“Should I braid my hair?” she asked.
I let out a twisted laugh. Ellie laughed, too, even though she had no idea what I was laughing about.
I told her yes, braid your hair. I told her that I was laughing at the fact that I’d been trying to picture Omar’s face, but all that had been rising from the swamps of memory were words, words that rejected me, words like rape and our affair. “They’re ghosts, resurrected and come to confess.”
At this, she laughed again; she laughed harder. She knew that I’d been trying to harvest the energy of these words for two decades, for two-thirds of my life. I’d been trying for so long to transubstantiate what had come to be, what was still becoming, into a story of failed love, an illicit liaison, trying to turn a protracted encounter with deadly peaks and tender valleys into a completed action when I knew, of course, that it would always be unfolding. The treacherous underside of passion, its bottomlessness.
Affair, I thought to myself as I retreated from the bathroom and resumed my perch near the living-room window. I briefly heard the roar of the sea again. But if it hadn’t been an affair, then what was it? He hadn’t made it easy to understand; he hadn’t forcibly spread my legs and raped me. Not at first. We’d spent time together, days, weeks, before we ever slept together, before that first time when he assaulted me. He’d waited until he’d earned my trust. I’d been caught off guard, in disbelief, terrified, and yet in denial despite having heard the intimations of violence in his voice. I’d thought stupidly that this must be how it’s done or that this is just a game we’re playing. I’d drunk the elixir of his dominion over me. It had taken me years to have the courage to look at the truth. It was only then, as I viewed my adolescence through the kaleidoscopic prism of time, that I could see clearly. I had been lied to so often that I’d become an expert at lying to myself.
More lights came on in the windows on the hill. I lit another cigarette and again told myself that it would be the last of the day. I was disgusted by how many cigarettes I’d smoked. I wanted to open the window and flick it over the ledge, watch its lit arch float through the inky sky that had drawn over the city like a dome, cutting us off from the silky golden light of the sun. But I didn’t. I always tried not to chain-smoke. I tried not to light one cigarette with the butt of another, a habit I’d first acquired in this very apartment. A habit I’d taken up as part of my performance of adulthood. Smoking had helped me to seal my fate as a feral child of the streets. Smoking had been part of my armed response to boredom and neglect.
These days, I’m rarely bored. In fact, there are times when I beg for boredom, when I track it down with the appetite of a hunter. No one ever told me that boredom becomes a scarce commodity as we age. But then again, people are rarely direct. They prefer to insinuate, to drop hints; they make such great efforts to imply and suggest their feelings. I considered this grandiose theater of evasion one of the primary causes of my discontent. Hardly surprising given my father’s disposition. I heard his voice—that’s what my father was to me, a disembodied, roving voice I’d occasionally hear over the telephone—saying, The hard lessons in life are best learned early; the early bird gets the worm; you can’t turn back the clock; it’s not over till the fat lady sings.
“Be warned,” I yelled to Ellie. “I’m letting in some air.”
The sky had darkened another few degrees, turned as black as tar. In the glass, I could see my hand lying directly over the reflection of my mouth, the bleak sky a halo surrounding my head. I looked closer. Omar’s hand was there, lying over my own. That hand of his that had ushered me into my own pleasure. That hand that had crushed me, gagged me. I laughed. A wild, unbuckled laugh. That, too, I learned early: to laugh my way back to reality even when I felt it had been lost to me forever, cracked, punctured beyond repair.
And what was my reality to be now that I’d returned to this sublime coast of sun and light, this place where Omar had silenced and strangled me? Where his hand had reached over the glazed surface of the lake time and again to peel off my bathing suit as I lay on my back on the paddleboard he’d procured? He kept a fishing rod, a canoe, a few boards chained to a tree near the shore. No one went there. No one except one or two other recluses. We would occasionally find an empty can of beer tossed behind a pile of rocks; the remains of a fire; a worn, soiled condom tossed aside, heavy with sperm. I felt the water of those lakes spilling over me, submerging me in their warmth. By returning to Marbella, had I caused my whole life to turn on its axis? I pushed the window open. My face disappeared. I saw our hands, asymmetrical, one smaller than the other, fly together into the night: two wings of a lopsided bird fluttering in the wind. I thought to myself, There’s no ours to speak of, but my pain is tied irrevocably to his ecstasy. He had, quite literally, extracted his power from my fragility.
