As the students sat engrossed in drawing vertical and horizontal lines in their notebooks and copying what the teacher had written on the blackboard, he suddenly stopped and erased everything he had written. He exclaimed that Mr J. Evans Pritchard’s method was excrement, and that this was poetry, not the laying of pipes.
Rather, he explained to them, the true measure of poetry is our astonishment, our dazzlement, our emotional response. In response to a poem, women faint, gods are born, and poets bawl like babies. After all, who can measure our tears, our joy, or anything else a poem does to us? The reason we read and write poetry is that we’re human beings. But how could we possibly measure our humanity with mathematical formulas? He told them to tear up everything they’d written in their notebooks. Then, after a brief silence, he added that they could rip out the introduction too, while they were at it.
The students looked at him questioningly, not knowing whether to take him seriously or not. However, in the face of his insistence, they had no choice in the end but to rip out the first pages of the book, which now contained nothing but poetry.
Meanwhile, the teacher made the rounds of the class with the wastebasket, gathering the ripped-out papers into the receptacle with a gleefulness for which he alone knew the reason.
He hadn’t given them a lesson in understanding poetry, but in understanding life. He’d given them a lesson in having the courage to question everything, even the things they saw written in textbooks on the authority of some big-name scholar, and the audacity to tear up everything they believed to be wrong and throw it in the dustbin!
I don’t know how responsive the audience was to this wonderful scene, or if there were some there who saw it as still more justification for ripping the seats to shreds.
In any case, the man sitting in front of me was busily looking for a pen and paper. As soon as he found them, he began writing something, which I assumed to be some thought that had occurred to him.
Dying to take a peek at what he’d written, I edged forward a bit as if I were trying to see the screen better. Maybe he was writing something he wanted me to see. After all, he knew I was there, and that I’d been spying on him.
But before I could see what he’d written, I sensed that I’d dropped something. I felt my ear, and sure enough, one of my earrings had fallen out. I bent down to look for it, relying on the light coming from the screen, and before I knew it the man beside me had bent down with his cigarette lighter to help me see.
His presence took me by surprise, as I’d nearly forgotten he was sitting next to me. What surprised me even more, I think, was his cologne or the smell of his tobacco. I felt as though he was deliberately catching me unawares, his masculinity taking me by storm in that dark place. There he was, just a few breaths away from me, watching me search for something without saying a word, and without even asking me what I was looking for. It was as though the flame he held in his hand was there not to help me find what I had lost, but simply to illuminate my face.
I looked up from the floor, unhurriedly climbing his chest with my eyes. But when I reached his face, his eyes took me completely off guard. It was as though the darkness had imbued them with a depth that was as unsettling as it was seductive.
I couldn’t see exactly what colour they were. What I could see, though, was that I couldn’t go on looking into them.
Then suddenly I decided to give up the search. The earring didn’t matter to me, and I wasn’t bothered by losing it. All I cared about was the looks I was receiving from this man or, more precisely, his disquieting presence.
Before settling back into my seat, I murmured out of politeness, ‘Sorry for troubling you.’
‘Not at all,’ he replied as he put out his lighter and slipped it into his pocket. Then he went back to watching the movie.
His terse response jarred me. It made me freeze. He’d uttered it as though he were uttering a password that was known to no one but us, or as though he were tossing me his calling card. The brevity of his response had an urbane provocativeness about it, or a subtle sarcasm.
Had he fallen silent in order to convince me, with an irrefutable argument, that he was the man of categorical language? I didn’t know.
But from that moment on, I couldn’t concentrate on anything going on around me.
Love always sits in a seat other than the one we were expecting it to, right alongside the place where we expected love to be.
This is something I’ve long known to be true, something I’ve experienced firsthand. So how could I have sat for more than an hour next to such a man without attaching any importance to his presence, distracted from him by another man in front of me who, unbeknownst to him, had come disguised in the garb of love for the simple reason that he was wearing a coat and sitting with a woman!
On the other hand, what if this man who had said, ‘Not at all,’ and then fallen silent wasn’t ‘him’? What if he’d said what he said without thinking? What if he’d only taken the seat next to mine because it was closest to the exit? What if life wanted to mock me as a writer, not just once, but twice?
I’ve often wondered what kind of a distance it is that separates us from the things we long for. Is it measurable in terms of space? In terms of time? In terms of the impossible?
And what kind of logic is the logic of desire? Is it a linguistic logic? A temporal logic? Or is it the logic of a circumstance in which life places you?
This man who, by virtue of three small words, had gone from being a stranger to being the man I longed for – how had he managed to ascend in rank so quickly, and with such ease? Had he colluded with language? With the darkness? With this ambiguous place that lay somewhere between falsehood and fact, day and night, dream and reality, literature and life?
