The Arch and the Butterfly (26 page)

She smiled affectionately at me and asked, after a moment of silence, ‘What was the first meal whose aroma surprised you?’

I said, defeated, ‘Yacine’s shirts, years after his death.’

I observed her face with its fine features, typical of the women of the Atlas. Her eyes had become a little larger, and their blackness was a transparent shade surrounding her whole face. Her lips jutted out as if they had grown fuller in reaction to the prominence of her cheekbones. I told her that her slimness was very becoming. She smiled without interrupting her fierce struggle with her crab. When she dipped her fingers into the bowl of lemon water, all the sadness in the world overwhelmed me, and all I wanted was to put an end to the meal as soon as possible.

We were leaving Al-Jazaïr Street, having first passed through the Udaya and talked about its planned tunnel, and proceeded along the wall of the Mellah and the bank of the Abou Regreg. We went by the grain market, which had been transformed into ateliers and was decorated with huge façades advertising the Emirati enterprise in charge of the building. There were beautiful drawings revealing blue water and happy children with rosy cheeks. Fatima asked me about the lofty building crowned with solid domes and facing the Sunni mosque on one side and the news agency where she worked on the other side. I told her it was the museum of contemporary art. She was amazed by the sudden changes in Rabat, but I suggested she hold her comments until she visited the Villa des Arts that faced the mosque on the other side, and awaited the trans­formations planned for the Lyautey residence to become another altar to art in the capital. She would then see how the ‘forbidden city’ had come out of its lair.

She asked me, joking, ‘Why do they surround this poor mosque with all these satanic spaces?’

I said, ‘Don’t exaggerate. There’s not a single devil in the capital.’

Fatima left me in front of the parliament building. I continued on my way behind the colonial building and wondered about the vulgar and provocative parallel building enlarging the parliament, using the same architecture as the old courthouse. I asked myself about this insistence on an imaginary harmony, when contrast was the best approach to obtaining sudden beauty. When I reached my apartment I was exhausted. I took a pain reliever and slept soundly.

Fatima told me that after spending time abroad, she found Moroccans optimistic and lovers of life. I asked her, ‘By God, where did you meet this wonderful species?’

She said everyone she met at parties and family gatherings, and even some people she encountered on the street and on the train, was like this.

Whenever I had this sort of discussion, I felt depressed. I sensed a huge gap separated me from the reality that surrounded me, and I wouldn’t ever truly understand what was happening. I saw from my vantage point that people appeared amazed by the new things that occurred around them and were eager to get involved in this fast-paced life. I saw them as having lost any possibility of escape from the trap, and I couldn’t predict what would happen to them when they awakened. I saw in the image projected by other sources of observation a country forging ahead heedless, even of those who fall off its open carts.

I talked with Layla about the subject and she said in a decisive manner, ‘You’re right, you have no reason to be optimistic. Don’t pay attention to the gold-plated superficialities. If you scratch below the surface, you will find layers of rust and emptiness.’

I said, ‘Fatima is back from Madrid.’

She was not happy with the news. ‘I don’t want to have anything at all to do with that woman!’

‘But we have to go with her to Marrakech,’ I explained.

‘You must definitely forget that,’ Layla said.

When my silence lasted too long, she added, ‘If this annoys you, you can just cancel the idea of going to Marrakech.’

‘It’s impossible.’

‘Of course it’s impossible. I know that you would prefer to get rid of me rather than give up Marrakech.’

Later, I repeatedly tried to convince her that my interest in Fatima and joining her on her Marrakech trip was an essential matter, and had nothing to do with a possible physical relationship. For me Fatima was not a woman in a sexual or amorous way. She was more than that. She was a geographical phenomenon in my life.

I tried to pull Layla out of an ingrained cycle of enmity towards Fatima, but I failed. She was overcome by jealousy and decided, with no possibility for retraction, that I had to choose between travelling with Fatima and our relationship.

This upset me very much and made me tell her angrily, ‘I choose to go with Fatima!’

In the train that took us to Marrakech, Fatima talked in a terse manner about her Kosovar lover. He had suddenly revealed a mean streak in Havana, something that made her realise, with great concern, that he did not have an iota of dignity.

‘And then what happened?’ I asked.

‘When we returned to Madrid, we arrived at six in the morning. I put my suitcase on the luggage cart and went to the exit without waiting for him. An hour later I was in my apartment, getting ready to go to bed alone, as I have always been.’

I asked her if she regretted anything. She said she was upset for not having understood at the right time, and then she asked me about Layla. I told her that I could unmistakably say that she was the best thing that had happened to me in the last few years, but I did not know how to organise my life with her.

‘It’s a true love story,’ Fatima said. ‘That’s why you can’t organise anything. All you have to do is let your imagination run freely and write an unprecedented love story.’

Her reply annoyed me. I heard in it an allusion to the fact that I wouldn’t live with Layla in a true love story, but would rather experience a kind of literary fantasy. I replied somewhat harshly, ‘But Layla is real. She is not the product of my imagination.’

‘What happened to you in reality was that you occasionally went to bed with a woman who was able to reconcile you with pleasure. But look at the story you wove around the subject!’

I felt suddenly blocked and remained silent. I watched the red fields devoid of vegetation, except for clumps of dispersed cactus trees. There on the nearby horizon was the road leading to Marrakech, which would soon expand to Agadir. In a few years the country would be connected by those empty roads, praised in anthems for uniting people and putting an end to isolation. Fatima loved roads, arched bridges and major highway projects. She said that they suited Hercules’s soul very well. They complied with the idea of the bare land from which adventurers extract new features.

We arrived at the big house and found Ghaliya busy preparing dinner, and Bahia overwhelmed by the commotion of baby Ghaliya, while Ahmad Majd was talking on the phone with the calm of someone who has awakened on a deserted island. I left Fatima to reconnect with this lively ambiance and went straight to my room, intent on napping until night-time.

