Andalusian Verse

We got the rest of my money back from the hotel and left. We were crossing al-Khalij Street in the blue Peugeot and saw the sea fusing with the sky in a collusion of color, as if the sea had forgotten it was the sea and the sky had forgotten it was the sky, each of them lost in the other.

Hayat put a CD into the player, summoning Fairuz’s voice.

“How’s Faris?”

“He’s no longer screaming into the phone.”

“That’s a good sign.”

“He probably lost his voice—he screamed for five whole days.”

“Maybe now he can try listening.”

“He stays silent and listens to me for hours. He asked me about my poems, my childhood, about my mother and Saqr and what exactly happened to me in those days. He never asked about those things before.”

“That’s great, Fatima.”

“Is it really great? I don’t think it means anything, but it’s becoming a habit. Why am I going into all these details with him when I’m declaring that our relationship is over?”

“Talking can never be bad. If renting a hotel room is what’s going to push men to listen to us then we should all do like you.”

“What’s weird is that in our discussions I never feel that the person on the other end of the line is the man named Faris I married a year ago, but is the whole society, the system, the rules, the lethal perpetuation of the unhealthy double standard. It’s this world that I’m talking to, the one I recently declared myself to be different from and in disagreement with. I’m talking to it through my husband, my future ex. I talk to him and it’s as if I’m trying to change things! To liberate freedom and limit harm. In the heat of the conversation I sometimes feel that my soul has risen above the scene. I’m seeing myself from a higher place and I laugh at the absurdity of the attempt. At Don Quixote tilting at the windmills inside me. It’s a comedy!”

“You must be enjoying that.”

“Are you kidding? I don’t feel this power at all. And it’s a power that comes from inside myself, without the need to impose any kind of control! I’m strong without hostility, strong because I am me. I hang up the phone and call him the next night for him to tell me that he didn’t sleep because he was so busy thinking about what I said. I’m turning into a real pain. Even so, I sometimes feel that it’s my inventive new way of destroying myself, to delve into a dialogue with the other to this extent, to go to the end of the tunnel despite knowing it’s blocked at the other end. What’s the point?”

We were silent for a few minutes. We let Fairuz’s voice fill the space. We forgot ourselves in the Andalusian song woven from al-Mutanabbi’s poetry: If you wish to kill me, you’re the judge. Who can question a master about his slave? A sigh escaped from my chest, deep, drawn out from a faraway place. An unusual sigh, as if it was four years old, and as if it came out of a heart that was not mine.

“By the way,” said Hayat, “Isam says hello.”