The Arch and the Butterfly (9 page)

‘Yes, most of the time. Back then, I believed we had to resist despair by any means.’

‘And now?’ he asked.

‘Now, to some extent, I’ve become reconciled to despair. Those who have boundless hopes make me more despairing than those in despair.’

‘It seems like I’ll never understand you,’ said Yacine.

‘No one can understand anyone,’ I replied.

At that moment, Layla arrived, her voice preceding her physical presence.

‘It looks like you’re talking to yourself!’ she said.

‘No, I was talking to Yacine!’

Her face darkened and she mumbled, ‘I’m sorry for interrupting you.’

She sat facing me. We looked at each other as if waiting for Yacine to leave. Once he had left, Layla began talking on the phone. I studied her face as she gave curt answers to end the conversation. Her whole face beamed with an inward smile, causing me unbearable pain because I would be unable to make her feel that way. Perhaps that pain cast its shadows over my gaze, for she asked me anxiously, ‘What’s wrong? Is everything all right?’

‘Yes, almost everything.’

Then I talked to her about the inner smile, and we came up with an amusing theory about having to create a sort of sieve in our internal spiritual space to sift the necessary in life (even if painful) from the useless (even if highly tempting). This process of sifting was the most eloquent expression of our balance, our strength and our mental and physical health. Without consulting us or even our being aware, our ultimate gratification, our most refined pleasure and our secret chemistry produced this inner smile. As the product of this marvellous sieve, this smile would be an aura around our bodies and souls, granting us luminous protection and invincibility in the face of life’s obstacles.

We talked at length about this subject in a kind of race for words and thoughts. We hardly knew who was saying what. Layla was directing this exercise in order to make me feel the need to arrange a space I controlled all by myself, without leaving any margin, however small, for others’ interference. That space, like the living space of any creature in this world, would allow me to differentiate between need and desire, because, according to Layla, the matter depended on this particular capacity.

‘Look at yourself,’ she told me. ‘You’re a perfectly healthy machine! All the mechanisms necessary for you to function are working. There’s nothing wrong with any of your systems, yet you’ve broken down and are in paralysis.’

We also talked about Bahia. I gave her an idea of our situation following Yacine’s death. I told her that deep down Bahia considered me responsible for what had happened and hated me for it. I hated her, too, for thinking that. Bahia believed Yacine had inherited the germ of rebellion from me and paid the price vicariously for my own political involvement and my neglect of the organisation. She would have preferred to see me settle this account personally, rather than making Yacine believe in my dreams, only to then find himself obliged to save me from the humiliation of my dreams’ disintegration by convincing me that extremism was the solution and that getting into bed with the enemy was not an option.

‘My God, it really is complicated!’ said Layla. ‘How is it possible to think like that? Life isn’t a succession of acts of revenge and the settling of scores. No generation can live the illusions of another generation. Plus, in the end, Yacine isn’t the tragic hero his mother claims. He’s just an extremist who met his death. And with the Taliban to top it off!’

Hurt, I said to her, ‘Please. Don’t talk about him like that.’

She squeezed my hand in apology, and looked closely into my eyes. ‘This relationship will destroy you – if it didn’t do so already ages ago. Save your skin! You can’t stake what’s left of your life on reckless hatred. Do you understand?’

To qualify matters, I said, ‘No, no, no. It is not as dangerous as all that. I’m at sufficient remove from all those things. The hatred I talked to you about doesn’t touch me from within. To tell you the truth, I’m not interested in what’s happening, or what will or won’t ever happen. I live totally detached from those things, even when I say that I hate her. I’m only using a word that suits the situation but does not express something I feel.’ I then seized this opportunity to tell Layla that I felt nothing, absolutely nothing.

She fell silent for a short while and then suggested we go to a Japanese restaurant. I agreed immediately. There, using a plate of sushi, I was able to explain what I meant. Raw flesh in particular eloquently embodied my non-feeling for things. Raw meat did not suggest food with a fabricated identity, but rather was an authentic food in its primitive form, before culture interfered to suggest it be used in a certain way and with accompanying substances. Cooked dishes were, first and foremost, a creation of scent. Raw dishes, however, were a liberation from history for the benefit of the ingredient. As a result, eating became a relationship with elements that were independent of each other, and not a relationship with flavour, as centuries of culture’s trickery had made it.

Layla did not seem interested by the topic and preferred to confront me firmly. She insisted that sushi was not something primitive, as I claimed, and that there was a huge difference between a man devouring a fish he had just pulled out of a river and a man enjoying sushi in a Japanese res­­taurant. ‘What you are devouring now is called sushi, not fish,’ she said.

I busied myself finishing off what was left on my plate, avoiding further discussion of the subject until her voice broke my concentration.

‘When you say you don’t feel anything, do you mean, for example, that you can’t fall in love?’ she asked.

‘The issue is probably more complicated than that.’

‘Can you or can’t you?’

‘Yes and no,’ I said.

‘How?’

‘There are many elements to love that I only know about through memory. Everything related to emotions, passion, fear, yearning, regret, guilt, seduction and tenderness.’

‘What about desire?’ Layla asked.

‘Desire in its actual form, yes, but not its course. For example, I am totally incapable of feeling the onset of desire, and its subsequent progress by means of words, movements and suggestions. I just know in my brain that the time has come. At that point I resort to memory to enjoy the culmination of desire.’

‘Do you mean to say that pleasure is unrelated to what your body’s doing?’ she asked.

‘No, not at all. I mean that in order for me to enjoy what my body’s doing, I must connect its hardware – in operation at that moment – with the bank of emotions found in the hard disk.’

