Now that Kaaffa was with him, Mansour felt like he was standing under a waterfall, embracing its pure fullness, its energy. He felt cleansed; he felt perfumed and molded by the spray that rose as the water hit the ground. He felt like a well-watered tree. He felt replete, overflowing with everything.
She was standing outside the waterfall: that is what it felt like for Kaaffa. Her back was pressed against the rocks as she looked across and through the waterfall at him while remaining completely dry. There was nothing to drink in; she was simply looking. Or trying to look. The view, from outside the waterfall, was a gaze through water. It was a foggy vista. That is how she saw him. Foggy, beneath the luxuriant spray of the waterfall she made.
She met his worship of her with a face that seemed elsewhere, features that were absent. This husband—someone whose bed she had awoken one morning to find herself in, merely because there had been a festive evening with lots of singing and a great deal of food. This husband was a person one might feel a bit curious about, but that was all. Only a few months passed before Kaaffa lost even the speck of curiosity she previously had. She didn’t feel any interest in discovering anything further. And now she did not know what to do in this big house, with this slightly overgrown adolescent who insisted on washing her feet and rubbing them with rose petals, or with this mother of his who had not even given birth to him. A mother who watched his madness in silence and seemed to have taken on the management of the orchards he had inherited and sat in the shop in his stead.
His love had been an idea, a thought, a fancy. Yes, it had an urgency to it; yes, it was an insistent, tormenting idea. But it was a semblance more than anything based in the here and now. Often, just being with him made her restless and uneasy. She felt as though she were walking hopelessly and aimlessly through a tract of land that stretched on in every direction, where every clump of vegetation had exactly the same shape as the next one and all of them were exactly the same shade of green.
Now and then, the tone of his voice sent rays of warm joy shooting into her chest, but the words themselves made her uncomfortable, throwing a dark pall over those bright rays and choking them out.
She was tired of being worshipped. She wanted something a little more human. Something more fun, but also more serious than this repetitive game of abject adoration. She wanted to be surprised, but it seemed that everything had been sketched out in advance. She wanted to be dazzled, to feel the anticipation of the wait. But he never made her wait. Every moment, every new thing—it was always ready, always polished and shiny and sitting at her feet.
She was longing for the desert, for a run through the sand, chasing after lizards, tending flocks of sheep and grooming the she-camels. She missed singing with her father as they sat on the tussocks nearby on moonlit evenings. She was bored with the silk that this husband wanted her to put on every night, and she was tired of living in a house surrounded by walls that looked endlessly high to her. The price of deification was being paid by her body and her spirit, both held lifeless in these walls. On the one hand, her body was sacred; on the other, it was the object of desire. Trying to fulfill both demands at once was exhausting her. She found it painful, too.