Chaos of the Senses (19 page)

I couldn't help but wonder whether there was some contagion going around among the men of the country that made them all say the same thing, and dream of nothing but leaving!

That evening I sat down to supper with my husband out of politeness. Actually, I'd already decided not to eat the meat of
those poor sheep, whose heads had been bobbing for several days from the seasickness that had stricken them during the month and a half they'd spent crammed into a ship's hull.

My husband for his part was so exhausted that he didn't notice my lack of appetite. We exchanged ordinary chit-chat about nothing in particular, and the minute he finished eating, I saw him head for the bedroom and take off his clothes as though he were casting off a burden he'd been carrying around all day long. Then he flung himself on the bed.

As I hung his clothes up for him, I said, ‘I'd been hoping you'd spend the day with me. I don't understand why it is that you have to spend every day in your office, even holidays.'

He replied, ‘If I spent the holiday with you, who would guarantee security in a city whose smallest university has a student population of over 23,000? And then there are the mosques. God knows many there are in the city, and new ones are springing up every day.'

‘What I meant was that we don't see each other at all any more. Even your days off, we spend apart.'

Our conversation reminded me of Nasser, and I thought back on my conversation with him. I kept his travel plans to myself. However, without thinking I found myself telling my husband about seeing him that morning at the cemetery. In general my husband avoided talking about Nasser, as though he reciprocated my brother's dislike for him.

But to my surprise, he said approvingly, ‘It's nice that you saw him.'

Then he added, ‘How did he seem to you?'

A bit startled by his question, I said, ‘He was his usual self. He might have lost a little weight, but he was in good health.'

‘Didn't he tell you anything?' my husband asked.

His question flustered me, and my mind started going in a million directions.

Did he know about Nasser's travel plans? Had somebody been eavesdropping on us at the cemetery? I hadn't seen anyone. And what if he was trying to find out things he didn't know?

Finally I said, ‘No, he didn't tell me anything except for the fact that my mother will be back from the pilgrimage the day after tomorrow.'

Shifting on the bed, he asked, ‘Didn't he tell you he'd been arrested?'

‘Arrested!' I cried. ‘Why? When did this happen?'

‘I didn't tell you about it when you were away so as not to worry you.'

In a daze, I wondered: Is he involved in some dangerous organization? Did they find documents or arms in his possession? Whatever the case, they must not have found enough evidence to condemn him. Otherwise they wouldn't have released him.

‘What did he do?' I wanted to know.

‘A good deal of suspicion hovers around him because of his ties to fundamentalist groups.'

‘But,' I said testily, ‘just because he sympathizes with them doesn't mean he's a terrorist! Nasser would never take up arms to kill anybody. I know my brother.'

His voice stern, my husband interrupted, ‘Your brother talks too much. If it weren't for his big mouth, he would have saved both me and himself a lot of trouble. He thinks his family name gives him some sort of immunity, and that it entitles him to badmouth the authorities and incite others to do the same. I intervened this time to get him released. But I can't do that all the time. We've got a tense security situation on our hands, and
exceptions shouldn't be made even for the people closest to us. You'd better explain this to him!'

I hadn't expected the news of Nasser's detention to put me in such a muddle, and I had no idea what I was supposed to explain to him.

In any case, I said nothing as my husband flexed his muscles in front of me, metaphorically speaking, and reminded me how much I owed him. I had no desire to get into any arguments. Nor was I prepared to end the holiday by squabbling with my husband after having started it off with a spat with my brother.

Suddenly I saw him fall fast asleep. All I could do at that point was to slip into bed beside him, feeling helpless and confused, and try to get some sleep myself.

I don't know how my rage died, but only then did I realize that it
had
died, and that I'd lost that marvellous spark that had so often set my pen ablaze and set me ablaze in confrontation with others.

When you've lost the ability, and even the desire, to get angry, it means either that you've got old, or that those inward conflagrations have burned out, one disappointment after another, to the point where you don't have the passion to argue about anything any more, not even about issues that once seemed so earthshaking, and ideals that you held so dear that you would have been willing to die for them!

All that mattered to me now was my mother's homecoming. I didn't know exactly what had made me so anxious to see her: the fact that I'd missed her, my need for her, or my desire to see Nasser and find out what surprises he had for me.

Since I was used to my mother going on pilgrimage and coming back again, it didn't surprise me to see her sitting in the
living room in her white pilgrim's garb and her white head covering. What surprised me was to find her, for once, without the usual entourage of women who came either to see her off or welcome her home.

I was happy for the chance to be alone with her and get up close to her. I guess I wanted to soak up some of her spiritual blessings before she went back to being an ordinary woman again.

The minute she saw me she said, ‘You don't look good. Is something wrong?'

‘No,' I said.

‘Your trip to the capital didn't do you a bit of good. You're paler than ever! Maybe the sea doesn't agree with you.'

‘It agrees with me just fine,' I said. ‘It's this city that tires me out.'

Once she'd reassured herself that there hadn't been any problems while she was gone, she went on to talk about her trip. She talked about the unbearable heat in Mecca, the pilgrims who'd been trampled to death, the collapse of the Algerian dinar, and the rise in gold prices.

‘Ma,' I said after a while, ‘did you pray for me when you were there?'

‘Of course, sweetheart,' she replied, taken aback. ‘I always do!'

I felt an overwhelming urge to cry, as if I'd just been waiting for her to come back so that I could break down. But I fought it off and went on listening to her talk while I cried on the inside.

Meantime, a neighbour lady arrived, followed by a number of other women, so I withdrew and went to be with Nasser the way I usually did on such occasions.

I loved Nasser's taciturnity, and the manly features and towering height he'd inherited from our father. Today in particular he seemed beyond his years.

