The Weight of the Heart

by Susana Aikin

  Constantine leaves the room after emitting a small mortified sigh. A blast of wind streams through the window and slams the door behind him.

  “Oooh, the South Wind, laughing at me again!” Delia says, turning toward the window. “Laughing at my cranky, mean old age! Always a humbling teacher.” The room is quiet now. Outside, the song of the cicadas has died down. A distant rumbling pulsates through the house. I long to get up and walk outside, but I feel trapped. Paralyzed, like a small prey in a den full of invisible predators.

  “The storm is approaching. Good, good.” Delia turns to the desk, where the cabinet lies in shambles. She stoops over the broken glass. “What do we have here?” She bends over and picks up the fallen pieces one by one, setting them with utmost care on the desk. She stands the bronze gift-bearing figures in line and then steps back to look at them. “Charismatic little messengers, these. I wonder what they carry in their boxes,” she muses.

  She stands across from me, leaning with both hands on her cane. “Your father was an interesting man, wasn’t he? Tell me about him.”

  “He loved art.”

  “He did, did he? More than he loved his daughters?”

  “Well . . .” I falter.

  “Well?” She waits for my answer, her eyes moist with a sort of challenge. I know what she’s trying to do, I know where she wants to take me, but I feel drained and dampened. For the first time today I am anxious to have all this done and over with, to go home and fall on my bed, cool cotton sheets under the air conditioner, and drift into sleep.

  I also know she’s not going to let me off that easily.

  Delia walks around. She pauses by the large bulletin board mounted on the wall, where different cuttings depicting Egyptian reproductions of hieroglyphic art are pinned up, forming a chaotic collage of enigmatic images surrounded by pictograms.

  Father’s initial fascination with the desert had led him to the valley of the Nile and the string of ancient pyramids and pharaonic tombs along its riverbanks. Then followed his infatuation with the ancient civilization and its enigmatic art, his subsequent trips to the Valley of the Kings, his visits to burial chambers, his obsession with mummies. Among the enormous collection of books on Egypt and reproductions of Egyptian art he had bought in his last years, he had acquired a reproduction of the Papyrus of Ani, one of the manuscripts of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The long scroll depicted the stages of death in striking polychrome images surrounded by hieroglyphic writing, which contained instructions and spells to help the deceased in their journey through the afterlife. A few of its pages that were at some point torn from the large book are still stretched out and secured with pushpins on the wall.

  “I thought your father was a Christian,” Delia says.

  “He was Protestant,” I say.

  “But he was looking for something he wasn’t getting in church, wasn’t he? Something special.” Delia unpins a few pieces from the board. “These are curious, but the text is in English. Will you read them for me?” She slumps into the old green leather wingback chair by the sofa and lodges her cane’s handle on its arm. She smoothes the pages of the papyrus over the coffee table. I bend over and examine them. One depicts a ceremony in which a mummy is being held upright at the entrance of his tomb by Anubis, the jackal-headed god, while a group of priests touch his face with a long, spooned blade. The English caption at the bottom of the page reads, “The Ceremony of the Opening of the Mouth.” I translate for Delia. She’s interested to know what is the meaning of the little winged figure that travels down a vertical shaft connecting the entrance of the tomb to what looks like the burial chamber below.

  “ ‘The opening of the mouth,’ ” I read, “ ‘is performed to give a voice to the deceased and to liberate his ba-spirit so it can reunite with its mummy and start its journey in the afterlife.’ ”

  “I see,” Delia says, tracing her finger along the vertical shoot where the birdlike figure travels. “They help the spirit out of the body. And with actual instruments. Intriguing. Is there a closer picture of the tools they’re using? I’m sure I could use something similar in my own work.” She takes the picture and pulls it close to her eyes. She studies it for a moment, then looks at me. “Your father was on to something here. How did he die? Was he sick? I thought he wasn’t that old.”

  “He was seventy-two.”

  I tell her that on his last trip to Egypt, after he traveled down to Luxor on the Nile, he had stayed in Cairo for a few weeks and become ill, to the point where he had to be transported back to Madrid in a Red Cross aircraft and hospitalized immediately. It was the beginning of August and the three of us were in different vacation spots, so it took us a couple of days to return to the city. He never left the hospital, and he never received a convincing diagnosis. It looked like a tropical disease at first, a case of inexplicable, extreme dehydration later, and finally, a cerebrospinal inflammation of unknown origin. He was never able to tell us what had happened to him. He died four weeks later.

