Chaos of the Senses

by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

  ‘It would have been better if you’d stayed a creature of ink, a fictitious character. They don’t get assassinated, at least. They don’t die at all, in fact, and we never have to worry about anything bad happening to them. So why did you come if you were going to insist on being a real man?’

  Drawing me towards him, he said, ‘I came to share desire with you. I came to give you pleasure, and to give myself pleasure through you. Storybook characters can’t do that, can they?’

  Then he began kissing me all over again with the same ardent desire as before. It was as though we had just met, or as though he had just noticed my presence with him despite the corpse that lay between us.

  I enjoyed observing his romantic mood shifts.

  I tried to understand what had suddenly aroused him all over again, causing him to storm me with such insatiable appetite.

  I gazed at him as he busied himself with me. It wasn’t his body that I loved as much as it was his generous masculinity, his body’s noble ethic.

  His body had a bountiful presence about it that gave and gave, the way love does. It was as though he was compensating for what he lacked by giving, although he also received with the same eagerness. He was possessed of the kind of masculinity that knows how to be humble in the presence of the woman, as though it sees itself as indebted to her for everything it has.

  Suddenly he put his arm around me and said, ‘I’m going to confess something to you. But don’t laugh!’

  Before I could answer, he continued, ‘I’ve felt jealous of Ziyad. Imagine – I’ve never once felt jealous of your husband, but here I am jealous of a creature of ink who was a character with me in that book of yours. I still feel as though he really exists in your life, and that he enjoyed your body before I did.’

  ‘Silly!’ I said. ‘That man has never existed in real life. I brought him into being because I like love triangles. I find love duos too simple and naïve for a novel, so I needed a man who would live alongside the story before becoming part of it. After all, that’s the logic of love in life – we’re always off by one digit.’

  ‘But I still envy him. I wanted a destiny like his, so much so that I’ve memorized his poems. I keep dreaming of some big love, some big cause, some heroic death.’

  ‘But the days of heroic deaths are over. Nobody can die in a big battle any more, not even in a novel. All our causes have gone bankrupt. That’s why I wanted Ziyad to die in the Israeli invasion of Beirut. Imagine – he had been dreaming of going back to Gaza. If he had lived, though, he would have gone straight to prison. Either that, or he would have ended up a policeman who imprisons and tortures other Palestinians on charges of threatening Israel’s security. Think of all the illusions that died with him. There’s no such thing as Palestine any more. So I’m happy for those who will come after us, since we’ve spared them having to spend their lives in illusion the way we have.’

  He adjusted his sitting position, leaving my head on his shoulder. He lit a cigarette and began smoking it unhurriedly.

  ‘Let’s not talk about Palestine. Tell me now: Are you happy with me?’

  His question took me by surprise, and I didn’t know how to reply.

  ‘When we’re miserable, we know it. But when we’re happy, we only realize it later. Happiness seems to be a belated discovery.’

  ‘So,’ he asked, ‘will I have to wait until your next book comes out to know whether you were happy with me or not?’

  ‘Of course not!’ I laughed. ‘I can answer you right now. But I think I’ve learned to be afraid of happiness, since whenever I find it, I lose it.’

  ‘That’s why you have to experience it as a moment under threat. You need to realize that, like joy and love, pleasure is a form of robbery. Pleasant experiences, whatever they happen to be, have to be stolen from life, or from others. The only way a person can experience pleasure is by stealing it in anticipation of death, which will strip him of all his booty.’

  ‘You remind me of Dead Poets Society. Do you remember the first scene, where the students gather around the teacher to look at pictures of students who had graduated from the Academy in earlier generations? The teacher tells them to seize the day, to make their lives extraordinary, since one of these days they’ll stop being anything. They’ll be gone as though they’d never come.’

  ‘I haven’t seen the film,’ he said somewhat indifferently, ‘but it sounds as though it was a nice scene.’

  ‘You really haven’t seen it?’ I asked in amazement.

  Taken aback by my tone of voice, he said, ‘Should I have?’

  Realizing that I had no good reason to be amazed at this discovery, I said feebly, ‘I just thought you might have seen it. It’s won several awards.’

  I retreated into my silence, reviewing our story from the beginning. I thought, if we didn’t meet at the cinema, then who was the man who, wearing the same perfume and exhibiting the same taciturn manner, sat beside me that day?

  Questions were taking me in all directions when he interrupted my train of thought, saying apologetically, ‘Abdelhaq told me about that film. During my last visit to Constantine, he suggested that I go to see it with him. He wanted to write an article about it for the newspaper. But I was busy that day, so he went by himself. It must still be showing in the capital, so I’ll try to go see it. Then I can discuss it with the two of you instead of listening to one or the other of you tell me about this or that scene.’

  Caressing my hair, he went on, ‘Would it make you happy for me to see it?’

  ‘Of course it would,’ I said, planting a kiss on his cheek.

