Chaos of the Senses (25 page)

Incredulous, I asked, ‘Are you getting married?'

With a kind of muffled sadness he said, ‘You might call it a marriage of sorts. It's the only permanent bond that we don't choose, and from which we can't escape.'

I didn't understand what he was saying, but I concluded he was joking with me as a way of getting me to come.

‘All right then, I'll be there. But beware of my jealousy. I'm a Sagittarius, and people with that sign of the zodiac make up the largest percentage of those who commit crimes of passion. I'll bring you a report to document it.'

‘Come then,' he said with a laugh. ‘Maybe I'll be the one to kill you!'

Why did this man insist on setting fire to my body and my notebooks? He who had always stood on the edge of the forbidden, contenting himself with a kiss, what had led him to change his convictions? Was there really another woman hovering around him? Who might she be? And how could such a thing have happened when I was talking to him every day?

I tried to sleep, looking for answers to these questions. Then I remembered him saying, ‘The time for questions is over.' So I hid my question marks under the pillow and began dreaming about our next tryst.

* * *

My mother's preoccupation with that wedding was an absolute godsend. Knowing of my dislike for such occasions, and having despaired of my going with her, she attended it by herself and left me to get ready for my secret celebration.

It was noon when I arrived at the house. He opened the door for me in what might best be described as a ‘seaish' mood, in that he seemed as mysterious and unpredictable as the high seas.

He kissed me without saying a thing.

I sat gazing at him on the sofa opposite his. I said, ‘You have something of the sea in you.'

‘Was my kiss salty?'

‘No, but there was something deceptively calm about it.'

He made no reply.

Silence made us more eloquent. The vibrations that passed through us in the stillness placed us on a faultline where an earthquake might strike at any moment. And since passion is a state of silent anticipation, we both loved and feared the silences that would suddenly come over us.

The call to the noon prayer rang out from a distant minaret. He seemed to be listening to it intently, so I didn't dare speak to him.

When it was over I got up. He was busy smoking a cigarette. As I headed towards the kitchen, I said, ‘May I bring some water? I'm thirsty.'

He didn't answer.

After reaching out to stop me, he pulled me towards him. Then suddenly he asked me, ‘Do you still like Zorba?'

His question surprised me. It made me feel as though I was being accused of loving another man.

‘Maybe,' I said.

‘But you do. You still have a fascination with everything dazzling and deadly. You love the type of painful losses that turn logic on its head.'

‘That's right,' I said.

‘Come, then. I've got the kind of enjoyment that will suit your mood.'

His tone revealed a trace of derisive melancholy that I didn't understand. I was going to ask him what he meant, but before I could speak, he had taken me by the hand and drawn me onward towards other questions.

In an adjoining room furnished with a huge bed, one corner of whose modest carpet was covered with an assortment of newspapers and books scattered here and there, he left me standing for a few moments. He went over to a tape recorder next to the bed and spent a few minutes looking for a certain cassette tape. He placed a tape by Demis Roussos in the machine, then came back.

Flustered at finding myself in his bedroom, I said, ‘It seems you like music.'

As he carefully drew the curtain over the room's sole window, he said, ‘Music makes us miserable in a better way. Have you heard that saying?'

‘No,' I said.

‘It's a saying of Roland Barthes's. Are you familiar with this tape?'

‘I'm familiar with most of Demis Roussos's work, and I like everything he sings, but I don't know this tape in particular.'

‘I don't either,' he said. ‘I found it here among a number of other tapes, and it includes a song you're sure to like.'

I didn't ask him which song he meant, but I had a sudden feeling that we were appealing to music in an attempt to rescue
ourselves from the destruction that was bound to follow an experience of pleasure which, for more than one reason, would cause us sorrow.

However, a frightening unspoken desire, and senses in a state of high alert, left us devoid of emotional resistance in the face of that throaty, sorrowful Greek voice singing about its romantic disillusionments.

We were on the verge of a kiss when the music came on. Taking us by surprise, it advanced upon us slowly, even lazily at first, before picking up speed in keeping with the mood of our wildly contradictory desires. It communicated its passionate rhythm like the steps of a dancer twirling in the pouring rain, his feet clad in nothing but the buoyancy of our ardent craving.

In the presence of Zorba, the sea took off its dark glasses and black shirt and sat gazing at me.

A man who was half ink, half sea denuded me of my questions between high and low tide, and drew me towards my destiny.

A man who was half timidity, half seduction inundated me with a feverish torrent of kisses.

Holding me with one arm, he cancelled out my hands and began writing me, pondering me in the midst of my perplexity. He said, ‘This is the first time I've looked off the page at your body. Let me see you at last.'

I tried to seek refuge behind a blanket of words. He said reassuringly, ‘Don't hide behind anything. I'm looking at you in the darkness of the sea and nothing but the lamp of craving is lighting your body now. So far our love has lived its entire life in the darkness of the senses.'

I wanted to ask him, ‘Why are you so sad?'

But a storm at sea swept my questions away, scattering me like foam.

The sea advanced, inundating everything in its path and staking the banners of its manliness on every spot it passed.

With every region that he declared occupied territory, and which I declared liberated, I discovered the greatness of the losses I had suffered before him.

Like someone fidgeting restlessly inside the body's cage, he got to his feet. He wanted to take leave of himself and be united with me.

I asked him, ‘What are you doing to me?'

‘Trees have no choice but to make love standing up. Come stand with me. In you I want to escort my friend to his final resting place.'

‘What are you saying?' I asked, taken aback.

Trying to hold on to me, he said, ‘I have a poem for you.'

Suddenly his words, like his fingertips, turned into matchsticks that set fire to everything they touched. I didn't know what he meant, nor why he wanted us to be consumed in such a huge, frightful conflagration.

