One day, what had been hidden was ushered into the light of day. The director of the library came to me, and said, “The Bibliothèque Nationale is preparing an exhibition entitled ‘The Hell of Books.’ You know, those volumes that are placed on a special shelf in the library to keep them out of sight. The exhibition will be accompanied by a seminar on erotic literature throughout the world. What do you say? They’re looking for someone to write a study of ancient Arabic books on sex. What do you say? I suggested your name to them. What do you say? They’re waiting for you to accept so that that they can go over the details with you. What do you say?”
What did I say?
I thanked him, warily, for his confidence in me. The whole business had been a secret game, or at least a discreet one. Now it seemed it was turning into an academic specialization. I pictured myself reading one of my favorite passages from one of those books in a loud voice in front of a gathering of scholars. Would I be transformed into a doctor of eroticism? A pornologist? And if I began to giggle? Was there something comic about the whole thing?
“The seminar will be held in the United States. What do you say? Did I tell you that it’s being organized in collaboration with New York University and that the exhibition will transfer there after it finishes in Paris? Are you aware that the Americans have become interested in everything Arab and Muslim since September 11th? What do you say?”
What could I say—about their newfound interest, or about September 11th? Nothing.
I might find some points of convergence with the Americans if they started to show an interest in the Arab sciences of coition.
A shy man, perhaps the director thought that, away from the library, he might find some points of convergence with me. In a manner that he didn’t dare even allude to.
The director’s face was not one to inspire much levity. Why then did he behave as though he was making an indecent proposal? I nodded in agreement. How could I not, when he talked as though he were asking me to write a study of the Seven Readings of the Koran? With the same complicit seriousness, he gave me the name of the person in charge. “Get in touch with him and you can agree on the details. What do you say?”
Secret reading had become a scholarly specialization. Long live progress, and the abolition of our taboos in deed, word, reading, writing, and seminar topics.
My secret readings had made me believe that the Arabs were the only nation in the world that considered sex a blessing and thanked God for it. Does not the Assiduous and Learned Sheik Muhammad al-Nafzawi, may God have mercy upon him and be well pleased with him, opens his Perfumed Garden with “praise to God, who placed man’s greatest pleasure in the cunt of women and that of women in the penises of men; for the cunt finds no ease, calm, or rest unless entered by the penis, and the penis finds none except through the vagina”?
Did not the Arab authors believe that one of the benefits of copulation (over and above that of the perpetuation of life) was that it provided a glimpse of paradise? Coition necessarily drew our attention to the promised pleasures of the afterlife—“for to tempt one with the image of a happiness that does not exist would be pointless.”
So, we are to taste in this world some of the rewards we shall experience in the next? This is what economists call “a production incentive.” Sex is a scent along the path leading to paradise, a place where: “the penis never wearies, the cunt is never absent, and desire never flags. There is, in the desire for copulation, a sort of wisdom that, in the long term, engenders pleasure; it directs our attention to the promised pleasures of Paradise and spurs us to seek them in order to deserve them. Observe, then, God’s blessings, and how he has created from one desire two lives, one manifest and one hidden—the life of man through the survival of his progeny, and the hidden life, which is the otherworldly life. For this pleasure that is ephemeral stimulates the desire for a pleasure that is eternal and perfect.”
Even when the body lost its ability to respond to the demands of desire, the Arabs went to great lengths to trick it into attaining its pleasures, not just by means of strengtheners and energizers, requiring lengthy and complicated preparation, but also by more elaborate stratagems. Thus the Caliph al-Mutawakkil, for example, “loved to have intercourse frequently but became too weak to move. So a basin was made for him that was filled with mercury and his mattress was spread upon it, the very one upon which he fornicated. The mercury allowed him to move without his having to move himself.”
If I were to see the Thinker now, I would tell him, “sex is divine grace and my study will begin with this idea. It will be the basis for my study on Arabic sexual literature.”
Why does the image of the Thinker return to me these days, mingled with the ancient texts?
The decision exploded inside me like a bomb. I realized that I would be doing what I had put off doing for so many years. I realized that I would be making public what I had kept secret for so long, the truth buried deep inside me. I realized that I would be making my parallel life public, would be bringing my little pile of secrets out into the light, tearing away the last curtain to reveal the darkened stage.
I realized that I must do what I had been postponing until now: conjure up the Thinker after an absence; write him in next to those Arab authors whom we had loved together.
The moment I started writing the study the decision exploded inside me as though the Thinker had taken hold of my hand and forced me to do what I had never dared to do before, forcing me to say out loud what I had only ever murmured in silence. He was forcing me to write my secret story with him.
Everyone I met in this society of pious dissimulation warned me off the topic. Why? The ideas themselves were not the reason. I was free to formulate ideas as I liked. The problem was the raw words. They were dangerous, I was told. They incur censorship. It seemed they hadn’t been following what was being written these days in the Arab World. They hadn’t awoken to the fact that of the forbidden triangle only two angles remained—religion and politics. Sex had fallen through the censor’s sieve or, let us say, the sieve’s holes had grown wider.
