I, The Divine

by Rabih Alameddine

  à Raya

  Contents

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  My grandfather named me for the great Sarah Bernhardt. He considered having met her in person the most important event of his life. He talked about her endlessly. By the age of five, I was able to repeat each of his stories verbatim. And I did.

  My grandfather was a simple man

  At the age of thirteen, the age of discovery, I was moved from an all-girl Catholic school to a boys’ school. My father decided I needed to have English, not French, as my primary language, so he transferred me to the best school in the city. It was all boys until I showed up. They wanted to integrate it and I was the guinea pig. What a guinea pig.

  I was not the only girl in the school, but I was the only one in my class, all five sections. The four other girls were in the upper classes. It was life-changing culture shock.

  In October of 1973, I arrived for my first day of school

  Nineteen seventy-three was a strange year. I cut my hair short, which drove my stepmother crazy. The Lebanese army went nuts and started bombing the PLO, a harbinger of things to come. I left those wacky Carmelite nuns and entered an American-bankrolled school where I was the only girl in the whole class. I also met Fadi, who changed my life forever.

  I had always been a little odd, which people blamed on my mother, but she was not at fault. My sisters were normal. People could not blame my father. My half-sisters turned out to be more normal than normal. Except for being gay, my little brother was probably the most normal of us all. I was the strange one.

  When I was little, we had a nanny from the Seychelles named Violet. I remember her showing us a picture of her family—her parents and all her sisters. I pointed out a white girl in the picture and asked Violet who she was. She said that was her sister. Surprised, I asked how that could be. She said, “My mother went astray.” That sentence stuck with me. I had always thought my mother “went astray” when conceiving me.

  I was different, but not nearly in Fadi’s league. We met my first day in class. I arrived ready for battle in jeans and sweatshirt, prepared to fight any boy who dared make fun of me. Fadi did. When I sat behind him, he turned and whispered, “If you’re a lesbian, I know just the right bar for you.” My mouth dropped. The boys were supposed to be the crème de la crème. How had this boy slipped through?

  He was disarming. His face had a combination of mischief and innocence that to this day I find attractive. He was not handsome, but an unearthly intelligence shone in his eyes. Years later they would dull, and after the gendarmes beat him senseless, an eye patch would cover one of them. He became a shell of his former self, a walking shadow. I try to remember him as he was at fourteen, the boy who turned my world upside down.

  At the age of thirteen, the age of discovery, I was moved from an all-girls Catholic school to a boys’ school. My parents had thought an English education would be better than a French one. It was the first year of integration for the school, and for the first couple of years, I was the only girl in my class. At the school, I met two people who were to become primary influences in my life: Fadi, my first boyfriend, and Dina, my best friend, who appeared at school two years later.

  I met Fadi on my first day in class. I sat behind him, where his first question to me was “Are you a lesbian?” My response was swift: “Your mother’s cunt, you brother of a whore.” The Lebanese dialect is filled with delectable curses, a luscious language all its own, of which I was a true poet, trained by none other than my father. He thought children’s use of adult curse words tremendously amusing and trained all his children in the art of insult. I grew up an avid practitioner.

  Fadi’s reaction was an ear-to-ear grin, hands coming together for one clap, and a look signaling welcome-to-my-world. We became fast friends, at first because he would not leave me alone. The first couple of days, I could not move anywhere without him tagging along, trying to involve me in some activity he was cooking up. We became friends and partners in crime.

  Fadi was not a handsome boy, nor did he mature into a handsome man. He had a long, pale face, with medium-long black hair, eternally unkempt, slightly frizzy. Depending on how the sun hit it, you could see single hairs sprouting independently out of the mess. His nose was long, downward, not outward, like the noses in ancient Greek drawings. His chest, skinny and caved in, as if malnourished. He was cute; all in all, not a particularly erotic package, but I always had peculiar tastes, somewhat exotic. Of all the boys in class, and I could have had my pick, being the only girl, he caught my fancy. His smile was his best and most memorable feature. Appearing quite natural, it was actually meticulously studied, its apparent innocence perfected in an attempt to confuse anyone who might suspect him capable of any of the acts he committed. I fell for his façade early on. I assumed he was a gentle, amazingly intelligent, studious boy. He was all that in a way, but as Miss Nahhas, our science teacher, once said, he was also the devil incarnate.

