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.
I woke up breathing forcefully, wheezing and wincing, a disturbingly acute smell of rot, sewage, mold, and dirt all around me. The room smelled rancid. The odor was overpowering. It stung my nose. It seemed to be released from the walls, the floors, and the ceiling, which appeared lower than it had before I’d gone to sleep, as though it were descending on me with cunning subtlety, moving in nearly imperceptible degrees. I could feel the walls sliding, shifting, drawing back to reveal my private ruins, the barren foundation of my youth, the parentless desert of my adolescence. I lay there in a frozen state, unable to tell if the dream had contaminated what small modicum of reality I held on to or if the smell was real and had seeped into my dream. Perhaps, I thought, it doesn’t matter. Perhaps there is no clear line to be drawn between waking life and sleep, between reality and perception.
It was dawn. I forced myself to sit up in bed and look out the window. The darkness was reluctantly giving way to morning. A rose-colored hue clung to the edges of the sky, nudging the screen of night apart. Soon we would all be vertical again, the streets packed with the machinery of moving limbs. I caught my reflection in the windowpane. My features were stiff with bewilderment, my mouth open in an O. I looked through myself to the trees. They looked as they always had: little scaled and silky tufts of golden hair sticking out of the bark, the fronds suspended in the air, flapping tenderly in the wind. The lanterns in the street were cupping the sky with their soft light. Soon, I thought, trying to distract myself from the assaulting images of my dream, the trees will be loaded with singing birds.
I opened the window to air out the room and returned to bed. I reached for my cigarettes. I’d left them on the nightstand along with my lighter and an ashtray Ellie had found in the kitchen, the same pale-green ashtray I’d used at seventeen. I lay there smoking in a nicotine-induced anesthetic fog. The smoke dissipated the smell, cutting through to the apartment’s musty air, the smell that had settled into the seams and the walls throughout the years the place had been empty, bereft of inhabitants. There hadn’t even been a stray visitor, a distant friend or cousin who’d requested the keys for a family vacation. The apartment seemed to have a will of its own, an energy that coursed through its stained walls, repelling anyone who might enter. Only I had remained trapped here. The apartment, I considered, drawing in the warm smoke, watching it float in rivulets up to that menacing ceiling, had threatened to annihilate me with the most tender trick of all: love’s oblivion.
I had tried to masturbate on and off through the night. Each time I awoke, I reached down to touch myself in the hopes that an orgasm would ease my breathing and help me glide back to sleep. But I felt nothing. I was numb and indifferent to my own touch, so I gave up and instead lay there in a state of disorientation thinking of all the times I had fantasized about Omar, his broad chest, his hands guiding me onto his hips, his encouraging voice as I rode him in the afternoons. I wondered what our days of lovemaking had meant to him. Did he rewind the tape of his life to relive those encounters while he was masturbating? Did he fantasize about me, too? The thought disturbed me. Yet, at the same time, it had a soothing effect: it cut through the gnawing pain of being discarded. But only for a moment, a brief flicker of a second.
I felt my blood bubble up at the base of my heart. I felt the old rage return at the thought that he’d consumed me only to dispose of me. That he’d thought of me as refuse. I placed the ashtray on my stomach and flicked the burned end of my cigarette into it. I sucked in all the smoke I could hold in my lungs in a single inhale and felt its warmth spread across my chest. I remembered lying on the carpeted floor of my college dorm room with my friend, a soft-spoken man from Thailand who’d been disowned by his family for being gay; we’d gone into the clinic together to get tested for HIV. The night before we were to receive the results, we’d lain there, side by side, wide awake, staring mutely at the ceiling. I’d been seized by a delirious terror, convinced that I’d contracted HIV from Omar. I’d gotten away without getting pregnant. There’s no way, I’d thought then, that I could have escaped from him physically unscathed. I was searching for a tangible consequence of our affair. I needed my body, which felt so dirty to me then, so despicable, to be my witness. I was tired of standing at the edge of an abyss, of the hollow well that had opened at the center of my life because I knew, even then, that emptiness cannot be combated; you have to learn to live with its sting, to bare the raw surfaces of your buried wounds. But I didn’t have the strength. I’d wanted visible evidence. See, I’d say, stupidly, thoughtlessly waving my test results, Omar and I are linked in the negative. Here, I would say, is confirmation that he had entered my body and changed it forever, left it in disrepair. What a fool I had been.
