The Arch and the Butterfly
Page 1
Whatever does not belong to me wholly and eternally
Means nothing to me.
Hölderlin
Contents
The Dilemma According to Al-Firsiwi
1
2
3
4
The Cornerstone of the Sacred Mausoleum
1
2
Dreamers and Others
1
2
3
Life’s Small Miracles
1
2
3
4
We’re Pieces of an Eternal Mosaic
1
2
The Book of Elegies
1
2
3
4
The Ravens
1
2
3
4
The Butterfly
1
2
3
4
5
A Note on the Author
A Note on the Translator
The Dilemma According to Al-Firsiwi
1
As soon as I read the letter, its single line written in a nervous hand, a cold shiver ran through me. I shrank into myself so far that I did not know how to stop the shock overwhelming me. When, after a gargantuan effort, I finally regained control of myself, I found nothing. I had become a different person, stepping for the first time into a wasteland. In this desolate new place, I began assimilating things without sensation, finding them all alike. I felt no trace of pain or pleasure or beauty. My only desire was to make my inner self react. My only weakness was that I could not make it do so.
I had been getting ready to leave the house when I had found the letter that someone had slipped under the door. It contained the following message: ‘Rejoice, Abu Yacine. God has honoured you with your son’s martyrdom.’ Then the phone rang and I heard the voice of a man with a northern Moroccan accent. He repeated the same cold sentence, accompanied by ready-made phrases of condolence.
I placed the letter on the table, only to watch my wife lift it to her face and read and reread it, losing her balance, like an animal being slaughtered, before giving a shattering cry and falling to the floor.
My only son, who had been doing so brilliantly at one of France’s most prestigious engineering schools, had chosen to go to Afghanistan and join the ranks of the mujahideen until the day he would meet God. He had met Him soon after arriving, in unexplained circumstances, before he had turned twenty.
I carried my wife, dragging myself with her, to our bed. At no point during those moments did I feel any piercing pain from the tragedy. I knew it had happened, but it did not touch me. I observed it spreading slowly before me like an oil slick. I watched my wife’s collapse as if it were merely something physical, until I understood that she had embraced the boundless tragedy. It was as if she were taking her revenge for our long years of emotional austerity.
I sat staring at my fingers, toying with the letter, and looked every now and then at Yacine’s photograph that hung in the living room. I saw his childish, innocent, delicate, cruel, sweet face. Scenes from his short life passed before me, starting with the day my wife, getting out of bed and lifting up her hair, announced that after the long, gentle intercourse of the previous night, she was sure an egg had been fertilised. Then Yacine crying in the doctor’s hands. All the growing up that followed, and the fears, joys and anxieties experienced along the way. The ferocious quarrels over his clothes, his eating habits, his education, his games and his comings and goings. The moment at the railway station when he took the train to the airport and then to Paris and then to darkness. His first and last letter, in which he wrote: ‘My studies are much easier than I expected, and the city is much harsher than I expected. I believe I’m living my first love story, a little later than the average for us Al-Firsiwis. I’m not sure I’m the best son, and I’m not sure you’re the best parents, either. Don’t send money till I ask. From this distance I could almost say I love you. I am, however, apprehensive.’
I listened for hours as a senior police officer questioned my wife and me about the letter and the phone call. We answered, with mindless incomprehension, questions related to Yacine’s friends, his habits, his books, his music, his films, his sports club and his favourite mosque. We felt as if we were reconstructing an entire life to be presented as a stiff corpse to the officer, who could think of nothing better than to ask me, ‘Do you approve of the way he died? Sorry, I mean, did you sympathise with his cause? Sorry, sorry, you didn’t know. Neither of you knew anything. Are you upset about what’s happened?’
I said, sincerely, ‘No, I’m not upset.’
From the moment I received the news, I was filled with a fury that made it impossible for me to grieve and feel pain. Had I had the opportunity to meet Yacine at that moment, I would have killed him. How could he do such a vile, cruel, contemptuous, humiliating thing to me? How could he push me over the precipice on whose edge I had stood all my life? When did the poisoned seed take root? Before he was born or after? When he was a small child or as a teenager? Did he play with hands dripping with blood that we did not see? Had we spent our lives walking behind a funeral bier?
My life seemed like an appalling mistake. It would have been impossible for all this to happen unless I had spent all those years going in the wrong direction. In the weeks following, this conviction made me think daily about decisions that would correct some of that overarching mistake. Whenever I sensed this was impossible, I was overcome by a strange feeling that my body had departed and I remained suspended between an absent person and another who observed him curiously, and I was undecided which of the two to choose.
*
What happened to me after Yacine’s death was very much like losing one’s voice. I was unable to convey anything to others, be it an idea, a comment or a joke. I sometimes answered questions I was asked, all the while wondering what another person would have answered had those questions been put to him. I was totally incapable of conveying anything related to feelings, simply because I could not feel anything any more.
