Other Lives Read Online Free PDF

me like this when she knew that I had a rendezvous with Joe. A hug with an equal mix of love and reproach that’s hard to explain: it’s like the hug of a mother who’s just discovered that her daughter has given her virginity to the neighbor’s son. Lying on the bed, I watched Eva close the door of the hotel room on me. I don’t know why at that moment an idea powerfully overtook me—that betrayal is a defense against the absence of love. Joe also came to Mombasa to meet me at the Gardens Hotel. After a year, I decided to stop seeing him. When he asked me why, I didn’t know what to answer. I searched for just one word to tell him and I couldn’t find it. I’ve grown tired. I’m tired of traveling. I’m tired of the repetition, of the heaviness of a sick, disabled relationship that can’t develop.
    â€œ The animal in you is tired of you …” Eva says when I end my relationship with Joe, poetic as usual, sometimes she’s even musical. I consider how Eva could become a famous poet, though she prefers to be an environmental activist working with endangered animals and sick trees and forests.
    Sometimes I leave my fantasies and remember specific moments in my life, like when I first discovered my body with Olga. We’d leave Asmahan’s voice playing and Olga would start kissing me on my mouth and breasts. I try hard to recall the moments of happiness that we lived together—Olga and I—without feeling I was doing something wrong. But that one night with Chris I can’t get my fantasies working. It’s as though I’m afflicted by a loss of memory or my fantasies can no longer help me tune into Georges or Joe’s features. The faces of everyone with whom I’ve shared pleasure suddenly vanish, as if they’ve all passed through my life quickly, in one stroke of forgetfulness. As if they never were. I try to recall their features but their faces are nebulous and unclear, their eyes all distorted and staring at me standing right in front of them. An invisible force is pushing them back. I try to recall Olga’s face and I see it vividly, as if it were right there in front of me. I turn my gaze away, toward my suitcase, and start recounting the previous night’s dream to Chris. I dream I’m a tree, a very tall tree, swaying in the breeze. I tell him that in the dream I’m a tree. He’s far away from me and can’t touch me. And I’m feeling a strange kind of pleasure, as though the wind itself were making love to me. I know that I reach orgasm but I don’t know how. It’s enough to hear the tree’s leaves rustle in the gentle breeze to feel an excitement that no man can arouse in me.
    It’s not Asmahan’s voice alone that transports me to this memory that I love and that helps me bear my life in Kenya. There are also the novels that Olga sends me and the vivid colors of the sky reflected in sea surrounding my house—bright colors, more vivid than the sky’s colors in Beirut and more brilliant.
    My dreams change and I forget most of them, except those that repeat themselves and invade me, year after year. There are many trees and plants and mountains in them that I’m always able to fly above easily. When I try to fall sleep I recall those dreams. As if I choose my dreams to push away the nightmare that’s lived with me for so many years. My dream of friendly trees is perhaps some kind of recompense. After my brother Baha’’s death, I so often see burning trees with the disfigured faces of featureless people hovering above them. I begin to fear trees. I no longer dream that I’m walking above them, as if walking on the ground. I no longer dream that I’m flying above them, never landing. Trees themselves become pure terror.
    Â 
    Sometimes I wake up afraid, then my headache worsens and I don’t know if it’s the pain or my nightmares that have awoken me.