The Arch and the Butterfly

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 expression implies in terms of adventure and upheaval, had been very poor; in my few prior experiences, the woman’s move from fantasy to the bedroom had been irreversible and tragic. I should point out that this displacement did not happen when I married Bahia. Rather, Bahia and I took up permanent residence in a state of incomprehension, which, no matter how hard I tried, I could never move away from.

When I first lost the sense of pleasure, I fought it by displaying an ability for pure, refined technique, and my accomplishments became an expression of pleasure that I did not truly experience. I became mad about cooking, acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of wines, and completed one of the most important artistic studies of Roman sculpture. I wrote Letters to My Beloved, a collection of reflections on love and despair related to the woman I had lost and whose love I recalled without being able to recall her. The reflections appeared serially in the newspaper where I worked, before being published in a book that one critic considered the most important work on love since al-Hazm’s eleventh-century The Ring of the Dove.

In all those achievements I attained the intended result — the total illusion that I could feel the tiniest and most complex pleasures, those connected in their essence with aesthetic perception, not only of actual forms of beauty, but also of all that came before. I grew convinced that what mattered most regarding pleasure was capturing the details of its formation, or, to be precise, making it eternal on an infinite trajectory. For example, the most important aspect in the appreciation of any wine is not the sensory experience of the seasoned taster, but the complex chemistry that contributed to that result. The pleasure lies in the sun and rain, in the bounty of the earth, then in the fruit and, finally, in the magical liquid derived from it.

Once I reached this conviction, I became more amenable to life and more copiously productive. I wrote a daily column, published a literary work in parts, and penned features and investigative pieces every month. I wrote an art review every week for a specialist journal. I had begun a new life, which had nothing to do with the drab years I had spent writing boring reviews of the free books mailed to me daily. This new life was a real renaissance that helped me return to my true self, pay attention to my wellbeing, reconnect with my old friends and put a minimum of order and rigour into my professional and private lives. The transformation confused my wife, who was unsure of how to react to the sudden changes. She considered my talk about the loss of my ability to enjoy life nothing more than a mask, behind which I hid my shame at seeking pleasure despite all that had happened to us.

I told my friends that I did not like anything at all, and I almost told them that I did not like anyone, either. I do not remember when all this began, and I cannot tell if it happened to me all at once or in timid steps, until that ill-fated moment when it reached its peak. I only remember the feeling that stayed with me for a long time as a result of what happened: no one owes anyone anything. In this world, no matter how strong and intimate your relationships, you face your fate alone, isolated, and with an instinctive inclination towards depression and self-pity. No one ever achieves happiness because of others, no matter how close and dear they are. Any moment of happiness, intense or tenuous, can only be achieved internally.

I resigned myself to accepting what befell me as a kind of incomplete death. Whenever I remembered myself in a state of enjoyment, fondness, savouring or admiration, it was as if I were recalling someone who had passed away, and I had to accept whatever was left of me before joining him. Only then would we become the way we had been, one person, with the hands of our clocks resuming their normal rotation. For that reason I did not resist or seek treatment, but organised myself according to the expectations of a man who loved life, and I set the rudder of this confiscated existence without dictating conditions on anyone.

*

I had lived a relatively quiet life until then. Though I had a complex relationship with my father, my mother had died tragically, and had spent several years in Qenitra’s central prison without knowing why, I felt my life consisted of connected parts leading painlessly from one to the other.

I had first joined an extreme leftist group while living in Frankfurt, Germany, which led me to a Moroccan leftist group that had split from the Communist Party. I rapidly grew tired of the effort required of me to adopt extreme positions, so I joined a moderate leftist party. But an old comrade had kept my name in his diary, which led to my arrest, followed by a trial not a single word of which I understood, and finally to a prison sentence that consumed three years of my life for nothing.

While most of my friends at university threw themselves into amazing love stories, I simply ended a terse conversation one day with a colleague with the question: ‘Could you possibly marry me?’

Clearly nervous, she had replied, ‘Why not? As long as you’re asking without even smiling!’

I discovered the morning after the wedding that I was in total harmony with Bahia, as if we were two identical beings or two machines running on the same programme. We loved, with identical degrees of intensity, the same foods and drinks, and the same music, films, paintings and cities. We had similar inclinations in our sexual desires, and in meeting them, down to the tiniest detail. All this existed in a sort of complete technical harmony, where there was no room for dysfunction or emotional confusion, apprehension or surprise. A harmony that began and ended with movements determined from time immemorial. All that was left in the end were the invisible ashes of momentary flames, volcanic ashes from ancient times, cold and petrified, only awakened from their timeless slumber by our slow breathing.

I was taken aback by this disturbing compatibility, and even more despairingly so by the absolute certainty that I would never love her. The moment I reached this certainty, our relationship settled into a permanent state of tension. Bahia considered me to be satisfied with the minimum in everything. This upset her and put her in a bad mood most of the time. I, on the other hand, saw her as a regrettable mistake that continually jabbed me and made me feel like I had lost out.

