Chaos of the Senses Read online

  Intending to surprise him, she said, ‘Al-hamdulillah – Praise God!’

  The very religions that urge us to be truthful provide us with expressions so loose that we can invest them with any number of meanings. After all, isn’t language a tool of distrust?

  Then, with gleeful pride, as though she’d scored her first victory, she added, ‘And you?’

  She was moving toward his region of uncertainty and stripping him of his first knight. He wasn’t accustomed to seeing her drape confidence over her shoulders like a burnoose.

  She eyed him steadily. Would he finally take off his coat and tell her he missed her and that he’d never forgotten her? Or would he turn up his collar and give her a reply that would make her feel even colder?

  Which chess piece would he play, he who seemed suddenly engrossed in thought as though he were about to deal his own fate with a word?

  As she sat pondering him, she remembered the words of Garry Kasparov, the man who had defeated everyone who ever sat across a chess board from him: ‘The moves we make in our minds during play, then decide against, form as much a part of the game as the moves we carry out on the board.’

  She wished she could discern which two answers he was debating in his mind, since the things he decided not to say would form part of his reply. However, all he did was shift in his seat and pick up a piece she hadn’t expected him to. Without putting down his cigarette, he said, ‘I’m the same as you are.’

  Then, after a brief silence, he added, ‘Precisely.’

  He hadn’t said a thing. All he had done was use one of his ‘categorical’ words in a new way this time, and the challenge between them had been aborted.

  She truly didn’t understand. She didn’t understand how a silence between two words could have such an impact on her, or how he had managed, with little more than an indolent glance, to infect her with a desire that climbed up her black dress, lighting passion’s fuse as it went.

  With a word, his hand was restoring the memory to its place. It was as though, with the back of a word, he had sent everything before them crashing to the floor and cleared the table of all the petty disagreements that had driven them apart.

  She knew that love isn’t a good thinker, and, what’s worse, that it has no memory. It doesn’t benefit from the foolish mistakes of its past, or from the little disappointments that once left it with a gaping wound.

  Nevertheless, she’d forgiven him everything.

  She was ‘most definitely’ happy with this defeat of hers, which had taken on the flavour of victory after the fact.

  As for him, he was ‘inevitably’ happy with a quick triumph in an extemporaneous duel he had fought without ‘exactly’ taking off his coat!

  * * *

  I liked this story, which I’d written without knowing exactly what I’d written. I’d never written a short story before, and I wasn’t entirely confident that the term ‘short story’ even applied to such a text. All that mattered to me at the time was to write something – anything – that would enable me to break two years of silence.

  I don’t know how the story was born. I know how my silence was born, but that’s another story.

  Some time ago I surprised myself by going back to writing: just like that, without forethought, and without there having happened anything in particular that would have inspired me to put pen to paper. Maybe it was nothing other than the fact that a few days before that, I’d bought a notebook the look of which enticed me into writing.

  I’d gone to a stationery shop to buy some envelopes and postage stamps, and I happened to see a notebook along with a number of others the shop owner was unpacking. As I watched, he began setting them out neatly in preparation for the approaching school year. As my glance might be arrested by a man, it was arrested by that notebook. It was as though I’d stumbled upon something I wouldn’t have expected to find in that dreary place to which I went only rarely.

  Isn’t writing like love: a gift you find when you’re least expecting it?

  There are houses where you can’t write a single line, no matter how long you live there and no matter how beautiful they are. It’s something that defies logical explanation.

  There are pens which, from the moment you buy them and from the first word you jot down with them, you’ll never use to write anything worth mentioning. You know that their lazy temperament and spasmodic breathing will keep you from reaching words’ secret passageways.

  Similarly, there are notebooks that you buy out of habit and that sit in your drawers for months without ever awakening in you that irresistible urge to write or provoking you to scribble even a few lines.

  I find that the longer I write, the better I get at making on-the-spot judgments about such things.

  So, prompted by a feeling that went beyond me, I paused before that notebook. I was captivated by this ‘thing’, which was set apart from the other things in the shop by nothing but my conviction – or illusion – that it would bring me back to writing again.

  From the moment I saw that black spiral notebook with its glossy, plain cover, I sensed a rapport between us, and I knew somehow that I was going to write something lovely on its smooth blank pages.

  I ran home with it and hid it as though I were hiding evidence of a crime, and didn’t get it out until several days later to write that short story, which might be called ‘The Man With the Coat’.

  As I usually do when I finish writing something at night, I reread it as soon as I woke up the next morning. I was anxious to see whether the story was really as nice as it had seemed when I first wrote it. Maybe I just wanted to make sure I’d actually written something.

  I read it several times, and each time I read it I felt more exhilarated than I had the time before. At long last I’d written something good. Even better was the fact that it was outside of me: everything in it had originated in my imagination. I’d created everything in it. I’d decided not to interfere with it in any way or introduce into it anything from my own life.

