Ali Bader - Papa Sartre

79

Abd al-Rahman started going to the Mackenzie bookshop every day and watched Nadia from behind the glass while smoking his pipe. Nadia often put pink ribbons in her hair and wore a print dress with small flowers. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. He scrutinized her every move and wanted to hold her very tight, as if he would never see her again. They used to meet every day after work at the Orient Express café near Maude Bridge, drink coffee, and talk for a couple hours. Edmond was aware of Abd al-Rahman’s daily visits to the Mackenzie bookshop. He couldn’t stand the thought of their daily encounters and growing intimacy. He would have loved to be the one watching Nadia from behind the glass, basking in her beauty.

On their third outing Abd al-Rahman tried to kiss her, but she refused. He pulled her to him, but she was trembling and had tears in her eyes. Her heart was beating fast and she put him off, saying in a hoarse voice, “No, no — I can’t.” He asked her for an explanation while still trying to touch her soft thigh under the table. She pushed him away. “I don’t know why, but things like that are repulsive to me. There was an incident. . ”

“What sort of incident?!” exclaimed Abd al-Rahman.

“I can’t. . I can’t,” she said, and fled the table.

He stood facing her. She was surprised and agitated, convinced that he had spoiled their relationship by dredging up a painful memory and doubting her. He left the café and walked beside her quietly down al-Rashid Street. They talked and slowly regained their usual familiarity, walking so close that their bodies almost touched. He liked to impress Nadia with talk about existentialism, nausea, estrangement, nihilism, and the absurd. For her part, she liked this abstractness that kept their focus distracted from physical matters. She liked this philosopher’s inclination toward delusive imagination, a yearning for the forbidden, and the ability to create great works in the air. Abd al-Rahman liked to walk in front of her and look at her as he continued talking nonstop, while she chimed, “A great philosopher.”

Abd al-Rahman felt that his love for her was stronger and deeper than her love for him. He never imagined that love could be so deep and catch a person so unawares. He disliked her calm, which bordered on aloofness. He was convinced that love proceeded according to inviolable but mysterious rules that impelled him to meld into her with all due force.

The philosopher wanted Nadia always to focus on him, admire him, and appreciate his greatness. Every time he talked to her about his successful philosophical debates with the greatest western philosophers he never failed to ask, “Well, what do you think of me?” She always replied, “A great philosopher.”

The things that Abd al-Rahman feared most were neglect, estrangement, and betrayal. He had a limitless ability to listen to comments about his greatness. He also knew that love was madness, and he believed exclusively in lust and sex. That’s why Nadia’s reserved attitude was suffocating him and put him off. He wanted her to pine for him and him alone. He became obsessed with this wish, and this obsession affected his behavior. He was obliged to take solace in words in order not to push her against the fence of the Armenian Church, press his body hard against hers, and force her to submit to him.

Nadia was not the innocent girl she seemed to be. She endured an excruciating inner struggle, torn between her physical desires and the memory she couldn’t erase. She wanted to resolve this conundrum using the philosopher as bait, and she enjoyed tormenting him. She considered him vulnerable, an antihero. She found Abd al-Rahman weak and consumed by his imagination, and she only pretended to believe him and his endless truth-defying proclamations. Of course, he never doubted that she believed him. She knew that this was his nature and that he was quick to cry or laugh. He was nothing but a contradiction caught between happiness and a mirage that existed solely in his imagination. She was well aware that he had a mind that roamed freely, a result of his obsessions, delusions, pains, failures, and denial.

Abd al-Rahman wanted his yearnings and memories to be firmly anchored to her, but after he took her home he was usually sad and frazzled because their conversations had not led to sex. He was left feeling empty. He realized that becoming a destructive existentialist through the application of continuous chatting was a myth. He felt nauseated, having strayed from his true self by getting involved in something alien and then gradually having lost his identity. He would stand near the lemon tree in his father’s garden, calling up a single repulsive image of her that he resented and from which he wanted to free himself. He had longed to kiss her and desired, more than anything, to simply take her, but the cell of existence was pressing too tight around him. In order to expunge her, he avidly sought a connection to some other world, a world without limits that he could interpose between himself and her notions of separation and defensiveness. He wanted to leave her to deal with indifference, to cast her far away, but he didn’t know how.

He desired her, but he felt disgusted by the idea of marrying her because he didn’t want to pass the futility of life — by means of a struggle in bed — to another human being who experienced unhappiness and suffering similar to his own. He liked depravity, which he felt was close to his soul. It was a renewal of his thinking and imagination, a taboo he pondered, a thirst for a special sort of worship, a type of isolation, a fulfillment that no one knew but which was cheap, enjoyable, and forbidden. It liberated him from his depraved dreams and freed him from pimples and nervous illnesses, the hatred of the body as a malady of existence. It freed him from dislikes, the disappointments of life, and its shortcomings.

He was at a loss as he stood in his parents’ garden, not knowing what to do next. He suddenly raised his head and saw a black cat at the window. He ran after it with a broom and swore at it, uttering words that are not fit to repeat. His true anger was aimed at Nadia, not the cat. She was the real threat to his existence.

When he returned to his room he decided to get drunk. He poured whiskey in a glass, added ice, and began to read Nizar Qabbani’s poems. He started reading the poem entitled, “Existentialism,” which discusses two aspects of existentialism in Paris. The poet saw his beloved’s eyes tear for the gray Parisian sky, he heard the whispers of her long throat, he visualized her hair cut à la garcon , and remembered the color of her dress. He imagined her dancing to the sound of jazz and the birds’ song, and saw her walking in a narrow Parisian street. Qabbani recalled how lively she used to be, how eagerly she chose the first thing she saw, her burning love for life as he was listening to the incessant barking of the dog. Abd al-Rahman couldn’t get over this shock. The winding path of love, spiraling like a snail. Love made him feel pain and joy at the same time. Despite his resentment, he was eager to see her the next morning.

He went to the bookshop and stood in front of her, unkempt and two days unshaven. She was impeccable, reflecting the elegance of a person in love. Her hair was beautifully coiffed, her makeup perfect, her face blooming, and her perfume filling the shop. She wore a red coat and a matching silk scarf. Her beauty and elegance were irresistible. He was speechless and cast about in vain for a topic of conversation. He was increasingly aware of her hold on him — a prisoner of her charm, unable to escape and save himself. The matter was out of his hands. He told her calmly, “I love you and I want to marry you.”

Her answer came fast and loud, “Please. We are in a place of work. Sartre’s books are on the last shelf.” He was instantly aware of the banality of the scene: A lover goes to an angry mistress and says one word to her; she shouts at him that they are in a workplace and directs him to the object of his interest to give customers the impression that he was pestering her. She then threatens to have him thrown out if he oversteps his boundaries again.