by André Aciman
She suggested I visit her every other morning and then have lunch with her at my great-grandmother’s home. Stunned by the proposition, my mother was silent, but I caught her pupils darting about, a sign of impatience and suppressed rage. “And what do I do while he’s with you, darn socks with my deaf friends?”
“Not at all. Oh, I didn’t mean for you to take it like that at all, Gigi,” the Princess replied, beating a hasty retreat with that startled, innocent air calculated to make you feel peevish and unfairly suspicious of her motives. “I just want the child to know my side of the family and hear polite conversation. He must learn how to speak correctly.”
“But I already take him to my parents every day for that very purpose,” protested my mother.
“That’s very good, Gigi. Still, it’s not quite the same thing,” she said, raising her index finger. The Princess had not invited my mother’s parents to the forthcoming celebration, owing to the alleged difference in standing between the two families—not to mention the Syrian question. “I want him to become distinguished,” the Princess said. “Like my brothers, who are, as you know, très comme il faut.”
Without thinking, my mother had already capitulated.
When my father arrived late that evening, the first thing he did was show he was extremely displeased to find Aziza still there.
“I don’t want her here all the time. Isn’t it enough that most of your deaf friends are here every day, do we need deaf servants as well?”
It took my mother a second to piece together the puzzle.
“Is this going to end up with your mother taking care of him every other day?” she said, pointing at me.
“Why not?” he replied, going on the offensive now that she had found him out. “I don’t want him growing up thinking he is either deaf or an Arab.”
My mother took this in silence.
“Meanwhile, poor Aziza stayed later than usual to finish ironing your shirts.” She flung open a cupboard and pointed to two stacks of neatly folded shirts.
“What do I care about shirts!” he shouted.
He picked up one of the shirts, examined it as though looking for a crease, found none, then brought it close to his nose. He found what he was looking for.
“Let me be very clear: don’t ever let me see Aziza again,” said my father, losing his temper. “I don’t want to hear her toadish croaking in my home, I don’t want her nosing around my things, and I certainly don’t want that fetid odor of hers lingering in the house after she’s done cleaning it. Here,” he said, almost thrusting the shirt into my mother’s face to let her sample the smell.
“It was washed this very morning,” she said.
“Smell again! It stinks of hilba! Hilba! Hilba!” he shouted as he picked up each shirt, sniffed it, and threw it on the floor. “Get rid of her!”
My father was right about one thing: Aziza always trailed that pungent odor of hilba, an auburn-colored substance that Egyptians drank in large doses for its alleged curative properties and which dyed their palms red and made their bodies exude what Europeans considered a repellent, dirty odor. My father called it une odeur d’arabe, an Arab smell, and he hated to find it trapped in his shirts, his linens, his food.
This odor was so unmistakable and so overwhelming that one could immediately distinguish Westernized Egyptians, who used a strong aftershave, from those who affected Western habits but whose minds, homes, and regimens were still steeped in the universe of hilba. Even if an Egyptian had completely adopted Western ways, shed his native customs to become what my grandparents called an évolué, and wore a suit every day, learned table manners, kissed mazmazelles’ hands whenever he greeted them, and knew his wines, his cheeses, and the required number of La Fontaine fables by heart, the fact that his clothes gave off the slightest trace of that telltale scent would make one think twice about his professed inclination for the West and suspect that not everyone in his household—himself included—had risen above the dark, sinister underside of Arab hygiene.
But there was another reason for my father’s visceral aversion to hilba. He, like his mother, disliked all kinds of recognizable ethnic odors, thinking that the more Westernized a family, the more odorless its home, its clothes, its cooking.
It would never have occurred to either of them that all homes bear ethnic odors, and that anyone born in Alexandria would just as easily have sniffed out a Sephardi household like ours, with its residual odor of Parmesan, boiled artichokes, and borekas, as they themselves could recognize an Armenian kitchen by its unavoidable smell of cured pastrami, a Greek living room by the odor of myrrh, and Italians by the smell of fried onions and chamomile. Working-class Italians smelled of fried peppers, and Greeks smelled of garlic and brilliantine, and, when they sweated, their underarms smelled of yogurt.