  This alone was an achievement that amazed me, since I’d never known anyone like this man, with his alluring remoteness and his unsettling presence: a man veiled behind the mysteriousness and ambiguity of silence, a man with the ability to create a state of sweet discomfiture whenever he speaks, even when he happens to be uttering one of those unequivocal words that he relishes in choosing according to the occasion.

  Nor is the woman in the story anything like me. She says the very opposite of what I’d say myself, and does the opposite of what I would do. With the fatuousness of a young girl, she believes that those we love were made to share pleasure with us, but not pain, and that the man who loves her should cry alone, then come to enjoy her, or find enjoyment with her.

  In fact, she’s so naïve that she sees his words as evidence of his love for her. She fails to see that when he replies to her ‘How are you?’ with ‘I’m the same as you are . . . precisely,’ all this means is that he’s decided not to tell her anything!

  And whereas what I liked about this story was the fact that it bore little resemblance to my life, the fact that it did bear some resemblance to it reminded me of how I resent the strange logic of Fate, which requires that in every relationship between a man and a woman, one of the two doesn’t deserve the other. Maybe, in my heart of hearts, I wished this man were mine. After all, he was well suited to both my silence and my way of speaking, and he resembled me in my anguish and my passion.

  However, this wasn’t my problem, and this story wasn’t my story – or, rather, it wasn’t my story yet.

  So I gave it a title, which I didn’t have much trouble deciding on, and went back to my daily preoccupations.

  Nothing had prepared me to become a party to this story or to enter into some protracted literary adventure.

  I’d wanted the story to be as short as possible and as distant from me as possible. I’d wanted it to be hard-hitting and to move rapidly towards its conclusion. But, like the seaweed that clings to you
r feet when you swim in the ocean, its final sentences clung to my mind. Its theme haunted me, and something inside me rejected the way it had ended.

  It didn’t matter to me why these two lovers had parted, whether they would be reunited, or which of them had lost the challenge. Their story, which I’d entered by coincidence like someone who, surprised to find a window open across from her balcony, begins stealing glances at the people in the house next door, didn’t pique my curiosity.

  All that mattered to me was that man. I was curious to understand him. I’d also made a bet with myself over whether I could get him to take that coat off. It was a challenge for me, nothing more.

  Before this experience I’d never realized that a novel can be a linguistic usurpation of sorts in which the novelist compels her characters to say what she wants them to, extracting by force all the confessions and statements she wants them to make for ill-defined, selfish reasons of which even she is unaware, then flinging them on to paper, weary and maimed, without stopping to wonder whether they really would have said those things if she’d given them the opportunity to live outside the pages of her book.

  However, this realization didn’t dissuade me from my intention to force this man to speak. He was the only thing that mattered to me. His proud silence unnerved me. His thick coat irritated me. His razor-sharp words had become a guillotine that spelled death for any future text in the making, and it was clear to me that I wouldn’t be able to write a thing until this man had spoken.

  So I sat down with my notebook and continued the story as though I hadn’t stopped writing it the day before.

  * * *

  One rainy day his voice came across the telephone line. Despite the cold, he seemed to have taken off his coat as he asked her, ‘How are you? Are you still fond of the rain the way you used to be?’

  She didn’t know whether she should conclude from his questions that he loved her again, or whether it was simply the rain that had brought him back to her.

  She hadn’t forgotten how he’d once said, ‘Questions are a kind of romantic involvement.’ She also remembered the time they’d been together in his car in the middle of a downpour.

  On that day she’d discovered the beauty of being lovers whose only address is a transitory abode with the intimate atmosphere of a car on a rainy day.

  She’d felt that at long last they were alone, concealed from everyone, shielded by a curtain of rain trickling down the windowpanes.

  She had wanted to say things that can only be said at such a moment. But then he pulled over to the kerb.

  Lighting a cigarette, he said, ‘It’s no use taking refuge under the umbrella of words. When it’s raining, it’s better to be quiet.’

  She hadn’t argued with him. She’d contented herself with the illusion of possessing him, her rainy-day captive inside a car, where she could share his breaths, the aroma of his tobacco, and the jingling of the keys in his pocket as he looked for a lighter. In the warmth of the car she sat watching him, mesmerised by all the details of his manhood as he fidgeted next to her, and his calm, unsettling presence.

  She’d long been dizzied by the fine points of a man’s makeup: the self-important suggestiveness, the unspoken, intimate provocation whose vibrations have nothing to do with virility but which a female picks up on and to which she falls slave.

  The bliss she had experienced with him that day led her to realize that rain doesn’t treat us all as equals. When the beloved takes leave of us and we find ourselves facing the rain alone, we have to ignore its painful invitation to romance and its sadistic provocation lest it exacerbate our suffering, since we know full well that, at that very same moment, it is creating happiness for others whom love hasn’t abandoned.

  In fact, there are times when nothing is more unfair than the rain!

  She was still wondering which weather forecast he was preparing her for.

  Had he come back because he wanted her? Or had he come in anticipation of the smell of the earth after it rains?

  The only thing he liked about sunny weather was the damp soil left by the rain. He would breathe in its fragrance with senses ablaze as though he were taking in his partner’s scent after making love.

