I gave Ellie a knowing look then walked past her into the bathroom. I needed to wash my face. The bathroom, narrow, rectangular, windowless, smelled damp with mold. The mirror had lost its shine. I looked at myself. I looked eaten with exhaustion. I remembered seeing my face staring back at me helplessly from that mirror before, my mouth stretched into a painful grimace. I’d been hungry. I thought of all of the figs Omar and I had eaten that summer, of all the times we’d pulled to the side of the mountain roads on his Ducati and removed our helmets to pluck fruit from the trees. We’d fed them to each other. We’d been happy, happy at the expense of my future self.
I wondered if that younger version of myself had known the power she’d ultimately wield, if she’d known then that I’d be accountable to her for the rest of my life, pushing myself to my limits trying to retrieve her from the abysmal well she’d found herself in. I wanted to tell Ellie that after the first terrible time when Omar had forced himself on me, trapped me the way he’d trapped that wild boar and had his way, I’d gone back for more until it became the most natural thing in the world. I wanted to tell her that my memories of the time I’d spent with Omar outside of the bedroom felt nebulous and disjointed, that I needed to remember more than the earthy taste of Omar’s cock, the sour smell of his sperm, the way it spilled onto his belly when he came, soaking his pubes, making his skin glow in the dim light of all of the rooms we’d ever exchanged fluids in. But I couldn’t find my voice, and besides, Ellie was already intimately familiar with my story. And in any case, she had stories of her own.
She had witnessed firsthand the power sex has to destroy, to decimate, to stifle. She’d left home at fifteen, unable to withstand the severity of her parents, the surveillance culture of the wider Orthodox community, the oppression bearing down on her body, the covenants policing her sex, curbing her desires. She’d lived on the streets for a year, sleeping under bridges huddled together with other runaways, relying on strangers’ leftovers, which she stole off the tables at sidewalk cafés. She moved in with a man halfway through the year. An older man in his twenties who was far more sexually experienced than she was; he’d insisted that in exchange for a warm bed and shelter she had to sleep with all of his friends and she’d done it. She had removed herself from her body. She had floated above herself or stood beside herself and watched this other curly-haired girl twist her body to conform to the needs of others. She told me that a few times this girl, this other girl, had lifted her face as if she were searching for Ellie but that her gaze had been vacant, that she’d stared emptily at something behind Ellie, that after that Ellie had removed herself altogether from the room. “I’d been remorseless toward myself, unforgiving,” she’d said to me once. She’d spent years in therapy sewing together all of her dissonant parts. She’d become convinced that the Israelis’ unacknowledged violence against the Palestinians—the repressed fear and guilt and grief of protecting one’s life at the expense of another’s—was erroneously expressed through sexual aggression. Sex, she believed, had become a way for the lost youth of that dense, troubled land to work through the cycle of violence and inherited fear that had shaped their lives, entrapped them. As Ellie walked into the bathroom and stood behind me, her plastic peach-colored makeup bag in hand, I remembered that we’d walked past the cafés that she’d stolen cold French fries and half-eaten falafel from and that we’d realized then that anything that has the ability to create life has the capacity to exterminate it in equal or greater measure. We had talked about the fact that sex could simultaneously create life and extinguish it, that people were either in denial of its power or terrified of it, that the closest Western society had come to acknowledging its influence was its romanticization of motherhood and procreation, a facet of femininity neither one of us was particularly interested in.
I took in Ellie’s face in the mirror. I tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t rise up through my chest. There was something in my throat holding them down. I could feel the accumulated pressure of all of the tears I hadn’t shed. Some understanding was taking shape: that the constriction in my throat was likely a result of my silence, a silence that had become habitual, that had shut me down, cut me off from myself.
I had tried my whole life to recover my relationship to language. I had tried through writing to arrive at the totalizing quality of torture, its capacity to destroy speech, to exterminate the contents of one’s consciousness, to turn reality itself—all of the concrete objects of one’s life (walls, underwear, couches) into participants in one’s destruction. But I wasn’t sure that I’d found adequate language for my pain. I wasn’t even sure that a structure built of words was capable of containing it.
