I looked to the right, where the refrigerators and the shelves of cups and glasses were, and I saw him standing there, looking over the city with his dreamy expression and the bunch of stony grapes over his shoulder. I saw his broken arm and his adolescent size. The statue had all the dullness of granite dating back to the first century BC. I stood up trembling and approached it. I examined its right foot and found it had lost four toes, the same ones that were still on the statue’s plinth at the entrance to Walili.
‘It’s Bacchus! The Bacchus of Walili,’ I yelled in excitement.
A number of guests gathered round. Ahmad Majd arrived, clearly upset. Layla held on to me as Fatima examined the statue and took photos. I was overcome with a feeling I could not define, a mixture of joy, madness and fear.
Ahmad Majd shouted at me, saying, ‘Bacchus, Bacchus! And so what?’
I said, ‘Nothing, but we must take it. That’s all there is to it.’
Our host approached our group and asked, a smile frozen on his face, what was the matter. Fatima explained that it was simply an unexpected encounter with a person we knew. The Frenchman said, ‘I always like to play a role in unexpected encounters.’
Fatima pointed to Bacchus, saying, ‘He has been our friend for about a quarter of a century. In other words, ever since he disappeared from his family home in Walili.’
The Frenchman did not make any immediate comment, but his face rippled with a mounting tremor. He said this adolescent Bacchus was not considered an exceptional artistic achievement, despite the lyricism deriving from the lack of harmony between the age of the young man and the delicacy of his movements, which almost stripped the statue of its unworked feel. ‘Despite all that,’ he said, ‘I loved it at first sight when I saw it in Frankfurt. I must confess that it did not cost me much. I can honestly say it is the cheapest piece in my collection.’
We left the apartment after an extended argument over what to do. I insisted on staying to wait for the police to arrive so I could make a statement regarding Bacchus’s recovery. But the French host, Ahmad Majd and other guests suggested otherwise, so as to avoid ruining such a beautiful evening, especially since the owner was not denying the fact or distancing himself from the matter. They all said they knew nothing about the origins of the Bacchus statue, and they wondered if it would be possible to wait until the morning for the guests to leave and the festivities to end. Then we could do whatever was needed, quietly.
Ahmad Majd asked me whether I was more interested in Bacchus or the scandal.
‘Both,’ I said, and to be honest, I added, ‘I’m interested in the scandal, first and foremost.’
Finally, dragging my feet, I left the gallery, went in the direction of the swimming pool and then to the circular hall, and finally to the lift. I was unable to fully recover from the in-between condition I had experienced. I had the feeling I had found Bacchus and not found him; I was happy at this and not happy; I was surprised and not surprised. I thought of calling Al-Firsiwi but I wondered what I would get from doing so. I would probably succeed in destroying his legend regarding Bacchus, and then what? Wouldn’t it be better for him to continue believing that he had fooled us all? Was there something closer to the truth than lies, since both revealed each other?
People in front of me were getting into the crowded lifts, and whenever they became a single mass of heads and apologies, the doors would shut and a mysterious abyss would swallow them. I was about to derive a certain lesson from this evocative image when Layla pushed me into the abyss.
I surrendered to an enjoyable descent, wishing it would never end, when the lift doors opened to a large commotion. At the centre of it all, I saw Fatima bleeding from her nose and shouting. It took me time to understand that two men had grabbed her as she was leaving the lift, attacked her and taken away her camera.
We went straight to the police station, where I reported that I had found the statue of Bacchus that had been stolen a quarter of a century before, and named all the witnesses who had been with me. Fatima reported that she had been attacked and her digital camera stolen. She was convinced theft in such a luxurious place would not be for the money but because she had taken pictures of Bacchus in the ninth floor apartment, in the presence of prominent guests and the owner, the most famous perfume maker in the world.
I no longer had any desire to get anything out of this storm. All I wanted was to return to our room in Ahmad Majd’s house and hold Mai in my arms. I urged Layla to hurry home, assuring her that I did not want anything from this situation, neither a court case nor a victory. All I wanted was to embrace Mai. This sudden upheaval made me easy prey to a destructive fear. My heart constricted, and I imagined that I would not find Mai in her bed or that I would find her swimming in a pool of blood. I had a fit as I fought this fear. I did not know why the fits occurred at my moments of fear in particular.
Layla began spooling the lifeline of words that would help me breathe, throwing it out to the depths that had started to swallow me. I stretched out my arm to grab the rope, but my hand was going crooked and bending back. I tried to return it to its normal position with my other hand, but it too froze against my chest. I was totally tied up while Layla continued to talk about Mai, who had taken her first steps, unexpectedly, the previous day. ‘She stood and looked at me. I told her: come on, come to Mama, and she took one step, then another, and then walked all the way to where I was, without smiling or crying, as if she were doing something she had been doing for ages.’
I then saw a face looking at the car window. I saw a garden and a person running with a dog or away from it. Then I could not see anything except a white light, an overwhelming white light that gradually faded away, revealing objects and sounds. I saw Mai extending her tiny hand towards my face. The moment she touched it, I understood everything.
