Savage Tongues
Page 3
I turned back to look at the bride-to-be one last time. Her crown was still on her head, shining under the overhead light. For a moment, I wondered if her partner knew the texture of her pain. If he knew her perversions. If he knew what turned her on, what made her wince, what shut her down. I thought of my husband, Xavi. He wouldn’t have been the best companion on this trip, my first return to Marbella. We didn’t always share the same moral convictions. I was interested in how desire is shaped by the destructive logic of empire, how at times sex facilitates the transmission of historical violence from one body to another. Xavi, however, possessed a purity I’d never be able to access. He experienced sex as a bridge, as union, as an explosive, an exhilarating coming together; I didn’t deny that was so, but that didn’t constitute the entire inventory of my experiences.
Xavi had paid the price for the bruises Omar had left me with. In the year leading up to my return to Marbella, I’d spent months sleepless, waking up in the middle of the night, sobbing, only to chase my grief with days spent remembering my affection for Omar. During those times, I would forget that what I’d experienced as union and tenderness had been, for Omar, a protracted disarmament; he’d lowered my defenses through seduction so he could have his way with me, consume my body, my youth, my fervor for his own satisfaction.
My contradictory, swinging emotions confused Xavi. They stoked his rage at the injustices Omar’s lust had unleashed on my life. His love for me, his desire to protect me, made it difficult for him to sit by my side as I revisited the more pleasant memories of my time with Omar. There was no reasoning with him then. He turned into a wall of anger. He couldn’t entertain any ambiguity in my account of Omar, would only accept a narrative in which he was entirely evil. I resisted the line of thought that Xavi was sure would salvage me from my pain: demonizing Omar in order to purify myself. I had no interest in obliterating the contradictions of the past. To the contrary, I wanted to savor them. Xavi was, I felt, asking me to ignore the nuances of my relationship with Omar, the historical and political terrain that had informed it. He didn’t see that in doing so I would be sacrificing my own sense of self and my ability to articulate that self in language. He didn’t understand, at least initially, how his attitude, pure to the extreme, dispossessed me of my own narrative, my sexuality, my appetite for inquiry, my openness to examining the darkest aspects of human nature, the things most people prefer to look away from. I was left to raise the frightening questions alone. In the process of vilifying Omar, Xavi had unwittingly placed an invisible restriction on my speech; what I needed was an eruption of language. He couldn’t tolerate the idea that I was complicit in my own destruction, that I had weaponized what little agency I had and wielded it against myself.
I wanted to explore my grief, to lick my wounds, but to do so without erasing the burgeoning desire I’d felt at the time or sacrificing Omar to the Western gaze, a gaze eager to perceive him as yet another violent Arab man, a man incapable of reason and restraint, of employing the Victorian ideal handed down to him by his imperial keepers. Xavi’s anger pushed me toward a reading of Omar’s character that seemed only to affirm Western superiority and its repressive code of behavior, a code that served to disguise the rampant sexual violence in the West, the psychotic irrationality of colonialism, the savage brutality of progress.
It’s odd that love so often acts as a barrier rather than a bridge. But so it goes. And yet, over the years, Xavi had come to know my pain. He’d learned it. It was never obvious to him, never legible. He’d studied it as if it were a map. He’d tried to figure out all the main roads, the detours, where they digressed and where they converged, where my pain met my pleasure. He’d tried to hold the most challenging facts of my life, had tried to tease out my conviction that violence and ecstasy often exist on the same terrible continuum. That pain, no matter how unfairly it’s doled out, can be our biggest asset. That conflict can be the source of justice. But as much as we’d come to understand each other, there was always a gap between when I felt something and when he came to grips with it. Our experiences of life were, to put it mildly, extremely different; he’d been dealt his own dose of suffering, but his life had been built of continuities while mine has been a conglomeration of discontinuities, fault lines, chasms. I suppose that he, too, has had to be patient when I’ve been slow to understand his perspective. In those moments, those times when we work to see eye to eye, I try to remind myself that love is sustained attention and I think: I am so lucky; I am so incredibly lucky.
