If al-Alfiya were among us now, she would write a book about her sex adventures, with her picture, naked, on the cover, and it would top all the bestseller lists and be translated into every living language, and her fame would travel around the world. How could al-Alfiya ever imagine that her legitimate heirs, centuries later, spread over five continents, would not even know her name, when she was the first, the pioneer?
Eleventh Gate
ON RUSES
When the Thinker left, I was as traumatized as a nursing child torn too soon from its mother’s breast—in a state of loss, of pain, of perdition, of death. The Thinker was my secret, and I had to live my public life without others discovering that secret.
When the Thinker left, I hoped he would die. I built myself a tomb hidden away in my heart. I had to protect myself. I protected myself by dying. When was I resurrected?
When I was with him, it was easy for me to hide my parallel life. Without him, this became more complicated. My parallel life had turned into absence, a non-life. And yet, I had to keep hiding it. I lived for months like the living dead. I wandered through my life emptied of all life.
I woke, slept, smiled, spoke, laughed, worked, travelled, and met others; I performed all my duties. I lied, I led a double life. I went about my business, moving my body by means of invisible strings, and with the skill of a virtuoso puppeteer.
When the Thinker left, I hoped he would die. I understood then the meaning of a story I had read in childhood: a king asks his daughter to determine the fate of her imprisoned lover. Of the two doors that kept him behind bars, one would lead him to life, in the bed of another woman, and the other to certain death in the jaws of a lion. The story has no ending. It is left suspended, focused on the princess’s raised hand as she is about to indicate one of the doors. As for me, I knew without a moment’s hesitation which door I would have opened. But the Thinker left without giving me the chance to choose. He left before the end of the story. He left without my seeing the word “departure” blazoned on my horizon. He was the one who chose the door, leaving me to face the hurt.
By day, my Thinker-self would scream its pain alone, far from me. I would hear its deafening screams and I knew that I must not turn toward them or I would collapse like a cracked edifice.
By night, I would return to him and make peace with him. We were united in our loss. I would sleep and wake, my eyes dry as an abandoned well and my spirit drier still.
I armed myself, in order to survive, with the only weapon I had: the innocence of lies.
Time has numbed my pain. One day, a man told me, in the same tone of voice and with the same assurance, “You are beautiful.” I smiled. For a brief moment I believed him, and I was brought back to life, jolted back to life as if I had received a charge of electricity.
Years after the departure of the Thinker, I realized that each of us has a Thinker, male or female, one or many, who waits for us in some part of the world to reveal us to ourselves, to uncover our powers, so that we can go further into the labyrinths of our beings.
Years after the departure of the Thinker, I realized that each of us has a Thinker waiting for that given moment in life, on one of its many roads.
We may lose our Thinker with a word, a shrug, a postponed journey, an awkward explanation, a dull-witted ancestral fear, or for having followed the rules of a game to whose laws we submit.
There are those who live and die without meeting this indispensible Other, who will open doors previously closed to the world.
There are those who live and die like a head of lettuce, wilted and emptied of life; those who never know what it is to be transformed into a burning coal that that consumes everything that approaches it. There are those who live and die without learning the way to their bodies, or to that of others.
How many little coincidences had to come together for me to discover the existence of the Thinker and for him to discover mine, for me to see him and for him to see me?
How many little coincidences had to come together for the moment of the first, decisive discovery to occur? Today, I can count off the moments of our affair as if they were prayer beads, one by one. But the day I met him, I had no idea that I held in my hands the thread of this story. My story.
Years after the departure of the Thinker, there were times I still whispered his name. I knew what he had given me and I was grateful to him. At other times, I cursed him.
Years after the departure of the Thinker, I stopped resisting and confessed.
At the beginning, he used to ask me, “Is what we have just about sex?” and I would avoid answering.
In the end, he no longer asked me.
In the end, he left.
In the end . . .
Years after the departure of the Thinker, a sentence by a German poet that he used to recite to me sprang to mind: “God created Man as the sea created the continents—by withdrawing.” Had he withdrawn so that I might be created?
I go back over what I have written about him and it occurs to me that what I have related is not about him alone. The stories have mingled, so too their heroes. Perhaps they all fused together in him, the Thinker. Those who came before him, and those who came after.
When I set off along the tracks of my men, each one takes on the appearance of the Thinker. They have disappeared into him. They have left him their place and gone away. They have surrendered everything to him as I surrendered everything. They have surrendered to him without knowing anything about him. They are gone, and I alone have remained with him; I know the whole story.
