I, The Divine

by Rabih Alameddine

  “He loved Sarah Bernhardt.”

  “He did not. He loved the myth, the unattainable myth of what a woman is. He had no clue who Bernhardt was. He apotheosized her. Her mother he called a whore, but according to him, Sarah lived la vie galante. Fuck that. She started out as a prostitute, like her mother, like her aunts. No metaphors, no euphemisms. She had to be a prostitute like her mother. There was no other way a woman could survive. But your grandfather probably thought she died a virgin. At least he wanted to believe so. She was born a star. Bullshit. Like any star in any age, she made it by sleeping her way to the top.”

  “I can’t think badly of him, though. He meant so much to me.”

  “I know that. It’s a good thing for you he died when he did. If he had waited until you reached puberty, he would have turned against you.”

  “I’m not sure about that.”

  “I am,” she said emphatically. “Do you ever wonder why he always told you the story of the Prince of Believers, but not the story of Sarah?”

  “He always told stories of Sarah. What are you talking about?”

  “Not Bernhardt, dummy. Sarah, the first woman sent out on the Druze Call. You don’t even know what I’m talking about, do you? You don’t know who your real namesake is?”

  “No idea at all.”

  “Al-Muqtana sent a messenger to Wadit-Taym to reconfirm the vows of the followers of a heretic called Sukayn. They tortured and killed the messenger. Al-Muqtana decided to send a woman messenger because she would not meet the same fate. Since the new faith felt that men and women were equal in the eyes of God, he sent the most faithful, a woman by the name of Sarah. You didn’t know that, huh? She led a congregation that included her own father. Her own father. Can you imagine what an amazing woman she must have been? She was unbelievably successful. She reconfirmed the vows of most of the followers, men and women. I loved the fact that your grandfather used to say that the boy was the reason we are all here. Sarah was the reason we are here. We are the direct descendants of the people she converted. Don’t you find it strange that he would not mention her? He preferred to fill your head with stories of the Divine Sarah, but not the Druze Sarah.”

  I was in bed, sleeping over at my grandfather’s house. He tucked me in and began another story. “A long, long time ago, all the Christians in the world got together and decided to invade our country. As always, they couldn’t stand the fact that not all the world was Christian like them. So they got together and decided they wanted to liberate our country from the infidels, which meant us. They wanted to liberate us from ourselves. They called themselves the Crusaders. When the Crusaders started coming, we fought them all over this country. But they kept coming and coming like ants and we kept beating them and beating them. One day this big ship of Crusaders landed in Sidon. They didn’t know what to do because all the crusaders were losing everywhere. So there was this young Crusader who was smart and evil and he had lots of plans. His name was Richard Nixon. Nobody liked him because everybody thought he was up to no good, but they always listened to him because he was smart. So Nixon looked around when the Crusaders landed and he decided he knew why they always lost. It was because all the seashore was flat and the mountains were so close that we always won because we attacked them from up high. So Nixon told the Crusaders they had to climb the first hill and build a fortress and they had to do it quickly before we arrived. The Crusaders listened to him because they knew that Nixon was devious. They climbed the hill and started building the fortress. They built and they built, they cut down trees, our cedar trees which were ten thousand years old. That’s why we have fewer than one hundred cedar trees left. It was all because of Nixon. They used wood and they moved rocks, and then they got tired when the night came. They were almost done so they thought they would finish it the next day. Well, at night, our birds and animals got together and they decided they didn’t like these foreigners coming over here and cutting down our trees. So while the Crusaders slept, the birds flew over and began taking each piece of wood and each stone, the donkeys put the heavy stuff on their backs, the foxes directed traffic, the rabbits dug holes under the walls so they would come tumbling down. The birds and animals worked until daybreak when everything that Nixon built was broken down on the ground. When the Crusaders woke up, they saw that all the work they did had been in vain. Nixon stood up and told them all was not lost. He told them they had to start all over again before the infidel army came. He told them they would win the war but all they needed now was a little more effort. So the stupid Crusaders began building the fortress again. They worked and they worked until they got so tired and it was night and there was only a little bit left to do so they went to sleep and decided they would finish it the next day. Again, that night, the birds and animals came and they were laughing. The birds laughed as they carried the wood. The donkeys laughed as they carried the stones. The rabbits laughed as they dug holes. The foxes and the turtles laughed. Because the Crusaders were stupid. When the Crusaders woke up the next day they saw again that the work they had done had been in vain. So Nixon got them to start working again. Same thing happened the next day and the next. Our army arrived one day from the mountains. The general looked down at the Crusaders and started to laugh. He said those stupid Christians think they can stop us with a small fortress like that. They won’t finish it in time anyway so we’ll attack them tomorrow after getting a good night’s sleep. The Crusaders did not see our army so they worked and they worked until night came and they got tired and went to sleep. The next day, when our army woke up, they saw that there was no fort at all. They saw the Crusaders begin to build the fortress again. The army wanted to attack, but the general said no. He said the army should wait until tomorrow because the stupid Crusaders were getting tired of building and they would never finish it anyway. They would attack them tomorrow when the Crusaders first woke up. So they went to sleep and when they woke up, the general saw that there was nothing there again. He laughed and he laughed when he saw Nixon telling the Crusaders they should build the fortress again. So the army sat down and watched the stupid Crusaders build the fortress again and again and again. Years and years passed and the Crusaders got tired. They started leaving one by one. Nixon got upset and he wanted everybody to stay and build the fortress because he thought it was a great idea. But the Crusaders stopped caring about anything. They were now old men. Then there were only twenty Crusaders, then ten, then five, then only Nixon. Every day, he would build a little bit of the fortress and every day it got taken down. Now, you know what they say. If you go to this little hill above Sidon, you will see this little old man trying to build a fortress. Nobody talks about it, but we all know he is still there.”

