Chaos of the Senses (29 page)

‘So,' I asked, ‘is that the way you think?'

Amused at the note of alarm in my voice, he said with a chuckle, ‘Since I met you, I've adopted a new philosophy of life: to strive in this world as though I'll be seeing you tomorrow, and to strive for the next world as though we're going to die together! So every day I prepare to meet you, whether here or there, with the same yearning.'

‘That scares me,' I murmured. ‘From the way you're talking, it sounds as though love is just a way of bypassing life, and that all we have time left for is a hug and a couple of kisses.'

‘On the contrary,' he reassured me. ‘We've still got plenty of time. I'll wait for you in life and in books, too. A moment of love is enough to justify a lifetime of waiting. Can you see that?'

‘I'm trying. But everything is against us.'

‘Like all great causes in life, love is something you have to believe in deeply, sincerely, and doggedly. Only then will the miracle happen. Take Boudiaf, for example: a seventy-eight-year-old man who spent half his life struggling against imperialism, and the other in exile. He was exiled even from the national memory, his name blotted out of our textbooks. Then,
after twenty-eight years of exile, history brought him back to his country as its president. Now, isn't that amazing? Isn't it marvellous? Believe me, it's just a matter of time before . . .'

‘But I'm afraid of time. Time is the enemy of lovers.'

‘Rather, it's the enemy of revolutions, both the big ones and the little, fly-by-night ones. They all get knocked off by time. And sooner or later, I expect to see the death of revolutionary illusions.'

* * *

Of course, time is the enemy of lovers.

It brings us a few steps closer together, only to disappear through a man who retreats into his initial darkness clad in black.

When that happens, I go back to walking along the seashore. I walk, and the questions walk with me as though my feet were shod in question marks.

Nietzsche used to say that the greatest ideas are the ones that come to us while we're walking. So I walk. But every idea the sea brings in goes out with the next wave.

I used to believe that the novel was the art of cunning deception, the way poetry is the art of amazement. So I couldn't figure out how this man, who hadn't seemed prepared for the role of either poet or novelist, had managed so thoroughly to dupe my senses that I felt like an illiterate in the face of his manhood.

How was it that, without knowing it, he had written the story in such a way that it was tailor-made for me in a book in which we had switched roles in so many places? And how had that absent friend suddenly become the main character?

It seemed clear by now that this was the man who had sat beside me during that film and in whose presence I had been living ever since – breathing in his cologne, reading his books, listening to his music, sitting on his sofa, talking on his phone, and falling in love with his home!

Somehow I had managed, with perfect stupidity, to fall for all the false signals love had placed in my path, and lo and behold, as I imagined myself discovering one man, I'd been discovering another.

At some station or another I had missed the train to my ‘first' love, and had taken one that led me to another.

Like a wandering tourist taking the metro for the first time, like an adventurer accidentally discovering a continent, I had missed my way in a moment of sentimental distraction. After discovering America, Columbus died thinking he had discovered India. And like explorers, novelists always die ignorant!

You definitely haven't arrived.

You're a traveller on a train headed towards questions, but who said you'd arrived? Who said you knew where the answers were leading you? After all, answers are blind. Only questions can see.

Time is a journey . . .

Ships laden with illusions have come into port, while others laden with dreams are on their way out.

The sea laughed when it saw me launching out on a boat of paper, hoisting words as sails in the face of logic, in the hope of discovering how all this had happened.

Time is rain . . .

A cloud wafting out of the telephone and coming to live in my suitcase. Outside autumn's window, a light drizzle knocks gently on my heart.

Time is destiny . . .

The sea rolls up its collar by night and buttons up memory all the way to the top lest the salt seep out into the words.

Then it puts on its best voice and dials a number.

‘Yes?' a woman answers.

Time is pain . . .

Why do we always say ‘Yes' when we answer the telephone, even when it's time to say ‘No'?

Time is ‘no'.

In sorrow's sumptuous entryway, learn to celebrate pain as an unexpected guest. It's only pain, so there's no need to prepare yourself for it.

Tears come belatedly over a sorrow which, like a dreaded farewell, has come too soon.

Time is a farewell . . .

Love says, ‘Hello? Yes?'

And life replies, ‘Hello? No,' as salt seeps across the telephone line, gradually inundating us. Meanwhile, between the tyranny of memory and the timidity of promises, things carry on their journey . . . without us.

* * *

I left Sidi Fredj at dawn, before the sea had awoken and begged me with a tear to stay.

He had the waves and I had the salt, as well as an aeroplane waiting for me.

When I had arrived at this place two weeks earlier, I'd been escorted by the lovely saying that used to precede Baudelaire whenever he went on a journey: ‘I'm summoned by desire, crowned by love.'

And now I left love's throne behind. The life of legitimacy summoned me, Constantine awaited me, and the life whose rules I had broken was bringing me back to the ‘house of obedience' crowned with the glitter of memories.

As I came back to Constantine, I avoided looking at it. I wished I could see it the way Borges saw Buenos Aires through his sightless eyes. I wanted to look at it without any visual memory.

Sometimes we have to lose our sight in order to recognize places we've seen so many times before that we have ceased truly to see them. Here in this city there were streets where we would have been afraid to look into other people's eyes, restaurants we wouldn't have dared frequent, houses we couldn't have entered together.

Here was a city that recognized love nowhere but in the songs of Farqani, that only left home to go to the mosque or a coffee shop, and that never opened a window to look at anything but a minaret.

I had arrived in the city lovesick, my head ringing with the words of Achilles when he beheld Athens: ‘Abandon the gods for a time, Madame, and give me a bit of your magnificent misery.'

Is there anyone more miserable than a lover in Constantine?

My husband welcomed me home so kindly, it made me suspicious. Of course, maybe I was blowing up his mistakes in my mind. Maybe I was even on the lookout for them as a way of countering the guilt I felt towards him.

