The Proof of the Honey

Love is for the soul, desire for the body. I have no soul. This idea haunted me before I discovered that there was a time when women were denied a soul.

When I was young I couldn’t find my soul. When I grew up, I couldn’t be bothered to look for it. “I have no soul”—the sentence became engraved in my memory and I started to live my life through it. I knew that I was body alone, that I possessed nothing else. My body was my intelligence, my consciousness, and my culture. He who desired my body loved me. He who loved my body desired me. This was the only love that I knew, and the rest was literature.

We had one rhythm from the beginning. We didn’t need to practice, or tune our instruments. He would be astonished and proclaim his astonishment. I wouldn’t have time to share in his proclamations. My time was dedicated wholly to pleasure. I would fall silent. I would cling to his body and bury my face beneath his armpit and breathe his smell deeply into my chest.

My secret vices are no longer secret and I no longer have to be clandestine or to hide the covers of the books.

I lost my memory of things at will: a useful trick for living in this society. I would erase memories or keep them at will—over long years I practiced this art until I was so supple at it that it required no thought.

I learned to be the sole guardian of my nights. My secret could never be known because I told it to no one.

Early on, I knew my path. I knew the game I would play. That game amused me, was part of my secret life. Nobody could claim to be the overseer of my nights; nobody could claim to be the marshal of my liberties. My life was my own. My secrets, too

Was it my being a woman that made my secret readings so explosive?

Was making a secret of it part of my emasculated upbringing? Why was it possible for me to take pride in my reading of Western and Eastern pornography while hiding the fact that I was reading al-Tifashi? How could I proclaim my passion for Georges Bataille, Henry Miller, the Marquis de Sade, Casanova, and the Kama Sutra and make no mention of al-Suyuti and al-Nafzawi?

Is the scandal in the act or in the proclamation of the act?