Sarmada Page 21

  Desire won out, that howling anticipation in her hand as she waited for his youthful fingers to feed her his flesh and his blood and his heat. Rather than push him away, she wrapped her hand around his and eased it back down into her moist sex. She gave him free reign over all her entire body without obstacle or reservation, and in a voice that resembled a pure spring, she whispered, “Don't burn me with your fire,” borrowing a line from an Egyptian film she'd seen in the Emirates.

  His hand learned the meaning of moisture in bloom; it discovered the secret of woman's dew. Her hand reached out to grasp his animal erection and when it did, the shock of his two penises made her shiver. She stopped everything. “Wait a second, wait a second,” she whispered, sitting up. She wanted to see what she'd felt, so she threw off the covers and pulled down his pajamas and her heart almost froze when she saw them, sticking up, pulsing together. She took them in her hands and tried to stifle her giggling, and then she was overcome with an insane lust. She must've come a dozen times and almost fell to pieces from the constant trembling. He only noticed because she was moaning beneath him: he had one of his penises inside of her and the other rubbing against her, nearly reaching her navel. “Don’t come inside me. Don’t come ins...”

  Her night had drifted toward the epitome of forbidden bliss. There was too much fragile stealth and the body opened wide to its farthest possible limits. She took him into the bathroom with her, defying any latent fear that they might be caught in the act. She bathed him: scrubbed him like a child and soaped up his two slender penises. Then she squeezed toothpaste onto them and massaged them with water and he could feel all his apprehensions diffusing mintily in the desire-sated air. It was like a rite of worship. She knew that the pleasure she’d experienced was unlike anything a woman could ever hope to attain and that it would be absurd to give up this immense gift no matter what the justification. She kneeled down and began to kiss them, nibbling at the two heads, taking one into her mouth and sucking it while her hand milked the other. She brought them to climax and he knew he was about to come and tugged at her hair, but she clung to him and he came. She swallowed. She licked at them and took them in her silky mouth, washing away his semen, like the placenta of an animal that had just given birth, until they died down between her lips. He looked down at her, his face marked by a few red pimples, and watched her ministrations, grinning like a lizard basking in the sun after a downpour. He was nodding in one continuous, harmonious movement and then her voice brought him back to dreadful reality.

  “Did you enjoy that, you little pimp?”

  On the other side of the door, eavesdropping Farida held back her tears and then skulked, broken, back to her bedroom.

  She wept silently until her anger was exhausted, and she submitted to all that had happened without daring to confront them.

  He was beaming. Buthayna had set him alight, given him something besides solitude, and they started doing it every chance they got. They were drunk on a bottomless love. They started avoiding Farida, whose face had begun to contort with the signs of devotion to God, faith, and the holy books. She was constantly going to the majlis to worship and tidy up, tending the carpets and the candles and the incense. It was like her second home. She was escaping from what she knew was going on in the shed, from an atmosphere heavy with desire, and old feelings that roared to life when she recalled them. After a month of madness and burning lust, Buthayna's house was ready.

  They had more freedom now. Although they'd lost the pleasure of stolen moments, they were able to open their relationship up to manic lust. He went to see her every day and would occasionally stay for three days straight. Nothing kept him from visiting except for a sudden impulse to go out into the wasteland and howl, or the compulsion to read a new book, as well as learning how to drink arak. He occasionally put on his school uniform: fatigues with a tenth-grade insignia, and set off—not to school—but rather out into the wasteland to clear his head and hone his body on the unique basalt and its radiant energy.

  After six months and with the beginning of eleventh grade, his passion began to fade. Buthayna could see he was constantly lost in thought, intermittently silent and distracted; he was more interested in drink and drunkenness than in her. He began repeating phrases, poems, and passages that she didn't understand at all; it seemed as if he was suddenly bored with everything. He was no longer the lusty teenager he'd been—the rocky stud. He was more tender and liable to be scratched by words. She didn't know what to do about him: the further he drifted, the more she craved him.

