by André Aciman
As we drove, all of us crammed together with the windows open, Signor Dall’Abaco explained Tosca, and after going over some of the more obvious harmonies, began to sing Cavaradossi’s last aria, and repeated it several times, asking me to sing it, then my friend Cordahi, who had come to stay the night, then—distracted man that he was—my mother, and finally Roxane. Everyone giggled, including Hassan the driver who, to prove he was no fool, sang a few bars himself, unintentionally Arabizing the aria as he sang. Signor Dall’Abaco liked this Middle Eastern touch, and after teaching us the famous choral air from Nabucco, asked Hassan how he would go about singing it. The driver obliged, and there was great mirth in the car, with Roxane mimicking the Egyptian’s treatment of Verdi. Signor Dall’Abaco explained to us the history of the Mohammed Ali Theater in Alexandria and of the big opera house in Cairo, for which the Egyptian khedive had commissioned Aïda. “Verdi came to Egypt?” I exclaimed in total disbelief. “In Egypt and how,” he replied, sounding as patriotic as Miss Sharif.
On our way to Mandara, we came upon my father’s carter, Abou Ali, driving the factory’s carriage on its lopsided wheels. He was headed for Mandara as well, lugging all of our belongings—summer gear, equipment, utensils, toys, even a new ice box, and the giant Grundig that had weathered all of Madame Marie’s sorrows and which my father had replaced with a newer model but never had the heart to part with. Everything was sloppily piled together and swathed in old carter’s cord; the carriage with its cannibalized British tank wheels and its tottering horse, who could hardly canter, looked more like a Gypsy van escaping famine and invaders than a vacation load on its way to a summer home. Hassan waved at the old arbaghi, and Abou Ali waved back with his whip.
Joey was driving his car behind ours, carrying as passengers my grandmother, Aunt Flora, and Uncle Nessim. Aunt Elsa, who was mourning for her mother, had consented to come at the last minute so as not to be left alone at home. But she sulked throughout the trip, thinking, as she never ceased to remind us, that our speeding to Mandara during a period of mourning made us look like avid peasants who had never seen the beach before.
To prove her right, as soon as we arrived, my friend Cordahi and I, along with Roxane and my mother, immediately changed into our bathing suits and were already hastening to go swimming, while Signor Dall’Abaco made himself comfortable on the veranda overlooking the sea, explaining that he had not brought his bathing suit. Perhaps he deliberately tried to look comfortable to discourage us from insisting he go to the beach with us. Or perhaps he felt he had sufficiently overcome his natural shyness by accepting my mother’s lemonade on the veranda and did not wish to pass another test of endurance by complying with complicated beach rituals that were totally foreign to him.
I, however, was only too pleased to practice these rituals— picking up beach paddles exactly where I had left them in September; balancing the weight of the umbrella on my shoulders; finding the same folded beach blanket, sun-tan lotion, or old tennis balls that never seemed to die; remembering to take a second bathing suit in case I wished to change; and packing the old bottle of benzine—and the cotton that went with it—to wipe off the tar which inevitably washed up on the beach and blackened our feet.
The house itself was in full bustle as the servants busily unloaded the cars. Some had arrived the previous evening and had already set up much of the place.
Signor Dall’Abaco’s quiet corner on the veranda seemed the ideal place for a man who was born to stay out of everyone’s way.
I sympathized with his reluctance to go swimming, not just because I had experienced it myself at VC, but because I had seen many of our guests at Mandara, particularly my father’s employees, pretend an irrational fear of the beach when all they were afraid of was us and of getting in our way. Some chose to stay behind while everyone else went swimming simply because they didn’t dare ask us for towels. “Did you have a good swim?” they would ask when we came back from the beach.
My mother told Signor Dall’Abaco he could borrow a bathing suit from a closet filled with suits of all sizes. But he continued to dawdle about the house, whose stuffy and musty air betrayed the closed-up winter months. He even showed an interest in the Spanish furniture and asked whether we ever used the house in the winter. “Sometimes at Christmas,” said my mother.
“Hurry,” Roxane shouted when she caught sight of Joey’s car on the driveway. “We’re going to the beach.”
