Mohammed Achaari - The Arch and the Butterfly

‘Now I see everything with my hands! Lady, please do not laugh. I can see the colour of your eyes with my hand. Let me try. Ha, ha, ha, beautiful too. The fairness of your skin is amazing, especially with your dark eyes! I am right, aren’t I? I saw clearly, as it is said. I would cut these fingers off were it not for their seeing this beautiful face! No, no, please, madam. I am the one who thanks God for the pleasure of touching your face.

‘We will now enter the house of the acrobat. Here there is a playful mosaic, a parody of the horserace, showing an acrobat riding a donkey backwards, and carrying a jug and a sash in his right hand, which together symbolise victory. A scene which for us makes a representation of war into a fantasy, as if the warriors, when they concede or are defeated, have nothing other than this ironic imitation to tame their craving for war.

‘This is the house of the handsome youth. The mosaic that decorates the dining hall consists of four circular medallions in the corners, intertwined with four other oval medallions. The centre of the tableau is decorated with a mermaid riding a hippocamp, while two dolphins swim between its legs in the opposite direction.

‘Once again the dolphin acts to ward off the evil eye. This does not mean that dolphin and fish lived in this river, just that mosaic makers had pattern books that they showed to their wealthy customers, some of whom suggested elements of their own. We all add something of our own.

‘The handsome youth is one of the site’s most beautiful bronze statues. Discovered in 1932 under a metre and a half of stones and soil, it represents a naked adolescent of exceptional beauty. If I had to steal something from Walili, I would have stolen the handsome youth and placed it next to me on this dark path, between the mosaic and the ghosts, instead of leaving him to kill his endless days in a forgotten museum, where he hears the voices of the drunks from the nearby bar and the news bulletins from the radio studios. While crossing this place, I would like you to pay attention to the mosaic, which represents an extremely fine-looking crab. I consider it the loveliest scene among these ruins.

‘Here is Bacchus, the god of wine, once again. This time he is riding a chariot pulled by tigers only whose claws remain to be seen. Bacchus is wearing sumptuous clothes and a laurel of vine leaves; he might be holding vine branches. Whenever I find Bacchus painted, carved, or even alive, my inner sense of battling comes to life. I have fought many wars for his sake! When I built the hotel and after I obtained a licence to sell alcohol; when the Cantina became a meeting place for the poxed and the drunk, and when it was stolen. In the mosaic in front of you, we see Bacchus in one of his encounters with Ariadne, daughter of King Minos. Legend tells us that Ariadne helped Theseus defeat the Minotaur after she helped him get out of the labyrinth. But he abandoned her alone on the shore of the island of Naxos, where the god Bacchus found her.

‘Notice the extreme multiplicity of Bacchus, to an extent that surpasses the needs of the legend. Time left him behind and he became a stone that Al-Firsiwi carried on his back, crossing the rugged roads with him, in search of the courtyard of an abandoned mosque where he could bury him.

‘Had the mosaic artists continued to innovate their colourful stories, they would have made Bacchus meet Moulay Idriss and placed in his hands a bunch of the Bu Amr grapes renowned in the region.

‘Let’s move a little further down. This is the house of Hercules with a mosaic representing the labours of Hercules. As you can see, the tableau represents three different subjects. In the middle we see Ganymede kidnapped by Zeus in the form of an eagle and taken to Mount Olympus. Inside the squares we find the seasons in the shape of the upper part of a woman, and finally we see the labours of Hercules: Hercules strangling serpents as a child, Hercules taming the Cretan bull, Hercules hunting the Stymphalian birds with arrows, fighting the nine-headed hydra, defeating the queen of the Amazons, battling the Nemean lion, and Hercules picking golden apples from the garden of the Hesperides. There might be other labours in the mosaic that I have forgotten.

‘Look at the details carefully. You will see extraordinary feats and other extremely simple ones. I personally consider every human being a greater or lesser Hercules. Had I enjoyed a similar reputation, I would have appeared on a huge mosaic: Al-Firsiwi strangling the scaly forest serpents of Zarhoun, Al-Firsiwi bringing Diotima back from the underworld, Al-Firsiwi committing to memory a poem by Hölderlin at the night university in Frankfurt, Al-Firsiwi concluding a winning deal to rent the Hall of Oil at the Zawiya, Al-Firsiwi building the Zaytoun Hotel, Al-Firsiwi burying Bacchus, Al-Firsiwi changing into Antaeus and twisting Hercules’s arm before exiling him to Bu Mandara.

‘You laugh because you are drawing sharp boundaries between reality and legend. A mistake, a grievous mistake. Are you sure, sir, that you never did something miraculous? You don’t remember. Just like that, you don’t remember. As if it were possible to forget a heroic act you performed! You want us to joke? Let’s joke, sir. I can assure you, that sometimes shit itself is a miracle!

‘In the good old days, I made something akin to a contemporary mosaic with a Roman spirit. If you ever visit the ruins of the Zaytoun Hotel, you can see it in the lobby. There you will still find the scene of Abd al-Karim al-Khattabi on his white horse submitting to the French. Orpheus is with him, playing his lyre while the beasts of colonialism crouch at his feet. Then there is a scene of Al-Firsiwi senior carrying a gazelle from Mount Salfat on his shoulders and your humble servant fighting a snake from Ain Jaafar.

‘I am the only nation whose founder saw it as workshops and ruins during the same era.

‘In all the mosaics of the hotel, there are Roman tesserae that I took from bags in the storerooms, where they were piled up for decades without anyone aware of the scenes that were destroyed in the haphazard gathering at the hands of your blessed ancestors. No one is able to recognise them nowadays. In return, you will easily recognise the new style, characterised by a mocking cubism that cost me next to nothing. The work was done by a painter from Asila, called Abd al-Wahhab al-Andalusi. He used to drink in the hotel lobby and tessellated me and my great ancestors while he talked at length about his aversion to Andalusian mosaics, which were imprisoned by blind geometric squares and devoid of features and movement.

‘To return to our subject, the labours of Hercules are simply a metaphor for the unattainable that clings to the human. Since, as a professional guide, I am required to present you the information in complete neutrality, I will spare you my opinion about the possible and the impossible. We had a teacher at the night university who used to say, “The most widespread possibility in our lives is the impossible!” This is, however, just German philosophising that neither suits us nor for which are we suitable!

‘After the public fountain on your left, you will find the northern baths which I will let you visit on your own, the bath being the only place I can’t enter dead or alive!

‘What a bore having to repeat the same thing every day while trying to make it exciting and enjoyable, as though it were being said for the first time. If Bacchus, Orpheus and Hercules knew how much I talked about them and celebrated their life histories, they would make me king of their stupid tales.

‘Let them all go to hell, them and their northern baths, and all Romans as well. I will wait for my Myrmidons in this wasteland whose only shade is my own. I am the tree and the man resting in its shade. There is no hope of a breeze and no need for one. No one has died of the heat in these places. If they take too long visiting the baths, I will have to occupy myself by thinking about my tragedies. Then they might find me crying like a child whose mother has forgotten him in these ruins.