  It seemed to me as though I were using Abdelhaq’s style with him, since I said nothing else.

  As I left soon thereafter, he was retreating into his state of mourning, and I was retreating – of course – into my questions.

  * * *

  When I was alone that evening, I opened the black notebook and began leafing through my story with this man, which I’d written in a series of daily entries.

  I recalled its beginnings, pausing at its various twists and turns in an attempt to understand how the story had come into being, and where this man had come from.

  How, over the course of the past eight months, had he managed to evade all my questions and wriggle out of all the traps I’d set for him? How had he managed to live inside my notebook disguised as another man, only to spring the truth on me when he himself was good and ready?

  But what truth? The truth that he’d divulged to me? Or the other truth that even he didn’t know, but had led me to without realizing it? As he himself had once said to me, ‘There isn’t just one single truth. 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.’

  His love also had become subject to question, like a moving target that kept eluding me. Yet the fact remained that there was a secret time that had been ours alone, a shared memory of something in the order of love that we’d experienced together even before we met.

  He had said, ‘No love is more wonderful than the kind we find when we’re looking for something else,’ and I had believed him. I had been so infatuated with him that I’d forgotten exactly what it was I’d been looking for on the day I first met him.

  And now, in his most recent incarnation, he’d become my reader. But how could a reader do all this to an author?

  It boggles my mind to think of the way the irrational dimension enters into people’s behaviours and decisions. The secret life of emotions is a strange thing indeed. I once read a psychological study which said that when we fall in love, it has nothing to do with the person we fall in love with. Rather, he or she happens to come into our life at a time when our emotional resistance is low because, for example, we’re on the rebound from a failed romance, so we ‘catch’ love the way we catch a cold when the seasons are changing. So I concluded that being in love is a pathological condition.

  After that I read
an article entitled ‘The Chemistry of Love’ which argued that we make our stupidest mistakes in the summer because of the sun’s effects on our mood and behaviour. Its rays penetrate our skin and our blood cells, which causes an imbalance in the nervous system and turns us into weird creatures that are liable to do anything.

  So, I said, falling in love must be a seasonal phenomenon.

  Something else I read was that writing changes our relationships with things. It causes us to commit sins without feeling guilty, because the overlap between life and literature gives you the illusion that you’re continuing in real life a text that you began writing in a book. Not only that, but the urge to write tempts you to experience things not for themselves, but for the pleasure of writing about them. So the writer’s problem is that sometimes he can’t resist the temptation to leave the text and let literature get mixed up with life, even in a bed.

  After giving it some thought, I saw that what had happened to me had nothing to do with logic but was, rather, due to the confluence of a number of random conditions. This man had come into my life one summer at a time when I had no emotional resistance and was busying myself writing a love story. So falling in love with him had been the coincidental outcome of several exceptional circumstances.

  I also discovered that my problem lies in the fact that I’m not illiterate. Just think about all the things that might happen to us on account of what we read! In fact, some of the things we read have the same effect on us as writing, taking us to places we would never have expected to go.

  Argentinean writer Luis Borges was once asked in an interview, ‘Once, when asked about your life, you said that few things had happened to you, but that you had read a great deal. What did you mean by that?’ He replied, ‘What I meant was that because I read a lot, many things have happened to me.’

  As for me, I’d been dreaming of writing a single book, after which I could die ‘an author’. The book I’d dreamed of writing would have such an impact on readers that they wouldn’t be able to sleep at night, and it would make them rethink their entire lives. With one reader, at least, I’d managed to have such an impact, the resemblance between him and my main character being so extraordinary that the book had turned both his life and mine upside down.

  What I’d concluded in the end was that an author had better think a hundred times before writing a story. At any moment life might decide to take her story seriously and punish her with it. Or it might punish some unsuspecting reader who falls so completely under its spell that he loses the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction.

  When Goethe wrote his tragic love story, The Sorrows of Young Werther, thousands of European youths began dressing and behaving like its main character in public places. They would carry copies of Homer’s poetry under their arms, and several of them committed suicide just as Werther had. Consequently, Goethe was accused by critics of having fomented these young people’s self-destruction by painting an idealized picture of death for them. In reality, however, Goethe hadn’t idealized death for these youths; rather, he had idealized life as depicted on the pages of a book: in that space reserved for dreams of distinction most commonly referred to as ‘literature’.

  And if it’s conceivable that you might love an author so much that you imagine yourself to be a character in one of her books, then what’s so strange about the idea of an author loving one of her characters so much that she imagines him really to exist, and that some day they’ll meet in a coffee shop and start reminiscing together?

  My mother’s return restored a semblance of normality to my life, and brought me for a while out of my constant questioning. She came bearing news of another wedding, and I expected her to bend my ear about it in the days that followed, since she was sure there was a confrontation brewing between the first and second wives.

  I amused myself by listening to her, knowing ahead of time where the conversation would lead, since she was convinced that my co-wife was the cause of my infertility as well as some other things that had happened to me, though I myself didn’t believe it.

