Chaos of the Senses by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

told by him, such as his description of our first meeting and the black muslin dress I’d been wearing. I might have believed in the possibility of such an encounter if I’d had such a dress in my wardrobe. But I didn’t!
    I’d purposely not interrupted him or commented on his story. I’d just listened, keeping my amazement to myself while secretly envying the woman who had once released all those wonderful feelings in him.
    This pang of envy led me to a surprising discovery: that my story with this person had also been born in a moment of jealousy. He was the man I’d been looking for, the man I could measure myself by. So from the time I met him, I’d felt both envious of him and possessive towards him. I’d also wished I could kill that other woman and take her place without leaving my fingerprints on her neck.
    She’d been my sole preoccupation from the start. I’d even asked him twice whether there was a woman in his life. Both times he’d replied in the negative, and this denial of his might have been the nicest thing that came out of his mouth.
    There hadn’t been any justification for my happiness, of course. When he saw how gleeful I was, he said, ‘Don’t be too happy now! It’s better for you to love a man with a woman in his life than a man with a “cause” in his life. The former, you might succeed in making your own, but the latter will never be yours, since he doesn’t even own himself !’
    And I never did make him my own. A cause took him away from me for ever. Still, I didn’t benefit from the advice he’d given me. In real life, I still fall in love with men who have a cause in their lives, and in novels, I fall in love with characters who have a woman in their lives.
    If only I did just the opposite!
    At some point it occurred to me that this man might also have some cause in his life. If he did, this would explain his extravagant sorrow, his bouts of silence, and his tendency to evade questions, all of which were traits I’d observed in this type of person.
    At the same time, however, I thought it unlikely. Gone were the days of earth-shaking causes, the worthy causes that made an entire generation of men seem more youthful and glamorous than they really were.
    In the political marketplaces run by rulers who shrewdly had outbid us with respect to every cause that comes along, they sold us ‘the mother of all causes’ as well as other, newer ones, packaged according to the dictates of the new world order and ready for local and national consumption. As for us, we took the bait with singular stupidity. Then we died, poisoned by our own illusions, only to discover, after it was too late, that they and their children were still alive, celebrating their birthdays over our dead bodies and making plans to rule us for generations to come.
    So, since the days of that cause, dreamers have gone extinct and the knights of romanticism have fallen off their mounts!
    Thoughts like these led me to my husband, whom I’d also failed to possess, not because I was sharing him legally with anotherwoman, but because he was possessed by responsibility, and since his only ‘cause’ was that of remaining in a position of power.
    In the end I nearly reached a frightening conclusion: that love is a purely feminine cause which, if it concerns men at all, concerns them to the most limited degrees between two lifetimes or two disappointments, and only when the other, ‘major’ causes have gone bankrupt.
    So was this why women suffered such grief when it came to love?
    Suddenly I felt afraid of this story, which was bound to cause me pain. I expected to be swept away by it, no holds barred, and without benefiting from anything I’d learned in life.
    In the face of love and death we’re all equals. In these confrontations nothing is of any avail to us: neither our culture, nor our experience, nor our intelligence, actual or feigned.
    Yet I, who had always confronted love unarmed, expected it to take into