The Arch and the Butterfly

by Mohammed Achaari

  I called my father many times on his mobile phone in a desperate effort to talk to him. My purpose was not to inform him about the report, nor to express my tremendous happiness at this miraculous achievement, but to beg him to reveal to me the unique personality that extracted from Hylas’s mosaic, the mosaic of Abd al-Karim al-Khattabi and Al-Firsiwi struggling against the serpent of the Valley of Death, as well as all the other designs he used to decorate the Zaytoun Hotel. If he was that unique person, why did he not tell me? Why did he spend years changing the course of this archaeological imagination to direct it into his own personal legends, without ever saying anything about it?

  I sent Fatima an e-mail and attached that story with the relevant questions. She replied that Al-Firsiwi had done nothing but repeat what humanity had been doing since time imme­morial – reproduce a single creation in different scenarios and personalities. I considered her answer a philosophical ploy to be done with a topic that did not interest her. I began having nightmares in which I was standing in the middle of the crumbling house, surrounded by dust, smashed ceilings and frightened birds, while Al-Firsiwi’s face kept appearing and disappearing in the midst of the ruins, his voice getting louder and then weaker. In the distance I could hear the sound of collapsing buildings or explosions, I could not say exactly which. Every time I woke from this repeated nightmare, I felt immense regret for having failed to get close to Al-Firsiwi and understand him. I was sorry for merely considering him a colourful persona, a callous acrobat who knew how to step on words and emotions while maintaining his own balance and calculated chaos. Then I saw the paradox in a journey like Al-Firsiwi’s. I had considered it confused and disconnected, while in reality it was extremely coherent and methodical, its links connected by flawless logic. I came to the conclusion that the true meaning of any life was this mysterious logic and nothing else.

  In an effort to put an end to the confusion that overwhelmed me, I went to Al-Firsiwi’s house and tried with my sister’s help to find something there: papers, poems, a will. We found nothing but an open box with a single piece of mosaic inside it and a copy of the poetry book published in Frankfurt. In another room we found one of the letters I had sent to him from Germany, in which I accused him again of having killed my mother. In the wardrobe we found nothing but a rustic djellaba he had kept from his teenage years. As I pushed the djellaba aside, I felt a solid object behind it. When I took the djellaba out of the empty cupboard, the statue of Bacchus, as I had known it, was clearly visible, with his dull gaze and the bunch of grapes hanging over his shoulder.

  My amazement and joy did not last long since I soon discovered that the statue was a copy made of brittle pottery and barely strong enough to move. It was impossible to know under what conditions it had been made, or by whom, with this amazing degree of accuracy. It consisted of a hollow clay body, its redness blackened by firing. When I examined it closely, I realised that Al-Firsiwi’s obsession had gone as far as his making a replica with a broken foot to resemble the original statue after it had been removed from its plinth. I wrapped the copy in a white robe, as if I were placing it in a shroud, and carried it, in a kind of determined ceremonial, to the old abandoned house in Bu Mandara inhabited by forlorn birds and scorpions. I dug near the foundation of the western wall that was all that remained of the impressive room where the great Al-Firsiwi, the father of the first immigration, had stayed. There I buried the clay Bacchus, the statue remaining from mysterious thefts, itself considered in its clay condition an exemplary theft, in perfect harmony with this eternal wasteland.

  On our way back from Bu Mandara, my sister asked, ‘Why did you bury the statue?’

  ‘I don’t know really. I didn’t know what else to do with it.’

  When I got out of the car at the entrance to the Zaytoun Hotel, she turned suddenly before closing the car door and pushed into my hand the piece of mosaic, the only one left from all the chaos. I was moved by this gesture, but I did not know why. I was elated to have this tessera in my life, and I felt for the first time that the woman who had showered me with this happiness was not only Al-Firsiwi’s daughter but my sister as well. Even though I was certain that I was leaving the city for good and without regrets, I knew we would remain attached to it by the strong bond of gratitude and brotherhood.

