Chaos of the Senses

by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

  I closed the door to my room and hurriedly took off my black dress as though I were trying to cast off an accusation.

  I sat down on the edge of my bed: exhausted, scattered, my eyes darting to and fro. I was trying to understand exactly what had happened to me, to recall everything that man had said over the past hour and a half. I wanted to recover all the details of our conversation, in the course of which he hadn’t asked me more than one or two questions whereas I had plied him with one question after another. But my interrogation of him had been to no avail, since I’d ended up with even more questions than before, among them: Who could this man be? Where had he got all that information? How did he know my address?

  Logically speaking, of course, I should have known a lot more about him than he did about me if he was nothing but a character out of a story I’d written.

  However, my creativity had been reduced to nothing but attempts at outsmarting him now that I’d discovered my ‘other’ story as told by him, such as his description of our first meeting and the black muslin dress I’d been wearing. I might have believed in the possibility of such an encounter if I’d had such a dress in my wardrobe. But I didn’t!

  I’d purposely not interrupted him or commented on his story. I’d just listened, keeping my amazement to myself while secretly envying the woman who had once released all those wonderful feelings in him.

  This pang of envy led me to a surprising discovery: that my story with this person had also been born in a moment of jealousy. He was the man I’d been looking for, the man I could measure myself by. So from the time I met him, I’d felt both envious of him and possessive towards him. I’d also wished I could kill that other woman and take her place without leaving my fingerprints on her neck.

  She’d been my sole preoccupation from the start. I’d even asked him twice whether there was a woman in his life. Both times he’d replied in the negative, and this denial of his might have been the nicest thing that came out of his mouth.

  There hadn’t been any justification for my happiness, of course. When he saw how gleeful I was, he said, ‘Don’t be too happy now! It’s better for you to love a man with a woman in his life than a man with a “cause” in his life. The former, you might succeed in making your own, but the latter will never be yours, since he doesn’t even own himself !’

  And I never did make him my own. A cause took him away from me for ever. Still, I didn’t benefit from the advice he’d given me. In real life, I still fall in love with men who have a cause in their lives, and in novels, I fall in love with characters who have a woman in their lives.

  If only I did just the opposite!

  At some point it occurred to me that this man might also have some cause in his life. If he did, this would explain his extravagant sorrow, his bouts of silence, and his tendency to evade questions, all of which were traits I’d observed in this type of person.

  At the same time, however, I thought it unlikely. Gone were the days of earth-shaking causes, the worthy causes that made an entire generation of men seem more youthful and glamorous than they really were.

  In the political marketplaces run by rulers who shrewdly had outbid us with respect to every cause that comes along, they sold us ‘the mother of all causes’ as well as other, newer ones, packaged according to the dictates of the new world order and ready for local and national consumption. As for us, we took the bait with singular stupidity. Then we died, poisoned by our own illusions, only to discover, after it was too late, that they and their children were still alive, celebrating their birthdays over our dead bodies and making plans to rule us for generations to come.

  So, since the days of that cause, dreamers have gone extinct and the knights of romanticism have fallen off their mounts!

  Thoughts like these led me to my husband, whom I’d also failed to possess, not because I was sharing him legally with another woman, but because he was possessed by responsibility, and since his only ‘cause’ was that of remaining in a position of power.

  In the end I nearly reached a frightening conclusion: that love is a purely feminine cause which, if it concerns men at all, concerns them to the most limited degrees between two lifetimes or two disappointments, and only when the other, ‘major’ causes have gone bankrupt.

  So was this why women suffered such grief when it came to love?

  Suddenly I felt afraid of this story, which was bound to cause me pain. I expected to be swept away by it, no holds barred, and without benefiting from anything I’d learned in life.

  In the face of love and death we’re all equals. In these confrontations nothing is of any avail to us: neither our culture, nor our experience, nor our intelligence, actual or feigned.

  Yet I, who had always confronted love unarmed, expected it to take into consideration my craze for its defeats, and to compensate me for every loss it inflicted with another loss no less lovely.

  Consequently, I’d never cared where love’s unruly steed was taking me as long I knew I had the freedom to choose one of two fates: death because of it, or death without it!

  My real worry was how I was going to go on writing this story of mine with any semblance of fairness or objectivity. How was I to be narrator and novelist in relation to a story that was my own? A narrator, after all, doesn’t just narrate. She can’t just narrate. She has to fabricate as well. In fact, fabricating is all she really does, clothing the truth in a fitting garb of speech.

  This being the case, a novelist resembles her lies the way one resembles one’s house. This idea came to me when I was thinking back on something I’d read about Borges. When he was in his fifties he began gradually losing his sight. Whenever he went to an unfamiliar home, he would ask his escort to describe for him the colour of the sofa and the shape of the table, nothing more. As for the rest, it was, as far as he was concerned, ‘mere literature’. In other words, it was a place he could furnish in his darkness however he pleased.