Overwhelmed by his manhood, I floundered in his arms like a fish out of water before entering little by little into a state of surrender.

‘Do you love me?' he asked me all of a sudden.

His single arm was infecting me with his passionate ferocity.

‘Of course I do,' I said, terrified. ‘This is the first time love has led me to sin.'

In a cynical show of distress, he began to recite,

How long will I go on being your first sin?

You have room for more than one beginning.

All endings are short,

and I now come to an end in you.

But those who give life an entire lifetime

deserve more than one beginning.

His voice had the belated taste of tears.

I nearly asked him, ‘Can the sea cry?' But he had disappeared.

When the storm subsided, the sea left me a corpse on the shore of bewilderment, and cast me a fleeting glance.

One kiss, two kisses, one wave, two waves, and the sea had withdrawn furtively in anticipation of an approaching tear.

After rolling in with a swift, tumultuous fury, it had departed on tiptoe. So is it possible that the sea makes love out of pain?

The sea had receded, leaving my body between two poems and two tears, and nothing but salt remained.

As for me, I stayed where I was, a sea sponge.

At that moment, with the awareness of one who has been prematurely betrayed, Zorba danced barefoot on the shore of grief, spreading his arms wide like a crucified prophet. He pranced about next to me to the rhythm of successive thrusts, with the ferocity of the masochist working himself into a state of pained ecstasy. So I danced with him, trembling like a fish that's just been released from the sea's power.

When the storm had come to an end, he lit a cigarette and sat smoking, leaning against a cushion of questions. But by the time he found the answers, he had turned back into a man.

After lovemaking there are certain eternal questions that always come back, questions men always pose as a way of reassuring themselves of their ongoing virility.

‘I've always worried about how you would handle a situation like this,' he said. ‘On the bed of reality, romantic feelings lose some of their beauty.'

‘What happened between us was beautiful,' I reassured him. ‘I don't want to know whether it was beautiful in fact, or whether love just made it seem that way.'

I tried to avoid looking at his arm as I spoke, but I continued to be uncomfortably aware of it. The problem novelists face is that they can't help but observe everything and everyone, including the people with whom they share a bed.

Adjusting his sitting position, he asked, ‘What is it that you want to see?'

His sarcastic tone took me by surprise. Like someone trying to justify a crime, I replied, ‘I want to read the secret history of your body so that I can know whether you really are Khaled Ben Tubal. You act like him in every way. It's amazing how much you resemble him! So tell me please, who are you?'

‘All your men are alike,' he rejoined with a touch of sarcasm.

After a pause he added, ‘But I'm not him.'

He uttered these last words calmly as though they were nothing out of the ordinary, as though he hadn't said something that would change the entire course of our story.

I said, ‘So why did you hide the truth from me all that time?'

‘There isn't just one single truth,' he said. ‘The truth isn't a stationary point. It changes in us, it changes with us. So I couldn't tell you or show you anything that would be the perfect truth.'

Then he added, ‘You used to say you loved my body, and I would tell you that one body might conceal another, but you didn't believe me. You used to say you liked forty-year-old men, and I would correct you by telling you that I wasn't the man
you thought I was, but you wouldn't believe me. As if that weren't enough, you fell in love with my hands, and you would ask me all sorts of questions about them. You told me you loved my hands and you asked me how old they were. In reply, I told you that you had always loved my complexes, but you didn't understand. And now this body is all I have to answer your questions with.'

‘But there was no need to be so evasive about it,' I said. ‘I like your body the way it is.'

He smiled and said, ‘You're mistaken. The fact of the matter is that you were ready to fall in love. I might have come to you disguised as anyone, in any form. I might have said what you were expecting me to say, or I might have said nothing at all, but you still would have loved me.'

Then he added, ‘That's because love adapts itself to all sorts of situations. It has the ability to see beauty in even the most ordinary people. So when you discover who I really am, you'll see amazing new details in our story, and you'll find that you love me, not who you expected me to be.'

‘But you showed me a newspaper article you had written under the name of Khaled Ben Tubal.'

‘That's another reality. And it really is my name. Or, if you will, it's the name you chose because it fits me. When I started getting death threats, I had to choose a new name to sign my articles with. I don't feel as though I stole it from anyone, since I'm sure that every word I've ever written in a newspaper is something that the man in your book would have said if he'd been able to speak.'

I was astounded by what he was saying. It was as though, because we lived our lives as storytellers, everything that grew out of our lives became a narrative.

‘Other than that, who are you?' I asked him.

He replied with a laugh, ‘I'm a good reader.'

‘I don't understand.'

‘Let's just say that I've read you well. I've always read you. In fact, I'm your alternate memory. I know things about you that you've forgotten.'

‘But what do you do in life?'

‘I work as a journalist. You probably wouldn't believe me if I told you that three years ago I was obsessed with the idea of meeting you on the pretext of interviewing you for the newspaper.'

After a pause he added, ‘As a matter of fact, I wanted to ask you questions that concerned no one but me. The publication of your book happened to coincide with the accident that paralysed my arm. So I spent my convalescence reading your works. My friend Abdelhaq gave me your book when I was in the hospital, and as he handed it to me, he said, “I've brought you a book I think you'll like.” Imagine: I was afraid of it before I read it. Then I was afraid of it because I read it so much! I was amazed to have found a character in a book that was so much like me. We had a city in common, interests and disappointments in common, and we even shared a physical impairment and similar tastes. You're the only thing that we didn't share, since you were his sweetheart, and his alone.'

He continued, ‘The day I met you, I was sure that in one way or another, my life would parallel your story with that character in your book. I was even afraid of you, and I would often feel that I didn't want to call you. If you only knew how I've loved you, and how angry I've been with you on account of a book!'