Chaos of the Senses

by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

  However, a frightening unspoken desire, and senses in a state of high alert, left us devoid of emotional resistance in the face of that throaty, sorrowful Greek voice singing about its romantic disillusionments.

  We were on the verge of a kiss when the music came on. Taking us by surprise, it advanced upon us slowly, even lazily at first, before picking up speed in keeping with the mood of our wildly contradictory desires. It communicated its passionate rhythm like the steps of a dancer twirling in the pouring rain, his feet clad in nothing but the buoyancy of our ardent craving.

  In the presence of Zorba, the sea took off its dark glasses and black shirt and sat gazing at me.

  A man who was half ink, half sea denuded me of my questions between high and low tide, and drew me towards my destiny.

  A man who was half timidity, half seduction inundated me with a feverish torrent of kisses.

  Holding me with one arm, he cancelled out my hands and began writing me, pondering me in the midst of my perplexity. He said, ‘This is the first time I’ve looked off the page at your body. Let me see you at last.’

  I tried to seek refuge behind a blanket of words. He said reassuringly, ‘Don’t hide behind anything. I’m looking at you in the darkness of the sea and nothing but the lamp of craving is lighting your body now. So far our love has lived its entire life in the darkness of the senses.’

  I wanted to ask him, ‘Why are you so sad?’

  But a storm at sea swept my questions away, scattering me like foam.

  The sea advanced, inundating everything in its path and staking the banners of its manliness on every spot it passed.

  With every region that he declared occupied territory, and which I declared liberated, I discovered the greatness of the losses I had suffered before him.

  Like someone fidgeting restlessly inside the body’s cage, he got to his feet. He wanted to take leave of himself and be united with me.

  I asked him, ‘What are you doing to me?’

  ‘Trees have no choice but to make love standing up. Come stand with me. In you I want to escort my friend to his final resting place.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ I asked, taken aback.

  Trying to hold on to me, he said, ‘I have a poem for you.’

  Suddenly his words, like his fingertips, turned into matchsticks that set fire to everything they touched. I didn’t know what he meant, nor why he wanted us to be consumed in such a huge, frightful conflagration.

  Overwhelmed by his manhood, I floundered in his arms like a fish out of water before entering little by little into a state of surrender.

  ‘Do you love me?’ he asked me all of a sudden.

  His single arm was infecting me with his passionate ferocity.

  ‘Of course I do,’ I said, terrified. ‘This is the first time love has led me to sin.’

  In a cynical show of distress, he began to recite,

  How long will I go on being your first sin?

  You have room for more than one beginning.

  All endings are short,

  and I now come to an end in you.

  But those who give life an entire lifetime

  deserve more than one beginning.

  His voice had the belated taste of tears.

  I nearly asked him, ‘Can the sea cry?’ But he had disappeared.

  When the storm subsided, the sea left me a corpse on the shore of bewilderment, and cast me a fleeting glance.

  One kiss, two kisses, one wave, two waves, and the sea had withdrawn furtively in anticipation of an approaching tear.

  After rolling in with a swift, tumultuous fury, it had departed on tiptoe. So is it possible that the sea makes love out of pain?

  The sea had receded, leaving my body between two poems and two tears, and nothing but salt remained.

  As for me, I stayed where I was, a sea sponge.

  At that moment, with the awareness of one who has been prematurely betrayed, Zorba danced barefoot on the shore of grief, spreading his arms wide like a crucified prophet. He pranced about next to me to the rhythm of successive thrusts, with the ferocity of the masochist working himself into a state of pained ecstasy. So I danced with him, trembling like a fish that’s just been released from the sea’s power.

  When the storm had come to an end, he lit a cigarette and sat smoking, leaning against a cushion of questions. But by the time he found the answers, he had turned back into a man.

  After lovemaking there are certain eternal questions that always come back, questions men always pose as a way of reassuring themselves of their ongoing virility.

  ‘I’ve always worried about how you would handle a situation like this,’ he said. ‘On the bed of reality, romantic feelings lose some of their beauty.’

  ‘What happened between us was beautiful,’ I reassured him. ‘I don’t want to know whether it was beautiful in fact, or whether love just made it seem that way.’

  I tried to avoid looking at his arm as I spoke, but I continued to be uncomfortably aware of it. The problem novelists face is that they can’t help but observe everything and everyone, including the people with whom they share a bed.

  Adjusting his sitting position, he asked, ‘What is it that you want to see?’

  His sarcastic tone took me by surprise. Like someone trying to justify a crime, I replied, ‘I want to read the secret history of your body so that I can know whether you really are Khaled Ben Tubal. You act like him in every way. It’s amazing how much you resemble him! So tell me please, who are you?’

  ‘All your men are alike,’ he rejoined with a touch of sarcasm.

  After a pause he added, ‘But I’m not him.’

  He uttered these last words calmly as though they were nothing out of the ordinary, as though he hadn’t said something that would change the entire course of our story.

  I said, ‘So why did you hide the truth from me all that time?’

