No, don’t be jealous of Yvonne, Huda tells herself, looking at Roberto. ‘I just don’t want to bother you again.’ She remembers how Yvonne dragged Roberto against his will to go swimming in the sea with her, the day they met him, and how he resisted her as she jumped on him, diving underwater, teasing him, trying to race him. When Yvonne came back to the beach Huda had said to her in Arabic, ‘We understand, Madam Yvonne, that you’re an excellent swimmer, but don’t forget: fish are good at swimming too.’
‘Roberto, can you tell me what you meant when you said that this palm tree kills itself?’
‘Once this tree starts flowering it never stops, it keeps flowering and flowering until it collapses and dies. It’s from Madagascar. The owner of the villa asked me to plant strange trees for him. He liked its name, “the blessed one”, and he was lucky because it flowered seven years after it was planted – he was afraid that he would die before it flowered, because it often takes decades. But tell me, Huda, does this asthma stop you swimming or doing sport in general?’
‘No, not at all. It just bothers me in saunas or glass buildings, or maybe in the Amazon if we go there this evening.’
‘Fine, fine, shall we go to the villa? I’ve prepared some food.’
They enter the villa where he lives while he’s working in the gardens. The curtains have long embraced the sun and their pinkness has faded; ivory-coloured sheets cover the furniture, and the sleeping mirror has draped itself in a light veil like smoke.
Does Roberto choose to live in this dim light, or maybe the lamps only want to see the family who originally lived in the villa? They are no longer here, but their faces remain, calm and familiar, looking down from the paintings hanging on the walls with faint smiles on their lips, as if they are waiting to see what the landscape architect and this woman are going to do now they are alone together.
I wonder if he brings a lot of women here, thinks Huda to herself. It’s as if the whole atmosphere, from the suicidal palm tree to the dim light inside, has reminded her of the beautiful, seductive woman in One Thousand and One Nights, who used to kill her lovers if sleep overcame them while they waited for her in her garden, or if they reached out their hands to her laden table before she appeared.
‘Is this table normally your desk?’ she asks him, trying to overcome the awkwardness that has begun to accumulate between them.
Roberto has set the table in a corner of the vast room and lit candles that make shadows on the roses. She gasps at the beauty of the tablecloth and begins touching the embroidery on it.
‘There’s a story to this tablecloth,’ says Roberto. ‘A young woman from this town embroidered it and she kept postponing her marriage until she reached the final stitch, and then it was too late for her to marry. Can you imagine? She was twenty.’
‘Twenty years old and she was on the shelf?’ interrupts Huda. ‘Or perhaps she was like me and was against the idea of marriage!’
‘Really?’
She has discovered over time that whenever she admitted this, it aroused men, maybe because they didn’t believe in marriage either, and liked the idea that they could attract her without any promise of a commitment, or maybe because they liked the idea of trying to change her mind.
‘The lady of the house here, the wife of the duke, sent for the young woman, wanting to buy the tablecloth from her as it had become famous. When she spread it out on the table, and her husband saw the tears and ears of corn and crosses embroidered on it in the most beautiful stitching, he began contemplating the eyes and fingers of the pretty seamstress, who had become an old maid without noticing and continued to live in the world she had designed on the table cover. The husband fell passionately in love with her and declared his love, but the seamstress rejected all his advances, despite the allure of money and status. When he insisted that she tell him why she had rejected him and she said that he was almost her father’s age, he took his revenge by removing the cover from the table and throwing it under his shoes in the bottom of his wardrobe. The wife thought her husband had gone mad, as everything about him had changed overnight.
‘When death overtook him and the widow’s eyes fell on the abandoned cover, she was once again struck by its beauty and asked the seamstress to add an angel on each of its four edges in memory of the duke. She agreed immediately, delighted at the return of the cover from under the shoes to the tabletop, so that it could see the light of day again. She finished embroidering the four angels in the corners of the cloth, but nobody contemplating its beauty could guess what each angel held in his hand: was it an apple or a beetle or maybe the sun? And the seamstress did not divulge the secret of what the angels were holding in their hands until after the widow had gone to join her husband.’