Like the light fading into the darkness of night, that same condition gradually progressed from the realm of feelings and emotions into the material world. I completely lost my sense of smell. Losing my sense of smell was not the result of poor health or progressive deterioration. It struck suddenly, without forewarning. Normally on my way to the office, I could recognise people’s features and their histories just from the way they smelled. But soon after Yacine’s death, as I was passing by the Experimental Gardens, I noticed that my system for picking people out had not been working since I had left Bourgogne Square. I felt that a cold, solid mass had inserted itself between the world and me.
I spent the rest of the day doing things that would prove this loss to be fleeting. I drank every kind of hot and cold drink served in Rabat’s bars. I devoured dozens of dishes. I drenched myself from every bottle of perfume at hand. I drew close to every creature I met on the way, hoping to find in their wake vestiges of fragrance or a stray scent. I sat for hours in my favourite bar, the Steamboat. I left it, exhausted and oppressed, to take what remained of the night back to the home whose covert violence I had endured for a quarter of a century. I stopped by the wall on the railway bridge and spent ages staring at the metallic sheen of the tracks, indifferent as to whether another train would pass. Then I emptied my stomach in one go and felt that I had also vomited out the man I had been until that day.
Yet all that complex chemistry had no smell.
From then on I stopped listening to music and watching films, and rarely went to exhibitions or museums. I had to
attend receptions as part of my work, and I would spend a long time listening to people’s chatter while trying to remember the taste of the wine I had had a passion for in my youth. I could only locate it in my imagination, something distinct from the liquids I was drinking, which I could differentiate merely by their colour or temperature.
During this time of my life, having already turned fifty, I also became convinced that there was a woman I had known and somehow lost. I made a huge effort to remember her, but to no avail. I could only recollect that something intense had brought us together, that I had made exhaustive efforts to win her over, and that I had endured many disappointments as a result. In particular, I remembered that I had never stopped chasing her. I did not recall the details, only my ensuing state of mind. I grew obsessed with picturing her face and finding a way to reach her. The more I tried and failed, the more obsessed I became with her, although this had no impact on my emotions, as if I were being impelled by a clockwork mechanism separate from my existence.
I believe that this searching endowed me with a mysterious charm that I interpreted as the energy of a mind seeking a woman who has slipped away. I acquired an extraordinary ability to seduce women without, however, experiencing any particular pleasure in doing so. As soon as I had exchanged a couple of words with a woman, I would feel I had become hostage to a love story that I had absolutely nothing to do with, and from which I would have to try very hard to extricate myself later on. Almost invariably, that meant leaving some of my scalp behind. I took no pride nor found any satisfaction in any of this. I thought long and hard about the matter, and devised a solid plan to avoid falling into traps of this kind. Deep inside, I was amused by this absurd situation that made me lose all restraint, after having spent a chaste quarter of a century with the same woman– my wife, Bahia Mahdi, who I had met one winter morning in the 1970s, married the same evening, and realised before midnight that I had made a fatal, and irreversible, mistake.
Before I lost my sense of smell, I could tell important details about the life of every woman I met based solely on the mix of scents I picked up. I could pinpoint her ambivalences, and their gradations. I would, for example, know roughly her age and the colour of her skin, the cosmetics she used, and the kind of hair she had. I could intuit the last dishes she had cooked. Sometimes I would know that a woman had just had sex, and whether she was very, or not at all, satisfied. All of this without seeing her.
My new situation compelled me to use my hands to become acquainted with these details. This required inordinate finesse and effort to avoid the rudeness and roughness of touch, and was not without mishap.
It goes without saying that this natural inclination to become acquainted through smell was not purely technical, but emotional as well. The drive behind this skill was a kind of abstract passion whose substance was nameless and featureless. It was a feeling similar to a passion for mathematics: something impalpable that traverses remote regions of an intense mind, where intelligence alone decides what must or must not be true. My sex life, with all that this expression implies in terms of adventure and upheaval, had been very poor; in my few prior experiences, the woman’s move from fantasy to the bedroom had been irreversible and tragic. I should point out that this displacement did not happen when I married Bahia. Rather, Bahia and I took up permanent residence in a state of incomprehension, which, no matter how hard I tried, I could never move away from.
When I first lost the sense of pleasure, I fought it by displaying an ability for pure, refined technique, and my accomplishments became an expression of pleasure that I did not truly experience. I became mad about cooking, acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of wines, and completed one of the most important artistic studies of Roman sculpture. I wrote Letters to My Beloved, a collection of reflections on love and despair related to the woman I had lost and whose love I recalled without being able to recall her. The reflections appeared serially in the newspaper where I worked, before being published in a book that one critic considered the most important work on love since al-Hazm’s eleventh-century The Ring of the Dove.