  Fadi’s intelligence was remarkable. We were both the top of our class, but the difference between first, him, and second, me, was immeasurable. He had an understanding of mathematics that bordered on genius. I excelled at mathematics but I was not even in the same league. My grades were close to his in the nonsciences, English, Arabic, French, history, geography, and civics, simply because he did not care about these subjects. He winged it in all the exams, never studying, and still he got higher grades than I did most of the time. He was a mechanical wiz. The first contraption I saw him make was a motorized bicycle. He took a motor from a scooter, attached it to an old bicycle. I thought it was such a magnificent feat, only to be more impressed when he confessed to having stolen both the bike and the motor. We became soul mates.

  I remember the first time I caught a glimpse of his Mephistophelian side, early October, the beginning of the school year. It was a hot day, the ceiling fan circulating stale air. The building was more than a hundred years old and had no air-conditioning. Fadi sat in front of me as usual. French class and Mr. Assiss drunk and trying desperately to control the class. Without looking back, Fadi told me, “Duck when I say duck.”

  “What?” I asked, confused. Assiss was rambling on about subjunctive something or other. Utterly bored, I was carving my name into the desk with a Bic pen. “What do you mean?”

  “Just duck when I tell you.” I noticed he was clasping something black between three fingers. It took me a while to figure out it was one of the rubber stabilizers used under each of the legs to keep the chair from sliding. The instant Assiss looked away, Fadi threw the rubber stabilizer up toward the fan, saying “Incoming,” in English. Half the class ducked under their desks. When the rubber stabilizer hit the fan, it ricocheted with such force, I heard the whoosh followed by various other sounds as it hit desks and walls. Assiss looked around, wondering what had happened. We pretended nothing had happened, so he pretended with us. Assiss continued with his boring lesson.

  The French teacher’s incessant drinking made him an easy mark and therefore Fadi’s favorite target. Assiss drove an older model Vauxhall, which Fadi habitually broke into. During free periods, Fadi and I would push the car out from the spot that Assiss parked it in, roll it down the hill, and park it all the way by the lower entrance. Assiss never figured out how his car got moved.

  We had three free periods a week. To this day, I have no idea what would possess a school to give a bunch of teenagers the run of the school unsupervised for an hour. Having arrived from a strict Carmelite school, where the nuns made us account for every nanosecond, I found the new school nothing short of heaven. The free periods were the time when Fadi shone.

  Fadi used to brag that there was no lock he could not pick. The easiest were the numbered locks. He taught me how to do it. I had to pull the
lock down as hard as possible and then roll each number until I heard a certain click. It was incredibly easy. During free periods, one of our favorite activities was opening lockers to ferret out the best lunch. Neither one of us brought lunch on Wednesday when the free period was in the morning. We looked in every locker until we came across something appetizing. When he felt playful, Fadi switched contents of different lockers causing complete chaos.

  Fadi and I were both middle kids from middle-class families, and we were envious of some of the really rich kids who came to school on brand-new bicycles. During our free periods, we got to ride any of the bicycles we wanted. One day, while riding a new-model, three-speed, shiny bike, Fadi was approached by Art Haddad, who, like me, was of mixed Lebanese and American parentage, but who, unlike me, had grown up in the United States. He had come to teach at our school and see if he could “recapture his heritage.” He always treated the students as equals, his American education method, and since he could not have been more than twenty-four or so, the approach was not considered offensive by the kids.

  “Great bike,” Art told Fadi. “Must be the newest model.”

  “Yes,” Fadi replied. “Would you like to try it?”

