Chaos of the Senses by Ahlem Mosteghanemi Page A

consideration my craze for its defeats, and to compensate me for every loss it inflicted with another loss no less lovely.
    Consequently, I’d never cared where love’s unruly steed was taking me as long I knew I had the freedom to choose one of two fates: death because of it, or death without it!
    My real worry was how I was going to go on writing this story of mine with any semblance of fairness or objectivity. How was I to be narrator and novelist in relation to a story that was my own? A narrator, after all, doesn’t just narrate. She can’t just narrate. She has to fabricate as well. In fact, fabricating is all she really does, clothing the truth in a fitting garb of speech.
    This being the case, a novelist resembles her lies the way one resembles one’s house. This idea came to me when I was thinking back on something I’d read about Borges. When he was in his fifties he began gradually losing his sight. Whenever he went to an unfamiliar home, he would ask his escort to describe for him the colour of the sofa and the shape of the table, nothing more. As for the rest, it was, as far as he was concerned, ‘mere literature’. In other words, it was a place he could furnish in his darkness however he pleased.
    When I went more deeply into Borges’ logic, I discovered that a novel is nothing but a flat furnished with little lies of décor and deceptive details. The writer’s purpose is to conceal the truth, which takes up no more space in a book than a sofa and a table would in a house. Around that sofa and table we furnish an abode of words which, chosen with the intention of misleading, encompass details as small as the colour of a carpet, the designs on a curtain, and the shape of a flower vase.
    This is why I’ve learned to beware of novelists who include too much detail, since they’re sure to be hiding something! Similarly, I’m amused at readers who fall so completely for a novel’s word tricks that they fail to notice the sofa of truth they’ve been perched on since the moment they started reading.
    For as long as I can remember I’ve been looking for a reader who will challenge me, one who can tell me where the ‘sofa’ and the ‘table’ are in whatever book he reads.
    My husband, for example, has never been able to distinguish the ‘real furniture’ from the ‘fake furniture’ in anything I’ve written. At one point he started expressing irritation at my sittingfor long hours writing rather than spending my time on some child that never came. He couldn’t admit that what irritated him was the writing itself. He was annoyed by this act of confrontation and silent artifice whose credibility he couldn’t verify despite his advanced espionage capabilities.
    Instead of telling me what he really thought, he began sending me from doctor to doctor and city to city, hoping to turn motherhood into my first concern. I lost count of all the doctors I went to with special recommendations, and all the shrines my mother made me visit for this or that saint’s blessing. For two years she and I made the rounds of Algeria’s shrines even though I wasn’t convinced of the value of what we were doing and didn’t even want to be ‘cured’ of my barrenness.
    I confess to having gone with her out of mere curiosity, and maybe as a way of following the path of least resistance. I confess, too, that sometimes I like just to give in. It gives me the chance to reflect on the world calmly and at a distance, as though it were no concern of mine.
    When I reflect on the world this way, I start writing without putting anything down on paper. One evening, for example, I decided to indulge in my habit of writing in my head while I watched my husband take off his military uniform and put on my body for a few moments before falling fast asleep.
    He’d always been an officer with a predilection for quick victories, even in bed, and I’d always been a woman with a predilection for pleasant defeats and romantic raids