‘Kiss me, I beg you,’ she said.
It was not her. She was not the one who had crossed the landing in my apartment building, and not the one I had carried and not carried. She was a girl from years past, whom I once found shivering on a rainy day under a bare willow tree, soaking wet and almost blue from cold and fear. I had not been able to follow what she was saying through her delirium, but I had understood that she had run there from the bus stop in a rainstorm and had no strength left. ‘I stopped here under the tree because my whole body was soaked and my limbs were numb.’
‘But the tree’s totally bare. It’s also soaked through and its branches have gone stiff!’
‘I didn’t notice. Really, I didn’t. I was waiting to drop dead and I preferred that that happen to me while standing here, where my friend would find me when she came back!’
I had spent a long time trying to dry her hair, her face and her limbs with little success. Still shivering, she had said, ‘I think I’d better take a hot bath and change my clothes.’
I had helped her remove her wet clothes and get into the hot water. I had massaged her body, her whole body, from the top of her head to her pale, slender toes. My fingers had detected vitality creeping back into her from the first touch. I had gone along with her body’s repressed frenzy, as if my whole body had become a movement that pierced her pulse. I was doing what I was doing not because I had found her in such a state, but because I would have surely done it, whatever the circumstances, to fulfil a mysterious desire for it to happen with the gentleness with which it did, and as an expression of another possibility for our existence, different from the one derived from planned desires, a possibility accompanied by impossibility and oblivion.
In one of the parts of Letters to My Beloved, I wrote:
You were sitting on the edge of the bed when I touched you. I cupped your delicate face in my hands; I cannot remember if it was burning hot or cold and damp. I simply remember that it almost vanished between my big hands and only your lips pulsated in this picture as they said, ‘Kiss me, I beg you.’ I do not remember kissing you. I do not remember what happened between us that distant afternoon. I do not remember your face. I remember carrying you up the stairs of a building, or in a sparsely furnished apartment between the bed and the bathroom, and noticing that a painting on the wall was not straight, its deep blackness slashed by an impetuous yellow. I said, ‘I will come back later to straighten the painting. It looks wrong tilted like that, because the streak of light across it hits too hard.’
You said, without being angry or sharp, ‘Je me fiche du tableau.’
When did this happen? I no longer remember a thing. Did it happen in Ibn Sina or in a room in some hotel? I no longer remember if it was when we were going out, before that or years later. What happened when I carried you and set you on the edge of the bed, or when I set you down and carried you, and then carried you and did not carry you? Did I really put you in a warm bath and massage the toes of your small feet? Impossible! I could not have done it! But where have all these images that waver between certainty and illusion, between remembrance and visualisation, come from? How would I settle on one of these and find peace? How would I know that you never existed before this day, or that you were always here, in this dark corner of my memory? And why is it not you who speaks? Why do you not return, knowing, contrary to what I claimed, that I love you more than anything in the world? Did you really know? How would I know?
I write to you full of sadness, because of the letter you sent me last year that I found in my desk and had not read. That was because I could not remember your name which was written on the back of the envelope, or the city from which you sent the letter. I slipped it between the pages of a book and forgot where I had put it. When I came across it months later and recognised its origin, I feared it would contain news that would make me die of sadness because I had not read it. So I threw it in the fireplace without regret, because I forgot what I did with it. Now I do remember it in a way I cannot fathom. I remember the whole story linked somehow with you standing wet under the bare willow tree! If you do read my letter today, I beg you to send me a sign, telling me that you do not bear a grudge against me for burning the letter.
The morning after my dinner with Layla, I woke up exhausted and spent a long time in a haze looking for the day’s schedule. When I found it, I pulled myself together and went straight to the shower.
As I was leaving the room I found an envelope slipped under the door. There was a blank sheet of paper in it. My heart beat hard and I understood that the matter was related to something I was expecting, but no longer knew what. When I saw Layla and her guest at the breakfast table, I wished to separate them as soon as possible in order to free her from this legendary companion. Layla was cheery and unruffled while our eminent guest had his face in a bowl of fruit, which he chewed with deliberation while his teary eyes scanned the faces and furniture in the restaurant, as if he were expecting to meet someone.
I exchanged an intense look with Layla and felt an inner lucidity, the lucidity of a person not bothered by anything any more. I told myself as I submitted to the serenity that came from this lucidity that I might have reached the last station of my life, where I would put my suitcase down on the platform like any traveller, not knowing, out of extreme fatigue, whether I had arrived or was about to depart.
At a certain moment in life a person gets detached from his path and becomes a scrap of paper hanging in the air. At that moment he rids himself of the pressures of the path and is able to join any adventure wholeheartedly, because he is not required to justify anything any more or to provide any conclusive evidence of anything. He has freed himself of the future, as if he had died a very long time ago. What he experiences now is nothing except what his immaculate corpse remembers of that shoreless future.
Layla stood up suddenly and startled me. She apologised, saying, ‘Were you lost in thought?’
‘I was sitting on my suitcase on this vast platform.’
We were on our way to the historical city of Walili when Layla announced that she hated ruins. I told her that ruins had a soul, contrary to buildings. But she stood her ground and claimed that the most beautiful ruins were those we saw around us every day in the form of fallen dreams.
I told her, ‘But what you’re saying is only a poetic image. Ruins are ossified souls we extract from the bowels of the earth.’
She replied sarcastically, ‘And what you’re saying now is an exact science and not a poetic image!’
Saramago laughed for the first time since the start of our trip, which annoyed me. We spent the distance between Fes and Zarhun via Zakkutah each absorbed in our own world.
I was thinking about my father, Al-Firsiwi, who, in the waning years of his life, was working as a blind guide among the ruins of Walili. How would I introduce him? How would he receive Layla, and how could I escape his raving if he decided once more to play his favourite game?
Layla was in the back seat, talking about Jesus’s adventure in the boat during the storm on the waters. She seemed to be making an affected effort to separate holy genius from literary genius, insisting once more that the miraculous in its literary form had a realistic dimension that gave it an astonishing beauty which was absent from the religious version. It was probably due to the fact that religious faith was the basis for experiencing the miracle, an aspect that was not derived from the text. Layla, despite her insistence, did not succeed in pulling the writer out of his silence, which gave me the impression that she was talking to herself and that the writer had not come with us in the first place, but only his novel, for us to use as a pretext to weave a text according to our own narrative.