I Sweep the Sun Off Rooftops

by Hanan al-Shaykh

  I forgot to say that this color has a smell like a powder puff, the smell of roses. And I also forgot to describe its silky feel as it slips through your fingers like quicksilver.

  I look at myself in the mirror, so disappointed and sour, and vow that this will be the last time I wake up in this state.

  I didn’t think about liberating my body until I was on a summer holiday with my friend Muna. Sex began cropping up in our conversations all the time and dominated our thoughts as we sat in our white summer cottons under the gentle sun, arranging our long hair, or appeared in the restaurant in all our finery after a long day’s preparation of our bodies: stretching them out under a layer of hot wax that picked up even the downy little face hairs so the surface of the skin was smooth as pearls, surrendering them to the masseuse’s hands, soaking them in frangipani milk, giving them a siesta, dressing them in underwear so soft it almost slipped off the skin, then sitting them down to wait and enjoy more conversations about sex, and fidget with lust. Even so, they showed no interest in flirting with the other guests in the hotel, quite the opposite: they couldn’t wait to be alone with the men they pictured waiting in bed for them, naked and scarcely able to contain their impatience. Meanwhile, we dawdled, fueling our desires and tantalizing these creatures of our bodies’ fantasies. But this intimate atmosphere changed at once when Muna began describing how she felt when she was with someone who understood what her body wanted: how she became like an unweaned baby content to lie back and suck on its pacifier, daydreaming about the flood of warmth and nourishment to come.

  “But that kind of desire isn’t always there,” she added. If she hadn’t said that, my throat would have exploded with the pulse that was beating there and preventing me from speaking. “It’s not always like that. I’ve had some disappointments too. There was one man who brought his big heavy hand down on my breast like a flyswatter and tweaked my nipples as if he was picking dust off a curtain. And I remember another who couldn’t work out where the well was in spite of the wetness all around. He whispered to me, demanding to know if I was normal, did I have a hole? And he hung on to my hair the whole time, as if he was scared he’d lose his balance and fall off! And of course there was the one who began to groan and sigh and gasp for breath and had his eyes shut. I thought he was having a heart attack, I didn’t realize it was just passion, so I sent for the doctor!”

  We laughed together, her laughter submerging mine because she saw them as she talked, and then her laughter silenced me. Suddenly there was this pulse beating in my throat again and it squirted out creatures that tried to throttle me as I listened to her saying how she used to rage like a fire, keeping the men off her with her hands, her tongue; scolding, mocking, angry as she laid down her terms for sex. And I was still behaving like a donkey, going down a road against my will, and on top of that, reassuring whoever was riding me that this was the ideal way, the way I’d always dreamed of, sometimes going to the lengths of hiding the hooves that had been bloodied by the sharp stones on the bumpy road.

  When I owned up to this, Muna was shocked to the core. She had always known me as a mistress of manipulation and deceit, a woman who took a thirsty man to water and led him back thirstier still, plucked words from a mute’s mouth, pulled out an eyelash even if there were no lashes there. Had I still managed to fall into the trap of my own cunning? Here I was complaining to her, like little Cupid to tall, sublime Venus, that I’d been stung by a nest of bees on my face and hands and chest, because my face was turned to the wall and I was lying on my front with one arm underneath me and the other hanging down desolately in space. All this just so that the joiner could try and make a hole for the screw to go into.

  Muna stroked my hair and twisted my curls around her fingers, just as Venus must have done to Cupid, and tried to soothe away my sadness and irritation with wise words that were addressed to the depths of my soul rather than being designed to instruct me on what my tongue could do.

  “But why do I have to teach him how to kiss me? How to make love to me? Why doesn’t he—?”

  “Shhh. Listen.” She wouldn’t let me talk at all, being rational just like Venus, and I was following her advice as if I had no choice. Her eyes were fixed on me, following me wherever I went. She controlled me as if invisible strings were attached to every part of my body and I only moved when she jerked them.

  My lover and I watched the video Muna had picked out for me. I wasn’t relaxing and enjoying it as I was meant to. Instead I was searching for clues like a detective, wanting to grab hold of the tongue as it moved up and down, in complete control. I watched intently, wishing that one shot would last longer, or another could have been in close-up. When my lover turned his attention to the dish of sliced carrots, I felt the strings working my feet, my head, my whole body and I wanted to make him turn back to the television for fear the golden opportunity would be missed. I saw that he was shaking his head in disgust. “Did you see how wide they were opening their mouths? Thank God I’m not that guy eating the woman’s tongue. It’s revolting! It distorts the shape of her lips, makes her look grotesque.”

  This was only the first stone to come rolling down the mountainside. Others followed: “That’s way over the top!” and “Why can’t they be satisfied with portraying sex as it is?

  When I repeated this last remark to Muna, she stopped pulling my strings and acted on her own behalf. She gave a little shiver and clapped her hands. “If only he could see me making love! He’d take it back and understand that what he saw on the video was one hundred percent realistic!”

  She wouldn’t let me despair and gave me some more movies, assuring me that he was the man I’d been looking for, because smell was the elixir of sex and I was always excited by his smell; even the thought of it drove me crazy. She told me how she’d paid a huge sum to have her lover’s scent manufactured artificially and distilled into a little bottle, so that she could sniff it and load herself up with it when she wanted things to flow with another man.

