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.