  She finally realized her dilemma: she was used to the idea of a foolish, doomed romance. She'd been certain that he'd grow up and leave her. She'd been expecting some girl his age to snare him with her charms. She never dreamed that she'd lose him to a fusty old weirdo called Arthur Rimbaud, who seemed to spout never-ending nonsense!

  Meanwhile, his mother was heading down an entirely different path: a shaykh, who was a great scholar of the secrets of the Epistles of Wisdom, had proposed a Seeing Marriage to her, which was a kind of marriage between a Druze man and a Druze woman who would be companions in every regard except that their relationship would remain entirely celibate. They would share the burdens of daily life and the secrets of the faith and immerse themselves in the spiritual together, renouncing the body, suppressing the self and its fire with their cool reason, in order to achieve knowledge of the true self and the universal intellect on an eternal journey toward the distant essence within each human being.

  Farida knew she had to ask Bulkhayr what he thought, but he just snorted and said, “Do whatever you want. I don't care.'” He sank back into the gloom of his own private meditation. The words of the wild French teenager and his call to tear down the senses in order to create a new vision filled him with terror. The mysterious sentiments transmitted by a soul convulsed with a wisdom induced by dread made him feel as if he needed a new alphabet—a new trailblazing, exotic language that had roamed the expanses of instinct. He wanted to know who this person was whom he was accompanying; he wanted to understand Rimbaud's soul and body before they'd been tamed.

  He felt Rimbaud's translated soul pushing through the sophistry of vague pronouncements, flashing in his moist, raw insides. He touched lights that would open up to him in his own mind's eye in the form of golden roosters crowing for promised dawns, which the sky sent down in floods of wine. He felt he had everything and that his mind was expanding widely, pushing him beyond his narrow confines and the ordered world of Sarmada. He saw that he would need a new language in order to realize his desires, so he started to learn French. The letters didn't curve and swoop like Arabic letters, they didn't have the same explosive force that comes from dotting. Arabic letters are arched and pliant. They can bend and twist in a way that other scripts can't. The letters in French were open; they had no sanctity, no great secrets, but still they unlocked new horizons and new lands that he couldn't even believe existed, and it made him smile whenever he said them. His mouth would gape, making it seem as if his scowling face had been wrenched open. Not to mention that this was the distant and seductive colonial voice, and yet he couldn't quite understand how it could be that French imperialism had left nothing behind except for a few words that had crept into their daily conversation, unlike in Lebanon or the Maghreb. As he repeated the French words into the voice recorder, he discovered that speaking French made people look as if they were always smiling or, as was more likely, that they were telling a joke, so that you could never tell when they were being serious.

  It was something Arthur Rimbaud had said—or had he said it? It was hard to know anymore: “the body a treasure to waste.” Buthayna didn't get it; she thought it went too far. She knew that all she wanted was for the body of this tanned adolescent to help extinguish the thirst of her own unique body and its ardent rhythm. But he had another passion in his life and it was tugging him away.

  The words he'd learned on Buthayna's body as a child still stung with desire and molasses after
all those years, for he was the only student in the world who'd learned to read and write with his other senses. The words themselves began to enchant him, to steal him from Buthayna's embrace. She could never have imagined that her teenage lover would sink into her, perfumed with book dust, repeating strange words in her ear. Once when he broke out in a raving fantasy, she realized she hadn't anticipated any of this and that she was beginning to lose control. She was no longer the older guide whom the crazy young man had seduced and whose parched heart he had scorched. And yet she was comforted by the vague assurance that no woman on earth could have resisted going to the furthest limits of madness if they'd met this alluring rake. He was bursting with wicked ruinous lust and a devilish passion that couldn't be resisted.

