Savage Tongues

by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

  I arrived at the BBC in Bristol for my scheduled interview only to discover that no one knew who I was. I heard the security guard announce my name over the telephone several times with a doubtful tone that quickly turned to confusion. I heard several versions of my name, all of them genuine but failed attempts at pronouncing it correctly. I thought of the desk manager at the hotel. Perhaps, I thought, smiling to myself, the pair should consult with each other; maybe then they’d get it right.

  “Yes,” the guard had said. “That’s the name.” His tone suddenly became hushed. “It’s very long, I know.” At that point, he began referring to me as either “young woman” or “young lady.”

  There’s nothing I despise more than being referred to as a young lady. I am in my late thirties. There’s nothing young about me, though I have a baby face. It’s the face of my father, a man-child in his eighties who still has a full head of hair and all his teeth. The same man who once told me that my face would be my biggest asset precisely because it is so deceptive.

  “No one,” he’d said, “would suspect your age or your level of maturity; it’s the best form of camouflage. It’s always best,” he’d said to me time and again, “to be underestimated.”

  All these years later, I still don’t know what he meant. Did he mean I would be better off in the world if I appeared to be naïve? How could I appear to be naïve and feel dignified at the same time? It seemed he was telling me that in order to survive I needed to act weak, stupid, like an empty receptacle. That I should hide my strengths in order to avoid making others—men, most likely—uncomfortable. For a time, I took the advice to heart; I avoided appearing too self-possessed. And somewhere along the line, I began to feel a gap grow inside of me between my thoughts and emotions and my behavior. I began to make choices that undermined my own instincts, my own judgments. I became suspicious of myself, afraid of exposing who I really was. This pattern of turning against myself became habitual. It took me years to understand that what my father was telling me was never to raise my voice in protest, never to articulate my demands or assert whatever I thought would be more just, equitable, respectful than the status quo. He’d infantilized me; maybe acting as if I were still a child was a way of excusing himself, of letting himself believe that there might still be time to parent me. But, of course, tomorrow never arrived. Omar, too, had wanted a child—not an adolescent and certainly not an adult; he’d wanted a child, a child with an unsuspecting heart and a smooth, pure face. I had known exactly how to play the part.

  I heard “a young lady” again as I was finally escorted back to the BBC studio through a series of revolving glass doors—but only after I’d spent a good forty minutes waiting in the lobby. I’d sat on a red couch eating peanuts from a bowl set on a laminated white coffee table and watching on a large-screen television a spectacular drama between a husband and a wife who’d lost her mind after a terrible accident and now felt persecuted by large shadowy figures that weren’t, in actuality, there. I couldn’t figure out what the originating trauma had been. Her words were barely audible through her sobs. Her voice was muffled, her lines indistinguishable from her delirious screams.

  I walked behind the producer through rows and rows of poorly lit cubicles, listening to the warble produced by a considerable mass of people working alongside one another, answering phones, sending emails, confirming appointments, checking facts, all of them packed into a small space underground, a windowless room that kept the distant drone of traffic at bay.

  “So what’s your name again?” the producer asked once we were in the recording studio, her eyes scanning three large screens that had been placed adjacent to one another on a large steel desk. I dreaded telling her. I couldn’t bear to hear my name turned into a butchered, fragmented sequence of words while she looked at me with a pleading gaze.

  Her hand reached for the phone. She was about to pass the baton to someone else. By then, the time of my appointment had come and gone. There was no point in lingering there any longer; I was beginning to lose patience, defeated by the notion that even if my voice aired on the radio there was no telling that anyone would be listening at the other end anyway. I was drowning in a deep sense of futility, exhausted from repeating my name and hearing it repeated back to me as if the world couldn’t quite wrap its mind around the basic fact of my existence; frankly, neither could I. I put my hand over hers and asked her to let it go, told her I wanted to leave, that I needed to go out for a cigarette and a walk. “Maybe next time,” I said.

