The Arch and the Butterfly

by Mohammed Achaari

  I shared those ideas with Bahia. In an effort to explain what was happening to me, I told her that parents who had penetrating emotional insight were not fooled by such tricks. Their hearts guided them to the truth and led them to reject false grief. But my wife lost her mind and organised a mourning ceremony, where she displayed all manner of hysterical behaviour, because, she argued, I was both denying Yacine’s death and making of him a future butcher. As far as I was concerned, I had come close to believing that behind this story was a certain miracle that might bring Yacine back into my life as a newborn. I then realised that if such a miracle occurred, it would hand him over to a destiny just as brutal as this one. I remembered once more the letter and found nothing to disprove it.

  One day I asked Bahia, ‘Why don’t we build a tomb for Yacine? It would be the best thing to bring us together.’

  She looked at me sternly and said, as she went on gathering objects from the bedroom, ‘Each one of us must build a tomb for the other, bury him alive, and pour all the earth of this world over him. Only that could unite us, do you understand?’

  I could have left the house for good, but I did not. If I had, the total and complete loss would never have happened.

  2

  Of all my friendships, I only kept up two – with Ahmad Majd and Ibrahim al-Khayati. I had a theory about this: at our age, we did not have the time or energy to make new friends. My friendship with them nevertheless proved to be problematic as they both treated me with a kind of paternalism that made them interfere in the tiniest details of my life. This was particularly so during the disturbance I went through, when I was convinced that the best way to get rid of a person you disliked was to replace him with someone else. But we really ought to do that with ourselves before doing it with others. At that stage, I had no illusions about my true losses. I came to realise that the real loss was not what had come to pass, but rather our feeling of helplessness at having failed to act. I had read – I no longer recalled where – that at birth we had unlimited possibilities for different lives, but by the time we died the only possibility left was the one that had come true. It was not so much that we had missed out on options – since they were not available to us at any time during our lives – but that we had tragically lost the possibility of being different to what we were.

  Ibrahim al-Khayati dreaded my fits and tried to stop me from driving by putting a driver at my disposal whenever I needed. He never understood that the attacks did not take me by surprise, but rather took hold of me gradually like a slow dimming. They began with something resembling depression, then I would lose the desire to do something specific, even if I were in dire need of it. I would be hungry without appetite for a definite dish; I would go to the Steamboat and not know what to order for my thirst; my innards would groan with an animal desire that I did not know how to satisfy. The situation was like going on strike against life for two or three days, after which I would awaken to a kind of existential burnout that gripped me in a new attack. I could prevent losing consciousness in the physical sense either by speaking or by moving my limbs.

  Early one summer morning during this delicate period, I walked along Al-Nasr Street, and then crossed the Experimental Gardens and Bourgogne Square, to attend a meeting of the party – one of those meetings that you secretly wished had been cancelled without your knowledge. I endured its atmosphere of despondence for half the day, and then decided to leave. This was not for any valid reason that I could have defended, not even because of Yacine, who had sprung from the loins of a pure socialist and died in the arms of the fundamentalists. I left because I could no longer bear the language used in those gatherings: the repetition of clichéd sentences that lacked any hint of imagination or witty sarcasm or sincere feelings – and even lacked good grammar. I felt crushed under the weight of the lifelessness being expressed, which exposed a different, and more dangerous, kind of death.

  I left the hall quickly and did not look back, until I found myself crossing the Experimental Gardens for a second time and exchanging subtle smiles with women and men who were killing time there on a Sunday in the temple of sport.

  The following day I went to the offices of a well-known independent newspaper and without much effort convinced the editor-in-chief to hire me. On my first day, I approached the job as I would territory that had surrendered, and immediately started writing my daily column, imagining with no little malice the splash it would make on the gossip exchange the next day.

  My wife paid no attention whatsoever to the stories that circulated about my presumed love affairs. She knew that I met many women in journalistic and artistic circles, but she also knew that, beyond the game of seduction and the pleasure of company, I did not understand much about women, and my chronic timidity did not help when it came to going further. Neither had we ever experienced the anxieties of jealousy and suspicion, or a tendency to control one another. My trips did not raise any questions for her, and the only time we had a quarrel over this issue had been years earlier in the car at the start of a holiday. We had been talking about Ahmad Majd and the story doing the rounds about his ex-wife and her relationship with a well-known architect in the capital. I had been expressing my disapproval at how public they were about the affair, when Bahia had lost her temper and begun defending the woman’s right to live as she pleased. I had asked if this meant that marital infidelity should also be considered a virtue.

  ‘Yes,’ my wife had said. ‘It’s the pinnacle of virtue because it leads to a moment of truth, while the pretence of faithfulness is nothing but a vulgar lie.’

  I had remained silent, knowing that she did not believe what she was saying but had said it only to provoke me, when she had added nervously, ‘Even vis-à-vis God, a person is purer while experiencing this moment of truth.’

  ‘Has this happened to you?’ I had asked.

  ‘Do you think I would tell you if it had?’ she had replied.

