Savage Tongues

by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

Ellie’s voice came at me from behind. “Didn’t we buy candles at the euro mart?”

  “Yeah, we did,” I said, weakly pushing my thoughts aside. There was a part of me that wanted to give in to that darkness, to crouch down and let it rule me. I was exhausted from the struggle, the daily strain of staying alive. Ellie tugged at my arm and I floated through the apartment alongside her. “Those candles,” she kept saying, willing them to appear before us.

  We walked down the corridor, an interminable hallway, its walls seemingly capable of compressing our bodies between their cold stones. I felt my heart harden, felt the walls grind it down. We made our way to her room.

  “They’re in here somewhere,” she said, and stepped carefully around her scattered belongings toward the window, then opened the shutters to let in the light.

  The arabesque windows of the old city, lit up like little fires, were visible in the distance. I could see the gigantic frames of the trees leaning their shadows against the solitary hill. I could hear the tender laughter of the children who had spilled onto the street to play while their parents took a stroll. Farther away, there was the sound of gypsy music, a guttural cry accompanied by the soft strokes of a guitar. It sounded primordial, as though it were coming from a buried heart, a fierce heart that had been treated gravely but that recognized pain as the first intimations of joy.

  “Do you smell that?” I asked Ellie, who was still searching through her bags.

  “It’s amazing,” she said.

  The night air was punctuated by the smell of jasmine, frankincense, basil, tobacco, bergamot. It smelled lush and sweet, so perfectly unlike the apartment’s stench of mold and rust and rot. The evening air was calling us away from the apartment to greener pastures, somewhere we could lie together in safety and listen to the quiet susurrus of the universe. The breeze, as it traveled down from the mountains toward the sea, was stirring an awakening in us. “Get away from here,” it seemed to say.

  “Aha!” Ellie said, and lifted a candle out of a plastic bag, holding it between us like a sword. “I found it.” She was pleased with herself.

  I didn’t have my lighter on me. I’d left it in my bag by the door. As we retraced our footsteps through the house, I felt a shift come on: a latent anger stirred in my heart, an anger that set my limbs on fire, my limbs, which had felt so heavy and immobile just a moment ago. I recognized the feeling. It was an anger that I reserved exclusively for my father. I had barely spoken to him since that summer long ago. But we had communicated recently about the apartment in Marbella, a brief, formal exchange. He’d promised that he’d paid someone to reconnect the water and electricity. He was always quick to pay someone to take care of his chores. It was the one favor I’d asked of him in years. The keys and the deed he’d mailed to me without a card or a note, without any hint of sorrow. I’d asked him more than once to make sure there was light, make sure there was water. And he’d promised he would. He’d said to himself, Let there be light when she arrives to that reckless pit of her painful past, then he’d washed his hands clean of it all by gifting me this wreck of a place, a place that I had no money to fix up or maintain, a place I would never again inhabit. No, not for long. The apartment, he had known, was a burden. A wound passed from hand to hand. A scar no one knew what to do with. And yet here I was, trying to come to grips with life in this apartment that rejected it, that resisted even the electricity coursing through its walls. The lights have gone out. The lights have gone out, I kept saying to myself, astonished at how alive those walls were, how overpowering.

  The moon rose higher in the sky and more light leaked into the living room. I again considered the possibility that my father had paid Omar to run his errands. My father, Omar’s patron. Perhaps the man on the motorcycle that first evening had been Omar after all. I listened carefully for the sound of its engine revving but heard only the sweet song of the children and the gypsy music gliding in through the windows. For a brief moment, I was thankful that the rear half of the apartment was veiled in darkness. I wanted to hide in the penumbra, in the shadows; I wanted to conceal my grief even from myself.

  I searched for my lighter and found it. Ellie leaned the wick of the candle toward me. I lit it and its small flame oscillated in the breeze that was circulating through the apartment. I retrieved the candleholder that I’d bought from Rosario’s son. We set the candleholder on the coffee table and collapsed onto the sofa. We were exhausted from the sun, from the conversation we’d had with Salim, from all the wine we’d drunk. I was drained from the ancient hold the apartment had on me. I wondered again if Omar had been the one to reconnect the utilities, if my father had told him that I’d be arriving soon. Assuming, I reconsidered, that he was still alive.

