The Arch and the Butterfly (25 page)

I went back to sleep, and dreamed that I was in Havana and the world of Cabrera Infante. I was walking down Calle O, leaving the Hotel Nacional, then crossing Avenida 23, passing in front of the Maraka, and returning quickly to the Nacional, where I had recently left Fatima. I told myself that if Arsenio Cué arrived before me, he would undoubtedly sleep with her. That explained my unexpected aggressive attitude with her when I saw her in the lobby reading the schedule of night parties. I dragged her violently to a corner in the garden where it was extremely hot and humid, and began to devour her. She put up languid resistance, interspersed occasionally with fast, savage parries. I had the feeling I would ejaculate before she reached her climax and decided to slow down, but when I needed to get it back to the same level, it escaped me. I would get close to ejaculating but fail to reach my aim, despite trying a few times. I was swimming in sweat and woke up startled, surrounded by unbearable heat. Then I dreamed that I was with Fatima, Silvestre and Cué, spending the evening in the Sky Club listening to Estrella Rodriguez. I sneaked out of that place and stood at the end of the street under a foggy lamp, listening to Bustrofedon talking about Cuban women and singing an old song, that went something like, ‘Girls without charm, without a proud stroll, without the queens’ lure, cannot be Cubans.’

As my dream continued I found myself in a noisy street following a fast-walking man who I would soon discover to be Yacine. What are you doing here, Taliban? Are you, like me, looking for Guevara’s face to stuff it in an old suitcase? I ran behind Yacine with a great effort that made me hear my quickened breathing. Then I noticed Guevara pushing a vegetable cart in the middle of the street. I stopped to tell him that it might be dangerous to drive his cart between the crazy cars. Never mind. Yacine too thought that Fatima was in danger. For some reason, she would find herself in hospital or in a morgue and not at the bar of the Nacional.

I was awakened by Layla’s phone call, her voice asking, ‘Where are you?’

‘I’m in Havana.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘Almost, but why don’t we run away to Cuba?’

‘Have you gone mad? Even our favourite Cuban writer is in London!’

‘True! Let’s run away to London then!’

I was unable to leave my bed. I was thinking about Layla, Havana, Yacine, Marrakech and Ibrahim al-Khayati. I was thinking about the suffering of Al-Firsiwi and Bahia and about Ahmad Majd and his big house. I was thinking about obscure sexual adventures and a large swimming pool where I could dive in and breathe deeply under the water. I was thinking about all that at once and could not concentrate on one specific detail. When I tried, I was assailed by various details from contradictory topics. When I finally pulled myself out of this swamp, I had no strength left and found nothing better to do than lie on the couch and fall again into a troubled sleep.

Over the weekend Layla and I went to Casablanca. We attended Essam and Mahdi’s performance; we drowned in the racket of Arthritis and laughed at the innocent words the boys in the group uttered to express an anger lacking any seriousness. Layla noticed that most of the songs had a religious flavour as a result of the traditional expressions found in the lyrics of the Gnawa, the Aissawa and the Rawayes orders. I told her that most of them had been tried in the devil worship case because of the T-shirts they wore and not because of the songs they sang. When the noise reached its peak, we left. We lingered a little in the Casablanca night before meeting Ibrahim al-­Khayati and some of his friends at a restaurant. Ahmad Majd was there and he teased Layla for boycotting Marrakech.

Layla and Ahmad Majd got into an argument about the city, which ended with Layla shouting, ‘Do you want the truth? I hate Marrakech and I hate that stupid house of yours that you call Al-Andalous. I shit on all those tacky ornaments you boast about to foreigners. And I hate you, you more than everything else I’ve mentioned.’

Ahmad responded with some allusion to his years in prison.

Layla exploded. ‘No one has the right to feel superior to us because of his years in prison, especially if he was rewarded for them. Didn’t you all say that you were reconciled? But I don’t know with whom. Whoever’s been getting drunk tonight with the reconciliation money should keep his tongue under wraps. I don’t owe any madman anything! If you can’t be proud of the price you paid, it means that you loaned the system a few years of your life and got them back later with hefty interest!’

