The Dust of Promises Page 7

  As far as Murad was concerned, gaining entry was just a matter of patience. However, he hated the humiliation of having to wait behind a closed door. Consequently, he appealed to his insight into human nature and his knowledge of physiognomy to determine what kind of woman he was dealing with, and to his burglar’s expertise to discover what kind of door he would have to weasel his way through.

  So, even though I was happy to have him with me and needed the energy he brought into my life, I decided to keep our meetings as infrequent as I could so as to avoid his macho advances on Françoise.

  The following morning I headed for the gallery in search of Françoise. I wanted to make sure she was still attracted to me. I’d never been given to fleeting romances, and I didn’t take to sleeping under the sheets of happenstance. However, Françoise had become of interest to me for a reason, and now she was of interest to me for two reasons.

  At a time of emotional instability, I may have become attached to her on account of a man to whom she had unique access. But now I wanted her on account of still another man, whom I’d decided not to let take her away from me just because he happened to have an audacity that wasn’t in my nature.

  I had some reasonable excuses for not feeling guilty in the event that I succumbed to her oblique advances. I couldn’t help but notice the malicious intentions that lurked behind certain innocent questions being posed to me by a woman who held out – or, at least appeared to hold out – the possibility of breathtaking pleasure.

  With a single statement Françoise could open the floodgates of infernal lusts and leave me in a daze, not knowing whether to try to resist the flood of molten lava or give in to it. Whichever choice I made, the possibility of regret remained.

  Sometimes, in order to escape from your questions, you have to play dumb in relation to sex. That way, you don’t notice that you’re going for pleasure because you need something slightly painful to distract you from a greater pain, and a small disappointment to take your mind off bigger disappointments.

  In order to indulge guiltlessly in stolen whims and fantasies, you need the body’s lies, its stupidity, its depravity, its ability to feign oblivion. You need to surrender to the pleasure that will prepare you for pain, and to the delicious, numbing pain that will prepare you for death.

  The Marquis de Sade once said something to the effect that the best way to know death is to bind it to a lascivious imagination. I was sure to need that kind of imagination in order to awaken the rowdy cacophony of male senses that had been suppressed for so long that they’d gotten used to lying low. I was haunted by the thought of people who go every morning to their death, prepared to face it sometimes with prayer and sometimes with a few final trespasses. But I needed to set fire to desires that were being endlessly deferred.

  I tried to do just that. However, my acceptance of Françoise’s invitation to have ‘a fun time’ brought a delight that was vitiated by a terror I’d never known before. It was the fear that my manly prowess would give out on me when we came together. I recalled hearing a certain opera singer say in a television interview once that the night before every concert she was to perform, she would have a nightmare in which she saw herself standing on stage having lost her voice. She would wake up in a fright, sit up in bed and start singing at the top of her lungs. Once she’d reassured herself that her voice was all it should be, she’d go back to sleep.

  So, I wondered: Have I gotten to the age when I have to be worried about my manly competence, the age when I suffer a pathological fear of suddenly losing my potency at the moment when I need it most, and with the person I most want to impress? Is every man a terror-stricken opera singer whose body is so silent that he doesn’t know how to test out the voice of his manhood?

  Françoise found something seductive in my reserve and lack of haste to be alone with her, something that aroused a kind of unspoken womanly defiance, as well as something that commanded respect. This was especially the case after I declined her offer – which I suspect arose from her naturally hospitable disposition – to put me up in her apartment for a while in order to save me the expense of living in a hotel.

  In confirmation of her good intentions, she said, ‘I have an extra room where friends passing through Paris sometimes stay. Most of them are acquaintances of Zayyan’s. The last person to occupy it was the wife of the director of Algeria’s Institute of Fine Arts. Both her husband and her son had been assassinated at the institute. The idea behind the exhibition was to provide financial support for the families of artists who had been victims of terrorism, and it had been organised on this woman’s initiative. So, given her need for psychological support after the ordeal she’d been through, I thought it would be a good thing to receive her in my home.’

  Little did Françoise know that she had uttered the magic words, words that would have been enough to convince me to agree to anything she happened to propose from that day onward.

  ‘So does Zayyan live in your apartment?’ I asked, dumbfounded.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied with a laugh. ‘Or, rather, I’m the one living in his apartment. When he went back to Algeria, he left the place to me for a long time. Later I offered to share the rent with him. It was a perfect arrangement for me: He would pay half the rent in return for staying in the apartment when he visited Paris. I’m really lucky, since it’s such a lovely house. You couldn’t find an apartment like this, one that overlooks the River Seine, for a reasonable rent any more!’

  Incredulous, I asked her, ‘And does the apartment overlook Pont Mirabeau?’

  ‘Have you visited it?’ she asked, amazed.

  She would have thought I was crazy if I’d told her that I’d visited it in a novel. So with feigned calm I replied, ‘No. It’s just that I love that bridge, and I was hoping it might be true.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it is true, and you can come over whenever you have the urge to see it.’

  Then suddenly, swallowing my pride, I asked her, ‘Does your offer to put me up in your home for a while still stand?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Then she added, ‘Oh my God, you remind me so much of Zayyan! This is crazy. And all of this on account of a bridge!’

