by André Aciman
“But please explain,” the Princess would insist, waiting to see what demented piece of logic might surface in her neighbor’s explanation. Like all mystics, however, the Saint refused to be baited.
“Madame Esther, I may not be learned,” she would say, “but I’m very sharp, très lucide. I sniff things out long before they happen.” Whenever she suspected someone was trying to make fun of her or pull the wool over her eyes, she would indicate her nose with an admonitory upraised index finger, as if her nostrils were a passageway to a venerable sixth sense. “And she thinks she’s sharp,” the Princess’s husband would scoff, sometimes even in the Saint’s presence. “She’s got the brains of a turnip, and the demented goathead goes around claiming she’s sharp—please!” Unruffled by the smirks around her, she would raise her inspired index finger, point to her nose a few times, smile her faint sagacious smile, and, whispering in my direction, say, “Let them. They think I don’t know, but I know.” She would look around sadly and sigh, reminded of yet sadder things in life.
“I’d give everything to see you grow into a young man. But that’s for an otra venida,” she would smile, referring to another lifetime, the one to come, that storehouse of might-have-beens and second-time-arounds where all of life’s blemishes are polished over and edged in gold and filigree.
That was my cue, for on hearing her speak of la otra venida, I would lunge toward her and clasp her tightly, while she struggled with mock annoyed shoves, like a person about to be tickled or embraced in public, feigning to ask how dare I kiss her now after doing what I had done—which was to outlive her and deprive her of me someday. But then, seeing that I refused to release my hold, she would slacken and cease to fight and hug me back, staring into my face as if to make out whether I was indeed worthy of so much love, finally taking a deep, intoxicated breath, filled with longing and premonition and the yearning to inhale my entire being. All I had to do then was squeeze a bit harder, and out would come the sob she had been struggling to contain.
“You love me, I know, but you must love your other grandmother more,” she would say.
“Pathologically Sephardi,” observed Aunt Flora, who had witnessed the scene and had no patience for these emotional torsions that go by the name of love on the Mediterranean. “Nothing was ever more hostile,” she told me years later, “than this gnarled, twisted selflessness that chokes you like a bad debt and always makes you feel slightly unworthy and always unkind in the end.”
“But why won’t you let him say he loves you more, Madame Adèle?” Aunt Flora would protest half-jokingly on those hot summer afternoons when they drew the shutters to keep the sun out of the Saint’s living room while the two women played music for four hands. It was upon the Princess’s recommendation during the last days of the war that the Saint had hired Aunt Flora as a piano teacher. Now, a decade later, they had become like mother and daughter.
“Don’t you think I want him to love me more?” the Saint would ask.
“But why not let him, then?”
Irked, my grandmother would answer, “If you don’t understand, Flora, then I’m really sorry.”
On those summer afternoons, it would grow so quiet in the Saint’s apartment—and downstairs on Rue Memphis and all over Ibrahimieh—that, while my grandfather Jacques slept in his room, I too would often doze on the sofa, letting the chatter of the two women and of their piano exercises lull me into a long and restful nap. Sometimes, in mid-sleep, I was roused by the stirring of long spoons in tall lemonade glasses, or by the persistent whispers of the two women, or by a fly wandering about my face, it too woven into a dream along with the music of Liszt and the cooing of turtledoves who would come to rest on the windowsill where yesterday’s rice had been left for them by the Saint.
“At least I want him to love her the same,” my grandmother would insist, as though upholding a stubborn, principled egalitarianism in matters of love.
“But why ask anyone to love anyone the same? Besides, did wanting anything ever move the heart?” Flora would ask, adding, as she did so many years later in Venice, when we walked around Campo Morosini one summer afternoon, that “one seldom loves anyone at all, much less loves them well.”
“You don’t understand, Flora,” insisted the Saint, “I want him to love her so she won’t be jealous of me. I worry. What kind of grandmother do you think she’ll be for him once I’m gone?” “What do you mean, ‘gone’?” “Gone. As in gone away, Flora.” “What are you saying? You’re hardly sixty!” “I meant gone to France, Flora, not gone like that! Gone to England. To Constantinople. How do I know. Gone.” She paused a moment, probably realizing that the other meaning was not so farfetched either. “And besides, how many more do you think I’ve got left?” she asked, meaning years.
Fearing the Princess’s resentment, the Saint resolved to conceal all of my visits from her neighbor across the street. Whenever she met the Princess, she never failed to ask after me, to let it seem she seldom saw me—all of it exquisitely Byzantine but quite pointless, as it would never have occurred to the Princess that she was not the more favored of the two.
Since the Princess was so punctilious in her daily schedule, it was never too difficult to hide my visits from her. At two in the afternoon, having had her lunch and being fully bedecked for a summer afternoon, the Princess would shut the door behind her and leave her house, slamming the green shutters tight one after the other from the outside. She would walk to the tramway station and there either hire a carriage or take the tram two stations up to Sporting where her mother lived and where the entire family was about to have coffee, before setting out for the Sporting Club.
These were the choicest hours of her life and she never let anything interfere with them—not her health, when it failed her, nor anyone else’s. It was then, just after lunch, that my mother would take me to her mother’s.
