The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty

by Vendela Vida

  EPIGRAPH

  The only ones who could depart this civilization were those whose special role is to depart it: a scientist is given leave, a priest is given permission. But not a woman who doesn’t even have the guarantees of a title. And I was fleeing, uneasily I was fleeing.

  –Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Vendela Vida

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  THE DIVER’S CLOTHES LIE EMPTY

  When you find your seat you glance at the businessman sitting next to you and decide he’s almost handsome. This is the second leg of your trip from Miami to Casablanca, and the distance traveled already has muted the horror of the last two months. What’s to stop you from having a conversation with this man, possibly even ordering two vodka tonics with the little lemon wedges that the flight attendant will place into your plastic cups with silver tongs? He’s around your age, thirty-three, and, like you, appears to be traveling alone. He has two newspapers on his lap, one in Arabic, and the other in English. If you get along well enough, you could enjoy a meal together once you get to Casablanca. You’ll go to dinner and you’ll sit on plush, embroidered pillows and eat couscous with your hands. Afterwards, you’ll pass by the strange geometry of an unknown skyline as you make your way back to one of your hotels. Isn’t this what people do when they’re alone and abroad?

  But as you get settled into your seat next to this businessman he tells you he plans to sleep the entire flight to Casablanca. Then, with a considerable and embarrassing amount of effort he inflates a neck pillow with his thin lips, places a small pill on his outstretched tongue, and turns away from you and toward the oval window, the shade of which has already been shut.

  As the flight takes off, the inevitable cries of babies start up and you absentmindedly flip through your guidebook to Morocco. You read: “The first thing to do upon arriving in Casablanca is get out of Casablanca.” Damn. You’ve already booked a hotel room there for three nights. You should be annoyed with yourself for not reading the guidebook before reserving and paying for your room, but instead you direct your annoyance at the guidebook itself for telling you your first three days in Morocco will be wasted. You stuff the book deep into your backpack and remove your camera. It’s a few months old, and though you’ve used it, you’ve kept it in its box with the instructions, which you have not yet read. You decide now is a good time to read them and figure out how to download the photos of your newborn niece onto your laptop. You turn the camera on—it’s a Pentax, a professional camera that’s nicer than you need—and study a photo of your niece on the day she was born. You feel your eyes start to well up and you turn the camera off.

  The plane has still not reached a comfortable cruising altitude and the seat-belt sign has not yet been turned off, but this doesn’t prevent a Western-looking woman across the aisle and two rows ahead from standing up. Wearing a dress patterned with autumnal leaves even though it’s spring, she removes her carry-on suitcase from the overhead compartment. Then she sits down, places it on her lap, opens it, shifts a few items of meticulously packed clothing around to a different position within the case, closes it, and lifts the suitcase back up to the overhead compartment. A flight attendant briskly approaches and reminds her the seat-belt sign is still illuminated. The woman in the autumnal dress sits for five minutes before she is unable to control herself and stands once more to retrieve her suitcase, place it in her lap, open it, and rearrange the clothing before restoring the suitcase to the cabinet above her seat.

  Your fellow passengers—half of whom look like tourists, and half like they might be Moroccans returning home—make eye contact with you and with each other and pupils are rolled. It’s collectively understood that this woman is suffering from an obsessive-compulsive disorder. When the woman in the autumnal dress stands for a third time, the passenger seated in front of her, holding a book and wearing glasses, abruptly turns around to stare. She is part of a group of women who have been traveling with you since Miami. Judging by their Florida State University sweatshirts and their approximate age, you assume they attended FSU together almost forty years ago, and are on a reunion trip.

  There’s something familiar about this bespectacled woman who’s now turned and looking back, and as you lock eyes for a moment, you sense she’s maybe wondering if she recognizes you from somewhere. You spot one of this woman’s sneakers, turned outward in the aisle—a clean, puffy white Reebok—and you immediately know where you last saw her. Your heart races the way it does when you’ve had too much caffeine. You avert your eyes from hers and concentrate on the seat back in front of you. You pull down the tray table and place your head on it. You do not want this woman to recognize you, to ask you questions.

  You are careful not to peer out into the aisle again, no matter how many times the woman in the autumnal dress stands up and sits down, no matter how many times the flight attendants come down the aisle to confront her and remind her that she must remain seated. You order a glass of wine from one of these flight attendants and you take a Unisom. You know you are not supposed to mix alcohol with this tablet but you’re suddenly afraid of passing the duration of the flight awake and anxious, of arriving in Casablanca feeling ragged and wrecked. You close your eyes and think of sex, which is what you think about when you have trouble sleeping. You see flashes of body parts and scenarios—some that you’ve seen in films, and a few you’ve experienced. You think of the sunscreen-smelling boy you kissed in a hammock on the beach when you were eighteen, the man from Dubrovnik who accompanied you to an Irish bar when you were twenty-five, a scene from an Italian film with Jack Nicholson and a foreign actress whose name you don’t remember. You think of the girl with the green eyes at the loft party whose hand brushed over your breasts. She looked back but you didn’t follow.

