Mohammed Achaari - The Arch and the Butterfly

I said, ‘But you were sleeping in a bed where nothing exploded.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I was sitting in a restaurant, then I was in the street and then at a silly party!’

I drank my coffee quickly, reading the newspapers’ banner headlines about the arrest of Al-Qaeda sleeper cells. This was for the second time in six months. I scrutinised the names carefully as if trying to see their faces; I had a vague feeling I would recognise one of them. I always had a premonition that I would recognise someone on the list, one of those confused people we never expected to find in a terrorist organisation, the kind of person who would eat and drink and laugh with us and visualise us as flying remains while staring at our faces.

We got on the train and sat silently side by side. When we reached Rabat, Layla took my hand and asked while squeezing it, ‘Do you hate me?’

‘Not yet!’

I did not see Layla for a week after that. We talked for hours on the phone about everything — her daughter, her little quarrels, domestic matters, funny incidents about her ex-husband and our own limited concerns, which we could cover in one minute. But whenever the conversation touched on the possibility of our seeing each other, she quickly changed the subject. It was as if the explosion had cast a dark shadow across our relationship.

Fatima returned from Havana and gave me a call. She was clearly quite anxious, so I assumed she was not on good terms with her Kosovar live-in boyfriend, but I did not ask. We talked about Ahmad Majd, Bahia and their daughter and about Ibrahim al-Khayati. She asked strange questions about everyone and wanted to know to what degree each one of us was in harmony with himself.

I said to her, joking, ‘The only person I know who has a good relationship with himself is you.’

‘I wish!’ she said firmly.

The following week she surprised me one morning, standing at my office door at the paper, greeting my colleagues, who welcomed her warmly. We went to the Beach restaurant, where I ordered a meal of crab and slices of salmon in cucumber sauce.

She said, laughing, ‘I know that you’ll smell nothing of this massacre!’

‘On the contrary, I’ll smell the most specific scents and the very weakest ones.’

She looked at me in surprise, and I explained that a miracle had restored my sense of smell.

She smiled affectionately at me and asked, after a moment of silence, ‘What was the first meal whose aroma surprised you?’

I said, defeated, ‘Yacine’s shirts, years after his death.’

I observed her face with its fine features, typical of the women of the Atlas. Her eyes had become a little larger, and their blackness was a transparent shade surrounding her whole face. Her lips jutted out as if they had grown fuller in reaction to the prominence of her cheekbones. I told her that her slimness was very becoming. She smiled without interrupting her fierce struggle with her crab. When she dipped her fingers into the bowl of lemon water, all the sadness in the world overwhelmed me, and all I wanted was to put an end to the meal as soon as possible.

We were leaving Al-Jazaïr Street, having first passed through the Udaya and talked about its planned tunnel, and proceeded along the wall of the Mellah and the bank of the Abou Regreg. We went by the grain market, which had been transformed into ateliers and was decorated with huge façades advertising the Emirati enterprise in charge of the building. There were beautiful drawings revealing blue water and happy children with rosy cheeks. Fatima asked me about the lofty building crowned with solid domes and facing the Sunni mosque on one side and the news agency where she worked on the other side. I told her it was the museum of contemporary art. She was amazed by the sudden changes in Rabat, but I suggested she hold her comments until she visited the Villa des Arts that faced the mosque on the other side, and awaited the transformations planned for the Lyautey residence to become another altar to art in the capital. She would then see how the ‘forbidden city’ had come out of its lair.

She asked me, joking, ‘Why do they surround this poor mosque with all these satanic spaces?’

I said, ‘Don’t exaggerate. There’s not a single devil in the capital.’

Fatima left me in front of the parliament building. I continued on my way behind the colonial building and wondered about the vulgar and provocative parallel building enlarging the parliament, using the same architecture as the old courthouse. I asked myself about this insistence on an imaginary harmony, when contrast was the best approach to obtaining sudden beauty. When I reached my apartment I was exhausted. I took a pain reliever and slept soundly.

Fatima told me that after spending time abroad, she found Moroccans optimistic and lovers of life. I asked her, ‘By God, where did you meet this wonderful species?’

She said everyone she met at parties and family gatherings, and even some people she encountered on the street and on the train, was like this.

Whenever I had this sort of discussion, I felt depressed. I sensed a huge gap separated me from the reality that surrounded me, and I wouldn’t ever truly understand what was happening. I saw from my vantage point that people appeared amazed by the new things that occurred around them and were eager to get involved in this fast-paced life. I saw them as having lost any possibility of escape from the trap, and I couldn’t predict what would happen to them when they awakened. I saw in the image projected by other sources of observation a country forging ahead heedless, even of those who fall off its open carts.

I talked with Layla about the subject and she said in a decisive manner, ‘You’re right, you have no reason to be optimistic. Don’t pay attention to the gold-plated superficialities. If you scratch below the surface, you will find layers of rust and emptiness.’

I said, ‘Fatima is back from Madrid.’

She was not happy with the news. ‘I don’t want to have anything at all to do with that woman!’

‘But we have to go with her to Marrakech,’ I explained.

‘You must definitely forget that,’ Layla said.

When my silence lasted too long, she added, ‘If this annoys you, you can just cancel the idea of going to Marrakech.’

‘It’s impossible.’

‘Of course it’s impossible. I know that you would prefer to get rid of me rather than give up Marrakech.’

Later, I repeatedly tried to convince her that my interest in Fatima and joining her on her Marrakech trip was an essential matter, and had nothing to do with a possible physical relationship. For me Fatima was not a woman in a sexual or amorous way. She was more than that. She was a geographical phenomenon in my life.

I tried to pull Layla out of an ingrained cycle of enmity towards Fatima, but I failed. She was overcome by jealousy and decided, with no possibility for retraction, that I had to choose between travelling with Fatima and our relationship.

This upset me very much and made me tell her angrily, ‘I choose to go with Fatima!’

In the train that took us to Marrakech, Fatima talked in a terse manner about her Kosovar lover. He had suddenly revealed a mean streak in Havana, something that made her realise, with great concern, that he did not have an iota of dignity.

‘And then what happened?’ I asked.

‘When we returned to Madrid, we arrived at six in the morning. I put my suitcase on the luggage cart and went to the exit without waiting for him. An hour later I was in my apartment, getting ready to go to bed alone, as I have always been.’

I asked her if she regretted anything. She said she was upset for not having understood at the right time, and then she asked me about Layla. I told her that I could unmistakably say that she was the best thing that had happened to me in the last few years, but I did not know how to organise my life with her.