Free Chaos of the Senses by Ahlem Mosteghanemi Page A

Besides, if I had ever walked into a wedding by accident with a strange man as striking as this one, it wouldn’t have slipped my mind. Nor would this scandal-mongering city have given me a chance to forget it!
    I was afraid to be honest with him, since it would have destroyed so much of the beautiful illusion each of us harboured about the other. So I kept quiet, enjoying my ambiguous position between two women, one of whom he was pursuing because she was wearing black, and the other of whom was pursuing him because he’d said, ‘Not at all’!
    Each of us was, to the other, both Cinderella and the prince, and this was the strangest thing about our story!
    I had only one comment to make on what he’d said, and it was a statement that I wanted to be subject to multiple interpretations.
    I said, ‘So we might have all sorts of beginnings for a single story!’
    ‘Yes,’ he concurred. ‘And that’s why I was so sure we’d meet up. In fact, I’d imagined us having a time together just like this one!’
    He paused slightly before asking, ‘Do you know why I risked ruining our first date by letting the taxi driver decide where to take us?’
    Before I had a chance to say, ‘Why?’ he went on, ‘Because in love, more than in anything else, you’ve got to have arelationship of trust with Fate. You have to turn over the wheel without giving it any particular address or telling it what you think is the shortest way to get where you’re going. Otherwise, life will amuse itself by working against you, and either your car will stall on you or you’ll get stuck in a traffic jam, and at best, you’ll arrive late for your dreams!’
    ‘Something like that takes a lot of patience,’ I said, ‘and I’m no good at waiting!’
    ‘You’ve never experienced love, then!’ he said.
    ‘Yes, I have!’ I objected. ‘It’s just that my experience of it has only made me more impatient. Maybe that’s why I’ve got it wrong so many times. Love taught me not to believe it, but I believed it anyway. It taught me to recognize it before celebrating it, but I couldn’t. So I’m still waiting for love’s train. Every time a passenger gets off, I think love has arrived. So I carry his bags for him and ask him how his trip was. I ask him his profession, the names of the cities he passed through and the women who passed through his life. Then, as he talks to me, I discover that he got on the wrong train and ended up in the wrong station. So I head for another passenger and leave the first one sitting on his suitcase!’
    He was listening to me with interest, perhaps on account of the possibility that he, too, might be sitting on his suitcase without realizing it. Maybe this is why, as he flicked his ashes into the ashtray with studied leisure, he said, ‘I hope you’ll leave that station and never go back.’
    Some silence passed between us, and I didn’t know how to break it with anything but a question which, after what he’d just said, struck me as naïve.
    It would have made more sense for me to ask, ‘How?’ But instead I said, ‘Why?’
    The reply came with an unexpected sternness. ‘Because,’ he said, ‘I’m the last passenger to get off that train. I had to travel a long way to get to you, and now that I’m here, trains have stopped running. So, wait no longer, Madame. I’ve declared you a closed city!’
    How could a woman resist a man so intoxicated with conceit? Is there anything more wonderful than a love that’s born out of the fervour of jealousy, out of the conviction that we have a legitimate claim over someone who doesn’t belong to us, and whom we’re seeing for the very first time?
    There was an alluring, unstudied manliness about him as he delivered this first romantic pronouncement. He uttered the words with a composure so disconcerting and so utterly self-assured that it left no room for a logical question such as, ‘By what right do you say such a thing?’ By virtue of a single sentence