Mohammed Achaari - The Arch and the Butterfly

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.

‘I believe that settling them at the heart of this architectural showpiece would not diminish its splendour, but might even add a certain naïve kindness. It won’t hurt anybody. We could add to that a giant memorial for the dump, consisting of an artificial hill of various shapes and colours, where children could play without harm. It would be an expression of an emancipated sense of the beautiful, one not controlled by rigid guidelines and hollow considerations. Add to this the pedagogical gain that might result from it, its ability to open people’s eyes to the importance of establishing a human relationship with rubbish. I bet people would respect water more as a result of this landmark than for the sake of the beautiful lagoon.’

I listened to Bahia, amazed. When she finished, my first reaction was to ask for her forgiveness, because I had made fun of her idea and attributed it to the depression that she suffered because of the lawsuit.

I told her that it was a truly wonderful idea, but I shared my fears with her, in case her project raised objections for various reasons, which would render its fulfilment impossible. She, on the other hand, demonstrated huge willingness to follow up on the project regardless of the outcome. I felt better about her spirits. Bahia’s good mood gave me the opportunity to ask her about the idea, suggested by our son, for an arch spanning the mouth of the river. She repeated that he had told her about it when they went together to see the confiscated land, the day before his departure.

She had wanted to give him a chance to think about a solution for it.

‘On our way back,’ she said, ‘we stopped at the mouth of the river, and there he expressed his lack of interest in the land and the projects surrounding it, but he said that if he could do something, he would install a giant rainbow-like arch that would connect the two banks; a huge, irregular arch, unlike any other. It would be taller than the Qasbah of the Udayas. One foundation would be on the Rabat side, then it would rise to its apex before dropping away towards the second foundation on the opposite bank. A steel arch painted blue to look like a thread of water frolicking over the ocean.’

I asked if Yacine had left anything about the idea in his papers or drawings, but Bahia said no. She thought it was a spur-of-the-moment idea, and he had probably made fun of these projects. He used to say that absurdity was the only thing that could save the city. I did not comment and left the house deflated. I walked for a long time in the alleyways of the old city in the direction of the river, recalling all the simple things I had not achieved. I had wanted to build a small house by the sea, it didn’t matter where, but hadn’t been able to.

I had wished to visit Havana. Why? I didn’t know for certain. Perhaps because of the music and Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s novels, or just because an old friend of mine went there on a journalistic assignment and did not return for a year. I always dreamed of getting caught in the net of a city whose embrace would not release me to another city; a city that hugs, breastfeeds, reprimands and licks your wounds, a city where you could live with the impression of building it, one stone at a time, and think of it when getting ready for bed, as if it were a woman awaiting you. Now, however, I had no energy to undertake such a trip. I did not feel like packing my suitcase and going to the airport. The most I could do was stand in the street on the side facing Havana’s seafront, awaiting the three tigers to pass, and go with them to the night of the city, opening the box of the language that sprang from the depths of night. How wonderful the city that stripped off the language of day at sunset and donned a different language for night.