He said to himself: You have incurable delusions. You think this story between you and her has a mystic dimension. Won’t you get rid of this obsession? You are here with her, with her charm and shortcomings. Isn’t she a woman? Isn’t she special in this unending ocean of people? Isn’t she marvelous as a human being and as a woman? She is a poor thing too. She is restless and ambitious. She is jolly and has her own insignificant and significant secrets, like everyone else. Isn’t that so? There are defects in her body as well as irresistible appeal. Yes, many have loved her, but what of it? She made mistakes, made sacrifices, became tired, performed duties and more. She did not concern herself with ethical and social conventions, but took them, intelligently and thoughtfully, into consideration. Her passion and her compassion are large enough for everything. Anyhow, you know only that she, a woman who knows how to please and how to enjoy herself, is with you. And you love her. Let it be. Can’t you accept that within its own limits?
The lofty minaret—slender, graceful, isolated; alone in the sky. From it, chains of colored electric lights dangle luminous balls of hard candy swaying without touching the millenary stones, whose flesh stands striped in wide horizontal lines of faded red and dusty white.
She walks with confidence next to him, but she is not with him. Tomboyish but with feminine grace of an empowering and daring kind, wearing expensive low-heeled shoes—their leather shriveled and faded by dust. Her wide skirt tightly covers her body; her blouse open, her full bosom moist and glittering with light sweat in the bright night. People are hardly looking at them in the crowded area. She is oblivious of him. He feels her withdraw into her private world.
Above the centuries-old dome is a small crescent, rusty from the powerful rays radiating from below, toward the faded blue skin of the sky. Beneath the deep narrow door the holy steps are lit by electric lamps. They lead to an inner sanctuary seeming distant and apart.
He was stunned by this heavy-edged sensual luxury. She was next to him, alone and happy: full of energy after hours of laziness and apathy that seemed without end; dynamic and aroused, attached to many things and many people, yet singular, secluded. She had performed unknown great things of which no one knew, and in the end she did not do any of the things she really wanted to do.
On the other side were wooden mashrabiya balconies and a huge sign bearing the inscription, “Arab Socialist Union.” Its doors were of wrought iron with circular designs—their stones carved in splendid imitation of the traditional style, covered by a layer of thick, dingy dust. Western bar chairs overlooked the Nile, retained a 1920s splendor. The advertisements on the mirrors were made of Belgian glass, the sides of their silvery mercury worn out. In the center of the wide street stood a row of carts displaying all kinds of fruits, vegetables, toasted local and Syrian bread—frail, small, stiff, flat loaves—with sesame seeds, radishes, fresh lettuce, leeks with dangling leaves. The street teemed with jallabiya gowns, qibqab clogs, malayat wraps, trousers, southern Egyptian turbans, horns, neon lights, sizzling oil, the heavy and pungent smell of fried fish in the night air.
He came close to her and took her tender arm. How many of your yearnings were frustrated, Rama? And how many joys fulfilled? You are limited, defined yet boundless. Always searching for some lost perfection, as if you were perfect, as if you were immortal. In his swaying heart, both gentleness and alarm are vying. His love knows no frontiers, has none of the unsteadiness of liquid. His love is sharp with wounding projections, sketching deep scar lines into living flesh.
On their first night in Cairo her small dark car was making its way on the Nile Road, under the lights of Imbaba Bridge. The car’s smell agitated his senses; a mixture of smelly leather and tin, with the stickiness of old milk and the heat of burning gas.
She had been crying as she drove. Her tears gushed silently, profusely. He felt wounded, profoundly frustrated—why? He was baffled as he gazed at her tears with awakened eyes, saying to himself: What hurts her? What would console her?
She said: Nothing joyful ever happens to me.
