The Arch and the Butterfly

by Mohammed Achaari

  Over the weekend Layla and I went to Casablanca. We attended Essam and Mahdi’s performance; we drowned in the racket of Arthritis and laughed at the innocent words the boys in the group uttered to express an anger lacking any seriousness. Layla noticed that most of the songs had a religious flavour as a result of the traditional expressions found in the lyrics of the Gnawa, the Aissawa and the Rawayes orders. I told her that most of them had been tried in the devil worship case because of the T-shirts they wore and not because of the songs they sang. When the noise reached its peak, we left. We lingered a little in the Casablanca night before meeting Ibrahim al-­Khayati and some of his friends at a restaurant. Ahmad Majd was there and he teased Layla for boycotting Marrakech.

  Layla and Ahmad Majd got into an argument about the city, which ended with Layla shouting, ‘Do you want the truth? I hate Marrakech and I hate that stupid house of yours that you call Al-Andalous. I shit on all those tacky ornaments you boast about to foreigners. And I hate you, you more than everything else I’ve mentioned.’

  Ahmad responded with some allusion to his years in prison.

  Layla exploded. ‘No one has the right to feel superior to us because of his years in prison, especially if he was rewarded for them. Didn’t you all say that you were reconciled? But I don’t know with whom. Whoever’s been getting drunk tonight with the reconciliation money should keep his tongue under wraps. I don’t owe any madman anything! If you can’t be proud of the price you paid, it means that you loaned the system a few years of your life and got them back later with hefty interest!’

  I pulled Layla back by her waist and told her, ‘We must leave immediately.’

  She did not object, and on the way home I told her I did not understand her antagonism towards Ahmad. She said that she could not fathom why I had such horrible friends and that she hated them all.

  ‘Didn’t you say you liked Ibrahim al-Khayati?’

  ‘I take it back,’ she said. ‘I hate you all.’

  When I held her hand she did not pull away, and after a period of silence she said, crying, ‘I was horrible to Ahmad Majd. I must apologise to him.’

  I tried to undo some of the damage by inviting everyone back to Ibrahim’s house. Layla apologised, and Ahmad somehow transformed her apology into a collective, public admission of his countless virtues. As the evening progressed I enjoyed listening, for the first time, to the chattering of the men and women Ibrahim had invited. They did not seem to have any of the pretensions or overblown professionalism we normally encountered in Casablanca. They were a new generation of officials, contractors and liberal professionals who led a very pleasant life. They talked about big business deals and stock exchange listings, about foreign investment and the property market. They discussed Casablanca’s new hotels, restaurants and dance clubs. They talked about all that without any bitterness, disapproval or affected regrets, and were pleased with the city’s new entertainment options. It seemed to me then that success and wealth had become agreeable beings, as if a sweet breeze had pushed the ogre that they once symbolised into a far corner.

  Slowly the atmosphere cleared and everybody lightened up, and people began telling risqué jokes and recounting the scandalous sex stories swelling the city. At this point Layla got upset and asked to leave the vulgar atmosphere. I walked her to our room in Ibrahim’s house, and there she wondered how I could have such crude friends. I told her that they were Ibrahim’s friends, but she objected, saying, ‘You too were laughing at their jokes.’ I tried to tease her but she recoiled. So I kissed her and returned to the vulgar soirée.

  The evening came to a dreadful end when someone called Ibrahim and told him that there had been a huge explosion at a nightclub called Horses and Gunpowder, and that police cars and ambulances had been running nonstop for more than an hour, which meant there were a lot of victims.

  We went to the beach area, but before we arrived at the nightclub we found security checkpoints that prevented us going any further. Ibrahim tried in vain to convince the secur­ity men of the need to let us pass, so we stood there amid a nervous and noisy crowd. We kept calling Mahdi and Essam, but all we got was their voicemails. I told Ibrahim nothing indicated that they had been at the nightclub, but he said nothing indicated that they had not. The voices of young men and women trying to get through the security cordon rose hyster­ically. One after another, ambulances passed by, the crowd wailing and crying at each one. Someone came from the other side and flung himself on to the barrier. He said that there were hundreds of victims and that their remains were spread over the area as far as the sea. The wailing got louder once more, until a security policeman informed us that the explosion had been caused by gas canisters and had only caused a few injuries. Through her wailing, a woman said to him, ‘May God send you good news.’ But another person came up to the security barrier and said two men had blown themselves up in the middle of the nightclub. Someone asked if there were dead people, and the man replied, ‘Ask if there are people still alive.’