  When I went more deeply into Borges’ logic, I discovered that a novel is nothing but a flat furnished with little lies of décor and deceptive details. The writer’s purpose is to conceal the truth, which takes up no more space in a book than a sofa and a table would in a house. Around that sofa and table we furnish an abode of words which, chosen with the intention of misleading, encompass details as small as the colour of a carpet, the designs on a curtain, and the shape of a flower vase.

  This is why I’ve learned to beware of novelists who include too much detail, since they’re sure to be hiding something! Similarly, I’m amused at readers who fall so completely for a novel’s word tricks that they fail to notice the sofa of truth they’ve been perched on since the moment they started reading.

  For as long as I can remember I’ve been looking for a reader who will challenge me, one who can tell me where the ‘sofa’ and the ‘table’ are in whatever book he reads.

  My husband, for example, has never been able to distinguish the ‘real furniture’ from the ‘fake furniture’ in anything I’ve written. At one point he started expressing irritation at my sitting for long hours writing rather than spending my time on some child that never came. He couldn’t admit that what irritated him was the writing itself. He was annoyed by this act of confrontation and silent artifice whose credibility he couldn’t verify despite his advanced espionage capabilities.

  Instead of telling me what he really thought, he began sending me from doctor to doctor and city to city, hoping to turn motherhood into my first concern. I lost count of all the doctors I went to with special recommendations, and all the shrines my mother made me visit for this or that saint’s blessing. For two years she and I made the rounds of Algeria’s shrines even though I wasn’t convinced of the value of what we were doing and didn’t even want to be ‘cured’ of my barrenness.

  I confess to having gone with her out of mere curiosity, and maybe as a way of following the path of least resistance. I confess, too, that sometimes I like just to give in. It gives me the chance to reflect on th
e world calmly and at a distance, as though it were no concern of mine.

  When I reflect on the world this way, I start writing without putting anything down on paper. One evening, for example, I decided to indulge in my habit of writing in my head while I watched my husband take off his military uniform and put on my body for a few moments before falling fast asleep.

  He’d always been an officer with a predilection for quick victories, even in bed, and I’d always been a woman with a predilection for pleasant defeats and romantic raids that are neither preceded by warning sirens nor followed by ambulances, and that leave the ground littered with lovers’ dead bodies.

  I have a fascination with random blitzes in which the innocent die of passion, just within desire’s reach, and without having time to ask, ‘Why?’

  I’d always been taken by his power, and sometimes I wished he would make love to me without taking off his uniform, since maybe, with his uniform on, he would make his way into my body by force. But he wasn’t about to do it on that night, or on any other, for that matter, probably because he was afraid it would get creased. Or maybe it was just because he was a man with no imagination or, rather, a man who exhausted all his imagination and intelligence somewhere other than in our bed.

  After all, men who were made to occupy a seat of power weren’t necessarily made to occupy a bed, while the ones who dazzle us with their clothes on don’t necessarily dazzle us with them off. The problem is, we don’t discover these things until it’s too late!

  So that night, like other nights, I watched him furtively as he took off his power and put on his nightclothes. As I did so, I thought back on the charming dialogue in Albert Camus’s play, The State of Siege:

  ‘Take your clothes off ! When men of power leave their uniforms, they aren’t nice to look at.’

  And the reply comes, ‘Perhaps. But their power lies in their having invented those uniforms!’

  Of course. Clothes are nothing but a statement we want to make to others. Like rumours, they convey the intent to deceive, as when that man with the extravagant sorrow wore a happy colour as a way of concealing his sadness.

  The genius of the military lies in their having invented a uniform that intimidates people. Similarly, the cunning of the clergy lies in their invention of pious-looking robes that make them look purer and more godly than everybody else, and the shrewdness of the wealthy in the invention of signatures for big-name designers so that they can wear clothes that place an unmistakable distance between themselves and others.

  And this man, why had he chosen to wear black?

  Was it to signal unmistakably to me that he was ‘him’?

  Or was it in order to match a colour I’d been wearing by coincidence when I encountered him, a colour life had chosen for me with the intent to deceive him into believing that I was ‘her’?

  * * *

  Ten days passed in silent anticipation.

  I tried to pretend I wasn’t waiting for anything, but waiting was all I could do.

  For some mysterious reason I was sure he’d contact me, one way or another. But as the days passed, life gave the lie to my intuition.

  The only thing he’d said as he bade me farewell was, ‘I’ll miss you.’

  Besides, he was a man who lived outside of time. So how could I have interpreted these words of his as some sort of promise?

  Little by little, despair began to seep into me until it had taken over vast regions once filled with expectation. Even so, enough hope remained that I started staying home for fear that his call would come while I was out.

  But all the phone brought me was my mother’s chatter and her mundane projects.

  One day she called to tell me she’d be coming to spend the day with me since my husband was away. The minute I opened the door for her, she began barraging me with questions. Looking at me in horror as usual, she said, ‘What’s wrong with you, girl? You don’t look good!’

  ‘What’s wrong with me?’ I nearly laughed out loud at the question. Like that man, she should have posed it in the opposite way, since then I could have answered by telling her what wasn’t wrong with me, which would have been a lot easier than telling her what was wrong with me.

