The Arch and the Butterfly (35 page)

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.

‘Since you’re talking about an accident, I will tell you what is usually said in such situations. Wait until your blood cools down, make sure your bones aren’t broken and you’re not suffering from internal bleeding,’ she said.

I laughed at the comparison and then showered Fatima with a flood of jokes and funny stories. I ate and drank like a happy man. At the end of our dinner I said to her, ‘Are you reassured now? Nothing is broken!’

We went back home. As soon as I entered the lift I was overcome with cold shivers. I lay down on the sofa bed trembling, and Fatima covered me up, concerned. I begged her to go to sleep, explaining to her that it might be only a cold because I had walked for a long time in the bitter weather. She agreed with me and decided to give me something for my cold. When she went to fetch the medicine, I thought to myself that it was my body punishing me. I wondered why I risked pretending to have escaped danger when I still consisted of bleeding shattered pieces in a topsy-turvy relationship. I might be sad to such a degree that I wouldn’t stay alive. I would die immediately. I couldn’t bear the idea of living without Layla for even one second. I had known from the first day that with her I had found eternity.

I felt excruciating pain throughout my body, but could not pinpoint its exact source until I realised that my soul had fallen victim to an unbearable agony. At that moment I felt that I was suffocating and losing consciousness, but my pain did not subside. I wanted Layla with me in that bed that was soaked with my sweat, and I wanted her to tell me that she loved me for ever, like she had never loved any other person in the world. I wanted her to threaten me, to say that she would come out of the phone and tell me that she hated me, making sure, however, that I knew she did not mean it.

I opened my eyes to a room full of natural light to see Fatima sitting close to the sofa. She had just returned from the office and was very worried about me. I pulled myself up and asked her the time. She said it was past two in the afternoon. I went to the bathroom and apologised for all the trouble I had caused her.

‘You didn’t stop moaning all night,’ she said. ‘Does anything hurt?’

‘Yes. Everything hurts, but what hurts most, what hurts me to death, is losing Layla.’

‘But you haven’t lost her,’ replied Fatima.

‘I felt something bad in her voice,’ I said.

Fatima told me that she found my delayed adolescence annoying. Her words made me really angry. I quickly shut the bathroom door for fear of doing something crazy. Raising her voice over the sound of the running water, she said, ‘You must first know what happened.’

When I did not reply, she said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m leaving.’

I packed my suitcase and booked my return ticket on the Internet. As I was walking along the cold street looking for a restaurant where I could still eat lunch, I called Layla. I did that quickly, like someone diving into water. In a calm and friendly voice, she said that she missed me very much and that I must return quickly, that this trip and Madrid were meaningless. I discovered that under the influence of her new tone of voice I had changed and become an exhausted person with only one wish: to rest and enjoy the chances for peace with oneself and with others that life has to offer.

4

Before I left Madrid, Spanish newspapers announced the discovery of a link between a Moroccan detainee and the group responsible for the Madrid explosions. Once more, there was an extensive debate about Al-Qaeda in Morocco and whether there weren’t preparations for a terrorist campaign on the Mediterranean’s northern shore.

I was with Fatima in the airport terminal casually discussing these matters, as if we were avoiding talking about personal matters. A man whom I felt I knew but did not recognise approached me. He greeted me warmly and said that he was from my village. To confirm this connection, he mentioned the names of people from Bu Mandara as if they were shining stars in the human firmament. He paused in particular at Al-Firsiwi’s name, and when he mentioned his own father’s name the resemblance I had noticed from the start became apparent. I greeted him anew and wished him a happy holiday in that city that had no connection to happiness.

After he went off, Fatima asked me if I was bothered by his Afghani outfit. I told her that it was national dress by now. She laughed, and once again asked me to take care of myself and to take from life whatever it was willing to grant me and avoid ruining its mood with endless requests. She said, ‘Life is like a woman and does not like that. How long will it take you to grasp this simple principle?’

I objected, saying, ‘Aren’t you ashamed to use the same advice I gave you weeks ago?’

She hugged me for a long time while the departure call concealed her crying. When I entered the gate I raised my hand high without turning back and then walked towards the plane, submitting to an unexplainable feeling that I too did not like even myself.

When the plane levelled off at cruising speed, the man from the airport, my townsman, joined me, invading my privacy with a flood of stupid comments on immigration, life in the West and Islam’s innumerable enemies. I answered him, agreeing to things I had never thought about. All I wanted was to see him return to his own thoughts and leave me alone. But he seemed to like my reactions, and would go away every time the hostess needed room in the aisle and then come back. He found a solution and asked the passenger next to me to exchange seats, which the passenger did gladly to my great annoyance, thus putting my mood, with all its sudden and permanent weaknesses, at the mercy of this man.

During the hour of the flight to Casablanca, matters moved extremely fast. He talked to me without any preliminaries about Yacine, whom he’d known. He said that although he had only met him once, in Paris, he was the kind of person you did not forget.

‘Do you know what happened to him?’ I asked.

‘Of course. Otherwise I would not have talked to you about him,’ he said.

All my intellectual powers were on alert, and I besieged him with hundreds of questions about Yacine, convinced that an exceptional coincidence had finally provided me with an opportunity to find out the truth about what had happened. My voice rose whenever he gave me ambiguous or incomplete answers. I asked him personal questions, such as why he had been in Madrid, whether our encounter was a coincidence, or had he known we were on the same flight.

He was flustered by the unexpected questioning and lost the confidence with which he had talked to me earlier. Even his bearing lost its force and harshness, which had been in harmony with his clothes and severe features. The plane had started its descent to Casablanca airport when he begged me to leave him alone, and told me that he had introduced himself to me spontaneously and should not have done that. But he had been unable to resist the opportunity to talk about Yacine, never expecting his decision to lead to this interrogation.