  ‘There isn’t just one single truth,’ he said. ‘The truth isn’t a stationary point. It changes in us, it changes with us. So I couldn’t tell you or show you anything that would be the perfect truth.’

  Then he added, ‘You used to say you loved my body, and I would tell you that one body might conceal another, but you didn’t believe me. You used to say you liked forty-year-old men, and I would correct you by telling you that I wasn’t the man you thought I was, but you wouldn’t believe me. As if that weren’t enough, you fell in love with my hands, and you would ask me all sorts of questions about them. You told me you loved my hands and you asked me how old they were. In reply, I told you that you had always loved my complexes, but you didn’t understand. And now this body is all I have to answer your questions with.’

  ‘But there was no need to be so evasive about it,’ I said. ‘I like your body the way it is.’

  He smiled and said, ‘You’re mistaken. The fact of the matter is that you were ready to fall in love. I might have come to you disguised as anyone, in any form. I might have said what you were expecting me to say, or I might have said nothing at all, but you still would have loved me.’

  Then he added, ‘That’s because love adapts itself to all sorts of situations. It has the ability to see beauty in even the most ordinary people. So when you discover who I really am, you’ll see amazing new details in our story, and you’ll find that you love me, not who you expected me to be.’

  ‘But you showed me a newspaper article you had written under the name of Khaled Ben Tubal.’

  ‘That’s another reality. And it really is my name. Or, if you will, it’s the name you chose because it fits me. When I started getting death threats, I had to choose a new name to sign my articles with. I don’t feel as though I stole it from anyone, since I’m sure that every word I’ve ever written in a newspaper is something that the man in your book would have said if he’d been able to speak.’

  I was astounded by what he was saying. It was as though, because we lived our lives as storytellers, everything that grew out of our lives became a
narrative.

  ‘Other than that, who are you?’ I asked him.

  He replied with a laugh, ‘I’m a good reader.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Let’s just say that I’ve read you well. I’ve always read you. In fact, I’m your alternate memory. I know things about you that you’ve forgotten.’

  ‘But what do you do in life?’

  ‘I work as a journalist. You probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you that three years ago I was obsessed with the idea of meeting you on the pretext of interviewing you for the newspaper.’

  After a pause he added, ‘As a matter of fact, I wanted to ask you questions that concerned no one but me. The publication of your book happened to coincide with the accident that paralysed my arm. So I spent my convalescence reading your works. My friend Abdelhaq gave me your book when I was in the hospital, and as he handed it to me, he said, “I’ve brought you a book I think you’ll like.” Imagine: I was afraid of it before I read it. Then I was afraid of it because I read it so much! I was amazed to have found a character in a book that was so much like me. We had a city in common, interests and disappointments in common, and we even shared a physical impairment and similar tastes. You’re the only thing that we didn’t share, since you were his sweetheart, and his alone.’

  He continued, ‘The day I met you, I was sure that in one way or another, my life would parallel your story with that character in your book. I was even afraid of you, and I would often feel that I didn’t want to call you. If you only knew how I’ve loved you, and how angry I’ve been with you on account of a book!’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I think that when you write, you go to the heart of things, for example, when you choose a main character who’s missing an arm. But life is still stranger than fiction. What a big trap it is! Imagine: all I wanted from you was answers, but life was preparing me for a counter role of sorts. I came to you at a time of questioning. Now the book has run its course, and I’m answering your questions rather than you answering mine. I have to admit, it’s a nicer role than I had expected. But it isn’t one that I sought out. Rather, I would have been content simply to go along with my fate, and with the various coincidences that went to make it up.’

  ‘In the meantime, you were leading me into a text whose emotional labyrinths I could easily get lost in, and into encounters whose outcomes no one could have predicted.’

  ‘Rather, I was leading you into love, and no love is more wonderful than the kind we find when we’re looking for something else. I know you were looking for a man who had come out of something you’d written, someone you had created yourself and who was tailor-made for you. But isn’t it nicer for me to be a man who enters into your writing rather than one who comes out of it?’

  ‘Is that why you wanted me to come today? So that you could claim later that you had shattered my pleasant illusion, and that you now had a woman of whom the only part you could hold on to is books, and questions that have no answers?’

  ‘Of course not. You know very well that that isn’t true. There are things I could say to convince you of anything I like. But I’ve taken care not to break anything in you or in the bond between us. I’ve always believed that desire alone is a state of possession, whereas enjoyment is the beginning of loss.’

  ‘So what brought us to this bed, then?’

  ‘Death.’

  ‘Don’t you think you’re insulting love by saying that?’

  ‘On the contrary, I think I’m restoring it to the position it deserves. Don’t think that it’s easy to approach pleasure through pain, or to have sex because one of your comrades has died. We need a lot of love to take revenge on death.’

  ‘So whose death is it that’s making you so sad?’

  ‘The person who died was Sa’id Muqbil. Didn’t you hear about his dying yesterday?’

  Apologetically I replied, ‘I haven’t watched television or read a newspaper for days. Was he a close friend of yours?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve never met him in person. He became my friend just yesterday. With a couple of bullets, his murderers raised him to the status of “friend”.

