Guapa

by Saleem Haddad

  I read the paragraph three or four times, Gramsci lambasting the intellectual who believes his particular thinking is universal for all mankind. Sufyan’s eyes found and then rested on me. I didn’t even need to look up, I could just sense it. The energy in the room shifted. Slowly he began to walk toward me, as if a magnetic field was pulling us closer. Feigning engrossment, I refused to look up. My fingers trembled as I flipped the page, the adrenaline pumping through my veins like an alcoholic who had just tasted a drop of vodka after months of sobriety.

  He stopped at my table.

  “Funny seeing you here,” he said. I looked up. He was carrying a cup of hot chocolate and had a half smile on his face.

  “You, too,” I said, forcing a smile. I closed the book. His eyes drifted to the front cover. “Do you know Gramsci?” I asked, even though I knew he had taken the book out of the library a few months earlier.

  He laughed. “His name is pronounced Gram-shi, not Gram-ski. He’s Italian, not Polish.”

  “Oh.”

  “Do you like him?”

  “I love him,” I gushed. His face twitched. “Not in that way, but —”

  “Yeah.”

  I asked if he liked Gramsci.

  “He’s all right,” Sufyan said. He shifted on his feet, his gaze traveling across the room.

  “Sit down.” I pushed out the chair opposite me with my foot. He looked at the chair but remained standing.

  “I never thought I’d see you in a place like this,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  He smiled but said nothing.

  “Come on, what do you mean?” I persisted.

  “You never struck me as the kind of guy who would spend time in an Arabic café.” There was an edge to his voice.

  “How so?”

  He shrugged. “Forget I said anything.”

  I should have taken the hint and forgotten about it like he suggested. But a part of me was flattered, flattered that I had provoked any reaction in him, that he had given me enough thought to make an assumption about me.

  “Well, I’m an Arab so I don’t know why it would be odd that I’m here.”

  “Yeah, you’re an Arab I guess … but you’re like a Westernized Arab.”

  I let out a nervous chuckle. “What do you mean, Westernized?”

  “Like the way you’re dressed …”

  “I’m wearing jeans and a shirt.” I looked down at my clothes. “You’re wearing jeans and a shirt. Everyone wears jeans.”

  “Yeah, but you speak English all the time,” he said.

  “You don’t even speak Arabic!” I laughed, but he didn’t laugh along.

  “Look, I can tell you’ve got some sort of contempt for Arabs and Arab culture.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. My hands trembled underneath the table. I rested them on my thighs to keep them steady. I felt my face turn red.

  “I mean, look at yourself, with your TV American accent and posters of George Michael on your wall. George Michael.” He laughed. “You get on a podium and chant for Arab freedom and then a few hours later say you wish you were not Arab. And even here, reading all this Western theory, hanging out at DuPont with all those white people. You’ve been colonized, dude.”

  I was aware my jaw was hanging open but I struggled to maintain composure.

  Sufyan shifted his weight again. A drop of hot chocolate spilled down the white mug and kissed the top of his index finger. Ten days ago I was kissing that hand. Now we are here. How did we get here?

  “Is this about the other night?” I asked.

  “What night?”

  “The night you came to my place.”

  “I can’t remember what happened that night,” Sufyan said quickly. “Besides, I’ve stopped drinking.”

  I looked down at my dog-eared library copy of the Prison Notebooks. The English letters seemed to jar with me in a way they hadn’t only moments before.

  “I can tell I’ve pissed you off,” Sufyan said. “I think I’ll leave you with Gramsci.” He turned and walked to an empty table in the corner.

  Feeling sick with shame, I watched the Arab waiters dance between the mess of plastic tables and chairs, using their fingers to pick up half-drunk glasses of red tea. A sweaty-faced man sliced strips of meat off the shawarma. The atmosphere seemed to switch from familiar and comforting to something alien and threatening. Was I a fake, a fat bourgeois cockroach who couldn’t succeed at anything, even something as straightforward as being Arab?

