by Dina Bennett
The boy looks crestfallen but only momentarily. Recovering his joie de vivre, he jumps out of the shot and grins at me, all liveliness and wheel-spinning vitality. I may have succumbed to boorishness, but he forgives me. For a minute he’s able to restrain himself while I take a photograph without him in it. Then he’s back to prancing and cavorting around us. As we stroll back to the square where camel and wallah are waiting, I expect him to tumble off down a side street. He doesn’t. He sticks closer to me than the others, as if to say, “I see you. Do you see me?”
Hidden
MASHHAD, IRAN, 2011
Imam Reza, descendant of the Prophet Muhammad and eighth imam of Shiite Muslims, was martyred in Mashhad twelve hundred years ago. It was a time when religious figures of any sort who fell out of favor could expect to pass into the next life via a variety of excruciating deaths, in this case, by poisoning. Reza’s shrine is in this city in northeastern Iran, near its border with Turkmenistan.
As Iranian cities go, Mashhad is a lovely one, the shelter of the nearby Binalud and Hezar Masjed mountain ranges blessing it with a kind climate. It’s a holy city, too. Thanks to its association with the imam’s untimely death, mashhad now is the Persian word for “place of martyrdom.” Just as those who make the pilgrimage to Mecca receive the title of hajji, those who make the pilgrimage to Mashhad—and especially to the Imam Reza shrine in particular—have a title. They are known as mashtee. For reasons I can’t quite grasp, other than that I am here and it is feasible, I want to find out what it’s like to be one. Superficially there’s no reason for me to feel this way. In fact, there are many reasons not to. First, I’ve always been a confirmed atheist. Second, if there’s a crowd gathering, I make it a point to be far from it. Third, I normally prefer to do whatever everybody else is not doing. But here’s the beauty of travel: the very act of being far from home and routine seems to open the possibility of being someone other than my usual self. As Marcel Proust is often quoted as saying, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” And if ever there’s a place where I can indulge my love for seeing another culture from the inside, it’s here.
To get into the inner sanctum of this immense marble and mosaic mausoleum, I have to wear a chador, the full-length, shawl-like semicircle of dark fabric worn by some Muslim women in Iran, to conform to the Islamic dress code of hijab. It’s not a requirement to wear the chador, but a choice, and unlike in Afghanistan or Arab countries, wearing a chador does not require wearing a veil to cover one’s face. However, since it has no hand openings and nothing to fasten it shut, going about one’s life in a chador, which is draped over one’s head to cover the hair, not one’s shoulders, takes practice. When women who choose to wear the chador go out on errands, they hold the fabric closed with their teeth, to keep their hands free. When errands aren’t scheduled, they scrunch the open ends from inside with their hands, to keep it from floating away like a lost kite. Although most cosmopolitan women in Iran conform to the laws of hijab by wearing a beautiful French silk scarf, there’s no question that inside one of the holiest Muslim shrines in the world, a chador will not be discretionary.
I do not own a chador and therefore have every reason to be concerned that the most I will see of Imam Reza’s shrine is the street outside. I need not have worried. The enterprising shrine managers have been faced with improperly clad non-believers like me for eons. They know exactly what to do with us: earn some money. They’ve opened a rent-a-chador booth, filled with wrinkled lengths of fabric. A small deposit of fifty cents is all that’s required and I can have my choice of chadors with which to robe myself appropriately. I consider renting one of the black offerings, but decide, rashly, that it looks too mournful. I point to a crumple of white and blue print cloth. Big mistake, which I will only discover after I’ve paid my fee and retired to the curb to try chadorizing myself. At first, I find the white and blue pattern flattering. It’s fresh and summery. Then I look around. Every woman I see is swathed in black. Instead of blending in, I am immediately marked as the interloper I am. Worse, no cosmopolitan Iranian woman would ever wear what I’m wearing. My chador is not meant for the urban sophisticate. It is one a country bumpkin would wear. It’s neither long enough nor wide enough to fully envelop me. I’ve chosen the chador of a child, and a village child at that. Why I thought I’d make a fashion statement, be the Badgley Mischka of chador-dom, I don’t know. But this chador is ridiculous. It barely reaches my knees. The worst part is that the fabric is a swath of cheap, slippery polyester, sliding off my hair at the first opportunity. To keep it even remotely in place I have to pull it far forward, giving me a hooded look more appropriate to a Gregorian monk than a Muslim anything. But I am not in a fitting room and this is not Bloomingdale’s. I’m in Iran, the chador I’ve been given has been handed to me by an official Muslim. Who am I to argue?
