The Proof of the Honey (9 page)

“He wanted to devote himself to you full-time, a perfectly honorable commitment,” I said, as serious as could be.

She chuckled again, as though she were recalling happy memories.

“From the first night he came to my bed.”

Her words slowed a moment in the silence of the office, then she concluded, “It was my fault. That’s what happens when they have nothing to do. Helping the neighbor in her garden! I’ll teach him manners. He’ll see.”

Her expression became nostalgic.

“You know what I like about him? The moment I touch his thing it goes stiff. Ready at any time. He must have had withdrawal symptoms before he even got to Paris. At home, the only thing he had was masturbation. For a penniless student, the prostitutes were too expensive.”

I admired her lucidity, her clear awareness of the true dimensions of the story. Rihab was the only one who’d go into minute details. I’ve never heard another woman go this far. Men yes, whether they’re friends or not. Most of them are always eager to tell me their adventures, make me share their experience. And me, always the attentive listener, I’ve been an ideal audience, with my insatiable curiosity and my inexhaustible laughter.

There was Anwar. We were colleagues, at the first library where I worked in Paris. When we were along in the big shared office, he’d tell me stories about the girls he’d flirted with in the street or at the café or on the bus or in the metro, or even at the library. He was married and, out of caution, stuck to generalities and allusions.

Albert, too, was married. His stories rubbed me the wrong way because they had only one goal, which was to convince me of his immense intellectual, emotional, and sexual prowess, should I ever . . .

Ghadir, a bachelor, shared an abundance of details. His fertile imagination knew no bounds.

In our shared office I was the only woman. Each of the men would take advantage of the others’ absence to tell me his real or invented stories. The effect they had on me was identical: I was entertained, I would open my ears wide and laugh. But their hidden strategies, whether conscious or unconscious, never succeeded, for the only thing I ever opened to them was my ears.

It’s certain that I learnt a lot from these and other stories. I listened lightly, or at least made a show of listening lightly. My comments were evasive, and if one of them was trying to gauge the effect of his words from my expression, all he’d see was an indifferent gaiety. But I’d make notes of everything I heard, then arrange them, classify them, sort them, and learn. Isn’t documentation my profession?

In the midst of a summer heat wave, I return to the old books and to the Thinker, and the world around me is ablaze. Is it what I’m writing that affects what I see? Has the world always been on fire like this?

What’s happening? Sex is everywhere. I open the newspapers and find it on the front page and in the headlines and in the weekly supplements. On television. On the radio. In the old days there had only been Brigitte Lahaie, the porn star. Now her gifted disciples have taken over.

What’s happening this summer? Everyone I meet has an erotic story to share. As if an invisible spark were setting everyone’s thoughts on fire. As though others know instantly what I’m looking for. Are the signs of my sexual curiosity so glaringly obvious?

When did I discover that my curiosity about sex is in fact a thirst for knowledge? I laugh when I read that every woman is the sum total of the men who have passed through her life. “We only learn what we know” was something my brother used to say constantly. From him too I learnt.

The desire for knowledge fuels my desire for men. No, my desire for men fuels my desire for knowledge. To learn, by myself, about desire and pleasure, to learn about others, and about the world. After the Thinker, I began to judge every new man in my life based on his pedagogical qualities above all. The more a man teaches me, the more I love him. After the Thinker, I could no longer put up with a man who couldn’t teach me.

For me, the pleasure of learning went along with the pleasure of sex. The center of pleasure and the center of knowledge got mixed up with each other in my head and fused together inseparably. My sexual curiosity grew deeper, deep as an abyss: those who cross my path cannot help but fall into it.

It is said that the virgin, if she be kept too long from copulation, will suffer from a condition that the physicians call “constriction of the womb,” which leads to delirium and melancholia in the brain, to the extent that she may be thought mad, though she is not; suffice that she be fucked for the ill to vanish immediately.

If I were to say that in front of a militant feminist, she’d declare war on me and accuse me of submitting to male chauvinist ideology.

Fadia. She is a desperate case. “When you’re about to shoot someone, you don’t tell your life story,” says the bad guy in the spaghetti western, before dispatching his chatterbox victim. I repeated this to Fadia but she didn’t find it funny. I laughed on my own. I watched her leave the office and shook my head. I suspect she would be capable of taming even the fiercest erection. It’s clear that she hasn’t learnt a thing. She’s at war with her body and with men’s as well, and it looks like it’ll be a long war.

I’d advise her to read the advice of al-Alfiya, a legendary character whom I consider to be a glorious heroine of women’s liberation.

The first time I came across her in my reading, I was awestruck by the breadth of her knowledge. From her life experience she was able to formulate both theoretical and practical teachings, which she presented to the whole world, the female half in particular. She was a genius. May God bless her.

Al-Jahiz, who relates her teachings to us, celebrates her as being the most learned of all the people of her time with regard to the science of coition. What made him admire her still more was that, like himself, she belonged to that school of scholars who speak only of what they know from personal experience, and who will only teach knowledge acquired through the direct observation of real phenomena.

