The Arch and the Butterfly (24 page)

‘My son. Have you forgotten?’

‘Youssef, please leave your hand where it is. I don’t want to know. Don’t say anything.’

‘Do you think he’s still in touch with them?’

‘I don’t know how you can want to do that.’

‘It seems that he meets with them and supervises their projects.’

‘Look at your feet. I’ve never seen a man with more beautiful feet. I want you to tease me with your toes. Let me show you how to do it. Like this. Do you like that?’

‘Yes, and I love the idea of you finding pleasure in my feet. In all honesty, I’ve never done this before. It’s great when a woman likes your feet. Truly amazing.’

‘What?’

‘I feel as if it’s me doing it.’

‘Yes, yes, it’s really like that, not as if. Please don’t stop.’

‘Do you think Yacine is deceiving me?’

‘I want you to ask me to do something you like.’ Layla said.

‘I will, and I know you will do it without me even asking,’ I said.

‘I know that this arouses you a great deal.’

‘It does. I love it when you’re like this, when you’re looking at me as if you were about to jump out of the window. Do you want me to turn around? I want to hear your voice and imagine your look while you’re falling from the window.’

‘I love you. I love you,’ she said.

‘Layla.’

‘Mmm!’

‘Layla!’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you think Yacine would dare involve me in something bad?’

‘Are you serious?’ asked Layla.

‘Of course I am. Do you think this is a joking matter?’

Layla jumped up and said, ‘I thought you had invented a crazy story to increase the thrill.’

I pulled her towards me and said, laughing, ‘I thought you didn’t understand the ploy.’

At breakfast, before the others woke up, Layla told me that even though we didn’t live under the same roof, we had to make vows, even if only between the two of us, to announce to ourselves that we were bound to each other for eternity.

I agreed and started organising a ceremony in my mind.

Mahdi and Essam appeared. They obviously liked Layla, enjoyed her company and did not hesitate to shower her with special attention. Layla had a magical influence on them that gave them a certain precocious maturity. Mahdi asked us both to attend a performance organised by their band, Arthritis. I smiled as I always did when I heard the name. Essam got upset once again and asked me if I wanted them to call it Blossom or Harmony, for example. I told him Arthritis was an appropriate name, particularly since the whole country was lame because of arthritis.

‘Of course we’ll come,’ I said. ‘I don’t like the music, let’s be clear about that, but I like the spirit in these concerts. I especially like the total conviction visible on the faces of the musicians, the singers and the dancers. It’s an almost ideo­­logical belief stating that they have found their way.’

I took the train from Casablanca to Rabat. During the trip I felt semiconscious, repeating to myself Layla’s name with the strong feeling that I was calling her, that she had just left the carriage and would return at any moment to bring me back from this state of unconsciousness. But she did not return and I kept calling her, mumbling every now and then, ‘Call me please. Do not stop talking to me.’ I had the express feeling that her words, even meaningless words, would keep me connected to life, and if she stopped, she would interrupt the electric current feeding my existence and I would inevitably descend into darkness. I felt her hand stroking my cheek, but the voice I heard was not hers. I heard her say, ‘I am here.’ Then I heard a stranger’s voice say, ‘He’s coming to’ and then a sharp voice say, ‘No use, he’s dead.’

As if challenged by this ridiculous statement, I suddenly shook myself and sat up. Before me were an astounded woman and a man who greeted me warmly and said, ‘I’ve had a similar reaction on the fast train many times. Don’t worry. There might be a magnetic field that causes certain people to have these fits. Who knows what will happen when fast trains start running everywhere in the country. Half of Morocco might faint!’

But the man’s words did not help me, and I found myself once again the victim of a post-seizure depression.

Lately I had been able to overcome this depression by returning to the box, as Layla called it. The box was the store of feelings, images and words where we spontaneously put all that happened to us in moments of intense love. In the box I would meet a person who was almost the me I longed for: outgoing, authentic, relishing life and, even better than that, capable of making someone else happy. There I would meet a body that I did not control, one that lay in the shadow of its desires. I would meet a woman with the extraordinary ability to make words and things equal in density, fragility and temporality. I would meet her in her overwhelming desire and its precise gratification, in the rapidity of her arousal and its subsidence, in her ability to pre-empt everything and capture all that crossed the vital space of our anxiety: visions, dreams, repressed fantasies, smells, colours, crazy words and signals. I would meet her in the stories, since the box was in essence a box of stories, a pile of unlimited possibilities for what happened and did not happen. This multiplicity might be a way for me to get over my depressions. What I needed was a first breach; in other words, a thread of light that made it suddenly possible to break through a wall.

I called Layla as I left the train and told her that I was going back to look for Bacchus. She asked me if this would help me find some peace, and I told her that it would and I would at least be close to Al-Firsiwi. I didn’t like to see him forgotten and ostracised. She liked the idea, and then said unexpectedly, ‘Why not write a story about Ibrahim al-Khayati?’ I told her we would have to discuss that some other time.

In the days that followed I thought of preparing an outline for a possible novel about Ibrahim. In the end I found myself reviewing the landmarks of his life: his idealism, his professional success, his lover’s suicide, his marriage to his lover’s widow, his relationship with his mother and with the twins Essam and Mahdi, his involvement in thorny cases such as the young musicians and gay marriage, the attempt on his life and his overall emergence from the rubble of the 1970s without convictions or bitterness. Finally, his appearance at the end of the century as an eloquent expression of a struggle that defied definition. When I finished writing this prelim­inary outline, I realised it was not a novel. It was simply Ibrahim’s life, the story etched on his face, and did not require someone to write it anew. If I wanted to write a novel about Ibrahim, I would have to invent another life for him, a life closer to the realistic scenario of a man without miracles. This would be a huge endeavour and would require energy that I did not have. It would also be a venture without guaranteed success.

