An Unnecessary Woman

by Rabih Alameddine

  “He sleeps with them on,” my mother told me as we ordered our coffee.

  I couldn’t tell from her straightforward tone whether she was proud or dismayed that her son kept the intimate company of fake medals in bed.

  Sleeping with the medals was not what horrified me. She informed me that he had captured an Israeli spy and they’d dealt with him. She used the innocuous word dealt. I tried to extract more information but she knew nothing. Boys’ dreams are mothers’ nightmares, but in my mother’s case, her boy’s dreams were her oblivions. I couldn’t imagine my half brother being able to deal with anything more complicated than opening car doors for his betters.

  In the newspaper a few days later, there was a small item saying that the hotel manager had been found dead on a side street, bound and tortured. I couldn’t imagine my half brother killing the man. He was too much of a coward. I could, however, imagine that he lied, that he informed others about his nemesis, that he poured pestilence into the ears of a future politician, that he witnessed the elimination of his humiliator.

  Do no harm to your fellow man unless he’s your boss.

  I tried to imagine that I was mistaken, or, if not, then to justify his actions in my mind. This was during a civil war when innumerable crimes were committed—crimes that made my half brother the eldest’s seem like lunch-recess pranks in comparison. Vengeance was in the very air then. To quote the poet Czesław Miłosz, during the Lebanese civil war, “causing someone’s death was dissociated from the reek of demonism, pangs of conscience, and similar accessories of Shakespearean drama.” Young men in perfectly clean uniforms were able to shoot people while gnawing on a kebab sandwich and sipping Pepsi.

  I tried to justify but I couldn’t.

  I don’t know what to think.

  He may be my half brother, but we’re not related. A chasm of incommunicable worlds lies between us.

  When my stepfather died, my half brother the eldest magically morphed into the man of the house that he had never moved out of. My mother went on living with him. She wouldn’t have considered living with me, nor would I have wished it. My mother loves her sons only and never cares to be discreet about it. She treats her youngest daughter as a second-class citizen, a second-gender offspring. I, her eldest, hardly register in her consciousness. Once I stopped trying to impress myself into her life, she forgot about me. If she considers her youngest daughter Fanny Price, I’m her Quasimodo, to be confined in the bell tower.

  For my half brother the eldest to bring her to my home means that every one of his brothers has adamantly refused to take her off his hands.

  I tell him, calmly, that I don’t think it’s feasible. I’m about to suggest that she won’t be happy when I see her standing in my open doorway, held erect by my sister-in-law. My mother, alarmingly fragile in all black, is hunched over, as if she has walked out of Goya’s A Pilgrimage to San Isidro. The face has the paleness seen in skin long hidden from the sun. Hair is still dyed black, fading, with a thumb’s-width vein of white at the roots. She barely keeps her head up; breathing is an effort, as is living. The lines of her body, of her form, seem to have melted; for a moment, incongruously, as light streams through the door behind her, it seems that I can see both the front and the back of her. My mouth drops, my shoulders droop. My mind becomes congested, jammed with feelings and thoughts that I can’t formulate nimbly enough. I haven’t been in her presence in so long. I’ve forgotten how scrambled my brain becomes when she’s around. My sister-in-law walks my mother gingerly into the foyer, holds her tightly like an overboard sailor clutching a piece of driftwood, but also delicately, as if she’s gossamer. My sister-in-law’s wedding band glimmers as her fingers wrap around my mother’s elbow.

  I receive a whiff of the musty, sour odor of my mother’s age.

  “She belongs to you now,” my half brother says. The wormlike vein in his temple throbs and thickens.

  “She’s yours now,” my sister-in-law says, spitting the words out of tightly pressed, raggedly crimsoned lips. Her mousy face reddens, like a wet shirt brightens on a laundry line.

  My mother, a modern-day succubus, has the ability to drain my soul and my voice without having to resort to something as rudimentary as a kiss. But I can’t allow this charade to go on much longer. I take a long motivational breath.

  “No,” I say, in a low, sticky tone. “She is not mine.”

