Chaos of the Senses Read online

  CHAOS

  OF THE

  SENSES

  AHLEM MOSTEGHANEMI

  Translated from the Arabic by Nancy Roberts

  Sometimes we have to write an entire novel in order to answer a one-word question: ‘Why?’

  Then we discover that the answer is found in other small words. It’s the cycle of life with its never-ending circles, from ‘Beginning’ to ‘Inevitably’. However, we lend no weight to the smallest words, even though it is precisely these that determine our fates. Nor are we wary of men of silence, because we are only suspicious of what is said. And herein lies women’s folly.

  To the men of silence, and to the chaos within us that they leave in their wake.

  Contents

  1 Beginning

  2 Always

  3 Of course

  4 Inevitably

  5 Definitely

  Glossary

  A Note on the Author

  A Note on the Translator

  By the Same Author

  Chapter One

  Beginning

  s he hadn’t with other people, he wanted to put sincerity to the test with her. He wanted to experience with her the satisfaction of loyalty born of hunger. He wanted to nurture love amid the mines of the senses.

  As for her, she didn’t know how she had found her way to him.

  With a single glance, he could strip away her reason and clothe her in his lips. What confidence she needed to resist that glance!

  And what silence he needed to prevent the flames from betraying his secret!

  He was a man who knew how to touch both a woman and words with the same hidden blaze.

  With a kind of mock lethargy, he would embrace her from behind the way he might embrace a fleeing sentence.

  His lips would pass over her with deliberate slowness, and at a studied distance, in order to produce the maximum arousal. They would graze her mouth without quite kissing it, slide down towards her neck without actually touching it, then ascend again with the same deliberate slowness as though he were kissing her with nothing but his breath.

  This man who determined her fate with his lips, writing her and erasing her without kissing her – how could she forget everything that hadn’t happened between the two of them?

  At a late hour of longing, his love would take her unawares.

  He would come at a late hour of the night, surprising her between one oblivion and another, set her ablaze with desire, and leave.

  She would gasp as untamed steeds of longing took her to him. His love would be as a luminous state in the darkness of the senses. He would send electricity into the recesses of her soul, awaken her inner madness, then be on his way.

  She sat in the seat across from his absence – there, where he had once sat across from her – recalling how smitten she had been with him in the beginning.

  What would she do with all those mornings without the ghost of his fragrance? He had violated a truce with love; he had left a vacant seat belonging to memory; he had left doors ajar in anticipation; he had left a woman. Until he came, she would love him as though he weren’t going to come, so that he would come.

  If he did come – the man of time in yearning – she feared that her unexpected elation would expose his presence after nothing but ink had exposed his absence.

  For him to come, if he should come . . .

  How many lies would she need in order to go on living as though he had never come? And how much honesty would she need in order to convince him that she had really waited for him?

  If . . .

  As usual, he had skirted love. So she wouldn’t ask him what road he had taken to reminiscence, or who had led him to a woman who had waited for him so long that she’d stopped waiting.

  If . . .

  Yearning had swept him towards her mid-flight. Hence, she wouldn’t ask him the reasons for his forced landing.

  She knew, as a sailor’s wife knows, that the sea would steal him away from her, and that he was the man of inevitable departures.

  Until he came.

  He was a master of time, a master of impossibilities, a voice that traversed continents, a sorrow that traversed long evenings, and an eternally dazzling first night.

  Until he became hers again, until she became his again, she would go on wondering at every late hour of the night: What is he doing now?

  Then one day he came back.

  He was a man who embodied the words of Oscar Wilde: ‘Human beings created language in order to hide their feelings.’ Whenever he spoke, he was clothed with language, but the silences in between stripped him naked.

  As for her, she was still a woman of repercussions, who hurriedly, restlessly, who took words off and put them on again.

  Here she was, her voice naked, shrouding the words of their encounter in a vacillation between two questions. As usual, she tried to hide how cold she felt in his presence by keeping up a constant chatter.

  She nearly asked him why, on this day in particular, after two months of absence, he had put on his smile like a coat.

  Then she thought of another question: Is love over when we start to laugh at the things that used to make us cry?

  It seemed to her that all he cared about was her silence in response to his laughter, and only then did she notice that he wasn’t wearing a coat.

  Sorrow – our ceaseless, secret downpour – doesn’t require a coat.

  Nevertheless, today she was resisting her habit of talking and trying, with him, to be silent, just as he was trying, with her, to smile.

  Yet it was an absent, wordless smile: that other language in which he seemed to be talking to himself more than to others, and which he used to poke fun at things known only to himself.

  His concealment had often aroused her anguish. However, when he abandoned her one day between two sentences, it was her curiosity that was aroused. She recalled how, on that day, he had closed in on the anguish with a laugh, and left, without her knowing exactly what he’d been intending to say.

  She didn’t want to believe that he’d abandoned her because she’d refused to go with him to a certain film he’d been anxious to see.

  She’d asked him if it was a schmaltzy film. ‘No,’ he replied.

  She’d asked him if it was a comedy. ‘No,’ he replied.

  ‘Why do you want to see it, then?’

  ‘Because I like things that make me cry.’

  At the time she’d laughed. She’d concluded that he was an eccentric who didn’t know how to deal with love.

  She didn’t believe him when he’d told her that the tragedy of every great love is that it dies young on account of something we least expect.

  Was it conceivable that her love had died for the simple reason that she hadn’t felt like crying with him in the darkness of a cinema?

  She would have preferred that he invite her to some safe place, far from others’ inquisitive eyes, where they could dive into each others’ flames.

