For Farida, who’d spent a lifetime trapped in a marriage that had ended with her return to her brother’s household as a divorced woman, freedom meant nothing more than being able to look out over a seaside balcony and experience the vicarious pleasure of watching others swim, roast in the sun and just live their lives. In short, freedom consisted of nothing more than her right to dream.
As for my freedom, it was opposed to the very logic of hers. I’d become a free woman precisely because I’d decided to stop dreaming!
I discovered this when I opened my black notebook one day, after having neglected it somewhat since our arrival, to jot down an idea I’d arrived at. The idea was: ‘Freedom is to expect nothing.’ I could have worded the same thought in a different way. I could have said, for example, ‘Expectation is a state of enslavement.’ In fact, I’d arrived at the first idea by means of the second.
But no sooner had I been liberated from my enslavement to expectation than I fell slave to writing. When Farida saw me staying in the house and scribbling away all day long, she got worried.
She felt responsible for me in two respects: as my elder, and as someone who had been assigned by her brother to watch out for my well-being. Consequently, she began encouraging me to watch television and to get out of the house.
One afternoon I decided to go out in an attempt to escape from both sleep and writing, which generally took turns trapping me at that particular time of day. I’d found that in this new location, a state of physical restlessness would come over me in the late afternoons, when most people were taking a nap. No matter what the weather was like, the feeling would dog me until sunset. And every day it would inspire the same questions: What do people do with themselves at this time of day? What do they do with their bodies? How do they spend these hours? Why is it that, in the late afternoon in particular, the rooms where women lounge around, bored, in house dresses are charged with such powerful vibrations of lust?
It wasn’t the right time for me to find answers to all these questions. So I just put on the first dress I saw in the wardrobe and left the house, fleeing from my body!
I walked lazily down our street looking at the white houses with blue and green window frames, houses whose nap-time was tranquil in a way I’d never experienced myself.
Nothing about this place bore any resemblance to Constantine with its traffic jams, crowded pavements and noisy bustle. Everything here was nice, neat and tastefully engineered as though it belonged to another world, or as though it had ended up where it was by accident. If it hadn’t been for the presence of a few cars parked along the sides of the street or the occasional sight of someone coming back from a bakery or a tennis court, a passerby would have thought nobody lived here.
It was a street that spent its every waking moment in a state of urbane serenity that placed it at the farthest possible remove from the shouting of hawkers, the squealing of young children and the call of the minarets with which the streets of Constantine began their day.
As I passed a bakery I was accosted by the aroma of freshly baked bread. I went in, surrendering to a sudden bout of hunger, and picked out an assortment of pastries and two loaves of bread. Then, remembering that I still had somewhere else to go, I asked the bakery attendant to keep them for me. I continued on my way in search of a newsstand. Once there, I began leafing through the newspapers with the curiosity of someone who hadn’t read the news in a week. Suddenly everything I saw made me feel like reading, as though I’d woken up that morning to discover the world.
I chose a women’s magazine and a political magazine, as well as a few newspapers in Arabic and some others in French. I didn’t ask myself whether I was actually going to read them. After all those years of having newspapers come to me already paid for and chosen in keeping with my husband’s tastes and interests, I took satisfaction in the mere act of acquiring them!
As I stood looking at one of them, I heard a voice behind me say, ‘Never mind getting any newspapers. There’s nothing worth reading these days!’
I started. Then I turned around, and who should I see but ‘him’.
Frozen in place, I stood there in a state of sweet speechlessness, staring at him in disbelief. For a few moments we just looked at each other, bowled over by the coincidence.
I have a feeling my cheeks were red by this time even though I’d forgotten to put on any blusher, and I spontaneously reached up to put some locks of hair back in place. As if he wanted to unnerve me even more, he didn’t take off his shades, and as he had the first time we’d seen each other, he gazed at me from behind his dark lenses.
Suddenly he said, ‘I have to admit, I didn’t expect to find you here.’
As if to apologize for my appearance, I said, ‘Neither did I!’
‘Didn’t I tell you to learn to trust Fate?’ he said with a grin.
‘I remember that. But let’s just say I’ve been having a crisis of confidence.’
Given the fact that we were his only two customers, the newsstand owner seemed to be taking a special interest in our con-versation. Wanting to avoid any further eavesdropping, I asked my interlocutor to buy his newspaper so that we could leave.
Instead, he smiled and said, ‘I didn’t come to buy a newspaper.’
‘What did you come to do, then?’ I asked as we walked out.
‘Now, I could say that I’d come to see you. The fact is, though, I only came to buy cigarettes.’
Then he added as he opened the pack, ‘I don’t trust anything any more, either.’
He lit his first cigarette, and we took a few steps together without any particular destination in mind, thereby exposing our madness to public view. Then we stopped in our tracks, weighed down by a load of unasked questions.
As we stood there he grabbed my arm unexpectedly as though he wanted to jolt me awake, the way you might do with someone who’s been sleepwalking.
‘I want to see you,’ he said.
My body was electrified by his touch.
‘But . . .’
‘That word has no place between us. It’s enough that it surrounds us on all sides.’