  ‘Imagine – I have twenty-nine friends most of whom I’ve never met anywhere but on the obituary pages of the newspaper. However, he was a close friend of Abdelhaq’s. The two of them worked together at the same newspaper before Abdelhaq left it to go to Constantine. I contacted him some time ago to offer him a job writing for the newspaper, and we were supposed to meet up sometime soon.’

  ‘How did they kill him?’

  ‘He was having lunch with a colleague at a small restaurant near the newspaper when someone came up to him. He thought at first that this person just wanted to talk to him. But then he pulled out a pistol, shot him, and calmly walked away. Imagine: the name of the restaurant was al-Rahmah – Mercy!’

  ‘But why hadn’t he taken precautions?’

  ‘He was being careful, of course, since an assassination attempt had been made on him two months earlier. He’d begun sleeping in different places and coming to work at different times of day. He’d also started varying the routes he took home from the office, and the places he frequented. Yet none of this had done anything to alter his fate. Two weeks before his death, he’d written a moving piece describing the terror journalists in Algeria have to live through every day, and the newspapers reran it today on their front pages as part of his obituary. Haven’t you seen it? It was carried by most news agencies.’

  ‘No,’ I said softly.

  He left the room and came back with a newspaper. He handed it to me, saying, ‘You can read it here, and weep over a lost friend.’

  I’d hardly reached the title of the piece – ‘The Thief Who . . .’ – when he took the newspaper from me and began reading aloud:

  ‘The thief who steals home by night along the walls . . .

  The father who instructs his children not to speak of his profession in public . . .

  The “bad” citizen who paces courtrooms, waiting for his turn to appear before the judge . . .

  The individual who is led away during a neighbourhood raid, then thrust by a rifle butt on to a truck bed . . .

  The one who leaves home every morning uncertain whether he will reach his place of work . . .

  The one who leaves work in the evening not knowing whether he will reach home . . .

  The homeless person who no longer knows under whose roof he will spend the night . . .

  The one who comes under threat in clandestine detention facilities . . .

  The witness who is obliged to swallow everything he knows . . .

  The unarmed citizen whose wish is simply not to die of a slit throat . . .

  The corpse on to which they sew a severed head . . .

  The one who doesn’t know what to do with his hands but to go on with his petty writings . . .

  The one who clings to hope against hope that roses will spring up on the refuse heaps . . .

  The one of whom I speak is a journalist.’

  He flung the newspaper on the table and said, ‘It’s a bitch to have to mourn a fifty-seven-year-old man who faced death with such stubborn defiance, and who published one outspoken newspaper article after another at a time when no one was willing any more to risk even putting his signature on a single one. He called his column “The Gadfly”, to make it clear that he intended to make himself obnoxious to everyone without exception, since he poked fun equally at the government and the terrorists.’

  He took a drag on his cigarette and, his tone frustrated, continued, ‘I don’t understand how a country can assassinate one of its own citizens, especially one as brave as he was. Most governments at least show a kind of motherliness towards their subjects so that, although they might be opposed to one of them, they don’t declare outright enmity against him. Around here, though, the government might assassinate somebody without even having been opposed to him. Abdelhaq once commented that we do everything in our daily lives
as though we were doing it for the last time, since nobody knows when, or on what charge, the government’s wrath might descend on him.’

  Suddenly he asked me, ‘Do you know why I asked you to come today?’

  Before I had a chance to reply, he said, ‘Because I was afraid I might die before I experienced this moment.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ I interrupted reproachfully. ‘We aren’t here to talk about death.’

  ‘Of course we aren’t,’ he retorted. ‘We’re here to play with it, to outsmart it. But it’s there on our subconscious agenda. Pleasure also, which we experienced a little while ago with such ferocity that we nearly consumed each other, is nothing but a state of normalized relations with death in a time of unexpected endings, premature demises, and nameless, ugly, petty wars in which you might die without being a party to them. Sex is the only way we have to forget ourselves.’

  ‘And what about writing?’

  ‘Writing? It’s our big illusion that others won’t forget us!’

  ‘Are you saying that to get me to stop doing it?’

  ‘Rather, I’m saying it to make you stop indulging in such big illusions. My friend who died, who’s being buried and surrendered to the maggots at this very moment, also believed that writing was a worthwhile undertaking. He believed that his daily newspaper column was necessary to change society, and that his readers couldn’t start their day without his wisecracks and caustic jokes. But now he can’t amuse or challenge anybody any more. Now it’s death that’s challenged him and amused itself at his expense. He had mistakenly imagined that he was changing the world every day with a few lines in a newspaper. But life is going on without him, and so is the newspaper. The people he died for will forget all about the place he occupied for a few years on that page of the newspaper. There’s plenty of ingratitude in the world of journalism.’

  What he had said plunged me into a state of sudden frustration. It robbed me of my desire to argue, or even to love.

  I felt cheated: Had I taken all these risks, suffered all this trepidation, and made up a million artful excuses just so that I could be alone with a man who wanted to talk to me about death?