The Arch and the Butterfly

by Mohammed Achaari

Ibrahim chose to live with his mother, an extremely bright, traditional woman with multiple talents, and he was affluent enough to indulge his natural inclination to live in a house with open, complex spaces. We were very close. He was an avid reader, and there was not a book I read that he had not recommended.

  Ibrahim would experience three serious traumas over as many years. The first was the suicide of Abdelhadi. He felt that the world had collapsed under his feet, and that he would keep endlessly plunging until he lost contact with everything around him. He felt he would continue falling, not quite touching something akin to the ground, until the void swallowed him anew. The reason for that feeling, as he explained to me later – after Yacine’s death – was not the death in itself, but his having failed to see it coming. He had not even once registered the suffering of someone close to him.

  Ibrahim and Abdelhadi had created a kind of social accommodation that made it possible for them to coexist without serious compromises and without gratuitous stubbornness. Ibrahim arranged an independent life for his friend; he married him to a relative of his, and celebrated the birth of his twins, Essam and Mahdi, with boundless joy. Their relationship remained intimate and warm despite the sadness that resulted from the sensible arrangement of a life that defied organisation. Late at night, Ibrahim would swing by the club where Abdelhadi performed. He would sit in a discreet corner, soaring up to the heavens with his friend’s beautiful voice, amazed by the depth of the sadness revealed by a man who normally did not stop laughing and joking. As soon as he opened his mouth to sing, it was as if a dark breath filled with past tragedies rose within him and he would withdraw into the far regions of his inner self. At the end of his performance, Abdelhadi would stride across the hall filled with his fans, laughing resonantly, and walk towards Ibrahim’s table to spend the interval with him. They would make small talk, commenting briefly and elegantly on clothes, skincare products and seasonal dishes. They would talk about the twins and their mother Haniya, always silent and busy with the housework with a devotion that bordered on the religious. They exchanged tender words about absence and missing each other, and fixed or failed to agree on a date for an upcoming soirée. The following day Abdelhadi would stop by Ibrahim’s house and sit with his mother by the back door of the kitchen that overlooked the garden and tell her that artichokes were available at the central market. If Ibrahim’s name should come up, his face would light up, as if his blood were talking, not his tongue.

  How could such apparent contentedness explode one day, to leave a hanged man dangling, and Abdelhadi of all people?

  I, in turn, tried to convince Ibrahim that Abdelhadi would have done what he had done in any case, regardless of the simple or complicated nature of their relationship. He seemed to accept this, but his look was one of dark despair.

  The second trauma occurred when Ibrahim was the victim of a vicious attack that almost cost him his life. He had left the commercial court building in Casablanca when two men stopped him. One said that he wanted to talk to him about an important and urgent matter, while the other wrapped his arm around his waist and pulled him forcefully towards him, saying, ‘An important personal matter.’ He was not fearful or concerned until he felt something sharp against his side. Things happened very quickly, but as Ibrahim attempted to shake free of the man, something cold pierced his stomach. Before he hit the asphalt like a heavy weight, something solid smashed into his face and another object caught his chest and head. As he was being kicked and stamped upon, he felt he was being shoved towards a thick fog which turned into darkness, stars and vivid colours. He heard someone ask for a stick, and the stick touched him or pierced him, he could not tell which. Soon he heard roaring laughter and had a distant impression that his whole body was coated in a stickiness that bit by bit turned into a confused consciousness within an extremely white and rainless cloud.

  Ibrahim spent five weeks in hospital. All of us – his mother, Haniya and the twins, Ahmad Majd, Fatima, and myself – visited him every day, monitoring his condition that was critical until he had been through six operations. While he was in a coma, a leading newspaper published his photo under the headline: Lawyer Ibrahim al-Khayati Target of Assassination Attempt by Anti-Homosexual Group. When Ibrahim recovered, the police questioned him at length about his sexual orientation. He strenuously confirmed that he was straight, as he had done when interviewed after Abdelhadi’s suicide.

