The Arch and the Butterfly

by Mohammed Achaari

  As if Fatima had heard what was going through my mind, she said unexpectedly, ‘What could create excitement in this kind of investigation is the possible relationship between black metal bands and the Islamist groups.’

  ‘That would be playing games with no connection to the truth,’ I said.

  She then asked me to stop wasting the little time remaining before her departure talking shop. I did as she asked and dropped the subject. She urged me to take care of myself, to remember my yearly tests, especially my prostate exam, and to watch my blood pressure. She wondered why I didn’t devote more time to writing, and why I didn’t go and see her in Madrid. ‘You need a city that has real nightlife,’ she said.

  She also asked why nothing in my relationship with Layla was clear.

  ‘What do you want to be clear about it?’ I asked.

  ‘I mean everything,’ she said. ‘And most of all, whether it’s a love story.’

  ‘How do you want me to know? I know there’s a story and I know more importantly that I am very comfortable in the relationship.’

  She asked if I dyed my hair. ‘Never,’ I said angrily.

  She adjusted her attitude and said, ‘You have some grey hairs here and there.’ She put her finger on the places she meant.

  I said, ‘If I’m still alive and my hair hasn’t gone white, I will come to Madrid.’

  She stood up to go to the boarding gate and hugged me quickly, as if she were getting rid of an annoyance. As she was collecting her things, she said nervously, ‘Don’t ever say “if I’m still alive”. It’s a phrase that upsets me.’

  On my way back from the airport, I was anxious because of this lousy goodbye. I found myself engaged in a remote argument with Fatima, about the way she implicitly blamed me for something I had not done. What did she want me to have done? I should have betrayed my wife with her on the first day. Had I done so, our relationship would have ended perfectly many years ago. But we did not do that and left the matter open to missed opportunities. Meanwhile, for each of us this friendship grew stronger and even more complex. What did she want me to do? Was it possible to build something on top of ruins? Even Al-Firsiwi could not do that. I ended this angry monologue with a torrent of choice swearwords that I addressed to myself and Fatima for obvious reasons, and then to Al-Firsiwi for no obvious reason.

  3

  I called Ahmad Majd to ask him about an apartment Layla had bought in a project he was developing in Rabat. She had requested minor changes inside the apartment, but the work was not yet completed. While discussing this issue, Ahmad asked me if I was interested in valuable information regarding a new real-estate scandal.

  I said jokingly, ‘Does it concern your group or the competition?’

  He did not laugh and told me that he preferred to discuss the matter in person.

  I went to Ahmad’s huge construction project in the suburbs of the capital. It comprised luxury apartment buildings, social housing – to justify the very low price he had paid for the land – and an area of villas. All of this was built on the site of the old hospital and the social work facilities of a number of ministries. The land was close to the city’s green belt, where building was forbidden. But the state went inside the green belt with its construction projects, citing their social role. Layla had bought a small apartment in one of those new buildings, putting all her savings into it. She would also be putting half her monthly salary into it for the next ten years.

  I wondered whether I too should buy an apartment in the same building. This would bring us close to a semblance of family life without the restrictions of living under the same roof. I liked the idea and immediately discussed it with Layla. At first she seemed distracted, but then she showed an overwhelming enthusiasm that made me embark immediately on a property venture with unforeseen consequences.

  It was the first decision I had taken for Layla’s sake. Previously, we had talked about the things that would help us build a relationship, when Layla had admitted she missed terribly some elements of daily life in our liaison, for example bringing a gas cylinder and installing it nervously like someone not handy in such things; or my preparing breakfast or using the wrong toothbrush by mistake; or her shouting at me because I had left a wet towel on the bed, knowing very well that that upset her. There was also the issue of socks. She hated men’s socks even if they were clean, in fact, even if they were brand new.

  ‘Do you sometimes leave the fridge door open?’ she asked me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And the wardrobe door and the kitchen tap.’

  ‘My God, those are things I could kill over!’

  I told her that we’d better avoid sharing anything that might lead us to a bloody end. She then said something that surprised me. She said that what delighted her in our relationship was that it had been a source of amazement from the first day. She wondered how she had met me and how we could continue to be together. She was surprised how we hadn’t met for years and then how we hadn’t missed each other on the way, although everything around us called for that. She was particularly surprised how we lived a love that we did not declare, that we did not expect and that we did not need to manage.

  My heart pounded when she talked about love, like a teenager thinking about it for the first time. It was the way I had felt when I regained my sense of smell, my face buried in Yacine’s shirt. I had the impression that Layla was pouring over me all at once, as if she were water that had been dammed for a long time behind a huge boulder, but had finally managed to displace the boulder and come streaming over me. I had no choice but to put myself at the mercy of the raging water and let it carry me, not knowing where I would surface or go under as I released myself from time, since time was condensed in this torrent.

  That evening as we were leaving Layla’s house I told her that I loved her. She said simply, ‘I know.’

  Quite disappointed, I said, ‘But I never told you that before.’