He seemed happy to have me home again. Or maybe he was happy for other reasons. Since Boudiaf 's return, everybody had started feeling safer, and life in the city had returned to
normal. Together with the feeling of normality came the pre-summer fever that sent families out in droves to Muruj `Ayn al-Bay and Djebel El Wahch.

People had begun daring at last to go on excursions here and there, trusting that the country had emerged from its long dark tunnel. This sudden tranquillity taught me to give myself over to time and place, confident that this man's words were something I could rely on.

But had he taught me optimism, or just how to bide my time? I often had to resist the temptation to make inquiries to find out who Abdelhaq was.

It unsettled me to see that even where I was, I continued living alongside him, sharing with him the same city.

Sometimes I would fantasize about bumping into him somewhere. I realized that he might not recognize me, even though he had read me and had even written me throughout this entire saga. After all, he was the one who had given that novel of mine to his friend, which had led him unwittingly to me.

The only thing that might place him in my path was the book by Henri Michaux. If only I'd brought it with me. I might find him through his silence, or through that taciturn manner that was his distinguishing mark and which, like his cologne, he had passed on to his friend.

I would ask him, ‘Do you recognize me?'

And the reply would come, ‘Of course,' two of the five words he had spoken on the day he sat beside me in the cinema.

Then I would confess to him, ‘I miss you. Do you realize how wonderful it is to miss someone you've never met before?'

I started imagining all sorts of beginnings for us, and more than one way to find him. But then I thought better of it, since I realized that I was repeating, down to the last detail, my romantic adventure with his friend.

This time also I was dealing with a man whose name I didn't know. After all, Abdelhaq wasn't a family name, and it wouldn't be enough to lead me to a journalist when I didn't know what newspaper he worked for, which language he wrote in, or what name he used to sign his articles at a time when virtually all journalists had two names.

As a matter of fact, I was glad for this man to be ‘no one' – a man without any name in particular, with no particular description, no identifying features, no credentials.

I'd learned from my previous experience that in what we don't know there is a beauty that surpasses the satisfaction we take in what we do know.

So I decided to leave my encounter with Abdelhaq to chance. I'd let life arrange things however it chose. This way I wouldn't miss out on the element of surprise or try to make the finale come before its time.

When we find the thing we've been looking for so long, it's the beginning of the end.

More importantly, I decided not to look for him because my constant preoccupation with him involved a kind of hidden betrayal of the man who had spent our last time together persuading me to be faithful to him. It was as though he could see what was coming, or as if he knew enough about me through what I had written to be wary of my capacity to be in love with two people at the same time.

Was this why he had loved me with such an erratic ferocity that he seemed to be more than one man? As he was bidding
me farewell over the telephone, he made a confession that pained me: ‘All I have to defend you from love's perils is love itself.' When I remembered him this way, a wave of desire for him came over me. I tried to escape from it by immersing myself in writing. But . . .

The hand has a memory of its own, a memory that haunts you with questions about what you've lost. I still couldn't understand how it was that this body of his, though it wasn't the most beautiful, had become so wildly alluring to me that it had disturbed my tranquillity and robbed me of the ability to write for days on end.

* * *

Two months went by, during which time I fed on dreams and quenched my thirst with quick sips of ink, leaving others to their banquets of tedium followed by slander-sweetened coffee.

From time immemorial, fire has puzzled over how to be united with water. I've never mastered the art of sitting around and gossiping with other women. I'm the mistress of sorrow, and they the maidens of frivolity. I've always enjoyed men's company more than women's, since when I'm with women, all I end up with is frayed nerves!

Nevertheless, I accepted an invitation from a relative of mine to attend the celebration of her daughter's passing some test or other. It was the end of June, and the women around me were chatting over coffee and sweets. Wanting to avoid their chatter, I stole periodic glances at the television, which had been left on to add to the racket.

From time to time I would listen to a speech by Boudiaf being broadcast live from the House of Culture in Anaba, but
I wasn't getting much of it, so I contented myself with just looking at him. Little did I know that I was witnessing this man's final appearance.

Even when he had no voice, Boudiaf would penetrate you with his eyes, which reflected a hard-to-define sadness that left you no choice but to believe what he said.

They were eyes that could see how the country had practised itself in treachery from time immemorial. They were eyes that forgave and forgot. Yet, given the suffering of exile and betrayal by those who had once been his comrades, sorrow had taken up permanent residence in them, and they'd lost their ability to laugh.

As he stood there before us for the last time, Boudiaf had his back turned to a curtain behind him – the curtain of Fate (and treachery).

He seemed so confident, so trusting, so brave, so innocent.

So how could what happened to him not have happened?

I don't know exactly what he'd been talking about at that moment, but I remember that the last word he said was ‘Islam'.

Before he had finished the sentence, one of his security men emerged on to the platform from behind the curtain. When he was a step away from his target, he threw a fake bomb, and at the sound of the blast, everyone there threw themselves to the ground. He then proceeded to empty his weapon into Boudiaf 's body. Just like that, right in front of all those looking on. Then he disappeared again behind the curtain.

It was 29 June, 11.27 a.m.

Algeria was looking on as its dreams were assassinated. Everyone expected an ambulance to come, but none came, at least not for a long while.

The Algerian flag over the podium now fluttered over a man lying prostrate on the ground. He had come to raise our heads, to make us proud, but we had left his dreams wallowing in a pool of blood.

Forty years earlier, in the very same month, his comrades had led him away to desert prisons. Then the country had brought him back as president for 166 days, only to reward him five months later with a spray of bullets, and a shroud.

In a mere seven days, on 5 July – Algeria's Independence Day – he had been planning to deliver a long-awaited speech to the Algerian people.