The Arch and the Butterfly (5 page)

‘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.

Layla said, ‘I may have been in love with you then. But you didn’t know, and I didn’t exactly know either. You gave off the impression of being very absent-minded, as if you were going up and down the stairs while walking on another planet.’

‘That’s if it actually was me going up and down the stairs.’

She responded firmly, ‘I‘m sure of it. There was a dim light in your eyes, which is still there now. I can’t mistake it.’

I remembered that during that particular time I was neither dimmed nor depressed. I was at the peak of my delusions and convinced that things responded to us if we wanted them to. From the lofty heights of the current moment, that time seemed lively, exuberant and eminently manageable. It also seemed to me that a being like Layla would exist in all times, and my relationship with her could take the form of a structure relegated to the past. Why not? Aren’t the relationships that we miss also real possibilities for a connection of a different kind? Isn’t every relationship one chance among others? It is not self-evident that we pick the best one. I put this to Layla, and she replied, ‘It isn’t self-evident that we’ll pick the worst, either.’

‘Ultimately,’ I said, ‘I’m pretty certain that every one of us, and not only Saramago’s Christ, has one divine biography and another one that springs from the tortuous paths of one’s life.’

I continued, ‘I don’t understand why you’re so enamoured of a run-of-the-mill novel, beautiful but still run-of-the-mill.’ As soon as I finished the sentence, her face darkened. We spent a long time trying to extricate ourselves from this sudden dis­­agreement. Finally, after a few shaky attempts, she returned to her ebullient self.

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘We all know that from the moment Satan refused to bow to Adam, he’s been carrying out, as much as he can, his threat to tempt human beings at every pass, pushing them towards sin and perdition. Then suddenly, as we read this book, we discover another side to Satan, as if with time and as a result of all the tragedies he caused or that were committed behind his back, he has changed, adopting a kindly wisdom completely unrelated to the menace that caused him to fall from paradise.’

‘We wouldn’t have needed the novel to assert that!’

‘But the novel did create the exciting idea that prophets, in a kind of alignment of opposites, see themselves mirrored in devils. Because managing the affairs of humanity makes this alliance necessary in order to maintain the world’s wavering balance between good and evil.

‘According to the story, once Jesus was in his mother’s womb, the archangel appeared in the shape of a beggar and told Mary, “The child is manifest in his mother’s eyes as soon as she becomes pregnant with him.” From that moment on the archangel would accompany Christ until his death. He would accompany him as if he were his avatar, his other voice imbued with certainty and doubt, pleasure and guilt. More than that, Christ would submit to a kind of initiation at the hands of the archangel; years spent herding sheep, before he departed for his destiny.’

‘But you said,’ I told Layla, ‘that what mattered most for you in the novel was the style and not Christ’s earthly form, the writing of a new Gospel according to another Jesus.’

‘Yes. It is, after all, a personal matter. It seemed to me that this arrangement answered some of my questions, and that basic things in my personal life totally conformed to some of the images I picked up on in the book. This transformed it, in a somewhat exaggerated manner, into my personal gospel. For example, when I became pregnant with my daughter I felt a vast emptiness. This upset me and even tortured me, because I didn’t appreciate the feeling of emptiness when I was filled – concretely not figuratively. When I read in the novel that Mary had the same feelings when she was pregnant with Jesus, the author’s interpretation made me jump out of my seat. He claimed that the emptiness was in everything around her. I found that amazingly convincing.’

Layla ate a large plate of tomatoes with white cheese, basil and olive oil. She then ate a plate of duck liver
à la française
. She ate with appetite and did not stop talking. I had slices of smoked salmon with onion and lemon and a thick piece of meat, without at any moment being able to tell them apart, because I lacked sufficient concentration. When we were ready to leave the restaurant, Layla’s face was flushed. She put her hands to her cheeks and said, ‘Look, I’m burning up!’

I said without touching my cheeks, ‘Me too!’

As we stepped out of the elevator, I was looking at her as if she were walking on the fourth-floor landing in Ibn Sina. I was still looking at her stimulating body with its slight dip to the right as she walked, when she turned and said, ‘It’s as if we were crossing the landing on our old floor.’

I was about to tell her I was thinking exactly the same, when she added, ‘Maybe you were thinking the same thing.’

At that moment I made my move, having lost all hope of keeping up with her. She was intensely and precisely present, and I was certain that her presence there and then could not be a passing coincidence, but was a powerful sign from destiny.

I took in her allure without being overcome by what lay at its core, or even by the possibilities it promised. I could not at that moment determine where our nervous steps along the dark corridor would lead us, since we could not read our room numbers. Then I found myself carrying her, and yet not carrying her, proceeding along an endless corridor. I felt her arms around my neck like two cold branches. I sat her on the edge of the bed and cupped my hands around her face, watching her with her eyes closed but without receiving any inner message, as if I were touching a being from a distant past.

‘Kiss me, I beg you,’ she said.

It was not her. She was not the one who had crossed the landing in my apartment building, and not the one I had carried and not carried. She was a girl from years past, whom I once found shivering on a rainy day under a bare willow tree, soaking wet and almost blue from cold and fear. I had not been able to follow what she was saying through her delirium, but I had understood that she had run there from the bus stop in a rainstorm and had no strength left. ‘I stopped here under the tree because my whole body was soaked and my limbs were numb.’

‘But the tree’s totally bare. It’s also soaked through and its branches have gone stiff!’

‘I didn’t notice. Really, I didn’t. I was waiting to drop dead and I preferred that that happen to me while standing here, where my friend would find me when she came back!’

I had spent a long time trying to dry her hair, her face and her limbs with little success. Still shivering, she had said, ‘I think I’d better take a hot bath and change my clothes.’

I had helped her remove her wet clothes and get into the hot water. I had massaged her body, her whole body, from the top of her head to her pale, slender toes. My fingers had detected vitality creeping back into her from the first touch. I had gone along with her body’s repressed frenzy, as if my whole body had become a movement that pierced her pulse. I was doing what I was doing not because I had found her in such a state, but because I would have surely done it, whatever the circumstances, to fulfil a mysterious desire for it to happen with the gentleness with which it did, and as an expression of another possibility for our existence, different from the one derived from planned desires, a possibility accompanied by impossibility and oblivion.

In one of the parts of
Letters to My Beloved
, I wrote:

You were
sitting on the edge of the bed when I touched you. I cupped your delicate face in my hands; I cannot remember if it was burning hot or cold and damp. I simply remember that it almost vanished between my big hands and only your lips pulsated in this picture as they said, ‘Kiss me, I beg you.’ I do not remember kissing you. I do not remember what happened between us that distant afternoon. I do not remember your face. I remember carrying you up the stairs of a building, or in a sparsely furnished apartment between the bed and the bathroom, and noticing that a painting on the wall was not straight, its deep blackness slashed by an impetuous yellow. I said, ‘I will come back later to straighten the painting. It looks wrong tilted like that, because the streak of light across it hits too hard.’

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?