Love in the Kingdom of Oil

by Nawal El Saadawi

  ‘It’s totally natural. A woman like you who exceeds all bounds with her sin can overturn the established order with the blink of an eye.’

  ‘Is the established order so dilapidated?’

  He did not have the energy to reply, but his heart quaked inside him. As if it had been fearing this movement all his life. What could wipe away this sin except for the woman to kneel before him. To wet his feet with her tears and ask his forgiveness. As her ignominy increased, so did his pride. For there is nothing that reduces the pride of a man like a woman without sin to fill her with regret.

  He was standing waiting for her to kneel or to burst into tears, to gasp out her repentance and her remorse. However, she remained as silent as the dead in their graves. Threatening her with the punishments of earth and heaven did not succeed. All he could do was wait. However long it took, he would wait, for the only thing that could rescue his pride was for her to let some words like ‘Forgive me!’ escape from her lips.

  ‘Were his eyes imploring?’

  Of course. With one movement of her eyes the situation was transformed. It was as if with her eyelids she was turning the pages of a picture book. In this picture he appeared bent low, kneeling in front of her, wetting her feet with his tears, begging her to say the words ‘Forgive me!’. She wanted to open her mouth and ask his forgiveness, but to no avail. Her lips were stuck with oil, like gum. Her eyelids also were stuck, like her lips, and her eyelashes were stuck together too.

  Before her eyes, all she could see was darkness. When would these black clouds move far away and the lights appear? If the lights had appeared there, why didn’t they appear here? If the sin had occurred here, why was it subject to punishment there?

  The door opened with the force of the sudden wind. The waterfall of oil gushed in with a roar. The black dunes towered up between earth and heaven. The man raised his arm as a sign of despair. He realised that he had lost his opportunity, that his emptiness had been revealed to the eyes of the whole world, and that there was no hope of concealing the truth.

  ‘Was that due to the oil gushing in at an unsuitable time?’

  He was talking to himself with his arm upraised. As if he was addressing the peaks of the dunes or an unspecified force in heaven.

  ‘O Oil! If you don’t submerge her totally until she’s dead, nothing will be left in this world of the pride of man.’

  Apparently, the oil responded to the man’s plea. The oil poured down with greater power, and the woman flailed around with her legs and arms to resist drowning. Of course, the oil could not abandon its nature and take sides with the woman. The man was convinced of this.

  ‘Won’t you apologise for your sin, woman?’

  ‘I tried but . . .’

  ‘Has this happened before?’

  ‘Yes, it has happened before . . .’ She said this with her eyes getting wider between heaven and earth. Unwittingly, she exchanged glances with the man. In the faint light she saw glances being exchanged that destroyed any remaining hope. Had she had life before? However, the question was beyond the strength of her imagination. The man had realised that she had been a sinner all the time, from birth until death.

  ‘Of course, I knew that. What’s new about it?’ He said that as he climbed a long ladder to the roof. His cast-off sarwal was still swinging on the hook. His arm was stretched out trying to reach it. From behind he looked hump-backed like a camel. He was bow-legged and his legs were covered in fine hair, which was soaked with black sweat and matted together.

  ‘Now she has to take the decision. If she doesn’t, she will never take it.’

  This was how things seemed to her. To stay forever or to return straight away. It was the first critical decision she had had to make in her life. Was it the oil that had forced her to make it? Or perhaps the memories of her old life made things seem more rosy than they had been. Although the slaps were a memory like the black marks, nevertheless woman-beating was a natural thing. The man had not stopped calling upon heaven to help him. Heaven whispered to him from on high, ‘Beat them! She cannot expect a better future unless she accepts a beating with pride.’ She made her head like the head of the goddess Sekhmet, which was made of bronze. She entered the kitchen holding her neck haughtily like the goddess Nefertiti. She stood in front of the fire inhaling smoke into her bowels as if they were the bowels of the earth. She stored pain as if she was pregnant with it, then perfumed herself on the outside to conceal the smell. She resisted the desire to raise her arm to slap the man, and smiled in his face like an angel.

  ‘Have you got two faces, woman?’

  ‘You have double that, don’t you? Four faces.’

  The oil was still gushing out powerfully. It was pushing her once again to do something she did not want to do. She was totally incapable of comprehending what sublime love was, and what base love was. Since childhood she had understood important things that nobody else had understood. In vain she had tried to search for what she wanted to search for. The man was no more than a hindrance in her life, like the dunes of oil.

  ‘He is a model man who is only responding to heaven’s behest that he beat women.’ This is how she comforted herself. In the depths of her she wanted to repent. She wanted to make him play his heavenly role and bestow forgiveness upon her. In the women’s meeting she heard the voice of the young woman. It resembled her own voice when she was the same age, except that then she did not conceal her mouth with her hand like she was doing. She opened her lips wide and swallowed the black particles as if they were nothing.

  ‘In the absence of pregnancy, the woman plays the role of mother, makes the man a child and bestows on him a role to play.’

  She did not know why her stomach was not getting larger. His four women had also reached their menopause. They raised their hands to heaven pleading to become pregnant. They called on all the prophets and saints by name. None of them responded to them. They called on the Lady of Purity and other female saints, all to no avail.