‘I don’t know how that could happen,’ I said.
He took a newspaper I was holding. Then he took a pencil out of his breast pocket and scribbled a telephone number on one edge of the paper, saying, ‘Call me at this number, and we’ll agree on the details.’
I took the newspaper from him, not believing what was happening to me. With feigned spontaneity I asked, ‘This number . . . what is it? Is it an office number, or a home number?’
‘It’s my number,’ he replied.
Trying to get him to reveal more, I said, ‘If somebody else happened to answer, who would I ask to speak to?’
Ignoring the meaning behind my question, he said, ‘Nobody but me would answer the phone.’
In a single statement he’d closed off the path to any further questions, including the most important one of all. So I wasn’t going to find out his name this time, either.
As we parted, I was just as flustered as ever, and he was just as self-assured as ever. He didn’t press me to contact him as soon as possible. Rather, he seemed to know it was going to happen, and that was that. He didn’t ask me what had brought me to this city or how long I’d be staying. Such details were apparently of no concern to him. Then again, maybe he already knew my schedule from A to Z!
All he said was, ‘You look ravishing today.’
Then, as his gaze rolled down my black dress, the same one I’d been wearing the first time we met, he added, ‘I love you in that dress.’
After a brief silence he continued, ‘And I envy it!’
We parted without saying goodbye just as we’d met without saying hello. This was the way things always happened with him.
Neither of us tried to get the other to stay with either a word or a look. We had a mutual feeling that we were headed for an even lovelier encounter.
I have to admit, I would have liked him to stay lon
ger, to say more than he did. However, I accepted the encounter the way it had come: amazing, surprising, fleeting. It had been an encounter with the lifespan of a cigarette. He’d lit it as we met, and as he put it out with his foot he’d said, ‘And I envy it!’ and was on his way.
This man, who was envious of my simplest dress and who’d said things to me that I would never have expected – did he mean what he’d said? Or did the fact that I’d happened to wear this same dress again arouse him because he thought I’d worn it deliberately, as a way of luring Fate in a certain direction? I hadn’t done any such thing, of course. If I had, I would have prepared for our meeting a lot better than I did.
Love is astounding. It always comes out of the blue, in the place and at the moment we least expect it to, which is why we so rarely give it a fitting reception.
I know now what fashion designer Coco Chanel meant when she advised women always to look their best whenever they leave the house. Each of us should go out looking as chic as she’d hope to look if she bumped into the man who was destined to change her life. Otherwise, it’s bound to happen on the day when she’s neglected her appearance!
So, was this love? A mere word from him, and I’d become another woman. The woman who’d left the house in an ordinary dress, her nails unpolished and her features worn and haggard, had come back more beautiful than ever. Life, too, seemed beautiful and ravishing.
Even more beautiful was the fact that life is always so full of surprises. At any turn in the road your life could change. You might have an accident. You might also encounter a man who causes a marvellous earthquake in your being!
When I got back to the house I found Farida sitting in front of the television (as if she hadn’t spent her entire life there), watching the same silly soap operas she always watched (as though they wouldn’t be waiting for her when she got back to Constantine).
I felt sorry for her for being so stupid. How was I supposed to explain to her that we have to live life to its fullest, that we have to fill our lungs to capacity, taking in all the things we come across with our senses and our emotions fully engaged, since they may never come our way again? How could I persuade her to love the things that she would only see once in a lifetime, not the things she saw every day on a television screen?
I wanted to infect her with my happiness, with my appetite for life. However, she was an unimaginative woman of limited intelligence. I could also see that her naiveté was a blessing of sorts, since it would keep her from noticing what was going on with me.
She looked up from the television and asked me if I’d brought the bread. With a gasp I said, ‘I forgot it at the bakery!’
As I headed to my room to change my clothes, I thought about how I’d now officially entered the phase of sweet follies and that if I’d forgotten some pastries I’d spent half an hour deciding to buy, then from now on I was likely to forget other things as well, and to take up residence on some other planet that had nothing to do with the details of my earthly world.
As soon as I’d changed, I picked up my newspapers and headed out to the garden, not to read the newspapers but so that I could be alone and leaf through the pages of my story with this man whom I’d chased down the streets of Constantine and who, after I’d despaired of finding him and come to another city, had found me here.
Life seems to operate by a strange sort of counter-logic. You go running after things, and they run away from you. Then the minute you sit down and convince yourself they aren’t worth the trouble, they come running after you, and you don’t know whether to give them the cold shoulder or welcome them with open arms as a gift straight from Heaven. After all, they might be your bliss, or they might be your ruin.
In situations like this it’s hard not to think of Oscar Wilde’s quip that, ‘There are only two tragedies in life: one is getting what one wants, and the other is not getting it’! I wondered to myself which of the two types of tragedy this man would be. Or what if he started out being the first type, and ended up being the second?
I inspected the newspaper he’d written his telephone number on, trying to decipher what Fate held for me with him through those six digits. It had a lot of zeros in it, which scared me. But the rest of the digits, all of them odd, made me feel better. I like odd numbers. They’re a lot like me.