He used to say to himself cruelly: What does she want? Does she want a man—a man no matter who? Or does she want me? And why my concentration on my own self? Should I continue feeling enclosed and separate? Why can’t I join in this strong current, gushing with blood, semen, and muddy waters? Why can’t I melt in it, gulp my pleasures from it, heedlessly, anonymously, without identity? She seems to want to drown—every night—in the never-ending waves of this river, allowing her fertile blackness, the mud of her body, to be available for appropriation, free for all, in order to become clean and bright—a blooming, glowing, yellowish-dark lotus, coming out from the mud between the thighs of ancient Hapi of the river without shores, both springing from and pouring into the underworld sea endlessly—a solid sandy island by now.
The car stopped in Sahel Rawd al-Farag Square. In the distance, there was a prickly pear cart on which a gas lamp droned with wild flames in a clipped cloud of tiny, flying, nocturnal mosquitoes. Its peddler with his long jallabiya casts an obscure figure in the shade. The Coca-Cola container, with its faded red color, the paint having peeled and erased the Arabic and English letters from its bruised sides. Taxis, old and blue, standing on the Corniche Road under the trees with low ceilings as if dusty, sleepy scarabs. The street leading to open deserted yards in which one can barely distinguish the holes between heaps of stones and bricks. The cafés, bright and empty. The script in their big signs large, colored, cursive. The Quran resounding powerfully from the cafés in confident recitation. Narrow, low, and subdued houses. The traffic policeman, dark and slight from afar, standing as if lost in the middle of the square. She said to him: Mikhail, what if I asked you to leave everything and come with me?
Her eyes appeared mad. But the rest of her was calm, still. She was motionless following the crying spell. By the street light filtering through the mist of imperceptible, minute gases, her cheeks were serene. Her plump hands rested casually on her thighs, lifeless on her old dark-blue short skirt. In her inner, intimate, buried core everything was afire. Deeply, carefully, in this body that was both revealed and concealed.
He said: If you really ask me to do so, yes.
His quivering voice came hurrying, no sign of thoughtfulness in it.
He did not respond simply, instantly, and directly by an absolute affirmation, without conditions since she had not said to him with complete certainty and complete despair, in an absolute way: Leave everything and come with me. He did not say to her: Yes, yes, now and at any time. He did not even tell her: Yes, whenever you ask me to, at any moment you ask me. He knew her question related to a number of different things. In fact he knew the question was not related to him personally. It was not meant to have him leave everything and go with her. He knew she was asking for something else, something temporary, transient. In this profoundly striking question, she was asking him for only a night perhaps, or even part of a night, until the morning. She was playing with the impossible, gambling with what was necessary, with the very necessity of life and death.
She said: Yes, I suppose you love me, in a way.
He did not say to her: In fact, it is you who loves me, in a way. Or does this statement of yours indicate “I don’t love you”? I don’t know. There will not be a story joining us. What is this then? What is between us? An earthquake, a hurricane, the falling sky? As for me, I love you without limits, without definitions, without reservations; a perfect love that wants you all, completely. Of course, completeness is also impossible. The impossibility is complete.
She said to him: I am myself with you. With you alone, I try as much as I can, with all that I can, to be myself, frank to the point of utmost honesty. Frank in my changing moods, in my distraction and wandering if you will; sorrowful at times and distant; cheerful, of course, if I am in the mood, full of vigor and interest. Isn’t it so? But you say I don’t love you. I don’t know what you want me to say.
Following the crying jag, her face was
bright and soft. But now it turned into a mask again.
He said to her bitterly: You are not sentimental at all.
He did not say to her: Does this mean that you do not understand sentiment?
I have never caught you in a sentimental state, stormed by emotions, except when you were talking—and rarely did you talk—about your inner self defensively. You with the multiple masks!
He also said to her: You’re strict; you don’t let go.
Your speculative, silent, clinical gaze that calculates everything, making decisions alone. Your private pleasure in diagnosing, knowing, and possessing. A moment, then you turn away without interest except in satiating your neutral cruel drive to press then relax—given your fear of sharing and your aversion to partnership, given your concern not to give up your very self. You give up your body, yes, but then you abandon this same body—when you want to—for appropriation with no fences or precautions—but only in order to preserve yourself without any scratches or compromises.