  ‘Is the man the cause?’

  ‘Impossible. What have men got to do with women becoming pregnant?’

  Under her ribs she felt the muscle trembling. In her head another muscle excreted thoughts. This black foam on her face was perhaps the surfeit of motherly tenderness, or perhaps it was a yearning for her mother’s womb.

  ‘Had her mother been buried alive in the bowels of the earth? Was this what pushed her to dig with her chisel, even though it’s impossible?’

  It was possible for her to orbit around the earth while she was lying down, and then return to the same spot where she had been. The man was there as well. He had just returned from work. His face was pale, and the black spots on his face had become blacker.

  ‘Have you denounced me?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I know that you are burning with desire to take revenge on me, but I warn you that we are partners in all things. In fact, it was you who always used to incite me against His Majesty. I was resisting your efforts to entice me with all my strength. If I gave in to you one day, that was only because I had despaired of reforming you. Yes indeed, you are a twisted rib that can only be repaired by breaking it.’

  Her breast ceased to move and she began to choke. He was a man without pride. In her old life, he had more manhood. She wanted to cry out words, which were imprisoned but which she longed to be rid of. Words that she had to pronounce before the end of the world. Distasteful words, whose flavour made her sick, which women mumbled in bed with a man, when the heat was intense enough to melt shame, and vice was turned into virtue with a movement of a man’s lips.

  ‘I don’t want anybody to know what happened. One day we shall be able to forget everything and celebrate His Majesty’s birthday together. Put your hand in mine.’

  His arm was stretched out towards her like a long stick. Before she stretched out her hand, he had grabbed it with his fingers. Big fingers covered in stains and calluses on skin the colour of oil.

  In the n
ight she tried to free her hand from his, but in vain. She turned over on her other side so that she was facing the wall. ‘OK then, I’ll run away tomorrow when he goes out to work.’

  She fell asleep gazing at the wall. She saw herself sitting on the bridge waiting for the lights to appear. Silence fell as it became completely dark, then points of light began to appear from afar, multiplying as if they were reproducing by the thousands and millions. As numberless as the stars, gathering in a white beam, which hovered on the horizon and came to land on the roof. The Lady of Purity whispered in her ears, ‘Hello there! What have you done up to now? Are you going to go on lying there like a sick cow?’

  She pulled herself out from under the cover. The storm was throwing up black dust. A torrent pouring from heaven and from the bowels of the earth. The men were filling the jars. She could see them from afar on the skyline like little black shadows the size of children. They were moving their arms in the air as if they were playing, trying to empty the waters of the sea into little buckets, or to empty the air of heaven into a tin carafe.

  She twisted her neck in an effort to see the women. The jar remained firmly on her head. No drops fell from it any more, even when she moved her head. To reach the women she had to slip down the slope covered with the muddy oil. She stopped halfway. She looked towards the horizon to the black dunes and to the blacker patches of the houses at the base of the dunes, and the roofs drowning in darkness, covered with overturned jars and dovecotes of black-feathered pigeons resembling bats, and the tips of minarets and the headstones of graves like raised crosses. She did not know the name of this village that she happened to find herself in. They called it Alma Mater. OK. What Alma Mater could this be, in which she was burying her head?

  The women raised their arms. They despatched the jars with a strong movement of their necks and a bend of the upper part of their bodies. They sat on the edge of a rock covered with black moss. The earth was moist. The silence was as noisy as a wind whistling. Under the faint light the surface of the lake was covered with waves, waves that followed one another and piled up in crannies with the mosses. The dunes surrounded the place like walls blocking out the whole world that lay beyond them.

  She was sitting in the middle, as her aunt used to sit in the middle of the women. One of them took a folded paper out of the pocket of her jallaba. The letters were in black ink in the handwriting of her husband or her boss at work, and of course it bore the seal of His Majesty.

  The women craned their necks to read it. The letters were strange like the feet of the cockroaches of the black night.

  ‘This is terrible.’

  ‘Is there any way to rescue her?’

  ‘To help her to run away?’

  ‘Ah but . . .’

  At this word the ladies shut their mouths in silence. A sound was heard like suppressed breathing, a feverish wind emerging from the breast, or perhaps the sound of the withdrawal of breath from the body. Her lips let out something like a cry. Of course, all of us need to run away, but where, when the world is empty? Before, yes, before, I used frequently to use this word ‘solidarity’. But it is forbidden to utter this word, as if it is Satan or the goddess of death Sekhmet.

  ‘Sakhmutt?’

  ‘We must correct people’s pronunciation. We can do this because it is our tongues that utter words.’

  ‘We shall not be worthy of a right that we take from hands other than our own.’

  ‘Thus we allow ourselves to be put in situations that an animal would not accept.’

  ‘There are only a limited number of things that we can do with our own hands.’

  ‘Running away for instance?’

  ‘We shall run away on our own feet, and not on anybody else’s feet. That is clear.’

  ‘And the travel ticket.’

  ‘Ah yes, the ticket!’

  ‘We must demand our wages.’