The thought was like a flash flood, quick and unexpected. It jolted me back to life. I felt a rush of pleasure filling my lungs with air. I realized that I was once again staring at the bride. She was gazing sadly at her soiled veil. I reached for my phone and secretly snapped a photo of her with that word—love—stamped to her forehead. I dropped it in a message to Ellie as soon as we deplaned. It would be the first thing she’d see upon landing. I wanted her to chuckle to herself as I had chuckled getting off the plane. I needed her to experience, as precisely as possible, what I was experiencing moment by moment—an impossible thing to do, but I knew that Ellie would get closer than anyone else would be able to; we were born of the same wounded clay, in the same ancient gutters of this fragile world.
2
WE DEPLANED AND THE HOT AIR, dense with moisture, hit me in the face with an urgency that made me feel claimed, spoken for. Here I am, I thought again. I’ve returned to Marbella to face its monstrosities.
The airport atmosphere filled me with a sense of disquiet. Everything appeared magnified in its yolky, oxidized light: the dirt on the marble floors, the vacant gazes of the other passengers, the screech of the conveyor belts, the luggage being thrown at them in even intervals. I felt oddly separate from myself as I walked across the nearly crumbling terminal to an ATM. I needed to take out cash.
I inserted my card into the machine’s illuminated strip and entered my PIN, aware as I punched in the numbers that unlike the last time I was in Marbella I was about to retrieve money that belonged to me, cash that I’d earned through my own labor rather than bills my father had likely borrowed from my stepmother and handed off to a stranger, a relative whom I had never met, but who, soon after delivering the money to me, asserted his dominance over me; I remembered how strapped I’d been, how carefully I’d rationed my food that summer; and just as a procession of images began to run through my mind—the bruised peaches I bought at a discount at the end of the day from the corner store, the bunches of parsley the shop owner gifted me, the butterless bread rolls I ate in the mornings—I saw the face of a man emerge on the screen of the machine, a face that seemed to be attached to my own, that hovered over mine. In the glow of his countenance, I saw my own teenage face looking back at me. She had the gaze of a stranger, a person who was not me, but whose identity was encased within the boundaries of my body. A terrible chill went down my spine. I felt giddy, nauseated. And yet, despite the alienation, the dread and desire I’d experienced as a teenager rose up in me, those old discordant notes of terror and repulsion mixed with a burning hunger to be consumed by Omar, a perverse appetite born of defiance and the sting of my unmet needs. I was afraid Omar was standing behind me, looming over me as he had so many times before. I drew in a breath and was about to turn around to confront him when the ATM beeped and expelled my card with a click. His face disappeared, leaving in its place a message that my request had been denied. I couldn’t get money out of the ATM. I had been refused. I had lapsed back into a state of need, my hand outstretched, a beggar.
I stared at the forbidding screen, my heart beating wildly against my chest. My blood pumped through my limbs with redoubled speed. How foolish I’d been to think that I could return to Marbella without resurrecting my adolescent fragility, the vulnerabilities of youth that I’d hidden for so long behind a facade of contrariness and provocation. I drew in a deep breath. I reinserted my card. Nothing. The machine refused it again.
Despondent, I walked toward th
e exit doors and into the assaulting heat. The sun had broken through the cloud cover, was beating harshly down onto the asphalt of the parking lot. The buses and cars seemed to be quivering, turning into liquid gas where their frames met the horizon. It occurred to me that what, as a teenager, I’d thought of as rebellion was in fact a deranged form of submission, a readiness to conform to the aberrant needs of others—specifically to Omar’s. He’d had a fervent need to consume me, a need that I’d tragically interpreted as love when it had, I could see now, surged forth from an infinite well of sorrow and secrecy at the center of his life, an abyss that had drawn me to him with a magnetic force.
