Chaos of the Senses (17 page)

As he set the coffee on the table, he continued, ‘Your requests are very modest. I'd been hoping you'd ask for something nicer!'

As I returned the other books to the shelf, I replied, ‘I'm fine with the modest requests. The nicest things can't be asked for.'

As if in correction, he said, ‘The nicest things always come last, Madame!'

His voice was so close, it seemed to be stroking my ears. No sooner had I turned to look behind me than I found myself up next to him. He was just breaths and a kiss away. However, he didn't kiss me. With his right hand he reached out and caressed my hair. After gliding slowly down my neck with a maddening flirtatiousness, his hand slid towards my ear and removed one earring, then the other.

In what appeared to be a kind of romantic ritual, he placed the earrings on one of the bookshelves with the unthinking spontaneity of someone who was accustomed to removing small items from women's bodies. Then his lips began where his hand had left off.

They passed over me with deliberate slowness and at a studied distance in order to produce the maximum arousal. They grazed my mouth without quite kissing it, slid down towards my neck without actually touching it, then ascended again with the same deliberate slowness as though he were kissing me with nothing but his breath.

He was a man who knew how to touch a woman, and words, with the same hidden blaze. With a kind of studied lethargy, he embraced me from behind the way he might embrace a fleeing sentence. I stood in surrender against the wall, numbed by a storm of pleasure. I didn't ask myself: What is he doing to me? Is he drawing my body with his lips? Is he plotting my destiny? Is he dictating to me the next thing I'll write? Or is he cancelling out my language?

How was I to resist a man who, with a single kiss, or without kissing me at all, could write me and erase me? How was I to resist him as he traversed desire's hidden passages with his lips, then assaulted me with sudden ferocity, devouring my lips and swallowing everything I'd been about to say to him?

I discovered that only now was he starting to kiss me. As he grasped me by my hair and mingled his saliva with mine, I broke out in a sweat so profuse that my body odour drowned out the fragrance of his cologne. Meanwhile, our mouths were locked so tightly that I felt as though I were breathing through him and with him.

I wished he would draw me closer so as to keep me from falling. But he seemed to derive such enjoyment from overpowering me with his manliness that he preferred to hold me with only one arm.

Then, in what might best be described as an erotic cluster- bomb attack, he began blanketing my neck with staccato kisses that descended in rapid succession as though he were placing ellipses at the end of a text he might return to later. Then he withdrew.

As I caught my breath, I noticed that the cloak I was wearing was drenched with perspiration. Meanwhile, I saw him take off his jacket, light a cigarette, and sit down on the sofa to drink his coffee.

My questions came back to me as I looked at him.

Like a gypsy woman reading someone's palm, I stood there reading his features with nothing but my intuition and my senses. At that moment I cared less about discovering his past than about discerning my own destiny as it related to him. Like a forty-year-old man, it was a destiny with tired lips, tousled hair, lazy words, confusing touches, unexpected kisses and conflicting desires.

‘What are you thinking about?' he asked.

‘I'm thinking about how I love forty-year-old men.'

He smiled and said, ‘But I'm not the man you think I am!'

Flicking his ashes into the ashtray, he held out his hand to me and said, ‘Come over and sit next to me.'

I hesitated a bit. Then I confessed, ‘I'm all sweaty. I've had this cloak on for hours.'

I expected him to say, ‘Take it off,' or some such thing. Instead, he drew me towards him, saying, ‘I like the way you smell. I've always liked the way your body expresses itself !'

Then, as if to reassure me, he added, ‘An odourless body can't talk!'

Sitting down beside him, I said, ‘I'm afraid the day might come when my body is more eloquent than I am!'

‘Whatever happens,' he said, ‘your body is more truthful than you are. It's only our senses that don't lie.

