An Unnecessary Woman
Page 17
The boys don’t touch, don’t hug, don’t try to console each other. They simply sit on the floor and share a cry.
I too am inducted into a sea of feelings. I am witness to an innocence that has never been mine, to a childhood that I missed and miss. No nostalgia is felt as keenly as nostalgia for things that never existed.
I am able to control my lips that want to quiver, but my breathing betrays me.
I move quickly behind the stairs so no one can see me. Though I am still in the main museum hall, the tawny light turns grayish, and the hidden air feels damper with its taste of copper. Under the landing is an altogether different universe. Tears carve a couple of furrows in each cheek. Terror creeps from chest to limbs; I’m frightened because I seem to be losing all semblance of composure and can’t figure out why. Sorrow settles on my heart like a vulture.
What’s going on?
I inhale from deep in my belly. I can’t allow sobs to escape these lips. Like the boys, I need to remain noiseless. To my right an oblong of dense darkness attracts my attention. I sneak into the room, lean against the wall next to the door, and cry. I can discern walls but not their color. The room’s temperature isn’t a pleasant eighteen degrees centigrade—no, not pleasant. The febrile heat turns the room into humid summer, August in December. I expect to be attacked by mosquitoes at any moment. My throat is parched. I sweat. I’m overdressed for August, of course. I can’t breathe as deeply because of a suffocating smell of paraffin and tobacco. I stroke the foldable umbrella for comfort. The fact that it’s wet as well does comfort me, as does the room’s atrocious odors.
I must hold on to my sanity. I must compose myself and leave this oppressive place.
I slap my head, once, twice—a habit to alleviate stress, or to make myself think when I’m acting stupid, just a slap on the top of my head. I run my fingernails through my hair, pull it back, and retie the scarf. I fan my face with the palm of my hand. The sweating, the wetness, seems to be contained in the triangle between my two armpits and my navel. I hold my handbag against it, take a breath of courage, and head out into the museum’s light, which by contrast is now blinding. I wish I’d thought to bring sunglasses.
The hall is empty, no sign of the boys, their mothers, or their Italian nemeses. This is how I like my museum, empty and desolate and all mine, but I can’t linger anymore.
The guard who always looks amused looks concerned. “Are you all right, Tante?” he asks.
I consider spouting the usual “I’m fine” refrain and continuing my rush through the exit, but I halt. He deserves better.
“I will be,” I say, turning to face him. “I came here to escape some family problems, but wasn’t able to.” I hesitate, notice that I’m stuttering slightly. “Everything will be all right, though.”
He nods slowly but assuringly, and relays the obligatory Lebanese homilies about family: its necessity, its insanity, its quandary, its mystery, and its comfort.
After the indoor heat, the cool air chills my bones; the drizzle has halted and is now hanging, damp in the air. I descend the outside stairs, cross the heavily trafficked street, and begin to walk. I don’t care where or in what direction. I need to circulate my blood.
Why can’t I be like my museum guard? Normal and imperturbably happy he seems—normal and belonging to the world he resides in.
Henri Matisse once said, “It has bothered me all my life that I do not paint like everybody else.”
I love this quote, love the fact that the most incandescent painter of the twentieth century felt this way. Being different troubled him. Did he genuinely want to paint like everybody else, to be like everybody else? Did he truly wish to belong?
It has bothered me all my life that I am not like everybody else. For years, I was able to convince myself that I was special, that being different was a choice. As a matter of fact, I wanted to believe that I was superior, not an artist, not a genius like Matisse, but unlike the rabble. I am unique, an individual, not simply idiosyncratic, but extraordinary. I considered my individualism a virtue, protecting me from collective moods and insanities, helping me float above familial and societal riptides. That gave me comfort. Except it is failing me now. Not just now. For some time, I haven’t been able to wall off my heart adequately.
“Every man guards in his heart a royal chamber,” wrote Flaubert. “I have sealed mine.”
