Chaos of the Senses (4 page)

I noticed later that it was my husband's fatherly role that meant the most to me. His political duties and military rank didn't matter to me because of their prestige but, rather, because they were an extension of the patriotic nostalgia I'd been raised on, because they hearkened back to the glory days of an Algeria of which I'd always dreamed.

In his stature I saw the homeland with its strength and pride, and in his body, which had endured hunger, fear and cold during the years of liberation, I saw justification for my craving and admiration for him in honour of memory.

It took me a long time to discover how foolish I'd been to confuse my ‘past complex' with the counter-reality of the present. But now I'd fallen prey to a similar confusion between the illusion of writing and real life. Consequently, I insisted on going on the date that I'd tried in vain to convince myself I had nothing to do with. I'd tried to convince myself that it concerned nothing but creatures of ink that would never leave the world of paper.

Even so, I decided to go, not realizing that the writing process in which I'd sought refuge from life would take me, albeit obliquely, back towards life itself, thrusting me into a story that would, one page after another, become my own.

Chapter Two

Always

M
Y FATE LAY SOMEWHERE
between torrential, incessant desires and their opposing forces.

Love was stealing into me through a half-open door and a half-closed heart.

Had I been waiting for it casually, leaving the door ajar for it while I amused myself closing the windows of logic?

Not long before love struck, its symptoms started to appear and I recognized them, subtle though they were. Of course, dwelling as I do in a heart with cracked walls, I've never been panic-stricken over a passion that sweeps in like a hurricane. Rather, I capitulate to the storms, each of them with a name of its own, that turn everything in me topsy-turvy and leave a lovely swath of destruction in their wake.

I've always had an affinity for lovers who cram themselves into love's narrow passageways and, after insinuating themselves into that cramped space between the possible and the impossible, stumble into whatever love story life has placed in their
path. They live inside a tempest of love that never abates, swept away by storms of passion and mesmerized by flames which, in return for lighting up their lives for a few days, devour everything around them. They live fully prepared for those luminous moments, which come by stealth and which, when they go out – as go out they must – leave their souls strewn with ashes.

I've always loved them, and maybe I'm like them.

This time, though, I thought I was too smart to stumble into some love story that literature had placed in my path, not to test my ability to write but, rather, to see whether I had the audacity to treat writing as a lived reality.

I'd been taken by André Gide's statement that ‘the nicest things are the ones that are suggested by madness, and written by sanity'. I was so taken by it, in fact, that when madness proposed that I go on a date that a character in my story had made with another woman, I took it, and decided to go on the pretext that it would give me something interesting to write about.

I was nervous for several hours before the date, the way you get before an encounter in which you don't know what to expect, but which you're determined to go through with anyway. I was curious, of course, to meet this man and anxious to see the film. After all, it might be the quickest way to understand him, and to figure out why he was so insistent on seeing it himself.

At the same time, I knew that by going alone to see a film in a city like Constantine, where women don't frequent cinemas, I was embarking on a foolhardy adventure with entirely unpredictable outcomes. How much more foolhardy, then, would such a venture be if the woman concerned was the wife of one of the city's senior military officers, and if she arrived in an official
car to be greeted by an army of men whose sole preoccupation in life was to harass any female who was sufficiently free (or out of her mind) to sit by herself in a cinema?

Consequently, I made a point of arriving fifteen minutes late so that I wouldn't have to wait in line or be seen as I went in. I also asked the driver to come back fifteen minutes before the film was over, since this way I could avoid the lights that come on at the end of the showing and allow people to look each other over in a way that had unnerved me so many times before.

Since I got there some time after the film had begun, I could sit wherever I wanted. It also gave me the chance to stand there for a few moments and gauge the atmosphere in the place, which appeared to be half-empty. As I'd expected, the audience was all men and, most probably, young men who had come to kill time inside a cinema rather than killing it leaning against a wall somewhere.

I only saw one couple, a man and a woman, sitting in the back, who appeared to have come for some purpose other than watching the film.

