The Proof of the Honey (5 page)

Haniya stopped talking.

“And?” I prompted.

“I went abroad.”

Only a few words, and an indecipherable expression on her face.

None of us said anything. What similar stories of our own were we recalling in silence? How many decisions, great and small, have we forged in bed? How many disputes had we resolved through such methods of persuasion?

Our generation was doing nothing new. There were many situations of the sort in the books of my masters. Al-Qali, an eminent Arab encyclopedist, writes:

Some ill will came between a man and his wife, and they shunned one another for a few days. Then he jumped on top of her and took her. And when he had emptied himself, she said: “Shame on you! Every time there is ill will between us, you bring me an intercessor whom I cannot refuse.” And in another tale a woman, mourning the passing of her days and particularly her nights with his “upright judge,” said to her aging husband: “The one who used to resolve our disputes has died.”

Rajaa turned to me and said, “You want stories of love? I’ll take you to see my friend Nadia, she knows all the stories for miles around.”

“I want stories about sex,” I said.

“We use the word ‘love,’” said Rajaa, giving me a mischievous look. We rarely use the word ‘sex.’ But is there a difference?”

Nadia was waiting for us at her house. Rajaa had told me a lot about her. She opened the door to us semi-naked. Just a short, diaphanous pareo knotted at her chest and falling to the tops of her legs. It was obvious that she didn’t feel any shame about her body, and there was nothing to feel ashamed about. With the red rose tied in her hair, like a girl of the islands, she was beautiful. She spoke and moved freely. And her freedom made her even more beautiful.

As soon as we went inside, the telephone rang and she pounced on the receiver. Her lover was ringing from France. She gave us a wink before continuing the conversation, which sounded as if it were going to be very spicy.

“He’s a lot older than she. His lamp’s running out of oil,” whispered Rajaa with a laugh.

I liked Nadia. I liked her confident movements. She read us extracts from her diaries where she described their torrid trysts. Rajaa winked at me: “Don’t believe it. These are her fantasies. I’ve seen him. He’s very old and he can hardly move.”

But I wanted to believe. Nadia was frank about her age and that of her lover, and burst out laughing, too. Could she not live a love story at her age, and after all her years as a widow? She left the room to fetch the tea and chocolates. I looked at her and it occurred to me that any man who crossed her path could not help but fall in love with her.

“Any man? Or any man of her generation?” Rajaa asked, with irony.

“Do you want to hear the latest?” asked Nadia.

“Take care,” Rajaa warned her, laughing and pointing to me. “She knows all the stories of the town, even the rumors. Your story will have to be really fresh.”

“I’m certain you won’t have heard it. This young actress went to study in Paris. She got to know a French producer as old as her father. Very rich and very influential. Married and with children older than she was. He fell in love with her. Her skin was brown and smooth and she was passionate. He went crazy over her. She drove him insane. He promised he would produce a blockbuster with her as the heroine, and he kept his word. You know what this generation’s like, everything all in a hurry. She wanted to be a famous actress, and he was obsessed with her youth. He would follow her to Tunis whenever she went there to visit her family. The last time he came here, he had a heart attack.”

“And then what?” I prompted her.

I knew the story couldn’t end there.

“He died. They were together. He was making love to her. He died on top of her. Someone asked if he’d died before he’d come or after. No one knew the answer.”

“And then what?”

“And then what? And then what? You want more? It was a scandal. I told you, the whole town was talking about it.”

I hadn’t heard about the scandal, but I’d seen the film. The poor young thing did indeed have the lead role, and the critics praised her promising talent and scintillating presence. She was a star. Who cared about the scandal? It would melt like a grain of salt and the film would remain, with the glory of the road that had opened up before her. A practical generation for a practical time. Then, too, the scandal had a spice about it that stimulated the imagination and, like a magnet, would draw people’s hearts to it. This was something I knew very well.

“A scandal with bells on it,” as they say in Egypt. The bells are chiming from your buttocks, and the noise is deafening. I listened to Nadia and it occurred to me that the actress’s butt was cause for alarm, and that her bells would certainly catch the eye.

I recalled this adamant assertion: “There is no sex in Egypt!”