A great damp breeze came blowing back through. It filled my lungs. It filled the apartment, the apartment that was and always had been antilife, antimatter. It was a blissful, decided breeze. Indeed, I thought, my life had turned on its axis. Finally, I thought. Because for so long I had been trapped inside a revolving door. I believed the door to have been constructed out of language, out of other people’s interpretations of the facts, the facts of my rape, my chronic rape, I should say, or my affair with Omar during the course of which I was raped. I’d been going around and around in this revolving door for so long that I couldn’t distinguish anymore between my own thoughts and the thoughts that were assigned to me, imparted to me not only by Omar but also by therapists, my father, and Xavi, who had always tried to stand between me and the dark. I am here, alone, I thought—and then I remembered Ellie, who was likely strapping on her heels, who would soon drag me out into the dim light of the night for a drink and a quiet, restorative stroll. How I loved her spirit, her soulfulness. How I needed it like I needed air, water, food.
I heard the sound of a motorcycle pulling up outside the apartment. I leaned out of the window to see who it was. The motorcycle pulled up onto the curb directly beneath the window. The driver unsaddled the bike and leaned against it. He left the motor running and the lights on. I felt my heart begin to race. I stood there and watched silently, frozen in place, terrified that the man could see me, that he could feel me watching him. I turned the apartment lights off then returned to the window. Was it Omar? I could see that the man was putting his helmet back on, getting ready to saddle his motorcycle again. My legs felt weak. I couldn’t see his face, couldn’t make out his features. Then he got back on his bike and squeezed the handgrip. The engine ripped through the air. He put his feet down, backed the motorcycle out of the spot he’d parked in, and took off into the night, disappearing into the horizon, a searchlight gliding down the street. I sat on the edge of the sofa.
“Did you have a good summer?” I heard my father asking.
“Of course she did,” my stepmother answered.
I was sitting in the backseat of my father’s old Mercedes as he drove me to the airport to return me to my mother—my father who had appeared at the tail end of the summer as mysteriously as he’d failed to appear at its beginning. I remembered quite suddenly that Omar had been following closely behind on his Ducati; he wasn’t wearing his helmet so I could see his face one last time, and he mine. I looked at him through the rear window and saw that he was accelerating with the pace of a madman, that he was about to drive his motorcycle into the car, right through the rear windshield, right into me. There was something implacable in his gaze, obstinate; he’d had his eyes fixed on me. That was the last time I saw him. A man with the eyes of a tiger perched on the back of a Ducati.
“Should we leave in a bit?” I heard and turned around. It was Ellie with her rosy cheeks, pale skin, and red curls, her black eyes, smiling widely, unblinking, beckoning me out for a drink.
I conceded. I needed to shake Omar from my memory. The image of his driving like a madman, hot in pursuit, without a helmet, as I sat in the backseat of my father’s battered Mercedes attracted and
repulsed me in equal measure. It was clear to me that in some recondite corners of my soul I still desired Omar. I still believed that all I had to do to reach him was turn around, that he would be there, making me feel wanted with his gaze, with his indefatigable appetite for observing me, a hunger that hung over me like a dead weight. He had shaped my desire. My perversions would always bear the imprint of his touch, of his particular tastes; it was painful, embarrassing, and left me with a tinge of guilt.
For a whole summer, I’d done nothing but wait for him to come around to the apartment. It was only now, as an adult in her prime child-rearing years, that it dawned on me that it had been easier to wait for Omar than it was to wait for my father. My father who was nothing but a roving, nomadic voice at the edges of my life. His absence had made me vulnerable to Omar, a man who had only taken things from me. He’d wanted my sex. He’d wanted desperately to drink from between my legs, to bend me over or sit me up, his doll, his pupil in all matters of lovemaking. I knew he would come around to the apartment to pick me up with his Ducati—he always did. And I wanted him to. We would go out to a deserted beach or run errands at a post office or a mechanic’s at the edges of town, to places where no one would recognize him. I hadn’t realized that then. I’d thought, We are in public; there must not be anything shameful here, nothing to hide.
