Chaos of the Senses

by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

  But was I really waiting for him? Or was I, as was more likely, only waiting for someone who could lead me to Abdelhaq?

  I was there for Abdelhaq. That was a certainty. So I set Henri Michaux’s book on the table in hopes that he would notice it if he came.

  Downstairs I could hear raucous laughter that concealed people’s grief, and it struck terror in my heart. Why hadn’t I had enough sense to resist a cold morning’s whim? Why was I so infatuated with men with a penchant for insubordination, and with fates so impossible to get hold of ?

  I set about trying to diagnose a case of love, which is always preceded by symptoms of an urge to write, and followed by some calamity.

  What had brought me here? What sort of intuition had brought me out on this particular morning looking like someone who hadn’t been planning on meeting anyone, then sat me down across from a desireless table?

  It must have been my writer’s sixth sense, which never misses the mark, and which had promised me some surprise today.

  The male voices, whose numbers increased the later it got, intensified my terror, and the only thing that protected me from them was the presence of a couple talking in a nearby corner. Yet even they weren’t entirely comfortable. On the contrary, they seemed flustered and nervous.

  The terror had suddenly become a group contagion that could easily pass from one person to another, and was likely to become all the more potent with the passing of the days. In the face of it I found myself growing smaller and smaller until I was the size of an insect that didn’t know whose stomach it was going to end up in or in which meal it would be served, just as I wondered on what charge I would end up being killed. This is the absurd, haphazard logic of death in the time of undeclared wars, the painful absurdity that Khalil Hawi summed up in the words, ‘All I know is that I’m going to die, a tiny morsel in the belly of a whale.’

  There being little in the café to arouse my curiosity, I took to studying an unpretentious-looking young man reading a newspaper at the table next to mine. He looked too young to be Abdelhaq. Even so, I began sneaking glances at him out of boredom, periodically raising Henri Michaux’s book in the air, either by way of camouflage, or as a signal to some stranger who might appear. Then – out of despair, or rather, out of fear – I got up to leave. I was being assailed by scenarios from detective novels, especially now that I’d noticed I was in a café frequented by journalists.

  What if the man sitting just steps away from me was concealing a pistol, hiding behind a newspaper as he lay in wait for someone or other? Most assassinations were committed by men in their twenties who were regular café-goers, or who would lean against some wall reading a newspaper while they waited for their victim.

  As I gathered my things in a panic and left the price of my coffee on the table, I saw the young man open the newspaper and begin reading something with rapt attention. Then suddenly, on the front page I glimpsed a large photograph of someone whose features I knew unmistakably. Above the photo were two words in French in large bold print – two words that made me freeze in place, dumbfounded.

  I would have expected anything from death – almost any, at least, of the despicable surprises that it’s so inimitably good at. But that morning, a newspaper I hadn’t bought brought me news of the one death I would never have expected.

  The day before, the whale had opened its jaws and, for its evening meal, swallowed – among others – Abdelhaq.

  A sadistic sniper par excellence, Fate takes up some forgotten corner of our lives. Then it opens fire randomly on people we love without a pang of remorse.

  I’d been confronted with two surprises relating to Abdelhaq – the first being his death, and the second his picture. It was as though he had had to die in order to become, at last, a real live man: with a full name, features, a life story, and a death story.

  For me, the story had begun with his picture. I hadn’t forgotten that face, which I’d contemplated at length with secret admiration one day in this very place.

  So, had I come here this morning because Fate was preparing me for one of its cruel surprises, and in the very place where I’d seen him for the first time?

  Had I come to witness his absence, to contemplate his unoccupied table in order to complete the cycle of leave-taking in a story in which there had been nothing but a single encounter, and the abundant stillness of absence?

  As I sat there thinking, someone walked up and asked the young man to come with him because he was needed at the printer’s.

  So the poor guy was a journalist, after all, or, at least, he worked for a newspaper. I nearly threw my arms around him and burst into tears, and if no one else had been around, I would have. But all I could muster the courage to do was to ask him for the newspaper he’d been reading. So he handed it to me and left.

  Feeling my legs giving out on me, I sat back down. This time I wasn’t sitting with a figment of my imagination. I was sitting with pain.

  Sorrow sat neglected in a corner of that café. The table in that corner concealed a secret, like a piano waiting for someone who was accustomed to playing it, and which remained silent without him. That table was the only thing around me that shared in my grief for him, and it seemed to wonder why he had chosen to sit there, and not elsewhere.

  I turned to the page that held his picture. The caption, for all its simplicity, pained me: ‘Adieu, Abdelhaq.’

  Why did the addition of the word ‘Adieu’ before a name make it so painful?

  So this was Abdelhaq, then.

  He was the one who, dressed in a white shirt and white trousers, had occupied this very table on the day when . . .

  I remembered how he’d kept writing and smoking nonstop, and how, for the nearly half hour he sat there alone, all he exchanged with me was silence and a few moments of distraction.

