Chaos of the Senses

by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

  I walked past the café with the same fear, the same defiance, and the same determination, knowing that love had become the biggest freedom-fighting operation any Algerian woman could carry out.

  *

  I’ve always told myself, ‘Don’t jump life’s red lights, and learn to stop at destiny’s checkpoints. There’s no point in rigging traffic signals, since destiny can’t be taken by force.’

  I used to tell my heart, ‘Try not to be like me. Don’t be in a hurry. Look right and left before you cross life’s streets, and don’t try to jump on to this runaway train when it’s moving. Dreamers travel standing still, since they know they always arrive one disappointment later than everybody else!’

  And my heart would reply, ‘Everybody you’ve ever known has seen his dreams crushed under the homeland’s wheels, and all the people you’ve ever loved have been scattered all over destiny’s train. So cross wherever you like, since either way you’re bound to die in some accident of love!’

  At last the building appeared.

  When I stepped inside, I felt myself leaving one world and entering another.

  I wasn’t bothered by its filthy staircase, I wasn’t put off by its broken-down lift, and the four flights I had to climb only added to my excitement.

  Love’s sweetest moments are when you’re going up the stairs!

  Outside a door behind which the unknown awaited, I caught my breath and tried to make sure I looked all right. But before I knocked, I saw it opening before me, and a familiar figure withdrawing slightly behind it as though it were gesturing for me to enter.

  So enter I did, and the door closed behind me.

  Having experienced the whole spectrum of love, I of all people know that it doesn’t stay in five-star hotels or in houses that are fancy but frigid, so it pleased me to find that this house was as unadorned and cosy as a nest.

  Without bothering to ask permission, I headed, exhausted, for the nearest room. I flung my bag on to the sofa and was about to fling myself down beside it. Instead, though, I stayed where I was for a moment, contemplating him, as though I were searching him for something that would justify all this madness.

  He came up to me and removed the headscarf that I’d forgotten to take off. He smiled. Then, after some hesitation, he confessed wistfully, ‘How I’ve missed you!’

  ‘I’ve missed you, too,’ I replied. ‘What else would have brought me all this way? If only you knew what a time I had getting here!’

  He sat down on the sofa across from me, fiddling quietly with the headscarf. He pondered this apparel that bore no resemblance to me, as though he were trying to decide who I was, while I in turn pondered the room where we were sitting. Its simple furniture, chosen with bachelor-ish taste, consisted of nothing but a large velvet sofa, a table, and a bookcase that extended the length of the opposite wall. The books arranged neatly on its shelves left room for nothing but a television and a tape player from which emanated the soft strains of a Richard Clayderman piano piece.

  I loved the way our tastes seemed to match. More than that, I loved our shared propensity for acting contrary to logic, such as listening to a piece of music like the one that was playing on a day marked by such outright lunacy. The only thing that surprised me was the absence of any pictures in the house, which deprived me of an important avenue for getting to know him better.

  ‘What do you consume besides cigarettes?’ I asked him.

  ‘Patience . . . and silence,’ he replied with a chuckle.

  ‘And how can you draw with such icy sensations?’

  ‘And who told you I drew? To draw is to remember, and I’m a man who tries to forget.’

  ‘I’d like to see some of your paintings,’ I said. ‘Would that be possible?’

  ‘No, actually,’ he said. ‘I don’t have any of them here.’

  ‘What did you do with them?’

  ‘I left them in another city.’

  Suddenly I felt suspicious of what he was saying. I sensed that he was hiding something, or lying, and that he’d never been a painter.

  ‘Where did you learn to draw?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh,’ he said dismissively, ‘the worst thing that can happen to an artist is to go to art school!’

  I wanted to argue this point with him, maybe just to get him to talk more about himself. But he fell silent, and didn’t say a word for some time. When he did open his mouth again, it was to talk to me about the political situation and to ask me whether I’d had trouble finding his house.

  As he spoke I was distracted from his words by listening to his hands, since they were the only thing that told me very much about him.

  First of all, they told me he was lazy, since he only used one of them: the right one.

  I took a long look at his fingers, which seemed to have a lot to say about who he was as a man. He had a way of trimming his fingernails to a studied roundness as though he didn’t want to cause anyone pain, even in romance. This was reassuring to me. It also whetted my appetite for intimate touches, though it didn’t help me in the least to figure out what his actual profession was.

  This man was no artist. His hands were too calm and collected for someone who lives with the nervous rush of creation.

  We recognize a pianist by his lithe, agile fingers. We may recognize the hands of a carpenter, who more often than not will have lost a finger or two. Similarly, we might be able to identify a house painter or a butcher by certain features of their hands. We recognize a teacher by the chalk dust clinging to his palms, the farmer from the dirt trapped under his fingernails, and a printer from the tell-tale signs of ink in his fingerprints.