The wait for Omar had superimposed itself onto the wait for my father. I’d walk up and down the promenade, pretending to admire the sea. I bought pomegranates, dates, and walnuts from a fruit vendor. I sustained myself on what I could afford to buy with the money Omar would give me each time I saw him, money he claimed my father had sent him to give to me, to tide me over until he arrived. Whether the money belonged to my father or to my stepmother or to Omar I did not know or care to know; what I cared about was the realization come too late that I was offering sex in exchange for the money Omar delivered. The thought left me stone-cold.
I bought what I could afford to buy and what I felt convinced I could swallow. My throat had closed up, my stomach had shrunk. I was always struggling with a sense of nausea. As though I were, on some level, rejecting life. And yet, I remembered how whole words, sentences, requests had formed on my lips against my will. Once, after freshly shaving my legs, I told Omar, “Feel how smooth they are.”
He was delighted at first, then annoyed, taken aback. He cast a hostile, impatient gaze in my direction. I registered the message immediately. I wasn’t supposed to express agency; it cut through his desire like a knife.
I remembered one day when I took the bus to Granada by myself and went to the Alhambra to luxuriate in the palace’s extravagance, in its majestic walls and eroded glory. I had felt beautiful then. The sun gleamed off my olive skin, made it shine like the leaves of the high trees and the surface of the rocks in the shallows of the sea. The Alhambra had restored to me a sense of dignity that I felt had been forever drained from my body. I marveled at its smooth arches and thin columns of pale marble, its tiles covered with Quranic verses, the words like a thousand hummingbirds come together. There were courtyards lined with roses, their faces greeting the broad blue sky, and diamond-shaped fountains, water flowing forth with the sound of life. Those waters were intended to replicate the sky, to remind us that heaven is as much above us as it is beneath the earth. I had felt safe, whole, unencumbered. I no longer felt like a problem. The world, for those few hours, seemed to be saying, You belong. Its shape mirrored the shapes of my inner landscapes and I felt that I fit, that there existed a space for me next to my ancestors. I had loved the doorways carved like locks, the magical terra-cotta passageways, the palms and aloes and cedars that lined the garden walls. I felt wide open to life’s mystery, to its strange way of shaping our fate. I didn’t feel repulsed by the exaggerated importance Omar had taken in my life. Perhaps I should have. Perhaps I should have felt embarrassed. But once I had matched and outdone his desire for me, once I had begun to crave him, there was no going back. I was intoxicated. In love.
I returned to my bedroom and sat on the bed. But I couldn’t just sit there, mute, obsolete, on the edge of the bed where Omar had ravished me. I could feel his odor coming off the sheets, faint but familiar enough to stir in me an old restlessness. I asked Ellie, who had followed me into the bedroom, to give me a moment; she walked out silently and closed the door behind her.
I got up and leaned against that door. I stared at the bed. I heard the roar of the ocean again. I saw the space shift, the present give way to the past as though they were adjoined, partitioned off by walls that could slide open or give way. The sheets were undone; my underwear, black, decorated with tiny hyacinths, lay on the floor beside his. He was lying back with his head propped up on the pillows. A faint light was coming through the window from the moon and had fallen across his thighs and torso, illuminating his bronze skin, his thick black chest hair, his long muscular legs. I felt my heart begin to race.
“Arezu,” he said tenderly, his voice beckoning me to return to bed. He was smiling at me, a secret smile I had come to believe that he reserved exclusively for me, a smile no other girl had seen on his youthful, sweet mouth. My name fell again from his lips.
I felt at war with myself. I wanted nothing more than to go toward him, to cry in his arms about what he had done to me, to hear him say that he was sorry, that he’d been wrong. But my body was as heavy as lead—it was smarter than I was; it was holding me back, telling me to avoid the humiliation he would always be capable of inflicting on me.
I breathed deeply, sliding air into my stomach to calm myself. I observed his long thick eyelashes, his green eyes, his arched eyebrows and the look of boyish surprise they gave him, the zestful air that contrasted so beautifully with his hair, already turning to gray. I stood there in the echo of my name. He repeated it, this time more firmly.