  We had spent the rest of the drive between Rabat and Agadir in a poisonous, destructive argument about who had done what, without gaining anything except a hollow, senseless jealousy that had nothing to do with us personally, yet which awakened feelings of outrage, affront and hatred. Meanwhile Yacine had been fussing in the back seat with his electronic games, shouting every now and then for us to tone it down.

  Once I became firm friends with Fatima Badri, however, Bahia began to pay attention to everything connected to the women in my life. She viewed with antagonism all my new clothes and books, the films I saw and the music I listened to, convinced that a woman, and most probably Fatima, had ushered me towards them.

  Bahia did not understand – from my explanations or of her own accord – that the falling away of my own sensation of things and the absence of any pleasure in what I consumed was what pushed me towards the unfamiliar in my life. The person I had been disliked Andalusian music, but since it was all the same whether I listened to that or jazz, I accepted what I had disliked before, seeking a modicum of pleasure to jolt me here and there. Perhaps I simply did not know what I wanted, which was also true of my romantic conquests, if we could call them such, which did not reflect a sudden flightiness or a delayed adolescence on my part. I was, despite myself, thrust into stories I did not help spin together, nor was I a real player at any stage of their development. It was as if the death of my senses had transformed me into a black hole that swallowed every particle of light that approached it. I was aware, every time this happened, that the total darkness controlling my inner self lent me this attraction. I therefore organised my affairs in a very strict manner to allow me to navigate within the limits of what I could see in this dark hubbub.

  When Fatima became a large part of my life, it was the culmination of an old acquaintance. I had known her distantly because of our shared profession and passion for the theatre. She had once directed one of my modest texts for the Casablanca Players. Our relationship changed on a scorching afternoon in a restaurant on the beach. On my way back from the restr
oom, I glimpsed the cook putting a giant crab into boiling water and saw the steam rising from the pot take on a pinkish tinge. I expected to be swamped by this putrid cloud. My body overreacted and I fainted. After I lost my sense of smell, I acquired an extraordinary capacity to imagine aromas, and even to be strongly and, at times, disproportionately affected by them. The unfortunate incident led me to share a delicious lunch with the woman – Fatima – for whom the crab was boiled. I watched Fatima struggle to use pincers and a scalpel to extract the pieces of white meat lodged beneath the carapace of the boiled creature, which she then devoured with gusto. The exertion quickened her breathing and made her chew in a way that sounded like staccato panting as she toyed with the long legs of the shellfish, sucking them with her eyes closed, holding the ends with her slender white fingers and hardly touching the horny pink shell.

  She asked if the smell would cause me to faint again, and I told her that I didn’t smell in the first place. My answer did not seem to surprise her, and she commented without interrupting her battle, ‘I also imagine scents. I can even smell them on TV and at the cinema.’

  I laughed, but she insisted that she was not joking.

  After that, I described to her in great detail the situation of a man who has lost his sense of smell. It was not, of course, to do with losing the memory of smell, because the scents we smell even once, starting with that of our mother and on to that of death, would never be forgotten. Taste remains, but requires more time for the tongue to register a substance and send a clear signal to the brain, which in turn deciphers the code and transmits a readable message to the sense of taste.

  I said to Fatima, ‘Do you know that this handicap has positive aspects? There are so many things that invade our nostrils without our permission and force us to retain stinky smells for ever!’

  I then confessed that the most annoying thing was not being able to recognise people from their smell. It was an unrivalled pleasure to first encounter the fragrance and then sense it was in motion, eating up its distance from me, then drawing closer or moving away, freely. It would offer me the encounter I had expected or one I had not expected; it had given me an exceptional opportunity to pack a whole woman with all her details into that wonderful moment. Sometimes it seemed to me that this inability was utter deprivation, so I would try to heighten other senses to overcome it. I would use my fingers alone, with the concentration of a mathematician, to recognise a body that did not invade my being with its scent. Less than a week after losing my sense of smell, I could distinguish scents by the colours and shapes I attributed to them. Tobacco had a brown, cylindrical scent and fish a rectangular yellow one, tea was a crimson-coloured square and coffee a blue semicircle.

  Fatima dipped her fingers into a bowl of lemon water and said, ‘Why don’t we sleep together this afternoon and see what happens after?’

  I was stunned into silence.

  ‘Listen,’ she added. ‘I don’t want us to tie ourselves down in a complicated affair. It’ll be sex only. We can have fun and then go our separate ways. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, I understand, but why me in particular?’

  ‘Because you won’t be able to smell the fish factory I’ve turned into after this meal!’

  But I did not have sex with Fatima. I had drinks at her place and we talked a lot. We read dozens of pages of haiku and a whole book about Scorpios. I then left the sad building where she lived, feeling good about the world.

  Fatima settled into many aspects of my life, as if she had entered it years earlier. She knew how to chat with me without expecting anything in return. She talked about the theatre, the press, and the man she was still waiting for on some quayside. She came to the house with invitations for concerts and exhibitions and tried to convince Bahia to join her. Whenever she was persuaded, they went off together and I would stay at home on the large black sofa, planning indifferently for a future that did not interest me.

