Chaos of the Senses

by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

  ‘That’s why we can have sex with someone that we have no desire to kiss, whereas we might be content with nothing but a kiss from a woman whose lips alone give us a fever that couldn’t be generated by the bodies of all other women put together!’

  I could feel myself blushing. His words had set me all aflutter, and my body was electrified. But I didn’t say anything. It was as if I’d become another woman all of a sudden.

  He pushed back a lock of my hair that had fallen out of place, saying, ‘I’ve had a lot of sex, but I just now realized that I haven’t kissed a woman for a long time, and that the last time I was in bliss was when my lips were pressed against yours on page 172.’

  I nearly asked him what book he was talking about, and how he could remember the exact page where the kiss he remembered had taken place. But I couldn’t think of anything to add to what he’d said. So I stood up, as if I were in search of an answer that I thought I might find more easily on my feet.

  Apparently having misunderstood the reason for my getting up, he looked at his watch and asked me, ‘When’s the driver coming for you?’

  ‘He’ll be waiting for me on the back street at five o’clock.’

  ‘You’ve got fifteen minutes. So you’d better be going.’

  I didn’t argue with him. I was used to his ending our time together at its sweetest moment, the way the electricity goes off in the middle of a celebration.

  Then, as if he’d recalled matters that love had pushed temporarily out of his consciousness, he added, ‘The situation’s bad, and in the next few hours there might be confrontations between the protestors and the army.’

  As if I were looking for an excuse to stay, I asked him, ‘Why today? Why now?’

  ‘Because the leader of the Islamic Salvation Front made a speech today in which he described Chadli as a nail in Algeria’s heel that had to be removed. An Islamist march is heading towards the presidential palace demanding that the presidential elections be moved forward.’

  Seeing my astonishment at the news he’d just announced, he said, ‘Don’t you listen to the radio?’

  ‘There’s no radio where I’m staying,’ I said apologetically. ‘And since you advised me not to read the newspapers, I’ve been isolated from the world over the past couple of weeks in that summer house.’

  As he looked on, I spruced myself up in front of a mirror and put the scarf back on my head.

  Then I headed for the door, about to leave behind the simple surroundings for which I so envied him.

  He stopped me, handing me the book I’d asked to borrow, and said with a wry wink, ‘It seems that here, too, I’m like Khaled in that novel of yours. But there’s no danger in my lending you this book as long as it isn’t one of Ziyad’s poetry collections!’

  I was amazed that he would remember so much from one of my novels.

  I reassured him, saying, ‘Henri Michaux died several years ago, so he poses no threat to you!’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he quipped back. ‘I’ve learned not to be complacent when it comes to the things you read!’

  I giggled.

  I remembered how Khaled lends the novel’s heroine a poetry collection written by a Palestinian friend of his named Ziyad. Khaled has been gushing to her constantly about Ziyad and his poetry, confident that nothing could happen between the two of them since Ziyad is away on the war front. Then Ziyad happens to come to Paris for a few days on a visit from Lebanon, and the heroine ends up falling in love with the poet and ditching the artist, who loses her from the minute she begins reading that collection.

  At the door that was still closed on our secret, he embraced me without a word. It was as though the scarf that now covered my head had relegated us once more to the realm of strangers.

  We parted without a kiss, without a word of farewell.

  All he said as I left the house was, ‘I’ll be waiting for your call. Ring me as soon as you get back so I’ll know you arrived safely.’

  ‘I will,’ I replied absently.

  Once outside, I paused to look back at the door as it closed behind me on a moment stolen from destiny. Then I walked down the stairs like a thief who’s certain that everyone he sees is eyeing him with suspicion, and who himself has begun to be suspicious of his own happiness. He suspects a pleasure which, now past, no longer seems to merit all the risk he took on its account, and the long-awaited moment of passion which, within the space of the instant it takes for a door to close, has suddenly become a thing of the past.

  If the truth be told, there’s no one more miserable than a lover going back down the stairs!

  I went home by the way I’d come, but with more fear and less enthusiasm. There was a blurred space in me for joy, and another for regret.

  Suppose you have a couple of hours to yourself in a car being driven by a military chauffeur who, bringing you back from a romantic tryst, takes you down the streets of wrath and the alleyways of death. Those two hours will set the stage for a heartbreaking plunge back into reality, and give you plenty of time to regret what you’ve done.

  The process is catalysed by the garb of piety you’re wearing for the occasion and which, before you know it, has started wearing you, with the result that your own thoughts turn on you!

  The minute I got back I hurriedly took off the cloak and returned it to its owner in the hopes of being reconciled with my body.

  A hundred years ago, in order to be able to write, French novelist Amandine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin took the pen name George Sand. She even adopted men’s attire inside of which she lived as a woman. Since that isn’t an option for me, I’ve always had to borrow some other woman’s clothes so that I can go on writing inside of them.

  Literature teaches us to borrow other people’s lives, convictions and outward appearances. But the hardest part isn’t to break into other people’s private spaces. The hardest part comes when we close our notebooks, take off what doesn’t belong to us, and go back to living inside of bodies that don’t recognize us any more because of all the times we’ve dressed them up in someone else’s clothes!

