Chaos of the Senses (26 page)

‘So?'

‘I think that when you write, you go to the heart of things, for example, when you choose a main character who's missing an arm. But life is still stranger than fiction. What a big trap it is! Imagine: all I wanted from you was answers, but life was preparing me for a counter role of sorts. I came to you at a time of questioning. Now the book has run its course, and I'm answering your questions rather than you answering mine. I have to admit, it's a nicer role than I had expected. But it isn't one that I sought out. Rather, I would have been content simply to go along with my fate, and with the various coincidences that went to make it up.'

‘In the meantime, you were leading me into a text whose emotional labyrinths I could easily get lost in, and into encounters whose outcomes no one could have predicted.'

‘Rather, I was leading you into love, and no love is more wonderful than the kind we find when we're looking for something else. I know you were looking for a man who had come out of something you'd written, someone you had created yourself and who was tailor-made for you. But isn't it nicer for me to be a man who enters into your writing rather than one who comes out of it?'

‘Is that why you wanted me to come today? So that you could claim later that you had shattered my pleasant illusion, and that you now had a woman of whom the only part you could hold on to is books, and questions that have no answers?'

‘Of course not. You know very well that that isn't true. There are things I could say to convince you of anything I like. But I've taken care not to break anything in you or in the bond between us. I've always believed that desire alone is a state of possession, whereas enjoyment is the beginning of loss.'

‘So what brought us to this bed, then?'

‘Death.'

‘Don't you think you're insulting love by saying that?'

‘On the contrary, I think I'm restoring it to the position it deserves. Don't think that it's easy to approach pleasure through pain, or to have sex because one of your comrades has died. We need a lot of love to take revenge on death.'

‘So whose death is it that's making you so sad?'

‘The person who died was Sa'id Muqbil. Didn't you hear about his dying yesterday?'

Apologetically I replied, ‘I haven't watched television or read a newspaper for days. Was he a close friend of yours?'

‘No,' he said. ‘I've never met him in person. He became my friend just yesterday. With a couple of bullets, his murderers raised him to the status of “friend”.

‘Imagine – I have twenty-nine friends most of whom I've never met anywhere but on the obituary pages of the newspaper. However, he was a close friend of Abdelhaq's. The two of them worked together at the same newspaper before Abdelhaq left it to go to Constantine. I contacted him some time ago to offer him a job writing for the newspaper, and we were supposed to meet up sometime soon.'

‘How did they kill him?'

‘He was having lunch with a colleague at a small restaurant near the newspaper when someone came up to him. He thought at first that this person just wanted to talk to him. But then he pulled out a pistol, shot him, and calmly walked away. Imagine: the name of the restaurant was al-Rahmah – Mercy!'

‘But why hadn't he taken precautions?'

‘He was being careful, of course, since an assassination attempt had been made on him two months earlier. He'd begun sleeping in different places and coming to work at different times of day. He'd also started varying the routes he took home from
the office, and the places he frequented. Yet none of this had done anything to alter his fate. Two weeks before his death, he'd written a moving piece describing the terror journalists in Algeria have to live through every day, and the newspapers reran it today on their front pages as part of his obituary. Haven't you seen it? It was carried by most news agencies.'

‘No,' I said softly.

He left the room and came back with a newspaper. He handed it to me, saying, ‘You can read it here, and weep over a lost friend.'

I'd hardly reached the title of the piece – ‘The Thief Who . . .' – when he took the newspaper from me and began reading aloud:

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

The father who instructs his children not to speak of his profession in public . . .

The “bad” citizen who paces courtrooms, waiting for his turn to appear before the judge . . .

The individual who is led away during a neighbourhood raid, then thrust by a rifle butt on to a truck bed . . .

The one who leaves home every morning uncertain whether he will reach his place of work . . .

The one who leaves work in the evening not knowing whether he will reach home . . .

The homeless person who no longer knows under whose roof he will spend the night . . .

The one who comes under threat in clandestine detention facilities . . .

The witness who is obliged to swallow everything he knows . . .

The unarmed 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.'

He flung the newspaper on the table and said, ‘It's a bitch to have to mourn a fifty-seven-year-old man who faced death with such stubborn defiance, and who published one outspoken newspaper article after another at a time when no one was willing any more to risk even putting his signature on a single one. He called his column “The Gadfly”, to make it clear that he intended to make himself obnoxious to everyone without exception, since he poked fun equally at the government and the terrorists.'

He took a drag on his cigarette and, his tone frustrated, continued, ‘I don't understand how a country can assassinate one of its own citizens, especially one as brave as he was. Most governments at least show a kind of motherliness towards their subjects so that, although they might be opposed to one of them, they don't declare outright enmity against him. Around here, though, the government might assassinate somebody without even having been opposed to him. Abdelhaq once commented that we do everything in our daily lives as though we were doing it for the last time, since nobody knows when, or on what charge, the government's wrath might descend on him.'

Suddenly he asked me, ‘Do you know why I asked you to come today?'

Before I had a chance to reply, he said, ‘Because I was afraid I might die before I experienced this moment.'

‘What are you saying?' I interrupted reproachfully. ‘We aren't here to talk about death.'

‘Of course we aren't,' he retorted. ‘We're here to play with it, to outsmart it. But it's there on our subconscious agenda. Pleasure also, which we experienced a little while ago with such ferocity that we nearly consumed each other, is nothing but a state of normalized relations with death 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?'