“You go, I’ll join you later,” he shouted back.
“Allora, Signor Dall’Abaco, are you going to change, yes or no?” asked Roxane.
“All right, but I’m not sure I’ll swim.”
She affected impatience, as though he had been put under her charge as well. Signor Dall’Abaco looked at Joey, who was helping the servants take down the new hassira from the roof rack. He envied the young reporter, probably hated him, and would have given everything to be in his place.
“Maybe the water’s not warm yet—” he had begun to say.
“You must put on a bathing suit,” she insisted, ushering him into one of the bedrooms. The tentative man entered meekly. He waited for me and Cordahi to leave the room and then closed the door behind him, slowly, almost reluctantly, and softly turned the key. We waited almost five minutes. When Roxane knocked at the door urging him to hurry, his nervous voice was heard apologizing, saying that of all the bathing suits he had tried inside, none seemed to fit someone as skinny as he.
When he finally came out he was wearing a suit whose original owner no one remembered but who must have been much thicker and taller than the Italian tutor, for he had rolled the top of the bathing suit several times down his tummy.
Signor Dall’Abaco turned out to be all bones, and his spindly legs didn’t have a speck of hair on them. But what made Roxane burst out laughing was his two big toes, which, without shoes, stood permanently erect. Even my mother noticed them, and, turning to Roxane in front of Signor Dall’Abaco, asked why did he keep his big toes up like that? “I don’t know,” he replied with typical self-derision. “I don’t do it on purpose.” “But don’t you run the risk of falling?” He looked down as though his toes were distant cousins he had always wanted to disclaim. “They don’t bother me,” he said.
We walked to the beach by way of the usual chalky shortcut, and as soon as we crossed the sand we could not wait to jump into the water. Signor Dall’Abaco stood along the shoreline, with his feet in the water and a benign look on his face as he watched us scamper about and dive into the surf. “I told you he wouldn’t swim,” said my mother to Roxane.
And indeed, though he said he loved Mandara, and though he would come two or three times a week in the summer to teach me Dante and De Amicis’ Cuore, spending the rest of the day with us, courting Roxane one year, then Aunt Flora, then my mother, I never saw him swim. In the evening, just after drinks on the veranda with my father and guests from neighboring villas, he would excuse himself and say he had to go back to the city. Usually, someone would drop him off at the Sidi Bishr tramway station, where he caught the night tram to Ramleh, riding second class with his borrowed magazine neatly folded in the left pocket of his imported Italian sport jacket.
After dinner that first evening at Mandara, everyone sat around the dining table with two kerosene lamps lighting the area as we played cards. Aunt Elsa opened a jar of marrons glacés—a rare treat in Alexandria. My grandmother, fearing not enough would be left for the guests, divided one with me; then, seeing there were plenty to go around, divided another, and after that another still. Elsa scolded her, saying that she should either take a whole marron or none at all, but that this habit of cutting things into halves only to eat the same amount in the end was thoroughly distasteful. Uncle Nessim told her to calm herself. Signor Dall’Abaco did not like sweet things. Joey did. He asked Signor Dall’Abaco for his marron and then reached for the jar to stab the last one with his fork. “By all means, ne vous gênez pas, don’t be bashful,” said Aunt Elsa, puckering her lips. He
r prized possession was gone in less than five minutes. Joey, who had hung his tweed jacket on the back of his chair, turned around and looked into his pockets, producing two sealed packages of cigarettes: Greys and Craven A’s. “This indeed is a treat,” said my father, who never dared buy anything on the black market. “May I too?” asked Signor Dall’Abaco. “But of course, Signor Dall’Abaco.” “Mario,” corrected Signor Dall’Abaco. “Mario,” repeated the amused Englishman as he downed more scotch. Almost everyone was smoking. Joey offered a cigarette to Abdou, who accepted reluctantly, saying he would smoke it later.
The inevitable subject of school was touched on momentarily. Joey had a colleague, a poet of sorts, whose Greek wife taught at an American school—the best school in the city—and with almost no debate it was agreed that I should go there the following year, VC being no longer viable, especially after what happened the last week of Ramadan.
