My Venice and Other Essays (9780802194039)

by Donna Leon

  “The same thing Saudis do,” my friend explained.

  The girl took some time being persuaded of this fact, and the reason for her reluctance, my friend unearthed by dint of careful questioning, was her brother’s extensive pornographic video collection, to which she seemed to have free access. In those films, none of the sex acts performed were progenerative, and so, in the best tradition of the scientific method, the girl sought information from an informed source: if you want to know about Westerners’ sexual customs, who better to ask than a Westerner?

  My friend William had an unusual sexual experience in Saudi Arabia, this some years after I had been there. He lived and taught in Jeddah and had a sweet Yemeni houseboy, Ahmed, who was happy to cook and clean and help William with his Arabic. Once, when William was about to leave for vacation in Europe, Ahmed asked Mister William if he would bring him a present from foreign. William agreed, Ahmed made him swear that he would, William swore, and then Ahmed revealed that he wanted Mister William to bring him a woman.

  “But Ahmed,” he said, “I can’t bring you a woman.”

  “But you said you would.” Crestfallen, pained looks.

  “But I can’t do it.”

  “Yes you can, Mister William. One of these women,” Ahmed explained, bringing his fist to his mouth and blowing air into it as though he were blowing up a rubber balloon. Or a rubber woman.

  William envisioned himself skulking into a sex shop, smuggling her back to Jeddah; he blushed. He agreed.

  He told me about this when he stopped to visit me in Venice on the way from London back to Jeddah. When I asked if he had found her, he confessed that he had seen one in the window of a sex shop in Soho and had bought her. I insisted on seeing her and, not a little embarrassed, he pulled her out of his suitcase.

  Flat, about the size of the New York Review of Books, she lay on the floor, looking back at us with cornflower-blue eyes, her red lips smiling, her blonde hair streaming down what we could see of her shoulders.

  “We’ve got to open her up,” I insisted. Without waiting, I pulled her from her plastic covering and snapped her open, unfurling her as one would a tablecloth.

  “Well?” I asked.

  William blew her up. She had—hmm—she had orifices.

  To put her back in her plastic envelope we had to flatten her out, but this we managed to do only by spreading her flat, letting the air out of her, and then placing books on her and walking on the books to squeeze all of the air from her.

  Then, after spending about fifteen minutes folding her into her original shape, we had to, as it were, bury the body, which we did inside one of his new shirts. Carefully, we removed the pins at collar and cuffs, unfolded the shirt and inserted her, then folded the shirt and replaced the pins. The shirt was a bit thicker, perhaps; aside from that, it looked like his other new shirts. At the airport, he later told me, the customs officers opened the bag, looked at the shirts with practiced eyes, pulled out the plump one, unpinned it, pulled her out, and snapped her open, this in front of not only William but three other men who worked for the same company.

  I hope Ahmed believed him.

  My students, dear little things, were usually driven to school by brother, father, uncle, paid driver, husband. They arrived, swaddled from head to foot in the enveloping black abaya, which they removed as soon as they passed through the portal that separated the girls’ section from that of the boys. The staff was female: videotaped lessons could be followed only if the teachers were also female. Now that so much teaching is done online I wonder if cyber promiscuity is allowed.

  I had fourteen girls in one class, and I grew quite fond of them, once we settled the issue of religion, that is, that neither of us was interested in the religion of the other; I failed to confess that I also wasn’t interested in the one that was listed on my job application. They were really quite sweet, those kids, even though one of them was married and one had a grandmother who was younger than I was—thirty-nine—at the time.

  The clearest memory I have of the class is the day I had to teach them about the subjunctive, or is it the conditional? Anyway, the one you use for talking about imagined situations and wishes. To avoid the accusation of teaching them to lie, and bearing in mind the fate of the woman who mentioned Paradise Lost to her literature class only to be fired the next day, I stressed the fact that this was how we talked about what we would like to do, as in, “If I had a million dollars, I would go to Paris on vacation.” Mind you, the truth of the matter was that if I had had a million dollars I would have gotten the hell out of their fucking country, but I settled for Paris as a compromise.

  First came Hariba, who said, “If having million dollars, going Paris vacation,” whereupon I turned to the class and told them, “Now, girls, Hariba has told us that, if she had a million dollars, she would go to Paris on vacation.” General smiles. “Now let us ask Nahir what she would do if she had a million dollars. Nahir, what would you do if you had a million dollars?”

  Well, I’ll be damned. Nahir wanted Paris going vacation too. Nice city, Paris.

  As I moved down the line, I grew ever closer to Farida, generally acknowledged as the nicest and most religious girl in the class as well as the best student. Unfortunately, as I got nearer, she grew more agitated until, when her turn came, she could barely speak but sat with her face lowered into her palms.

  “What’s the matter, Farida?” I asked, and to hell with Paris.

  “Oh, Miss Donna,” she said, raising a tear-washed face, “I cannot tell a lie. I have a million dollars.”

  Indeed.

