In such way, a fragrance cached in the box of miracles leads us to a timeless pleasure that moves through our body, shaking its withered branches and scattering their leaves to the wind. But we know neither who enjoys what nor who seduces whom.
I asked her, ‘Can I stay a little?’
‘Of course, you have to stay, even if you didn’t say I love you!’
‘But you asked me to leave immediately.’
Panic stricken she continued, ‘Impossible! Did I really say that?’
‘Yes you did, and you also said: “I never want to see you again!” ’
‘They seem like my words, but I was in no state to say them.’
‘Perhaps you said them at another time or in another life. To me or, hopefully, to another man.’
‘You could have said I love you even without feeling it.’ she said, ‘Just like you would say anything else. Would it have hurt you to say it?’
‘I did not see a need for it. I figured that such a powerful sentence ought to be said in a different setting.’
She explained herself. ‘You should know that I feel insulted if it is not said to me while making love.’
‘You’re exaggerating.’
‘Anyhow, given you’re a man who claims not to feel, the sex was still the best thing to have happened to me in years.’
‘It’s worthy of two persons living a great love story,’ I said.
‘True!’ she said pensively.
She then stretched her body over mine, took my face between her hands and said, ‘I like the way you do it!’
I was absorbed in contemplating her face, with the attitude of someone without a care in the world, when she suddenly got up in a panic. ‘My daughter’s school has ended! You must leave right now.’
I got up ponderously, but she pounced on me with my clothes. She tidied up the room, got dressed, helped me get dressed and leapt around until I found myself at the lift door. She was laughing and told me, having calmed down a little, ‘What a miracle! A charming man!’
I walked slowly down the street on my way to the bus stop, then it occurred to me to keep walking. When I left Bourgogne Square and turned right to enter the dreamy street housing the Ecole Normale Supérieur, Yacine poked me with his little finger and asked, ‘Is she a new love story?’
‘I love no one,’ I replied sharply.
He answered immediately, ‘Easy, easy now. I’m not partisan here. You could even consider me a neutral bystander. In the best case scenario, I can help you ask good questions.’
‘What I need most is good answers,’ I said.
‘I know, but the dead don’t have answers!’
‘Too bad. Tell me, how did you figure out it was a new love story?’
‘When a man is on his way to the bus stop, then decides to walk, and does this as if he were compressing the distance between him and a woman he was just with, there are grounds to ask whether he hasn’t fallen in love!’
‘What definitive proofs!’
‘You’re making fun of the matter to cover it up.’ he said, ‘But as you were walking, I heard you say, “Me too, I like the way you do it.” ’
‘I said that while I was alone?’
‘Yes, quite a few times!’
‘I think I’m suffering from a kind of asynchronicity. I should have said that in reply to something that was said to me fifteen minutes before — not because that’s what I feel, but only to provide a decent answer.’
‘I don’t know an illness with that name, but you have strange illnesses. Who knows? Since there was a space of time between what was said to you and what you said in reply, there might be an interval between your falling in love and your being aware that you’ve fallen in love.’
‘You’ve either said more than necessary or you haven’t said enough!’
‘I’m only trying to understand what you called asynchronicity,’ he explained.
‘But you’ve put your finger on something that tortures me.’
‘Such as?’
‘Such as the feeling that I’m belatedly living the scenes of an old affair.’
‘Do you mean that you loved this woman in another life?’
‘Don’t be stupid. It’s just an affair set in two times.’
‘Love in instalments!’
‘Or something like that.’
That evening I wrote in Letters to My Beloved:
I am waiting for you. All I do is wait for you. I am neither in a hurry nor discouraged. I am not sure of anything and I am neither suspicious nor in despair. The fact is that I am waiting for you and I feel that this gives my life meaning, though I do not know what it means to give one’s life meaning. I waited for you as if you were still in the summer nightclub, while I was in the desolate square. Why did you stay there and why did I leave? Are you still dancing with someone we met there? You were extremely moved to see him and you said that he was one of your dearest friends. I imagine that you are still angry with me because of the funny way I danced to the soundtrack of Pulp Fiction. I intended it to be an awful, funny dance to spoil the artistry of your dance. But you insisted that we do it perfectly, the way Travolta and Uma Thurman did it in the film, including maintaining the right distance to allow you to pass your fingers before your eyes and face. It was the other person who provoked me, his muscles moving in a blind mirroring. Only you were close to the soul of the dance, even if I was busy performing that insolent mockery. There was something sarcastic in the film as well, but I can’t remember it any more. Travolta only danced with his body, but you — I mean Uma Thurman — danced with her soul. She was saying, ‘I want to win a prize this evening!’ But what she meant was, ‘I want to win you.’ And you, to whom were you saying that?
Here we are now, in the desolate square, in the garden adjacent to the entrance of the building. Here we are storming the dawn with our nudity; here you are taking away what is left of my caution and placing it on the stones of the wall where you press your open hands and form with the white contours of your body a wound in the night. Then you vanish, leaving no trace of you in the ashes surrounding me.
2
I jolted Bahia out of her afternoon nap, jeopardising the quiet of the afternoon. Ahmad Majd wanted to talk to her about an urgent matter related to a lawsuit her family had initiated over land near the capital. She sat up in bed and, after much grumbling, snatched the telephone from my hand — as if we were fighting over it — and placed it directly to her ear.
Whenever conversation revolved around the land whose ownership the government had expropriated from my wife and her brothers, the atmosphere became charged. Dialogue among the siblings, between the lawyer and the siblings, and among all those involved in the matter, became impossible. No one had a solution for it.
For more than fifty years, successive generations of my wife’s family had lived with dreams of the unexploited wealth lying in a piece of real estate that stretched along the bank of the Bou Regreg, from its mouth to the edge of Akkrach. They had no rivals except the awqaf with their huge properties and a few old-established families from Salé who owned scattered lots.
When the Akkrach rubbish dump settled in that romantic spot of the neglected capital, with its waste, its fires, its smoke and its foul smells, the value of the land went through the floor. The only ones who endured in this rotten hell that stretched along the river were potters with their kilns, a few farmers who grew contaminated vegetables and, slightly later, some villages that sprang up around the dump. Their inhabitants came from the wasteland of Zaeer, the village of Oulad Moussa and the hills of Akkrach, and from the slums along the river. All this happened in an area of Rabat with the most unique and natural beauty. Meanwhile, Rabat’s middle classes, with their lack of imagination, expanded on the plain leading to Zaeer Road and fought a stupid war over the sea and the river at the same time.