I haven’t done as good a job as Gustave. My sealant leaks. Jagged cracks have surfaced in my walls through the years. The weeping episode at the museum may have been unusual, but it certainly wasn’t the first. They seem to occur more often these days. The walls are showing ineluctable signs of decay, cracks. I don’t recall ever crying like this before I reached my midfifties.
I wonder at what age Flaubert wrote the line above. He died a couple of years before he turned sixty.
Pessoa, more a connoisseur of alienation than even Flaubert, wrote: “I’ve surrounded the garden of my being with high iron gratings—more imposing than any stone wall—in such a way that I can perfectly see others while perfectly excluding them, keeping them in their place as others.”
What a way with words this poet has, what a grasp of images.
I am becoming one of the many things I despised when I was younger, a sentimental fool. These corroding walls can’t even defend me against the predictable emotionalism of bad movies; bad Hollywood movies starring big heroes with bigger motivations now make me cry.
You want bad? Imitation of Life with Lana Turner. That manipulative film sank its sappy claws into my heart during a recent viewing. Terms of Endearment? I’m embarrassed to admit that it did too.
A few years ago, The Color Purple appeared on television after the news. I’d disliked the novel for its lack of subtlety, but it was a study in diaphanous nuance compared to the film, which aired on one of the tertiary Arab satellite stations, maybe Sudanese or Libyan, so even the television picture was mediocre. I couldn’t stop watching. Yes, hating myself for it, I sat through The Color Purple in its fuzzily pixilated entirety. When the fallen woman—a former prostitute, once a lesbian, now a married blues singer who used to sing in the choir—leads the sinners back to the bosom of the church, whose pastor is none other than her strict, upright father who has disowned her for her wayward ways but now engulfs her in his forgiving embrace because she enters His demesne singing (wait for it) “Maybe God Is Trying to Tell You Something,” while the gospel choir backs her up, and just in case you and I missed any of the portentous cues careening about the screen, she, the wandering daughter, tells her father, “Even sinners have soul”—when all that happened, every pretense of rationality abandoned me, and I bawled like—well, like a fallen child now redeemed.
Soppy stupid girl, that’s me.
But it’s not just movies. People make me cry as well.
Aaliya, the above, the bellower.
Fadia’s lover, Abdallah, died about fifteen years ago; his heart gave up one evening. A mutual friend called her early the next morning. She had to force herself to listen to the news stoically, as if Abdallah were simply an acquaintance of not much import. Oh, his poor children, she must have been forced to say, his suffering family. She had to wait until she was out on the landing, after the men of the building had left. She had to wait till she was alone among her friends and their coffee.
Can you imagine how lonely she must have felt when she received that phone call? Your lover has just died, your companion has abandoned you, but don’t you dare make an inappropriate sound, because your family is around. No one to touch you the way he did, no one to understand you, no one to hug you to sleep, but don’t dare allow your face to show a glint of grief. The cutting pain of feeling alone amid loved ones.
I was waiting for the kettle to boil when I heard her break. She mentioned that Abdallah had passed away, mentioned it as if in passing, and at first I was shocked that she seemed so casual about it until I understood that she was waiting for Joumana’s husband to leave with Marie-Th�
�rèse’s. The coffee klatsch didn’t react, or at least I couldn’t hear anything from my kitchen window. Then Joumana’s husband and his prework commotion stumbled down the stairs, followed by more racket when Marie-Thérèse’s husband joined him.
The women waited for a few seconds after the men’s departure. Then Joumana and Marie-Thérèse began their comforting, and Fadia uncorked her grief. On the landing, Fadia couldn’t wail, Joumana and Marie-Thérèse had to keep their voices low, but standing at the sink with yesterday’s dishes drying in the wire rack, I heard every word, every whimper, every sob, every susurration. As you might anticipate Joumana and Marie-Thérèse deployed a litany of Lebanese condolences, still trite after so many generations: “God wants him close to His bosom,” “Time heals all,” “You still have your health,” “God will help us.” You’d think this would have been irritating. While crying together, they repeated the platitudes over and over—stupid, worthless, inconsequential, hollow words over and over, signifying nothing and definitely not full of sound and fury. It worked. They wept and grieved.
