The Arch and the Butterfly

by Mohammed Achaari

  One morning I sat at my desk and became aware, even before thinking about the matter, that I wouldn’t be able to write another letter to the woman I had loved and forgotten, even though I hadn’t forgotten I was still in love with her. Nearly every love story encompasses an expansion in time, for many are the lovers who tell each other: ‘I loved you before I loved you’ or ‘I loved you ever since I was no more than an idea in the universe’ or ‘I love you outside the time that brings us together’ or ‘I love you at a time that does not belong to us any more’ or ‘I will love you for ever’. And many other words that lovers use to give their overflowing love an impossible infinity.

  The story of the lover who loses his memory and is unable to find his beloved in a defined form is, to some extent, the story of our relationship with everything we build in our lives and one that we confuse with our delusions and doubts. Over time we are unable to confirm which are the material and concrete aspects of this construction and which are nothing but defeated dreams. We wonder what is truly fulfilled in this blend. What is it that we call our life? Is it the things that were or those that could have been?

  As I asked those questions, some confusion developed between me and the personality I had invented. I had the impression that what I had endured for years while writing those letters was a loss of memory. I had considered the letters emotional compensation or a presentiment of the memory loss that I would later succumb to. Perhaps in some fashion I projected on to Layla when I met her and found in my relationship with her a sort of substitution between what was and what never existed. But in my relationship with her, paradoxically, it was she who anchored me forcefully in the present. She surrounded me with a wall of reality that made me recover all at once important details in my relationship with people and places, not as a form of recollection, but as multiple and real possibilities.

  Fatima was the first person to celebrate the end of my letter writing. She told me it was grounds for optimism and considered it an announcement that a new life would begin. She asked about Layla, and I told her that we lived totally connected but at a distance. Layla herself showed no interest in my stopping, just as she had shown no interest in the writing. She had her own theory about the matter, as she believed I was wasting real talent in writing unreal texts. She would tell me that if she had a similar talent, she would write immortal literary texts rather than wasting it writing essays that died the moment they were born.

  While I gradually restored some of my forgotten desires and got used to a simple life, without giving in to the bitterness all around, Ibrahim al-Khayati was fighting heated battles in the jungle that was Casablanca. He was drowning us with him in cases that did not impinge on us, and Ahmad Majd found in them fertile material for his mockery. He called this period the time of biological struggle, because of its close connection with most people’s sexual lives.

  I used to spend some of my weekends in Marrakech with Layla, until she told me during one of our return trips that she would never go back with me to that city. I tried to convince her that the big house, Ghaliya, Ahmad Majd, and even Bahia and her daughter, were all a major part of my life and people I relied on as a harbour where I could find peace from life’s storms. But she said that she hated the city precisely because of its role as a harbour, and that she would end up hating me if the disgusting place continued to control my life. She explained that she hadn’t severed her ties with many things in life in order to throw herself into a combination of the remnants of a remote past and a present detached from its surroundings. I told her Marrakech was only a city, not a legend or a lie, just a place that made it possible to choose various paths that no one controlled. She said that she did not want a city that required all those linguistic tricks to define it.

  She then settled the problem by saying, ‘Do you know what it means to impose on me a city I hate? You’re inviting me to hate you!’

  As she was talking I saw her face ablaze, not in anger or out of stubbornness, but simply in mortal perplexity, akin to the expression of a person lost in a maze. I hugged her with all my force and said, ‘To hell with Marrakech and pleasure. I’ll go there by myself every now and then just to watch its hidden disintegration. You’re right, it’s a city unfit for our story. It’s nothing but heavy ornamentation and accumulated layers of paint. As for us, we are living a white story, like a Japanese garden devoid of plants and colours, studded only with bits of rock, and millions of pure pulses dancing in its darkness.’

  I knew she was the woman of my life. When a woman can make a city drop from your life like a dead leaf, it means that she has built countless cities inside you. I almost told her that, but the emptiness haunting me returned and nipped the blossom in the bud.