I had ten pounds left in my pocket. I walked to the money exchange kiosk next to the bar and changed them into euros. I needed to steady my nerves. The rugged elegance of Omar’s face had impressed itself deep into my subconscious; I knew that if I wasn’t careful it would reappear in the haunted stage of my mind every time I closed my eyes, just as it had on the screen. I thought about the fact that my teenage self existed in fossilized form within me and that I was loping around the world with her dead weight. I wondered if she returned to Omar’s mind, too. I pictured him recalling the smell of my body, my unresolved adolescent gestures, my mercurial facial expressions that shifted from defiance to an almost infantile smile, a wide-open and stupid grin that made me wince with shame. He must have felt such pleasure at the thought of the two of us together, such self-satisfaction for having gotten away with the crime. But for all I knew, Omar was dead; he could have died years ago. Or if he hadn’t died, if he was still alive and well, breathing in the brackish Mediterranean air, there was no knowing if we’d even recognize each other. I had no idea what he looked like these days, and my face, I considered—while thinking on a parallel plane of my mind that I could use a beer and a cigarette—had changed beyond recognition. I was no longer the open-faced girl I’d once been.
I crossed the sidewalk to the bar. I needed to distract myself, to pass the time while I waited for Ellie to land. It had been so long since I’d ordered a beer in Spain, since I’d looked at a bartender and said, “Ponme una caña.” I loved saying that word, caña, loved thinking of all of its literal meanings—cane, leg, bone. After all, there I was in Marbella again, twenty years later, waiting for Ellie to show up, Ellie who had said, “Arezu, you might need an extra limb to lean on while you’re out there.” It was true. I needed all the limbs I could get. I couldn’t even get money out of the ATM. I’d been in Marbella for a quarter of an hour and already I was being stalled.
I took my place in the long line that had formed around the bar, behind tourists who were mispronouncing their orders, pointing at items tastefully laid out in the glass case, little ham sandwiches and pan con chocolate, willing the server to understand their demands. They nodded gleefully once they’d succeeded, satisfied at having communicated without employing language. It was a well-rehearsed guessing game; I enjoyed the exaggerated theatrics of the charade.
For me, it’s Omar who robs me of words. What I experienced that summer may ultimately be resistant to language; the most terrible parts may forever remain unspeakable. I watched the bartender pour pints of cold blond beer into tipped glasses, the foam spilling over the edge. In a sense, the excess of pain and pleasure that I had accessed through Omar at such a premature time of life had obliterated me. How, I wondered, watching the bartender wipe the rim of the glass with a wet cloth, does one transcribe onto paper an experience of annihilation? Of erasure? Of having been forced to vanish, to evacuate oneself in order to survive the brutal event? How does one document in language an experience of pain so totalizing that it refuses the fixed nature of words altogether?
The line for the bar moved and I moved along with it. I thought to myself, I have returned to Marbella to conduct emotional fieldwork, to turn the soil with a plow and unearth the past, loosen its hold on the person I had become. My feelings in general and my feelings about Omar in particular had ossified. It had been years since I’d shed a tear over what had happened between us. The tremor I’d felt as I saw his reflection come forward on the screen—his long lashes, his black curls, his dark skin and large green eyes—was a reminder of the energy I’d felt with him, as menacing as it was hypnotic, the first indication of the emotional turbulence ahead and an affirmation that beneath the hard surface of denial I’d constructed around myself, my defense mechanism against the private catastrophes of my life, a subterranean network of toxic emotion continued to circulate.
“What will you do if all of the feelings you’ve been suppressing come out at once?” Ellie asked me as we’d prepared for the trip. “Who will remind you that your story with Omar already happened, that it isn’t happening again?”