  She insisted, ‘Yes you did. A million times without uttering the words.’

  ‘No, no, no,’ I said. ‘There’s a terrible misunderstanding here. The feeling itself, I mean the feeling of love, never occurred to me. You know, I felt that the person I am, who does not experience the feeling of love, does, in fact, love you. But this feeling was nothing but a cold awareness. It has nothing to do with what I feel today.’

  We got into the car, and when I started speaking again, she stopped me and said that the subject did not interest her at all. She then took my hand, placed it on her chest and said that she wanted to sleep a little while I drove to the Japanese restaurant. Then she said, ‘Look how beautiful the sky is, the clouds, the melting colours. And the light, oh my God, do you see the light?’

  ‘I do, I do.’

  ‘It’s a sky just for us.’

  I laughed, surprised, but she insisted, saying, ‘Really, it’s a sky for us. Every time we make love, it gives us this gift.’

  I drove in silence while she held my hand and I felt her breathing. When I stopped near our restaurant, Layla was fast asleep. I switched off our mobiles and lay down without removing my hand, unconcerned by the curiosity of the passers-by.

  Layla had told me many times that all her life she had looked for an easy-going man and that I could be that man. I attributed that to my total inability to ask her for anything. And the pain I had endured liberated me from many aspects of myself without my planning it or making an exceptional effort to that end. Therefore I began watching what was happening to me as if it were happening to somebody else. This distance gave me the capacity to act with a satisfying generosity that I did not clearly understand until I sensed its delightful impact on my surroundings.

  Layla, however, understood everything. She knew how I worked and exactly what my weaknesses were. She knew that at a certain moment in my journey, which resembled the steps of an acrobat, there would be a momentary loss of balance that could push me into a precipitous fall. She was very concerned that this moment would take me by surprise
in a dangerous place or that my fall would dent my dignity. I, on the other hand, dreaded having one of my fits while with her. I didn’t care at all whether it happened on the train or in the street. But not with her. Then one day it happened. I begged her to keep talking to me, not about anything in particular, but with unchecked words as if I would breathe with those words. She did that with amazing skill, as if she had trained for it for years. After that I never needed to suggest to her what she had to do. She would know the fit was approaching before I felt it myself. She would take my hand and help me get over the dark moments, as if leading me to a comfortable chair.

  Layla also knew that I loved her and clutched her back from the talons of savage loss. I ran after her absent face in details that happened in my life, or did not happen. She became an unalloyed possibility from the first day. She was always possible, and if she did not materialise at a specific moment, it was not because she was not there but because the moment was not the one, and now she was at an infinite moment and so was I. There was a desert that I had to cross, and I knew that paradise was at a certain turn in this immensity. She knew that, too, and responded to every situation that upset us by saying, ‘It’s a matter that does not concern us, it’s happening to other people.’ In so doing she borrowed an image that she knew represented precisely my relationship with the world.

  We received our apartments the same week. But I spent a whole week getting rid of my belongings in my old home. I had told Layla that this apartment would be meaningless if I did not use it to fulfil a wish going back to my adolescence of an empty white house with hardly any internal walls. And so it was. One of Ahmad’s contractors helped me realise my dream.

  I reserved the space for the bedroom and the bathroom and left all the rest open with a huge balcony that ran along the side that faced west. The kitchen was on the right from the entrance, and the remaining space extended to the blueness of the ocean. All this white expanse would be filled with nothing but white curtains, a large low black table, and four white poufs for sitting on. In the kitchen I placed all the utensils in a wooden black frame made to measure, which turned them into a neutral barrier that did not disrupt the sense of emptiness. I had a single bookcase with very few books that I had kept from my desert days, which I put in the kitchen out of a conviction that books belonged to the realm of spices, oils and preserves. In the lower drawers of the kitchen I stashed the documents and photos that I did not have the courage to burn. Two days before I moved into my new apartment I sold all my paintings, taking advantage of the huge rise in their value, and I donated my library to an association in the Yacoub El Mansour district in Rabat. I gave my furniture to the first old friend willing to take it. I had a single large key for the apartment made out of pure red copper.

  No one liked my home. All my friends found it cold and desolate, and made fun of the minimalist decor. Even Layla said that I had imported Japanese emptiness to a culture that finds itself only in clutter. Despite all that I stood my ground for fear I would relapse if I went back on my decision. I later realised that I mainly used the bedroom, while the white void was inhabited by mysterious souls.

  One evening Layla and I were sitting in this spiritual space, taking our time to eat dinner. We could see our shadows, the flame of the candle and the wild fish – as I called Al-Wazzani’s carving standing on the table – reflected in the glass of the balcony, while the sky was still lit by a soft sunset. I was coming and going to the kitchen without interrupting my conversation with Layla or going out of sight. She found this situation practical and appreciated having the whole kitchen open to the living room.

  ‘The surprise comes in how the food tastes, nothing else,’ she said. ‘I saw from the start that you were preparing fish, but that only doubled the surprise of tasting the tang of saffron in the slices of sea bream. Both the place and the meal will forever remain two sides of a single coin. The relationship between places and tastes is truly amazing.’

