Chaos of the Senses

by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

  ‘Don’t leave her alone very much then,’ he urged me. ‘Please,’ he added by way of emphasis.

  From the beginning my mother had rejected the idea of coming to live with me while we waited for Nasser to come back. She considered it humiliating to have to live with her son-in-law, especially in view of the fact that she owned a lovely apartment of her own, and that she was quite attached to all of her little trinkets.

  But from that time onward she became more and more attached to me. She was constantly visiting me or calling on the phone, she consulted me about everything, and she liked to go everywhere with me. Things got to the point where I felt as though I was her mother.

  I understood her constant need for my love and affection. She’d been widowed at the age of twenty-three and orphaned as a child. She didn’t understand why life had to make trouble for her and even for her children, or why she’d been destined to have a barren daughter and an absent son. So I listened patiently to her grumbling and complaining and to her motherly chatter, and had no choice but to surrender to all her whims.

  I even agreed to accompany her that afternoon to the Turkish bath, though I’d never shared in her enthusiasm for the weekly rituals of hygiene that took place there. As a matter of fact, I could understand her logic. The bath was the place where she could meet all the women in the city. Like them, she could gossip freely, talk about whatever was new in her life, and show off her new purchases, her jewellery, and the clothes that no man had ever seen.

  It reminded me of the way, in the old days, she’d liked to show off her fancy bathroom set, which included a silver wash basin, a fine-toothed comb made of ivory and silver, plush embroidered towels, imported scented soap, colognes, preparations for removing or dyeing hair, and all sorts of women’s accessories that she kept in a fancy pail of engraved silver in the corner of the bathroom cabinet, ready for her weekly show-and-tell session.

  Twenty years later not much had changed. The pail had been emptied of its contents and had been moved from my mother’s bathroom cabinet into the parlour, where it had been transformed into a fancy pot that held a decorative plant. However, my mother’s mind hadn’t been emptied of its contents, at least not completely. Nor was it devoid of its original mentality. It had simply adjusted itself to the requirements of the age. There was no longer any need for her handbag with the sky-blue satin lining, which had had the pleasure of rubbing against my mother’s lingerie more often than any man had.

  As a child I would often sneak a look inside that bag as though it were a chest full of wonders. I would sit on the edge of the bed, dreaming of a women’s world that as of yet I knew nothing about. I would look at my mother’s things and dream of having a body just like hers on which to sport all that lovely lingerie.

  I would dream and dream, close my mother’s body up again in the bag, stash it in the wardrobe, and rush out of the room before being taken by surprise by my other mother, the one that had no body.

  I found myself now with my mother the ‘Hajja’, whose body had changed since the days of my childhood. As she had when I was a little girl, she led the way, and I followed her unquestioningly from one room to another through the vast Turkish bath. The rooms of the bath were of different temperatures, growing hotter the farther in one went. My mother insisted on staying in the third, and hottest, of the rooms. I made no objection despite the fact that this was the room I hated the most.

  I walked after her gingerly over a wet tile floor that seemed all too ready for someone to slip and fall on it, then shatter into a million pieces. I remembered once seeing a woman fall right in front of me. She’d been holding an infant who fell out of her arms and died within hours at the hospital.

  As I entered the room, steam rose from pools situated along its walls. A child’s cry could be heard here, women’s laughter there.

  Without question, I sat down in front of the first pool I came to. Or rather, I did have one question: Why was it that, ever since I’d been a young girl, I hated to sit in rooms that were devoid of anything but steam and water, and whose only furnishings consisted of women’s naked bodies? Was it out of respect for femininity, which I had always expected to be more beautiful than bodies that had lost their natural contours? Or was it because from the very beginning I’d been destined to be a creature of paper and ink whose existence was imperilled by these prodigious amounts of water and steam?

  My mother sat down beside me and placed her things on the tile floor. As for me, the only things I had were some clothes that I’d left outside, and which I had brought in her honour in case we ran into someone who knew me. Disturbed by the thought of such an eventuality, I wrapped my towel around my body again and secured it mechanically around my bosom.

  Suddenly I heard my mother’s voice repeating words that I knew all too well from having heard them so many times in this very place. From the time she was a teenager, she’d been ashamed of her femininity and had hidden inside of towels with the insistence of someone denying an accusation.

  This is a place where you learn from the glances of others how to deny your body, persecute your desires and wash your hands of your femininity. People here teach you that not only is sex shameful, but so too femininity, along with everything that bespeaks it.

  As usual my mother yelled at me, ‘Take that towel off !’ Her words led me to new questions.

  Since she had given birth to me, did she think of my body as a personal possession that she was entitled to flaunt before others as one of her accomplishments, finding in it some solace or compensation for what her own body had become?

  Suddenly I became aware of one of the reasons behind my complex, distant relationship to this place. In this city, where there was nowhere that one could describe as intimate or private, the Turkish bath was the place where the sanctity and modesty of people’s bodies were routinely violated. They were placed under bright lights and subjected to women’s curious stares, while hands passed over them in succession, rubbing, massaging, rinsing and dowsing them with huge quantities of water as though they wanted to purge them of their womanhood.