But then again, I considered now, just as I had considered then, on the few occasions when I’d dared talk about Omar even I couldn’t believe my own story. It seemed untrue, made up. The words seemed false. Suddenly, upon hearing them, I would feel cut off from myself, oddly detached, a single thought repeating endlessly in my head: that I had been both repulsed and compliant, a participant in Omar’s ruthless behavior; that I’d helped that exceptionally handsome man take advantage of the fact that I was only partially conscious of my sexual power, to contaminate me with his actions, his motives, his aberrant desire, so I would be the one to spend the rest of my waking life considering these pitiable flashbacks and wondering if it was then, during that strange lonesome summer when I’d had no one to consult, when I’d pushed even my own mother away, if it was then that my life had been cleaved in two, each horn forking and reforking until my future resembled nothing more than a maze.
I ran my hands through my hair. I lifted a few strands and let them drop back down onto the pillow. My hair had been a source of drama in my life, covered in Tehran with a scarf, always pulled back and tucked away. I had come to consider it a sexual organ of sorts. Why else would one need to hide it from men? I thought of Omar grabbing my hair from behind, twisting it around his fist to draw my head back. I remembered shaving my hair off in college. I had wanted to begin again, to erase the convoluted labyrinth that had taken over my life. I had wanted a smooth, round surface ready to have new lines drawn across it. I’d driven to Supercuts and asked the hairdresser to shave my head. She’d refused. She was Iranian.
“What will your mother say?” she’d asked, bewildered.
“Should I ask someone else?” I said tersely.
She’d finally agreed, reluctantly. I watched her face in the mirror. As my hair dropped in thick strands to the floor, her eyes grew darker, the lines around her mouth deeper. Her brow was furrowed from the distress she imagined my bald head would cause my mother. And it had. She’d buried her face in her hands and sobbed at the sight of my shaved head.
“Why? Why? Why?” she’d asked, as she gasped for air, even though she had known why before I had ever mentioned a word about it. She had intuited what Omar had done to me while it was happening, and her premonition had been confirmed by my remoteness, my despondence, the embittered silence with which I had greeted her upon my return that summer.
But her question had hung unanswered between us. I didn’t know why I’d shaved my hair. Or I did, but I had lost my grip on language, was unable to articulate my needs, to build a coherent story to justify my impulses. It was only now that understanding was sliding into place.
I put out my cigarette. Beyond the window, the black canvas of the night sky had faded into a dull pinkish gray. There were a few birds chirping in the trees, announcing the imminent arrival of daylight. I could hear the shopkeepers opening their stores, lifting the metal shutters, stacking their piles of leeks and onions and apples, the red globular pomegranates, the bright bushels of herbs arranged in plastic bins on the sidewalks. I thought about how lonely I’d been in college. I’d refused to have sex while I was at university. I couldn’t have verbalized this then, but I’d become fearful of the frontiers sex offered me, of the yawning emptiness it opened inside of me. Perhaps, I thought, the sex I’d had with Omar had burned up my full reserve of teenage desire. Perhaps I was punishing myself for having misused my sexual energy. I’d watched my friends brag about sex while I shaved my hair and took shower after shower. During my sophomore year, I’d showered constantly. Sometimes three or four times a day. I’d sit in the tub and let the water run over me until it turned cold, then I’d get out shivering, my toenails and lips blue. I felt perpetually dirty. I was often constipated. Once, I remembered, I had to stick my finger up my ass and pull the shit out myself. It was so painful, I almost fainted. It hadn’t occurred to me to go to the pharmacy to buy laxatives or make an appointment with a doctor. I hadn’t wanted to deal with anybody. I’d recoiled at the thought of being touched by a stranger. I suffered quietly.
I got up. I felt restless, likely from the nicotine surging through my veins I thought as I got dressed. I grabbed my cigarettes and wallet, and headed out. I closed the door lightly so as not to wake up Ellie. Neither of us were ever sharp in the mornings, never eager for conversation. We had that in common. We tended to let each other be until noon.
