Chaos of the Senses (8 page)

‘Why do you call it silly?'

‘Let's just say I don't like bridges.'

‘Strange. He spent months trying to get me to love them. I thought all artists would like the same landmarks.'

He put out his cigarette as if to avoid an unpleasant subject and said, ‘Who knows! He might have changed his mind since then. The only people who never change their minds are dimwits!'

Sensing that it bothered him for me to talk about Constantine, I tried to think of something else I could draw him into a conversation about. Before I'd opened my mouth, he looked at me and said, ‘I like you in that dress. Black suits you.'

‘Really?'

‘Really. But more than that, I like the fact that we both happened to wear the same colour today. I still remember the dress you were wearing the first time I saw you. Like Cinderella's
prince, who has nothing but a shoe to guide him to the girl of his dreams, I think that if I'd seen a woman wearing a muslin dress, I would have run after her, sure that she must be you!'

He slowly knocked the ashes off his cigarette and continued, ‘What saddened me that day was that I didn't get to exchange a single word with you. All the lights were against us, maybe because we were the best-looking couple at somebody else's wedding. The band had been playing lively music when all of a sudden it stopped and struck up the wedding march in announcement of the bride and groom's arrival. Women lined up on either side, decked out in their finest traditional garb and beating on ben-idirs and tambourines. Just when you and I happened to come in, both of us wearing black, the women starting to ululate. We weren't the bride and groom, of course. We were there at that moment by sheer coincidence, just steps ahead of the bride and groom, but it was the loveliest possible mistake. Next to us, the actual wedding procession looked downright dull! It was as though they'd been escorting you to me in that black dress as my imaginary bride, and the scene stayed with me for years afterwards.'

He puffed on his cigarette. Then he continued, ‘I remember how we were so flustered, we split up after that. You struck up a conversation with some other man, and I began talking to another woman, making a point of seeming interested in her. Wanting to avoid more lights and mistakes, each of us found a place in a different group. Even so, we couldn't get past each other. Even while we were deliberately ignoring each other, we were still face to face. I don't think you felt any desire for me at first, and I didn't feel any for you. It was love that desired both of us, dreaming of a pair of characters like us to play these outlandish roles.'

I just sat there listening, not daring to interrupt him with a single word. In silence I found a refuge, a way of creating the
impression that I already knew everything he was saying. Besides, silence imbues situations like this with a special sort of beauty.

I felt sure he must be talking about some other woman. I couldn't recall ever having gone to a wedding by myself wearing a dress like the one he'd described. I didn't even have one in my wardrobe. Besides, if I had ever walked into a wedding by accident with a strange man as striking as this one, it wouldn't have slipped my mind. Nor would this scandal-mongering city have given me a chance to forget it!

I was afraid to be honest with him, since it would have destroyed so much of the beautiful illusion each of us harboured about the other. So I kept quiet, enjoying my ambiguous position between two women, one of whom he was pursuing because she was wearing black, and the other of whom was pursuing him because he'd said, ‘Not at all'!

Each of us was, to the other, both Cinderella and the prince, and this was the strangest thing about our story!

I had only one comment to make on what he'd said, and it was a statement that I wanted to be subject to multiple interpretations.

I said, ‘So we might have all sorts of beginnings for a single story!'

‘Yes,' he concurred. ‘And that's why I was so sure we'd meet up. In fact, I'd imagined us having a time together just like this one!'

He paused slightly before asking, ‘Do you know why I risked ruining our first date by letting the taxi driver decide where to take us?'

Before I had a chance to say, ‘Why?' he went on, ‘Because in love, more than in anything else, you've got to have a
relationship of trust with Fate. You have to turn over the wheel without giving it any particular address or telling it what you think is the shortest way to get where you're going. Otherwise, life will amuse itself by working against you, and either your car will stall on you or you'll get stuck in a traffic jam, and at best, you'll arrive late for your dreams!'

‘Something like that takes a lot of patience,' I said, ‘and I'm no good at waiting!'

‘You've never experienced love, then!' he said.

‘Yes, I have!' I objected. ‘It's just that my experience of it has only made me more impatient. Maybe that's why I've got it wrong so many times. Love taught me not to believe it, but I believed it anyway. It taught me to recognize it before celebrating it, but I couldn't. So I'm still waiting for love's train. Every time a passenger gets off, I think love has arrived. So I carry his bags for him and ask him how his trip was. I ask him his profession, the names of the cities he passed through and the women who passed through his life. Then, as he talks to me, I discover that he got on the wrong train and ended up in the wrong station. So I head for another passenger and leave the first one sitting on his suitcase!'

He was listening to me with interest, perhaps on account of the possibility that he, too, might be sitting on his suitcase without realizing it. Maybe this is why, as he flicked his ashes into the ashtray with studied leisure, he said, ‘I hope you'll leave that station and never go back.'

Some silence passed between us, and I didn't know how to break it with anything but a question which, after what he'd just said, struck me as naïve.

It would have made more sense for me to ask, ‘How?' But instead I said, ‘Why?'

The reply came with an unexpected sternness. ‘Because,' he said, ‘I'm the last passenger to get off that train. I had to travel a long way to get to you, and now that I'm here, trains have stopped running. So, wait no longer, Madame. I've declared you a closed city!'

How could a woman resist a man so intoxicated with conceit? Is there anything more wonderful than a love that's born out of the fervour of jealousy, out of the conviction that we have a legitimate claim over someone who doesn't belong to us, and whom we're seeing for the very first time?

There was an alluring, unstudied manliness about him as he delivered this first romantic pronouncement. He uttered the words with a composure so disconcerting and so utterly self-assured that it left no room for a logical question such as, ‘By what right do you say such a thing?' By virtue of a single sentence I'd fallen under the sway of love in all its insanity, and I began conversing with him outside the bounds of logic.

