The Arch and the Butterfly

by Mohammed Achaari

  I took a long bath and then went down to the restaurant to find Layla waiting for me at a table for two. Saramago did not wish to leave his room. This must have pleased me, or my facial expression must have implied it, but Layla was sad. She might even have been crying before I arrived, but I did not know why. She soon regained her vitality and burst out talking. Her joyful outpouring of words and energetic rush of ideas and images projected happiness, as if she were dancing with her sentences.

  I said to her, ‘He doesn’t know what he’s missing by retreating into a tête-à-tête with his old man’s memory!’

  She laughed, but her laughter was like a cold blast blowing across our table. I contemplated her again in confusion and saw a frisson pass over her face. I looked down, and before I lifted my gaze, she said that a few years before, she and a friend had lived in the same apartment building as me in the Ibn Sina quarter. She said, ‘I used to see you every day and it made me furious that you never showed even the slightest interest in my humble self!’

  This was how dinner led to a strange intersection of two dormant memories.

  I did not remember having met a woman who looked like her in the building where I had lived. If I had seen her, it probably would have been on the stairs or in the courtyard. Then again, I might have met her in another life and lost her the way I had lost many other people. I might have loved her for a short or a long time but could no longer remember. I might have waited a whole lifetime for her, but she never came or came and did not find me.

  Now here she was before me in another life, and I had nothing to entertain her with but fanciful conversation about a desperate effort to build a vast edifice, a castle with a thousand doors and endless halls, rooms within rooms, a palace made of words and visions inhabited by our forgotten desires, our fears, our apprehension at returning to our small huts, where there was no possibility of contradiction between what was and what could have been.

  Layla said, ‘I may have been in love with you then. But you didn’t know, and I didn’t exactly know either. You gave off the impression of being very absent-minded, as if you were going up and down the stairs while walking on another planet.’

  ‘That’s if it actually was me going up and down the stairs.’

  She responded firmly, ‘I‘m sure of it. There was a dim light in your eyes, which is still there now. I can’t mistake it.’

  I remembered that during that particular time I was neither dimmed nor depressed. I was at the peak of my delusions and convinced that things responded to us if we wanted them to. From the lofty heights of the current moment, that time seemed lively, exuberant and eminently manageable. It also seemed to me that a being like Layla would exist in all times, and my relationship with her could take the form of a structure relegated to the past. Why not? Aren’t the relationships that we miss also real possibilities for a connection of a different kind? Isn’t every relationship one chance among others? It is not self-evident that we pick the best one. I put this to Layla, and she replied, ‘It isn’t self-evident that we’ll pick the worst, either.’

  ‘Ultimately,’ I said, ‘I’m pretty certain that every one of us, and not only Saramago’s Christ, has one divine biography and another one that springs from the tortuous paths of one’s life.’

  I continued, ‘I don’t understand why you’re so enamoured of a run-of-the-mill novel, beautiful but still run-of-the-mill.’ As soon as I finished the sentence, her face darkened. We spent a long time trying to extricate ourselves from this sudden dis­­agreement. Finally, after a few shaky attempts, she returned to her ebullient self.

  ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘We all know that from the moment Satan refused to bow to Adam, he’s been carrying out, as much as he can, his threat to tempt human beings at every pass, pushing them towards sin and perdition. Then suddenly, as we read this book, we discover another side to Satan, as if with time and as a result of all the tragedies he caused or that were committed behind his back, he has changed, adopting a kindly wisdom completely unrelated to the menace that caused him to fall from paradise.’

  ‘We wouldn’t have needed the novel to assert that!’

  ‘But the novel did create the exciting idea that prophets, in a kind of alignment of opposites, see themselves mirrored in devils. Because managing the affairs of humanity makes this alliance necessary in order to maintain the world’s wavering balance between good and evil.

  ‘According to the story, once Jesus was in his mother’s womb, the archangel appeared in the shape of a beggar and told Mary, “The child is manifest in his mother’s eyes as soon as she becomes pregnant with him.” From that moment on the archangel would accompany Christ until his death. He would accompany him as if he were his avatar, his other voice imbued with certainty and doubt, pleasure and guilt. More than that, Christ would submit to a kind of initiation at the hands of the archangel; years spent herding sheep, before he departed for his destiny.’

  ‘But you said,’ I told Layla, ‘that what mattered most for you in the novel was the style and not Christ’s earthly form, the writing of a new Gospel according to another Jesus.’

  ‘Yes. It is, after all, a personal matter. It seemed to me that this arrangement answered some of my questions, and that basic things in my personal life totally conformed to some of the images I picked up on in the book. This transformed it, in a somewhat exaggerated manner, into my personal gospel. For example, when I became pregnant with my daughter I felt a vast emptiness. This upset me and even tortured me, because I didn’t appreciate the feeling of emptiness when I was filled – concretely not figuratively. When I read in the novel that Mary had the same feelings when she was pregnant with Jesus, the author’s interpretation made me jump out of my seat. He claimed that the emptiness was in everything around her. I found that amazingly convincing.’