“There is no sex in Islamic society!” Words of a young French writer whose novel had been quite a success two years earlier; that had, indeed, won a literary prize. The words belong to the book’s narrator, who travels to Egypt to take part in the Cairo Book Fair, nourished by his orientalist delusions. He travels in the footsteps of Flaubert and his women . . . and fails to find what he’s looking for, of course. Gone are the Nubian maidens the writer had encountered in the nineteenth century, “adorned with necklaces of gold pieces that reached to their thighs and with belts of colored pearls over their black bellies.” In their place are women wearing hijabs. The cultured traveler is traumatized to find that Flaubert’s Levant, the Levant of 1847, has vanished. All that is left is September 11th and the days of Islamic jihad. The only woman to fulfill the hero’s expectations is an opportunistic Francophone Moroccan who works at the French embassy, of whom it is said that she is the most beautiful woman in Cairo. And yet he will reject her advances out of loyalty to his beloved who is waiting for him in Paris. After this pitiful adventure, long conversations with Francophile Egyptians and with travelers even more disappointed than he himself regarding Muslim men and women, the young novelist is forced to conclude: Islam and sex do not mix. A universal truth discovered by a French novelist in the matter of a few days. The earth is round, and there is no sex in Islamic society. This catchphrase echoes another: “There is no sex in the Soviet Union.” The first was proclaimed in nostalgic tones by a writer returning empty-handed from his travels, the second by a puritanical communist in a television interview. In either case, blind propaganda prospers in ignorance, whether real or feigned.

“Why didn’t Sulayma come with you?” asked Nadia.

“She has guests,” lied Rajaa, in a neutral tone that convinced no one.

Nadia and Sulayma do not get along, but I love them both and their personal conflicts don’t concern me.

I love Lebanese Sulayma, who married a Moroccan diplomat and now lives with him in Tunis. This is the virtue of Paris: it allows the Mashriq and the Maghreb to meet. If you make the acquaintance of such a couple
,
there’s a good chance that they’ll have gotten to know one another in Paris.

I love Sulayma. I enjoy her company and love listening to her stories. Arab and French stories about her first lover, and her second, and her third, and . . . and . . . about her lovers whom she cannot count and half of whose names she cannot remember. Are these are stories from before her marriage—or after? Society demands that the page remain blank, to be marked only by the scribblings of the husband.

“He came to see me at the student residence,” relates Sulayma. “He was Lebanese like me, tall and beautiful, fair-skinned with black hair. A playboy, every day a new girl. The men were jealous, and the women were mad about him. He was doing a doctorate at the Sorbonne, though he didn’t finish it, of course. In fact, he didn’t do a thing, except pursue his sexual conquests.

“He lived at the student residence like me. I met him a couple of times with other people. The presence of my Palestinian lover did not stop him flirting with me openly. One day, he came to see me in my room. It was summer and Paris was at its hottest. He’d no sooner sat down than he declared, ‘It’s hot,’ and took off his shirt. Then he said, ‘It’s hot,’ and took off his trousers. He told stories about his Argentinean girlfriend who was jealous and watched him all the time and made his life miserable. I talked with him and responded verbally to his stories but kept my distance while I watched the striptease act that he was performing in front of me. I was curious as to what would follow. I kept talking to him as though he were wearing a tuxedo, when in fact all he had were his white boxers. He said, ‘It’s very hot,’ and took off even those, and stood there as naked as the day he came out of his mother’s belly. The difference was that he’d come out of there as a little child, and now he was a man with all his male attributes. Imagine!

“He took hold of his member and said to me, ‘See? My girlfriend’s crazy. She’s so jealous of me she puts a mark on it with a pen and inspects it when I come home, to make sure it’s still there.’ I was on the point of telling him to give her an indelible marker next time but I didn’t. I shook my head in commiseration, looked at where the mark was, examined it, and made a show of surprise. He stayed naked as a worm for more than twenty minutes, strutting about in front of me in my room, standing at my window, and looking at the paintings on my wall, while I watched him with cool curiosity and kept up an ordinary chatter with him. In the end he said, ‘I feel ridiculous,’ and put on his clothes. I nearly agreed with him. He left me with two light pecks on the cheek, like an ordinary friend, and that was the last time he came to see me in my room.”

“And then what?” I asked, as usual.

I always want the stories to go further.

“Then nothing. We became friends. He got married and I got married. He got divorced and I got divorced. He got married again and I got married again and went abroad. Sometimes we run into one another when I’m in Paris. He knows my second husband. When we meet, he gives me a hug and a kiss. Ordinary friends.”