  2

  I went down the road covered by shade and silence, and then I saw the blue hills stretching like lazy animals and the buildings that began to crawl from the Sidi Mohammed ben Qasem neighbourhood towards the mountain. The buildings, like their people, were crowded together and mysterious, and only characterised by their provocative white colour. When I turned left towards Meknes, I cast a cold look at Walili, as if I wanted to be sure there was not another car in the parking lot. I again felt depressed, as if the difficulty I found being nostalgic about places triggered it anew. I fought that black moment by thinking about Havana, about the seaside and nightclubs, about words that cropped up in the dark not because we needed them, but because the main street, the anxious souls and the song rising from the depths of the sea all needed fleeting words, words that flared like a match. We did not express anything with them, but we used them to build stairs towards rapture.

  This thinking saved me from the onset of depression. I felt I would do something wonderful and exceptional if I went to Havana and shared a funny chat about Hamuniya with Bustrofedon. Why not? We could consider Hamuniya a vari­ation on Estrella Rodriguez. The former collapsed with her weepy ’aytah in Casablanca and the second was swallowed by the night of Havana?. . .?Here I am here, where am I from? Where are you from? Ah, where. Let’s go Havana, hava, here I am, here she is, hava. I am a mouth, he is a mouth, hafah, hafaha, Havana, Havana all of us, fahani, fahuni, hafuni, hafac, hafac, ha, ha, ha, nana, fana, Havana, ha, ha.

  I called Fatima, who had returned to Madrid, but she was busy talking on another line. She asked me to call her later, but I insisted we talk then and told her, ‘We have to travel together to Cuba.’

  She exclaimed, ‘Do you know what the weather is like there at this time of year?’

  I had no idea, but she told me. ‘It’s simply a watery hell!’

  ‘What about the idea?’ I asked.

  She replied, ‘It belongs to a time in the past. It would have been a beautiful idea if it had happened before, but it’s too late now. I went to Havana without you, or rather with someone else, and my illusions about it are over. Can we talk later?’

  ‘Yes, yes, we’ll talk later,’ I said, and then put the phone down. As I drove I thought about ‘before’ and ‘after’, about the right time that no one had succeeded in setting since the beginning of creation.

  In the days that followed that phone conversation, Fatima would talk to me in a somewhat rude manner, as if she were settling a score. I could not find a positive sentence to include in our phone calls or a pleasant way to end them. One evening she left a message on my answering machine, telling me she would accompany a Spanish journalist on a two-week visit to Morocco to investigate the case of the devil worshippers and Essam al-Khayati’s disappearance. She did not include a single affectionate word, as she used to do, which I considered a virtual declaration of war. When I told her that later, she laughed and said she had stopped fighting years ago. But she remained aloof during her whole visit, which gave a sharp edge to all her comments and reactions. This upset Layla and led her to make some rash assumptions, most significantly that Fatima was expressing repressed jealousy and was unable to recover from her failure to have a relationship with me. Layla yet again asked about the true nature of my friendship with Fatima. I repeated to her the details of the story, including the feeling of loss that sometimes overcame me when I realised how important Fatima was in my life, yet there was no possibility of a sexual relationship between us. Once again Layla was upset because of my feeling of loss, and she considered it a lurking danger that might surface in our relationship one day. She also interpreted Fatima’s present anxiety as a sign of the imminent e
ruption of that volcano.

  The events that ensued put an end to Layla’s sedition. It so happened that we spent an evening at my house a week after the arrival of Fatima and Joaquin, the Spanish journalist. There was an ambiguous rejoicing during our get-together that clearly reflected a waning in Fatima’s ire and an increase in her affection for me, and for Layla as well. But I soon understood that the reason for this change was the visit she had paid to Ibrahim al-Khayati in Salé prison, particularly something Ibrahim had said. When the conversation turned to that visit at the end of the evening, Fatima admitted that she was very angry with the way we had given up on Ibrahim’s innocence, or at least his presumed innocence, and the ease with which we had eliminated this important man from our lives. Layla said that the matter had nothing to do with innocence or guilt, and that even if we assumed that Ibrahim had in fact killed Essam, that did not make him a different person. ‘He’s still the same man who inundated our lives, yours in particular, with unusual feelings.’ The forgetfulness surrounding Ibrahim, his wife and his son Mahdi, and his friends and acquaintances, was painful. ‘He feels like it’s a miracle that you remember him from time to time,’ Fatima said.