Bernard is already at the front of the men’s security check by the time I join the women’s queue. His line moves briskly, but mine is one of those societal contradiction in terms, being both sluggish, with women standing around not moving, and disorderly, with women shoving themselves through the clots of nonmoving believers, tugging their children along with them. My line seethes with properly chador’d women in black, all pushing toward a curtained booth where they are frisked and their bags opened within the privacy of sheltering canvas. Once out of the cubicle they have only to pass through a metal detector under the stern gaze of two female security guards and they’re into the immense courtyard of the shrine itself.
I push with the best of them, trained as I was by rush hours at Grand Central Station, but when I make it to the front, I am not allowed to pass. A guard points to the ground. I follow her gaze, look around me and begin to understand. All the women are wearing stockings or socks. My feet are in sandals, toes bare and offensive. I look chagrined, pantomime apologies, point toward the exit while clutching my scrap of cloth under my chin to at least keep my hair covered. The guard asks me if I’m Muslim. What to do? I don’t think this is the place to do the big reveal that I’m born Jewish. I keep my mouth shut, wobbling my head in my favorite Indian head waggle, to connote a middling response of maybe yes, maybe no. The female guards stare at each other, arched, perfectly tweezed black eyebrow answering bored uniformed shrug. It seems they do not want their job to be about deciding which feet can stride forward and which must slink back. I learn only later that there was a bombing here fifteen years ago that killed twenty-five people, giving weightier concerns than sacrilegious feet, concerns such as ferreting out cleverly hidden explosives. At the time, though, I’m ignorant and stewing—how Bernard can determine that I’m not one of the chador’d many who’ve been let in, without, so-to-speak, lifting a flap, and therefore how will he glean that I’m stuck out here while he’s in there?—when they wave me through.
I emerge into a vast courtyard tiled with slabs of white marble which gleaming so relentlessly in the sun that I am tempted to pull my chador over my face after all. It’s blinding, as if someone had turned on a theater spotlight and shone it five inches from my face. The courtyard teams with men, women, and children come to pay their respects and to pass the rest of the day within the mosaic walls of the holy site. Everyone streams toward what must be the mausoleum. The arch of its lofty entryway is lacquered in gold leaf, as is the minaret above it and the high dome behind. On either side extend two-story arched walls intricately tiled in curlicues, diamonds, and filigrees of greens, blues, turquoise, white, and gold, the patterns mixed with Farsi prayers from the Koran. It is chillingly ostentatious, designed to uplift and humble at the same time.
I remove my offending sandals at the carpeted entry, thinking to mark them by the black shoe nearby. Then I notice all the shoes are identical: black, solid, low-heeled, blunt-toed footwear, as if the Mashhad branch of DSW had one style and one color only. I find consolation in the knowledge that no Iranian would bother taking sandals such as mine, so delicate, so fri
lly, so unfit for normal wear. It’s also consoling that my DSW has more to offer. I walk over the carpet toward a large open door. Within seconds, I’m in a mass of people and like a riptide they catch me up and sweep me onward with them, into the mausoleum, toward the shrine.
I start gulping air like a freshly landed fish, washed by panic that the people around me will discover I don’t belong here. How stupid could I be? How could I think that if I dressed like everyone else I’d be one of them? I berate myself, because I learned this lesson in high school, when even on those days when I escaped our house in proper hippie garb, I still never pierced the shield of the “in” kids. Inside, or rather underneath, I’m still me and now that I’m here with the devout every instinct screams that I should be elsewhere. I clutch my chador tighter around my face terrified it will slide down and expose my hair inside Iran’s holiest religious site. I am so far out of my comfort zone that the word “zone” can’t even apply.
