You Know Nothing of Love, Dumbass
By Kareem Mohsen
Translated by Mandy McClure
We sat side by side in the restaurant. I made sure our knees were touching to create a safe passage for desire. We ordered two bottles of beer with the food. The talk came easy, effortlessly, streaming off the tongue like the desire coursing between our knees. Desire needs some sort of conduit: the contact of knees, the gentle press of shoulders. Holding hands on the first date seems too much too early. There’s a high probability that it ruins everything.
We discussed Marxism, of course. Gauging the extent of class consciousness, getting to know your potential partner’s understandings of the modern labor system and life in the era of high capitalism—all urgent matters. Relationships that cannot bear a minimum threshold of anger, rebellion, and a desire for change are destined to fail.
I suddenly noticed the food had arrived. Sure, I had seen the waiter setting out the forks and knives and plates and then putting the pizza in front of us (pepperoni for me, spicy Mexican chicken for her). I saw him leave and come back with two bottles of Heineken and two tall glasses. He had asked us politely, “Anything else, sir?” and I’d looked at him and replied with a brief smile, “Thanks very much.” But all this had happened in a haze that made it difficult to discern clearly what was going on around me. All I wanted to do was keep talking to her and looking at her mad, angelic face.
“You know that feeling when you look at someone and feel their beauty is caressing your eye?” That’s what I would say to my friend after midnight as we sat at the café, smoking cigarettes in the stillness of the night while a mutt slept at my feet, and I gently scratched his head.
I shifted in my seat. Now our shoulders and thighs were firmly touching. The bench at the booth was wide enough for us to easily scoot over, but we kept widening the channel of desire and contact between our bodies.
I grabbed the bottle of olive oil to drizzle a little on a slice of pizza. My hand shook and a huge amount fell out and drenched the whole pizza.
After we finished eating, she would sit in my embrace, my arms wrapped around her waist and my hand resting lightly on her stomach. At some point, we would kiss, a long kiss with half-closed eyes.
That day, I dreamt of her all night. We were kissing, our eyes closed, relaxed. No fear of the waiter suddenly swooping in and dragging our families’ honor through the mud. The next morning, I would wake up to her voice whispering in my ear: the love just oozes out of you, honey.
One night, I’d tell her on the phone that I truly loved her, even though we’d only known each other ten days. She’d get freaked out and embarrassed, and she’d disappear from my life completely. Later, I would understand that all it takes is a long kiss and tight embrace for me to fall in love. A year later, we’d meet by chance at the cinema. We greet each other icily, with the kind of grimacing smile you make when you want to throw up.
***
Every love story goes wrong at some point. Only rarely do you decide to patch it up and give it a new lease on life, to let it hobble along on one foot.
***
We’re sitting at the Vienna Café in Garden City, looking out at the traffic on Qasr al-Aini Street.
The anxiety is thrashing around in my guts like a fish. My left foot is shaking, conveying the stress from the pit of my stomach to my extremities. It gets worse, and an electric bolt of anxiety seizes my heart, which starts furiously racing and pounding.
She’s sitting beside me, calm and smiling, an orange cat on her lap. She’s gently rubbing its ears, and it melts in the flood of attention. She’s so tender with cats and such a bitch with me.
She continues to pet and play with the cat, ignoring my presence to the best of her ability. She looks briefly my way to give sharp, staccato replies when I speak. She allows no space for mutual exchange. Her responses are formulated with a finality that precludes continued conversation and stifles any desire to talk, creating stretches of silence filled only by the cat’s mews, car horns, the sound of backgammon pieces slamming the board, and the cracked voice of the coffee shop guy, like he’d gone hoarse from yelling for help.
I don’t know why I keep humiliating myself with her. I imagine you reach a point of self-abasement after which it’s difficult to stop, and you feel weird to be treated kindly by the other person. The humiliation is not explicit and overt. It’s wrapped up in a joke or a story about the past or talk of the future. It comes in the form of a response as sudden as a slap, followed by a fake laugh designed to lighten the sharpness of the insult. Or to make you feel you’re too dull to get the other person’s sense of humor.
For her, love and pain are synonymous. Only through another’s suffering, pain, and agonized longing does she understand that he needs and loves her, that he wants to be in her presence more than he wants to exist. She plays her cards well. She doesn’t exchange emotions, but gives you crumbs and then convinces you that this is all the love she has. You better get used to it, sweetie, because those crumbs are your breakfast and lunch and even dinner, if you like. Don’t ask more of her because all she has is crumbs. I swear. But of course, she wants a whole loaf from you at every meal.
The guy came with coffee and tea. I lit a cigarette and gave her one. Deciding to defuse the tension, I asked her about the last film she’d seen. I’m more at ease when the talk turns to the arts. My mind starts to relax. Its fragile edifice starts to cohere and come to life. The tangents go off in all directions and I stop being conscious of myself, no longer fixating on my anxiety and stress. She told me about her favorite film of the moment. Damage, by Louis Malle. No surprise there. Ultimately, we like works of art for personal reasons.
The film tells us explicitly that love is a rib-cracking force. It’s danger, a risky foray through a minefield. A certain step toward annihilation. Dr. Stephen takes the plunge, falling into violent love with the kitten of cinema, Juliette Binoche, his son’s fiancé. Violence and pain are the twin engines of the film. Even the ending only comes about through resounding violence that negates the lives of the three characters (father, son, kitten) and alters their fates.