  “But you’re here,” she said. “Let’s make something of it.”

  Backup arrived in the form of a tall overweight man wearing a greasy shirt. He was the man who had committed to and swiftly forgotten our appointment. He offered to get me on air so I could introduce myself and my book, said he would give me a few minutes of his time to do so. He kept waving his bloated hand around, saying, “Why not just introduce yourself?”

  To whom? I wanted to bark back, but I held the words in and instead said no, kindly at first, then firmly. I had sworn off doing other people’s jobs for them, or that was my objective—an impossible project tied to a ridiculous hope of being reborn. A foolish wish to be free from the demands of other people, untouched by our human shortcomings, our imperfections.

  Then I turned on my heels and left. Dusk had fallen. The sky was an electric-blue dome lit from below by the streetlights. The city looked like a jewel. I walked back to the hotel, down the hills of Bristol, with the river, steely and cold, always within view.

  I looked through the rectangular window of the bus at the azure sky that glowed with the light of a stubborn Mediterranean sun. The sun looked to me like a hole that had been punched in the sky through which a bright light that exposed our collective despair, our thirst and hunger, shone. I woke Ellie up again. I told her we were there, that we had actually arrived at the correct destination. I could hardly believe it. I had returned. Soon I would have to climb up the stairs to the apartment, Ellie trailing behind me, my heart in my mouth, beating in an awful way. I felt feverish, terrified that Omar would be there, still forty and handsome and tall, smiling seductively, ready to whisper in my ear, to say again and again—I can still hear his voice, low but firm, carrying a controlled anger palpable to me only now—“I want you naked as the day you were born.”

  4

  IT WAS STILL EARLY IN THE SEASON. After lying empty and exposed to the tides of winter, the streets were renewed by the arrival of foreign tourists, Arab sheiks, Spaniards who kept summer apartments by the sea. The local shopkeepers had stocked and decorated their shelves, thrown their polished windows open to let in the warm air, which trembled with the prospect of money. The early summer light was brilliant, luminous, incandescent. The palms and aloes with their green arching leaves thick with water, the white stucco walls of the homes set squarely against one another, the thick, papery bougainvillea that crawled across the city’s surfaces like mouths painted rouge, like kisses turned toward the vivid blue of the sky—all of it screamed yes to life. We made our way through the crowd. We maneuvered our suitcases around elderly women dressed in modest pale peaches and purples and sequined flat shoes, around children playfully walking their dogs. Parents trailed languorously behind, occasionally yelling words of caution at their children, who were full of zest for the lazy pleasures of summer. We walked alongside the old straw-colored walls of the city, puckered with cavernous holes that resisted the bright, eager light. We stopped a few times, breathless, and set down our suitcases to listen to the cawing of the crows, the whining of the seagulls.

  Eventually, all that remained of our journey was to cross the promenade that ran parallel to the old Arab walls, walk across the cut-granite pavement, the pink and gray stone shimmering in the gleam of the sun. I felt heavy. Across the way, the light seemed to have been sucked from the sky; darkness abided over our building. It sat on a narrow, crooked street in cold shade. As I took in its smog-stained walls, its blistering paint and cracked terra
ces artlessly stacked on top of one another, I felt a dreadful stirring. An acidic terror stung my throat. It was a feeling that had stirred in me then, too, during that most terrible summer of my life, its darkest dawn, when the hours had passed under the Spanish sky with no one watching over me.

  On we went. We walked up the steep, curved road flanked on either side by cars parked nose to tail, their wheels pulled up on the sidewalk to leave room for passing traffic. All at once, we made our way through the heavy doors of the building into its cool dim interior. The light in the lobby was wounded, bleak. There was a deadly silence. It was midafternoon. The neighbors were likely napping or sprawled out on the sand at the beach. The only footfalls were ours, and yet I felt certain that I was being followed, tracked at a distance. I kept turning to look behind us. When I pressed the elevator button, I felt Omar’s hand reaching through mine as if our bodies were superimposed; for a moment, my limbs filled with lead. All of the energy and vitality and strength I’d cultivated over the years drained out of me. I felt the pressure of his finger against the illuminated call button and a cold shiver rushed down my spine. I could hear Ellie breathing behind me. I wasn’t alone, I reminded myself. No, not this time. I stubbornly held up my head in the face of rising horror. I thought, I’ve come this far; I’m not going to turn around now, to reverse my steps as I should have done then.