“As long as there aren’t any repercussions, what your wife did that day was very brave,” said Aunt Flora.
“As long as there aren’t any repercussions,” repeated my father.
“We did worse in our day,” said Aunt Flora, whose years at the conservatory were filled with infractions of all sorts.
“And I was a downright terror,” said Joey, the old pupil from Eton, looking up as he chased an eddy of smoke with his breath. “And, God knows, I’ve done much worse than change into my gym clothes during another class.”
“But this was Islam class,” interrupted my father.
What had happened during Islam class on that particularly warm day in May was that I had secretly taken off my gray trousers and put on white shorts. Then I removed my shirt, without removing my tie. My undershirt. My socks. My watch. Other students had followed suit and were changing as well, except that, out of respect for their religion, they had refrained from putting on their tennis shoes. It was young Tarek who, more out of piety than malice, had alerted Miss Sharif to what had happened. Lifting her eyes from her copy of the Koran, she saw to her amazement a class almost entirely dressed in white. “He’s made them change into their gym clothes,” said Tarek. “Oh, my sister!” she exclaimed, racing toward me and slapping me hard on the head with the book. “Oh, my sister!” she shrieked.
I was summarily hauled off to Miss Badawi’s office.
That evening, when I returned from a soccer game, Roxane noticed bluish stains on the backs of my thighs. Otherwise I would never have told. She tried to brush them off with her palm, then, horrified, ran out and told my mother, who immediately came into my room, asking for an explanation. Roxane’s perturbed face and my tears as I narrated the events of the morning must have moved her to quell her horror, and once I was in the bathtub, she got down on her knees next to Roxane and both women joined in bathing me, so watchful and solicitous with the washcloth that I felt like a soldier having his wounds dressed by two young nuns.
My father was distressed, and all through dinner was trying to decide whether to be furious with the school or with me.
“This time they’ve gone too far,” said my mother.
“No, this time he’s gone too far. He’s insulted their religion, and when he insults their religion we insult their religion, and when we insult their religion, we get arrested, we go to jail, we lose everything and get expelled from Egypt. I don’t need to have my name popping up all the time at the Muhafza. Do you understand now?”
“I don’t want to understand.”
The next morning, as my father was bathing after his exercises, my mother told Monsieur Politi to put on his jacket in a hurry, instructed Abdou to tell the bus driver that I would not be going to school that day, and rushed all of us downstairs, where she ordered Hassan, my father’s driver, to take us to VC. We got there twenty minutes before any of the school buses; the boarders were probably still finishing breakfast. Mother told me to get out of the car. The dumbfounded Politi, his athlete’s chest bulging out of his jacket and looking very much like a gangster’s bodyguard who had forgotten to put on a tie, followed close by.
She led us directly to Miss Badawi’s office, which she remembered from her previous visit. She asked Politi to wait outside. We knocked, were told to wait, and when Miss Badawi finally opened the door, were told by way of greeting that we were not entirely unexpected. Her measured smile conveyed no apology but rather a sense of collected, bureaucratic compassion for the parents of unruly children who are punished for their own good.
My mother, who spoke no English, asked me to tell Miss Badawi that she wished to know what had happened. “You mean yesterday?” she asked. I nodded. Miss Badawi gave a long speech detailing school rules, pacing her explanation to give me time to translate for my mother, all the while staring at me intensely as I tried to convey her version of my guilt to my mother. My mother nodded at each sentence, though I knew I was speaking far too incoherently for her to understand much. As often happened between us, we were going through the motions of communication for the benefit of third parties. At one point, my mother interrupted me, saying, “I know, I understand, tell her I understand,” and then, before I knew what she was doing, she had turned me around and was pointing to the eggplant-colored weals on the back of my legs, touching each one, saying, “Look at this, and this one, and this one here,” with the disparaging manner she would use when unfolding a dress and asking her tailor to take a good look at this blemish, that imperfection, and that stain left behind by his sloppy assistant. Miss Badawi arched her eyebrows like a shopkeeper refusing to take back defective merchandise, alleging that all sales are final.
