Mohammed Achaari - The Arch and the Butterfly

‘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.

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, especially 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?’