Yacine’s death accelerated the collapse in our relationship, with all the rage, fights, murderous thoughts and feelings of guilt this entailed. Bahia felt I had not grieved at all for our tragic loss. That was not true: I knew exactly what Yacine’s death meant in the context of events related to the Taliban. I imagined him awash in his own blood, lying somewhere after a raid or clash and waiting for someone to pick him up off the dusty road. I wondered whether he thought of me before he died and if he remained determined to go all the way, or if he experienced last-minute regret and thus spoiled the glory of martyrdom. I was unable to picture him even for a second under the ground or revelling in the shade of Paradise. Yet I did not fall victim to unbearable grief, and one day I even surprised myself with a deep conviction that Yacine was still alive. Nothing provided incontrovertible proof that news of his death had come from Afghanistan. The letter had been written in Morocco and the call could have come from anywhere. I imagined that the story was only intended as camouflage and that Yacine would show up later to carry out terrorist operations here, free of the stigma of his previous identity.

I shared those ideas with Bahia. In an effort to explain what was happening to me, I told her that parents who had penetrating emotional insight were not fooled by such tricks. Their hearts guided them to the truth and led them to reject false grief. But my wife lost her mind and organised a mourning ceremony, where she displayed all manner of hysterical behaviour, because, she argued, I was both denying Yacine’s death and making of him a future butcher. As far as I was concerned, I had come close to believing that behind this story was a certain miracle that might bring Yacine back into my life as a newborn. I then realised that if such a miracle occurred, it would hand him over to a destiny just as brutal as this one. I remembered once more the letter and found nothing to disprove it.

One day I asked Bahia, ‘Why don’t we build a tomb for Yacine? It would be the best thing to bring us together.’

She looked at me sternly and said, as she went on gathering objects from the bedroom, ‘Each one of us must build a tomb for the other, bury him alive, and pour all the earth of this world over him. Only that could unite us, do you understand?’

I could have left the house for good, but I did not. If I had, the total and complete loss would never have happened.

2

Of all my friendships, I only kept up two — with Ahmad Majd and Ibrahim al-Khayati. I had a theory about this: at our age, we did not have the time or energy to make new friends. My friendship with them nevertheless proved to be problematic as they both treated me with a kind of paternalism that made them interfere in the tiniest details of my life. This was particularly so during the disturbance I went through, when I was convinced that the best way to get rid of a person you disliked was to replace him with someone else. But we really ought to do that with ourselves before doing it with others. At that stage, I had no illusions about my true losses. I came to realise that the real loss was not what had come to pass, but rather our feeling of helplessness at having failed to act. I had read — I no longer recalled where — that at birth we had unlimited possibilities for different lives, but by the time we died the only possibility left was the one that had come true. It was not so much that we had missed out on options — since they were not available to us at any time during our lives — but that we had tragically lost the possibility of being different to what we were.

Ibrahim al-Khayati dreaded my fits and tried to stop me from driving by putting a driver at my disposal whenever I needed. He never understood that the attacks did not take me by surprise, but rather took hold of me gradually like a slow dimming. They began with something resembling depression, then I would lose the desire to do something specific, even if I were in dire need of it. I would be hungry without appetite for a definite dish; I would go to the Steamboat and not know what to order for my thirst; my innards would groan with an animal desire that I did not know how to satisfy. The situation was like going on strike against life for two or three days, after which I would awaken to a kind of existential burnout that gripped me in a new attack. I could prevent losing consciousness in the physical sense either by speaking or by moving my limbs.

Early one summer morning during this delicate period, I walked along Al-Nasr Street, and then crossed the Experimental Gardens and Bourgogne Square, to attend a meeting of the party — one of those meetings that you secretly wished had been cancelled without your knowledge. I endured its atmosphere of despondence for half the day, and then decided to leave. This was not for any valid reason that I could have defended, not even because of Yacine, who had sprung from the loins of a pure socialist and died in the arms of the fundamentalists. I left because I could no longer bear the language used in those gatherings: the repetition of clichéd sentences that lacked any hint of imagination or witty sarcasm or sincere feelings — and even lacked good grammar. I felt crushed under the weight of the lifelessness being expressed, which exposed a different, and more dangerous, kind of death.

I left the hall quickly and did not look back, until I found myself crossing the Experimental Gardens for a second time and exchanging subtle smiles with women and men who were killing time there on a Sunday in the temple of sport.

The following day I went to the offices of a well-known independent newspaper and without much effort convinced the editor-in-chief to hire me. On my first day, I approached the job as I would territory that had surrendered, and immediately started writing my daily column, imagining with no little malice the splash it would make on the gossip exchange the next day.

My wife paid no attention whatsoever to the stories that circulated about my presumed love affairs. She knew that I met many women in journalistic and artistic circles, but she also knew that, beyond the game of seduction and the pleasure of company, I did not understand much about women, and my chronic timidity did not help when it came to going further. Neither had we ever experienced the anxieties of jealousy and suspicion, or a tendency to control one another. My trips did not raise any questions for her, and the only time we had a quarrel over this issue had been years earlier in the car at the start of a holiday. We had been talking about Ahmad Majd and the story doing the rounds about his ex-wife and her relationship with a well-known architect in the capital. I had been expressing my disapproval at how public they were about the affair, when Bahia had lost her temper and begun defending the woman’s right to live as she pleased. I had asked if this meant that marital infidelity should also be considered a virtue.

