Chaos of the Senses (30 page)

Like a car spinning its wheels in the mud on its way to some happy outing, Fate suddenly brought us to a halt.

Everything – including the ambulance that lost its way to the hospital, causing him to be the last of the wounded to arrive – colluded to prevent Boudiaf from missing his appointment with death this time.

On the day Boumédienne died, Boudiaf had said, ‘I disagreed with Boumédienne on a lot of issues. But when I saw his funeral procession, I felt I'd been unfair to him. After all, anyone whose loss causes people this much grief has to have done something right for the country.'

At the same time, of course, there were people who cheered from their balconies when they heard the news of his death, venting their malicious glee at his demise in front of the television cameras without the least embarrassment. People like these flocked to the mosques, donating feasts of couscous in celebration of his shed blood.

The forty thieves who were secretly delighted at the sight of his corpse rubbed their hands with glee over the spoils they were sure to divide among themselves for years to come.
People like this supposed that Boudiaf wouldn't be missed, that his death would be a mere blip on the screen of Algeria's history.

So I wonder if they expected his funeral to be as it was?

Things had undergone a shocking collapse. An entire nation went into hysterics, crying like babies in the streets for the men it had lost and shouting, ‘Here we are!' Women came out wrapped in Algerian flags, in their hands the picture of a man who hadn't governed in order to have his image plastered all over the streets but, rather, in order for the image of Algeria to cover the pictures of the slain that filled the newspapers.

Though he had never been able to tread on his homeland's soil with a sense of real safety, he was now being carried by waves of grief-stricken humanity towards the soil where he would rest.

He had departed and left us orphans once again, and as we escorted him to his grave we cried, ‘Go in peace – we are here!' And history chimed in after us, ‘Sleep well, Abu Nasser. Sleep in peace. They are here!'

I didn't leave home to attend the funeral. My grief was too overwhelming to share it with anyone else.

But somewhere deep inside, I was happy for him.

This country that hadn't given him a life commensurate with his dreams had given him a funeral commensurate with his life.

It was the funeral of a man who had governed the land for a mere 166 days with his feet on the ground. However, he had been vulnerable to the wiles of those who had ruled for a quarter of a century with an army of informers, and who had held sway over peoples crushed by a never-ending degradation.

Those who are so confident of their tanks' loyalty to them should try dying some time, and when they see what kind of a funeral they're given, they'll be in for a big surprise!

Week after week, death after death, I came to realize I was living a life in the making, a life created sometimes by major events, and at other times by peripheral happenings.

At every moment, for whatever reason, my fate might take a different course.

I was a woman living among three men whose lives hung from the bullet of Fate! Their lives and destinies were controlled by those who engineered such daily death and terror in this country that I didn't know when one of them might be brought down by an accusation, or when another of them might be brought down by its opposite.

I'd become possessed by a fear of some shock lurking in the shadows, obsessed with an unexpected death that I saw hovering over everyone around me.

Between my fundamentalist brother being trailed by the authorities, my military husband under the fundamentalists' watchful eye, and the journalist I loved and whose blood was the stuff with which the other two men settle their scores, how could I possibly live outside the realm of terror?

After Boudiaf 's assassination on national television in front of millions of viewers, it was obvious that it was now open season, and after every new death the question was: Whose turn is next?

I used to try to ward off fear by writing or by loving. I thought back on everything Khaled had told me in an attempt to prepare me for a time like this. However, since Boudiaf 's death he hadn't
been here to reassure me, and all my attempts to communicate with him were in vain.

Since my home phone, being owned by the military, was tapped, even calling him from Constantine was a risky undertaking. So I would try to call whenever I found myself at a relative's house. My mother's telephone was tapped so that the government could spy on Nasser's comings and goings. This man's telephone was bound to be tapped, too, since he was both a journalist and a member of the Consultative Council. This made me lonelier than ever, and intensified the feeling that I was suffering a fate set against love.

One morning I woke up in the mood to harass memory, so to speak. After four months of anxious waiting and anticipation, I was tired of having time's corpse lying between us, and I could think of only one place that might lead me either to the man in black or to Abdelhaq.

Consequently, I made the craziest decision of my life. I put on the most modest clothes I could find and left the house without makeup or accessories of any kind. I also left without the driver. All I had in my bag was the book by Henri Michaux, which I'd brought with me so that I could use it to ward off curious glances, and the ennui that would ensue from what might be a long wait. I'd also brought it, I suspect, so that if Abdelhaq came to the café and saw me reading his own book, he would recognize me, and I would be spared having to initiate the conversation myself.

After walking a short distance, I nearly stopped to buy a newspaper. Reading newspapers had become one of my bad habits, in which respect I was like everybody else in Algeria, who would mob the newsstands every morning, whether out of boredom or fright, as though something important had
happened or was going to happen. This time, though, I thought better of it, since I knew that if I took it and read it in a café, some people might suspect me of being a journalist.

Happily, I managed to find a taxi a block from my house. As warmly as I knew how, I asked the driver to take me to ‘The Date' café. I felt somehow as though I had to prove my innocence to everybody I met, including taxi drivers, since I knew what a crazy thing I was doing.

Actually, I had a lot more craziness in store than I had good sense, and my patience level was nil. I was happy for my worldly fortune to consist in no more than a few novels I'd written for my own satisfaction and which brought me no income, but whose characters intervened in my life to the point where they might lead me to my death!

On the upper floor of the café, I sat down across from love's vacant places, expecting the appearance of a man for whom I'd grown accustomed to waiting in silence. I sat looking at a table in the right corner, remembering how lovely it is to have desire's mines explode at the moment of a first encounter.

