When I announced one day in front of my male and female colleagues gathered around the lunch table that monogamy was contrary to nature, that fidelity was merely an illusion, that sexual desire needed freedom in order to flourish, and so on, they looked at me with mistrust and suspicion before embarking on a heated discussion in which I took no part. My game consists of throwing out words and observing their effect.
From Marguerite Duras I learned to conceal from my lovers the love I felt for my husband. And to conceal from my husband the love I felt for my lovers: that I learned from all women.
I learned to be the sole guardian of my nights. My secret could never be known because I told it to no one. Is a secret that is shared by two people no longer a secret? No. Any secret that is shared is not a secret.
My recurring nightmare took the form of one unchanging scenario: there was a corpse hidden somewhere and I was the murderer. I had hidden the corpse carefully and I lived in terror of its being discovered. I would scheme in vain to prevent the others from seeing it, but sooner or later they would. The nightmare was set in those moments that preceded the discovery of my crime, of the corpse, of all my hidden secrets. I would open my eyes in the darkness, trembling with terror. “The skeleton’s in the closet,” as the proverb says. Everything was clear; I didn’t need an expert to interpret these dreams.
I lost my memory of things at will: a useful trick for living in this society. I would erase memories or keep them at will—over long years I practiced this art until I was so supple at it that it required no thought.
I was my own role model. I had no need of worldly or heavenly guidance. I had no need of a fatwa that would allow me to cling to my men in the fever hours. Mr. Quick loved to tell a certain story. Once upon a time he had a colleague, a woman journalist. They were on assignment together and she knocked on the door of his hotel room one night, well after midnight, to ask him to be one of the witnesses to a rapidly arranged wedding. The African who had caught her fancy, and whose fancy she had caught, had refused to sleep with her in a state of sin; he needed two witnesses for his one-night marriage. Mr. Quick told the story to anyone who’d listen, and everyone, gloating and sneering, passed it on as if they, too, had been there. I remember I told it to the Thinker and we amused ourselves running through names in search of anyone we knew who could serve as our own witness.
Such a marriage is called a “marriage of pleasure.” It is permitted to Shiites, and only to Shiites. Could I consider every man I’d known (in the Biblical sense) “a husband of pleasure”?
A marriage of pleasure? The basic contradiction between the two nouns is evident. The first makes a slave of the spirit. The second frees it.
Perhaps the virtue in a marriage of pleasure is that it lasts only as long as the pleasure lasts. Its other virtue lies in the fact that the pleasure to be found in it is legal, licit, halal. Without the “for all eternity” part, marriage isn’t quite so burdensome—is it not so?
The “marriage of pleasure” is for Shiites only. That doesn’t concern me in the least. I do not recognize communalism or religious divisions. In any case, I cannot consider my passing men to be “husbands of pleasure” because I have yet to fulfill the rules of religious law, which states:
The marriage of foreshortened term, like that which is permanent, requires a contract that includes positive oral response and acceptance, the inward consent of the two parties being insufficient. It follows that the contract of a marriage of pleasure is, unambiguously, a legal contract, with all the latter’s conditions. It is reported on the authority of Aban ibn Taghlib that he said to Abu ‘Abd al-Rahman: “How should a man make a contract with a woman if he finds himself alone with her?” And he replied: “You say, I marry you for pleasure according to God’s Book and the practice of His prophet, without your acquiring the right to inherit or to pass on by inheritance, for so and so many days. If she replies in the positive then she has consented and thus become your wife, and the priority of your claim to her over that of all other people is established.”
I wonder where the African came up with the clause about the two witnesses. I can’t find a trace of it in the books of Muslim jurisprudence. Indeed, that never concerned me; in my secret rites, I made do with the announcement of desire through the body. After all that I’d read and studied and learned and been taught, nothing remained in my head but the word “desire,” and the pleasure of its satisfaction.