  I accompanied Ibrahim al-Khayati to Zarhoun to help him gather information for the gay marriage case he was handling in the village of Sidi Ali. On the way I rang my father and apologised to him for what I had said in my previous phone call. He was calm at first and then burst into tears. I was annoyed that he was so upset by our disagreement. I repeated my apologies and told him I regretted every word I had said. But he went on crying, and I thought he had been hit by a new bout of depression, one of those that had become part of his life ever since he lost his eyesight. I began joking with him, putting on a show of meaningless levity, until he stopped me with a bald statement: ‘The hotel mosaics have been stolen.’

  I told him I would come immediately and ended the conversation.

  Al-Firsiwi was standing in the hotel lobby, in the middle of the ruin left behind by time and thieves. For the first time in years I was moved, and I felt injustice, anger, bitterness and love, all at once, for this blind man struggling alone against a tragic stubbornness that was intent on breaking him every time he raised his head. Al-Firsiwi told me that he knew the thief, it could not be anyone else. Ever since the man had come to the area, he had wanted nothing more than to acquire what was left of the Roman heritage.

  Ibrahim al-Khayati said, ‘But this is not Roman heritage, it’s private property!’

  My father took me by the arm and led me to the old lobby, where he asked, ‘Who is this man?’

  ‘An old friend. Ibrahim, you know him.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk to someone of Ahmad Majd’s sort, or others like him,’ he said.

  ‘He’s not like him.’

  ‘All right. He must understand that the thief knows that the hotel mosaics contain Roman pieces. Even the most novice expert would know how to pick them out of a pile of new tesserae!’

  ‘But why do you insist on saying that this man is the thief?’ I asked.

  ‘I know because he would benefit from the destruction of the hotel and putting pressure on me to sell. He was the one who stole the lanterns from the site storehouse two years ago. He also stole the gold ring the British found a year ago.’

  ‘Forget about those things,’ I said. ‘You must calm down and think what should be done about it. Plus, there are very few stolen pieces compared to what’s left.’

  We talked with Ibrahim, who advised us to report the crime without saying who we thought had done it, rather than accusing a man in authority without any damning evidence. He advised against saying that the mosaics contained authentic Roman pieces, because that would mean that the only recognised and self-confessed thief would be Al-Firsiwi. We all agreed on the matter and went to the city centre to eat grilled kofta, for which the city was renowned in the East and the West, although Al-Firsiwi insisted that its only distinguishing features were the dirt and the flies.

  Ibrahim and I then left for the village of Sidi Ali. Ibrahim was representing several men who had been arrested during the town’s annual festival held around the tomb of Sidi Ali, a grandson of Al-Hadi Benissa, one of Morocco’s famous Sufis. According to legend, a woman named Aisha was brought from the East by Sidi Ahmad al-Daghughi, a pupil and a disciple of Sidi Ali, for his sheikh to marry and thereby to put an end to his prolonged celibacy. But the marriage did not happen.
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  I wondered about the mysterious chemistry that made contradictory things arise from the same source. The Sidi Ali festivities drew large numbers of homosexuals, fortune-tellers and worshippers. In the same location and out of the same spiritual feelings, the supplications of the worshippers encountered the throng of agitated bodies. Why did Sidi Ali never marry and why did queers gather around his tomb? No one knew.

  The alleged gay marriages and arrests had made a scandal in the press. But when we arrived at the village, we could not find anyone who had attended any of the weddings. We could not even get an exact description of events organised for the festival. Visitors behaved according to their own norms, people said. Some of them adhered to the order of the Hamadchas and shared their famous mystical possession. Others watched the blood ritual, when some of the possessed broke clay water jugs over their shaved heads, or beat sharp hammers on their heads as they swayed to the Hamdouchi beat. Some cared for their deep wounds by passing a piece of bread over them, while others slaughtered a goat in the throng around Aisha’s grave, or hung a piece of clothing on her holy tree, believing she could help them find a spouse. Some people spent long hours waiting in front of the booths of the fortune-tellers.