  I would be unable to define the kind of relationship I had with Fatima. I only knew that it was essential. I knew this with a certain cold feeling, taking into account that she too had good reasons to consider me highly essential. I trusted her reasons, even if I could not pretend that the world would be out of kilter were she not around. I would simply feel that the machine was not running right. It would be like reading a message on the dashboard of a car telling me that my internal guidance system was amiss.

  Bahia and I never discussed Fatima, although she did sometimes glean information about her by asking seemingly innocent questions. Only once did Bahia follow a dead-end. It happened when Fatima went to the US and asked Bahia to send her the serialised Letters to My Beloved as they became available. Bahia did not say anything that betrayed her feelings, but I felt her frustration when I heard her, one morning while I was in the bathroom, send the requested fax, loudly enunciating the US hotel phone number to draw my attention.

  This was followed by total silence until I heard her read aloud: ‘I nearly drew your real face yesterday evening. Ever since I began drawing your face to reflect my feelings, I was never this moved. It was something like the pulse of an adolescent who sees his beloved suddenly appear on the balcony he has been watching. The situation lasted only a few seconds and I could not recapture it. I am unable, as you well know, to recall anything. All that remains in memory is the feeling of loss, but the content is swallowed by darkness. Nevertheless, the partial appearance of your face had an amazing effect on my whole being, and I almost remembered our first kiss and the sentence that preceded me to your lips. I do not know any more if I talked about love, or the heat or the dream. I do not know any more whether a single letter remained attached to my tongue. I remember it mixed with a full lip; whose lip was it? Mixed with burning breaths; who was kissing whom? Was it in a strange room? Yes, yes. It was in a hotel room you could not leave, while I was in the lobby waiting for you. I still am. But you had locked the door, placed a second pillow over your head, and switched off everything, including the fiery kiss that was followed by total darkness. I would like to tell you something, but I wish I knew what. Come out from behind this mute curtain, I am on the balcony where I have always been. If you were to pass by the garden now, I would simply stretch out my arm, which would lengthen and lift you higher and higher, until you rested, once more, between your lips and the sentence that precedes me.’

  Silence returned to the room. I poked my head outside the bathroom and looked at Bahia apprehensively. She was sitting down, holding the paper in both hands and smiling, the smile of someone who understands and does not understand at the same time. When she turned her head and saw me staring at her, she quickly folded the paper and said in an irritated tone, ‘What wonderful bullshit!’

  3

  Ibrahim al-Khayati became the cornerstone of my relation­ship with the world for different reasons. When I was a member of the party organisation, he was both close to us and distant at the same time. He financed our cultural magazine and helped run it without seeking some of the minor glories that went with the territory. He was not affected by the arrests of the 1970s, but remained our strongest supporter. Generally, there was nothing in the practical part of my life that did not include Ibrahim. I could almost say that I never took a decision that needed insight without Ibrahim being a key factor.

  It was natural, therefore, that he was the third person to read the letter on Yacine’s death, and then, as a lawyer, that he represent Bahia and me in the subsequent investigation into Al-Qaeda’s activities in Morocco. Since the letter had been delivered locally, it suggested that the group that had received the news was a local organisation. It also implied that Yacine had been in touch with this organisation before he left, and might even have been sent by that same organisation to Afghanistan. This clearly meant that other members of a sleeper cell were awaiting orders to depart or participate in attacks on home soil.

  When a Fes group was arrested following the assassination of a French tourist, it was believed that someone fro
m that group had brought the letter to my house. From the moment Ibrahim started providing me with information about Yacine’s direct links with flesh-and-blood terrorists – fellow citizens, not phantoms from Kandahar – I fell victim to destructive anxiety. I could not bear the idea that Yacine had joined Al-Qaeda while he was living with us, mad about electronic games, annoyed at our political discussions, always ready to poke fun at us and everything else. The possibility of that deception made me doubt everything. Ibrahim tried to make me stop believing that Yacine had deceived me, insisting that every one of us proceeds towards our fate unable to distinguish the things we use to deceive ourselves from those others use to deceive us.

  In the early years of our acquaintance, Ibrahim had been the thread that bound our group. He had served as a romantic go-between, capable of solving the most complex love-related problems, particularly since the great esteem he enjoyed among women made them confide their secrets and stories in him. He was not known to have had a special relationship with a woman, and it was rumoured that he was gay. This did not upset him, and he did not deny it. He would bring his friend Abdelhadi, an’aytah artist who sang at the Marsawi nightclub in Casablanca, to our soirées; both were welcomed with smiles that soon faded into a tolerant complicity that Ibrahim’s sparkling yet modest personality inspired. After a brilliant education in Rabat and Paris, Ibrahim had been able to set up a large law firm dealing in financial and corporate cases. He amassed a huge fortune that had allowed him to support a large number of painters, sculptors and actors.