  She was mistaken, of course. It hadn’t all been ‘on account of a bridge’. On the other hand, maybe she was right to see something in me that reminded her of Zayyan.

  After all, this bridge wasn’t just a bridge to either of us.

  ‘By the way,’ she added, ‘his exhibition will be opening two days from now. I hope to see you there.’

  Thinking about all the surprises that still awaited me, I replied, ‘Absolutely. I’ll be there.’

  Chapter Four

  I attended the opening of Zayyan’s solo exhibition even though I knew he wouldn’t be there. For some reason I felt like using up the reserve of sadness that I keep for such occasions.

  I don’t think it was his illness that deprived me of my first chance to meet him. It was simply that he was reserving his right as an artist not to keep an appointment, even if it happened to be his own paintings’ wedding celebration.

  Françoise told me that he didn’t like attending the openings of his exhibitions because, with its bustle and bright lights, opening day was a day for strangers. Zayyan didn’t have the patience any more to indulge people who were more concerned about attending an exhibition’s opening festivities than they were about reflecting on works of art, some of which had taken years of the painter’s life to produce. In fact, before one of his exhibitions he had asked Françoise not only to manage the gallery but to hang his paintings wherever she thought they should go, since this would allow him to come visit the exhibition later as a ‘stranger’.

  The perpetual fugitive, his only refuge was blank space.

  So he’d gotten what he wanted. But had he feigned illness in order to give himself an excuse to withdraw gracefully, his dignity intact, only to fall into the clutches of actual illness?

  In the painter’s absence, eve
rything reverts to its primary colour, and the gaiety of those who make a profession of attending opening rituals is extinguished.

  I felt as though I’d lost something that hadn’t yet been mine. I was overcome with grief over a man I’d never see, while his presence-in-absence – his terrible, wonderful absence – concealed him from me.

  He was a man who, as I would realise later, hated for his presence to be misunderstood, for his words to be misinterpreted. After all, painters haven’t mastered the art of speech. Rather, they’re perpetually silent musicians.

  Like a grand piano with its cover down, he was there: closed in on his own silence in a hall that thundered with his paintings, that was filled to overflowing with his raucous absence. He was there: scattered, dispersed, flowing onto the walls, the clouds of his soul pouring down rain on the visitors.

  I couldn’t help but sympathise with him as he confronted losses with a paintbrush. As he practised the art of strewing grief over the bridges and doors that called out from his paintings, I could see that this was simply a way of reclaiming exquisite losses.

  As I left the exhibition, a certain quest was fixing itself more and more firmly in my mind: to pursue this man’s phantom all the way to Françoise’s house so that I could go on gathering up his secret, one piece at a time – the secret of someone who had also mastered the art of strewing absence along the path.

  As though I were a character in a novel, I left the small hotel where I’d been staying for nearly a month and packed my bag for an unexpected journey to a house I’d thought existed only in a book.

  I’d become interlinked with bridges, with cities bisected by bridges, and with women who, wherever I alighted, were prepared to cross.

  On a lover’s pretext, I rode away on the gaunt steeds of suspicion towards a house that belonged to him and constructed an illegal settlement atop others’ memory, where this artist was certain to have rendezvoused with a certain writer.

  How do you monitor the vibrations of a house you enter as though it were an internment camp for sweet melancholy?

  Surprised by the familiarity of the various places in the house, I resumed a life I’d begun in a book, as though I existed to pick up the lives of others where they’d left off.

  I entered it as a character in a novel. I opened it the way I would have opened a book written in Braille, running my fingers over things to make sure they were real, or rather, to make sure I was experiencing a real moment, and that I wasn’t there just to go on identifying with a fictitious hero in a book where I seemed to know things that I really didn’t, and where I imagined I’d experienced moments that I really hadn’t.

  I’d thought that life was entangling me in a book, only to find that a book was entangling me in a life. So which of the two people inside me was more unhappy: the reader who’d fallen for a trick played by a novel, or the lover who’d fallen for a trick played by the novel’s author?

  And why was I happy, then? With a peculiar sort of delight, I would do the most painful things: cohabiting with the corpse of a love now deceased, copulating with the cadavers of scandalous things, searching in trivial, neglected details for something that might expose the betrayal of the one I loved. Was this an attempt to pull a prank on memory, to outsmart literature? Was it my need to be jealous, and to sleep in beds whose sheets still smelled of the men who had occupied them before me? Was it my need for light blankets due to the panting of a woman who’d caught her breath on someone else’s chest? Or my need to cry on a pillow that cradled my head alone, but that had once cradled two heads together?

  There’s nothing worse than an impotent jealousy, a jealousy that’s too late for you to do anything about.

  At some point – I don’t know when, exactly – I was afflicted with the melancholy of the deceived, and after having tried countless times, after the manner of Sherlock Holmes, to decipher the book’s code by comparing its details with the contents of the house, I decided to call off the search for whatever it was I’d been looking for.

