Mohammed Achaari - The Arch and the Butterfly

I called my father many times on his mobile phone in a desperate effort to talk to him. My purpose was not to inform him about the report, nor to express my tremendous happiness at this miraculous achievement, but to beg him to reveal to me the unique personality that extracted from Hylas’s mosaic, the mosaic of Abd al-Karim al-Khattabi and Al-Firsiwi struggling against the serpent of the Valley of Death, as well as all the other designs he used to decorate the Zaytoun Hotel. If he was that unique person, why did he not tell me? Why did he spend years changing the course of this archaeological imagination to direct it into his own personal legends, without ever saying anything about it?

I sent Fatima an e-mail and attached that story with the relevant questions. She replied that Al-Firsiwi had done nothing but repeat what humanity had been doing since time immemorial — reproduce a single creation in different scenarios and personalities. I considered her answer a philosophical ploy to be done with a topic that did not interest her. I began having nightmares in which I was standing in the middle of the crumbling house, surrounded by dust, smashed ceilings and frightened birds, while Al-Firsiwi’s face kept appearing and disappearing in the midst of the ruins, his voice getting louder and then weaker. In the distance I could hear the sound of collapsing buildings or explosions, I could not say exactly which. Every time I woke from this repeated nightmare, I felt immense regret for having failed to get close to Al-Firsiwi and understand him. I was sorry for merely considering him a colourful persona, a callous acrobat who knew how to step on words and emotions while maintaining his own balance and calculated chaos. Then I saw the paradox in a journey like Al-Firsiwi’s. I had considered it confused and disconnected, while in reality it was extremely coherent and methodical, its links connected by flawless logic. I came to the conclusion that the true meaning of any life was this mysterious logic and nothing else.

In an effort to put an end to the confusion that overwhelmed me, I went to Al-Firsiwi’s house and tried with my sister’s help to find something there: papers, poems, a will. We found nothing but an open box with a single piece of mosaic inside it and a copy of the poetry book published in Frankfurt. In another room we found one of the letters I had sent to him from Germany, in which I accused him again of having killed my mother. In the wardrobe we found nothing but a rustic djellaba he had kept from his teenage years. As I pushed the djellaba aside, I felt a solid object behind it. When I took the djellaba out of the empty cupboard, the statue of Bacchus, as I had known it, was clearly visible, with his dull gaze and the bunch of grapes hanging over his shoulder.

My amazement and joy did not last long since I soon discovered that the statue was a copy made of brittle pottery and barely strong enough to move. It was impossible to know under what conditions it had been made, or by whom, with this amazing degree of accuracy. It consisted of a hollow clay body, its redness blackened by firing. When I examined it closely, I realised that Al-Firsiwi’s obsession had gone as far as his making a replica with a broken foot to resemble the original statue after it had been removed from its plinth. I wrapped the copy in a white robe, as if I were placing it in a shroud, and carried it, in a kind of determined ceremonial, to the old abandoned house in Bu Mandara inhabited by forlorn birds and scorpions. I dug near the foundation of the western wall that was all that remained of the impressive room where the great Al-Firsiwi, the father of the first immigration, had stayed. There I buried the clay Bacchus, the statue remaining from mysterious thefts, itself considered in its clay condition an exemplary theft, in perfect harmony with this eternal wasteland.

On our way back from Bu Mandara, my sister asked, ‘Why did you bury the statue?’

‘I don’t know really. I didn’t know what else to do with it.’

When I got out of the car at the entrance to the Zaytoun Hotel, she turned suddenly before closing the car door and pushed into my hand the piece of mosaic, the only one left from all the chaos. I was moved by this gesture, but I did not know why. I was elated to have this tessera in my life, and I felt for the first time that the woman who had showered me with this happiness was not only Al-Firsiwi’s daughter but my sister as well. Even though I was certain that I was leaving the city for good and without regrets, I knew we would remain attached to it by the strong bond of gratitude and brotherhood.

I went down the road covered by shade and silence, and then I saw the blue hills stretching like lazy animals and the buildings that began to crawl from the Sidi Mohammed ben Qasem neighbourhood towards the mountain. The buildings, like their people, were crowded together and mysterious, and only characterised by their provocative white colour. When I turned left towards Meknes, I cast a cold look at Walili, as if I wanted to be sure there was not another car in the parking lot. I again felt depressed, as if the difficulty I found being nostalgic about places triggered it anew. I fought that black moment by thinking about Havana, about the seaside and nightclubs, about words that cropped up in the dark not because we needed them, but because the main street, the anxious souls and the song rising from the depths of the sea all needed fleeting words, words that flared like a match. We did not express anything with them, but we used them to build stairs towards rapture.

This thinking saved me from the onset of depression. I felt I would do something wonderful and exceptional if I went to Havana and shared a funny chat about Hamuniya with Bustrofedon. Why not? We could consider Hamuniya a variation on Estrella Rodriguez. The former collapsed with her weepy ’aytah in Casablanca and the second was swallowed by the night of Havana?. .?Here I am here, where am I from? Where are you from? Ah, where. Let’s go Havana, hava, here I am, here she is, hava. I am a mouth, he is a mouth, hafah, hafaha, Havana, Havana all of us, fahani, fahuni, hafuni, hafac, hafac, ha, ha, ha, nana, fana, Havana, ha, ha.

I called Fatima, who had returned to Madrid, but she was busy talking on another line. She asked me to call her later, but I insisted we talk then and told her, ‘We have to travel together to Cuba.’

She exclaimed, ‘Do you know what the weather is like there at this time of year?’

I had no idea, but she told me. ‘It’s simply a watery hell!’

‘What about the idea?’ I asked.

She replied, ‘It belongs to a time in the past. It would have been a beautiful idea if it had happened before, but it’s too late now. I went to Havana without you, or rather with someone else, and my illusions about it are over. Can we talk later?’

‘Yes, yes, we’ll talk later,’ I said, and then put the phone down. As I drove I thought about ‘before’ and ‘after’, about the right time that no one had succeeded in setting since the beginning of creation.

In the days that followed that phone conversation, Fatima would talk to me in a somewhat rude manner, as if she were settling a score. I could not find a positive sentence to include in our phone calls or a pleasant way to end them. One evening she left a message on my answering machine, telling me she would accompany a Spanish journalist on a two-week visit to Morocco to investigate the case of the devil worshippers and Essam al-Khayati’s disappearance. She did not include a single affectionate word, as she used to do, which I considered a virtual declaration of war. When I told her that later, she laughed and said she had stopped fighting years ago. But she remained aloof during her whole visit, which gave a sharp edge to all her comments and reactions. This upset Layla and led her to make some rash assumptions, most significantly that Fatima was expressing repressed jealousy and was unable to recover from her failure to have a relationship with me. Layla yet again asked about the true nature of my friendship with Fatima. I repeated to her the details of the story, including the feeling of loss that sometimes overcame me when I realised how important Fatima was in my life, yet there was no possibility of a sexual relationship between us. Once again Layla was upset because of my feeling of loss, and she considered it a lurking danger that might surface in our relationship one day. She also interpreted Fatima’s present anxiety as a sign of the imminent eruption of that volcano.