As for the notebooks and newspapers I’d brought with me as a smokescreen, it appeared now that they might do more harm than good and that, rather than protect me, they might actually invite suspicion.
In the end, the only thing I could take refuge in that morning was the words of Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who spoke of treading air when the line runs out, and the fishers, ‘who don’t know and never try’, pursuing the work at hand as their destiny.
So it was that I, against all logic, went treading towards my destiny.
The café was quieter than I’d expected it to be. Even so, I was visibly flustered when I walked in. I didn’t know who I was looking for, where to sit, what to order, or whether to hide my papers or spread them out on the table as though I’d come there to write.
I didn’t know which corner I should head for either, and I was afraid that if I chose the wrong one, I’d miss my mark.
He’d said to find a table anywhere but in the left-hand corner, adding, ‘Left isn’t the place for us any more.’ So, did this mean I should sit in the right-hand corner of the café and wait there? Or should I sit in the left-hand corner with the expectation that somebody would come and sit to my right?
The place seemed huge to me. In one left-hand corner sat a young couple absorbed in a lively discussion. In its right-hand corner sat a man wearing a white shirt without a necktie who was busily engaged in some sort of writing project. He had papers and newspapers spread all over the table, and his ashtray was full of cigarette butts.
I sat in the corner across from him, leaving a distance of three tables between us to be on the safe side.
He turned his head in curiosity. He cast a brief glance at me and the newspapers I’d set down on the table. Then he went back to his writing.
I’ve never understood how some people can write in a café or on a train, as if they didn’t have any sense of what an intimate activity writing is.
How could you just sit down and start writing in a public place? Wouldn’t it be like making love on a bed with creaky metal springs so that everybody could follow your psychological states and your mood shifts, if even from a distance?
I tried to distract myself from the man, but I kept thinking about him. I was amazed by the way he absented himself from everything around him the minute he started to write. Even more amazing to me was the fact that he seemed to write everything down in its final form: without hesitation, without thought, and without erasing or scratching anything out.
Every now and then he’d stop, take a drag on his cigarette, and go on writing again.
At one point he seemed about to say something to me. He stopped between sentences and began looking at me without a word. I expected him to make some gesture that would tell me more about him. But instead, it was as if he were looking at something that only he could see. I couldn’t find any way to flee from that look of his except to open a newspaper I had with me and start reading wherever my eyes happened to fall.
Just then he gave a smile that I didn’t know how to interpret. Was it a greeting? Was he pitying me because I was by myself ? Was he laughing to himself at what I was reading? Or was it just a way of telling me that he recognized me?
This may have been the first time I’d taken a good look at his features. He was rather handsome, and I felt a sort of vague affection for the countenance I saw, as well as a weakness in the face of a silent manly presence that bore no resemblance to that of the typical male in this city.
Something told me that at some time or other I’d loved a man like him, or that he was like a man I’d love at some point in the future. Even so, I didn’t dare conclude that he was ‘the one’ until he made some gesture that revealed his identity more clearly.
Was he really too busy to pay attention to me? Or was he just trying to get a rise out of me with that silence of his, sitting across from me a destiny away and waiting for a question that would escort us into some other realm?
Cowardly woman that I was, I’d never initiated a conversation with a man before. So how was I supposed to make a move? How was I going to press the buttons that would get him to stop writing and say something to me?
I was dying for him to speak. But instead, he was working on me with words that could only be uttered in silence, and that had ushered me into a state of sweet discomfiture.
As I sat there thinking, the waiter came and asked me for my order. Without knowing why, I said, ‘Coffee,’ even though I hardly ever drink it. Maybe I said it just to make him forget I was a woman, since coffee is what men usually order.
In any case, he left and didn’t come back.
I was less concerned about the waiter’s disappearance than I was about the arrival of a distinguished-looking man wearing a black shirt and dark sunglasses. Looking to be in his thirties, he had a confident gait and exuded an effortless manly elegance.
It seems that this man knew me, and that he was surprised to see me there. After casting me a look of astonishment, he greeted me warmly with a nod of his head and went to sit down with the man at the table across from me, who at last stopped writing, and the two of them launched into a conversation I couldn’t make out a word of.
The longer they talked and the longer I went on waiting for something that didn’t come, the more mortified and insignificant I felt.
When you’re waiting for someone, you don’t see or focus on anything in particular, since your gaze is as scattered as your mood. However, the person you’re waiting for might come out of nowhere and take you by surprise, jolting you out of your stupor and your jumble of thoughts and questions.
Who was this man? Had he recognized me? And how was I supposed to recognize him? Further, this woman whose identity I’d stolen: What did she look like? What colour was her hair? What was her customary way of greeting others? What sorts of mannerisms did she have? What kinds of things did she do or say when she was waiting for something or someone?
And this man who’d greeted me and gone his way: Did he know me? Did he know my brother? Or my husband? Do you suppose he knew ‘her’? And why was he looking at me the way he was? Did I look like her? Had he been waiting for me, or for her? Or had he come just to talk to this friend of his? And what if he was ‘him’?