  For a long time I’d looked for things’ ‘lips’ so that I could interrogate them in search of the possibilities of a tryst, a disagreement, or pleasures stolen in this place or that.

  Like an investigator who’s found the black box of a crashed aircraft, I wanted to know the last word the lovers had uttered before disaster struck, from what elevation their love had fallen, exactly where it had landed, in which room the lovers’ body parts had been strewn, and whether anything but that book had survived this romantic catastrophe.

  With no little fanfare, Françoise put me in the room next to hers, explaining that it was the room Zayyan had used as a studio. Then she added jokingly, ‘You’re lucky. You can actually spread out your things in here now! A couple of months ago there were paintings everywhere. Even the bed was unusable!’

  Amazed, I asked her, ‘And what did the two of you do with them all?’

  ‘Zayyan showed some of them in the joint charitable exhibition, and he’s showing what’s left of his paintings in the solo exhibition he’s putting on currently, half of whose proceeds will go to the same charity. I tried to convince him to keep some of them. But he’s always the extremist. For years he refused to sell a single one, and this time he refuses to keep a single one! Imagine . . . The only paintings left are the ones hanging on these walls. If he hadn’t given them to me, he would have put them up for sale as well. Maybe it’s the illness. I think he wants to get rid of them while he’s still alive, and these two exhibitions serve as a nice excuse to sell them. There’s nothing he hates more than to sell a painting to somebody who only cares about hanging it up on the wall of his pride, so to speak. He used to like to quote another painter who said once, “You don’t lose a painting when you sell it. You lose it when it’s acquired by someone who won’t hang it on the wall of his heart, but only on the wall of his house to be seen by others.”

  ‘Maybe what motivated him to put all his paintings up for sale was his fear that they might fall into the hands of people like this – the ones who only hang them on the walls of their houses. He knows that the people who’ll buy his paintings or those of these other Algerian artists, whether they’re known painters or still new, are sure to be people with big hearts, even though some of them might have limited means.’

  In her bedroom Françoise kept a painting Zayyan had done of her in 1987, when he first met her as a model at the Institute of Fine Arts. Despite its nudity, the painting wasn’t without a touch of modesty – thanks not to this woman who made it her profession to take off all her clothes, but to Zayyan’s brush.

  Françoise struck me as a woman who didn’t belong to any particular artist but who was, rather, a female meant for every paintbrush. She had covered her bedroom walls with paintings bearing the signatures of other artists. Her persona came across so differently from one painting to the next, I felt, when I was with her, as though I was giving myself over to a whole tribe of women.

  Nothing here held any allure for me, and I had no desire to enter into a challenge with the men who had known her before. As intense as my bodily cravings were, I was selective not only about how, when, and with whom I indulged in pleasure, but, also, about what pleasures I chose to deprive myself of. I, who was infatuated with a robe slipping off an imaginary body, failed to find any fascination in this woman’s unclothed frame.

  I wanted a woman like Venus, with her robe sliding off one shoulder. I could clothe half of her and denude her other half as I liked. I wanted a woman who was half pure and half dissolute, one of whose halves I could reform while I corrupted the other, measuring my manhood in a different way by each of her halves.

  As for Françoise, she was a bad test of manhood. She was a woman composed of two seasons living side by side: the spring of her auburn hair, and the autumn of her wan lips. My first problem was her mouth: How was I supposed to have sex with a woman whose thin lips didn’t tempt me to kiss her?

  I got up the courage to engage with her lips by thinking abou
t Zayyan, who had undoubtedly done so before me. I would picture him, like me, having relations with Françoise while conjuring images of Hayat. So had he discovered before me that a counterfeit kiss is more miserable than counterfeit sex?

  During that first rendezvous, our bed was of necessity teeming with the ghosts of those who had lain in it before me. But only I was aware of this fact, and I tried to get its memory to talk. Beds that hold an accumulation of sins, I would expect to violate the rule of secrecy. But did I really want this bedchamber steeped in deception to break the law of silence, and speak? After all, beds’ silence is one of God’s blessings, since all of us, wherever we alight, are ‘bedfarers’ in the end.

  I know the awkwardness of two bodies that come together for the first time before having invented a shared language. In our case, however, it was obvious that we didn’t even have the same alphabet to work with.

  I don’t like women who scream at the moment love reaches its peak. A scream involves a wiliness that conceals certain deceitful intentions. In my experience, there are only two forms a woman’s pleasure can take: she’ll either cry, or faint. There’s no pleasure without reaching a consciousness of unconsciousness. Like a bird in flight with its wings spread, and not a flutter to be heard, pleasure is a state of breathtaking, silent stupefaction.

  However, Françoise knew nothing of the silence of two entities at the moment of union. She meowed like a cat, jumped like a fish, writhed like an adder, and, like a lioness, put on a show of fierce resistance. She was the female of every species, and I was a man who didn’t know how to bridle his headstrong filly.

  Lovemaking with Françoise had the taste of dried fruit, and sometimes, careworn man that I was, I’d suddenly feel the need to be alone and have a smoke in the courtyard. Love had come to an end, and I would find myself naked and trembling like a leafless tree.