I moved away from the door and walked to my suitcase to pick out a dress to wear, to shake off his presence in my room. I turned away from the bed, but still I felt I was not alone. I heard his voice as I bent over my suitcase and retrieved a long black dress, simple but elegant, a boat-neck dress I had purchased in London during my tour, a distraction from my increasing fatigue. He was still there no matter what I did; his voice pursued me around the room, turning more resolute, more vulgar, with every passing second. I opened the window to drown him out with the commotion of cars, motorcycles, and people from the street below.
What an idiot I’d been to believe that I was special to him, that he’d loved me as he’d never loved any other girl. He’d pushed me prematurely over the ravine into womanhood; I’d crossed over with a lame leg, limping, unsure. There had been a moment at the start of our long encounter when I’d felt so powerful, a moment that had lasted only a few weeks, when I’d foolishly felt that I was his lover. Before he’d uttered those cutting words: I want you naked as the day you were born.
I undressed now and smiled at myself in the mirror, looked through it at the empty bed, the clear floors. I pulled on the long black dress. It was elegant, dignified, a little playful. I admired its fine lines, its structure. As I was pulling up the zipper and removing the tags, I remembered having said to Ellie, right before she purchased her ticket from Oxford to Marbella, “I feel such contempt for who I was as a teenager.” I told her I was worried that old self-loathing would return the second I set foot in Spain. That I would come face-to-face with that adolescent who had tried, albeit indirectly, to kill herself, me.
It was true. As I removed the tags, I considered that I’d been complicit in my own murder, an accomplice in my own death. This, I acknowledged as I reached for the door handle to exit my room and head out into the night with Ellie, was another one of my reoccurring thoughts. It was and would likely forever remain one of the most painful to hold, and yet I refused to release it, refused to let it go, because I feared that if I did I would also have to let go of the notion that I’d had any agency in the relationship, that my desire had been valid, had been mine, a sign that I was a living, br
eathing human.
“I’m despicable!” I repeated breathlessly, just as I’d repeated to Ellie that day on the phone.
“No,” she had said on the phone. “You’re not.”
I could hear her breathing on the other end just as I could feel her coming down the cavernous hallway now to beckon me along. “Have you changed your mind?” she asked.
“No,” I told her. “I haven’t. Let’s go.” I, too, was in the mood to put on some lipstick, to strap on a pair of heels, to go out to a bar where we could listen to music, where I could trace the rim of my wineglass with my finger. I was in the mood to drink some blood, to become intoxicated. Perhaps I am a vampire, the child of vampires. Meant to feed and be fed on.
The last remnants of that phone call came back to me as we walked out the door into the night together. “A deviant and not in a good way!” I’d said on the phone after a long heavy pause and we’d both laughed. Neither one of us believed in deviancy. How could we when our whole lives had been one side step stacked atop another? I was still in the United States with Xavi then, and Ellie was in her Victorian office overlooking the rose gardens of Oxford. I had pictured those flowers as we spoke. Pink, perfectly manicured. The same color as the lipstick she’d put on and that I was about to borrow, applying it in the dark corridor of the building.
She had remained silent and I had loved her for it. She knew better than to bark back, But you were seventeen! A pawn. She knew that I would have much rather heard her say, Little nymph, haven’t you read Nabokov?
6
THAT NIGHT I SLEPT on and off for a few hours. At first, my sleep was empty of dreams, but the last stretch assaulted me with a gruesome, uncanny vision of the woman with the wounded face who’d come to me earlier in the mirror. In the dream, she’d grown out of a tree. The bark had peeled away so you could see her sitting inside the trunk, her hands covering her face. But then they opened; I saw that they weren’t really hands at all but insects, dark and winged, crawling over her nose, her eyes as dark as bruises, every last bit of light punched out of them. I gasped and her hands dropped from her face. I felt my throat constrict with terror. Her features were so battered, so grotesquely ravished, that I could barely stand to look at her. She had the face of someone who’s forgotten how to love, how to be loved. The face of someone long dead.
Savage Tongues Page 10