I asked Al-Firsiwi to tell me, frankly, who stole Bacchus.

He settled himself comfortably in his seat and said, ‘Listen, Youssef, son of Diotima, this weak man was strung up by his feet and flogged night and day for two months. Do you think that if I knew, I would have gone on enjoying the beatings, for the love of God?’

‘But you have been saying many things ever since,’ I replied.

‘I say what I like!’

‘Among the things you say is that you buried Bacchus in the courtyard of a mosque in one of the mountain villages.’

‘Very likely! One possibility among many others.’

‘I know you have many accounts you’d like to settle. You probably want to punish this region by destroying one of its timeless antiquities.’

‘It’s not worth so much fuss. It’s an ordinary statue of the god of wine posing as a dusky adolescent. Even from an artistic perspective, it’s not a masterpiece. The Prado in Madrid and a museum in Florence have wonderful white marble statues of Bacchus. One of them, I can’t remember which, has the shadow cast by the bunch of grapes sculpted on Bacchus’s shoulder. How can one compare this with the dull appearance of the granite adolescent? Please! Spare me! He’s standing as if he had just come out of Jupiter’s thigh. Every land inherits what God granted it in intelligence and kindness. All this commotion, including some stupid people crying over a stolen memory. Let it go. What nonsense!’

‘All right, all right. No need to get all worked up about it. I said maybe. It might be one possibility among others, regardless of the value of Walili’s Bacchus. He disappeared in mysterious circumstances. Can you help me find an avenue to search for him?’

‘I haven’t the slightest idea,’ he replied.

I opened my briefcase and took out a book of poetry published a few weeks earlier in Frankfurt and titled
Elegies
. I said to Al-Firsiwi, ‘You know, an interesting book of poetry titled
Elegies
written by an obscure poet called Hans Roeder has been published in Frankfurt.’

He turned his face as he did when he wanted to listen carefully. I waited for him to say something, but he did not open his mouth. His features remained stiff as he sat listening in agitated silence before he asked me, ‘Can I touch it?’

I handed him the book. He spent a long time feeling it with his slender dirty fingers, then he opened it and buried his face between the pages, breathing in the smell of the paper, the letters and the printing press. Then he said, ‘I have no doubt it is a good book!’

‘It is the literary event of the season in Germany,’ I said.

‘Germany is a great poetic nation.’

‘That’s not what it’s best known for,’ I said.

‘It doesn’t matter. It knows itself and so does poetry.’

‘People say you have something to do with this book,’ I told him.

Al-Firsiwi laughed nervously. ‘Is there anything in this world I’m not connected with?’

‘People say this is the poetry book that Hans, Diotima’s grandfather, buried in the ruins of Walili.’

‘It’s possible,’ he said. ‘Why not? Though it’s a matter that would make Diotima turn in her grave!’

‘The introduction states that the publisher received the book from an anonymous sender, and that the poems are those of a German soldier who was held prisoner in Africa and participated in excavating a Roman site. Don’t you think that is more than enough proof that you found and sent the book?’

‘Does the book include two elegies, one addressed to Juba II and the other to Diotima?’

‘Yes, yes it does,’ I said enthusiastically. ‘And the introduction says that they are the best poems in the collection!’

‘Then I’ve screwed Hans Roeder with those two poems!’

‘But why didn’t you publish them under your own name?’

‘I’m not interested in that. He buried his poems in Walili and I buried my poems between his poems. No one will ever know what lies under the rubble and what comes to the surface. Plus, I did it for Diotima’s sake, as a final salute to her restless soul.’

I opened the book to the page where Diotima’s elegy began. I read two lines, but Al-Firsiwi stopped me with a sign of the hand as he stood up. His face had bloomed as a result of this story; he was proud of himself and looked somewhat happy. He went to his safe at the far end of the room and took out a big envelope.

He handed it to me, saying, ‘Here’s the manuscript of your great-grandfather’s poetry. I only found it after losing my eyesight. One evening I became very depressed, and the hopelessness of being blind pushed me to wander among the ruins, where I found a pile of dusty papers and a worn-out hat. They were in a room in a ruin, not far from the house of the handsome youth and close to the statue of a prone male, a symbol of fertility that did not last long in these halls. I slipped into the manuscript two poems that were not part of the savage intensity of Hans Roeder’s poems. I had written them as elegies for two important people in my life who did not live at the same time, but they both lived long in my heart, and at the same time.’

‘What about Bacchus?’ I asked.

‘Listen, when you begin digging, there’s only one chance in a million that you’ll find what you’re looking for and countless chances that you’ll find things you haven’t even dreamed of. You’ve found the manuscript, now forget about the worthless adolescent.’

3

Fatima sent me a text message saying that she had travelled to Havana with her partner. She said she was doing it for both our sakes. The following day I felt a mysterious apprehension that something might happen to Fatima and was haunted by the idea that I should travel to Havana. Before dawn the next morning I awoke sad and exhausted, and called her, unaware of the time difference. Her voice came from deep sleep as she tried to calm me, while I was delirious, repeating that Havana was not suitable to be a dream. It was nothing but a prison that looked like Al-Firsiwi’s bar, where illusions from different time periods stood side by side.

‘What’s happened to you?’ asked Fatima. ‘Havana is a real city. There are dreamers and malingerers, drunks and people who struggle to feed themselves, and once in a while, they dance. Listen to me, this city has a night, it only has night, a quick, thick and amazing night.’

I told her about the poetry book, and she said that I was lucky to have such an intense father. I was saying that I felt a dense fog was covering me, when she yawned and begged me to tell her what to do with the man sleeping in her bed. I told her, half-joking, ‘Smother him with a big pillow.’ I sent her a kiss, hung up and turned off the light to go back to sleep.