The Arch and the Butterfly (3 page)

‘Yes,’ my wife had said. ‘It’s the pinnacle of virtue because it leads to a moment of truth, while the pretence of faithfulness is nothing but a vulgar lie.’

I had remained silent, knowing that she did not believe what she was saying but had said it only to provoke me, when she had added nervously, ‘Even vis-à-vis God, a person is purer while experiencing this moment of truth.’

‘Has this happened to you?’ I had asked.

‘Do you think I would tell you if it had?’ she had replied.

We had spent the rest of the drive between Rabat and Agadir in a poisonous, destructive argument about who had done what, without gaining anything except a hollow, senseless jealousy that had nothing to do with us personally, yet which awakened feelings of outrage, affront and hatred. Meanwhile Yacine had been fussing in the back seat with his electronic games, shouting every now and then for us to tone it down.

Once I became firm friends with Fatima Badri, however, Bahia began to pay attention to everything connected to the women in my life. She viewed with antagonism all my new clothes and books, the films I saw and the music I listened to, convinced that a woman, and most probably Fatima, had ushered me towards them.

Bahia did not understand – from my explanations or of her own accord – that the falling away of my own sensation of things and the absence of any pleasure in what I consumed was what pushed me towards the unfamiliar in my life. The person I had been disliked Andalusian music, but since it was all the same whether I listened to that or jazz, I accepted what I had disliked before, seeking a modicum of pleasure to jolt me here and there. Perhaps I simply did not know what I wanted, which was also true of my romantic conquests, if we could call them such, which did not reflect a sudden flightiness or a delayed adolescence on my part. I was, despite myself, thrust into stories I did not help spin together, nor was I a real player at any stage of their development. It was as if the death of my senses had transformed me into a black hole that swallowed every particle of light that approached it. I was aware, every time this happened, that the total darkness controlling my inner self lent me this attraction. I therefore organised my affairs in a very strict manner to allow me to navigate within the limits of what I could see in this dark hubbub.

When Fatima became a large part of my life, it was the culmination of an old acquaintance. I had known her distantly because of our shared profession and passion for the theatre. She had once directed one of my modest texts for the Casablanca Players. Our relationship changed on a scorching afternoon in a restaurant on the beach. On my way back from the restroom, I glimpsed the cook putting a giant crab into boiling water and saw the steam rising from the pot take on a pinkish tinge. I expected to be swamped by this putrid cloud. My body overreacted and I fainted. After I lost my sense of smell, I acquired an extraordinary capacity to imagine aromas, and even to be strongly and, at times, disproportionately affected by them. The unfortunate incident led me to share a delicious lunch with the woman – Fatima – for whom the crab was boiled. I watched Fatima struggle to use pincers and a scalpel to extract the pieces of white meat lodged beneath the carapace of the boiled creature, which she then devoured with gusto. The exertion quickened her breathing and made her chew in a way that sounded like staccato panting as she toyed with the long legs of the shellfish, sucking them with her eyes closed, holding the ends with her slender white fingers and hardly touching the horny pink shell.

She asked if the smell would cause me to faint again, and I told her that I didn’t smell in the first place. My answer did not seem to surprise her, and she commented without interrupting her battle, ‘I also imagine scents. I can even smell them on TV and at the cinema.’

I laughed, but she insisted that she was not joking.

After that, I described to her in great detail the situation of a man who has lost his sense of smell. It was not, of course, to do with losing the memory of smell, because the scents we smell even once, starting with that of our mother and on to that of death, would never be forgotten. Taste remains, but requires more time for the tongue to register a substance and send a clear signal to the brain, which in turn deciphers the code and transmits a readable message to the sense of taste.

I said to Fatima, ‘Do you know that this handicap has positive aspects? There are so many things that invade our nostrils without our permission and force us to retain stinky smells for ever!’