After a silence, she tells me she’s lost all feeling for me. Two months in, she woke up to find her feelings were somewhere else. At that moment, the scrappy orange cat jumped from her lap to mine, its tail carelessly knocking the glass of coffee onto my jeans. It then jumped to the ground and, realizing the gravity of its actions, fled.
Relief suddenly flooded over me and my nerves went slack. I hugged her tightly—not to say farewell, but to thank her for what she’d done. I left money for the tab on the table and walked away, heedless of the brown coffee stain that covered my lap, like I’d just shit myself.
Later, I would understand that I prefer tragedy to strike rather than building in the background. That night, I’d return to Nasr City and walk next to the wall around ENPPI clutching a plastic bottle half-filled with Auld Stag and coke. The ideal drink for vomiting. I’d sit on the sidewalk, wasted, and light a cigarette. I’d see a white cat walking with a haughty elegance, and she’d slowly circle me, like she was wearing high heels. She’d approach me, but when I went to pet her, she would scratch me with her sharp nails and say: “You dumbass, you know nothing about love! Hey, you got a cigarette?”
***
You ask what I know of love. Everything I know I learned by error and with the passage of time. Love is an invention, a creative endeavor like writing or revolution. Every time it’s a new experience like nothing that came before.
It is exactly like writing and revolution: it stares bravely into the eye of failure.
***
She took a photo of me with her phone and looked at it, smiling. “It’s a nice photo, but you’re more handsome in real life.”
Her words delighted and bothered me to the same degree. We all want good pictures of ourselves, even if we pretend otherwise.
I didn’t ask to see the photo. But she jumped up to me with the agility of a former ballerina and put the phone directly in front of my eyes. I saw a rumpled shirt, slightly unkempt hair, a beard that needed trimming, and a pronounced belly. I looked at the photo and burst out laughing.
I had been supremely confident all day. I’d made a point of checking myself out in the mirror for a long time before leaving that morning. I remembered the smile that spread across my face when I realized that I was seeing my best-looking incarnation in a long time.
Tensing up slightly, I grabbed my phone and turned on selfie mode to see myself and my clothing and xamine them. I wasn’t so different from the morning. But as I peered more closely, I would notice the following: the right side of my hair was a bit messy and frizzy; the bottom edges of my shirt were wrinkled from the bus and sitting down and standing up; a few hairs on the right side of my beard had escaped the barber’s scissors and wandered off solo.
I realized she had taken the photo from my blind spot, and it showed a side of me I wished I could keep hidden forever. Her photo caught all three of my flaws in one shot, along with the belly that I’d long tried to control by sucking it in most of the time. Her photograph left me naked and exposed. It was too much for a first date to bear.
The discouragement I felt caused my shoulders to slump a bit. My self-confidence suddenly collapsed, and I fell into a deep inner hole. I’m so puny that a single photo can break me. That’s what I’d tell myself at night. I realized, that day, that I have a blind spot, a gap that I will never see no matter how long I stare into the mirror, but that is easily visible to everyone around me. And they take pictures of it to boot.
Every now and then, she would stop to take a photo. Her eye could capture surprising visual compositions. Every time she took a picture, we’d pause over it together. We’d discuss it, then we’d keep on walking.
It was our first date, after online chats of more than two months, full of scattered emotions and a shared desire to arrange a meeting, so that we could take a step forward in our relationship, which was still suspended in the brittleness and fluidity of cyberspace. It was a quiet day without event. Cool summer breezes grazed our faces, and we laughed. We decided to walk for a while, no destination in mind, and when we got tired, we sat on the sidewalk to smoke.
She told me about her childhood memories of ballet, her brief journey into religiosity, and then her exit into a broader, more welcoming world that made her think of returning to ballet. But it was too late: she’d lost her flexibility and gained a little weight. And she’d been smoking a pack of Marlboro Reds a day since the end of high school. She suddenly fell silent, and then tragedy slyly morphed into comedy: she stood on one foot and looked at the sky, then began to dance and sway haphazardly to some imaginary music.
At the end of the day, she got up on a short wall that made her a bit taller than me. She looked me in the face and hugged me tightly. I will never forget it. That’s what I told myself when her arms were still around my neck. For days afterward, every time I closed my eyes, I would remember her clasping me, envisioning it so much that I convinced myself that, when I opened them again, I’d see her standing there in front of me, smiling.
I bid her farewell, and we agreed to go on another date soon. That night, she would tell me that she dropped her phone, scratching the camera. I consoled her with some platitudes, hoping that the phone was shattered so that the photo it held of me would disappear forever.
With time, I’d gradually grow more distant. Honestly, you’re a petty little fucker. That’s how my friend would describe me at the café when I told him the whole story. Sometimes our feelings about others are so insubstantial that a photo can end it all. My self-confidence was shaken and, with it, the whole flimsy structure of my emotions. It fell in on itself, turning my desire and feelings into rubble. I cleared it away in time.
Later, I would discover that she had created an Instagram page for her photos. I noticed my pic among them, and I pressed the like button so she’d know that the insult had safely reached its target. For a long time, I would avoid the mirror—I lost my faith in its ability to tell the truth. Photography seemed well up to that task.
Although our relationship, like many love stories, ended for no real reason, even today whenever I want to feel at ease, I close my eyes and feel her arms wrapped lightly around my neck.
***
Love stories don’t override each other. They coexist and pile up over a lifetime, in the end drawing a sweeping portrait of your own personal failure.
Mandy McClure is a translator living in Cairo.