Mohammed Achaari - The Arch and the Butterfly

You said, without being angry or sharp, ‘Je me fiche du tableau.’

When did this happen? I no longer remember a thing. Did it happen in Ibn Sina or in a room in some hotel? I no longer remember if it was when we were going out, before that or years later. What happened when I carried you and set you on the edge of the bed, or when I set you down and carried you, and then carried you and did not carry you? Did I really put you in a warm bath and massage the toes of your small feet? Impossible! I could not have done it! But where have all these images that waver between certainty and illusion, between remembrance and visualisation, come from? How would I settle on one of these and find peace? How would I know that you never existed before this day, or that you were always here, in this dark corner of my memory? And why is it not you who speaks? Why do you not return, knowing, contrary to what I claimed, that I love you more than anything in the world? Did you really know? How would I know?

I write to you full of sadness, because of the letter you sent me last year that I found in my desk and had not read. That was because I could not remember your name which was written on the back of the envelope, or the city from which you sent the letter. I slipped it between the pages of a book and forgot where I had put it. When I came across it months later and recognised its origin, I feared it would contain news that would make me die of sadness because I had not read it. So I threw it in the fireplace without regret, because I forgot what I did with it. Now I do remember it in a way I cannot fathom. I remember the whole story linked somehow with you standing wet under the bare willow tree! If you do read my letter today, I beg you to send me a sign, telling me that you do not bear a grudge against me for burning the letter.

The morning after my dinner with Layla, I woke up exhausted and spent a long time in a haze looking for the day’s schedule. When I found it, I pulled myself together and went straight to the shower.

As I was leaving the room I found an envelope slipped under the door. There was a blank sheet of paper in it. My heart beat hard and I understood that the matter was related to something I was expecting, but no longer knew what. When I saw Layla and her guest at the breakfast table, I wished to separate them as soon as possible in order to free her from this legendary companion. Layla was cheery and unruffled while our eminent guest had his face in a bowl of fruit, which he chewed with deliberation while his teary eyes scanned the faces and furniture in the restaurant, as if he were expecting to meet someone.

I exchanged an intense look with Layla and felt an inner lucidity, the lucidity of a person not bothered by anything any more. I told myself as I submitted to the serenity that came from this lucidity that I might have reached the last station of my life, where I would put my suitcase down on the platform like any traveller, not knowing, out of extreme fatigue, whether I had arrived or was about to depart.

At a certain moment in life a person gets detached from his path and becomes a scrap of paper hanging in the air. At that moment he rids himself of the pressures of the path and is able to join any adventure wholeheartedly, because he is not required to justify anything any more or to provide any conclusive evidence of anything. He has freed himself of the future, as if he had died a very long time ago. What he experiences now is nothing except what his immaculate corpse remembers of that shoreless future.

Layla stood up suddenly and startled me. She apologised, saying, ‘Were you lost in thought?’

‘I was sitting on my suitcase on this vast platform.’

We were on our way to the historical city of Walili when Layla announced that she hated ruins. I told her that ruins had a soul, contrary to buildings. But she stood her ground and claimed that the most beautiful ruins were those we saw around us every day in the form of fallen dreams.

I told her, ‘But what you’re saying is only a poetic image. Ruins are ossified souls we extract from the bowels of the earth.’

She replied sarcastically, ‘And what you’re saying now is an exact science and not a poetic image!’

Saramago laughed for the first time since the start of our trip, which annoyed me. We spent the distance between Fes and Zarhun via Zakkutah each absorbed in our own world.

I was thinking about my father, Al-Firsiwi, who, in the waning years of his life, was working as a blind guide among the ruins of Walili. How would I introduce him? How would he receive Layla, and how could I escape his raving if he decided once more to play his favourite game?

Layla was in the back seat, talking about Jesus’s adventure in the boat during the storm on the waters. She seemed to be making an affected effort to separate holy genius from literary genius, insisting once more that the miraculous in its literary form had a realistic dimension that gave it an astonishing beauty which was absent from the religious version. It was probably due to the fact that religious faith was the basis for experiencing the miracle, an aspect that was not derived from the text. Layla, despite her insistence, did not succeed in pulling the writer out of his silence, which gave me the impression that she was talking to herself and that the writer had not come with us in the first place, but only his novel, for us to use as a pretext to weave a text according to our own narrative.

I was thinking about the ruins that my father roamed every day, ruins that had nothing to do with the Romans but concerned him personally. I thought about how he endured the humiliation of this end. He would show off his fluent German, deliberately pronouncing every letter separately and stressing their tonal variations. He would introduce biting comments about the city that had led him to these ruins, in cruel revenge for his glory days. He would be in his rickety boat, facing storms he could not see that pulled him into a crushing tornado which he rowed towards with his voice.

As we approached the city, Layla was narrating the scene of the boat caught in the divine presence, while Jesus rowed, as if this action still had meaning compared with the gravity of the encounter. Man remains bound to his body even when that body becomes meaningless, having just met God at the height of his loss and despair.

This preoccupation with the novel had driven me to despair. I suddenly turned to the back seat and said, ‘Mr Saramago, would you like to know my humble opinion of your novel?’

He replied immediately, ‘No, no, no. Not at all. Don’t bother yourself. I absolutely don’t want to know your opinion.’

At that point I pulled myself together, took my mobile out of my jacket pocket and called Fatima. I told her that I was in my old ruins, in the house of Juba and Bacchus and others, amid the earthy scent that no longer welcomed me, part of the cloudy landscape of all those forgotten columns, arches, temples, olive presses and houses.

She responded every now and then with ‘Oh’ and whenever she was about to start talking, I would interrupt her with something similar to my father’s delirium. ‘I will once again enter the palace of ruins,’ I told her. ‘Everyone in this world imagines he can rescue something under the ruins.’

‘I imagine that too. Do you want me to join you there?’ she asked.

‘No, no, I’ll be back this evening. If you want, we’ll start a new dig together!’

‘I’ll prepare the site,’ she replied.

When I ended the call a heavy silence reigned in the car. The avenue of olive trees that led to Wadi Khumman welcomed us as it had invaders and transients, without emotion or any particular disposition.

At the outhouse to the historical site, my father was saying goodbye to a mass of German tourists amidst roars of laughter and warm handshakes. As soon as we stepped out of the car, speaking in our soft voices, he came over, perceiving that we were a new group. When he got close to us he recited his favourite line from the Qur’an: ‘Do not think me senile, I do indeed scent the presence of Youssef.’