It was seven in the morning now. I stood near the neighbor’s door. I no longer knew who lived there. Likely an older woman with whiskers, a lady in the habit of wearing oil-stained aprons, a woman who fries food—potatoes and breaded cod—for her grandchildren all day.
I felt as though I’d been stopped in my tracks. I was being assaulted with memories that seemed to be surging forth of their own volition. When I was living in Brooklyn, I thought, deep into my relationship with the chef, I mostly stopped eating. We were both lean, not an ounce of fat on our bodies. But whenever he developed a new plate—chocolate foie gras, venison with plum sorbet and eucalyptus air, lobster decorated with lemon verbena bubbles—he would have me come into the restaurant to try it. He worked at a three-Michelin-star restaurant in Manhattan, and it was easy enough for me to get there from Brooklyn. There were always famous people loitering at the bar, drunk actors who came in followed by a herd of young women in short sequined dresses, their hair ironed and shining like a leopard’s skin, high heels like weapons, mouths painted bright, fake lashes they expertly batted. They were so loud, they often ruined everyone’s meal, but they brought in the cash, stashes of money spent on the finest food and wine. No one dared say a word to them. That’s how we lionize the wealthy, I thought.
I would eat like a queen on those nights then wait for my boyfriend to finish his shift at three or four in the morning, at which point we would ride the subway all the way down the spine of the island and back across the bridge. The only words we’d exchange would be about the showmanship of his food or the moon hanging over the river, sometimes as round and bright as a peach; the sky in New York always seemed to keep one eye open. We would walk quietly to our rat-infested apartment. Sometimes, just to take the temperature of our relationship, I would try to seduce him, and he would go stiff, likely from exhaustion but also because he’d probably had sex in the dry pantry—like I said, his mouth often smelled like another woman’s vagina. I didn’t care much. I was too busy writing, trying to make my own way; in that regard, we were a good match. When it came to art, we held ourselves to the highest standard and weren’t afraid of a life of discipline and resolve. We pushed each other to succeed, which is, I suppose, its own kind of high.
I remembered that the chef had gone through a phase of dreadful nightmares; a faceless man would rape him and he would wake up whimpering, defenseless. He’d lean into me and sob. But then suddenly, with a terrifying resolve, he would get up and go to work and come home with a distant, self-protective air that, if I tried to puncture it, would only lead to a confoundingly cruel exchange. The sexual transgressions he had likely suffered would remain beyond my reach. I could neither soothe him nor relate to him to ease my own suffering. I could only listen during the rare moments he allowed himself vulnerability. One time, he told me, he’d dreamt that he had two penises and that he was fucking me with both his dicks and that it felt amazing, that he could have stayed in that dream forever. I joked that I was sure he would eventually run out of steam. I didn’t know what to say. It had been months since he’d approached me with the singular penis of his waking hours; I couldn’t understand the chasm between the reality of our sexless relationship and his erotic flights of the night. I suppose any psychologist would say that I’d stayed with him to avoid having sex, a simple enough conjecture I couldn’t entirely refute even if at times I felt so tortured by the lack of desire in our relationship that I considered cheating on him. But I’d had my fill of lies. I didn’t want to live a double life. It’s incredible, the capacity we have for living with someone for years, for rearing children with them, without ever letting them in or extending ourselves to know them, without ever truly understanding the source of their grief. I suppose the tangled web of our future is imprinted upon us long before we learn to speak; it’s no easy task to trace our behavior, all of our impulses, to the network of disturbances in which we were raised. I suppose that’s not even the answer, or is only partially the answer, to our inner turbulence.
A loud noise—a broken plate or a fallen glass—startled me out of my reverie and I realized that I’d been standing there, stupidly staring at the neighbor’s door for quite a while. I decided it was time to get some coffee and head down to the beach. Once I was on the street, I turned left onto the main road that descended sharply toward the water. Light had broken, but the sky was overcast. A mild fog hung at the lit windows of the shops. The hills in the distance looked blue in the opaque light; the palms appeared to be made of steel; the air, still and dense, was firmly set against their fronds so they appeared to have been covered with silver varnish. I could hear the fierce howling of dogs in the distance. There were seagulls perched on the serrated edges of the old city’s fortified walls. The gunmetal sky seemed to exhaust everything, to mute the colors of the roads, the native plants, to drain the blood from the faces of the few people who were out on the streets.