In all those achievements I attained the intended result – the total illusion that I could feel the tiniest and most complex pleasures, those connected in their essence with aesthetic perception, not only of actual forms of beauty, but also of all that came before. I grew convinced that what mattered most regarding pleasure was capturing the details of its formation, or, to be precise, making it eternal on an infinite trajectory. For example, the most important aspect in the appreciation of any wine is not the sensory experience of the seasoned taster, but the complex chemistry that contributed to that result. The pleasure lies in the sun and rain, in the bounty of the earth, then in the fruit and, finally, in the magical liquid derived from it.
Once I reached this conviction, I became more amenable to life and more copiously productive. I wrote a daily column, published a literary work in parts, and penned features and investigative pieces every month. I wrote an art review every week for a specialist journal. I had begun a new life, which had nothing to do with the drab years I had spent writing boring reviews of the free books mailed to me daily. This new life was a real renaissance that helped me return to my true self, pay attention to my wellbeing, reconnect with my old friends and put a minimum of order and rigour into my professional and private lives. The transformation confused my wife, who was unsure of how to react to the sudden changes. She considered my talk about the loss of my ability to enjoy life nothing more than a mask, behind which I hid my shame at seeking pleasure despite all that had happened to us.
I told my friends that I did not like anything at all, and I almost told them that I did not like anyone, either. I do not remember when all this began, and I cannot tell if it happened to me all at once or in timid steps, until that ill-fated moment when it reached its peak. I only remember the feeling that stayed with me for a long time as a result of what happened: no one owes anyone anything. In this world, no matter how strong and intimate your relationships, you face your fate alone, isolated, and with an instinctive inclination towards depression and self-pity. No one ever achieves happiness because of others, no matter how close and dear they are. Any moment of happiness, intense or tenuous, can only be achieved internally.
I resigned myself to accepting what befell me as a kind of incomplete death. Whenever I remembered myself in a state of enjoyment, fondness, savouring or admiration, it was as if I were recalling someone who had passed away, and I had to accept whatever was left of me before joining him. Only then would we become the way we had been, one person, with the hands of our clocks resuming their normal rotation. For that reason I did not resist or seek treatment, but organised myself according to the expectations of a man who loved life, and I set the rudder of this confiscated existence without dictating conditions on anyone.
*
I had lived a relatively quiet life until then. Though I had a complex relationship with my father, my mother had died tragically, and had spent several years in Qenitra’s central prison without knowing why, I felt my life consisted of connected parts leading painlessly from one to the other.
I had first joined an extreme leftist group while living in Frankfurt, Germany, which led me to a Moroccan leftist group that had split from the Communist Party. I rapidly grew tired of the effort required of me to adopt extreme positions, so I joined a moderate leftist party. But an old comrade had kept my name in his diary, which led to my arrest, followed by a trial not a single word of which I understood, and finally to a prison sentence that consumed three years of my life for nothing.
While most of my friends at university threw themselves into amazing love stories, I simply ended a terse conversation one day with a colleague with the question: ‘Could you possibly marry me?’
Clearly nervous, she had replied, ‘Why not? As long as you’re asking without even smiling!’
I discovered the morning after the wedding that I was in total harmony with Bahia, as if we we
re two identical beings or two machines running on the same programme. We loved, with identical degrees of intensity, the same foods and drinks, and the same music, films, paintings and cities. We had similar inclinations in our sexual desires, and in meeting them, down to the tiniest detail. All this existed in a sort of complete technical harmony, where there was no room for dysfunction or emotional confusion, apprehension or surprise. A harmony that began and ended with movements determined from time immemorial. All that was left in the end were the invisible ashes of momentary flames, volcanic ashes from ancient times, cold and petrified, only awakened from their timeless slumber by our slow breathing.
I was taken aback by this disturbing compatibility, and even more despairingly so by the absolute certainty that I would never love her. The moment I reached this certainty, our relationship settled into a permanent state of tension. Bahia considered me to be satisfied with the minimum in everything. This upset her and put her in a bad mood most of the time. I, on the other hand, saw her as a regrettable mistake that continually jabbed me and made me feel like I had lost out.
Yacine’s death accelerated the collapse in our relationship, with all the rage, fights, murderous thoughts and feelings of guilt this entailed. Bahia felt I had not grieved at all for our tragic loss. That was not true: I knew exactly what Yacine’s death meant in the context of events related to the Taliban. I imagined him awash in his own blood, lying somewhere after a raid or clash and waiting for someone to pick him up off the dusty road. I wondered whether he thought of me before he died and if he remained determined to go all the way, or if he experienced last-minute regret and thus spoiled the glory of martyrdom. I was unable to picture him even for a second under the ground or revelling in the shade of Paradise. Yet I did not fall victim to unbearable grief, and one day I even surprised myself with a deep conviction that Yacine was still alive. Nothing provided incontrovertible proof that news of his death had come from Afghanistan. The letter had been written in Morocco and the call could have come from anywhere. I imagined that the story was only intended as camouflage and that Yacine would show up later to carry out terrorist operations here, free of the stigma of his previous identity.