Chaos of the Senses (2 page)

She discovered later that she couldn't have changed a thing, since those words weren't only his language; they were his philosophy of life. She realized that things happen in a fixed, predetermined sequence, just as they do in the life cycles of organisms. We go ‘voluntarily' to our destinies to repeat ‘inevitably', with an enormous degree of stupidity or feigned intelligence, what ‘most decidedly' had to happen, since it has ‘always' happened from time immemorial, believing, ‘of course', that we're the ones who create our destinies!

How are we to know, amid the dualities of life that tug us back and forth between birth and death, joy and sorrow, victories and defeats, hopes and disappointments, love and hate, loyalty and betrayal, that we choose any of the things that happen to us? And that in our ebbs and our flows, our ascents and our descents, we're governed by a recurring sequence of Fate from whose grand cycles and vicissitudes we're separated by nothing but a hair's breadth?

How can we escape the power of that intricate cosmic law whose huge back-and-forth swings govern details as minute as the tiniest words in a language, including the little words that change the course of a life?

The day she heard him talking this way, she hadn't tried to understand him very deeply, since it had been during a sweet time known as ‘the beginning'. How long had it taken her to realize that the two of them had completed the cycle of love, and that on account of some trifling matter that she couldn't yet name, they'd entered the final chapter of a story that had ‘most definitely' reached its conclusion?

When love's flames go out, we always lose a part of ourselves, but we refuse to acknowledge it. So it was obvious that, in order to alleviate the pain of loss, he deliberately avoided practising the art of breaking with a lover.

She thought back on the day when she'd said to him, ‘I want us to have a pleasant parting,' to which he had replied with veiled sarcasm, ‘And is there any such thing as a pleasant parting?'

There were times when he seemed to her like a despot who amuses himself with the guillotine of language. He was a man infatuated with incisive words and decisive positions, whereas she was a woman seated on the swing of ‘maybe'.

How then could language accommodate both of them at once?

All he had said was, ‘How are you?'

Until that day, she hadn't expected to be flustered by such a question. To her surprise, she discovered that she was daunted by routine questions, the kinds of questions we answer unthinkingly every day when speaking to strangers who don't care about us in the end, and without caring whether they believe an answer that's no less hypocritical.

Yet, it takes no little astuteness to conceal our wounds with language.

Some questions lead to gloating, and the question mark with which they end, though it comes clothed in a warm voice that was once the voice of someone we loved, is a titter designed to incapacitate.

*

‘How are you?'

It was a devious way of formulating another question, so one would have to be careful not to parse it incorrectly.

It contained an unstated pronoun with a challenge attached, the underlying meaning being, ‘How are you without
me
?'

As for the unstated assumption behind it, all schools of love would agree on it. After all, we find it easier to accept the death of someone we love than to accept the idea of losing him, then discovering that he can carry on with his life in all its details without us. That's because in death, a loss takes place on both sides, a fact in which we find some solace.

She was weighing two possible replies when she noticed that their session had suddenly turned into a silent emotional battle, and that it was being fought with linguistic weapons chosen with the greatest of care.

The square table that separated them had become a chess board and, in preparation for the showdown, each player had chosen his colour and his position, arraying before him an army of knights and castles amid the mines of silence.

Intending to surprise him, she said, ‘
Al-hamdulillah
– Praise God!'

The very religions that urge us to be truthful provide us with expressions so loose that we can invest them with any number of meanings. After all, isn't language a tool of distrust?

Then, with gleeful pride, as though she'd scored her first victory, she added, ‘And you?'

She was moving toward his region of uncertainty and stripping him of his first knight. He wasn't accustomed to seeing her drape confidence over her shoulders like a burnoose.

She eyed him steadily. Would he finally take off his coat and tell her he missed her and that he'd never forgotten her? Or would he turn up his collar and give her a reply that would make her feel even colder?

Which chess piece would he play, he who seemed suddenly engrossed in thought as though he were about to deal his own fate with a word?

As she sat pondering him, she remembered the words of Garry Kasparov, the man who had defeated everyone who ever sat across a chess board from him: ‘The moves we make in our minds during play, then decide against, form as much a part of the game as the moves we carry out on the board.'

She wished she could discern which two answers he was debating in his mind, since the things he decided not to say would form part of his reply. However, all he did was shift in his seat and pick up a piece she hadn't expected him to. Without putting down his cigarette, he said, ‘I'm the same as you are.'

Then, after a brief silence, he added, ‘Precisely.'

He hadn't said a thing. All he had done was use one of his ‘categorical' words in a new way this time, and the challenge between them had been aborted.

She truly didn't understand. She didn't understand how a silence between two words could have such an impact on her, or how he had managed, with little more than an indolent glance, to infect her with a desire
that climbed up her black dress, lighting passion's fuse as it went.

With a word, his hand was restoring the memory to its place. It was as though, with the back of a word, he had sent everything before them crashing to the floor and cleared the table of all the petty disagreements that had driven them apart.

She knew that love isn't a good thinker, and, what's worse, that it has no memory. It doesn't benefit from the foolish mistakes of its past, or from the little disappointments that once left it with a gaping wound.

Nevertheless, she'd forgiven him everything.

She was ‘most definitely' happy with this defeat of hers, which had taken on the flavour of victory after the fact.

As for him, he was ‘inevitably' happy with a quick triumph in an extemporaneous duel he had fought without ‘exactly' taking off his coat!