‘But I don't know anything about you,' I said.

‘That makes it all the nicer.'

‘And all you know about me is whatever illusions you harbour about muslin.'

‘It doesn't matter.'

‘Do you believe you can keep the trains from whistling inside me?'

‘Absolutely.'

‘And do you think it will be easy for us to be lovers at a time like this that's so opposed to love?'

‘Of course.'

‘But we're headed for a romantic involvement . . .'

‘Quite necessarily, Madame!'

By the time I'd gathered my astonishment-scattered wits to say something else, he was signalling for the waiter to bring the bill and call us a taxi.

Within minutes we were headed for a farewell when we were still approaching love's door.

Like my voice, his cologne wasn't high-pitched this time.

‘When will we see each other?' I asked.

‘I'll call you,' he said.

He left me no room for anything but an exclamation mark.

‘Call me? How?'

‘Don't worry. I know everything.'

‘But . . .'

‘I know.'

As the taxi descended with us towards Constantine's usual noisy bustle, we, with one bend in the road after another, were climbing love's steep mountain path, whose silence grew ever deeper as we ascended.

Then suddenly, as we were waiting at a traffic light, he asked the driver to let him out. As I looked on in amazement, he handed him a note and told him my exact address, instructing him to deliver me to my doorstep. He leaned towards me as though he were going to plant a kiss on my cheek. Instead, he whispered in my ear, ‘It's better for us not to come all the way back together. It's safer for you this way.' As an afterthought, he added, ‘I'll miss you.'

Then he got out, leaving me in a state of stunned surprise.

* * *

It was love, then. This was the way it always presented its credentials.

In a state of emotional fluidity, along would come a man against whose directness and unpretentiousness I'd taken no precautions. I'd reassure myself that nothing was in the offing, since he wasn't that handsome or charming. Then, when I was least expecting it, he would say something confusing that no man had ever said before, and suddenly he would become the most important of them all.

It was usually when I was in a state of bewildered amazement over him that catastrophe would strike. After all, love is nothing but being struck by the thunderbolt of surprise!

So here it was again, going away and leaving me hanging on question marks. I found myself in a state I'd never experienced before. As I got out of the car, a mix of peculiar sensations suddenly came over me and I rushed into the house as innocently as a woman who's just come back from a shopping trip or a visit, not from a tryst in an unknown location with a man she doesn't know but who knows her!

I closed the door to my room and hurriedly took off my black dress as though I were trying to cast off an accusation.

I sat down on the edge of my bed: exhausted, scattered, my eyes darting to and fro. I was trying to understand exactly what had happened to me, to recall everything that man had said over the past hour and a half. I wanted to recover all the details of our conversation, in the course of which he hadn't asked me more than one or two questions whereas I had plied him with one question after another. But my interrogation of him had been to no avail, since I'd ended up with even more questions than before, among them: Who could this man be? Where had he got all that information? How did he know my address?

Logically speaking, of course, I should have known a lot more about him than he did about me if he was nothing but a character out of a story I'd written.

However, my creativity had been reduced to nothing but attempts at outsmarting him now that I'd discovered my ‘other' story as told by him, such as his description of our first meeting and the black muslin dress I'd been wearing. I might have believed in the possibility of such an encounter if I'd had such a dress in my wardrobe. But I didn't!

I'd purposely not interrupted him or commented on his story. I'd just listened, keeping my amazement to myself while secretly envying the woman who had once released all those wonderful feelings in him.

This pang of envy led me to a surprising discovery: that my story with this person had also been born in a moment of jealousy. He was the man I'd been looking for, the man I could measure myself by. So from the time I met him, I'd felt both envious of him and possessive towards him. I'd also wished I could kill that other woman and take her place without leaving my fingerprints on her neck.

She'd been my sole preoccupation from the start. I'd even asked him twice whether there was a woman in his life. Both times he'd replied in the negative, and this denial of his might have been the nicest thing that came out of his mouth.

There hadn't been any justification for my happiness, of course. When he saw how gleeful I was, he said, ‘Don't be too happy now! It's better for you to love a man with a woman in his life than a man with a “cause” in his life. The former, you might succeed in making your own, but the latter will never be yours, since he doesn't even own himself !'

And I never did make him my own. A cause took him away from me for ever. Still, I didn't benefit from the advice he'd given me. In real life, I still fall in love with men who have a cause in their lives, and in novels, I fall in love with characters who have a woman in their lives.

If only I did just the opposite!

At some point it occurred to me that this man might also have some cause in his life. If he did, this would explain his extravagant sorrow, his bouts of silence, and his tendency to evade questions, all of which were traits I'd observed in this type of person.

At the same time, however, I thought it unlikely. Gone were the days of earth-shaking causes, the worthy causes that made an entire generation of men seem more youthful and glamorous than they really were.

In the political marketplaces run by rulers who shrewdly had outbid us with respect to every cause that comes along, they sold us ‘the mother of all causes' as well as other, newer ones, packaged according to the dictates of the new world order and ready for local and national consumption. As for us, we took the bait with singular stupidity. Then we died, poisoned by our own illusions, only to discover, after it was too late, that they and their children were still alive, celebrating their birthdays over our dead bodies and making plans to rule us for generations to come.

So, since the days of that cause, dreamers have gone extinct and the knights of romanticism have fallen off their mounts!

Thoughts like these led me to my husband, whom I'd also failed to possess, not because I was sharing him legally with another
woman, but because he was possessed by responsibility, and since his only ‘cause' was that of remaining in a position of power.