationship with my father and his country.
But being categorical about anything related to human nature is always reckless. As the years sped by, the sharp impetuosity that made me believe that my mother’s blood – contrary to Al-Firsiwi’s claim – was a gift from heaven melted away. Deep inside I had been ashamed of my peasant blood, which would undoubtedly corrupt the accumulated genetic capital that the German nation had spent long centuries investing in before I received my miraculous share.
It was my discovery of the Rif, its language, its places, its history and its people, in the heart of Frankfurt that took me back to the country I had left. I returned overflowing with forgiveness for Al-Firsiwi, his new wife and a half-sister who loved nothing more than contemplating my blue eyes and declaring them a glorious link with the civilised world. But after months in prison, the closure of his hotel and the myriad court cases, Al-Firsiwi had become a difficult man to deal with. After he went almost totally blind, he grew hot tempered, ready to engage in violent fights for the simplest of reasons. This made me consider him an integral part of my difficult return. I tried to spare him from becoming engaged in a new, tragic role, and I attempted to immerse myself gradually into his world without receiving from him the keys to that world.
Of all his ordeals, Al-Firsiwi’s arrest in what became known as the Bacchus case was the nearest thing to a personal mythology. On its account, he spent six months in prison and was subject
ed to torture during interrogation (which he could never face talking about) before the court acquitted him.
My father said that being found innocent was prima facie evidence of the justice system’s stupidity. He backed those words with a thousand arguments that incriminated him and proved his amazing success in pulling off a masterful theft that no one could solve. It was an honest robbery which he had not undertaken for monetary gain, but simply to humiliate the Romans and their modern allies.
‘So,’ I said, ‘what people say about you having stolen Bacchus and selling it to a rich German to ward off bankruptcy is a plausible explanation?’
‘Bullshit!’ replied my father. ‘Did I steal it? Yes I did. But sell it? No! I’m not a dealer in idols.’
‘What did you do with it?’
‘I buried it!’
‘Oh, Firsiwi, there’s no bigger idiot than you. Bacchus had been buried for centuries until French archaeologists and German prisoners of war came and excavated the city from the depths of the earth, and excavated Bacchus from the depths of the city. Then you come and steal it only to bury it again!’
‘Yes. And if I could have, I would have buried all of Walili and Zarhoun too!’ He added, laughing, ‘I buried it in the courtyard of an obscure mosque. I can just imagine the puzzlement of archaeologists in a few centuries’ time asking themselves what Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, was doing in the courtyard of the twenty-first century mosque of the Muslims of Zarhoun!’
Al-Firsiwi obtained a permit to work as an accredited tour guide for the ancient city of Walili thanks to his being found innocent of the Bacchus theft and his profound knowledge of Walili’s history and archaeology. He had painstakingly read ancient and modern texts and dig reports in search of – or so he claimed – a direct or indirect cause, foreknown to God, that had pushed him to undertake the robbery. Or to be unjustly and vindictively accused of having committed the robbery, as stated in the court’s verdict of innocence.
The Arch and the Butterfly Page 5