  I thought again of those bloodied rags. It occurred to me that the blood could have belonged to Omar. Had he tried to kill himself? The idea of his death—of this spinning earth no longer containing his human form—had crossed my mind in a tangible way only once before, when I’d heard about his accident, the accident that had nearly killed him. I’d felt aggrieved and relieved by the news, quarreling sensations that were quickly followed by an antiseptic wave of numbness. He’d lost control of his motorcycle on the highway. It had skidded out from under him and dragged him across three lanes of traffic. His leg was pinned under the weight of the motorcycle as it sailed across the hot tarmac. Cars and trucks swerved to avoid him. He was lucky. He’d kept his life but had lost his skin in the process. The road had shredded the skin right off his body. It had peeled him raw. It had left his musculature seared, uncovered, and exposed. He was in danger of contracting an infection for months. He was hospitalized for a long time. He’d spent weeks screaming for help, had felt as though he were caught in an interminable fire, a fire that had the capacity to burn him without turning him to ash, without melting the flesh off his bones. He was alive, trapped in a scalding body that stung without relief. He’d lived that way for months. My heart, I’d told Ellie, had ached for months once the initial shock of hearing the news had passed. “How come?” she had asked me. Because I could feel his pain, I told her, because it was the same pain he’d inflicted on me. We’d both been left raw and unprotected; what he had done unto me, he’d also done unto himself.

  I’d told her before, and was telling her again now, that after Omar I’d felt dispossessed of my life, as if my life, the very energy that coursed through my body, no longer belonged to me. Perhaps it never had. That lesson had been drilled into me early and often so by the time I was a young woman—my breasts growing, my hips widening for the birthing of children, my thighs filling out, becoming lean and muscular—I fully believed that I existed for the taking, an edible woman with an expiration date. I told her that until the moment I’d heard the news—delivered to me by my stepmother in an email, a bitter and accusatory email that suggested that I’d brought the accident onto him through the ill feelings I harbored toward him, through my evil eye, she’d written—until that moment, I’d felt as though I were completely alone, left to spend the rest of my life uncovering the stratified layers of his crime while he walked away without consequence. That accident, I told her, became, in my mind, the end of our physical story together. The consequences of our enmeshment were captured in that image: me, raw, hollowed out, and him with his skin scraped off, denuded.

  But he’d recovered. He’d come back from the dead. I told Ellie that being here, in the apartment, walking the same streets I’d walked with him, surrounded by the mountains he’d taken me to, I’d realized that in some ways I was more afraid of him dying than I was of seeing him alive.

  “Who’s to say he won’t appear at my back wherever I go, wherever I happen to be once he’s been liberated from his body?” I said. His ghost could hover over me undetected, could torture me without consequences; there would be no tangible evidence of his ability to manipulate and distort me from beyond the grave just as I had no physical wounds—no scars that were visible to the naked eye—to prove that I’d been r
aped. His fantasy, I told Ellie, would once again be my demise.

  “It’s just a feeling,” she said.

  “A feeling that stings,” I said. “But that, too, shall pass.”

  I told her that I considered myself lucky that my relationship with Omar was not the only violent event I’d lived through or witnessed. The scope of my pain was far greater than my relationship with Omar; and that, I realized, was a kindness on the part of the world. There had been other chapters; other hands had penned the lines of suffering in my book. And what that meant was that, while there were moments when I wanted to annihilate myself because of the shame and repulsion he’d made me feel, I would never hurt myself; I’d already encountered, and would encounter again, life’s vindictive nature. The evil this world harvests had come to seem normal to me, par for the course, part of everyday life. That knowledge had hardened me, yes, had removed me from myself for many years, a rift I would always be negotiating, but it had also made me resilient. It had awoken me to the full power of love, the expansiveness and radiance I’d cultivated with my queer family, my chosen people; with Ellie, with Sam, and briefly with Sahar, I felt like a peaceful warrior. We grieved and laughed together. We restored our lives in one another’s company. We built ground under our feet and put roofs over our heads; our individual homes were always shared.

