by André Aciman
“Not to worry. One more week and you’ll be sitting with your daughter on your balcony, enjoying the sun as you always have and as you always will long after I and all of my siblings are gone.”
“No, madame, you’re made of steel,” said the Saint, remembering how the Princess’s husband had once complained that his wife’s very skeleton was made of steel rods that clanked when she tossed in bed at night. “Besides, we all go when He wills us to go, no sooner, no later.” The Saint assumed that characteristic pinched and pious little air of hers whenever she meant to put people in their place.
As we stood up to leave, the Saint remained in bed, producing a lank rosy hand which she placed gently on the back of my neck muttering a string of words in Ladino. Then, full of love, she bit my arm and kissed it, while I threw my arms around her.
“Don’t I get a hug now?” interrupted the Princess rubbing my hair. Before she had time to finish her request, I had already put both arms around her and was hugging her very tightly, pressing tighter still, because I wanted not only to reassure the Saint that I was finally complying with her wish to love the Princess more, but also to tease her into thinking that, during her sickness, I had done just that. I waited for the Princess to unstiffen and yield to my embrace as the Saint had done on so many occasions. I wanted to hear her own litany of endearments, the accent of her sorrow, of her love, of her passion—and the less she responded, the more I stiffened my grasp. But she did not know this game and, in the end, all she did was utter a squeamish little cry, half giggle, half squeal.
“Look at all this love,” she exclaimed, beaming with joy. “It’s not good to love so much,” added the Princess as she ran her fingers through my hair.
“I try to teach him this too, but he won’t listen.”
As the Princess had predicted, two weeks later the Saint was once again sitting on her balcony with her usual visitors, enjoying the late afternoon sun waning into splendid summer evenings. She swore she felt much younger, now that her Egyptian doctor had worked a miracle. “A generation ago he would have been no better than the boy servant bringing us tea on this balcony,” she said. “Now he’s brought me back to life. He speaks impeccable French. And you should see his office—sumptuous. Not bad for an Arab who is scarcely thirty years old. If he represents the new order here, well, chapeau to the new Egypt.”
“Just wait until they’re all in power. Then you’ll see how the new Egypt will treat you, Madame Adèle,” broke in one of her Greek neighbors.
“I don’t care. This one is a true gentleman. I owe him my life. You’d be surprised, but ever since my operation, I’ve become quite philosophical. I thank God for everything He’s given me; what I don’t have, I don’t miss, and what I can’t get, I don’t want. We are not rich, but we are comfortable; I’ve never loved Egypt, but life has been good here; and almost everyone I love comes to see me at least once a day. Never was I happier I didn’t die.”
“She should have died right there and then,” said Aunt Flora thirty years later as she insisted on paying for our coffee somewhere near Ponte dell’Accademia. “For she died worse than a dog’s death, and in such squalor, you’d swear there never was a God in heaven.”
She collected the change but left the waiter no tip. “Because they’re impertinent fannulloni,” she said. Then, as though to apologize for the restaurant, she added, “I know the food isn’t very good here, but it’s not bad, and I like to sit at this table in the shade and listen to the water and let my mind drift.” She finally put away the toothpick she had been twiddling. “Perhaps this is why I’ve chosen to live in Venice—because no matter where you turn there’s always water close by, and you can always smell the sea, even if it stinks; because there are mornings when I wake up and think the clock is turned back and I’m on the Corniche again.”
Summers were long in Venice, she said, and there was nothing she liked more some days than to take the vaporetto and ride around the city, or head directly for the Lido and spend a morning on the beach by herself. She loved the sea. I loved it too, I said, reminding her that it was she who had taught me how to swim.
I looked at her. At sixty-seven she had the same clear green eyes I remembered and the same tapered, nicotine-stained fingertips that could race across the keyboard when she played the opening bars of the Waldstein. I had not seen her in ten years, and for another five before that. We spoke about Rue Memphis again.
“She wasn’t a bad piano player at all. Her trouble was discipline. And memory. Memory especially. I, on the other hand, have plenty of discipline; as for memory, there isn’t a thing I’ve forgotten. I can still remember the names of all the tramway stops from Ramleh to Victoria.”
I took a paper napkin, unfolded it, gave her my pen and asked her to write them down. She decided I might want those of the Ramleh–Bacos line as well, so she jotted them too.
“Mind you, I remember the old names, not those newfangled, patriotic names which the new regime adopted: Independence Street, Freedom Square, Victory-this-and-that.”
Our waiter, who had been scowling in our direction, turned his face elsewhere and was busily talking to a colleague from across a makeshift hedge separating our restaurant from another. When he sighted a hesitant tourist couple scanning our empty terrace, he went out to greet them and, before they had time to retreat, strong-armed them and asked them to please, follow this way.
She watched the sheepish tourists being escorted to the worst table on the terrace. “I do hate Italy sometimes,” she added. “But then there are days when I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.”