  Delia listens intently. “I am truly sorry,” she says. Then she asks, “How did you and your sisters take it?”

  I stare at Delia but don’t answer her question. Instead, I stay inside my head. I remember the three of us feeling devastated. Unbearable grief mixed in with the sense of guilt we all felt because somewhere deep down we felt liberated from a father who had embittered our lives. That much was obvious in the uneasy glances we exchanged during the hours that followed his passing. Later on, Marion acted more conventionally bereft, while Julia openly admitted relief. But I felt stunned. My cold indifference of the last years turned instantly to remorse. Was there really nothing I could have done to bury the hatchet? No gesture of atonement I could have accepted in order to forgive the past?

  CHAPTER 18

  My mind plunges into murky waters of painful recollection, like a diver hurled into the cold depths of oceanic limbos. Father’s arms punctured with needles, connected to tubes, IV drips, catheters. His body emaciated, rigid on the sterile bed. His eyes staring out of his face, in mute terror. And his ears seemingly deaf, indifferent, while his hands felt limp as I squeezed them on that last long, unending night. To have him die without a word of reckoning, without an explanation. I sat on the plastic chair adjacent to his bed, feeling sick under the thin tube of fluorescent light, my lungs bruised with unexpressed grief. Julia paced outside along the pale green corridor. She looked in now and then, with a haggard, drooping face. Marion sat on the small sofa by the window. She had filled the room with flowers during the last days and brought innumerable boxes of chocolates, the contents of which she now nibbled at distractedly.

  The young night nurse with the pink piggy face and chubby fingers walked in and whispered, “The doctor has agreed to put him on morphine,” and Julia rolled her eyes from the door, her lips gesticulating big words without sound. “About fucking time.”

  What had happened to Father on that last trip? It had been his fifth trip to Egypt, and he had embarked on it without telling anyone. I had called the house minutes after he had taken a cab to the airport, and Lolita, who still tended to the housework three times a week, answered and reported that he had only told her he would be back in three weeks. Three weeks! That was a long time to hang around Cairo and the pyramid routes. Organized trips were normally a week or ten days long. And to go in the month of July, when the country’s scorching temperatures could easily hit beyond one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. He was no longer traveling under the auspices of the Spanish Association of Egyptology. He had fallen out with them, after launching into unending squabbles over petty matters, as he so often did with everyone around him, until they suspended his membership. When later I combed all documents and paperwork in this room in search of clues, I found nothing besides a hotel bill on his credit card statement among other expenses, and a couple of printed emails where he corresponded with a certain Hammed El Yussuf. In the emails, El Yussuf offered to rent him an apartment in Giza, in a neighborhood called Nazlet el-Sa
mman. There was a picture of the apartment that showed a sparsely furnished living room opening onto a large adobe terrace looking out onto the pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx. But he never made it to Hammed El Yussuf’s place. Instead, he stayed in a small, cheap hotel in the Cairo quarter of Mohandeseen, the Zayed Hotel, the same place from where the international Red Cross had repatriated him. The Zayed Hotel personnel had been very gracious when I called up, giving me a heartfelt, although foggy, account of Father’s days locked in their room number 24.

  “Miss Hurt, your father was a nice gentleman. But he stayed in his room for many days before we realized he was not well. He refused food, and didn’t want the cleaning lady. Miss Hurt, please, if you want to come stay at our hotel, we will welcome you. We are so sorry for your loss.” I looked at the website picture of the circumspect concierge with droopy eyes and cropped black hair behind a fake malachite counter, who might well be Mr. Karim Rashid, the Zayed’s spokesperson expressing his condolences. I clicked on the photos of some of the rooms as I gracefully declined his invitation. Small cheap-looking beds covered with red-striped counterpanes against sandy walls stuccoed with imitations of pyramid reliefs. Why did he stay at the Zayed? A strange choice for a first-class traveler like Father. Maybe, at that point, he didn’t care about anything anymore.

  What was it with Father and the desert? He, who took the battle against my love for Marcus to the desert, did he end up losing himself in the same torrid dunes where he had tried to torch my heart and break my lover?

