Idris Belmnebi does not know where to point to indicate the tragedy. The excess of options overwhelms you. Leaning on his motorcycle next to a fruit stand in Amizmiz, a town 56 kilometers south of Marrakech, he hesitates and points his finger towards the Atlas Mountains, the epicenter of the earthquake that shook all of Morocco on Friday night.
"There is a town that no longer exists, behind that hill, another in which almost a hundred people have died. If you follow that road there you will end up in an area with several destroyed towns, but the road is now blocked."
Idris talks about distant shocks from the quake as if he weren't standing just twenty meters from a destroyed building. In Amizmiz there are dozens of facades thrown up on the paved road that crosses the town. From time to time the sirens of ambulances and fire trucks sound as they pass by or return in the direction of Marrakech. Idris takes no notice of the destruction around him because he knows that it pales in comparison. "Mountain villages have been the most affected by the earthquake, stone houses have fallen on people and in other places the rocks of the walls have fallen and have destroyed entire villages."
Finally, Idris resolves: he gets on the motorcycle and asks us to follow him. He squeezes the clutch along a narrow white dirt road, which twists like a snake through the mountains, to the village of Tafgarte. And as soon as you arrive, you understand why the man did not have the nerve to notice the pile of broken buildings in Amizmiz. Because Tafgarte is no longer: it was. Three days ago, the place was a bucolic village of 120 humble stone and adobe houses. Since Friday night, it has been a mass of stones from which crooked iron or pieces of tattered clothing protrude.
Nothing remains. Everywhere there are stones and fallen walls, and fallen columns, and broken doors, and bent bicycles, and couches covered in dust, and more stones, as if the entire village had been blown away by a massive gas explosion. At the top of a wall that is miraculously standing, there is a solitary brown and maroon striped sofa, with no walls around it, presiding over the total destruction.
The earthquake that shook Morocco last Friday, the worst in its history, with more than 2,122 dead and 2,421 injured, has hit especially poor and rural areas of the African country. In Tafgarte, more than 80 people have died so far and they are looking for a dozen more. On the esplanades, between olive trees and dry bushes, there are dozens of families waiting on carpets who don't know what. Forty-eight hours after the quake, no one from the government has come to help them. Only a handful of civilian volunteers have brought up some food and blankets. Some neighbors wander around disoriented and a man with a blue cap who speaks broken English because he acted as a tourist guide when he was young repeats over and over again: “This is like Iraq! This is like Iraq. This destruction is like Iraq.” This is like Iraq. Nobody pays much attention to him.
Every turn down any broken alley in Tafgarte, rivers of stones and rubble, has the same soundtrack: the sobs of women and men mourning those who did not run far enough when the earth roared. Some wait next to the ruins of their house without moving. The disaster scene in rural areas also has a smell: it is hot and the stench of decomposing bodies begins to emanate from between the stones. At the end of a hillside, where there used to be dozens of houses and now only destruction, Mohamed moves away some stones with a vacant look. He is looking for his 76-year-old father, who was sleeping when the house fell on him. Mohamed wears a T-shirt with various models of colored sneakers and a worn-out cap with the words Fleur de Savane emblazoned in pink. He says that he has no hope of finding his father alive.
“The dust of the adobe drowns the few who survived under the stones. In this village there is no one alive under the stones.” Mohamed rectifies, clarifies and immediately regrets having clarified. There is a live cow left under the stones. She can be heard mooing, she says, although her moos are getting weaker and weaker. That same afternoon, a group of Spanish firefighters accompanied by four dogs trained to find survivors will confirm what Mohamed already knew: they found no signs of life under the rocks.
Sitting a few meters from Mohamed, three children wait with empty eyes in front of the ruins of their house. Next to him, someone has wrapped the few belongings they have been able to recover from the rubble with blankets. The youngest has a toy bus in his hands that he rolls briefly on his knees. In a kind of macabre joke, in front of them and lying on the surface of the sea of stones, the door of the house resists, wide open, as if welcoming the catastrophe.
The magnitude of the loss in a place like this, where everyone is family or has known each other forever, is expressed above all by solitary tears. Everyone has lost so many, that there is not always warmth for everyone. In an esplanade converted into an improvised cemetery there are more than thirty graves with fresh and disturbed earth. At one end, Abderahim Ait Elghounbaz prays in front of the graves of his seven-year-old daughter, his brother, his sister-in-law and his niece, who died during the earthquake. He is accompanied by several friends, who support him from a safe distance.
Loneliness is a little further away. At the other end of the esplanade, an old man leans desolately on a tombstone and weeps silently in front of two graves covered in dry brush. He takes a handkerchief out of his pocket, wipes away his tears, and starts crying again. When he realizes how lonely he is, another man approaches him and gives him a loving kiss on the forehead. The old man's name is Mohamed al Kabira and, he explains, he mourns the death of his wife and his mother, who were trapped when the ground thundered. There is no way to console him. Mohamed al Kabira has a nasty gash on his cheek and walks on a crutch. He accepts the condolences with a sad smile and limps away, without turning around.
The old woman Zahra ben Brik cries differently: as a vehicle of rage. She stands in front of this journalist, raises her orange hands from the henna and cries with the despair of the forgotten. Eighteen members of her family have died after their stone houses fell on them. Zahra wipes her eyes with her hands, but she surrenders again to a slow, high-pitched sob.
“No one has come to help us; I am old and I don't have the strength, a neighbor helps me remove stones one by one so that he can find my family and bury them. I have lost everything and I am alone, what is going to happen to me?
Complaints about the slowness of the authorities are repeated throughout almost the entire Atlas. Although the roads were already poor and difficult to access before the earthquake and now some have become impassable after the tremor, the feeling of apathy and inefficiency on the part of the Government is spreading, which not even in Marrakech has set up tents or shelters for Those who have lost their homes should not sleep outdoors. In rural areas, oblivion is thunderous. The consequence is a feeling of irrespirable oblivion in lost places of the Atlas.
But if almost everyone in Tafgarte cries, there are few tears more bitter than those of Brahim Mazahar. He doesn't even stop to respond, and while he speaks he continues removing stones with his hands. Again and again and again, without stopping for a moment. The facade of his house does not exist and there is an old truck buried by stones in front of the main door. Brahim has blood on the tips of his fingers and the dust from it whitens his arm up to the elbow. He also has deeper, more invisible wounds: guilt has been gnawing at him since Friday. He had just prayed with his wife and his daughter and they were preparing to have dinner together when they noticed a terrible tremor, as if the earth was roaring and writhing like an angry dragon. “I was wrong, I told them to wait inside the house because stones were raining outside and the house couldn't hold up. It fell on them. “He thought he protected them and now they are both dead.” Brahim says that he doesn't need anything, that he drinks water and eats yogurt and it's enough for him to have strength, but that the rest of the town needs everything: especially tents to shelter in because the rainy season is coming, but also mattresses, food or water... He insists that he doesn't need anything, just to find them so he can bury them.
