The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith

by Stephanie Saldaña

  It’s been harder and harder for me to come see him these last weeks. It’s not his fault. After all, we never actually talk about the war. We talk about poets who write in cottages beside the sea, or Degas’s paintings of young ballerinas. We speak about Rilke’s angels, or the suffering of Nikos Kazantzakis’s Christ. But beneath this lurks all that we refuse to speak about. Hassan carries the war inside of him, and I can feel it building more and more each day, threatening to break through the surface. By the time I leave Hassan and make my way home, I’ve lost all of the shining I stored up from taking photographs in the mosque. Just the fact of sitting across from him makes me tired. He is like a letter sent from the war into my own life, and now I have to read it, whether I want to or not.

  NOW I TAKE MY SEAT BESIDE HIM and he offers me a cigarette. After he lights it, we begin to speak about poetry.

  “Do you know what I’ve decided, Stephanie? There are two kinds of poets. The good poet is able to put beautiful words on paper. But the great poet doesn’t need words, and he doesn’t need paper. The great poet sees that there is poetry in everything.”

  He steps out of the store and begins pacing back and forth in the alley. I can see him as a professor again, laboring over a particular point, pacing in front of the chalkboard. “I’ve decided that poetry is best considered as a science. So, just as hydrogen and oxygen are bound together to create water, the force that binds them can be compared to poetry. Poetry is an invisible energy that exists between everything, holding it together, giving it meaning. The job of every human being is to search for the poetry hidden within the midst of things.”

  Something about him sounds desperate. He keeps pacing. “So, this brings us back to the role of poets in society. Some people write poetry, and some people live poetry. The man who lives poetry is the greater of the two.”

  He meets my gaze from the street. Behind him I can see the Minaret of Jesus, and the piece of sky behind it turning gray as evening continues to fall over the alley. Flocks of birds perch at the top of the minaret, and we can hear them calling to one another from below. In the street a small breeze builds, lifting dust from the ground and then setting it down again.

  “Poetry exists in everything?” I ask. “Even the war?”

  “Even the war,” he answers.

  Suddenly I’m so utterly tired, and I can actually feel it—my heart breaking in half. He’s lying to me. There isn’t poetry in the midst of any of this. There’s no poetry in that man, whoever he was, who collapsed in the midst of his roses this morning. There’s no poetry in the soldiers who were blown in half in Falluja. There is nothing beautiful about the killing and nothing beautiful about the dying. The most stunning language in the world won’t set it right again.

  “Then why don’t you go back to Baghdad, Hassan?” I finally ask him.

  I know that my question is unfair, that I’m hurting him by asking it. But I can’t stop.

  “Why don’t you go back, Hassan?”

  He looks at me for a long time. Behind him the sky has already settled into gray, so that the minaret is a tall black shadow reaching up to heaven. His eyes go even darker than usual.

  Finally he sighs. “Go back where, Stephanie?” he relents. “You know I can’t go back. How do you return to your neighborhood, when everyone you know has gone away? When my family and friends have all left? Where is my home? My Baghdad doesn’t exist anymore.”

  He looks away from me, and his last sentence is spoken softly, to himself. “My Baghdad is gone forever.”

  I stand up to leave. He stops me. We remain for a moment, face-to-face, just in front of the door, and he places his hand on my shoulder. “Wait for a moment,” he says.

  Then he turns and walks to the back of his small shop and reaches behind a painting to take out a shoe box full of old, outdated postcards. He shuffles through them, delicately, quietly glancing at one after another, until he stops at a bright, almost Technicolor postcard of Baghdad from decades ago. He hands it to me.

  “Take this. I want you to keep it.”

  I finger it gingerly. A line of tall buildings is set against a vast and clear blue sky. In the foreground, a bridge runs over azure waters, and a bush of white and red flowers is in full bloom. Brightly painted classic cars and a British red double-decker bus cross over the bridge. I turn the postcard over. “Ahrar Bridge,” it says on the left-hand corner in German, English, French, and Arabic. In the right-hand corner, a square waits for a tourist in Baghdad to purchase a postage stamp and stick it in the mail.

