Chaos of the Senses

by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

  Before I could reply, he said, ‘You know, the hardest part of breaking in a wild horse is approaching it for the first time. Once you’ve done that, taming it is just a matter of time. That’s why cowboys invented the rodeo, where they compete to see how many minutes a rider can stay on a horse’s back before it throws him. Within those few minutes, a rider might win a horse over, or he might get all his bones broken or even lose his life!’

  Flicking his ashes leisurely into the ashtray without taking his eyes off me, he said, ‘So, contrary to what you may believe, I didn’t win you over the last time we were together. Rather, I won you over the first time we saw each other. It happened in the café when I asked you whether I could sit down at your table with you. You were about to say no, but instead you said, “Of course.” After that, all I had to rope you in with was a string of words. That was the first time I experienced the terror of approaching a wild mare.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Well, here we are together facing our most difficult test so far. We aren’t the ones testing each other today. We aren’t the ones measuring our willingness to persevere in the face of love or our ability to bring others down. Rather, it’s life that’s testing us, and testing love through us. In order to pass tests like this, sometimes we have to put ourselves on the level of bankrupt lovers and dispense with the luxury of owning keys to a flat. By doing that we restore to love its pristine beauty and impossibility.’

  ‘What you’re saying sounds nice enough, but all you’re doing is spouting theories of love that don’t apply to our situation. Don’t forget that I’m married. Don’t forget that I’m here with you by stealth, and at great risk to myself.’

  ‘I haven’t forgotten. But you yourself have said that you aren’t ashamed of our love, and that you hate clandestine relationships that live their lives lurking on back streets. So give our love the legitimacy of living in the light. Give it a bit of dignity so that we don’t have to be classified as thieves.’

  ‘What if someone saw us together? How would I defend myself against their accusations? How would I justify my being with you here?’

  ‘Defend yourself against their accusations? What accusations? And before whom? Before your husband? He’s one of the prime suspects in this country! How amazing, that of all the actions people commit, loving is the one they’re most anxious to hide, as though it were an accusation they have to clear themselves of. You can be a criminal: a thief, a liar, a traitor, someone who fleeces the entire country. Then you can flaunt all your booty without the slightest compunction and carry on with your life as a respected member of society. Now, isn’t that outrageous?’

  Continuing his tirade, he said, ‘Compared to the people who’ve destroyed our past and insist on destroying our futures, who’ve emptied out our bank accounts and hijacked our dreams, those of us who’ve got rich on love are downright honourable.’

  Flicking the ashes irritably off his cigarette, he went on, ‘Since my arm was paralysed, I’ve learned something – that it’s better to define a person by what he’s lost than by what he still has. We’re always the product of what we’ve lost. But nobody ever asks you about that. They only ask you about what you have. You yourself have never asked me how or when I lost the use of my arm. Wouldn’t you like to know?’

  Taken by surprise at a question I hadn’t dared ask myself, I said apologetically, ‘I thought it might bother you to be asked.’

  ‘And why should I be ashamed of something I didn’t do?’ he rejoined bitterly. ‘After Picasso had finished his famous painting, Guernica – in which he depicts the ruin the city became at the hands of the Fascists – someone asked him, “Are you the one who did this?” To which he replied, “No, you are.” If you asked me a similar question, I would answer, “I didn’t do it. They did.”’

  Not knowing who he was referring to exactly, I asked, ‘When did it happen?’

  He slowly pulled out a new cigarette like someone defusing a memory. Then he said, ‘It happened in 1988. I was a photojournalist at the time, and I’d gone to photograph the demonstrations that had flooded the streets without warning. I could hardly believe what I saw: cars whizzing by, faces everywhere – some terrifying, and others terror-stricken – stray bullets, and people being shot point blank. It was a city ruled by tanks, where everything standing, even telephone poles, had been levelled to the ground.