I stopped to have a coffee and a pan con tomate at the first bar that had sidewalk tables where I could smoke in peace. I was one of the only customers at that hour except for a few elderly men sitting morosely at the bar inside, busily reading their newspapers and dunking their croissants into their café con leches in semiautomatic movements. The intense smell of coffee wafted outdoors, and even from the sidewalk, I could hear the braying sound of the espresso machine. I sat in a red plastic chair with the Estrella Damm beer logo plastered onto it—those chairs were a hallmark of my adolescence—and faced the mountains. They looked beautiful in the subtle light of the morning. Their backs, carpeted in greenery, lent them an air of solitary grandeur. I could see the sky opening up in the distance, a ribbed sky that suggested the wind was picking up over the craggy rocks and would soon shear the fog that had settled overnight.
Finally, a heavyset woman walked over to my table to take my order. She stared rigidly ahead and was gesturing at a pair of chattering women who were walking their dogs across the street. Without turning to face me, she asked, “¿Qué te pongo, guapa?”
I had forgotten that in Spain, women often called each other guapa, a habit I treated with disdain because it suggested that our existence began and ended with our bodies, that we were undifferentiated, pretty face after pretty face, our personalities flattened.
Once I’d finished my coffee and toast, I headed to the beach. I crossed the main avenue and made my way down to the wide seaside promenade. A few steps led down to the beach, which was stark and empty at this hour, bereft of humans. Massive clouds were coasting above the sea. Little had changed since I’d last been there in the ’90s. There were putrid remnants of fruits and vegetables abandoned by the previous day’s beachgoers in the sand—tomatoes, orange rinds, sliced watermelon, pears left to rot. I observed the coconut-hair umbrellas staked into the blond sand, the sun beds with their white cushions lined up to receive the lazy bodies of tanners, tourists from Britain and the Nordic countries desperate for sun. They would spend their days lying on the beach, ordering expensive drinks poured into carved pineapples. Beyond the beach, along the promenade, beneath the shade of the awnings, shopkeepers were hanging bikinis and summer dresses out on racks next to stacks of sun hats and tanning lotions and bright extra-large beach towels.
The sounds of the city were still so faint that I could hear the birds cawing overhead. The sea, which I’d heard roaring from the apartment, as if water were on the verge of coming up through the floorboards, was silent now, still. I felt my chest tighten; my stomach began to ache. I heard the frenetic sound of a motorcycle in the distance and remembered the feeling of the hot leather seat pressing against my jeans as I clung to Omar on the Ducati while we whizzed through traffic. I was astonished that I hadn’t died. That we hadn’t wiped out or flown off a cliff. There were times when he’d gone up to two hundred kilometers an hour. The sheer force of the wind had opened my backpack once and my CDs had gone flying out; they’d scattered across the highway and gotten shredded to bits. The only thing left in my backpack was my passport, and that had survived only because I’d been cautious enough to tuck it into an inside pocket. I couldn’t understand how we’d never been pulled over, nor would I ever know why Omar lived so recklessly. What, I wondered, my stomach twisting itself into a knot, had his father been like? He’d disappeared during the war, but I couldn’t trace the effects of his absence on Omar. Had Omar’s father treated him like a feral animal before he’d died, prematurely weaned and left to survive on his own, as mine had? Had his mother become undone, left to raise her children alone during the bloodshed of the civil war? I had, at times, intimated the searing ache that moved like a great flood through him, but I had never asked him any questions about it. When the subject of family came up, his neck and shoulders would tense, his jaw would lock, and his gaze would turn simultaneously sad and vindictive. His whole body seemed to become armed in those moments, to turn into a weapon; and I, in order to avoid provoking him, instinctively kept quiet. While he discovered my body, revealed its limitless capabilities to me, shaped my desire and my peculiar perversions and longings, I had neither knowledge of nor influence over the dark passages of his life.