“It smells as though an Arab caravan camped here overnight,” said the Princess when visiting us late one morning. “I can smell her, I know she was here.” Though my father had pronounced a ban on Aziza, it was never enforced.
“At least have her confined to the kitchen whenever I’m here,” my grandmother would say. “And while you’re at it, keep that Om Ramadan out of sight as well—or do you want me to invite her to the centennial ball?” This last was a particularly cruel command, as Om Ramadan, our washerwoman, had been in my mother’s father’s family service for forty years.
Om Ramadan was a very tall, lanky woman who came about twice a week and spent the entire morning in the bathroom with a large steel bucket filled with dirty lukewarm water in which she washed our clothes by kneading, slapping, and wringing them until she had squeezed the very life and color out of them—an exercise that required such vigorous movements that, as with famous conductors, it explained her longevity. She was ugly and old, probably in her seventies. Her hair was not white but fair, with a light auburn touch, because of either henna or peroxide. Her skin was very white, especially her arms and hands, which some said had lost their pigmentation because of the heavy bleach she used in her wash.
Om Ramadan had only one eye. She never hid her bad eye, and, to joke, she would pry open her eyelids with her fingers and show me what was no longer behind them.
“One day this eye will go bad too, and then they’ll have to take it out,” she would say, as though speaking about a tiny mole on her foot. “But I’ll continue washing here all the same.” And just to prove her point, she would tilt her head slightly upward, roll up her good eye so that only the white showed, and with a pained, uplifted face staring vacantly in my direction, go on wringing my shirts with mechanical hand motions, intoning, “Alms for the blind, alms for the blind.”
Om Ramadan’s method for washing clothes was the simplest and oldest. She would squat in front of the large washbasin with both feet flat on the floor and her bony knees jutting up inside her galabiya, almost reaching her chin. Sometimes she wore wooden clogs about two inches high and would squat on those, chain-smoking and drinking scalding dark tea from a tall glass that never left her side and which Abdou kept replenishing throughout the morning, while she, without looking up, would bless him for his kindness, and he bless her for hers.
By midmorning, Om Ramadan would start her singing, and though everyone in the household made fun of her voice, with its dirgelike, monotone drone, still, from outside our windows, coming from neighboring homes, another maid or washerwoman, followed by yet another nearby, would echo the same song, as they all plied away at their wash, squatting in their respective sunlit perches, which were filled with the peace that inhabits large Mediterranean bathrooms. Without budging from their places, without seeing the others, they had learned one another’s names and would call them out and swap entire life histories like ships exchanging signals in the fog.
After finishing the wash, Om Ramadan would sit in the kitchen and smoke a cigarette with Abdou. Then, with more tea in her system, she would return to the bathroom, load a large wicker basket with wet clothing, and carry the load on her head up the five flights
of circular servants’ stairs that led to the roof, taking slow, deliberate steps, stopping to catch her breath on the landing above ours, where another neighbor’s servant would hand her a glass of water. Then she would resume her climb, I alongside her, and the closer we got to the top, the brighter the stairwell grew, with more and more light shining against the walls of the sixth, seventh, and finally the eighth floor, where a sudden, blinding spell of heat and sunlight dazzled our senses.
Not a sound on the terrace. Only the faraway whir of distant traffic below. Everything I touched was burning hot, and as I roamed about the empty terrace and looked over the tops of all the other buildings of Smouha, there it was, immense as always, that color blue lining the limitless horizon, quiet, serene, and forever beckoning: the sea.
A gridwork of clotheslines awaited us. The sagging gray cords were frayed with use and, all along them, abandoned clusters of unused pins sat like little sparrows idling on electric wires.