I pulled Layla back by her waist and told her, ‘We must leave immediately.’

She did not object, and on the way home I told her I did not understand her antagonism towards Ahmad. She said that she could not fathom why I had such horrible friends and that she hated them all.

‘Didn’t you say you liked Ibrahim al-Khayati?’

‘I take it back,’ she said. ‘I hate you all.’

When I held her hand she did not pull away, and after a period of silence she said, crying, ‘I was horrible to Ahmad Majd. I must apologise to him.’

I tried to undo some of the damage by inviting everyone back to Ibrahim’s house. Layla apologised, and Ahmad somehow transformed her apology into a collective, public admission of his countless virtues. As the evening progressed I enjoyed listening, for the first time, to the chattering of the men and women Ibrahim had invited. They did not seem to have any of the pretensions or overblown professionalism we normally encountered in Casablanca. They were a new generation of officials, contractors and liberal professionals who led a very pleasant life. They talked about big business deals and stock exchange listings, about foreign investment and the property market. They discussed Casablanca’s new hotels, restaurants and dance clubs. They talked about all that without any bitterness, disapproval or affected regrets, and were pleased with the city’s new entertainment options. It seemed to me then that success and wealth had become agreeable beings, as if a sweet breeze had pushed the ogre that they once symbolised into a far corner.

Slowly the atmosphere cleared and everybody lightened up, and people began telling risqué jokes and recounting the scandalous sex stories swelling the city. At this point Layla got upset and asked to leave the vulgar atmosphere. I walked her to our room in Ibrahim’s house, and there she wondered how I could have such crude friends. I told her that they were Ibrahim’s friends, but she objected, saying, ‘You too were laughing at their jokes.’ I tried to tease her but she recoiled. So I kissed her and returned to the vulgar soirée.

The evening came to a dreadful end when someone called Ibrahim and told him that there had been a huge explosion at a nightclub called Horses and Gunpowder, and that police cars and ambulances had been running nonstop for more than an hour, which meant there were a lot of victims.

We went to the beach area, but before we arrived at the nightclub we found security checkpoints that prevented us going any further. Ibrahim tried in vain to convince the secur­ity men of the need to let us pass, so we stood there amid a nervous and noisy crowd. We kept calling Mahdi and Essam, but all we got was their voicemails. I told Ibrahim nothing indicated that they had been at the nightclub, but he said nothing indicated that they had not. The voices of young men and women trying to get through the security cordon rose hyster­ically. One after another, ambulances passed by, the crowd wailing and crying at each one. Someone came from the other side and flung himself on to the barrier. He said that there were hundreds of victims and that their remains were spread over the area as far as the sea. The wailing got louder once more, until a security policeman informed us that the explosion had been caused by gas canisters and had only caused a few injuries. Through her wailing, a woman said to him, ‘May God send you good news.’ But another person came up to the security barrier and said two men had blown themselves up in the middle of the nightclub. Someone asked if there were dead people, and the man replied, ‘Ask if there are people still alive.’

I told Ibrahim it might be better to go back home, where we would hear less random news. But he thought we should go by the hospital to make sure Essam and Mahdi were not among the victims. The hospital had no news of any explosion, and had not received any warning that a large number of victims would be arriving at the emergency room. We went home broken. As we crossed the garden we heard the jittery sounds of a guitar, and as soon as we opened the door there were the voices of Essam, Mahdi and the members of their band. They were in the living room, which still showed traces of the earlier soirée.

Ibrahim shouted at them, ‘Stop this bloody mess!’

The room fell silent and Ibrahim collapsed on the closest sofa, shaking all over. I told everyone about the explosion at the Horses and Gunpowder. Mahdi said they had been there at the time and were told that a truck transporting gas had exploded in a parking lot near the beach.