Bodies squeeze and hug close. They move with the fervent blindness of the faithful, pushing around me to get down the stairs and into the mausoleum, intent on getting close to the imam’s tomb. I shuffle forward, carried along by a black current of warm bodies, until the moment I feel silky fabric under my toes. Looking down I spy with horror that I’ve stepped on the chador of the woman in front of me. It’s hard to move my feet anywhere but where they are, as I have ladies on all sides. But the woman ahead continues to drift inch by inch away from me. I fear provoking an international incident, in which not only do I improperly disrobe one of the faithful, but am disrobed myself, to reveal the lying, sockless, sandal-wearing infidel I am.
In the nick of time a miracle occurs, which I have since titled The Miracle of the Two-Step. A dance lesson from decades ago finds its way to my offensive feet and reminds them of a country western step I learned in the early days of my marriage. Beyond receiving a blessing of which I am definitively unworthy I have no other way to explain why suddenly my feet mince out a tiny two-step, shifting me an iota to the side, enough to release the chador just as the woman inside it finds an opening and disappears into the cavernous room below.
Shortly I, too, am within sight of Imam Reza’s tomb, at the rim of a marble ramp leading into a multi-chambered hall swarming with praying, weeping women. They keen, they shout a prayer, they bow and kneel and bow more. The hubbub swells and recedes, wave after wave of voices ascending the stairs to where I stand. If I go down into the maelstrom, I may never make it back up the same day, so I observe the passions from above, the chador’d heads reflected by a million mirrored facets lining the surrounding domes and columns. After a few minutes, I swivel around to go back out, thereby wedging myself more tightly into the crowd. Then a hand is pressed against my back, shoving me insistently forward. I’m fifty feet from the exit to the general courtyard, but it’s all black in front of me and I’m only going to get there at the pace of the women around me, many of whom stand transfixed, intoxicated by the experience, their eyes puffy and red from weeping. On each face I see an expression ranging from bereft to ecstasy. With a liquid sigh the women surge gently onward, an ocean swell of religious fervor, until I, too, reach the courtyard.
It seems fitting that it was a clergyman, Henry Ward Beecher, who said “clothes and manners do not make the man,” to which I must add “nor the woman.” I know this now, as I also know that not all travel experiences result in smiles of pleasure. Despite this, each one is profoundly worthwhile for the way they allow me to see myself, if not necessarily to always change myself. Released from the crowd, my spirit soars, relief floating high. I have been privileged to join with other women in a rite that has moved them deeply. I’m a mashtee. And my sandals are waiting right where I left them.
Huaso Initiation
TORRES DEL PAINE, CHILE, 2008
Having reached Puerto Natales, the terminus of our three-day ferry trip from Puerto Montt on the cargo ship Evangelistas, it is time to get back in our rental Suzuki.
I live my life very much in the present. This means I keep nostalgia to a minimum, with few sops to sentimentality. A couple of drawers is all I need to hold those albums and old photos I rarely thumb through, though I confess I cart around my baby albums like the treasures they are; I love to admire what a cute infant I was. Despite reading copiously as a child, cherishing my library card more than the aquamarine three-speed bike I got for my eighth birthday, only half a shelf in my library is given to favorite childhood books. I’ve never returned to gaze at any house I’ve moved out of. Yet here I am, sighing with happiness to be reunited with a car I’ve known for only ten days, three of which she sat in a cargo hold with the cattle and fuel tanks while we wandered the fog-shrouded deck and let bartenders tempt us with pisco sours well before cocktail time. Now, as we prepare to return to land once more, all seems right with my world.