  So was womanhood a kind of ritual impurity? Or did these women, most of whom went through their entire lives without ever denuding themselves in front of a man, have some sort of libidinous relationship with these huge quantities of water, which they poured over their bodies pail after pail for hours on end with a mysterious sort of enjoyment, and an utter preoccupation with the womanly aspects of their physical selves? It was as though they had come here for a rendezvous with their own bodies, and for no other reason. Or are all women, regardless of their nationality or their age, the granddaughters of Cleopatra, who ruled Egypt during its glory days without ever entirely leaving her bathroom?

  Whether collectly or mistakenly, these women were of the belief that after every bath they would go back home to take up their seats on the ‘throne’ of the marriage bed, whose crown they would wear for a few brief moments – in the dark – before resuming their routine lives again.

  The dark! As I sat gazing at these bodies whose femininity had been so disfigured, with their flabby bellies and drooping breasts, I suddenly saw one of the blessings of the dark, and I understood why God in his infinite wisdom had created darkness as a way of making it possible for his creatures to make love when their physical appearance had ceased to be conducive to sexual attraction. Otherwise, what man or woman, however wild their desires and however drunk they happened to be, would feel like making love with the lights on?

  I kept these comments to myself. I also kept my towel wrapped around me in protest against being associated with this category of women. Each of them sat beside a small pool surrounded by streams that were either red or black depending on the colour of the henna that she used on her hair, which as she washed it, turned the Turkish bath’s tile floor into a multicoloured Danube.

  Suddenly there entered three middle-aged women of mediocre beauty who nevertheless possessed a peculiar allure. They had walked in stark naked,
flaunting their feminine charms in everyone’s faces, whereas the custom was for women to come in wrapped in a towel, and only to take it off after they were seated.

  For a moment they were the centre of attention, and they were pursued mercilessly by curious, disapproving glances from every direction. I gathered from my mother’s insulting remarks about them that they were prostitutes. Prostitutes? Did such a profession still exist in this city? Other than on the pavements of rundown neighbourhoods where certain down-and-out women might work the streets, I didn’t think it did.

  Before I knew it the room had divided itself into two camps, one of them occupied by the ‘honourable women’, and the other occupied by the ‘women of ill-repute’. The former proceeded to make comments about the latter, targeting them with gibes and derisive glances inspired by a sudden exaggerated sense of their own virtue and superiority. The targets of these taunts were unfazed, and the three newcomers acted as though they had the place to themselves, laughing loudly, washing and flirting with each other as if to get a rise out of their critics.

  I took pleasure in my anomalous presence between the two sides, since I considered neither of them morally superior to the other. Surrounded by steam, water, unspoken desire and women’s hypocrisy, I may have been secretly amusing myself by recording wry comments in my mind. After all, a writer, like any other ordinary human being, stands halfway between purity and sinfulness.

  Every virtuous human being has just enough filth inside him that at any given moment it might surface and drown out his virtues, and that deep inside every bad person there is a spark of goodness that’s bound to shine out one day at the very moment when he least expects it. Similarly, every woman has the capacity to be either a saint or a whore, since she was created with both potentialities. But the more she leans towards one of the two, the more likely she is to shun and deride the other.

  Her patience at an end, my mother began vigorously massaging my arms, refusing to turn me over to a masseuse. Then she went on badmouthing the ‘harlots’, saying that large families had a custom of reserving the Turkish bath once a week and inviting relatives and friends to come at their expense. They did this in order to ensure that they didn’t have to mix with strangers, including the seedy types that had infiltrated Constantine, violated its sanctity and insulted its population.

  I was only pretending to listen to her, and made no reply. I was busy thinking about something that Sasha Guitry once said: ‘There aren’t honourable women and dishonourable women. There are only dishonourable women, and ugly women.’

  As I left the Turkish bath that day, Sasha Guitry was still on my mind, and when I went home that afternoon in the rain, I recalled a certain sarcastic comment of his: ‘Don’t make love on Saturday nights. What will you do then if it rains on Sunday morning?’ He was poking fun at husbands and wives who make love out of boredom on Saturday nights, then don’t know what to do with themselves if they have to stay home the next day.

  Even though it was a rainy Saturday, I decided that evening to go against Sasha Guitry’s advice, since in our country Saturday isn’t the last day of the week, but the first, which meant that my husband wouldn’t be around the next day to share my boredom. Add to this the fact that I was coming back from a Turkish bath that had set my desires aflame, and I was dying to give my womanhood to a man.

  I didn’t know, of course, that the mere fact of my intending to fall in love would be enough to turn the country upside down. Nor did I know that history was planning to give Algeria one of its greatest surprises on that day. President Chadli Bendjedid had chosen this particular Saturday, 11 January, 1992, to announce his resignation and the dissolution of Parliament during the eight o’clock news broadcast, a development which would usher the country into a constitutional labyrinth. I didn’t blame Bendjedid for dumping cold water on my desires at night. After all, he’d been dumping cold water on the desires of an entire nation for years on end.

