Chaos of the Senses (3 page)

She didn't know whether she should conclude from his questions that he loved her again, or whether it was simply the rain that had brought him back to her.

She hadn't forgotten how he'd once said, ‘Questions are a kind of romantic involvement.' She also remembered the time they'd been together in his car in the middle of a downpour.

On that day she'd discovered the beauty of being lovers whose only address is a transitory abode with the intimate atmosphere of a car on a rainy day.

She'd felt that at long last they were alone, concealed from everyone, shielded by a curtain of rain trickling down the windowpanes.

She had wanted to say things that can only be said at such a moment. But then he pulled over to the kerb.

Lighting a cigarette, he said, ‘It's no use taking refuge under the umbrella of words. When it's raining, it's better to be quiet.'

She hadn't argued with him. She'd contented herself with the illusion of possessing him, her rainy-day captive inside a car, where she could share his breaths, the aroma of his tobacco, and the jingling of the keys in his pocket as he looked for a lighter. In the warmth of the car she sat watching him, mesmerised by all the details of his manhood as he fidgeted next to her, and his calm, unsettling presence.

She'd long been dizzied by the fine points of a man's makeup: the self-important suggestiveness, the unspoken, intimate provocation whose vibrations have nothing to do with virility but which a female picks up on and to which she falls slave.

The bliss she had experienced with him that day led her to realize that rain doesn't treat us all as equals. When the beloved takes leave of us and we find ourselves facing the rain alone, we have to ignore its painful invitation to romance and its sadistic provocation lest it exacerbate our suffering, since we know full well that, at that very same moment, it is creating happiness for others whom love hasn't abandoned.

In fact, there are times when nothing is more unfair than the rain!

She was still wondering which weather forecast he was preparing her for.

Had he come back because he wanted her? Or had he come in anticipation of the smell of the earth after it rains?

The only thing he liked about sunny weather was the damp soil left by the rain. He would breathe in its fragrance with senses ablaze as though he were taking in his partner's scent after making love.

‘Can I see you tomorrow?' he asked. ‘I thought it would be nice for us to see that film together on a rainy day.'

Before she could ask him which film he was talking about, he added, ‘Did you know it's been showing in the same cinema for the last two months? That's how long it's been since we saw each other last.'

This time she didn't try to make up excuses. She just asked, ‘Where shall we meet?'

‘At the Olympic Cinema before the four o'clock matinee.'

Then, as an afterthought, he said, ‘Or, if you'd like, you could wait for me at the university entrance. I'll pick you up there at 3:30. That would be better.'

Without giving her time to say another word, he hung up in farewell, leaving her once more to her questions.

* * *

I was happy with this ending, which I'd thought up without much effort. In fact, I'd written it down just like that, the way it had occurred to me, without debating between it and some other version and without crossing out a single line or rereading it more than once the way I usually do. It was as if I wanted to convince myself that I wasn't the person who had written it.

But isn't there always something that words conceal, even when they come this spontaneously? In fact, when they come pouring out so naturally, in one way or another, this itself should arouse one's suspicion.

Language can be more beautiful than we are. In fact, we beautify ourselves with words. We choose them the way we choose our clothes, in keeping with our moods and our intentions.

There are also words that have no colour, that are scandalously transparent, like a woman who's just come out of the sea wearing a diaphanous dress that clings to her body. Yet transparent words are decidedly more dangerous, since they cling to us to the point where they pass into our very beings.

This man who insisted on remaining silent while I insisted on getting him to speak, who insisted on keeping his coat on while I insisted on taking it off him, unnerved me in all of his states, even when he took off his silence and put on my voice and my sodden words.

But at last I'd got him to talk. I'd made him say something that I wanted him to. So perhaps I'd actually defeated him.

But, I confess, he surprised me, not because he'd invited this woman for the second time to go and see that film, which was out of character for him, but because he'd given her the name of a cinema I'd never heard of before. I didn't know whether it existed or not, since I'd never been to cinemas in this city before or taken note of the films playing there.

Then suddenly it occurred to me to look in the newspaper to see whether there really was a cinema by that name. I began searching on the entertainment page where television programmes and film screenings are listed. I pored over the names of cinemas until, lo and behold, I came across an ‘Olympic Cinema' where an American film by the name of
Dead Poets Society
was showing. I guessed it must be dubbed into French, since no one around here knows English, and I tried to find a translation of the film title in hopes that this might solve some of the mystery.

I found it hard to believe that it would be the same film the man in my story had been talking about. So I went searching through the old newspapers piled on the floor of my husband's office, the ones he would bring home every day as part of his job, then leave on the floor until he threw them out.

I looked at the entertainment pages in all the issues I came to, and every time, I found that same film playing at the same cinema.

The last newspaper I looked at took me back a month and a half. On this basis I concluded that the film might have been playing for the last two months, just as the man had said. This surprised me; in fact, it bowled me over, since I hadn't been familiar with this particular cinema, and had never heard of this film. How could I have known that it had been playing there for the last two months and that, as the newspaper
also confirmed, one of its showings was at four o'clock in the afternoon?

The shock of this discovery left me nonplussed. Had I received some sort of revelation telling me to write things I knew nothing about? Should I be wary of this story I'd written, whose details had turned frightening? Or should I view it as a sign from the Beyond and a promise of some future encounter?

All my questions revolved around that man. Why did he matter so much to me? Why did he raise so many questions in my mind? Were questions really, as he said, ‘a romantic involvement'? And was he the one who had said this, or had I said it myself ?

He'd only asked one question: ‘Can I see you tomorrow?'