“Amazing! Friends? After something like that?”

“Why not?”

“Have you ever talked about it?”

“Once he said to me, ‘Do you remember the day I visited you at the dorms and you took your clothes off?’ I told him, ‘No, sweetie, I didn’t take anything off. You took everything off and then put everything back on again and left.’ ‘I did that? Was I such an idiot?’ ‘That’s exactly what you said at the time,’ I answered.”

“Was he testing your memory or did he want to rewrite the facts of history? Did he think something like that could be forgotten? If so, he really was an idiot.”

“What’s even better is that I told the story one day to a mutual friend, and he laughed from the depths of his heart and said, ‘You know, I was jealous of his beauty and even of his wit—every day with a different girl, and each one more beautiful than the last. He was giving me a complex. It reassures me to hear how you treated him: yes, there is a woman on this earth who can say no to him! Now he’s just like the rest of us.’”

“Another idiot. It seems there are lots around like that.”

“When it comes to women, they lose their heads.”

“Like we lose ours when it has to do with men,” I continue, and our laughter mingles.

I look at Sulayma the artist, whose paintings abound with sensuality and bright colors. Plump naked women, with heavy breasts and even heavier buttocks, women overflowing with curves. I look at Sulayma as she talks and all I see is her beauty, her smile, her lightheartedness, and her indifference to the image she projects. Perhaps I love her because I don’t have her courage, child of dissimulation that I am. I have drawn my own image, and have always preserved it jealously. I have never spoken of my secret life, or my hidden stories, either orally or in writing.

I have never dared. I know now that this won’t be the case for much longer. I smile to myself with a certain mischief as I continue the conversation.

T
he first time I saw her, I failed to notice the beauty of her features.  I met her at the spa. The receptionist led me to her but, in her presence, she kept her eyes lowered. With a sure and certain step, she walked ahead of me into the massage room. She raised her eyes and looked at me only once she had closed the door. And only then did I see her smile, and hear her greeting: “You’re Arab? You are most welcome. Where are you from? We don’t get many Arab tourists here at the spa. You are most welcome.”

She came to the point very quickly.

“I divorced him after he got out of prison.”

“Prison?”

“Yes. For adultery.”

“Adultery?”

“The police caught him with a woman.”

“A woman?”

“I myself went to the police station and asked them to come.”

“The police?”

I repeated her words, with a mechanical slowness.

“He thought I was here, at work, like any other day. But the
patron
saw that I was tired and gave me the day off. I returned home unexpectedly and saw them there together.”

“You saw them together?”

“Through the window. I didn’t go in. I just saw them through the window. What a shock! From that day I’ve had this hoarseness in my voice, as though someone had tried to cut my throat and something got caught in my windpipe. Even now, three years on, I still feel as if I’m choking whenever I think of it.”

“Did you know her?”

“No, I didn’t. God forbid. A loose woman. A slut. God forbid. What are they called where you come from?”

I almost said, “Where I come from they call them whores,” but I held my tongue and settled for fallen woman. It’s almost the same thing.

Her fingers were moving over my back. I couldn’t see her, only heard her voice.

“He did that to me after five years of marriage. Our love story had been very intense. And in the end? He betrays me, in my own house, in my bed. Thank God that here in Tunisia they don’t take adultery lightly. He was in prison nine whole months. He deserves what he got.”

Adultery?

“Any relation between a man and a woman who are not bound by the ties of matrimony and in which complete sexual contact occurs.” The word “complete” is a story unto itself, the definition becomes conditional. What, then, constitutes incomplete? The Imam Khomeini himself, believe it or not, states the following in his book of fatwas: “kissing, sexual contact, embracing, and further acts of pleasure that do not involve contact between the sexual organs of the male and the female are not to be considered adulterous, and incur other punishments; such chastisement remains at the judge’s discretion.”

Hearing the hoarse voice of the masseuse, I imagine tears welling in her kohl-rimmed eyes.

I thought of the oft-repeated stories about Monica and the cigar and this question, asked insatiably by the host of a French television show of his guests: “Should sucking be considered infidelity?”

He could have put this fundamental question to the Ayatollah during his French sojourn. He would have given him the definitive answer on this delicate matter.

In one of the old stories that my mother always used to tell us, she spotted my father in the street, walking with a strange woman. He didn’t see her. He was too absorbed by the other woman. My mother quickly crossed the street to avoid running into them.