  She suspected that he’d wanted to humiliate her as a way of ensuring that he really possessed her. Perhaps he’d thought that if a man wants to hold on to a woman, he has to keep her under the illusion that he might leave her at any moment.

  As for her, she’d always thought that a woman should be willing to give up anything to keep the man she loves.

  And that was how it came about that, one day, she’d given up everything and gone to him. But she hadn’t found him.

  She remembered sitting alone in the left-hand corner of that café that knew so much about the two of them, and which from that day onward had mistakenly borne the name ‘The Date’.

  Sometimes places need to change their names to fit what we’ve become since being there, so as not to provoke us with co
unter-memory.

  Maybe this was why, when she’d called him the day before, he had said, ‘Wait for me there,’ and then, as an afterthought, added, ‘Find us another table that isn’t in the left-hand corner,’ and, after a brief silence, ‘ “Left” isn’t the place for us any more.’

  Had wars and political disputes invaded everything now, even lovers’ tables and beds?

  Or was it that, because he didn’t want to humiliate memory, he’d wanted a table where love wouldn’t recognize them, so that they could laugh where they’d never been able to cry?

  In any case, here they were, sitting at the table across from memory.

  They were sitting in the place where, one day, he’d put out his last cigarette on words’ body. Then, since he didn’t have any cigarettes left, he’d smoked up what was left of all her dreams and said . . .

  She didn’t remember exactly what he’d said before turning her heart into an ashtray and leaving.

  Be that as it may, since that day she’d resisted her longing, which he had booby-trapped with a challenge. She would distract herself from her love for him by hating him until she could find some respectable excuse to call him: some occasion that would give her a pretext to say, ‘Hi, how are you?’ without being entirely defeated.

  In an attempt to camouflage love’s failures, one day she proposed that they become friends.

  Laughing, he replied, ‘I don’t know how to be friends with a body I crave!’

  She would have felt happier if he hadn’t added, ‘You’re more delectable when you go away. There are women who are more beautiful when they aren’t around.’

  She hadn’t understood what he meant. However, it had mattered to her to listen to him.

  So, he hadn’t changed. He still had a penchant for things that can only be said with the eyes, while all she could do was keep quiet so that they could listen together to the clamour of silence between two ex-lovers.

  Between one glance and another, love continued its playful dodging, and passion’s memory was in confusion.

  With some other lover she could have stirred up a commotion and feigned laughter. She could have contrived a voice to cover up her silence. She could have invented answers to every question. With him, however, she either kept the questions to herself or posed them to him all at once, not with a voice but, rather, with the vibrations of a silence that he alone would recognize.

  And he, without putting out his cigarette completely, without saying anything in particular – without saying anything at all – would confess to her that he had changed a lot since they’d been together last.

  He was a man whose sudden silences between one word and the next gave him away. Consequently, he was someone for whom silence had become a kind of atmospheric condition brought on by a sudden cloud of memory.

  He undoubtedly had a bit of the sadist in him.

  At that moment, too, she saw him, at once seductive and hurtful, but didn’t ask him why he was the way he was. After all, is it possible for seduction – the seduction that awakens in us the ferocity of dreams – to be kind?

  All she’d wanted had been to ask him how he was. But before she said anything, he stole from her that very question, the question that would be both his first and his last. ‘How are you?’ he asked.

  After a couple of smiles, he wrapped the question around his neck like a cravat crafted from elegant duplicity, and reverted to his silence.

  Was he afraid the words would get cold? Or was he afraid that questions might hurt her?

  Questions are generally a ruse: a polite untruth by means of which you draw others into stating a greater untruth.

  He himself had said as much one day long before, before . . .

  She remembered his saying, ‘Avoid asking questions when you’re with me. That way, you won’t force me to lie. Lying starts when we’re forced to give an answer. But everything I say to you of my own accord will be the truth.’

  She’d learned the lesson well, and from then on had striven to create a new language tailor-made for him, a language devoid of question marks.

  She would wait for the answers to come, and only then would she place them under her questions, remembering to follow them with exclamation marks, and often with admiration marks.

  Over time she’d found some wisdom, and perhaps a blessing as well, in his philosophy of dialogue – dialogue devoid of questions and answers.

  She appreciated the fact that he exempted her from the consequences of the lies, big or small, that she would tell without thinking, and she began to enjoy the game of carrying on a so-called conversation in which there were neither questions nor answers.

  Now here he was, himself faced with a question. He was probably wondering whether to pose it or to answer it, though in either case he would be lying.

  A question is a ruse: a way of taking somebody by surprise in his or her private space. As in war, then, surprise becomes the decisive element. Maybe this was why the man in the coat had decided to steal her question from her and abandon his usual exotic way of engaging in conversation.

  It was a way of conversing that had long unsettled her, causing her to choose her words carefully, and forcing her to explore all sorts of linguistic turns in the road in an attempt to avoid the interrogative form. It reminded her of a radio game that requires players to answer questions without saying either ‘yes’ or ‘no’. However, that game had suited her perfectly, since she was a woman who, standing poised on the edge of doubt, liked to reply with ‘maybe’ even when she meant ‘yes’, and ‘might not’ when she meant ‘won’t’.

  She liked vague formulations and statements that sounded promising even when they really weren’t: sentences that ended not with a full stop, but with ellipses.

  As for him, he was a man of categorical language. His sentences consisted of words that put all doubt to rest, from ‘of course’, to ‘definitely’, to ‘always’, to ‘absolutely’.

  Their relationship had begun a year before with one of these words, just as, with one of these words, it had ended two months earlier. She remembered how, on that day, he had suddenly cut the conversation short with one of these guillotine words, and for a few moments she had remained suspended from the telephone cord, not understanding what had happened.

  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 pra
ctising 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.