  Chapter Five

  Definitely

  TIME ALONE WILL MAKE you sane when everyone else has gone mad. As for history, don’t expect it to be in a hurry to say what it has to say in such cases. It’s waiting for the right moment.

  After a wait of twenty-eight years, an aeroplane landed on the tarmac. A man more than seventy-eight years old disembarked and walked across a red carpet with a bewildered look on his face.

  Was it only a one-hour trip between his place of exile and his homeland? Then why had it taken him twenty-eight years to cover the distance?

  A thin man with an upright posture, and tall as the truth is lofty, he was slightly stooped over, his hands were dry and rough, and the bones in his face and hands were prominent.

  Not long before history began, his name had been Mohamed Boudiaf. He lived in a small city in Morocco where, with his rough and calloused hands, he had run a small brick factory. Since igniting the spark of Algeria’s War of Independence in November 1954, he had lived far removed from all political activity other than the memories of a revolution that had spurned him, and news that drifted in from a country whose rulers had deleted his name even from their history textbooks.

  Hence, he no longer had a name, from the time he set foot on the homeland’s soil, his name became ‘history’. (But isn’t history what prevents the future from coming to be?)

  He had been ageless before, but now he was as old as his dreams, which had arrived on the scene two or more generations late.

  Now at last he was learning to tread over the soil of the homeland in which he had never before walked with freedom or safety. France, which had pursued him doggedly, found that the only way it could detain him and his comrades was to hijack their aeroplane in 1956 as it crossed the Mediterranean Sea from Morocco to Tunisia. It diverted the plane to France, taking Boudiaf and his four companions – Ahmed Ben Bella, Aït Ahmed, Mohamed Khider and Rabah Bitat – with their hands bound towards their various places of detention. It did so to the astonishment of the entire world, which had yet to hear of the innovative practice of hijacking. It was met with outraged demonstrations on the part of the Arab masses, which during that same year had been filled with pan-Arab fervour and zeal by Abdel Nasser’s rousing rhetoric.

  It was only days before The Voice of the Arabs began broadcasting lively tunes demanding the five men’s release. These anthems were soon taken up by young and old alike accompanied by women’s ululations. One of them ran, ‘In the name of the heroes five, O France, we will have our revenge!’ And we cried.

  *

  History, on the other hand, was laughing, since it alone knew what no one else could ever have anticipated. In June 1963, not long after Algeria won its independence and the five revolutionary leaders found themselves free men, the then-new president Ben Bella, who had once been Boudiaf ’s comrade in arms, had Boudiaf arrested as he left his home. Boudiaf was led from one place to another until he ended up in a prison somewhere in a trackless wasteland. Thus it happened that the Algerian revolution’s leading man suffered the disgrace of discovering that he had a homeland more savage than his enemies.

  Ben Bella himself made the same discovery two years later when, in June 1965, Boumédienne removed him from power and threw him in prison, from which he emerged fifteen years later a wizened old man. As for Boudiaf, who had never demanded power for himself, but had refused to fight to free a nation from imperialism just to surrender it to the tyranny of a one-party system, he saw no difference between the two rulers who had come to power since the revolution.

  On the day he disappeared, none of his comrades asked where he’d been taken. They were too busy dividing up the spoils!

  But despite his long absence, Boudiaf re-entered the scene with a powerful presence.

  Just like that, after twenty-eight years, his enemies had remembered him again. Sated and bloated, they had filled their pockets at the expense of the Algerian people. Then they had withdrawn, leaving a country that had been mortgaged to the World Bank – though with high hopes – for several ge
nerations to come. Boudiaf was the only one with any degree of integrity or self-restraint, and who had never once sat at the table around which dubious power deals had been struck.

  Consequently, he was the only one whose name could restore confidence to a people who had lost all confidence in everything and everyone after seeing Ali Baba and the forty thieves lead one corrupt government after another.

  They told him, ‘Algeria needs you. You’re the only one who can save her!’ – words to which his ageing frame could only respond with a loving ‘Yes!’

  The old man rose, washed the clay off his hands, and purged his memory of hatred and bitterness, since he had always been of the belief that you can’t build something with hatred. A man with an extraordinary ability to forgive, he embraced those who had exiled him and came home. Never once had Algeria called upon him but that he had answered her call.

  Behold the man . . .

  He was wearing a suit that he had never expected to wear for an occasion such as this.

  He was learning to walk before us, to smile at us. He raised his right hand in a bashful salute, like someone apologizing for a hand that had never held anything but a weapon or fired bricks, and which saw itself as unprepared for such a role.

  Behold the man, Boudiaf . . .

  He had come to us on foot, treading on dreams. He was received with national flags by a generation that until that day had never heard his name, but which saw in his stature the history of Algeria in its legendary greatness.