  “When you remember Baghdad, I want you to remember it like this,” he tells me. “Like it was, when it was paradise.”

  When you remember Baghdad. As though I have already been there.

  God be with you, he says as I leave. I go home. I sit on my bed, with his postcard in my hands, and I cry like a child.

  17.

  November

  THE NEXT TWO WEEKS pass quickly.

  By the end of October, Syrians have become obsessed with the American presidential elections. My neighbors stay up late glued to their television sets, watching round-the-clock coverage of John Kerry and George Bush, debating what each man might mean for their lives.

  “Maybe it would be better if they just elect George Bush again,” a driver grumbles to me on the way home from school. “At least we know that he’s terrible. I always say it’s better to have the devil you know than the devil you don’t know.”

  Predictably, the Baron is less interested in the politics of the elections than in finding yet another way to taunt me.

  “Ya, Stefanito, are you all set for four more years of Señor Bush?” he asks me one afternoon after my daily Arabic pop quiz. I have no idea why he’s given the president a Spanish name.

  “How much do you want to bet that Kerry will be elected?” I chide him.

  “A bottle of whiskey,” he counters.

  “What will I do with a bottle of whiskey?”

  “You won’t need to worry,” he sings sweetly. “You won’t be drinking it. Bush will win.”

  ON THE EVENING OF NOVEMBER 2, I stay awake in an all-night café and watch the states turn red one after another as George W. Bush is narrowly reelected to his second term as president. When it is finished, I pay my bill and set out on the long walk home. It is early morning when I arrive in the Christian quarter and men are wearily sweeping their storefronts and opening the doors. I stop inside a liquor store and buy the most expensive bottle of Jack Daniel’s I can find.

  When I return to the house off Straight Street, I hand the brown paper bag over to the Baron. “Merry Christmas, Grandpa,” I mutter. He giggles like a child.

  A weight falls over the city with the knowledge that the war in Iraq will only get longer, an invasion of Syria will only be more likely. A kind of existential exhaustion sets into the eyes of people, like men who had set out for a long, four-year journey, only to be told at the conclusion that they are only halfway there.

  The following night, I summon up the courage to finally phone Mark. I buy several cell-phone cards and dial the thirteen digits of his number while lying across my cold, narrow bed, listening as the phone rings and rings, the sound echoing.

  “Hello,” he mutters, his voice cased with sleep. “Oh God, Stephanie. Do you know what time it is?”

  I know that I should hang up, but I can’t. I’m just so impossibly tired, and I need to believe that something in the world can be good again. So I speak to him of my Arabic classes and my room off Straight Street, the loneliness of Damascus, and how many hours I have passed longing for home. “I love you,” I finally tell him.

  “No you don’t,” he answers in an even voice. “You don’t even know me. And I don’t think that I was ever in love with you.”

  I say nothing. He might have discovered the one sentence in the world to which there is no adequate response.

  I hang up the phone and spend the rest of the day in bed, staring up at the spearmint-painted ceiling, trying to fi
nd some way to measure what I’ve lost. That street in Cambridge, that mailbox with my mail, the kitchen table where I drank my tea, and the box of my clothes in the basement waiting for the day when I would come home to retrieve them. His voice. Pieces of music I might never recover again. The only place I had planned on returning home to, if something in Damascus goes wrong.

  The next week the American invasion of Falluja begins. Then Yasser Arafat dies, of poisoning, everyone whispers, opening up a political vacuum in the neighboring West Bank. My neighbor bawls in front of her television screen when I visit her. “He was a good man,” she insists. “You know, he married a Christian.” But when I pass by a Palestinian merchant near the Eastern Gate and offer my condolences, he looks up at me with an utterly blank expression in his eyes.

  “God have mercy on him,” he mutters in a quick, clipped voice and then goes back to his work.