I thought again of my brother, of his vulnerability. I went over the incident in my head. He’d been viciously charged at from behind while walking home from school, first with vulgar racist remarks then with punches that pounded his skull against the sidewalk. His attacker had crawled on top of him even after he’d passed out and continued smashing his brain against the concrete. I thought about how my brother had left us as soon as he’d physically recovered. How now, years later, he’d taken to disappearing, vanishing for weeks or months at a time. His absence cleaved my mother in two. She barely spoke while he was gone. Throughout my high school years, when I still lived with her, she wept in bed for hours every morning. When she finally did get up, I’d make her bed. I’d dry out her pillowcase, which was always wet with tears. I tried to fill the dent her head had left in the pillow. We spent our days waiting for my brother in a silent state of dread, unsure if he was dead or alive.
It hadn’t taken long before my mother had fallen into a deep depression, a monolith of confusion and grief punctuated by moments of intense panic. She’d become so fearful of losing me, the only proof left in the world that she was a mother, that she’d ripped children from her womb and nursed them with her own milk, that she never let me out of her sight, not even to cross the street to CVS to buy nail polish with my friends. She would drop me off at school and pick me up promptly after swim practice. It was a life of tyranny, a dry life, empty of love or laughter, a life in which pleasure had turned into a distant memory.
When my brother eventually reappeared months later, he was a different person. He had wild eyes and a suspicious gaze; he hallucinated, had turned violent. It took my mother nearly a decade to rehabilitate him. By then, I had faded into the margins. I was strong-willed, stubborn, impatient, quick on my feet. My mother believed that she could afford to look away from me while she focused on my brother’s pain, pain that had taken just a few moments of a skinhead’s life to cause but that we would spend the rest of our lives contending with. My brother (and I by extension) had horrified that skinhead. Our presence in school and around town terrorized him because, even though we had white skin just like he did, we also had Persian accents and wore clothes made in Turkey or Iran: flowered vests, neatly pressed shirts, shoes with beads or bells on them. We were not “quite white,” or we were too white, or not white in the right ways.
Until he had laid his hands on my brother, I considered, his was a nuanced, concealed racism. Difficult to prove until the moment he’d raised his fist but nonetheless palpable to those of us on the receiving end of its toxic waste. I know now how to recognize this grade of racism. I can feel the air pressure change. It’s a racism that persists, that leans into the stereotype that Iranians, whose history is intertwined with Russia, Turkey, Mongolia, Greece, the Arabian Peninsula, and elsewhere, are either too dark or not dark enough; our brand of whiteness, if we can even call it that, has nothing in common with the entitled whiteness of America. What this kind of racism claims, I considered, is an exclusive and proprietary right to whiteness; it considers whiteness as a privileged status that belongs to Europeans exclusively, and to their American descendants, who have flung themselves so far from the annals of history that they’ve deliberately repressed the truth of their own immigration, their own otherness. Whiteness, the skinhead taught my brother and me just weeks after we’d landed on US soil, is a performance the standards of which we failed to meet. We, with our near-white skin and our un-American manners, gestures, clothes, and gait, were tainting his whiteness, reducing its stock value, lowering the profitability of his biggest asset.
I took off my clothes and got in the ocean. I’d made sure to wear my swimsuit in case the water called me to it. It was cold, colder than I’d expected; for a moment, I couldn’t breathe. I felt as though my lungs were being squeezed. I swam to warm up. I was still a strong swimmer, capable of doing a thousand yards without stopping to take a break. I was always most at home in the water.
When I finally stopped, I turned around, treaded water, and stared back at the empty shore. The air turned heavy. I heard a rumble in the distance. A heavy mass of compressed air was rolling down the cordillera, a gloomy avalanche that expanded as it approached. I was cold. My lungs stung. I could barely feel my fingers; they were as stiff as twigs. A darkness descended upon me; I watched the metallic light of the sky disappear from the sea. All I could see was night. I was alone in a world apart. My life, I thought in a surge of panic, runs parallel to the lives of others. I felt a rising sense of trepidation, the sense that I was about to be carried out to sea never to be seen or heard from again. My heart ached with loneliness.