  These thoughts came to her as she lay there, completely naked, wading through a mire of unease as he melted bars of chocolate in a copper coffee pot over the leaping blue flame of her gas stove. He brought the coffee pot over to her and dipped his finger into the hot dark liquid. He began to drizzle the chocolate onto her lambent-white belly as her body seized in pleasure and pain. He traced the burning dark-chocolate letters of the French alphabet across her polished, twitching skin, and when he'd finished writing out the vowels, he leaned to lick them off. Old memories were brought to mind and new ones were forged as he licked the chocolate off her body and then he whispered to her, “Did you know that letters have sounds and scents?” She laughed at his inappropriately timed linguistic theories, which broke in and interrupted her pleasure. He stopped his licking and recited a poem by Rimbaud on vowels that he'd memorized in translation.

  A: Black, E: White, I: Red, U: Green, O: Blue, the vowels.

  One day, I'll explain your coming births:

  A, black velvet coat of gleaming flies that buzz and dive round heartless smells, Gaping shadows; E, innocence of steam and tents, proud glacier spears, white kings, shudder of ombelles...

  He recited, stretched out beside her, how the poet had tried to give the letters new meanings, images, spice-tastes, lights, and colors.

  “I don't understand a word,” she said coquettishly. She moved closer to nibble at the base of his neck and lick his lips, but he pushed her away roughly.

  “You know, all we ever do is sleep together and you're always making different noises, especially when you're coming like, ‘Ahhhhhhhh,’ or sometimes ‘Ee ee ee ee ee.’ Lots of times you just say, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!’ Can you explain what they all mean?”

  “Stop it! Shame on you. You're embarrassing me.”

  “Seriously, tell me. What makes all those sounds different? Isn't it weird that you can make those noises when you're panting and you know exactly what they mean, but then when we write them down and read them off your body, all of a sudden you can't understand? I swear you'll never understand a damn thing!”

  She held back her laughter when she saw he was being serious and that his questions had been meant to mock her limits of comprehension. She tried to stop him, but he knocked back the glass of arak. He stood up, still completely naked, and started spouting the words of someone a lot older than he was, gesturing and making faces, as if he were in front of some notional audience. “They're the first sounds: nature's unadulterated sonata. They're called ‘vowels’ because they're in all the vows us sick people make. They're there in the first cries of birth, they're there in our last screams of pleasure. They're what give us everything pure and clean. They're how we get terror, and fear, and lust, and pain—the will to endure. They're the vocal code to reproduction. If we can unlock their meanings, we'll be able to explore the secret of humanity, the depths of our first language, when everyone used to make the exact same sounds to talk about precise and unambiguous things, which didn't have names most of the time, but could be felt—sensed.

  “Rimbaud tried to capture them, to categorize them, to give the alphabet back its glory. But the problem was that his language was holding him back. French was too narrow for his passion and that's why he had to break away from it. Yes, he broke away from his language. He tried to invent a new language in which the words had scents and characters. He gave them shapes and colors they'd never had before, but French didn't help him. That's the real secret behind his silence: his language couldn't contain his soul.

  “After he'd destroyed his senses, his experiences could no longer be expressed in words. If he'd known Arabic at the time, he could've invented a new sacred alphabet and become a prophet in the East. Rimbaud wanted to be a son of the sun so he studied Eastern wisdom, the spring and the source. He went to search for another explosive energy, preserved in language, in the letters themselves. He had a hunch that it was here, in the East, in our language, in its magic and mystery and shades. That's why he abandoned poetry once he'd used it to get rid of all the toxins he'd inherited from his forefathers over millennia, and slipped off to go look for a different kind of meaning—something less dangerous than words. He exposed what mankind had tried to stamp out. He untangled it. He strangled it. He extracted all the deep longing for freedom, for an awesome trust between life and one's self, for contact with the great poetic being, the creator of the world.”

  Her jaw dropped as she watched his clouded eyes darken while he let out a flood of words and thoughts. She was worried about him as he stood there, sweating, speaking not to her but as if to someone else. His thin, naked body moved about the room and he spoke hurriedly as if he were reading from tablets he couldn't see through eyes caked with too much sadness and earnestness. It was an unimaginable and illuminating moment and it was then that he began to be aware of the threads running through his life.