4

Yacine placed his hand on my cheek as he used to do when he was a baby. I opened my eyes, inhaling the scent of a distant childhood. I smiled at him. He told me that this was his last appearance in my life. He would then disappear for good.

‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you to misunderstand me. I’m not anybody’s messenger. I have no connection with anyone, and there is no connection between what happened to me and what is happening to you. There is no connection between what I was and what I am able to read in tomorrow’s paper. You will be obsessed for a long time trying to understand how this happened. There is no “how” in the matter. An idea does not survive long as an idea. Try to jump one metre. Then try to think about it for more than one second, and you will be unable to jump for good. All there is in the matter is the fact that a spark passes through your brain and says to you, “Why not?” and then you jump. This is how I found myself over there. I did not know whether it was a beginning or an end. I only knew that if I did not do it I would remain suspended, all the way to eternity, at that point on the pavement where I allowed the idea to survive more than necessary. I say this to put an end to the matter. I mean, in order for me to put an end to it. As far as you are concerned, you won’t stop digging in this grave. You will follow in the footsteps of your ancestors, the diggers. Will you find anything? I don’t know. You might be able to extract a city from inside you, a combination of Zarhoun, D
u
?
sseldorf, Rabat, Bu Mandara, Frankfurt, Bu Dayrab and Marrakech. You might find poetry in the prosaic ruins that surround you. None of that concerns me! You must know that I will always manage to escape the control of the descendants. I will soar alone and fall alone as I always did.

‘Listen carefully. Jamaa al-Fna, the Mediterranean Press Club, the medina entrance from the side of the seller of smoked heads, near the olive and falafel shop. Free yourself from the balcony of the café. Nothing deserves all this attention on your part. Listen to the call of someone looking from the narrow window of an old house. He is talking to another person on the roof of a nearby house, and asking, “Has the person concerned arrived?” The other replies at the top of his voice that he does not know. You, however, must stand exactly under the spot where the call originates or under the window. Look closely in the direction of those who leave the alley and melt into the throng of the square. You should not concern yourself with those entering the medina. You should know that in this narrow place it is difficult to distinguish between those entering and those leaving, but everything depends on this distinction. You will see a billboard that shades the alleyway with its dull glimmer. You will incidentally read on it that Marrakech welcomes cinema lovers. You will then see a large poster that covers a large area of the wall, and if you read it you will know the whole programme of the film festival. I beg you, do not read it. If you busy yourself reading it – and I know that an overwhelming temptation will push you to do so – you will miss the critical moment.

‘Why am I telling you all this? Why do I run to you specifically? It is either your fate or mine, we can’t escape it. The face is that of a child who grew up very quickly. His cheeks are those of a healthy baby and his eyes are the eyes of a tired man. It is a face that looks like many others, like the face of the greengrocer located near the fuel station in Al-Zizafon Street, the face of the teacher at the private school located behind the general’s house, or the face of your brother-in-law who lives in Germany, whom you haven’t seen in years. Look at his hands next. Why is there a blackness creeping up all his nails? Why does the silver wedding ring sit so lightly on his thick little finger, making the hand look dead? Where has the man sprung from? From Sidi Youssef Ben Ali? From Daoudiate? From a vault in the old medina? From the enclosure of Marrakech or from the night of Casablanca? Or from the nameless margins?

‘You told me once that you recognised people’s origins from their walk. Pay careful attention then to this unhurried gait, slightly off-centre as if the person were trying to avoid an unexpected obstacle. Can you tell where people are heading from the way they walk? No. No, you can’t know. No one can tell whether a person is going towards the centre of the square or to the Conference Hall, or the Hotel La Mamounia. His body stretches towards all those places without taking the direction it points to. It is the camouflage of a person who knows what he wants.

‘The sleek buses are lined up in the square, unloading hundreds of weary tourists. The sun covers this city like a
tanjiya
dish cooked over high heat. This is the end of the tour, after the tombs of the Saadis, Badie palace, Bahia palace, the Koutoubia, the house of Si Said, the Pasha’s house, the lighthouse, and the Almoravid Dome. Here, the scalded faces take a break before they are split among the hotels of the city. Do you think he is here, hiding in an obscure corner, waiting for the gathering of foreigners near the buses? Do you think he is observing the situation carefully from behind the cart of an itinerant vendor? Scrutinise his features closely, if you can get near him. If the designated moment has arrived, a vivid yellow colour will cover his face. In that case do not leave him at all. But if the time is still far off, the burning sun will turn his face bluish. So stay close to him but only look at his face occasionally. It would be better to look at his feet, the feet of a duck in a hurry wearing impromptu socks and knock-off trainers.

‘If he is not there? You will ask yourself if he wasn’t just an apparition that sprang from the fear present in each one of us. If, despite his socks, his Pakistani shirt and his uneasy look, he wasn’t just a simple construction worker on his day off, or a cleaner in foreigners’ houses who has just taken a quick shower before noon, for fear of being surprised in a state of impurity? At the exact moment when you ask that kind of question, a person’s colour might change from blue to yellow, the colour of death. Beware of falling victim to this suspicion when you can’t see him. If he is not where we left him a short while before, he is now at the entrance to the Mamounia, which is packed with cars, buses and taxis, and where the smoke of Cuban cigars extends from the restaurants to the Churchill Suite or Orson Welles Rooms. Do not take the risk of leaving this golden square. There, in the same square metre, huge fortunes compete and our friend can raise the pillars of paradise.

‘Why are you looking at me like that? You have not been assigned a mission and you are not anybody’s messenger. You just gave birth to a naïve angel who flew from the Trocadero to Kandahar, certain of his return.