  The inhabitants of the village gave thanks to God and called for God’s mercy on the holy Wali, grateful for all the additional income they got from the slaughtered animals, the stall and room rentals during the festival and other business. No one asked questions in this mountainous village that stood peacefully under the shade of olive and carob trees. No one interfered in what did not concern him and no one could tell exactly what would happen behind closed doors at nightfall, when the Hamdouchi whirling settled into its entrancing monotony. No one knew who would marry whom and who would sleep with whom. No one knew and no one wanted to know. If such things happened, they happened with the knowledge of authorities. If homosexuals attended the festival, no one knew them or disavowed them: they melted into the hubbub of the festivities. Perhaps only the secret police knew, and maybe some of the phoney therapists who confused Freud with the miracles of Sidi Ahmad al-Daghughi, or journalists whose imaginations were fired by lurid stories.

  The people said forgetfulness had enfolded them for cen­­turies. They had endured wars and famines, given birth to scholars, leaders and walis, but no one had been interested in them, published their news, or made a comment. Anyway, who were these gays? Was even one of them from Sidi Ali or nearby villages? Of course not! They did not know the face or name of anyone like that. If there really were any, they must have come on the heels of sustainable development. They came to make the region prosper and encourage cultural tourism. Had they come that year for the first time? Was it conceivable that such a defined ritual could spring up overnight? In that case, Aisha’s site with its almost dried-up spring, its mud, its tree and its slaughtered animals would all have been improvised that year as well. That also went for the male and female fortune-tellers who were visited by the wealthy grandees of Casablanca, Rabat, Fes, Meknes, Marrakech, Tangier and the Gulf countries. The residents told Youssef and Ibrahim that they were being lied to and that everything that went on in the village, especially during its festival, was with the knowledge of the authorities.

  When we left the village on our way to Meknes, Ibrahim al-Khayati wondered whether the commotion hadn’t been created by a specific group to serve a specific purpose.

  ‘What should I say to defend the young men who have appointed me?’ he asked.

  ‘Say what some newspapers have said: it’s their sex lives and they’re free to do as they please!’ I said.

  He did not reply.

  I was saddened by what had happened to my father at the hotel and by his condition in general. I remembered his rigour, his sharpness and his bright mind too. I compared all that to his present frailty and his bewilderment as he felt his personal world crumbling under his feet. I said to myself that I might be able to forgive him one day, and if that happened I did not want it to be due to his physical collapse and the end of his power, as demonstrated in his lost eyesight. We are all defeated by death, but nothing is worse than to be defeated by life.

  My mother struggled with my father and loved him at the same time. It seemed she wanted to put a raging camel inside a bottle. I never saw her cry; silence was the expression she excelled in. She was a genius in devising horrible forms of silence that drove my father mad. He would fume and froth with rage and threaten to cut out her tongue, saying she was not using it to talk as God had intended when he elevated human beings above beasts.

  Neither of them helped me understand the other. Diotima did not explain my father to me and Al-Firsiwi did not reveal who Diotima was. Each one painted the other as a dark abyss that totally engulfed them. Whenever I saw my father now, lost in the ruins of Walili and his memory, I visualised a poet who sprang from the belly of the earth to decorate a forgotten city with his inner mosaics, always trying to point out the tragic fate of every poetic experience in this world.

  I talked with Ibrahim al-Khayati about Al-Firsiwi on our way back, and I said that I would return to help him look for Bacchus. He told me that investigating an antiquity theft would not interest anyone. People had got so used to stories of theft that they had become part of protected heritage. Try to announce, for example, that Morocco had not seen a single theft for three months, and you would see people demonstrating in the streets, denouncing this obvious failure in public life.

  A few weeks earlier the French police had found seventeen thousand discarded archaeological and geological pieces that had been smuggled from Mali, Mauritania and Morocco. The news only preoccupied an ordinary civil servant close to retirement, who wrote a letter to a local paper wondering where those thousands of pieces could have been, since there wasn’t such a number in all of Africa.

  ‘Suppose you follow Bacchus’s trail till you find him in the collection of a rich local or foreigner,’ Ibrahim said. ‘What would happen then?’

