Chaos of the Senses (33 page)

As a matter of fact, I wasn't feeling anything. I wasn't feeling anything at all.

Suddenly, as though my brain had short-circuited, all sensations came to a halt, and things around me began happening to another woman.

At the same time, I was experiencing a kind of lightness, something bordering on happiness that I couldn't find any explanation for. Then I remembered that the reason for it was the notebook I'd left behind, indifferent to the literary gains I might have made by publishing it even though I'd spent an entire year writing it. As a matter of fact, I'd been afraid that if I kept it, I might meet the same fate as that writer, who never forgave herself for hesitating to leave the manuscript of her novel on her father's grave and return to exile.

She had taken it to him on the day of his death, excusing her absence for those many years by telling him that she had been busy writing to him, and for him. She'd been lying, of course. The fact was that she'd been writing for herself. Otherwise, she would have left the manuscript on his grave and gone her way.

But because she hadn't dared part with it, she hadn't been able to write a word since the day of her father's death.

Through years of silence, she punished herself for the crime of preferring thousands of readers over one particular reader who would never see what she had written, and who alone had reason to do so. It may be on account of that writer's cowardice that my own view of writing, and the prestige that attaches to it, underwent a change. The fame that descends without warning on a writer on account of a single book is, in reality, merely a reminder of the betrayal of a single reader somewhere, a reader from whom we have stolen, on one pretext or another, the manuscript that was written for him, so that we can produce thousands of copies for readers who care nothing about us.

Every successful publishing venture means that someone, somewhere, has been betrayed.

* * *

So then, this is life . . .

What happens to people isn't what they deserve but, rather, what fits them best.

So why does there have to be pain? Why should there be pain if the endings to our stories fit us so well, as though death made us more beautiful?

One womb casts us forth into another, and all of us arrive here in the same way. Yet we never ask why there's only one form of birth, but so many forms of death.

With sorrow's nightly raids, I'd been assassinated by the perfume of a man who'd just died, leaving me nothing but the odour of time, and a mountainous city with a penchant for
scaring you with the bridges of unknowing and bottomless valleys of misfortune.

Through the ambushes life sets for us, Fate had proceeded, slowly and deliberately, to blast my illusions.

This was what had happened. So had it been nothing but a hypothetical love?

He had known enough about her to love her.

She had known enough about him to love him.

Even so, neither of them had known the other well enough.

Despite my sadness, I left the cemetery feeling more or less content.

If every joy entails some degree of sadness, then it should come as no surprise to find that every sadness entails some degree of joy. It's a joy we feel ashamed to recognize, but those gifted with the creative spirit know it well.

I have to admit, it made me happy to be rid of that notebook. For an entire year I'd gone on writing on the pretext that it was my only way of staying alive. This wasn't true at all, of course, not only because writing is the ideal prescription for spending your life isolated from life itself, but because in this country in particular, it's the charge on which you're most likely to lose your life.

So, after getting rid of it, I decided to explore the virtues of ignorance, the blessings of being illiterate in the face of love, death, and the world. I didn't know how easy it would be to descend into ignorance. Even so, I'd always believed Jabra Ibrahim Jabra's observation that, ‘The writer . . . is someone who knows how to go up and down the ladder of life with perfect ease.' I may have spent my life going up and down that ladder without letting on that I'm out of breath. Actually,
it's the words inside me that are out of breath. And that's why I am a writer.

I came home a woman stripped of all desire, a woman who had nothing of that story left but a perfume stored inside her body, the perfume she still dabbed on occasionally as a way of getting a rise out of memory.

A scent is the last thing left to us by those who depart, and the first thing asked of us by those who return.

It's also the only thing we can offer to assure them that we've been waiting for them.

This is why, when a certain great lover by the name of Napoleon sent news of his victory to his wife, he asked her to keep her scent for him, saying, ‘Don't take a bath, Josephine! I'm coming home in three days!'

Alone among military commanders, Napoleon had mastered the art of conversing with women and allowing himself to be defeated before their femininity with the same passion with which he defeated his enemies.

As for me, I had decided to take a bath that evening and go to bed!

Before that, I would sit with my mother after having neglected her for so long. I had also been neglecting my brother. My mother had been pestering me to write to him, but I hadn't done it since I was so distracted with that notebook and the life of fiction I'd so immersed myself in.

No sooner had I freed myself from my slavery to writing than I was overcome by longing for Nasser. The longing came on so suddenly, it frightened me, and filled me with pangs of remorse.

How could I have abandoned him all that time? Why hadn't I thought about all the tricks life might play on him in his place of exile?

How could I have lived all that time without him, without his grumbling and complaining, his sarcastic remarks, and the quarrelsome affection that meant more to me than all the romantic sweet talk in the world?

I decided to write him a long letter. It would be as beautiful, as poignant, as unsettling as a love letter. I wanted to show him my mischievous side. I wanted to make him laugh, to make him cry in the hope of winning him back. I even told him I'd be willing to ask my husband for a divorce if that would make him happy, although I also made it clear that things were improving between the two of us.

I wanted to celebrate my return to life, and to serve notice of this to everyone around me. I wanted to share in their ordinary existence, with its mundane preoccupations and trivialities, with its chitchat and its boredom, with its joys, sorrows, its dangers. I wanted at last to become an ordinary woman again, with a family and a home.

My husband was the beneficiary of my suddenly renewed interest in him, which rescued a relationship that had been stricken with a tepidity for which he could see no reason, and he worked to win me back with small gestures.

As usual, my mother understood nothing of what had happened to me, and contented herself with taking over my entire schedule.

For example, she spent the entire first day dictating a letter to Nasser, and the first thing she did the next morning was to remind me to send it.

I was about to give it to my husband so that he could send it for me, but then I remembered that I needed to keep Nasser's address a secret from him.

Consequently, I had no choice but to get dressed and go to buy an envelope and some postage stamps from the stationery shop.

I was leaving the house for the first time in two weeks when I was accosted by unexpected autumn winds. An approaching grief suddenly came over me, taking me by surprise like a rain storm that comes one season too early.

Shop windows were displaying warm winter coats for the coming season, while stationers' offered displays of books, notebooks, pencils and pens.

Life was preparing for the end of one season and the beginning of another – preparing to start all over again.

As I saw children running to school with their book bags, I remembered that the last time I had come to this shop was exactly one year before, and that I had come there to buy exactly the same items.

As on this occasion, the weather had been autumnal and enticing, though what it was enticing one
to
wasn't exactly clear.

For the last two weeks I had been an illiterate woman who avoided questions for fear that she might get an irresistible urge to write.

It was the beginning of the school year, as I recall . . .

The sky was putting on a new face between one season and the next, while a writer was renewing her ink supply between one book and the next.

The shopkeeper was engrossed in arranging his new shipment of school supplies, spreading an array of notebooks, pens and pencils before me.

And on this day, as the year before, he stopped and came over to me, set his load of new notebooks on the table that stood between us, and asked me hurriedly what I wanted.

I was about to ask him for envelopes and postage stamps when . . .