Chaos of the Senses

by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

  It seemed clear by now that this was the man who had sat beside me during that film and in whose presence I had been living ever since – breathing in his cologne, reading his books, listening to his music, sitting on his sofa, talking on his phone, and falling in love with his home!

  Somehow I had managed, with perfect stupidity, to fall for all the false signals love had placed in my path, and lo and behold, as I imagined myself discovering one man, I’d been discovering another.

  At some station or another I had missed the train to my ‘first’ love, and had taken one that led me to another.

  Like a wandering tourist taking the metro for the first time, like an adventurer accidentally discovering a continent, I had missed my way in a moment of sentimental distraction. After discovering America, Columbus died thinking he had discovered India. And like explorers, novelists always die ignorant!

  You definitely haven’t arrived.

  You’re a traveller on a train headed towards questions, but who said you’d arrived? Who said you knew where the answers were leading you? After all, answers are blind. Only questions can see.

  Time is a journey . . .

  Ships laden with illusions have come into port, while others laden with dreams are on their way out.

  The sea laughed when it saw me launching out on a boat of paper, hoisting words as sails in the face of logic, in the hope of discovering how all this had happened.

  Time is rain . . .

  A cloud wafting out of the telephone and coming to live in my suitcase. Outside autumn’s window, a light drizzle knocks gently on my heart.

  Time is destiny . . .

  The sea rolls up its collar by night and buttons up memory all the way to the top lest the salt seep out into the words.

  Then it puts on its best voice and dials a number.

  ‘Yes?’ a woman answers.

  Time is pain . . .

  Why do we always say ‘Yes’ when we answer the telephone, even when it’s time to say ‘No’?

  Time is ‘no’.

  In sorrow’s sumptuous entryway, learn to celebrate pain as an unexpected guest. It’s only pain, so there’s no need to prepare yourself for it.

  Tears come belatedly over a sorrow which, like a dreaded farewell, has come too soon.

  Time is a farewell . . .

  Love says, ‘Hello? Yes?’

  And life replies, ‘Hello? No,’ as salt seeps across the telephone line, gradually inundating us. Meanwhile, between the tyranny of memory and the timidity of promises, things carry on their journey . . . without us.

  * * *

  I left Sidi Fredj at dawn, before the sea had awoken and begged me with a tear to stay.

  He had the waves and I had the salt, as well as an aeroplane waiting for me.

  When I had arrived at this place two weeks earlier, I’d been escorted by the lovely saying that used to precede Baudelaire whenever he went on a journey: ‘I’m summoned by desire, crowned by love.’

  And now I left love’s throne behind. The life of legitimacy summoned me, Constantine awaited me, and the life whose rules I had broken was bringing me back to the ‘house of obedience’ crowned with the glitter of memories.

  As I came back to Constantine, I avoided looking at it. I wished I could see it the way Borges saw Buenos Aires through his sightless eyes. I wanted to look at it without any visual memory.

  Sometimes we have to lose our sight in order to recognize places we’ve seen so many times before that we have ceased truly to see them. Here in this city there were streets where we would have been afraid to look into other people’s eyes, restaurants we wouldn’t have dared frequent, houses we couldn’t have entered together.

  Here was a city that recognized love nowhere but in the songs of Farqani, that only left home to go to the mosque or a coffee shop, and that never opened a window to look at anything but a minaret.

  I had arrived in the city lovesick, my head ringing with the words of Achilles when he beheld Athens: ‘Abandon the gods for a time, Madame, and give me a bit of your magnificent misery.’

  Is there anyone more miserable than a lover in Constantine?

  My husband welcomed me home so kindly, it made me suspicious. Of course, maybe I was blowing up his mistakes in my mind. Maybe I was even on the lookout for them as a way of countering the guilt I felt towards him.

  He seemed happy to have me home again. Or maybe he was happy for other reasons. Since Boudiaf ’s return, everybody had started feeling safer, and life in the city had returned to normal. Together with the feeling of normality came the pre-summer fever that sent families out in droves to Muruj `Ayn al-Bay and Djebel El Wahch.

  People had begun daring at last to go on excursions here and there, trusting that the country had emerged from its long dark tunnel. This sudden tranquillity taught me to give myself over to time and place, confident that this man’s words were something I could rely on.

  But had he taught me optimism, or just how to bide my time? I often had to resist the temptation to make inquiries to find out who Abdelhaq was.

  It unsettled me to see that even where I was, I continued living alongside him, sharing with him the same city.

  Sometimes I would fantasize about bumping into him somewhere. I realized that he might not recognize me, even though he had read me and had even written me throughout this entire saga. After all, he was the one who had given that novel of mine to his friend, which had led him unwittingly to me.

  The only thing that might place him in my path was the book by Henri Michaux. If only I’d brought it with me. I might find him through his silence, or through that taciturn manner that was his distinguishing mark and which, like his cologne, he had passed on to his friend.

  I would ask him, ‘Do you recognize me?’

  And the reply would come, ‘Of course,’ two of the five words he had spoken on the day he sat beside me in the cinema.

  Then I would confess to him, ‘I miss you. Do you realize how wonderful it is to miss someone you’ve never met before?’