  ‘Military personnel had lined up in a kind of human barrier in front of the thousands of young demonstrators, who had begun shattering everything in their path that symbolized the state. Sometimes the soldiers would fire into the air, and sometimes into the crowds in a vain attempt to frighten them. Meanwhile, soldiers had occupied the roofs of government buildings. I remember trying to take a picture of a soldier standing on top of the party headquarters building with an Algerian flag behind him. He was firing a machine gun into the street. Suddenly a shot was fired from the building, and it penetrated my left arm. I didn’t know whether the soldier had become suspicious of me when I raised my camera to shoot the picture, thinking that my camera was a weapon, or whether I was hit by a stray bullet that was meant for somebody else.’

  As if he were talking to himself, he continued, ‘Imagine: the moment I took that picture, it was stored not only by my camera, but by my body as well. It’s become an indelible memory in the flesh, a memory I share with the hundreds of wounded and dead who fell during those events.’

  Once again this man had surprised me with a story he hadn’t been intending to tell on this particular day, in this particular place, or in this particular circumstance. And as usual, he’d answered a question that I’d refrained from asking, so beleaguered had I been by all my question marks.

  I sat pondering him as he undid the last button on that many-buttoned overcoat, and as he solved the last of the riddles that had so preoccupied me over the previous months. It was as though he’d grown weary of evasion and had decided at last to give me . . . the truth.

  In his glowing youth he was even more beautiful than the illusion I had formed of him.

  I said, ‘You know, the truth makes you even more alluring!’

  ‘I would have liked for it to make me more respectable. I don’t think we can love or desire someone who’s lost our respect, so it means a lot for me not to have grown smaller in your eyes because of my disability, but more worthy on account of it.’

  I said, ‘I’ve never met a man so drunk on pride!’

  ‘Shall I take that to mean that you love me?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  He continued, ‘Would you mind me asking you if you love your husband?’

  ‘I did once,’ I replied.

  ‘And are you happy with him?’

  ‘I don’t know. Sometimes I discover how miserable I am, and then I forget again.’

  ‘So why have you stayed with him?’

  ‘Because he’s my husband, because I’m alone, and because I don’t know how to make any decisions.’

  ‘But you’re free to change the course of your life and separate from him if you want to.’

  ‘I think it was André Gide who once said, “It’s easy to know how to be free, but it’s difficult to be free.” I might succeed in freeing myself from this man, though I wouldn’t expect it to be easy. But the hardest part would be handling my freedom after that. The life of a divorced woman in a country like this is a slavery worse than marriage, since everybody else makes themselves your guardians.’

  Suddenly I fell silent. Then I asked him, ‘If I separated from him, would you marry me?’

  ‘Marry you?’ he asked, surprised. ‘Are you kidding?’

  ‘Wouldn’t it make you happy for me to be your wife?’

  ‘Of course it would, but . . .’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘Madame, I own nothing of the things that you’ve grown accustomed to. My whole fortune might be summed up in the words of Imam al-Shafi’i, who wrote, “Rich without money, in need of no one, the wealthy are wealthy no
t by virtue of what they own, but what they can do without.” ’

  ‘None of that matters to me. I love the flat you live in, and it would be enough for us. We could be happy there.’

  ‘But even that flat isn’t mine. I’m only living there temporarily.’

  ‘Whose is it, then?’

  ‘It belongs to Abdelhaq, the friend I’ve told you about. He left it after receiving death threats and went to live for a while with his family in Constantine. He might move back when conditions improve.’

  ‘Does everything in the house belong to him?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Including the library?’

  ‘That too.’

  ‘And the book by Henri Michaux that I borrowed from you – is that his too?’

  He was surprised by my questions. As for me, I was flummoxed, and I fell into a silence for which he could find no explanation.

  He asked me jokingly, ‘So which bothers you more – for the house to be his, or the book by Henri Michaux?’

  Smiling at him wanly, I replied, ‘Neither. You just surprised me, that’s all.’