Ellie was now busy applying her lipstick. She was leaning so far into the mirror that I could see her pores. Behind her, I saw myself, and I saw my child’s face come forward alongside my reflection. She regarded me from the space of the mirror with a remote, contemptuous gaze that terrified me. Her anger and her shame were palpable. My heart began to beat furiously. In the lineaments of her face, I saw, for a brief moment, the flickering image of who I would have become had I stayed in this apartment. I saw a ravaged, wounded face, her eyes leaking and as blue as bruises, her hair thin and brittle, her teeth yellowed and chipped. She was all grief, all remorse, all helplessness. Then the frozen rictus of that face slid away and my child’s face returned, a helpless, pleading expression on her face.
“You don’t look good,” Ellie said. “Why don’t you rest. You need to lie down.”
It was true. I looked as white as chalk. I thought of my younger self. I couldn’t believe how much darker my skin had been then, how much lighter my eyes appeared. I’d looked so much more like my mother. My mother to whom I’d barely spoken that summer.
I left the bathroom quietly. I told Ellie I needed to be alone. I still didn’t dare open the door to my old room, so I returned to the window in the living room and lit a cigarette. My hand was shaking. The couch with its geometric patterns looked to me even more aged than it had moments before. I noticed that the legs of the wicker coffee table had come undone, and there were bits of straw missing, likely due to the humidity or the salt coming off the sea or some rodent that had run freely through our family wreckage. I stood at the window. I took a few long drags and held the smoke in my chest. The nicotine steadied my nerves. As I smoked, I considered the fact that my adolescent years had been dulled by the same sinking silence that still grabbed hold of me. The rest of my adolescence, the years that came after Omar had had his way with me—after he’d made it impossible for me to know who I would have become without his leaning into me with all of his weight—were muted by my encounter with him. I’d spent those years unsure which parts of me had come from me and which had come from him. There was no way of measuring my sense of self without also accounting for Omar, for his darkness, for the ways in which he’d been tarnished by the demands others had imposed on him—to be a friend and a father to his mother, who’d been widowed during the Lebanese civil war, to show courage despite his own growing trepidation at such a young age—demands that had escalated when he’d graduated into adulthood, which he’d likely been too weak to either fulfill or refute. And so, in his cowardice, he’d turned around and placed those demands on me.
I heard Ellie call after me in a benevolent, admiring tone.
“I’m fine,” I told her, lifting the cigarette to my lips. I remembered that throughout high school, I’d watched other students as they slung their backpacks over their shoulders and walked the corridors, as they changed confidently in the locker rooms and leapt into the chlorinated waters of the pool for training. I’d watched them as they pulled their cars into the school parking lot, as they applied their lipstick during lunch, as they struggled to recover from a weekend of binge drinking. I could feel them asking themselves, Who am I? I could see them shaping an identity for others to adore. They were crafting a life, carefully curating their habits, exhibiting their most desirable traits, a priv
ilege that had been stolen from me, my ability to compose my own identity eclipsed by Omar.
Or perhaps, I considered, inhaling the sweet warm scent of tobacco, I hadn’t so much as lost the ability to ask who I was as I had lost the ability to decide what the answer would be. Who I was in the process of becoming had been interrupted by Omar. My life had collided with his. Only his life, by virtue of being larger, had steered mine; it had influenced the course of my barely formed life more forcefully than mine had influenced his. I had misjudged him terribly, his motivations, his ruthless desire to satisfy his personal needs, to allow me to believe he was in love with me; I’d been so wrong about him that the rest of my life became incomprehensible to me. I didn’t trust my sense of anyone, of what other people wanted from me, or from others, or from themselves.