‘Yes,’ my wife had said. ‘It’s the pinnacle of virtue because it leads to a moment of truth, while the pretence of faithfulness is nothing but a vulgar lie.’

I had remained silent, knowing that she did not believe what she was saying but had said it only to provoke me, when she had added nervously, ‘Even vis-à-vis God, a person is purer while experiencing this moment of truth.’

‘Has this happened to you?’ I had asked.

‘Do you think I would tell you if it had?’ she had replied.

We had spent the rest of the drive between Rabat and Agadir in a poisonous, destructive argument about who had done what, without gaining anything except a hollow, senseless jealousy that had nothing to do with us personally, yet which awakened feelings of outrage, affront and hatred. Meanwhile Yacine had been fussing in the back seat with his electronic games, shouting every now and then for us to tone it down.

Once I became firm friends with Fatima Badri, however, Bahia began to pay attention to everything connected to the women in my life. She viewed with antagonism all my new clothes and books, the films I saw and the music I listened to, convinced that a woman, and most probably Fatima, had ushered me towards them.

Bahia did not understand — from my explanations or of her own accord — that the falling away of my own sensation of things and the absence of any pleasure in what I consumed was what pushed me towards the unfamiliar in my life. The person I had been disliked Andalusian music, but since it was all the same whether I listened to that or jazz, I accepted what I had disliked before, seeking a modicum of pleasure to jolt me here and there. Perhaps I simply did not know what I wanted, which was also true of my romantic conquests, if we could call them such, which did not reflect a sudden flightiness or a delayed adolescence on my part. I was, despite myself, thrust into stories I did not help spin together, nor was I a real player at any stage of their development. It was as if the death of my senses had transformed me into a black hole that swallowed every particle of light that approached it. I was aware, every time this happened, that the total darkness controlling my inner self lent me this attraction. I therefore organised my affairs in a very strict manner to allow me to navigate within the limits of what I could see in this dark hubbub.

When Fatima became a large part of my life, it was the culmination of an old acquaintance. I had known her distantly because of our shared profession and passion for the theatre. She had once directed one of my modest texts for the Casablanca Players. Our relationship changed on a scorching afternoon in a restaurant on the beach. On my way back from the restroom, I glimpsed the cook putting a giant crab into boiling water and saw the steam rising from the pot take on a pinkish tinge. I expected to be swamped by this putrid cloud. My body overreacted and I fainted. After I lost my sense of smell, I acquired an extraordinary capacity to imagine aromas, and even to be strongly and, at times, disproportionately affected by them. The unfortunate incident led me to share a delicious lunch with the woman — Fatima — for whom the crab was boiled. I watched Fatima struggle to use pincers and a scalpel to extract the pieces of white meat lodged beneath the carapace of the boiled creature, which she then devoured with gusto. The exertion quickened her breathing and made her chew in a way that sounded like staccato panting as she toyed with the long legs of the shellfish, sucking them with her eyes closed, holding the ends with her slender white fingers and hardly touching the horny pink shell.

She asked if the smell would cause me to faint again, and I told her that I didn’t smell in the first place. My answer did not seem to surprise her, and she commented without interrupting her battle, ‘I also imagine scents. I can even smell them on TV and at the cinema.’

I laughed, but she insisted that she was not joking.

After that, I described to her in great detail the situation of a man who has lost his sense of smell. It was not, of course, to do with losing the memory of smell, because the scents we smell even once, starting with that of our mother and on to that of death, would never be forgotten. Taste remains, but requires more time for the tongue to register a substance and send a clear signal to the brain, which in turn deciphers the code and transmits a readable message to the sense of taste.

I said to Fatima, ‘Do you know that this handicap has positive aspects? There are so many things that invade our nostrils without our permission and force us to retain stinky smells for ever!’

I then confessed that the most annoying thing was not being able to recognise people from their smell. It was an unrivalled pleasure to first encounter the fragrance and then sense it was in motion, eating up its distance from me, then drawing closer or moving away, freely. It would offer me the encounter I had expected or one I had not expected; it had given me an exceptional opportunity to pack a whole woman with all her details into that wonderful moment. Sometimes it seemed to me that this inability was utter deprivation, so I would try to heighten other senses to overcome it. I would use my fingers alone, with the concentration of a mathematician, to recognise a body that did not invade my being with its scent. Less than a week after losing my sense of smell, I could distinguish scents by the colours and shapes I attributed to them. Tobacco had a brown, cylindrical scent and fish a rectangular yellow one, tea was a crimson-coloured square and coffee a blue semicircle.

Fatima dipped her fingers into a bowl of lemon water and said, ‘Why don’t we sleep together this afternoon and see what happens after?’

I was stunned into silence.

‘Listen,’ she added. ‘I don’t want us to tie ourselves down in a complicated affair. It’ll be sex only. We can have fun and then go our separate ways. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, I understand, but why me in particular?’

