Chaos of the Senses

by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

  Meantime, a neighbour lady arrived, followed by a number of other women, so I withdrew and went to be with Nasser the way I usually did on such occasions.

  I loved Nasser’s taciturnity, and the manly features and towering height he’d inherited from our father. Today in particular he seemed beyond his years.

  I felt him to be a man above complexes, above suspicion. He had nothing in common with people for whom fundamentalism was nothing but a handy solution to all their male hang-ups or earthly problems and who used their extremism as a way of compensating for some emotional deficit, exacting revenge for social injustices, or venting their patriotic frustrations.

  He’d chosen this path and left everything else behind, while others had followed him simply because they had nothing to lose. He could have had any girl he wanted, any job he wanted, any fortune he sought. But he’d turned up his nose at them all. I wondered what kind of inward wealth he drew on, what cause he’d married in secret, what country he emigrated to every day as he sat sipping his coffee in silent discontentment. My mother was always trying to get him to find a job and take advantage of the opportunities at his disposal. She’d needle him by comparing him to people who, although they’d started out in circumstances less fortunate than his, had succeeded in life.

  But had they succeeded? Hardly. The people my mother had in mind had succeeded in sparing themselves life’s hardships by plundering the country wherever they went and shamelessly flaunting their spoils. Within the space of a few years, they’d erected huge mansions with fancy cars parked outside, and their wives had made it their pastime to travel to Europe whenever they wanted to buy themselves new wardrobes.

  What my mother didn’t realize was that she was only deepening his sense of failure, and encouraging him to defy her even more.

  As the days went by I saw him lose his ability to respond to her. He was also losing his elegance. It was as if he’d gone on strike against both life and elegance, since the homeland wasn’t as elegant as his dreams!

  Had he decided to join the Silence Party and give up his voice, the way others suddenly give up their slogans and shave off their convictions for fear of prisons that lie in wait for men with beards?

  The time had come for razorblades – which, with a sudden decline in values and in the value of human beings – were finally available on the market. So, was this the time for the homeland to renounce its claim to be of some value?

  As values went downhill, slogans came down off the walls, marking the beginning of a time of tribulation as prisons filled up with bearded men and with those who’d been arrested by accident, caught in the crossfire the way people so often are in times of war.

  In a low voice I asked him, ‘Do you really have to leave, Nasser? Have you thought about what will happen to Ma if you’re not around?’

  ‘I’m only leaving to come back,’ he said. ‘But if I stayed, you might lose me for good. I can tell you this, of course, but not Ma. I’ll keep her in the dark about it and go meet my fate on some nice-sounding pretext. She’ll tolerate my not being around better than she’d tolerate finding out that I’d been arrested or murdered.’

  ‘Are your options really that limited?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course. Gone are the days of fleeting disappointments. Now’s the time for prisons, sudden death, and fabricated assassinations.’

  ‘My husband tells me you were arrested while I was away.’

  ‘And did he also tell you he’d intervened to get me released?’ he interjected.

  ‘Is that not true?’

  ‘It’s true, all right. It’s just that it was a political ploy with multiple aims. First, it puts me in his debt. Second, it calls my integrity into question, since it causes my friends to doubt my opposition to the state. After all, I was only in jail for a couple of days, whereas they might be there for months or even years. Not to mention the fact that if they release you, it means your problems have just begun. They’ve started releasing the ones that irritate them the most so that they can kill them on the outside and claim that it was some random crime. So what choice do I have but to leave?’

  I listened to him incredulously. It was as though somebody had lifted the lid of a chest in which I’d deposited my dreams, thinking they were in a safe place – a place I’d called my ‘homeland’ – only to find that they’d turned into a stinking mess!

  All I wanted to do now was run away with him to some other country, any other country, or some other continent or planet until this crazy train had passed.

  Although I wasn’t convinced of the logic of a man who had gone off and left me, I was convinced of the logic behind this man’s wanting to leave home, and I soon found myself helping him invent lies and excuses to persuade my mother of the same.

