Mohammed Achaari - The Arch and the Butterfly

‘I love you. I love you,’ she said.

‘Layla.’

‘Mmm!’

‘Layla!’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you think Yacine would dare involve me in something bad?’

‘Are you serious?’ asked Layla.

‘Of course I am. Do you think this is a joking matter?’

Layla jumped up and said, ‘I thought you had invented a crazy story to increase the thrill.’

I pulled her towards me and said, laughing, ‘I thought you didn’t understand the ploy.’

At breakfast, before the others woke up, Layla told me that even though we didn’t live under the same roof, we had to make vows, even if only between the two of us, to announce to ourselves that we were bound to each other for eternity.

I agreed and started organising a ceremony in my mind.

Mahdi and Essam appeared. They obviously liked Layla, enjoyed her company and did not hesitate to shower her with special attention. Layla had a magical influence on them that gave them a certain precocious maturity. Mahdi asked us both to attend a performance organised by their band, Arthritis. I smiled as I always did when I heard the name. Essam got upset once again and asked me if I wanted them to call it Blossom or Harmony, for example. I told him Arthritis was an appropriate name, particularly since the whole country was lame because of arthritis.

‘Of course we’ll come,’ I said. ‘I don’t like the music, let’s be clear about that, but I like the spirit in these concerts. I especially like the total conviction visible on the faces of the musicians, the singers and the dancers. It’s an almost ideological belief stating that they have found their way.’

I took the train from Casablanca to Rabat. During the trip I felt semiconscious, repeating to myself Layla’s name with the strong feeling that I was calling her, that she had just left the carriage and would return at any moment to bring me back from this state of unconsciousness. But she did not return and I kept calling her, mumbling every now and then, ‘Call me please. Do not stop talking to me.’ I had the express feeling that her words, even meaningless words, would keep me connected to life, and if she stopped, she would interrupt the electric current feeding my existence and I would inevitably descend into darkness. I felt her hand stroking my cheek, but the voice I heard was not hers. I heard her say, ‘I am here.’ Then I heard a stranger’s voice say, ‘He’s coming to’ and then a sharp voice say, ‘No use, he’s dead.’

As if challenged by this ridiculous statement, I suddenly shook myself and sat up. Before me were an astounded woman and a man who greeted me warmly and said, ‘I’ve had a similar reaction on the fast train many times. Don’t worry. There might be a magnetic field that causes certain people to have these fits. Who knows what will happen when fast trains start running everywhere in the country. Half of Morocco might faint!’

But the man’s words did not help me, and I found myself once again the victim of a post-seizure depression.

Lately I had been able to overcome this depression by returning to the box, as Layla called it. The box was the store of feelings, images and words where we spontaneously put all that happened to us in moments of intense love. In the box I would meet a person who was almost the me I longed for: outgoing, authentic, relishing life and, even better than that, capable of making someone else happy. There I would meet a body that I did not control, one that lay in the shadow of its desires. I would meet a woman with the extraordinary ability to make words and things equal in density, fragility and temporality. I would meet her in her overwhelming desire and its precise gratification, in the rapidity of her arousal and its subsidence, in her ability to pre-empt everything and capture all that crossed the vital space of our anxiety: visions, dreams, repressed fantasies, smells, colours, crazy words and signals. I would meet her in the stories, since the box was in essence a box of stories, a pile of unlimited possibilities for what happened and did not happen. This multiplicity might be a way for me to get over my depressions. What I needed was a first breach; in other words, a thread of light that made it suddenly possible to break through a wall.

I called Layla as I left the train and told her that I was going back to look for Bacchus. She asked me if this would help me find some peace, and I told her that it would and I would at least be close to Al-Firsiwi. I didn’t like to see him forgotten and ostracised. She liked the idea, and then said unexpectedly, ‘Why not write a story about Ibrahim al-Khayati?’ I told her we would have to discuss that some other time.

In the days that followed I thought of preparing an outline for a possible novel about Ibrahim. In the end I found myself reviewing the landmarks of his life: his idealism, his professional success, his lover’s suicide, his marriage to his lover’s widow, his relationship with his mother and with the twins Essam and Mahdi, his involvement in thorny cases such as the young musicians and gay marriage, the attempt on his life and his overall emergence from the rubble of the 1970s without convictions or bitterness. Finally, his appearance at the end of the century as an eloquent expression of a struggle that defied definition. When I finished writing this preliminary outline, I realised it was not a novel. It was simply Ibrahim’s life, the story etched on his face, and did not require someone to write it anew. If I wanted to write a novel about Ibrahim, I would have to invent another life for him, a life closer to the realistic scenario of a man without miracles. This would be a huge endeavour and would require energy that I did not have. It would also be a venture without guaranteed success.

I asked Al-Firsiwi to tell me, frankly, who stole Bacchus.

He settled himself comfortably in his seat and said, ‘Listen, Youssef, son of Diotima, this weak man was strung up by his feet and flogged night and day for two months. Do you think that if I knew, I would have gone on enjoying the beatings, for the love of God?’

‘But you have been saying many things ever since,’ I replied.

‘I say what I like!’

‘Among the things you say is that you buried Bacchus in the courtyard of a mosque in one of the mountain villages.’

‘Very likely! One possibility among many others.’

‘I know you have many accounts you’d like to settle. You probably want to punish this region by destroying one of its timeless antiquities.’

‘It’s not worth so much fuss. It’s an ordinary statue of the god of wine posing as a dusky adolescent. Even from an artistic perspective, it’s not a masterpiece. The Prado in Madrid and a museum in Florence have wonderful white marble statues of Bacchus. One of them, I can’t remember which, has the shadow cast by the bunch of grapes sculpted on Bacchus’s shoulder. How can one compare this with the dull appearance of the granite adolescent? Please! Spare me! He’s standing as if he had just come out of Jupiter’s thigh. Every land inherits what God granted it in intelligence and kindness. All this commotion, including some stupid people crying over a stolen memory. Let it go. What nonsense!’

‘All right, all right. No need to get all worked up about it. I said maybe. It might be one possibility among others, regardless of the value of Walili’s Bacchus. He disappeared in mysterious circumstances. Can you help me find an avenue to search for him?’

‘I haven’t the slightest idea,’ he replied.

I opened my briefcase and took out a book of poetry published a few weeks earlier in Frankfurt and titled Elegies . I said to Al-Firsiwi, ‘You know, an interesting book of poetry titled Elegies written by an obscure poet called Hans Roeder has been published in Frankfurt.’