I felt him to be a man above complexes, above suspicion. He had nothing in common with people for whom fundamentalism was nothing but a handy solution to all their male hang-ups or earthly problems and who used their extremism as a way of compensating for some emotional deficit, exacting revenge for social injustices, or venting their patriotic frustrations.

He'd chosen this path and left everything else behind, while others had followed him simply because they had nothing to lose. He could have had any girl he wanted, any job he wanted, any fortune he sought. But he'd turned up his nose at them all. I wondered what kind of inward wealth he drew on, what cause he'd married in secret, what country he emigrated to every day as he sat sipping his coffee in silent discontentment. My mother was always trying to get him to find a job and take advantage of the opportunities at his disposal. She'd needle him by comparing him to people who, although they'd started out in circumstances less fortunate than his, had succeeded in life.

But had they succeeded? Hardly. The people my mother had in mind had succeeded in sparing themselves life's hardships by plundering the country wherever they went and shamelessly flaunting their spoils. Within the space of a few years, they'd erected huge mansions with fancy cars parked outside, and their wives had made it their pastime to travel to Europe whenever they wanted to buy themselves new wardrobes.

What my mother didn't realize was that she was only deepening his sense of failure, and encouraging him to defy her even more.

As the days went by I saw him lose his ability to respond to her. He was also losing his elegance. It was as if he'd gone on strike against both life and elegance, since the homeland wasn't as elegant as his dreams!

Had he decided to join the Silence Party and give up his voice, the way others suddenly give up their slogans and shave off their convictions for fear of prisons that lie in wait for men with beards?

The time had come for razorblades – which, with a sudden decline in values and in the value of human beings – were finally available on the market. So, was this the time for the homeland to renounce its claim to be of some value?

As values went downhill, slogans came down off the walls, marking the beginning of a time of tribulation as prisons filled up with bearded men and with those who'd been arrested by accident, caught in the crossfire the way people so often are in times of war.

In a low voice I asked him, ‘Do you really have to leave, Nasser? Have you thought about what will happen to Ma if you're not around?'

‘I'm only leaving to come back,' he said. ‘But if I stayed, you might lose me for good. I can tell you this, of course, but not Ma. I'll keep her in the dark about it and go meet my fate on some nice-sounding pretext. She'll tolerate my not being around better than she'd tolerate finding out that I'd been arrested or murdered.'

‘Are your options really that limited?' I asked.

‘Of course. Gone are the days of fleeting disappointments. Now's the time for prisons, sudden death, and fabricated assassinations.'

‘My husband tells me you were arrested while I was away.'

‘And did he also tell you he'd intervened to get me released?' he interjected.

‘Is that not true?'

‘It's true, all right. It's just that it was a political ploy with multiple aims. First, it puts me in his debt. Second, it calls my integrity into question, since it causes my friends to doubt my opposition to the state. After all, I was only in jail for a couple of days, whereas they might be there for months or even years. Not to mention the fact that if they release you, it means your problems have just begun. They've started releasing the ones that irritate them the most so that they can kill them on the outside and claim that it was some random crime. So what choice do I have but to leave?'

I listened to him incredulously. It was as though somebody had lifted the lid of a chest in which I'd deposited my dreams, thinking they were in a safe place – a place I'd called my ‘homeland' – only to find that they'd turned into a stinking mess!

All I wanted to do now was run away with him to some other country, any other country, or some other continent or planet until this crazy train had passed.

Although I wasn't convinced of the logic of a man who had gone off and left me, I
was
convinced of the logic behind this man's wanting to leave home, and I soon found myself helping him invent lies and excuses to persuade my mother of the same.

I went home that day laden with kisses and instructions from Nasser and with presents from my mother, foremost among them some water from the Well of Zamzam, which she brought me every time she came back from the pilgrimage in anticipation of the day when I got pregnant and used it during childbirth.

Meanwhile, I was pregnant with that man. He was the only thing that kept growing inside me. As the days passed, his presence overshadowed even Nasser's departure and life's other disappointments. At the same time, I couldn't understand how, in spite of all the tragedies happening around me, he managed to go on living in me and keeping me from concentrating on anything but him.

More than his words, what clung to me was his scent. It was mingled with a kind of perfume, with the smell of a certain tobacco, and with the odour of a certain perspiration which, taken all together, made up a presence that awakened my senses. It was a presence that had no name. Or maybe its name was simply ‘him'.

I remembered how Diderot had proposed a hierarchy of the senses, describing sight as the most superficial, hearing as the most conceited, taste as the most pessimistic, and touch as the most profound. As for smell, he described it as the sense of desire; that is, a sense that can't be classified because it's governed not by logic, but by the subconscious.

The frightening thing about this man was that he'd led me to discover my senses, or, more precisely, my womanly fear of them. In fact, he'd cast me into a chaos of the senses so extreme that I feared the day when I wouldn't be able to describe him or even recognize him, my knowledge of him having passed out of the realm of logic.

So one day I decided to devote my time to reading the book I'd brought back with me by Henri Michaux, the one he'd marked with notes and comments of his own. Since I'd failed to unlock this man's secrets through real-life observations, I wanted to see if I could unlock them outside the realm of his concrete
presence, with the calmness of someone getting to know a character in a book.

Being swept off your feet by someone whose inscrutability makes him not only alluring, but even obnoxious at times, may be your chance to write a great novel – that is, if you're a novelist. If, on the other hand, you're a lover, the beloved's inscrutability will be your torment and your curse, since love will turn you into a part-time detective.

Like everyone in love, you want to know everything about your beloved. You want to know his past, his present, the names of the people he's loved and who have loved him, where he's lived, the cities he's visited, the professions he's practised, the places he frequents.