Mohammed Achaari - The Arch and the Butterfly

Ibrahim’s mother, who constantly repeated that she knew him best because she had given birth to him, had a stroke of genius. She sat on his hospital bed one evening and spent a long time staring into her wounded son’s eyes. She began laying out her plan for Ibrahim in veiled words and tear-filled sentences. Ibrahim responded with an appeasing gesture and a few words. ‘OK, I agree. Don’t torture yourself. I completely understand. I agree.’

‘What are you agreeing to, my son? I haven’t said everything yet.’ Finally she spat it out. ‘I want you to marry Haniya, so that Essam and Mahdi can be looked after by you. That’ll put a stop to all the gossip and give me peace of mind before I die.’

Ibrahim knew full well what awaited him. He signalled his acceptance with a wave of the hand and gave his mother permission to act as she saw fit. He felt that the arrangement fitted in totally with everything else. There was no better way to avenge Abdelhadi’s suicide, and there was nothing in his life that did not reveal to him, on a daily basis, that step by step he was drawing nearer to this destiny, submitting to the inevitable.

When, months later, the door closed behind Ibrahim and Haniya for the first time, he was nervous and embarrassed. He almost choked on his feelings, until he turned towards her. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, her face angled slightly towards the wall. His heartbeat quickened because in her isolation, she looked like Abdelhadi in the melancholy of his song.

Casablanca was still joking about their marriage when Ibrahim received another terrible shock, the death of his mother, which hurt him like a painful amputation. The morning she died, he was awakened by the cries of Haniya, Essam and Mahdi shouting, ‘May God have mercy on the Hajja!’

‘What are you doing in the garden? Why don’t you keep still so I can understand?’ he asked.

Haniya then stood before him and told him his mother had been playing with Essam and Mahdi in the garden and collapsed. She now lay dead, her head in the water of the swimming pool and her body stretched on the lawn. ‘Listen, invoke God’s name. Your mother has passed away.’

Ibrahim said impatiently, ‘No one dies like that. Mother’s playing, she’s just playing!’

When he raised her head from the blue of the swimming pool, she seemed to smile. He got ready for her to jump to her feet cackling with laughter, as she would do to amuse the twins, unconcerned that she was stiff and cold. At that point, Haniya and the maids, wailing loudly, came and picked her up. They carried her to her room and laid her carefully out on the bed, as though they had long been trained for this.

Ibrahim buried his face in his hands and relived, as if standing under a gentle shower of rain, the details of the life they had been through together: her milk, her fears for him, her tears, her devastation at the loss of his father, her silence, her games, her happiness, her misery, her presence on the edge of his bed until he went to sleep, her stories, her dreams, and her skills at fighting poverty and time. He remained in that position until Haniya reminded him angrily that death was a believer’s duty and if life were meant to last, it would have lasted for Prophet Mohammed. Ibrahim replied, distressed, ‘But Prophet Mohammed is not my mother!’

After the funeral rites were over, Ibrahim entered a black box where he lost his ability to reconcile with life. He turned inward and dwelled on his conviction of the futility of a life of delusions. This was before he submitted to the resignation that dominated the scene and impacted our whole generation, a mixture of dervish tendencies, secular Sufism and new-age spirituality. I was at his side during that difficult period and took advantage of his spiritual predisposition to reveal that I was meeting Yacine as a child who talked to me about everything, as if he had not crossed to the other side. Ibrahim accepted and approved my experience, confirming that souls meet in total freedom independent of our ephemeral bodies. Whenever the police called us to resume the investigation with new information related to terrorist organisations, Ibrahim, in all seriousness, begged me not to tell Yacine, as there was no need to bother souls with what we did or did not do.

I met Layla for the first time one quiet morning in the lobby of the Hilton. She was absorbed in a book as people came in and out of the hotel with their luggage and I approached to make sure it was her. Sensing my presence, she lifted her head but did not give me a chance to talk or introduce myself and burst out saying, ‘You must be the journalist who’s covering Saramago. It’s great, really great, that you’ve come early. It’s a good omen to meet a journalist who arrives early. An interview? A newspaper interview with Saramago? Forget it! He’s the type who believes that what he writes is all he needs to say. There’s no point insisting. Hold on, use a hunting technique. Track the prey then pounce. Or maybe he’ll decide on his own to grant you an interview. Try and talk to him; cajole him or trick him. You must have read his books — or at least I hope you’ve read them. I don’t think it’s possible to talk to a person like him about anything else. He doesn’t talk much about the weather! I’m reading The Gospel According to Jesus Christ for the thousandth time. Believe me, out of all the books I’ve read, there isn’t one I enjoyed more. You know what? The subject of the book doesn’t matter at all. How Jesus was born, how he grew up and faced life’s questions, how he met God and how he met death. The story isn’t like in the Gospels, but as Jesus might have lived it. What are the Gospels anyway? Are they the book, or Jesus as he lived or might have lived? None of this matters at all. What matters is the prose, the way words and sentences become more important than the narrative, a purity that gives you the sense of beauty in the abstract, without subject matter, or it’s its own subject matter. Do you understand that?’

I had been straining to interrupt her dense stream of words and finally managed to get a word in. ‘Yes, yes, I understand completely. I’ve also read Blindness for personal reasons to do with my father, but it depressed me so much that I stopped reading for a few months.’

She was nervously gathering her belongings when she said, ‘Have you spotted him? He’s just stepped out of the elevator. There he is. Look at his movements. I swear, the slowness has nothing to do with age or anything else — quick, let’s head over — it’s a deliberation of the mind — this way’s better, come on — a pause over every detail. One must have extraordinary ability to do that. To think that I spend most of my time fighting details. What idiocy!

‘Mr Saramago, please, don’t make us run after you. This is the journalist I told you about. I don’t know his name yet. Let’s make his acquaintance together.’

I heard myself pronounce my name, Youssef al-Firsiwi. I noticed that it had a strange impact on the woman whom I had not taken my eyes off from the moment she started talking.

On our way to Fes, I said to Saramago, ‘When all is said and done, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and the revealed Gospels are two sides of the same coin. Imagination is needed in both narratives, and fiction is needed in both cases.’

He smiled and shook his head in a way that did not reveal whether he agreed or disagreed. At that point Layla said, ‘The novel is open to multiple interpretations, including the ones present in the revelation. As for the revelation, it accepts only its own narrative.’

Saramago laughed but did not comment. We all looked in the direction of the green fields that had been startled by the November rain. We agreed, with varying degrees of sincerity, that it was a beautiful morning. Layla then announced that she would eat the pastries she had brought with her, and asked whether we would like some. Neither Saramago nor I wanted one. Nor did he want to discuss literature. He asked me about the Sahara and the negotiations with the separatists, and whether Morocco was moving towards real democracy or whether there were those who longed for rule with an iron fist. He asked about the strength of the religious movement, what interest groups there were and where the opposite interests lay.