  Then his friend had arrived, clad in black, and greeted me from afar as if he knew me. The two of them talked for quite a while, and the whole time I kept wondering if he was the man who . . .

  Then all of a sudden the man in black had got up and brought me a bowl of sugar when I was about to ask the waiter for one.

  I remember being surprised by his cologne, which reminded me of the cologne that . . .

  So I’d tested him with an apology, only to have him reply with those terse words that . . .

  That was when my senses escaped from me, and seemed to turn him into what I’d imagined him to be.

  Little did I know that love was making fun of me, and leaking the same password to more than one man.

  Now I realized that, by virtue of a word and a colour, I’d missed the love train that I would have taken otherwise.

  In a moment of sensory chaos, I had followed the man in black, and lost my way.

  He’d told me once that ‘no love is more wonderful than the kind we find when we’re looking for something else’.

  How was I to know now whether what I’d experienced with him was really more wonderful than what I would have experienced if I’d followed the other colour?

  On the other hand, had there really been another colour?

  Love had struck me with colour-blindness that day. It had even impaired my vision.

  I remember telling the man in black on the day we first met, ‘I’ve never seen a man wear black in this city, even if he was in mourning.’

  ‘So what colour did you expect me to wear?’ he asked in reply.

  ‘I don’t know, but people around here tend to wear clothes that don’t have any colour.’

  Then, after a bit of thought, I went on, ‘Your friend doesn’t seem to be from around here either.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked, laughing. ‘Because he wears a white shirt and white trousers?’

  ‘No, because he wears white with a kind of happy flamboyance, whereas everybody else in this city wears it to show how pious they are.’

  He smiled and said, ‘My friend isn’t really happy. He just has an extravagant way of showing his sadness, that’s all. White, f
or him, is actually the equivalent of black.’

  In the end, I realized that I was dealing with two men who, each in his own way, wore the same colour. It seemed clear now that love wouldn’t have made fun of a woman with so much self-confidence.

  Of course not.

  Love is nothing but a state of suspicion.

  How can you be sure of a feeling that’s based on the chaos of the senses, on a mutual lack of understanding, on a situation in which each person thinks he or she knows enough to love the other? In reality, neither of them knows more than what love wants him or her to know. Nor does either of them see more than what he or she has already loved in some previous relationship. Hence, when each love comes to an end, we discover that in the beginning we were loving someone else!

  Of all the deaths I’d heard of, Abdelhaq’s came as the greatest shock to me. Is there anything more painful than to enter someone’s life just when he’s about to leave it?

  This was a man I hadn’t known, yet about whom I’d known everything. So what could newspapers add to my knowledge of him apart from the details of his death, which I didn’t want to know about anyway? All the national newspapers carried his obituary on their front page, together with a large photo of him with a caption that read, in one language or another, ‘Farewell, Abdelhaq.’

  Journalists in this country have a custom of publishing pictures of their deceased colleagues along with elegies they had written for themselves. And Abdelhaq was no exception. Hence, the newspaper he’d written for published a large photo of him on its front page alongside a poem he had composed after the assassination of his journalist and poet friend Tahar Djaout, and which read like an elegy for himself. The deaths of these two men had differed in nothing but a few minor details.

  Tahar Djaout had been taking his last article to the newspaper when his assassins came up from behind and pumped two bullets into his head. As for Abdelhaq, he had been kidnapped in front of his mother’s house in Sidi al-Mabrouk after coming in secret two days earlier to say goodbye to her before she left for the minor pilgrimage to Mecca. His body had been found with one bullet in the chest, and another in the forehead.

  In other words, he had been looking defencelessly at his slayers as they shot him, because one of his hands had been bound with his own belt, and the other with a metal wire attached to the belt. When his body was found, he was lying face down on the side of the road.

  At the time of his death, he may have recalled Che Guevara’s last words as he saw his executioner aiming a gun at him, incredulous that this great leader was now within range of his pistol. Guevara shouted at him, ‘Shoot, you coward! You’re killing a human being!’ Two months before his death, Abdelhaq had begun using these words as the title for his daily news column. This had coincided with his elegy for his journalist friend Sa’id Muqbil, whose killer had shot him point blank as he was eating his lunch.

  Abdelhaq spent the last three months of his life thinking up thirty-six ways to eulogize himself, thirty-six being the number of his friends and colleagues in the profession of troubles, tragedies and death who had already met their end. Death couldn’t surprise him any more, so whichever way it came, he already had a description for it, and whichever direction his killers came from, he had already gone there to vilify and defy them. In this way he had hastened his death, and he became number thirty-seven on the hit list whose end no one could predict.

  I came home with several newspapers in both Arabic and French. So this was Abdelhaq, then. Now I could read the newspapers and discover who he was:

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

  The 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.

