My masseuse went on in a low voice, as though revealing the secrets of the universe: “Monique, the Frenchwoman, the client before you. You saw her as you came in. I think she’s had a hard time with men. When I told her my story, she said, ‘There’s no trusting men. I will never trust another one.’ Something happened to her, it must have. I asked her but she just shook her head. Something must have happened to her, I’m sure. She will tell her story some day. She has to tell it. She still has a few days left here, she’ll tell me her story. She only ever wants me to give her her massage. She asks for me by name. She gave me her address in Paris and took mine. She’s sure to tell me her story. She said: ‘Don’t trust men.’ She’s right. Of course she’s right.”
I couldn’t give her the same advice. Why are women always talking about trust?
Hisham, the Prophet’s servant, did say: “A man came complaining to the Prophet and said, ‘My wife does not reject the hands of those who touch her.’
The Prophet advised: ‘Divorce her.’
The man said, ‘I love her.’
The Prophet replied, ‘Then take pleasure in her.’”
I have grasped this simple lesson: I take my pleasure with men and they take their pleasure with me. Full stop? I do not ask of them either love, or faithfulness, or devotion, or any commitment that might limit their horizons, close their eyes, or zip up their flies.
By the time Monique tells her story, I’ll be gone. I’ll have said goodbye to this sea, this country, this masseuse. By the time Monique tells her story, I’ll be gone, back to my life. Do I need to hear her story? History repeats itself. I know the words by heart.
She will say she found out he was betraying me.
She will say he came to her weeping because he loved another woman and couldn’t bear to lie to her any longer and so he had to tell her the truth, no matter how painful.
She will say that other well-intentioned people had already informed her, and when she confronted him he confessed to the crime and thanked her because she had relieved him of the burden of lying, so heavy to carry.
She will say, after all those years of marriage she had discovered that he preferred men. That he had a lover. That everyone knew except her.
She will say, he packed his bags and left the house.
She will say she cannot bear for someone to betray her trust.
She will say that men do not deserve our trust.
Will she talk about her loneliness? Will she talk about her search for another man? Will she talk about the nights out with her single girl friends? About the matrimonial agencies and singles clubs and Internet dates?
Men do not deserve our trust?
As I arrived, Monique was coming out of the booth. A dyed blonde with a smile stuck to her face, which shone with massage oil.
“Next time Monique comes from Paris, she’ll bring me a face cream. She made me swear to ask her for whatever I want. She’ll give me a call as soon as she arrives. The first day she asked me to put her in touch with someone who could give her a hair removal treatment with sugar. You know the sugar treatment? You use it in your country too? She wants to remove all the hair on her body—legs, arms, armpits, and the face too. Everything. I sent a friend of mine to her room at the hotel and she was very pleased. It costs her a lot less that way than if she goes to a beauty salon. She wants to go to the hammam in the city center, too, not to the hotel bathhouse. I’m going to go with her on my day off. I only get a half day off each week. My daughter’s with my sister in the capital. She insisted on staying with her for the school vacation. She’s a help to me. I love your accent. It sounds so nice. There’s a serial from your country that I watch every evening. It’s fantastic. I’ve forgotten the name. Excuse me just a moment, I’ve got to go put the music on and I’ll be right back.”
A song from the Gulf that I don’t know precedes her return:
Ah, you beauty, who, when you came,
Cast all others in the shade!
You looked down upon us
And of all that light
Yet more light you made!
I haven’t listened to Arabic songs since the time of the Thinker. Songs from the Gulf are new to my ear.
Why does he haunt my thoughts so insistently after all these years?
Seventh Gate
ON THE ECSTASIES OF THE BODY
I opened myself to him with all my senses. I gazed at him. Savored his smell. Hung on his every word. He would talk and I loved his words, words that ignited my desire. He mixed the poetry he recited and the words of his own pleasure in his cries. When I drew close to the abyss, he would control the rhythm of my movements. This is torture! I would cry in protest. Later I would understand, and learn in turn how to hold back my quest for the final shudder, the shudder that left me breathless, smeared with honey and semen; I would learn how to hug my freshly picked pleasure like a heartbeat between my legs.
The first time I saw him. We were with a group of friends, men and women, at a dinner party. Mezzé and Lebanese arak and chatter and political discussions and risqué jokes and laughter. He was doing the rounds, saying goodbye to everyone. It was still early. When he got to me, he gave me a polite, distant kiss, and suddenly the smell of his body reached me: the smell of desire. I breathed it in, and realized that we would meet again and that this smell would fill my lungs and the pores of my skin.
“Whence springs love?” asks Ibn Arabi.
“I love what fills me with light and increases the darkness deep within me,” answers René Char.
Between the question and an intimation of the reply, I moved ever closer to the Thinker, becoming more aware of the dangerous game that was defining itself in the space between us.