  What a remarkable world, the world of hands. It’s remarkable in its scandalous nakedness, a nakedness that reveals who we are. No wonder, then, that artists and sculptors spend so much of their time studying people’s hands, since it’s through these that they enter into their paintings and sculptures. Renowned French sculptor Auguste Rodin, who himself devoted no little attention to hands, once summed up his obsession with them in the words, ‘There are hands that bless and hands that curse, hands that exude a sweet perfume and hands that quench a burning thirst. And there are hands made for love.’ How, then, could he sculpt one type and neglect another?Hands have a lot to say about our intimate secrets. They hold our memories, the names of those who’ve embraced us, the people whose bodies we’ve passed over with tender touches, or on which we’ve left a scratch.

  Our hands reveal the age of our bliss, and of our misery. They expose the true age of our bodies. They make known all the professions we’ve practised and all the love we’ve made, and not made.

  Consequently, there are hands that, like their owners, aren’t worthy of life because they’ve done nothing with their lives.

  As I looked at him, I knew I was seeing hands that had experienced life, hands that had woven life and kneaded it to the point of impassioned identification. It was clear from their calculated indolence that they’d given pleasure to many a woman, and that life had given them many a disappointment.

  Here were hands that had dallied, fondled, discovered, hands that had set fire to untold numbers of women, and which were setting fire to me now from behind the smoke wafting off his cigarette as he sat there in silence.

  They were also setting fire to my questions, stoking the flames of my jealousy. These hands to which nothing had clung, had they ever clung to anyone? What was the name of the last woman they’d loved? The last women they’d undressed? How old was their bliss?

  I could tell he was a man of many lifetimes. Consequently, I might have asked him, ‘How old are your eyes?’, ‘How old are your lips?’ or, ‘How old is your silence?’

  But instead I asked him, ‘How old are your hands?’

  I thought he’d like my new way of condensing questions and turning them upside down the way he always did.

  However, seemingly unimpressed by my query, he replied, ‘They’re as old as my disappointment.’

  ‘But
I still love them,’ I said.

  Getting up suddenly to turn the tape over as though it were a way of changing the subject, he replied, ‘You’ve always loved my neuroses!’

  I didn’t understand what he meant, and I didn’t try to. I just got up and headed over to the bookcase, which I’d been wanting to take a closer look at. It was to my advantage that he didn’t seem to have heard of Roland Barthes’ apt observation that ‘one should hide from others both one’s medicine cabinet and one’s library!’

  I glanced at their titles, exultant that now at last I could acquaint myself with this man, who, seeing me distracted by his library, withdrew, saying, ‘I don’t suppose you’d miss me too much if I went to make you some coffee!’

  ‘Of course not!’ I said, laughing. ‘Books can only bring us closer!’

  From the very first glance, I was bowled over by the breadth of the subjects covered by his book collection, which bespoke a highly cultured individual conversant in two languages, with diverse political and historical interests that I hadn’t expected this man to have.

  At the same time, I was amazed not to have seen a single book on the fine arts or drawing in the house of a painter whose library reflected such wide-ranging interests. There were books on the lives of historical figures, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and even the global hegemony of multinational corporations. However, there seemed to be no room for creativity in the entire collection with the exception of a lower shelf filled with small, pocket-sized volumes of a contemporary French poetry series. I found Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil, Rimbaud’s The Drunken Boat, something by Jean Cocteau, and books by other poets.

  As I stood leafing curiously through some of the books, I happened upon one by Henri Michaux entitled Corner Columns. It was a book I’d never read or even heard of before even though there’d been a time when I loved this poet.

  I don’t know what led me to this book in particular. However, of all the books I’d looked at, it was the only one this man had written in, adding occasional comments in the margins and highlighting specific passages.

  As I leafed through it, I suspected that I’d found the key that would unlock his secret.

  I was sure that Roland Barthes had been right in what he said. After all, just as our medicine cabinets will tell others what sorts of illnesses we’ve suffered from, our bookshelves might tell them more about us than we’d like them to know, especially if they come across a book that we’ve shared in writing by scribbling in the margins.

  I was still looking through it when he came back with the coffee.

  ‘Would it be all right if I borrowed this book?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, without bothering to ask me its title.

  As he set the coffee on the table, he continued, ‘Your requests are very modest. I’d been hoping you’d ask for something nicer!’

  As I returned the other books to the shelf, I replied, ‘I’m fine with the modest requests. The nicest things can’t be asked for.’

  As if in correction, he said, ‘The nicest things always come last, Madame!’

  His voice was so close, it seemed to be stroking my ears. No sooner had I turned to look behind me than I found myself up next to him. He was just breaths and a kiss away. However, he didn’t kiss me. With his right hand he reached out and caressed my hair. After gliding slowly down my neck with a maddening flirtatiousness, his hand slid towards my ear and removed one earring, then the other.

  In what appeared to be a kind of romantic ritual, he placed the earrings on one of the bookshelves with the unthinking spontaneity of someone who was accustomed to removing small items from women’s bodies. Then his lips began where his hand had left off.

  They passed over me with deliberate slowness and at a studied distance in order to produce the maximum arousal. They grazed my mouth without quite kissing it, slid down towards my neck without actually touching it, then ascended again with the same deliberate slowness as though he were kissing me with nothing but his breath.

