The Occasional Virgin

by Hanan al-Shaykh

  Yvonne stands up. ‘Come on, Huda. Let’s have a glass of wine. I have a great solution.’

  ‘You mean you’ll think of a solution after you’ve had a drink?’

  ‘No, I’ve already thought of a great solution. OK, let’s sit first, then we’ll go to the terrace to celebrate.’

  Yvonne had a watertight plan: Huda would contact the backer and tell him that at present there was no complete text. ‘I’m going to rely on rehearsals, experimentation, discussions with the actors, so we create the text together, but I understand completely if you’ve changed your mind and want to pull out, as there are plenty of Canadian backers only too happy to step forward. I prefer to have you of course, as you’re Arab–Canadian and your name’s well known.’

  ‘At this point I come into the picture,’ continues Yvonne, ‘and try to help by putting you in touch with backers from England.’

  Huda jumps to her feet and throws herself on Yvonne. ‘You’re brilliant.’

  ‘I know!’

  Huda hurries to her phone to punch out her email to the backer with some force. ‘It’s not my pornography you should be scared of,’ she mutters to herself.

  ‘Listen,’ Yvonne urges her, ‘tell him you’ll show him the text when it’s ready. Of course in reality he won’t see a single word of it until it’s being performed!’

  Huda doesn’t close her eyes until the first light of dawn, exactly when Shahrazad sighs and whispers coyly to King Shahrayar, ‘My lord’, as drowsiness overcomes her. Huda has chosen this play to show that women’s wiles are merely a product of their longing to control their own destinies. Now she embraces all of them beneath her closed eyelids.

  It’s the following evening and the sky is a playground for the swallows, who are like a group of small children darting here and there until their mothers call them in to get ready for bed, while Huda and Yvonne, dressed to kill, hope the night will only end at dawn. They wait for Roberto and Lucio on the hotel terrace. ‘You know, Yvonne, yesterday, when I was having nightmares about whether I’d manage to get the play out or not, I promised myself that I would never complain or lose my temper again, and that nothing was important compared to financing my play. But the moment I heard the backer had agreed to finance it after all, I forgot my promise, and now look at the state I’m in. I’m really tense, I’m obsessed by the feeling that Roberto isn’t going to show up this evening, even though he promised.’

  ‘Are you making fun of me, Huda? Please don’t try to beat me at my own game. I’m the one who’s always fearful and apprehensive, not you. One of us is enough! And I have to face the fact that when Lucio promised to pass by the hotel, he was just teasing me. I don’t know why promises made at night feel as if they’ll never be kept, the opposite of promises made in the daytime.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I won’t leave you alone in the hotel if Lucio doesn’t keep his promise.’

  ‘You too, don’t worry.’

  ‘Has it occurred to you that we’re behaving like adolescents?’

  ‘I don’t understand what you mean.’

  ‘We know very well that nothing’s going to come of our relationships with these men. All we really want is someone to while away the time with, make us feel desirable, take an interest in us. And yet we’re so anxious that they won’t show up. Anyone would think it was a matter of life or death.’

  They laugh. ‘It’s all Lebanon’s fault,’ comments Huda. ‘We left when we were teenagers and we’ve never grown up.’

  Lucio takes them both by surprise. They shriek together delightedly: ‘Lucio, Lucio’, as if he’s a policeman rescuing them from a gang of criminals.

  Yvonne goes off with Lucio, seeing and hearing nothing, consumed by the fear that things might not go as she desperately hopes they will. She has to convince herself that he’s a one-night stand, no more and no less. She makes a big effort to appear cheerful and carefree and ensure that he doesn’t disappear before he’s slept with her.

  ‘Shall we go to a restaurant? I’m inviting you!’

  Immediately she is embarrassed by the dregs of the past, her way of treating men, trying to buy them with fancy meals and invitations to restaurants, but he deserves to be spoiled today!

  She persists. ‘Are you hungry?’