‘The strange thing,' he went on, ‘is that I keep feeling as though I've met you before in some other house, that I've kissed you at some earlier time, that I recognize this odour of yours from some other embrace, and that I've tasted your lips in some other kiss. How do you explain the fact that we can forget a body we've possessed, but not one that we've only desired?'

Of course I had no answers to questions like these, especially since I didn't share his feeling that these things had happened before.

All I said was, ‘It's lovely to feel so much desire. There's a kind of heroism in the ability to remain faithful to . . . an illusion!'

He put his feet up on the table in front of him and, puffing his cigarette smoke in my direction, said a bit sarcastically, ‘What heroism? You're still approaching life as though it were literature. People like stories with sad endings where the hero sticks to his principles till the very last page, since they don't how to stick to their own principles in real life.'

Then he added, ‘Gone are the days of great causes. Heroism in real life has let us down. So let's go for a better type of heroism in novels. All the heroism of virtue and all the victories of wisdom are nothing compared to the greatness of surrendering to the one we love in a moment of weakness. Falling in love is our most enduring victory!'

He took my hand as though he wanted to keep me from going anywhere and said, ‘This time I want us to settle for a heroism that's sweet and simple, one that's within everyone's reach, like, for example, trying for the longest kiss in the history of Algerian literature!'

Then he asked, ‘Do you know what I was thinking about when I kissed you a little while ago?'

‘What?'

‘I was thinking about how our life together began with our imitating literature, as though love had motioned to us to carry on, in real life, with a kiss we'd begun in a book. Just like in that novel, we're having the same first date and kissing in front of the same bookshelf after you look at the books and ask if you can borrow one of them.'

He went on, saying, ‘I love the fortuitousness of kisses that travel from one story to another. Imagine how wonderful it is for there to be a kiss that's begun by a fictitious man in a book, and that's continued in real life by another man who's so much like the first that he even knows what the woman's lips will taste like. In the age of superhuman feats, intercontinental ballistic missiles and interplanetary satellites, the achievement that one can take the most pride in is a kiss that can travel from one time to another, from one novel to another.'

‘That's all well and good,' I said. ‘But I don't understand why you're so bent on breaking this record in particular. Men usually pride themselves on breaking other types of records!'

He chuckled, seemingly surprised by my question. After a pause, he said, ‘The reason is that kissing is the only romantic act in which all the senses take part. Unlike having sex, kissing someone requires all five senses. A kiss exposes us, because it reflects a state of sheer romantic transport that has nothing to do with the sexual urges that we have in common with all other animals.

‘That's why we can have sex with someone that we have no desire to kiss, whereas we might be content with nothing but a kiss from a woman whose lips alone give us a fever that
couldn't be generated by the bodies of all other women put together!'

I could feel myself blushing. His words had set me all aflutter, and my body was electrified. But I didn't say anything. It was as if I'd become another woman all of a sudden.

He pushed back a lock of my hair that had fallen out of place, saying, ‘I've had a lot of sex, but I just now realized that I haven't kissed a woman for a long time, and that the last time I was in bliss was when my lips were pressed against yours on page 172.'

I nearly asked him what book he was talking about, and how he could remember the exact page where the kiss he remembered had taken place. But I couldn't think of anything to add to what he'd said. So I stood up, as if I were in search of an answer that I thought I might find more easily on my feet.

Apparently having misunderstood the reason for my getting up, he looked at his watch and asked me, ‘When's the driver coming for you?'

‘He'll be waiting for me on the back street at five o'clock.'

‘You've got fifteen minutes. So you'd better be going.'

I didn't argue with him. I was used to his ending our time together at its sweetest moment, the way the electricity goes off in the middle of a celebration.

Then, as if he'd recalled matters that love had pushed temporarily out of his consciousness, he added, ‘The situation's bad, and in the next few hours there might be confrontations between the protestors and the army.'

As if I were looking for an excuse to stay, I asked him, ‘Why today? Why now?'

