The Arch and the Butterfly

by Mohammed Achaari

  ‘Imagine all this crowd tanned by the sun and the grime, those who were born there and spent all their lives on, under or inside the dump. They don’t know any other space and think that life can only exist in a dump, and that the rubbish piling up around them comes from another planet. Imagine all the people who built their huts and their dreams there. Imagine the situation when they are told, “The dump has moved. Follow it to the new location.”

  ‘But the dump wasn’t just a rubbish dump. It was a hill and a bank on a river. OK, a stinking bank, but still a bank by a river in flow covered with reeds blown by the wind, and a large market for vegetables, fruit and meat. It was also home to love stories, good and bad marriages, grudges, small tortures, the dead and the buried. They cannot be told to go away because we have decided that the banks of the Bou Regreg will become the most beautiful spot in the city. You may look from afar and remember the ugliness in which you lived. What I mean by rehabilitating is us finding them a place among us, a place in this beautiful game. As if we were saying thank you to them for implanting so much life in this place, which for years we tried to kill, before suddenly deciding to save.

  ‘I believe that settling them at the heart of this architectural showpiece would not diminish its splendour, but might even add a certain naïve kindness. It won’t hurt anybody. We could add to that a giant memorial for the dump, consisting of an artificial hill of various shapes and colours, where children could play without harm. It would be an expression of an emancipated sense of the beautiful, one not controlled by rigid guidelines and hollow considerations. Add to this the pedagogical gain that might result from it, its ability to open people’s eyes to the importance of establishing a human relationship with rubbish. I bet people would respect water more as a result of this landmark than for the sake of the beautiful lagoon.’

  I listened to Bahia, amazed. When she finished, my first reaction was to ask for her forgiveness, because I had made fun of her idea and attributed it to the depression that she suffered because of the lawsuit.

  I told her that it was a truly wonderful idea, but I shared my fears with her, in case her project raised objections for various reasons, which would render its fulfilment impossible. She, on the other hand, demonstrated huge willingness to follow up on the project regardless of the outcome. I felt better about her spirits. Bahia’s good mood gave me the opportunity to ask her about the idea, suggested by our son, for an arch spanning the mouth of the river. She repeated that he had told her about it when they went together to see the confiscated land, the day before his departure.

  She had wanted to give him a chance to think about a solution for it.

  ‘On our way back,’ she said, ‘we stopped at the mouth of the river, and there he expressed his lack of interest in the land and the projects surrounding it, but he said that if he could do something, he would install a giant rainbow-like arch that would connect the two banks; a huge, irregular arch, unlike any other. It would be taller than the Qasbah of the Udayas. One foundation would be on the Rabat side, then it would rise to its apex before dropping away towards the second foundation on the opposite bank. A steel arch painted blue to look like a thread of water frolicking over the ocean.’

  I asked if Yacine had left anything about the idea in his papers or drawings, but Bahia said no. She thought it was a spur-of-the-moment idea, and he had probably made fun of these projects. He used to say that absurdity was the only thing that could save the city. I did not comment and left the house deflated. I walked for a long time in the alleyways of the old city in the direction of the river, recalling all the simple things I had not achieved. I had wanted to build a small house by the sea, it didn’t matter where, but hadn’t been able to.

  I had wished to visit Havana. Why? I didn’t know for certain. Perhaps because of the music and Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s novels, or just because an old friend of mine went there on a journalistic assignment and did not return for a year. I always dreamed of getting caught in the net of a city whose embrace would not release me to another city; a city that hugs, breastfeeds, reprimands and licks your wounds, a city where you could live with the impression of building it, one stone at a time, and think of it when getting ready for bed, as if it were a woman awaiting you. Now, however, I had no energy to undertake such a trip. I did not feel like packing my suitcase and going to the airport. The most I could do was stand in the street on the side facing Havana’s seafront, awaiting the three tigers to pass, and go with them to the night of the city, opening the box of the language that sprang from the depths of night. How wonderful the city that stripped off the language of day at sunset and donned a different language for night.

  I had less glorious wishes as well: losing weight, for example, or mastering the tango, but I had given up everything and was content to keep up an understated elegance that I had learned from my mother.

  When I remembered all the things I had failed to achieve, I felt cheated. This often prompted me to compare the effort I exerted when I adopted big causes and the effort I made to fulfil my little wishes. Whenever I made such a comparison, I realised that if I had exerted a small effort to fulfil my modest wishes, compared to the huge effort I devoted to those great causes, I would have been another person today. I admitted to myself, based on this truth, that the fulfilment of all the aims in the world would be meaningless if it resulted, on the personal level, in putting a person’s remains in a plastic bag and forgetting it on the side of the road.

  I sat down at a café near the river, exhausted from my walk and my black thoughts. I called Fatima and told her I was waiting for her there. At that instant, Yacine appeared.

  ‘Why this serious concern for the arch?’ he asked.

  ‘For no reason, I just liked the idea,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t want you to adopt it. Your projects and mine have nothing to do with each other, do you understand?’

  ‘I do understand, but you’re not here any more,’ I replied.

  ‘It’s you who’s not here any more.’