  My mother raises her wraithlike head and looks at me. Her furrowed face contorts, shrinking the wrinkles and multiplying them tenfold. Her mouth draws open in toothless horror. Her gnarled hands rise, her palms face me, warding off evil. My mother tries to pull back from her daughter-in-law’s arms. The black shawl drops from her bony left shoulder, but doesn’t fall off completely. Her eyes display strident, unspeakable dread. She screams, a surprisingly loud and shrill shriek. From such a frail body, a defiant skirl of terror that does not slow or tire.

  None of us budge; in a well-lit 1950s foyer we stand like Italian terra-cotta sculptures, Renaissance, all of us terrified, my mother screaming and screaming. The normally invisible dust in the foyer dances and prances in the light, mocking the immobility of the humans.

  Her body exudes a cold of ancient winters. The chill rises up from my feet. I shiver and tremble.

  My half brother the eldest finally turns to me, his hand palming his right chin; his body, his face, the age-old universal pose of the horror-struck. “What have you done?” he asks, while my mother screams some more.

  Nothing. I’m still in my nightgown and robe de chambre, for crying out loud.

  Nothing. I’ve done nothing.

  Fadia storm-troops across the foyer, her clogs loud enough to be heard alongside the scream, but not till she is almost upon me does she ask, “What is happening here?” Her eyes are questioning, more surprised than anything. Eyelids already hued with blue eye shadow, azure—not fully made up yet, but on the way. Her lips are outlined with black eyebrow pencil, but not filled in with color. Girlish golden hoops adorn her ears.

  “She doesn’t recognize you,” shouts my sister-in-law, still holding my mother. “That’s all. She doesn’t recognize me most of the time either. It’s nothing. She’ll get used to you. I know she will. She has to.”

  “Can someone shut her up?” yells Fadia, her open mouth showing teeth stained by nicotine. “My nerves can’t handle this.”

  I can’t tell whether Fadia means the screamer or the speaker. No one is asking about my nerves.

  I notice that my upstairs neighbor Joumana has entered my apartment as well. Marie-Thérèse remains in the doorway, curious but considerate, too many people in my small foyer. Joumana, in a winter dress with scalloped neckline, positions herself next to Fadia, holding a long-handled broom bottom side up, other hand on hip, looking less like a menacing sentinel than a burlesque of a Pontormo painting. Why did she rush down with a broom? Did she expect a swordfight? Dumas, Marías, Conan the Barbarian?

  Joumana and a broom, a university professor and a housecleaning implement, an incongruous vision.

  My mother tires suddenly, looks hopeless and threadbare. The decibels drop; her screams are reduced to mewls and whimpers.

  “Tell her she must keep her mother.” My sister-in-law nudges her husband, who appears the most shaken. His white comb-over stands on end. “She must. I’ll not take her back. I cannot bear it. You tell her.”

  “I will do no such thing,” I say.

  “You tell her,” yells my sister-in-law.

  My mother begins lowing softly, like a sick cow. She drops her head as if she wants to fold into herself. She is tiny, making it difficult to imagine that I, the tallest person in the room, am related to her in any way, let alone that I’m her offshoot.

  “You want to leave her here?” asks Fadia. “Are you insane?”

  “This doesn’t concern you,” my sister-in-law says. Her teeth crowd together as if trying to jump out of her mouth.

  “Of course it does.” Fadia’s eyebrows fly up toward h
er hairline. “Everything in my building concerns me. Leave now. I’ve had all I can take from your family for fifty years. No more. Get out.”

  My sister-in-law tries to move my lowing mother forward, and the scream returns. I cover my ears.

  “Take her back,” shouts Fadia. “Leave and take her with you. Take her back.”

  I lean against the glazed door separating the crowded foyer from the rest of my apartment. I wish to be transported to another dimension. Nothing makes sense. I watch the proceedings as if I were at a screening of an Antonioni movie without subtitles. My hands, usually so calm, tremble slightly, and my left eye moves restlessly, independently. In my head, and only in my head, I hear a fast rendition of one of Liszt’s transcendental études, played by Sviatoslav Richter on 78 rpm.