The ritual of settling into the car is comforting, and it pleases me no end to gently lay the napkin-wrapped cheese sandwiches, which I’d surreptitiously assembled from our final meal in the captain’s mess, on the floor behind my seat. Even Bernard, who likes to pretend everything is status quo, is joyful. As he goes through his now-I’m-preparing-to-drive ritual, he wriggles around in the seat like a puppy released from its crate, smiles to himself as he places his fingerless black leather driving gloves on his lap. He inspects the glove compartment, patting the sheath holding his long blade knife, shimmies his shoulders as he adjusts his seat forward and then back, as if checking whether the sea legs he acquired during the 1,100 nautical miles (1,260 land miles) between Puerto Montt and Punta Arenas are the same length as the legs he left land with three days ago. Glancing left and right, his good humor is momentarily blackened when he realizes the rear-view mirror is askew. He’s like Papa Bear, concerned someone’s been sitting in his seat. “I knocked it with my head just now,” I tell him. “When I got in the car.” Instantly he’s relieved, toggling it back into place, flexing his hands into the gloves. We’re ready.
Clanking down the Evangelistas’s gangplank, we head north to Torres del Paine National Park. If I wanted to be purely geological, and if I were able to pronounce obscure terminology, I would tell you that a large swath of the Paine mountains is made of Cretaceous sedimentary rocks intruded by a Miocene-aged laccolith, between five to twenty-three million years before I was born. And that in the case of Las Torres, a thick cloak of sedimentary rock layer has eroded away, leaving behind gleaming obelisks of more resistant granite. These statements would be accurate, but wouldn’t convey the jaw-dropping, eye-rolling, hair-grabbing splendor of the place.
Probably only Switzerland’s Matterhorn is as iconic an image as the Torres del Paine. The shape and character of these massive, pale gray spires are unmistakable. There’s nothing else like them in the world. They erupt straight from the pampas to a level that would equal the rise of Everest from its base camp. The pampas themselves are only a few hundred feet above sea level and there are no gentle foothills here. We’re talking granite and we’re talking vertical. The immense glaciers Grey, Dickson, and Tyndall have eroded the spires over eons, in the process dropping rock powder into lakes that are now milky aquamarine and teal jewels.
Torres del Paine is a hiker’s mecca, a fisherman’s dream. I can do neither. Because of my toe, painful and bandaged since the nail was surgically removed at the Catholic hospital in Pucón on Lake Villarrica, I’m not fit for the former, and I know nothing about the latter. What I do know is that pampas mean gauchos. Or to be correct, since we’re in Chile, huasos. Where there are huasos there are cows, in this case Herefords, just like at home. And where there are cows and huasos, there must be horses. That’s all to the good because at this point, the only thing I can do is ride.
When we reach our hotel, we immediately add it to our secret society, the one we’ve started calling CASA—Chilean Association of Stunning Architecture. It’s vast, airy, and whitewashed, with walls of windows framing perfect views of the Cerro Paine across the aquamarine waters of Lake
Pehoé. The bathroom in our room is another wonder, with a cutout in the granite wall so even in the shower we don’t have to miss one moment of awe-inspiring beauty. It’s so genius it demands to be used immediately. I stand in the shower with my bandaged toe propped on the wall, explaining to Bernard why our trip will end right here, because I will be taking a shower forever.
Now that we’re actually in prime hiking country, and I can’t hike, some negotiation is needed. It’s generally a disaster if I organize Bernard’s time for him. He goes along with the plan because he’s courteous, but then he doesn’t enjoy what we do and we wind up grousing at each other. I don’t blame him for being this way. I’m the same. Sometimes I even wonder whether he might not have learned the “polite now, crabby later” thing from me. Still, I’ve been so unusually chipper and stoic that it could be Bernard thinks I’m healed and is expecting we’ll be hiking together to the base of the Torres.
“So, Bernard, what do you want to do?”
“I don’t know. Don’t really care actually. It’s beautiful here. I’m up for anything. What do you want to do?” This is the way activity discussions always start between us, with each bowing and scraping in front of the other, firmly expressing how little our own needs matter—which is a big lie.
“All I can do is ride, but that makes me happy. So that’s what I’m going to do every day. This is prime horse country you know, so they’ve got to have good horses.”