  A long interval of silence passed. Ellie and I listened to the gypsy music.

  “It’s beautiful,” she finally said. “It’s so full of grief and pleasure. It’s the bravest music I’ve ever heard.”

  It was. I told her that it was the most complete music, the song of the heart, of the flesh and the earth. I thought of Lorca’s gypsy ballads, of the lines I’d memorized. I recited a few verses and Ellie listened with her eyes closed. I felt so much stronger. I felt held by those words, nurtured by the forward moving energy of those lines.

  Ellie rubbed aloe into her skin. “I must be so red,” she said. Her voice was calm, tender. She, too, had breathed in those words. She’d devoured them and was happy now, satiated.

  I picked up the candleholder and scanned her body in its light. “You are!” I helped her put the aloe on her back.

  I went into the bathroom, soaked a few towels in the tub, and brought them over for her to lay on her skin. After that, I smoked a cigarette.

  “Are you going to reconnect the electricity?” she asked.

  “No,” I said.

  I told her that I didn’t want to give any more than I already had to this place.

  “So we’re going to live in darkness, by candlelight?” Ellie asked, her voice trembling. “How am I going to finish grading?” I’d forgotten about the papers she’d lugged with her from Oxford.

  “I’ll find us a place,” I said, “in Granada.”

  I felt something stir in me, a voice, an intuition, that seemed to say, Get away from here before it’s too late. There’s nothing more to see. Take who you used to be far, far away from here. I told her that there was one last thing I needed to do, to go to Puerto Banús where my story with Omar had begun, where I suspected, if he was still alive, he’d be. I needed to know that I was stronger than those streets where we’d first kissed. I told her I would go there in the morning, that we would spend one last night here and take off the next day, that we would get out of here.

  “One more night after this,” I said. “And then we’ll go to the heart of that music, to the caves in the hills of Granada.” I got up and went to bed. I lay there for a long time staring emptily at the ceiling. I was hot. My skin was damp. The moon was hovering in the sky, yolk colored. I saw Omar standing before me. A mildewy yellow light spilled through the window. I felt my breath catch in my throat. He was mumbling something.

  “You are a ghost,” I said to him.

  I drew the covers over my face, but I could hear him breathing, struggling, and I understood that he was trying to confess something to me. The line between memory and madness is razor-thin. What’s the difference, I thought, between a reconstruction and a hallucination? I couldn’t make out what he was trying to say. I heard sirens blasting in the distance. I pulled the cover off my face. Broad shafts of light were coming through the window. A searchlight. There were helicopters chopping the sky overhead.

  “I want you naked as the day you were born,” I heard. There was a violence in his voice I hadn’t heard before. As if he were holding a knife out of view, a knife he was prepared to nick me with, that had been there all along though I hadn’t seen it. “Now,” he said.

  I stripped off my clothes. I was weak, confused. We’d been so tender with each other until then. He got down on his knees and pulled my underwear off.

  “Lift your legs,” he commanded, and I lifted them one at a time.

  He slipped my underwear off and walked me to the bathroom. He had me put one leg up on the edge of the tub, the same tub where that poor wild boar had cried with its squealing tones. He shaved me completely on one side then had me turn around and put my opposite leg on the edge of the tub. He shaved the other half of my vagina then kissed the surface and grunted with pleasure.

  “That’s how I like it,” he said. Then he laid me down on the bed.

  That I’d merely been compliant, and in no way participatory, had not dissuaded him. I don’t remember what happened after that. All I see is darkness. A black square exists where the memory of the rape should be. A black impenetrable square. But I do remember coming to after he was finished. I was lying there, on my side, in the fetal position, limp and lifeless, watching the curtains float in and out of the window in the breeze.

