Mohammed Achaari - The Arch and the Butterfly

‘Has this happened to you?’ I had asked.

‘Do you think I would tell you if it had?’ she had replied.

We had spent the rest of the drive between Rabat and Agadir in a poisonous, destructive argument about who had done what, without gaining anything except a hollow, senseless jealousy that had nothing to do with us personally, yet which awakened feelings of outrage, affront and hatred. Meanwhile Yacine had been fussing in the back seat with his electronic games, shouting every now and then for us to tone it down.

Once I became firm friends with Fatima Badri, however, Bahia began to pay attention to everything connected to the women in my life. She viewed with antagonism all my new clothes and books, the films I saw and the music I listened to, convinced that a woman, and most probably Fatima, had ushered me towards them.

Bahia did not understand — from my explanations or of her own accord — that the falling away of my own sensation of things and the absence of any pleasure in what I consumed was what pushed me towards the unfamiliar in my life. The person I had been disliked Andalusian music, but since it was all the same whether I listened to that or jazz, I accepted what I had disliked before, seeking a modicum of pleasure to jolt me here and there. Perhaps I simply did not know what I wanted, which was also true of my romantic conquests, if we could call them such, which did not reflect a sudden flightiness or a delayed adolescence on my part. I was, despite myself, thrust into stories I did not help spin together, nor was I a real player at any stage of their development. It was as if the death of my senses had transformed me into a black hole that swallowed every particle of light that approached it. I was aware, every time this happened, that the total darkness controlling my inner self lent me this attraction. I therefore organised my affairs in a very strict manner to allow me to navigate within the limits of what I could see in this dark hubbub.

When Fatima became a large part of my life, it was the culmination of an old acquaintance. I had known her distantly because of our shared profession and passion for the theatre. She had once directed one of my modest texts for the Casablanca Players. Our relationship changed on a scorching afternoon in a restaurant on the beach. On my way back from the restroom, I glimpsed the cook putting a giant crab into boiling water and saw the steam rising from the pot take on a pinkish tinge. I expected to be swamped by this putrid cloud. My body overreacted and I fainted. After I lost my sense of smell, I acquired an extraordinary capacity to imagine aromas, and even to be strongly and, at times, disproportionately affected by them. The unfortunate incident led me to share a delicious lunch with the woman — Fatima — for whom the crab was boiled. I watched Fatima struggle to use pincers and a scalpel to extract the pieces of white meat lodged beneath the carapace of the boiled creature, which she then devoured with gusto. The exertion quickened her breathing and made her chew in a way that sounded like staccato panting as she toyed with the long legs of the shellfish, sucking them with her eyes closed, holding the ends with her slender white fingers and hardly touching the horny pink shell.

She asked if the smell would cause me to faint again, and I told her that I didn’t smell in the first place. My answer did not seem to surprise her, and she commented without interrupting her battle, ‘I also imagine scents. I can even smell them on TV and at the cinema.’

I laughed, but she insisted that she was not joking.

After that, I described to her in great detail the situation of a man who has lost his sense of smell. It was not, of course, to do with losing the memory of smell, because the scents we smell even once, starting with that of our mother and on to that of death, would never be forgotten. Taste remains, but requires more time for the tongue to register a substance and send a clear signal to the brain, which in turn deciphers the code and transmits a readable message to the sense of taste.

I said to Fatima, ‘Do you know that this handicap has positive aspects? There are so many things that invade our nostrils without our permission and force us to retain stinky smells for ever!’

I then confessed that the most annoying thing was not being able to recognise people from their smell. It was an unrivalled pleasure to first encounter the fragrance and then sense it was in motion, eating up its distance from me, then drawing closer or moving away, freely. It would offer me the encounter I had expected or one I had not expected; it had given me an exceptional opportunity to pack a whole woman with all her details into that wonderful moment. Sometimes it seemed to me that this inability was utter deprivation, so I would try to heighten other senses to overcome it. I would use my fingers alone, with the concentration of a mathematician, to recognise a body that did not invade my being with its scent. Less than a week after losing my sense of smell, I could distinguish scents by the colours and shapes I attributed to them. Tobacco had a brown, cylindrical scent and fish a rectangular yellow one, tea was a crimson-coloured square and coffee a blue semicircle.

Fatima dipped her fingers into a bowl of lemon water and said, ‘Why don’t we sleep together this afternoon and see what happens after?’

I was stunned into silence.

‘Listen,’ she added. ‘I don’t want us to tie ourselves down in a complicated affair. It’ll be sex only. We can have fun and then go our separate ways. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, I understand, but why me in particular?’

‘Because you won’t be able to smell the fish factory I’ve turned into after this meal!’

But I did not have sex with Fatima. I had drinks at her place and we talked a lot. We read dozens of pages of haiku and a whole book about Scorpios. I then left the sad building where she lived, feeling good about the world.

Fatima settled into many aspects of my life, as if she had entered it years earlier. She knew how to chat with me without expecting anything in return. She talked about the theatre, the press, and the man she was still waiting for on some quayside. She came to the house with invitations for concerts and exhibitions and tried to convince Bahia to join her. Whenever she was persuaded, they went off together and I would stay at home on the large black sofa, planning indifferently for a future that did not interest me.

I would be unable to define the kind of relationship I had with Fatima. I only knew that it was essential. I knew this with a certain cold feeling, taking into account that she too had good reasons to consider me highly essential. I trusted her reasons, even if I could not pretend that the world would be out of kilter were she not around. I would simply feel that the machine was not running right. It would be like reading a message on the dashboard of a car telling me that my internal guidance system was amiss.

Bahia and I never discussed Fatima, although she did sometimes glean information about her by asking seemingly innocent questions. Only once did Bahia follow a dead-end. It happened when Fatima went to the US and asked Bahia to send her the serialised Letters to My Beloved as they became available. Bahia did not say anything that betrayed her feelings, but I felt her frustration when I heard her, one morning while I was in the bathroom, send the requested fax, loudly enunciating the US hotel phone number to draw my attention.

This was followed by total silence until I heard her read aloud: ‘ I nearly drew your real face yesterday evening. Ever since I began drawing your face to reflect my feelings, I was never this moved. It was something like the pulse of an adolescent who sees his beloved suddenly appear on the balcony he has been watching. The situation lasted only a few seconds and I could not recapture it. I am unable, as you well know, to recall anything. All that remains in memory is the feeling of loss, but the content is swallowed by darkness. Nevertheless, the partial appearance of your face had an amazing effect on my whole being, and I almost remembered our first kiss and the sentence that preceded me to your lips. I do not know any more if I talked about love, or the heat or the dream. I do not know any more whether a single letter remained attached to my tongue. I remember it mixed with a full lip; whose lip was it? Mixed with burning breaths; who was kissing whom? Was it in a strange room? Yes, yes. It was in a hotel room you could not leave, while I was in the lobby waiting for you. I still am. But you had locked the door, placed a second pillow over your head, and switched off everything, including the fiery kiss that was followed by total darkness. I would like to tell you something, but I wish I knew what. Come out from behind this mute curtain, I am on the balcony where I have always been. If you were to pass by the garden now, I would simply stretch out my arm, which would lengthen and lift you higher and higher, until you rested, once more, between your lips and the sentence that precedes me. ’