‘Because you won’t be able to smell the fish factory I’ve turned into after this meal!’

But I did not have sex with Fatima. I had drinks at her place and we talked a lot. We read dozens of pages of haiku and a whole book about Scorpios. I then left the sad building where she lived, feeling good about the world.

Fatima settled into many aspects of my life, as if she had entered it years earlier. She knew how to chat with me without expecting anything in return. She talked about the theatre, the press, and the man she was still waiting for on some quayside. She came to the house with invitations for concerts and exhibitions and tried to convince Bahia to join her. Whenever she was persuaded, they went off together and I would stay at home on the large black sofa, planning indifferently for a future that did not interest me.

I would be unable to define the kind of relationship I had with Fatima. I only knew that it was essential. I knew this with a certain cold feeling, taking into account that she too had good reasons to consider me highly essential. I trusted her reasons, even if I could not pretend that the world would be out of kilter were she not around. I would simply feel that the machine was not running right. It would be like reading a message on the dashboard of a car telling me that my internal guidance system was amiss.

Bahia and I never discussed Fatima, although she did sometimes glean information about her by asking seemingly innocent questions. Only once did Bahia follow a dead-end. It happened when Fatima went to the US and asked Bahia to send her the serialised Letters to My Beloved as they became available. Bahia did not say anything that betrayed her feelings, but I felt her frustration when I heard her, one morning while I was in the bathroom, send the requested fax, loudly enunciating the US hotel phone number to draw my attention.

This was followed by total silence until I heard her read aloud: ‘I nearly drew your real face yesterday evening. Ever since I began drawing your face to reflect my feelings, I was never this moved. It was something like the pulse of an adolescent who sees his beloved suddenly appear on the balcony he has been watching. The situation lasted only a few seconds and I could not recapture it. I am unable, as you well know, to recall anything. All that remains in memory is the feeling of loss, but the content is swallowed by darkness. Nevertheless, the partial appearance of your face had an amazing effect on my whole being, and I almost remembered our first kiss and the sentence that preceded me to your lips. I do not know any more if I talked about love, or the heat or the dream. I do not know any more whether a single letter remained attached to my tongue. I remember it mixed with a full lip; whose lip was it? Mixed with burning breaths; who was kissing whom? Was it in a strange room? Yes, yes. It was in a hotel room you could not leave, while I was in the lobby waiting for you. I still am. But you had locked the door, placed a second pillow over your head, and switched off everything, including the fiery kiss that was followed by total darkness. I would like to tell you something, but I wish I knew what. Come out from behind this mute curtain, I am on the balcony where I have always been. If you were to pass by the garden now, I would simply stretch out my arm, which would lengthen and lift you higher and higher, until you rested, once more, between your lips and the sentence that precedes me.’

Silence returned to the room. I poked my head outside the bathroom and looked at Bahia apprehensively. She was sitting down, holding the paper in both hands and smiling, the smile of someone who understands and does not understand at the same time. When she turned her head and saw me staring at her, she quickly folded the paper and said in an irritated tone, ‘What wonderful bullshit!’

3

Ibrahim al-Khayati became the cornerstone of my relationship with the world for different reasons. When I was a member of the party organisation, he was both close to us and distant at the same time. He financed our cultural magazine and helped run it without seeking some of the minor glories that went with the territory. He was not affected by the arrests of the 1970s, but remained our strongest supporter. Generally, there was nothing in the practical part of my life that did not include Ibrahim. I could almost say that I never took a decision that needed insight without Ibrahim being a key factor.

It was natural, therefore, that he was the third person to read the letter on Yacine’s death, and then, as a lawyer, that he represent Bahia and me in the subsequent investigation into Al-Qaeda’s activities in Morocco. Since the letter had been delivered locally, it suggested that the group that had received the news was a local organisation. It also implied that Yacine had been in touch with this organisation before he left, and might even have been sent by that same organisation to Afghanistan. This clearly meant that other members of a sleeper cell were awaiting orders to depart or participate in attacks on home soil.

When a Fes group was arrested following the assassination of a French tourist, it was believed that someone from that group had brought the letter to my house. From the moment Ibrahim started providing me with information about Yacine’s direct links with flesh-and-blood terrorists — fellow citizens, not phantoms from Kandahar — I fell victim to destructive anxiety. I could not bear the idea that Yacine had joined Al-Qaeda while he was living with us, mad about electronic games, annoyed at our political discussions, always ready to poke fun at us and everything else. The possibility of that deception made me doubt everything. Ibrahim tried to make me stop believing that Yacine had deceived me, insisting that every one of us proceeds towards our fate unable to distinguish the things we use to deceive ourselves from those others use to deceive us.