I searched his eyes for something: a memory, a deferred longing, the remains of a secret sorrow, a love that had died in this place.
But his eyes, which scrutinized me from across the room from behind dark glasses, gave me no clues.
Of course, for him to steal glances at me during a conversation with someone else meant nothing in and of itself. Any other man would have done the same, if not out of curiosity, then as a way of silently harassing a woman who dared to sit alone in a café in a city like this.
But what if his friend were the man I’d come for? What if he was pretending to ignore me the way he had in the cinema? After all, that would have been just like him. However, he’d been betrayed by his silence, and by the right-hand corner he’d chosen to sit in, across from memory.
At long last the waiter brought the cup of coffee, set it down in front of me – or, rather, flung it down – and left. Noticing that he hadn’t brought any sugar, I raised my hand and was about to call out to him. But then I thought better of it, since he was across the room by this time, and I didn’t want to raise my voice just to say something trivial like, ‘Excuse me, please, could you bring me some sugar?’
I felt as though my silence was too sweet to break by saying something to a waiter, especially in view of the fact that, based on what I knew about men with beards, the consequences of speaking might not be pleasant. He might refuse to bring it to me. He might tell me that if I want coffee, I should go home and drink it there, with sugar, tar, or whatever else. That is, if he didn’t throw it in my face first!
After all, from time immemorial Algeria has been a country where, with a waiter, anything can happen!
It reminds me of an incident from the 1970s that a journalist friend of mine once related to me.
She’d been staying in a swanky hotel in the capital with a delegation of foreign journalists on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the outbreak of the revolution. She was in the hotel restaurant and had waited so long that she’d nearly given up on getting her order. So, in true Oriental fashion, she summoned the waiter and said, ‘We’ve been waiting for half an hour. But we’re guests of the president, so you should be giving us special treatment!’
In reply, he quipped, as only an Algerian could, ‘Since you’re a guest of the president, why don’t you ask Bendjedid to serve you?’
Then he walked away, leaving her with her mouth hanging open.
Of course, when she went back to Syria and told the story there, nobody believed her. After all, only in Algeria would a waiter tell the President of the Republic to come serve his guests himself !
Given all the stories I’d heard, I’d decided not to ask that waiter for anything, especially since, as far as he was concerned, I was an object of suspicion.
In fact, I ended up not even wanting that coffee.
Then all of a sudden, the man wearing the black shirt got up and came towards me carrying a bowl of sugar.
Given how busy he’d been talking to his friend, I don’t know how he’d noticed that I needed some.
In any case, a hard-to-describe feeling came over me as he approached and handed me that bowl. Penetrating my senses, his cologne took me back to the scent I’d picked up in the cinema when that man had bent down with his cigarette lighter to help me look for my earring, and I was gripped by a mixture of fear and surprise.
All that was missing to complete the scene was a look from him. Yet even without removing his shades, he aroused in me the same feelings I’d experienced before, since that cologne was now associated with a memory that identified him for me in the darkness of the senses.
I couldn’t resist the urge to recreate the scene with him by using the same words I’d used before.
‘Sorry for troubling you,’ I said.
‘Not at all,’ came the response, astounding in its perfect correspondence.
And, as he had the first time, he spoke the words and went his way without adding anything further.
I was so stunned, I just sat there for a few moments, watching him as he went back to his table and sat down with the same spontaneity with which he’d got up and come over to me.
I’d wanted so badly to hear those words that it took them a while to sink in, since I suspected that I’d just been imagining things.
It wasn’t my earring that fell this time – it was my heart, which swooned every time love started to play hide-and-seek with me: presenting me with one man, then another, and making me tell which was which on the basis of nothing but a few tiny words!
I was still under the spell of those words when I saw the two of them get up. The man wearing the white shirt nodded as if to bid me farewell. His nod was accompanied by an absent look that promised something. And then he was gone.
I noticed that he’d been wearing white trousers, too. Meanwhile, I was approached by the other man, who was holding a newspaper that he hadn’t had with him when he came in.
He stood in front of me for a moment. Then he asked, ‘Might I sit down?’
I was supposed to say, ‘No,’ or, in another scenario, ‘Be my guest.’ Instead, I said, ‘Of course.’
However, he didn’t sit down. Still on his feet, he said, ‘Actually, I hate this place. So I’d prefer that we go and have something at some other café. Would you mind?’
‘Not at all,’ I replied.
I was supposed to say the opposite, of course. However, his dislike for the place served as further evidence that he was ‘him’, and I found that the only language I possessed any more was his.
He took a coin out of his pocket and left it on the table to pay for the coffee. Then, with a gentility that took me by surprise, he pulled my chair out for me as I got up to leave.
All I could do was follow him – or rather, Seamus Heaney – and, against my better judgment, keep on ‘treading air’ now that the line had run out!
After flagging down a taxi in front of the café, he got in the front seat. I got in the back, and found myself sitting behind a young driver who was surprisingly well-mannered. He was so kind, in fact, that I forgave him for his cramped, deathly- hot cab.
