Chaos of the Senses (16 page)

It kills me to see the gargantuan statues that adorn Arab capitals in honour of rulers who've given their peoples nothing but blood and destruction, while this man – who gave us a reason to be proud of our history by founding an Algerian state that dazzled France itself, and who wouldn't have demanded that we bring his remains back from Syria or that we erect a statue of him in a square that, large as it is, will always be dwarfed by his greatness – has nothing but a puny little statue to his name.

(It's a strange time indeed, when values are turned on their heads and people make statues for their leaders in celebration of their crimes rather than their greatness!) No wonder, then, that for twenty-five years Emir Abdelkader had been registering his displeasure at being among us by standing with his back turned to the Liberation Front Party headquarters and his face to the sea, a fact that had become the stuff of many a political joke among residents of the capital.

There was a time when we Algerians had been masters of irony. So how had we lost our sense of humour? Where had we got these expressionless faces, these hostile temperaments and these strange fashions that had never suited us?

How had we become strangers to ourselves and each other? We were alienated to the point of being afraid of each other, taking precautions lest others look at us askance, and terrified every time we heard footsteps behind us.

As I walked through the square, hidden safely inside clothes that I'd borrowed from Farida and that weren't the least bit like me, fear prompted me alternately to speed up and slow down. I found myself living back and forth between two people, one of whom was practised in seduction, the other in piety. One time I went to meet this man wearing a skin-tight black dress, and the
next, a loose cloak and a headscarf that left nothing but my face showing. In short, I was being occupied in turns by two different women, both of whom were me.

Because we tend to think and act in keeping with what we put on and take off, I passed through the crowd in a kind of vague collusion. In fact, I might have joined in their excited shouting if I hadn't been so engrossed in looking for the building where that man was waiting for me. Meanwhile, I kept wondering: Why is he always alongside of politics? Why does he come back according to history's timing? And why is it that, when I relate to him, my joy is constantly on guard against sorrow?

As I walked warily past the Milk Bar Café, I suddenly remembered Djamila Bouhired. It's said that one day during the revolution, she came to this café dressed in European clothing and ordered something. Before leaving, she put her bag under the table. It turned out that the bag was filled with explosives, and when they went off, the resulting blast rocked all of France, which, after having demanded that Algerian women remove their hijabs, discovered that European dress might be used to conceal a freedom-fighter!

And here I was, forty years later, Djamila Bouhired's legitimate heir, passing the same café disguised in the garb of piety, since women had discovered that this very garb might conceal a lover whose body is set to explode with passion.

I walked past the café with the same fear, the same defiance, and the same determination, knowing that love had become the biggest freedom-fighting operation any Algerian woman could carry out.

*

I've always told myself, ‘Don't jump life's red lights, and learn to stop at destiny's checkpoints. There's no point in rigging traffic signals, since destiny can't be taken by force.'

I used to tell my heart, ‘Try not to be like me. Don't be in a hurry. Look right and left before you cross life's streets, and don't try to jump on to this runaway train when it's moving. Dreamers travel standing still, since they know they always arrive one disappointment later than everybody else!'

And my heart would reply, ‘Everybody you've ever known has seen his dreams crushed under the homeland's wheels, and all the people you've ever loved have been scattered all over destiny's train. So cross wherever you like, since either way you're bound to die in some accident of love!'

At last the building appeared.

When I stepped inside, I felt myself leaving one world and entering another.

I wasn't bothered by its filthy staircase, I wasn't put off by its broken-down lift, and the four flights I had to climb only added to my excitement.

Love's sweetest moments are when you're going up the stairs!

Outside a door behind which the unknown awaited, I caught my breath and tried to make sure I looked all right. But before I knocked, I saw it opening before me, and a familiar figure withdrawing slightly behind it as though it were gesturing for me to enter.

So enter I did, and the door closed behind me.

Having experienced the whole spectrum of love, I of all people know that it doesn't stay in five-star hotels or in houses that are fancy but frigid, so it pleased me to find that this house was as unadorned and cosy as a nest.

Without bothering to ask permission, I headed, exhausted, for the nearest room. I flung my bag on to the sofa and was about to fling myself down beside it. Instead, though, I stayed where I was for a moment, contemplating him, as though I were searching him for something that would justify all this madness.

He came up to me and removed the headscarf that I'd forgotten to take off. He smiled. Then, after some hesitation, he confessed wistfully, ‘How I've missed you!'

‘I've missed you, too,' I replied. ‘What else would have brought me all this way? If only you knew what a time I had getting here!'

He sat down on the sofa across from me, fiddling quietly with the headscarf. He pondered this apparel that bore no resemblance to me, as though he were trying to decide who I was, while I in turn pondered the room where we were sitting. Its simple furniture, chosen with bachelor-ish taste, consisted of nothing but a large velvet sofa, a table, and a bookcase that extended the length of the opposite wall. The books arranged neatly on its shelves left room for nothing but a television and a tape player from which emanated the soft strains of a Richard Clayderman piano piece.

I loved the way our tastes seemed to match. More than that, I loved our shared propensity for acting contrary to logic, such as listening to a piece of music like the one that was playing on a day marked by such outright lunacy. The only thing that surprised me was the absence of any pictures in the house, which deprived me of an important avenue for getting to know him better.

‘What do you consume besides cigarettes?' I asked him.

‘Patience . . . and silence,' he replied with a chuckle.

‘And how can you draw with such icy sensations?'

‘And who told you I drew? To draw is to remember, and I'm a man who tries to forget.'

‘I'd like to see some of your paintings,' I said. ‘Would that be possible?'