Second Gate
ON THE THINKER AND PERSONAL HISTORY
The Thinker is a tale on his own. My life is divided into two halves—Before the Thinker and After the Thinker. I would come to him completely wet. It was enough for me to think of him and I would be ready for love.
The Thinker would say: “You’re always aroused. I’ve never seen you when you weren’t ready for love.” I’d smile, thinking it unnecessary to explain that he was the reason for my readiness. I would just throw myself on him and my analysis would be confirmed.
Once, on the metro, I was deep in thought, reliving an encounter with him, when I noticed that the man sitting opposite was staring at me. He was looking at me as though he were reading my thoughts. As though he were watching a pornographic film. Was it not the Thinker himself, one day when we were seated in a café and I could hardly contain my lust for him, who said, “I’ve never before known a woman whose face proclaimed her ‘erection.’”
I would come to him wet and he would slip his finger between my legs, looking for “the honey,” as he used to call it, tasting it and kissing me and pushing his tongue deep into my mouth. “Clearly, you follow the Prophet’s commandments,” I’d say, “and take him as your model, for did he not say, ‘Let not one of you fall upon your folk as a beast does, but let there be between you a messenger—the kiss, and conversation.’ And A’isha, the Prophet’s favorite wife, said, ‘the messenger of God, when he kissed one among us, would suck on her tongue.’”
How could I refute such a heritage? How could I not remind the Thinker of it? He had no need of anyone to remind him of his heritage. In such things he was a Muslim par excellence, as was I.
I would go to him in the morning before work. I would run up the steps. A light ring on the bell and he would open the door immediately, as though he had been waiting for me behind it, half asleep. I would throw off my clothes and slip into the bed. I would cling to him and start sniffing him. He would raise the cover and his hand would caress me, slowly. Grave and happy, he would taste my honey. I would investigate every place on his body with my lips. My eyes were open, and likewise my body. Between my greedy haste and his appreciative deliberation we found our rhythm. Time passed, we remained together. Beneath him, above him, to the side of him, flat on my belly, or on my knees; between each position and the next, he would repeat his pet phrase: “I have an idea.” He was never short on ideas. As for me, I adore philosophy, the world of ideas. I named him “The Thinker.”
The Thinker is a tale on his own. My life is divided into two halves—yes, BT and AT. Before him was my prehistoric age.
Which does not mean that I was a virgin either in spirit or in body. I was neither the one nor the other. I was not like Eve, “who asked Adam the first time he slept with her, ‘What is this?’ and he said, ‘They call it fucking,’ to which she replied, ‘Fuck me again, for it is good.’”
I, for all my practical experience and my secret and public readings, was only dimly aware of what pleasure was. It was like a blurry picture. The Thinker came, and contours appeared. The lines and the colors became clear, the lighting focused. I no longer acted my part. I became myself.
BT, was that not my Prehistoric Age?
I would meet men. I would fancy them, and they would fancy me. I knew what I wanted from them and I didn’t care what they wanted from me. Pages covered with words written on top of one another, accumulating, not a single one ever erased. In the end, what was spread out before me was a spoiled draft whose symbols no one could make sense of, not even myself—page
s written in a secret code. The Thinker came to shine a light on the code and make sense of the symbols. He did not sweep the past aside but bestowed upon me a key with which to read the palimpsest of my life.
AT was the Age of the Sexual Renaissance, my own personal renaissance, and everything that I lived thereafter, with other men, was colored by my time with him.
This has nothing to do with the satisfaction of appetite.
Before him I was complete unto myself, replete, quenched—and it showed. The Traveler had seen it. When a friend of mine complained that a lesbian had tried to seduce her, I replied: “No lesbians ever tried to seduce me.”
The Traveler interrupted: “You exude the scent of men, how do you expect a woman to want to seduce you . . .”
The Thinker used to tell me, “So far you’ve been used to filling up on fast food. You’ll know another kind of nourishment with me.” Was he right?
Perhaps.