Ever since I met the Thinker, even after all these years, not a single day has gone by without my thinking of him. I cannot desire a man without thinking of him. I cannot read a newspaper without thinking of him. Every day, something reminds me of him.
What? What reminds me of him?
Every detail of my life is linked to him. With him I learnt to swim slowly, to sink beneath my own undertow, toward the bottom, calmly, confident that he was with me, and that when I opened my eyes I would find him there.
Open my eyes? I didn’t really close them. I tried to remain wakeful, alert. To see him, and be seen by him.
The first time I saw him. I was in the metro. I was reading a satirical newspaper. I raised my eyes and saw him staring at me. He was sitting opposite me, talking with friends. I went back to my reading, but I was distracted. There was something in him that called to me; something in his look that called to me. Our eyes met again and that stubborn, exploratory look was trained on me. We got off at the same station. We each went our own way with a last, lingering look. But I didn’t have enough time to register that look so that I might recall it, and try to decipher it.
The first time I saw him. He was sitting in front of me at the political conference I had come to attend. He was with a group of people that I knew. A mutual friend introduced us and from that point on he did not leave me. He stayed by my side, and I felt good. For two days we did not leave one another; we parted only in the evening, each returning to our respective life.
He gestured to his throat. “It grabs me here,” he said at the end of the second day, for my ears only. Had I heard him correctly? When he repeated this words, I knew that I had been waiting for them. I almost gave that half serious, half mocking laugh that I use to avoid the issue. But then I didn’t dare. I didn’t dare play with him the game that I play with others. His presence was so complete that it obliged me to answer him. I felt dizzy. How did I know that I had to make my decision at that instant, or lose him?
I didn’t want to lose him.
The first time I saw him. I was with the Palestinian film director. He was in Paris for just a few days and we had agreed that we’d meet at a café in the Quartier latin known for its Arab clientele. He was with two other men at the next table. I heard something in Ar
abic about the situation in Lebanon. I could see his face; the two others had their backs to me. He was opposite me, talking somewhat angrily, and his eyes never left mine. As one of his friends stood to leave he recognized the Palestinian filmmaker. Greetings and congratulations all round, and they put the two tables together. He sat next to me, and from that point on, never left my side. He talked and laughed, as though a sudden happiness had taken him unawares. His bare arm brushed against mine. How many times did his bare arm brush against mine? “I’m sorry. I don’t usually behave like that, but something stronger than me made me move closer to you,” he told me later, when I was in his arms.
He was forever reciting poetry. Whole poems that he’d learn by heart. He’d read them to me and I’d imagine he was writing them over again, for me alone.
Was poetry one of the keys to my body?
Poetry was there between us. He loved me through the poems of others. When he was traveling, he would phone me to give me the name of a collection and a poem. I would look for the poet, read the words, and know that he was with me.
Pessoa, Cavafy, Char, Michaux; others I didn’t know. I became like him. I would learn the Arabic poems that I loved by heart and recite them for him, and only him.
Was poetry always there between us?
With him, I started writing my short poems once again, and it became an opening ritual for each of our encounters. He’d ask me about my words. In silence, I would offer him the poem and he would read as though discovering the dark side I concealed with frivolity and laughter. He would discover things that I didn’t dare reveal even to myself. In silence, he would fold the paper carefully and put it in his pocket.
Was my body one of the keys to poetry?
The first time I saw him. I was at a Book Fair in an Arab capital. I was filling in for a colleague who’d fallen ill at the last moment; the director had chosen her to represent the library. I went in her place, somewhat grudgingly. When a representative of the fair came to welcome the five people arriving from Paris, he was next to me. His questions gave off a magnetic force, under the mask of legitimate curiosity. A form of conversation without end. He opened up to me, and I to him. He told me how he’d seen me at the airport, and how he’d watched me from his seat on the plane. It was as though he knew me. I told him the same story: it was as though I knew him. Our encounters do not end, and the body is always the preamble. The body was the basis of our story.
Every morning, the Thinker accompanies my nudity. It’s enough for me to look at myself naked in the mirror to remember his words about my body. About my breasts, my ass, my sex, my skin, my smell, my color.
I recall his words and I shudder. I recall his words and his touch and his gaze and I shudder.
I recall and I shudder, but I want to forget, to get on with my life.
The Thinker used to ask me, “Do you know what it is I love about you?”
I would give him a knowing look and I laughed.
“No, it’s not what you think, even though I do love your dirty mind.”
Laughing, he repeated the well-known English phrase.
“I wasn’t thinking anything. I was just waiting for the answer.”
“I love two things about you. Your free spirit and your Arabness.”
“Never in my life would it have occurred to me that a free spirit and Arabness could be the height of sex appeal,” I replied, with a light-heartedness that tried to hide the pain racking my consciousness, as the words penetrated deep within, to re-emerge, later on, letter by letter.
Now I recall his words and I shudder. Now I recall his words, his touch, his gaze, and I shiver.