  I left the café, walked through the smoggy midday traffic, feeling increasingly irate. The rage I felt was conflicted: Was I angry because I expected more from Sufyan? Or was I angry because in a warped way he had pointed out something that contained a sliver of truth? What was it that I had said that gave him the impression I had contempt for Arabs? Had I internalized that much from the pundits and from Cecile? I tried to recount every conversation Sufyan and I had ever had, which was not difficult considering I relived them in my mind until I had memorized each in great detail, in the same way we were forced to memorize the Quran passages and old nationalist poems that appeared on the first page of those damn Arabic textbooks in those classes I spent my high-school years running from. Could that be it? Maybe it was all those times I ditched Arabic class. I missed out on the lesson about how to be Arab. Maybe there was an ingredient somewhere there, a lecture we were given that I missed. Damn Maj and damn Smoker’s Paradise. All those times we ran away had now come back to haunt me.

  I walked home, head down and lost in thought. I crossed the road and failed to see the traffic light had turned green. A car screeched to a halt in front of me. I fell backward on the road. A black man popped his head out of the driver’s window.

  “Watch where you’re going, asshole,” the man yelled, as I picked myself up from the ground and dusted off the gravel from my jeans. “Stupid white bitch thinks he owns the road.”

  “I’m not white, I’m Arab,” I shouted. The man looked surprised. I ran away before he could say anything else.

  Sufyan’s accusation settled uncomfortably in my conscience. I studied myself in the bathroom mirror. My clothes might be too fashionable to be authentically Arab, I thought. The T-shirt was just a little too tight, the jeans a tad too ripped. Also, I over-enunciated my English letters. Did my r’s roll too smoothly now? Was there not enough of an Arabic hint in the way I spoke English? Was my beard too scruffy? Not scruffy enough? Was my homosexuality responsible? Or was it something deeper, something foreign in my soul?

  Whatever it was, I needed to reverse the transformation. Sufyan’s accusation left me in a no-man’s-land, alienated and fearful of the English books that had kept me company for so many years. I kept away from Damascus Express, spending my days studying in my apartment, away from any possibility of running into Sufyan. Of running into anyone, really. I couldn’t face Arabs in case they saw through me, and I couldn’t spend time with Americans lest they rub off on me. When I ventured out, I did so in a hurry. Head down, I chased pavements until they led me to dark corners of the library or damp computer labs in the basements of campus buildings.

  And yet, I had never felt closer to my mother than I did during this time. For once I understood why she might have left, why she needed to get out from under Teta’s rules.

  I had only just begun to settle into that thought when I ran into Cecile in a damp computer lab in the basement of one of the campus buildings. When I walked in, I should have known that something was wrong — that damn room had not seen sunlight in years, yet Cecile looked radiant. She had a big smile on her face. I should have turned around and gone home and never spoken to her again. Instead I tossed my bag on the table opposite hers and asked her how she was doing.

  “Amazing,” she gushed. There was a sparkle in her eye.

  “Why?”

  Cecile looked coy. “Can I trust you?”

  “Yes …”

  “Not a word …”

  “Of course.”
>
  “I was at that crusty coffee shop you always go to, DuPont, yes? You’re right, the coffee there really is good. Anyway, I met someone there … someone very special. I just saw him sitting alone at a table and I knew I had to have him.”

  I don’t recall what words she used to tell me about her and Sufyan. I only remember her saying Sufyan’s name, and the way she pronounced it, it wasn’t like it should be pronounced. The u was too hard and the yan was clipped and it was all just wrong. As she told me what happened an image burned itself into my brain, of Sufyan and Cecile gyrating against each other in the bathroom of DuPont like wild dogs in heat. I pictured Cecile with her black skirt hiked up above her waist as Sufyan’s powerful body plowed into her.

  I didn’t ask who made the first move. I didn’t want to know. I preferred to imagine it was Cecile who pushed herself onto him. Of course it was Cecile who, like her ancestors, felt entitled to the world and everything in it. Like another Western conquest, Sufyan was no longer a person. The poor man had become a situation in the bathroom of a fair-trade coffee shop. I thought of what he might have whispered in her ear, but I struggled to picture him whispering anything to her. They were not right for each other.