  ‘Can I see you tomorrow?’ he asked. ‘I thought it would be nice for us to see that film together on a rainy day.’

  Before she could ask him which film he was talking about, he added, ‘Did you know it’s been showing in the same cinema for the last two months? That’s how long it’s been since we saw each other last.’

  This time she didn’t try to make up excuses. She just asked, ‘Where shall we meet?’

  ‘At the Olympic Cinema before the four o’clock matinee.’

  Then, as an afterthought, he said, ‘Or, if you’d like, you could wait for me at the university entrance. I’ll pick you up there at 3:30. That would be better.’

  Without giving her time to say another word, he hung up in farewell, leaving her once more to her questions.

  * * *

  I was happy with this ending, which I’d thought up without much effort. In fact, I’d written it down just like that, the way it had occurred to me, without debating between it and some other version and without crossing out a single line or rereading it more than once the way I usually do. It was as if I wanted to convince myself that I wasn’t the person who had written it.

  But isn’t there always something that words conceal, even when they come this spontaneously? In fact, when they come pouring out so naturally, in one way or another, this itself should arouse one’s suspicion.

  Language can be more beautiful than we are. In fact, we beautify ourselves with words. We choose them the way we choose our clothes, in keeping with our moods and our intentions.

  There are also words that have no colour, that are scandalously transparent, like a woman who’s just come out of the sea wearing a diaphanous dress that clings to her body. Yet transparent words are decidedly more dangerous, since they cling to us to the point where they pass into our very beings.

  This man who insisted on remaining silent while I insisted on getting him to speak, who insisted on keeping his coat on while I insisted on taking it off him, unnerved me in all of his states, even when he took off his silence and put on my voice and my sodden words.

  But at last I’d got him to talk. I’d made him say something that I wanted him to. So perhaps I’d actually defeated him.

  But, I confess, he surprised me, not because he’d invited this woman for the second time to go and see that film, which was out of character for him, but because he’d given her the name of a cinema I’d never heard of before. I didn’t know whether it existed or not, since I’d never been to cinemas in this city before or taken note of the films playing there.

  Then suddenly it occurred to me to look in the newspaper to see whether there really was a cinema by that name. I began searching on the entertainment page where television programmes and film screenings are listed. I pored over the names of cinemas until, lo and behold, I came across an ‘Olympic Cinema’ where an American film by the name of Dead Poets Society was showing. I guessed it must be dubbed into French, since no one around here knows English, and I tried to find a translation of the film title in hopes that this might solve some of the mystery.

  I found it hard to believe that it would be the same film the man in my story had been talking about. So I went searching through the old newspapers piled on the floor of my husband’s office, the ones he would bring home every day as part of his job, then leave on the floor until he threw them out.

  I looked at the entertainment pages in all the issues I came to, and every time, I found that same film playing at the same cinema.

  The last newspaper I looked at took me back a month and a half. On this basis I concluded that the film might have been playing for the last two months, just as the man had said. This surprised me; in fact, it bowled me over, since I hadn’t been familiar with this particular cinema, and had never heard of this film. Ho
w could I have known that it had been playing there for the last two months and that, as the newspaper also confirmed, one of its showings was at four o’clock in the afternoon?

  The shock of this discovery left me nonplussed. Had I received some sort of revelation telling me to write things I knew nothing about? Should I be wary of this story I’d written, whose details had turned frightening? Or should I view it as a sign from the Beyond and a promise of some future encounter?

  All my questions revolved around that man. Why did he matter so much to me? Why did he raise so many questions in my mind? Were questions really, as he said, ‘a romantic involvement’? And was he the one who had said this, or had I said it myself ?

  He’d only asked one question: ‘Can I see you tomorrow?’

  It was a question that he’d posed to her in particular. But how could I, the writer, fail to show up for the date they’d made? Wasn’t I the one who had wanted it, who’d set the day and time? If so, then wouldn’t I need to be there in order to invent more conversations, dates, arguments, happy encounters, disappointments, amusement, astonishment . . . and endings?

  This is the exclusive privilege of the novelist, who, mistakenly imagining that she owns the world by proxy, toys with the fates of creatures of ink before closing her notebook and becoming, for her part as well, a puppet suspended from invisible strings or moved, like others on life’s vast stage, by the hand of Fate! And once this happens, it’s useless for her to preface her plans with ‘God willing’ as though she were bribing Fate to fulfil her dreams.

  I remember once telling someone, ‘Learn to say, “God willing”.’ Then one day I asked him, ‘When shall we meet?’ At the time he’d been hurriedly packing a suitcase of sorrow, and he answered me, in typical fashion, with a line from a poem by Mahmud Darwish – something like, ‘We’ll meet in a while . . . a year . . . a generation.’

  But we never met again. Both of us had forgotten that day to say, ‘God willing’! Is that why he didn’t come back? Or maybe it was because he went to bury his father in that country that kills poets while hosting all manner of poetry festivals, and ended up being buried, a maimed corpse, next to the one he had gone to bury.