Idris Belmnebi does not know where to point to indicate the tragedy. The excess of options confuses him. 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 struck on Friday night make all Morocco tremble.
"There is a village there that is no longer there, behind that hill, there is another one where almost a hundred people have died, if you follow that road from there you will end up in an area with several destroyed villages, but now the road is blocked”.
Idris speaks of the distant shocks of the earthquake, as if he were not standing upright just twenty meters from a destroyed building. In Amizmiz there are dozens of facades thrown up on the asphalted road that runs through the town. From time to time, the sirens of ambulances and fire engines sound, passing by or returning in the direction of Marrakesh. Idris doesn't notice the destruction around him, because he knows it's little compared to other places. "The villages in the mountains have been the most affected by the earthquake, the stone houses have fallen on the people and in other places the rocks from the walls have come off and have razed entire villages."
Finally, Idris makes up his mind: he gets on his motorcycle and asks us to follow him. I press the clutch along a narrow white dirt road, which snakes like a snake through the mountains, to the town of Tafgarte. And as soon as he gets there, one understands why the man didn't have the firmness to focus on the pile of broken buildings in Amizmiz. Because Tafgarte is no more: he was. Three days ago, the place was a bucolic village of 120 humble stone and adobe houses, since Friday night it is a jumble of stones from which crooked irons or tattered pieces of clothing stick out.
There is nothing left. Everywhere there are stones and fallen walls and fallen columns and broken doors and bent bicycles and sofas full of dust and more stones, as if the whole town had been blown away by a huge gas explosion. Atop a wall that miraculously holds up, there is a lone brown-and-garnet-striped sofa, with no walls around it, presiding over total destruction.
The earthquake that rocked Morocco on Friday, the worst in its history with more than 2,122 dead and 2,421 injured, has particularly affected humble 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 they don't know what. Forty-eight hours after the earthquake, 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 walk around disorientated and a man in a blue cap who speaks English poorly because he was a tourist guide when he was young repeats over and over: “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 through any broken alley in Tafgarte, rivers of stone and rubble, has the same soundtrack: the sobs of women and men weeping who didn't run fast enough when the earth roared. Some wait next to the ruins of their house without moving. The disaster scene in rural areas also smells: it's hot and the stench of decomposing bodies begins to emanate from the stones. At the end of a slope, where there used to be dozens of houses and now only ruins, Mohamed moves some stones with a lost 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 several models of colorful sneakers and a worn cap with the words Fleur de Savane emblazoned in pink. He says he has no hope of finding his father alive.
"The adobe dust suffocates the few who survived under the stones. There is no one left alive in this town, under the stones." Mohamed rectifies, nuances and immediately regrets having nuanced. A cow remains alive under the stones. He can hear her mooing, he says, although the mooing is 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 find no signs of life under the rocks.
Sitting a few meters from Mohamed, three children wait with empty eyes in front of the rubble of their home. Next to him, someone has wrapped the few utensils they were able to recover with blankets. The youngest has a toy bus in his hands which he briefly rolls on his knees. Like a kind of macabre joke, in front of him 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 shown above all by the lonely tears. They have all lost so many, that there is not always warmth for everyone. In an esplanade turned into a makeshift cemetery, there are more than thirty graves with the earth fresh and removed. At one end, Abderahim Ait Elghounbaz prays at the graves of his seven-year-old daughter and his brother, sister-in-law and niece, who died in the earthquake. With him, there are several friends, who accompany him from a prudent distance.
Solitude is a little further. At the other end of the esplanade, an old man leans despondently on a tombstone and weeps in silence in front of two graves covered with dry rubbish. He takes a handkerchief from his pocket, wipes his tears and starts crying again. When he realizes how lonely he is, another man approaches him and kisses him affectionately on the forehead. The old man's name is Mohamed Al Kabira and, he explains, he mourns the death of his wife and mother, who were trapped when the earth thundered. There is no way to comfort him. Mohamed Al Kabira has an ugly wound on his cheek and walks with the help of a crutch. He accepts the condolence with a sad smile and limps away without turning around.
Elderly Zahra Ben Brik cries differently: as a vehicle for rage. He stands in front of the reporter, raises his henna-orange hands and cries with the despair of the forgotten. Eighteen members of his family have died after their stone houses fell on them. Zahra wipes her eyes with her hands, but gives in again to a slow, high-pitched sob.
"No one has come to help us, I'm old and I don't have the strength, a neighbor helps me remove stones one by one so that I can find my family and be able to bury him. I've lost everything and I'm alone, what will become of me?".
Complaints about the slowness of the authorities are repeated almost throughout the Atlas. Although the roads were already poor and difficult to access before the earthquake and now some have become impassable after the earthquake, there is a widespread feeling of laziness and inefficiency on the part of the Government, which has not even erected tents in Marrakesh or shelters so that those who have lost their homes do not have to sleep in the open. In rural areas, the oblivion is deafening. The consequence is a sense of breathless oblivion in lost places of the Atlas.
But if in Tafgarte almost everyone cries, there are few tears more bitter than those of Brahim Mazahar. He doesn't even stop to answer, and as he speaks, he's still picking up 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 the stones in front of the front door. Brahim has blood on his fingertips and dust whitens his arm up to the elbow. He also has deeper, invisible wounds: he has been consumed by guilt since Friday. He had just prayed together with his wife and daughter and they were about to have dinner together when they felt a terrible shaking, as if the earth roared and twisted like an enraged dragon. "I was wrong, I told them to wait inside the house because it was raining stones outside and the house didn't hold up. It fell on top of them. I thought I was protecting them and now they're both dead." Brahim says he doesn't need anything, he drinks water and eats yogurt and has enough to have strength, but the rest of the village needs everything: especially tents for shelter, because the rainy season is about to arrive , but also mattresses, food or water... He insists that he doesn't need anything, just to find them so he can bury them.