  After we dropped Fatima and Joaquin at their hotel, Layla said that the journalist seemed pleasant enough and wished that something would happen between him and Fatima. I said that what mattered was for Fatima to wish it, which made Layla say, ‘I feel that she is searching for him but she probably does not dare desire him.’

  I replied, just for the sake of bickering, that she was a few years older than him.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Layla said joyfully. ‘He will grow old very quickly and then she will be younger than him.’

  Fatima and Joaquin’s investigation concluded that the musicians in the groups that were considered devil worshippers were simply budding amateurs. Not one of them was a professional musician or had a true understanding of song and dance. Most of them were university or school students who liked hard rock, heavy metal, death metal, black metal and grunge. Although many named their groups in imitation of international bands, especially those from the Scandinavian countries, such as Arthritis, Busted Eye, Polluted Mind, Cemetery Air, Orgasm and Snake Blood, they had never travelled abroad or participated in any international music festival. They only performed their work in the hall of the Secular Institute, FOL, located in Ibn Nussair Alley, and in other fringe venues in Casablanca. Most members of these bands lived their passion on the TV channels VIVA, MTV and HCM. Their role models were some of the groups that had preceded them, such as Total Eclipse, Immortal Spirit and Carpe Diem.

  Despite the state of high alert that accompanied the arrest of these musicians, the police only confiscated some hard rock and black metal CDs and some black T-shirts with pentagrams, skulls and inverted crosses. They also took some magazines such as Hard Rock, and posters for Western bands. The young men mostly did not understand the meaning of the English lyrics they sang. The songs they composed were about issues such as Palestine, the chaos of Casablanca and the difficulty of living on a low income.

  One thing stood out in the information gathered here and there: all the young men, including Essam and Mahdi, frequented the same clubs as a group called the Ravens, so named because their members dressed all in black, including black leather overcoats and black combat boots. The Ravens wore metal sleeves around their wrists and rings with pointed claws, and had their ears, noses and eyebrows pierced. They adopted sullen expressions and went to all the clubs and cafés high on drugs or alcohol, accompanied by young women with strange names and who wore low-slung pants that revealed their navels and a large part of their hips.

  The leader of the Ravens was a man called the Vampire. He organised parties at his house, where he reiterated some of the ideas found in black metal songs, such as mocking Jesus, encouraging sexual freedom, and advocating pleasure, violence and death. But that was not a call for anybody to join in devil worship. It was simply a form of exhibitionism that sometimes prompted him to take his friends to a nearby cemetery and organise a drinking session around a plastic skull with a candle stuck in it. He was once accompanied by a girl called Bish Bish, and he encouraged her to kiss Essam in the presence of his friends and then lie with him on a grave and move in time to a noisy song in imitation of sexual intercourse.

  Mahdi avoided talking about this time, probably because he was not fully involved in the groups’ activities then, and possibly because he knew things he did not want to reveal. Fatima believed that the developments no one knew about were those that took place during Essam’s friendship with the Vampire. No one knew how far the cemetery nights went, or the nature of the relationships between Bish Bish and Essam, and Bish Bish and the Vampire.

  Joaquin concluded that it was not inconceivable that Essam had been the victim of one of the devil worshippers’ rituals, thanks to direct instigation by the Vampire. It was also possible that this ritual had combined with a settlement of scores based on jealousy, revenge and even simple goading under the influence of alcohol and music. I tried to address those assumptions by eliminating the elements of prurience and exaggeration that were normal in this case. My words upset Fatima once more, and she answered me nervously, claiming that the fixation with incriminating Ibrahim al-Khayati was a political solution.