  The last question was followed by words like wow, sure, gee, golly, man, thanks, incredible, hey wow, amazing, guy, but not in any comprehensible order. Fadi told him he had to get back to class, to lock the bike in the bike rack when he was done. We left for class only to hear later that the owner of the bike had come out to find Mr. Haddad riding it. The kid had a fit. Mr. Haddad had to see the headmaster, who, of course, asked to see Fadi. Fadi said the bike was unlocked and he could not help himself. When Mr. Haddad begged him to ride the bike, Fadi specifically asked him to lock the bike so no one would steal it.

  I was not saintly by any means before I met Fadi, nor was I led unwillingly down a path of demonic trickery and shenanigans. I was always a mischievous child. Fadi simply inspired me to greater heights. My father had divorced my mother, sent her packing back to America, and married a younger Lebanese woman. I saw my stepmother as a family intruder and spent most of my childhood trying to make her life miserable. I was so effective that at ten, I was transferred, along with my sisters, to the strictest school in Lebanon, run by a pod of fiendish Carmelite nuns. They were so strict, the punishments so severe, even my stepmother, a firm believer in discipline, could not leave us there. My sisters and I were transferred to different schools three years later. I won the lottery. I ended up in the best school in Lebanon, one where there was absolutely no discipline, where no teacher could raise his voice when talking to a student.

  The school I transferred to had an outstanding athletic program. Since it was a boys’ school, and I was the only girl in class, the PE class was geared exclusively toward young males. They played soccer primarily. I fit right in. If there was one thing at which I was superior to Fadi, and, as it turned out, every other boy in class, it was the beautiful game of soccer. I had always been a tomboy and I was blessed with a soccer-playing ability which amazed even those who knew nothing about the game. I showed up with the rest of the class on the soccer field for the first PE class. I was wearing the school’s athletic uniform, a green T-shirt with the school’s logo in yellow, white shorts with the logo in green, white tube socks, and a pair of desert boots. The last was not part of the uniform, but since my stepmother refused to consider buying me athletic shoes, let alone actual soccer shoes, I had to make do. Our PE teacher, Mr. Najjar, could not believe his eyes. He ordered me off the field, screaming and hollering. In later years, I would have been able to describe Mr. Najjar as a male chauvinist pig with the intelligence of a four-year-old, but back then I did not have the vocabulary so I simply called him an ugly-dog-fornicating-son-of-a-whore. I left the field. Fadi followed me, saying we had to go see the headmaster. He took me aside, went to his locker, pulling out a sheet of paper. On it he wrote:

  To Whom It May Concern:

  I hereby authorize my daughter, Sarah Mustapha Nour el-Din, to participate fully in all physical education classes. I wish her to be treated exactly like the boys. I do not wish her to be traumatized by unfair exclusionary policies. I expect my wishes to be followed or I will take appropriate action.

  Sincerely,

  Mustapha Hammoud Nour el-Din

  I was dumbfounded. I could not believe he would do that.

  “Nobody would think this letter is real,” I said.

  “Yes, they will.”

  “It’s badly written,” I said, alternating my weight between one foot and another, fidgeting. “My father would have written it better.”

  “They will believe it,” he replied. “Trust me. I’ve done this many times before. They always believe it.”

  “They might call him to check.”

  “Look,” he said. “Do you want to play or not?” When I did not reply, he pulled me by the hand toward the headmaster’s office. “It would help if you look traumatized.”

  Fadi walked into the headmaster’s office with me. He told the headmaster he had to come because his conscience would not allow him to stand idly by as Mr. Najjar screamed insults at me. Not during his entire stay at the school had he witnessed such repulsive behavior from a teacher, behavior sure to damage a sensitive student like me. I was shocked at his audacity, which the headmaster must have interpreted as my being adequately traumatized. Fadi proceeded to show my faux father’s letter. The headmaster was livid, telling me I was to show up at the next PE class and he would take care of everything. Mr. Najjar was forced to apologize to me publicly, and I became one of the boys. I also became a Fadi devotee.

