‘Where were you?’
‘I was wandering around Walili,’ I replied.
‘Were you looking?’ she asked.
‘Why would I look by myself like a madman?’
‘Haven’t we agreed that you would only look for it when I’m there?’
I said sharply, ‘I was not looking and I couldn’t care less about finding this loon’s hat or his poetry!’
But the seed of doubt was planted in Diotima. She thought I had found the book of poetry and buried it again to keep it for myself. That was because a few days before I had unintentionally left on the breakfast table a piece of paper where I had written:
Come on, it suits me to be silent, do not let me see again
See what is being killed and let me at least
Go in peace to my solitude
Let this be our true goodbye.
Drink, then pass me this holy poison,
Let me drink with you from the Lethe — saving river of oblivion –
A brim-full cup to help us forget
All the hatred and the love that was.
I am leaving,
But the time to see you
Might return, Diotima,
Here, anew.
Her blood has been totally shed by desire,
While aimlessly, we proceed.
When I realised that I had forgotten the piece of paper, I looked for it anxiously. I came across Diotima sitting in the lobby with frozen features. When I stood before her, she rose and said in a metallic voice, ‘When did you start writing poetry?’
I adopted a blasé, semi-sarcastic attitude and replied, ‘From the moment we began looking for it under the rubble.’
‘I didn’t know you had a drop of tenderness in you to make you write poetry!’
‘There is no relation between poetry and tenderness, please. It is only a question of daring,’ I explained.
‘And where do you want to go and which holy poison do you want to take?’
‘Those are just poetic meditations,’ I said.
She watched my face for a long time as if she were looking for a trace of poetry hidden under my skin. Then she took the piece of paper out of her pocket and handed it to me.
I was folding the paper nervously and getting ready to leave, when she asked me, ‘Have you found the book?’
I shook my head, in sincere and honest denial, and left.
That incident, if we can describe it as such, was responsible for turning my relationship with the poetry book upside down. Something happened that day that made me consider the book as a last testament addressed to me and not as Diotima’s inheritance based on family ties. I was responsible for saving the poetry with all this meant in terms of violence, exile and eternal fire. If I had not yet become aware of the value of poetry in my life, it was because my fate was preparing me for this striking encounter, which made me consider poetry a fluke of nature. It was like walking carefree, totally absorbed by one’s musings, and then suddenly finding oneself face to face with a waterfall cascading down from high above. Thus was born my relationship with poetry. I would even come across it while changing the wheel of my Mercedes under the blazing sun. This was also how the lost book of poetry came back into my life, as an adventure that concerned me alone, without anyone else being involved, whether related to Hans Roeder or not.
We shall see, Youssef, which of us is better able to domesticate ruins. Your father has not spent a day without seeing a building collapse and people around him remove stones and earth and pull out wounded souls. We used to begin the day in Bu Mandara by lifting tons of earth from the Rif to restore the image carved in our memory in exile. In Germany we started our day thinking about a lost paradise of unknown location. Here I identified with the ruins until I became an abandoned house myself. Even the beach house you encouraged me to build in the country was destroyed by the Al Hoceima earthquake. Sometimes I tell myself that if I had not built that house, the earthquake would not have happened. I then curse Satan and say to myself, everything comes from God.
Driver, slow down a little. Wouldn’t you like to have a drink at the Cantina? Why do you always refuse this offer? Every day I say, let’s go and have a drink at the hotel bar and take a look at the mosaic before going home, and you tell me to go on my own and drink the wind! Fine, I will go and I will drink the wind. There is no place like the Zaytoun Hotel to drink a good wind!
Let’s begin then with a visit to that hotel, or to its immortal remains. You may now put aside your hats and your heavy bottles of mineral water. Diotima used to sit here surrounded by nymphs and dolphins. Here sat the poxed, scratching and getting drunk. In this mosaic, Bacchus lavishes his munificence on the worthy, and in this one he finds Ariadne wandering lost on the shores of Naxos. He looks at her and sees that she is more beautiful, more dangerous, more delicate and more prone to despair than the labyrinth itself. Here is the mosaic that depicts the fall of Ptolemy drenched in blood, trying to behave like a king or die for the sake of a noble cause and be pardoned.
Here is Bacchus again meeting Medusa by chance, and she changes him into stone with her enchanting gaze. He was condemned to remain at the entrance to the site, a statue of black granite posing as an eternal adolescent, carrying bunches of grapes from Bab al-Rumaila over his shoulders, until a stupid thief toppled him from his glorious throne!
No need to hurry, you stupid taxi. Your old man Al-Firsiwi is ready for the glorious return. Drive slowly. Why are you looking at the city as if seeing it for the first time? Don’t worry about me tomorrow. I will sleep in the lap of the nymphs and swim with the dolphins in the opposite direction, as befits a respectable mosaic like myself. What are the dolphins? Drive, my son, drive. You have nothing to do with this world! None of us have anything to do with this world.
The Book of Elegies
1
I stopped writing Letters to My Beloved.
One morning I sat at my desk and became aware, even before thinking about the matter, that I wouldn’t be able to write another letter to the woman I had loved and forgotten, even though I hadn’t forgotten I was still in love with her. Nearly every love story encompasses an expansion in time, for many are the lovers who tell each other: ‘I loved you before I loved you’ or ‘I loved you ever since I was no more than an idea in the universe’ or ‘I love you outside the time that brings us together’ or ‘I love you at a time that does not belong to us any more’ or ‘I will love you for ever’. And many other words that lovers use to give their overflowing love an impossible infinity.
The story of the lover who loses his memory and is unable to find his beloved in a defined form is, to some extent, the story of our relationship with everything we build in our lives and one that we confuse with our delusions and doubts. Over time we are unable to confirm which are the material and concrete aspects of this construction and which are nothing but defeated dreams. We wonder what is truly fulfilled in this blend. What is it that we call our life? Is it the things that were or those that could have been?
As I asked those questions, some confusion developed between me and the personality I had invented. I had the impression that what I had endured for years while writing those letters was a loss of memory. I had considered the letters emotional compensation or a presentiment of the memory loss that I would later succumb to. Perhaps in some fashion I projected on to Layla when I met her and found in my relationship with her a sort of substitution between what was and what never existed. But in my relationship with her, paradoxically, it was she who anchored me forcefully in the present. She surrounded me with a wall of reality that made me recover all at once important details in my relationship with people and places, not as a form of recollection, but as multiple and real possibilities.