The Arch and the Butterfly

by Mohammed Achaari

  ‘My God, it really is complicated!’ said Layla. ‘How is it possible to think like that? Life isn’t a succession of acts of revenge and the settling of scores. No generation can live the illusions of another generation. Plus, in the end, Yacine isn’t the tragic hero his mother claims. He’s just an extremist who met his death. And with the Taliban to top it off!’

  Hurt, I said to her, ‘Please. Don’t talk about him like that.’

  She squeezed my hand in apology, and looked closely into my eyes. ‘This relationship will destroy you – if it didn’t do so already ages ago. Save your skin! You can’t stake what’s left of your life on reckless hatred. Do you understand?’

  To qualify matters, I said, ‘No, no, no. It is not as dangerous as all that. I’m at sufficient remove from all those things. The hatred I talked to you about doesn’t touch me from within. To tell you the truth, I’m not interested in what’s happening, or what will or won’t ever happen. I live totally detached from those things, even when I say that I hate her. I’m only using a word that suits the situation but does not express something I feel.’ I then seized this opportunity to tell Layla that I felt nothing, absolutely nothing.

  She fell silent for a short while and then suggested we go to a Japanese restaurant. I agreed immediately. There, using a plate of sushi, I was able to explain what I meant. Raw flesh in particular eloquently embodied my non-feeling for things. Raw meat did not suggest food with a fabricated identity, but rather was an authentic food in its primitive form, before culture interfered to suggest it be used in a certain way and with accompanying substances. Cooked dishes were, first and foremost, a creation of scent. Raw dishes, however, were a liberation from history for the benefit of the ingredient. As a result, eating became a relationship with elements that were independent of each other, and not a relationship with flavour, as centuries of culture’s trickery had made it.

  Layla did not seem interested by the topic and preferred to confront me firmly. She insisted that sushi was not something primitive, as I claimed, and that there was a huge difference between a man devouring a fish he had just pulled out of a river and a man enjoying sushi in a Japanese res­­taurant. ‘What you are devouring now is called sushi, not fish,’ she said.

  I busied myself finishing off what was left on my plate, avoiding further discussion of the subject until her voice broke my concentration.

  ‘When you say you don’t feel anything, do you mean, for example, that you can’t fall in love?’ she asked.

  ‘The issue is probably more complicated than that.’

  ‘Can you or can’t you?’

  ‘Yes and no,’ I said.

  ‘How?’

  ‘There are many elements to love that I only know about through memory. Everything related to emotions, passion, fear, yearning, regret, guilt, seduction and tenderness.’

  ‘What about desire?’ Layla asked.

  ‘Desire in its actual form, yes, but not its course. For example, I am totally incapable of feeling the onset of desire, and its subsequent progress by means of words, movements and suggestions. I just know in my brain that the time has come. At that point I resort to memory to enjoy the culmination of desire.’

  ‘Do you mean to say that pleasure is unrelated to what your body’s doing?’ she asked.

  ‘No, not at all. I mean that in order for me to enjoy what my body’s doing, I must connect its hardware – in operation at that moment – with the bank of emotions found in the hard disk.’

  Her eyes welled with tears. ‘That’s so horrible! What kind of pain is that? What an ordeal!’

  I tried to make light of the situation and pretended that the matter required only additional effort on my part for me to obtain some pleasure; and I might, after all, achieve better results due to this effort.

  She smiled through her tears and asked suddenly, ‘And us?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What shall we do with our life?’

  ‘In the immediate future, we go to your flat and lock ourselves in until we find an exceptional love story.’

  ‘No, no. You’re mixing up the immediate and the long term. We can only lock ourselves in until my daughter returns from school!’

  And so it was.

  We went straight to her bedroom, and when I paused to look at the titles of the books carefully arranged on black shelves near the bed, she pulled me away, saying, ‘Forget the books. We don’t have much time.’