  There is a remoteness to the air about me. I am off kilter.

  Take her back.

  I am slowly beginning to regain my composure, to collect its dispersed shards, when I realize that my neighbors and I are emphatically forcing my mother out of the house—my own mother. How rude it is.

  Kicking your mother out—your dying mother.

  Now, describing my mother as dying doesn’t mean much, signifies almost nothing. All of us are dying; all days are numbered. My mother has been at death’s door for quite a while, but has willfully managed to keep from opening it, or knocking for that matter. Yet that body, that vessel, can’t withstand life much longer.

  Above her head a ticktocking alarm clock should be floating, one of the old ones with a metal dome on top.

  At the end of every summer, my mother cooked lamb fat in salt to store for winter, and kept up this ritual even with the advent of refrigeration and the availability of meats year-round. She shouldn’t cook lamb fat this year. No green bananas. She’ll soon be departing this building, my life, and this world. But not soon enough.

  “Take her back,” Fadia keeps repeating, “take her back,” in an unrelenting tone that brooks no discussion, no disagreement, a tone that grows stronger and more insistent with each repetition. “Take her back.”

  Let me go; take back thy gift.

  Of all the lovely phrases and images, the bright jewels embedded in Tennyson’s “Tithonus,” this sentence, “take back thy gift,” is my favorite. Lodged in my memory from the moment I first read it, it quickens my essence.

  I wither slowly in thine arms,

  Here at the quiet limit of the world.

  Joumana and her broom remain silent as Fadia talks and talks. How she, a university professor, can be so close to Fadia, who was unable to pass her baccalaureate, is difficult to understand, a most odd pairing. They’re conjoined like an orange and its navel.

  Fadia, arms wide like wings, guides the invaders out the door. Her offensively bright housedress, Yellow Submarine palette, is long enough to sweep the floor as she moves. My sister-in-law seems dispirited, like a weary actress in a failed play.

  Take her back.

  Here at the quiet limit of the world it isn’t so quiet.

  Untangling my feelings toward Fadia is as challenging as any of Psyche’s tasks, and more difficult still is trying to understand hers toward me. The child looked up to me as a young bride; she despised me as a divorcée. Yet as we aged, after she married and had her own family, she seemed to soften. She became civil; she may not like me, but she doesn’t loathe me either, and from time to time she exhibits a kindness and generosity so profound as to confound me.

  The war forced us to be strangers no more. We helped and supported each other during the battles, though that didn’t transform our relationship into any recognizable kind of friendship. Other than uttering polite meaningless words, we hardly spoke. A word here, a phrase there.

  The longest exchange we ever had was on a cold morning in 1995 as I was heading to work. Coming out my door, I surprised her, cheeks ruddy with cold and good health as she ascended the stairs to the daily gathering of the witches, having bought a warm tray of kenafeh, its smell hunger inducing even wrapped in waxy paper. Good morning, good morning, and Fadia suggested I wear an overcoat on such a cold day. I told her I was warm-blooded, but she insisted that once I was out on the street the wind was freezing cold.

  “Once you’re out there,” she said as her hands stroked her camelhair coat, “you’ll thank Fadia.”

  She was right that day.

  I stopped dismissing her as inconsequential early on. Fadia was outrageously frivolous as a child, and remains so as an adult, yet she possesses a courage, a gumption, that few of her generation have. One night years ago—she was nineteen, possibly twenty, definitely no longer a student—the sky was inky, India ink, and she was outside her door fuming much too loudly. Sartre wrote, “Hell is the Other,” which I agree with, of course, but I also agree with Fernando Vallejo: “the torment of Hell is noise.” That night Fadia was the inferno of my soul.

  At the time, Fadia was causing her father, Hajj Wardeh, great concern, and concerned he should have been, as it turned out. The favorite and the youngest, she was the only one of his three daughters who was still unmarried. Worse yet, her delight in Egyptian romantic movies, her obsession with them, banished sleep from his nights. He correctly worried that she not only watched them with her girlfriends but was also sneaking into theaters by herself when she had the chance. Having watched a few of these films himself, he understood that they were breeding grounds of illusion, planting misbegotten seeds in the minds of impressionable young Arab girls and sowing unhappiness and discontent when life turned out to be less ideal than it appeared on those cursed screens.

