The Arch and the Butterfly

233 Pages·2014·1.29 MB·English

by  Achaari Mohammed

Whatever does not belong to me wholly and eternally
Means nothing to me.
Hölderlin
Contents
The Dilemma According to Al-Firsiwi
1
2
3
4

The Cornerstone of the Sacred Mausoleum
1
2

Dreamers and Others
1
2
3

Life’s Small Miracles
1
2
3
4

We’re Pieces of an Eternal Mosaic
1
2

The Book of Elegies
1
2
3
4
The Ravens
1
2
3
4

The Butterfly
1
2
3
4
5

A Note on the Author
A Note on the Translator
The Dilemma According to Al-Firsiwi
1
As soon as I read the letter, its single line written in a nervous hand, a cold
shiver ran through me. I shrank into myself so far that I did not know how to
stop the shock overwhelming me. When, after a gargantuan effort, I finally
regained control of myself, I found nothing. I had become a different person,
stepping for the first time into a wasteland. In this desolate new place, I began
assimilating things without sensation, finding them all alike. I felt no trace of
pain or pleasure or beauty. My only desire was to make my inner self react. My
only weakness was that I could not make it do so.
I had been getting ready to leave the house when I had found the letter that
someone had slipped under the door. It contained the following message:
‘Rejoice, Abu Yacine. God has honoured you with your son’s martyrdom.’ Then
the phone rang and I heard the voice of a man with a northern Moroccan accent.
He repeated the same cold sentence, accompanied by ready-made phrases of
condolence.
I placed the letter on the table, only to watch my wife lift it to her face and
read and reread it, losing her balance, like an animal being slaughtered, before
giving a shattering cry and falling to the floor.
My only son, who had been doing so brilliantly at one of France’s most
prestigious engineering schools, had chosen to go to Afghanistan and join the
ranks of the mujahideen until the day he would meet God. He had met Him soon
after arriving, in unexplained circumstances, before he had turned twenty.
I carried my wife, dragging myself with her, to our bed. At no point during
those moments did I feel any piercing pain from the tragedy. I knew it had
happened, but it did not touch me. I observed it spreading slowly before me like
an oil slick. I watched my wife’s collapse as if it were merely something
physical, until I understood that she had embraced the boundless tragedy. It was
as if she were taking her revenge for our long years of emotional austerity.
I sat staring at my fingers, toying with the letter, and looked every now and
then at Yacine’s photograph that hung in the living room. I saw his childish,
innocent, delicate, cruel, sweet face. Scenes from his short life passed before me,
starting with the day my wife, getting out of bed and lifting up her hair,
announced that after the long, gentle intercourse of the previous night, she was
sure an egg had been fertilised. Then Yacine crying in the doctor’s hands. All the
growing up that followed, and the fears, joys and anxieties experienced along the
way. The ferocious quarrels over his clothes, his eating habits, his education, his
games and his comings and goings. The moment at the railway station when he
took the train to the airport and then to Paris and then to darkness. His first and
last letter, in which he wrote: ‘My studies are much easier than I expected, and
the city is much harsher than I expected. I believe I’m living my first love story, a
little later than the average for us Al-Firsiwis. I’m not sure I’m the best son, and
I’m not sure you’re the best parents, either. Don’t send money till I ask. From
this distance I could almost say I love you. I am, however, apprehensive.’
I listened for hours as a senior police officer questioned my wife and me about
the letter and the phone call. We answered, with mindless incomprehension,
questions related to Yacine’s friends, his habits, his books, his music, his films,
his sports club and his favourite mosque. We felt as if we were reconstructing an
entire life to be presented as a stiff corpse to the officer, who could think of
nothing better than to ask me, ‘Do you approve of the way he died? Sorry, I
mean, did you sympathise with his cause? Sorry, sorry, you didn’t know. Neither
of you knew anything. Are you upset about what’s happened?’
I said, sincerely, ‘No, I’m not upset.’
From the moment I received the news, I was filled with a fury that made it
impossible for me to grieve and feel pain. Had I had the opportunity to meet
Yacine at that moment, I would have killed him. How could he do such a vile,
cruel, contemptuous, humiliating thing to me? How could he push me over the
precipice on whose edge I had stood all my life? When did the poisoned seed
take root? Before he was born or after? When he was a small child or as a
teenager? Did he play with hands dripping with blood that we did not see? Had
we spent our lives walking behind a funeral bier?
My life seemed like an appalling mistake. It would have been impossible for
all this to happen unless I had spent all those years going in the wrong direction.
In the weeks following, this conviction made me think daily about decisions that
would correct some of that overarching mistake. Whenever I sensed this was
impossible, I was overcome by a strange feeling that my body had departed and I
remained suspended between an absent person and another who observed him
curiously, and I was undecided which of the two to choose.