I then confessed that the most annoying thing was not being able to recognise people from their smell. It was an unrivalled pleasure to first encounter the fragrance and then sense it was in motion, eating up its distance from me, then drawing closer or moving away, freely. It would offer me the encounter I had expected or one I had not expected; it had given me an exceptional opportunity to pack a whole woman with all her details into that wonderful moment. Sometimes it seemed to me that this inability was utter deprivation, so I would try to heighten other senses to overcome it. I would use my fingers alone, with the concentration of a mathematician, to recognise a body that did not invade my being with its scent. Less than a week after losing my sense of smell, I could distinguish scents by the colours and shapes I attributed to them. Tobacco had a brown, cylindrical scent and fish a rectangular yellow one, tea was a crimson-coloured square and coffee a blue semicircle.

Fatima dipped her fingers into a bowl of lemon water and said, ‘Why don’t we sleep together this afternoon and see what happens after?’

I was stunned into silence.

‘Listen,’ she added. ‘I don’t want us to tie ourselves down in a complicated affair. It’ll be sex only. We can have fun and then go our separate ways. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, I understand, but why me in particular?’

‘Because you won’t be able to smell the fish factory I’ve turned into after this meal!’

But I did not have sex with Fatima. I had drinks at her place and we talked a lot. We read dozens of pages of haiku and a whole book about Scorpios. I then left the sad building where she lived, feeling good about the world.

Fatima settled into many aspects of my life, as if she had entered it years earlier. She knew how to chat with me without expecting anything in return. She talked about the theatre, the press, and the man she was still waiting for on some quayside. She came to the house with invitations for concerts and exhibitions and tried to convince Bahia to join her. Whenever she was persuaded, they went off together and I would stay at home on the large black sofa, planning indifferently for a future that did not interest me.

I would be unable to define the kind of relationship I had with Fatima. I only knew that it was essential. I knew this with a certain cold feeling, taking into account that she too had good reasons to consider me highly essential. I trusted her reasons, even if I could not pretend that the world would be out of kilter were she not around. I would simply feel that the machine was not running right. It would be like reading a message on the dashboard of a car telling me that my internal guidance system was amiss.

Bahia and I never discussed Fatima, although she did sometimes glean information about her by asking seemingly innocent questions. Only once did Bahia follow a dead-end. It happened when Fatima went to the US and asked Bahia to send her the serialised
Letters to My Beloved
as they became available. Bahia did not say anything that betrayed her feelings, but I felt her frustration when I heard her, one morning while I was in the bathroom, send the requested fax, loudly enunciating the US hotel phone number to draw my attention.

This was followed by total silence until I heard her read aloud: ‘
I nearly drew your real face yesterday evening. Ever since I began drawing your face to reflect my feelings, I was never this moved. It was something like the pulse of an adolescent who sees his beloved suddenly appear on the balcony he has been watching. The situation lasted only a few seconds and I could not recapture it. I am unable, as you well know, to recall anything. All that remains in memory is the feeling of loss, but the content is swallowed by darkness. Nevertheless, the partial appearance of your face had an amazing effect on my whole being, and I almost remembered our first kiss and the sentence that preceded me to your lips. I do not know any
more if I talked about love, or the heat or the dream. I do not know any
more whether a single letter remained attached to my tongue. I remember it mixed with a full lip; whose lip was it? Mixed with burning breaths; who was kissing whom? Was it in a strange room? Yes, yes. It was in a hotel room you could not leave, while I was in the lobby waiting for you. I still am. But you had locked the door, placed a second pillow over your head, and switched off everything, including the fiery kiss that was followed by total darkness. I would like to tell you something, but I wish I knew what. Come out from behind this mute curtain, I am on the balcony where I have always been. If you were to pass by the garden now, I would simply stretch out my arm, which would lengthen and lift you higher and higher, until you rested, once more, between your lips and the sentence that precedes me.
’

Silence returned to the room. I poked my head outside the bathroom and looked at Bahia apprehensively. She was sitting down, holding the paper in both hands and smiling, the smile of someone who understands and does not understand at the same time. When she turned her head and saw me staring at her, she quickly folded the paper and said in an irritated tone, ‘What wonderful bullshit!’

3

Ibrahim al-Khayati became the cornerstone of my relation­ship with the world for different reasons. When I was a member of the party organisation, he was both close to us and distant at the same time. He financed our cultural magazine and helped run it without seeking some of the minor glories that went with the territory. He was not affected by the arrests of the 1970s, but remained our strongest supporter. Generally, there was nothing in the practical part of my life that did not include Ibrahim. I could almost say that I never took a decision that needed insight without Ibrahim being a key factor.