Her eyes welled with tears. ‘That’s so horrible! What kind of pain is that? What an ordeal!’

I tried to make light of the situation and pretended that the matter required only additional effort on my part for me to obtain some pleasure; and I might, after all, achieve better results due to this effort.

She smiled through her tears and asked suddenly, ‘And us?’

‘What?’

‘What shall we do with our life?’

‘In the immediate future, we go to your flat and lock ourselves in until we find an exceptional love story.’

‘No, no. You’re mixing up the immediate and the long term. We can only lock ourselves in until my daughter returns from school!’

And so it was.

We went straight to her bedroom, and when I paused to look at the titles of the books carefully arranged on black shelves near the bed, she pulled me away, saying, ‘Forget the books. We don’t have much time.’

I imagined her body’s fragrance, or I remembered it, I don’t exactly know, right at the moment our lips met and I took in her tongue, reluctantly at first and then compliantly. I imagined her scent when she raised her arms to free her breasts, and as I explored the details of her pale skin, moving from cold, shivering areas to warm, pulsating ones. I imagined her smell as I pulled her to me and released her, when she lay prone, when she turned over, when she spread open and when she curled up, when she turned away and drew back, when she resisted and then yielded and shuddered. I imagined her fragrance in the movement of her fingers, and when she quieted, swooned, moaned and said, ‘Yes, like that, yes. Exactly what you did, never do it with another woman, I beg of you. I forbid you to do it with another woman.’ She was silent, and then burst out, ‘Yes. Now. Please say you love me.’ She cried and then was spent.

At every moment, I imagined her body’s fragrance – or recalled its memory. I did not say ‘I love you’. I remembered the fence of the garden leading to the Ibn Sina apartment, the acacia tree, the scent of a summer night, and the advent of dawn after a silent return from the Beach nightclub. I remembered the woman and the short black dress around her feet, her hands holding the garden fence and the magic of her back illuminated by lamplight. I remembered her fragrance, hers out of all the sleeping or vigilant, seen or unseen creatures that surrounded us; a fragrance redolent of water, vegetation, soil and fruit; the fragrance of her face, the expression of her face that in a flash of anger turned it into a metallic scent, dry and stinging. For she had bent down and pulled up her dress from around her feet up the length of her legs, her thighs and her chest, all the way to the curve of her shoulders. Then she turned around and told me, through her angry expression and her messy hair, ‘You must leave at once. I never want to see you again.’

In such way, a fragrance cached in the box of miracles leads us to a timeless pleasure that moves through our body, shaking its withered branches and scattering their leaves to the wind. But we know neither who enjoys what nor who seduces whom.

I asked her, ‘Can I stay a little?’

‘Of course, you have to stay, even if you didn’t say I love you!’

‘But you asked me to leave immediately.’

Panic stricken she continued, ‘Impossible! Did I really say that?’

‘Yes you did, and you also said: “I never want to see you again!” ’

‘They seem like my words, but I was in no state to say them.’

‘Perhaps you said them at another time or in another life. To me or, hopefully, to another man.’

‘You could have said I love you even without feeling it.’ she said, ‘Just like you would say anything else. Would it have hurt you to say it?’

‘I did not see a need for it. I figured that such a powerful sentence ought to be said in a different setting.’

She explained herself. ‘You should know that I feel insulted if it is not said to me while making love.’

‘You’re exaggerating.’

‘Anyhow, given you’re a man who claims not to feel, the sex was still the best thing to have happened to me in years.’

‘It’s worthy of two persons living a great love story,’ I said.

‘True!’ she said pensively.

She then stretched her body over mine, took my face between her hands and said, ‘I like the way you do it!’

I was absorbed in contemplating her face, with the attitude of someone without a care in the world, when she suddenly got up in a panic. ‘My daughter’s school has ended! You must leave right now.’

I got up ponderously, but she pounced on me with my clothes. She tidied up the room, got dressed, helped me get dressed and leapt around until I found myself at the lift door. She was laughing and told me, having calmed down a little, ‘What a miracle! A charming man!’

I walked slowly down the street on my way to the bus stop, then it occurred to me to keep walking. When I left Bourgogne Square and turned right to enter the dreamy street housing the Ecole Normale Supérieur, Yacine poked me with his little finger and asked, ‘Is she a new love story?’

‘I love no one,’ I replied sharply.

He answered immediately, ‘Easy, easy now. I’m not partisan here. You could even consider me a neutral bystander. In the best case scenario, I can help you ask good questions.’

‘What I need most is good answers,’ I said.

‘I know, but the dead don’t have answers!’

‘Too bad. Tell me, how did you figure out it was a new love story?’

‘When a man is on his way to the bus stop, then decides to walk, and does this as if he were compressing the distance between him and a woman he was just with, there are grounds to ask whether he hasn’t fallen in love!’

‘What definitive proofs!’

‘You’re making fun of the matter to cover it up.’ he said, ‘But as you were walking, I heard you say, “Me too, I like the way you do it.” ’

‘I said that while I was alone?’

‘Yes, quite a few times!’

‘I think I’m suffering from a kind of asynchronicity. I should have said that in reply to something that was said to me fifteen minutes before – not because that’s what I feel, but only to provide a decent answer.’

‘I don’t know an illness with that name, but you have strange illnesses. Who knows? Since there was a space of time between what was said to you and what you said in reply, there might be an interval between your falling in love and your being aware that you’ve fallen in love.’

‘You’ve either said more than necessary or you haven’t said enough!’

‘I’m only trying to understand what you called asynchronicity,’ he explained.

‘But you’ve put your finger on something that tortures me.’