Mansour's Eyes

by Ryad Girod

  On the long, stony, and arid plains of the Tafna, which perhaps he saw as great pastures, Abdelkader had his mount rear up like a flash with the famous lines of Ibn ʿArabi in his mind:

  My heart has become able to take on all forms

  It is a pasture for gazelles and an abbey for monks

  It is a temple for idols and the Kaaba for any to circle around it

  It is the tables of the Torah and also the tomes of the Qur’an

  The religion I practice is that of love

  Wherever its mounts may turn, love is my religion and my faith!

  and sensing, perhaps, for the duration of that flash during which his mount reared up and he brandished his saber just before bringing it down on the neck of one of the elegant soldiers of the King of France, sensing that the fleetingness of this scene would be fixed in bronze, here and there, in that new nation they would call Algeria, and sensing—or maybe more than sensing, maybe seeing … seeing beyond the decades and the centuries … seeing the bronze statues desecrated, here and there, in that old country that would continue to be called Algeria, covered in obscene writing, in insults, in spit and in piss—seeing perhaps, during the time his horse was reared up and kicking and bounding forth, that all peoples who lose a thought, a grandeur, are inevitably bounding forth into violence and self-destruction.

  When the blade is brought down on your neck, an entire people, an entire nation, an entire community of believers, will return to a pre-Islamic period, dark, violent, apocalyptic.

  I left the scorching terrace of Al Faisaliyah and the pessimism that it had inspired in me and I raced over to Stan and Nadine’s house to find Mansour and remind him about Abdelkader’s circles and Faisal’s tears in the hope that something would come of it or that something would cease happening in his donkey head and that everything would return to the place it was destined to be … our lives, their trajectories … and to make him catch at least a glimpse of the possibility of holding onto something from Abdelkader’s circles, from Faisal’s tears, of holding onto something of this world that was evolving so quickly or, if absolutely necessary, to just accept the monstrosity and to settle for understanding even a tiny little part of it, one that was a more appropriate size for us, and if absolutely necessary to give up on that which is too big for us and to at long last make a fresh start on a new existence devoid of pretention, without great aspirations, those the wide avenues of Riyadh bid us to pursue, from mall to mall, in luxury automobiles without worrying about the rest, about what isn’t working or what we don’t understand, and to hold on to the small pleasures stolen here and there, as we had so well begun to do, out among the cliffs of the Najd or in the bars of Dubai or the brothels of Manama, and then, even if the small pleasures turned out to be ephemeral, the tears would be just as brief. Full of hope in the luxurious Camaro as it flew through the deserted avenues of Riyadh, crushed by the sun at the height of that sweltering afternoon, full of hope that everything would return to how it had been before, I crossed that hell with a smile on my lips, between the rows of buildings packed one against another as if they were melted or soldered to that dry and hard earth where not a soul would dare take their shadow for a stroll and as if finally there were none left, no souls and no shadows … flying, with the sensation of being free and happy, inside the leather and air-conditioned interior of the luxurious Camaro, crossing that capital which had abruptly become Sodom or Gomorrah with the sensation of being reborn and of starting over … crossing Riyadh without ever encountering anyone other than King Abdullah and his welcoming face on the giant billboards that punctuated the length of Tahlia Street that I traveled down at top speed and right to its end until I was gobbled up by the streets, then the alleys that would lead us, my hope and me, to reclaim Mansour … And it was full of this hope that I stretched out my arm and that, miraculously once again, my finger reached the button of the intercom and I heard the bell ring in Stan and Nadine’s villa …

  7.

