Two Women in One

by Nawal El Saadawi

  Now she sat on the sofa, he beside her, the window opposite and the mountain behind. Beyond the mountain the blue sky was tinged with the red glow of the late afternoon sun. The sunlight was reflected in her eyes like a radiant smile and she laughed with abandon, pointing to the window and saying, ‘What a wonderful view!’

  She expected him to take his eyes off her and look at the view, but he did not. His eyes remained on hers. She stammered as she said, ‘Why don’t you look? Isn’t the scenery wonderful?’

  His eyes still on hers, he said, ‘You are even more wonderful than the scenery!’

  She looked away from him and he seemed surprised. ‘Why do you look away?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know’, she replied, confused, ‘but your eyes sometimes seem not to belong to you.’

  ‘Whose eyes are they, then?’

  ‘Someone else’s.’

  ‘Who do you prefer: him or me?’

  ‘You.’

  They both laughed. Then he asked, ‘Do you want something to drink?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Something to eat?’

  ‘No.’

  She laughed again, for no reason. When she heard the sound of her laughter she wondered whether this was happiness and whether happiness meant that the whole world with everyone and everything in it would disappear, leaving nothing but the small area of the sofa and its two adjacent bodies, not yet touching but divided by a space no greater than a millimetre.

  She tried to retain that moment of happiness, to savour its taste. But it was thin and transparent, like a breath of air: if she raised her hand to touch it, it would be torn apart. Her hand was near his on the sofa a hair’s breadth away, but neither of them moved so much as a finger. Both were afraid that if one of them moved, the hair’s breadth of distance would die, and with it that fragile, veil-like moment of happiness.

  But they were both frustrated by this moment. They wanted it driven to a conclusion: for no one can stand more than a moment of happiness, suspended in time like a floating particle of air, suspended, neither attracted by the earth nor drawn by the sky. How difficult it is for people to be suspended between earth and sky! How strong is their desire to put their feet on the ground, or on the surface of any solid object whose familiar weight reassures them that they really exist.

  Like the force of gravity that attracts the body to the earth, his arms moved round her. They embraced with a violent desire to dissolve into the world, to lose all consciousness of the body and its weight, and to be annihilated and vanish in the air, like death, if you could manage to die and then come back to life and describe it. Yet it was not exactly like death, for in death people lose all feeling. It was like losing feeling yet not losing it, as though his body vanished while he was still there, and as though the world around him had been obliterated while he remained alive. As if the sky had become the earth and the earth the sky. It was all things intertwining, merging in a single point at the centre of the head, throbbing perceptibly like a heartbeat, but stronger.

  She heard the violent pounding of his heart. It sounded like her own heartbeat. Everything of him that reached her senses became like the touch of her own body. Only with great difficulty could she distinguish her body from his: temperature, smell, complexion, the flow of blood in the veins — all were as similar as if they were in one body. She wanted to whisper something in his ear but she could not find the words. Would she say, ‘I love you’? Before the words came to her lips, they seemed inadequate and fell far short of what she actually felt. What do the words ‘I love you’ mean?

  Only silence could express what she really felt, because silence could convey something momentous: that words between people were no longer adequate, that she must coin new ones, a whole new language. He too was silent and absorbed, as if searching for the key to the moment of eternal contact when the body would no longer feel separated from the world but would become one with it, an enormous entity filling the space between sky and earth.

  When she looked up and saw the mountain through the window-pane she slowly realized that she was returning to her definite position on the sofa. She ran her hand over her body and found that she had a body of her own, separate from his. Her eyes opened in astonishment, but she saw him in front of her and smiled. She laughed and said, ‘Isn’t this strange!’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘What’s happening between us.’

  ‘And what’s happening between us?’

  ‘Something strange.’

  ‘Why so strange?’

  ‘So fast, and without a word spoken!’

  ‘In real life there’s never any time and people invent words to justify their unreal lives.’

  They both laughed.

  ‘But how can we communicate with other people?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s impossible to communicate with other people, Bahiah. People don’t want a real person. They’re used to faking everything, including themselves, and in the end they forget what their real selves are like. When they see a real person they panic and may even try to kill him. That’s why such a person will always be hunted down, killed, condemned to death, imprisoned or isolated somewhere far from other people.’

  ‘In a flat in al-Muqattam.’

  ‘Yes, in a flat in al-Muqattam.’

  ‘I love you, Saleem.’

  His blue-black eyes were staring at the sky and the mountain and he was quiet for a long time, as if absorbed in something far off. She wanted to ask him: ‘Do you love me, Saleem?’ and to hear his voice saying, ‘I love you, Bahiah.’ But the question itself seemed meaningless, so what was the point of the answer? She loved him and whether or not he returned her love would change nothing in her feelings for him.

  ‘What are you thinking about, Saleem?’ she asked.

  ‘In nine months we may have a baby.’

  She shuddered. Her hand, lying on the arm of the sofa, began to shake and when she glanced at her watch she saw that it was half past seven. With a sinking feeling, she remembered her home, the college, her father, the dissecting room, her anatomy books, her fellow students, Dr Alawi, the tram, the streets, the people, and the whole world she had walked away from and to which she thought she would never return.