Concluding that they were ‘the ones', I took a seat right behind them, as though I were either hiding behind them or spying on them. I suspect that my being there annoyed them. However, the fact that I was female seemed to make me sufficiently unthreatening, since they made no objection.

Lovers must be miserable in a city like this, where love has to spend every minute holding its breath, cowering in the darkness on seats that have been knifed to shreds by hands that have never touched a woman's body!

I distracted myself from the couple in front of me by watching the film. When I arrived, the star of the film was arriving in class at the beginning of the school year.

He was a forty-something secondary-school teacher who'd had his share of disappointments in life. With a ready and wry sense of humour, a touch of romanticism and, possibly, some secret sorrow, he'd come back more than a generation later to teach English literature in the same institution where he'd once studied. It became clear as the movie proceeded that he'd come to save the students from the fallacies he'd learned while sitting in the very seats they now occupied, or the convictions he'd been raised on but had later proved to be baseless.

With a kind of provocative hilarity, he came into class whistling. This amazed the students, who weren't accustomed to this kind of behaviour in a staid academic institution known for its adherence to long-standing tradition. He headed straightaway for a wall covered with black-and-white photographs of students who had occupied these same academic seats, one graduating class after another, one generation after another, over the course of an entire century.

Then he gestured to the students to come and stand with him. He asked them to ponder these group photos that had never given them pause before, and to study the faces they saw there.

Bewildered, the students came up to join him, and he began to talk to them as though he were continuing a previous conversation, or as though he were introducing himself to them as one of the people whose pictures they'd walked past without a thought.

He said, ‘All the people you see in these pictures – athletic- looking just like you, young like you, with their big grins and their great ambitions, their projects, their dreams, their absolute confidence in life – they're all nothing but bones now in fancy tombs. They're dead, just the way you're going to be some day!'

As the students were still processing the strange things they were hearing from this teacher they were meeting for the first time, he continued, ‘For every one of you standing here, some day everything inside him is going to stop. His body will grow cold, he'll be eaten by maggots, and it will be as though he never existed.

‘Look at them. They're looking at you! They're telling you something you need to hear. Come on. Lean in. Try to hear them whisper their legacy . . . '

Stunned, the students approached the photo-lined wall as the teacher's voice followed them from behind, entreating them to hear it:
Carpe
,
carpe diem
. Seize the day. He whispered to them that they should make their lives extraordinary, since one of these days they would stop being anything. They would be gone as though they'd never come.

He concluded by telling them that this was their first lesson, then instructed them to go back to their seats and open their books.

My absorption in the movie didn't prevent me from thinking about the man and woman in front of me. After all, it was on their account that I'd come in the first place.

They were silent. I don't know whether they were actually busy watching the movie, but they weren't saying anything to each other. At the same time, I had a feeling the teacher's remarks and advice had made an impact on them somehow. I thought I saw the woman's right hand moving slowly and determinedly in the man's direction. This encouraged me to believe that she was ‘the one', since she seemed less interested in the film than she was in getting a reaction out of her companion.

It was obvious that she'd been anxious to be with him. After all, what, other than love, could have brought her to a place like this, where she was bound to be the sole female, to watch a movie like this?

I sort of pitied her, and myself, too, knowing that both of us had come for the sake of the same man.

From behind, the man looked around forty. His hair was neatly combed and he looked quite respectable compared with the other men there, who gave me the creeps. So I figured he was probably ‘him'. He was wearing a coat, and had just stood up to take it off and spread it over his knees in such a way that it covered both his lap and that of the woman beside him. So it wasn't difficult to imagine what would come next!

Just then a man came along and sat down in the seat next to mine. This irritated me all the more, and I regretted being stupid enough to come to a cinema and make myself look so suspicious. After all, nobody in the entire place would have believed that I was a writer who'd been drawn there by mere curiosity, and nobody would have understood that I considered myself entitled to spy on a certain couple and even come between them since they were my creations!

By this time they were exchanging suspicious-looking touches in plain sight of me. I was trying to convince myself that I was a writer, just a writer, and that the only reason I was interested in what was happening in front of me was that it would help me understand the characters in my novel.