  I told Ibrahim it might be better to go back home, where we would hear less random news. But he thought we should go by the hospital to make sure Essam and Mahdi were not among the victims. The hospital had no news of any explosion, and had not received any warning that a large number of victims would be arriving at the emergency room. We went home broken. As we crossed the garden we heard the jittery sounds of a guitar, and as soon as we opened the door there were the voices of Essam, Mahdi and the members of their band. They were in the living room, which still showed traces of the earlier soirée.

  Ibrahim shouted at them, ‘Stop this bloody mess!’

  The room fell silent and Ibrahim collapsed on the closest sofa, shaking all over. I told everyone about the explosion at the Horses and Gunpowder. Mahdi said they had been there at the time and were told that a truck transporting gas had exploded in a parking lot near the beach.

  ‘What about the nightclub?’ I asked.

  Essam said it had been evacuated, in case another explosion was part of the programme.

  ‘Then there were no victims?’ I asked.

  ‘We don’t know. There might have been. We’ll find out from the news bulletins.’

  I said, ‘You don’t seem bothered by what’s happened, or by the fact that there might be dead and injured or terrorised people, Ibrahim among them, who almost lost his mind over worry for you. All that is mere detail?’

  ‘They are details, not mere detail,’ Mahdi said.

  The others laughed, and one of them said with feigned ser­­iousness, ‘The fact is that the explosion present in your head did not happen.’

  I was gripped by a desire to slap the young man and controlled myself with difficulty. Then I walked over to Ibrahim, pulled him off the sofa, and led him to his room, shouting at them without looking back, ‘We don’t want to hear a sound from you.’

  I heard Essam say in affected Arabic, ‘May you have a good night.’

  The group responded with noisy laughter.

  The next morning was the kind of morning I hated: Layla was in a rotten mood, the young men were asleep on the living room sofas, Ibrahim had gone to his office, the maid had yet to arrive, the kitchen was a mess and coffee was not at hand. The only thing I could do was put on my shoes and go back to Rabat. Just then Ahmad Majd called and asked about the previous night’s explosion.

  When I told him it was just a gas explosion, he said, somewhat surprised, ‘Then nothing happened to Essam and Mahdi?’

  ‘No, nothing happened. If it had, we would now be in the funeral procession, while you are lying in bed waiting for detailed news about the incident.’

  Layla and I went out, a sea breeze, moist and fresh, erasing the rotting smell of the closed house. I would need an entire day to get over this morning.

  Layla was walking fast and crying. She said she was scared and wanted to see her daughter immediately. We went to the railway station, and since we had to wait for half an hour, I suggested drinking a cup of coffee
.

  Layla replied, upset, ‘I don’t want coffee or anything else. I want to see my daughter. I’m ashamed of myself. What would I tell her if I had been killed in the explosion? What would she have done? She has no one but me.’

  I said, ‘But you were sleeping in a bed where nothing exploded.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I was sitting in a restaurant, then I was in the street and then at a silly party!’

  I drank my coffee quickly, reading the newspapers’ banner headlines about the arrest of Al-Qaeda sleeper cells. This was for the second time in six months. I scrutinised the names carefully as if trying to see their faces; I had a vague feeling I would recognise one of them. I always had a premonition that I would recognise someone on the list, one of those confused people we never expected to find in a terrorist organisation, the kind of person who would eat and drink and laugh with us and visualise us as flying remains while staring at our faces.

  We got on the train and sat silently side by side. When we reached Rabat, Layla took my hand and asked while squeezing it, ‘Do you hate me?’

  ‘Not yet!’

  I did not see Layla for a week after that. We talked for hours on the phone about everything – her daughter, her little quarrels, domestic matters, funny incidents about her ex-husband and our own limited concerns, which we could cover in one minute. But whenever the conversation touched on the possibility of our seeing each other, she quickly changed the subject. It was as if the explosion had cast a dark shadow across our relationship.