If he’d spoken, he would have helped me somewhat to understand what was happening. As it was, however, he hadn’t left any room for further exchange. Instead, he’d gone on watching the film, seemingly paying no attention to me while, at the same time, emitting the vibrations of a silent conversation in the darkness of the senses.
I myself couldn’t think of anything to say to him. Rather, speech had been extinguished, giving way to a conflagration in the silent intervals.
I don’t know how long we went on this way, with him watching the movie and me either watching him or stealing occasional glances at the lovers who didn’t matter to me any more, since, from the moment this man had uttered his three little words and fallen silent, nothing they said had been of any more use to me!
Now that I was so preoccupied with him, I couldn’t focus on the film any more, and a number of scenes and events passed me by. One of them, however, grabbed my attention:
As the teacher gave a lesson one day he began explaining to the students how our perspective on something changes depending on our location and the angle from which we look at it. Then he asked them, one by one, to come to the front of the class and stand on top of his desk so that they could see how the classroom looked from there. He wanted them to see that the proper way to understand the world is to break out of the tiny spot we occupy in it, to dare to change our orientation even if it means standing on top of a table rather than sitting at it and leaning on it.
As he spoke, the students took turns standing on top of his desk. Sometimes he would have one of them stay there a bit longer, encouraging him to take a little more time to look at the things in the room from his new vantage point, and to observe how his desk looked without him sitting at it. Then they came down, dazzled.
But suddenly, after this light-hearted phase of the story, things took a tragic turn with the suicide of a student who had decided to try out for a theatrical production without his father’s permission. The student’s involvement with theatre had involved rebellion against his father, who had sent him to this prestigious, upmarket academy in order to become a doctor, and nothing else. After the student delivered a marvellous theatrical performance for which he received a standing ovation, his father, having s
omehow got wind of events, came to the school and angrily drove him home. His father informed him that as punishment for his defiance he would transfer him forcibly to a military academy. Faced with this prospect, the boy took his life.
The boy’s father held the teacher responsible for his son’s suicide. The teacher was fired for having corrupted his students’ thinking and, through his unconventional teaching methods, having encouraged them to rebel. The academy’s headmaster then prepared a document condemning the teacher for having flouted his authority, and threatened to expel any student who refused to sign it.
I wanted to see how the film ended. I wanted to know whether the students would desert this teacher who’d taught them everything, including the importance of defending what they believed to be the truth. Would they be defeated in the face of the first challenge life sent their way?
But then I noticed that I was nearly out of time, and that if I stayed, the lights would come on and blow my cover. Like a modern-day Cinderella, I’d be turned from the mistress of the impossible into an ordinary woman sitting in a shabby cinema next to a man who might not be worthy of all the lovely feelings he’d created inside her.
I’d given up on the hope that this man might surprise me with a word that would confirm or deny my suspicions. So, having decided to surprise him by leaving, I got up and, trying to sound as natural as possible, said to him, ‘Excuse me. Could you let me pass, please?’
‘Of course,’ he replied.
He stood up and, pressing himself against his seat, left just enough space between us for his body to brush mine from behind. I don’t know whether I traversed that space in a moment, or in hours. In any case, it was the kind of space that’s as vast as it is infinitesimal, the kind that, when you cross it, you feel as though you’ve passed from the world of dreams into the world of reality.
Was the time it took me to traverse it long enough for his cologne to cling to me, to penetrate my senses to the point where, for months thereafter, I knew I’d encountered a man I’d only be able to recognize again by his scent?
I suspect that his gaze escorted me all the way out of the cinema. He made no attempt to make me stay. Even so, I could feel his eyes bidding me a silent farewell.
I suspect, too, that he was engrossed in the film’s ending. As I left, the teacher was collecting some papers from the classroom as the elderly headmaster taught the day’s English lesson in his stead. Anxious to fix everything this wayward teacher had broken and to make certain that the students were taught the entire curriculum from the very beginning, the stern and unyielding headmaster had them open their books to the introduction on literary criticism, only to discover to his surprise that the introduction had been torn out.
It thus became apparent that although this teacher was leaving, he was only doing so after having discarded everything he believed to be untrue, and that from now on, no one would be able to convince the students of something they’d chosen to tear out and throw away.
Papers in hand, the teacher was about to leave the classroom when, without a word, one of the students suddenly climbed up on his desk and stood facing him in an emotion-laden farewell salute. The boy’s act of courage inspired a number of the other students who, one after another, climbed on to their desks to bid a silent farewell to their former teacher, who had taught them to defy senseless prohibitions and to look at the world in a new way. As one would expect, there were a few students who, kowtowing to the headmaster, remained in their seats. In their cowardly surrender, however, it wasn’t these students that captured the audience’s attention, since they’d been dwarfed by all the other students who were standing on top of their desks!