She said to him: What is this? Are we performing an autopsy? I hope we don’t have already in front of us the corpse of our relationship. We have not yet put it on the slab for dissection. There is something still alive between us, I hope. I know how to be a true friend. Believe me, I know how to be a friend, and I am very proud of our friendship.
She would tell him later: Perhaps what is between us is a romantic friendship.
He said calmly with a repressed voice: I do not want friendship; I don’t want you as a friend.
Later on, he used to repeat to himself his response. He never wavered. He did not want this friendship, he wanted something else, larger and permanent. He would say to himself: You are very ambitious and empty-handed, aren’t you? His distressful tears fell heavily one after the other, snatching with each teardrop a rib from his ribcage, from the inner wall of his heart. With years, the tears had dried off and become solidified, his suffering become rock-like, replacing the youthful storms that shake and whirl, pouring down pain that turns into rocks that can’t melt or crumble. And when these rocks break up under the weight of cruelty, they make blunt, jagged fragments, oppressive and repressive, impossible to displace.
He knew she would use everything in order to obtain what she wanted, literally everything: polished arguments and sophisticated ideas that she knew how to manipulate while scrutinizing their various facets; modern values and traditional ones that she mobilized, displaying their core and disconnecting their charges as she pleased. She knew how to plead and implore while she wept. How to play on vanities, how to pacify fears, how to inflame prejudices, how to tap the inflated pride and pat facile arrogance. She knew how to play meek and how to stoop. She also knew how to become a shrew, and harass. She would do everything. She would mold her body, mind, and complex make-up into a living, gushing weapon and attack. She would besiege from all sides, but with absolute honesty. She would use no weapon apart from herself: other than she and you and the relationship between you two alone—a relationship that truly sums up the entire world, though it does not transcend itself. She, her body and her soul, her womb and her intelligence, all of her, and only her; she, herself, is her own weapon and tool. No matter her ways and maneuvers, she is honest, completely honest. The matter is entirely between you and her. Nobody else, nothing else, outside the two of you has anything to do with it. Only the two of you. This is where her singularity and exceptional veracity lie. Only the two of you can decide what you want to do with this pliant and powerful drive, enveloping, immersing, and strangling each one of you with its unbearably soft siege.
She said to him: There is no sense in staying with me in the room, I am waiting for a telephone call. Don’t you want to go to the museum or to a shop? You can just go window-shopping. Really, I don’t want you to confine yourself here with me.
He said: What? How could this be possible? No, I will stay with you.
She said with irritation, as she glanced at him: Never. I don’t want you to be irritated with me and with yourself in this shut-off room.
He said: But, my dear, I don’t want to. I want to be confined as long as I am with you.
The confinement in the clouded density of the room was not relieved by the window—looking like an open wound—as if her presence with him, her flesh and her tense body, her nightgown over which she had slipped her faded wide skirt—all were filling the confinement with a panting density.
She said to him afterward: I’m going out for a while. I have an appointment.
He said: With whom?
She said: You know who, I told you about him.
She had told him about her friendship with the former Sudanese prime minister, the good-hearted old man with sharp intelligence and broad knowledge, still preserving the traces of Afro-Arab handsomeness. Out of medical and political reasons, he had opted for exile. She said to him: That man has witnessed the birth of all the children in my family. Whenever he visited Egypt, presents for them were on top of his list. The only time he enjoyed himself was when he was visiting us at our home.
The man had come two days before and greeted Mikhail coldly with his cold palms, indifferent eyes, discerning glances indicating discreet sharpness. They had watched a tennis match together on TV in the somber and bare sitting room with dispersed, unused, desolate, leather-ripped chairs. The man talked with the skill of an eloquent, experienced, aging, weary diplomat about tennis strokes and fate strokes. He went on with elaborate technical details about the game of tennis and the game of politics. She exchanged conversational eloquence with him. Mikhail never stopped wondering over her skillful discourse—calling on her swift, trained hands, her graceful, elegant mind—on a subject she didn’t know the least about, but whose general contours she could sense from her interlocutor himself. Eroticism flowed continually from every pore in her body, mind, and eyes.