  He shows her to a restaurant where the sea almost touches her shoes. She smiles broadly at him, encouraging him, as they examine the menu, to order the same as her. He hesitates over whether to order a glass of wine for himself until he hears her ordering a whole bottle; she’s been brought up on the saying ‘the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach’, but the wine has another function, to make his head swim.

  She notices how he eats and drinks slowly and thoughtfully, the opposite of her family who, whenever she invited them to a restaurant during her visits to Lebanon, would devour everything in front of them, leaving the plates shiny and white like cats and dogs. They would always choose the most famous and expensive restaurants, until she eventually realised that common sayings like ‘Generosity generates happiness’ and ‘Feed someone and they’ll be obliged to you’ were just big lies.

  The wine begins to change little by little into a Botox injection, instant cosmetic surgery, reinforcing her feeling that she is beautiful and desirable, especially because Lucio picks up where he left off on the beach, flirting openly with her, paying no attention to the people around them in the restaurant. When the bill arrives and he reaches for his pocket, attempting to contribute, she hurries to pick up the bill and pay. As soon as they are outside the restaurant he suggests taking her to the highest point in the town so that she can see ‘a view like nothing else on earth’. Her heart rejoices. Is it possible that there are still romantic men in this world, dreamers like him?

  He takes her along streets and alleyways whose gardens give off a perfume of jasmine and honeysuckle. Every time she sees a beautiful house, she imagines herself living in it with Lucio. I really am crazy! Huda’s quite right. Even a teenager doesn’t imagine life with a boy she’s going out with for the first time. Tick tock tick tock. That must be the waiting eggs’ clock ticking. Tick tock tick tock. She begins to worry about how to smuggle him into her room that night with everybody watching. When they have been walking for around twenty minutes, she starts to feel uneasy. Maybe he’s changed his mind about her. Otherwise how can he wait so patiently to be alone with her somewhere private?

  He studies medicine and is trying to apply what he’s learnt about digesting food before having sex, she tells herself.

  They reach the town’s old fort, illuminated like a giant star, and climb steps through the heart of a small wood, redolent with the pungent smell of pine and cinchona trees that settles in her head like a delicious drug.

  A big box rests between the branches of a sycamore tree; it stirs Yvonne’s imagination and she takes a picture of it to use in one of her advertisements.

  ‘Yvonne, get ready to take an even better picture!’

  He purses his lips and begins whistling and a dove emerges from the box and perches in its entrance as if to enquire what’s going on.

  He whistles again and a second dove emerges, and a third and a fourth, until the outside of the box is crowded with doves on its roof and its sides, cooing and inspecting Lucio and Yvonne, curious to know what these visitors want. Yvonne carries on clicking, taking photos with her phone.

  ‘Who do these dovecotes belong to?’

  ‘Not to me, that’s for sure!’ and he leans her against the tree and kisses her greedily on her lips and neck and hair. She returns his kisses, trying to slow him down, because she likes taking her time. She likes the kiss to breathe inside her gently until its warmth spreads all through her body. When she doesn’t succeed in slowing him down, she thinks about giving in. Let him do what he wants. They have the whole night ahead of them and she can make him go slower once they are alone together in her room. But when his hand reaches under her dress, and with his other hand he begins taking out his prick, just as with hi
s whistling he managed to bring out the first dove from its house, she whispers to him, ‘Let’s go to my room.’

  ‘Si, si,’ he answers her, but he is almost inside, and then he is. She tries to keep her balance, afraid her foot will slip, and when she anchors herself firmly to the tree trunk it begins to scrape her back, while Lucio carries on with what he’s doing as if he is knocking a nail into her, despite her fidgeting. He stops suddenly, whispering to her: ‘Yvonne, hurry up. I’ve come, I’ve come.’

  She pretends that she’s come too, pulling him to her, violently squeezing his lower half as if trying to make sure none of the sperm escapes. But is it possible to get impregnated standing up? She is obsessed with the idea of having a child before it’s too late, wanting a relationship with a man just so she can become a mother and create a family. The child would make the two of them blend like labneh and za’atar: neither labneh nor za’atar tastes so delicious on its own. But every man, whether she was in a stable relationship with him or not, was afraid for his sperm, as if it was the only currency he possessed, and pulled out of her even if he’d checked that she’d taken precautions.

