Mohammed Achaari - The Arch and the Butterfly

I had less glorious wishes as well: losing weight, for example, or mastering the tango, but I had given up everything and was content to keep up an understated elegance that I had learned from my mother.

When I remembered all the things I had failed to achieve, I felt cheated. This often prompted me to compare the effort I exerted when I adopted big causes and the effort I made to fulfil my little wishes. Whenever I made such a comparison, I realised that if I had exerted a small effort to fulfil my modest wishes, compared to the huge effort I devoted to those great causes, I would have been another person today. I admitted to myself, based on this truth, that the fulfilment of all the aims in the world would be meaningless if it resulted, on the personal level, in putting a person’s remains in a plastic bag and forgetting it on the side of the road.

I sat down at a café near the river, exhausted from my walk and my black thoughts. I called Fatima and told her I was waiting for her there. At that instant, Yacine appeared.

‘Why this serious concern for the arch?’ he asked.

‘For no reason, I just liked the idea,’ I said.

‘I don’t want you to adopt it. Your projects and mine have nothing to do with each other, do you understand?’

‘I do understand, but you’re not here any more,’ I replied.

‘It’s you who’s not here any more.’

‘Listen to me, Yacine. No one needs this arch, not you, me or anyone else. The new project, however, does need it. Among all the material components the new city requires, there isn’t a single whimsical element. The arch could be that element, and might be able to break down the meticulous calculations of profit and loss. It might move the city from a path of pure construction to a path of pure imagination. Can you understand that?’

‘Yes, I understand,’ he replied, ‘but your hijacking of the idea upsets me. I don’t want another kind of relationship between the two of us. The fact is, I know exactly what will happen: you’ll chase after the project to no avail, and then you’ll add a new loss to our stock of losses.’

‘What if I like the idea and the arch becomes a feature of the city?’

‘That’d be horrible too!’

‘Why?’

‘Because another, more complex relationship will emerge between us, and I don’t like that.’

‘We have to forget our past disagreements,’ I said. ‘You know, I don’t have the slightest enthusiasm for this or any other project. All I want is to get out of the pits.’

‘And the dump?’ he asked.

‘I don’t want to have anything to do with it. Imagine that after all the years I spent fighting imperialism and reactionaries, I end up as an activist for a dump!’

Yacine laughed and asked me, ‘And the arch? Do you think it could save the toiling masses?’

‘Yes, it would.’

‘From what?’

‘From getting used to killing imagination.’

He said, ‘You’re joking. The arch would only redeem a minor thing of concern to you, nothing else.’

Fatima arrived and Yacine withdrew, leaving a cruel sentence hanging in my mouth. She might have noticed its effect on my face, for she asked, ‘Are you just emerging from the heat of battle?’

‘No, not at all. I was only arguing with myself about a crazy project.’

She asked excitedly, ‘Going to Havana?’

‘No, Yacine’s arch at the mouth of the river.’

Her eyes twinkled, and she said that ever since hearing of the project she had not stopped thinking about it. She also said that building the arch would take our cities in a new direction that might break down the mould of traditions that weighed heavily on our chests.

That was how we began planning the arch. We established a group in charge of the project and identified the doors to knock on and the consultants to use. We said that even if we failed to complete the arch, we would get involved in an unusual cause, one with poetic dimensions that might succeed in moving something that was difficult to move.

A disagreement bloomed in the press between those who considered the arch an aggression against the historical fabric of the city and those who considered it a modern, artistic addition to a view frozen in the past. There were those who saw an arch overlooking the ocean as an invitation to adopt the absolute, and others who saw it as an expression of Moroccans’ phobia with any space not controlled by doors and locks. Some considered it a bold proposal to give expression to new needs in the urban environment; others deemed it an expression of the crisis of the traditional left, which did not conceive projects but rather invented the games that messed them up.

The strangest thing we read during this period was an article written by one of the new yes-men, who claimed that the idea was very old and already existed in the development plan for the riverbanks. He added that a naïve campaign based on that idea had been launched to suggest that only one party in the country was capable of visualising splendid things for our urban spaces.

When the Agency invited our association to a meeting on the subject, we understood that the article had been a preamble to the idea’s adoption. We were happy. Fatima, as president of the association, presented the elements of the project, its philosophy and its artistic and humanitarian dimensions. She offered a vision backed by a technical report prepared by a firm of consulting engineers and a declaration of support from a group of well-known artists. At the end of her presentation before a number of directors and engineers, there was a slow exchange of hesitant smiles before they all exploded in noisy laughter.

We tried a few times to intervene and resume the conversation. The laughter would subside, but as soon as one of us uttered a word or two, the laughter would resume, louder than before. We had to stop talking entirely and simply watched these eminent people — successful in everything and more refined than the rest of humanity — as they handed paper handkerchiefs to one another, some suppressing their laughter and others in fits. They looked at us every now and then and apologised with partial signs, as if they were blaming us for leading them into this embarrassing situation.

When matters reached a level of awkwardness that made it impossible for them to go on laughing, the director cleared his throat, arranged himself in his chair, and said in a low voice, ‘We’re sorry! We’ve been following the arch proposal in the papers, but never, for one moment, did we think that the matter would be so serious.’

‘There is nothing serious about it,’ I said. ‘We only want to make you see that games are also an architectural requirement.’

‘Yes, we understand that. While you are no doubt aware that this game would be highly expensive, and with the project in its current state we could not convince anyone to agree to this huge expenditure.’

‘We weren’t thinking in those terms,’ I said. ‘It occurred to us that the development project was so bold and so enormous, it might be considered the only project open to such games.’

Confusion pervaded the room, and we instinctively took advantage of it to collect our papers and get ready to leave. The director pushed his chair back and stood up, revealing his great height. ‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘I hope you did not consider our laughter rude or a way to avoid the issue.’

I said sincerely, ‘Laughter was right at the heart of the matter.’

Fatima was affected by the events of the meeting for a number of weeks. She said that what shocked her most was the amount of power those people had, power that gave them the right to turn a public domain like the city into a sphere for their sole, unrivalled intervention. They could decide to set an island in the heart of the river, create a lagoon and put up an amusement park, without seeing their plans as an assault on the space or an attack on the citizen. But they begrudged us for imagining setting an arch over the river, which would not require the confiscation of land or the displacement of inhabitants.