  It all started after the company got involved in providing equipment for oil rigs along the northern coast of Africa. After Marcus’s experience, I refused to get involved in that department and focused solely on public-works machinery and mining equipment within Spanish territory, leaving Father in charge of desert rigs. He started traveling to the different sites along the Sahara in Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, and Egypt. When the pressure of Islamist militants started building up against international companies rigging the desert, Father moved the company business away from controversial areas like Algeria and Libya, but still kept ties with the Egyptian drilling scene by dealing directly with their National Petroleum Corporation. The extent of his business transactions with them was modest but constant, and although it didn’t bring in proportional benefits to the efforts needed to keep the bond going, Father was intent on maintaining it that way.

  From the beginning he was mesmerized by the desert. Despite the heat, the uncomfortable dwellings, the mounting danger around the rig settlements, there was a gleam in his eyes every time he returned from a trip. He was in rapture when he talked about the desert night skies, the profound silence, the shifting landscapes of sand dunes. His skin was always red and burned after a trip, making his ice-blue eyes stand out even more in his face. Sometimes I thought I saw a glimpse of madness in his fixed stare as he recounted anecdotes about the resilience of camels on the long journeys, or the beauty of palm trees surrounding oases in the middle of nowhere. He had once met a nomadic group of Berbers in Tunisia who gave him and his travel companions shelter for the night, after their jeep broke down on pathless sandy territory.

  “Desert Berbers are noble and trustworthy, you can see it in their eyes. It’s rare to see deeper eyes than those of the Berbers,” he said. “For people who have nothing, their hospitality is exuberant. Even if they only offer you a few dates, it feels like you’re tasting the most delicious food in the world. They make you feel like you belong to their tribe.” I looked at him in surprise. Only a few months ago he had rambled about those A-rabs—who, in his book, included all inhabitants of northern Africa—intent on boycotting Western civilization through their resistance to selling oil at decent prices. Now, all of a sudden, he had touched their souls through their eyes, through their kindness, and had been moved. But I paid him no attention. To me, the desert was reminiscent of Marcus’s ordeal, a wasteful sacrifice that had left a bitter taste in my mouth, that had broken something that would never be made whole again. I hated the desert even more after Marcus left and I had to deal with my own desolation.

  “Only someone with no imagination whatsoever could not fall in love with the desert,” Father would say, referring to Marcus without naming him, maybe in an attempt to assuage my grief after he was gone. “Forget the rigs and all their hardship. Just to walk out at night and look up above and see a perfect map of the constellations shining down on you like you’re the only being left on Earth. To wake up every day and see a different landscape of dunes and know that they move and change shape all the time, whether you can grasp it with your eyes or not. Who wouldn’t be transported by that?” And he insisted I accompany him on trips, but I always refused. It would take me years before I understood how this very desert had affected our lives, how it had been the crossroads where I had lost my lover, and my father had begun to lose his mind.

  His increasing trips to the Sahara had a deep, insidious effect on him, and it all began to set us apart. He lost interest in the things we shared: trips to European cities, visits to museums, classical concerts and theater plays. And I became more and more obsessed with finding ways to live with my broken heart. By the time Marcus returned to Madrid, Father had removed himself from most social activities and become somewhat of a recluse between the house and the office, outside of his desert traveling. His old, angry persona now alternated with increasing spells of absent, fixed gazing through windows or into empty space. His focus on business matters began to dwindle. By that time, I was practically running the company single-handedly. So when I left, the whole operation shriveled down to half its size in less than two years. Father had lost the drive to prosper and develop the business. He had been fired up while we were growing up and while he was training me, thinking I would inherit the company. But now he didn’t see any point. I had been his last card.

  What did the desert hold for him? I’ve never stopped wondering. I remember flinching when looking him directly in the eye as he talked about the vast regions of golden dunes under the dazzling sun or the pointed white light of stars. I remember holding my breath, paralyzed with vertigo, as if I were leaning over an abyss and watching strange, disconnected scenes unfold before my mind’s eye. Vertical rods of blinding light shooting down, searing the corneas, frying the mind; brown, parched, protruding tongues of camels, lizards, of defeated men gone crazy with thirst; and sand, burning sand sifting over and through everything, sliding out of Father’s fists and pouring out into the wind. Maybe the burning sand running through his fingers was the image of his deepest, hard-bone truth. For all his passion, for all his yearning to possess and to belong, his life had unfurled as a barren territory where nothing ever took root, where nothing could be grasped and held for long, where isolated experiences with generous, welcoming Berbers might just be shimmering mirages of a desperate mind. And in the end those sands burning through his fingers were only the yield of his rage, of all the years spent consuming, desiccating, reducing to ashes all he touched, all he coveted and loved, like a King Midas of sorts, obsessed not with gold but with the possessive greed of a heart that sucked in everything around like a black hole.