Often, a neighbor, friends, Aunt Flora, or others would sit on the balcony outside of the Saint’s dining room, and everyone would talk quietly under the delicate shade of a striped awning, hardly a breeze fluttering, with sunlight shifting so slowly that it could be hours before everyone would pick up their chairs and move to an adjacent balcony to resume conversations filled invariably with gossip, tears, venom, and self-pity. When one of the women was moved to cry, she would do so softly, quietly, her face folded into her chest, holding a crumpled handkerchief against her mouth, not because she was ashamed of crying in front of the others, but so as not to wake up Monsieur Jacques, who did not like having his naps interrupted by women whom he lumped together dismissively in the category of sales comediennes, sobbing or no sobbing.
Thus the summer hours would linger, and the Sudanese boy servant, who had taken forever to bring out the rainbow assortment of sherbets, seemed to take yet another eternity to come back to clear the sticky dishes from the balcony. And even then, there were still so many more of these afternoon hours before dusk set in that, in Aunt Flora’s words, Egypt had the longest hours in the world.
“How time passes,” my grandmother would say in one of her unworried moments, thinking that this is how she wanted to end her days, with her friends, her family, her home, her piano, whiling away the hours in the peaceful glow of the noonday sun. This is what she meant by preparing herself for a sound old age, une bonne vieillesse. In her case, une bonne vieillesse did not just mean healthy, vigorous old age, free of ailments and worldly cares, with plenty of time to put her things in order and never ask anyone for anything; it had also come to mean the sort of old age that allows one to be taken by a friendly hand and, preferably in mid-sleep, ferried across to the other side, having been spared both the shame and indignity of dying.
“There she is,” one of the four or five women on the balcony would finally interrupt as soon as they noticed the Princess turning the corner of Rue Memphis and heading home. “Already six o’clock!” someone would exclaim. Instinctively, the Saint would tell me to go inside. “How are you today, madame?” she would shout
, her voice flying from her balcony, eager as she always was to be the first to greet anyone—a habit that invariably left you feeling remiss by comparison. For couched in the joy that lit up her face whenever she saw you on the street was the mild, unspoken reproof that your tardiness in seeing her either betrayed a desire to avoid speaking to her or that, if she always noticed you first, it was only because she thought of you more often than you did of her.
This time she greeted her neighbor with exceptional zeal, precisely because, with me in the house, she had every reason to avoid greeting her. She had stood up too swiftly, her flustered expression belying her nonchalant pose against the banister. “Ah, I didn’t see you, Madame Adèle,” said the Princess, stopping exactly under the balcony. From within the living room, through the space between the open French window frame and the door jamb, I spied her familiar handbag and folded fan, watched her raise an awkward hand to block out the sun from her face. “And what are you doing later?” asked the Princess. “Me? Nothing. I was thinking of buying some cloth—my tailor is coming in a few days—but with this heat, I doubt I’ll ever go now.” “If you wish, I can walk with you.” “I don’t know, perhaps another time.” They said goodbye.
“She always fights with her husband,” whispered the Saint to one of her guests. “You should hear the horrible things they say to each other at night.”
Then she would change her mind, and still confused and dazed in her thinking, would shout out to the Princess, “Attendez, wait,” from the top of her balcony after the other had already crossed the street and was about to open the wrought-iron gate to her garden. “Maybe I will buy cloth after all. There are so many receptions this fall, and my clothes are so old, Madame Esther,” she would lament, hinting for the nth time that she had not yet been invited to the Princess’s mother’s centennial ball that was to take place early that autumn.
“Do you want me to come upstairs, then?”
“No, no, I’ll be down in a jiffy.” Then, turning to my mother, she would say, “Wait until we’re gone before leaving.”
Five minutes later, the two mazmazelles could be seen hobbling down the street toward the Camp de César station, one with an unusually wide-rimmed hat, the other carrying a folded fan in one hand, her handbag and a white glove in the other, chattering away in the language that had brought them together and which, despite their repeated reminders to themselves and everyone else in the world that they had absolutely nothing else in common, despite their rivalry, their barbs, their petty distrust of one another, would always rescue a friendship that remained close until the very, very end.
The Saint’s conversation was mostly plaintive, with a repertory of unflagging complaints: her health, her son, those daily reminders of unrest and turmoil in Egypt, the servants, who robbed her down to the last tablespoon of sugar, and her daughter, my mother, whose deafness had robbed her of the best years of her life. Since she was always scattered and vague in her speech, once the mood for complaining had set in, she would digress from one woe to another, weaving a never-ending yarn filled with subplots in which the principal villains were her ailments, heartaches, and humiliations, with herself cast in the role of the hapless victim fending off adversities as best she could, a medieval martyr tied to a post surrounded by advancing dragons—all of it leading up to the gallstones that would drive her out of bed at night with never a soul to complain to except the wind on her balcony, which was where she sat all night, staring at an emptied Rue Memphis, heeding the tick of the pendulum in the hallway with its occasional, subdued gong announcing, as she always feared it might, that it was still very early, and that the hours would crawl into dawn before she heard the quiet, welcome steps of Mohammed coming in through the service door. For now, there was just the stillness and the tireless caterwauling, rising and subsiding in waves, as glinting cats’ eyes flitted about in the dark, crossing Rue Memphis, turning toward her balcony with defiance and suspicion, followed by a limping chienne whom everyone feared. “My nights,” she called them.
