In Mecca, we’d often heard the rumors about Jeddah’s fanatic nationalism, but we never took it seriously. In a country leery of any kind of celebratory motorcades, this was the one day in the year when the streets were given over to public celebration. There was no official sanction, but laws were bent and young people took advantage of the blind eye that the religious police turned to that holiday in particular. Headscarves slipped off girls’ heads and every street was a party.
I rolled down the car window with trepidation, a strange mixture of intimidation and utter abandon as the driver weaved in and out of traffic James Bond — style, taking every unannounced shortcut he could to rescue us from the storm we’d found ourselves in the middle of.
A strange dreamworld in which car radio speakers blasting Gulf dance music vied with mosque loudspeakers broadcasting verses from the Quran during vigil prayers in the Ramadan night.
You should’ve been here, ^^^, to taste the Saudi hodgepodge for yourself. Sow-Dee Champagne cocktail!
Aisha
P. S. We grew up hearing mother Halima’s words: “All the demons are chained up in Ramadan, so any sin we commit during that month stems from our own impulses. It’s ours and ours alone and we’ll be held accountable for it. No help from the devil.” Azza always laughed at that, muddying up the gravity of those words.
When I look through the emails I’ve sent you, I wonder: Do you think I’m making up for Satan’s absence? Adding enough of his flavor? Or are they boring, the lines I write you?
It isn’t Ramadan at the moment but my stomach’s completely empty. Not a bite of food or a drop of water in twenty-four hours. I weigh almost nothing right now. It was so windy at sunset today, the air-conditioning unit almost flew out the window.
With people starving like we are now, it’s no trouble at all for the wind to pick us up and blow us through the air like it does all those plastic bags.
P. P. S. What will it take to break the bond between us?
I tried to do it a few times, but I was too fragile to send us both on our way.
And yet the whole time it would’ve been so simple:
Just a step in the air.
P. P. P. S. There’s something I haven’t been able to bring myself to say to you. If Azza jumps, there won’t be anything left for me to hold on to.
“Jumps?” Nasser leafed frantically through the emails, in hot pursuit.
Bad Is Good
You once enchanted me by saying “Love is sharing our normality … Taking pleasure in our normality, without magic or charms.”
Why do I complain? Isn’t that the essence of living?
To deepen the pain, I listen again to the tape you gave me of music by de Falla. I told you one day how I adored Don Quixote, so you got me this tape of his ballet about Don Quixote but told me that you liked the other piece, about the nighttime secrets of the gardens of Andalusia … You told me more about Don Quixote and explained that Sancho Panza had spent years creating Don Quixote, honing him with every forbidden dream he didn’t dare to carry out himself, and every adventure he’d always wanted to embark on, till he finally got Don Quixote to bring them to life …
Azza and I wonder now: which one of us is Don Quixote and which Sancho Panza?
I have to be honest with you — I can’t keep living in my computer screen like this …
Aisha
P.S. I was reading about Prize for Oddest Title of the Year at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and apparently the book that won this year was called If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start with Your Legs.
I think that I probably need to start by letting go of Azza …
And you, I know you’re bringing me down from the sky bit by bit, and you feel guilty — don’t …
After seeing your last photo, with veins bulging at your temples and fatigue dripping from your nose, which looks so long now, I felt like a creature of a totally different caliber, from a whole other world, maybe of light …
You, on the other hand, are a hole, whose emptiness no passion or pain can fill, and you’ll carry on swallowing us all one after the other …
Just now, at this moment, I was appalled to realize that I don’t love you any more. In fact, I never loved you! You were nothing but a placebo whose narcotic effect I willed my body to imagine … To end up, now, faced with your pitiable baldness and the way your hips start to hurt when you try to get into certain positions. The first time you pushed me onto a bed, you slumped heavily like a bear, your face distorted by panting, oblivious to my fear and my body, from which you proceeded to strip every illusion of passion. I put up with it just to get to the end of the tunnel, whenever and wherever it would come. I have this ability to close my eyes to things, even when my body’s all eyes …
There’s something dead about you, can’t you smell the stench? There’s something missing in the look of a man who has lost his virility. You confided in me once that your idol was Federico Fellini, because despite his own impotence, he attempted to feed off his friends’ sexual glories and turn them into artistic masterpieces.
I understand, you can’t believe this is happening to you; you go after every new face in the hope they can give you back that electric shock — don’t you get it? Your wires have been cut.
That’s it.
The current flowed again once with me, but it was just a fluke. It isn’t going to happen every day. That day, you called me a “sex bomb”!
I wonder if it’s you I’m talking to or Ahmad. Whichever one shook the kaleidoscope of my head, tangling my wires and electrodes so I can’t tell who’s who or what’s what any more …
Now, how far can I limp without an idol to worship that’ll distract my body from this pain?
I wonder: can an impotent man fall in love? Can his heart thrash with passion or skip a beat? What is love? Just a physical reaction? In that case, according to your theory of existence, you’re finished!
Intelligent young men rush headlong, blinded by love, and then as they age, their virility betrays them and they take refuge in clinging to that slim alternative, the thing they call sensuality, going totally overboard in their obsession with the senses and their desperation to satisfy them. Who was it who said that?
June 30, 2006
Aisha, that thieving script-writer — why did I let her write the last act?
She called out to me. I was going past her house when I noticed her hand signaling to me from the doorway. My mouth went dry … But no, it’s not true that her hand reminded me of Azza’s.
Despite my resentment, I went closer, scarcely believing I’d find that it really was Aisha. She addressed me from behind the door in a whisper: “Come in, take them to … There are minds who could live off these books; maybe you’re one of them.” I could hardly make out where it was she wanted me to take them.
I confess I was shaken to hear her hoarse voice for the first time in my life. It was as if she were really saying “these books should be saved from the Lane of Many Heads.” Rats are the first to leave a sinking ship, I felt like retorting nastily, but I didn’t dare, and instead went into the dim hall to find a row of cardboard boxes, overflowing with books, waiting for me. The dizzying smell of damp paper and ancient minds poured out of the boxes … I wanted to lie down and inhale to death.
When I looked up to catch a glimpse of Aisha, she’d already gone, leaving a patch of darkness on the wall of the stairs after disappearing upward. She didn’t wait to see if I’d carry out her instructions — she knew my weakness. A faceless woman; I’ll never know what she looks like.