He used to tell me, “There are two kinds of women—lettuce women, and women of embers.” “What am I?” I’d ask slyly. He wouldn’t answer but would pull me to his chest and I’d throw myself on him and kiss his eyes and his lips and taste his saliva, and he’d run his hand over my belly and I’d open my legs and he’d enter me deeply burning in consort with me. I wanted to ask: And men? How many types of men are there?
But my pleasure made me forget all questions.
We had one rhythm from the beginning. We didn’t need to practice, or tune our instruments. He would be astonished and proclaim his astonishment. I wouldn’t have time to share in his proclamations. My time was dedicated wholly to pleasure. I would fall silent. I would cling to his body and bury my face beneath his armpit and breathe his smell deeply into my chest.
“The benefits of intercourse are in the first place the satisfaction of lust, in the second the enjoyment of pleasure, and in the third healing.”
Behind the closed door he’d give me a farewell embrace. We never could leave one another without ado. He’d kiss me and kiss me again. I couldn’t pull myself away. I’d kneel down in front of him and bend over and rub my face against him and want it to fill my mouth, almost choking with longing. It would grow as I sucked greedily down to the last drop and then raise my eyes to watch his face, tense with pleasure. His head was thrown back, his hands were in my hair. Only then could I return to the world, illuminated by the taste of him in my mouth—“thick, white, sweet, exuding the piercing smell of camphor,” as it is in the books.
He used to tell me, “You are beautiful.” After every period of separation, as though shocked by the fact, he’d say: “You’re getting more beautiful. Widowhood suits you.” I never thought myself a widow, neither in his absence nor in his presence. I’d smile and think of Garance’s response in Les Enfants du paradis: “I’m not beautiful, I’m simply alive. That’s all there is to it.” I’d say nothing, but he understood the silence of my smile.
He would encircle my wrist with two fingers and say, “This is what comes to mind when I think of you: closed and open. It’s something rare.” He’d squeeze harder as he explained to me. With him, the discoveries never ceased. Everything was new to me. This was what he called “the nutcracker.” I had to look it up right away in the dictionary of sex.
Long after he’d left me I still shuddered with the feeling of him inside me. I’d wait for the moment when I could slip away from others to be on my own, then close my eyes and fill myself with him all over again. I never told him.
He would say, “You don’t talk much,” and I would content myself with a smile. I talked to myself. I had become accustomed to talking to myself. Even with him?
He would close his eyes as though he were reviewing a storehouse of images: “What I see drawn before me is the furrow down the middle of your back that ends in two deep dimples. Two curves above your waist, and then your buttocks. Beneath the dome lies the Silk Road. Did you know that?” he would ask. And I would reply frivolously, “I cannot see what you see.”
“I’ll bring a camera next time, and you’ll see what I see,” he’d answer, as if he were sure to astonish me.
One day, after an absence, the Thinker asked me, “Do you think about me?” I said, “Yes.” “So it’s love,” he said. I fell silent and didn’t answer.
The Thinker was incapable of walking next to me without putting his hand on my backside and caressing it through my clothes or directly on the flesh. I’d yell and move away, saying “You’re crazy! We’re in the street. People can see us.” I was a coward and my sexual freedom only expressed itself in practical terms when I was far from others. “You attract people’s attention when you move away. In fact, they see nothing. Nobody will look at us if you keep walking calmly,” he would respond, putting his hand back on me. I’d gasp in spite of myself and cling to him. And I would forget the strangers’ eyes.
He’d start looking for the doorway to the next building so that he could draw me inside, kiss my lips, suck on my tongue, and feel my breasts. His boldness flustered me, but I was thrilled by the game. I took to walking next to him, my eyes searching with his for that doorway where I could kiss him, suck on his tongue, and feel his body.
One day the Thinker wrote to me. A love letter. I said to myself, How can he use the word “love”? I avoid it as much as I can, with him and with others. I do not know love, I know desire. Love belongs to a world of occult mysteries that is beyond me, and I have no desire to chase after it. Desire—my own or another’s—is something I know. I can touch it, see it, smell it, experience its effects and transformations. It alone takes me by the hand to lead me toward my unknown spaces.