  “Did you guys mention me?” I asked. The back of my neck burned and my skin felt clammy. I wanted to vomit.

  “Why would we mention you? Anyway, I’m seeing Sufyan tonight,” she continued. “We’re going for a date … at DuPont, of course.”

  I closed my eyes. The caged birds were flying in dizzying circles in my mind. Kung Pao chicken. Kung Pao chicken.

  “That’s not how you pronounce his name.” I tried to sound calm but my voice trembled.

  “Pardon?”

  “I said,” I repeated, “that’s not how you pronounce his name.”

  “He’s American —”

  “No, he’s not fucking American,” I snapped. “He’s Arab. He has an Arabic name. You can’t just decide how you’re going to pronounce names. It’s pronounced Souf-yaan, not Suf-yen. If you’re going to fuck us at least get our names right.”

  Cecile looked at me like I had just told her I was about to detonate a bomb.

  “And stop introducing me to people as your Arab friend.”

  “Rasa, it’s a JOOOKEE.”

  “It’s not funny. You’re not funny. How could you sleep with him? You barely even know him!” I shouted. “You … you just slept with this … this guy you don’t know anything about? Are you a prostitute? What if he has a girlfriend? You don’t know anything about his life. What is it with you? You just do things without thinking of the consequences … this stupid entitlement … this … this individualistic freedom to act as you please means you act like an animal, a slave to your whims and impulses. Don’t you have any shame? What kind of way of life is this?”

  I looked down at my quivering hands. For a few minutes neither of us spoke. I turned back to the computer to work.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Cecile finally asked. She looked at me like I was crazy, and maybe I was. I felt fucking crazy.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “So you think I’m a whore now? Some kind of loose woman?”

  “That’s not what I meant …”

  Cecile stood up. She grabbed her bag and stormed out of the computer room. Before she left she turned around.

  “You know, Rasa? Sometimes you can be so. Fucking. Arab.”

  I sat in the empty room. The computers hummed around me. Thoughts raced through my mind. How could all this happen at DuPont? That was our favorite coffee shop. Only a few weeks ago, after he had left my room, I had been in agony. But even then, there was a sliver of hope. Now, there was nothing.

  I should have been with Sufyan in that bathroom. I closed my eyes and pictured it, Sufyan and I grabbing at each other in a bathroom stall as the whooshing sound of the hand dryer concealed our moans. Against the hum of the computers, which sounded more and more like an irritable buzz, I pictured myself wearing the black pencil skirt Cecile might have been wearing. I thought of Sufyan hiking the skirt up in one violent tug and pressing himself against me.

  The image of me in a skirt turned my sadness into rage. The computers were roaring now. I wanted to stand up and push them to the floor, smash them into a million pieces and scream into the empty room. There were no answers to any of this. In all the books I had read, there were no answers. I was aware that my thoughts were darkening, and that if I did not leave the computer room soon I would grow more bitter with each passing second, like an abandoned cup of DuPont coffee.

  So I left. I stepped out into the chill of the spring evening. I speed-walked through the city. The air smelled fresh from the afternoon rain, and the familiar loneliness fell upon me. I embraced the feeling and wrapped myself in it. The buzzing in my head subsided and the thumping in my chest slowed to a dull ache.

  A man in a military uniform approached me.

  “Any spare change for our heroes?” he asked, shaking a plastic bucket that jingled with coins.

  I shouldered past him without responding. I took great joy in doing this. I could never walk past such a soldier back home without being arrested, or worse. But here, let him try and stop me.

  I arrived at my apartment and climbed into bed. I pulled the covers over my head and lay in the stifling darkness. I wanted to cry but there was nothing tangible to cry about. I hadn’t lost anything. I was back to where I always was, because I had never left. I cocooned myself in my feelings, breathing in the stale smell of the duvet that reeked of sleep and cigarettes. All around me I smelled loneliness and rejection, and it smelled like butter.