Huda brings her face up close to the cloth and sees the hearts and rosebuds and little birds and ears of corn and the four angels and puts her fingers on something resembling a pear. ‘Are these pears?’
Roberto laughs and says somewhat hesitantly: ‘The seamstress had her revenge on the man who hid the cloth under his shoes, by making the angels squeeze a man’s testicles.’
After they have finished eating and drunk the wine, Huda stands up to help him collect the plates, then goes to the bathroom to brush her teeth as she always does when she thinks she is about to have sex with someone. She rushes out to him and, just as she imagined herself doing when they kissed the day she met him, she undoes his shirt buttons and his belt, leaving him to undo the rest as she notices the astonishment on his face, then she brings her lips down to his neck, his hairless chest, his waist, his stomach. She pauses briefly, then carries on below his stomach and when she reaches his thighs, he moves restlessly and takes hold of her hand. He leads her into his room where the humidity and heat of the day mix with the cold of the night, the walls are peeling and the patterns have faded. A big mosquito net hangs down over the sofa bed.
She takes off her own clothes and pulls him to her, seeing his surprise, and his excitement and desire for her escalating. She knows what’s going on in his head. Is this the same woman I saw holding on to the iron railing, staring at the sea in such sorrow and confusion that I was afraid she was going to jump in?
She kicks the clothes away with her bare foot and holds Roberto tight and clings to him. Instead of laying her down, he begins kissing her neck and her back: ‘How I’ve longed to be alone with you since we were on the beach. I didn’t think there was any hope of it.’
They fall on each other, their bodies intertwining like a man and a woman in a Picasso painting. He disentangles himself and kisses her again. She doesn’t want to wait. She takes hold of his hand and pulls him down on to the bed and finds herself on top of him. She begins to flower like the suicidal palm tree, nectar pouring from her until they collapse together, then he tries to lift her off him, but she pulls him to her, murmuring ‘Don’t worry, don’t worry,’ thinking to herself, I don’t care if he makes me pregnant. I can always get an abortion.
‘You’re a witch! I have to admit you made me feel as if I was the female, wanting to take, instead of worrying about how to satisfy you.’
‘Thanks very much for the compliment – I think!’
‘Sorry, Huda, if I repeat the question: are you the Muslim or Yvonne?’
‘I’m the Muslim and she’s the Christian!’
‘I’ve been confused this evening. You’re as liberated as any Western woman, if not more so. I won’t hide it from you, I was shocked, I wasn’t expecting … So you’re a Muslim! You’re great at sex!’
Huda was not especially surprised to hear this. Maybe it’s because I’m a Muslim, she thought, and her mind went back to her childhood.
Huda was no more than seven years old when she went with her mother to visit a relative and Sawsan, this woman’s daughter, took her out to play with the girls who lived nearby. One of the games they played was new to her. It was called ‘the bee and the wasp’ and when Huda’s turn came, she had to stand back to back with Sawsan, they linked
arms, then she lifted Huda off the ground. Sawsan told Huda to call out ‘I’m the bee’, then lowered her so that she could lift Sawsan up on her back and she could shout ‘I’m the wasp’, and so on.
Huda loved this game, especially when she was the one being lifted, her face to the sky; and also because she discovered she was strongly built and could raise Sawsan high in the air. When Huda went home and there weren’t any girls in her neighbourhood to play with, she wished she could teach her brother the new game, even though he was six years older, but she knew in her heart of hearts that it was impossible. She didn’t remember playing with her brother at all – she wasn’t even allowed to enter his room. Huda waited until the next day to tell her school friends about the bee and the wasp, and in no time the school playground had turned into dozens of games of bees and wasps. Up and down, up and down they went, on each other’s backs, calling in turn ‘I’m the bee’, ‘I’m the wasp’. One day Huda’s mother happened to come into her bedroom and see Huda and a friend back to back, with Huda high up in the air, legs waving around as she laughed and shouted, ‘I’m the wasp’. Her mother attacked the girls like a mad bull. Their intertwined arms separated and they collapsed on to the hard tiled floor. They were terrified of her furious, disgusted eyes, as she lashed out at them: ‘For shame! I never imagined my daughter would sink so low!’ Then she slapped Huda round the face.