In the early years of our acquaintance, Ibrahim had been the thread that bound our group. He had served as a romantic go-between, capable of solving the most complex love-related problems, particularly since the great esteem he enjoyed among women made them confide their secrets and stories in him. He was not known to have had a special relationship with a woman, and it was rumoured that he was gay. This did not upset him, and he did not deny it. He would bring his friend Abdelhadi, an’aytah artist who sang at the Marsawi nightclub in Casablanca, to our soirées; both were welcomed with smiles that soon faded into a tolerant complicity that Ibrahim’s sparkling yet modest personality inspired. After a brilliant education in Rabat and Paris, Ibrahim had been able to set up a large law firm dealing in financial and corporate cases. He amassed a huge fortune that had allowed him to support a large number of painters, sculptors and actors.

Ibrahim chose to live with his mother, an extremely bright, traditional woman with multiple talents, and he was affluent enough to indulge his natural inclination to live in a house with open, complex spaces. We were very close. He was an avid reader, and there was not a book I read that he had not recommended.

Ibrahim would experience three serious traumas over as many years. The first was the suicide of Abdelhadi. He felt that the world had collapsed under his feet, and that he would keep endlessly plunging until he lost contact with everything around him. He felt he would continue falling, not quite touching something akin to the ground, until the void swallowed him anew. The reason for that feeling, as he explained to me later — after Yacine’s death — was not the death in itself, but his having failed to see it coming. He had not even once registered the suffering of someone close to him.

Ibrahim and Abdelhadi had created a kind of social accommodation that made it possible for them to coexist without serious compromises and without gratuitous stubbornness. Ibrahim arranged an independent life for his friend; he married him to a relative of his, and celebrated the birth of his twins, Essam and Mahdi, with boundless joy. Their relationship remained intimate and warm despite the sadness that resulted from the sensible arrangement of a life that defied organisation. Late at night, Ibrahim would swing by the club where Abdelhadi performed. He would sit in a discreet corner, soaring up to the heavens with his friend’s beautiful voice, amazed by the depth of the sadness revealed by a man who normally did not stop laughing and joking. As soon as he opened his mouth to sing, it was as if a dark breath filled with past tragedies rose within him and he would withdraw into the far regions of his inner self. At the end of his performance, Abdelhadi would stride across the hall filled with his fans, laughing resonantly, and walk towards Ibrahim’s table to spend the interval with him. They would make small talk, commenting briefly and elegantly on clothes, skincare products and seasonal dishes. They would talk about the twins and their mother Haniya, always silent and busy with the housework with a devotion that bordered on the religious. They exchanged tender words about absence and missing each other, and fixed or failed to agree on a date for an upcoming soirée. The following day Abdelhadi would stop by Ibrahim’s house and sit with his mother by the back door of the kitchen that overlooked the garden and tell her that artichokes were available at the central market. If Ibrahim’s name should come up, his face would light up, as if his blood were talking, not his tongue.

How could such apparent contentedness explode one day, to leave a hanged man dangling, and Abdelhadi of all people?

I, in turn, tried to convince Ibrahim that Abdelhadi would have done what he had done in any case, regardless of the simple or complicated nature of their relationship. He seemed to accept this, but his look was one of dark despair.

The second trauma occurred when Ibrahim was the victim of a vicious attack that almost cost him his life. He had left the commercial court building in Casablanca when two men stopped him. One said that he wanted to talk to him about an important and urgent matter, while the other wrapped his arm around his waist and pulled him forcefully towards him, saying, ‘An important personal matter.’ He was not fearful or concerned until he felt something sharp against his side. Things happened very quickly, but as Ibrahim attempted to shake free of the man, something cold pierced his stomach. Before he hit the asphalt like a heavy weight, something solid smashed into his face and another object caught his chest and head. As he was being kicked and stamped upon, he felt he was being shoved towards a thick fog which turned into darkness, stars and vivid colours. He heard someone ask for a stick, and the stick touched him or pierced him, he could not tell which. Soon he heard roaring laughter and had a distant impression that his whole body was coated in a stickiness that bit by bit turned into a confused consciousness within an extremely white and rainless cloud.

Ibrahim spent five weeks in hospital. All of us — his mother, Haniya and the twins, Ahmad Majd, Fatima, and myself — visited him every day, monitoring his condition that was critical until he had been through six operations. While he was in a coma, a leading newspaper published his photo under the headline: Lawyer Ibrahim al-Khayati Target of Assassination Attempt by Anti-Homosexual Group. When Ibrahim recovered, the police questioned him at length about his sexual orientation. He strenuously confirmed that he was straight, as he had done when interviewed after Abdelhadi’s suicide.

Ibrahim’s mother, who constantly repeated that she knew him best because she had given birth to him, had a stroke of genius. She sat on his hospital bed one evening and spent a long time staring into her wounded son’s eyes. She began laying out her plan for Ibrahim in veiled words and tear-filled sentences. Ibrahim responded with an appeasing gesture and a few words. ‘OK, I agree. Don’t torture yourself. I completely understand. I agree.’

‘What are you agreeing to, my son? I haven’t said everything yet.’ Finally she spat it out. ‘I want you to marry Haniya, so that Essam and Mahdi can be looked after by you. That’ll put a stop to all the gossip and give me peace of mind before I die.’