‘Because the leader of the Islamic Salvation Front made a speech today in which he described Chadli as a nail in Algeria's
heel that had to be removed. An Islamist march is heading towards the presidential palace demanding that the presidential elections be moved forward.'

Seeing my astonishment at the news he'd just announced, he said, ‘Don't you listen to the radio?'

‘There's no radio where I'm staying,' I said apologetically. ‘And since you advised me not to read the newspapers, I've been isolated from the world over the past couple of weeks in that summer house.'

As he looked on, I spruced myself up in front of a mirror and put the scarf back on my head.

Then I headed for the door, about to leave behind the simple surroundings for which I so envied him.

He stopped me, handing me the book I'd asked to borrow, and said with a wry wink, ‘It seems that here, too, I'm like Khaled in that novel of yours. But there's no danger in my lending you this book as long as it isn't one of Ziyad's poetry collections!'

I was amazed that he would remember so much from one of my novels.

I reassured him, saying, ‘Henri Michaux died several years ago, so he poses no threat to you!'

‘I don't know,' he quipped back. ‘I've learned not to be complacent when it comes to the things you read!'

I giggled.

I remembered how Khaled lends the novel's heroine a poetry collection written by a Palestinian friend of his named Ziyad. Khaled has been gushing to her constantly about Ziyad and his poetry, confident that nothing could happen between the two of them since Ziyad is away on the war front. Then Ziyad happens to come to Paris for a few days on a visit from Lebanon, and the heroine ends up falling in love with the poet and ditching the
artist, who loses her from the minute she begins reading that collection.

At the door that was still closed on our secret, he embraced me without a word. It was as though the scarf that now covered my head had relegated us once more to the realm of strangers.

We parted without a kiss, without a word of farewell.

All he said as I left the house was, ‘I'll be waiting for your call. Ring me as soon as you get back so I'll know you arrived safely.'

‘I will,' I replied absently.

Once outside, I paused to look back at the door as it closed behind me on a moment stolen from destiny. Then I walked down the stairs like a thief who's certain that everyone he sees is eyeing him with suspicion, and who himself has begun to be suspicious of his own happiness. He suspects a pleasure which, now past, no longer seems to merit all the risk he took on its account, and the long-awaited moment of passion which, within the space of the instant it takes for a door to close, has suddenly become a thing of the past.

If the truth be told, there's no one more miserable than a lover going back down the stairs!

I went home by the way I'd come, but with more fear and less enthusiasm. There was a blurred space in me for joy, and another for regret.

Suppose you have a couple of hours to yourself in a car being driven by a military chauffeur who, bringing you back from a romantic tryst, takes you down the streets of wrath and the alleyways of death. Those two hours will set the stage for a
heartbreaking plunge back into reality, and give you plenty of time to regret what you've done.

The process is catalysed by the garb of piety you're wearing for the occasion and which, before you know it, has started wearing you, with the result that your own thoughts turn on you!

The minute I got back I hurriedly took off the cloak and returned it to its owner in the hopes of being reconciled with my body.

A hundred years ago, in order to be able to write, French novelist Amandine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin took the pen name George Sand. She even adopted men's attire inside of which she lived as a woman. Since that isn't an option for me, I've always had to borrow some other woman's clothes so that I can go on writing inside of them.

Literature teaches us to borrow other people's lives, convictions and outward appearances. But the hardest part isn't to break into other people's private spaces. The hardest part comes when we close our notebooks, take off what doesn't belong to us, and go back to living inside of bodies that don't recognize us any more because of all the times we've dressed them up in someone else's clothes!

I put on a summer house dress and sat down to think about what had happened to me.

Like pain, pleasure forces you to re-examine your life and your convictions. In fact, it might make you go so far as to ask the crazy question: ‘What use is my life now?'

There are kisses which, if you don't die during them, you don't deserve to survive. But either way, you make an astounding discovery: namely, that up until that existence-defining pleasure or pain, you hadn't yet lived.