  “Grandfather,” I said, “Richard Nixon is the president of the United States.”

  “That was a different Nixon.”

  “I’m ten years old now, Grandfather,” I said. “Don’t you think I would know the difference between the Crusaders and the president of the United States?”

  I had always wanted to believe it was my grandmother who schemed to get my parents divorced. She was the one who constantly badmouthed my mother after my father divorced her. Even on her own deathbed, my grandmother still spoke ill of my mother. My assumption was understandable. My grandmother was the one whose plotting was visible to the naked eye. She was always mean-spirited, angry, and resentful. I do not think she liked any of us girls. When my stepmother had her first boy, my father’s sixth child, my grandmother was not happy like the rest of us. She bemoaned the fact that her husband was not alive to see my father’s first boy. I do not think she liked my half-brother either. While he was growing up, she made fun of his childhood stuttering and accused him of being a momma’s boy.

  It took me years to accept the truth. When I finally heard what my grandfather told my mother at my birth, I was converted.

  “The Americans are so stupid,” he told me. “They all grow up in barns. They’re cow people. Even now, they all have
money and things, but they still are stupid. When Sarah went to America, the Americans loved her because she was the greatest star in the world. But they didn’t understand her at all. Sarah was a hard worker. In America, she was doing play after play and she was extremely tired. One time, she got so tired in the middle of the first act of a play, she fainted. The director brought down the curtains to see if she was all right. Being the trooper that she was, when she woke up she wanted to go on with the play. She said she was ready. They raised the curtain, but there was no one in the audience. Thinking the play was over, those dummies had left. The stupid Americans didn’t understand a thing.”

  Amal was right about one thing. My grandfather told me so many stories of Sarah Bernhardt, of her awe-inspiring acting, her wonderful sculpture, her devilish tantrums and hysterical rages. He talked of her beauty and charm, of her eyes that borrowed color from the changing light. He talked of having met her as a young boy of eleven and her kindness toward him. He talked of her presence on stage, the brilliance of her personality. He could not stop talking about her infatuation with death, her sleeping in caskets. How she was the only actress in history to have been a success as both Hamlet and Ophelia. He never talked about Damala, the gorgeous, abusive Greek she gave herself to. That I had to find out on my own, how obsessed she became with the man twelve years her junior, their tumultuous marriage, how she let a man with no talent convince her to let him become her lead actor. He never told the story of the Prince de Ligne, the Belgian who seduced her when she was still a young girl, who showed her a different life only to withdraw when she told him she was pregnant. He never mentioned all the men she toyed with, who were so in love with her she kept them on a leash for her entertainment. He never said anything about her pattern of falling in love only with men who could not love her back.

