That seductive life
To you, peaceful girl, I tell my story this time. For it happened during those moments that were to rob me of your company, and I had barely begun to discover how carefully I was choosing you, that you were the destiny precisely calculated to suit me.
The moment you got off the bed, in that sanitised paper coat, and as I helped you onto the stretcher that would convey you to the operating theatre, I felt you were specifically my own. When you looked at me, your pale face seemed like the luminous destiny of an infinite identity.
You were bidding me farewell, wishing we would meet again, when I felt a nostalgia and a horror I have never felt in my life. And when you passed the red line into the operating theatre, beyond which I wasn't allowed, I was overtaken by a feeling of the alienation of the universe.
You were surrendering as you went, your internal hemorrhage placing you at the threshold of death, going into this great adventure, and your surrender made it seem as if you were cowering under my wing. Nor was it all so far from me: I had participated in creating the tragedy your body was going through; I was the father of the foetus that grew outside your womb, tearing that delicate vessel inside and exploding the hemorrhage inside you.
You were in such pain, suppressing your desire to scream in order not to upset me. Now, as they pushed you along the corridor leading up to the operating theatre, I recalled this, and the sequence of light and shade through the length of the corridor passed through insinuated the gulf separating life and death. Come back to me, I whispered, praying to God when you disappeared behind the final door. I was alone in that derelict part of the hospital, striving to prevent myself from breaking down in tears.
Three hours later -- they were long and bitter -- you returned to me, asleep in a cloud of anaesthetic, pale and small like a child. The squeak of the stretcher wheels sounded like the wheels of toy cars. Hope was very close, and so was fear. On the bed you began to surface, and I breathed deeply for the first time.
Your delirium at the start of your waking was as kind as you are, making me sure there was a lot of life in you. I kissed you; I played along with your drivel, finding you as you were when fully sober -- free from any obscenity. I liked that: to be the barbarian to your dew-like purity. I went back home, to our home, to bring what you would need to stay in the hospital for a few days, and what I would need to stay with you.
The emptiness of the house was such an embodiment of your absence: the sorrow-filled shadows created by the shutters of closed windows; the dryness of the glasses and the sink; the silence. And your things -- I could never have imagined that things were capable of such heart-rending evocation. The folded clothes, the towels, turned into beings that speak silently, telling secrets, setting off waves of emotion that left me at the edge of tears. What if you left, and I stayed with all these things asking after you? All these things glowing with cleanliness, which went to sleep, folded and delicately organised, under your fingers.
Death is terrifying not in itself, but by virtue of what it leaves to the living of the remains of those who depart.
Thus, I left the house to follow you back to the hospital, a bag full of things in my hand and a flood of nostalgia and passion in my frame. Perhaps this was the appropriate prelude to the amazing sight, and I refrain from saying "vision".
You are fond of that Maadi avenue, full of trees and plants and flowers, a street that looks like a tunnel carved out of the shadows of trees on both sides, their branches interlocking above. You were seduced by the shadows and the green, especially the rambling plants of the railings, flooding over the ground and mingling joyfully with the grass and the yellow petals glittering there, petals meeting with white jasmine, violets and red begonias.
It was a microbus, the vehicle in question, one of those that carry 15 passengers a time. I was in the back seat, but I could see the street unfolding ahead through the spaces between the heads of fellow passengers in front of me. And there was the cat, jumping around in jest, from one side of the street to another, no doubt in response to the teasing of butterflies hovering above the flowers. It was at the point where the street opens out onto the little Nahda Square, at the centre of which lies an island of regal palms near the Mexican Embassy -- that beautiful cream building with a hint of rose, with orange windows and a delightful garden surrounded by an abundant hedge.
At this point, while the cat was absorbed in its game, the vehicle was turning into the square in a rush since it was empty as usual. The cat was near the pavement opposite the Mexican Embassy, about to hurry across the street along which the vehicle would pass. In a split second it all happened: the cat was overtaken by the speeding microbus, and instead of turning back it ran on. The driver could not dodge it and did not slow down in time. Once hit, the cat split in two.
Two cats, one of which I saw through the window at my side, fleeing, terrified, to safety, jumping over the hedge of the embassy to disappear among the trees. The other cat was left there, a lump of flesh on the asphalt that I glimpsed momentarily through the glass at the back just as the microbus sped past.
I know, to my comfort, that no one will believe me as you do. I also know that in believing me you are not simply going along with a madman whom you love. Rather, you believe me out of a conviction that the world around us is full of amazing things whose laws we do not know, and therefore we call them "miraculous" or "supernatural". And I know you are kind enough to be happy with each enchanting miracle. This is why I won't betray your kindness, but instead will describe, with sincerity, my explanation for the sight that came to me after you were saved from death twice -- once due to internal hemorrhaging and once to the dangerous operation during which a part of your insides was surgically removed.
According to the laws of the perceptual world, my comfort, the cat rushed ahead and was crushed by the advancing vehicle. But, according to the laws of the soul, by virtue of its joy in playing and its confrontation with the abrupt, deceptive menace of the microbus, it undertook a leap of life in the face of death, and so survived. And if you decide you need more explanation, my peaceful girl, I'll tell you about the relativity of time and the warmth of the observer, for it was a warmth in which tenderness for you had placed me -- and time slows down before a warm observer -- that allowed me to perceive both moments at the same time.
Yes, my comfort, I experienced both moments. I even saw the moment of survival before that of death, which is possible when our minds work faster than light, allowing us to see the effect before the cause.
My comfort, many of the people we see moving through the life surrounding us have been crushed by life before, once or many times. But they leap up and keep moving. For life is fine in spite of everything, and in spite of the fact that, in such cases, memories of painful moments bear down on it. Life becomes full of melancholy, and melancholy is as grand as it is sad. And grandness is the highest level of seduction.
Translated by Youssef Rakha