  The elevator arrived with a disconcerting thump and its old doors jerked open. The structure was rusty; the hinges squeaked as we rose through the floors, an uncertain, hollow sound, an eerie drone that unleashed a feeling of vertigo within me. I closed my eyes.

  “Everything is okay,” Ellie reassured. “I’m here with you.”

  I heard her words echo against the metal walls of that narrow vault. The elevator halted and bounced on the traction cords before the doors lunged open again. We pushed our way through and stood quietly on the landing, our belongings in tow.

  “Which one is it?” Ellie asked, as her eyes glided down the hall.

  “This one,” I said. “Door H.” I moved closer to its wooden frame and examined the golden H that had been drilled into the wood. When I’d come here before, when I’d first seen that letter, which appeared to me now like two Is joined together by a knife or a dagger, I’d lost my way in the world. Returning to it now, I was tense, fearful. It’s just a door, I told myself, a door like any other, made of wood, adorned with a knocker. It had a peephole installed at eye level. I remembered looking through it and seeing Omar for the first time. The concave glass distended his face and curved the corridor. I should have known what he was capable of there and then. I should have sensed the brutality simmering in the depths of his soul from the expression on his face, distorted as it appeared through the peephole, from the way he’d moaned when he let go of the envelope with my allowance, meager as it was, always late, arriving only after I’d been thoroughly gripped by the despair of not having enough.

  Ellie stood beside me. “We’re in this together,” she said. It was her second attempt at ushering me in. I could hear the consolation in her voice.

  I took the key out of my pocket, inserted it in the lock, and turned. The door swung open with a strange force, as if its hinges were loose; or maybe it had a will of its own, had been wanting to open for a long time, to welcome my body back into its hideous entrails so it could feed on fresh blood again.

  An odious air of mold and sewage and dirt rushed out at us. “I promise no one died here,” I said to Ellie, forcing a smile.

  “Death comes in many forms,” she said. “What you went through was a kind of death.”

  I said that I supposed she was right, that I’d died a death in that apartment. I couldn’t bring myself to move. My feet were firmly planted in the foyer. The longer I stood there, the more convinced I became that no time had passed since I’d last arrived at this point. Or that time had passed—it had acquired new dimensions, I’d lived new experiences—but everything that had happened between Omar and me was still in the process of becoming, as though that summer had never found its due place in the grand flow of my life. The events of that summer—that summer of lust and trepidation in the Costa del Sol—were continuous. They were stubbornly rupturing the sallow crust of time to call me back to this apartment, this apartment where I’d been ravished by Omar, strategically consumed—groomed, some might say—this same apartment with its low ceiling and stained walls, the faint smell of sewage that rose from the floors every time I flushed the toilet.

  I could hardly believe that I was there. The apartment had been waiting for two decades, neglected and yet more or less intact. As I stood in the entryway, I realized that the apartment was a map of my wound. The apartment, I thought, looking around in disbelief, with its emptiness, its dirt, its false appearance as a home. This apartment where I’d arranged my body, exposed it to Omar’s terrible desire to drink from my mouth, to stroke my limbs.

  My eye caught the answering machine, a white plastic box covered with grime and dust, its surface, I could see even from across the room, sticky from disuse. I remembered unplugging it because I was sick of its little red light flashing every day. I was avoiding my mother even though she was all alone in the world. She’d left message after message for me, the despair in her voice rising to panic, pleading for me to call her, to pick up, to stop torturing her. The memory of those words, the knowledge that I’d hardened in Omar’s company, acted cruelly toward myself and my mother, the woman who made me, was a stab to my heart. I was disgusted with myself.