  I imagined her body’s fragrance, or I remembered it, I don’t exactly know, right at the moment our lips met and I took in her tongue, reluctantly at first and then compliantly. I imagined her scent when she raised her arms to free her breasts, and as I explored the details of her pale skin, moving from cold, shivering areas to warm, pulsating ones. I imagined her smell as I pulled her to me and released her, when she lay prone, when she turned over, when she spread open and when she curled up, when she turned away and drew back, when she resisted and then yielded and shuddered. I imagined her fragrance in the movement of her fingers, and when she quieted, swooned, moaned and said, ‘Yes, like that, yes. Exactly what you did, never do it with another woman, I beg of you. I forbid you to do it with another woman.’ She was silent, and then burst out, ‘Yes. Now. Please say you love me.’ She cried and then was spent.

  At every moment, I imagined her body’s fragrance – or recalled its memory. I did not say ‘I love you’. I remembered the fence of the garden leading to the Ibn Sina apartment, the acacia tree, the scent of a summer night, and the advent of dawn after a silent return from the Beach nightclub. I remembered the woman and the short black dress around her feet, her hands holding the garden fence and the magic of her back illuminated by lamplight. I remembered her fragrance, hers out of all the sleeping or vigilant, seen or unseen creatures that surrounded us; a fragrance redolent of water, vegetation, soil and fruit; the fragrance of her face, the expression of her face that in a flash of anger turned it into a metallic scent, dry and stinging. For she had bent down and pulled up her dress from around her feet up the length of her legs, her thighs and her chest, all the way to the curve of her shoulders. Then she turned around and told me, through her angry expression and her messy hair, ‘You must leave at once. I never want to see you again.’

  In such way, a fragrance cached in the box of miracles leads us to a timeless pleasure that moves through our body, shaking its withered branches and scattering their leaves to the wind. But we know neither who enjoys what nor who seduces whom.

  I asked her, ‘Can I stay a little?’

  ‘Of course, you have to stay, even if you didn’t say I love you!’

  ‘But you asked me to leave immediately.’

  Panic stricken she continued, ‘Impossible! Did I really say that?’

  ‘Yes you did, and you also said: “I never want to see you again!” ’

  ‘They seem like my words, but I was in no state to say them.’

  ‘Perhaps you said them at another time or in another life. To me or, hopefully, to another man.’

  ‘You could have said I love you even without feeling it.’ she said, ‘Just like you would say anything else. Would it have hurt you to say it?’

  ‘I did not see a need for it. I figured that such a powerful sentence ought to be said in a different setting.’

  She explained herself. ‘You should know that I feel insulted if it is not said to me while making love.’

  ‘You’re exaggerating.’

  ‘Anyhow, given you’re a man who claims not to feel, the sex was still the best thing to have happened to me in years.’

  ‘It’s worthy of two persons living a great love story,’ I said.

  ‘True!’ she said pensively.

  She then stretched her body over mine, took my face between her hands and said, ‘I like the way you do it!’

  I was absorbed in contemplating her face, with the attitude of someone without a care in the world, when she suddenly got up in a panic. ‘My daughter’s school has ended! Yo
u must leave right now.’

  I got up ponderously, but she pounced on me with my clothes. She tidied up the room, got dressed, helped me get dressed and leapt around until I found myself at the lift door. She was laughing and told me, having calmed down a little, ‘What a miracle! A charming man!’

  I walked slowly down the street on my way to the bus stop, then it occurred to me to keep walking. When I left Bourgogne Square and turned right to enter the dreamy street housing the Ecole Normale Supérieur, Yacine poked me with his little finger and asked, ‘Is she a new love story?’

  ‘I love no one,’ I replied sharply.

  He answered immediately, ‘Easy, easy now. I’m not partisan here. You could even consider me a neutral bystander. In the best case scenario, I can help you ask good questions.’

  ‘What I need most is good answers,’ I said.

  ‘I know, but the dead don’t have answers!’