  My passport? My passport? Who’s got my passport? Women who had been there longer than one year—and we won’t go into that particular form of insanity, shall we?—finally told me that all passports were confiscated upon arrival and not returned until the teacher left. This way, should any of us quit, the administration of the university was free to “process” our exit visa, though our quitting made us ineligible for university housing, and since women could not rent hotel rooms we would remain in our apartments but at the cost of a hundred dollars per night. It was generally believed that they would keep us there until they’d earned back all salary paid until then, at which point the exit visa would be issued, or maybe they’d keep us there a while longer, just to encourage the others. Lovely beaches, and the local people are so friendly.

  One Saturday, we were allowed to take the female students to the newly constructed sports center of the university, where they were to, well, I don’t know what they were meant to do, since our girls were not much given to any physical activity more strenuous than walking, and that slowly. But we took them, about fifty of them, and we entered the immense sports complex: professors in long skirts and girls enveloped in their black clouds. And there our wondering eyes beheld the pool, squash courts, handball courts, basketball courts, all state of the art and all of the courts covered with fresh parquet, just varnished and not yet used by the boys. One of our students took a basketball and tried to dribble it on the floor of the court. It rolled away and some others went out onto the court to get it. They knew enough to toss it from one to another, and then they got the idea of tossing it to one another while they were running. More and more of them flung aside their abayas and ran out onto the court. Up and down, up and down they ran. Occasionally one of them would stand under the hoop and try to make a basket, and when the ball came down one would grab it and run up the court holding the ball, the others following.

  The Western professors, all women, sat on the sidelines and watched. I don’t remember who was the first of us to notice that the girls were wearing high heels and that each of their footsteps was leaving a tiny hole—round or square or rectangular—in the parquet floor. No one said anything. The girls ran their happy way, up and down, hair streaming down their backs, squealing with delight. And in her wake each of them left a trail of l
ittle holes. There were perhaps thirty girls on the court, all of them running back and forth, back and forth. The recalled image of those hundreds, thousands of tiny holes is one of the few happy memories I have of Saudi Arabia.

  Okay, now it’s quiz time. A woman stands on the checkout line in the Riyadh Safeway supermarket. In her shopping basket are eighteen bottles of grape juice, a box of yeast, five kilos of sugar, and a twenty-liter plastic demijohn. What is the woman going to make?

  You got it. Wine. Most of the people who worked for the university, both men and women, made alcohol at home. I did, and it was horrible, so horrible that I ended up pouring most of it down the sink, but not before my apartment stank of alcohol for days as the disgusting liquid went through the process of fermentation. Some of my colleagues who had been there longer possessed quite sophisticated recipes for both wine and beer. Those people with connections to diplomatic services of any sort had access to wine, beer, and whiskey, and it was said that most of the major compounds, where the employees of the major contracting companies lived their apartheid lives, had not only professional stills but, in one case, a store where bacon and pork could be found. I did not enter many Saudi households while I was in the country, but every one I entered had ample supplies of whiskey.

  For a time, I played tennis with the manager of one of the major foreign banks, often went back to his compound for a beer after we finished playing. The tennis ended the day he offered me cocaine, of which he had an ample supply, mailed to him through the diplomatic post and kept in the freezer in the kitchen, along with hashish and marijuana. At the worst, the beer might have gotten him flogged and me tossed out of the country, but they chop your head off for drugs, and I was not willing to risk that, certainly not for a habit I did not share and that has never interested me.

  One might as well dismiss the university as a joke, well, a joke with a library. All students were to be promoted, and all students were to do well. This probably won’t do much damage in the English literature department, but when the same rules apply to the classes in surgery at the medical school, the consequences might be graver.

  I ran afoul of the administration only once, when I was called in to speak to the male (of course) dean, the man who had hired me. He was a slick one, was the good doctor: slicked-back raven wing hair, utterly, devastatingly cool sunglasses, and even an English accent. He told me, as he went on to tell all of the women professors, that the university had decided to request of us, out of respect for local customs, to veil our hair, perhaps even our faces (no doubt in respect for local customs, in which case I’d be in my underwear), even though our contract made it clear that this would not be necessary.

  I listened, admiring his shoes and suit, until he had finished. The slick doctor, I knew, married to a lovely Saudi woman and the lover of a colleague of mine (nought odder than folks, is there?), had taken a degree in American studies.

  “Doctor,” I began with a smile almost as oily as his own, “I know your degree is in American studies.” I paused to allow him time to smile modestly. “That being the case, I’m sure you’re familiar with the e. e. cummings poem ‘i sing of Olaf glad and big.’” He smiled to suggest not familiarity, but intimacy, with that poem, though I rather suspect the slick doctor seldom read much American literature more demanding than Playboy and Hustler.

  Taking his next smile as permission to continue, I said, “And so I fear I have no choice but to recall to you the final line in stanza four.” He looked up brightly and I went on, “Where he writes, ‘There is some shit I will not eat.’” I paused, but he did not indicate, neither in gesture nor in word, any familiarity with the text. “Good day, Doctor,” I said and left.

  When I left the country, the original deposit I’d given on my apartment was not returned and was done so only when I wrote to ask for it from the States, adding that I was sure this was an administrative oversight, for surely the people entrusted with the protection of the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina could not so much as contemplate even the thought of dishonesty, and whatever would a person think of Islam if this sort of thing went on, boys?