Ibrahim knew full well what awaited him. He signalled his acceptance with a wave of the hand and gave his mother permission to act as she saw fit. He felt that the arrangement fitted in totally with everything else. There was no better way to avenge Abdelhadi’s suicide, and there was nothing in his life that did not reveal to him, on a daily basis, that step by step he was drawing nearer to this destiny, submitting to the inevitable.

When, months later, the door closed behind Ibrahim and Haniya for the first time, he was nervous and embarrassed. He almost choked on his feelings, until he turned towards her. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, her face angled slightly towards the wall. His heartbeat quickened because in her isolation, she looked like Abdelhadi in the melancholy of his song.

Casablanca was still joking about their marriage when Ibrahim received another terrible shock, the death of his mother, which hurt him like a painful amputation. The morning she died, he was awakened by the cries of Haniya, Essam and Mahdi shouting, ‘May God have mercy on the Hajja!’

‘What are you doing in the garden? Why don’t you keep still so I can understand?’ he asked.

Haniya then stood before him and told him his mother had been playing with Essam and Mahdi in the garden and collapsed. She now lay dead, her head in the water of the swimming pool and her body stretched on the lawn. ‘Listen, invoke God’s name. Your mother has passed away.’

Ibrahim said impatiently, ‘No one dies like that. Mother’s playing, she’s just playing!’

When he raised her head from the blue of the swimming pool, she seemed to smile. He got ready for her to jump to her feet cackling with laughter, as she would do to amuse the twins, unconcerned that she was stiff and cold. At that point, Haniya and the maids, wailing loudly, came and picked her up. They carried her to her room and laid her carefully out on the bed, as though they had long been trained for this.

Ibrahim buried his face in his hands and relived, as if standing under a gentle shower of rain, the details of the life they had been through together: her milk, her fears for him, her tears, her devastation at the loss of his father, her silence, her games, her happiness, her misery, her presence on the edge of his bed until he went to sleep, her stories, her dreams, and her skills at fighting poverty and time. He remained in that position until Haniya reminded him angrily that death was a believer’s duty and if life were meant to last, it would have lasted for Prophet Mohammed. Ibrahim replied, distressed, ‘But Prophet Mohammed is not my mother!’

After the funeral rites were over, Ibrahim entered a black box where he lost his ability to reconcile with life. He turned inward and dwelled on his conviction of the futility of a life of delusions. This was before he submitted to the resignation that dominated the scene and impacted our whole generation, a mixture of dervish tendencies, secular Sufism and new-age spirituality. I was at his side during that difficult period and took advantage of his spiritual predisposition to reveal that I was meeting Yacine as a child who talked to me about everything, as if he had not crossed to the other side. Ibrahim accepted and approved my experience, confirming that souls meet in total freedom independent of our ephemeral bodies. Whenever the police called us to resume the investigation with new information related to terrorist organisations, Ibrahim, in all seriousness, begged me not to tell Yacine, as there was no need to bother souls with what we did or did not do.

4

I met Layla for the first time one quiet morning in the lobby of the Hilton. She was absorbed in a book as people came in and out of the hotel with their luggage and I approached to make sure it was her. Sensing my presence, she lifted her head but did not give me a chance to talk or introduce myself and burst out saying, ‘You must be the journalist who’s covering Saramago. It’s great, really great, that you’ve come early. It’s a good omen to meet a journalist who arrives early. An interview? A newspaper interview with Saramago? Forget it! He’s the type who believes that what he writes is all he needs to say. There’s no point insisting. Hold on, use a hunting technique. Track the prey then pounce. Or maybe he’ll decide on his own to grant you an interview. Try and talk to him; cajole him or trick him. You must have read his books — or at least I hope you’ve read them. I don’t think it’s possible to talk to a person like him about anything else. He doesn’t talk much about the weather! I’m reading The Gospel According to Jesus Christ for the thousandth time. Believe me, out of all the books I’ve read, there isn’t one I enjoyed more. You know what? The subject of the book doesn’t matter at all. How Jesus was born, how he grew up and faced life’s questions, how he met God and how he met death. The story isn’t like in the Gospels, but as Jesus might have lived it. What are the Gospels anyway? Are they the book, or Jesus as he lived or might have lived? None of this matters at all. What matters is the prose, the way words and sentences become more important than the narrative, a purity that gives you the sense of beauty in the abstract, without subject matter, or it’s its own subject matter. Do you understand that?’

I had been straining to interrupt her dense stream of words and finally managed to get a word in. ‘Yes, yes, I understand completely. I’ve also read Blindness for personal reasons to do with my father, but it depressed me so much that I stopped reading for a few months.’

She was nervously gathering her belongings when she said, ‘Have you spotted him? He’s just stepped out of the elevator. There he is. Look at his movements. I swear, the slowness has nothing to do with age or anything else — quick, let’s head over — it’s a deliberation of the mind — this way’s better, come on — a pause over every detail. One must have extraordinary ability to do that. To think that I spend most of my time fighting details. What idiocy!

‘Mr Saramago, please, don’t make us run after you. This is the journalist I told you about. I don’t know his name yet. Let’s make his acquaintance together.’

I heard myself pronounce my name, Youssef al-Firsiwi. I noticed that it had a strange impact on the woman whom I had not taken my eyes off from the moment she started talking.

