Mohammed Achaari - The Arch and the Butterfly

Let’s leave this pestilent place. Everything is behind me as if it had happened to another person. The ruins I sold for peanuts to pay the hotel’s debts are now being sold for millions right in front of me. I hear the news and assuage my pain in silence. Then, hurt, I take the mosaic tour. I begin with the tableau of Medusa and tell her, ‘Look at this hard stone. What are you waiting for here, beautiful woman who angered Minerva? All those who contemplate your face are nothing but old stones. There is no hope. Believe me, there is no hope!’

Let’s move. Where is the stupid taxi, let’s move! No heat is worse heat than Walili’s heat, as if it were the accumulation of centuries of blazing heat. At midday a hellish white veil covers the fields that stretch behind Wadi Khamman. Go to hell, there is nothing I can do for you, this land. It is time for my sacred siesta. I will go all the way to the last stone that still belongs to me in this city, and before that I will wend my way to the hotel. I will walk through the ruined lobby and the garden and then leave, followed by women’s perfumes and the voices of vociferous drunken men struggling to find the right word to say. Are there truly any right words? When Youssef shouted in my face, ‘You are nothing but a stupid, racist murderer,’ I was angry and, for the first time in many years, I felt the words hurt me. You can’t imagine how happy I felt after that. I thought I had lost the ability to experience such feelings, as a result of the state of total atrophy that only made it possible for me to raise minor storms of anger that dissipated in their early stages. Were those exactly the right words to restore my humanity and my desire to go on living?

They really were the right words! To be accused by my only son of killing his mother and to be considered, on top of that, no more than a stupid and racist murderer! Language is so easy. You can make it destroy a whole country without blinking. I understand what it means to be a racist murderer, but a stupid one? Murder is always stupid: there is no clever murderer. It doesn’t matter. One day, I’ll tell him that his insistence that I killed Diotima means only that he always wished it! Hah! A man who writes about love and who is branded a leftist hopes that his mother is murdered by his father! We want to procreate, but we give birth to a monstrosity. So be it. The monster is among us.

I will dig in vain around this rotten seedling. I will not achieve much and I will not succeed in developing antagonistic feelings for Youssef. I just can’t stand the idea of quarrelling with him, that’s all. I’d like there to be a certain complicity between us, something that would help me find my bearings on this parched island.

When Diotima was busy with this mountain and seduced by the possibility of finding her grandfather’s poetry book, everything seemed settled and clear, heralding remarkable futures. I felt that I had done something great for this place, that I had come to a kingdom about to fall, infused it with my soul, and placed it on the road to an exciting adventure. The possibility of finding German poetry under Roman ruins filled me with a dazzling conviction that I was embarking on a universal mission. But Diotima with her piercing vision saw that we were heading towards utter darkness. When she got that idea, I don’t know, but I remember her sitting on one of the hotel balconies and me not noticing her until I was going up the hill on my way back from the dig site. I had enough time to invent a story to dissipate her doubts, but I did not do it. When I reached the lobby I found her standing there, ready with her question.

‘Where were you?’

‘I was wandering around Walili,’ I replied.

‘Were you looking?’ she asked.

‘Why would I look by myself like a madman?’

‘Haven’t we agreed that you would only look for it when I’m there?’

I said sharply, ‘I was not looking and I couldn’t care less about finding this loon’s hat or his poetry!’

But the seed of doubt was planted in Diotima. She thought I had found the book of poetry and buried it again to keep it for myself. That was because a few days before I had unintentionally left on the breakfast table a piece of paper where I had written:

Come on, it suits me to be silent, do not let me see again

See what is being killed and let me at least

Go in peace to my solitude

Let this be our true goodbye.

Drink, then pass me this holy poison,

Let me drink with you from the Lethe — saving river of oblivion –

A brim-full cup to help us forget

All the hatred and the love that was.

I am leaving,

But the time to see you

Might return, Diotima,

Here, anew.

Her blood has been totally shed by desire,

While aimlessly, we proceed.

When I realised that I had forgotten the piece of paper, I looked for it anxiously. I came across Diotima sitting in the lobby with frozen features. When I stood before her, she rose and said in a metallic voice, ‘When did you start writing poetry?’

I adopted a blasé, semi-sarcastic attitude and replied, ‘From the moment we began looking for it under the rubble.’

‘I didn’t know you had a drop of tenderness in you to make you write poetry!’

‘There is no relation between poetry and tenderness, please. It is only a question of daring,’ I explained.

‘And where do you want to go and which holy poison do you want to take?’

‘Those are just poetic meditations,’ I said.

She watched my face for a long time as if she were looking for a trace of poetry hidden under my skin. Then she took the piece of paper out of her pocket and handed it to me.

I was folding the paper nervously and getting ready to leave, when she asked me, ‘Have you found the book?’

I shook my head, in sincere and honest denial, and left.

That incident, if we can describe it as such, was responsible for turning my relationship with the poetry book upside down. Something happened that day that made me consider the book as a last testament addressed to me and not as Diotima’s inheritance based on family ties. I was responsible for saving the poetry with all this meant in terms of violence, exile and eternal fire. If I had not yet become aware of the value of poetry in my life, it was because my fate was preparing me for this striking encounter, which made me consider poetry a fluke of nature. It was like walking carefree, totally absorbed by one’s musings, and then suddenly finding oneself face to face with a waterfall cascading down from high above. Thus was born my relationship with poetry. I would even come across it while changing the wheel of my Mercedes under the blazing sun. This was also how the lost book of poetry came back into my life, as an adventure that concerned me alone, without anyone else being involved, whether related to Hans Roeder or not.

We shall see, Youssef, which of us is better able to domesticate ruins. Your father has not spent a day without seeing a building collapse and people around him remove stones and earth and pull out wounded souls. We used to begin the day in Bu Mandara by lifting tons of earth from the Rif to restore the image carved in our memory in exile. In Germany we started our day thinking about a lost paradise of unknown location. Here I identified with the ruins until I became an abandoned house myself. Even the beach house you encouraged me to build in the country was destroyed by the Al Hoceima earthquake. Sometimes I tell myself that if I had not built that house, the earthquake would not have happened. I then curse Satan and say to myself, everything comes from God.

Driver, slow down a little. Wouldn’t you like to have a drink at the Cantina? Why do you always refuse this offer? Every day I say, let’s go and have a drink at the hotel bar and take a look at the mosaic before going home, and you tell me to go on my own and drink the wind! Fine, I will go and I will drink the wind. There is no place like the Zaytoun Hotel to drink a good wind!