  ‘Listen to me, Yacine. No one needs this arch, not you, me or anyone else. The new project, however, does need it. Among all the material components the new city requires, there isn’t a single whimsical element. The arch could be that element, and might be able to break down the meticulous calculations of profit and loss. It might move the city from a path of pure construction to a path of pure imagination. Can you understand that?’

  ‘Yes, I understand,’ he replied, ‘but your hijacking of the idea upsets me. I don’t want another kind of relationship between the two of us. The fact is, I know exactly what will happen: you’ll chase after the project to no avail, and then you’ll add a new loss to our stock of losses.’

  ‘What if I like the idea and the arch becomes a feature of the city?’

  ‘That’d be horrible too!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because another, more complex relationship will emerge between us, and I don’t like that.’

  ‘We have to forget our past disagreements,’ I said. ‘You know, I don’t have the slightest enthusiasm for this or any other project. All I want is to get out of the pits.’

  ‘And the dump?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t want to have anything to do with it. Imagine that after all the years I spent fighting imperialism and reactionaries, I end up as an activist for a dump!’

  Yacine laughed and asked me, ‘And the arch? Do you think it could save the toiling masses?’

  ‘Yes, it would.’

  ‘From what?’

  ‘From getting used to killing imagination.’

  He said, ‘You’re joking. The arch would only redeem a minor thing of concern to you, nothing else.’

  Fatima arrived and Yacine withdrew, leaving a cruel sentence hanging in my mouth. She might have noticed its effect on my face, for she asked, ‘Are you just emerging from the heat of battle?’

  ‘No, not at all. I was only arguing with myself about a crazy project.’

&
nbsp; She asked excitedly, ‘Going to Havana?’

  ‘No, Yacine’s arch at the mouth of the river.’

  Her eyes twinkled, and she said that ever since hearing of the project she had not stopped thinking about it. She also said that building the arch would take our cities in a new direction that might break down the mould of traditions that weighed heavily on our chests.

  That was how we began planning the arch. We established a group in charge of the project and identified the doors to knock on and the consultants to use. We said that even if we failed to complete the arch, we would get involved in an unusual cause, one with poetic dimensions that might succeed in moving something that was difficult to move.

  A disagreement bloomed in the press between those who considered the arch an aggression against the historical fabric of the city and those who considered it a modern, artistic addition to a view frozen in the past. There were those who saw an arch overlooking the ocean as an invitation to adopt the absolute, and others who saw it as an expression of Moroccans’ phobia with any space not controlled by doors and locks. Some considered it a bold proposal to give expression to new needs in the urban environment; others deemed it an expression of the crisis of the traditional left, which did not conceive projects but rather invented the games that messed them up.

  The strangest thing we read during this period was an art­­icle written by one of the new yes-men, who claimed that the idea was very old and already existed in the development plan for the riverbanks. He added that a naïve campaign based on that idea had been launched to suggest that only one party in the country was capable of visualising splendid things for our urban spaces.

  When the Agency invited our association to a meeting on the subject, we understood that the article had been a preamble to the idea’s adoption. We were happy. Fatima, as president of the association, presented the elements of the project, its philosophy and its artistic and humanitarian dimensions. She offered a vision backed by a technical report prepared by a firm of consulting engineers and a declaration of support from a group of well-known artists. At the end of her presentation before a number of directors and engineers, there was a slow exchange of hesitant smiles before they all exploded in noisy laughter.

  We tried a few times to intervene and resume the conversation. The laughter would subside, but as soon as one of us uttered a word or two, the laughter would resume, louder than before. We had to stop talking entirely and simply watched these eminent people – successful in everything and more refined than the rest of humanity – as they handed paper handkerchiefs to one another, some suppressing their laughter and others in fits. They looked at us every now and then and apologised with partial signs, as if they were blaming us for leading them into this embarrassing situation.

  When matters reached a level of awkwardness that made it impossible for them to go on laughing, the director cleared his throat, arranged himself in his chair, and said in a low voice, ‘We’re sorry! We’ve been following the arch proposal in the papers, but never, for one moment, did we think that the matter would be so serious.’

  ‘There is nothing serious about it,’ I said. ‘We only want to make you see that games are also an architectural requirement.’

  ‘Yes, we understand that. While you are no doubt aware that this game would be highly expensive, and with the project in its current state we could not convince anyone to agree to this huge expenditure.’

  ‘We weren’t thinking in those terms,’ I said. ‘It occurred to us that the development project was so bold and so enormous, it might be considered the only project open to such games.’

  Confusion pervaded the room, and we instinctively took advantage of it to collect our papers and get ready to leave. The director pushed his chair back and stood up, revealing his great height. ‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘I hope you did not consider our laughter rude or a way to avoid the issue.’

  I said sincerely, ‘Laughter was right at the heart of the matter.’

  Fatima was affected by the events of the meeting for a number of weeks. She said that what shocked her most was the amount of power those people had, power that gave them the right to turn a public domain like the city into a sphere for their sole, unrivalled intervention. They could decide to set an island in the heart of the river, create a lagoon and put up an amusement park, without seeing their plans as an assault on the space or an attack on the citizen. But they begrudged us for imagining setting an arch over the river, which would not require the confiscation of land or the displacement of inhabitants.

