Chaos of the Senses (23 page)

Why had he turned the world into a crossword puzzle or a game of Scrabble in which no woman could keep up with him, still less defeat him?

As a writer who made words her profession and who refused to be defeated by a protagonist of her own making, on her own turf, in her own book, I had joined him in a linguistic fencing match in which I found myself being defeated in round after round. I was also becoming more involved with him with every question I asked, since every question led me to still more questions.

From the beginning I had known full well that questions would only increase my romantic involvement. What I hadn't known was that, with this man in particular, answers also would lead to an infatuation no less overwhelming.

I loved his answers although, I have to admit, I often didn't know exactly what he meant by them. There were times when
he seemed to be speaking to some other woman about some other man. Even so, I loved everything he said, maybe because I was so taken by how mysterious he was.

Fiddling with his hand, I said, ‘I love you. I need you to free me a little from my slavery to you.'

He put his arms around me and drew me towards him, saying, ‘Love means letting the person you love take you by storm and defeat you. It means letting him take over everything that's you. It's all right to be defeated now and then. Love is a state of weakness, not strength.'

‘But . . .'

‘But because you haven't understood this, you're repeating a mistake you made in a previous book.'

I wanted to ask him when this had happened, in what book. But before I knew it, his lips were stealing my questions and sweeping me away in an unexpected kiss. I surrendered to his lips' assault, as though I wanted to prove to him, with every region that fell under his manly sway, how much I loved him.

Actually, I would have had neither the strength nor the will to resist him. I took pleasure in being overwhelmed by him as he placed his keys in my body's secret locks.

In pleasure there is a bodily code that renders one person another's slave without his realizing it. This man who had used nothing to arouse me but his lips, who had told him how to give me such pleasure? Who had told him how to traverse the secret passageways of desire that no other man's lips had ever probed?

Suddenly he planted two staccato kisses on my mouth as though he were placing ellipses after an unfinished sentence. Then he got up to look for a pack of cigarettes.

While he was busy with his search, I went to the bathroom to spruce myself up. I cast a casual glance at the toiletries on the
shelf above the sink. My attention was drawn to two bottles of the same type of cologne, one of them opened, and the other still wrapped in transparent plastic.

I picked up the open bottle and began examining it with the curiosity of someone who's happened upon a clue. I thought back on all the times when I had been about to ask him what kind of cologne he used. I also remembered how my story with this man had come into being thanks to a word and a whiff of cologne. In fact, it might have been this very cologne, without which I may never have found my way to him.

I was still holding the bottle in my hand when he came down the hallway towards the kitchen.

As I sprayed some of the cologne on my hand, I asked him jokingly, ‘Is it because I told you I liked your cologne that you've started buying two bottles of it at a time?'

‘No!' he said with a laugh. ‘Whenever I go to France, I bring one bottle for myself and one bottle for my friend Abdelhaq. Actually, he's the one that got me using it. He never uses anything else.'

I was about to come out of the bathroom when he came back as though he'd remembered something. Then, as he handed me the unopened bottle of perfume, he said, ‘I apologize for not having brought one for you too. I was in such a hurry, I didn't think of it. So how about if I give you this one? They say women like their sweethearts' cologne. So you can put some on whenever you miss me.'

As I took the bottle from him I said, ‘I had never heard that, but it sounds like a good idea. It's just that I might need a whole bottle a week!'

Then I added, ‘And your friend?'

‘Don't worry,' he said. ‘I'll get another one for him.'

Delighted with this gift, I felt as though I was drawing him closer every time we met. I was infiltrating his private world in ways he would never have expected, and taking hold of everything that might bring me nearer to him.

When I went back to the living room, he was sitting quietly on the sofa across from me smoking a cigarette. It was as though he had decided to meditate on me, or what he had done to me in the course of that long kiss.

I stowed the bottle of cologne in my bag with the same exultation I had felt on the day when I borrowed Henri Michaux's book from him, hoping against hope that at long last I could figure this man out.

As I put my bag back down, I found myself saying unthinkingly, ‘Guess what kind of present I'd like to have from you?'

‘What's that?' he asked, still smoking his cigarette with his feet propped on the table.

‘The truth!' I said. ‘Could you give me the truth? I have the right to know who you are!'

‘Better to postpone your disappointment a little longer!'

‘What's your name?' I insisted. ‘Is that such a difficult question to answer?'

‘No!' he replied, laughing. ‘So which name do you want to know?'

‘And do you have two names? Why is that?'

‘Because we're living in a time when even states, organizations and political parties change their names with the stroke of a pen. In Russia alone there are twenty-eight cities that have changed their names, including Leningrad. So why can't people do the same when they change their beliefs, or when something happens to change the course of their lives?

‘The Chinese have a lovely custom of choosing a new name for themselves at the end of their lives. It's as if, now that they've experienced life, they're ready to choose a name that would fit them in another realm. After all, the names that suit us best are given to us by our lives. As for the names that we bring into life, they often tyrannize us and do us wrong. So let's just say I like this idea, and I decided to be a man with two names.'

As usual, his answer was no answer at all. Instead, it simply manifested his ability to avoid people's questions.

But I didn't give up. I kept after him.

‘Give me any name you like. I just want something to call you by.'

‘My name is Khaled Ben Tubal,' he replied evenly.

‘Khaled Ben Tubal?' I repeated, aghast. ‘But . . .'

‘I know,' he interrupted me. ‘I know it's the name of a character in your novel. But it's my name, too.'

I sat on the edge of the sofa looking at a man that I was just getting acquainted with, and recalling another man that I had known in a previous book who was also a painter from Constantine. He was a man I knew everything about. I knew him as well as I knew myself. The only thing that set him apart from me was the fact that he was a man, and that his left arm had been disfigured by war.

