Chaos of the Senses (31 page)

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, for 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 something 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.

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.