I was about to open the window, but decided not to for fear that people would see me. Then I sat waiting for the man in black to say something so that we could be on our way.
‘Do you know somewhere we could go?’ he asked the driver.
The driver gave him a bewildered look, since it was the first time a passenger had ever asked him such a question.
The driver’s expression then turned to one of amusement, which seemed to mean either that he felt sorry for us, or that he commiserated with our madness.
‘Where do you want to go?’ he asked us.
The man in black replied, ‘Anywhere we won’t be bothered. Are there any quiet cafés or tea shops around here?’
The driver smiled sardonically at his request and, having apparently concluded that we were from out of town, started the engine and took off at top speed.
It was a fairly long drive, and all the way there I had an overwhelming desire to sit with this man at last, to be next to him or across from him, not behind him. As the smell of his cologne wafted back in my direction, borne on the breezes of a speeding car, the two of us shared the same current of air, and countless unuttered questions.
The first question was: Why had he sat beside the driver? Was it to put some distance between us for one reason or another? Or was it simply because every taxi driver in Algeria insists that his male passengers sit in the front seat rather than the back, and if one of them should happen to do otherwise, he might scream in his face, ‘Listen here, brother, I’m no servant of yours!’
However, the most important question wasn’t why I was sitting behind him, but, rather (of course), why I was with him at all.
How had I ended up where I was? Had my literary curiosity led me into this bizarre adventure? Or was I running after love on a literary pretext?
How could a man who’d only spoken a few words to me bring me all this way without my even asking him who he was? It was as though all my mental faculties had been suspended and replaced by my senses, which had stored up this man’s fragrance and made me follow him wherever he went.
At one point I nearly asked him, ‘What kind of cologne are you wearing, sir?’ Then I hesitated. It would have been madness to ask a man what cologne he used before asking him what his name was! As for asking him his name now, it would have been an affront to the dream, since a dream has no name.
And he, did he know my name? If so, which name did he know: my name, or hers? Who had he been sitting with in the cinema: with me, or with her? And with whom was he going to some unknown destination: with me, or with her?
The taxi stopped in front of the Sayyidat al-Salam Café, which lay nestled in an idyllic, elevated spot overlooking deep, deep valleys.
The driver took off, richly laden with our verbal and monetary thanks, and leaving us in the face of innumerable questions.
When the waiter came to take our order, our joint reply was, ‘We want Coke!’ or, in other words, ‘We want to be left alone!’
Then we fell silent, clearing the way for bigger questions.
I’d been expecting him to say quite a bit. However, he didn’t say anything. He just lit a cigarette and began scrutinizing me between one train of thought and another. Then, as he poured me my drink with the same hand that held the cigarette, he said, ‘Here you are at last!’
His tone conveyed a yearning or pleasant surprise that was so intense, it was as if it had to be condensed into those five words.
He seemed to be continuing a previous conversation with some other woman. Maybe it was that woman to whom he’d given nothing but his silence, and maybe it was someone else.
It perplexed me to arri
ve at this sort of conclusion. After all, would it make any sense for him to mistake me for her?
However, as he continued to speak, he confirmed my suspicion. He said, ‘How strange that I should have run into you in that café. If it hadn’t been for my friend, I wouldn’t have gone there!’
After a brief pause, he went on, ‘Something about you has changed since the last time I saw you. Maybe it’s your hairstyle. I like you in long hair. You know, if it weren’t for that black dress you’re wearing, I wouldn’t have recognized you.’
‘And do you know this dress?’ I asked, surprised.
‘No,’ he replied with a laugh, ‘but I know your way of wearing black, which turns it into a colour that’s glamorous rather than plain and sober.’
I didn’t know how to respond to flirtation that I didn’t think of as being intended for me.
However, going along with him in his confusion, I said, ‘As for me, I’ve got to admit: you surprised me. You’re the first man I’ve ever seen wearing black in this city, even in mourning. It’s as if men hate this colour, or are afraid of it.’
‘So what colour did you expect me to wear?’
‘I don’t know, but people around here tend to wear clothes that don’t have any colour.’
Then, after a bit of thought, I went on, ‘Your friend doesn’t seem to be from around here either.’
‘Why?’ he asked, laughing. ‘Because he wears a white shirt and white trousers?’
‘No, because he wears white with a kind of happy flamboyance, whereas everybody else in this city wears it to show how pious they are.’
He smiled and said, ‘My friend isn’t really happy. He just has an extravagant way of showing his sadness, that’s all. White, for him, is actually the equivalent of black!’
Seeing my confusion, he continued, ‘The colour white is a kind of optical illusion. Didn’t you know that?’
‘No,’ I said apologetically, ‘I didn’t.’
I sank into a moment of silence.
How was I supposed to carry on a conversation with a man who appeared to be as insincere in his show of happiness as his friend was extravagant in his show of sadness?
Chaos of the Senses Page 5