In a gathering of women, questions were asked of al-Alfiya that dealt directly with her domain: “Tell us about intercourse, its types and variations.” And the wise woman would reply: “You have asked me concerning something that I cannot suppress and that I have no right to conceal.”

The words of al-Alfiya have only reached us through their translations into Arabic. According to al-Jahiz, this woman came to us through Indian erotica, and she became a legend passed on by the Arabs, essentially the men, with a certain degree of fear, envy, and admiration. The legend begins with her name. She was called al-Alfiya, “the thousand,” because she had slept with a thousand men. Although “slept” is deceiving . . . As if she had spent a thousand nights sleeping . . . She did not sleep and she would not have let a single man sleep. The books say, precisely, “She fucked a thousand men.” Words were exact, among the Arabs of ancient times. There was no business of sleeping or waking. To “fuck” was the word used.

What is the dictionary definition of the Arabic word for fuck? Are there not a number of verbs with the same meaning? It is said that there are a hundred words or more for the vagina, and a hundred more for the penis, but in fact they never have the same meaning: each word is distinct from the others. I did not count them. What is important, above all, is to catch the nuances.

Al-Alfiya’s response to the issue is methodical and rigorous: there are six basic modes—lying on the back, lying on the side, lying on the stomach, bending over, sitting, and standing up. Within each mode there are at least ten positions, and each position has a name. Sixty positions, then, starting from the easy ones that everyone can apply to the arcane that would never occur to anyone and that call for the physical agility of an athlete and the skill of a circus acrobat.

Al-Alfiya would explain to her female listeners what it was that made love of women spring up in the hearts of men, what men took pleasure in and what they hated in terms of women’s dispositions, and what women had to do to procure men’s desire.

If al-Alfiya were among us now, she would write a book about her sex adventures, with her picture, naked, on the cover, and it would top all the bestseller lists and be translated into every living language, and her fame would travel around the world. How could al-Alfiya ever imagine that her legitimate heirs, centuries later, spread over five continents, would not even know her name, when she was the first, the pioneer?

W
hen the Thinker left, I was as traumatized as a nursing child torn too soon from its mother’s breast—in a state of loss, of pain, of perdition, of death. The Thinker was my secret, and I had to live my public life without others discovering that secret.

When the Thinker left, I hoped he would die. I built myself a tomb hidden away in my heart. I had to protect myself. I protected myself by dying. When was I resurrected?

When I was with him, it was easy for me to hide my parallel life. Without him, this became more complicated. My parallel life had turned into absence, a non-life. And yet, I had to keep hiding it. I lived for months like the living dead. I wandered through my life emptied of all life.

I woke, slept, smiled, spoke, laughed, worked, travelled, and met others; I performed all my duties. I lied, I led a double life. I went about my business, moving my body by means of invisible strings, and with the skill of a virtuoso puppeteer.

When the Thinker left, I hoped he would die. I understood then the meaning of a story I had read in childhood: a king asks his daughter to determine the fate of her imprisoned lover. Of the two doors that kept him behind bars, one would lead him to life, in the bed of another woman, and the other to certain death in the jaws of a lion. The story has no ending. It is left suspended, focused on the princess’s raised hand as she is about to indicate one of the doors. As for me, I knew without a moment’s hesitation which door I would have opened. But the Thinker left without giving me the chance to choose. He left before the end of the story. He left without my seeing the word “departure” blazoned on my horizon. He was the one who chose the door, leaving me to face the hurt.

By day, my Thinker-self would scream its pain alone, far from me. I would hear its deafening screams and I knew that I must not turn toward them or I would collapse like a cracked edifice.

By night, I would return to him and make peace with him. We were united in our loss. I would sleep and wake, my eyes dry as an abandoned well and my spirit drier still.

I armed myself, in order to survive, with the only weapon I had: the innocence of lies.

Time has numbed my pain. One day, a man told me, in the same tone of voice and with the same assurance, “You are beautiful.” I smiled. For a brief moment I believed him, and I was brought back to life, jolted back to life as if I had received a charge of electricity.

Years after the departure of the Thinker, I realized that each of us has a Thinker, male or female, one or many, who waits for us in some part of the world to reveal us to ourselves, to uncover our powers, so that we can go further into the labyrinths of our beings.

Years after the departure of the Thinker, I realized that each of us has a Thinker waiting for that given moment in life, on one of its many roads.

We may lose our Thinker with a word, a shrug, a postponed journey, an awkward explanation, a dull-witted ancestral fear, or for having followed the rules of a game to whose laws we submit.

There are those who live and die without meeting this indispensible Other, who will open doors previously closed to the world.

There are those who live and die like a head of lettuce, wilted and emptied of life; those who never know what it is to be transformed into a burning coal that that consumes everything that approaches it. There are those who live and die without learning the way to their bodies, or to that of others.

How many little coincidences had to come together for me to discover the existence of the Thinker and for him to discover mine, for me to see him and for him to see me?