A few days later I met up with Sahar, a scholar at a Parisian university. Without preamble, she asked, “Is it true you’re working on a book about love as seen by the Arabs? There are lots of books on the subject. Have you read André Miquel? Have you read about platonic love? About Qays and Layla? About . . .”
I interrupted her enthusiasm with deliberate rudeness.
“I’m writing about sex as seen by the Arabs.”
She fell silent for a moment and hesitated before continuing. Then she asked, “Have you found a publisher?”
“I haven’t looked for one. I’m writing a study as a contribution to a seminar on the subject.”
“You’re making a mistake. You should start looking for a publisher now. Subjects like that sell.”
“I didn’t choose the subject. It was proposed to me and I accepted. It’s an academic study.”
“Academic?”
“Right. On ancient Arab erotica.”
“I’ve read some translated into French. Very beautiful.”
“I’m writing in Arabic and relying on the original texts.”
“In Arabic? In that case the problem will be the censor. There’s no problem in using explicit words in a foreign language. It’s a different matter in Arabic.”
“The texts exist, are published, and are sold in the bookshops. I’m not making anything up. I told you, it’s a study. I’m not the first.”
“And if it’s banned?”
I replied scornfully: “Then I’ll be famous.”
“All writers these days dream of having their books banned so they’ll become famous.”
And why not? If the censor is prone to such stupidity, why not?
Fourth Gate
ON WATER
Possessed by the study that I was writing, happy with its publicly acknowledged status, I spoke about it at length to everyone, with great pleasure. I requested leave from the li
brary, gathered up my books, and fled Paris for Tunis. I wanted to write the opening pages in my world, the Arab world. I felt a physical need for that world. For the language and the people. For the streets and the gardens and the tastes and the scents and the light and the sounds. For the faces and the bodies. A need for the sun and the sea. A need for the hammam, the souk, the masseuse, and the scalding water.
When I think of hammam, I think of sex. My mind associates the one with the other, irresistibly. Why? Is it the heat that wafts from my pores? Is it the beating of the blood in my temples that seems to herald sensual delight? I leave the hot room and my body appears rosy before me. After the bath I become beautiful, like after love. The Thinker used to tell me that every time.
“The Sufi al-Junayd wrote: ‘I hunger for coition as I hunger for food.’” I have a physical need for water, semen, and words. The three things I need in life. I cannot exist without them. Each helps to organize my confusion and accompanies me through my days and nights. When I open my eyes in the morning, I am as disjointed as a puppet, I neither see, nor hear, nor understand. I stumble to the bathroom. I stand under the gush of the shower and the parts of my body gradually start to assemble themselves. The water collects me, like a sorcerer manipulating my strings and uncovering my innermost self. I recover my senses and my powers. I become supple, ready for life.
I stretched myself out on a slab of stone in the hammam, as though crucified. I divined the bodies of the other women through the hot mist. My eyes were wide open. I watched the steam depositing droplets that merged together on the domed ceiling, waiting to fall. They taught us in school that Newton discovered gravity watching an apple fall. What would I discover?
Would I discover the gravitational pull of the Thinker? That was no discovery. I had known it and lived it.
After all those hours in the hammam I could not help but think about him, could not help but know that I was ready for love, ready for the Thinker. He used to tell me, “We shall meet tomorrow. Be ready.” And I would reply, “You know that I am ready for you, always.”
I am the cleanest woman in the world, not from love of cleanliness but from a passion for water. The same passion will make it impossible for me to die anywhere but in an Arab city by the sea. Water is the first element. My first element. I felt the truth of this on my skin, even before I read it in books. Even before reading this Hadith from the Prophet to his daughter Fatima, on the eve of her wedding to ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib: “Wash yourself ever with water; thus, when your husband looks at you, he shall delight in you.” I washed myself with water; thus, when I looked at myself, I was delighted.
It was not so long ago that the hammam was where the mother of the groom would evaluate prospective daughters-in-law. What better place to see a woman as she really is? It was a flawless method, with no cheating and no deception. The bride like Eve in Paradise. As she really is.
I turned over on my back and in silence the masseuse continued her hard scrubbing of my skin. One of her colleagues asked me if I understood Arabic. Did I look so much like a foreigner—an orientalist?
There, in that traditional hammam, there was no place for fake folklore—no cushions of velvet or oriental perfumes. There were only the women, the tiles, and the water. And that smell that I could identify among a thousand, coming to me from Damascus, the city of my childhood. In those years, I went only rarely to the women’s baths as my mother was as far as could be from such rituals. Our young neighbor took me there sometimes. I remember the steam, the oranges, the bread with oil and thyme. A family hammam for women and children of the kind you see in certain Arab films. Now the oranges and the thyme had disappeared. Only the smell continued to cling to the place. I like to return to the past through memory—but only through memory.
