Mohammed Achaari - The Arch and the Butterfly

Let’s begin then with a visit to that hotel, or to its immortal remains. You may now put aside your hats and your heavy bottles of mineral water. Diotima used to sit here surrounded by nymphs and dolphins. Here sat the poxed, scratching and getting drunk. In this mosaic, Bacchus lavishes his munificence on the worthy, and in this one he finds Ariadne wandering lost on the shores of Naxos. He looks at her and sees that she is more beautiful, more dangerous, more delicate and more prone to despair than the labyrinth itself. Here is the mosaic that depicts the fall of Ptolemy drenched in blood, trying to behave like a king or die for the sake of a noble cause and be pardoned.

Here is Bacchus again meeting Medusa by chance, and she changes him into stone with her enchanting gaze. He was condemned to remain at the entrance to the site, a statue of black granite posing as an eternal adolescent, carrying bunches of grapes from Bab al-Rumaila over his shoulders, until a stupid thief toppled him from his glorious throne!

No need to hurry, you stupid taxi. Your old man Al-Firsiwi is ready for the glorious return. Drive slowly. Why are you looking at the city as if seeing it for the first time? Don’t worry about me tomorrow. I will sleep in the lap of the nymphs and swim with the dolphins in the opposite direction, as befits a respectable mosaic like myself. What are the dolphins? Drive, my son, drive. You have nothing to do with this world! None of us have anything to do with this world.

I stopped writing Letters to My Beloved .

One morning I sat at my desk and became aware, even before thinking about the matter, that I wouldn’t be able to write another letter to the woman I had loved and forgotten, even though I hadn’t forgotten I was still in love with her. Nearly every love story encompasses an expansion in time, for many are the lovers who tell each other: ‘I loved you before I loved you’ or ‘I loved you ever since I was no more than an idea in the universe’ or ‘I love you outside the time that brings us together’ or ‘I love you at a time that does not belong to us any more’ or ‘I will love you for ever’. And many other words that lovers use to give their overflowing love an impossible infinity.

The story of the lover who loses his memory and is unable to find his beloved in a defined form is, to some extent, the story of our relationship with everything we build in our lives and one that we confuse with our delusions and doubts. Over time we are unable to confirm which are the material and concrete aspects of this construction and which are nothing but defeated dreams. We wonder what is truly fulfilled in this blend. What is it that we call our life? Is it the things that were or those that could have been?

As I asked those questions, some confusion developed between me and the personality I had invented. I had the impression that what I had endured for years while writing those letters was a loss of memory. I had considered the letters emotional compensation or a presentiment of the memory loss that I would later succumb to. Perhaps in some fashion I projected on to Layla when I met her and found in my relationship with her a sort of substitution between what was and what never existed. But in my relationship with her, paradoxically, it was she who anchored me forcefully in the present. She surrounded me with a wall of reality that made me recover all at once important details in my relationship with people and places, not as a form of recollection, but as multiple and real possibilities.

Fatima was the first person to celebrate the end of my letter writing. She told me it was grounds for optimism and considered it an announcement that a new life would begin. She asked about Layla, and I told her that we lived totally connected but at a distance. Layla herself showed no interest in my stopping, just as she had shown no interest in the writing. She had her own theory about the matter, as she believed I was wasting real talent in writing unreal texts. She would tell me that if she had a similar talent, she would write immortal literary texts rather than wasting it writing essays that died the moment they were born.

While I gradually restored some of my forgotten desires and got used to a simple life, without giving in to the bitterness all around, Ibrahim al-Khayati was fighting heated battles in the jungle that was Casablanca. He was drowning us with him in cases that did not impinge on us, and Ahmad Majd found in them fertile material for his mockery. He called this period the time of biological struggle, because of its close connection with most people’s sexual lives.

I used to spend some of my weekends in Marrakech with Layla, until she told me during one of our return trips that she would never go back with me to that city. I tried to convince her that the big house, Ghaliya, Ahmad Majd, and even Bahia and her daughter, were all a major part of my life and people I relied on as a harbour where I could find peace from life’s storms. But she said that she hated the city precisely because of its role as a harbour, and that she would end up hating me if the disgusting place continued to control my life. She explained that she hadn’t severed her ties with many things in life in order to throw herself into a combination of the remnants of a remote past and a present detached from its surroundings. I told her Marrakech was only a city, not a legend or a lie, just a place that made it possible to choose various paths that no one controlled. She said that she did not want a city that required all those linguistic tricks to define it.

She then settled the problem by saying, ‘Do you know what it means to impose on me a city I hate? You’re inviting me to hate you!’

As she was talking I saw her face ablaze, not in anger or out of stubbornness, but simply in mortal perplexity, akin to the expression of a person lost in a maze. I hugged her with all my force and said, ‘To hell with Marrakech and pleasure. I’ll go there by myself every now and then just to watch its hidden disintegration. You’re right, it’s a city unfit for our story. It’s nothing but heavy ornamentation and accumulated layers of paint. As for us, we are living a white story, like a Japanese garden devoid of plants and colours, studded only with bits of rock, and millions of pure pulses dancing in its darkness.’

I knew she was the woman of my life. When a woman can make a city drop from your life like a dead leaf, it means that she has built countless cities inside you. I almost told her that, but the emptiness haunting me returned and nipped the blossom in the bud.

I accompanied Ibrahim al-Khayati to Zarhoun to help him gather information for the gay marriage case he was handling in the village of Sidi Ali. On the way I rang my father and apologised to him for what I had said in my previous phone call. He was calm at first and then burst into tears. I was annoyed that he was so upset by our disagreement. I repeated my apologies and told him I regretted every word I had said. But he went on crying, and I thought he had been hit by a new bout of depression, one of those that had become part of his life ever since he lost his eyesight. I began joking with him, putting on a show of meaningless levity, until he stopped me with a bald statement: ‘The hotel mosaics have been stolen.’

I told him I would come immediately and ended the conversation.

Al-Firsiwi was standing in the hotel lobby, in the middle of the ruin left behind by time and thieves. For the first time in years I was moved, and I felt injustice, anger, bitterness and love, all at once, for this blind man struggling alone against a tragic stubbornness that was intent on breaking him every time he raised his head. Al-Firsiwi told me that he knew the thief, it could not be anyone else. Ever since the man had come to the area, he had wanted nothing more than to acquire what was left of the Roman heritage.