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

‘Are you saying that to get me to stop doing it?'

‘Rather, I'm saying it to make you stop indulging in such big illusions. My friend who died, who's being buried and surrendered to the maggots at this very moment, also believed that writing was a worthwhile undertaking. He believed that his daily newspaper column was necessary to change society, and that his readers couldn't start their day without his wisecracks and caustic jokes. But now he can't amuse or challenge anybody any more. Now it's death that's challenged him and amused itself at his expense. He had mistakenly imagined that he was changing the world every day with a few lines in a newspaper. But life is going on without him, and so is the newspaper. The people he died for will forget all about the place he occupied for a few years on that page of the newspaper. There's plenty of ingratitude in the world of journalism.'

What he had said plunged me into a state of sudden frustration. It robbed me of my desire to argue, or even to love.

I felt cheated: Had I taken all these risks, suffered all this trepidation, and made up a million artful excuses just so that I could be alone with a man who wanted to talk to me about death?

‘It would have been better if you'd stayed a creature of ink, a fictitious character. They don't get assassinated, at least. They don't die at all, in fact, and we never have to worry about anything bad happening to them. So why did you come if you were going to insist on being a real man?'

Drawing me towards him, he said, ‘I came to share desire with you. I came to give you pleasure, and to give myself pleasure through you. Storybook characters can't do that, can they?'

Then he began kissing me all over again with the same ardent desire as before. It was as though we had just met, or as though he had just noticed my presence with him despite the corpse that lay between us.

I enjoyed observing his romantic mood shifts.

I tried to understand what had suddenly aroused him all over again, causing him to storm me with such insatiable appetite.

I gazed at him as he busied himself with me. It wasn't his body that I loved as much as it was his generous masculinity, his body's noble ethic.

His body had a bountiful presence about it that gave and gave, the way love does. It was as though he was compensating for what he lacked by giving, although he also received with the same eagerness. He was possessed of the kind of
masculinity that knows how to be humble in the presence of the woman, as though it sees itself as indebted to her for everything it has.

Suddenly he put his arm around me and said, ‘I'm going to confess something to you. But don't laugh!'

Before I could answer, he continued, ‘I've felt jealous of Ziyad. Imagine – I've never once felt jealous of your husband, but here I am jealous of a creature of ink who was a character with me in that book of yours. I still feel as though he really exists in your life, and that he enjoyed your body before I did.'

‘Silly!' I said. ‘That man has never existed in real life. I brought him into being because I like love triangles. I find love duos too simple and naïve for a novel, so I needed a man who would live alongside the story before becoming part of it. After all, that's the logic of love in life – we're always off by one digit.'

‘But I still envy him. I wanted a destiny like his, so much so that I've memorized his poems. I keep dreaming of some big love, some big cause, some heroic death.'

‘But the days of heroic deaths are over. Nobody can die in a big battle any more, not even in a novel. All our causes have gone bankrupt. That's why I wanted Ziyad to die in the Israeli invasion of Beirut. Imagine – he had been dreaming of going back to Gaza. If he had lived, though, he would have gone straight to prison. Either that, or he would have ended up a policeman who imprisons and tortures other Palestinians on charges of threatening Israel's security. Think of all the illusions that died with him. There's no such thing as Palestine any more. So I'm happy for those who will come after us, since we've spared them having to spend their lives in illusion the way we have.'

He adjusted his sitting position, leaving my head on his shoulder. He lit a cigarette and began smoking it unhurriedly.

‘Let's not talk about Palestine. Tell me now: Are you happy with me?'

His question took me by surprise, and I didn't know how to reply.

‘When we're miserable, we know it. But when we're happy, we only realize it later. Happiness seems to be a belated discovery.'

‘So,' he asked, ‘will I have to wait until your next book comes out to know whether you were happy with me or not?'

‘Of course not!' I laughed. ‘I can answer you right now. But I think I've learned to be afraid of happiness, since whenever I find it, I lose it.'

‘That's why you have to experience it as a moment under threat. You need to realize that, like joy and love, pleasure is a form of robbery. Pleasant experiences, whatever they happen to be, have to be stolen from life, or from others. The only way a person can experience pleasure is by stealing it in anticipation of death, which will strip him of all his booty.'

‘You remind me of
Dead Poets Society
. Do you remember the first scene, where the students gather around the teacher to look at pictures of students who had graduated from the Academy in earlier generations? The teacher tells them to seize the day, to make their lives extraordinary, since one of these days they'll stop being anything. They'll be gone as though they'd never come.'

‘I haven't seen the film,' he said somewhat indifferently, ‘but it sounds as though it was a nice scene.'

‘You really haven't seen it?' I asked in amazement.

Taken aback by my tone of voice, he said, ‘Should I have?'

Realizing that I had no good reason to be amazed at this discovery, I said feebly, ‘I just thought you might have seen it. It's won several awards.'

I retreated into my silence, reviewing our story from the beginning. I thought, if we didn't meet at the cinema, then who was the man who, wearing the same perfume and exhibiting the same taciturn manner, sat beside me that day?

Questions were taking me in all directions when he interrupted my train of thought, saying apologetically, ‘Abdelhaq told me about that film. During my last visit to Constantine, he suggested that I go to see it with him. He wanted to write an article about it for the newspaper. But I was busy that day, so he went by himself. It must still be showing in the capital, so I'll try to go see it. Then I can discuss it with the two of you instead of listening to one or the other of you tell me about this or that scene.'