The details of the story might change, but her voice as she told it was always the same: full of pride. I was young and would listen to her and picture the scene as though I were watching it on a screen. My father laughing, his arm around the waist of a beautiful woman wearing a pillbox hat. She leans her head on his shoulder with a coquettish smile. A whore? In the eyes of my mother she couldn’t have been anything else. I imagined my mother, who was also beautiful, quickly weaving her way through the cars to the other side. Her head down, not wanting my father to discover her there.

A melodramatic moment open to multiple interpretations, you might say.

There was a time in which I would attempt to decipher its various meanings. Now I no longer want to understand. I content myself with reviewing the images in my head and going over them again and again, like a cinema-lover watching a cult film.

A simple case of adultery? As though adultery were something simple. As though one could commit adultery just like that. As though it were nothing. Such misguided thoughts reveal an ignorance of adultery’s precise rules and regulations, rules that cannot be bent. It has ever been so.

The first condition of the adulterer is that he be a youth of tender years and sweet of smell, the reason for this being that sweet smells bring the woman into heat and intensify her desire; also that he wear clean and handsome clothes, make frequent use of the bathhouse, and employ henna on his hair, as well as using a twig to polish his teeth, and oils; that he have among his acquaintances an old woman to act as a go-between; that he be soft of heart, quickly moved to tears, capable of weeping whenever he wills so that, when he finds the opportunity to speak with his beloved, he may complain that passion has destroyed him. Should such conditions be fulfilled in the man and he be alone with a woman, he will find her more biddable to him than his own feelings and closer to his desire than his own breathing.

These conditions applied to the man only, as if the author were aware that women are always ready for passion. If all the conditions are met, the adulterous act can be picked like a ripe fruit.

These conditions applied to the man only. In the woman, one sought outward signs of desire.

If he speak with her, her eyes never leave him, a blissful look overcomes her, she plays with the hem of her dress or her wrap as though she were about to pull it over her head; she stirs the earth with her toes or touches it intermittently with her big toe; she bathes her child and dresses him in finery, combs his hair, rims his eyes with kohl, and introduces the child to him; she mentions him often and talks about him with her female friends and neighbors; grows weary and changes her mood for no reason should she cease to have news of him; and befriends his wife, if he has one, and visits her frequently; and if she sees something at his house that belongs to him she takes it in her hand and makes a great fuss over it, and if she finds his bed, she lies down on in and squirms about on it.

For the Arabs, desire was all-powerful. The universe of lovers was subject only to its reign. Desire answered to nothing but its own laws, the same laws for men and for women, which neither marriage nor children changed. The basic scenario was scripted for its two heroes alone. All those who surrounded them—spouses, children, friends and neighbors—were no more than extras who could do nothing to prevent, or rein in, the lovers’ lust; they could at best be catalysts that ignited the fires of desire or helped to express it. The leading roles belonged to the lovers, and those around them were bit players.

“Here, no one knows I’m divorced. You know how men look at a divorced woman. They crave her. They hover around her and try her out. I don’t want problems. I’m raising my daughter on my own. There’s no one to stand by me. My father told me, ‘Forgive him. He made a mistake and he won’t do it again.’ My husband came too, begging to be allowed to return home, but I refused. When he got out of prison, he came weeping and imploring me.”

“How long was the sentence?”

“Nine months, because he was married. And three months for her. That’s the sentence for adultery in our country. Thank God I have my daughter. She’s everything in my life. I’ve been living for her alone for the past two years. I work for her sake. I have no one to stand by me. There’s no one to help me.”

Now, there is a civilized country where human rights are respected, even in cases of marital infidelity. Nine months for the married, and only three for the unmarried.

A civilized country indeed. Prison, sure, but no flogging, contrary to what is prescribed by the Koran: “The adulterous woman and man shall each receive one hundred lashes.” Starting with the woman, naturally. A truly civilized county. I had a very close call.

Her fingers massaging the soles of my feet, I was unable to concentrate enough to do the math: how many years would I have to spend in prison if on each occasion I were caught red-handed?

If they had caught me with the Thinker every time we met, we would have to spend our lives behind bars. And what if they had caught me with the others before and after him? My life, no matter how long, would not have sufficed. I would still owe the law years and years after my death. Though I wouldn’t be alone. My jail would be overflowing, all my acquaintances would be there with me.