I smoked my cigarette and enumerated certain facts that I’d begun to understand as integral to my relationship with Omar—my father’s absence, his emotional debt to my melodramatic stepmother, Omar’s own disappeared father (his body was never found), the civil war in Lebanon, my father’s Orientalism, the poverty in which he’d been raised in the East End of London, my mother’s hatred toward my stepmother. All of that, I was realizing with greater lucidity, was central to our story; we were caught in a series of powerful social dynamics, our bodies conduits for all of the toxic energies flowing through the fabric of our blended families. Omar and I were merely the denouement, the final act of a generations-long psychic play. I was the sacrificial lamb in a humiliating stage set not only by my parents but also by the two supposedly absolute hemispheres of good and evil from which they originated. So Omar, I considered, as I finished my cigarette, had acted on me in private but had certainly not acted on me alone.
My gaze shifted flatly across the surfaces of the apartment. Everything was caked in dirt. Nothing had been spared. I looked at the television set, its concave glass thick with dust, the antenna bent and hanging between the console and the wall. I glanced again at the answering machine, imagined my mother’s voice trapped inside. I could hear people walking outside; cars, motorcycles, and buses navigating the narrow streets; shops closing their doors, drawing their metal shutters, turning their locks. I could hear the ebb and flow of the city, the even, familiar tempo of noise rising and retreating. But it was as if I were listening to it all from afar.
I put my cigarette out and returned to the window. Dusk was beginning to flood the sky, to unload the day’s burdens. A soft auburn glow hung over the silvery roads of Marbella. I watched the wind shear the palm fronds that lined the tiled boulevard from the city center down to the sea. I closed my eyes and listened to the wind moving through the leaves. It was a sound I loved. I opened the windows even wider. The wind we’d felt in Málaga was lifting again, a damp, brackish air that carried with it the scent of jasmine, oranges, four o’clock flowers.
I could hear Ellie moving about the kitchen. I heard her open the refrigerator door.
“It smells like mold in here,” she announced.
“What did you think it would smell like?” I asked as jovially as I could.
I stuck my face in the wind and let the air wash over me. There I was in Marbella, I reiterated, as if in disbelief. Marbella, beautiful sea. There I was, caught once again in its savage beauty.
“Should we go get some groceries?” Ellie asked.
“In a minute,” I said.
It suddenly dawned on me that Omar might still be in Marbella, living up near the lakes in the Sierra Blanca where his first transgressions had taken place; that he was more than likely still there, fishing, laying down traps for the birds, catching baby wild boars with his bare hands. Or perhaps, I suddenly considered, he was dead and it was his ghost that lingered behind. I considered hiking up those hills, going in search of him, confronting him once and for all, levying him to the same turbulence and rage to which he’d subjected me.
I couldn’t understand why I had so rarely considered the possibility of his death. His actual death. How rarely I’d considered that he might have exited this world. Somewhere along the line, I thought, I must have come to believe that, were he to die, I would know, that I would have intuited it, that some part of me would have died with him. His death would open a space inside me for the winds of the cosmos to rush into, and the air would burn, burn the way a wound burns when it’s prematurely exposed to the elements. But I had no idea if Omar was dead or alive. I only assumed he was alive because I hadn’t heard otherwise. I’d heard other news of him here and there. He’d had an accident, a terrible accident, an accident the details of which I can barely consider even now because it had happened so soon after that summer, on a windy fall day, and I’d still loved him then. I pined for him and he refused to pick up the phone, to hear me, to have anything to do with me; the pain of being cut off from him was searing. Everything else I knew of him I knew from my stepmother, from details she would share in passing, a sarcastic, mocking smile on her face. I knew that he’d gone to South America, that he’d grown a beard, a long, wild beard, and been arrested at the US-Mexico border in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 because his profile too closely resembled that of an Islamist terrorist’s. That was when I learned that Omar was a pilot. That he’d gone to school in Germany, the same school that the terrorists who’d piloted their way into the Twin Towers had attended.
Ellie’s voice came at me from behind. She was saying something about there not being any coffee in the house, insisting that we leave the apartment immediately before all of the shops closed because if there’s one thing she hated it was waking up in a house with no coffee.
