The Proof of the Honey

by Salwa Al Neimi

  The publisher pulled out his cell phone and started reading a joke that had been sent to him by SMS, the latest technology to be put at the service of the lewd joke. I’ve already heard this particular joke, but I go ahead and laugh with the others. I knew a certain Elie, who, every day on his cell phone, got fresh jokes about Hayfaa Wahba and Nancy Ajram, our archetypical bimbos and the butt of many a saucy Arab joke. He’d learn them by heart to tell them later. The latest jokes generally reach me via the Internet. I read them and generally forget them, with the exception of those that include word play.

  I sat listening as the intellectuals of our society of dissimulation spoke, and mentally I took notes. The publisher was telling a new joke. He didn’t read it off the cell phone this time. He’d memorized it. They laughed and exchanged opinions. I didn’t say a lot. I was content, as usual, with laconic comments and expansive laughter.

  “Viagra has rescued us all,” said the Enumerator. “Both ourselves and our honor. God bless the people who discovered it and their lab assistants. They ought to be nominated for the Nobel Prize. They have performed a service to all humanity, women and men.”

  The Poet told another amusing story and they all laughed heartily.

  “Do you know why they classify Viagra now as a cosmetic and not as a medicine?” asked the publisher.

  I had heard the joke so I settled for polite laughter.

  “Because it restores our honor!”

  “I’ve never used it,” said the Enumerator, disapprovingly. “I’ve bought it for friends in Arab countries. Every time I ask one of them, ‘What do you want me to bring you from Paris?’ the answer is, ‘Viagra.’ Imported Viagra is very expensive over there, while the locally produced variety is cheap. And apparently it’s good, results guaranteed.”

  I listened to him detailing the prices of the different brands and their degrees of effectiveness.

  “You say you don’t use it yet you know all about it?” said the Spinning Top.

  “I’ve bought it for friends. Nothing more than gifts, I swear. They’re the ones who tell me about it.”

  In the Thinker’s day, there was no such thing as Viagra. I desired him. He desired me. We didn’t need the products of any foreign laboratory. Our bodies were enough.

  What would the people sitting around me think if they read what I’m writing? What would they think if they discovered I had broken the social contract? That I had violated the Law of Dissimulation that everybody applies? What a scandal! “So that’s what she was hiding behind her laughter? I was sure there was something going on, that under that impenetrable mask there was a wanton woman of the first order. I was sure of it . . .”

  How many of them would insist that they had always known what was going on?

  Mocking laughter arose. All of them were men. At first they didn’t dare use the ibahya words—salacious words, as they termed them—in front of a woman. But I laughed loudly, not the least bit embarrassed. So they ventured into territory meant for men only. They would forget that I was there, or pretend to forget, which is what I wanted. I made full use of the maxim, “When a man and a woman meet, there is always a third: the devil.” At present there are four men gathered around my reassuring social personality, and I am the devil.

  “In the past my sugar level was so high that I couldn’t do a thing without Viagra. Now after my diet my sugar’s gone down and I don’t need any stimulants.”

  I looked at the Poet and it occurred to me that he had indeed lost a quarter of his weight. Still, I wasn’t convinced that he could make love without a little help.

  Everyone ordered seafood dishes. I remembered something a doctor had written in the magazine Elaph about a soup known as “Poor-man’s Viagra”:

  An Egyptian invention whose secret is jealously guarded by fish restaurateurs and itinerant fish-vendors. It consists of an arbitrary mixture of seafood such as mussels, winkles, crabs’ legs, and bits of shrimp, plus a little boiled fish and lots of chili pepper and spices, and every newly wedded couple in the coastal areas is advised to take it and places blind faith in it. Necessity being the mother of invention, the people there, to whom the minister of health has so long denied Viagra, came up with this wonderful soup, which warms their bodies and restores life and energy to their limbs.

  The friends sitting around me must certainly know the miracle recipe; they don’t need me to help them choose what will make them feel good.

  One day the Activist arrived at the library wearing a smile from ear to ear. I raised my eyebrows the moment I entered his office, and I knew he had something to tell me.

  “Close the door,” he said in a whisper. “Would you believe, yesterday I tried Viagra for the first time. It really is extraordinary. May God bless the inventor. And may he repay his good deed a hundredfold and welcome him into Paradise.”

  Then there was the Director, who went on and on that “the erotic must by definition be revolutionary.” He would hold up the magic box that he’d ordered directly from the United States and announce in front of everyone, “I have the box. All I need now is the woman.”

  When we replied, “How about your wife?” he would answer truculently, “I’m not going to waste it on my wife. In my entire life I’ve never seen her satisfied. My wife? The very idea!”

  We would laugh, eat, and drink in our restaurant in Paris. I had always seen them together, and always without their wives—even in their own homes, in their own countries.

  Where were their wives?

  I thought of a scene in a film by Fatih Akin, where the German hero says to some Turkish men as they are about to head to a brothel, “Why don’t you fuck your wives instead?” They blanch, and are so offended that one of them jumps on the offending German to beat him up. In the room next door, meanwhile, the wives are making fun of their husbands’ performance in the marital bed.

