As for the important personality, I was indeed contacted by him and invited for a memorable cup of coffee at his lovely home. While there I listened to his analysis of the situation and received a fresh piece of news, one that I kept to myself, as befitting a civilised human being. A few days following that astounding meeting, the authorities demolished two floors that had been added to a building without, as it was rumoured, a permit. The demolition was surrounded by huge security measures and received wide press coverage and shook public opinion. A few minor scandals surfaced in connection to the exceptional permits that had allowed some restaurants in the old city to raise their roofs to rival the Koutoubia. But the whole matter did not last more than a few hours in a press that knew how to turn the page extremely quickly, even when it gave the strong impression that nothing, no matter how big or small, was beyond its control.
While property remained the focus of money and business in the city, many were convinced that Marrakech’s huge success in the field of tourism was the beginning and end of wealth. Ahmad, on the other hand, developed the theory that the North laundered drug money in real estate, the South laundered bribes in real estate, and real estate laundered itself with time.
I said to Ahmad one day, ‘You are a man of the law. Tell us what can we do with that knowledge.’
He replied quite seriously, ‘Write about it in the papers!’
‘And leave all those unpunished?’ I said.
‘Defamation is the only possible punishment these days,’ he replied.
*
Laissez faire, laissez passer! I left Marrakech determined to remove myself completely from the issues of the moment and return to those of my childhood. I wanted to go where my father was living the last chapter of his life, a prisoner of his blindness and the tourist circuit of the city of Walili. Every day he constructed an opulent palace out of Roman stones, the stones of the Rif and Bu Mandara, and through the fabric of his narration to foreign visitors took revenge on centuries of absolute truth. I would revisit the theft of Bacchus after a quarter of a century, just to revive that story in a country where stories do not last long. We could compare today’s thefts and see that in the past we had nothing like the impudence of today’s thieves, preening peacocks who showed off their cars, their djellabas and their yearly umra.
I imagined a child who grew up at the statue’s feet and filled his eyes with Bacchus’s stony complexion. While the statue remained an adolescent, the way it had come out from under the chisel centuries ago, the boy became a man eking out a living in a bleak windblown expanse. I too wanted to step down from the pedestal to which I had been pinned for years. I wanted to walk and get away, as befitted a stolen statue.
After I returned from Marrakech I suffered more severe anxiety attacks and had to go to hospital and submit to a series of frightening tests. During this, Fatima contacted me a few times from Madrid and said she would not allow me to die. Once I was able to joke, I told her that I had not died out of respect for her wishes. She then filled me in on the latest developments in her relationship with the Kosovar.
‘I’ve moved in with him, but haven’t given up my apartment. I don’t want to take uncalculated risks.’
I told her that she had made a wise decision, because there was nothing better for our spirits than having a place to ourselves.
When I left hospital I knew that I was quite healthy in body — as shown by the medical equipment — but I also knew that I was not all right. My body carried me with difficulty, while I carried it with difficulty too. Layla visited me a few times in the hospital, and when I left it I tried hard to feel her presence. In the taxi we looked at each other and I knew from her expression that she was worried about me, but I could not make that connection internally and did not feel that she was doing it for my sake. I was not afraid that she might suddenly get out of the taxi and disappear for good. Had she done so, I am not sure I would have been saddened by it. I lived as if walking were my only activity, in the expectation of arriving at a specific place, or of not arriving. I simply did not care what would happen, except that in order to walk I had to remain standing and actually walk.
When we arrived at my apartment I was flabbergasted to find an entirely different space. Layla had transformed a colourless, almost dead apartment into a spacious, light-filled, dynamic place. As soon as I entered I felt something both dense and delicate within me, something I had not experienced for years. I realised, at that moment, that people who were able to tame places and give them new life were endowed with a special magic that gave them keys to the human soul and made them capable of growing spacious gardens within it. I extended my arm towards Layla and I walked, mesmerised, until I reached her body. I felt as if I understood something very deep, connected somehow to the transformation she had wrought upon the apartment. It was as if by choosing colours and pieces of furniture, by filling some spots and leaving others empty, she had drawn a map of her own body. This map had no connection whatsoever with the trajectory of a thinker or a visionary, but was the result of an instinctive interaction between bodies and places.
It was a momentous week. Layla told me that she loved me, even if she could not live with me under the same roof, and even if we had to organise our lives in an unusual manner without room for the day-to-day. I was unable to say anything in response. She was hurt and did not contact me or answer my phone calls for three straight days.
That same week the Ministry of Justice announced that a number of prominent people had been arrested for corruption involving property deals in Marrakech. While my investigation had not mentioned any of the implicated persons or projects, people believed I had played a small role in this heroic action.
Back from Rome, Ahmad called me from the airport to announce, without introduction or show of emotion, that Bahia was pregnant. I said half joking, ‘One more Muslim!’
He replied haltingly, ‘Another of our generation’s miracles!’
In the midst of all these events, I thought seriously about my relationship with Layla. When I thought of her like a distant gleam from a vague past, I was overcome with confused emotions and was on the verge of declaring my love for her. But as soon as she stormed the present with her youthful body, her language and her delicate presence, everything went dark and I was left only with her critical importance for survival on this planet. But that was not enough to declare my love. We do not declare our love for water, the blue of the sky or the rays of the sun. When I understood the situation in this way, I decided to share it with her, to let her know the difficult position I was in and to let her know that the problem, in the long run, would be our ability to set the clock of our relationship to the right time.
She listened to me until the end, and I had the fleeting impression that she understood the situation more clearly than I had explained it and was happy with it. When she said that only I needed to reset the hands of my clock, we laughed and indulged in what she used to call a reconciliation with the world, which was nothing but an unruly hour or so during which we pretended to quarrel violently before enjoying each other with passion.
The arrest of the big-shots gave the press free rein to take a substantial bite at the subject of real-estate corruption and chew it gluttonously. Newspapers went so far as to issue condemnations even before the trial started, and when it did begin in the midst of endless procedural battles, people had already spent their anger by talking about the issue. The case was buried under a thick layer of dust within days. For a while, the inhabitants of Marrakech joked about the demolished storeys, the unfinished buildings and the plots of land abandoned until forgetfulness allowed new projects to begin on them. Conversations would stop completely when people saw a driver hastily open the door of a luxury car and one of the major figures of the lawsuit step out.