I had been staring at it for almost five minutes without realizing. It was Miss Badawi’s cane, leaning against a corner behind her chair. So this was the weapon, these the ridges that hurt the most, they looked so harmless. “Yes, but tell your mother we cannot guarantee we will never use the cane on you again. Tell her.” I told my mother they could not guarantee they would never use the cane on me again. I watched Mother nod. Would she back down now? I continued to translate the headmistress’s reiteration of school policies, and then my mother’s subsequent question, until I feared that she would yield.
Suddenly there was a terrible yell. Mother had shrieked at the top of her lungs the way she shrieked at shopowners, servants, and itinerant vendors. The school janitor and gardener had gathered outside on the patio. I watched their faces looking in through the windows. My mother pointed at the cane and said, “Tell her—doesn’t she know this hurts?” I said: “She asked me to ask don’t you know this hurts.” “Of course it hurts,” replied Miss Badawi, slightly put off by my mother’s screams yet wearing the same smile she had when she first opened the door. “We can talk all you want,” her expression said, “but the school won’t apologize.”
It was the smile—the eerie, insolent, pernicious grin with which she once called me “dog of the Arabs” and which had flitted across her face when she asked me whether I wanted the cane wearing my school uniform or my gym clothes—it was this smile that persuaded my mother there was absolutely no hope, that her visit was a lost cause.
Her decision was so sudden that Miss Badawi was still smiling after it happened. “You don’t smile like this with me, not with me,” shouted my mother so loudly that all of VC must have heard her voice that day. More startled than upset, the headmistress brought her palm to her cheek, either in disbelief or to cover the red handprint that was now beginning to blossom there. “But what is this, what is this?” she said in Arabic. My mother picked up the bag she had left on Miss Badawi’s desk and, turning to me, said, “Let’s go.” One of Miss Badawi’s hairpins lay on the floor in front of her door. I pushed it gently with my foot. “I’m reporting you to the Muhafza,” said my mother.
Miss Sharif was standing outside with Miss Gilbertson when we came out of Miss Badawi’s office. As soon as my mother saw Miss Gilbertson, she looked at her directly and said, “Sale putain,” and spit on the ground.
I told her I did not wish to go to my desk or empty
my locker. We headed straight to our car, which was waiting for us on the other side of the quadrangle. I never returned to VC again.
We were home in less than twenty minutes, still very shaken by the events of the morning. My father was beside himself when he heard the news. He called my mother names, cursed Hassan and Monsieur Politi, and warned them never to take orders from my mother again. “Anyway, what difference does it make, we’re finished here,” he added.
A few weeks later my father reduced Monsieur al-Malek’s hours. “Children need to rest during the summer,” he explained. However, by equalizing Monsieur al-Malek’s and Signor Dall’Abaco’s hours, he conceded for the first time that Arabic might not be all-important, that we might not stay in Egypt forever.
We never heard from VC about the incident. My report card was disastrous and my grade for Egyptian National Studies, a course taught entirely in Arabic, was—predictably enough —zero. My father, unable to understand how I could have done so poorly, decided to punish me. No movies for the week. Then he forgot and broke his resolution when it rained one evening and there wasn’t anything else to do but head to the movies.
As soon as you awoke at Mandara, the first thing you did was run to the window and see what sort of water you would have that day. Even in bed sometimes you heard the waves from a distance and from their sound already knew the weather. Sometimes the shouting of children from the beaches told you they were catching waves and that therefore the sea was rough that day. But then there were times when you did not hear a sound, not of boys, not of waves, not of vendors, nothing, everything was at a standstill, as though something in the air smothered every sound. And then you knew the water was as smooth as an oil slick—Aunt Flora’s words—not even a ripple.
The house smelled of ground coffee. Roxane was already in the kitchen brewing a small pot, smoking a cigarette. She was wearing her bathing suit. Joey, she said, was still sleeping, everyone was sleeping, none of the servants had arrived. Softly, we opened the door to the veranda, knowing that the view awaiting us, once we lifted the loosely woven curtain, would be nothing short of miraculous. No one was in sight, only a few parked cars with their hoods sparkling in the early morning light, and beyond them—past the sand dunes, and the aged palm trees, and all the villas basking in Sunday silence—the pale-blue sea, glaring in the morning light.