Mohammed Achaari - The Arch and the Butterfly

I offered lukewarm responses because I was annoyed with the inquisition and did not have answers.

‘Your conversation is ruining my mood,’ said Layla. ‘I don’t understand how the same person could write with such sensitivity about Jesus’s relationship with his mother, with Mary Magdalene, and with Satan, and yet lose valuable time talking about the Sahrawi people’s right to self-determination. Do you know what people do in the desert, Mr Saramago? They roam the wilderness, eat, perform their ablutions and compose poetry in the style of pre-Islamic times. They fatten up their women, and screw while talking aloud lest the children hear them. Do you think they would dance for joy if they heard you cared about their self-determination?’

We laughed, and then Layla said, ‘What truly amazes me is the magical power that you and those like you have to express what we all know in detail but are unable to express, simply because we lack the magical means you have. I feel infuriated sometimes because you’re saying exactly what I’ve felt for ages, but could not describe with precision until I read it. I don’t know what you think, but, personally, I consider precision to be the ideal form of beauty.’

Her voice from the back seat seemed to strike my shoulders and neck, jolting me out of my recent lifelessness. I felt the words were addressed to me in a kind of unintended consolation. Precision in science, nature and art — without the distortion of emotion — really did embody the concept of beauty.

Consider the compatible and incompatible elements needed to add flavour to a piece of raw fish. We do not want one flavour to overpower the others, or any flavour to be hidden, delayed or premature. We want the saltiness to peak at a specific moment, before the spices but after lemon by a fraction of a second. Then comes the waning of the substance and the lingering aftertaste of all these elements, along with an additional element, the time the aftertaste takes to permeate the farthest reaches of our body. The aftertaste fades, leaving behind another trace of a trace, then another trace of the trace of a trace, and so on. This precision in making and then unmaking something, in its emergence and evanescence, can give birth to the pleasure we seek to eternalise in total despair, attempting to move it from the realm of the senses to the realm of perception, from incoherence to coherence. All the while we are aware of the tremendous tragedy latent in beauty, because outside this mental precision, beauty can only be fleeting.

Having pinpointed this matter under Layla’s inspiration, I expected to feel deliriously happy, but instead was assailed by a depression similar to the one I had experienced in previous panic attacks. I fought it off, while the conversation in the back seat continued and I could hear Layla’s voice and Saramago’s mumblings on and off.

‘I confess,’ said Layla, ‘that at first I found your novel a variation on an old theme, then your writing made me feel that devils are the mirrors of prophets, and that good, in order to be good, must subsume the burning heat of evil. It doesn’t matter what the subject is, because we’re not looking to be persuaded while reading the novel. You made the Christ in your book throw off the mantle of revelation, only for him to don it again as a shepherd, a fisherman, a lover and a prophet. He suffered, desired, feared and performed miracles, then proceeded towards his crucifixion where he found no one in the end but Satan himself to collect the drops of his blood in the clay bowl that cleaved from the ground at the moment Christ cleaved from nothingness. That’s the life that became a Gospel, isn’t it?’

‘Hmm-m-m,’ mumbled Saramago.

‘What I mean is there’s a constant ambivalence in the subject of revelation. Who reveals to whom!’

‘Hmm-m-m.’

‘Do you mean yes or no?’

‘Hmm-m-m.’

‘It’s yes and no then! No problem. Believe me, writing matters more than all the Gospels. It’s not a question of belief. I’m a believer myself. I tried very hard for years to be an atheist, but I failed.’

Saramago chuckled.

‘I’m not bothered by your laughter. I believe in God and He loves me. I’m sure of it!’

A whispered conversation followed that I could not make out. I dozed off and the conversation passed me by. I then felt that my whole body was hurting and that the blue sky, the ripening earth and the rain-washed light were nothing but tricks to hide my unhappiness.

When we reached the hotel I could not get out of the car, and no one asked me why. My limbs were numb and I regretted having come along. I was busy wondering whether we did not all need to rewrite our life stories and free them from the violence of the single reading. In my case, I thought what my life story would have been if I had not lost Yacine, and how Yacine would have remained alive if I had not been what I was. I woke up and saw Layla’s face. She had opened the car door and was leaning towards me, anxious and concerned.

‘Are you all right? Do you want us to take you to a doctor? Can you walk? My God, what happened?’

I had the impression she was far away, although I felt her breath on my face. Her features changed continuously, from those of a woman I knew to those of an unknown woman, and then to a woman I remembered.

‘It’s terrible that we left the car without noticing you weren’t feeling well!’ she said.

‘No, no. I’m fine. Sometimes I fade like this. I‘m sorry.’

‘But we went up to our rooms, and this dolt of a driver went to have a coffee and a cigarette by the pool. Nobody noticed that you were still in the car. Scary!’

‘No need to exaggerate. Has it been long?’

‘Almost an hour. You must hate me!’

‘I’m very sorry, but I’m unable to hate you.’

As we entered the hotel lobby, I felt that I had recovered and my spirits were high. I was able to forget why I was there, and look forward to other things that were impossible to predict.

I took a long bath and then went down to the restaurant to find Layla waiting for me at a table for two. Saramago did not wish to leave his room. This must have pleased me, or my facial expression must have implied it, but Layla was sad. She might even have been crying before I arrived, but I did not know why. She soon regained her vitality and burst out talking. Her joyful outpouring of words and energetic rush of ideas and images projected happiness, as if she were dancing with her sentences.

I said to her, ‘He doesn’t know what he’s missing by retreating into a tête-à-tête with his old man’s memory!’

She laughed, but her laughter was like a cold blast blowing across our table. I contemplated her again in confusion and saw a frisson pass over her face. I looked down, and before I lifted my gaze, she said that a few years before, she and a friend had lived in the same apartment building as me in the Ibn Sina quarter. She said, ‘I used to see you every day and it made me furious that you never showed even the slightest interest in my humble self!’

This was how dinner led to a strange intersection of two dormant memories.

I did not remember having met a woman who looked like her in the building where I had lived. If I had seen her, it probably would have been on the stairs or in the courtyard. Then again, I might have met her in another life and lost her the way I had lost many other people. I might have loved her for a short or a long time but could no longer remember. I might have waited a whole lifetime for her, but she never came or came and did not find me.

Now here she was before me in another life, and I had nothing to entertain her with but fanciful conversation about a desperate effort to build a vast edifice, a castle with a thousand doors and endless halls, rooms within rooms, a palace made of words and visions inhabited by our forgotten desires, our fears, our apprehension at returning to our small huts, where there was no possibility of contradiction between what was and what could have been.