The car arrived, and I took my place in it as I had the day before.
Laughing, the woman asked, “What brought you at this hour? Hadn’t we agreed to meet this evening?”
“You, you’re the reason,” I said with a smile.
Smiling back at me happily, she said, “We’ve got to stick ourselves together with glue so that we’ll never be separated.”
As the motor revved in preparation for the car’s departure, I said imploringly, “It’s daytime, so please avoid the busy streets.”
“Are you afraid someone might see you?”
“Yes,” I said in an embarrassed tone.
“Ah! I forgot you were married! Pardon me, Mr. Husband, but we’re going to Heliopolis!”
And the car took off at its usual break-neck speed.
On the way she asked me, “What did you do with your wife yesterday?”
I furrowed my brow involuntarily and made no reply.
“Do you hate to mention her that much?”
Then, disregarding my silence and discomfort, she asked, “Don’t you sleep in the same bed?”
I tried to force a laugh, but I couldn’t, and I felt a resentment that ruined my tranquil mood.
“How I’d love to see her!” she said with a raucous laugh.
Wanting to cheer me up in her own way, she caressed my lips with her finger and, like a mother speaking playfully to her little boy, said, “My little chickadee!”
The car pulled up in front of a tea shop. We sat there chatting happily away about whatever came to mind, and she told me she’d chosen the seamstress’s house as the place for our lovers’ trysts. As we left the place at noon, she wanted to pay the bill, but I wouldn’t let her, and we parted after reaffirming the evening’s meeting time. We met repeatedly, and when the vacation ended two days later, we continued our meetings in the evenings. The experience of success convinced me that love is health and well-being. My habit of spending the evenings out was a secret to no one, and although Rabab preferred, as she said, for me to spend my evenings with her on her endless visits, she didn’t press me about it. Hence, we each lived our lives in the way we pleased. This was no secret to my mother, either. Once she said to me, “I’ve noticed, son, that you haven’t been yourself lately. I’ve been afraid that if I said anything you’d be angry. In any case, if you enjoy spending the evenings out, spend the evenings out. All men are like that!”
57
I spent a month or more in a state of unmitigated bliss. Peace took the place of suspicion and doubt, and my relationship with Rabab was restored to one of goodwill and pure affection. At the same time, I surrendered myself to Inayat in tumultuous passion and triumphant joy. She was a woman of means, and not once did we go to our beloved nest in the seamstress’s house but that she presented her with a gift of a riyal, and sometimes half a pound. As for me, my sense of dignity required that I, too, be generous toward her, albeit within my more limited means. Without realizing it, she made it possible for me to resume drinking on a regular basis, since the seamstress would keep bottles of whisky and soda in constant supply for us. In fact, she nearly got me into the habit of smoking. In addition, she had certain virtues, and what virtues they were! She was possessed of perfect femininity and vitality, as a result of which she was a source of pleasure to lovers despite her middle age and her lovable homeliness. At the same time, however, she possessed such virtues alongside an alarming degree of wantonness and audacity. For her, loving a man was everything, and for its sake she deemed anything and everything permissible. She may not have been truly the type that devotes herself unstintingly to her man. Rather, she may simply have been a woman driven by anxiety and despair. In other words, she may have been driven by an awareness of the fact that the brightness of her youth was fading, as a result of which she couldn’t bear to let a day go by without a taste of love. The most peculiar thing about my passion for her was that the things about her that enchanted me were the very things that might normally be looked upon as shortcomings — her maturity, her homeliness, and her audacity. She filled me with boundless confidence, and when I was with her, I worried about nothing. If it hadn’t been for the angst that would come over me as a result of the frightening divorce I experienced between body and spirit, I would have enjoyed life in unruffled tranquility. Yet even with such perturbation, it was a happy life.
Then one afternoon, right after I’d finished lunch, I went in to spend some time with my mother over a cup of coffee as was my custom every day. As soon as I walked into the room, I noticed her limpid eyes searching my face anxiously as though there were something on her mind. Looking intently into her face, which looked drawn and languid, I realized immediately that she wanted to say something.
I felt worried, but I said with a smile, “What is it, Mama? Tell me what’s on your mind.”
A look of hesitancy flashed in her eyes for a few moments.
Then she said, “Yesterday I heard some things that shocked me. Could you tell me more about what’s going on between Rabab and her mother?”
This was the last thing I’d expected to hear. My eyes clouded over with dark memories and my fluttering heart wondered: Has the woman gone back to her nagging? Rabab had told me nothing about her mother’s visit to her the day before, contenting herself with conveying her mother’s greetings to me.
In a calm voice — or, at least, in a voice that I made appear to be calm — I replied, “Everything’s just fine between them.”
Shaking her head skeptically, my mother said, “There may be things you’re missing. I wasn’t able to receive Madame Nazli yesterday because I hadn’t been feeling well, so when Sabah came to tell me she’d arrived, I pretended to be asleep. The visit went on for quite a long time. At one point, I slipped out of the room to go to the bathroom. On my way back, I came past the sitting room door. When I did, I was shocked to hear the woman say, ‘This is intolerable!’ Then Rabab came back at her angrily, saying, ‘Don’t meddle in my affairs!’ As for me, all I could do was come back to my room.”
My forehead burning with humiliation, I felt furious and unspeakably bitter toward my meddlesome mother-in-law.
Intruding on my thoughts, my mother asked, “Don’t you know anything about it?”
“Their disagreements are none of our business,” I said firmly.
When I returned later to our room, I found Rabab reclining on the long seat. When she saw me, she drew her legs toward the back of the seat to make room for me, and I sat down broodingly. How could she have kept such a thing from me? Was she afraid of upsetting me?
As if she hadn’t noticed my altered state of mind, she began talking about how it was Friday and suggested that we go to the cinema together.
I let her finish what she had to say. Then I asked, “How’s your mother?” to which she replied that her mother was fine.
Then I looked her straight in the eye and asked her, “Did yesterday’s visit go well?”
“What do you mean?” she asked with a disconcerted look in her eyes.