  I started imagining all sorts of beginnings for us, and more than one way to find him. But then I thought better of it, since I realized that I was repeating, down to the last detail, my romantic adventure with his friend.

  This time also I was dealing with a man whose name I didn’t know. After all, Abdelhaq wasn’t a family name, and it wouldn’t be enough to lead me to a journalist when I didn’t know what newspaper he worked for, which language he wrote in, or what name he used to sign his articles at a time when virtually all journalists had two names.

  As a matter of fact, I was glad for this man to be ‘no one’ – a man without any name in particular, with no particular description, no identifying features, no credentials.

  I’d learned from my previous experience that in what we don’t know there is a beauty that surpasses the satisfaction we take in what we do know.

  So I decided to leave my encounter with Abdelhaq to chance. I’d let life arrange things however it chose. This way I wouldn’t miss out on the element of surprise or try to make the finale come before its time.

  When we find the thing we’ve been looking for so long, it’s the beginning of the end.

  More importantly, I decided not to look for him because my constant preoccupation with him involved a kind of hidden betrayal of the man who had spent our last time together persuading me to be faithful to him. It was as though he could see what was coming, or as if he knew enough about me through what I had written to be wary of my capacity to be in love with two people at the same time.

  Was this why he had loved me with such an erratic ferocity that he seemed to be more than one man? As he was bidding me farewell over the telephone, he made a confession that pained me: ‘All I have to defend you from love’s perils is love itself.’ When I remembered him this way, a wave of desire for him came over me. I tried to escape from it by immersing myself in writing. But . . .

  The hand has a memory of its own, a memory that haunts
you with questions about what you’ve lost. I still couldn’t understand how it was that this body of his, though it wasn’t the most beautiful, had become so wildly alluring to me that it had disturbed my tranquillity and robbed me of the ability to write for days on end.

  * * *

  Two months went by, during which time I fed on dreams and quenched my thirst with quick sips of ink, leaving others to their banquets of tedium followed by slander-sweetened coffee.

  From time immemorial, fire has puzzled over how to be united with water. I’ve never mastered the art of sitting around and gossiping with other women. I’m the mistress of sorrow, and they the maidens of frivolity. I’ve always enjoyed men’s company more than women’s, since when I’m with women, all I end up with is frayed nerves!

  Nevertheless, I accepted an invitation from a relative of mine to attend the celebration of her daughter’s passing some test or other. It was the end of June, and the women around me were chatting over coffee and sweets. Wanting to avoid their chatter, I stole periodic glances at the television, which had been left on to add to the racket.

  From time to time I would listen to a speech by Boudiaf being broadcast live from the House of Culture in Anaba, but I wasn’t getting much of it, so I contented myself with just looking at him. Little did I know that I was witnessing this man’s final appearance.

  Even when he had no voice, Boudiaf would penetrate you with his eyes, which reflected a hard-to-define sadness that left you no choice but to believe what he said.

  They were eyes that could see how the country had practised itself in treachery from time immemorial. They were eyes that forgave and forgot. Yet, given the suffering of exile and betrayal by those who had once been his comrades, sorrow had taken up permanent residence in them, and they’d lost their ability to laugh.

  As he stood there before us for the last time, Boudiaf had his back turned to a curtain behind him – the curtain of Fate (and treachery).

  He seemed so confident, so trusting, so brave, so innocent.

  So how could what happened to him not have happened?

  I don’t know exactly what he’d been talking about at that moment, but I remember that the last word he said was ‘Islam’.

  Before he had finished the sentence, one of his security men emerged on to the platform from behind the curtain. When he was a step away from his target, he threw a fake bomb, and at the sound of the blast, everyone there threw themselves to the ground. He then proceeded to empty his weapon into Boudiaf ’s body. Just like that, right in front of all those looking on. Then he disappeared again behind the curtain.

  It was 29 June, 11.27 a.m.

  Algeria was looking on as its dreams were assassinated. Everyone expected an ambulance to come, but none came, at least not for a long while.

  The Algerian flag over the podium now fluttered over a man lying prostrate on the ground. He had come to raise our heads, to make us proud, but we had left his dreams wallowing in a pool of blood.

  Forty years earlier, in the very same month, his comrades had led him away to desert prisons. Then the country had brought him back as president for 166 days, only to reward him five months later with a spray of bullets, and a shroud.

  In a mere seven days, on 5 July – Algeria’s Independence Day – he had been planning to deliver a long-awaited speech to the Algerian people.

  Like a car spinning its wheels in the mud on its way to some happy outing, Fate suddenly brought us to a halt.

  Everything – including the ambulance that lost its way to the hospital, causing him to be the last of the wounded to arrive – colluded to prevent Boudiaf from missing his appointment with death this time.

  On the day Boumédienne died, Boudiaf had said, ‘I disagreed with Boumédienne on a lot of issues. But when I saw his funeral procession, I felt I’d been unfair to him. After all, anyone whose loss causes people this much grief has to have done something right for the country.’