  She was struck by his ideas. They threw everything she knew into doubt. They yanked her from the complacency of her intellect and femininity and she felt like slapping him, or hitting him, anything to stop this lunacy. But then, before she could even reply, he left; he left her there naked and decorated with French chocolate vowels. He gathered up his books and notebooks and walked out. She felt a sin-tinged remorse for those times she'd made him learn to write the letters with his tongue and taste them with his lips. She felt that she'd finally come to the last chapter of the transgression that still tormented her. She decided that she quickly had to regain her real life, to return to her senses, but there was still something vague that gnawed at her, that wore her out. She desperately wanted him to come back one last time, for the final hoorah that had been too long in coming.

  He began to drift further and further away, even to run away from her. The roles in their old struggle were now reversed and now instead of her fleeing his constant harassment, it was him running from her, sinking deeper into a thrilling world of words brought to life in the pages of the devil's books—that was Rimbaud's nickname. Could words really have such power? She knew that magicians used talismans to get the genies to submit and to serve, and that repeating certain words could bring on disasters or stave them off, but she'd never entirely believed in those myths, even back when she'd gone to visit the soothsayer of Kanakir. She watched her little one, her sweetheart, the companion of her loneliness and the quencher of her thirst, the giver of meaning and bringer of light. She could see him departing her bodily heaven for a wordy hell. She was tormented by worry for her boy and she felt indescribably guilty. Despite the premonitions of danger and the distress that left her lovely face ashen, she decided with uncommon intelligence not to object, but rather to go along with this lunacy. It was nothing more than a youthful fit; one taste of molasses was all it would take to bring him back from his chocolate fit. She took comfort in her reasoning: he had to be allowed to taste another flavor before he could realize the value of what he had. But aside from the body and its logic, her heart was still in thrall to that sixteen-year-old boy whose eyes had turned black.

  It just isn't fair that we're forced to wear out our trousers on the chairs at school. Yes, it was most likely Rimbaud who'd given him the idea that school was the exact opposite of what his heart required. He longed for the chance to flee
far away, somewhere outside this thicket that annihilated every last desire. In the translated melodies of Rimbaud's poems, he found his devotion and his course. It would lead him through life, on his intoxicated quest for great answers. He copied out Rimbaud's French expression: “Yes, I've shut my eyes to your light, and you are all phony negroes.”

  A peculiar energy filled his soul. School was a deathbed and home was a wide grave. The village on the mountain's edge was drowning in its eternal silence and amazement, colluding in its historical fate, turning into a chicken coop on the farm of the nation. He had no reason to stay.

  Early one morning, he woke up, quietly and calmly, went into his mother's room and stole a thousand lire from her handbag. He packed a small bag with some pointless things, put on his shoes, and walked out of Sarmada in the direction of Damascus, where eventually he would fall into a hysterical madness that no one would ever hear about.

  He never returned to Sarmada, except on the evening on the day Farida was buried. He came limping on an artificial leg, sallow-faced and weighed down by a crushing emptiness that no human being could hope to bear.

  So it was up to me to bring an end to the shedding of Sarmada's memory and put all the pieces together. I, Rafi Azmi came to Sarmada a few days ago to discover a village that I hadn't known and stories I'd never heard before—or as I've been told, stories I hadn't listened to well enough the first time. It's up to me to conclude things, to stop writing the stories if only because otherwise they'll never end, and to make a quick round past everyone to make sure they've played their parts and left, or to discover that they're still waiting, ready to fill in any odd role.

  Buthayna had a breakdown after Bulkhayr left. A few weeks later, she went to visit Farida and her new husband at the shed and asked if she could go into his room. She breathed in his scent and took some of his clothes. She cried that he'd gone away and she knew that she'd lost him forever. Before she left, she spotted the chest that she'd been given by the soothsayer of Kanakir. She pulled it out from under a pile of books and asked Farida if she could have it back. Without waiting to hear the answer, she left, taking the chest home with her.