  ‘You surprised me too. This is the first time a woman has ever asked for my hand. Of course, the military took my left hand, along with my camera, during the events of 1988. And as soon as I switched to written journalism, the Islamists demanded the right one! Imagine: I’m so obnoxious that both sides have agreed to cut my hands off. So you’ll have to decide quickly whether you really want me or not, since the time may come when nobody in this country can ask for a journalist’s hand in marriage any more!’

  I laughed at his ‘joke’, and at the irony with which he always kept his sorrow out of view. But he didn’t laugh with me.

  I asked him, ‘You rarely laugh. Why is that?’

  ‘Life has taught me to smile ten times before I laugh, and to rephrase what I want to say ten times before opening my mouth. This is why I decided to become a photographer. The photograph is an extended moment of silence. Like drawing or painting, it’s an experiment in wordlessness.’

  ‘What else has life taught you?’

  ‘It’s taught me patience. Patience is my sign of the zodiac, but it’s the last thing I would want to teach you!’

  He slipped his hand in his pocket and drew out a leather keychain which he set on the table. Then he continued, ‘All that lies between us and pleasure is a key. But I refuse to let that key control us. That would be an insult to love. I feel just as much desire as you do right now. In fact, I need this love and the pleasure that goes with it even more than you do. But when we reach a certain level of pleasure, every pleasure that follows it only makes us that much hungrier. What we need to do now is to experience the pleasure of abstinence, to be reconciled with our bodies and learn how to live inside them when we aren’t together. That way we can discover the beauty of fidelity born of deprivation.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I broke in. ‘Why did you tempt me to infidelity if you were going to demand that I be faithful to you?’

  ‘You’re misunderstanding me again. I haven’t demanded anything of you. I’ve prepared you for faithfulness, but without demanding that you be faithful to me.’

  ‘I was hoping you’d say something else. It would have made me happy for you to ask that of me.’

  ‘But faithfulness can’t be asked for. Asking for it is like begging, which is an insult to love. If it doesn’t come spontaneously, it’s no more than an attempt to avoid or suppress the temptation to infidelity. In other words, it’s infidelity in another form. So, calling infidelity an adventure is a misnomer. It turns the facts on their heads. The real adventure is fidelity, since it’s inevitably a lot harder.’

  ‘Why are things always so complicated with you? All I want is simple words, like the ones lovers say to each other when they’re about to be separated. Words that are short and sweet, unsettling, joyful and painful at the same time, words that go to the heart and never leave us. But you haven’t said anything like that.’

  ‘I don’t want a love that feeds on words, one that will be killed by our silence when we’re apart. You want words like the ones you’ve read in books or heard in movies. But our story is better than anything you’ve ever read or heard.’

  He paused briefly. Then he added, ‘When I read your book three years ago, I wondered how my story could start where Khaled’s left off – in the same year, and with the same events. I wondered: Did I lose my arm just so that I could give life the luxury of conforming to a novel, or so that I could give literature the proud distinction of carrying on in real life? When we met, I knew the answer. Literature and life have colluded to give us a love story more beautiful than any reader or author has ever dreamed of. You yourself, novelist that you are, were outdone by our story, since it’s been more bizarre than anything you could have thought up and put down in a book.’

  ‘I’ve got to admit,’ I replied, ‘I never expected anything like this, though I’ve always dreamed of a reader who would take revenge on me through my writings. It’s amazing the things that can happen to us on account of a book. We might be honoured, we might be thrown in jail, we might be assassinated. We might be loved, we might be hated, we might be revered, we might be exiled. We can’t squeeze a verdict of not guilty out of a book, since it would amount to nothing more than the suspicion that we aren’t really writers. The weird thing about our story is that life punished me by turning what I had written into reality. Maybe it happened because I’m a writer with criminal impulses, who sits down at her desk every evening and, without the slightest compunction, kills off some men whose love she doesn’t have time for and others that she’s loved by mistake, whereupon she proceeds to build them fancy tombs in a book, and then goes to bed.’