But I wasn’t alone. I was bathing under Omar’s gaze. I could feel him hovering over me. I felt something move over my skin, crawl up my limbs. I started to gasp for air. I thought to myself, Calm down, search the water. But the darkness was complete, impenetrable. I dipped my head under, reemerged, wiped my face and eyes. I took in a deep breath. My heart was beating furiously. I heard Omar’s voice; I heard my name. “Arezu, Arezu.” He was searching for me, calling my name as if it were a question, an existential plea he was making to the universe only to be greeted with silence. So he, too, was lost. I steadied my nerves. I thought, He has come to me because I have searched for him, for who we had been, for all of the ways we’d bent each other’s will. He’d bent mine to a much larger extent than I had his, and yet we’d each of us been susceptible to the other, willing to transgress any sense of propriety that our families and society had instilled in us in order to be near each other.
I closed my eyes and felt something swim over me. It was his hand, and it was crawling up my back to my neck, turning me over. He pulled me toward him. My hair tangled like soft rope in his fingers. His breath was hot against my face. That boyish smile of his sent a shiver down my spine. I looked up. It was a different sky altogether: a pure electric-blue sky with just a few wispy clouds careening down to the sea. We were high up in the lakes again; the water that was dripping off his chin into my mouth was sweet. The air was sublime. The world, I felt, was aflame with pleasure and the danger of deceit.
Who knows what would have become of me if I hadn’t met Omar? We’d laughed together and played in the mountains like they belonged to us and us alone. I was willing to give him my sex in exchange for that. Or so I’d thought then. I’d thought that Omar had shocked me back to life. Until I met him, I’d been standing on the great hungry lips of death, prepared to sacrifice myself to its insatiable appetite. Omar, while bringing into center stage the knowledge of my mortality, had also jolted me back into existence, into being. It was a delicate trade: a return to life as a teenager that would drain me of vital energy in the future. He had deposited such a surplus of fear in me that I would need the rest of my life to parse through it. The fear hadn’t been palpable to me then. Or perhaps it had been so all consuming, so much larger than I was, that I couldn’t see or recognize or name it. What I did know was that he’d made me laugh my way back to the world of the living that summer. And for that I was eternally grateful to him.
I got out of the water and pulled my jeans on and peeled my swimsuit top off. I didn’t care. Most of the women tanning on the beach were already topless. I let my breasts dry off in the wind and then put my shirt back on and began to make my way back to the apartment. Ellie would be up by now, and I wanted to bring her down to the beach with me. I felt exhausted, drained. It was my turn to rent a sun bed, to luxuriate, to order bottle after bottle of rosé, to eat shrimp out of an impossibly tall martini glass, to pluck olives out of a dish with a toothpick. I wanted to get drunk. I wanted to spend the day fantasizing about having unprotected sex with a stranger. For a brief moment, I forgot that I was married, that I had left Xavi with a lump in his throat that was only somewhat assuaged by the fact that I had agreed not to go to Marbella alone, to allow Ellie to come with me, because according to him, and to her, too, returning would be more difficult than I could ever predict. I couldn’t say that they’d turned out to be wrong. I could never have guessed that Omar’s ghost would be here waiting to greet me, that I’d be retracing my footsteps under his gaze.
Halfway to the apartment, I decided to cut through the blind alleys of the old city, to climb up through its shaded streets and stout houses, their windows gazing at one another coyly, to the Plaza de los Naranjos. I remembered an old woman who ran a shop in the far corner of that plaza; we’d chatted once or twice. I wondered if she was still alive. She was thin and had a wrinkled face, a humped back, but nevertheless she was elegant, attractive, a woman with a poised demeanor, pearls in her ears, and hair meticulously combed into a chignon pinned together with silk flowers.
I walked resignedly through the streets now, jostled by crowds of chattering tourists, by young men in leather jackets, their motorcycle helmets hanging off their forearms, the odor of alcohol wafting from their armpits as they staggered home from the clubs. As I looked at them, I felt an intense, searing heat crawl up my throat. It was Omar’s name rising to my lips. My eyes grew moist. I felt as though steam were rising from the center of my being, forcing its way up and out of my eyes, ears, nose. It was time. The hour of sobbing had arrived. I didn’t want to submit to my tears. I didn’t want to succumb. I feared I would collapse, turn to liquid, be unable to put myself back together. So I swallowed his name. I willed it to drown. And for a moment—a brief minute—I experienced relief. Perhaps, I considered, I could hardly bear the thought that Omar was still there, in that recondite twist of alleys, hiking through the brush and bramble of the mountains, drying herbs on his terrace, because I feared that, if given the chance, he would work his way through my body again. I shook away the thought. I pushed his name down.
