In the Spider’s Room

At noon the next day we were all on the beach. I sat alone, watching them from behind my sunglasses. I was watching his body, as vibrant as the sea, the sun, the sand, and the wind. It was a warm April day and the weather was pleasant. The light was astonishingly pure, despite a trace of dust from time to time that irritated Asma, who had a sensitive nose and often complained for the most trivial reasons. High in the sky, fragile wisps of cloud like cotton candy dispersed almost as soon as they appeared. I started to think about my tremulous happiness, examining it with the curiosity of an expert appraiser. It wasn’t that old superficial happiness that was the product of the moment, the kind that made me jump and shout and sing. It was its elder sister, sensible and staid, the one that smiles at a cup of tea and a cigarette after the afternoon siesta or that purrs with affection when she hears little Badriya laughing as she splashes Shireen and Asma with water. Just to have Abdel Aziz in front of me in the sunlight, covering his firm body as little as possible, was another form of happiness, secret and buried like a bean that the soil cradles, a seed that sleeps and dreams of the journey that awaits it, the long journey that will one day be its life aboveground.

After lunch I told them I’d like to take a walk alone for a short while. I walked until I found an Internet café, where I searched everywhere for the mysterious Warda song. Eventually I found it, downloaded it, and burned it onto a CD. I took Abdel Aziz by surprise with it that night as we were sitting on the balcony. He couldn’t believe it, and he hugged me while Essam the little monkey wasn’t looking. He looked contented as he listened to the opening section of the song from his childhood for the first time:

On the nights when the tears in my eyes have stayed awake singing,

For loved ones whose only pleasure is to do me wrong.

When Essam had the impression that his sister’s fiancé had run out of hashish, he stood up to go to bed. We sat up with Warda, a bottle of wine, and an assortment of nuts and cheeses. We chatted about everything under the sun. I told him the story of my first relationship, with Ra’fat, when I was a naïve adolescent, and how he had abandoned me and eventually offered me to one of his colleagues. I wasn’t embarrassed and I didn’t hide anything from him. I wanted to encourage him to be honest with me about himself, without overtly pushing him to do so. Then we reminisced and laughed about the days after we first met, and I told him how I was mad about him as soon as I saw him at his engagement party and about my strange dream about him and the uncertain memory of the kiss. Even in this heart-to-heart, with the April breeze sometimes harsh and sometimes gentle, he didn’t satisfy my quest for the truth about that kiss. He ignored my reference to it as if it were unworthy of attention, and I didn’t press him.

He took a small piece of hashish out of his pocket and proceeded to crumble it into a joint. “I hope Essam doesn’t get a whiff of this and wake up,” he said.

He lit the joint and handed it to me. I took one short puff and coughed so violently that my eyes watered. He reached out and wiped my tears away, while sneaking a look into the living room. After a while he admitted sweetly that in my company he had found something he hadn’t been used to, maybe something that was simple but that now seemed necessary. He said he had never experienced the pleasure of “playing,” and he had never been brave enough to break free from considerations of rules and conventions, right and wrong. Now he had suddenly discovered what it meant to be like a child again, a child other than the old one who trembled in fear of his big brother, and naturally of his father, the army man who was absent most of the time. They were a clan of males who watched each other constantly, in a big cold house that hadn’t been graced by the spirit of a woman since their mother had died. They ate, drank, watched television, and did everything at fixed times and under a strict regime. Dissent or rebellion was banned, even in their imaginations. Any disagreement could easily end in a heated battle, and then the leather belt from their father’s army uniform would come out to resolve everything, leaving its mark on the boys’ young backs. Compared with my childhood, Abdel Aziz’s was one long nightmare. I had once thought it was too much coddling that had sapped me of my masculinity, but long ago I had stopped bothering about the reasons, because I had come across so many diverse cases among gay men, some of them almost contradictory when it came to the backgrounds in which they had grown up. We went back to listening to Warda in the calm of the night:

The joy of our love was our hopes.

The hours when we meet pass in seconds.

All our lives, from our joy, the world sings to us.

All the flowers, even the birds, rejoiced and became like us.

They sang to us, to us, and we together,

And I learned the meaning of love.

He was about ten years old when one of his brothers caught him with another local boy in the bathroom at the youth center. His eldest brother tied him down and beat the soles of his feet twenty times with a thick piece of wood. His brother added another punishment—blindfolding him with a coarse black rag and making him stay home for two days under constant observation. If he tried to lift the blindfold off, even for a second, the two-day period would restart. Abdel Aziz was willing to take any punishment as long as his father knew nothing of what had happened. He spent two days stumbling from room to room, banging into pieces of furniture and falling over every few paces, while his brothers laughed at him and insulted him in the vilest language. Even so, his eldest brother told their father everything as soon as he came home. Abdel Aziz couldn’t tell me how his father punished him. He was completely silent and tears welled in his eyes. When he tried to talk again his voice trembled. I wanted to spare him the memory, so I asked him jokingly, “And what were you doing with the boy in the bathroom, bad boy?”

He smiled and slapped me gently on the shoulder. “Nothing,” he replied. “We were seeing what he had and what I had. Not even kissing or playing.”

Toward the end of the pleasantly cool night I found myself wondering if I was happy now. I didn’t know the answer. I thought that maybe happiness was the carrot that they put in front of us so that we keep walking forward whatever happens, and maybe it’s not even a real carrot, but just a picture of one and nothing more.

What do we care for our critics?

We’ve been through enough already.

We toiled and we suffered

Until we met one another.

Whatever they say about us, let them say.

What they say isn’t on our minds.

When Abdel Aziz heard this part of the song, he suddenly livened up. He rose to his feet and started to sing along, swinging his firm body right and left like a second-rate showman. “There’s only the ice cream left now,” he said ecstatically.

He gave me a mischievous conspiratorial look, and a few minutes later we were out looking for ice cream in the streets of Agami, which were quiet at two o’clock in the morning. Eventually we found a grocery that was still open. We licked our ice creams as we walked along laughing. Not far off, customers were going in and out of a fancy nightclub, the men in full suits, some of them swaying slightly, accompanied by women in furs and jewels. We watched them from a distance like schoolboys playing hooky.

“We and the gang should come and spend the evening here some time,” he suggested.

“Or without the gang.”

“That would be better,” he replied.

On our way back a pack of dogs behind the wall of a small villa barked at us when we went too close, and we started barking back at them. When lights came on in the villa, we ran off to our dilapidated beach house, which was hidden among smart new buildings.

Before I fell asleep I heard my bedroom door opening slowly and felt his warm body slipping under the cover by my side. “I can’t sleep for Essam’s snoring,” he whispered.

“Really?” I said.

He went back to his own bed before dawn. In the meantime we had shared each other’s bodies without making the slightest sound, as frightened and cautious as thieves.