  She calmed down after a while and regained her gift for sarcasm. She repeated that we deserved the lack of respect because we had thrown away our revolutionary demands, and our utmost ambition was reduced to acquiring for the Moroccan people a piece of steel to hang over the river.

  Bahia, who haughtily watched us abandon her project, never let an opportunity slip without asking, ‘Where did the arch go?’ I replied most often, ‘To the landfill of history.’

  Our disinterest did not stop her from revealing the latest news in the rehabilitation of the dump, especially after Ahmad Majd had used his friendship with people in high places and attracted some official sympathy for it. He also introduced many formal and substantive changes that stripped her idea of all its elements of surprise and turned it into a plain melody in the symphony of sustainable development. We did not, therefore, pay any attention to the news or to her arguments that the new design was a victory for the substance, though at the expense of the form. And all as a result of difficult negotiations, where cunning Ahmad Majd played the role of the unstop­pable engineer.

  It so happened that one evening as we sat discussing the details of our failed projects, the TV news began with two long reports, one dealing with the incorporation of the Akkrach region into a huge project for social housing and the creation of a new city on the ruins of the dump. The second report concerned the beginning of work to build the Gate of the Sea, exactly at the mouth of the river where Yacine, before his death in Afghanistan, had imagined it. It was a steel arch for the river to pass under as if it were flowing through the fingers of the city.

  Life’s Small Miracles

  1

  When I returned home one evening, I found Bahia lying on the couch facing the TV. She sat up and told me, hesitantly, that we needed to talk. I sat, apprehensive, as she handed me an envelope. I recognised the name of the medical lab located at the entrance of our apartment building. I reluctantly took hold of it, and she asked me to read it carefully, which I did, extremely quickly, expecting one of those catastrophes that only laboratories can cause. I read through it once and then again, but I understood nothing. I looked at her and asked, hardly able to speak, ‘What is this?’

  ‘Tests the doctor ordered to check my fertility,’ she explained.

  ‘What are the results?’

  ‘Can you believe that I’m as fertile as ever!’

  My nerves settled, now that I knew it was not about ter­­minal cancer. ‘And?’ I asked.

  ‘We can make a new baby!’

  I shivered and relived in one second the hell I would have to go through, starting with the maternity ward and ending in the wilds of Kandahar. I got up, nervous, and said decisively and unequivocally, ‘That will never happen.’

  For almost four weeks we hardly talked to each other, and then only about simple day-to-day matters. I would spend the whole day out of the house and when I returned in the evening, I went directly to the TV set. I avoided the slightest physical contact with my wife lest she use it as a way to achieve her foolish plan. Fatima visited us every now and then, telling us about her imminent transfer to Madrid, where she had been assigned by her news agency. Her visits lightened the tense atmosphere at home.

  One day I told Bahia, for no special reason, that I was grateful to her for having discussed with me the issue of a new baby. She could have obtained what she wanted without my know­ledge, though we had not had sex for years. She explained that she had
thought about it, but did not consider it an elegant way to resume our relationship, and somewhat demeaning to both of us. I assured her that I understood her longing to have a child, but she had to understand that the matter terrified me. It wasn’t a disagreement that could be resolved, but rather something impossible to overcome.

  She said very simply, ‘If that’s the case, we must separate.’

  We did. We appeared before a judge and explained our situation to him without embellishment. He first said it was impossible to use my refusal to have a child as a cause for divorce, because having children was the only legal justification for marriage. He said marriage was not like shooting a film on love. He made a feigned effort to convince Bahia to reconcile, and found it appropriate to remind me of the joys of having children, our greatest blessing. He added, ‘If God grants you another child, you yourself would be reborn!’ When he realised that his words would not change our minds, he completed the procedure in silence, noting down very carefully our monetary agreement without further comment.

  I caught up with Bahia after we left the court building as she was getting ready to drive away in her car. I suggested through the car window that we have a cup of coffee somewhere.

  We sat down in the garden of the Hassan Hotel and, for the first time in years, talked with pure affection, as if something in the papers we had just signed had helped end our little wars. As if it had placed us on the path of regular people who did not see a mountain of hidden meaning in every word, or get upset when the other splashes water on the newspaper when filling a glass, or chain smoked. We were no longer people who made their lives a succession of nerve-racking moments because, even if they did not say it aloud, they were sick of living together.

  Bahia told me that she had thought a lot about the matter, explaining that it was not nostalgia for motherhood. ‘You know that I’m not attached to such things, and I wouldn’t blame you, on that basis, if you accused me again of being a bad mother. It seemed to me that the best way to avenge this tragedy was to repeat the experience: become pregnant, have cravings, give birth, breastfeed, climb this mountain all over again. You know that pain can sometimes drive you to imagine magic solutions. For many months, every time the telephone rang I expected to be told that the letter was a terrible mistake and that Yacine would be back on the nine o’clock flight! Then the delusion evaporated. So when the lab confirmed that my fertility was still normal despite my age, I took it as a clear sign from fate, and one that I had to seize. When you objected so forcefully, I understood that our remaining together would kill this new baby.’