  He never once mentioned her son, not how he was born out of wedlock, not how much she loved him.

  “She was so skinny at a time when girls were fat,” he told me as I sat on his lap. “You could see her collarbone, just like yours.”

  “She’s just like me.”

  He traced the jutting collarbone. “You have exactly the same collarbone, deep and capacious. I’m going to start drinking my soup from here.” He bent down wanting to lick my neck and I laughed like crazy.

  I was visiting my mother in her New York apartment. She lay back on her divan, enigmatic and morose. She was in a talkative mood for a change.

  “Your grandfather was an evil man,” she said without any hint of emotion. “He made my life miserable. Whenever no one was around, he would whisper things like, ‘You may think you have him because you spread your legs, but all vaginas go sour after a while.’ He even called a couple of times and I picked up the phone and bang, he’d call me a whore or a slut. What could I do? I tried telling your father, but he didn’t believe me. There was no one I could talk to. He did not relent, kept going after me again and again. You know, when I heard your father remarried, I was so hurt at first. I wanted his new wife dead. But then I thought, you know, there’s no worse fate I could wish on someone than having that devil for a father-in-law.”

  “He did treat her very badly.”

  “The worst was after each of my deliveries. Did I ever tell you what he told me after you were born? He and his fucking wife were in the hospital room with me. Your father was in the waiting room playing host with all the visitors. Your grandfather picked you up and said, ‘You know, Janet, I love this girl so much. Do you know why?’ Like an idiot, I asked, ‘Why?’ And he said, ‘I love her so much because she’s the reason I am going to be able to return you to your fucking country.’ ”

  Our novel opens with the sound of running water. We are unable to discern clearly at first because we are at a distance. We feel a cold, the cold of low temperatures not that of harsh weather. The visuals are unclear. It is hard to see for everywhere there is white. Snow covers the ground, the trees, every stationary thing. As we get closer, we realize the sound is a waterfall. The sound is concentrated, bowl-shaped. Within ten feet of the waterfall, it is deafening, yet one step farther quiet creeps in.

  Hovering above the waterfall, we see that the river is about thirty feet wide. The fall is manmade. No. That is not exactly accurate. The fall is man-aided. The drop has been evened out, but the rocks and the spasmodic fits of water at the bottom show that nature has not been completely vanquished. The white of the water is slightly more colorful, less virginal, than the white of the snow covering the rocks.

  It is March in a small town in New Hampshire.

  Our river runs through the center of the sleepy town, houses and small buildings on each side. We hear the sound of a miniature snowplow driving along the sidewalk. The street has already been done. Even though the sky is a dazzling blue, not many pedestrians are out. Only one woman steps off the sidewalk onto the road to let the plow through. She smiles at the driver, who stops.

  “Hello, John,” she says cheerfully. She is of hardy New England stock, short, no more than five-two or so, we can guess one hundred and sixty pounds, but we can’t be completely sure because of the dumpy gray overcoat she wears. A woolen cap covers her relatively small head, which makes it difficult to figure out her hair color, but we can assume, with some confidence, that it is gray, for she does not seem like the kind of woman who would bother with hair coloring.

  “Mornin’, Mary. Turned out a lovely day, hasn’t it?” John sits behind a large bushy mustache and the handlebars of the snowplow. He seems eternally happy, plowing being the perfect job for him, dreaming of motorcycle racing.

  “Ah, yeh. They say there won’t be another storm for three days.”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “Did you see that coat there?” Mary asks, pointing at a couple down below the road watching the waterfall.