I wept and grieved in my kitchen, silently so as not to disturb them. I wasn’t able to control my feelings. I’d never met Abdallah, I’d only heard his stories while listening to the women. I felt sorry for him. I felt sorry for Fadia. Like a sentimental teenager, I grieved for a love lost.
Now, I don’t cry at the drop of a hat or at the drop of a bomb. What I’m saying is that I used to be stronger. I didn’t cry when I was a child or a younger woman. The fact that I do now, rare as it is, the fact that I’m unable to control my weeping at these infrequent times, is disconcerting. That’s all.
I’ll have you know that it’s not common.
I’ll admit that I also lost control four years ago when Joumana’s daughter announced to the coffee klatsch that she’d been accepted into a doctoral program at the Sorbonne. Amid the screeching congratulations and ululations on the upper landing, I shared their joy and wept over my gray stone countertop.
It is rare, however.
The mist of drizzle has lifted. The damp pavement and a quilt of tenuous low clouds—now comforting, now threatening—are the only evidence that rain passed this way. My legs, each trying to outpace the other, lead me along a side street. Unlike the main streets that cut the city with a butcher’s cleaver, this ancient one wiggles its hips quite a bit. It negotiates with the neighborhood, it haggles, gives and takes; rarely is it straight, it is intrinsic. This street is more old-fashioned than the bigger boulevards, more settled. I walk on the asphalt, for the pavement—more discontinuous curbstones than an actual sidewalk—is covered with parked vehicles and the Vespas belonging to the many castes of delivery boys of the city. A film of drizzle residue makes the road feel like a sheaf of tar beneath my walking shoes, which squish ever so slightly. The buildings on this street are all four stories or higher, each floor with a balcony wearing long, wide outdoor drapes that were brightly colored once, a long time ago.
A small car passes, filled to the brim with smokers; it seems to be on fire with all the lit cigarettes and the smoke. In another car a bored boy presses his face into the back window. He notices me looking and extends his tongue into the smushed self-portrait. This brief exchange amuses me, as it does him, it seems. He pulls back, whether to admire my reaction or his handiwork on the window, I can’t tell. A third car honks to make sure I don’t jump in its way, then howls past me. I move to the curb, but only for one step, since a rack overflowing with bags of potato chips blocks my path. The owner of the grocery store sits outside on a stool, earphones plugging his senses, blithely unconcerned that he and his merchandise have overflowed his store and taken over the pavement. He seems happy in his world.
I pass a sign that says SALON AALIYA in Arabic lettering, though its Roman alphabet counterpart says SALON BEYONCÉ. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. There are no customers in the barber chairs.
It feels colder. The last traces of autumn are rising and disappearing. I clutch my handbag close. I’m no longer perspiring, of course, but moisture still clings to the valleys between my fingers.
A sandwich shop pumps the smell of garlic into the street. I’m hungry. I can’t tell whether it’s lunchtime yet or whether it has passed. I forgot my watch, not so unusual since my retirement.
This neighborhood is a rabbit warren, at least what I imagine a rabbit warren might be, but it doesn’t compare with the ever-changing mazes of the Palestinian camps. It feels more solid. I probably see a chasm of difference because of familiarity. I haven’t been to Sabra since I went looking for Ahmad all those years ago. I may not walk this neighborhood regularly, but I know it. It’s changed some since I was here last, but it’s recognizable, inherently so. The neighborhood I grew up in lies not far from here—not a stone’s throw, a mortar’s launch.
There were quite a few launches a couple of years ago. In 2008, the Shiites and Sunnis—a plague o’ both your houses—clashed briefly and violently along these streets. Traces of the shooting can be seen on the buildings, a few bullet holes on one, two blotches on the second floor of another, a single beauty mark on a third, residues on edifices that can’t afford plastic surgery. No trace of the psychological scars those battles caused can be found on any Beiruti, however. We suppress trauma so very well. We postpone the unbreathable darkness that weighs us down.
