She said to him: Mahmud, in the end, is insignificant and silly. I had to put him in his place. I am sorry. He wasn’t acceptable.
He said: What did he do? What did he say?
She said: Nothing in reality. Trivialities. No reason at all to make you jealous of him.
He said: No reason?
She said, going out from Mikhail’s place at high noon, as she was closing the door behind her: I am the one who is beginning to be jealous—something that has never happened to me before. I was trying to trigger your jealousy all day.
She closed the door in a hurry without waiting for a response.
He did not tell her: Because I worry about you. Because I am concerned, in the end, with the immediacy of your responsiveness toward them, concerned by the easy companionship you grant them.
She had said to him: You don’t care about knowing people. This isolation of yours and your solitary inclination …
He said: Not that. I do care about knowing people. I’m fascinated by them and I yearn to know them. Their ideas, dreams, calculations fascinate me. But who can claim to know people genuinely in this confused marketplace which has nothing but buying and selling? There are no people in it, only instruments. They have turned themselves into instruments. How do we know them? I mean, the burning knowledge, the knowledge of those we love: For this is knowledge. What are you thinking about? How do you feel? What do you read? Of what do you dream? Even, how do you breathe? What are your discourses, your visions, your concealed ravings? What is in your handbag? This is not meddling. To know is not to possess or to dominate. Knowledge, alone, is Truth; it is love.
She said: Haven’t I told you that you are Platonic?
He did not say to her: No, this jealousy is simply an irresistible inclination toward possessing love alone. Nothing else. Not your life nor your memories, not your past nor your future. But only this love-eroticism-knowledge, filling all the gaps of the past and future, making it one massive body, no matter how heavy and stifling, nor how crushing and unbearable.
He said to himself: No, the issue for me is ambiguous. Doubtless. Furthermore, these are the ideas of the market place exposed at every corner. So why are you tortured by such vulgar, common, and trodden ways?
In a hoarse voice, she was humming a song to him, making him feel as if he were on a ship without mast or sail, deep within its somber inner hold, as it tracked across still waters toward a vast blue sea whose light foamy waves poured onto a sand of green slopes from which grew lofty, ancient cedar trees.
He said: I have not heard you laugh loudly, burst into laughter, at all. How does your laughter sound?
She said: Maybe I am more inclined to be tragic, somehow. Like you.
He said: There is something tragic in you, it’s true. Not melodramatic; something inevitable, as if fated despite all your surprises.
She said: Yes, written on the forehead.
He held her hand.
He said to her: I really want to know who I am in your view, my image in your mind.
She said to him: As you wish. I have two images of you. One is that of a rational man: the image of a man who lives by a set of rules and conventions concerning what one should and should not do; the image of an ethical man or at least he who views everything in an ethical light. This, in itself, is a good thing. The other image is that of an emotional man: the image of a donor. You know my well-known distinction between people. For me people fall into two categories: those who take and those who give.
She gazed at him for a moment then said: You are in the category of those who give. Of course, you also take like everyone else. But giving for you is what you wish for, in my opinion.
He said urgently: Where are you situated in this split image?
She said: I am the wicked side of you; that is the way you see me. The side in you that dismisses rules, conventions, that which should be done, which is correct, permissible; the side that does away with social and psychological fetters. This is what I am for you. This is what drives me crazy almost. This is what I hate in you.
He was baffled. The surprise was such that he could not respond to it at all. Her words had never occurred before in his mind.
He said to himself: You are extremely self-conscious, you ramble too much about yourself. That is why you don’t know yourself, and you don’t know her, and you don’t know what goes into her mind. With all this babble you say nothing in the end, and particularly you don’t say anything about yourself.
