Naguib Mahfouz - The Mirage

She told me she’d been invited to give private lessons to a first-grader who was the daughter of a prominent judge, and she asked me what I thought. Although I didn’t see any reason for suspicion, I wasn’t enthusiastic about the proposal, and I said, “You tire yourself out enough all day long!”

“You’re right,” she said casually.

Pleased by her quickness to agree with me, I thought to myself: I’ll never find the slightest reason to doubt her! I lay down beside her, whereupon she shoved the magazine aside, turned out the light and lay down peacefully. I had every reason to go right to sleep. Instead, however, I experienced a strange sort of wakefulness. My thoughts went flying away to Inayat, and to the car on Pyramids Road. I’d been unfaithful. How astounding! Who would have thought that an impotent husband would take a lover! At that moment I wished my wife could know of this astounding fact. However, the moment was a fleeting one, and it wasn’t long before my heart had shrunk in fear and shame. I’d gone trailing my wife, suspecting that she’d been unfaithful to me, and I ended up being unfaithful myself beyond the slightest shadow of a doubt. In her, I’d seen no evidence of anything but integrity and modesty. How was it that with her, my portion had been impotence and failure, whereas in the arms of the homely, crude woman, I’d been blessed with the wildest bliss? I was unspeakably confused, and my soul longed for a ray of light.

What made my confusion even worse was that I felt deeply that I couldn’t do without either of them. In fact, I couldn’t find any way to compare them in such a way as to see which was superior to the other. One of them was my spirit, and the other was my body, and my torment was that of someone who isn’t able to reconcile his body with his spirit. What would the world be worth without that lovely, pristine, nay, perfect face? But then again, what pleasure and sense of manhood would I have left if I lost the other woman? I became so engrossed in thought that there was no way to sleep. First Rabab would appear to me, and then Inayat. Then suddenly the vision in my mind’s eye turned for no apparent reason into my mother, who took her place in the string of successive images. My confusion finally reached the point where I was enveloped in a cloud of sadness and gloom. Nevertheless, the feelings one experiences by night rarely survive the light of day. By night they merge into the stream of a mysterious melody in a fog-enveloped, ethereal atmosphere. But once the day breaks, nothing remains of them but faint echoes that do nothing to prevent us from searching out our paths in life.

The morning of the fifth day arrived, and I took off as usual for Abbasiya. But was I really going there to trail Rabab, or was I going in obedience to that irresistible summons? My wife’s behavior left no room for doubt: what she was on the outside, she was on the inside. Hence, she must have told the truth in what she said about the ill-fated letter, and if there was a traitor, it was I.

I went to the Nubians’ coffee shop, which was the perfect symbol for my new love. I waited until the window opened, and we greeted one another with an amiable smile. She disappeared for a moment, then reappeared, ready to go out, gesturing to me to wait for her at the previous day’s rendezvous spot. I hadn’t expected us to meet in the morning. However, I called the waiter without hesitation, paid the tab, and headed straightaway for the bridge, which wasn’t far away. On my way there, it seemed to me that I’d realized a fact of life, namely, that there isn’t a single movement among men but that there’s a woman behind it. Women are to men’s lives what gravity is to the stars and other heavenly bodies. Hence, there isn’t a man alive but that there’s a woman in his imagination, be she present or absent, attainable or unattainable, loving or hateful, faithful or unfaithful. Now I understood in a new way the meaning of the saying, “Love is life, and life is love.” In fact, it hit me so forcefully, it was as though I were thinking about it for the first time. It wasn’t that there was life, after which there was love. Rather, there was love, therefore there was life. And at that moment I swore that never as long as I lived would I turn away from love!

The car arrived, and I took my place in it as I had the day before.

Laughing, the woman asked, “What brought you at this hour? Hadn’t we agreed to meet this evening?”

“You, you’re the reason,” I said with a smile.

Smiling back at me happily, she said, “We’ve got to stick ourselves together with glue so that we’ll never be separated.”

As the motor revved in preparation for the car’s departure, I said imploringly, “It’s daytime, so please avoid the busy streets.”

“Are you afraid someone might see you?”

“Yes,” I said in an embarrassed tone.

“Ah! I forgot you were married! Pardon me, Mr. Husband, but we’re going to Heliopolis!”

And the car took off at its usual break-neck speed.

On the way she asked me, “What did you do with your wife yesterday?”

I furrowed my brow involuntarily and made no reply.

“Do you hate to mention her that much?”

Then, disregarding my silence and discomfort, she asked, “Don’t you sleep in the same bed?”

I tried to force a laugh, but I couldn’t, and I felt a resentment that ruined my tranquil mood.

“How I’d love to see her!” she said with a raucous laugh.

Wanting to cheer me up in her own way, she caressed my lips with her finger and, like a mother speaking playfully to her little boy, said, “My little chickadee!”

The car pulled up in front of a tea shop. We sat there chatting happily away about whatever came to mind, and she told me she’d chosen the seamstress’s house as the place for our lovers’ trysts. As we left the place at noon, she wanted to pay the bill, but I wouldn’t let her, and we parted after reaffirming the evening’s meeting time. We met repeatedly, and when the vacation ended two days later, we continued our meetings in the evenings. The experience of success convinced me that love is health and well-being. My habit of spending the evenings out was a secret to no one, and although Rabab preferred, as she said, for me to spend my evenings with her on her endless visits, she didn’t press me about it. Hence, we each lived our lives in the way we pleased. This was no secret to my mother, either. Once she said to me, “I’ve noticed, son, that you haven’t been yourself lately. I’ve been afraid that if I said anything you’d be angry. In any case, if you enjoy spending the evenings out, spend the evenings out. All men are like that!”

I spent a month or more in a state of unmitigated bliss. Peace took the place of suspicion and doubt, and my relationship with Rabab was restored to one of goodwill and pure affection. At the same time, I surrendered myself to Inayat in tumultuous passion and triumphant joy. She was a woman of means, and not once did we go to our beloved nest in the seamstress’s house but that she presented her with a gift of a riyal, and sometimes half a pound. As for me, my sense of dignity required that I, too, be generous toward her, albeit within my more limited means. Without realizing it, she made it possible for me to resume drinking on a regular basis, since the seamstress would keep bottles of whisky and soda in constant supply for us. In fact, she nearly got me into the habit of smoking. In addition, she had certain virtues, and what virtues they were! She was possessed of perfect femininity and vitality, as a result of which she was a source of pleasure to lovers despite her middle age and her lovable homeliness. At the same time, however, she possessed such virtues alongside an alarming degree of wantonness and audacity. For her, loving a man was everything, and for its sake she deemed anything and everything permissible. She may not have been truly the type that devotes herself unstintingly to her man. Rather, she may simply have been a woman driven by anxiety and despair. In other words, she may have been driven by an awareness of the fact that the brightness of her youth was fading, as a result of which she couldn’t bear to let a day go by without a taste of love. The most peculiar thing about my passion for her was that the things about her that enchanted me were the very things that might normally be looked upon as shortcomings — her maturity, her homeliness, and her audacity. She filled me with boundless confidence, and when I was with her, I worried about nothing. If it hadn’t been for the angst that would come over me as a result of the frightening divorce I experienced between body and spirit, I would have enjoyed life in unruffled tranquility. Yet even with such perturbation, it was a happy life.