Here also I was echoing something she’d once said, namely, ‘No love is more wonderful than the kind we find when we’re looking for something else.’
How can you free yourself from a love that’s taken you over to the point where it’s infiltrated the ways you express yourself, and where one of the things you enjoy about it is unveiling language’s mysteries?
The intoxication of being with her was a linguistic state of being. It was as though I were dancing with her through words: clasping her about the waist, making her fly through the air, scattering her, gathering her in. The steps our words took always found their rhythm from the very first sentence.
In every conversation we were a pair of dancers who went gliding over mirrors of ice in festive attire, our feet clad in the music of words.
One time she’d said, ‘I dream of opening the door to your house with you,’ to which I’d replied to the rhythm of a tango, moving her dreams two steps back, ‘And I dream of opening the door . . . and finding you.’
However, life had reversed our roles for us. Here she was, opening the door of a gallery to visit an exhibition, and finding me. It wasn’t time for a tango, but for a Viennese waltz, with its feverish spinning, its sentences with hands clasped around one another’s waists, and its faltering first steps with their rapturous, interlocking declarations. It was time for the puckered lips of a woman who, during my absence, had turned thirty years (and a few more kisses) old, and who would need to add seven more kisses to reach the age of my sadness – an age documented in a certificate that took no account of my birth at her hands in a café one October thirty-first at a quarter after one in the afternoon.
With her, things always begin the way they end: on the brink of the last quarter of an hour!
She studied me in awkward surprise. After two years of being apart, we were hastily sizing each other up, and entering into a silence amid lengthy tête-à-têtes that had never been.
I asked her if anyone had come with her.
‘No, I came by myself,’ she replied.
‘Well, then, I suggest that you take a look around the exhibit, and then we can have something to drink at the café across the street.’
I deliberately let her tour the exhibit on her own. I wanted to preserve the beauty of the distance, since this way I could see her clearly, and spy on that memory of hers that hung suspended on more than one bridge.
As I’d expected, it wasn’t long before she headed towards that particular painting. I saw her stand in front of it for a long time, which wasn’t surprising if she hadn’t seen it for an entire ten years.
I went casually over to her. She was looking through the exhibit guide. I asked her if she’d liked the painting she’d been looking at.
As if to conceal some cause for suspicion, she said, ‘I was just thinking how odd it was that the artist had sold it. I see a red “sold” sign on it.’
Seizing the opportunity, I asked her if she knew the artist.
‘No, not at all. But it’s most artists’ custom to keep their first painting. Based on the date written on it, this was his first painting. In fact, there’s more than a quarter-century gap between it and the rest of his work!’
‘Were you interested in buying it?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said after some hesitation.
Then she continued, ‘In any case, it’s been sold, and I’ll have to choose another one. In any case, I can’t concentrate on anything as long as you’re with me, so I’ll come again some other time to pick out a painting or two.’
Wanting to lure her into a confession of sorts, I said, ‘I still can’t believe we’re together. What on earth would have brought you here?’
I, who didn’t put much store by her answers, wasn’t concerned about how to word my questions. It was enough for me to see how flustered she was, like a woman holding onto her skirt when the wind blows. She had the ability to captivate with a sudden silence in lieu of a confession that had nearly been sent flying by the winds of surprise. So, between two sentences that were retreating in deceit, she pulled down the skirts of language without a word.
‘It was just a coincidence. My brother Nasser gave me a card announcing this exhibit since he knows I love art. I left France ten years ago, and from that time on I stopped following the local cultural scene.’
I couldn’t understand why she would insist on denying this man’s presence in her life at some earlier time. Was it because of his handicap? His age? Or was it just that, like all authors, she didn’t like her characters to be exposed as real people?
It was obvious that Nasser hadn’t made any mention of me, nor had Zayyan, of course, so that she thought I’d been at the gallery merely by chance. In view of the difference between the name of the artist and the name of the character in her novel, she may have thought I’d fallen for the lie, especially since she knew Zayyan was in the hospital and that, as a consequence, I couldn’t possibly have seen him.
I guess that was the moment when a certain crazy idea was born in my mind, and I excitedly began planning out its details, having decided to pull a prank on her memory as huge as her denial!
When we were alone at the café, Hayat was very quiet, and seemingly distracted. As though she were recalling something, or expecting someone to come, she kept looking over at the gallery, which was visible to us through the café’s front window on the other side of the street. She hadn’t changed.
Her love existed in a kind of overlapping time zone: It was as though, when she was with you, she was carrying on with a man she’d loved before you, while getting ready to love the one who would come after you. She was in such a never-ending state of romantic attraction, she no longer experienced the kind of panic women feel at the beginning of a love relationship, or the bereavement experienced by former lovers when they’ve been left emotional orphans.
I, on the other hand, might take a full two years to mourn a love lost. How idiotic! How plebeian! How could I have had such patience with a woman for whom the end of a love affair is no different than the passing of royalty? No sooner has the king died than, with the announcement of his death, his successor is announced. No sooner is one love declared dead than the next man to ascend the throne of her heart is ushered in.