  I went home that day laden with kisses and instructions from Nasser and with presents from my mother, foremost among them some water from the Well of Zamzam, which she brought me every time she came back from the pilgrimage in anticipation of the day when I got pregnant and used it during childbirth.

  Meanwhile, I was pregnant with that man. He was the only thing that kept growing inside me. As the days passed, his presence overshadowed even Nasser’s departure and life’s other disappointments. At the same time, I couldn’t understand how, in spite of all the tragedies happening around me, he managed to go on living in me and keeping me from concentrating on anything but him.

  More than his words, what clung to me was his scent. It was mingled with a kind of perfume, with the smell of a certain tobacco, and with the odour of a certain perspiration which, taken all together, made up a presence that awakened my senses. It was a presence that had no name. Or maybe its name was simply ‘him’.

  I remembered how Diderot had proposed a hierarchy of the senses, describing sight as the most superficial, hearing as the most conceited, taste as the most pessimistic, and touch as the most profound. As for smell, he described it as the sense of desire; that is, a sense that can’t be classified because it’s governed not by logic, but by the subconscious.

  The frightening thing about this man was that he’d led me to discover my senses, or, more precisely, my womanly fear of them. In fact, he’d cast me into a chaos of the senses so extreme that I feared the day when I wouldn’t be able to describe him or even recognize him, my knowledge of him having passed out of the realm of logic.

  So one day I decided to devote my time to reading the book I’d brought back with me by Henri Michaux, the one he’d marked with notes and comments of his own. Since I’d failed to unlock this man’s secrets through real-life observations, I wanted to see if I could unlock them outside the realm of his concrete presence, with the calmness of someone getting to know a character in a book.

  Being swept off your feet by someone whose inscrutability makes him not only alluring, but even obnoxious at times, may be your chance to write a great novel – that is, if you’re a novelist. If, on the other hand, you’re a lover, the beloved’s inscrutability will be your torment and your curse, since love will turn you into a part-time detective.

  Like everyone in love, you want to know everything about your beloved. You want to know his past, his present, the names of the people he’s loved and who have loved him, where he’s lived, the cities he’s visited, the professions he’s practised, the places he frequents.

  You ply him with questions about his sign of the zodiac, his hobbies, his associations. You might even bring a book home from his library just for the pleasure of finding out what sorts of things he reads!

  Love will turn you into a sneak, a spy, a snoop. However, questions will only draw you more deeply into your romantic morass, and herein lies lovers’ tragedy!

  My first question was: What had drawn this man to Henri Michaux? And why had he chosen this particular book to record his own thoughts on? The only answer I could come up with was that, like him, Henri Michaux had been an artist.

  At that point the question became: How can I understand a man through a poet wh
o was himself a mystery? He was, in fact, a poet whose questions only led to more questions. His life was founded upon never-ending attempts to penetrate life’s outer façade. He steadfastly rejected literary prizes, he refused to have his picture taken, and he refused to allow his books to be published in large quantities. Instead, he wanted no more than five copies of any given book of his to be printed. He was haunted his entire life by a sense of meaninglessness, a sense that makes itself felt from the first idea he records in this book. He writes, ‘In your belief that you place others in your service, it’s more likely that you yourself turn gradually into a servant. But the servant of whom? The servant of what? Search, search.’

  In the margin someone had written, ‘Don’t search. You only place your intelligence in the service of insanity.’

  This was followed by another thought: ‘In the absence of the sun, learn to grow ripe in the cold.’

  Below it he had added in blue ink, ‘. . . or in a newspaper!’

  The next comment was: ‘If you’re embarking on failure, then don’t fail any old which way.’ The pen went on to say, ‘If, on the other hand, you’re embarking on death, don’t worry!’