  It hadn’t been easy, of course, to accept the idea of sharing a man with another woman. I could have stipulated that he divorce her before marrying me, since he had wanted me so much at the time that he would have been willing to do anything I asked. But I felt sorry for this woman who was fifteen years my senior, and who had shared twenty years of my husband’s life with him. Not only this, but she had borne him three children before he became a high-ranking officer and inevitably, like other high-ranking officials around him, began rethinking his marital situation.

  She resigned herself to the new arrangement from the very beginning, which I think disarmed me. I don’t think she was so kindhearted as to be excited about the new marriage, but she wasn’t wicked either, and she never plotted against me. As time went on, a kind of unspoken womanly collusion grew up between us; each of us realized that she could neither cancel the other one out, nor have this man all to herself.

  I’d often wondered if I was jealous of this woman. My husband was most likely at her house now, sharing with her a bed that he rarely occupied unless I was away. Amazingly, the answer to this question was always no. Even so, my body had never completely accepted the idea of her existence. She was on my mind my entire wedding night, and I couldn’t stop thinking back to her silent presence at the wedding party out of consideration for my husband, who had wanted to prove to everyone that he was marrying me with her blessing. And maybe this is why my body created a barrier that my husband couldn’t penetrate despite his virility.

  Despite my desire for him, something in me beyond my control refused to surrender to him, while Nasser’s decision to boycott all wedding celebrations had put me in a negative frame of mind.

  All these thoughts were going through my mind as my mother gave me a blow-by-blow account of the aforementioned nuptials. It appeared that the couple’s wedding night hadn’t been to the macho groom’s satisfaction, which set the women to speculating about what might have gone wrong.

  The development of greatest relevance to me personally was the fact that my mother suddenly felt bored and wanted to go back to Constantine as soon as possible. When I heard her say this, I got a taste in my mouth that seemed like a foreboding of sadness, a sadness I made a point of concealing from her. I’ve learned over the years to hide both my sadness and my happiness from my mother, lest I find myself obliged to explain the former or justify the latter, since she and I have never shared the same criteria for what constitutes a happy or sad event.

  Happiness is like a sparrow perched eternally on either the tree of anticipation or the tree of memories, and now it was about to escape from me again. Because I realized this, I began living my love for Khaled with the ferocious intensity of someone who knows the object of her passion will soon be gone.

  Like those who live their lives under threat, the death all around me had taught me to live in the shadow of evanescence. It had taught me to love this man as though I’d lose him the very next moment, to desire him as though he belonged to someone else, to wait for him without believing he would come, and when he came, to receive him as though he’d never come again. It taught me to search for a joy too vast to be contained by a lovers’ tryst, and for a parting too poignant to be a mere farewell.

  Yet suddenly he seemed indifferent to the fact that life was about to run out on us. In fact, he placed so little value on the time we had left that he insisted our last meeting be not in his house, but at a seaside café half an hour’s walk from there.

  In vain I tried to convince him that we might not see each other again for a long time, and that this kind of place wasn’t suited for a farewell meeting. But he said, ‘On the contrary, our time will be even nicer in a place like this.’

  So we met, at a café where love had arranged, impromptu, a place just for us. There he was, he and the sea, at a table drenched in summer evening light.

  There we were, he and I, between us the sighs of the w
aves.

  ‘We could have met at your place,’ I said reproachfully. ‘Why do you insist on squandering our dream this way?’

  Still smoking, he replied, ‘Squandering life is also a part of life.’

  ‘But I want you, and we might not see each other again for a long time.’

  As usual, he placed between us the ashtray of silence, filled with the butts of unfinished sentences. Then he said, ‘I’ve wanted you so much myself, I understand what it means for you to want me. But we have to get used to deprivation, even when we’re together.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because we’re destined not always to be together.’

  ‘So why did you give me all that pleasure if you were just preparing me for pain?’

  ‘Actually, I’m preparing you for an even better pleasure. Before I knew you, I didn’t see deprivation as beautiful. But in order for it to be that way, we have to want it. It has to be a kind of secret collusion between two people, and when that happens, it takes on a new name.’

  After a pause, he asked me, ‘Do you know what its new name is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Fidelity!’

  The words were followed by a trail of smoke as he exhaled indolently in my direction.

  ‘I understand what you’re saying, but don’t you think you’re trying to get ahead of destiny, and punishing us even more than life has already?’

  ‘What I think is that you’ve always been love’s pampered child. I imagine it’s always given you what you wanted without your having to exert any effort to speak of. There are people who have an extraordinary ability to trample on other people’s hearts without feeling guilty.’

  I murmured, ‘So is that why . . . ?’

  ‘No,’ he interrupted me. ‘That isn’t why I’m punishing you with deprivation. In that case I’d be punishing myself as well. But it’s a good thing for you to be broken in by a man who’s never known anything about horses.’