Now would start the most tranquil and contemplative work on earth. Pursing a few pins between her lips, Om Ramadan would begin to unwring and uncoil bedsheet after bedsheet, hanging one on the clothesline, then another next to it, then another on a line opposite the first, thus unfurling row upon row of draped and scented passageways where one could run and lose oneself as surely as in heaven’s corridors, with the sky above, silence below, and the odor of clean sheets drying in the sun, some still dripping on the gray cement floor that exhaled a salty smell of summer and seawater.
Hours later, Om Ramadan and Aziza would go upstairs, bring back the dried laundry, and proceed to fold what was not going to be ironed. Usually, a large heaping mound of crisp, clean clothes would collect on someone’s bed, and, early on those warm afternoons, I would throw myself into that large pile of scented sunlight and half-nap to the quiet flutter of two women folding large white and light-blue sheets, each tugging from her end as hard as she could—there was bad blood between them—folding and tugging, until, picking up the last sheet, on which I lay, they would have to wake me up.
“Om Ramadan gives me the creeps,” said the Princess. “Every time I come here it’s as though I’ve walked into an asylum. There is always a deformed person roaming about. This isn’t a bestiary, it’s my son’s home.”
In addition to Om Ramadan, there was in our domestic asylum Hisham, the sofraghi—the waiter—who, as irony would have it, had only one arm and could never hold a large platter long enough to serve eight persons without having to rest awhile. Then there was Abdou, the cook, an alcoholic. And his much older cousin, an albino, also named Abdou, who spoke fluent Turkish and who came as an extra sometimes but who had a terribly ulcerated leg, which my grandmother suspected was leprous. And Margherita, our Italian neighbor’s retarded daughter who came to do the ironing. And finally there was Fatma, the errand girl, who one day, in trying to help the two Abdous dust a carpet by hanging it from the balcony, had lost her balance and fallen to the sidewalk, as a result of which she limped on her way up and down the service stairway until finally, unable to find a husband, she went back to the Said in the south.
But the person my grandmother most despised remained Aziza—Aziza, that invidious, evil-eyed jinxer who smirked all to herself in her corner of our living room, casting a spell on you when you least suspected; Aziza, that insidious factotum who knitted all of our sweaters, darned all of our socks, and helped with injections, cupping glasses, and enemas, and who, once a month, performed halawa on all of the women. “A barbaric ritual!” the Princess said in disgust, referring to this Arab practice of boiling sugar-water until it formed a thick, caramelized paste which was then applied to women’s bodies to remove body hair. Before “doing halawa,” Aziza, who by common consent was an expert halawiste, would knead the paste, spitting into it several times until it had achieved the desired consistency. Seated before her, the women would put forth their legs as Aziza bent down and applied the paste. Then, with short, determined pulls that sounded like paper being ripped from a notebook, she would tear off the paste as if it were a huge bandage, leaving behind a smooth red blotch. She would knead the paste again and apply it elsewhere.
Nothing seemed more painful than halawa, especially on women’s underarms. I once saw my mother in such pain that she bit her knuckles hard enough for them to carry a weeklong bruise. The Princess, finally persuaded to try the procedure, yelled in agony. Aziza laughed and said, “It’s nothing.” “Barbarian!” shouted the Princess.
Aziza originally belonged to a coterie of friends my mother had made while a student at Madame Tsotsou’s boarding school for deaf girls. Under Madame Tsotsou’s vigilant egalitarianism, no one was permitted to distinguish between rich and poor, Greek and Arab, and since none of the girls were allowed any pocket money, there were no privileges to be had, except for the occasional jar of marmalade, whose contents were equitably spooned out to all in the dining room. The school was quite successful, and well-to-do pupils came from all around the Mediterranean with no other goal than to speak and behave like the hearing—preferably in French, and through French, to free themselves from this terrible corvée, this burden of silence.