It was natural, therefore, that he was the third person to read the letter on Yacine’s death, and then, as a lawyer, that he represent Bahia and me in the subsequent investigation into Al-Qaeda’s activities in Morocco. Since the letter had been delivered locally, it suggested that the group that had received the news was a local organisation. It also implied that Yacine had been in touch with this organisation before he left, and might even have been sent by that same organisation to Afghanistan. This clearly meant that other members of a sleeper cell were awaiting orders to depart or participate in attacks on home soil.

When a Fes group was arrested following the assassination of a French tourist, it was believed that someone from that group had brought the letter to my house. From the moment Ibrahim started providing me with information about Yacine’s direct links with flesh-and-blood terrorists – fellow citizens, not phantoms from Kandahar – I fell victim to destructive anxiety. I could not bear the idea that Yacine had joined Al-Qaeda while he was living with us, mad about electronic games, annoyed at our political discussions, always ready to poke fun at us and everything else. The possibility of that deception made me doubt everything. Ibrahim tried to make me stop believing that Yacine had deceived me, insisting that every one of us proceeds towards our fate unable to distinguish the things we use to deceive ourselves from those others use to deceive us.

In the early years of our acquaintance, Ibrahim had been the thread that bound our group. He had served as a romantic go-between, capable of solving the most complex love-related problems, particularly since the great esteem he enjoyed among women made them confide their secrets and stories in him. He was not known to have had a special relationship with a woman, and it was rumoured that he was gay. This did not upset him, and he did not deny it. He would bring his friend Abdelhadi, an
’aytah
artist who sang at the Marsawi nightclub in Casablanca, to our soirées; both were welcomed with smiles that soon faded into a tolerant complicity that Ibrahim’s sparkling yet modest personality inspired. After a brilliant education in Rabat and Paris, Ibrahim had been able to set up a large law firm dealing in financial and corporate cases. He amassed a huge fortune that had allowed him to support a large number of painters, sculptors and actors.

Ibrahim chose to live with his mother, an extremely bright, traditional woman with multiple talents, and he was affluent enough to indulge his natural inclination to live in a house with open, complex spaces. We were very close. He was an avid reader, and there was not a book I read that he had not recommended.

Ibrahim would experience three serious traumas over as many years. The first was the suicide of Abdelhadi. He felt that the world had collapsed under his feet, and that he would keep endlessly plunging until he lost contact with everything around him. He felt he would continue falling, not quite touching something akin to the ground, until the void swallowed him anew. The reason for that feeling, as he explained to me later – after Yacine’s death – was not the death in itself, but his having failed to see it coming. He had not even once registered the suffering of someone close to him.

Ibrahim and Abdelhadi had created a kind of social accommodation that made it possible for them to coexist without serious compromises and without gratuitous stubbornness. Ibrahim arranged an independent life for his friend; he married him to a relative of his, and celebrated the birth of his twins, Essam and Mahdi, with boundless joy. Their relationship remained intimate and warm despite the sadness that resulted from the sensible arrangement of a life that defied organisation. Late at night, Ibrahim would swing by the club where Abdelhadi performed. He would sit in a discreet corner, soaring up to the heavens with his friend’s beautiful voice, amazed by the depth of the sadness revealed by a man who normally did not stop laughing and joking. As soon as he opened his mouth to sing, it was as if a dark breath filled with past tragedies rose within him and he would withdraw into the far regions of his inner self. At the end of his performance, Abdelhadi would stride across the hall filled with his fans, laughing resonantly, and walk towards Ibrahim’s table to spend the interval with him. They would make small talk, commenting briefly and elegantly on clothes, skincare products and seasonal dishes. They would talk about the twins and their mother Haniya, always silent and busy with the housework with a devotion that bordered on the religious. They exchanged tender words about absence and missing each other, and fixed or failed to agree on a date for an upcoming soirée. The following day Abdelhadi would stop by Ibrahim’s house and sit with his mother by the back door of the kitchen that overlooked the garden and tell her that artichokes were available at the central market. If Ibrahim’s name should come up, his face would light up, as if his blood were talking, not his tongue.