  Layla ate a large plate of tomatoes with white cheese, basil and olive oil. She then ate a plate of duck liver à la française. She ate with appetite and did not stop talking. I had slices of smoked salmon with onion and lemon and a thick piece of meat, without at any moment being able to tell them apart, because I lacked sufficient concentration. When we were ready to leave the restaurant, Layla’s face was flushed. She put her hands to her cheeks and said, ‘Look, I’m burning up!’

  I said without touching my cheeks, ‘Me too!’

  As we stepped out of the elevator, I was looking at her as if she were walking on the fourth-floor landing in Ibn Sina. I was still looking at her stimulating body with its slight dip to the right as she walked, when she turned and said, ‘It’s as if we were crossing the landing on our old floor.’

  I was about to tell her I was thinking exactly the same, when she added, ‘Maybe you were thinking the same thing.’

  At that moment I made my move, having lost all hope of keeping up with her. She was intensely and precisely present, and I was certain that her presence there and then could not be a passing coincidence, but was a powerful sign from destiny.

  I took in her allure without being overcome by what lay at its core, or even by the possibilities it promised. I could not at that moment determine where our nervous steps along the dark corridor would lead us, since we could not read our room numbers. Then I found myself carrying her, and yet not carrying her, proceeding along an endless corridor. I felt her arms around my neck like two cold branches. I sat her on the edge of the bed and cupped my hands around her face, watching her with her eyes closed but without receiving any inner message, as if I were touching a being from a distant past.

  ‘Kiss me, I beg you,’ she said.

  It was not her. She was not the one who had crossed the landing in my apartment building, and not the one I had carried and not carried. She was a girl from years past, whom I once found shivering on a rainy day under a bare willow tree, soaking wet and almost blue from cold and fear. I had not been able to follow what she was saying through her delirium, but I had understood that she had run there from the bus stop in a rainstorm and had no strength lef
t. ‘I stopped here under the tree because my whole body was soaked and my limbs were numb.’

  ‘But the tree’s totally bare. It’s also soaked through and its branches have gone stiff!’

  ‘I didn’t notice. Really, I didn’t. I was waiting to drop dead and I preferred that that happen to me while standing here, where my friend would find me when she came back!’

  I had spent a long time trying to dry her hair, her face and her limbs with little success. Still shivering, she had said, ‘I think I’d better take a hot bath and change my clothes.’

  I had helped her remove her wet clothes and get into the hot water. I had massaged her body, her whole body, from the top of her head to her pale, slender toes. My fingers had detected vitality creeping back into her from the first touch. I had gone along with her body’s repressed frenzy, as if my whole body had become a movement that pierced her pulse. I was doing what I was doing not because I had found her in such a state, but because I would have surely done it, whatever the circumstances, to fulfil a mysterious desire for it to happen with the gentleness with which it did, and as an expression of another possibility for our existence, different from the one derived from planned desires, a possibility accompanied by impossibility and oblivion.

  In one of the parts of Letters to My Beloved, I wrote:

  You were sitting on the edge of the bed when I touched you. I cupped your delicate face in my hands; I cannot remember if it was burning hot or cold and damp. I simply remember that it almost vanished between my big hands and only your lips pulsated in this picture as they said, ‘Kiss me, I beg you.’ I do not remember kissing you. I do not remember what happened between us that distant afternoon. I do not remember your face. I remember carrying you up the stairs of a building, or in a sparsely furnished apartment between the bed and the bathroom, and noticing that a painting on the wall was not straight, its deep blackness slashed by an impetuous yellow. I said, ‘I will come back later to straighten the painting. It looks wrong tilted like that, because the streak of light across it hits too hard.’

  You said, without being angry or sharp, ‘Je me fiche du tableau.’

  When did this happen? I no longer remember a thing. Did it happen in Ibn Sina or in a room in some hotel? I no longer remember if it was when we were going out, before that or years later. What happened when I carried you and set you on the edge of the bed, or when I set you down and carried you, and then carried you and did not carry you? Did I really put you in a warm bath and massage the toes of your small feet? Impossible! I could not have done it! But where have all these images that waver between certainty and illusion, between remembrance and visualisation, come from? How would I settle on one of these and find peace? How would I know that you never existed before this day, or that you were always here, in this dark corner of my memory? And why is it not you who speaks? Why do you not return, knowing, contrary to what I claimed, that I love you more than anything in the world? Did you really know? How would I know?

  I write to you full of sadness, because of the letter you sent me last year that I found in my desk and had not read. That was because I could not remember your name which was written on the back of the envelope, or the city from which you sent the letter. I slipped it between the pages of a book and forgot where I had put it. When I came across it months later and recognised its origin, I feared it would contain news that would make me die of sadness because I had not read it. So I threw it in the fireplace without regret, because I forgot what I did with it. Now I do remember it in a way I cannot fathom. I remember the whole story linked somehow with you standing wet under the bare willow tree! If you do read my letter today, I beg you to send me a sign, telling me that you do not bear a grudge against me for burning the letter.

  The morning after my dinner with Layla, I woke up exhausted and spent a long time in a haze looking for the day’s schedule. When I found it, I pulled myself together and went straight to the shower.