As the teacher left the classroom, I was leaving the cinema, confident that this nameless man and I had shared both a tearful moment, and several moments of unspoken desire. By this time it didn’t matter whether the woman sitting next to the man in front of me had been ‘her’ or ‘me’, since things had happened between us as he himself had wanted them to, in the darkness of a cinema.
* * *
When I saw the driver waiting for me at the entrance, I flung myself hurriedly into the car, wanting to keep those sweet sensations in a safe, closed place. I was afraid that the lovely thing I’d experienced in silence next to a strange man might fade away inside me, or be destroyed or scattered by the street with its bright lights, its noisy bustle, its curious passersby, and the misery that lived there.
It reminded me of the experience we have when we sit for a while next to or across from a stranger in the metro or on a train. We know nothing about the other person, and during those shared moments we exchange nothing but an occasional collusive glance. Then we get off, contenting ourselves with the pleasure of silence and a few transparent moments which, having brushed by like a shawl of passion-scented lace, leave in their wake a lovely inward chaos, as well as the peculiar realization that we might never see that face again and that just a bit of courage, or a few words, might have been enough to give that face a name and an address.
Yet in that case, how would we experience the enjoyment of the unknown?
That evening as I was cleaning out my handbag, I came across the earring I thought I’d lost. It had fallen inside one of the compartments.
And I wondered: Could something this small change the course of a story? If it hadn’t been for that tiny incident, would I have noticed the man beside me rather than the one in front of me? I would probably have come home from the cinema convinced of the stupidity of having banked on illusions!
Indeed. Aren’t our lives just a series of coincidences and details so small that we wouldn’t think of them as important enough to alter our fates or our convictions? Details the size of those five little words which, small as they were, caused me to believe that the craziest dreams can come true, and that there are no boundaries between writing and life?
From the beginning I’d been enraptured by the beauty of the bizarre, hypothetical, nay, impossible love relationship that might join a man of ink with a woman of paper, who meet in the hazy realm between writing and life and set about together to write a book that both emerges from life and rebels against it.
Intrigued as I was by this man’s persona and its shadowy areas, I was still more intrigued by the possibility of our meeting between the darkness of ink and the darkness of the senses.
The more I let this idea sink in, the more fervently I believed, and the more involved I became in the words of André Gide, confident that I was capable of writing the most beautiful love story madness had ever inspired!
Madness begins with a dream, and my dream now was to take up residence inside the body of the woman in whose place I’d gone to see a film that afternoon. I wished I could borrow her body for the duration of a book, the way women borrow jewellery or a dress to wear to a wedding.
In this city where women borrow virtually everything from each other and trade everything imaginable, what if I, who’d lent everything in my wardrobe at one time or another, borrowed the one thing I could never truly possess: the body of some other woman – her face, her features, her memories of romance, her story with a man that mattered so much to me?
Yet it mattered even more to make sure I hadn’t been dreaming, that I hadn’t lost my mind, and that I’d actually sat beside him for a whole two hours in the course of which he’d spoken five words to me!
I wished I could disguise myself in her clothes so that I could see him in the light rather than in the dark.
. . . so that we could have a normal conversation rather than just clipped phrases.
. . . so that we could sit across from each other, not side by side, in the left or right corner of whichever café it might be.
But how? And where?
These details led me one by one to another crazy thought, and before I knew it I was scurrying to my desk and grabbing the black notebook. I began rereading the story I’d written, my eyes leaping breathlessly over the pages in search of a particular thing. When
I found it, I stopped reading with the excitement of someone who’s found something he’d lost at the bottom of the sea.
Heaving a sigh of relief, I shut the notebook. I’d found the name of the café where the two of them used to meet.
And as with the cinema, it was a place I’d never heard of before.
When I asked the taxi driver to take me to ‘The Date’ café, the bewildered expression on his face made me wonder whether the place actually existed.
When he saw me laden with notebooks and newspapers which I’d brought with me as a sort of camouflage, he asked me if I meant the café near Faubourg Lamy. Hoping to avoid more questions, I answered in the affirmative.
But then he started talking about the security situation. He told me about a policeman who’d been thrown off a bridge the night before, and about a couple of girls who’d been kidnapped on their way home from school and who’d been found later with their throats slit.
I sat there listening to him as he told me stories about relatives, neighbours and clients and all the tragedies he’d ever heard about. I didn’t know whether it was better to engage him in conversation so as to keep him from being too curious about me, or to be quiet so that he wouldn’t ruin my mood. I knew very well how bad the security situation was. In fact, it was one of the reasons my husband was visiting the capital. So the last thing I needed, on this morning in particular, was more details about this sort of thing.
I was aware that I was committing another act of folly by going somewhere I knew nothing about when I didn’t even know whether I’d find the man I was looking for. The only precaution I’d taken was to go in the morning at an hour when it wouldn’t be very crowded, since this was the time, it seemed to me, when a couple would be most likely to meet in such a place.
Chaos of the Senses Page 4