  I put on a summer house dress and sat down to think about what had happened to me.

  Like pain, pleasure forces you to re-examine your life and your convictions. In fact, it might make you go so far as to ask the crazy question: ‘What use is my life now?’

  There are kisses which, if you don’t die during them, you don’t deserve to survive. But either way, you make an astounding discovery: namely, that up until that existence-defining pleasure or pain, you hadn’t yet lived.

  It reminds me of a man who used to defy death and who, when I worried about him, would make light of my fear, saying, ‘I need to die sometimes in order to realize that I’m still alive.’

  Now that life had brought me this much enjoyment, I was afraid of the realization that before it, I’d been among the living dead.

  A single kiss, and I found myself discovering life all at once. I also discovered the enormity of what I’d been missing.

  I wished I could fill that whole black notebook of mine with nothing but a description of that defining moment, the moment that had marked the end of one lifetime and the beginning of another. I wished I could freeze it, or embalm it inside of time.

  I wished I had the hands and the talent of Auguste Rodin so that I could immortalize two lovers for whom time had come to an eternal standstill in a moment of passion that took them up into another world, fused in a kiss of stone. If only, like Proust in his masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, I could spend twenty pages doing nothing but describing a single kiss!

  Was it because Proust’s kiss hadn’t really happened and had ended, after his lengthy narrative, on the beloved’s cheek, that he was able to describe it in such detail?

  And was it because Rodin wasn’t entirely devoted to Camille Claudel, the sculptress whose stormy affair with him may have contributed to her ending up in the mental institution where she died, that he wanted to compensate for her absence by crea
ting a statue which, in its unsettling nakedness, immortalized a kiss they would never again share?

  Is an early experience of betrayal a condition for creativity? Is coming back empty-handed the only thing that can fill a book?

  It didn’t matter to me to answer such questions. Besides, I couldn’t have answered them even if I’d tried.

  The desire that had now taken me over was preventing me from thinking. It was setting me on fire, singeing my fingers, making it impossible to write. Of course, it might actually have forced me to write if it hadn’t been for the telephone that sat nearby and which, by means of a magical six-digit number, could provide me with an instant dose of love and affection that would make it pointless to conjure my beloved by sitting in front of a piece of paper!

  So I went over to the telephone to call him. As I did so, I thought about what a loss to literature had been caused by this modern gadget. How many an exquisite text and how many a love letter will never be written because of that deadly word, ‘Hello’!

  Before I’d lifted the receiver, the phone rang. I jumped. It was my husband on the line. So the word ‘Hello’ can put illusions to death, too!

  It was a hurried exchange, as though we were continents apart, or as though his telephone bill weren’t paid by the government.

  So be it, then! I thought. He was always in a hurry. Maybe it was events around him that were in a hurry, since he was telling me to come back to Constantine in two days’ time. He told me that given the deteriorating security situation in the capital, I’d be flying back rather than returning in the car.

  When I asked him what to do about the driver, he said, ‘He’ll bring the car back after taking you and Farida to the airport. I’ve reserved seats for the two of you on the 9:30 a.m. flight.’

  He hung up, and I sat there, frozen.

  I’d been expecting to return to Constantine, of course, with Eid al-Adha just three days away. However, I’d expected some miracle or emergency that would make my husband ask me to stay until my mother got back from the pilgrimage, which would have given me a chance to see that man again, if even just once.

  With time close on my heels, I was all the more anxious to call him.

  Six digits later, the telephone began to ring. And only two rings after that, as though it had been waiting for me, a voice came over the line, saying, ‘Did you get home safely?’

  ‘Yes. How about you?’

  ‘I haven’t left the house. I decided it would be better to soak up certain places’ memory of you. This house is still haunted by your scent. It must be your polite way of punishing me!’

  ‘I didn’t punish you on purpose.’

  ‘Well, you might have, if you’d read about what Josephine did to Napoleon when he forced her out of the palace.’

  ‘What did she do?’

  ‘She sprayed her perfume all over his room to make sure he’d be surrounded by her for a full fifteen days even though he was with another woman. And before that, Cleopatra used to spray the sails of her ship with her perfume as a way of leaving a trail of fragrance behind her wherever she went.’

  ‘All right, then,’ I said, laughing. ‘I’ll keep that in mind for the next time!’

  After a pause, he replied, ‘There won’t be a next time.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked, distressed.

  His voice even despite my agitation, he said, ‘Because I’m leaving tomorrow.’

  ‘Are you going to Constantine?’

  ‘No, to France.’

  ‘To France!’ I cried, incredulous. ‘What are you going to do there?’

  ‘What everybody else does when they go there,’ he said with a laugh.

  ‘But you . . . .’

  ‘But I’m not like them,’ he said, finishing my sentence for me. ‘Isn’t that what you were going to say? I’m a creature of ink that travels between your notebooks and in your company alone. I might go back and forth between Constantine and the capital, but I wouldn’t go anywhere else. And I have no right to buy a ticket for myself and go somewhere without you.’

  After a pause, he continued, ‘But I’m not the hero you think I am. Your heroes and heroines don’t get sick or grow old. As for me, Madame, I’m sick and tired.’