‘What have we done?’ Huda asked, crying. ‘We were just playing the bee and the wasp, the game that Sawsan taught us.’
This seemed to rekindle her fury, for she rushed to the kitchen and returned clutching a red chilli pepper. She began rubbing it on Huda’s lips and tongue, holding her head tightly with her other hand to keep her still. You’d think she’d never tasted one of those peppers in her life, and she clearly felt no pity for Huda as her face turned to fire and the choking sensation in her throat almost stopped her from breathing. She finished by shouting in a frenzy, ‘Every time you think of the bee and the wasp, I want you to remember the red chilli pepper!’
But hadn’t Huda heard her mother describe hard-working people as being like bees? And wasn’t a wasp just an ugly-looking bee? At school Huda had learnt that bees were intelligent and knew when it was going to rain and were superior to human architects, building houses out of wax in exactly equal hexagonal shapes without any tools. Bees were famous for being clean, for they constructed coffins out of wax when one of them died, so that the beehive didn’t smell, then got rid of the coffin as soon as possible. And every time she or her brothers had a stomach ache, their mother gave them a spoonful of honey, while her grandmother mixed honey with musk to put around her eyes to stop them watering.
The burning of the chilli on her lips stayed for a long time and she felt it every time she was with a man. As the unmarried daughter of their neighbours was daring enough to explain, the game of the bee and the wasp was like a re-enactment of cats coupling in February, when male and female cats clung together, miaowing loudly, and annoying the grown-ups who poured water over them and shouted at them and tried to distract them from their embraces with pieces of meat, all to no avail.
She always tries to be content to remember only the burning in her mouth, because even the chilli pepper itself doesn’t want to remember the time it rubbed her backside. Chillis grow and flourish so that they can be added to food in small doses, not to the bottoms of eleven-year-old girls! Her screams reached God and the angels and the dead whose souls had gone to heaven, but apparently not her mother as she continued rubbing the pepper on her bottom. As she screamed, Huda was convinced her mother had finally gone mad, and was so confused that she thought the hole where her food came out was actually her mouth.
They were three girls and one boy – Issam, the dyer’s son. His father used to hang the clothes and fabrics that he’d washed and dyed in the garden next to his shop. They slipped in through the back gate at a signal from Issam, to play with the dyes, but then started playing doctors and patients. They all took off their underpants and one by one, the girls lifted up their dresses in front of ‘Doctor’ Issam, who merely looked, then gasped in horror and announced that the cases was extremely grave and the only cure in such difficult cases was for them to look at the doctor’s ‘pigeon’. His pigeon didn’t look anything like a pigeon, more like a thick lily that hadn’t yet flowered.
Suddenly they heard the laughter of their neighbour Farouk, who had caught them when he came into the garden through the shop, looking for the tops of Coca-Cola bottles to replace lost backgammon pieces. His laughter and kindly words – ‘Go on, kids, why don’t you go back to your own homes now?’ – deluded them into believing they were just children playing children’s games, but when they scattered like ants on a sugar lump blown away by a sudden puff of wind, the game turned deadly serious and the punishment was terrible. First Fatima, who was tied to the door handle for a whole day, without food or drink and without being allowed to go to the toilet so she wet herself and was beaten for not holding her pee in. Then Nadira, whose mother tried to rub chilli on her bottom at the suggestion of her grandmother; but when Nadira passed out, her mother had to make do with rubbing chilli on her mouth, so she came round coughing and wailing. Nadira’s mother’s failure to get the chilli where she had originally wanted it must have been the spur for Huda’s mother to succeed, since she was the shaykh’s daughter, who had to be a model of good behaviour, an example to all. Later Huda used to think about Issam, son of the dye-shop owner, who had never been punished, while she screamed in pain at the burning sensations that spread up into her eyes and then settled in her nose. Issam made them do it; wasn’t it his fault? Yet Huda saw him a few days later laughing loudly and pointing at his bottom, as he told his mates about the monkey that sat on the chilli pepper and jumped up and down in the air. The story of Huda’s burning bottom went all around the neighbourhood and everybody was talking about it. I’ll get my revenge on all of you, you’ll see, she shouted to herself.