I recall them now and I do not want to forget.
I want to remember.
I want to write.
Multiple scenarios; identical first encounters. The sudden discovery of the other, the looks exchanged, the words repeated, the nervous laughter, the unintentional touches, the anguish of the moment of declaration. How is it that we re-create all these details differently each time?
Which of these first times was the Thinker’s? All, or none of them? The minor details differ but the story remains the same. I love details, in any story; their color gives a new meaning to each story.
Every new man is a new story. Which of these stories was the Thinker’s?
The Distant One sent me an email, in English, with a stupid joke called “The Woman and the Bed”:
When she’s eight, you take her to bed to tell her a story.
When she’s eighteen, you tell her a story to take her to bed.
When she’s twenty-eight, you don’t need to tell her a story to take her to bed.
When she’s thirty-eight, she tells you a story to take you to bed.
When she’s forty-eight, she tells you a story to avoid having to go to bed.
When she’s fifty-eight, you stay in bed to avoid her story.
When she’s sixty-eight, if you take her to bed, then that’s the story.
When she’s seventy-eight, what bed; what story? What devil of a man are you?
A stupid joke of the sort men tell one another in an attempt to forget the trap they’ve fallen into. What I found interesting were the two alternating motifs—the bed and the story.
In my life, one has led to the other, and vice versa. In my life, they have been intimately linked, and I oscillate between the two.
In my life, I have been addicted to beds and stories. Every man is a story and every story a bed.
I don’t want to lose the bed. I don’t want to lose the story.
On the bed of stories I sway and strut.
I touch the sky with my fingers
And dig valleys in the desert of my soul.
“I would use firash for ‘bed,’” the Distant One wrote to me after I’d emailed back to him the translation into Arabic of his joke. “Why do you use sarir?”
I replied, “The firash, for me, is for sleeping and sickness, childbirth and death. The sarir is for pleasure. Sarir is from sirr, or ‘secret.’ Two words which have the same root. Desire is secret. Pleasure is secret. Sex is secret. Sex is the secret of secrets. That is why in my mind it remains linked to the sarir, even if I do it in a lift.”
“Have you done it in a lift?” asked the Distant One in his reply.
I pictured his thick eyebrows raised in avid curiosity.
“Not even on the beach!” I replied, shortly.
I love secrets. These stories that no one knows but me. These stories give my life meaning. An entire life that belongs to me alone, that I share with no one. It’s enough for me to close my eyes to taste the honeyed juice of pleasure, as it is called in the Hadith, the sayings of the Prophet. It’s enough for me to close my eyes and the image rises before me, the sound, sight, smell, touch, and taste. It’s enough . . .
Could I go on living without them? Could I wake up every morning and find the strength to begin a new day without them? The answer comes clear and sharp as the blade of a sword, and I am not afraid.
In the long spans between stories, I live off memories, confident that the coming days will bring me my new story.
I could not merely wait, because I don’t know how to wait. Nor could I precipitate them. And then? I often asked myself this question, without ever really looking for an answer. The answers, like the stories, came of their own accord, in their own time, as ripe fruit falls from the tree.
Eighth Gate
ON ARAB DISSIMULATION
That morning I was working on the section on aphrodisiacs and the same evening I found myself surrounded by my male friends whose conversation revolved around that very topic. They were swapping stories about an Egyptian artist who tried some sort of Syrian Viagra. His member remained flaccid, while his head started to swell up. Terrified, the girl who was with him fled. He was scared, too, even more than she, but didn’t dare call the doctor. Instead he called a friend, who told him to wait a little, long enough for the unexpected symptoms to go away on their own, and not
to do it again.
In a study on sexual impotence among men in the Arab World, I read disturbing figures regarding the fantastic dollar amounts spent on Viagra and other love remedies, as they are called in the advertisements I get daily over the Internet. This brought to mind the characters in the last novel I read by Rashid al-Da‘if and how they take Viagra like aspirin.
Why do they expect Viagra to rescue them from their misery? A collective sexual misery, present even in our relationship to our traditions. Why bother with Viagra! All one has to do is read those old manuals of Arab eroticism and apply their prescriptions. “Results guaranteed!” said the old authors. “Try these remedies and you’ll obtain miracles!” Arouse women and excite men. Lengthen and thicken your penis. Constrict the vagina and make it tastier. True, some of the ingredients, such as red bull’s pizzle, white cockerel’s brains, and wolf’s spleen, are difficult to obtain; but pepper, spikenard, musk, ginger, grape juice, and oil are available to everyone.
Take lukewarm water and massage the penis with it until it turns red and becomes erect. Then take a piece of thin parchment and put hot tar on it and wrap it around the penis. If you do this frequently, it will grow larger and longer.
Before undertaking such measures (and this is my personal advice), you’d better make sure you have the number of the nearest hospital handy.
The Proof of the Honey Page 6