  Suddenly alarmed, I said, ‘What’s wrong?’

  He replied with a kind of sorrowful derision, ‘I’m tired of standing up. I’ve spent my whole life standing up, since I’m no good at sitting on principles.’

  I didn’t try to understand what he was saying. The only question that mattered to me was, ‘When are you coming back?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m a man who’s always in transit.’

  ‘But I care about your life.’

  ‘Which life do you mean?’ he shot back sarcastically.

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t understand what he meant.

  ‘I haven’t been successful in life,’ he went on, ‘so my hope now is that I might be successful in death. Could you give me a sweet death if life lets me down in the last scene?’

  ‘What are you saying?’ I shouted. ‘Just a few hours ago we were happy, talking about love. So where did all this pessimism come from?’

  ‘Since you care about love, you must care about death, too. Love and death are the two greatest puzzles in the world. They’re alike in their inscrutability, their fierceness, their unexpectedness, their meaninglessness, and the questions they raise. We come and we go without knowing why we loved one person and not another, why we die on one day and not another, or why we die here, now. We also don’t know why we’re the ones who die, and not others. This is why love and death alone fuel all the literature in the world, since apart from these two themes, there’s nothing worth writing about.’

  What he’d said got me to thinking, and I sank into a silence that was interrupted by his voice:

  ‘Do you know what I thought about as I was kissing you today?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I thought about how, if kisses die the way we do, then the best time to die would be during a kiss.’

  ‘Amazing. Would you believe that when I got back to the house I got out my notebook and wrote, “There are kisses which, if you don’t die during them, you don’t deserve to survive”?’

  He registered a moment of silence, as though he were savouring the idea, delving deep into it.

  Then he said, ‘You’ve realized on your own that unless we come straight up against death, we’ll never experience a love sublime enough to be called true passion.’

  I sat there without saying anything, like a student who’s trying to memorize a lesson being taught by a professor whose entire curriculum consists of his shifting moods, and who, in the space of a single day, has to master one lesson on desire, a second on death, a third on love, and a fourth on how someone can kiss a woman with perfect passion, then abandon her with perfect indifference!

  This is all I can recall of that conversation.

  I don’t remember him saying anything romantic after that or leaving me a new telephone number or address.

  All he said was that the fragrance of that stolen time still hung about him. Then he drew the conversation to a close by saying apologetically that he needed to get some sleep before his trip.

  I understood from what he’d said that I’d be able to call him the next day so that we could talk one last time.

  At seven o’clock the next morning, still half-asleep after a troubled night, I dialled his number. The ring of the telephone sounded like someone crying, with no one on the other side of memory to silence it. It was the tragicomedy of love, repeating itself without end.

  Only now would silence be able to weep.

  Chapter Four

  Inevitably

  WE ALWAYS ARRIVE AT love just a bit late.

  Then we knock cautiously on somebody’s heart, apologizing before the fact for a sentiment that we know will vanish the minute it appears.

  Love repeats itself in various forms, with beginnings that give birth to lofty dreams, and
with precipitous, excruciating endings. So we learn to expect love’s drunken driver to deliver us to disappointment’s door.

  The dream matures by necessity, but before the time is ripe. So what use is it for the heart to grow up so fast?

  When Eid al-Adha arrived, Constantine was awaited by another sort of occasion.

  I returned to the city, my heart suffering from multiple fractures. As I struggled out from under the wreckage of a dream, gasping for breath beneath a massive heap of illusions, Constantine presented me with a face I didn’t recognize. Its streets were piled high with refuse, since the Islamists had commandeered the rubbish collectors’ dustcarts to force them to join the open strike, leaving the city’s stray cats to celebrate the holiday alone.

  I was in a hurry to get back to my house, where all I could hear was the city’s loud bustle as it prepared for its holiday, and the bleating of the sheep awaiting slaughter the next morning.

  I’d always hated holidays, and this one promised to be the saddest of them all. It was a holiday of absence. The feeling of absence came over me as I woke up on the morning of Eid, since there was nobody in the house, other than the maid, to wish a happy holiday. There wasn’t anybody to call, either, except for Uncle Ahmad’s wife, whose voice over the phone made me feel all the sadder since it revived my feeling of guilt towards her.

  My husband had left the house early in anticipation of possible demonstrations or unrest after the end of the holiday prayer. Farida had gone as usual to spend the day with her family. My mother wasn’t back from the pilgrimage yet, and Nasser wasn’t at home to answer the telephone when I called. Even the sheep, which had been outside in the yard, weren’t there any more. Or, rather, all that was left of them were blood stains on the ground and carcasses hung up on hooks and being skinned by a butcher.

  What do people do on the morning of the holiday but attack sheep’s carcasses: skinning them, cutting them to pieces, dividing them up? No one here, no matter how limited his means or humble his abode, could conceive of Eid al-Adha without slaughtering a sheep. So I was used to seeing people scurrying around on the morning of Eid al-Adha, the men to the open areas set up specially for the ritual slaughter, and the women to their kitchens, where they would divide up the animals, keep the parts they needed, and distribute the rest as alms.