Chaos of the Senses

by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

  So I timed my arrival at the cemetery such that the burial ceremony would be over but people would still not have left, hoping to see that man in the crowd.

  It definitely wasn’t on account of the funeral that I’d come.

  There are people who only care about others’ assassinations to the extent that they give them a platform for bashing the enemy, reminding people of the barbarity and sadism on the other side.

  In the midst of this duel, pens fall dead one after another, victims of a well-publicized death.

  I’d always imagined that creativity makes death different somehow, so I attended the funeral the way one goes to a lovers’ tryst.

  Once upon a time Cleopatra put on her jewellery, perfumed herself, and, in preparation for her death, put on a dress in which Antony would recognize her when they met among thousands of people. Like her, I put on makeup and some of the perfume with which this story had begun. I wore the black dress with the big gold buttons that go all the way down the front, leaving the last one open as usual. With it I wore a black belt that hugged my waist and showed off my curves. It made me look like an Italian actress. At least, that’s what the man in black used to tell me. He loved this dress, and whenever he saw me in it, he would say, ‘Black suits you.’

  ‘That’s nice of you to say,’ I’d reply absently. ‘It would make a good title for another novel!’

  I most definitely wasn’t wearing black in mourning. I was just being extravagantly sorrowful, extravagantly alluring, defiant in excess. I didn’t go disguised in my chaste-looking cloak – it would have been foolish to face death in a get-up like that.

  I had dressed this way with the intention of seducing two men I’d seen together for the first time in a certain café wearing this very same dress. If one of them came to pay his respects to the other, he would be bound to see me and recognize me. As for the other . . .

  It didn’t matter for me to see him so much as for him to see me, and I wanted to look as ravishing as I would have liked to be on a first date. I wanted to catch his eye and distract him from his death by the surprise of seeing me there. I expected him to notice me, since I was the only one carrying a notebook, whereas most women come to cemeteries laden with loaves of bread and dates to distribute as charity.

  I was also the only one who had thought to bring him a pack of cigarettes for his first night. After that he would have to stop smoking, not because smoking is bad for your health, but because I wouldn’t be able to bring him cigarettes all the time.

  When I stopped on my way to buy the cigarettes, the vendor looked askance at me. I even thought he might throw me out of his shop. Any woman who has the audacity to buy cigarettes in Constantine has to be either immoral or crazy.

  Even though I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life, I thought it would be silly to exonerate myself by explaining to him that the cigarettes weren’t for me, but for a man who was going to be buried that day. He would need them if he wanted to write something that evening, and I suspected that on this day in particular, he wouldn’t be able to keep himself from putting pen to paper.

  I’ve always loved writers who have the ability to say the most painful and serious things with levity and disdain. I’ve always wished I had their ability to treat everything as if it were its opposite. Like the characters in their books, they act in a way that goes against logic in relation to death, love, infidelity, success, failure, tragedies, victories and losses. That’s why I love Zorba, who starts to dance when he ought to be crying.

  I suppose I’d always been looking for an occasion like this, the chance to go with my madness, against logic, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to try out some of the scenes that I had hoped, in my wild writing fantasies, to experience myself just for the pleasure of writing about them later.

  For some unknown reason, it wasn’t sadness I was feeling that day, but rather, an overwhelming sense of defiance of which my jewellery and my fashionable appearance were simply the outer expressions.

  I don’t think I went there to defy death. Death is a decree from God before which all of us are equals. Nor do I think I went to be a heroine. All I wanted was to defy the killers, brandishing the two accusations that I knew might be levelled against me: being a woman, and being a writer (which was a silent tool of defiance in my hand), and with me I carried a notebook containing the story whose main character was the act of writing itself.

  In the face of death, neither being a woman nor being a writer is any consolation. On the contrary, both of them are constant reminders of death’s presence. But in the face of crime, what does a writer have but her words, and the life which, from the time she began writing, hasn’t belonged to her?

  If he came, I hoped to say all these things in silence to the man in black. Or maybe what I hoped was that if he came, we could go on writing our story.

  During our last time together, he had wanted us to put ourselves on a level with bankrupt lovers, and had refused for us to meet in Abdelhaq’s flat. So now we could meet at his funeral and be truly on a level with the lovers of this city, whose lives had become so desperate that they’d begun meeting in cemeteries, disguised in the garb of mourning, exchanging their intimate secrets on any grave they came to. Love alone has the ability to make everything beautiful, even trysts in a cemetery.

  But even such a bittersweet rendezvous hadn’t awaited me there. I stood at a distance among the graves, midway between pain and the temerity it required to scrutinize scores of men’s faces, men being the only ones allowed to escort the dead to their final resting place. I was looking for a man who resembled no one, and nothing, and who couldn’t possibly fail to keep an appointment such as this.

  After depositing their burden underground, everyone withdrew, and I found myself in a peculiar position. It reminded me of a scene from some silent movie in black-and-white. There I stood in my black radiance, alone against the backdrop of a vast white marble decor with a black notebook in my hand in the hope that if he came, he would recognize me and approach me.