  She has been pregnant twice, when she was twenty, then again when she was twenty-eight. The first time, the man she was in a relationship with was delighted and asked her to marry him at once, but she was completely immersed in her studies and the father didn’t have a well-paid job. The second time she was blissfully happy to find she was pregnant, but the one who had sowed his seed in her, instead of feeling love and tenderness because there was something of him in her womb, immediately began to blame her and accuse her of wanting to trap him, of being jealous of his freedom and wanting to imprison him, urging her to end the thing at once.

  She still remembers how he didn’t go with her to the doctor, or offer to pay even a part of the costs, how she had been consumed with regret when she opened her eyes and heard the doctor saying, ‘We’re done here. Everything’s fine,’ discovering what stood between her and the maternal instinct that had wanted to preserve the foetus.

  Lucio has withdrawn at the last minute and come on her thigh. She is about to give him an almighty shove, so he will roll all the way down the hill and into the town, but she sticks to her promise to herself on this holiday to be submissive to men to the end, make herself believe that a woman is a man’s shadow, follow, not lead. I wonder if he’s stained my beautiful dress?

  She begins trembling, eyes closed, pretending that her pleasure has made her lose the power of speech. She takes his hand, kissing it and sighing a long sigh, and doesn’t let go as they leave the woods. The doves must have been the only witnesses to her disappointment. The climb up the hill was full of expectation. Now she feels as if she’s walking downhill alone. When they are back in the noise and bustle, she stops at a bar saying she wants to go in. He agrees gladly, and they drink a Martini and a Cinzano.

  With more Martinis and Cinzanos there are more embraces, whispering, happiness. They cross through the hubbub of the town to her hotel. She summons up her courage and flings herself on him before they go in, so he kisses her at length. Who says I’m with him now because I want to get pregnant? I feel as if I’m lying in the branches of a tall tree, suspended between the sky and the earth, with no thoughts or responsibilities, happy in the warmth of his arms.

  ‘What’s this historic kiss between Lebanon and Italy?’ she says to him, laughing as she walks towards the hotel door, while he remains where he is. ‘Don’t be afraid. Nobody’s going to object.’

  He comes up to her and kisses her briefly on the cheek this time.

  ‘I have to join my friends. We’re going back to Rome early tomorrow morning.’

  He reaches into his shirt pocket and takes out a card: ‘This is my email. Let’s be in touch! I’ve really enjoyed getting to know you. I’d like to visit you in London one day.’

  ‘I thought you were staying till Sunday. For three days.’

  ‘No, no, we’re going back to Rome. Ciao, Yvonne, ciao.’

  ‘Let’s go into the hotel,’ she whispers, unable to believe what she’s hearing.

  When he kisses her again on both cheeks, she descends on his lips, trying to immobilise him and imprison him, but he disengages himself from her clutches with his usual agility.

  ‘Bye, lovely Yvonne, ciao,’ and he turns his back on her and vanishes.

  ‘Lucio, ciao, you bastard.’ She goes into the hotel and asks for her room key then rushes outside, intending to go after him, but stops herself and hurries to the bar and drinks a whisky this time, then another.

  ‘Lucio is like my hotel key: as soon as I hand it in, it becomes somebody else’s property,’ she says to Huda, when she comes back from her date with Roberto. ‘At least I behaved like a woman with him. I didn’t kick him or smash his teeth in.’

  But it was Lucio who eventually rolled her from the top of the mountain to the valley bottom, while she was in the process of recovering from the annoyance that choked her every time she thought of what happened. She forced herself to go back to the same beach the next morning, to the rocks that had witnessed her happiness. When her feelings of dejection got the better of her she asked the sea to console her, so it rocked her and played with her as if she was a child, soothing her fury and resentment. But the sea’s efforts turned out to be in vain, as did Huda’s attempts to cheer her up. Huda and Roberto took her to a restaurant on the beach, accessible only by boat, and the moment the three of them entered amid the noise of people and raucous music and dancers spraying champagne on each other, her gaze alighted on Lucio in the embrace of a young woman. Their arms and legs were intertwined and they were making love with their eyes.