  He was a man who knew how to touch a woman, and words, with the same hidden blaze. With a kind of studied lethargy, he embraced me from behind the way he might embrace a fleeing sentence. I stood in surrender against the wall, numbed by a storm of pleasure. I didn’t ask myself: What is he doing to me? Is he drawing my body with his lips? Is he plotting my destiny? Is he dictating to me the next thing I’ll write? Or is he cancelling out my language?

  How was I to resist a man who, with a single kiss, or without kissing me at all, could write me and erase me? How was I to resist him as he traversed desire’s hidden passages with his lips, then assaulted me with sudden ferocity, devouring my lips and swallowing everything I’d been about to say to him?

  I discovered that only now was he starting to kiss me. As he grasped me by my hair and mingled his saliva with mine, I broke out in a sweat so profuse that my body odour drowned out the fragrance of his cologne. Meanwhile, our mouths were locked so tightly that I felt as though I were breathing through him and with him.

  I wished he would draw me closer so as to keep me from falling. But he seemed to derive such enjoyment from overpowering me with his manliness that he preferred to hold me with only one arm.

  Then, in what might best be described as an erotic cluster- bomb attack, he began blanketing my neck with staccato kisses that descended in rapid succession as though he were placing ellipses at the end of a text he might return to later. Then he withdrew.

  As I caught my breath, I noticed that the cloak I was wearing was drenched with perspiration. Meanwhile, I saw him take off his jacket, light a cigarette, and sit down on the sofa to drink his coffee.

  My questions came back to me as I looked at him.

  Like a gypsy woman reading someone’s palm, I stood there reading his features with nothing but my intuition and my senses. At that moment I cared less about discovering his past than about discerning my own destiny as it related to him. Like a forty-year-old man, it was a destiny with tired lips, tousled hair, lazy words, confusing touches, unexpected kisses and conflicting desires.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m thinking about how I love forty-year-old men.’

  He smiled and said, ‘But I’m not the man you think I am!’

  Flicking his ashes into the ashtray, he held out his hand to me and said, ‘Come over and sit next to me.’

  I hesitated a bit. Then I confessed, ‘I’m all sweaty. I’ve had this cloak on for hours.’

  I expected him to say, ‘Take it off,’ or some such thing. Instead, he drew me towards him, saying, ‘I like the way you smell. I’ve always liked the way your body expresses itself !’

  Then, as if to reassure me, he added, ‘An odourless body can’t talk!’

  Sitting down beside him, I said, ‘I’m afraid the day might come when my body is more eloquent than I am!’

  ‘Whatever happens,’ he said, ‘your body is more truthful than you are. It’s only our senses that don’t lie.

  ‘The strange thing,’ he went on, ‘is that I keep feeling as though I’ve met you before in some other house, that I’ve kissed you at some earlier time, that I recognize this odour of yours from some other embrace, and that I’ve tasted your lips in some other kiss. How do you explain the fact that we can forget a body we’ve possessed, but not one that we’ve only desired?’

  Of course I had no answers to questions like these, especially since I didn’t share his feeling that these things had happened before.

  All I said was, ‘It’s lovely to feel so much desire. There’s a kind of heroism in the ability to remain faithful to . . . an illusion!’

  He put his feet up on the table in front of him and, puffing his cigarette smoke in my direction, said a bit sarcastically, ‘What heroism? You’re still approaching life as though it were literature. People like stories with sad endings where the hero sticks to his principles till the very last page, since they don’t how to stick to their own principles in real life.�
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  Then he added, ‘Gone are the days of great causes. Heroism in real life has let us down. So let’s go for a better type of heroism in novels. All the heroism of virtue and all the victories of wisdom are nothing compared to the greatness of surrendering to the one we love in a moment of weakness. Falling in love is our most enduring victory!’

  He took my hand as though he wanted to keep me from going anywhere and said, ‘This time I want us to settle for a heroism that’s sweet and simple, one that’s within everyone’s reach, like, for example, trying for the longest kiss in the history of Algerian literature!’

  Then he asked, ‘Do you know what I was thinking about when I kissed you a little while ago?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I was thinking about how our life together began with our imitating literature, as though love had motioned to us to carry on, in real life, with a kiss we’d begun in a book. Just like in that novel, we’re having the same first date and kissing in front of the same bookshelf after you look at the books and ask if you can borrow one of them.’

  He went on, saying, ‘I love the fortuitousness of kisses that travel from one story to another. Imagine how wonderful it is for there to be a kiss that’s begun by a fictitious man in a book, and that’s continued in real life by another man who’s so much like the first that he even knows what the woman’s lips will taste like. In the age of superhuman feats, intercontinental ballistic missiles and interplanetary satellites, the achievement that one can take the most pride in is a kiss that can travel from one time to another, from one novel to another.’

  ‘That’s all well and good,’ I said. ‘But I don’t understand why you’re so bent on breaking this record in particular. Men usually pride themselves on breaking other types of records!’

  He chuckled, seemingly surprised by my question. After a pause, he said, ‘The reason is that kissing is the only romantic act in which all the senses take part. Unlike having sex, kissing someone requires all five senses. A kiss exposes us, because it reflects a state of sheer romantic transport that has nothing to do with the sexual urges that we have in common with all other animals.