  When the horizon turned totally dark, Layla asked me to draw the curtains because she always imagined that someone was watching us. I did as she asked, knowing that the flowing white drapes would give the glass façade a cottony dimension that would totally change the sensation of the inner space. As soon as the lights of the city disappeared and the white drapes fell over the transparency of the glass, something blossomed in the ambiance. The light and the emptiness became like a mad wind playing in the mind and planting a fiery desire in everything. Layla said that if she had not been so shy, she would have walked around naked in the space.

  I got close to her and began seeking her nakedness, in submission to my fingers and a desire more powerful than I had felt in years. I felt as if I did not recognise my own movements, which seemed to be guided by something that rose freely within my body. The details of her body seized me by surprise, without passing through the mind’s filter that used to guide me to her. They reached me through her neck, her chest and the smoothness of her back. I closed my eyes and submitted to her fingertips exploring my features and prying inside every shudder that passed through me. I heard for the first time her innermost sounds rising between my hands, reaching me from a cavernous flow, not a language but a straining musical performance. Then I found myself inside her breath, her sweetness and a closed oyster, where I transformed into the scent of the sea scattered far by salt and seaweed. She resisted my incursion with nervous pushes, a mixture of rising and ebbing, until she succeeded in creating a small breach in our wave. She said she wanted to walk naked. I followed her gradual rise with my hands and lips until she placed her two small feet with long toes, the nails carefully painted, on the same marble that I was warming with two burning cheeks. I saw her toes move when I touched them with my lips, then I saw the feet move like glowing objects. I remained lying down and could not see her walk in the white space; I saw only her feet leaving the shiny surface of the marble and then returning to it in breathtaking harmony.

  When the cold stung I sat up and asked Layla to stand against the curtains, which she did with exciting compliance. I saw her expression for the first time and I was enveloped with what looked like thick clouds as a result of what I saw. Her face had become filled with the emptiness she was walking in and had acquired a metaphysical dimension, as if the effort she had made and the secret dance she had performed had poured infinite distance into her expression. I stretched my arms to her for a long time. She did not move, but remained standing in front of the curtains in all her desire. I begged her to touch her body. She moved her hands in unison, starting with her face and then descending over all her body until she reached the bottom of her tummy with one hand. With her other hand she pulled part of the curtains over her body, covering movements that made the cloth ripple and her face fill with the glow of total pleasure.

  I fell in love with my apartment that night. After that night I felt clearly that Layla would fill the place of the mysterious souls. She would live in this house the way she lived in my skin. She liked the idea of the books placed in the kitchen, and she would even help me get rid of books I used to consider essential in my life, such as the complete works of Hölderlin and Rilke, Henri Michaux and Pessoa. She said that poetry was not beautiful when it was easily accessible, and that when I wanted to read it, I should go to the library and read only one poem.

  She developed a theory of minimalism and applied it to my music collection and my clothes. I was happy to find myself freed of the weight of the years that had made me attached to the insignificant things piled around me, in the belief that I was preserving the years themselves. I even felt that this renewal in the material domain gave objects a new soul. It was as if another person had come as reinforcements in the battle that I had been waging for survival.

  4

  My doctor noticed a general improvement in my condition, and recommended that to fully recover I take up a sport that would exercise body and soul. He suggested a yoga club that offered Pilates. I welcomed the advice with childlike enthusiasm. But I
couldn’t stand the fact that the club was in the basement and that the regulars made fun of my jerky movements. I discreetly withdrew, but not without going through a transformational experience.

  In the yoga club I met a young man who looked very much like me. He and Yacine were as alike as two droplets of water. When I told him that he said, smiling, ‘You might well be my father. I am the illegitimate child of a woman who died single. If twenty years ago you knew a young teacher from the city of Khenifra and you might have had a child with her, then I’m your long-lost son. From now on you have to make room in your life for me.’

  When he noticed my anxiety and nervousness, he burst out laughing and said in a friendly tone, ‘Don’t worry, I won’t harass you. I don’t want a father that I’m supposed to kill in order to live at peace.’

  His concise, joking sentences made it clear he was quite unaware of the bomb he was throwing into my life, for one summer, twenty-four years earlier, I had had a passionate affair with a woman called Zulikha. It ended, naturally enough, at the beginning of the new school year. There was nothing special about the story except that she looked like the French actress Romy Schneider.

  Remembering her, it was almost like the only real tragedy in my life had been her disappearance one distant autumn, followed by her sudden death, which I knew nothing about. Then our potential son turned up – a broadcast engineer who liked yoga and comedies.

  I was overcome with questions about whether Zulikha might have been the woman I had lost but could not remember. Perhaps news of her death had reached me without my realising. I charted all the accomplishments that might have been expected in her life and turned her into a vague object of loss. A suspicion tormented me: I had finally found an ex­­­planation for my being emotionally lost, yet I had not found the woman, not even as a distant memory.