  I take my final exams, and I never return to the university again, not even to see whether I have passed or failed. Instead I find a travel agency and change my destination from Boston to San Antonio for Christmas, go home to the house off Straight Street, pack a single bag, and drink a last, strong cup of coffee with the Baron.

  TODAY IS NOVEMBER 14, the end of Ramadan, and more than two months after my arrival in Damascus. I have crossed some invisible line in myself that I cannot go back on again. I wake up in the morning, and I don’t even remember who I am.

  And so I make my way to the bus station and buy a ticket north.

  THE RIDE OUT INTO THE DESERT feels like coming up for air, like watching the earth strip itself clean and become new again. From the window of the battered minibus, Damascus gradually gives way to bare stones alternating between shades of brown and hewn red, the sky becoming blue. Outside in the desert, empty black trash bags swell with air, the open spaces appearing as though they are clogged with phantoms. We are already on the edge of winter, and I have packed no winter clothes for what will be a month spent in the desert. In fact, I have brought no real clothes at all: two pairs of pants, two shirts and a jacket, a pair of sandals and a load of books, as someone who hastily flees in the middle of the night with no thought of what they might require for the journey.

  EVEN I DO NOT KNOW what I am running from. I suspect that it is not only Damascus, not only Mark no longer loving me, but another, more complex and unnameable thing—a series of places or lives abandoned in the middle, stories ruptured before completion. Maybe that’s the only country I have left to flee from, this house of memories appended one onto another, each room a different country, a street, the name of a man I left standing in an airport, a fraction of myself.

  If I were a better person, it would be God’s voice haunting me as I watch the buildings disappear and the landscape bleed to bone dry. But it is not God’s voice. It is the poet Rilke’s voice haunting me, the words he had written in the last line of his poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo”: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.

  Part Two INCARNATION

  Last of all, as though to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.

  –1 CORINTHIANS 15:8

  1.

  FROM THE FOOT OF THE DESERT VALLEY, I look up to see the ancient monastery of Mar Musa staring down at me from its perch on the cliffside, majestic, suspended in the meeting point between two mountains, no logical line marking the separation between mountain, monastery, and sky. The light on the stones turns them to a deep rose, so that the scenery as much as the monastery itself reminds me of what Moses might have felt like standing in front of the mountain of the Lord. The medieval builders piled walls the color of baked clay one behind another, each ascending floor of the monastery built deeper into the face of the mountain. From a distance, the monastery clawing to the side of the cliff gives me the discomforting sense that at any moment it might collapse and tumble into the valley below.

  There are some three hundred and fifty steps winding across the mountainside, and it takes half an hour to climb the mountain. I begin slowly, my bag digging into my shoulders, pausing every so often to catch my breath, my body exhausted and cold, my lungs weak from pollution. Something about this staircase makes me think of the Spanish medieval mystic St. John of the Cross, writing of his anguished dark night of the soul, the space of pure despair before the soul climbs the ladder leading back to life again. He promised that, after climbing, the soul reaches God and attains stillness. “The ladder rests in God.”

  I have no idea how I succeeded in falling so far, from God and from myself. How much I also want rest.

  IN DAMASCUS I LIVED IN A ROOM, in a house, which was placed on a street, which was then in a neighborhood located in the Old City. If those had been the only circles of my life, then perhaps I would not have fled from Damascus to the desert to start over again. Yet I carried still another world inside of myself, a world as real as the war that Hassan carried within his body to Damascus and could not escape, no matter how far he fled from Baghdad.

  Damascus was not the first place I had lived with violence. Nor was the Middle East. I have been running from a different story of violence for a long time, and that was the deeper reason why I couldn’t go home again. On the surface, there is nothing in common between my story and the events I experienced in the Middle East. Perhaps the only thing that ties them is my growing knowledge that once history decides to unravel on you, there is very little that you can do to change its mind.