  Fatima returned from Havana and gave me a call. She was clearly quite anxious, so I assumed she was not on good terms with her Kosovar live-in boyfriend, but I did not ask. We talked about Ahmad Majd, Bahia and their daughter and about Ibrahim al-Khayati. She asked strange questions about everyone and wanted to know to what degree each one of us was in harmony with himself.

  I said to her, joking, ‘The only person I know who has a good relationship with himself is you.’

  ‘I wish!’ she said firmly.

  The following week she surprised me one morning, standing at my office door at the paper, greeting my colleagues, who welcomed her warmly. We went to the Beach restaurant, where I ordered a meal of crab and slices of salmon in cucumber sauce.

  She said, laughing, ‘I know that you’ll smell nothing of this massacre!’

  ‘On the contrary, I’ll smell the most specific scents and the very weakest ones.’

  She looked at me in surprise, and I explained that a miracle had restored my sense of smell.

  She smiled affectionately at me and asked, after a moment of silence, ‘What was the first meal whose aroma surprised you?’

  I said, defeated, ‘Yacine’s shirts, years after his death.’

  I observed her face with its fine features, typical of the women of the Atlas. Her eyes had become a little larger, and their blackness was a transparent shade surrounding her whole face. Her lips jutted out as if they had grown fuller in reaction to the prominence of her cheekbones. I told her that her slimness was very becoming. She smiled without interrupting her fierce struggle with her crab. When she dipped her fingers into the bowl of lemon water, all the sadness in the world overwhelmed me, and all I wanted was to put an end to the meal as soon as possible.

  We were leaving Al-Jazaïr Street, having first passed through the Udaya and talked about its planned tunnel, and proceeded along the wall of the Mellah and the bank of the Abou Regreg. We went by the grain market, which had been transformed into ateliers and was decorated with huge façades advertising the Emirati enterprise in charge of the building. There were beautiful drawings revealing blue water and happy children with rosy cheeks. Fatima asked me about the lofty building crowned with solid domes and facing the Sunni mosque on one side and the news agency where she worked on the other side. I told her it was the museum of contemporary art. She was amazed by the sudden changes in Rabat, but I suggested she hold her comments until she visited the Villa des Arts that faced the mosque on the other side, and awaited the trans­formations planned for the Lyautey residence to become another altar to art in the capital. She would then see how the ‘forbidden city’ had come out of its lair.

  She asked me, joking, ‘Why do they surround this poor mosque with all these satanic spaces?’

  I said, ‘Don’t exaggerate. There’s not a single devil in the capital.’

  Fatima left me in front of the parliament building. I continued on my way behind the colonial building and wondered about the vulgar and provocative parallel building enlarging the parliament, using the same architecture as the old courthouse. I asked myself about this insistence on an imaginary harmony, when contrast was the best approach to obtaining sudden beauty. When I reached my apartment I was exhausted. I took a pain reliever and slept soundly.

  Fatima told me that after spending time abroad, she found Moroccans optimistic and lovers of life. I asked her, ‘By God, where did you meet this wonderful species?’

  She said everyone she met at parties and family gatherings, and even some people she encountered on the street and on the train, was like this.

  Whenever I had this sort of discussion, I felt depressed. I sensed a huge gap separated me from the reality that surrounded me, and I wouldn’t ever truly understand what was happening. I saw from my vantage point that people appeared amazed by the new things that occurred around them and were eager to get involved in this fast-paced life. I saw them as having lost any possibility of escape from the trap, and I couldn’t predict what would happen to them when they awakened. I saw in the image projected by other sources of observation a country forging ahead heedless, even of those who fall off its open carts.

  I talked with Layla about the subject and she said in a decisive manner, ‘You’re right, you have no reason to be optimistic. Don’t pay attention to the gold-plated superficialities. If you scratch below the surface, you will find layers of rust and emptiness.’

  I said, ‘Fatima is back from Madrid.’

  She was not happy with the news. ‘I don’t want to have anything at all to do with that woman!’

  ‘But we have to go with her to Marrakech,’ I explained.

  ‘You must definitely forget that,’ Layla said.

  When my silence lasted too long, she added, ‘If this annoys you, you can just cancel the idea of going to Marrakech.’