Love is for the soul, desire for the body. I have no soul. This idea haunted me before I discovered that there was a time when women were denied a soul.
When I was young I couldn’t find my soul. When I grew up, I couldn’t be bothered to look for it. “I have no soul”—the sentence became engraved in my memory and I started to live my life through it. I knew that I was body alone, that I possessed nothing else. My body was my intelligence, my consciousness, and my culture. He who desired my body loved me. He who loved my body desired me. This was the only love that I knew, and the rest was literature.
When the Thinker asked me at the beginning, “Is what is between us just sex?” I didn’t answer. I didn’t say to him, “I love only with my body. I have no other way of expressing love.”
Before the Thinker, my public and my secret lives ran in parallel. As a little girl, I’d learned in school that two parallel lines never meet. Some wits claim that in the schools in Saudi Arabia they add the words “unless God wills,” but that’s another story.
The parallel lines of my life never met, just like it says in the books on architecture. The Thinker came and confusion set in, like in Saudi Arabian schools.
The change began within me. I carried him out of my secret life and introduced him into my public one. I’d think about him, look for him, yearn to see him. I was scared. He had stepped into my everyday life, and it was not what I had bargained for. Equilibrium is my lifeline and to break it meant that everything would change. That is not what I wanted. I had wanted to control my own life with the skill of a great director. Now that I had departed from the script, the plot was running away from me, the pages of the script turned before my eyes but I was unable to grasp them.
I look at my face in the mirror and I remember. He said, “after love, your eyes turn dark and your skin is illumined, as though there were a light beneath your pores.” “All women are like that after love,” I would reply. He would rub his face between my breasts and nestle there. I would tighten my arms around him to force him closer against my breasts, the better to feel him.
I contemplate my body and I remember. The first time he entered me, he praised the glory of God. I smiled. He pressed me to him, naked and hot. He kissed me and I forgot to laugh.
In my dream, the Thinker was waiting for me and I burned to be with him but the people around us would not allow
it. I told him the dream. He wasn’t amused. “As you are in life, so you are in the dream—powerless, incapable of doing anything for me.” He spoke solemnly, looking deep into my eyes. I turned away and pretended to be absorbed by the passers-by, trying to ignore the boiling of my blood and the pounding in my heart.
Was I starting to get scared?
The night the Thinker stole into my dreams, I knew that our story was beyond my control. The abyss opened before me and day after day I watched it grow wider.
The Thinker wrote me a love letter: my heart was blind and I was afraid.
Before the Thinker, men entered my dreams only long after they had left my bed. None of them, ever, had slipped from my bed into my sleep. They had to be left to mature in my secret caves for a time before they could come to me in my dreams and enliven them. I needed time as my accomplice to recreate them as stories that kindled my imagination, as words that restored my balance. The Thinker, however, would steal away from my bed and enter my dreams: he was going too far, too fast. He came to me. I awoke.
I was scared.
Third Gate
SEX AND THE (ARAB) CITY
Following the shock of the first discovery, I continued to read whatever books on sex I came across in Arabic, wherever my curiosity led me. I waited years, however, before starting my systematic reading. That began when I first went to work at the university library, where I stumbled upon a long list of erotic books in Arabic. I started reading carefully, one by one. Was it not part of my duties to know the contents of the library’s holdings?
My professional conscience was indefatigable. The book remained invisible, carefully concealed under a plain wrapper or hidden behind another and, from a distance, I appeared to be a very serious and very studious person, utterly absorbed by her research. The moment a student approached me the clandestine book would disappear. I would attend to his request and go back to my reading. Whenever a new book was added to the collection in what I considered my specialization, my appetite for discovery would lead me straight to it. As the years passed and my readings accumulated, I became an expert on books on erotica. A secret expert, of course.
The Proof of the Honey Page 2