I entered the shop and asked for the woman. Rosario. Her name had come back to me the second I crossed the threshold. I said it over and over to myself—Rosario—a prayer bead, an incantation, shoving Omar’s name further down with each repetition. Rosario. The man who was minding the shop looked at me with expert eyes, then looked down at his desk, which was crowded with objects—saltshakers shaped like tuna fruit, tiny olive and almond and salt platters with flowers painted on their glazed yellow surfaces. Slowly, without raising his gaze from his desk, he told me that Rosario was his mother, that she’d passed away nearly ten years prior, that the shop was his now. There was a grandfather clock standing against the wall behind him. The clock was wheezing like a pair of lungs. I stared at its swinging pendulum. It seemed to be whispering something to me. I felt a hot breath on my neck. Omar. There it was: his name trembling on my lips, more powerful than I was.
“I want you naked,” I heard, “as the day you were born.”
“Excuse me?” I asked Rosario’s son. He had a concerned look on his face.
“I was just asking,” he said, “if you were looking to buy something.”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes.” Nervously moving about the store, I picked out a candleholder, a beautiful centerpiece delicately carved and painted a regal blue. I told him that I was looking to light some candles, paid him, and quietly left.
Outside, I sat on a bench. The ache in my stomach had worsened; the pain had become unbearable. I felt as though someone had turned up the pressure in my gut. I felt ready to burst. I needed to take a moment to breathe before walking the rest of the way to the apartment. There were two men standing a few meters behind me. I directed my attention to them in order to distract myself from the tears working their way out of my body, tears I was afraid would be toxic. I swallowed hard. I shoved everything that was rising up in me as far down as I could. Listen to their conversation, I told myself, and my old habit of obedience kicked in; I resigned myself to listening. They were talking about women, marriage. I heard one of them say that he preferred his women to be ugly because the ugly ones made more competent housewives. They’re better cooks and don’t complain when it’s time to mop the floors and deweb the ceiling. Besides, he added, he could always go down to the beach and stare at the foreign women, their bodies overflowing with sexual offerings, their habits and tastes indiscriminate. “Obscene women,” he said. “Women who spread their legs for anybody.”
The other man laughed and clapped encouragingly.
“What happened to women cutting their hair short when they got married and letting their waists thicken and being happy in their house slippers and aprons?” the first man asked. “They used to go down to the butcher looking like that, and now they all want to be appreciated; they want us to cup their breasts as if they were pears carved from gold by the hands of Jesus,” he exclaimed happily. “Forget it. Give me an ugly wife or nothing.”
His friend went on clapping, applauding what he kept referring to as a timely sermon.
It dawned on me then why all the women called one another guapa here. It was a code of solidarity, a rallying against the abusive language catapulted at them by certain men. It was a collective affirmation of their dignity.
I’d closed my eyes. When I opened them, I saw that Rosario’s son was standing before me. He was holding out his arm. He said, “You forgot your change.” He opened his palm to show me a five-euro bill.
I took the bill and thanked him.
He walked away, dragging his feet, head hanging, his eyes on the ground. A man who was afraid, who had likely always been afraid, of making eye contact with women. There are all kinds of men in this world, I thought. All kinds.
As soon as he was out of sight, I began shaking. I tried to push the surge of tears back down. I swallowed. I begged. I negotiated with the heavens. But nothing worked, and soon I had given in to a long bereft fit of weeping. It hurt. My throat and the backs of my lids hurt. I cried until my head throbbed. My lungs were exhausted and sore, my lips raw, but I couldn’t stop. It was as if a great flood were moving through me. A terrible earthquake. A shifting of the fault lines in the oceanic depths of my life. I thought of Ellie, reminded myself that I wasn’t alone. I just had to get myself to the apartment. I just had to make my way to Ellie. I got up and walked downhill through the old quarter. I could hardly see straight. My vision was blurred with tears that were collecting faster than I could unload them. I walked down a narrow street flanked by the puckered walls of the Arab ruins; great tufts of lavender and capers were growing out of the cracks and seams. I stopped halfway down the road and clung to one of those bushes. I nearly yanked it out of that great ancient wall, those stones that were as rough as sandpaper. The street was deserted. There was no one in sight. I heard my mother’s voice. I heard her utter that saying she had so often repeated: “God is our only witness.” I didn’t even know if I believed there was a God hovering in the heavens, crowning our heads.