All of them? Let’s say, most of the people I know would share their company with me, for varying periods of time, each according to how clever he or she had been in hiding their crime. The only innocents are those whose crimes have not yet been discovered.

In flagrante delicto, as with the husband of the masseuse, is the precondition for any punishment, without which it becomes a difficult business. Rumors and accusations are not enough. A’isha, the Prophet’s favorite wife, was accused of adultery, and the Prophet set down these conditions of proof:

Summon four male witnesses who saw the sexual act in detail, namely, the entry of the man’s penis into the woman’s vagina in the manner that the kohl-applicator enters the kohl-container or the bucket the well.

How can such conditions be met when the act itself is essentially an illicit and thereby clandestine one?

Two lovers were caught one day in the library’s toilet. The director general wanted to fire them, but a union representative was quick to ask for a meeting in which he appealed to the Prophet’s inalienable conditions in cases such as this. After examining the facts the director, convinced, withdrew his call for their dismissal.

It occurred to me that the husband of the masseuse would not have gone to prison if these conditions had been applied to him. All she had seen through the window was two forms: no bucket and well, no kohl-applicator and kohl-container. Had the policemen really caught them in flagrante delicto? Well of course! They knew their religion, in that country, just as the union representative friend, in the heart of Paris, knew how to convince the director general of the library.

“Did he marry again?”

“No. He lives by himself like a dog. Pardon my expression. There’s no one to take care of him, to cook for him. He sends his clothes to the laundry. He’s like a dog. I have my daughter, who’s the whole world to me.”

“Does he see her?”

“Yes, he sees her. I don’t say anything bad about him in front of her. He’s still her father. I don’t want her to hate him. He is still her father whatever may have happened.”

Her voice has grown even hoarser, and her fingers are now on my leg. The scent of the jasmine oil fills the booth. Laying face down, I can still smell it even though my nose is pressed against the sheet. I turn my face a little and see a beauty spot on the edges of her round face.

I close my eyes and surrender with genuine innocence to the soothing rhythm, the practiced fingers, the scent of jasmine, and the old images that throb in my naked body. I try to catch hold of them before giving way.

Walking beside me in Saint Germain, Sonia asked, “Fathiya confessed that she’s been trying to seduce you for years without success. Is that true?”

I didn’t answer, merely gave a smile.

“Why?” she insisted.

“Why is she trying to seduce me?”

“No. Why do you refuse?”

“I don’t know,” I replied, shrugging my shoulders to make light of it.

“You don’t find her attractive?”

“Maybe.”

“You’re afraid to break your fast with an onion? That it will ruin your pleasure?”

I didn’t say that. Fathiya is not an onion, and I held back a smile of complicity as Sonia laughed mockingly. “It’s an experience that we have to have, even if it’s only once. For the pleasure of discovery,” she went on.

I didn’t tell her that I hadn’t yet finished exploring the world of men and, so far at least, was not in need of additional complications.

“You might behave differently, with another woman,” she insisted, craftily.

“If, by some miracle, I desired a woman, I would be the one to seduce her.”

“That’s just overstatement, as usual. I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t need to be believed.”

“Don’t you ever stop playing games?” she said, looking at me out of the corner of her eye with assumed exasperation.

“Perhaps. The day when there are no men left on earth . . .”

“Or the day you find yourself with Fathiya on a desert island.”

“Fathiya or anyone else,” I replied wickedly.

In the street, the sounds of our laughter mingled and rose.

The old books of erotica have passed down
The Stories of
Huba of Medina
, a remarkable woman who spared neither men nor women. The story goes that to her daughter she said:

Above all, never forget to moan when fucking, and know that once in the desert I gave such a cry as to terrify the camels of ‘Uthman ibn Abi ‘Affan, may God be pleased with him, so that they ran away, and to this day have not been rounded up.

Our grandmothers were worthier than us. They made the best of both worlds.

A man was told that his wife loved women. He replied, “Indeed. I have ordered her to so do for it purifies the opening of her sex. Thus, when she has contact with the penis, she knows better how to appreciate it.”

And what about our grandfathers? May they all rest in peace.

“In the interests of comparison, some women have said, ‘Fucking a man is healthy, fucking a woman is discreet.’” This is the fruit of deep wisdom that I do not have. If the masseuse had been a man, my mind would have been full of fantasies and my body feverish.