  After a pause, I said absently, ‘How was I supposed to know that in everything we write, we’re writing our destiny? Life comes disguised in the simplicity of a book, and at any moment someone may discover that a page out of his writings has fallen into the clutches of reality and become his life.’

  He suddenly stopped puffing on his cigarette and, in a mix of sadness and sarcasm, asked, ‘Might I have the honour of knowing whether you intend to kill me off ?’

  ‘Of course you may,’ I replied jokingly. ‘You in particular, I’ll fight to the death to keep alive!’

  Then, as though to confirm what I had said, I went on, ‘Besides, Khaled didn’t die in that novel.’

  ‘I know,’ he interrupted. ‘It was Ziyad who died. But I don’t see anybody left standing around me. All my friends have been killed off, and now it’s my turn, isn’t it! Where do you think I am on the hit list?’

  I didn’t know whether he was talking to me about the writing game or about real life – that is, real death. In other words, I wondered if he was concerned about being assassinated the way all his friends had been.

  Before I had a chance to reply, he added, ‘Hayat, put off my death for a little while, but love me as if I’m going to die. I’ve made a frightening discovery about love: that you can’t really love somebody until you know that death is going to take you by surprise and take him or her away from you. You’ll forgive the people you see every day for a lot more things if you remember that they aren’t always going to be around, even to do those little things that irritate you and make you angry. If, every time you see people, you think about the fact that you may never see them again, you’ll appreciate them more. If everybody thought this way, they’d love each other better.’

  ‘So,’ I asked, ‘is that the way you think?’

  Amused at the note of alarm in my voice, he said with a chuckle, ‘Since I met you, I’ve adopted a new philosophy of life: to strive in this world as though I’ll be seeing you tomorrow, and to strive for the next world as though we’re going to die together! So every day I prepare to meet you, whether here or there, with the same yearning.’

  ‘That scares me,’ I murmured. ‘From the way you’re talking, it sounds as though love is just a way of bypassing li
fe, and that all we have time left for is a hug and a couple of kisses.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ he reassured me. ‘We’ve still got plenty of time. I’ll wait for you in life and in books, too. A moment of love is enough to justify a lifetime of waiting. Can you see that?’

  ‘I’m trying. But everything is against us.’

  ‘Like all great causes in life, love is something you have to believe in deeply, sincerely, and doggedly. Only then will the miracle happen. Take Boudiaf, for example: a seventy-eight-year-old man who spent half his life struggling against imperialism, and the other in exile. He was exiled even from the national memory, his name blotted out of our textbooks. Then, after twenty-eight years of exile, history brought him back to his country as its president. Now, isn’t that amazing? Isn’t it marvellous? Believe me, it’s just a matter of time before . . .’

  ‘But I’m afraid of time. Time is the enemy of lovers.’

  ‘Rather, it’s the enemy of revolutions, both the big ones and the little, fly-by-night ones. They all get knocked off by time. And sooner or later, I expect to see the death of revolutionary illusions.’

  * * *

  Of course, time is the enemy of lovers.

  It brings us a few steps closer together, only to disappear through a man who retreats into his initial darkness clad in black.

  When that happens, I go back to walking along the seashore. I walk, and the questions walk with me as though my feet were shod in question marks.

  Nietzsche used to say that the greatest ideas are the ones that come to us while we’re walking. So I walk. But every idea the sea brings in goes out with the next wave.

  I used to believe that the novel was the art of cunning deception, the way poetry is the art of amazement. So I couldn’t figure out how this man, who hadn’t seemed prepared for the role of either poet or novelist, had managed so thoroughly to dupe my senses that I felt like an illiterate in the face of his manhood.

  How was it that, without knowing it, he had written the story in such a way that it was tailor-made for me in a book in which we had switched roles in so many places? And how had that absent friend suddenly become the main character?