  ‘It’s impossible.’

  ‘Of course it’s impossible. I know that you would prefer to get rid of me rather than give up Marrakech.’

  Later, I repeatedly tried to convince her that my interest in Fatima and joining her on her Marrakech trip was an essential matter, and had nothing to do with a possible physical relationship. For me Fatima was not a woman in a sexual or amorous way. She was more than that. She was a geographical phenomenon in my life.

  I tried to pull Layla out of an ingrained cycle of enmity towards Fatima, but I failed. She was overcome by jealousy and decided, with no possibility for retraction, that I had to choose between travelling with Fatima and our relationship.

  This upset me very much and made me tell her angrily, ‘I choose to go with Fatima!’

  In the train that took us to Marrakech, Fatima talked in a terse manner about her Kosovar lover. He had suddenly revealed a mean streak in Havana, something that made her realise, with great concern, that he did not have an iota of dignity.

  ‘And then what happened?’ I asked.

  ‘When we returned to Madrid, we arrived at six in the morning. I put my suitcase on the luggage cart and went to the exit without waiting for him. An hour later I was in my apartment, getting ready to go to bed alone, as I have always been.’

  I asked her if she regretted anything. She said she was upset for not having understood at the right time, and then she asked me about Layla. I told her that I could unmistakably say that she was the best thing that had happened to me in the last few years, but I did not know how to organise my life with her.

  ‘It’s a true love story,’ Fatima said. ‘That�
��s why you can’t organise anything. All you have to do is let your imagination run freely and write an unprecedented love story.’

  Her reply annoyed me. I heard in it an allusion to the fact that I wouldn’t live with Layla in a true love story, but would rather experience a kind of literary fantasy. I replied somewhat harshly, ‘But Layla is real. She is not the product of my imagination.’

  ‘What happened to you in reality was that you occasionally went to bed with a woman who was able to reconcile you with pleasure. But look at the story you wove around the subject!’

  I felt suddenly blocked and remained silent. I watched the red fields devoid of vegetation, except for clumps of dispersed cactus trees. There on the nearby horizon was the road leading to Marrakech, which would soon expand to Agadir. In a few years the country would be connected by those empty roads, praised in anthems for uniting people and putting an end to isolation. Fatima loved roads, arched bridges and major highway projects. She said that they suited Hercules’s soul very well. They complied with the idea of the bare land from which adventurers extract new features.

  We arrived at the big house and found Ghaliya busy preparing dinner, and Bahia overwhelmed by the commotion of baby Ghaliya, while Ahmad Majd was talking on the phone with the calm of someone who has awakened on a deserted island. I left Fatima to reconnect with this lively ambiance and went straight to my room, intent on napping until night-time.

  4

  Yacine placed his hand on my cheek as he used to do when he was a baby. I opened my eyes, inhaling the scent of a distant childhood. I smiled at him. He told me that this was his last appearance in my life. He would then disappear for good.

  ‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you to misunderstand me. I’m not anybody’s messenger. I have no connection with anyone, and there is no connection between what happened to me and what is happening to you. There is no connection between what I was and what I am able to read in tomorrow’s paper. You will be obsessed for a long time trying to understand how this happened. There is no “how” in the matter. An idea does not survive long as an idea. Try to jump one metre. Then try to think about it for more than one second, and you will be unable to jump for good. All there is in the matter is the fact that a spark passes through your brain and says to you, “Why not?” and then you jump. This is how I found myself over there. I did not know whether it was a beginning or an end. I only knew that if I did not do it I would remain suspended, all the way to eternity, at that point on the pavement where I allowed the idea to survive more than necessary. I say this to put an end to the matter. I mean, in order for me to put an end to it. As far as you are concerned, you won’t stop digging in this grave. You will follow in the footsteps of your ancestors, the diggers. Will you find anything? I don’t know. You might be able to extract a city from inside you, a combination of Zarhoun, Du? sseldorf, Rabat, Bu Mandara, Frankfurt, Bu Dayrab and Marrakech. You might find poetry in the prosaic ruins that surround you. None of that concerns me! You must know that I will always manage to escape the control of the descendants. I will soar alone and fall alone as I always did.