* * *

I liked this story, which I'd written without knowing exactly what I'd written. I'd never written a short story before, and I wasn't entirely confident that the term ‘short story' even applied to such a text. All that mattered to me at the time was to write something – anything – that would enable me to break two years of silence.

I don't know how the story was born. I know how my silence was born, but that's another story.

Some time ago I surprised myself by going back to writing: just like that, without forethought, and without there having happened anything in particular that would have inspired me to
put pen to paper. Maybe it was nothing other than the fact that a few days before that, I'd bought a notebook the look of which enticed me into writing.

I'd gone to a stationery shop to buy some envelopes and postage stamps, and I happened to see a notebook along with a number of others the shop owner was unpacking. As I watched, he began setting them out neatly in preparation for the approaching school year. As my glance might be arrested by a man, it was arrested by that notebook. It was as though I'd stumbled upon something I wouldn't have expected to find in that dreary place to which I went only rarely.

Isn't writing like love: a gift you find when you're least expecting it?

There are houses where you can't write a single line, no matter how long you live there and no matter how beautiful they are. It's something that defies logical explanation.

There are pens which, from the moment you buy them and from the first word you jot down with them, you'll never use to write anything worth mentioning. You know that their lazy temperament and spasmodic breathing will keep you from reaching words' secret passageways.

Similarly, there are notebooks that you buy out of habit and that sit in your drawers for months without ever awakening in you that irresistible urge to write or provoking you to scribble even a few lines.

I find that the longer I write, the better I get at making on-the-spot judgments about such things.

So, prompted by a feeling that went beyond me, I paused before that notebook. I was captivated by this ‘thing', which was set apart from the other things in the shop by nothing but
my conviction – or illusion – that it would bring me back to writing again.

From the moment I saw that black spiral notebook with its glossy, plain cover, I sensed a rapport between us, and I knew somehow that I was going to write something lovely on its smooth blank pages.

I ran home with it and hid it as though I were hiding evidence of a crime, and didn't get it out until several days later to write that short story, which might be called ‘The Man With the Coat'.

As I usually do when I finish writing something at night, I reread it as soon as I woke up the next morning. I was anxious to see whether the story was really as nice as it had seemed when I first wrote it. Maybe I just wanted to make sure I'd actually written something.

I read it several times, and each time I read it I felt more exhilarated than I had the time before. At long last I'd written something good. Even better was the fact that it was outside of me: everything in it had originated in my imagination. I'd created everything in it. I'd decided not to interfere with it in any way or introduce into it anything from my own life.

This alone was an achievement that amazed me, since I'd never known anyone like this man, with his alluring remoteness and his unsettling presence: a man veiled behind the mysteriousness and ambiguity of silence, a man with the ability to create a state of sweet discomfiture whenever he speaks, even when he happens to be uttering one of those unequivocal words that he relishes in choosing according to the occasion.

Nor is the woman in the story anything like me. She says the very opposite of what I'd say myself, and does the opposite of what I would do. With the fatuousness of a young girl, she
believes that those we love were made to share pleasure with us, but not pain, and that the man who loves her should cry alone, then come to enjoy her, or find enjoyment with her.

In fact, she's so naïve that she sees his words as evidence of his love for her. She fails to see that when he replies to her ‘How are you?' with ‘I'm the same as you are . . . precisely,' all this means is that he's decided not to tell her anything!

And whereas what I liked about this story was the fact that it bore little resemblance to my life, the fact that it did bear
some
resemblance to it reminded me of how I resent the strange logic of Fate, which requires that in every relationship between a man and a woman, one of the two doesn't deserve the other. Maybe, in my heart of hearts, I wished this man were mine. After all, he was well suited to both my silence and my way of speaking, and he resembled me in my anguish and my passion.

However, this wasn't my problem, and this story wasn't my story – or, rather, it wasn't my story yet.

So I gave it a title, which I didn't have much trouble deciding on, and went back to my daily preoccupations.

Nothing had prepared me to become a party to this story or to enter into some protracted literary adventure.

I'd wanted the story to be as short as possible and as distant from me as possible. I'd wanted it to be hard-hitting and to move rapidly towards its conclusion. But, like the seaweed that clings to your feet when you swim in the ocean, its final sentences clung to my mind. Its theme haunted me, and something inside me rejected the way it had ended.

It didn't matter to me why these two lovers had parted, whether they would be reunited, or which of them had lost the
challenge. Their story, which I'd entered by coincidence like someone who, surprised to find a window open across from her balcony, begins stealing glances at the people in the house next door, didn't pique my curiosity.

All that mattered to me was that man. I was curious to understand him. I'd also made a bet with myself over whether I could get him to take that coat off. It was a challenge for me, nothing more.

Before this experience I'd never realized that a novel can be a linguistic usurpation of sorts in which the novelist compels her characters to say what she wants them to, extracting by force all the confessions and statements she wants them to make for ill-defined, selfish reasons of which even she is unaware, then flinging them on to paper, weary and maimed, without stopping to wonder whether they really would have said those things if she'd given them the opportunity to live outside the pages of her book.

However, this realization didn't dissuade me from my intention to force this man to speak. He was the only thing that mattered to me. His proud silence unnerved me. His thick coat irritated me. His razor-sharp words had become a guillotine that spelled death for any future text in the making, and it was clear to me that I wouldn't be able to write a thing until this man had spoken.

So I sat down with my notebook and continued the story as though I hadn't stopped writing it the day before.

* * *

One rainy day his voice came across the telephone line. Despite the cold, he seemed to have taken off his coat as he asked her, ‘How are you? Are you still fond of the rain the way you used to be?'