  When I smiled at her, she said grimly, ‘Yes, like I’m saying. The decision to downplay the seriousness of the case and release the guys who were arrested came after the media frenzy, the questions in parliament and the solidarity demonstrations. This explains why they couldn’t go back and make it serious again by putting a murder at the heart of it. True? Right?’

  ‘If you say so,’ I replied.

  That same evening we went back to the subject in Layla’s presence. She poked fun at Fatima and Joaquin’s theory, stressing – somewhat hastily I thought – that it was preferable for Essam to have been killed by Ibrahim and possibly buried in the garden, as the police believed.

  I didn’t know how it happened, but later I found Fatima crying bitterly. Anxiety had settled in our midst and controlled everything. I could not calm Fatima. Her crying fit took over her whole body and reached such a pitch that she paralysed us all; we could not do a thing for her. Layla convinced us, with unusual calm, that the best thing to do was to let the fit run its course.

  Once we got in the car Fatima had regained her composure. She sat next to me and apologised for what had happened, saying, ‘I don’t usually collapse like a child. The point is that I find Ibrahim al-Khayati’s case painful. It hurts me if he did it and it hurts me if he did not. It hurts me because he smiles like an idiot and asks me if I visited Mahdi and whether he has said anything, and why no one visits him and why Ghaliya does not visit him the way she did with the others in the old days. It hurts me that we accepted what happened as if it had to happen and moved on to something else as if we were not ourselves or as if the others were not themselves. Then what? What next? I return to a city that I know but find insipid; I find myself in an apartment like a teenager’s. I feed a colleague, just a colleague who won’t become anything more. There’s friction with Layla, so sure of herself, happy with what she does, and you, I put you especially in the position of bringing me back to reason. What a shame. Why don’t we run away to Havana?’

  ‘You said it was too late.’

  ‘I’m talking about the Havana nightclub in Casablanca. It was the last nightclub Essam went to before he disappeared.’

  I told her I had been there once with Mahdi and I did not think it a suitable place for us, just a vast bubble of unmelodic noise performed by unattractive people.

  I stood in the hotel doorway facing Fatima. Joaquin next to us was like a child past his bedtime. The night was desolate. I looked into Fatima’s eyes, transparent after the tears. Then I moved close to her and kissed her on the lips.

  She said, laughing, ‘That’s nice, even if too late!’

  Layla’s sharp voice and rapid sentences woke me up at three in the
morning. She wanted to know if Fatima was with me.

  ‘Why would I do that?’ I asked her.

  ‘I don’t know. I either felt it or dreamed about it.’

  I replied sleepily, ‘Check for yourself. Do you see how tiny I look in this large bed? There is no woman here.’

  She asked angrily, ‘Did you wish there were?’

  ‘No. I just want to sleep actually.’

  Layla felt sorry for me and said, ‘Sleep well and sweet dreams.’ She was sorry for her behaviour and asked me if I did not want her to appear out of the phone, and I said yes. She then said she loved me.

  Fatima and Joaquin went on collecting news from various sources about Essam’s relationship with the Vampire. They wanted to know if he had seduced Essam into some kind of satanic relationship that had brought him back, even after the court case and what was considered the betrayal of Arthritis. According to Fatima, this suspect relationship might have created the sort of dramatic tension that could lead to a crime. But when, two days later, I took her and her Spanish colleague to the airport, she had distanced herself from the story. She considered Ibrahim’s arrest before the trial a sensible measure as it would protect him from any foolish act on the part of Mahdi or his mother. She added that Ibrahim was totally convinced Essam had crossed to the other side and might now be in a training camp somewhere, a member of a sleeper cell. I shuddered when I heard her talk so casually about the issue, as if engaging in this tragic destiny was a simple possibility among many others.

  I wanted to ask her not to pay any attention to that possibility and to keep up her correspondence with Ibrahim, to help him remain strong. I wanted to convince her to abandon the idea of publishing her investigation in the Spanish press, because of the anxiety some Moroccan officials experienced whenever something was published in the foreign press. I told myself that, after all, the investigation only had limited importance because it did not go beyond the buzz generated by that kind of trial.