  They all shouted with one voice. The word became like a ball of light that jumped from mouth to mouth, banging against the wall of darkness and returning in retreat carried by the wind to mouths that were still open, returning to where it was before it had been uttered. Silence fell.

  ‘Haven’t we demanded our wages before?’

  ‘Yes, we have.’

  ‘Then we must stop demanding them and take them with our own hands.’

  The women exchanged glances behind the black cover. They scratched their heads where the skin had swollen under the base of the jars. Not one muscle of their faces moved. Their lips let out no sound. Their eyes darted backwards and forwards without seeing anything. She looked at the lake covered in dust. The moss in the crannies was being swept away by the current. The lake seemed to be as deep as the sea or the ocean, with dead bodies lying on the bottom.

  ‘Is there someone watching us?’

  The eye was looking out through the keyhole. She knew him immediately from his back view. The hump stood out under the faint light. The women raised their arms with one powerful movement. The jars returned to their places and settled in the holes on their heads. She could no longer see anything apart from their bowed backs. Their bodies were as small as children’s, and their size decreased as they got further away, and there was no noise apart from the whispering of the jallabas in the distance like the rustling of the wind.

  She was sitting by herself. The darkness of the night was growing less. The darkness had been veiling her like a curtain, and now the light was uncovering her. She saw the man standing there. She realised that he had seen her, as she had previously seen him. They were standing there, equal in their vision and height. This upright situation should not happen in a world that was not upright.

  ‘You no longer have an opportunity.’

  He said it angrily. By anger he was trying to conceal his lack of uprightness. It was her last opportunity, and if it were lost, there would not be another. She raised her arm to protect her face from the slap. If she did not raise it now, she would not raise it later. If she lived, she would live with her head held high. If she died, she would die kicking. She would not stop kicking until her last breath.

  ‘This woman is losing blood.’

  Indeed, the women needed to lose blood. If not, the world would remain as it was, and everything would end in nothing. We must take the fresh blood of this woman and transfuse it into the world that is on the point of death.

  ‘She has finally closed her eyes and died, standing there like a tree.’

  She remained standing in her place, incapable of movement. Her roots were in the bowels of the earth, her head was held high, tossed about by the wind. Her leaves trembled and her arms bent and twisted like twigs. She tried to no avail to rid herself of her branches. The wind rubbed against her audibly and with a regular rhythm like the breathing of someone sleeping.

  ‘Will you go back to sleep in this heat?’ he asked her in a voice full of jealousy. As if he was jealous of her ability to sleep. The gushing of the oil was eating away at the wall, and jealousy was eating away a bit of his flesh under the twisted rib. He jumped up, taking off his clothes as if he was stripping off his skin.

  ‘I can stand it no longer. I have a desire.’

  ‘To write?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You have this new machine now, and you no longer need to know how to read or write.’

  ‘Yes, but His Majesty wants a speech for his birthday tomorrow.’

  ‘OK. The new machine can make a copy of last year’s speech in a few minutes, can’t it?’

  ‘Yes, I know that.’

  ‘What’s new then?’

  She grasped everything instinctively. Emptiness was spreading in the depths of her. What was the point of pretending then? There was no need to hide. Perhaps there was still some passion between them, the remains of a love from her old life. But there was a gust of wind and the current of oil swept everything away.

  She heard the sound of the policeman typing and spinning in his swivel-chair.

  ‘As you see, the
woman went on leave.’

  ‘Yes. These cases have become totally commonplace. One in three women goes on leave like this.’

  ‘Is it a new illness?’

  ‘Yes. In psychiatry, we call it schizophrenia.’ As he said ‘in psychiatry’, he twisted his neck towards heaven at a sharp angle, and the pipe, which was fixed in the corner of his mouth, shook.

  ‘Do you mean a dual personality?’

  ‘No. With a dual personality, the woman and the other person are two who are forced to accompany one another. With schizophrenia, the woman herself and that other man become one person. Understood?’

  ‘Yes. I know that. But the result is the same in any case.’

  ‘Of course, but dual personality is a totally natural case, and all women can be put in this category.’

  ‘Of course. I know that. Apart from our wives, of course.’

  ‘Of course. Because we men are different from all other men. We are descended from a distinct lineage that stretches back to the prophets. Didn’t you hear the speech of His Majesty on the occasion of his birthday?’

  ‘Yes, I heard it. It was a historic speech, and I wrote that in my article in the newspaper. His Majesty must have seen it.’

  ‘He must have seen the photographs at least. For as you know, His Majesty does not know how to read.’

  ‘Yes, I know, and there is no shame in that. None of the prophets knew how to read, but in spite of that they led the world into a new era.’

  ‘Yes, I know that, but His Majesty loves colour pictures, especially pictures of himself. He never gets bored of looking at pictures of himself published in the newspapers or broadcast on the screen, does he?’

  ‘Of course he doesn’t. That’s natural for a great person like him who is leading us to the new oil era.’

  ‘Of course, but what is the problem with oil?’

  ‘Nothing except . . .’

  ‘Except what?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I feel that you want to say something. Come on, speak, don’t be afraid.’

  ‘Not at all. It was only a trivial thing. When I returned from work today I found a small paper.’