  ‘Too bad. Tell me, how did you figure out it was a new love story?’

  ‘When a man is on his way to the bus stop, then decides to walk, and does this as if he were compressing the distance between him and a woman he was just with, there are grounds to ask whether he hasn’t fallen in love!’

  ‘What definitive proofs!’

  ‘You’re making fun of the matter to cover it up.’ he said, ‘But as you were walking, I heard you say, “Me too, I like the way you do it.” ’

  ‘I said that while I was alone?’

  ‘Yes, quite a few times!’

  ‘I think I’m suffering from a kind of asynchronicity. I should have said that in reply to something that was said to me fifteen minutes before – not because that’s what I feel, but only to provide a decent answer.’

  ‘I don’t know an illness with that name, but you have strange illnesses. Who knows? Since there was a space of time between what was said to you and what you said in reply, there might be an interval between your falling in love and your being aware that you’ve fallen in love.’

  ‘You’ve either said more than necessary or you haven’t said enough!’

  ‘I’m only trying to understand what you called asynchronicity,’ he explained.

  ‘But you’ve put your finger on something that tortures me.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Such as the feeling that I’m belatedly living the scenes of an old affair.’

  ‘Do you mean that you loved this woman in another life?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. It’s just an affair set in two times.’

  ‘Love in instalments!’

  ‘Or something like that.’

  That evening I wrote in Letters to My Beloved:

  I am waiting for you. All I do is wait for you. I am neither in a hurry nor discouraged. I am not sure of anything and I am neither suspicious nor in despair. The fact is that I am waiting for you and I feel that this gives my life meaning, though I do not know what it means to give one’s life meaning. I waited for you as if you were still in the summer nightclub, while I was in the desolate square. Why did you stay there and why did I leave? Are you still dancing with someone we met there? You were extremely moved to see him and you said that he was one of your dearest friends. I imagine that you are still angry with me because of the funny way I danced to the soundtrack of Pulp Fiction. I intended it to be an awful, funny dance to spoil the artistry of your dance. But you insisted that we do it perfectly, the way Travolta and Uma Thurman did it in the film, including maintaining the right distance to allow you to pass your fingers before your eyes and face. It was the other person who provoked me, his muscles moving in a blind mirroring. Only you were close to the soul of the dance, even if I was busy performing that insolent mockery. There was something sarcastic in the film as well, but I can’t remember it any more. Travolta only danced with his body, but you – I mean Uma Thurman – danced with her soul. She was saying, ‘I want to win a prize this evening!’ But what she meant was, ‘I want to win you.’ And you, to whom were you saying that?

  Here we are now, in the desolate square, in the garden adjacent to the entrance of the building. Here we are storming the dawn with our nudity; here you are taking away what is left of my caution and placing it on the stones of the wall where you press your open hands and form with the white contours of your body a wound in the night. Then you vanish, leaving no trace of you in the ashes surrounding me.

  2

  I jolted Bahia out of her afternoon nap, jeopardising the quiet of the afternoon. Ahmad Majd wanted to talk to her about an urgent matter related to a lawsuit her family had initiated over land near the capital. She sat up in bed and, after much grumbling, snatched the telephone from my hand – as if we were fighting over it – and placed it directly to her ear.

  Whenever conversation revolved around the land whose ownership the government had expropriated from my wife and her brothers, the atmosphere became charged. Dialogue among the siblings, between the lawyer and the siblings, and among all those involved in the matter, became impossible. No one had a solution for it.

  For more than fifty years, successive generations of my wife’s family had lived with dreams of the unexploited wealth lying in a piece of real estate that stretched along the bank of the Bou Regreg, from its mouth to the edge of Akkrach. They had no rivals except the awqaf with their huge properties and a few old-established families from Salé who owned scattered lots.