  Americans aren’t supposed to use the word “nigger,” are we? Well, for the time I was in Saudi Arabia, I was a nigger. That is, because of some accident of birth—in my case, the fact that I was a woman—most of the people around me assumed my inferiority. Further, they saw no reason why I should be afforded basic human or legal rights or civil treatment. I was the object of their sexual fantasies as well as the object of their violence, at the same time they profited from my labor. After nine months there I could, given the means, easily have become violent. And bear in mind that my niggerhood was temporary. I always knew it had a temporal limit, and had I been willing to pay enough I could have ended it whenever I pleased. The longer I stayed, the more intoxicating grew the fantasy of violence, and the memory of it, even now, after twenty-five years, lingers.

  As an aside, I would like to make clear that my dislike, my profound loathing, has nothing whatsoever to do with Arabs or Islam, for I admire much of Arab culture and have always under­stood Islam as a source of comfort and peace in my Muslim friends. I lived peacefully and happily in Iran for four years and took with me when I left great affection for the people and admiration for the culture. My rancor has to do only with Saudi Arabia and only with its male citizens. I was a guest in their country and they spat on me and cheated me. After more than a quarter of a century, I still wish them any bad thing that history can bring them. But, darlings, it’s got lovely beaches, and the local people are so friendly.

  The New York Man

  Some years ago, in search of civilized male company, I was led to respond to some of the ads placed in the “Personals” section of the New York Review of Books, believed by many to be the premier intellectual review of the United States. No, I was not answering for myself but for my oldest and dearest friend, she then seven years a widow. Resident in New York for more than thirty years, she well knew the city, its customs and its habits, and she had, in the past, often remarked to me on the unavailability of suitable men. She had, now that I think of it, just as often remarked upon the unsuitability of the available men, but I was certain I could, with an Alexandrine slash of my sword, cut through her difficulties and find for her Mr. Right.

  Social changes have made it increasingly difficult for single American men and women to meet: there are no more church suppers, membership in all manner of social organizations has declined rapidly in the past decades, increasing numbers of people work at home. Further, most of the good ones get cut from the herd early and so, arrived at a certain age, most men are either married or gay. Or both.

  Undeterred by statistics, over the course of the next few months, I wrote to three of these men, explaining that I was writing not for myself but for a friend of mine in New York. Letters followed, and in the end all of them made contact with my friend, who met all of them. And, because I am frequently in New York, I also met them.

  By some sort of miracle of patience and love, the sort of thing that develops during the course of a friendship that spans forty years, she still speaks to me, though I am forced to admit that it is only with the exercise of great patience and forbearance on her part. Because these men, for various reasons, proved unsuitable, though God knows they were available. In them, one might well see manifest the various difficulties that confront single New York women of a certain age (in New York that category appears to begin somewhere soon after the thirtieth birthday) who seek a man with whom to have what Americans seem incapable of calling anything other than “a relationship.”

  The first was Edward, a hulking, bearded bear of a man, a cross between Fidel Castro and Helmut Kohl. Divorced, with adult children, Edward was in his late fifties and described himself as an “intelligent, bookish doctor, interested in classical music, food, and museums.”

  Here’s the first clue. “Interest” is often a euphemis
m for “obsession.” Edward’s interest in music turned out to take the form of an encyclopedic knowledge of the recordings of the music of certain composers—Hindemith and Bartók were two of his favorites, as I recall. Hence he could, and unfortunately would, go on at great length about the differences between the 1936 Furtwängler this and the 1951 de Sabata that. I spent one evening in his company, listening to him talk about music, and at no time did the words “sublime,” “lovely,” or “thrilling” pass his lips. Instead, he spoke of the shading of the flutes here, the late arrival of the second violins there. He might as well have been discussing the price of pork bellies on the Chicago commodities exchange, so little did he seem to like what he was talking about.

  Edward was equally omniscient about food and the collections of the major museums of an exhausting number of countries. Nothing he said ever suggested that he found the paintings beautiful, even that he much enjoyed looking at them. It is my observation that many American men, especially those in their forties and fifties, turn the enthusiasm they formerly felt for collecting baseball cards or memorizing the batting averages of their favorite players to more “adult” interests. Unfortunately, in the process of switching from sports to culture, they lose most of the pleasure and all of the passion that endowed their childhood interests with such wonderful charm. Favorite subjects appear to be expensive cars, first editions, and stereo equipment so sophisticated that the differences in sound created by the various models can be detected only by other machines or dogs.

  Refreshingly, Edward loathed all forms of physical exercise and had not been in a gym since he left university. He drank wine with lunch and brandy after dinner. And he smoked. Bless him for those things. It often seems to me that New York is filled with smoke-free nondrinkers who spend their weeks going back and forth between the office and the “fitness center” in search of immortality.

  The second was Jason, who described himself as a “professional, interested in film [they never call them “movies”], history, and politics.” Well, I thought as I sent off my letter, he’s a New Yorker so he’s got to be liberal.