  As I was leaving the room I found an envelope slipped under the door. There was a blank sheet of paper in it. My heart beat hard and I understood that the matter was related to something I was expecting, but no longer knew what. When I saw Layla and her guest at the breakfast table, I wished to separate them as soon as possible in order to free her from this legendary companion. Layla was cheery and unruffled while our eminent guest had his face in a bowl of fruit, which he chewed with deliberation while his teary eyes scanned the faces and furniture in the restaurant, as if he were expecting to meet someone.

  I exchanged an intense look with Layla and felt an inner lucidity, the lucidity of a person not bothered by anything any more. I told myself as I submitted to the serenity that came from this lucidity that I might have reached the last station of my life, where I would put my suitcase down on the platform like any traveller, not knowing, out of extreme fatigue, whether I had arrived or was about to depart.

  At a certain moment in life a person gets detached from his path and becomes a scrap of paper hanging in the air. At that moment he rids himself of the pressures of the path and is able to join any adventure wholeheartedly, because he is not required to justify anything any more or to provide any conclusive evidence of anything. He has freed himself of the future, as if he had died a very long time ago. What he experiences now is nothing except what his immaculate corpse remembers of that shoreless future.

  Layla stood up suddenly and startled me. She apologised, saying, ‘Were you lost in thought?’

  ‘I was sitting on my suitcase on this vast platform.’

  We were on our way to the historical city of Walili when Layla announced that she hated ruins. I told her that ruins had a soul, contrary to buildings. But she stood her ground and claimed that the most beautiful ruins were those we saw around us every day in the form of fallen dreams.

  I told her, ‘But what you’re saying is only a poetic image. Ruins are ossified souls we extract from the bowels of the earth.’

  She replied sarcastically, ‘And what you’re saying now is an exact science and not a poetic image!’

  Saramago laughed for the first time since the start of our trip, which annoyed me. We spent the distance between Fes and Zarhun via Zakkutah each absorbed in our own world.

  I was thinking about my father, Al-Firsiwi, who, in the waning years of his life, was working as a blind guide among the ruins of Walili. How would I introduce him? How would he receive Layla, and how could I escape his raving if he decided once more to play his favourite game?

  Layla was in the back seat, talking about Jesus’s adventure in the boat during the storm on the waters. She seemed to be making an affected effort to separate holy genius from literary genius, insisting once more that the miraculous in its literary form had a realistic dimension that gave it an astonishing beauty which was absent from the religious version. It was probably due to the fact that religious faith was the basis for experiencing the miracle, an aspect that was not derived from the text. Layla, despite her insistence, did not succeed in pulling the writer out of his silence, which gave me the impression that she was talking to herself and that the writer had not come with us in the first place, but only his novel, for us to use as a pretext to weave a text according to our own narrative.

  I was thinking about the ruins that my father roamed every day, ruins that had nothing to do with the Romans but concerned him personally. I thought about how he endured the humiliation of this end. He would show off his fluent German, deliberately pronouncing every letter separately and stressing their tonal variations. He would introduce biting comments about the city that had led him to these ruins, in cruel revenge for his glory days. He would be in his rickety boat, facing storms he could not see that pulled him into a crushing tornado which he rowed towards with his voice.

  As we approached the city, Layla was narrating the scene of the boat caught in the divine presence, while Jesus rowed, as if this action still had meaning compared with the gravity of the encounter. Man remains bound to his body even when that bo
dy becomes meaningless, having just met God at the height of his loss and despair.

  This preoccupation with the novel had driven me to despair. I suddenly turned to the back seat and said, ‘Mr Saramago, would you like to know my humble opinion of your novel?’

  He replied immediately, ‘No, no, no. Not at all. Don’t bother yourself. I absolutely don’t want to know your opinion.’

  At that point I pulled myself together, took my mobile out of my jacket pocket and called Fatima. I told her that I was in my old ruins, in the house of Juba and Bacchus and others, amid the earthy scent that no longer welcomed me, part of the cloudy landscape of all those forgotten columns, arches, temples, olive presses and houses.

  She responded every now and then with ‘Oh’ and whenever she was about to start talking, I would interrupt her with something similar to my father’s delirium. ‘I will once again enter the palace of ruins,’ I told her. ‘Everyone in this world imagines he can rescue something under the ruins.’

  ‘I imagine that too. Do you want me to join you there?’ she asked.

  ‘No, no, I’ll be back this evening. If you want, we’ll start a new dig together!’

  ‘I’ll prepare the site,’ she replied.

  When I ended the call a heavy silence reigned in the car. The avenue of olive trees that led to Wadi Khumman welcomed us as it had invaders and transients, without emotion or any particular disposition.

  At the outhouse to the historical site, my father was saying goodbye to a mass of German tourists amidst roars of laughter and warm handshakes. As soon as we stepped out of the car, speaking in our soft voices, he came over, perceiving that we were a new group. When he got close to us he recited his favourite line from the Qur’an: ‘Do not think me senile, I do indeed scent the presence of Youssef.’