How many little coincidences had to come together for the moment of the first, decisive discovery to occur? Today, I can count off the moments of our affair as if they were prayer beads, one by one. But the day I met him, I had no idea that I held in my hands the thread of this story. My story.

Years after the departure of the Thinker, there were times I still whispered his name. I knew what he had given me and I was grateful to him. At other times, I cursed him.

Years after the departure of the Thinker, I stopped resisting and confessed.

At the beginning, he used to ask me, “Is what we have just about sex?” and I would avoid answering.

In the end, he no longer asked me.

In the end, he left.

In the end . . .

Years after the departure of the Thinker, a sentence by a German poet that he used to recite to me sprang to mind: “God created Man as the sea created the continents—by withdrawing.” Had he withdrawn so that I might be created?

I go back over what I have written about him and it occurs to me that what I have related is not about him alone. The stories have mingled, so too their heroes. Perhaps they all fused together in him, the Thinker. Those who came before him, and those who came after.

When I set off along the tracks of my men, each one takes on the appearance of the Thinker. They have disappeared into him. They have left him their place and gone away. They have surrendered everything to him as I surrendered everything. They have surrendered to him without knowing anything about him. They are gone, and I alone have remained with him; I know the whole story.

I read what I have written and it occurs to me that everything I have experienced was of my own making. The Thinker did nothing but lift the veil on all I had gathered in preparation for life. He came so that I might arrive at meaning. He didn’t bestow it on me: I found it through him.

I read what I have written and it occurs to me that I have made the Thinker into an allegory. I have recreated him, but not in my image. I said, “Be,” and he was. He was just as my words had shaped him. This image belongs to me; it has nothing to do with him.

Why the Thinker?

The question occurs to me now as I am rereading what I have written. He wasn’t the most charming, the most brilliant, the most virile, or the most amusing. He wasn’t. He was himself.

He was the Thinker. I read what I have written and it occurs to me that the Thinker was a writer’s device, a ruse, and that he never existed at all: that is why I had to invent him.

I understand now what he meant when he said, every time we met, “You are the core of what is between us. You are the source of what is between us.” The first time he said it I was upset. Then I became accustomed to the idea, I understood its implications, and made a game of it with him. The story is mine; he is only the subject.

I tell it and play with it according to my will.

Now it occurs to me that, in truth, everything I experienced after the Thinker already existed within me, hidden. I was living with his absence, confident that I would meet him again one day.

I didn’t look for him and he didn’t look for me. I never met him even by chance. After all those years . . . I always thought that the future would lead him to me. I thought that all I had to do was to wait and he would come back.

Wait? I didn’t wait. The parallel lines of my life met, crossed, and separated. The dykes gave way and the rush of water swept everything away, changed everything.

I didn’t wait because I don’t know how to wait.

I was confident that the Thinker would appear before me one day at a sudden turning, and he would say, like the first time: “It grabs me by the throat.” He would ask me about my honey, as though he had left me the day before, and I would reply that he should look for the answer for himself; that it was up to him to stretch out his hand and put it between my thighs and taste. “The proof of the sweetness of the honey is the honey itself,” says Ibn Arabi. I used to say it in front of him, and then he became the one who would repeat it, to teach me what I already knew.

The era After the Thinker begins now, while I am writing about him. I discover him only today, and I discover that this book is his book. As if he had sowed its seed in me, and I needed all these years for it to grow in me.

I remember how he used to say, “Write about those books that you love. You have to do it.” I would laugh and reject the idea. I didn’t dare even think about it. It has taken all these years, and a pretext, for me to find the courage to make a study of classic Arab books of erotica. To shout out loud what I was whispering in secret.

I needed all these years for the study to take me back to the time of the Thinker and give me the power to evoke him. So that I could make him public, too, so that he could become a story. The time of the Thinker.

Yesterday, the director came into my office. It was something serious, I felt it, the way he came in and closed the door behind him. I raised my head in a silent question.

“The director of the National Library called me. There is some news. For security reasons, the Americans have cancelled their participation in the Hell’s Books exhibition and consequently the seminar in New York has been cancelled. The French said they couldn’t bear the costs on their own. So we won’t be going. What do you say? How far have you got with your presentation on the Arab books of erotica? Have you finished it? I’m so sorry. You can always publish it, and I’ll help you with that. I am truly sorry.”

Security reasons? A change of heart. I had been looking forward to seeing New York again, but never mind. What mattered was the book. And the Thinker I had created. I would publish the study: what need had I of the apologetic director, or the Americans and the French cowering in terror of the bogeyman of terrorism?

If they hadn’t asked me to do it, I wouldn’t have found the courage to write it, or to return to the time of the Thinker. Certainly, I must give them the credit for that, and thank them, simply, for their collaboration.

The Thinker was my secret, and the books were a part of that secret. Does the scandal lie in the deed, or in the revelation of the deed?

Who is asking the question?

My story is no scandal, nor is my book.

The scandal was in the secret.

But the secret is no longer.

Paris/Tunis

2005-2006