She spoke of his coughing, which never stopped when he was in bed, and the noises he made while asleep as though he were speaking classical Arabic.
Why did the doors of hell open at the end, and what did “the end” mean?
Things had started to take a different turn when Nasim had phoned his brother to inform him he was marrying Hend. Before Karim could come out with the word “Congratulations!” he heard the name and the words turned to lumps in his throat and he started to cough. Later he’d discover that words die when a person chokes on them. The cough that would never stop had begun that day. The Lebanese doctor went to a French throat specialist, only to discover that what he had wasn’t an ailment but what they call “psychosomatic.” He didn’t know how to tell Bernadette about this psychological disease that had come to an end only when he’d returned to Beirut. In fact, the problem was only manifest at home, where he became incapable of talking with his wife and daughters. The moment he opened his mouth to speak, the cough would begin, the words would turn to stone, and he’d feel he was choking.
He had no idea what had happened. Bernadette and the little girls, Nadine and Lara, filled his life. He’d decided to forget that other country. He’d buried his body in the Frenchwoman’s white body and had forgotten everything. He’d even begun dreaming in French. During the first days of their love he told her she was his homeland. Bernadette couldn’t understand the obsession of this Arab, whose appetite for her body never waned, with homelands. He’d make love to her as though clinging to her for safety, feeling her body with his fingertips and not closing his eyes the way men do when making love to a woman, and when he was done he’d sit naked on the bed, listen to the songs of Fairuz, and grow melancholy.
In Beirut, Bernadette disappeared from the screen of his consciousness as though she’d been erased. There, amid the ruins of the city, he felt as though his French life had been just a dream and that by returning to his city he was rediscovering the young man he’d left behind to wander, lost, through Beirut’s corridors of fear.
Grudgingly, Bernadette had agreed. She said she knew him well and that the six months he was going to spend in Beirut would only add new disappointment to his life.
She said she understood him and knew his heart would burn with longing for Nadine and Lara; he’d discover again how much he loved them and wouldn’t be able to live without them.
Bernadette was right, for this woman with the blue eyes wreathed in love and tenderness knew how to read his feelings.
She loved him when love came and treated him like a child when she sensed he was lost in his new land. She was harsh with him when he went too far in derision of his former life. She had extended toward him a bridge that would allow him to make peace with himself.
She told him that that was love.
Love isn’t desire, that comes and goes. Love is the warmth of safety, the enjoyment of secret understandings, the pleasure of discovering life through the eyes of children.
She left her job at the hospital to devote her time to the house and her two daughters, and decided to be nothing but the wife of this man who excited her with his contradictions. She loved in him his vacillation between an illusory manliness which he pretended and a shy femininity that overwhelmed him whenever he came face to face with life’s difficulties and upsets.
In Beirut, Bernadette was erased but the longing for his little ones grew in his guts. He would get up from sleep to the sound of their crying and, on finding himself in Beirut, go sadly back to sleep, resolving to call them early the following morning before they went to school.
But in that accursed city the telephones did not work.
And when the project had fallen apart altogether, to the rhythm of Radwan’s voice and his threats, he’d felt that all he wanted was to return to Montpellier to embrace his white-skinned wife and breathe in the smell of their first love.
On their wedding night Bernadette was overcome with astonishment as she listened to a strange request from her husband.
They’d signed the marriage contract in the town hall, in the presence of a coterie of French friends, and then they’d all gone on to Palavas-les-Flots, where a banquet of that royal fish, the sea bream, grilled inside a mountain of salt, had been laid out, bottles of champagne had been opened, and white wine had sparkled to the rhythm of the waves.
Karim drank a lot that night, as bridegrooms always do. He danced and ate and said he wanted to become one with the “White Sea,” which from the restaurant balcony looked gray. He took Bernadette’s hand and led her to the beach.
They ran and laughed and rolled on the firm sand of Palavas and he pulled her by the hand and told her that he wanted to swim.
She told him he was crazy and she loved his craziness because it made her laugh. Bernadette’s chortling grew louder as she watched Karim approach the cold water, take off his shoes, and enter the sea in his clothes. She watched him shiver with cold and told him to come back, but he continued. Then she saw a high wave that rolled forward, bringing with it a cold spray that reached the beach, and she screamed with fear and sat down on the sand. He, though, instead of disappearing into the wave, started running so as to beat it to the shore, his clothes soaked.
“Did you see? I beat the wave!”
She ordered him back to the restaurant, where she wrapped him in her long coat and said they had to go home before he caught a cold, but Karim refused. He opened a new bottle of champagne and raised his glass in a toast to his new country, France, the taste of whose sea he had sampled that day, and with the body of whose most beautiful woman he had been baptized.
“You’re crazy,” she said on their way back.
Karim had said he didn’t want to go home because he’d reserved a room in the hotel.
“Why the hotel?” she asked.
“For the honeymoon,” he said.
“But we’ve been living in the same house for a year and we don’t need all that nonsense,” she said.
“But a marriage isn’t complete without the hotel,” he said.
Bernadette was exhausted but Karim insisted it wouldn’t do. Getting married meant having sex. And when she said she couldn’t because she was having her period, his eyes gleamed: he said that was even better because that way he’d feel as though he’d opened her up.
“How vulgar! What do you mean ‘opened me up’? What could be uglier than ‘opening up’? Thank God it wasn’t you who did that because I would have hated you for the rest of my life.”
Karim laughed and didn’t reply. He said he was cold and needed her body to feel warm and continued steering the little Renault toward the Hôtel Royal.
The next morning he said apologetically that it had just been a caprice; he used the French word but was thinking of the Arabic word nazwa — from the verb naza, meaning “to leap” — which is used only figuratively, to mean “rampant desire.”
The word caprice, however, doesn’t have that sense, being only a neutral expression indicating unexpected desire. He’d said the French word, with a cough, because he couldn’t think of another, then leapt onto his French wife and made love to her, coughing and shuddering.
What, though, had happened to Bernadette?
After six years of marriage and giving birth to two children, the French nurse had become fed up with him and his desire, to the point that he’d begun to feel that desire had abandoned him and the magical whiteness of the Frenchwoman’s body had begun to crack and turn to yellow.
The coughing rescued him from his failure in the matrimonial bed. He had no idea what had happened. He would approach Bernadette, take her in his arms, feel his desire starting to crest, and then, suddenly, before he’d taken her, he’d collapse into nothingness, and the cough would rack him. The woman would get up to make him a cup of lemon balm tea and the grief would spread over her face before she returned to her sleep and her loneliness.