  Maybe the empty landscape of the desert was also a mirror of his loneliness, of his extreme isolation at the end of his life. He had no friends, no real family ties. His life had been emptied out after his three daughters left the house in rancor. But it was not just at the end of his life. As long as I could remember, Father had been lonely. Lonely sitting in the cold living room while we, as girls, milled about with Nanny in the kitchen, warm with smells of baking, with laughter and silly gossip. Lonely in the office, in the beautiful office with large windows pouring over gardens, while around him employees struggled with their tasks and seethed at his overbearing power and superior know-how. A lonely man in his passion for art, in his jealous possessiveness of his daughters, in his journey through an exile that landed him in Spain, a foreign territory whose gifts he never was able to fully embrace. I used to think of him as a lo
nely boy too, a boy scourged and whipped into corners, a boy turned fugitive from sheer misery. And then later, I witnessed him also as a lonely old man, as a destitute dying man, destitute because for all his riches, for all his accomplishments, for all his beautiful house, he died alone, far away from the hearts of the daughters who stood around the hospital bed, far away from his Manchester home, in the suffocating heat of a Madrid August afternoon.

  Poor Father. A part of me had always felt pity for him, always wanted to protect him. Even as a little girl, when I saw him come in late from work, his face gaunt, his shape frazzled, and he stood by the door looking in at our three little beds to say good night, my heart would beat painfully against my ribs. Why the straitlaced distance, our small bodies rigid under the covers instead of jumping out of bed, insubordinate with affection, to rush over and embrace him, jump around him in welcome, as children and puppies do? We never touched Father’s body. An occasional peck on the cheek, a shy pat on the arm or the back, was all. Neither did he touch us. Taking my arm to help me out of a car on our way to a party or a meeting was exceptional. His love was in his fight to provide for us: food, a beautiful house, a bountiful education. His gifts, money and things money could buy. But his passion could only be channeled through jealousy, through possession. And loving him back was difficult, a balancing act between standoffish devotion and a terror of disappointing him. Even as girls we knew that we had a wounded animal for a father.

  “Everyone thinks they are Romeos and Juliets, but no one knows how hard it is to come by real love. The love that never dies. Like that between your mother and me,” he said once, during the time when I was grieving for Marcus. I remember looking at him, surprised at first, since he never spoke of Mother, and then feeling the sting of his words. There were standards of perfection akin to the consecration of high art that he applied to everything and that were impossible to reach. Nothing was ever good enough. In this book, my love story with Marcus belonged to a lower strand of passions, there was something worthless and pointless in it, it would never be approved. But it couldn’t be vanquished. Neither could it be suppressed. So we started living in a bubble of hypocrisy, fogged up by the duplicity of thoughts and words. I became a fabricator, a weaver of whole tapestries of deceit, and he, a sly receiver of corrupt legends. Anything to avoid the naked truth. I used to return to the house after weekends of furious lovemaking with Marcus, with face and body visibly swollen from all his mauling and his kissing and my whole aura stinking of his bodily juices mingled with mine, and I would walk up to Father right here, in front of this very desk, and feed him lies about my whereabouts, about the sweet girlfriends I had slept over with, about their mother serving breakfast. And Father would listen quietly and nod approvingly, careful to avert his glance, because we both knew that if he ventured to meet my gaze, his pain and my shame would merge, combust and burst, exploding our bell jar. We were trapped in the delusion that the truth would tear us apart, but it was deceit that consumed us, swallowed us up like a marsh of slime and quicksand from which we could never pull out again. Not even when I left the house and the office in a tornado of bitterness did I confront him about his role in the devastating outcome of my love story. Instead, I just informed him, stone-faced and ice-hearted, giving supercilious reasons for my decision. Neither did I ever find out if he understood the resentment I had built over the years under the idyllic father-daughter relationship we both wielded on the surface. How my love for him had been infringed by hatred for his dominance, for his arrogance, for the way he felt entitled to meddle in other people’s lives, in his daughters’ love lives, crushing our hearts and conniving to destroy our lovers.