He said to himself: Also, in everything you say there are these familiar, ready-made formulas available in the marketplace. Her body is hers alone; she possesses it and she has never turned it into a commodity; it has never been an instrument. She has made love with you and others, but she has not compromised her body or cheapened it; she has never turned it into a thing. This is a way of speaking, a discursive formula. Granted. She is the only one capable of giving or not giving her body. You cannot take it for granted, doing with it what you please. It is not an object. Between her and her body there is total unification. She is, contrary to you, seeking multiplicity from within her unargued unity. As for you, you are searching for a divided, fragmented, lost unity.
He did not say to her: I am not holding you accountable, nor is it within my capacity to do so. You have absolute freedom, and this is not a donation or a gift from me. I know—it seems to me I know—the wretchedness that pushes you and provokes you toward your madness as well as the wretchedness that keeps you within the fences of your moderation. My eternal wise child, the enchantress who cannot be seized: Because I love you, I want to know who you are, what you are. I want to plunge my naked hands into your innermost being without wounding you. And I know that it is impossible. Don’t say this is sadism. That would be easy. How difficult it is to tell you that the inundation of this love brings along self-loss and self-discovery in the same act. This is another formula: to cross in dignity the space of unbearable humiliation. A formula, formula, formula. Where can I find the redeeming word? When can I finish with the suffering of faltering and muttering? Don’t tell me it is simply the wish to possess when I really want freedom, not my freedom, but freedom … with you, as a crown under your feet. Yet I am unable to reach its threshold. You and I continue to be bound by fetters when I want to reshape the face of the world after your face. This is my freedom. What insolence!
He was silent.
Why?
He said: Surely words impoverish, because they put fences around that which cannot be enclosed.
He said: Because there is the act. Acts alone can give silence its meaning.
He said: Acts too can contain ambivalence. In fact, they are mysterious in themselves. They are the thing and its opposite. They are limited too, and they set limits.
He said: Therein lies their value.
He said: Whither escape? An act is more than one thing and less than one thing.
He said: Words too are acts, acts-in-words, their tone, warmth, allusion, spontaneity, reserve, inarticulateness are all necessary, inevitable, vital.
She said: You make my head turn. Isn’t all this absurd?
The old-fashioned kerosene lamp fell with him, with its plump belly, its long glass neck, as he dropped down on the floor without a sound. Is this the old yellow mat that used to be on the floor of his room in their house in Ghayt al-‘Inab in the years of his childhood? His hands were hanging onto air while the glass belly had broken and its fragments flown about, mute on the mat, as the kerosene flowed slowly. An elongated circular spot darkened over the slender cords of the delicately woven mat, flattened by successive footsteps and the pressure of cushions and soft, sitting pillows. His face bumped across its soft cords. A sudden pain stabbed his chest as he was opening his mouth that had smashed against the floor, but no sound was emitted. Wide stretched wings with firm feathers flap on his body, but he does not hear their flutter. They hit the walls that contract and enclose completely on him. The slow spreading fire has the color of light red
with dancing fringes inclining toward the color of orange peel. He shakes off a nameless pain as if his limbs are cracking and dropping shaggy-sided, like sharp stones, and ripping hooks plunge into his living flesh. He strikes with both fists on the floor without the slightest sound or echo. The successive, random pounding does not help him. The windowpane shudders, and suddenly from it comes the sound of continuous convulsion. It is the first sound he hears after a long silence. He falls at once into a wounding, resounding, successive clamor. The huge wings flutter roughly around his head and rap with tight armor and rattling iron clatter. The tall spear plunges into a muddy sky. The trumpets of heralds resound at a distance in despairing lament. Stars fall and crumble between his fingers. The smile of pleasure on her beautiful face appears in a rusty brass mask that stretches out and is crushed by armors. The waves of the oceans of the universe cannot erase the bitterness in his mouth, nor wipe the pain bursting in his ribs. A tremendous earthquake hurls him. He is tossed about by the walls of the confining room that contains heaven and earth, having all become a vast ruin in which the wind blows. The braids of her honey hair are drooping from the sun, and the green-eyed moon is dripping blood. His eyes shed pebbles of tears. The seven seals are locked. They are not opening in the clamor of the earthquake nor are they broken by his fist which continues to fumble with their locks. The black steed rips the ceiling, escaping with the fast beat of the rumbling thunder of its hooves. The guts of the Dragon are open, throbbing and welling out a bloody flood, gushing in the glow of fires in the dark, which is then swallowed by the wasteland. The two great olive trees have dropped their fruits in the roar of outpouring waters. The six wings are not broken in a war that ends in either victory or defeat. Heaven’s towers are collapsing, but the supple feminine body in his contracting embraces is pure. It has not been touched by the flood of water replete with corpses. The large sunflowers with their rounded tips and dark-colored centers are up, thriving and swaying among the flames, and he has fallen.