  ‘Nothing would happen, but I might be able to draw attention to the fact that if we continue on this path, we will soon find our whole country in other countries!’

  We also talked about his twins, as he referred to them. Both loved pop music, rap, hip-hop and heavy metal. One of them had spent a few weeks in prison, in a case involving alleged devil worship. I said I admired the two young men, who were completing their foundation courses very successfully and had a band known throughout Casablanca. As we approached the last toll in Casablanca, Ibrahim al-Khayati’s face darkened suddenly, and he told me with great emotion that the two young men might be aware of the true nature of his relationship with their father. They might have a permanent aversion to him.

  ‘Can’t you discuss the matter openly with them?’ I asked.

  ‘Impossible. Do you think they would show any understanding of the matter?’

  ‘Why not? Wouldn’t they understand that you are what you are, and that everything you’ve done, you did for them? Do they understand that the luxury they’re living in and that all they’ve accomplished is thanks to you? Yet they don’t understand that you are what you are before they were born and had an opinion?’

  I was angry because I had suddenly become aware of the injustice that underlined our hypocritical social relations. None of us had any scruples about wolfing down everything in sight, without pausing to criticise the way the dishes had reached our mouths. In our heads, we all lived in a system of forced labour that made others – all others – servants at our disposal.

  As a result of my anger, I said to Ibrahim, ‘Listen, you must tell them the truth, and tell them also that if they don’t want to be your children because of that old story, all they have to do is leave your house and disappear from your life. Then you will see what direction their aversion takes!’

  ‘But if they choose to stay with me only because I’m providing for them, it would be a real tragedy!’ he said.

  ‘In that case you must make them say they’re proud of you and, if t
hey want to continue living with you, ask them to love you openly and fully.’

  We both laughed to break this sudden tension, and then talked about the new restaurants in Casablanca. Ibrahim told me that the ’aytah was losing its place in the city. I told him that I would not have gone with him to those places even if they were still there. ‘Frankly,’ I said, ‘I don’t know what you like about all that ugly shouting.’

  Ibrahim would not shut up, and we spent hours arguing back and forth about the subject, until we finally sat facing a tired waiter and ordered two cold drinks.

  I said to him, ‘Forget the subject completely. The ’aytah is the most sublime art this people has produced. Can we talk about something else now?’

  Ibrahim smiled and said, ‘We are an incomparably fanatical country. Consider the way they deal with music, dance and song. There is no such art form that has not suffered condemnation and discrimination, from ’aytah to hip-hop!’

  ‘You’re exaggerating. All artistic expressions were natural and spontaneous until the plague of darkness arrived. It forbade and allowed whatever it liked. It was unable to defeat dancing and singing, but managed to impose the hijab and the umra on the libertines of our women’s bands!’

  2

  Layla returned from a quick trip to Madrid and I went to meet her at Casablanca airport. I suggested we celebrate her return at Ibrahim’s house. She seemed happy at the idea, saying, ‘I like that man.’

  ‘You either like him or we go to Marrakech,’ I said. She made a face of teasing indignation and said that she loved me, and that, for the first time, this was happening in a completely different way, a calm, relaxed and cheerful way, like slow, effortless breathing. I held her small hand in mine, took a deep breath, and said to her, ‘Me too.’

  ‘You too, what?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s also happening to me in a completely different way!’ I explained.

  We had a lovely time with Ibrahim and his twins. Layla was excited and talked about everything with great enthusiasm. But when the conversation turned to the songs of new bands, there was a serious disagreement between Layla, Essam and Mahdi. Layla thought the songs, aside from their occasional sarcastic and rebellious spirit, were abominable. Their lyrics were vulgar and devoid of imagination, their music was primitive and incomplete. Essam, who had spent time in prison in the case of the devil worshippers, considered this music and rap, hip-hop and hard rock an expression of a new identity, that of the modern cities sinking under the weight of contradictions and living with the threat of terrorism – yet still staging astonishing popular festivals.