The Arch and the Butterfly (13 page)

For almost four weeks we hardly talked to each other, and then only about simple day-to-day matters. I would spend the whole day out of the house and when I returned in the evening, I went directly to the TV set. I avoided the slightest physical contact with my wife lest she use it as a way to achieve her foolish plan. Fatima visited us every now and then, telling us about her imminent transfer to Madrid, where she had been assigned by her news agency. Her visits lightened the tense atmosphere at home.

One day I told Bahia, for no special reason, that I was grateful to her for having discussed with me the issue of a new baby. She could have obtained what she wanted without my know­ledge, though we had not had sex for years. She explained that she had thought about it, but did not consider it an elegant way to resume our relationship, and somewhat demeaning to both of us. I assured her that I understood her longing to have a child, but she had to understand that the matter terrified me. It wasn’t a disagreement that could be resolved, but rather something impossible to overcome.

She said very simply, ‘If that’s the case, we must separate.’

We did. We appeared before a judge and explained our situation to him without embellishment. He first said it was impossible to use my refusal to have a child as a cause for divorce, because having children was the only legal justification for marriage. He said marriage was not like shooting a film on love. He made a feigned effort to convince Bahia to reconcile, and found it appropriate to remind me of the joys of having children, our greatest blessing. He added, ‘If God grants you another child, you yourself would be reborn!’ When he realised that his words would not change our minds, he completed the procedure in silence, noting down very carefully our monetary agreement without further comment.

I caught up with Bahia after we left the court building as she was getting ready to drive away in her car. I suggested through the car window that we have a cup of coffee somewhere.

We sat down in the garden of the Hassan Hotel and, for the first time in years, talked with pure affection, as if something in the papers we had just signed had helped end our little wars. As if it had placed us on the path of regular people who did not see a mountain of hidden meaning in every word, or get upset when the other splashes water on the newspaper when filling a glass, or chain smoked. We were no longer people who made their lives a succession of nerve-racking moments because, even if they did not say it aloud, they were sick of living together.

Bahia told me that she had thought a lot about the matter, explaining that it was not nostalgia for motherhood. ‘You know that I’m not attached to such things, and I wouldn’t blame you, on that basis, if you accused me again of being a bad mother. It seemed to me that the best way to avenge this tragedy was to repeat the experience: become pregnant, have cravings, give birth, breastfeed, climb this mountain all over again. You know that pain can sometimes drive you to imagine magic solutions. For many months, every time the telephone rang I expected to be told that the letter was a terrible mistake and that Yacine would be back on the nine o’clock flight! Then the delusion evaporated. So when the lab confirmed that my fertility was still normal despite my age, I took it as a clear sign from fate, and one that I had to seize. When you objected so forcefully, I understood that our remaining together would kill this new baby.’

In turn, I tried to explain to Bahia that the baby would not save me or our relationship. I did not want to chase after something that did not exist. I did not want the child she talked about to see me so exhausted. I did not want to avenge anything. All I wanted was my share of calm, nothing more, nothing less. I wanted to chat in a café on the pavement of life, to comment on the weather, to talk about crimes and football matches. I wanted to go out at night to celebrate something beautiful I had read or seen. I wanted to travel without a reason, aimlessly, to travel for travelling’s sake.

Bahia cried in silence and then asked me, ‘Can’t you do that while being a dad over again?’

‘I couldn’t do it at all!’ I said.

At that moment she stood up and, without looking at me, grabbed her handbag with both hands. She put her sunglasses over her teary eyes, and asked as she was leaving what I would like to keep of Yacine’s things.

Distraught, I told her, ‘An item of clothing, a T-shirt, for example, or one of his shirts.’

She left, but I did not move.

Yacine appeared, coming to the table and asking if I had just returned from a funeral. I said, ‘Something like that.’

‘You must feel very light now. Weren’t you carrying this relationship like a huge mountain on your shoulders?’

‘It’s not so simple. What appears like salvation at first sight, once we’ve done it, makes us feel that we’ve buried part of ourselves.’

‘You always look for the drama in every story,’ he replied.

‘You’re right! Really I should be celebrating the happy event.’

‘Or at least you should admit that you’re relatively lucky compared to Al-Firsiwi, who is still carrying my grandmother’s corpse on his back.’

‘We all carry a corpse of sorts on our backs.’

‘I hope you’re not alluding to me,’ objected Yacine.

I was overcome by a sudden fear, so I rushed to explain, ‘You’re not a corpse, as you well know.’

‘What will you do now? Tell me,’ he said.

‘I’ll make space for myself.’

‘Before you do, I want to involve you in an important matter,’ he said.

‘I hope it has nothing to do with preaching and guidance.’

‘No, but it’s a question of life and death.’

I left the café and Yacine went off without his last sentence provoking me. I was busy digesting my new circumstances, which obliged me to take care of a large number of formalities, not least among them finding an apartment where I could move my occasional dreams. Before doing anything else, however, I had to spend most of that day transferring myself, one piece at a time, from the material and the symbolic spheres, where I had spent a quarter of a century, to a sphere I would have to navigate in an unfamiliar boat. At the end of the day I left my office at the newspaper with the same feeling that I had experienced when I came to Rabat for the first time. I had told myself then that if I could spend a whole night in this city, I could remain here for ever.

I was still walking aimlessly when I called Fatima. I hung on to her voice with all my force. I told her, ‘If you can remain on the line until we meet at a restaurant, you’ll save me.’ But she didn’t, and we met half an hour later, during which time I felt I had aged a little.