  As I waited, my sense of defiance turned into an overwhelming sense of sadness and disappointment. I had wanted to show my defiance through him, for him. Had he stayed away in order to defy me through his absence? How could he stay away like this when Abdelhaq had been his closest friend? Was he out of the country? Had he decided to visit the grave later, on his own?

  Or had he already said goodbye to his friend in his own way, by making love to a woman?

  I don’t know how, but grave after grave, the questions kept leading me onward towards the other man until at last I stood before him. A corpse of dreams, he lay beneath a flower- festooned mound of dirt.

  Oddly, I didn’t cry. I was writing in my head, looking for the words I needed to describe this extraordinary encounter and reviewing some of the passages from Henri Michaux’s book that he had underlined or commented on.

  I thought back on the poem he had written to eulogize Tahar Djaout and which had been published again the previous day next to his photo and obituary. I’d clipped it out of the newspaper and stuck it into my black notebook. To my surprise, I had a sudden urge to look at it again, so I got it out and began reading, noting its effect on me in this particular place.

  Not knowing whether I was doing this for myself or for him, I read in a soft voice that he would be hearing for the first time since the day when I sat beside him in a cinema and we had shared just two brief exchanges. Still his silent self even in his final role, I carried on with my soliloquy.

  He went out one morning to buy a notebook,

  some pens and a newspaper.

  No one will ever know what he was going to write

  at the moment when ink spirited him away

  to his final resting place.

  He had an outline in his head, as well as a bullet,

  so instead of putting roses on his grave, they put the pens he’d bought.

  Nor did they write anything on his epitaph.

  Instead they left the whi
te marble slate clean.

  Consequently, you won’t recognize him there,

  where the headstones are nothing but pens,

  and where every evening hands awaken to carry on writing.

  I think my voice died in the last verse, and when I closed the black notebook on that poem, I felt as though I’d been playing a part in a movie. I didn’t try to look back at the scene, which I knew would never repeat itself. But I also knew I’d be able to describe its impact on me in future novels because it had actually happened.

  For two years I had wanted, if only just once, to experience what it felt like to place a manuscript on a grave and walk away with no regrets. And now I’d done it, though I hadn’t exactly planned on it. I had brought the notebook in order to give it to the other man, but when he didn’t show up, I couldn’t resist a certain crazy idea that came over me.

  In response to the unexpected situations in which life places us, I think people should follow their inner voice and go with the first idea that comes to them, without weighing it or comparing it with any other. The first idea is always the right one no matter how perverse or strange it might seem, because that’s the idea that best reflects who we are.

  There was an idea that suited a certain writer I knew. It suited her so well that I felt I was avenging her on a time long past, when she used to amuse herself creating characters of paper and killing them off in books in keeping with the logic of life, where love and murder follow their own absurd reasoning.

  Then life in turn began transforming everything she wrote into reality. As if she’d been trying to provoke a response from life, it brought her book out in a new, reality-based edition. She then found herself the sole reader of a forged copy, an ingenious plagiary in which Fate had changed a few names here and there and the order of events.

  The strangest thing that can happen to an author is to discover that with every page she writes, she’s writing her own future. Yet if this does happen, she can’t accuse life of having conformed to her imagination or shamelessly imitated her work, since it usually happens the other way around!

  A certain author, having written a novel with the intention of pre-empting pain, killed off the character dearest to her. She didn’t realize, of course, that she was writing her own fate and that, like the character in her novel, she would rush back to Algeria on board an aeroplane of sorrow in the midst of a curfew with the manuscript of this very novel. When faced with an ill-tempered customs officer determined to rummage through her luggage, she told him the only thing she had to declare was her manuscript, the memory she had come to bury along with her father.

  She didn’t cry at his grave. She was too busy wondering: Why had he died now? Why had he died three months after Boudiaf ?

  Why had he died two weeks before the book’s release when he had been waiting for it for several years? During those years he had been supplying her with information about a city she had never visited, a city named Constantine, and with a memory he’d grown weary of carrying alone.

  Had he gone away in order to leave more room for that book, as though life wasn’t big enough for the two of them? Had he left so that this text would become more beautiful by virtue of his death? Or was it simply that, because they were living in a time of contrived death and booby-trapped cars, they had booby-trapped his dreams and put a bullet through his memory before his very eyes? If so, he had descended into a stupor, not out of old age, but because the nation had entered the age of despair, and the age of the nation had always been inseparable from his own.

  Indeed, being a man of history, he was bound to choose the right time to die. She remembered the morning of 1 November, and the national anthem whose strains could be heard throughout the military hospital as they brought his body out. It seemed as though they were playing it for him, or as though he had stopped the pallbearers so that he could hear it one last time:

  By the blows of Fate and blood shed pure

  By flags aflutter on mountains high

  That Algeria might live, we rose up to die

  Bear witness, bear witness, bear witness!

  Military ambulances drowned out the strains of the national anthem, ploughing ahead with their sirens blasting. The bodies of Algerian soldiers who had fallen at the hands of other Algerians, some wounded, others dead, their corpses maimed, were loaded on to stretchers, and the dead were taken to a refrigerator to await their families.