An obdurate middle-class idealist, Madame Tsotsou defined a successful graduate as one who befriended the hearing over the deaf, who felt less deaf than she truly was, and who experienced an instinctive revulsion toward those who knew no better than to speak with their hands, not their mouths. Her most cherished success stories were girls who had married the hearing; it was the romance of the servant girl marrying the landowner’s son. But of the seven in my mother’s class who married, only one had a successful marriage, and she was the only one to disappoint Madame Tsotsou by marrying a deaf boy.
A few times every week, four or five of these young women would be in for tea—to the revulsion of my grandmother, who, more than ever now, deplored the world in which I was growing up. She would sit and fidget, complaining she had to share her visits with survivors of malnutrition, amputation, and meningitis, not one of whom was worth the two cents she paid the coachman to drive her to her son’s home after visiting with her sisters. Even their conversation, when she was able to fathom it, was insufferable, since it usually devolved into slapstick, gossip, and recipes. Sometimes they began shouting and screaming at each other, made peace a few moments later, and resumed their confounded cackling with greater vigor yet, forcing her to conclude that of all the people she knew none spent more time talking than the deaf-mute.
Among my mother’s friends was a young woman named Sophie who came from a patrician Greek family that had lost everything in Smyrna and now retained nothing but the vestiges of distinction in their obligatory afternoon tea where you tasted oversweetened Greek jams on a spoon. Sophie and my mother often recalled their dreadful boarding-school days when Madame Tsotsou locked them up in the dark whenever they forgot to turn off a water faucet—a frequent mishap among the deaf, who cannot hear the water running. “But look at what women I’ve made out of two spindly little girls who couldn’t read or write, much less speak, when I got them,” Madame Tsotsou would say.
Sophie married a Greek auto mechanic, a hairy, cocksure sailor-type with greasy hair and dirty fingernails who roared about Alexandria on his motorcycle on Sundays, sporting gold bracelets, a tank-shirt, and the nymph Sophie on the backseat. Costa had the boisterous familiarity of Alexandrian Greeks and was a jack-of-all-trades dabbling in twenty more, a sale débrouillard—“Impresario,” he would say with a tiny wink in his eyes, meaning a trader in stolen, black-market, and counterfeit goods.
The only person who took a liking to him was, of all people, the Princess.
“He’s a true savage, but a heart of gold,” she would say. Unbeknownst to my mother, Costa would often visit my grandmother and bring her presents, ranging from caviar and champagne to perfumes and foie gras hijacked from Beirut. In return, he asked nothing but the ear of an old woman who, he said, was like a mother to him and understood him far better than did his Sophie, who, during mating
season—as he called it—could think of nothing better than to squeeze the pimples on his forehead. “Can a man live that way, madame? Tell me, can he?” he would ask, exasperation bubbling in his voice.
“What can you do? These are unfortunate women.”
“But I can’t anymore.” He would get worked up, choke a moment, and suddenly break down sobbing.
“Now, don’t get angry like this, Costa,” my grandmother would say, pretending to mistake his weeping for anger so as not to embarrass him.
“Angry? These are not tears of anger. These are tears of shame, tears of stupidity, mine, hers, and everyone who watched this happen to us and said nothing.”
“Patience, Costa, patience,” my grandmother would urge.
“And what for?” he would shout, truly furious this time. “I am Costa, and Costa is a man, and Costa needs passion, fire, spices, madame, not this—” he said pointing to a pimple on his forehead. “I don’t like speaking in front of children,” he went on, looking my way, “but she has shown me the passion of a tapeworm—and Costa, madame, needs a tigress.”
My grandmother had met Costa one evening just as he was arriving to pick up his wife, Sophie. Since the two of them were the only hearing people in the room, they began to talk and soon discovered that both were born in Constantinople. The man showed all the requisite deference a sailor is expected to extend to a princess from Constantinople, and she found in the garrulous palikar—warrior—a gentle soul yearning for kindness.