I stretched out on my back and the masseuse rubbed my body with the coarse loofah. Earlier, in the hot room, she had given me a bucket of water to soak my feet in. Then she came to collect me. I stretched out on my belly, my favorite position. She rubbed hard and I followed the movement of her hands over my body. Little by little, she moved upward from the soles of my feet . . . A light touch from the Thinker’s fingers, moving between the two dimples at the base of my back, was enough to ignite a flame in my belly and my breasts. That was in the past. She rubbed hard and I closed my eyes to the naked bodies of the women as they moved around the warm room. A mother and her three young daughters. A woman with her elderly mother. The foreign woman with her small breasts, on her own, like me.
For me the hammam is associated with pleasure, with sex. Not because of the nakedness so much as the stories on which I was raised.
Fifth Gate
ON STORIES
Stories. And more stories. Stories of women. I had heard so many, and then forgotten them. Of love and jealousy. Of women clothed and unclothed. Of sleep and waking. Of divorce and marriage. Of those who fell in love and those who were unfaithful. Unspeakable chaos, and relationships so tangled that it would take an astrologer to unravel them. Women’s stories that resembled men’s stories—I was attracted to both. In every Arab city, the same stories. Stories of the kind you wouldn’t suspect in this world of taqiyya, of dissimulation, where people have learned to live their sexuality, as with other dangerous domains in their lives, with pious duplicity.
I am stretched on my back at the hammam in a working-class neighborhood of an Arab city. Men come here in the morning, women in the afternoon. Yesterday, I met Rajaa at the mixed-sex hammam of the Grand Hôtel. We were alone in the relaxing room following our treatment; there are few customers at that time of year. I was drowsing, insouciant and languid. Two men came in, and stretched out on the velvet cushions in the midst of the sumptuous Oriental décor. They were smoking and talking in loud voices. I glanced at Rajaa, who was quietly drinking tea and we understood one another. Our nap had been interrupted, so we fled together to the sands of the beach, far from the noise and smoke.
Our neighbor in Damascus used to take me with her to the cinema. I was the solution that she had arrived at with her husband to allow her to move with limited freedom in a city where she knew no one. In the darkness of the cinema I would see her head swaying rhythmically to the sound of the songs of Farid al-Atrash, whose face filled the screen, and it amazed me. I was too young to understand such stolen euphoria.
One day, I told Sulayma about these outings with our young neighbor. She concluded, categorically: “She must have been using you as a cover for her assignations.”
“No!” I yelled in protest. “No. She couldn’t have.”
She interrupted me: “In the darkness of the cinema, could you tell who was sitting on the other side of her?”
This time, I was the categorical one. “You don’t know what Damascus was like in those days. I used to go with her to the three o’clock showing. The only people you’d see there were groups of women with their small children. Your tendentious conclusions have no basis, can’t you see?”
She replied with a smile. “Why are you defending her, I’d like to know. Have you considered the usher, for example?”
I wasn’t defending my young neighbor. Vigilant, ever on the alert, I wanted to defend the images impressed upon my memory. I couldn’t stand the idea of anyone chipping away pieces of my old stories and changing their meanings behind my back: I was defending my personal history.
At a later point in my childhood, one of our uncles, a ladies’ tailor, came from far away to sew clothes for all of us, our neighbors included. “He didn’t spare a single woman,” as my sister put it. That young neighbor with whom I went to the cinema was one of those he fondled. He spread the fabric over her, and then followed her curves of her figure with a sure hand. She blushed through the entire spectrum from pale pink to bright crimson; she wriggled, smiled in embarrassment, and said nothing. I watched the two of them while waiting impatiently for my turn to try on my new dress. I heard my adolescent sister yelling on behalf of our neighbor, “Uncle, that’s enough! Stop it! Uncle, enough!
” Uncle never paused in his work.
I was young when this dressmaking relative came to visit. The stories would unfold in front of me but I wouldn’t understand much. All I know is that, after a long discussion with my mother behind the closed door of their bedroom, my father convinced his relative to curtail his visit and return to his wife and children in his distant city.
My adolescent sister was the instigator of this sentence. Years later I learnt that she had come to know of secret meetings that went much further than touching and hues of pink, a story of secret trysts. A story between the skilful tailor and a well-educated spinster neighbor of ours, who devoted herself to raising her nephews, as their own mother was ill. My sister feared that there would be a scandal and told my mother, who in turn also grew fearful. In order to get rid of the dangerous guest she invented an abridged version of the real story, one that was innocent but convincing, for my father. As usual, he believed her.
Some years later, when the neighbor in question was well over forty, she ended up grist for the gossip mill once more. She ran away with a taxi driver who worked the road from Damascus to Beirut and who was much younger than she. She had travelled with him a number of times accompanying the nephews on visits to the Lebanese branch of the family. She fell in love with him and he with her and they decided to get married. She knew full well that her brother would never agree and would consider the very idea an unforgivable crime: who would look after the children, with their mother sick in bed?
The Proof of the Honey Page 3