  At least these friends of mine don’t make a show of virtue, abstinence, or decorum. Freedom of speech is undoubtedly a form of sexual freedom. Who was it who said that words meant nothing and bore little relation to the act? Not true! To talk about sex is to indulge in it. Words are a component of sexual energy.

  I remember another neighbor in Damascus and her stories full of double entendres, her equivocal words, and my mother’s embarrassed smile as she listened to the woman, whom she considered brainless and mad. I was too young. I didn’t understand most of her allusions, but I could sense the sort of nimbus that surrounded her like a saint’s halo, a wave of heat that burned anyone who drew near. She frightened the women, and fascinated the men.

  The funniest thing is that my friends resort to foreign languages when they want to use sexually explicit words. Obscenity is mitigated when spoken in a foreign language. The embarrassment they feel using those same words in Arabic evaporates. In English or French, they can pronounce any of them with the greatest of confidence.

  Ninth Gate

  ON LINGUISTICS

  I am a creature of language. Each passing day confirms the fact. Language sets traps for me; it compels me to listen to its voices, to gaze upon its colors, to sound its depths. This is why I love dictionaries of all sorts. I use them to excess, and my questions about language are never-ending. No sooner do I utter a new word than I am trying to trace it to its roots in order to understand its origins, its derivatives, and its various shades of meaning. I even try to invent new words in a language that is mine alone.

  Yesterday the Traveler shared his motto with me: Je baise, donc je suis. He spoke in French, in the language of Sade. “I fuck, therefore I am.” I took it to be a joke, a play on words, and repeated it after him.

  When speaking in Arabic, the Traveler uses the passive form of the verb: “I get fucked.” This deprecating form is something that surprises me about him, as he comes off as an inveterate philanderer, at least in his stories. It occurs to me that I love the word when it is unadorned, free: to fuck. Period.

  I fuck, therefore I am. Why can’t I say it, or write it, in Arabic
? In Arabic, in this day and age the word “fucking” is banished. The word is a sin, though the act itself is legitimate.

  All this hypocrisy brings to mind the words of al-Jahiz, one of the ninth century’s greatest writers:

  Some of those who are given to asceticism and abstemiousness feel disgust and shrink back if the words “cunt,” “cock,” and “fucking” are mentioned. Most men of this sort turn out to be as lacking in knowledge and magnanimity, nobility of soul and dignity, as they are rich in falseness and treachery. These words were invented to be used. It is nonsense to invent them if they are then left to go to seed.

  I translate the Traveler’s “I fuck, therefore I am” into Arabic. I fuck, you fuck . . . I conjugate the verb and search for derivatives. On my computer, the spell-check function underlines each attempt in red. The computer will not admit to knowing such a word! It, too, is programmed for dissimulation. This computer is a shrinking violet! Or, to be more precise, a eunuch of a computer. That has castrated the language. That castrated the computer. That castrated me.

  After not seeing each other for some time, I met the Thinker again in a Japanese restaurant. He sat opposite me. He put out his hand to touch mine: “I want you. I want to come inside you. Now.” The act of love in words is total and violent. No detail is overlooked—from the burning breath to the shuddering of the body, from the first moistness to the beating heart, from the awkwardness of the first gestures to the shared repose after love.

  In the sixteenth century the poetess Louise Labé wrote: “The greatest pleasure, after love, is talking of it.” The fact that her existence is contested does not alter the truth of her words.

  With the Traveler, much of our conversation was about sex. On our very first encounter, several years ago, he declared: I want you. His desire has never been fulfilled, to this day, but every time we meet, he assures me of the constancy of his desire and describes in detail all the ways in which he intends to satisfy his lust for me. And there are many details; it is an ambitious program. I laugh. Sometimes I let him talk and sometimes ask him to be quiet, depending on my mood. It has turned into a game we play.

  At our last meeting, he said to me, “So you reckon we’ve never made love? Of course we have. We’ve done better than that, with words.”

  I smiled and it occurred to me that he might be right. This intimacy we share is something I haven’t known with any other man. Or even with any woman. We talk openly about sex. He tells me his adventures in minute detail. And then he urges, “And you? Tell me the last time you slept with a man!”

  I answer each time, “I’ve told you, I don’t sleep, I wake.”

  “Liar. You don’t do anything outside of marriage.”

  He persists in not believing me, harping on the old refrain. I change the subject. I ask him to tell me about his latest trip, or his latest rendezvous with that girl from the Gulf.

  “Pretty. Plump. Breasts to drive you wild. But she made my head spin. In bed, she never stopped talking. She sang. She complained. She never stopped spouting nonsense. She’d give a blow by blow description of what we were doing, like a sports commentator. At first, it excited me, but little by little I started to feel as though her words were a kind of perversion. I tried to shut her up by plastering kisses on her mouth but it was no use. If I stopped to catch my breath, the transmission would start all over again. I don’t know how I managed to finish. Ouff!”

  I laughed as I tried to imagine the scene. And I wanted more.

  “That’s the end of the story. Tell me how it began.”