Could he possibly be the same person? I gazed at him in disbelief. I expected him to say something, but he didn't. He just went on smoking his cigarette as calmly as before.

For a moment I felt I was getting close to the truth, that I was just a question away from it. ‘Is Khaled Ben Tubal his first name, or his second?'

The answer to this question was going to be frightening and decisive. It was bound to turn our relationship upside down
and, with it, the story. However, given his evasiveness, I didn't expect him to answer it easily.

I asked him, ‘Is this the name your friends and colleagues call you by?'

‘Of course,' he said. ‘It's also the name I sign my articles with.'

Then, to my amazement, he handed me a newspaper that lay nearby and showed me a political article written by one Khaled Ben Tubal.

I took the newspaper from him, not believing my eyes.

From my reading of Henri Michaux's book, I had suspected he might be a journalist, and I clearly remembered the verse in which Michaux had written, ‘In the absence of the sun, learn to grow ripe in the cold,' below which he had added in blue ink, ‘. . . or in a newspaper!'

However, I hadn't given much thought to the verse that followed it: ‘I have no name. Rather, my name is a squandering of names.' The reader had underlined this verse twice, as though it was the one that described him the best.

I held on to the newspaper as he went on smoking his cigarette and avoiding my glances. Then, as if to drive home the point that he was ignoring me, he turned on the television and absorbed himself in watching a news report. He almost seemed to have forgotten I was there.

The report included a live broadcast of the national tour Boudiaf was making to explain the principles of the National Assembly. Gesticulating to the crowd, he said, ‘There's a mafia in this country, and certain government officials have pocketed funds that don't belong to them. Rest assured that I will declare war on such individuals. The Ministry of Justice will investigate all relevant files and take whatever steps are necessary. In this context, I ask citizens to help the Ministry by writing in and
providing it with any information they may have. From now on no one will be above the law. Everyone will be held accountable. The people have the right to know the truth. They have the right to know where public funds have gone.'

The crowd responded to Boudiaf 's extemporaneous speech with loud shouts and ululations, which changed the mood of our time together somewhat. Breaking the silence between us again, the man turned to me and commented, ‘They aren't going to let him accomplish what he came to do. I'm sure of it.'

I didn't know exactly what he meant, as my thoughts were still scattered. However, in hopes of keeping the conversation going, I said, ‘Why?'

‘Why?' he retorted. ‘Because they didn't bring him back to open those booby-trapped files. They brought him back to be a front behind which they can go on plundering the country just the way they have been. The people closest to him say he shuts himself up for long hours day and night. He's looking for the facts that he intends to present to the people in three months' time on the occasion of Algeria's Independence Day celebration.'

After a short pause he continued, ‘Are you looking for the truth? Everybody's looking for the truth, but everybody's afraid of it. You know why?'

‘Why?' I murmured.

He put out his cigarette in the ashtray, crushing it slowly. Then suddenly he got up and began unbuttoning his shirt with one hand.

I realized then that never once had I seen him use anything but his right hand. I was startled by this belated discovery, which took me back again to the character in my novel. But before I could think any further, I saw him fling his shirt on to
the sofa and turn to me bare-chested. Then, as though he were continuing a conversation about another subject, he said, ‘Because the truth expresses itself badly.' After a pause he went on, ‘In fact, sometimes it's downright murderous, even if its only crime is to murder our illusions.'

Suddenly my attention was drawn to his left arm, which appeared to be paralysed. His upper left arm was disfigured in several places, as though it had been operated on without any aesthetic considerations. A terrified shudder went through me, not because of what I saw, but because of my fear that I might have gone insane, and lost the ability to distinguish between fiction and fact.

It was as though I'd dreamed about the events now taking place, and was being confronted by a man I had created and maimed with my own hands.

I knew he was testing me, and taking careful note of the surprise's effect on me. Doing my best to conceal my embarrassment, I told him honestly, ‘I don't care what you believe now, but trust me when I say that I love you the way you are. Otherwise I wouldn't have created a man just like you so that I could live years with him in a book.'

‘Well,' he replied sarcastically, ‘you've certainly exercised love's destructive powers to good effect.'

‘All I've done is to exercise a writer's power of imagination,' I said.

‘Stop it, then. Everyone you've worked so hard to create has been snatched up by life. A writer's only real accomplishment consists in the blank spaces he leaves. Every blank page in a book is a space stolen from life, since it can serve as the beginning of another story or another book. It's out of that kind of blank space that I came to you, not out of what you would think of as literature.'

Wanting to avoid an argument, I said, ‘It doesn't matter to me where you came from. All I know is that I want you.'

‘Is that so?' he replied sceptically. ‘I thought you wanted the truth!'

‘What kind of confession do you want exactly?' I asked irritably.

‘I don't want any confession from you,' he said. ‘All that matters to me is for you to admit to yourself that what is happening between us as man and woman is your first concern, and that if it weren't for that, this story wouldn't even be worth writing.'

‘Then?'

‘Then nothing, apart from the fact you're bypassing this major fact by distracting yourself looking for another, less important fact having to do with the question of who I am.'

He had me cornered, and all I could say was, ‘I'm here because it's my duty as a writer to look for the truth. And as a woman, it's only natural that I'd be looking for love. However, I agree with you that I'm not good at distinguishing between the two.'

In a professorial tone he replied, ‘I'll show you a sure way to tell them apart: the truth always expresses itself in an ugly sort of way, while love always seems more wonderful than it is.'

As he spoke he was putting his shirt back on, his right hand fumbling clumsily with the buttons.