On our way to Fes, I said to Saramago, ‘When all is said and done, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and the revealed Gospels are two sides of the same coin. Imagination is needed in both narratives, and fiction is needed in both cases.’

He smiled and shook his head in a way that did not reveal whether he agreed or disagreed. At that point Layla said, ‘The novel is open to multiple interpretations, including the ones present in the revelation. As for the revelation, it accepts only its own narrative.’

Saramago laughed but did not comment. We all looked in the direction of the green fields that had been startled by the November rain. We agreed, with varying degrees of sincerity, that it was a beautiful morning. Layla then announced that she would eat the pastries she had brought with her, and asked whether we would like some. Neither Saramago nor I wanted one. Nor did he want to discuss literature. He asked me about the Sahara and the negotiations with the separatists, and whether Morocco was moving towards real democracy or whether there were those who longed for rule with an iron fist. He asked about the strength of the religious movement, what interest groups there were and where the opposite interests lay.

I offered lukewarm responses because I was annoyed with the inquisition and did not have answers.

‘Your conversation is ruining my mood,’ said Layla. ‘I don’t understand how the same person could write with such sensitivity about Jesus’s relationship with his mother, with Mary Magdalene, and with Satan, and yet lose valuable time talking about the Sahrawi people’s right to self-determination. Do you know what people do in the desert, Mr Saramago? They roam the wilderness, eat, perform their ablutions and compose poetry in the style of pre-Islamic times. They fatten up their women, and screw while talking aloud lest the children hear them. Do you think they would dance for joy if they heard you cared about their self-determination?’

We laughed, and then Layla said, ‘What truly amazes me is the magical power that you and those like you have to express what we all know in detail but are unable to express, simply because we lack the magical means you have. I feel infuriated sometimes because you’re saying exactly what I’ve felt for ages, but could not describe with precision until I read it. I don’t know what you think, but, personally, I consider precision to be the ideal form of beauty.’

Her voice from the back seat seemed to strike my shoulders and neck, jolting me out of my recent lifelessness. I felt the words were addressed to me in a kind of unintended consolation. Precision in science, nature and art — without the distortion of emotion — really did embody the concept of beauty.

Consider the compatible and incompatible elements needed to add flavour to a piece of raw fish. We do not want one flavour to overpower the others, or any flavour to be hidden, delayed or premature. We want the saltiness to peak at a specific moment, before the spices but after lemon by a fraction of a second. Then comes the waning of the substance and the lingering aftertaste of all these elements, along with an additional element, the time the aftertaste takes to permeate the farthest reaches of our body. The aftertaste fades, leaving behind another trace of a trace, then another trace of the trace of a trace, and so on. This precision in making and then unmaking something, in its emergence and evanescence, can give birth to the pleasure we seek to eternalise in total despair, attempting to move it from the realm of the senses to the realm of perception, from incoherence to coherence. All the while we are aware of the tremendous tragedy latent in beauty, because outside this mental precision, beauty can only be fleeting.

Having pinpointed this matter under Layla’s inspiration, I expected to feel deliriously happy, but instead was assailed by a depression similar to the one I had experienced in previous panic attacks. I fought it off, while the conversation in the back seat continued and I could hear Layla’s voice and Saramago’s mumblings on and off.

‘I confess,’ said Layla, ‘that at first I found your novel a variation on an old theme, then your writing made me feel that devils are the mirrors of prophets, and that good, in order to be good, must subsume the burning heat of evil. It doesn’t matter what the subject is, because we’re not looking to be persuaded while reading the novel. You made the Christ in your book throw off the mantle of revelation, only for him to don it again as a shepherd, a fisherman, a lover and a prophet. He suffered, desired, feared and performed miracles, then proceeded towards his crucifixion where he found no one in the end but Satan himself to collect the drops of his blood in the clay bowl that cleaved from the ground at the moment Christ cleaved from nothingness. That’s the life that became a Gospel, isn’t it?’

‘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?

I write to you full of sadness, because of the letter you sent me last year that I found in my desk and had not read. That was because I could not remember your name which was written on the back of the envelope, or the city from which you sent the letter. I slipped it between the pages of a book and forgot where I had put it. When I came across it months later and recognised its origin, I feared it would contain news that would make me die of sadness because I had not read it. So I threw it in the fireplace without regret, because I forgot what I did with it. Now I do remember it in a way I cannot fathom. I remember the whole story linked somehow with you standing wet under the bare willow tree! If you do read my letter today, I beg you to send me a sign, telling me that you do not bear a grudge against me for burning the letter.

The morning after my dinner with Layla, I woke up exhausted and spent a long time in a haze looking for the day’s schedule. When I found it, I pulled myself together and went straight to the shower.

As I was leaving the room I found an envelope slipped under the door. There was a blank sheet of paper in it. My heart beat hard and I understood that the matter was related to something I was expecting, but no longer knew what. When I saw Layla and her guest at the breakfast table, I wished to separate them as soon as possible in order to free her from this legendary companion. Layla was cheery and unruffled while our eminent guest had his face in a bowl of fruit, which he chewed with deliberation while his teary eyes scanned the faces and furniture in the restaurant, as if he were expecting to meet someone.