I once asked her why she’d written only one book. She replied sarcastically, ‘There’s only one love that I’ve ever put on mourning for. In order to write, you have to enter into a state of mourning for someone or something. Life gets shorter as we get older, and we’ve got no time for this sort of extravagant waste. Mourning is just a betrayal of life.’
Maybe what she meant was that loyalty to a single person is a betrayal of ourselves. However, she avoided saying so, since at the time, I’d happened to be the person she loved!
When the waiter brought our orders, I lit a cigarette and asked her, ‘Have you written anything over these past two years?’
By means of this question alone, I could find out what had happened after me.
My question must have surprised her, at the very least for the way it anticipated questions to come. Clever woman that she was, I think she’d figured out our ‘lovers’ code’. So she knew that what I was actually asking her was whether she had put on mourning for me, if even for a while.
‘No,’ she replied in an absent voice.
She added nothing to this word, no justification that might have softened its impact. A pang went through me, as I took the confession I’d just received as an insult to our love. Hadn’t there remained enough of the conflagrations of that lovely time to ignite words in a book?
Had she not really loved me, then? Was the only thing she’d loved in me Khaled Ben Toubal, the man I reminded her of and who, or so she had claimed, was one of her literary creations? Or was it Abdelhaq, the man she’d mistakenly imagined to be me, and who would have succeeded me to her heart’s throne if death hadn’t beat her to him?
One love passed her on to another, and she had no time for loss, the loss that fil
ls a writer’s inkwell.
After a long silence on my part, she asked me, ‘What are you thinking about?’
‘About a play entitled, Mourning Becomes Electra. Try doing a bit of mourning. You might end up writing some nice things.’
‘I’ve quit writing novels. Writing novels is like gambling – it gives you a false sense of having gained something. While you’re busy managing others’ lives, you forget to manage your own. I mean, you forget to live. What a novel adds to others’ lifetimes, it steals from its writer’s. It’s like frittering away a life on the pretext of managing its affairs.’
‘So,’ I asked acerbically, ‘do you kill off your characters to save yourself the trouble of managing their lives?’
‘There are characters who grow so big inside you, they don’t leave you any room,’ she quipped, ‘so in order to survive yourself you’ve got no choice but to kill them off. Some novelists have died at the hands of their characters because they didn’t expect that a creature of ink would be capable of murder.’
After a pause she continued, ‘Take Khaled, for example. If I hadn’t killed him off in a novel, he would have killed me. Every time I’ve measured another man against him, my situation’s gotten more disastrous. He had to go. His beauty exposed others’ ugliness, and unsettled my emotional life.’
I felt the urge to tell her that, in spite of it all, Khaled was still alive, breathing in Paris’s air along with us. But I held my peace. It wasn’t time yet for that confrontation.
Yet, for some reason unbeknownst to me, talking with her only made me want her more. A writer who’s too busy devouring life to write any more novels will whet your appetite to devour her. Besides, her capacity for subterfuge gave me an added excuse to lure her into an encounter in which her novelistic masks would come falling off.
Here she was. And here I was, distracted by her, from her. I’d forgotten everything I’d ever held against her. I’d forgotten why we’d parted, and why I’d hated her. I wanted her now, without delay, and with the same extremity as before. I was going to say, ‘Light the tunnel of anticipation by setting a time we can meet.’ But I feared that this might come across as a kind of begging that wouldn’t sit well with a woman who only liked men who found it next to impossible to express emotion. So I rephrased the thought in a form that would leave her no choice but to do what I wanted her to.
I said, ‘What time will I see you tomorrow?’
‘Are you in a hurry?’
‘I’m in a state of plenitude.’
Then, as if to correct a deliberate slip of the tongue, I added, ‘I’ve got a lot of words for you in my quiver.’
‘Why dissipate yourself being prolix with me? What you’ve got in your quiver might be the stuff of a novel.’
She had a kind of innate womanly guile, the charm of a woman who conspires against you with your tacit approval. She was a difficult, seductive woman whose beauty resided in an impossible half that blocked the way to another half that might give you the mistaken impression that she was open to the possibility of fulfilling your desires.
She was the criminal by design, the charmer as if by accident. You made a pact of fidelity with her, knowing that you were concluding a bargain with a cloud, and that it would be impossible to predict where or when it would burst.
She was a woman who knew how to clothe herself in someone else’s persona. She could identify herself with women who ran the gamut from the extremes of chastity to the extremes of wantonness, from the extremes of innocence to the extremes of criminality.
I said, ‘Our conversations need to take place behind closed doors.’
‘I don’t like boring bed chatter.’
Ready with an answer I was sure would persuade her, I said, ‘You won’t get bored. I’m preparing you a bonfire for which you’ll be the firewood.’
I uttered this statement with a smile on my face, since I alone knew what I meant by it.
Then, in a different tone, I continued, ‘How can you endure this rain alone? We’re in Paris. So, if you aren’t defeated by your hankering for me, you’ll be defeated by the weather forecast – unless, that is, you’ve brought someone in your luggage who can keep you warm!’
She sank for the first time into a long silence. Finally, as though she were talking to herself, she murmured, ‘Shame on you.’