He calls out voicelessly in the clamor of the earthquake: O Mikhail! O Archangel! O Centurion!
His arms desperately and heroically encircle the legs of the old desk-where he used to sit studying and dreaming, during the years of his childhood—seeing with unblinking eyes its marble, oval slab, and holding onto its carved twisting legs of old black wood infested by woodworms making small irregular holes in it. The desk is staggering, almost falling then straightening over his head. The tongues of fire rise up with elegance and precision, licking the lower, rough, gray side of the white marble. Her cold, soft arms, as if they were weightless, were embracing his neck above the rapping of wild wings, blowing a breeze of repose and ease. He longs to wallow his ripped face in the freshness of her temptation. But he does not say the words of the final incantation that consecrates his fall and repose: “O my enchantress, I surrender to you.” No words can be pulled from his innermost. A destructive, ardent, scorching, cauterizing flame, touched by pain monsters, has lived with him for a long time. He cannot live with them without retribution.
Water drops fall from the long, rusty wound in the stone of the centuries-old statue. The murmuring water flows cheerfully, without quivering, under the light poured from a strong, high-pitched, firmly radiant lamp. The iron surrounding the fountain is low, circular, presenting an island in a street gushing with two streams of shiny cars—one in each direction—hurrying with their noisy, exploding, fluctuating emissions.
The new friends, Mikhail and Rama, having come out of the cinema, are overlooking the statue from behind a broad windowpane inside a large modern restaurant practically without customers. Their comfortable seats were mounted with ribbed, black plastic resembling leather, Formica armrests dappled with splendid cunning to imitate wood. The hollow, round aluminum, resembling commonplace silver, emits hushed echoes whenever a leg accidentally grazes it.
They have been to the cinema. Her warm and subdued whispering—unfolding vague images that possess distinctly erotic features-draws the side of her face, radiant with captivating appeal, near to his eyes. He glances at her as if she were part of the film itself, his arm in his short-sleeve shirt touching her soft, bare arm whose fullness increases as she presses it on the rough woolly armrest cover. Between them stands a kind of physical affection, a warm, undeclared sensual understanding.
After the disappearance of the last traffic wave over the crosswalks used by the nocturnal crowds and the dispersal of the last show viewers gathered in their intimate circles, the lit city became theirs, as if its empty, clean, wide streets were welcoming avenues into the mind for a gentle night wind that promised unlimited good things. Having left the restaurant they passed an endless series of dazzling ponds of light, gravely empty and quiet, choosing to amble toward islands of still shades with tree leaves fluttering harmoniously.
He said to her: I have known streets of many cities in almost all hours of day and night. There is nothing more beautiful than empty streets at night with the city lamps lighting them in a practically useless way. Public lights fall on buildings and on the black asphalt-vast, shiny, free—which can be crossed and walked on without penalty. Despite the heaving danger and the unknown, the city seems as if healed forever of hidden evil and violence, from the wrangles of a herd of mechanical and electrical armors gushing without stopping. How beautiful is this city!