  When the Akkrach rubbish dump settled in that romantic spot of the neglected capital, with its waste, its fires, its smoke and its foul smells, the value of the land went through the floor. The only ones who endured in this rotten hell that stretched along the river were potters with their kilns, a few farmers who grew contaminated vegetables and, slightly later, some villages that sprang up around the dump. Their inhabitants came from the wasteland of Zaeer, the village of Oulad Moussa and the hills of Akkrach, and from the slums along the river. All this happened in an area of Rabat with the most unique and natural beauty. Meanwhile, Rabat’s middle classes, with their lack of imagination, expanded on the plain leading to Zaeer Road and fought a stupid war over the sea and the river at the same time.

  Then came the new era, and in the stream of token projects launched under its banner, the government created the Bou Regreg Basin Development Agency, which quickly became the aesthetic branch of plans to restructure the capital. Dreams of unexploited treasure came to life for a new generation: that of my wife and her siblings. They carefully calculated their acres and the anticipated price of a single square foot, and found that their family, which had survived for decades on the breadline, living off the respectability and superiority of old-established families, had become rich under the new dispensation. But the prices did not move up or down because, in the blink of an eye, the self-same land completely evapor­ated. The Agency seized it, just as it had all other plots of land, to use for a city of dreams.

  After every telephone conversation with our friend Ahmad Majd, my wife would speak angrily about how she failed to understand all the bragging over democracy and modernity in a country that did not have the slightest respect for the individual and his property. I would tell her, for the sake of bickering, ‘Your family slept on top of this treasure for decades without ever offering any of it to its children or its country. Now that the nation has decided to revive this wealth and lavish it on the people, you suddenly see flaws in the rule of justice and law.’

  Bahia would reply by blaming this presumed modernity first and foremost. Then, veering off the point, she would hint at the plaudits for absolute power with which we on the trad­itional left intoxicated ourselves while collectively humiliating the nation.

  I would reply sarcastically. ‘Why are you singling out the traditional left, my dear? Is there any louder cheering than that of the new left?’

  Mostly, she did not reply, lest her words reach our friend Ahmad Majd, who, after gradually infiltrating into public life, did not miss an opportunity to tout his decisive role in taking major decisions in the highest circles, esp
ecially those concerning sensitive subjects related to human rights and secret talks with the Polisario. All that generated an energy for cynicism in me, and I fell victim to its dark side for several weeks.

  I had not talked with Bahia about the disputed land during the years of our relationship. I had vaguely understood from her father, who died suddenly, that he owned swathes of the banks of the Bou Regreg, like many other families who considered these marshlands as nominal riches that meant little to them. But after the formation of the Agency and the ensuing conflict, we nervously broached the subject, because the expedited expropriation made Bahia feel she was the victim of an injustice. It made her believe she was pursued by a strange destiny, and if she won this battle something fundamental in her life would change. When I would tell her that the worst thing was that the question of this wealth – the real estate, potential income and endless speculation – would end her life, she would snap that the worst that could happen at the end of a person’s life was that they would settle for so little. In other words, accepting that what we had obtained was the best we could get. She would then add, ‘Who told you that I want to end my life?’

  My wife’s family had lived in Salé for generations. None of them left its walls and it never occurred to one of them to go and live somewhere else, far from the city’s holy tombs and great mosque. Only one member of the family – no one knew what had got into him – decided to repeat the experience of paradise lost in the family history. In the midst of unprecedented emotional uproar, he emigrated to the opposite bank of the Bou Regreg, a mere fifteen minutes away from his paradise. As soon as evening fell he would set the table of nostalgia in his house of exile and lament Salé and its people, bewailing its ephemeral blessings. With every drink, his nostalgia grew more intense and he vented his anger on the parasitic growth of neighbourhoods around the city. The scion of Andalusia was reduced to a minority lost among the riff-raff, like a single tidy strand in the midst of tousled hair. That man was my wife’s father, a professor of modern linguistics at Mohammed V University, whose fear of poverty, nostalgia for Salé and grief over the decline of the Arabic language cost him his life.