  “She works in the office of this official I was supposed to meet. She sat next to me at the lunch hosted by her boss. I started flirting, and she let me. I put my leg next to hers under the table and she didn’t move hers away. On the contrary, she pressed against me. As I said, she was responsive.”

  “And the people around you?”

  “No one noticed a thing.”

  “And then?”

  “We were on our own and the conversation got more explicit. She told me she liked my boldness. I suggested she come up to my hotel room. Impossible, she said. She was married and had never cheated on her husband.”

  “And then?”

  “She said she’d have to divorce him before she could sleep with me. I said that would take more time than either of us had. I explained to her that as long as she liked me and I liked her, why shouldn’t we just enjoy ourselves? She refused vehemently. She went protesting that she loved her husband and would remain faithful to him, but she followed me to my room. In the elevator I kissed her and she went on protesting. As soon as we were in the room, I took off her abaya, then the jeans she had underneath, and still she was protesting. I was kissing her breasts and—she protested.”

  “I get it.”

  “You wanted details. She was wearing the most beautiful underwear I’ve ever seen in my life. Pure silk. Absolutely gorgeous. Imagine, her husband’s a lot younger than me. Just imagine. She told me it was the first time she’d slept with a man other than her husband.”

  “Did you believe her?”

  Every time a man sleeps with a married woman it’s the first time she’s been unfaithful to her husband. According to the Arab proverb: Before marriage, the Arab woman says that no lips have touched her own save her mother’s. After marriage come her husband’s lips. One way or another, they’re all virgins.

  Siham used to say to every man she met that he was her first, in spite of her marriage and her three children. “Why is that?” they would ask. Because with her husband she knew no pleasure. Because each time he slept with her it was as if he were raping her. He would hit her, and lock her up. She would tell every new man she met that he was the first in her life. She didn’t tell me this in person, but her words reached my ears, repeated by several of the men, each of them telling me his version in private.

  Tenth Gate

  ON UPBRINGING AND EDUCATION

  The Thinker kindled a fire. It burned in me for a time, even more so after he left. Was that the price of my initiation? Was that the price of being awakened to life? While waiting for other thinkers and further revelations?

  It has come down to us from the ancients that an old woman gave her daughter the following advice, before giving her to her husband: “I will give you a piece of advice, my daughter, which if you hearken to it will make you happy, make your life sweet, and make you fall in love with your husband. If he comes to touch you, gasp and moan, sway your body, and show him languidness and languor. If he grasps your breasts, gasp loudly. If he enters you, weep and speak whorish words, for these arouse sexual desire and assist in strengthening the erection. When you see that he is close to ejaculating, gasp for him and say, ‘Come deep inside me!’ And when he has filled you, clasp him to your bosom, be patient with him, kiss him, and tell him, ‘My master. How sweetly you fuck!’”

  My mother never said anything like that to me, not at all. The most risqué thing she ever told me was that angels in Heaven exchanged kisses. The substance of this was that whatever angels did, perforce, mortals were authorized to do. The immediate and practical application of this knowledge was that I had permission to kiss the neighbors’ son, but nothing more.

  By the time she explained this to me, I had, of course, gone way beyond kissing. I may have laughed out loud, but the thought of angels kissing was engraved in my memory. It’s the same thing with all parents: by the time they decide it’s the moment to open the door, their children are already out in the garden.

  The joke has it that a father says to his son, “You’re big enough now for us to talk frankly about sensitive subjects.” The adolescent replies, “Tell me, what would you like to know?” We knew more than our parents as young people, and our children will know more than we do. If my mother had read what I have in the ancient books about the kiss, she would not have spoken to me about angels.

  Know that the kiss arouses desire to begin with, and then sexual vitality. It brings on erection and ejaculation
. It causes the penis to rise, and inflames the woman, especially if a man intersperses his kisses with gentle bites and light pinches.

  The only mothers one encounters who are wise enough to teach their daughters lessons on desire are to be found in books of erotica. The advice she gives to her son-in-law will not be less important. In some of the books we find the father himself playing this role and advising his daughter.

  Huba did not content herself with teaching the women of Medina “the art of kissing,” as prescribed by the books; indeed, she extended her experience to her son. One day, he asked her: “Mother, in which positions do women prefer to be taken by men?” To which she replied: “Dear son, if she is old like me, you should make her lie on the floor with her cheek to the ground, and then insert it all the way into her. And if she is a young girl, you should pin her thighs to her chest, and you will know your desire, and you will have what you want.”

  Nobody taught me. Not my mother, not my father, and not even my big sister. No one explained anything to me. I studied the theory in books, films, and stories, and by watching men and women around me. As far as practice was concerned, I learned a little at a time, by trial and error. Slowly. I was cooked on a very slow fire; often, indeed, the fire was out. This is not a play on words.

  Yes, I started my sex education with writing and films—novels, magazines, films, and serials. Sex education? Well, emotional, at least, with small doses of practical sexual culture and traditional Arab theoretical knowledge. I would have to wait to move to Paris to discover, in French, pornographic films, books, and magazines.