I couldn’t wait to get home to Ellie. I thought of the healing power of friendship as I made my way down that empty street, a street as old as time. Friendship, I thought, is a form of witness. She had received my testimony. She had held it with tenderness and love. She had taken care with my story. If it hadn’t been for her, I would have never been able to receive Xavi. I could feel myself—my whole body—rushing toward Ellie. I thought of her contagious laughter, how we’d doubled over laughing in the middle of an empty maze of streets behind the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem, the air thick with the smell of incense and the sound of murmured prayers because I, who did not even know if I believed in God, had been turned away from the Al-Aqsa Mosque that morning by two Israeli soldiers in green fatigues and combat boots, bullet belts strapped to their chests. They were holding machine guns. “You are not Muslim,” they’d said in unison, as if channeling God herself. I was wearing a full hijab. I’d wanted to go into the mosque, to pray, to press my forehead against its well-worn floors as a way to be near my mother and her parents, to salute their deep religiosity despite my own confused ambivalence. I had been raised, after all, to greet God every morning, to thank God every evening. “Recite the Ash-Shura,” the soldiers commanded, stroking their guns. And I had. I stood there with a fire in my eyes, holding back my pain, hardening my face so it wouldn’t show my sorrow or anger. I recited the verses. I recited them for myself. I recited them for the soldiers, for the collective humiliation that we had been forced to perform. For the Palestinians whose relationship to the divine was eclipsed by the Occupation, a form of psychological and spiritual torture, not to be allowed to access the sacred sites of one’s culture. And as I recited the Ash-Shura, in that moment, against all odds, I had suddenly believed there was a God. I had felt heard, accompanied by an invisible fleet of bodies that had gathered at my back to support me. I was sure my ancestors were standing behind me, placing each verse of the Quran in my mouth to be uttered. Halfway through the prayer, the soldiers grew impatient and let me in. And my privilege in comparison to the Palestinians to whom this land and its sites belonged was not lost on me. What business did I have entering the mosque while they, who were devoted to the mosque, were cut off from its holy walls? I almost turned away, but the soldiers waved me through the arched passageway with their guns and a nod of their heads, and I walked, aware that I was a target, that all my life there had been a gun pointed at my back. I walked through the courtyard of olive trees, beneath a blue sun so bright that it appeared to have been lit from below, past men and women dressed in simple robes, toward the golden dome of the mosque, and left my shoes at the door. I’d needed to cry but hadn’t been able to.
I met Ellie at the Damascus Gate after that. I told her what happened, and we’d begun to laugh. You are not a Muslim, we kept repeating to each other, laughing our hearts out at the preposterous request that I justify my humanity. It was an absurd utterance, a statement that ushered hatred into the world—a statement designed to remind me that I was under surveillance, that I, a potential purveyor of future violence, needed to be monitored, controlled. How, Ellie and I had wondered, laughing out our pained hearts, were we expected to carve out lives for ourselves amid all of that suspicion and hatred? How were we meant to believe in God? And what would that belief absolve us of? We had treated our friendship as sacred, as a kind of religion. Was that not, then, a manifestation of devotion? Was love and laughter not devotional? “Laugh,” my mother had often said to me as a young child. “Laugh as a way of being close to the grace of God.” That was long before this story had unfolded. As I emerged from the street and looked up at our building, I remembered how Ellie and I had stood in the shade of those ancient walls and given ourselves over to laughter. We’d barely been able to contain ourselves. Tears had streamed down our faces; we’d been on the verge of having to urinate, folded over, giggling in heaves between breaths, everything rushing out of us in one mad delirious stream. Had we been crying then? Crying together through our laughter, articulating side by side our profound sense of loss and loneliness? Had we been asking the universe not to turn its back on us? Had we been asking God to kneel down as our witness?