“I know,” said the Princess, who would try to steer her neighbor clear of unhappy thoughts, which wasn’t so difficult, for just as the Saint was known to drift from one shoal to the other, with some steering she could be made to sway into the opposite direction and seek out cheerful islands in the sun—as though what ultimately mattered to her when she spoke was not so much her inventory of woes and heartaches as the right to digress, to lose her thread, to say what came to mind, which is exactly what none, particularly her husband, ever allowed her.
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, while she sat alone on her balcony, nursing the gallbladder pain in her side—years before they met over red mullet—the Saint would watch the lights suddenly go on in the veranda across the street, and out would come the Princess wearing a bathrobe, carrying a large cup in one hand, with something like a flat hot-water bottle in the other, followed by my grandfather, his hair undone, staggering about the porch till his unsteady hand grasped the banister and he dropped into an armchair.
Facing one another across Rue Memphis, my grandparents-to-be would sometimes wonder what secret ailment kept the other awake, for neither dared speak, much less inquire into the other’s health by way of neighborly conversation during the day.
“It would have been so indiscreet,” said the Saint when asked by the Princess’s husband why she had never even waved at night.
“I’m a refined woman,” she added with mild apology in her voice.
“I’m a refined woman,” he mimicked and right away would slip in a word or two in Ladino. “Sit here and don’t move,” he said, himself seized by the intimacy that had sprung up between the two women. “You are one of the very few people here who speak Ladino well. The others belong to my wife’s family, and they’re too stuffy to speak real Ladino. Do you think I’ll let you go now that I’ve found someone to speak with?”
Phrases like “sit here and don’t move” set the tone for a friendship that was to last until the day my grandfather died —he always pretending to want to shock her, she pretending to tolerate someone who was too much of a scalawag to be taken seriously, and the Princess, always fast to find fault with her husband’s manners, forever eager to shield Madame her neighbor from her husband’s wanton humor. It was an easy familiarity that came as much from the city and the world where they were born as from the language they spoke in it. To the three who had discovered one another, Ladino spoke of their homesickness for Constantinople. To them, it was a language of loosened neckties, unbuttoned shirts, and overused slippers, a language as intimate, as natural, and as necessary as the odor of one’s sheets, of one’s closets, of one’s cooking. They returned to it after speaking French, with the gratified relief of left-handed people who, once in private, are no longer forced to do things with their right.
All had studied and knew French exceedingly well, the way Lysias knew Greek—that is, better than the Athenians—gliding through the imperfect subjunctive with the unruffled ease of those who never err when it comes to grammar because, despite all of their efforts, they will never be native speakers. But French was a foreign, stuffy idiom and, as the Princess herself would tell me many years later, after speaking French for more than two hours, she would begin to salivate. “Spanish, on the other hand, réveille l’âme, lifts up the soul.” And she would always slip in a proverb to prove her point.
The Saint and the Princess met at least twice a day, once in the morning on their way to the market, and once after the Princess had come back from her sisters. Since her husband was rarely in his billiard hall after six, all three would regularly have tea in the Princess’s garden, under an old linden tree whose perfume filled the late afternoon air until it was time to move indoors, where more tea was served.
The Saint’s husband, a Jew born in Aleppo who spoke no Ladino, would often return from work and peek through the wrought-iron fence into the arbor. Sometimes, having opened the gate to the Princess’s garden and made his way past the guava t
rees, Monsieur Jacques would look through the living room window and knock at the glass door with something of a grudge. “It is time to go home,” he would tell his wife after perfunctory pleasantries with the owner of the pool hall. “Just when we were beginning to enjoy ourselves,” someone would say. “Spanish, Spanish,” the Aleppid would mutter as he and his wife crossed Rue Memphis on their way home, “always your damned Spanish,” while she apologized for not being home yet, trying to explain to a man whose native tongue was Arabic why she had tarried past her usual hour.
“But it’s only a quarter to seven.”
“I don’t care. By eight o’clock I want to have supper.”
“But Mohammed is cooking it at this very moment,” she protested. “What’s the matter with you?”
“What’s the matter? I’ll tell you what’s the matter. I don’t like having to come looking for my wife in another man’s house, that’s what.” He was working himself into a temper, and the more he felt his anger rise, the more he was convinced he was right.
Monsieur Jacques was the type of husband who was jealous of his authority, not of his wife, just as he loved his comforts, not those who provided them. He despised Ladino because everything about it conspired to exclude him from a world whose culture was foreign to him, as much by its customs and sounds as by its insidious niceties and clannish etiquette. The more his wife delighted in speaking it, the more repulsive it became, and the more it pleased her to remind him—as her father had reminded her to remind him—that Arabic may have been Arabic, but Spanish was always going to remain Spanish!