  Ibrahim’s mother, who constantly repeated that she knew him best because she had given birth to him, had a stroke of genius. She sat on his hospital bed one evening and spent a long time staring into her wounded son’s eyes. She began laying out her plan for Ibrahim in veiled words and tear-filled sentences. Ibrahim responded with an appeasing gesture and a few words. ‘OK, I agree. Don’t torture yourself. I completely understand. I agree.’

  ‘What are you agreeing to, my son? I haven’t said everything yet.’ Finally she spat it out. ‘I want you to marry Haniya, so that Essam and Mahdi can be looked after by you. That’ll put a stop to all the gossip and give me peace of mind before I die.’

  Ibrahim knew full well what awaited him. He signalled his acceptance with a wave of the hand and gave his mother permission to act as she saw fit. He felt that the arrangement fitted in totally with everything else. There was no better way to avenge Abdelhadi’s suicide, and there was nothing in his life that did not reveal to him, on a daily basis, that step by step he was drawing nearer to this destiny, submitting to the inevitable.

  When, months later, the door closed behind Ibrahim and Haniya for the first time, he was nervous and embarrassed. He almost choked on his feelings, until he turned towards her. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, her face angled slightly towards the wall. His heartbeat quickened because in her isolation, she looked like Abdelhadi in the melancholy of his song.

  Casablanca was still joking about their marriage when Ibrahim received another terrible shock, the death of his mother, which hurt him like a painful amputation. The morning she died, he was awakened by the cries of Haniya, Essam and Mahdi shouting, ‘May God have mercy on the Hajja!’

  ‘What are you doing in the garden? Why don’t you keep still so I can understand?’ he asked.

  Haniya then stood before him and told him his mother had been playing with Essam and Mahdi in the garden and collapsed. She now lay dead, her head in the water of the swimming pool and her body stretched on the lawn. ‘Listen, invoke God’s name. Your mother has passed away.’

  Ibrahim said impatiently, ‘No one dies like that. Mother’s playing, she’s just playing!’

  When he raised her head from the blue of the swimming pool, she seemed to smile. He got ready for her to jump to her feet cackling with laughter, as she would do to amuse the twins, unconcerned that she was stiff and cold. At that point, Haniya and the maids, wailing loudly, came and picked her up. They carried her to her room and laid her carefully out on the bed, as though they had long been trained for this.

  Ibrahim buried his face in his hands and relived, as if standing under a gentle shower of rain, the details of the life they had been through together: her milk, her fears for him, her tears, her devastation at the loss of his father, her silence, her games, her happiness, her misery, her presence on the edge of his bed until he went to sleep, her stories, her dreams, and her skills at fighting poverty and time. He remained in that pos­­ition until Haniya reminded him angrily that death was a believer’s duty and if life were meant to last, it would have lasted for Prophet Mohammed. Ibrahim replied, distressed, ‘But Prophet Mohammed is not my mother!’

  After the funeral rites were over, Ibrahim entered a black box where he lost his ability to reconcile with life. He turned inward and dwelled on his conviction of the futility of a life of delusions. This was before he submitted to the resignation that dominated the scene and impacted our whole generation, a mixture of dervish tendencies, secular Sufism and new-age spirituality. I was at his side during that difficult period and took advantage of his spiritua
l predisposition to reveal that I was meeting Yacine as a child who talked to me about everything, as if he had not crossed to the other side. Ibrahim accepted and approved my experience, confirming that souls meet in total freedom independent of our ephemeral bodies. Whenever the police called us to resume the investigation with new information related to terrorist organisations, Ibrahim, in all seriousness, begged me not to tell Yacine, as there was no need to bother souls with what we did or did not do.