  ‘A baby?’ she asked in astonishment. The idea had never crossed her mind. She had never believed that children were created so fast and in such a trance, completely separated from earth and all sense of reality: can a body which dissolves in the universe create in that vanishing-point another body attached to the earth? Is it possible for a non-existent moment to create a concrete moment that can be touched and held?

  She felt the new pulse deep within her like magical life born out of nothingness, as if a rock fixed firmly to a mountain suddenly moved and throbbed like a heartbeat. Her lips parted in astonishment and joy and she shouted, putting her hand on her belly, ‘Look, Saleem, it’s moving.’

  He saw her looking at the mountain and asked in surprise, ‘What is?’

  ‘The mountain’, she answered, laughing.

  He laughed with her but she soon stopped, realizing that her joy was unreal: the mountain was not moving, nor the earth, the wall, the window, the sofa nor anything near her. All that was moving were the two hands on her wrist in their idiotic, slow, monotonous turn; they reminded her that time was ticking on and would never return, that the moments of her life were pouring into nothingness, and that nothing would remain but the absurd vibrations of two metal hands in a small metal box, piastre-sized and covered with glass.

  ‘Saleem’, she said sadly.

  ‘Yes, Bahiah.’

  ‘I don’t want to go home.’

  ‘Then don’t go.’

  ‘But . . . ’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘My father, my mother, the people at the college and . . . ’

  ‘And Bahiah Shaheen . . . ’

  She felt droplets of sweat on her palm and under her armpits. Her complexion turned as pale as Bahiah Shaheen’s, her eyes le
ss dark and her nose less upturned. She tried to raise her head, to make her eyes as dark as they had been and to tilt her nose as sharply upwards, dividing the world into two, passing unhesitatingly through the middle, never fearing to reach the end, the end of the end. But by now Bahiah Shaheen had returned to her. How? She did not know. Suddenly, without realizing what she was doing, she stood, took her bulging leather bag, and walked to the door.

  Back in her bed that night, she felt that what had happened was only a dream. If not a dream, then an accident that had befallen her without her willing it, like all acts of fate and destiny. Somehow she was now back in her familiar bed, her body intact and with all its usual external boundaries.

  But with some other mischievous part of her mind she realized that this accident was the only real thing in her life. It was not an accident, a dream, an act of fate and destiny or mere chance, but the only act she had ever performed intentionally, the only thing she had actually wanted to do.

  None of her life was of her doing or her own choice. It was her mother who had given birth to her and her father who had enrolled her at the medical college. Her aunt, who suffered from a lung disease, wanted her to specialize in this particular field of medicine. Her uncle wanted her to be a successful, highly-paid doctor, who would marry his son, the business-school graduate. Her savings would grow thanks to his expertise in commerce, and they would raise children who would inherit their wealth and bear his name, and the names of his father and grandfather before him.

  Everyone told her what they wanted. No one asked her what she wanted. In fact, she had never wanted any of the things they wanted for her. She did not want to be a doctor, and especially not a chest specialist. She used to watch the rows of TB patients looking like walking skeletons, their doctors obese and flabby. She had never liked her uncle or his son the businessman. The whole family thought him good-looking: he was tall, slim, with a fair complexion and pink cheeks. His eyes glowed with health and happiness. His features were as innocent as a child’s. It was as if he was still being breast-fed. He gave everyone the same happy, vacuous smile.

  She hated his smile and his happiness, and responded with bared teeth and angry lips. But he never got angry, believing — either because he was stupid or because, like all stupid men, he was arrogant — that she was hiding her real admiration for him behind those bared teeth. He would say to her in his dull, flat voice, ‘I know women. A woman says no, but her heart says yes.’

  She would have liked to spit in his face, but she would not do anything out of choice. So when she saw her father smiling at him, she would smile too, saying, ‘Who told you that I’m a girl?’ They were used to hearing this question from her. It did not annoy them; on the contrary, her father was rather pleased by it, as if secretly delighted that his daughter was not really a girl, or as if he wished, deep down, that she was not. She knew that her father’s approval was genuine, for he had wanted her to be a boy. But her mother had willed something different and given birth to a girl — or perhaps it was not her mother at all, but mere chance that had made her female.

  The word female sounded like an insult to her, like the first exposed genitals she had ever seen. She felt embarrassed when she undressed in the bathroom. She could not stand to look at her naked body in the mirror. When her fingers approached her genitals while washing, she would jerk them away, as if her hand had touched an electrified or prohibited area. She still remembered the rap her mother gave her as a child. The traces of her mother’s big fingers were engraved in her memory and stuck to her skin like a tattoo. Her mother’s voice still rang in her ears: ‘Don’t do that. Say “I won’t do it again!” ’ She did not say it. What could there be in that forbidden area? She would examine her body with trembling hands. She felt that something dangerous was concealed in that forbidden place. She could not touch it or see it, but it was there all the same. She felt it clearly between her legs. Her mother’s fingers would tremble when she neared it when she washed her daughter’s body. It must be dangerous and frightening. But she carried it in her body as an inseparable part of her. Sometimes she would forget it and consider it one of the myths that had filled her head as a child. At other times it would become an inevitable naked truth like a live wire; when she touched it her body would shiver and tremble violently.