And she added nothing further. In her voice I detected a note of sadness that wasn’t quite like her.
As for me, I felt the sadness of someone who’s done harm to a butterfly, and I couldn’t see any reason to have been mean to her. Maybe it was because I was so in love with her. Or maybe, since I realised I’d have her only for a short time, I couldn’t restrain myself from this sort of amorous aggression.
‘Forgive me,’ I said contritely. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you.’
After a pause she said, ‘What hurts me is that you still don’t realise how much I’d be willing to pay for a time together with you. My husband’s spies are planted everywhere, yet I’m sitting with you in a café, not caring if I die because of you in some “accident of love”. And if I haven’t died yet, it’s because I gave up on both love and writing, the two things my husband has never forgiven me for.’
As I took her hand to kiss it, her wedding band came into view, so I put it down and picked up the other one, planting a long kiss on it and murmuring as if to myself, ‘My darling . . . ’
As I withdrew my lips from her hand, I asked, ‘How did he allow you to travel without him?’
‘I came with my mother on the pretext that I wanted to see a gynaecologist who specialises in treating infertility. We’re also here to meet with my brother Nasser. He’s come from Germany especially to see us. I’ve been afraid my mother would die without seeing him again. This thought has become my constant dread. She’s aged rapidly since he left.’
Still holding her hand, I said, ‘How I’ve wished I could meet your mother. I’ve often thought of her as my mother, too, not just because I’m an orphan, but because I feel as though my body overlaps with yours somehow. Sometimes I feel as though we came out of the same womb. Other times I feel that your body is the one that brought me into the world, and that I have a right to settle there. Give me a nine-month residence permit inside your womb – I’m applying to your body for emotional refugee status!’
She smiled, her cheeks flushing like a virgin’s. Some locks of hair fell out of place, and she looked as though she could be my little girl.
Sometimes what I loved about her was her brazenness, and other times, her girlish modesty. I loved that proud, self-contained femininity that you couldn’t compromise unless you’d received permission born of passionate affection.
Unhurriedly brushing a strand of hair off her face, she said, ‘With you I want to be eternally pregnant.’
‘In that case,’ I said jokingly, ‘I won’t be able to ask you to have a little girl who’s pretty like you. Do you realise what a loss it would be for you not to be repeated in another female? The amount of femininity in the world would suffer a decline!’
‘Rather, I know what a loss it is to run my fingers over my belly in search of you, and wonder why you still haven’t penetrated me. You’d have to be a woman to imagine the grief of a womb that hasn’t conceived by the one it loves. Only a woman could understand that.’
After a pause I asked her, ‘Hayat, did you love me?’
‘I’m not going to answer that. Your question is an insult to me, and
my answer to it would be an insult to you. Feelings that beg to be expressed are half-lies. Verbal disclosures are a kind of psychological undressing that violates others’ intimate spaces. This is something I learned from you. I used to beg you for some confession of your love, and you would say, “A mouth-watering verbal revelation is bound to be spiced with hypocrisy. Silence is the only thing that’s free of all deceit.”’
‘So when did you memorise all that?’ I asked, amazed.
‘In the days I lived at the foot of your so
fa with the patience of a cat, lapping up every word you uttered from the bowl of infatuation.’
I retorted with a chuckle, ‘And when the cat was full, she’d turn me into a ball of yarn. Sometimes she’d play with me, and other times, she’d fray my strands with her claws. How many times did you dig your claws into my kindheartedness, then make my pain even worse by licking my wounds?’
We laughed together with the collusiveness of a lovely era past. When I saw her look at her wristwatch in an announcement that she was late, I said, ‘I want to see you. We’ve got to arrange a time to meet.’
‘I don’t think I can outmanoeuvre both Nasser and Mama. One of them is bound to tag along wherever I go.’
‘Why are you a novelist, then?’ I asked, laughing.
Once I’d given her my mobile number, we parted in the café for fear that we might bump into one of the Algerians frequenting the exhibit.
I had her leave a few steps ahead of me, and as she was waiting for a taxi I headed for the Metro to go home, fearful of losing the beauty of a happy excitement that might give my secret away.
My other reason to be happy was that Françoise would be leaving on a trip the following morning. When I got back, I found her packing.
Exhausted after two days of working at the institute, all she wanted was to sleep so that she could get up early the next day.
I was glad she hadn’t approached me for sexual attention. My mind was entirely on Hayat, and, unbeknownst to me, her mind was on another man!
I stayed up late that night watching television. I couldn’t sleep. Then I thought of calling Nasser out of politeness to ask about his mother.
When I called, he welcomed me heartily as though he’d missed me, and insisted on inviting me for dinner the following Saturday at Murad’s house, since his mother would be coming to make Constantinian food for them.
I asked him about her health. With a tinge of sadness, he said, ‘The misery Ma went through at the hands of the French when my father was a wanted revolutionary leader was nothing compared to what she’s suffering at this age on my account. Imagine an older woman having to endure the hardship of travelling to see her son because his home country has closed its doors in his face, and having to choose between his being dead, or homeless.’
The Dust of Promises Page 16