  I watched the new videos with my lover; they had scenes depicting the five senses, as if the lovers’ creator had given them life and immediately withdrawn his breath from them, leaving them in this raw state to take in smells, to be numbed, to plunge deep into the images before them and take on their colors and absorb their tastes until they became the tastes themselves. The woman lay down and spread her thighs like airplane wings; her waist was the aircraft’s belly, her breasts its propellers, her pussy the engine. She soared away without leaving the ground.

  I followed her movements breathlessly, wishing that I too could fly without leaving the ground.

  “How beautiful it was!” I said.

  “Did you notice? Just like we do it sometimes,” he said.

  “Wasn’t it a new way?” I pretended innocence.

  “That! It’s the most classic of all!” he asserted like a scientist in a laboratory.

  I swallowed and bit my bottom lip and wondered if this means I was losing my nerve. Then the words come involuntarily. “No. We’ve never done it like that,” I said firmly.

  “Your memory seems a bit rusty.”

  “No. I haven’t forgotten. I don’t remember opening my legs like that.”

  “What? Are you really saying that you’ve never opened your legs!”

  “I mean I’ve never opened my legs the way the woman in the video did.”

  “Opening the legs is opening the legs. No two ways about it.”

  “You’re wrong. There is a difference. Those legs opened like a pair of scissors.”

  “You’re ungrateful! That’s all there is to it. Ungrateful!” he said irritably.

  “Did you hear me saying anything except that I’ve never opened my legs like it showed on the video?”

  “You’re ungrateful. So ungrateful. Shall I remind you how you moaned? Shall I remind you how much you enjoyed it?”

  “I just said I didn’t open my legs like the actress.”

  Now he was shouting. “You don’t kno
w when you’re well off. Naturally you’ve forgotten that I’m always ready. You’re the one who’s tired or not feeling well.”

  Now I was shouting too. “I don’t open my legs like her. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “And I’m telling you that you must have forgotten. That you don’t know how lucky you are. Ask your imagination. Perhaps it would have been better if I’d made love to that. It might remember how strong I was, how exuberant.”

  “But … all I wanted—”

  “Tell me which of your friends has a man like me, with my strength …”

  Later, when my lover, whom I love, wanted me to have a glass of wine with him, I refused. I told him there was a magnetic force in my blood, pulling my energies down between my legs, while wine went to my head, and I wanted all the ecstasy for the black lace at the center, the focus of all feelings, crude and sublime. The moment I found myself underneath the man whom I love and who loves me, I spread my legs just like a crab. If crabs kept their legs together they wouldn’t be able to move around and find food; to put it bluntly, they’d die.

  But my lover bundled me up and returned me to the fetal position. I was squeezing my eyelashes tight shut—he’d once said they were like fans—so that I couldn’t see what my heart was feeling. I couldn’t believe that one of my ears—which he’d said were as sweet and tempting as cotton candy—could be pressed so hard against the pillow, while the other strained to hear a single passionate word. When my arm went numb under the weight of my body, I tried in vain to extricate it with the other arm. To counter my disillusion, I tried to convince myself that I should be satisfied with feeling the way I did about my thighs. Letting my mind wander, I pictured them as two smooth slopes that the traveler had to climb in order to find the Venus flytrap, the welcoming flower that would give him squeezing, sucking kisses and spread its nectar around about him.

  My thoughts must have given me the energy to turn toward my lover, not to complain this time, but to offer him my face or, to be more exact, my nose, the one out of all the body’s orifices through which the spirit enters and leaves. This was to remind him that when we slept together it was like a continuation of our whispered conversations, our shared smell, the looks we gave each other. The whole of him had to enter me, not just a part of him, enter me holding the thread of water that would irrigate every corner of me, all that is me: my heart, which wants and desires him, and my mind likewise; two bodies in one soul or two souls in one body. So I stretched before him like a cat, but as always he shut my legs again with an unconscious gesture, as if he were folding a deck chair, and rolled me up like a ball of wool, pinning me in with my arms. I was squeezing my eyelids shut again to block out what was happening between my legs. I noticed he had summoned all his strength, and he was racing along like a man on horseback, every sinew and bone and drop of blood in his body hell-bent on winning the race.

  I took my head in my hands and drew my limbs in tightly like a mummy. Later I unwrapped myself and went to the local arts center, where I was to give a reading. I felt myself relaxing as I settled myself comfortably to read a short story.

  There was a woman in a village in the country who used to leave her mud-brick house every morning wearing a black headcover fixed with a colored rope and a translucent face veil which left only her eyes free. As she stepped out she was well aware that the sight of veiled women sets hearts ablaze, because the imagination cannot rest until it has seen the whole face. She made her way through the fields and trees, carrying an earthenware water jar on her hip, which looked like a man resting comfortably in the hollow of her waist. As soon as she got to the river, she put the jar down at the waters edge, raided her veil, and splashed water over her neck and face, then under the arms of her dress. She filled the water jar and went hack but this time she took the route through the village. She balanced the jar on her head and began swinging her hips from side to side and sticking out her breasts and moving them to the right and to the left. Buttocks, breast. Buttocks, breast. Until the men’s eyes were fastened on her and their sighs followed her, as she walked firmly on, saying to herself, “Even if you make me wear a veil and hide my face from the world, you cant hide my body.”