  ‘Bahiah!’ . . . Her father’s voice rang in her ear like a shot, like the sole voice of truth. It made her realize that she was Bahiah Shaheen, hard-working, well-behaved medical student, the pure virgin, untouched by human hands and born without sex organs.

  She pulled the bedclothes over her head and feigned sleep as she heard her father’s footsteps coming toward the bed. His big fingers lifted the blankets and he stared at her and discovered, thunderstruck, that she was not Bahiah Shaheen after all: she was not his daughter, nor was she polite, obedient or a virgin; she had actually been born with sex organs, not only clearly visible through the bedclothes but moving as well, like the very heartbeat of life. By moving, she had removed the barrier in her way. She had torn away the membrane separating her from life. It was a thin membrane, intangible and invisible, like a transparent glass panel dividing her from her body, standing between herself and her reality. She could see herself through it but could not touch it or feel it, for it was like glass; the slightest movement and it would shatter.

  Her mother used to gasp when she saw her jumping down the stairs. Then Bahiah would hear her heart thumping. She would tense the muscles of her legs, bring her thighs tightly together, and walk towards her mother with that familiar girl’s gait: legs bound together, barely separated from one another. She felt that if they separated, something would tumble down like broken glass.

  When her mother disappeared into the kitchen, Bahiah would go back to her jumping. It was not enough to bound down the stairs, so she would stand on the balcony (their flat was on the first floor) and leap, shouting for joy when she felt her body flying, weightless, as light as air. The earth would no longer pull her towards it, she had rid herself of its iron grip for ever — but it was a fleeting moment. She had time for just one joyful shout before gravity pulled her back and she tumbled down like a falling star, her body plummeting to the ground like a stone.

  She would pick herself up, brush the dust off her clothes and gingerly touch her arms and legs. Everything was in place! Bones still unbroken. She then came to suspect that her mother had been lying to her and that no part of her was breakable after all. Then she would jump as she walked, swinging her legs freely and separating them wide apart, now certain that no glass object lay between them. She would climb onto the balcony and jump a second, third, fourth, and twentieth time. With each jump she became more convinced that nothing would break, that her muscles were strong and her bones firm. She pumped the air proudly with her knees, as her brother did when he walked. She stood erect, lifted her head high and focused on life, her dark eyes wide, sharp, and unblinking. With great pride she moved her feet over the ground. When standing, she would put one foot up on any chair or table. She would lift it onto any high edge, just like her father when he stood in the living room — and with the same pride.

  ‘This is disgraceful, Bahiah’, her mother said, slapping her knee to make her put her foot down. ‘Can’t you see how your girlfriends stand?’ She would look at the other girl students with their fat, tightly bound legs, their beaten eyes like the eyes of the corpse laid out on the table, and their trembling lancets as they approached the uterus or penis. Their defeated eyes made her angry, and she was sure that she did not belong to this sex, that nothing in her was breakable. When she raised her eyes, her gaze was level, and no power on earth could make her lower them.

  The next morning she went off to college as usual. She entered the dissecting room just like any other day, but she walked differently. Her feet were not hers. The hand holding the bag was not hers. Her eyes were no longer her own. She looked like the person who had been there yesterday, the day before and the day before that, but it was definit
ely not her. She was different. Things looked different to her. They were smaller and paler than before — and slower too. The bodies of the male students were smaller, the female students’ legs moved more slowly. They walked like reptiles, legs together, and if their thighs happened to separate briefly, they would quickly snap together again. The girls pressed their legs together as if something valuable might fall if they separated. They held their leather satchels bulging with anatomy books against their chests, hiding something valuable from the male students’ gaze and sharp elbows. None of the female students could walk alone. They always went in groups, like gaggles of geese. If one of them found herself alone in the college grounds or in the lecture hall she would quicken her step, her high heels tapping, anxious to catch up to the other women students and hide her body among theirs.

  She saw Dr Alawi doing his rounds of the tables and sneaked out through the back door of the dissecting room. She wandered around the spacious grounds as if looking for someone, then went into the exhibition to look at the paintings and see her drawings. Her black eyes searched for those blue-black eyes, for the thin face with its exhausted, sharply-defined features. She left and walked slowly around the grounds scrutinizing the male students’ faces. Their faces, movements and voices were all similar. When you looked into their eyes you would not even see them. She drowned in a sea, seen or recognized by no one. Her face became like those of the other female students: Bahiah, Aliah, Zakiah and Yvonne, it made no difference.

  Without thinking, she ran out into the street. She recognized her footsteps. The street was not horizontal like all the others, but sloped upwards. Her body travelled up it and she panted as her eyes were drawn irresistibly to that grey cloud-coloured house; she was pulled by fine wires like invisible silken threads, with all the speed she could muster, in harmony with the blood coursing through her veins. The heat and warmth of her blood drove her on inexorably to her destiny, whatever it might be, even if it meant death and extinction.