  “Must be from Boston.”

  “Must be. Well, I’d better be getting along. You have a good day, John.”

  There you go. We have now been introduced to the coat and the woman wearing it.

  If we look down at where sturdy Mary pointed, we see two women below the road, along the promenade, leaning across the metal railing, watching the waterfall. Right away we can tell they are not local, but we are also sure they are not Bostonians either. The coat alone should have been enough of a clue. It is fake fur, ankle-length, hyacinthine, and seems to highlight the woman’s lovely curves as opposed to obfuscating them. She wears purple high-heeled boots with matching mittens. Her hair (we note the absence of any hat, more prima facie evidence she is not local) is a lustrous blue-black, wavy and abundant, dropping an inch past her shoulders. We are observing her from the back, still, almost statuesque, watching the raging waters do battle with the implacable rocks.

  The woman standing to her right seems jittery in comparison, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. She moves her head sideways to glance at her companion, as if gauging the other’s feelings. We can tell from the appearance of the woman on the right that she is slightly perturbed. She wears a small black skullcap that barely covers her head. The cap is obviously no match for the temperature. She also wears a parka, which makes her look like the Michelin man, with a warm hood that is not being used. It hangs loosely on her back, barely held on by one button, like a relic about to be discarded. Her hair is recently cut, a short boyish crop, dyed an unnatural red. Her hands are parked in her parka. She has obviously forgotten her gloves.

  We can’t hear much of their conversation yet; the sound of running water overpowers everything. Let us try and move closer so we can eavesdrop. We begin to hear a conversation already in progress. The hyacinth woman says, “His hair was still soldered with brilliantine. It was still black-black. I couldn’t believe it. My mother actually dyed the hair of the corpse and then used a ton of brilliantine like she did every morning while he was still alive. I walk into the room and the bastard looks like he’s twenty years younger except he doesn’t look anything like himself, all sallow and pallid. M
y mother had him lying on the bed, his head on the pillow, his arms folded on his chest, exactly like he looked all the time when he was resting and I wasn’t allowed to disturb him. It was right out of the Twilight Zone. Kept waiting to hear the music in the background. So here I am, just arrived, everybody berating me for being late as if I could have taken the Concorde to Beirut or something, and my mother takes me in to see him and he looks like he’s been waiting for me. It was sick. My mother says I can touch him if I want. Well, the only thing I wanted to touch was his hair. I don’t know what came over me. I wanted to muss up his hair.”

  “Actually,” the red-haired woman says, “I’ve always wanted to do that myself. Not sure why.”

  “Me too. But I couldn’t do it while he was alive and now here he lay dead in front of me. So I tried and you know what? I couldn’t do it. That damn brilliantine was so stuck it felt like I was trying to break up cement. It remained like a bowling ball. All I did was break his hair into compact strips, but it sure didn’t move. Even at the end he frustrates me. Too bad he’s dead because he could have explained all this to me.”

  “Brilliantine is never just brilliantine.”

  “No,” the hyacinth woman says with a giggle, “nothing is ever just what it is.” She smiles for the first time. Her companion joins her in smiling, happy to be of some use. Hyacinth woman puts her arm through her friend’s, moves closer and lays her head on her friend’s shoulder.

  Now, what can we gather from this glimpse into these two women’s lives? We have a slightly clearer picture. First, let us name them, for we cannot keep calling them the hyacinth and the red-haired woman. The former we shall call Dina and the latter, Sarah, good Lebanese names. It is fairly obvious from the snippet of conversation we overheard that Dina has just attended her father’s funeral, which must have happened in Beirut. It seems Sarah is here to comfort her. We can tell from the last physical interaction, the laying of the head on the other’s shoulder, that they are close, probably old friends. What else? Well, they spoke without much of a discernible accent—discernible foreign accent, that is. That means they have probably been living in America for a while, probably arrived at a fairly young age, not children, but young adults. Dina does seem to have a noticeable Boston twang to her words, so maybe Snowplow John, with his quick assessment, was not far off after all.