How do I talk about the betrayal we felt when Lebanese killed Lebanese once more? For years, since the end of the war in 1990, we deluded ourselves into thinking that we’d never fight each other again. We thought we’d buried our horror. Yet the Lebanese do not wish to examine that period of our history. We, like most humans, consider history a lesson on a blackboard that can be sponged off. We’d rather ostrich life’s difficulties.
I can dig out the old chestnut from George Santayana, that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” but it serves no purpose. It’s a hopelessly optimistic quote. We are condemned to repeat the past whether we remember it or not. It is inevitable; just ask Nietzsche (eternal return) or Hegel (history repeats itself) or James McCourt (history repeats itself like hiccups).
Beirutis are intricately woven into their city’s wars.
I’m fond of Mark Twain’s quote: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
We’re traumatized every time the Israelis go on one of their macho homicidal binges, but we explain it away. They are not us. It’s the price we pay for living next to a neighbor who constantly has to prove how big his endowment is. It is big, trust me, nuclear even. The destruction our neighbors inflicted on us in 2006 was monumental—no, I shouldn’t use that adjective, which implies raising instead of razing. The southern suburbs of our city were nearly wiped out, hundreds if not thousands were killed. They bombed every bridge in the country, every electric plant. I refused to leave my house even though my neighborhood was in no danger of being bombed. Yet as horrifying as that was, like most Beirutis, I dismissed all this as the insanity of the Israeli military and the lunatic fringe of Hezbollah meeting head-to-head. O Poseidon, grant that these sackers of cities both find troubles in their households.
Two years later, in 2008, when the clashes between Shiites and Sunnis erupted, I was no longer able to dismiss.
I’m sure you’ve noticed that I dislike Israel, that ridiculous pygmy state dripping with self-overestimation, yet many of the giants I respect are Jewish. There is no contradiction. I identify with outsiders, with the alienated or dispossessed. Like many nation-states, including its sister pygmy state Lebanon, Israel is an abomination.
Israelis are Jews who have misplaced their sense of humor.
I like men and women who don’t fit well in the dominant culture, or, as Álvaro de Campos calls them, strangers in this place as in every other, accidental in life as in the soul. I like outsiders, phantoms wandering the cobwebbed halls of the doomed castle where life must be lived.
David Grossman may love Israel, but he wanders its cobwebbed halls, just as
his namesake Vasily wandered Russia’s. To write is to know that you are not home.
I stopped loving Odysseus as soon as he landed back in Ithaca.
I love the idea of homeland, but not the actual return to one.
A while back Czesław Miłosz wrote in an essay that in today’s age of technology and mass mobility “the whole nostalgic rhetoric of patria fed by literature since Odysseus journeyed to Ithaca, has been weakened if not forgotten.” Weakened, possibly, but I think not forgotten. It is that longing for a mythical homeland, not necessarily a physical one, that inspires art. Without that longing, patria is nothing more than the name of a Finnish company that produces armored vehicles used by Israel in its wars on Lebanon, or the name of an Argentine submachine gun.
I appreciate longing.
I also appreciate irony.
In the summer of 1982, while Israeli armored tanks and gunships imposed a siege of another age on rampartless Beirut, cutting off the water supply and food shipments, the modern catapults, the air force, leveled residential buildings, destroyed all infrastructure, and, amazingly, bombed the synagogue of Beirut’s Jewish neighborhood.
There is no contradiction.
I notice a mother sitting on the pavement across the street, not Lebanese, as shows in her face, and not from this neighborhood, as shows in her haggard dress. A beggar by profession, she’s surrounded by the tools of her trade: a baby in her arms; a girl of about five with dirty dress and knees, hovering in the world of her mother; the eldest, a girl of no more than ten, sitting on the ground, back against the building wall as she examines me from afar. The grim out-of-a-fairy-tale mother nudges her eldest, who jumps up and charges toward me in one smooth, experienced sweep. Brown hair, grimy face, and pink cheeks, she seems determined and overly earnest. Her eyes gleam with a heavy dose of resolve, a predator sighting her prey.