I read what I have written and it occurs to me that everything I have experienced was of my own making. The Thinker did nothing but lift the veil on all I had gathered in preparation for life. He came so that I might arrive at meaning. He didn’t bestow it on me: I found it through him.
I read what I have written and it occurs to me that I have made the Thinker into an allegory. I have recreated him, but not in my image. I said, “Be,” and he was. He was just as my words had shaped him. This image belongs to me; it has nothing to do with him.
Why the Thinker?
The question occurs to me now as I am rereading what I have written. He wasn’t the most charming, the most brilliant, the most virile, or the most amusing. He wasn’t. He was himself.
He was the Thinker. I read what I have written and it occurs to me that the Thinker was a writer’s device, a ruse, and that he never existed at all: that is why I had to invent him.
I understand now what he meant when he said, every time we met, “You are the core of what is between us. You are the source of what is between us.” The first time he said it I was upset. Then I became accustomed to the idea, I understood its implications, and made a game of it with him. The story is mine; he is only the subject.
I tell it and play with it according to my will.
Now it occurs to me that, in truth, everything I experienced after the Thinker already existed within me, hidden. I was living with his absence, confident that I would meet him again one day.
I didn’t look for him and he didn’t look for me. I never met him even by chance. After all those years . . . I always thought that the future would lead him to me. I thought that all I had to do was to wait and he would come back.
Wait? I didn’t wait. The parallel lines of my life met, crossed, and separated. The dykes gave way and the rush of water swept everything away, changed everything.
I didn’t wait because I don’t know how to wait.
I was confident that the Thinker would appear before me one day at a sudden turning, and he would say, like the first time: “It grabs me by the throat.” He would ask me about my honey, as though he had left me the day before, and I would reply that he should look for the answer for himself; that it was up to him to stretch out his hand and put it between my thighs and taste. “The proof of the sweetness of the honey is the honey itself,” says Ibn Arabi. I used to say it in front of him, and then he became the one who would repeat it, t
o teach me what I already knew.
The era After the Thinker begins now, while I am writing about him. I discover him only today, and I discover that this book is his book. As if he had sowed its seed in me, and I needed all these years for it to grow in me.
I remember how he used to say, “Write about those books that you love. You have to do it.” I would laugh and reject the idea. I didn’t dare even think about it. It has taken all these years, and a pretext, for me to find the courage to make a study of classic Arab books of erotica. To shout out loud what I was whispering in secret.
I needed all these years for the study to take me back to the time of the Thinker and give me the power to evoke him. So that I could make him public, too, so that he could become a story. The time of the Thinker.
Yesterday, the director came into my office. It was something serious, I felt it, the way he came in and closed the door behind him. I raised my head in a silent question.
“The director of the National Library called me. There is some news. For security reasons, the Americans have cancelled their participation in the Hell’s Books exhibition and consequently the seminar in New York has been cancelled. The French said they couldn’t bear the costs on their own. So we won’t be going. What do you say? How far have you got with your presentation on the Arab books of erotica? Have you finished it? I’m so sorry. You can always publish it, and I’ll help you with that. I am truly sorry.”
Security reasons? A change of heart. I had been looking forward to seeing New York again, but never mind. What mattered was the book. And the Thinker I had created. I would publish the study: what need had I of the apologetic director, or the Americans and the French cowering in terror of the bogeyman of terrorism?
If they hadn’t asked me to do it, I wouldn’t have found the courage to write it, or to return to the time of the Thinker. Certainly, I must give them the credit for that, and thank them, simply, for their collaboration.
The Thinker was my secret, and the books were a part of that secret. Does the scandal lie in the deed, or in the revelation of the deed?
Who is asking the question?
My story is no scandal, nor is my book.
The scandal was in the secret.
But the secret is no longer.
Paris/Tunis
2005-2006
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Salwa Al Neimi was born in Damascus, Syria. Since the mid-seventies, she has lived in Paris, where she studied Islamic philosophy and theatre at the Sorbonne. She has published five volumes of poetry and a collection of short stories.
[1] Cavafy, C. P., Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, edited by George Savidis. London, Chatto and Windus, 1994 (p. 59).
[2] Idem (p. 81).
Table of Contents
ON MARRIAGES OF PLEASURE AND BOOKS OF EROTICA
ON THE THINKER AND PERSONAL HISTORY
SEX AND THE (ARAB) CITY
ON WATER
ON STORIES
ON THE MASSEUSE AND HER ADULTEROUS HUSBAND
ON THE ECSTASIES OF THE BODY
ON ARAB DISSIMULATION
ON LINGUISTICS
ON UPBRINGING AND EDUCATION
ON RUSES
About the Author
The Proof of the Honey Page 9
