The Arch and the Butterfly Read Online Free

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