Mohammed Achaari - The Arch and the Butterfly

I got close to her and began seeking her nakedness, in submission to my fingers and a desire more powerful than I had felt in years. I felt as if I did not recognise my own movements, which seemed to be guided by something that rose freely within my body. The details of her body seized me by surprise, without passing through the mind’s filter that used to guide me to her. They reached me through her neck, her chest and the smoothness of her back. I closed my eyes and submitted to her fingertips exploring my features and prying inside every shudder that passed through me. I heard for the first time her innermost sounds rising between my hands, reaching me from a cavernous flow, not a language but a straining musical performance. Then I found myself inside her breath, her sweetness and a closed oyster, where I transformed into the scent of the sea scattered far by salt and seaweed. She resisted my incursion with nervous pushes, a mixture of rising and ebbing, until she succeeded in creating a small breach in our wave. She said she wanted to walk naked. I followed her gradual rise with my hands and lips until she placed her two small feet with long toes, the nails carefully painted, on the same marble that I was warming with two burning cheeks. I saw her toes move when I touched them with my lips, then I saw the feet move like glowing objects. I remained lying down and could not see her walk in the white space; I saw only her feet leaving the shiny surface of the marble and then returning to it in breathtaking harmony.

When the cold stung I sat up and asked Layla to stand against the curtains, which she did with exciting compliance. I saw her expression for the first time and I was enveloped with what looked like thick clouds as a result of what I saw. Her face had become filled with the emptiness she was walking in and had acquired a metaphysical dimension, as if the effort she had made and the secret dance she had performed had poured infinite distance into her expression. I stretched my arms to her for a long time. She did not move, but remained standing in front of the curtains in all her desire. I begged her to touch her body. She moved her hands in unison, starting with her face and then descending over all her body until she reached the bottom of her tummy with one hand. With her other hand she pulled part of the curtains over her body, covering movements that made the cloth ripple and her face fill with the glow of total pleasure.

I fell in love with my apartment that night. After that night I felt clearly that Layla would fill the place of the mysterious souls. She would live in this house the way she lived in my skin. She liked the idea of the books placed in the kitchen, and she would even help me get rid of books I used to consider essential in my life, such as the complete works of Hölderlin and Rilke, Henri Michaux and Pessoa. She said that poetry was not beautiful when it was easily accessible, and that when I wanted to read it, I should go to the library and read only one poem.

She developed a theory of minimalism and applied it to my music collection and my clothes. I was happy to find myself freed of the weight of the years that had made me attached to the insignificant things piled around me, in the belief that I was preserving the years themselves. I even felt that this renewal in the material domain gave objects a new soul. It was as if another person had come as reinforcements in the battle that I had been waging for survival.

My doctor noticed a general improvement in my condition, and recommended that to fully recover I take up a sport that would exercise body and soul. He suggested a yoga club that offered Pilates. I welcomed the advice with childlike enthusiasm. But I couldn’t stand the fact that the club was in the basement and that the regulars made fun of my jerky movements. I discreetly withdrew, but not without going through a transformational experience.

In the yoga club I met a young man who looked very much like me. He and Yacine were as alike as two droplets of water. When I told him that he said, smiling, ‘You might well be my father. I am the illegitimate child of a woman who died single. If twenty years ago you knew a young teacher from the city of Khenifra and you might have had a child with her, then I’m your long-lost son. From now on you have to make room in your life for me.’

When he noticed my anxiety and nervousness, he burst out laughing and said in a friendly tone, ‘Don’t worry, I won’t harass you. I don’t want a father that I’m supposed to kill in order to live at peace.’

His concise, joking sentences made it clear he was quite unaware of the bomb he was throwing into my life, for one summer, twenty-four years earlier, I had had a passionate affair with a woman called Zulikha. It ended, naturally enough, at the beginning of the new school year. There was nothing special about the story except that she looked like the French actress Romy Schneider.

Remembering her, it was almost like the only real tragedy in my life had been her disappearance one distant autumn, followed by her sudden death, which I knew nothing about. Then our potential son turned up — a broadcast engineer who liked yoga and comedies.

I was overcome with questions about whether Zulikha might have been the woman I had lost but could not remember. Perhaps news of her death had reached me without my realising. I charted all the accomplishments that might have been expected in her life and turned her into a vague object of loss. A suspicion tormented me: I had finally found an explanation for my being emotionally lost, yet I had not found the woman, not even as a distant memory.

Al-Firsiwi, if he were to reappear, could rest assured about his offspring. No matter how much we tried to get away from our seed, they plotted their own course, which, sooner or later, snared us in the net of paternity.

I spent a few weeks in a spin at this striking discovery. When I told Layla about it, she commented sarcastically, ‘You’d be stupid to think that being a father is simply sowing your oats!’

Fatima, on the other hand, advised me to take it easy and ask the young man if his mother’s name was Zulikha. I returned to the club for that reason, and when he left the hall I went up to him and asked.

He replied, smiling, ‘Of course her name is Zulikha.’ Then he asked me quite seriously, ‘Do you want to put your doubts to rest?’

I nodded, so he said, ‘Let’s do a DNA test. If it confirms that I’m your son, everything will be clear. You’ll have to pass by the club as soon as possible and pay my monthly membership!’

He walked away and then turned to look at me and laughed, his face joyful. I did not think then that he resembled Yacine or me to the degree I had imagined when I first met him. But I said to myself that he probably looked like Zulikha, whom I didn’t remember then, and never would.

On the way home I thought long and hard about what was happening to me, and I told myself that this was also one possibility among many others that could come along. Devastated by the loss of an only son, we suddenly find ourselves a father in a different story. We await the birth of a baby girl with great joy, and then she is born with a handicap; we think our life is over with the arrival of this baby, only to discover that life has become meaningful. No one could know which possibility might bring the greatest comfort. I told myself this because I felt calmer about the tragedy of Yacine’s loss than about this new story.

I shared my thoughts with Fatima, and she suggested that we adopt a child together. I tried to avoid the subject but she insisted. ‘The baby would only need you to be a father from a distance. You’d see, helping to shape a human being would only require a few years — perhaps less time than would be needed for a tree. That person would then become your heart’s delight.’ She also said, ‘Just imagine how many things we would put right with such a venture, even those things that time has spoiled.’