  I was born into a family with such a strange and cruel history that I was raised to believe that we were cursed. My mother’s mother, Elida Magdalena Calderon Cantu, was born on March 2, 1930, in San Antonio, Texas, to a family that owned a series of mom-and-pop grocery stores on the Mexican west side of the city. She was beautiful in the way only women from that particular era were beautiful, her face narrow and always smoothed white with powder, her long hair often pulled back and fastened with a flower. I have seen that face so often in photographs, and I like to imagine that she held the same allure for my grandfather when he first met her that a film actress might hold if caught unawares in her everyday life, walking down the street in the late afternoon sun. The truth, though, is that I never learned how they met, much less if they were ever in love, and I received no stories that hinted at whether they shared any happiness between them.

  By all accounts, my grandparents were an explosive couple. My grandmother Elida’s personality hovered between mesmerizing and eccentric. She had a penchant for turbans and lipstick and brightly colored dresses, along with a collection of peacocks that sauntered beside her through her San Antonio backyard. Yet with all of her glamour, she was also tragic, frequently thrown between bouts of mania and despair, and late in her life she was finally diagnosed as manic-depressive. Her husband, my grandfather Enrique, had no idea how to cope with her mood swings, and in his own right was said to have been a difficult man to love, one who too often judged his children and his wife harshly.

  In 1950, Elida gave birth to my mother, the oldest of her six children, who despite the tensions of her family grew into a precocious and exceptionally bright dimpled child who loved to paint and sing, and who dreamed of one day traveling beyond the confines of her small neighborhood in San Antonio. In the following years, four more girls and a boy were born, all of them gifted in the arts and more than a little melancholic. Madness and music, they used to say, were the particular gifts that my family carried.

  Growing up in the 1960s, my mother watched as her mother became increasingly unbalanced. She developed an obsession with death and attempted to take her life several times. Eventually she began electroshock therapy and woke up in a mental hospital, many of her memories gone. My mother’s own memories of these moments remain traumatic. “Oh God,” she once told me. “I know that they were trying to do good in theory, but it was as if you could eliminate just that part of the brain that would make her want to destroy herself. To me it was torture.”

  In 1973, two years after my parents were married an
d four years before I was born, my grandfather Enrique Cantu filed for divorce from his wife Elida, a predictable act after many turbulent years, and yet one full of shame for our conservative Catholic and Hispanic family. On March 2, my grandmother celebrated her forty-third birthday with her children. Two days later, the day before her divorce would have been finalized, she laid out on her bed in loving detail the clothes she wished to be buried in. Then she laid herself down also, on the sofa in her living room, and swallowed enough pills to move her body into sleep forever. She died a married woman. That afternoon her brother discovered her body lying in the living room as though dreaming, the empty pill bottles beside her.

  DESPITE HIS REPUTATION AS A DIFFICULT MAN, my grandfather Enrique Cantu adored me with a peculiar tenderness. After his wife’s death, he lived out in a small Texas ranch house set among high grass, bluebonnets, and Indian paintbrush, and in my eyes his rough, fierce features and ability to shoot and skin rattlesnakes made him almost superhuman. On weekends he sometimes took me fishing on the San Antonio River, which ran through his property in the dry brush and cacti of south Texas. He knew I hated the sight of anything dying and would always bait the hook of my fishing line for me, passing his hand through the water afterward to rinse away the blood.

  He called me his “little runner,” encouraging me by giving me money every time I won a long-distance race. He cooked scrambled eggs with bacon and baked beans. I loved him dearly. When I was thirteen years old, my grandfather Enrique was discovered in his Texas ranch house one afternoon in March, shot in the back of the head with his own pistol. He had been tortured: beaten and gagged, shot execution style at the base of his skull. In a less tragic family, he would have died instantly. He did not. The bullet ricocheted in his brain and killed him slowly. He somehow freed himself from his bonds, called one of his daughters, and mumbled the words I’ve been shot. His brain was filling with blood. I do not know why he could not summon the strength to say another word, the name of the man who shot him.