*
What happened to me after Yacine’s death was very much like losing one’s
voice. I was unable to convey anything to others, be it an idea, a comment or a
joke. I sometimes answered questions I was asked, all the while wondering what
another person would have answered had those questions been put to him. I was
totally incapable of conveying anything related to feelings, simply because I
could not feel anything any more.
Like the light fading into the darkness of night, that same condition gradually
progressed from the realm of feelings and emotions into the material world. I
completely lost my sense of smell. Losing my sense of smell was not the result
of poor health or progressive deterioration. It struck suddenly, without
forewarning. Normally on my way to the office, I could recognise people’s
features and their histories just from the way they smelled. But soon after
Yacine’s death, as I was passing by the Experimental Gardens, I noticed that my
system for picking people out had not been working since I had left Bourgogne
Square. I felt that a cold, solid mass had inserted itself between the world and
me.
I spent the rest of the day doing things that would prove this loss to be fleeting.
I drank every kind of hot and cold drink served in Rabat’s bars. I devoured
dozens of dishes. I drenched myself from every bottle of perfume at hand. I drew
close to every creature I met on the way, hoping to find in their wake vestiges of
fragrance or a stray scent. I sat for hours in my favourite bar, the Steamboat. I
left it, exhausted and oppressed, to take what remained of the night back to the
home whose covert violence I had endured for a quarter of a century. I stopped
by the wall on the railway bridge and spent ages staring at the metallic sheen of
the tracks, indifferent as to whether another train would pass. Then I emptied my
stomach in one go and felt that I had also vomited out the man I had been until
that day.
Yet all that complex chemistry had no smell.
From then on I stopped listening to music and watching films, and rarely went
to exhibitions or museums. I had to attend receptions as part of my work, and I
would spend a long time listening to people’s chatter while trying to remember
the taste of the wine I had had a passion for in my youth. I could only locate it in
my imagination, something distinct from the liquids I was drinking, which I
could differentiate merely by their colour or temperature.
During this time of my life, having already turned fifty, I also became
convinced that there was a woman I had known and somehow lost. I made a
huge effort to remember her, but to no avail. I could only recollect that
something intense had brought us together, that I had made exhaustive efforts to
win her over, and that I had endured many disappointments as a result. In
particular, I remembered that I had never stopped chasing her. I did not recall the
details, only my ensuing state of mind. I grew obsessed with picturing her face
and finding a way to reach her. The more I tried and failed, the more obsessed I
became with her, although this had no impact on my emotions, as if I were being
impelled by a clockwork mechanism separate from my existence.
I believe that this searching endowed me with a mysterious charm that I
interpreted as the energy of a mind seeking a woman who has slipped away. I
acquired an extraordinary ability to seduce women without, however,
experiencing any particular pleasure in doing so. As soon as I had exchanged a
couple of words with a woman, I would feel I had become hostage to a love
story that I had absolutely nothing to do with, and from which I would have to
try very hard to extricate myself later on. Almost invariably, that meant leaving
some of my scalp behind. I took no pride nor found any satisfaction in any of
this. I thought long and hard about the matter, and devised a solid plan to avoid
falling into traps of this kind. Deep inside, I was amused by this absurd situation
that made me lose all restraint, after having spent a chaste quarter of a century
with the same woman– my wife, Bahia Mahdi, who I had met one winter
morning in the 1970s, married the same evening, and realised before midnight
that I had made a fatal, and irreversible, mistake.
Before I lost my sense of smell, I could tell important details about the life of
every woman I met based solely on the mix of scents I picked up. I could
pinpoint her ambivalences, and their gradations. I would, for example, know
roughly her age and the colour of her skin, the cosmetics she used, and the kind
of hair she had. I could intuit the last dishes she had cooked. Sometimes I would
know that a woman had just had sex, and whether she was very, or not at all,
satisfied. All of this without seeing her.
My new situation compelled me to use my hands to become acquainted with
these details. This required inordinate finesse and effort to avoid the rudeness
and roughness of touch, and was not without mishap.
It goes without saying that this natural inclination to become acquainted
through smell was not purely technical, but emotional as well. The drive behind
this skill was a kind of abstract passion whose substance was nameless and
featureless. It was a feeling similar to a passion for mathematics: something
impalpable that traverses remote regions of an intense mind, where intelligence
alone decides what must or must not be true. My sex life, with all that this