  None of this helps: you cannot sleep. The children on the plane are screaming, especially the little girl across the aisle from you who is sitting in her mother’s lap. Her hair is braided into multiple plaits, secured with bows. Usually girls in braids make you tender—they remind you of your own childhood, of how your mother came into your room every morning at six and wove your hair into two tight braids. At the ends she tied bows out of short pieces of thick fraying yarn, usually red or yellow in color to match your school uniform. She did all this while you slept because she needed to be at work before 7 A.M. Even if the strokes of her brush or the rapid motion of her fingers roused you, you were careful not to reveal you were awake. You knew she would be upset with herself that she had deprived you of sleep, so you kept your eyes shut and mimicked the slow breath of slumber.

  You attended an expensive all-girls school on scholarship and not many of the other mothers worked, so she wanted to say to any mother who was watching (and they were always watching): Yes, we are middle class, yes, I work, but my daughter isn’t the worse for it—look at her neat, tight braids. For reasons that were never clear to you at the time, your twin sister was not given a scholarship to the school and attended the public school near your apartment building. Not that you will ever pity her: she was always prettier (you are fraternal twins, not identical) and more outgoing. The result of this combination meant she was more frequently in trouble. She wore her hair cut short even when it wasn’t stylish, but usually it was. You, on the other hand, had braids until you were in the seventh grade.

  The girl with the braids sitting across the aisle from you in her mother’s lap repeatedly startles you out of your dips into sleep with her shrieks,
which are followed by her mother’s attempts to quiet them. Her mother is almost louder in her soothing, as though to reassure everyone around her—look, I’m doing my best. You squint at her with judging eyes, though you know if you ever have children of your own you will do the same—you will soothe too loudly. One thing you observed at your all-girls school: half of parenting is a performance for others.

  When the plane begins to descend into Casablanca, you organize your belongings inside your backpack. You will need to get off the plane without making contact with the FSU woman in the white puffy Reeboks. The businessman next to you wakes with five rapid blinks. He smiles at you and you smile weakly in return because you are envious of the sleep he has slept. When the plane lands, it veers left, then right, and then finds its way into a straight line. Your fellow passengers roar with applause. The cockpit door is closed, so they’re not clapping for the pilots. They are clapping because their existence persists, because they are not aflame on the tarmac, because they did not disintegrate over the Atlantic. The scattered applause seems too muted a celebration of living, so you choose not to clap.

  Now, as everyone stands, waiting to disembark, the children’s cries are loud and the parents have given up on comforting them. When the doors to the plane open, there’s a palpable, collective thrust of passengers toward the front. Everyone who has not yet stood, rises. As you gather your things—your blue suitcase and nondescript black canvas backpack that doesn’t demand any attention, both of which you bought yesterday, for this trip—someone from the row behind yours tries to cut in front of you. This is the way of air travel: fellow passengers applaud because they didn’t die, and then they cut in front of you so they can exit four seconds earlier.

  Unlike the women on the college reunion tour, you don’t have to wait for your checked luggage, so you can pass them and progress through customs. Plans have been made for someone to pick you up, and you’ve been told the driver will have a sign. You see him right away, a thin man in black jeans holding a piece of yellowed paper with your name scrawled upon it. He spells your name the French way; of course he would. You studied French at your all-girls school because a Parisian heiress started the school and French was required of its students. Now as you speak this language of your youth you find yourself remembering words you didn’t know you knew, and making mistakes that you immediately recognize as mistakes. You ask the driver how long it will take to get to the hotel (thirty minutes), how the weather has been (rainy), and after that there’s not much to talk about. He asks where you are from and you tell him Florida and he tells you he’s been to Idaho to visit relatives. You smile and say it’s beautiful there. “C’est beau là,” you say. He agrees. You have never been to Idaho.

  Outside the window of the van the sky is white, the grass green. You pass by vacant lots, billboards for cellphone companies and cars, and then the tall cream-colored buildings of Casablanca shoot up suddenly, all at once, in the distance. You see young men hitchhiking, and the driver tells you that they’re trying to get to school, to college. Isn’t there a bus? you ask. Yes, he says, but they don’t want to wait for the bus.

  The traffic is bad in Casablanca and the driver tells you it’s always bad. You wish you had listened more closely when he introduced himself because now it’s too late to ask him again what his name is, and you have no idea. At a stoplight, a man on a motorbike with a camouflaged-patterned trunk on the back slams into the side of the van. He was trying to get ahead in the traffic. Though you’re in the middle of a road, the driver stops the van and steps out and they argue in the street. They yell and the driver gesticulates dramatically, then he gets back into the van, and you drive on with sudden, stuttering stops.

  The streets seem wild to you now—so many trucks and so much smog, and the potential for motorbikes to bump against vans. The buildings around you are ugly. They once were white but now are dusted with soot. There’s nothing to look at through the window except traffic. You can’t wait to check into your hotel room.