  Like someone who’s fallen in love with a man through correspondence, having learned everything about him but never having had the chance to get to know him up close, I was exploring his life with a belated fascination, reading the newspaper like thousands of unnamed readers who had learned this morning of the death of a man they had never met.

  But he would never know me: the clandestine, unnamed female presence in his life. How could he have known what his death would do to me? I had lived in his house, slept in his bed with his friend, talked with another man on his telephone, and without this knowledge, read a book that revealed his thoughts and preoccupations. I’d used his cologne and, in the darkness of a cinema, shared with him in a sudden conflagration of desire and a moment of weeping. And, sitting a table away from him at a café, I had conducted with him a conversation that could only be carried on in silence.

  Yet he hadn’t expected my presence in his intimate world at the far end of his life. Do we need to die in order to love, and to know that there were those who loved us?

  As I looked at his picture that evening, I tried not to dwell on it, lest I see on his lips the vestiges of the last kiss he had shared with a woman, and grieve for her, or of some woman he might have kissed if he hadn’t died, and grieve for him.

  I avoided his eyes, which were fixed on a place that only he could see, and his moustache, which, like his dreams, refused to humble itself even after his death.

  Before I knew it, I found myself cutting the picture out and hiding it among my papers.

  At first I had wanted to cut out the poem and keep it in my black notebook. Then some old, unsettling feeling came over me. It took me back to my childhood, to the day, thirty years earlier, when I’d cut my father’s picture out of the newspaper. The same size as Abdelhaq’s photo, it had been on the front page of all the newspapers. However, that was during a war in which the murderers were foreigners, and death was seen as noble, not as a tragedy.

  Indeed, every war changes the definition of death for a time, and in this way it draws a fine, unseen distinction among the generations.

  The yellowed picture, in which my father’s gaze was frozen for ever, had hung on the wall ever since I’d found it several months earlier. I was separated from that gaze by the glass of time, while it was separated from time by a new name for death.

  Beside my father’s picture hung a picture of Abdel Nasser. However, Abdel Nasser’s picture was bigger. It was as though, in the broken youth of which it was a reminder, the picture epitomized a death more painful than all others – death by defeat.

  In their silent presence, these two pictures embodied all the martyrs and great causes I’d believed in since I was a child. It was a faith I hadn’t questioned any more than the other beliefs I had been raised on.

  It didn’t matter to me that Nasserism existed nowhere but in the realm of feeling, or in a generation which by a historical coincidence bore the name of the last Arab warrior-poet.

  What could be lovelier than for my father to have given his only son the name Nasser before he was martyred? Mohamed Boudiaf ’s oldest son was also named Nasser and he had books in his library about Abdel Nasser, while everyone who had died in a national tragedy had left us something of the illusion of pan-Arabism.

  These thoughts came to me as I worked to remove a picture from its frame so that I could stealthily place another one behind it. I’d discovered that this was the best way to keep it, like the person it depicted, present and absent at the same time. It was also a way to avoid the questions it might arouse if people saw it in my office.

  Behind my father I was hiding a man I had loved, since I knew he would understand, as men had often approached me disguised as him.

  I was hiding one death behind another, one country behind another. I was also hiding one suspect love behind another.

  As I looked at my father’s picture nearby, I could see that one man might conceal a second, and possibly even a third, and that this was somet
hing only I knew.

  The next morning I woke up unusually early. I probably hadn’t slept at all. I was looking for a way to live the day that would fit the bitter sweetness of life.

  I tried to write, but I couldn’t.

  The man who had disappeared two months earlier had laid mines on all the roads leading to the act of writing. He had succeeded in convincing me that empty space is the endpoint to every narrative, the only thing any book really accomplishes, and that every novel has to end with a possibility-laden blank page.

  So what was I supposed to do? How was I supposed to cope with all this ‘sweet ruin’ without a pen? I remembered him saying on the day his friend died, ‘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?’ I had asked.

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

  So what was I going to do with my sadness today?

  Should I make love? To whom? How was I supposed to pursue pleasure on the pretext that a man I had hoped to belong to some day, but never would, had died?

  The manliness that had sat in silent provocation across from my womanhood, the manliness I had wanted to experience if only just once, life had withheld from me and fed as a sumptuous repast to the maggots.

  The body my lips had longed to cover with kisses would soon be covered with soil, and I would never have the chance to set it on fire even in my imagination. It had entered the world of frozen tundra. ‘The grave is cold, Mama. Send me a wool sweater.’

  I would have preferred that my encounter with this man had been on another day, alone, away from the weeping and the prayers. I would have liked it to be intimate and romantic in spite of the distance that now lay between us.

  However, I would have to be at the funeral in order to carry on, as an anonymous woman, my secret presence in the final scene of a love story. I’d come to pay my respects to a man whom I knew but who didn’t know me, and to search for another man who knew me, but whom I still didn’t know.