Mohammed Achaari - The Arch and the Butterfly

I believe that this searching endowed me with a mysterious charm that I interpreted as the energy of a mind seeking a woman who has slipped away. I acquired an extraordinary ability to seduce women without, however, experiencing any particular pleasure in doing so. As soon as I had exchanged a couple of words with a woman, I would feel I had become hostage to a love story that I had absolutely nothing to do with, and from which I would have to try very hard to extricate myself later on. Almost invariably, that meant leaving some of my scalp behind. I took no pride nor found any satisfaction in any of this. I thought long and hard about the matter, and devised a solid plan to avoid falling into traps of this kind. Deep inside, I was amused by this absurd situation that made me lose all restraint, after having spent a chaste quarter of a century with the same woman— my wife, Bahia Mahdi, who I had met one winter morning in the 1970s, married the same evening, and realised before midnight that I had made a fatal, and irreversible, mistake.

Before I lost my sense of smell, I could tell important details about the life of every woman I met based solely on the mix of scents I picked up. I could pinpoint her ambivalences, and their gradations. I would, for example, know roughly her age and the colour of her skin, the cosmetics she used, and the kind of hair she had. I could intuit the last dishes she had cooked. Sometimes I would know that a woman had just had sex, and whether she was very, or not at all, satisfied. All of this without seeing her.

My new situation compelled me to use my hands to become acquainted with these details. This required inordinate finesse and effort to avoid the rudeness and roughness of touch, and was not without mishap.

It goes without saying that this natural inclination to become acquainted through smell was not purely technical, but emotional as well. The drive behind this skill was a kind of abstract passion whose substance was nameless and featureless. It was a feeling similar to a passion for mathematics: something impalpable that traverses remote regions of an intense mind, where intelligence alone decides what must or must not be true. My sex life, with all that this expression implies in terms of adventure and upheaval, had been very poor; in my few prior experiences, the woman’s move from fantasy to the bedroom had been irreversible and tragic. I should point out that this displacement did not happen when I married Bahia. Rather, Bahia and I took up permanent residence in a state of incomprehension, which, no matter how hard I tried, I could never move away from.

When I first lost the sense of pleasure, I fought it by displaying an ability for pure, refined technique, and my accomplishments became an expression of pleasure that I did not truly experience. I became mad about cooking, acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of wines, and completed one of the most important artistic studies of Roman sculpture. I wrote Letters to My Beloved , a collection of reflections on love and despair related to the woman I had lost and whose love I recalled without being able to recall her. The reflections appeared serially in the newspaper where I worked, before being published in a book that one critic considered the most important work on love since al-Hazm’s eleventh-century The Ring of the Dove .

In all those achievements I attained the intended result — the total illusion that I could feel the tiniest and most complex pleasures, those connected in their essence with aesthetic perception, not only of actual forms of beauty, but also of all that came before. I grew convinced that what mattered most regarding pleasure was capturing the details of its formation, or, to be precise, making it eternal on an infinite trajectory. For example, the most important aspect in the appreciation of any wine is not the sensory experience of the seasoned taster, but the complex chemistry that contributed to that result. The pleasure lies in the sun and rain, in the bounty of the earth, then in the fruit and, finally, in the magical liquid derived from it.

Once I reached this conviction, I became more amenable to life and more copiously productive. I wrote a daily column, published a literary work in parts, and penned features and investigative pieces every month. I wrote an art review every week for a specialist journal. I had begun a new life, which had nothing to do with the drab years I had spent writing boring reviews of the free books mailed to me daily. This new life was a real renaissance that helped me return to my true self, pay attention to my wellbeing, reconnect with my old friends and put a minimum of order and rigour into my professional and private lives. The transformation confused my wife, who was unsure of how to react to the sudden changes. She considered my talk about the loss of my ability to enjoy life nothing more than a mask, behind which I hid my shame at seeking pleasure despite all that had happened to us.

I told my friends that I did not like anything at all, and I almost told them that I did not like anyone, either. I do not remember when all this began, and I cannot tell if it happened to me all at once or in timid steps, until that ill-fated moment when it reached its peak. I only remember the feeling that stayed with me for a long time as a result of what happened: no one owes anyone anything. In this world, no matter how strong and intimate your relationships, you face your fate alone, isolated, and with an instinctive inclination towards depression and self-pity. No one ever achieves happiness because of others, no matter how close and dear they are. Any moment of happiness, intense or tenuous, can only be achieved internally.

I resigned myself to accepting what befell me as a kind of incomplete death. Whenever I remembered myself in a state of enjoyment, fondness, savouring or admiration, it was as if I were recalling someone who had passed away, and I had to accept whatever was left of me before joining him. Only then would we become the way we had been, one person, with the hands of our clocks resuming their normal rotation. For that reason I did not resist or seek treatment, but organised myself according to the expectations of a man who loved life, and I set the rudder of this confiscated existence without dictating conditions on anyone.

*

I had lived a relatively quiet life until then. Though I had a complex relationship with my father, my mother had died tragically, and had spent several years in Qenitra’s central prison without knowing why, I felt my life consisted of connected parts leading painlessly from one to the other.

I had first joined an extreme leftist group while living in Frankfurt, Germany, which led me to a Moroccan leftist group that had split from the Communist Party. I rapidly grew tired of the effort required of me to adopt extreme positions, so I joined a moderate leftist party. But an old comrade had kept my name in his diary, which led to my arrest, followed by a trial not a single word of which I understood, and finally to a prison sentence that consumed three years of my life for nothing.

While most of my friends at university threw themselves into amazing love stories, I simply ended a terse conversation one day with a colleague with the question: ‘Could you possibly marry me?’

Clearly nervous, she had replied, ‘Why not? As long as you’re asking without even smiling!’

I discovered the morning after the wedding that I was in total harmony with Bahia, as if we were two identical beings or two machines running on the same programme. We loved, with identical degrees of intensity, the same foods and drinks, and the same music, films, paintings and cities. We had similar inclinations in our sexual desires, and in meeting them, down to the tiniest detail. All this existed in a sort of complete technical harmony, where there was no room for dysfunction or emotional confusion, apprehension or surprise. A harmony that began and ended with movements determined from time immemorial. All that was left in the end were the invisible ashes of momentary flames, volcanic ashes from ancient times, cold and petrified, only awakened from their timeless slumber by our slow breathing.