  That had been the first time we’d had sex. A month into what I had considered to be our relationship. Once that terrible day had passed, sex became normal, just as it had become normal to hang around the deserted lakes, to eat at odd hours in the loneliest of Chinese restaurants, to search together for distant beaches hardly anyone ever went to. I had gone back for more. We’d had sex almost daily after that. He would tell me what to do and I would do it. My relationship with Omar was a lesson in obedience. And I felt pleasure; I felt a pleasure that was born in pain. The violent event, I had come to learn, becomes a nonevent through repetition.

  The night felt interminable. I felt pinned to the bed as if a wild animal—that wild boar—were sitting on my chest, forbidding me to move. I had to get through the night. I had to bear the weight of my own past. No one else could hold this story for me. Not my mother, not my father, not Omar.

  Dawn broke. I had lain awake the whole night, chain-smoking, drinking water, getting up to pee. The sirens waned. Omar was gone. The apartment was silent. Ellie was still asleep. I got up. In the light of morning, I could see that we’d done a good job cleaning the place, that we had, if nothing else, removed the stale dust. In the limpid light of morning, I could see that the candles we’d lit were a radical act of defiance against the darkness of the apartment. We’d relit the flame of my life. We’d created warmth where the arctic chill of death reigned supreme. There was no going back.

  11

  THE DAY TURNED OUT TO BE OVERCAST. I rushed through the gray streets early in the morning. I walked past women with narrow eyes sunken into yellowed skin, past young girls in bright dresses and expressions of tragic boredom, older men with faces as lined as the sharply angled streets of the city, streets laid in rough slabs of stone. I felt as though the city’s houses, squatting side by side, their stunted, square facades overlooking the passersby, were leaning over me, ready to come crashing down at any moment.

  At the bus stop, I bought a ticket to Puerto Banús from the driver, a man with eyes that bulged out of their sockets, a man possessed by a forbidding, indisposed air. I stood in the back of the bus where the crowd was thickest. The air on the bus was heavy with the smell of salt and body odor, and I struggled to move each time the crowd parted to let another passenger through. I felt nauseated.

  The bus made its way down a gently sloped street and picked up speed as it left town. The buildings grew
more severe, practical and unadorned, at the edges of town. There was a long interlude of silence on the bus as we were transported along the highway, a flat two-lane road carved into the arid hillside punctuated with cacti, a lone aloe, the pale curved trunks of palm trees, which looked to me like the fingers of corpses pointing at the ashen sky above. I felt light-headed. I was in a strange state of mind, hungover from lack of sleep and strung out with anxiety at the thought of returning to Puerto Banús. I knew I would find him there, not necessarily in flesh and blood, but I would be able to sense him lurking about or see his apparition as I had so many times before; yes, I would see him, feel him, smell his skin moist with sweat as it had been on that interminable evening we’d spent dancing and drinking vodka. I could hardly believe that twenty years had passed. I could hear my blood roaring, my heart pulsing in my ears, as if I were deaf to all sounds beyond my own: my organs working, my heart receiving and pumping blood, my skin holding my tissues and bones and ligaments together.

  I hated that feeling, the old feeling of terror washing over me. To distract myself, I looked between the passengers’ pressed bodies at the road. We exited the highway and made a few turns; the bus leaned to one side, then the other. We went past an El Corte Inglés. I gazed at the rectangular concrete building; its austere facade was adorned only with the refined green sign hanging over the door. I remembered shopping at an El Corte Inglés in another Spanish town as a child, my mother holding me by the hand and leading me down the long corridors of clothes. That’s where we’d lived during my childhood years in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution. Spain had been—through chance and the random assaults of history—our temporary home. And what a strange, liminal space it had turned out to be, I thought, on the margins of Europe, its Arab and Sephardic roots still so visible in the present day; it was, will always be, a contested space I couldn’t leave behind. Spain haunts me, just as Omar does; it shows up in my dreams, tortures me with false pangs of nostalgia. My mother. Forced to care for us in foreign lands! I remembered how soft her hand was, how lovingly she’d held mine. I remembered her stopping at a wooden table to admire a stack of neatly folded sweaters.