What lies between her and those old men, those decrepit remains of bodies and minds, who were once youthful and dazzling, who have left their imprints on the stones of history? She is always there in the background, effective nevertheless. Her erotic tenderness—soft, delicate—envelops those massive, dried out, hard-edged, left-over remains of men, who have experienced bygone masculine glories.
She had said to him: My heart goes to Don Quixote. I love him, I love everything in him.
The old man who does not want to let go of a lance placed in his hand by an extinct age.
She collected Don Quixote paintings, wooden and iron statuettes, metallic insignia etched with his distinctive figure. She also collected his personifications, his wasted dreams. He asked himself anxiously: Do I fight, too, the windmills? Yes, justice is impossible; love is impossible. Can I, then, give up? Can I resign myself?
When returning, she knocked on his door unexpectedly. She had come back early. He was having a brief afternoon siesta. Agitated, he was conversing, half-asleep, with people in his dream. He did not know who they were, but then he did know them. When he heard the knocks he got up in a hurry and opened the door, half-naked, not knowing exactly where the door knob was as he opened it. With a quick stern glance she said to him: Are you doing a striptease or what?
She said to him: What do you think? Do you think I am going to have an affair with you and I will be your mistress? This is ridiculous! I am not your mistress, and I will not be your mistress. We will not have an affair. Doubtless, there is another formula, yes, to be friends; that is all. We have to find this formula. A romantic friendship, perhaps.
She said: Where will all this lead us to? Nothing, perhaps.
His silence was, at that time, another treason.
O Rama, my distant beloved, am I simply a number in the economy of your cravings? Am I an equation between two brackets in the accounts of your passion and the pressing demands of your flesh? No, I am not the sum result of arithmetical calculation. No, there will never be an inevitable and neat solution to the problem.
Let it be. Isn’t your gift of yourself, your gift of your offered body—even
within the calculus of senses—a donation that cannot be substituted for, nor compared to, anything else? Why am I standing helpless before such a donation? You are marvelous in your offer. Yes, this pliant open body is offered to others, to the others, offered whenever the night sets, immersing it and baptizing it in the virility of the universe, in the wide, running, ever-changing river.
His rejection smacked of boyishness in the final analysis. He did, and still does, insist on the singular, the absolute, the unique. This is not to be found here, on the shore of a world where the sun rises and sets not for one, not for all, not for anything, not for anyone. The sun is not a constant sculpted burning disk in the petrified surface of the sky. The black night prevails then withdraws from this constantly anonymous mass, made up of infinite units without end and without distinctions.
The car was stuck, unable to advance much in the human torrent, moving mechanically, slowly, along Fuad Street. The exhaust smoke, the intermittent yet persistent honking horns, carbon dioxide, muffled curses behind car-window glass, the unrelenting whistle of the Security pick-up truck, filled with soldiers, hardly stopping yet unable to make its way through the traffic—jammed and creeping slowly, but not silenced. He said to her: What is happening? She did not answer. She was driving the small car, moving it bit by bit, changing gears and modifying speed, her foot rising up and pressing down. Her skirt was slightly above her knees; beneath it her legs showing. On the dusty black mat, partly pulled off from the car-floor, were the remains of a crushed matchbox, a folded and ripped cellophane paper, cigarette ashes, a ribbon of faded fabric. The leg next to him short; its calf tightly round. He could see the interior of the other leg’s knee through the grayish, transparent hose—looking whitish because of the reflection of the back light filtered through the car-window. Her legs were two short pillars in a low-ceilinged, secret building. Just the same, they had an extraordinary smoothness, not the sort produced by a sculptor, but a smoothness obtained by the touches of several generations of worshiping hands. The car exuded, intensely, a smell of burning oil and burnt milk.
Rama and the Dragon Page 11