  Reading a book in which somebody has recorded some of his own opinions and ideas or highlighted certain sentences is like getting to know him by looking into his briefcase or spying on him unawares.

  Intimate realities are more easily written about than spoken of, since writing is a kind of silent confession. So I felt a bit embarrassed in the presence of a book that wasn’t meant for my eyes. In fact, I didn’t understand how he could have lent me this book with no hesitation whatsoever. In any case, I found myself reading it from two different angles at the same time.

  I love texts that have been written by two pens. They’re similar in their effect to a piano duet. In a solo played to the rhythm of Henri Michaux, the first player seems to say, ‘Rest assured: some purity still remains in you.’ Then the second player comes in on an unexpected note, as if to say, ‘Is that so?’

  In the violent passion of his earthshaking La Symphonie Fantastique, Berlioz says in effect, ‘What have you left once you’ve destroyed the impregnable wall of your own knowledge?’

  In reply, confident fingers come in once more in blue ink: ‘Rather, it’s a wall called fear.’

  Then the piano falls silent, and the blue pen continues apace, underlining verses and ideas that have arrested its attention.

  ‘Don’t despise your mistakes, and don’t be in a hurry to correct them. After all, what will you put in their place?’

  Or . . .

  ‘It wasn’t long before I noticed that I wasn’t just the ant, but the ant’s path as well.’

  Or . . .

  ‘Sleep in the end is your most enduring disappointment.’

  Next to this a question had been penned in a tone of even greater disappointment. Like the opening bar of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, it seemed to say, ‘And what about love?’

  Then the blue pen fell silent.

  I spent days rereading Michaux’s little book, at first merely out of curiosity. As I read it I was taken by how similar these two men were in numerous areas, including their love for drawing, and their fondness for the colour black, in which and against which Michaux did most of his paintings. Add to this their mutual dislike of big names and being in the spotlight, and their obsession with death.

  My other discovery was that this man worked for a newspaper, that there had been a major emotional disappointment in his life, and that he had a rather sardonic style which served to conceal a profound bitterness and an acute intelligence. In short, he was just the kind of man I tended to fall in love with.

  Perhaps because I was possessed by thoughts of Nasser, I found myself reading it again and again with alternating ideas in my mind.

  There are books that enable you to make the most amazing discoveries. In them you discover yourself, and regions within your being that you’d known nothing about.

  In other books you discover someone else you hadn’t expected to find. In fact, they might lead you from one person to another. Thus it was that I found myself thinking of Nasser. It even seemed that some of the thoughts I was reading were things he had said. Take this verse, for example: ‘I have no name. Rather, my name is a squandering of names.’

  After all, wasn’t Nasser Abd al-Mawla just a squandering of two dreams and two names: Gamal Abdel Nasser, and al-Tahir Abd al-Mawla?

  How could my brother have been born during both the Algerian War of Independence and the Nasserite era without coming to feel that a series of historical coincidences were bound to change the history of his own life?

  Before he had ever heard any political discourse, Nasser developed an awareness of his name, half of which had been dedicated to pan-Arabism, and half of which was a repository for the patriotic memory.

  Before he was old enough to follow the news or read a newspaper, he had opened his eyes to the absence of his father and to the constant presence of Abdel Nasser, smiling and saluting in that famous picture of his, not only because we didn’t have a television in our house in those days, but because, when we were living away from our own country, it was the only picture that graced the wall of our humble sitting room.

  I remember how that picture came to us in our place of exile in Tunisia through a friend of my father’s known as Si Abd al-Hamid. This man used to come to visit us while my father was on the front. He would come laden with gifts and a sum of money, which may have been from him, or which he may have given us on instructions from the front – I don’t know which.

  One day as he was playing with Nasser, the man asked him, ‘What would you like me to bring you?’ Nasser, who was only four years old at the time, cried, ‘Bring me Abdel Nasser!’ as though he were asking for a toy. My mother has told me how Si Abd al-Hamid was left speechless at first by the little boy’s question and how, with the logic of a child, he finally replied, ‘I’ll bring him to you next time I come.’