At the same time, I couldn’t help but wonder why he’d written it in pencil. Was it because artists usually write with pencils? Or was it because things with him were liable to be erased at any moment? Then again, maybe it was just because this was the Age of Lead, which writes some stories and erases others!
Evidence in favour of the last possibility lay in the fact that his telephone number was written in a narrow white margin of the front page of a newspaper that was filled with news of national and pan-Arab tragedies.
Why did his love have to run parallel to the tragedies of the homeland, as though there were nowhere left for it on the pages of our lives but a tiny, nearly invisible space? Wasn’t there any place left in this country for a normal, happy love?
As I sat there bursting with joy, the newspapers of sorrow lay in wait for me on the garden table. Even before reading them, I regretted having bought them. I remembered somebody once saying, ‘Every time I buy an Arabic newspaper, I end up regretting it!’
I turned the pages hurriedly, afraid that their contents would ruin my mood. But some of the headlines arrested me and drew me into reading entire articles in a kind of masochistic orgy.
If you’d bought an Arabic newspaper in June 1991 as a way of reading the Arab world’s future, you would have risked giving yourself a heart attack. If, on the other hand, you’d bought an Algerian newspaper on the very same day, your worst national and pan-Arab nightmares splayed across its front page, you would have risked losing your mind.
Before you’d even opened the newspaper, the homeland would have assaulted you with its headlines: ‘Military Authorities Suspend Curfew Until After Eid al-Adha’; ‘469 Arrests Over the Past Three Days’; ‘Salvation Front Declares Civil Disobedience’; ‘Strike and Open Vigil Begin’; ‘Heavy Military Presence Around Government Buildings and Mosques’; ‘Municipal Transport Buses Seized in Preparation for Large March on the Capital’.
If you’d fled to the bottom of the page, you would have been met by other homelands that you’d thought were your own. At least, that’s what you’d been told when you were little by a certain naïve poet who died singing, ‘All the Arabs’ lands are my lands!’ But by 15 February, 1991, he wasn’t around any more to read the headlines, which ran: ‘Palestinian Miya Miya and `Ayn al-Hilweh Camps Still Surrounded by Lebanese Army’; ‘Iraq Arrests and Tortures Scores of Egyptians’; ‘Executions of Arab Citizens in Kuwait Ongoing’; ‘US Firms Monopolize Kuwaiti Reconstruction’ and ‘Egypt’s Debts Forgiven’.
The good news in all of this wasn’t the last headline. Rather, it appeared on an inside page, written large: ‘On the occasion of Eid al-Adha, Algeria’s National Livestock Office has imported 220,000 sheep from Australia, most of which have arrived safely.’ The word ‘safely’, of course, meant nothing more than that they were still alive despite having spent a month in transit, packed like sardines into the hull of a ship, and even though most of them had nothing to look forward to but the mercy of being slaughtered on the morning of Eid al-Adha. In this respect they differed little from the hundreds of Algerians who’d been jostling and shoving each other for months in front of the Australian Embassy, waiting for the mercy of obtaining an escape visa to a country that was falsely rumoured to be needing workers!
Upon the arrival of the ship laden with its blessed cargo, the newspaper had devoted an entire page to a discussion of how to resolve the juristic question raised by the fact that, unlike the sheep Algerians were accustomed to with their long, fat tails, the Australian sheep had had their tails docked. The question was whether it was permissible to slaughter such sheep as sacrifices for Eid al-Adha. The upshot of the debate was a legal ruling that said, ‘If,
whether as a result of a birth defect or human intervention, a sheep has no more than one-third of a tail of normal length, it is to be considered blemished and unacceptable for slaughter as a religious sacrifice.’ The question then became, ‘What shall we do with the sheep, then, and what are we going to slaughter on Eid al-Adha?’
However, the real difficulty lay not in what to do with some Australian sheep whose tails had preoccupied Algeria’s jurists and laymen alike for days on end, but rather in what to do with the human sheep piled in front of the Australian Embassy, and in how to answer the worrying question: How could a country that once exported revolution and lofty dreams have come to the point where it exports human beings and imports sheep?
* * *
Of course . . .
It wasn’t a time for love. But doesn’t love’s greatness lie in its ability to survive even in the times most opposed to it? And wasn’t this evident in the fact that nothing I’d read and nothing that had happened to me because of this man had made me give up on loving him?
Then one evening, something started urging me in his direction. It picked me up, ran with me, and plopped me down in front of the telephone.
I sat down on the edge of the bed, barely touching it, as though I were sitting on the edge of my fate. Some other woman then dialled up a man that might be ‘him’, a man whose name was ‘him’, and who would at last put on his own words rather than hers. He would become a voice over the telephone line. He might say, ‘Hello.’ He might say, ‘Yes?’ He might say, ‘Who is it?’
A woman in a hurry dialled his six-digit number, then waited for him to speak. Remembering that I didn’t know exactly who I was calling, I’d made up my mind not to say anything when he picked up the receiver.
Then suddenly his voice penetrated my silence. He didn’t say, ‘Hello.’ He didn’t say, ‘Yes?’ He didn’t say, ‘Who is it?’
Chaos of the Senses Page 11