We crossed the bridge and made toward Campo Morosini. Except for occasional groups of young tourists braving the early afternoon heat that Sunday, Venice appeared deserted. The quiet piazza with its white marble and travertine masonries offered scant relief from the sun. Along its western edge, two establishments that were totally vacant at this time of day sported straw chairs neatly packed, three to a table, all of them baking under closed Cinzano umbrellas that studded the cobbled sidewalk. On the piazza, the shops were closed.
She bought me an ice cream.
“Do you need to buy souvenirs or things?”
I shook my head.
“Your mother spends all of her time buying gifts for everyone each time she visits me. I assumed you would too. How about books?”
“No. I came to visit you.”
“You came to visit me,” she repeated, visibly pleased anyone should do such a thing.
We threaded our way through the narrow, empty streets of Zattere while the sun, following an oblique path, cast an ochre-hued glow along the stuccoed fronts of the little buildings lining Calle del Traghetto. One could still make out the faint clatter of plates being washed after late Sunday family luncheons. Several corners later, we arrived at her home. She lived on the ground floor, though the place was sunken below street level. Like most Venetian apartments, hers was extremely small, and her bedroom, with its low ceiling and small window, had all the makings of a sparsely furnished monk’s cell. On the nightstand was an old portable tape player surrounded by a scatter of cassettes: Callas and di Stefano, Wanda Landowska, Paul Anka. She could have been an undergraduate in a college dormitory. On her dresser I caught a picture that could only have been of me, though I had never seen it before. For a moment I was baffled to see that a part of me had traveled all the way to Venice and had been sitting in someone’s bedroom for twenty years before I myself had finally come upon it.
Inside the only other room in her apartment sat two old grand pianos, side by side, leaving little space for anything or anyone else. I had to squeeze behind the first piano to reach the second. The room looked more stuffy yet, because the walls were lined with very old cork tiles. I could not tell how one would go about opening the window.
“I leave the room shut throughout the year. It stinks of cigarettes. But this is exactly how I learned to play. None of my students has ever complained. And if they did—”
&n
bsp; She showed me the kitchen where she cooked, ate, wrote letters, read, watched television, corrected homework.
She began to clear the table.
“Can I help?” I asked.
“Sure, just tell me where you propose to put all of these papers.” She dumped an entire bundle of brochures, flyers, scores, newspapers, and unanswered mail into my arms. I looked around and acknowledged defeat.
“On top of the first piano.” I could tell she was happy.
“Meanwhile, I’ll heat up some water and cook the gnocchi. I made them myself. I’ve also baked some vegetables. If there is one thing I know how to do,” she said, kneeling down to light the stove with a match, “it’s how to make good gnocchi.” She tried another match.
“This may interest you,” she said, still concentrating on lighting the stove. “It was your grandmother who taught me how to cook. I gave her piano lessons, she taught me how to cook. ‘One day you’ll need to cook a man a real meal, and piano music is all very nice, but men need un bon biftek, vous comprenez ce que je veux dire, Flora?’ So she taught me Sephardi dishes which nowadays even Sephardim have forgotten how to cook. Fish, artichokes, lamb, rice, eggplant, leeks. And red mullet, of course.”
At which we both chuckled.
“You may laugh, but your grandmother was no fool. She knew exactly how to manipulate people. And the person she manipulated best was the one everyone thought could easily outfox her. Letting her think she didn’t know how to buy red mullet, when she, her mother, and her great-grandmother had been cooking them forever. Or letting her think she thought her a Frenchwoman, which she knew would tickle her no end, when, in fact, they had grown up in the same neighborhood in Constantinople. Or letting her think she was so inferior, and so humble, and so distracted, when all along she knew perfectly well what she was doing.
“To think that I was there with my mother on the very evening they met. That I was waiting to hear from him on the very day they decided to get married. That I, who should have been the first, was in fact the last to know.
“Here,” she smiled, announcing dinner. “I’ve also prepared something I remember you liking years ago. I hope you haven’t changed.”
She apologized for the stainless steel knives with red and green plastic handles that clashed with the silk-embroidered tablecloth she had placed on top of an old kitchen table. In the twenty years since she had left Egypt, she had managed absentmindedly to throw all of her real silverware into the garbage, piece by piece. “The symbolic end of my brother’s fortune,” she said, referring to her inheritance from the Schwab. Only these five silver teaspoons remained—and that because she never used teaspoons, otherwise they too would have wound up at the bottom of the Canal Grande. “Five silver teaspoons,” she repeated, as if this short sentence summed up the ledger of her life.
“Your father kept it secret from me for months,” she said, returning to the subject of my parents. “I can’t begin to tell you how shattered I was. I never showed it—I even became best friends with your mother—but it took me a long time, years, to get over it. Even now, there are still days when I think I never outgrew any of it. And days when I’d like to think that neither has he. You know, we were an odd match —we always left our doors ajar, but we never let each other in. We were right for each other, provided there were others to return to. Left to ourselves, we were always evasive, couldn’t even stay alone together in the same room without feeling awkward and strained.
“Even today, I continue to live my life that way. I cross the street on the slant, I always sit in the side rows at concert halls, I am a citizen of two countries but I live in neither, and I never look people in the eye,” she said, as I, conscious of her effort to do so now, averted my own. “I’m honest with no one, though I’ve never lied. I’ve given far less than I’ve taken, though I’m always left with nothing. I don’t even think I know who I am, I know myself the way I might know my neighbor: from across the street. When I’m here, I long to be there; when I was there I longed to be here,” she said, referring to her years in Alexandria.