  This man, who used to go to Cairo frequently to conduct political consultations and was responsible for monitoring Algerian students’ affairs there, once brought us a large picture of Abdel Nasser with a number of souvenirs. During some of our evenings in Tunisia, we would listen to The Voice of the Arabs from Cairo, which broadcast Abdel Nasser’s speeches and rousing pan-Arab anthems. Some of them I still know by heart, since we would memorize them the way little children in those days would memorize songs in kindergarten and never forget them. Then we would go to sleep happy without any need for television.

  We used to watch the world on a screen that consisted of a wall on which Abdel Nasser’s picture hung. This picture was later joined by a smaller one of my father from a front- page newspaper article from the summer of 1960 announcing the death of one of Algeria’s revolutionary leaders at the hands of French paratroopers after a fierce battle in the city of Batna.

  I remember keeping that newspaper for days. I would open it up to the front page and sit staring at my father’s features, contemplating the way he had looked when time stood still for him for ever. Then one day I surprised myself by cutting the picture out and asking my mother to frame it, whereupon it became the second picture to hang in our home.

  Perhaps it was then that I first developed a secret habit which, some twenty years later during the Palestinian intifada, took a new and painful form. I began spending long hours poring over the pictures of martyrs-to-be, who would have their pictures taken individually and in groups as a keepsake before a suicide operation. Newspapers would then publish the photos the day after the operation to announce their martyrdom. I would always keep this page of the newspaper, one operation after another. I finally accumulated such a huge pile of them that I decided to gather them into a bag and put it somewhere far away, out of reach and out of sight, so that I could find some relief.

  I had forgotten all about those two pictures which, after our move from Tunisia back to Algeria, had ceased to be part of the decor in our new
sitting room, which was too elegant to be decorated by a couple of pictures on that order of simplicity. Then, about a year ago, I came across them entirely by coincidence in a small attic room where my mother hides things she likes to hold on to. She keeps them organized, neatly arranged, and ‘buried’ in metal lockers of the sort that went out of style when people began to travel by air, and which my mother probably used to move her things from Tunisia to Algeria in 1962 after Algeria’s independence.

  I remember how delighted I was to stumble across those two pictures. They awakened within me a time that was now so far removed that it seemed never to have been. They were the types of things that my mother used to keep hidden away, because they were too important to throw out but not important enough to take up space in our house. I considered leaving them to gather the dust of oblivion. I also considered taking one of them and leaving the other. However, together they embodied the memory of a single era. They were so fused in my mind, in fact, that my visual memory couldn’t distinguish one from the other. So I decided to take both of them back to my house, where, to my mother’s dismay and my husband’s amazement, they came to occupy a permanent place on my desk.

  I didn’t feel like explaining myself to anybody. This memory concerned me alone, and possibly Nasser as well. However, Nasser surprised me in the way he related to those two pictures. He met them with silence, as though they were no concern of his.

  I didn’t want to draw him into childhood confessions that the logic of manhood had rendered invalid. I just pondered his silence, and concluded that he had forgotten his passion for the one, and the other’s fatherly passion for him, and had decided to let them be my concern alone.

  Even so, Nasser remained my main preoccupation. He had been gone for more than a month, and my mother badgered me with questions about him to which I had no answers. ‘Why did he go to Germany?’ she wanted to know. ‘People usually go to France. I’ve never heard of anybody going to Germany.’

  I didn’t know what to say to her. I myself hadn’t known where he was going until just a week earlier. I’d been at my mother’s house when he called. I asked him if everything was the way he had hoped it would be. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. I asked him if he had an address or telephone number where we could reach him. He replied that he would call us whenever he got the chance, from which I understood that he didn’t want to tell me anything over the phone. When he asked me whether our mother had come to live with me since he left, I told him she’d insisted on staying in her own house.