  4

  I met Layla for the first time one quiet morning in the lobby of the Hilton. She was absorbed in a book as people came in and out of the hotel with their luggage and I approached to make sure it was her. Sensing my presence, she lifted her head but did not give me a chance to talk or introduce myself and burst out saying, ‘You must be the journalist who’s covering Saramago. It’s great, really great, that you’ve come early. It’s a good omen to meet a journalist who arrives early. An interview? A newspaper interview with Saramago? Forget it! He’s the type who believes that what he writes is all he needs to say. There’s no point insisting. Hold on, use a hunting technique. Track the prey then pounce. Or maybe he’ll decide on his own to grant you an interview. Try and talk to him; cajole him or trick him. You must have read his books – or at least I hope you’ve read them. I don’t think it’s possible to talk to a person like him about anything else. He doesn’t talk much about the weather! I’m reading The Gospel According to Jesus Christ for the thousandth time. Believe me, out of all the books I’ve read, there isn’t one I enjoyed more. You know what? The subject of the book doesn’t matter at all. How Jesus was born, how he grew up and faced life’s questions, how he met God and how he met death. The story isn’t like in the Gospels, but as Jesus might have lived it. What are the Gospels anyway? Are they the book, or Jesus as he lived or might have lived? None of this matters at all. What matters is the prose, the way words and sentences become more important than the narrative, a purity that gives you the sense of beauty in the abstract, without subject matter, or it’s its own subject matter. Do you understand that?’

  I had been straining to interrupt her dense stream of words and finally managed to get a word in. ‘Yes, yes, I understand completely. I’ve also read Blindness for personal reasons to do with my father, but it depressed me so much that I stopped reading for a few months.’

  She was nervously gathering her belongings when she said, ‘Have you spotted him? He’s just stepped out of the elevator. There he is. Look at his movements. I swear, the slowness has nothing to do with age or anything else – quick, let’s head over – it’s a deliberation of the mind – this way’s better, come on – a pause over every detail. One must have extraordinary ability to do that. To think that I spend most of my time fighting details. What idiocy!

  ‘Mr Saramago, please, don’t make us run after you. This is the journalist I told you about. I don’t know his name yet. Let’s make his acquaintance together.’

  I heard myself pronounce my name, Youssef al-Firsiwi. I noticed that it had a strange impact on the woman whom I had not taken my eyes off from the moment she started talking.

  On our way to Fes, I said to Saramago, ‘When all is said and done, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and the revealed Gospels are two sides of the same coin. Imagination is needed in both narratives, and fiction is needed in both cases.’

  He smiled and shook his head in a way that did not reveal whether he agreed or disagreed. At that point Layla said, ‘The novel is open to multiple interpretations, including the ones present in the revelation. As for the revelation, it accepts only its own narrative.’

  Saramago laughed but did not comment. We all looked in the direction of the green fields that had been startled by the November rain. We agreed, with varying degrees of sincerity, that it was a beautiful morning. Layla then announced that she would eat the pastries she had brought with her, and asked whether we would like some. Neither Saramago nor I wanted one. Nor did he want to discuss literature. He asked me about the Sahara and the negotiations with the separatists, and whether Morocco was moving towards real democracy or whether there were those who longed for rule with an iron fist. He asked about the strength of the religious movement, what interest groups there were and where the opposite interests lay.

  I offered lukewarm responses because I was annoyed with the inquisition and did not have answers.

  ‘Your conversation is ruining my mood,’ said Layla. ‘I don’t understand how the same person could write with such sensitivity about Jesus’s relationship with his mother, with Mary Magdalene, and with Satan, and yet lose valuable time talking about the Sahrawi people’s right to self-determination. Do you know what people do in the desert, Mr Saramago? They roam the wilderness, eat, perform their ablutions and compose poetry in the style of pre-Islamic times. They fatten up their women, and screw while talking aloud lest the children hear them. Do you think they would dance for joy if they heard you cared about their self-determination?’

  We laughed, and then Layla said, ‘What truly amazes me is the magical power that you and those like you have to express what we all know in detail but are unable to express, simply because we lack the magical means you have. I feel infuriated sometimes because you’re saying exactly what I’ve felt for ages, but could not describe with precision until I read it. I don’t know what you think, but, personally, I consider precision to be the ideal form of beauty.’

  Her voice from the back seat seemed to strike my shoulders and neck, jolting me out of my recent lifelessness. I felt the words were addressed to me in a kind of unintended consolation. Precision in science, nature and art – without the distortion of emotion – really did embody the concept of beauty.