The police called us in the following day. They told us they had found no trace of a Roman statue in the apartment. I told the officer that we should be taken to court for making up a crime. He said amiably, ‘We don’t see any need for that. There’s no complaint against you.’
I smiled dumbly at the faces that surrounded me. Fatima led me out by the arm. I felt a heavy burden lifting off my chest. I might have been worried that Bacchus, in the event of his glorious return, would become a lawsuit that I would have to manage in connection with many things that were beyond me.
‘OK. The best thing is for all of us to retire to their corner, isn’t it?’ I asked Fatima.
She turned towards me and asked me with teary eyes what I meant.
I said that it was normal for such things to happen at the end of a muddled party, where one sees people and things that no one else sees.
Fatima said, ‘It was simple theft. Why are you trying to give it wings?’
‘I was a stone’s throw from achieving my only victory over Al-Firsiwi, but I failed. His story about the courtyard of the village mosque will remain the most plausible.’
We got in the car, and Fatima hurried to wipe her face and get ready as she always did when she was overtaken by anger. She said, without any trace of hesitation in her voice, ‘I will never return to this country to live. I cannot live in a place I do not understand.’
I wished, deep inside, not to believe her, but I failed. Then I quickly felt better because her decision not to come back had nothing to do with me.
When we returned to Ahmad Majd’s house and I told Layla what happened, she reacted by quickly and determinedly packing our suitcases. We did not even need to discuss the matter. We put the suitcases in the car and left. She insisted on driving. I gave in, not wanting to upset her, but she begged me while I was sitting in the back with Mai never to drive again.
‘Promise me, I beg you, never to drive again.’
I told her frankly that I would never give up this poetic machine, and if a fit did not kill me while I was driving, it would while I was doing something else. ‘What’s the difference?’ I asked.
‘The difference is
that you won’t be around for me to hate you.’
Layla drove in her deliberate, restrained manner while I played with Mai, teaching her sounds made by birds and animals and play-acting roles from cartoons that only the two of us knew. Mai was excited, and after more than an hour she became tired and began rubbing her eyes. Still she did not give in and concentrated her efforts on making me sleep, placing her cheek on my head the way her mother would do for her, then passing her fingers through my hair, insisting with her half words that I rest. Whenever I moved to evade this obligation, she got upset like a true mother and quickened the stroking of her fingers.
When Layla said we were approaching Settat, Mai said, ‘Shustt, shustt.’ The last thing I heard was Layla’s laughter. Then I woke up and heard her say, ‘We’ve arrived.’
I put Mai to bed and helped Layla get everything in order before going up to my apartment. I entered the large, empty space illuminated by the city lights, and took a deep breath.
2
I woke up exhausted for unknown reasons and thought: no one can do anything for anyone else. At that stage in my life, or that moment of the morning, I had the impression that I was a prisoner of situations I was not responsible for and was unable to get away from. Even when I had all the best intentions in the world to do something, I could not do it. I could not do anything for Fatima, I could not do anything for Al-Firsiwi, I could not save Bacchus and I could not go to Havana. I could not run away to a far-off island with Layla, yet I could not stop thinking of escape as the only way to start a new life.
I said all of that to Layla and she answered sharply, ‘A few months ago you could not think about a new place to live, and here you are now living in it and according to the ridiculous Japanese style of your dreams. Before that, there were loads of things you could not do, but sometimes they happened without a huge effort on your part.’
‘Like what?’ I asked.
‘Our relationship, for example. Many lives had to intersect before you could find the way that led you to me.’
I asked her angrily, ‘And you?’
‘I always knew what I wanted.’ This seemed to me the ideal expression of human happiness: to wake up or not wake up and be able to define exactly what you wanted without random additions and gaps, to say ‘I want to get up now and go to a park’ and to walk with a strong feeling that serenity would certainly be found where the row of eucalyptus trees ended.
For many years I had carried Yacine on my shoulders, and every time I laid my head on the pillow I would decide to bury him. In the dark I would rehearse the rituals of the delayed funeral: I would carry the bier by myself and proceed towards the hole, but when I looked at it, it appeared bottomless. As soon as I lowered the bier into it, I would see Yacine come out and run through a vast cemetery with headstones made of flesh and blood.
Ahmad Majd called me one day. He was in a pitiable condition, searching for words to resume our friendship as if nothing had happened. He said Bahia was very ill and he was taking her to Paris for treatment. His words did not sink in and I did not ask him for explanations. I was not worried about her. I felt as if something were happening to a distant person, and no matter what occurred I would be unable to help. I felt better about that and I realised that powerlessness was, after all, comforting, because it freed you of guilt and always made you the victim.
I called Fatima many times to tell her about Bahia’s illness, but she did not answer and did not contact me. I thought that she too might have disappeared, like Al-Firsiwi and Ibrahim al-Khayati and Essam. I was overcome with a deep fear and called Layla. I told her I wanted to see her immediately because I was afraid she would disappear. She was busy, so we agreed to meet in the evening, though this did not spare me from being troubled the whole day by black thoughts about her disappearance. When we met and I told her that, she caressed my face with her hand and said that I was merely upset because of what was happening around us. She also said that the quarrel with Ahmad Majd had opened a door to fear that we had to shut quickly. I was very happy that she said this, and said it for my sake, knowing full well that Ahmad Majd did not deserve this effort. I wanted to comment on the matter but she begged me not to. We ate quickly and went to a modern dance performance at the French Cultural Centre.