I told her to go ahead without me. She left suddenly, anxiously, in a manner that suggested she was irritated with my smoking and perhaps even, if only momentarily, with my shell-shocked face.
“Don’t forget the keys,” I said.
“Just buzz me in,” she said, closing the door behind her.
I heard her say the door was rotten, then I heard her footsteps as she made her way down the marble corridor, the steps that opened up to the lobby and the dark crooked street beyond. I walked through the apartment flipping light switches. Most of the bulbs were out, but every second room seemed to have one that still worked. I noticed the stains on the walls had darkened. It looked as though blood had pooled throughout the apartment: near the baseboards, on the ceiling, beneath the frames of the windows. Blood seemed to be running down the walls like ink on paper; I felt the trace of it trickling down my limbs and nearly gasped in horror. I tried to regain my focus. I couldn’t be sure the buzzer worked, so I returned to the window to watch for Ellie. I gazed at the old stone walls of Marbella, at the hyacinth bushes and the palms, the aloes and the interlaced trunks of the palms, the serrated edges of the Arabic fortress, the shadows of the seagulls that flew over the chipped wheat-colored stone. I considered again that I needed to enter my old room. I’d watched Omar bury his broad face and drink from between my legs in that room. The first time it happened, I’d stood there, just as Ellie described, dumb, mute, a little astonished. He’d spoken to me violently, his face hard, severe. He’d closed the door behind him, had blocked it off with his body; he was large enough to crush me. I understood then what was about to happen. My legs gave out and I fell back on the bed. “Good,” he’d said. “Good. That’s exactly where you should be.”
I remembered his powerful chest, his broad shoulders. I remembered considering the texture of the curtains as he worked his way up to my breasts. I’d torn those curtains off the rails the next morning. I no longer recalled what they looked like or what I’d done with them. Were they made of cotton, satin, velvet? The baby wild boar was there then, in the bathroom. I remembered hearing her squealing on the other side of the wall, the wild boar he’d captured with his bare hands. She’d been separated from her mother, and as he chased her, she’d run hysterically into the dried bramble at the edge of the dirt road. I’d stood next to the Ducati, watching, stunned, as Omar chased her. I’d protested, telling hi
m to stop, to leave the poor animal alone, but by then he’d caught her and stuffed her into an empty backpack he kept in the compartment beneath the motorcycle seat.
He’d forced me to wear that backpack as we rode back down the hills. I remembered the wild boar’s warmth against my back, her heavy breathing. She squealed and kicked her legs, but there was no way out. Omar had fastened the zipper with a rope. I’d breathed against her, trying to calm her down, to show her that she wasn’t alone. I’d tried to comfort her once we were back in the apartment, but Omar had thrown her in the bath. I’d watched mutely as he washed her, as she struggled against the slippery edges of the tub. Omar was going to fatten her up and sell her. That was one of the ways he made a living. He thought the whole world was at his disposal, his to manipulate, waste, consume.
I examined the curtains on the living-room window. They were pale blue, the same color as the sky, now as flat as a bed as it prepared for nightfall. The auburn glow had faded. I searched the street for Ellie. No sign of her yet. The wind sucked the curtains out of the window. I watched them billow and fall limp. I took in the city: the Arab ruins, the old Roman walls, the forsaken Visigoth rubble. The pillars of oblivion. The day was on the cusp of being sealed. I watched the seagulls dash through the sky. I traced their flight—a spiral, then a straight line, the approach of a calculated descent—and thought, rather hesitatingly, about the path I was attempting to trace as I tried to recover all of the parts of myself that I’d previously amputated from memory.
I remembered that when I’d been in Oxford with Ellie, we’d sat in the university’s steam room, and I’d told her that while I could remember the incidents, the sinister transactions, that took place between Omar and me, I couldn’t recall how or in what order I’d experienced them. I told her that each time I’d tried to assign words to the experience I felt as if someone had reached into my brain and scrambled the alphabet, so I could no longer recall the correct progression of letters: what came first, what it led to, what I was meant to discover at the end.
Savage Tongues Page 8