“My story with Omar,” I’d said to her, “will always be happening; it will always be unfolding because it runs parallel to my life, a wild boar snapping at my heels”—and I remembered, in a terrible instant, the baby wild boar Omar had captured high up in the mountains. A second shiver went down my spine. Oh, that wild boar! I heard her high-pitched squeals of terror as though she were still trapped in the backpack Omar had shoved her into, the backpack he’d forced me to wear. I felt my back grow hot with her hurried breaths. Beneath her piercing screams I heard the echo of my moans in response to Omar’s touch. I felt queasy. Those noises, mine and the wild boar’s, had doubled Omar’s power; we had used our voices to express his dominance over us. His internal life, his desires and needs, had extended beyond the boundaries of his body onto ours and outward again through our screams of pain and pleasure. I felt as though I were being strangled, as though an invisible hand were exerting pressure on my heart, filling my throat with blood, drowning my voice.
I needed a beer, some water, anything to counteract the heat that was rising through my esophagus. My turn at the bar finally came. I ordered the beer and some sliced watermelon for good measure. I sat in front of the television set hanging over the bar. A young man was being interviewed. He was sitting on a wooden chair in a dim room at a breakfast nook covered in an embroidered tablecloth; he kept leaning forward to speak. He had a tortured look on his face; he was trying to pry the words out of his chest, to cough them up. Eventually, the interviewer, who remained off screen, spoke over him. They had found his girlfriend dead, discarded behind a bush, her pants pulled down to her knees, her thighs and arms bruised, her fingers chopped off. I kept hearing the words violent assault, dismemberment, rape.
“How are you coping? What’s helping you move on?” the interviewer asked. He repeated the first question a few times; his tone, initially urgent, went slack by the third time around.
Perhaps, I thought, the faceless interviewer, comfortably seated out of view, was beginning to see that there was no answer or that, given the circumstances, the questions he was asking were too pointed, too accusatory; that this young man’s power had died with his girlfriend, had been converted into the instrument of another man’s will. The interviewer’s questions only served to assassinate whatever remained of the boyfriend’s privacy, his sense of control over his own life. The boyfriend was being asked to resolve his grief efficiently and deliberately, to comfort us, to provide us with hope and insight despite the blinding darkness that had consumed him. He was being asked to tell us all how to survive the death of a loved one, a death caused by spontaneous, lurid violence, a death that kills the grievers as it does the grieved, maims and cripples. It was preposterous, callously insensitive. It takes time, I thought, a whole lifetime, to learn how to move forward with our lives after being thrown in such close proximity to mortality without degrading or ignoring the losses we’ve suffered.
Finally, the interviewer went silent. In that silence, the young man retrieved his words.
“She fought back,” he said. It was clear that this gave him comfort. That he was proud of how his girlfriend had handled herself in those final moments of her life, that despite losing the battle she’d left him with the knowledge that she’d stood her ground, th
at she’d kicked and screamed and tried to strangle her attacker. Her belief in her dignity, her value and sense of self-worth in the face of a brutal, unjust death, gave him solace.
I hadn’t known to fight back. I hadn’t known enough to know to stand my ground. Or perhaps there was no ground beneath my feet in the first place; the ground had been dug, hollowed out, replaced by a trapdoor that led to further violence. Or maybe I’d only known the wrong things: betrayal, rejection, loss. After all, my own father had washed his hands of me. He’d sent another man to do his job for him, and that man, upon seeing that I was alone, without any protection, inserted himself into my life, forever changing its shape and the composition of my character. He’d obliterated what little trust I’d had in the world, altered the way I perceive other people; now I’m often overcome with a sense of disgust at the sight of other people; I see right through to the animal nature hiding just beneath our suits and makeup and ironed hair. We are, I consider, deeply disturbed and exquisitely deranged in those moments. We’ve tried so hard to transcend our basest instincts, to deny them, to pretend they aren’t there, that we engage in a process of apparent refinement, a spectacle of our supposed progress. Progress, modernity, openness—that triumvirate of lies that guards the Western front against the absence of civilization that supposedly plagues the East.