I knew, of course, that I was lying to myself, and that what I was concerned about was this man, the man with the coat, who for all I knew might have brought me to this place just to torment me by flirting with another woman while I looked on. After all, he'd already seduced me as a woman with something unstated
and unnamed and had deceived me, as a writer, into believing that under his coat of silence he concealed some secret that would justify the risk I'd taken.

And here he was taking his coat off, not for me, or because of me, but, rather, to use it as a screen behind which he could run his hands over a woman sitting next to him!

So, then, he was scum, the type of man who conceals all the world's hang-ups and filth behind a façade of staid decorum, who sits beside his wife without a word, looking dignified and prestigious, while his feet carry on a vulgar conversation under the table with another woman!

However, what shocked me most wasn't this discovery but, rather, the realization that from the very beginning of this story I'd been acting like a perfect fool. I'd invented situations, dialogues and trysts for no other reason than that I wanted to experience a kind of make-believe romance.

I'd even convinced myself that a man could leave the page and make a date for me in the world outside my notebooks.

But it was obvious now that this had been a stroke of madness.

Deflated, I nearly got up to leave, to get away from the poisoned atmosphere I'd placed myself in. But then I remembered that the driver wouldn't be back for another hour, not to mention the fact that I'd miss seeing a film that, according to the placards at the cinema entrance, had won a number of prestigious awards.

So I went back to watching the movie, trying to ignore what was going on in front of me.

The teacher was giving his students a lesson on how to understand poetry based on a method presented in the introduction to their poetry textbook, which had been written by renowned
literary critic J. Evans Pritchard. According to Pritchard, one could rate the quality of a poem and compare it to other poems through the use of a mathematical formula that could be plotted on a graph, where the y-axis was used to quantify the meaning and the x-axis was used to quantify the structure. In this way, one could determine how weak or strong a given poet or poem was in relation to others based on precise mathematical criteria.

As the students sat engrossed in drawing vertical and horizontal lines in their notebooks and copying what the teacher had written on the blackboard, he suddenly stopped and erased everything he had written. He exclaimed that Mr J. Evans Pritchard's method was excrement, and that this was poetry, not the laying of pipes.

Rather, he explained to them, the true measure of poetry is our astonishment, our dazzlement, our emotional response. In response to a poem, women faint, gods are born, and poets bawl like babies. After all, who can measure our tears, our joy, or anything else a poem does to us? The reason we read and write poetry is that we're human beings. But how could we possibly measure our humanity with mathematical formulas? He told them to tear up everything they'd written in their notebooks. Then, after a brief silence, he added that they could rip out the introduction too, while they were at it.

The students looked at him questioningly, not knowing whether to take him seriously or not. However, in the face of his insistence, they had no choice in the end but to rip out the first pages of the book, which now contained nothing but poetry.

Meanwhile, the teacher made the rounds of the class with the wastebasket, gathering the ripped-out papers into the receptacle with a gleefulness for which he alone knew the reason.

He hadn't given them a lesson in understanding poetry, but in understanding life. He'd given them a lesson in having the courage to question everything, even the things they saw written in textbooks on the authority of some big-name scholar, and the audacity to tear up everything they believed to be wrong and throw it in the dustbin!

I don't know how responsive the audience was to this wonderful scene, or if there were some there who saw it as still more justification for ripping the seats to shreds.

In any case, the man sitting in front of me was busily looking for a pen and paper. As soon as he found them, he began writing something, which I assumed to be some thought that had occurred to him.

Dying to take a peek at what he'd written, I edged forward a bit as if I were trying to see the screen better. Maybe he was writing something he wanted me to see. After all, he knew I was there, and that I'd been spying on him.

But before I could see what he'd written, I sensed that I'd dropped something. I felt my ear, and sure enough, one of my earrings had fallen out. I bent down to look for it, relying on the light coming from the screen, and before I knew it the man beside me had bent down with his cigarette lighter to help me see.