But was I really waiting for him? Or was I, as was more likely, only waiting for someone who could lead me to Abdelhaq?

I was there for Abdelhaq. That was a certainty. So I set Henri Michaux's book on the table in hopes that he would notice it if he came.

Downstairs I could hear raucous laughter that concealed people's grief, and it struck terror in my heart. Why hadn't I had enough sense to resist a cold morning's whim? Why was I so infatuated with men with a penchant for insubordination, and with fates so impossible to get hold of ?

I set about trying to diagnose a case of love, which is always preceded by symptoms of an urge to write, and followed by some calamity.

What had brought me here? What sort of intuition had brought me out on this particular morning looking like someone who hadn't been planning on meeting anyone, then sat me down across from a desireless table?

It must have been my writer's sixth sense, which never misses the mark, and which had promised me some surprise today.

The male voices, whose numbers increased the later it got, intensified my terror, and the only thing that protected me from them was the presence of a couple talking in a nearby corner. Yet even they weren't entirely comfortable. On the contrary, they seemed flustered and nervous.

The terror had suddenly become a group contagion that could easily pass from one person to another, and was likely to become all the more potent with the passing of the days. In the face of it I found myself growing smaller and smaller until I was the size of an insect that didn't know whose stomach it was going to end up in or in which meal it would be served, just as I wondered on what charge I would end up being killed. This is the absurd, haphazard logic of death in the time of undeclared wars, the painful absurdity that Khalil Hawi summed up in the words, ‘All I know is that I'm going to die, a tiny morsel in the belly of a whale.'

There being little in the café to arouse my curiosity, I took to studying an unpretentious-looking young man reading a newspaper at the table next to mine. He looked too young to be Abdelhaq. Even so, I began sneaking glances at him out of boredom, periodically raising Henri Michaux's book in the air,
either by way of camouflage, or as a signal to some stranger who might appear. Then – out of despair, or rather, out of fear – I got up to leave. I was being assailed by scenarios from detective novels, especially now that I'd noticed I was in a café frequented by journalists.

What if the man sitting just steps away from me was concealing a pistol, hiding behind a newspaper as he lay in wait for someone or other? Most assassinations were committed by men in their twenties who were regular café-goers, or who would lean against some wall reading a newspaper while they waited for their victim.

As I gathered my things in a panic and left the price of my coffee on the table, I saw the young man open the newspaper and begin reading something with rapt attention. Then suddenly, on the front page I glimpsed a large photograph of someone whose features I knew unmistakably. Above the photo were two words in French in large bold print – two words that made me freeze in place, dumbfounded.

I would have expected anything from death – almost any, at least, of the despicable surprises that it's so inimitably good at. But that morning, a newspaper I hadn't bought brought me news of the one death I would never have expected.

The day before, the whale had opened its jaws and, for its evening meal, swallowed – among others – Abdelhaq.

A sadistic sniper par excellence, Fate takes up some forgotten corner of our lives. Then it opens fire randomly on people we love without a pang of remorse.

I'd been confronted with two surprises relating to Abdelhaq – the first being his death, and the second his picture. It was as though he had had to die in order to
become, at last, a real live man: with a full name, features, a life story, and a death story.

For me, the story had begun with his picture. I hadn't forgotten that face, which I'd contemplated at length with secret admiration one day in this very place.

So, had I come here this morning because Fate was preparing me for one of its cruel surprises, and in the very place where I'd seen him for the first time?

Had I come to witness his absence, to contemplate his unoccupied table in order to complete the cycle of leave-taking in a story in which there had been nothing but a single encounter, and the abundant stillness of absence?

As I sat there thinking, someone walked up and asked the young man to come with him because he was needed at the printer's.

So the poor guy was a journalist, after all, or, at least, he worked for a newspaper. I nearly threw my arms around him and burst into tears, and if no one else had been around, I would have. But all I could muster the courage to do was to ask him for the newspaper he'd been reading. So he handed it to me and left.

Feeling my legs giving out on me, I sat back down. This time I wasn't sitting with a figment of my imagination. I was sitting with pain.

Sorrow sat neglected in a corner of that café. The table in that corner concealed a secret, like a piano waiting for someone who was accustomed to playing it, and which remained silent without him. That table was the only thing around me that shared in my grief for him, and it seemed to wonder why he had chosen to sit there, and not elsewhere.

I turned to the page that held his picture. The caption, for all its simplicity, pained me: ‘Adieu, Abdelhaq.'

Why did the addition of the word ‘Adieu' before a name make it so painful?

So this was Abdelhaq, then.

He was the one who, dressed in a white shirt and white trousers, had occupied this very table on the day when . . .

I remembered how he'd kept writing and smoking nonstop, and how, for the nearly half hour he sat there alone, all he exchanged with me was silence and a few moments of distraction.

Then his friend had arrived, clad in black, and greeted me from afar as if he knew me. The two of them talked for quite a while, and the whole time I kept wondering if he was the man who . . .

Then all of a sudden the man in black had got up and brought me a bowl of sugar when I was about to ask the waiter for one.

I remember being surprised by his cologne, which reminded me of the cologne that . . .

So I'd tested him with an apology, only to have him reply with those terse words that . . .

That was when my senses escaped from me, and seemed to turn him into what I'd imagined him to be.

Little did I know that love was making fun of me, and leaking the same password to more than one man.

Now I realized that, by virtue of a word and a colour, I'd missed the love train that I would have taken otherwise.

In a moment of sensory chaos, I had followed the man in black, and lost my way.

He'd told me once that ‘no love is more wonderful than the kind we find when we're looking for something else'.

How was I to know now whether what I'd experienced with him was really more wonderful than what I would have experienced if I'd followed the other colour?