‘What about the nightclub?’ I asked.

Essam said it had been evacuated, in case another explosion was part of the programme.

‘Then there were no victims?’ I asked.

‘We don’t know. There might have been. We’ll find out from the news bulletins.’

I said, ‘You don’t seem bothered by what’s happened, or by the fact that there might be dead and injured or terrorised people, Ibrahim among them, who almost lost his mind over worry for you. All that is mere detail?’

‘They are details, not mere detail,’ Mahdi said.

The others laughed, and one of them said with feigned ser­­iousness, ‘The fact is that the explosion present in your head did not happen.’

I was gripped by a desire to slap the young man and controlled myself with difficulty. Then I walked over to Ibrahim, pulled him off the sofa, and led him to his room, shouting at them without looking back, ‘We don’t want to hear a sound from you.’

I heard Essam say in affected Arabic, ‘May you have a good night.’

The group responded with noisy laughter.

The next morning was the kind of morning I hated: Layla was in a rotten mood, the young men were asleep on the living room sofas, Ibrahim had gone to his office, the maid had yet to arrive, the kitchen was a mess and coffee was not at hand. The only thing I could do was put on my shoes and go back to Rabat. Just then Ahmad Majd called and asked about the previous night’s explosion.

When I told him it was just a gas explosion, he said, somewhat surprised, ‘Then nothing happened to Essam and Mahdi?’

‘No, nothing happened. If it had, we would now be in the funeral procession, while you are lying in bed waiting for detailed news about the incident.’

Layla and I went out, a sea breeze, moist and fresh, erasing the rotting smell of the closed house. I would need an entire day to get over this morning.

Layla was walking fast and crying. She said she was scared and wanted to see her daughter immediately. We went to the railway station, and since we had to wait for half an hour, I suggested drinking a cup of coffee.

Layla replied, upset, ‘I don’t want coffee or anything else. I want to see my daughter. I’m ashamed of myself. What would I tell her if I had been killed in the explosion? What would she have done? She has no one but me.’

I said, ‘But you were sleeping in a bed where nothing exploded.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I was sitting in a restaurant, then I was in the street and then at a silly party!’

I drank my coffee quickly, reading the newspapers’ banner headlines about the arrest of Al-Qaeda sleeper cells. This was for the second time in six months. I scrutinised the names carefully as if trying to see their faces; I had a vague feeling I would recognise one of them. I always had a premonition that I would recognise someone on the list, one of those confused people we never expected to find in a terrorist organisation, the kind of person who would eat and drink and laugh with us and visualise us as flying remains while staring at our faces.

We got on the train and sat silently side by side. When we reached Rabat, Layla took my hand and asked while squeezing it, ‘Do you hate me?’

‘Not yet!’

I did not see Layla for a week after that. We talked for hours on the phone about everything – her daughter, her little quarrels, domestic matters, funny incidents about her ex-husband and our own limited concerns, which we could cover in one minute. But whenever the conversation touched on the possibility of our seeing each other, she quickly changed the subject. It was as if the explosion had cast a dark shadow across our relationship.

Fatima returned from Havana and gave me a call. She was clearly quite anxious, so I assumed she was not on good terms with her Kosovar live-in boyfriend, but I did not ask. We talked about Ahmad Majd, Bahia and their daughter and about Ibrahim al-Khayati. She asked strange questions about everyone and wanted to know to what degree each one of us was in harmony with himself.

I said to her, joking, ‘The only person I know who has a good relationship with himself is you.’

‘I wish!’ she said firmly.

The following week she surprised me one morning, standing at my office door at the paper, greeting my colleagues, who welcomed her warmly. We went to the Beach restaurant, where I ordered a meal of crab and slices of salmon in cucumber sauce.

She said, laughing, ‘I know that you’ll smell nothing of this massacre!’

‘On the contrary, I’ll smell the most specific scents and the very weakest ones.’

She looked at me in surprise, and I explained that a miracle had restored my sense of smell.