  You pass by an upscale Regency Hotel, an expensive-looking Sofitel, and when the driver says your hotel is close, you’re happy because you think your hotel might be on par with these other tall, glassy buildings. You’ve been told your hotel, the Golden Tulip, is comfortable, and you’ve been looking forward to this comfort on the plane and in the van, but as you approach you’re disappointed. The Golden Tulip has a glossy black entrance with two long banners, one advertising its restaurant and another advertising its pool. It looks like a typical tourist hotel, the kind that large groups might stay at for two nights before going to the next city on their itinerary. As the driver pulls up you see and hear American and British tourists emerging from the front door. You’re deflated but what did you expect? That it would be full of locals? It’s a hotel.

  The driver opens the side door of the van and retrieves your suitcase from the rear. You tip him in U.S. dollars because it’s all you have. You took out $300 at Miami International because you’ve learned from your travels to countries like Cuba and Argentina how valuable it can be to have U.S. cash. You tip the driver with a twenty-dollar bill. Later, you will wonder if this was your initial mistake.

  You pass through a security portal as you enter the hotel—the kind you go through at an airport—but you keep your backpack on, and hold the handle of your suitcase. Bellboys offer to take your bags, and you tell them you can manage. Or rather: you smile and say, “No, it’s okay. I’m okay.”

  A long black bench runs along the side of the lobby wall, but other than that there’s no place to settle into—no comfortable-looking couch or chair. This lobby is not a place for lingering. You walk to the front desk, and wait behind another couple. The lobby isn’t busy, so you don’t understand why the two desk clerks, both in blue-gray suits, are so frazzled.

  As you stand at the desk, you notice there’s an ATM to your right and you decide you will get Moroccan money there later. When the couple in front of you has moved out of the way, you approach the desk. You tell the desk clerks that you have a reservation. One of the two men says your room is not ready and you argue that when you made the reservation you were guaranteed early check-in. One of the men goes into the back office—it’s unclear whether he’s verifying this fact or if he’s avoiding you. The remaining clerk looks at his computer. “Housekeeping is there. It will be ready in five minutes.”

  “Five actual minutes?” you ask. Time is not how you know it, but how the country knows it.

  “Five American minutes,” the man behind the desk says. He pushes a sheet of paper toward you. On the paper you’re supposed to write down your passport information. The man disappears to the back office. You assume he’s gone to check on the room.

  You stare at the passport information form. You take your passport from your backpack. You have your new blue suitcase in front of you and you place your backpack on top of it and lean over the suitcase and the backpack and start to fill out the form. Your name, place of birth, passport number, nationality. When you’re done you call out to the clerk: “I’ve filled out the form.”

  He returns to the counter and shows you a list of names on a computer printout, and says, “Which one?” Your name is halfway down the list, which you assume must be a list of people checking in, and then he crosses out your name so thoroughly, so violently, that there’s no trace of it. You are given a key to the room that is now available, and you reach for the handle of your suitcase, which is still parked in front of you.

  But where is your backpack?

  You look on the floor. Not there.

  You touch your back. You turn around, while touching your back, as though you might get a glimpse of it over your shoulder. You tell the man behind the desk you don’t have your backpack. You look at the bottom edge of the desk, which does not extend to the floor. You think it might have inadvertently slid beneath. The hotel clerk looks down at the floor on his side of the desk. Nothing.

  You are growing increasingly panicked—you are in
Morocco and you don’t have your backpack. You think of everything in it—laptop, wallet with credit cards and all the cash you took out at Miami International. A three-month-old camera. Your library book. Your toiletries. A pair of small coral earrings. As the list of inventory of lost contents increases, you forget to breathe.

  You try to explain to the unhelpful hotel clerk what’s going on. He suggests that one of the bellboys might have taken the backpack up to the wrong room. He talks to the young and clean-cut Moroccan bellboys. The bellboys suggest you left it in the van; they tell you the driver is still parked outside. You don’t think you left it in the van because you took your passport out of the backpack at the reception desk, didn’t you? Maybe you already had the passport. You are so exhausted, so frazzled that you’re no longer certain of anything. Everyone else’s narrative seems more likely than yours.

  You follow one of the bellboys out of the hotel. People pass you on the street—this is a crowded city—but you don’t register faces. A color, red, there. A yellow hijab there. When you get to the van, it’s locked, so you look through the windows. Nothing on the floor of the van. Where is the driver? Maybe the driver took the backpack and came looking for you. Maybe he’s looking for you in the hotel.

  You run back inside the hotel. The driver has been located and is waiting for you. He says he doesn’t have the backpack. He walks outside to the van with you and unlocks it and the backpack is not there. You return to the hotel. The driver, looking very worried, speaks in Arabic with the bellboys and security guards stationed at the front door.

  “They say you wear the backpack when you come in,” he tells you in English. Why were you trying to speak French with him? “They say they remember you had it.”

  You wonder for a moment why they were looking at you so closely that they recall this, but you don’t have time to wonder: you’re half relieved that they remember. Your exhaustion is a curtain you cannot part.