  At the same time, of course, there were people who cheered from their balconies when they heard the news of his death, venting their malicious glee at his demise in front of the television cameras without the least embarrassment. People like these flocked to the mosques, donating feasts of couscous in celebration of his shed blood.

  The forty thieves who were secretly delighted at the sight of his corpse rubbed their hands with glee over the spoils they were sure to divide among themselves for years to come. People like this supposed that Boudiaf wouldn’t be missed, that his death would be a mere blip on the screen of Algeria’s history.

  So I wonder if they expected his funeral to be as it was?

  Things had undergone a shocking collapse. An entire nation went into hysterics, crying like babies in the streets for the men it had lost and shouting, ‘Here we are!’ Women came out wrapped in Algerian flags, in their hands the picture of a man who hadn’t governed in order to have his image plastered all over the streets but, rather, in order for the image of Algeria to cover the pictures of the slain that filled the newspapers.

  Though he had never been able to tread on his homeland’s soil with a sense of real safety, he was now being carried by waves of grief-stricken humanity towards the soil where he would rest.

  He had departed and left us orphans once again, and as we escorted him to his grave we cried, ‘Go in peace – we are here!’ And history chimed in after us, ‘Sleep well, Abu Nasser. Sleep in peace. They are here!’

  I didn’t leave home to attend the funeral. My grief was too overwhelming to share it with anyone else.

  But somewhere deep inside, I was happy for him.

  This country that hadn’t given him a life commensurate with his dreams had given him a funeral commensurate with his life.

  It was the funeral of a man who had governed the land for a mere 166 days with his feet on the ground. However, he had been vulnerable to the wiles of those who had ruled for a quarter of a century with an army of informers, and who had held sway over peoples crushed by a never-ending degradation.

  Those who are so confident of their tanks’ loyalty to them should try dying some time, and when they see what kind of a funeral they’re given, they’ll be in for a big surprise!

  Week after week, death after death, I came to realize I was living a life in the making, a life created sometimes by major events, and at other times by peripheral happenings.

  At every moment, for whatever reason, my fate might take a different course.

  I was a woman living among three men whose lives hung from the bullet of Fate! Their lives and destinies were controlled by those who engineered such daily death and terror in this country that I didn’t know when one of them might be brought down by an accusation, or when another of them might be brought down by its opposite.

  I’d become possessed by a fear of some shock lurking in the shadows, obsessed with an unexpected death that I saw hovering over everyone around me.

  Between my fundamentalist brother being trailed by the authorities, my military husband under the fundamentalists’ watchful eye, and the journalist I loved and whose blood was the stuff with which the other two men settle their scores, how could I possibly live outside the realm of terror?

  After Boudiaf ’s assassination on national television in front of millions of viewers, it was obvious that it was now open season, and after every new death the question was: Whose turn is next?

  I used to try to ward off fear by writing or by loving. I thought back on everything Khaled had told me in an attempt to prepare me for a time like this. However, since Boudiaf ’s death he hadn’t been here to reassure me, and all my attempts to communicate with him were in vain.

  Since my home phone, being owned by the military, was tapped, even calling him from Constantine was a risky undertaking. So I would try to call whenever I found myself at a relative’s house. My mother’s telephone was tapped so that the government could spy on Nasser’s comings and goings. This man’s telephone was bound to be tapped, too, since he was both a journalist
and a member of the Consultative Council. This made me lonelier than ever, and intensified the feeling that I was suffering a fate set against love.

  One morning I woke up in the mood to harass memory, so to speak. After four months of anxious waiting and anticipation, I was tired of having time’s corpse lying between us, and I could think of only one place that might lead me either to the man in black or to Abdelhaq.

  Consequently, I made the craziest decision of my life. I put on the most modest clothes I could find and left the house without makeup or accessories of any kind. I also left without the driver. All I had in my bag was the book by Henri Michaux, which I’d brought with me so that I could use it to ward off curious glances, and the ennui that would ensue from what might be a long wait. I’d also brought it, I suspect, so that if Abdelhaq came to the café and saw me reading his own book, he would recognize me, and I would be spared having to initiate the conversation myself.

  After walking a short distance, I nearly stopped to buy a newspaper. Reading newspapers had become one of my bad habits, in which respect I was like everybody else in Algeria, who would mob the newsstands every morning, whether out of boredom or fright, as though something important had happened or was going to happen. This time, though, I thought better of it, since I knew that if I took it and read it in a café, some people might suspect me of being a journalist.

  Happily, I managed to find a taxi a block from my house. As warmly as I knew how, I asked the driver to take me to ‘The Date’ café. I felt somehow as though I had to prove my innocence to everybody I met, including taxi drivers, since I knew what a crazy thing I was doing.

  Actually, I had a lot more craziness in store than I had good sense, and my patience level was nil. I was happy for my worldly fortune to consist in no more than a few novels I’d written for my own satisfaction and which brought me no income, but whose characters intervened in my life to the point where they might lead me to my death!

  On the upper floor of the café, I sat down across from love’s vacant places, expecting the appearance of a man for whom I’d grown accustomed to waiting in silence. I sat looking at a table in the right corner, remembering how lovely it is to have desire’s mines explode at the moment of a first encounter.