  He tried to forbid her from going with her girlfriends, but the truth was, and he was fully aware of it, that his family had reached the point where his daughter ruled the realm. She could inveigle her father to agree to whatever she wanted, within reason, of course. She considered his demands mere suggestions. She possessed a potent weapon: her pout. He loved her so deeply that all it took was for her to curl her lips and push them out, squint her eyes and stare at him, and he would hastily rescind whatever it was that he had merely suggested.

  Hajj Wardeh arrived at the most expected of solutions: it was high time she was married. He found the perfect suitor, a son of a good friend of his. The husband-to-be’s name was Abdallah, a handsome twenty-six-year-old, educated, intelligent, decent, a good Muslim, an engineer who had graduated from the American University of Beirut with high honors. When Hajj Wardeh invited his good friend’s family for dinner, he noticed with great glee that Abdallah practically fell over every time Fadia looked at him. He kept expecting the poor young man’s eyes to jump out of their sockets as in the popular cartoons. Nothing was said during the dinner, of course, but he foresaw a full proposal by the next day.

  Joy caressed his heart, if only briefly.

  That night, after she figured out the purpose of the dinner, Fadia the noisemaker threw her infamous tantrum, which the entire neighborhood heard. She would not marry just anybody, and certainly not this son of her father’s good friend. She would marry for love, and only for love. She would not reenter the apartment until her father promised he wouldn’t give her to that man. She didn’t care who heard her night cries. She’d sleep on the landing. All of Beirut would know her father was an indecent man for forcing her to marry against her will. She didn’t care how he was to tell his best friend that she wasn’t interested. She wouldn’t set foot inside her home unless her father relented. The poor man did, and a suddenly meek Fadia was smart enough not to gloat in her triumph.

  What Hajj Wardeh didn’t know at the time, although he was wise enough to understand it later, was that Fadia already had her eyes set on a future husband. Yes, she would marry for love. She and her girlfriends had noticed a young man at the theaters, attending the same movies they were. They approached him the third or fourth time they saw him. They found him charming and delightful, as enamored of Egyptian movies as they were. He was a gentleman from a good family and treated them with the utmost respect. All of Fadia’
s girlfriends wanted him as a husband, this well-mannered, considerate man with a good job who had the same interests they did. What girl would want anything more?

  I should have slipped them a copy of Giovanni’s Room or, had they been more intelligent, Corydon.

  Fadia worked on him for two years before he understood that he was supposed to propose, and propose he did, asking for her hand officially from her father. Their marriage worked in its way. In time she lost her infatuation with Egyptian films, but he never did. He was kind to his family and supported them. He was amiable to me, for which I was grateful. He passed away with no one who could say a bad thing about him. At the same time, he passed away with no one outside his immediate family who could remember much about him. Most people weren’t able to recognize him from one sighting to the next; he had to constantly reintroduce himself. And then he died.

  I myself can’t recall what his face looked like—the metaphorical cataracts, once more.

  He was a dutiful husband who never cheated on Fadia or strayed. She, of course, did, as I had expected. What I hadn’t expected, and neither did Fadia, was the choice of whom she strayed with. She encountered Abdallah at some gathering, and apparently, as a married woman, she found his interest in her more intriguing. She claimed he seduced her while sitting next to his wife; he removed the red rose in his boutonniere, plucked it, and ever so inconspicuously allowed the petals to drop from his hand along her path as she passed him. She was his faithful mistress for twenty-three years. They were somewhat discreet in order not to hurt their families, but the whole city knew of their affair—knew of it discreetly, of course. I heard her talk about him regularly to Joumana and Marie-Thérèse up there on the landing. It is noteworthy that only Fadia’s eldest child takes after her husband. The rest of them do not take after Abdallah, but they certainly don’t look like their father, whatever he looked like.