The show was fast and frenetic, the tempo high and athletic. It shifted all the burden on to us, as we shrank back into our seats under the pressure of that devotion of the body that toyed with violence and seduction. I told Layla when we left the show that words were the best means of expression for human beings. There was something too intimate about the body and movement, or a limitation, that prevented the act of expression from making unexpected stupid mistakes.
She said, ‘We are able to do that with violence or love.’
I agreed with little enthusiasm and continued walking, feeling something hot rise from my guts that absorbed me in a kind of material absence. I thought it was the sign of a new fit, but soon realised that part of the show’s choreography had seized my body, which felt possessed by a violent inner storm. We got into the car and Layla ignored me as she drove, and I heard Yacine confiding to me in a clearly stern tone, ‘Now. Now!’
‘Now what?’ I asked.
He repeated insistently, ‘Now!’
I shouted angrily, ‘What now?’
Layla said, scared, ‘What’s with now? What’s with you?’ She pulled the car over to the side of the road, confused.
‘Nothing, it’s nothing. I think I’m tired, that’s all,’ I said.
We continued on our way. Layla had regained her composure and tried to justify the confusion that had taken hold of me. According to her I had internalised the scene of violence in the show, and the slow and clean movements depicting mutual seduction and pleasure had led to a sudden desire to kill.
I said, ‘Yes, it might have been that.’
As a special consolation, she suggested that we sleep in the same place, an idea I deemed a good ending to a trying day.
So here she was on the snow-white bedding, bathed by the glow of a distant lamp, her hand resting on my chest as she slept curled up in the foetal position. I asked myself what love was. For many years I had been unable to identify a feeling connected to this emotion. As I watched her face, radiant in peaceful sleep, I told myself that perhaps love was being with a woman at the right time.
As we were eating breakfast the next day Layla said, ‘You must visit Bahia as soon as possible. It isn’t Ahmad Majd who will make her feel at peace.’
‘No one can do anything for anyone else,’ I said.
‘I don’t like to begin the day in a bad mood,’ she said angrily.
Whenever I travelled from Rabat to Marrakech, I would look out the train window and see places I had known for years, barren fields, square patches of cacti and a scattering of withered eucalyptus trees. Nothing had changed in these poor landscapes, where every now and then I would spot somebody crossing these badlands with the assurance of someone living in paradise. One day the motorway would pass through that arid poetry, and we would have to draw another landscape to put in train windows. The motorway would extend all the way to Agadir, and the journey from there to Tangier would take only eight hours instead of the two days it did before. We would become a small country that could be crossed from north to south in less than a day.
Bahia quietly greeted me when I arrived. She did not look like she was suffering from a fatal illness or the devastating anxiety linked to it. We sat in the garden and she talked to me with amazement about the war waging between her husband and his rival. The latest chapter involved land that was open for development on the mountain road, land that was on the books as security at one of the banks before the ferocious rival got hold of it through scary pressure tactics, fraud and byzantine manoeuvres.
Bahia knew the tiniest details of what she called the new scandal. She was trying to deduce what should be deduced, in the form of a pessimistic analysis of our general condition, which did not
seem about to be cured of rampant illnesses like those.
I said, joking, ‘But the wheels are turning, or so I believe. There are no breakdowns, and I only hear stories about the huge fortunes being made here and there. I have not heard so far about a bankruptcy declared or about to be declared.’
‘Bankruptcy is like a terrorist operation,’ Bahia said. ‘Nothing on the horizon predicts it, and then suddenly you hear about it on the news.’
She asked me if I knew about her illness. I nodded and said, ‘It’s an illness like any other illness.’
She was moved for the first time and talked about young Ghaliya. ‘I don’t worry about leaving her alone, but it hurts not to have spent more time with her.’ She said that she had not noticed any emotional attachment on my part towards the child, and added, ‘You don’t like her very much.’
I defended myself, saying that I considered her our baby, but Bahia was not convinced. But said she understood and did not blame me. Human nature was supremely complex, she said, and oddly enough she did not see any logic in all that was happening to her except her illness, because it was the only thing in total harmony with her human condition.
Bahia confessed, without overdone emotion, that she sat every day in the garden and cried. She did not cry for a specific reason, but out of abstract torment where nothing was obvious except her tears. Every time she asked herself why she cried, she would cry even more without finding an explanation. She added, ‘I did not get the life I dreamed of when I was young.’
‘No one gets the life they dreamed of,’ I said to her.
‘I did not imagine that. I was convinced I would get from life exactly what I dreamed.’
I tried to explain that life was better when it remained capable of surprising us.
She laughed and said, ‘As far as surprises go, I got my share and more. Imagine, I marry someone who loves opera and sculpture, and one day I see him cover the walls of our house with photos of the housing compounds he has built, his inauguration ceremonies and meetings to sign financial agreements.’
The Arch and the Butterfly Page 25