Just before their walk, they had ordered hamburgers and beer; she said she liked beer. They ate with an appetite for everything. She spoke spontaneously and heatedly about her fear of death, though not her own. She said that death was horrible and unimaginable. He said: No one ever believes inside himself that he will die. Death is simply an abstraction, something that happens to others, and does not happen to me at all. It is the only thing that no one knows, for I think that even at the very unimaginable moment of loss of consciousness, no one knows, no one believes that he will die, nor would he know the meaning of death even if he knew and believed that it would happen. For a person remains convinced, intuitively certain, that he will live, until he crosses the boundaries. And he is right, for even in crossing he lives. After that no consciousness, nothing. Yes, death is the only thing that can never be known, neither before nor after. What is known about it are things related to it, associated with it, that precede it or surround it, but not the reality itself. Death—simply—does not exist.
She said in a bout of strange passion that this was exactly what she had been thinking about all the time without saying it, for no one would believe it or be convinced by it. She said: The frightening thing is the death of a loved person. And she asked: How can someone live if his truly beloved person dies? She said: This is the death that a person feels and knows intimately through a loss that cannot be made up for at all. This is the diffused suffering, gratuitous, filling the corners of earth and heaven. And she asked: Why? Why? The flowers of such suffering are so thorny.
Her eyes watered. She was swept by terrible fear, provoked, maintained by the fact that her loved ones were still living, that they had not died. She said that she was ready to die for the sake of those she truly loved. She said that she prayed, never knowing whether she was a believer or not, but nevertheless pleading vaguely and daily to a divine power to protect and keep alive those whom she loved.
He said to her: As if you were talking with my voice, expressing what I sense without having given it a form or a definition!
Their happiness in this rare, enabling articulation was complete and untarnished. They celebrated in the refreshing, faint glow of the beer mugs, in the light meal, and in the warmth of the sensuous closeness in the cool night air blowing from the open window, open onto the wet statue and fountain—gushing in geometrically intricate trajectories; its drizzle radiating on the husky, muscular male body in a challenging position, entrenching his exploding legs in the earth, two tree trunks of undecaying stone.
He saw on her bare arm, as if embroidered on her skin, the trace of the cinema armrest with its rough woolly cover.
She said to him: I always need human warmth, human relations. I cannot stand for any substitute. I can’t live in a furnished apartment, day in, day out by myself, cooking on Fridays for the week, washing my pantyhose on Saturdays, going to the hairdresser on Sundays. I am not this kind. I want to meet people, talk and live with them, get out in the world and encounter new types of men. This is why you find me looking for inspection trips in my job, so that I can embark to any place without hesitation.
He said without complaint, without disapproval: As for me, I am a loner. I can—and at times I love to—stay in my room for a week without seeing streetlights.
She said thoughtfully: Yes, that is possible for you. You can be cut off from people.
He said: No, no. I need people badly, especially those I love, even if at a distance. The most important thing is that they are there. Being cut off, like monks are, troubles me and gives me insomnia.
One day, he said to himself: Was her interest in me in the beginning simply to pick up a new type of man? A new naive type that seemed uncontaminated, simply for the hobby of her collection? How does she best get to know new types of men? Is this an accusation of cheapness I’m launching?
He said to himself: Why does the traditional reaction of an Eastern man, of a southern Egyptian, persist in you? Isn’t it an outdated and medieval sensibility, no matter what philosophical and contemporary views and positions—existentialism, Marxism-are involved?
It never occurred to him to answer the question, which, in the final analysis, constituted a process: admission of the fact, then the doubting of it, then the admission of it again: an endless cycle.
He said to her: The need for human warmth triggers your many friendships?
She leaned toward him, in the fervor of an opening up between two new friends. The pressure of her breasts on the bra beneath the light blouse was evident. She pushed her face close to his unintentionally, relaxing her bosom on the Formica table next to the empty beer mug on whose lip a slight white foam was attached, and, on the other side the shiny metal box from which white paper napkins come out, also the small ceramic hamburger plate with its brown color and traces of dark red, dry ketchup.
Rama and the Dragon Page 19