  … AND NADINE’S VOICE, nearly unrecognizable through the intercom, informed me that Mansour wasn’t there and that she was alone and would be glad if I came in for a moment. Even though I had made up my mind to convince everyone it was still possible to return to normal life, as I faced Nadine I found myself petrified, as if by Medusa, turned to stone by her beauty … I remained mute at the bottom of the stairs, which she descended to join me, mute as she took my arm to lead me out under the acacia, which, although it offered only slight shade, was still lifesaving beneath the violent sun that was starting to burn our skin. Mute as she rested her hand on my arm even though we were already in the dappled shade of that poor acacia and as she revealed to me that, in spite of everything, she couldn’t do without this oppressive heat and that this earth, as distressed as it was, was her own … and as if there was any need to argue about it—or maybe it was simply to make conversation?—she explained to me how she had ended up here—here, right next to me, I thought discretely—her hand still resting on my arm and my heart racing under the garden’s poor acacia … while she told me of her life or the important parts of it, like her childhood in al-Khobar where her father had migrated to try to make his fortune in petroleum and her teenage years at the French school of Riyadh where her father had changed careers to become a salesman of luxury RVs … And, while she unpacked her life for me, or what had been its watershed moments, like her studies in Paris and her thesis on Bergson, I sought on her face the tiniest details that made Nadine such an irresistible woman, in her way of tucking her curls back behind her ears, her gaze that was successively sad and cold and benevolent and hopeless and loving and her lips, ample and full and slightly parted, promising to offer all of her sensuality and even more … until I forgot the reason I had come, concentrated on that irresistibly attractive face and those lips that shared with me the Lebanon of her holidays and her first loves and her first battles and her first losses only to return, after a smile and as I sought once again the tiniest details that made up what seemed to me to be perfect harmony, to that thesis at the Sorbonne on Bergson and mysticism, which had left her without energy and without her bearings and without money in a Paris full of liquor and misadventures and illness, from which her father had more or less exfiltrated her against her will and brought her back to Riyadh where he had become responsible for the administration of a sports complex and where she had met Stan, who had seemed to be the exact opposite of Bergson, which she had seen as a clear sign and hadn’t hesitated a single moment to reply with a Yes! when he had asked her to share her life with him immediately after her father’s expulsion from Saudi Arabia for reasons related to age and taxation and then there was nothing left but the sun in her life, its burns and its glare, violent and vital at the same time … and I decided to give in entirely, she said, to giving up. In the dry heat of the Riyadh nights, I found comfort for my waiting solely in the company of the poets and the prophets. And I awoke, every morning, beside that lengthy waiting … Nadine maintained the distance between the two of us through the chronological unfolding of her existence—or was she showing me the trajectory that had brought her to where she was, under that acacia?—that distance I could not manage to reduce and I contented myself with her hand on my arm and with hearing resonate in me the Yes! she had recently pronounced as I attempted to comprehend the harmonious order or the random distribution that made Nadine’s face such a marvel, violent and vital at the same time … right up until the day where everything finally came together in the revelation I had at the end of that long period of waiting. Until the day that time contracted itself to such a point that it had to break into pieces. No before and no after … a rupture I resisted but to which I finally yielded and in the face of which I gathered up all of my élan vital, preparing to throw myself forward to embrace each and every part … but Nadine didn’t leave me enough time because she took me in her arms and squeezed me very hard as she told me that soon she would have to leave this country and that everything that should happen would happ
en, and when I went to extricate myself from her arms to find enough space so that my lips could reach hers, the front gate began to scrape and swing open and warn us of Ikram’s arrival. Nadine’s arms pushed me away just like that and I took flight as if something had happened between us and without letting Ikram’s gaze meet my own.

  Then, Mansour, another hope was born in me and I lost the one I had of leading you back to the life that we had lived before, and I lost, before Nadine’s immense eyes, the life that had been my own. Because I too, Mansour, I hoped for something greater than myself so I could go on living a life that wasn’t that of an animal and because I wasn’t going to be able to hold up long against the need to understand something about this world where the pleasures seem to lack substance and the tears are of perpetual anguish. And that’s where we are today, under this yellow sky where the winds taper the clouds, giving them the appearance of ephemeral trajectories.

  Set free, the two hundred and sixty horses of the beautiful red Camaro reared up, raising the front of the car as it charged along the straightaway of Mekkah Road, all the other vehicles moving aside at its passage, allowing me to fly toward the red dunes of the desert of the Najd. I stopped where we had always stopped and I climbed the dune atop which Mansour had customarily isolated himself and I isolated myself, in turn, among the sand and the scent of burnt wood. Quickly, the sky seemed to run from blue to black, revealing the uncountable quantity of stars tracing paths from either side of its expanse … the trajectories of which I tried to follow without the least bit of success. As night gradually set in, the blackness of the sky veered toward a kind of impure white … streaks of stars soiled the absolute darkness of the void. The chill then pushed me to regain the interior of the Camaro to contemplate the exterior in the sort of torpor characteristic of those who can bear no more … Nadine came back to me over and over, almost as present as if she had been there, right beside me, and I could marvel at her face and hear her irresistible call … as well as the strength of her voice and the warmth of her skin and the scent of her curls and the love of her eyes … In my dream, I gradually took Mansour’s place behind Nadine’s stretched-out, splayed-out, spread-wide body to go farther, go deeper, she asked me, head thrown back, eyes already closed, mouth open wide and neck extended, from which a silver cross stirred and swung and waved … and I thought I even cried out I love you in the heart of my fantasy. I lost consciousness lying beside Nadine, beside her beauty, her pleasure, and the streaks of stars that spurted all over the black that surrounded me and finally swallowed me up. A slight sunburn on my face woke me and when I opened my eyes, the raw light of the sun closed them for me immediately. I turned my head and got out of the car. I leaned against the trunk of the dust-covered Camaro, lit a cigarette, and contemplated the new day that was slowly spilling across the dunes. A whitish color spread across the sands and the rocks of the desert, giving it the look of a dead planet … the aftermath of an apocalypse. An unexplained anxiety grew within me as my eyes followed the serpentine meanderings of the path that led down to Mekkah Road. The freshness of the morning and the fatigue brought shivers to my body … and that anxiety won over me completely as the impression of being alone in the world carried me away. From afar, the still-empty Mekkah Road managed to convince me that Riyadh and the entire plateau of the Najd had been destroyed in the night … and maybe even worse … the planet destroyed in its entirety, without men and without the slightest trace of any kind of civilization … there was nothing left but me and the stone … me and the sand.

