Free The Proof of the Honey by Salwa Al Neimi Page A

within, to re-emerge, later on, letter by letter.
    Now I recall his words and I shudder. Now I recall his words, his touch, his gaze, and I shiver.
    I recall them now and I do not want to forget.
    I want to remember.
    I want to write.
     
    Multiple scenarios; identical first encounters. The sudden discovery of the other, the looks exchanged, the words repeated, the nervous laughter, the unintentional touches, the anguish of the moment of declaration. How is it that we re-create all these details differently each time?
    Which of these first times was the Thinker’s? All, or none of them? The minor details differ but the story remains the same. I love details, in any story; their color gives a new meaning to each story.
    Every new man is a new story. Which of these stories was the Thinker’s?
    The Distant One sent me an email, in English, with a stupid joke called “The Woman and the Bed”:
     
    When she’s eight, you take her to bed to tell her a story.
    When she’s eighteen, you tell her a story to take her to bed.
    When she’s twenty-eight, you don’t need to tell her a story to take her to bed.
    When she’s thirty-eight, she tells you a story to take you to bed.
    When she’s forty-eight, she tells you a story to avoid having to go to bed.
    When she’s fifty-eight, you stay in bed to avoid her story.
    When she’s sixty-eight, if you take her to bed, then that’s the story.
    When she’s seventy-eight, what bed; what story? What devil of a man are you?
     
    A stupid joke of the sort men tell one another in an attempt to forget the trap they’ve fallen into. What I found interesting were the two alternating motifs—the bed and the story.
    In my life, one has led to the other, and vice versa. In my life, they have been intimately linked, and I oscillate between the two.
    In my life, I have been addicted to beds and stories. Every man is a story and every story a bed.
    I don’t want to lose the bed. I don’t want to lose the story.
     
    On the bed of stories I sway and strut.
    I touch the sky with my fingers
    And dig valleys in the desert of my soul .
     
    “I would use firash for ‘bed,’” the Distant One wrote to me after I’d emailed back to him the translation into Arabic of his joke. “Why do you use sarir ?”
    I replied, “The firash , for me, is for sleeping and sickness, childbirth and death. The sarir is for pleasure. Sarir is from sirr , or ‘secret.’ Two words which have the same root. Desire is secret. Pleasure is secret. Sex is secret. Sex is the secret of secrets. That is why in my mind it remains linked to the sarir , even if I do it in a lift.”
    “Have you done it in a lift?” asked the Distant One in his reply.
    I pictured his thick eyebrows raised in avid curiosity.
    “Not even on the beach!” I replied, shortly.
    I love secrets. These stories that no one knows but me. These stories give my life meaning. An entire life that belongs to me alone, that I share with no one. It’s enough for me to close my eyes to taste the honeyed juice of pleasure , as it is called in the Hadith, the sayings of the Prophet. It’s enough for me to close my eyes and the image rises before me, the sound, sight, smell, touch, and taste. It’s enough . . .
    Could I go on living without them? Could I wake up every morning and find the strength to begin a new day without them? The answer comes clear and sharp as the blade of a sword, and I am not afraid.
    In the long spans between stories, I live off memories, confident that the coming days will bring me my new story.
    I could not merely wait, because I don’t know how to wait. Nor could I precipitate them. And then? I often asked myself this question, without ever really looking for an answer. The answers, like the stories, came of their own accord, in their own time, as ripe fruit falls from the tree.
     
     
     
     

Eighth Gate  
ON ARAB DISSIMULATION
 
     
     
     
     
     
    T hat morning I was working on the section on aphrodisiacs and the