Mohammed Achaari - The Arch and the Butterfly

On my way to the railway station, I called Layla. She was not at all nice to me.

‘This is a story you have to put behind you,’ she said, ‘and not immerse yourself in it again as if you had never left. Since you have changed your life, there is nothing more to go back to. Why do you insist on keeping everything in tow for ever?’

‘But I’m not keeping anything in tow. There is only a painful situation that I cannot face in an unemotional manner,’ I said calmly.

She replied angrily, telling me that I walked with my head turned backwards, like a person looking towards the past.

I tried to find a way out of this anger but failed. She then asked if I had spent the night in the big house. When I told her I had, she said, ‘I was sure you would do that. It’s disgusting and vulgar, but you cannot do otherwise!’

I asked her about Mai. She put the receiver in the child’s hands and left us to talk with our voices and first words, not knowing how to end the call.

I finally went to Madrid, but I could not have gone at a worse time: Bahia was undergoing chemotherapy, Layla was angry with me and with everything, and my life was in suspension over something unknown.

I spent happy days with Fatima. We enjoyed Madrid by night, talking nonstop during long dinners. It was all very good for our spirits, as if she and I were undergoing group therapy. We talked about books, films and music. We dug into our small problems and our memories and found forgotten details and treasures that we soon placed above all our other feelings. We did not feel how quickly time was passing till the first week of my visit was over. I called Layla to gauge her mood. I found it was still sullen, and nothing helped change it, neither my talk about the city, its restaurants and its theatres, nor even an offer for her to spend the remaining time of her spring break here with the two girls. Her refusal was categorical and rude, so we ended the conversation under dark clouds.

I patiently tried to recover some warmth in our relationship during conversations over the following days, but I failed. When I was fed up with the situation, I asked her if she still loved me. She told me she did not even love herself. I tried to pursue this thread, but she closed all avenues and said she did not want to talk about the subject any more.

I was constantly thinking about our estrangement, trying to find a way back into the world we had built with a great deal of passion and effort. But I always faced Layla’s insistence on enveloping everything in mysterious silence. I talked with Fatima about it, and she said that maybe things had happened that frightened Layla. I wondered what they could be. She said, ‘I don’t exactly know, but my instinct tells me that something you did or did not do scared her.’

I was disconcerted that Fatima considered me so scary. It made me recall the details of my relationship with Layla as I searched for that fatal moment: how I loved her, and how I lived a terrifying schizophrenia split between two time periods, how the threads of our story were woven from a vague past and a troubled present; my fits, my relationship with Yacine, my work, my risk taking, my family, Al-Firsiwi, Diotima, Bahia, Essam, Mahdi and Fatima. I could not find anything that did not play a direct or indirect role in building our story.

Fatima noticed my depression and said, ‘You will see that it is only a passing crisis. Don’t forget that age too lands painful blows, hitting women especially hard.’

I swallowed my voice and realised fearfully that returning to my apartment in Rabat would be a difficult test of my ability to remain alive.

I then remembered all the lovely moments I had spent with Layla, and I felt that if I did not make love to her as soon as possible, I would die of sadness. I immediately called her number and told her that.

She said angrily, ‘You have to come back first.’

‘I’ll come back immediately,’ I told her.

‘I must still tell you that I have become as frigid as a block of ice!’

I did not tell her that she was the sweetest block of ice in the world. I did not tell her how desolate the world would be without her, nor did I tell her that for some incomprehensible reason I expected something bad to happen but did not know what it was.

That evening I needed to bring back the feeling that had followed our conversation. I was surprised that Layla’s voice was sleepy, and she begged me to call her later; she was exhausted and wanted to eat and go straight to bed. The conversation upset me, and I was overcome with a sudden anger at myself. I had failed to protect this last chance in my life, because, completely unfairly, I was being mistreated by the woman for whom I had given up Marrakech, with whom I had adopted Mai and for whose sake I had read, despite myself, a novel by Saramago five times. As my anger grew, it was evident to me that I deserved better, but since there was no better alternative, I went back to being hard on myself. I felt that everything happening to me was due to the unhappiness I had inherited, passed on from father to son, and that would stay with me to the very end.

To explain to myself what was happening, I imagined a person standing on the bank of a large river who cast his hook and line into the calm waters. Suddenly the line went taut, and the fisherman sensed from the violence of the movements the struggle he would have with the fish. He felt the resistance of the fish, its anger, refusal to submit, sudden thrashing and then compliance, as if the fish was not hooked but had decided to swim towards him. It arrived, floating over the water and jumping in frenzied movements as if to say it was not dead. Then all movement stopped and the line went limp, lying still on the surface of the water, the fish gone.

All the sadness in the world now overwhelmed the man. It chewed him up before spitting him out as wreckage on to the shore. What would the man do? What would he do with all the despair? Suddenly he looked at the flowing river and the reeds bending in the wind, he listened carefully to the rustling of the leaves in the nearby trees, and he became aware with a joyous conviction that this was the best thing that had happened to him in a long time. He understood that the fish getting away was the most deeply pleasurable event in his life, and that this sunny day where there was still a river, a sky and trees was exactly his lot in life and there would not be any other. If there were another chance, he would be overwhelmed by all the despair in the world because he would not get a sunny day, a river and trees.

Layla’s sudden distancing in this dramatic, painful and destructive manner was the best thing that could have happened to me. What did I want from this story? To spend the rest of my life in exhausting disagreements in order to learn how to escape the clutches of old age? To devote myself to suffocating the fish? To sew a life tailored to our measurements, which would undoubtedly become too small for our bodies and we would be obliged to rip it up?

What did I want beyond what I had achieved? That first shiver, the response of the fishing line, the beating of the whole body as it welcomed another resisting body, the pleasure that went as far as the desire to kill, the peace offered by pain? And then what? Did we have to spoil the impossible with the crumbs of the possible?

I walked in a street unknown to me, and once I realised I was lost, I went further. I talked to Fatima on the phone, and told her I did not know where I was and did not want to know. If I found a restaurant I liked, I would call her back.

When we finally sat at a table in a noisy restaurant, one that took Fatima more than two hours to find, I was at my best. I was elated by my new condition, happy to have escaped certain death if the relationship had flipped over due to excessive speed. I shared this with Fatima, but she was upset because the hard-to-find restaurant was located in a dangerous part of the city.