  Under the covers I am eleven years old again. It is the night before Eid. My father has an overnight shift at the hospital. My father had always accepted the burden of supporting my mother. An emotional wife was a hand he had been dealt, and Mama swallowed up all the love he gave her and demanded more. But when Baba had his night shifts Mama would appear extinguished, like a punctured balloon. Tonight she is more agitated than usual and spends the entire evening chopping onions. It is the largest bowl I have ever seen. She chops furiously for hours, her face swollen and red.

  “Mama, are you okay?”

  “Yes, habibi, I’m fine.”

  “Please no more onions,” I beg. “I can’t eat another onion.”

  She looks up just as a teardrop rolls down her nose and drips onto her forearm. She sniffs, her eyes watery, and rubs her nose with the back of her arm.

  “You’re right,” she says. She puts the knife down and takes a drink from the glass by the chopping board. “After tonight no more onions.”

  She is quiet and sniffly when she puts me to bed. The sour smell of alcohol envelopes me as she lies beside me, a wet tissue wedged inside the palm of her hand as her long fingernails stroke my back. I can tell something is wrong by the way she scratches me. The long, lazy loops she makes with her fingernails are more hurried this evening.

  “If I write you letters, will you write back?” she asks.

  “Why? Where are you going?”

  “I’m not well, habibi …”

  “Mama, you’re scratching my back too hard.”

  “I love you so much.” She leans into me for a kiss. “One day you’ll understand that sometimes loving someone too much can keep you from becoming yourself.”

  I wake up a few hours later to the sounds of loud sobbing and Teta tearing through the house. The room is pitch-black. I stumble, bleary-eyed, out of my bedroom and down the dark hallway to the living room. My mother is on the floor, crouched on the Persian carpet with the symmetrical designs of flowers and branches. There is a broken bottle and a pool of blood by her hands. Doris is kneeling beside her. Teta is standing a few feet away. In her arms she has a box of chocolates, an envelope with eiddieh cash in it, and a plastic bag filled with marbles in various colors. I stand there silently in my Fido Dido pajamas. Mama is sobbing into the pool of blood. She looks up at me briefly and then buries her face in her chest. He
r wailing intensifies.

  “Mama’s sick, habibi. Mama’s sick,” she says over and over again.

  Teta turns to Doris. “What happened?” she booms.

  “I don’t know,” Doris says.

  “You whisper in her ear all these years and now you act stupid?” Teta roars.

  Teta turns to me. The look on her face releases a terrifying blackness that comes plunging down on me like a vulture. I rub the sleep from my eyes to deflect her unyielding gaze.

  “Do you know what’s going on?” she asks in a calm voice.

  I shrug and begin to cry. I don’t know why I am crying but the tears come and I cannot stop them.

  “Stop crying,” Teta screeches. I cry harder. “Be a man for God’s sake!”

  I try to hold back my tears but they burst from me.

  “Go into your room,” Teta demands, pointing with one red manicured finger. I drag myself obediently back to my room, crying, feeling a sorrow that seems to stretch for the rest of my life.

  I shut my bedroom door as my mother lets forth a wave of hysterical sobs. I jump inside my bed. I am terrified — terrified and furious. Terrified for my mother and also furious at her. Furious that I am caught up in this, furious that my mother has ruined Eid, furious for all those damn onions she’s been making me eat. I bury myself under the covers, farting and weeping and thinking furious thoughts.

  “Leave me alone,” I can hear my mother screaming from the living room. “Get out of my house!”

  “Do you see what you are doing to your son?” Teta yells. Upon hearing this, a wave of self-pity roars through my body. I burst into the loudest sobs, making sure I am heard throughout the house. I want my mother punished for this, for making me feel this way. The sound of Teta’s footsteps makes its way toward my bedroom, piercing the silence with each step. I smear my tears and snot across my face for added drama, and hold my breath so that my breathing comes out heavy and desperate. The bedroom door swings open. Teta’s large figure rushes toward me like a storm.