  I kept quiet, since she wasn’t going to understand no matter what I said.

  She continued, ‘I brought you some basisa that I made for you yesterday. We can get you a bowl of tammina to go with it. The minute you eat it, you’ll be strong as a horse!’

  Who’d told my mother that I wanted to be as strong as a horse?

  I couldn’t help but smile when I saw her storm into the kitchen, thinking that my problem could be solved with food and that no one cared enough about me to cook me the things I liked. Since I happened to have liked tammina in the past, my mother was sure to go on chasing me down with it until my dying day, or hers, whichever came first.

  Tammina is a dish made from a mixture of honey, clarified butter, and chickpea flour. It’s served to women who are post-partum to help them get their strength back after delivery. It’s also served to the guests who visit her after the baby is born to congratulate her and make sure she’s all right.

  I don’t know how much tammina I ate with breakfast and afternoon coffee without stopping to wonder, the way I do now, whether my mother was making it just to feed me, or to lure Fate into blessing our household so that she could serve it to guests who had come to check on me and her grandchild!

  In any case, there we sat, with our cups of coffee and plates of tammina, checking on each other as though we hadn’t been talking on the telephone every day, or as though there were anything in this city worth talking about in the first place.

  She asked me about my husband, and I said he was fine. I almost didn’t reply, since I remembered how the man in black had told me that he responded with silence to stupid questions, such as when people ask you about your wife and not about the woman you love.

  But how was my mother supposed to ask me about a man whose name I didn’t even know? And how was she to know that I loved him?

  What would she have said if, in a fit of madness, I’d told her I was in love with another man? Had she experienced love herself ? Otherwise, how would she understand what it felt like? The fact is, she’d never even known what marriage was – she’d only borne its consequences.

  How many times had she made love in her lifetime? During their five years of marriage, my mother had lived in one country and my father in another. He would only come back from the front to Tunisia once every few months to spend a few days with her. Then he would head back to the freedom fighters’ bases, where he was responsible for directing operations in Eastern Algeria.

  Then one day he went to Algeria and didn’t come back. At last he’d had the honour of suffering martyrdom, and she suffered the fate of being widowed at an age when other women were just getting married.

  When she was twenty-three years old, my mother shed her dreams. She shed her youth and her aspirations and put on the clothes of mourning, thenceforth to carry a name that was beyond her years and beyond her size. She’d fallen into the trap of big names, having fallen before that into the trap of arranged marriage. This time also, no one consulted her. No one asked her whether this big name was worth the black dress she would be consigned to wear for the rest of her life. No one asked whether she might have preferred to be the wife of an ordinary man rather than the widow of a national symbol. Instead, she found herself confronted with a fait accompli, which included two young children and a big name.

  So she’d carried on: with a body that didn’t belong to her and a fate that satisfied the pride of the homeland – the homeland that possessed the exclusive right, whenever it pleased, to strip you of everything, including your dreams. It had stripped my mother of her womanhood, and me of my childhood. Then it had walked away.

  And here it was, still walking: trampling on my body and hers, on my dreams and hers, the only difference being that in my case, it wore army boots, and in her case, the
stilettos of history.

  I sat pondering her, with her damaged womanhood, her placid beauty, her down-to-earth gaiety mingled with sorrow. She was mysterious and calm like the Mona Lisa. But I don’t like the Mona Lisa! I don’t like calm features, placid femininity and frigid bodies. Where had my mother got all her frost? From her capitulation to Fate, or from her ignorance?

  And where had I got all my fire? From my rebellion against everything? From the verbal volcanoes that were continually erupting inside me?

  How could the ashes seated across from me in a black shawl have given birth to all the flames that burned inside me?

  There’s a saying that goes, ‘Fire gives birth to ashes.’ Well, sayings get it wrong a lot of the time! Here was a pile of ashes that had given birth to red-hot embers, to torrents of molten lava that had incinerated everything inside me: all the ready-made convictions, all the lies that women had inherited.

  These thoughts led me back again to that man, and I thought of an idea that I’d been resisting for the past ten days. Taking advantage of my mother’s visit, I suggested that I ride back home with her, after which I could ask our driver to take me on a tour of the city.

  I knew that my chances of coming across that man in a city the size of Constantine were slim at best. But why not give it a try? I had nothing to lose but some time, the one thing I had too much of.

  So I quickly put on a pretty dress and spruced myself up in anticipation of a possible encounter.

  Not long thereafter I found myself in a government car, seated next to a driver to whom I’d turned over the wheel of Fate. I felt at ease, since I’d made no effort to determine where this rendezvous would take place. As long as the little details were Fate’s responsibility, I’d let it dispose of my affairs however it pleased. I was determined not to intervene in deciding which direction the driver would go, and I wouldn’t suggest any particular way for him to get me to my destiny.

  The car sped along towards the unknown. The driver, who was well acquainted with both me and the city and whom I affectionately called Uncle Ahmad, had been baffled when I said, ‘Take me wherever you like. I want to see the city.’