‘No, actually,' he said. ‘I don't have any of them here.'

‘What did you do with them?'

‘I left them in another city.'

Suddenly I felt suspicious of what he was saying. I sensed that he was hiding something, or lying, and that he'd never been a painter.

‘Where did you learn to draw?' I asked.

‘Oh,' he said dismissively, ‘the worst thing that can happen to an artist is to go to art school!'

I wanted to argue this point with him, maybe just to get him to talk more about himself. But he fell silent, and didn't say a word for some time. When he did open his mouth again, it was to talk to me about the political situation and to ask me whether I'd had trouble finding his house.

As he spoke I was distracted from his words by listening to his hands, since they were the only thing that told me very much about him.

First of all, they told me he was lazy, since he only used one of them: the right one.

I took a long look at his fingers, which seemed to have a lot to say about who he was as a man. He had a way of trimming his fingernails to a studied roundness as though he didn't want to cause anyone pain, even in romance. This was reassuring to me. It also whetted my appetite for intimate touches, though it didn't help me in the least to figure out what his actual profession was.

This man was no artist. His hands were too calm and collected for someone who lives with the nervous rush of creation.

We recognize a pianist by his lithe, agile fingers. We may recognize the hands of a carpenter, who more often than not will have lost a finger or two. Similarly, we might be able to identify a house painter or a butcher by certain features of their hands. We recognize a teacher by the chalk dust clinging to his palms, the farmer from the dirt trapped under his fingernails, and a printer from the tell-tale signs of ink in his fingerprints.

What a remarkable world, the world of hands. It's remarkable in its scandalous nakedness, a nakedness that reveals who we are. No wonder, then, that artists and sculptors spend so much of their time studying people's hands, since it's through these that they enter into their paintings and sculptures. Renowned French sculptor Auguste Rodin, who himself devoted no little attention to hands, once summed up his obsession with them in the words, ‘There are hands that bless and hands that curse, hands that exude a sweet perfume and hands that quench a burning thirst. And there are hands made for love.' How, then, could he sculpt one type and neglect another?Hands have a lot to say about our intimate secrets. They hold our memories, the names of those who've embraced us, the people whose bodies we've passed over with tender touches, or on which we've left a scratch.

Our hands reveal the age of our bliss, and of our misery. They expose the true age of our bodies. They make known all the professions we've practised and all the love we've made, and not made.

Consequently, there are hands that, like their owners, aren't worthy of life because they've done nothing with their lives.

As I looked at him, I knew I was seeing hands that had experienced life, hands that had woven life and kneaded it to the point of impassioned identification. It was clear from their calculated indolence that they'd given pleasure to many a woman, and that life had given them many a disappointment.

Here were hands that had dallied, fondled, discovered, hands that had set fire to untold numbers of women, and which were setting fire to me now from behind the smoke wafting off his cigarette as he sat there in silence.

They were also setting fire to my questions, stoking the flames of my jealousy. These hands to which nothing had clung, had they ever clung to anyone? What was the name of the last woman they'd loved? The last women they'd undressed? How old was their bliss?

I could tell he was a man of many lifetimes. Consequently, I might have asked him, ‘How old are your eyes?', ‘How old are your lips?' or, ‘How old is your silence?'

But instead I asked him, ‘How old are your hands?'

I thought he'd like my new way of condensing questions and turning them upside down the way he always did.

However, seemingly unimpressed by my query, he replied, ‘They're as old as my disappointment.'

‘But I still love them,' I said.

Getting up suddenly to turn the tape over as though it were a way of changing the subject, he replied, ‘You've always loved my neuroses!'

I didn't understand what he meant, and I didn't try to. I just got up and headed over to the bookcase, which I'd been wanting to take a closer look at. It was to my advantage that he didn't seem to have heard of Roland Barthes' apt observation that ‘one should hide from others both one's medicine cabinet and one's library!'

I glanced at their titles, exultant that now at last I could acquaint myself with this man, who, seeing me distracted by his library, withdrew, saying, ‘I don't suppose you'd miss me too much if I went to make you some coffee!'

‘Of course not!' I said, laughing. ‘Books can only bring us closer!'

From the very first glance, I was bowled over by the breadth of the subjects covered by his book collection, which bespoke a highly cultured individual conversant in two languages, with diverse political and historical interests that I hadn't expected this man to have.

At the same time, I was amazed not to have seen a single book on the fine arts or drawing in the house of a painter whose library reflected such wide-ranging interests. There were books on the lives of historical figures, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and even the global hegemony of multinational corporations. However, there seemed to be no room for creativity in the entire collection with the exception of a lower shelf filled with small, pocket-sized volumes of a contemporary French poetry series. I found Baudelaire's
The Flowers of Evil
, Rimbaud's
The Drunken Boat
, something by Jean Cocteau, and books by other poets.

As I stood leafing curiously through some of the books, I happened upon one by Henri Michaux entitled
Corner Columns
. It was a book I'd never read or even heard of before even though there'd been a time when I loved this poet.

I don't know what led me to this book in particular. However, of all the books I'd looked at, it was the only one this man had written in, adding occasional comments in the margins and highlighting specific passages.

As I leafed through it, I suspected that I'd found the key that would unlock his secret.

I was sure that Roland Barthes had been right in what he said. After all, just as our medicine cabinets will tell others what sorts of illnesses we've suffered from, our bookshelves might tell them more about us than we'd like them to know, especially if they come across a book that we've shared in writing by scribbling in the margins.

I was still looking through it when he came back with the coffee.

‘Would it be all right if I borrowed this book?' I asked.

‘Of course,' he said, without bothering to ask me its title.