“‘You see, Flora,’ the Saint used to say to me, ‘you think too much, and you ask too many questions. In life one must put blinders on, look straight ahead, and, above all, learn to forget. Débarrasser. You cannot live and be your own pawnbroker.’
“As you see, I’ve only learned how to get rid of my silverware. That’s all. All the rest is dutifully catalogued and neatly stowed away in the book I carry here,” she said, pointing to her forehead. “I forget nothing—not the way things were, nor how I wished they might have been. I’m like old widows who spend hours sifting through objects they suspect may no longer mean much but which they continue to cherish because it takes more time to replace or discard them than to keep them clean.” She was silent for a moment. “Perhaps I remember more because I’ve lived—and loved—far less than my years show.”
She stood up, took down something that had been hiding on top of the refrigerator, and produced her surprise, a large Ottoman dessert made with goat cream called “bread of the palace.”
“What is so pathetic, now that I think about it, is that forgetting is what the poor Saint did best of all. She forgot so much that in the end she forgot who she was. After the government seized her husband’s assets in ’58 and they were forced to flee the country, she arrived in France the most pitiful sight in the world: there she was, the grande bourgeoise of Rue Memphis—with her grandchildren, her pianos, her tea parties—standing at Orly airport as frightened and confused as a five-year-old child.
“Robert, who had gone to meet her, told me years later how lost she looked as she scanned the crowd for him, even after he came up to her and said, ‘Mother, I’m here!’ He tried to embrace her, but she kept pushing him away, declaiming, ‘Mais je ne vous connais pas, monsieur,’ in that fine textbook French of hers. ‘But it’s me, Bertico,’ he said.”
Flora went on to tell me that when the Saint finally did recognize her son, all she did was touch his face and say he looked so old. Then she apologized and said it was because she wasn’t wearing her glasses; she had forgotten them at home. But not to worry—she would send the boy servant to fetch them. Only then did Robert realize the extent of the damage. He had left her a beefy-armed woman who could walk about with a grandchild on each hip. Here was an unkempt, defeated old lady who couldn’t even string together a coherent sentence. The airplane trip had been disastrous; she had cried the whole way.
When they arrived at the bus terminal in Paris and were waiting to get their luggage, my grandmother did the most unexpected thing: she bolted, wandered off. When Robert came back with a porter and the suitcases, he found his father totally beside himself. “What is it?” he asked. “Your mother’s gone.”
They immediately contacted the police. But it took them days. Eventually, they found her—at the opposite end of Paris, beyond the Porte de Clignancourt, without glasses, without dentures or underwear. How she had gotten there or what had happened to her during those seven days and nights we’ll never know. In the hospital, she refused to speak French and, when she wasn’t weeping, would mutter a few syllables in Ladino, saying she had gone back to Rue Memphis as a dog but found no one home.
“I’m told she complained of nothing,” Flora continued. “She always said she was comfortable, that the nuns and nurses were kind to her. But she refused to eat. There were terrifying fights over food. At night she howled in her sleep, a long, plaintive, heartrending howl he says he will never forget. She would call for her mother and for her son. Then she would wake up, remember something, mutter a string of senseless words, and doze off again.”
Silence filled the kitchen. I looked out the window and saw that it was night outside.
“I didn’t know,” I said.
“No one knew. Robert only told me years later.” After a pause she asked, “And now, how about coffee?”
“Yes,” I said. Then, trying to break the heavy silence that had settled over the kitchen, I
asked at what time I should take the vaporetto that evening.
She said I had plenty of time. Besides, it depended where I wanted to take it.
“So, then, could we hear the Schubert now?” I asked like a boy who hadn’t forgotten his promised treat.
“Is Schubert what you really want to hear?” she asked, alluding to my letter in which, to earn her forgiveness after not seeing her for so many years, I had written that I still remembered her Schubert on those warm summer afternoons on Rue Memphis. She wrote back saying that my grandmother had never liked Schubert. “But if Schubert is what you remember, well, maybe we did play Schubert then.” I wrote back saying it was the B-flat major sonata. “If you insist,” she conceded. “Maybe I was practicing alone and you overheard it.”
She probably continued to suspect I had made it up. I wasn’t sure that I hadn’t.
“At any rate, you’ll hear Schubert the way I played him when the Germans stood outside Alexandria and everyone in the house thought the world had come to an end. I played it every night. It annoyed them at first, for they didn’t know the first thing about music. But they came to love it—and then me—after a while, because Schubert stood like the last beacon in the storm, tranquil and pensive, an echo of an old world we believed we belonged to because we belonged nowhere else. At times it felt like the only thing standing between us and Rommel was a sheet of music, nothing more. Ten years later they took that sheet of music away. Eventually they took away everything else as well. And we let it happen, as Jews always let these things happen, because, deep inside, we know we’ll lose everything we own at least twice in our lives.
