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 spray 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.