  Soon afterward this woman married a man whose imagination wouldn’t rest until he had seen the face which complemented the eyes and lashes and beautifully arched brows. This was why, when they had a daughter who was the spitting image of her mother, her father wouldn’t let her hide her face behind a veil.

  I stopped reading and let my eyes wander over the audience. I knew my black, low-cut dress, dark eyes and skin and Rita Hayworth hair, long rippling waves the color of aubergines, attracted their attention more than my reading. Once I felt they were listening, I recrossed my legs, pursed my lips, made the warmth ooze from my voice and finished reading my story.

  This girl refused to help her mother with the housework. When she was reprimanded she exploded in anger: “What right have you to call me lazy? If you knew what happens to me when I do housework you’d bless my disobedience. Every time I go up and down stairs my breasts roll from side to side and my hips sway and I get aroused. Every time I rest against the sink to wash the dishes the hardness of the concrete arouses me. When I knead the dough my bottom shakes and makes my pussy vibrate. When I bend down to scrub the floor, the sweat collects between my thighs and makes me excited. When I hollow out the zucchini with the vegetable corer it makes me think of fucking.”

  In no time at all her excuses were making the rounds of young and old and making people toss and turn in bed. Then a young man came knocking on the door in the middle of the night, asking to marry her, and the next day they were married, and she bore him a daughter as beautiful as the full moon. The girl grew up and followed the same path as her mother and grandmother, beset with feelings and desires. But she made a big mistake when she found herself with her lover and wanted to spread her thighs like a leaf opening as the light touches it.

  I stopped reading to have a sip of water, confident that among the audience I had found someone who would take my face in his hands and let me lie the way I wanted to. I saw him even though my eyes had not left the page. But his eyes grazed my skin, and started heating up my blood.

  1 The title of a painting by Lucas Cranach (1472–1563).

  The silver rays cast by the full moon over the village of Kawkabana were unusually bright, because the village was higher even than the clouds. It appeared to have grown by itself on the summit of the mountain, for how could the clay and earth and little colored glass windows have been transported up there unless a goat had carried them in its teeth? And even a goat would have needed some kind of track; a human being without shoes or sandals could never have done it. All the same, this village was there, carved into the rocky mountain, making the summit into a complete circle. It was as if the mountain had enlisted the help of jinns to build a place which was so inaccessible that only those who loved it would make the effort to reach it. Every stone was polished and arranged with regard to its size and color and the result was an ornament of incomparable beauty.

  When the moon was full the women were overcome with happiness, eagerly anticipating the things they would do—fill the paraffin lamps, and stay up late strolling around well into the night now that they no longer needed to be afraid of scorpions and snakes. They would set off to listen to songs and chew qat in the yards of their mud-brick houses, accompanying one another on drums and tambourines, all happy except Layla, who used to say, “Every time there’s a full moon, it reminds me that life is short.”

  But the village women who practiced magic were convinced that the silver moonlight spoiled their witchcraft and waited until the moon waned or was completely hidden by the clouds before they began again to prepare amulets, which were always written under cover of darkness, or bury locks off doors in the night (this was done to open up a woman’s tubes). The moonlight not only laid bare their plans and destroyed their potions but seemed to exert its authority over all human po
wers. Only the magician Qut al-Qulub disagreed with them: she swore that she could work magic only by moonlight. She always claimed that its silver beams penetrated curtains, stonework, wood shutters and glass windows and shook her awake if she was asleep, activated her if she was still, made her get to her feet if she was sitting down. It also gave her the power to see beyond the field and the hills and the villages on the plains below to take in the whole country at a glance.

  This time they didn’t believe her. They knew that exaggeration was the breath of life to her, but they had faith in her ability to see into the unknown, prepare love and hate potions, compose prayers to retrieve lost articles, obtain God’s mercy, divert plotters and schemers, make fruit grow bigger, get rid of ants, make a woman beloved by the man she desired, provide a woman with a mirror to reflect the inner thoughts of those who wished her ill, especially a mother-in-law or a co-wife. She even made up special prayers for backbones so that they were not burdened with too many heavy loads. She could make hair grow, stop the stomach demanding more food and, most important of all, compose prayers to awaken passion in husbands so that they came home for a visit, and in bachelors so they thought about marriage. They acknowledged her ability to alter feelings and intentions, for she had been on the verge of reducing Raifa’s husband to a pair of lusting eyes and a male member panting like an asthmatic chest. But Raifa had lost her nerve at the last moment and given the potion, made of a sheet of red ink scribblings soaked in herbs and water, to her nanny goat instead of putting it in her husband’s coffee. After that the goat followed Raifa wherever she went, snuffling at the hem of her dress and bleating incessantly to attract her attention. Its excitement reached a peak whenever Raifa bent over or squatted on her haunches as she worked in the field and around the house.