  I watched Ellie forge ahead through the silent hallways and rooms, and considered how incapable I’d been, how incapable I remained, of fully grasping my adolescent impulses. For years I hadn’t talked to anyone about what had happened. I could barely admit the facts to myself. They settled in the bottom of my mind like sediment, and I did my utmost not to disturb them. But the air of my life was murky, full of dirt and dust and fog. For years, I deceived myself with a story I could live with; instead of acknowledging that Omar had taken advantage of my naïveté and innocence, I wove together a hard-edged story that celebrated my perversions and recklessness. Perhaps, I considered, both stories were true. Perhaps my aberrations existed alongside my vulnerabilities; perhaps they appeared as dichotomous traits when in reality they informed one another.

  I remembered how Omar had leaned against the refrigerator, how he’d stared at me with his brazen gaze; he was a man preparing for conquest, a fact I could see so clearly now but had not known to look for then. I heard the deep, heaving gurgle of the sea. The sound droned in my ear, and for a moment, I was convinced that the apartment would soon be underwater, that a great big tidal wave was going to crash over its unmopped floors and wash the whole thing away. I heard a heavy clambering behind me; heat spread across my back. It was Omar. I was sure of it. This apartment was his waystation. A part of him had died here, too. He was still in the apartment, dead and yet walking, clambering down the hall, living out his death alongside my former self, the part of me that had died servicing his needs. I shivered at the thought of it. I closed my eyes. I felt his hot breath against my back, his hand wrapping around the nape of my neck. I could hardly breathe. I wanted to scream but couldn’t. He spoke to me through his teeth. He was breathless, his tone insinuating. “Don’t lie,” I heard him say. “You’re not a virgin.” I gasped with horror. He’d said those words to me so often that I’d believed him. I felt a bitter pain spread in my chest. It was the sediment of the past rising to the surface. I had to force myself to step farther into the apartment, to breathe. My throat ached. I called Ellie, but she didn’t hear me. She was moving about the apartment. When she reemerged, she looked at me, astonished, and said: “What happened? All the color’s gone from your face.”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I’m just tired.”

  For a moment, I didn’t know what to do, what more to say. The sound of the ocean had retreated. The heat that had pressed against my back had given way to a chill. The apartment was empty of lif
e again, a hollow container; nothing stirred, not even death.

  “Why don’t you sit for a minute,” Ellie said, and she walked me over to the sofa, the tired old sofa with its worn geometric patterns; I’d hated how dated it was even then. I searched the cushions for impressions of our bodies, Omar’s and mine, indentations where we’d sat or lain down, before taking my place on the edge and resting my head in my hands. Ellie left to grab me some water. I heard her open the cabinet and reach for a glass.

  The problem, I thought, as I waited for her to return, is that I’ll never know how much of that summer was my fault, how complicit I was in my own destruction—was I more reckless or more vulnerable? It was the not knowing that continued to erode my trust in myself. I was trapped in a circuitous mental loop. In Western society, I kept thinking, in the part of the world where I’ve spent my adult years, the accepted narrative is that rape retroactively strips its victims of agency. In order for society to acknowledge that a woman has been raped, she has to be able to prove that she was not complicit in any way, that her will was not divided. You have to give in to the notion that, as a survivor, healing is only possible once you acknowledge your own lack of agency. But I hadn’t been a passive body. No. Not entirely. I had pursued Omar. I had gone after him. I was unaware of the danger I was in. Of his power over me. Each time he’d dropped me off, I’d made sure that he was going to return the next day. I never wondered where he went during the hours he didn’t spend with me—whom he slept with, what he ate or wore, or how he combed his hair. I only cared that he would come back to me soon. I felt desired, wanted. What a fool I’d been.