  So she forgot to weep for her father, and wept instead over the blank stares of soldiers who would never know why they had died.

  When she visited his grave the following day, she tried to look her best. She dressed up, as she usually did, to set herself apart from the other women there and in order to give him, as she always had, a reason to be proud of her in his final resting place.

  Knowing how dear she had been to him, she refused to be the equal of those who would come to mourn him for a day, then go their separate ways.

  There is a kind of grief so profound that it renders weeping banal, even an insult to the one being mourned.

  So why cry, when those who die take part of us with them without realizing that, as death follows upon death, we the living become more to be pitied than the dead themselves? Their departure has turned back the hands of the nation’s clock by generations.

  Quite inexplicably, she left everyone gathered around her father and, to their consternation, went looking for another grave.

  In the courtyard reserved for Algeria’s greatest martyrs, who lay beneath bouquets that had been laid upon their graves on the occasion of 1 November, she stopped in front of the grave designated as Boudiaf ’s. However, her attention was drawn to another grave nearby. Small and unpretentious, it seemed almost apologetic for being located to the right of the great leader’s resting place.

  Here lay Suleiman Umeirat, a man she had never heard of until the day when his bizarre, painful death made the front pages. He had fallen dead of a heart attack at Boudiaf ’s grave. A small burial place had been set aside for him next to that of Boudiaf, and the two of them hadn’t parted since.

  This was where his journey had ended.

  From the tender age of seventeen to the ripe old age of seventy, he had devoted himself to the love of Algeria. He had known the inside of both French prisons and ‘revolutionary’ Algerian prisons, where he had spent a number of years on charges of fomenting democracy.

  In his last television interview, by which time he was aware of the danger that the weapon of democracy might fall into the hands of those who, rather than believing in it, merely exploited it for their own ends, he declared, ‘If I were forced to choose between Algeria and democracy, I would choose Algeria.’ And indeed, he had chosen – he had chosen death at the feet of the homeland.

  Homeland? How could we have called it a homeland when its every grave harboured a crime, and every piece of news involved tragedy and loss?

  Homeland? Was this the homeland we had dreamed of dying for, only to find that we had died at its hands?

  Was this a homeland, this country that whenever we knelt to kiss its soil, stabbed us in the back, slaughtered us like sheep? One corpse at a time, we had blanketed its surface with men who had the stature of our dreams, and the youthful bloom of our proud aspirations.

  Between two graves, the only difference between which was that one of them had a fancy marble headstone, I saw a woman sobbing and who, by virtue of her sobbing, had become like all the other women gathered there.

  There was nothing I could do for her. In a brief moment, she had become a woman I didn’t recognize. With its primitive rites of sorrow, tragedy had turned her into an illiterate woman, and her sudden cry of pain rent the silence around her.

  It was as though she wanted to imitate that man in his death, to experience a state in which, through her weeping, she could die in defeat at the foot of the grave.

  Was this how al-Khansa’ had died as she mourned her brother? Had she wept over every grave she came to, as though any one of t
hem might hold her dear Sakhr?

  I couldn’t ask: Why now? Why here? Why these two?

  This eccentric woman had no answers to obvious questions, since otherwise she wouldn’t have left the crowd weeping for her father to go and weep for someone else. Something about her suddenly started to frighten me, terrify me. So I left her sobbing at Boudiaf ’s grave and hurriedly left the place.

  These memories, which had suddenly come upon me because I’d placed that notebook on a grave and left, did nothing to change my mood. At least, they didn’t change it enough to make me cry.

  As a matter of fact, I wasn’t feeling anything. I wasn’t feeling anything at all.

  Suddenly, as though my brain had short-circuited, all sensations came to a halt, and things around me began happening to another woman.

  At the same time, I was experiencing a kind of lightness, something bordering on happiness that I couldn’t find any explanation for. Then I remembered that the reason for it was the notebook I’d left behind, indifferent to the literary gains I might have made by publishing it even though I’d spent an entire year writing it. As a matter of fact, I’d been afraid that if I kept it, I might meet the same fate as that writer, who never forgave herself for hesitating to leave the manuscript of her novel on her father’s grave and return to exile.

  She had taken it to him on the day of his death, excusing her absence for those many years by telling him that she had been busy writing to him, and for him. She’d been lying, of course. The fact was that she’d been writing for herself. Otherwise, she would have left the manuscript on his grave and gone her way.

  But because she hadn’t dared part with it, she hadn’t been able to write a word since the day of her father’s death.

  Through years of silence, she punished herself for the crime of preferring thousands of readers over one particular reader who would never see what she had written, and who alone had reason to do so. It may be on account of that writer’s cowardice that my own view of writing, and the prestige that attaches to it, underwent a change. The fame that descends without warning on a writer on account of a single book is, in reality, merely a reminder of the betrayal of a single reader somewhere, a reader from whom we have stolen, on one pretext or another, the manuscript that was written for him, so that we can produce thousands of copies for readers who care nothing about us.