  Consider the compatible and incompatible elements needed to add flavour to a piece of raw fish. We do not want one flavour to overpower the others, or any flavour to be hidden, delayed or premature. We want the saltiness to peak at a specific moment, before the spices but after lemon by a fraction of a second. Then comes the waning of the substance and the lingering aftertaste of all these elements, along with an add­­itional element, the time the aftertaste takes to permeate the farthest reaches of our body. The aftertaste fades, leaving behind another trace of a trace, then another trace of the trace of a trace, and so on. This precision in making and then unmaking something, in its emergence and evanescence, can give birth to the pleasure we seek to eternalise in total despair, attempting to move it from the realm of the senses to the realm of perception, from incoherence to coherence. All the while we are aware of the tremendous tragedy latent in beauty, because outside this mental precision, beauty can only be fleeting.

  Having pinpointed this matter under Layla’s inspiration, I expected to feel deliriously happy, but instead was assailed by a depression similar to the one I had experienced in previous panic attacks. I fought it off, while the conversation in the back seat continued and I could hear Layla’s voice and Saramago’s mumblings on and off.

  ‘I confess,’ said Layla, ‘that at first I found your novel a variation on an old theme, then your writing made me feel that devils are the mirrors of prophets, and that good, in order to be good, must subsume the burning heat of evil. It doesn’t matter what the subject is, because we’re not looking to be persuaded while reading the novel. You made the Christ in your book throw off the mantle of revelation, only for him to don it again as a shepherd, a fisherman, a lover and a prophet. He suffered, desired, feared and performed miracles, then proceeded towards his crucifixion where he found no one in the end but Satan himself to collect the drops of his blood in the clay bowl that cleaved from the ground at the moment Christ cleaved from nothingness. That’s the life that became a Gospel, isn’t it?’

  ‘Hmm-m-m,’ mumbled Saramago.

  ‘What I mean is there’s a constant ambivalence in the subject of revelation. Who reveals to whom!’

  ‘Hmm-m-m.’

  ‘Do you mean yes or no?’

  ‘Hmm-m-m.’

  ‘It’s
yes and no then! No problem. Believe me, writing matters more than all the Gospels. It’s not a question of belief. I’m a believer myself. I tried very hard for years to be an atheist, but I failed.’

  Saramago chuckled.

  ‘I’m not bothered by your laughter. I believe in God and He loves me. I’m sure of it!’

  A whispered conversation followed that I could not make out. I dozed off and the conversation passed me by. I then felt that my whole body was hurting and that the blue sky, the ripening earth and the rain-washed light were nothing but tricks to hide my unhappiness.

  When we reached the hotel I could not get out of the car, and no one asked me why. My limbs were numb and I regretted having come along. I was busy wondering whether we did not all need to rewrite our life stories and free them from the violence of the single reading. In my case, I thought what my life story would have been if I had not lost Yacine, and how Yacine would have remained alive if I had not been what I was. I woke up and saw Layla’s face. She had opened the car door and was leaning towards me, anxious and concerned.

  ‘Are you all right? Do you want us to take you to a doctor? Can you walk? My God, what happened?’

  I had the impression she was far away, although I felt her breath on my face. Her features changed continuously, from those of a woman I knew to those of an unknown woman, and then to a woman I remembered.

  ‘It’s terrible that we left the car without noticing you weren’t feeling well!’ she said.

  ‘No, no. I’m fine. Sometimes I fade like this. I‘m sorry.’

  ‘But we went up to our rooms, and this dolt of a driver went to have a coffee and a cigarette by the pool. Nobody noticed that you were still in the car. Scary!’

  ‘No need to exaggerate. Has it been long?’

  ‘Almost an hour. You must hate me!’

  ‘I’m very sorry, but I’m unable to hate you.’

  As we entered the hotel lobby, I felt that I had recovered and my spirits were high. I was able to forget why I was there, and look forward to other things that were impossible to predict.