  The first cigarette. In the Lebanese dialect, the words associated with smoking, verbs in particular, are sui generis. You not only smoke a cigarette, you can drink it. The verb to smoke may stand on its own, but the verb to drink cannot, of course, since it implies the drinking of liquids. One must use the phrase drink a cigarette, which sounds ridiculous in any other language. That kind of idiosyncrasy fascinated my thirteen-year-old mind. However, the particular use of the Lebanese dialect which turned out to be an embarrassment was the word inhale. When it comes to cigarettes, one does not inhale in Lebanese, one swallows. So, on a November day, first rain of the season, taking cover in one of the many Turkish arches embedded in the walls along the school grounds, Fadi offered me a cigarette, Marlboro, and asked, “Do you swallow?”

  I replied, “Yes, of course.”

  I took the cigarette from his pale, nail-bitten fingers, and he proceeded to light it for me. I had seen it done many times. Everyone smoked in Lebanon. I could fool him into thinking I had done this before. I took a drag, but instead of inhaling, I swallowed.

  At first, he fell for it. “You’ve done this before,” he said. “If this were your first time, you’d be coughing like crazy.”

  “Of course, I’ve done this before,” I said haughtily. “I’ve been doing this since I was ten.” I kept swallowing over and over, drunk on my own pride for not coughing or wheezing.

  He noticed what I was doing, though. He smacked me on the side of the head. “When you swallow, you don’t swallow, you baby.” He shook his head, smirking. “I’ve been doing this since I was ten,” he repeated sarcastically.

  I could not for the life of me figure out swallowing without swallowing, so I stared at him intently, earnestly pretending not to look. “Well,” I said between swallows, which were beginning to sound more like gulps, “this is how we do it in my family.”

  “Yeah, right. I believe that.” He inhaled on his cigarette, took a long drag, and blew in my face. He laughed and I had to smile. Finally I figured out how to smoke, but it was too late. I might not have coughed hysterically from smoking my first, and what was to be my last, cigarette, but the smoke I had swallowed upset my stomach. I began to feel more and more queasy until I threw up, right there in front of him. He worried about me, asking if I was all right. I was so embarrassed. I lay on the ground and teared up.

  I s
at up and he moved closer to me, shoulder to shoulder, extinguished his cigarette saying, “I think smoking is overrated anyway. It tastes like shit.”

  “I have to drink something,” I said. “I have to get rid of this taste in my mouth.”

  “Let’s get a Seven-Up.” Excited to be doing something helpful. “It’s good for your stomach anyway.” He helped me up, even though I was feeling better.

  “I have a better idea,” he said. He zipped his anorak, but did not pull the hood up, running out into the rain. He stood five feet away from me, all smiles, impish as usual, calling me with his hands and eyes. I walked out tentatively. He pulled me close to him and hugged me, still smiling, hair all wet. He tilted his head backward, opening his mouth to the sky. I did the same, rain falling on my face, drinking whatever drops fell in my mouth, quenching an unnamable thirst, laughing. We hugged closer and drank. We were sopping wet. I looked down to see a craned neck, elongated like a swan’s, and my heart fluttered. He looked at me, mouth open, tongue distended to capture more. And then he kissed me. Two thirteen-year-olds who knew nothing about anything, French kissing in the rain. I wanted to swallow his tongue.

  I was in New York last week and saw two retrospectives, Pierre Bonnard’s and Rothko’s. Besides noting that Bonnard could not draw if his life depended on it and that Rothko did not even try, I was stunned by a major realization. When it came to a choice between a beautiful color and the correct color, Bonnard always picked the beautiful one, while Rothko, in his great paintings, picked the correct one. I realized when it came to men, I did not pick the beautiful or the correct. I picked the wrong one. I chose David.

  I stared out of my window onto the bleak, leafless branches of the tree in front of my Victorian flat. The late afternoon light was fading to violet. Noisy sparrows appeared, a bustle of activity before they retired for the night. January of 1992.