But this threat of Huda’s was redirected at herself a few years later when her father died suddenly of a heart attack. She was sure God intervened in the lives of His servants, especially if they were believers. God had taken pity on her father when he saw his daughter half-naked in a swimsuit, not wanting him to remember the sight whenever he looked at her, so He instantly released him from his suffering.
That day she began covering her hair from genuine conviction. All that showed were her hands. Her dress reached well below her knees. She no longer felt weighed down like before and tried to be passive, like her mother and most of the girls in the family, going from home to school and back again, letting life move sluggishly along on crutches, and being as her parents wished her to be: neither female nor male, not even human. She began blocking her ears to songs, whispered promises of love and all worldly enticements, in case God poured molten tin and metal in her ears and repeatedly flayed the skin off her body in the fires of hell. The man who taught them about religion had described this fire: ‘God spent a thousand years gathering wood for it, and a thousand years burning the wood until the fire grew red, and a thousand more years until it was black.’
‘Is this your first time since breaking up with him?’ Roberto is asking her now, hesitantly, his voice like cool water extinguishing the flames, and so she frees Fatima’s hand from the doorknob, puts ice on Nadira’s lips, and feels loving and affectionate.
‘Yes. And you, what’s your situation?’
‘I’m in a long-term relationship. She’s in India now, teaching Italian in New Delhi.’
‘India! She’s very far away from you.’
‘How glad I am that she’s far away, especially at this particular moment. Shall I see you tomorrow, Huda?’
‘Of course. You don’t have to ask.’
‘How wonderful you are!’
He holds her close.
‘Will you take me to the sea for a few moments?’
‘Now?’
‘Yes, please.’
He takes
her to the sea that lies under a beautiful dark blanket and she can hear it whispering to her joyfully: ‘Your father’s death is not your fault.’ ‘But why did he die the day he saw me in a swimsuit?’ ‘Chance. Sheer chance. Your father suffered from heart disease. Everyone knew that. The Creator created me so that people could embrace me, gaze at me, feel at peace with themselves and enjoy my fruits.’
‘Thanks, Roberto.’
He holds her close again and kisses her tenderly.
Because every journey has a beginning and an end, the two friends left the Italian Riviera four days later to go back to Rome. Yvonne cried constantly, even when she was sitting on the toilet, and looked everywhere for Lucio so that she could punch him. But the moment she set foot in Rome, her sadness began to diminish and as the beauty of the ancient city gently encompassed her, the horrible taste in her mouth gradually went away. The tall columns, the sculptures, the incense in the churches, the eyes of the saints, all of these made her mock her own pride, which had raged at first, then complained and howled like a dog that had been kicked in the stomach. Meanwhile, Huda’s attachment to Roberto increased whenever she heard his voice in furtive phone calls, kept secret from Yvonne, in fact every time she heard a man talking away unintelligibly in Italian.
But as soon as Huda began rehearsals for her play, the day after she arrived back in Toronto, the effects of her holiday evaporated. She slept badly, overwhelmed by the play and its huge cast of actors and musicians. Only in the theatre could she sleep soundly, so she would always take a short nap around midday. Meanwhile Yvonne immersed herself, not in the waters of the local pool as she’d promised herself when in Italy, but in sessions with the psychoanalyst, and in getting to know other single women as they tried together to overcome the pain caused by loneliness and childlessness, by accepting it and enjoying it.
The Occasional Virgin Page 7