I exchanged an intense look with Layla and felt an inner lucidity, the lucidity of a person not bothered by anything any more. I told myself as I submitted to the serenity that came from this lucidity that I might have reached the last station of my life, where I would put my suitcase down on the platform like any traveller, not knowing, out of extreme fatigue, whether I had arrived or was about to depart.

At a certain moment in life a person gets detached from his path and becomes a scrap of paper hanging in the air. At that moment he rids himself of the pressures of the path and is able to join any adventure wholeheartedly, because he is not required to justify anything any more or to provide any conclusive evidence of anything. He has freed himself of the future, as if he had died a very long time ago. What he experiences now is nothing except what his immaculate corpse remembers of that shoreless future.

Layla stood up suddenly and startled me. She apologised, saying, ‘Were you lost in thought?’

‘I was sitting on my suitcase on this vast platform.’

We were on our way to the historical city of Walili when Layla announced that she hated ruins. I told her that ruins had a soul, contrary to buildings. But she stood her ground and claimed that the most beautiful ruins were those we saw around us every day in the form of fallen dreams.

I told her, ‘But what you’re saying is only a poetic image. Ruins are ossified souls we extract from the bowels of the earth.’

She replied sarcastically, ‘And what you’re saying now is an exact science and not a poetic image!’

Saramago laughed for the first time since the start of our trip, which annoyed me. We spent the distance between Fes and Zarhun via Zakkutah each absorbed in our own world.

I was thinking about my father, Al-Firsiwi, who, in the waning years of his life, was working as a blind guide among the ruins of Walili. How would I introduce him? How would he receive Layla, and how could I escape his raving if he decided once more to play his favourite game?

Layla was in the back seat, talking about Jesus’s adventure in the boat during the storm on the waters. She seemed to be making an affected effort to separate holy genius from literary genius, insisting once more that the miraculous in its literary form had a realistic dimension that gave it an astonishing beauty which was absent from the religious version. It was probably due to the fact that religious faith was the basis for experiencing the miracle, an aspect that was not derived from the text. Layla, despite her insistence, did not succeed in pulling the writer out of his silence, which gave me the impression that she was talking to herself and that the writer had not come with us in the first place, but only his novel, for us to use as a pretext to weave a text according to our own narrative.

I was thinking about the ruins that my father roamed every day, ruins that had nothing to do with the Romans but concerned him personally. I thought about how he endured the humiliation of this end. He would show off his fluent German, deliberately pronouncing every letter separately and stressing their tonal variations. He would introduce biting comments about the city that had led him to these ruins, in cruel revenge for his glory days. He would be in his rickety boat, facing storms he could not see that pulled him into a crushing tornado which he rowed towards with his voice.

As we approached the city, Layla was narrating the scene of the boat caught in the divine presence, while Jesus rowed, as if this action still had meaning compared with the gravity of the encounter. Man remains bound to his body even when that body becomes meaningless, having just met God at the height of his loss and despair.

This preoccupation with the novel had driven me to despair. I suddenly turned to the back seat and said, ‘Mr Saramago, would you like to know my humble opinion of your novel?’

He replied immediately, ‘No, no, no. Not at all. Don’t bother yourself. I absolutely don’t want to know your opinion.’

At that point I pulled myself together, took my mobile out of my jacket pocket and called Fatima. I told her that I was in my old ruins, in the house of Juba and Bacchus and others, amid the earthy scent that no longer welcomed me, part of the cloudy landscape of all those forgotten columns, arches, temples, olive presses and houses.

She responded every now and then with ‘Oh’ and whenever she was about to start talking, I would interrupt her with something similar to my father’s delirium. ‘I will once again enter the palace of ruins,’ I told her. ‘Everyone in this world imagines he can rescue something under the ruins.’

‘I imagine that too. Do you want me to join you there?’ she asked.

‘No, no, I’ll be back this evening. If you want, we’ll start a new dig together!’

‘I’ll prepare the site,’ she replied.

When I ended the call a heavy silence reigned in the car. The avenue of olive trees that led to Wadi Khumman welcomed us as it had invaders and transients, without emotion or any particular disposition.

At the outhouse to the historical site, my father was saying goodbye to a mass of German tourists amidst roars of laughter and warm handshakes. As soon as we stepped out of the car, speaking in our soft voices, he came over, perceiving that we were a new group. When he got close to us he recited his favourite line from the Qur’an: ‘Do not think me senile, I do indeed scent the presence of Youssef.’

Fighting back my emotions, I said, ‘I’m Youssef, this is Layla, and this is José Saramago. You are still alive and kicking I see.’

‘Of course, of course! Who can escape life? You cannot go backwards and you cannot flee forwards. Life — as you know, my son — is a real dilemma. Is that not so, Mr?. .? Who did you say he was, Youssef?’

‘Saramago.’

Listening to Layla’s translation and showing true engagement for the first time, Saramago said, ‘Yes, yes, it’s a real dilemma!’