I told Fatima what Bahia and I had done that day. Her eyes bulged but she did not comment. When I returned to the subject while we were eating, she begged me to talk about something else, because, as she put it, she did not want to say something harsh that evening. She talked at length about her anxieties over moving to Madrid. While I considered this reassignment a way to pull her out of a demoralising situation, she explained to me that it would open the door to numerous fears: fear of the new world, fear of return, fear of separation, fear of adventure, fear of accidents and the fear of dying all alone in her apartment.

I told her that there was no connection between all those risks and where we were. Then she told me that she sometimes wished she had emigrated twenty years ago. ‘There are things that we do badly, if we do not do them early in life.’

I asked her to help me with some of the arrangements I needed to make for Bahia, and we agreed to meet the following day in the office of our lawyer friend, Ahmad Majd.

When I arrived for our appointment the next morning, Ahmad was not as cheerful as usual. Fatima sat on the sofa facing his desk, and it looked like she had been crying. As soon as I began talking, Ahmad assailed me with criticism and sanctimony, and ended up telling me that my relationship with Fatima shouldn’t have destroyed such a major thing in my life.

‘What does Fatima have to do with the situation?’ I asked.

‘You certainly know that Bahia never considered your relationship with Fatima to be innocent,’ he explained.

‘And what do you know about all this? What do you know about my private life that gives you the right to make judgments about innocence and guilt?’

I said that in a state of great anger, as I was struck by a pernicious idea regarding Ahmad. When I calmed down I explained to him, while Fatima listened without looking at us, the essence of my relationship with Fatima. I told him, since he wanted to interfere, that our relationship existed in the narrow border between love and other emotions, that neither of us was ever able to cross that line and that we did not regret it. This might have been because at heart we did not need a love affair, but only this liberated bond that allowed us to understand each other in a sea of misunderstanding, where everybody appeared to be right and wrong at the same time.

At that moment Ahmad stood up behind his desk, adopting the stance of an intellectual about to issue a final word of wisdom, and said, ‘Do you understand now why I prefer prostitutes?’

I looked at Fatima and saw her mouth wide open, like mine. As our silence persisted, Ahmad added, ‘Because they are real beings, not literary creations like you two!’

This joke alleviated, somewhat, the meeting’s prevailing tension. We started discussing the separation and the material arrangements and their impact with as little emotion as pos­­sible. I gave Ahmad all the documents he needed to deal with the situation and then left to rent an apartment, since I had to leave our shared dwelling. The obvious place for me was the Ibn Sina district, and I went directly there. I found an empty apartment through an estate agent, in the very same building where I had lived years earlier. As soon as I entered one of the rooms and opened the window, I saw the garden fence and the body lit by the streetlamp that had crossed my imagination.

When I told Layla that evening about all these events, she expressed deep concern at what had happened. She was not interested in my return to the neighbourhood; she was concerned about my new life and how I would manage it and whether I would be psychologically affected by the end of my marriage. She was worried whether I would fall into the trap of guilt and self-reproach and would be depressed as a result of the loneliness that would hit me. I assured her that loneliness would not be anything unusual for me, and that I was not heading for a breakdown.

‘But you’ll have to organise yourself in a different way and take care of things you haven’t done before. Listen to me. You must hire a housekeeper to look after the household. I’ll look for someone to do that. This new situation shouldn’t be a reason for your health, your appearance or your spirits to deteriorate. Do you understand? I won’t allow you to turn into a slovenly bachelor, living in a filthy house and wearing creased shirts!’

I tried to point out the romantic aspect of my return to the building. But she did not give up and preferred to list the things the new apartment needed. Half an hour later she gave me another list, and a third one while we ate dinner.

As we were leaving the restaurant, Layla said she wished I could have fulfilled Bahia’s wish to give her a new baby.

Upset, I said, ‘What the heck? Do you also think I’m just a mechanism for impregnation?’

She rushed to catch a taxi and waved her hand in a cold farewell.

2

My acquaintance with Ahmad Majd dated back to the time I was living in Germany. One of the members of the organisation introduced him to me during an exploratory trip back to Morocco in preparation for my final return. He was a first-year law student then and lived with his Marrakech group in a small apartment in the Qubaybat district. He spent the whole night making fun of my rural German accent, and I was convinced that he had invited me merely for his friends’ entertainment. We nevertheless became friends, although politics and life sent us in different directions. Our relationship remained strong, despite being soiled by a single dark spot – the passing and flimsy connection he had with Bahia before our marriage. It bothered me once in a while, but I bore it with a candid patience until I could ignore it completely. I did not think he held a grudge towards me as a result.

He and others were imprisoned at the same time as I. While there, we interacted, dealing with whatever the place imposed upon us in the form of break-ups and contradictory feelings. I was among the first group to leave prison after three years of incarceration. I went back to visit him with our other friends, and we did all the small assignments he entrusted us with.

Ahmad was a conciliatory, balancing element in the group, until he experienced a severe shock: his girlfriend had started dating someone else. The new boyfriend worked on human rights cases and continued to visit him regularly with her. We did our best to get him through the betrayal, but while in prison he was unable to form an emotional relationship that could have helped him get out of that wilderness, despite his meeting many women who visited the prison regularly as members of the organisation, which remained active despite being proscribed and under tabs.

In prison Ahmad completed his graduate studies and built his political life. He had no literary inclinations – though he was mad about opera and classical music – and paid no attention to his comrades’ published creative writings, which they considered gems of world literature. So he surprised everybody with a beautiful text he had written. It consisted of sarcastic dialogues between the prisoners and their visitors. It was brought out by a small publishing house and achieved great success under the title
The Visiting Room
. An insensitive film-maker adapted the book for the cinema and called it
In a Headscarf in the Visiting Room
, a title he considered funny. One critic described it as ‘the worst film in the history of Moroccan cinema’. Whenever the subject was mentioned, Ahmad would say, ‘Thank God it happened to the film and not the book.’