Chaos of the Senses Read Online Free Page A

voice and my sodden words.
    But at last I’d got him to talk. I’d made him say something that I wanted him to. So perhaps I’d actually defeated him.
    But, I confess, he surprised me, not because he’d invited this woman for the second time to go and see that film, which was out of character for him, but because he’d given her the name of a cinema I’d never heard of before. I didn’t know whether it existed or not, since I’d never been to cinemas in this city before or taken note of the films playing there.
    Then suddenly it occurred to me to look in the newspaper to see whether there really was a cinema by that name. I began searching on the entertainment page where television programmes and film screenings are listed. I pored over the names of cinemas until, lo and behold, I came across an ‘Olympic Cinema’ where an American film by the name of Dead Poets Society was showing. I guessed it must be dubbed into French, since no one around here knows English, and I tried to find a translation of the film title in hopes that this might solve some of the mystery.
    I found it hard to believe that it would be the same film the man in my story had been talking about. So I went searching through the old newspapers piled on the floor of my husband’s office, the ones he would bring home every day as part of his job, then leave on the floor until he threw them out.
    I looked at the entertainment pages in all the issues I came to, and every time, I found that same film playing at the same cinema.
    The last newspaper I looked at took me back a month and a half. On this basis I concluded that the film might have been playing for the last two months, just as the man had said. This surprised me; in fact, it bowled me over, since I hadn’t been familiar with this particular cinema, and had never heard of this film. How could I have known that it had been playing there for the last two months and that, as the newspaperalso confirmed, one of its showings was at four o’clock in the afternoon?
    The shock of this discovery left me nonplussed. Had I received some sort of revelation telling me to write things I knew nothing about? Should I be wary of this story I’d written, whose details had turned frightening? Or should I view it as a sign from the Beyond and a promise of some future encounter?
    All my questions revolved around that man. Why did he matter so much to me? Why did he raise so many questions in my mind? Were questions really, as he said, ‘a romantic involvement’? And was he the one who had said this, or had I said it myself ?
    He’d only asked one question: ‘Can I see you tomorrow?’
    It was a question that he’d posed to her in particular. But how could I, the writer, fail to show up for the date they’d made? Wasn’t I the one who had wanted it, who’d set the day and time? If so, then wouldn’t I need to be there in order to invent more conversations, dates, arguments, happy encounters, disappointments, amusement, astonishment . . . and endings?
    This is the exclusive privilege of the novelist, who, mistakenly imagining that she owns the world by proxy, toys with the fates of creatures of ink before closing her notebook and becoming, for her part as well, a puppet suspended from invisible strings or moved, like others on life’s vast stage, by the hand of Fate! And once this happens, it’s useless for her to preface her plans with ‘God willing’ as though she were bribing Fate to fulfil her dreams.
    I remember once telling someone, ‘Learn to say, “God willing”.’ Then one day I asked him, ‘When shall we meet?’ At the time he’d been hurriedly packing a suitcase of sorrow, and heanswered me, in typical fashion, with a line from a poem by Mahmud Darwish – something like, ‘We’ll meet in a while . . . a year . . . a generation.’
    But we never met again. Both of us had forgotten that day to say, ‘God willing’! Is that why he didn’t come back? Or maybe it was because he went