  ‘It’s Lucio,’ muttered Yvonne, frozen to the spot, in spite of the fact that everything had begun to spin around her at a dreadful speed. ‘Look, everybody, look at the whore. He said he was leaving town.’

  She didn’t come to her senses until she was outside the restaurant, leaning on Huda and Roberto, her mouth dry. ‘I hope God dries his spit so he explodes and dies. He had his fill of me and pissed on me like a dog, then he ran away.’

  ‘You’re still angry,’ observes Huda later that evening. ‘But don’t forget that the two of you meeting was like when a train stops in the station for a few moments then leaves again.’

  ‘And Roberto? Wasn’t he like a train stopping at your station, and yet he’s still here? He even hired a little boat just for you so he could take you to that beach. Lucio must have really despised me. I thought my pride was like a turtle’s shell that nobody could dent, and it turns out it’s like a soap bubble. I don’t understand! Why do they make love with me once or twice then rush away as if I have a barrelful of acid between my legs?’

  ‘Listen, Yvonne, remember what Eve said to Adam when he asked her why she fell in love with him. “There was nobody else, you shit!”’

  Yvonne smiles, then collapses into laughter and embraces Huda, but almost at once she begins weeping bitterly. ‘I was ovulating and I thought I could get pregnant from a handsome Italian boy, charming, a medical student, with no morals as it turns out. Great characteristics for the offspring!’

  ‘Yvonne, surely you don’t want to be pregnant without letting the father know?’

  ‘Why not? Instead of throwing his sperm into the garbage, he can throw it into my womb in blissful ignorance. Isn’t that better for everyone?’

  Everyone has a baby, Yvonne thinks, my sister, mother, aunts, grandmother, great-great-great grandmothers, even women who are forced to have sex, have babies. For heaven’s sake, even a female courgette flower makes its own baby courgettes and when it doesn’t work, if the insects are blind or have blocked noses, it can be fertilised by a human hand.

  Huda feels sad and as if she’s letting Yvonne down, because her wonderful night with Roberto is still going on in her mind. After they’d left her hotel and walked through the narrow alleyways, he’d taken her hand and said: ‘Huda, let me show you something extraordinary.’

&
nbsp; He hurries her along as if the thing he wants her to see is going to disappear in a few moments. He takes her down uninhabited streets, which seems odd to her. Why don’t people realise that you only get to know a place properly when you see where the locals live?

  ‘Sorry, you must be hungry. But I really want to show you something I think will fascinate you.’

  He rings a bell and a guard opens the large gate for them. He greets Roberto warmly. Huda finds herself in a forest of pine trees, their tops lit up as if their hair has suddenly gone white. In the midst of them is an illuminated glass building, shaped like a pyramid. Roberto leads her towards it, and when he pushes open the door and a strong smell of damp is released, Huda recoils in horror, afraid for her hair, and invents an excuse.

  ‘I can’t go in, sorry, I have asthma and the damp is bad for me.’ She puts a hand to her hair, feeling it, convinced that it’s already started to go frizzy.

  ‘Oh sorry, sorry, I’ll go in then and show you from a distance.’

  She sees Roberto standing in front of a ‘European’ date tree, as they were known in Lebanon, because they were barren and unable to produce dates; princess’s fans, children called them. Roberto points to its luxuriant branches with their white flowers, looking upwards and indicating the highest point on the tree, then lowering his hand to pick up the broken fan-shaped branches on the ground.

  ‘It’s the suicidal palm tree,’ he explains to her enthusiastically as he emerges.

  ‘Suicidal tree?’

  ‘Yes, it died by its own hand. Perhaps I’ll bring you tomorrow so that you can see it in daylight.’

  ‘But I saw it very clearly, just as if I was inside,’ she replies quickly, scared that he will bring her here tomorrow, her and Yvonne, and Yvonne will go inside with him while she remains outside, touching her hair, fearful of the damp.