  Look, Mansour, the sky is yellow! Why don’t you raise your eyes up to the sky? What is the meaning behind that gaze of yours, unwavering and unfeeling, fixated on the unrelenting crowd that calls for your death? What is the sense of it, Mansour? What are you saying with your eyes, Mansour? Look, Mansour, the sky is yellow … look at the sky, Mansour, it is made of beauty … look at the spirals drawn across it and the interlacing woven across it … look at the sky and go there! There is no longer any man worthy of your gaze, no longer any man who measures up to your eyes. What do you see, Mansour, among this crowd and these cries? Yes, what are you able to see a few feet away from the point where you will disappear? What are you still able to see as you guide yourself toward that pail and mat? Are they all you can see? I followed you and I climbed laboriously up that dune where you, Mansour, still rested, sitting lightly, and, while I continued to toil away, to sink into the goldenness of the sand, to struggle for breath, you offered up your gaze to me … What is the structure of this eternal world? I wanted to ask you when I saw that clarity in your eyes. Your empty gaze. Is it emptiness? What is it you see that is so great? What is it you see that is so great beyond the immensity that opens up before you? Beyond the dunes that unfold into infinity? Beyond the emptiness as far as the eye can see? Or had your gaze been full? Full of a density that was almost inhuman or maybe, quite the opposite, full of a density that was at the origins of what we are, at the origins of humankind. Between two things, as close as they may be, there is always a path that separates them and along that path other things are inevitably discovered … that’s what your eyes told me while I was suffering on my way to join you and to come to your aid. But it’s you, Mansour, or rather your eyes, Mansour, that pulled me from the sands that were holding me back.

  I reentered Riyadh all dirty but without the slightest urge to stop by my place, freshen myself up, have something to eat, and even less of an urge to go to work and return to something that resembled everyday life … It was maybe 10 a.m. and I meandered through the galleries of the Royal Mall as I waited … as I waited for something to happen … as I waited for something inevitable to happen. Near the central roundabout, I once again encountered little Aziadeh holding her father’s hand, and inevitably, I exchanged a smile with him. He let go of Aziadeh’s hand, who took off at full speed around the circumference of the roundabout while swinging her arms … back to making the helicopter or the airplane propeller. And then, inevitably once again, our trajectories split away from one another. The Starbucks had just opened, and I forced myself to go inside and order a coffee and something to eat. With an eye still on the exterior, I noticed that Aziadeh’s father had sat down on the same bench as the first time I had noticed him and that he once again had that dazed look … which I must have had as well. And maybe more than dazed, he bore a look of suffering, his eyes hanging down with sadness and despair. It seemed as if we were like two castaways who, in spite of ourselves, had survived who knows what dreadful catastrophe or what horrible nightmare, and had been delivered back to reality along the shores of the glittering shops of the Royal Mall, which was just starting to fill up … slowly … slowly … and I don’t know what wave carried me away only to set me back down next to him … sitting side by side on that bench and the both of us watching while Aziadeh turned endlessly around as I opened my mouth and let it all out, all jumbled and in no semblance of order, but absolutely all of it … without him being particularly amazed or uncomfortable, not even surprised to hear me express myself in French. He listened attentively, his gaze consistently sorrowful, to everything I had to say about Nadine, her face lit by pleasure and her body stretched-out undressed and hanging from Mansour’s eyes, and Mansour’s mind, or what remained of it, his millions of neurons that were being transformed each day into grains of sand and the billions upon billions of grains of sand that formed the dune we went to each day so as to understand or at least try to understand something, without really getting into Abdelkader’s story and Ibn ʿArabi’s thought and what was afoot in the secret meetings at the embassy about the future of Syria and maybe of the entire Arab world and maybe even the whole world, period … and I’m not sure which wave carried the three of us away as I continued to let it all out as if yelling Help! Help! only for it to set us down around a table at the Starbucks where Aziadeh persisted in twisting the straw that the server had given her in every direction and I persisted in detailing in consistent disorder what seemed to me to b
e the facts and nothing but the facts … as exemplified by Zeno’s paradox and Abdelkader’s hand moving toward Bishop Dupuch’s shoulder without ever reaching it and Mansour’s head or what was left in it, as it was irreversibly transforming into the head of an ass that brayed behind Nadine’s perfumed curls in that bedroom that smelled of oud or sandalwood where they recited the verse of Hafiz or Khayyám but also certainly that of Ibn ʿArabi, which was chanted aloud over the crumpled sheets of Nadine’s bed … her voice, at once hoarse and hot and short of breath and straightaway supported by that of Mansour as he ceased his braying behind the perfumed curls of that exhausted body to take up the chanting … My God, the chanting … picking up once more the verse of Ibn ʿArabi, on Nadine’s heels, at the same spot where her voice had left off … in that Chamber of Love where the two of them had hidden away from everyone …