It was a question that he'd posed to her in particular. But how could I, the writer, fail to show up for the date they'd made? Wasn't I the one who had wanted it, who'd set the day and time? If so, then wouldn't I need to be there in order to invent more conversations, dates, arguments, happy encounters, disappointments, amusement, astonishment . . . and endings?

This is the exclusive privilege of the novelist, who, mistakenly imagining that she owns the world by proxy, toys with the fates of creatures of ink before closing her notebook and becoming, for her part as well, a puppet suspended from invisible strings or moved, like others on life's vast stage, by the hand of Fate! And once this happens, it's useless for her to preface her plans with ‘God willing' as though she were bribing Fate to fulfil her dreams.

I remember once telling someone, ‘Learn to say, “God willing”.' Then one day I asked him, ‘When shall we meet?' At the time he'd been hurriedly packing a suitcase of sorrow, and he
answered me, in typical fashion, with a line from a poem by Mahmud Darwish – something like, ‘We'll meet in a while . . . a year . . . a generation.'

But we never met again. Both of us had forgotten that day to say, ‘God willing'! Is that why he didn't come back? Or maybe it was because he went to bury his father in that country that kills poets while hosting all manner of poetry festivals, and ended up being buried, a maimed corpse, next to the one he had gone to bury.

Before that he used to say he was going to stop writing poetry and try his hand at a novel!

Do you suppose those two lovers would really have met again if I'd given her the freedom to reply as she'd wanted to? And what would she have said?

I think she would have replied with one of those nebulous expressions of hers. She would have said, for example, ‘Maybe we'll meet,' knowing full well that she meant ‘of course'. And to be even more circuitous, she could have said, ‘It might not happen,' to give him the false impression that it wasn't going to happen.

In that case, he would have upped the ante and replied, ‘Absolutely. It doesn't matter anyway.' Then he would have put down the receiver and buttoned up his coat again.

Silence in and of itself doesn't bother me. But I hate men who withdraw into an absolute silence like someone who buttons his shirt up to the very top, like a door with myriad locks and keys, in order to convince you of his importance.

That kind of armoured door doesn't inspire my confidence. The possessions such a person keeps hidden behind it don't so
much impress me as they expose their owner as some nouveau-riche obsessed with his newly acquired fortune. After all, truly rich people always forget to close a window or a wardrobe in their mansion.

Keys are the obsession of the poor, or of those who are afraid that if they open their mouths they'll lose other people's illusions about them.

The nice thing about this man was that, like all people who dream of being wealthy, he would leave one button undone at the top of his heavy coat of silence for the sake of illusion, like a door that's left ajar. This may have been the most seductive thing about him. He wasn't entirely silent, nor did he say any more than necessary in order to crack open the silence.

He was a character ready to be set in a novel, who granted himself to you in instalments.

And is a novel anything but the distance between the top button that's been left undone and the bottom button, which may have been left undone as well?

Did this man really exist only in my imagination? If so, then what was to explain all the factual details I'd included in that story without ever having heard of them before? Although I'm doubtful of authors who claim that there is some supernatural force that dictates what they write, I also doubt that such details, taken together, are nothing but a coincidence.

Had I fallen prey so thoroughly to writing's seductive allure that I thought this man had dictated to me an appointment I'd thought up myself ?

I love that moment when I'm surprised by a man, even when, after the moment of surprise, he no longer resembles my illusion of him.

Every story with a man lands you on the shore of surprise. If he's a husband, the story is bound to usher you into a series of surprises. In the beginning, we know who it was that we married. But the longer we're married, the less certain we are who it is we're living with!

The most mysterious and surprising men are the ones who've been through protracted wars that swallowed up their childhoods and youths without mercy and turned them into men who are at once violent and fragile, sentimental and superhuman.

A man of this type always has another man hidden inside him who might wake up when you least expect him to. He also conceals a little boy who grew up at a time before they'd invented Legos so that, like boys of the younger generation, he could practise putting their pieces together and taking them apart again according to the dictates of his childlike imagination.

I suspect that my husband was born with a military mindset, and that the first thing he ever held was a weapon. So what wonder is it that he breaks me without meaning just as, years ago, he allured me without trying? Doesn't power, like wealth, make us seem more beautiful and appealing?

Don't women, like the peoples of the world, always fall prey to the charm and prestige of a military uniform before noticing that, by allowing themselves to be dazzled by it, they've given it its power?

It's true, of course, that he did it gradually, with a good deal of tact and, quite possibly, with a good deal of planning. It's true also that I entered into slavery of my own free will, though probably without noticing. I was content in my meek surrender to him, leaving to him the more enjoyable role: the role of manliness that commands, decides, demands, protects, pushes, and goes to extremes.

In his demeanour I found something of the authoritative, fatherly nurture I'd been deprived of, while he found in his dominion over me an extension of the professional tasks he was used to performing away from home.

* * *

Our relationship began with a mutual infatuation, and with the violent passion of an unspoken challenge.

I should have realized that violently passionate connections are short-lived by virtue of their very ferocity, and that we can't invest everything in a single relationship. We can't be spouses, friends, parents, sweethearts and symbols to each other all at the same time.

As for him, it seems most likely that, in the area of relationships, he thought with the logic of a military officer who, when he comes to power, insists on occupying every major government post and receiving every ministerial portfolio of any importance in the belief that no one else would be competent to do so, and that the mere presence of someone else in any of these posts would constitute a threat to his regime.

Consequently, he'd given me no freedom, nor had he left any space in my life into which anyone could steal. He'd taken all the seats, yet without occupying any of them worthily.