The Automobile Club of Egypt

by Alaa Al Aswany

  Mahmud said nothing but felt a little uneasy. He really wanted to leave, but suddenly Rosa became jolly again. She got out of bed, took his hand and said playfully, “Come on, let’s take a shower.”

  “You go first.”

  “No,” she said with a giggle. “Come with me. Let’s have a shower together.”

  She pulled him into the bathroom, laughing, turned on the shower and started soaping him up, patting his muscles.

  “My fantastic stud!”

  Then she handed him a big pink sponge. “Mahmud, will you scrub my back?”

  He had hardly started doing so before she whirled around, threw her arms around him and started insatiably kissing his stomach, working her way up to his chest and finally to his mouth, while her hand slithered around between his thighs. They fell onto the bed again, still dripping wet. This time Rosa went slowly. The first time she had gone at it hammer and tongs, but with her initial thirst quenched, she could now allow herself to luxuriate in total pleasure, as the two of them gave themselves over to a veritable tidal wave of lovemaking that left them both spent. Mahmud asked if he might take another shower before he got dressed. As he said good-bye at the door of her apartment, he felt that everything between them had changed. The way he felt when he embraced her, the timbre of her voice, even the perfume that earlier had seemed maternal—all of them now drove him mad with desire.

  Mahmud lay on his bed thinking over what had happened with Rosa until he fell asleep. The following day, he went to the Club and worked as usual but could not banish the questions: Might he discover that what happened with Rosa had been a dream? Perhaps a hallucination?

  If not, had Rosa fancied him from the start, or was she suddenly overcome with lust? She was over sixty, but at what age did a woman lose her libido? Was it only foreign women or did all women, whatever their age, desire men with such ardor? Did his mother have such feelings? Did her sedate and dignified appearance belie an incandescent desire for sex? He felt awkward to imagine his mother feeling passion, but then he told himself, “Of course my mother and father did what I did with Rosa; otherwise, how would my siblings and I have come into the world?”

  Mahmud plunged headlong into this new reality. Rosa did her best to satisfy him in bed, teaching him so much about the technique of lovemaking that after a few weeks he became quite expert at it. They met so often that they developed their own rituals, which he loved. Rosa would start off by feeding him up. She served him various delicious meals, such as kebab and kufta from Abu Shaqra, chicken and brain sandwiches from the New Kursaal and fatta with calf’s foot from Hati el-Geysh. When he expressed his astonishment at how much she knew about Egyptian food, Rosa shook her head and laughed. Just like any good mother, she told him, “Mahmud, I’ve lived in Egypt longer than I lived in England.”

  She taught him to drink wine. It tasted a little acrid at first, but then he felt the soothing sensation work its way into his brain. Time after time, his visits to Rosa followed the same routine: Mahmud would eat heartily, drink a whole bottle of wine and then go to the bathroom to brush his teeth and take a shower. He would come out wearing only the cashmere dressing gown Rosa had bought him. Then he would sit down next to her saying nothing, his legs crossed, as if he were waiting for the train. Rosa would sit there squirming a little, getting herself worked up and chatting away about nothing in particular. She would ask him about his family or grumble about how lazy and what a liar her doorman was, as if her relationship with Mahmud was nothing unusual or as if they were a married couple or a pair of lovers whose relationship was not simply sexual but extended into everyday life. Mahmud would sit there giving terse answers without looking at her. Suddenly, she would move closer to him, and he would feel her hot breath, or she might start stroking his curly hair or running her fingers along his broad lips. Mahmud would take his cue from that, and then the performance would start. He would enfold her in his strong arms, giving her no chance to resist. Then, like a toy he had played with long enough, he would carry her off to the bed. After kissing her for a long time and caressing her slowly, he would then run his hands all over her body until she relaxed and opened up to him, at which point he would make violent and merciless love to her. He seemed to be trying to hurt or punish her. Mahmud would pump away at Rosa like a machine, devoid of any false emotion or fake sentiment. He went at her with ever-increasing roughness, like a street brawler with Rosa his adversary. He would find her weak spots and then set at them as if there were no tomorrow, until she could do no more than lie there like a rag doll. Mahmud’s lovemaking, so rough and crude, drove Rosa wild. He seemed to have uncovered in her a land mine that had lain hidden for years under her polite and refined veneer. He took her back to a distant past, a primordial time when men and women did not disguise their animal lust but simply acted on it without shame or guilt, the way they might eat when they felt hungry. There was another reason why Mahmud was so good in bed: being slow-witted, he went about it slowly. He could lie there caressing Rosa for an age, forgetting time and space. Then, with the careless rhythm of a piston, he would make Rosa scream with wide-eyed delight as wave after wave of uncontrollable pleasure flowed through her. Rosa always had a few orgasms before Mahmud ejaculated. At that point, she would behave like a celebrant performing the rituals of a festival. With a happy and grateful look, she would kiss him on the face, neck, chest and hands as if he were a cat in his owner’s arms. Mahmud was such a fantastic lover that when Rosa thought back to all her previous lovers (including her late husband), she realized that she had never before experienced sexual pleasure such as Mahmud gave her.

  His tumultuous nights with Rosa became such a fixture of his life that he could no longer imagine going without them. He lived for them the way a drug addict waits for his next fix. If a few days passed without a visit to Rosa, the absence of sexual relief beset him like a muscle cramp. She released all his pent-up sexual frustration, so he now slept soundly at night and no longer dreamt of sex. She gave him a life of ease: delicious food, fine wine and a soft bed. He felt some pride at bedding Rosa, for here he was, a dark-skinned Egyptian, expressing his manhood for the first time with an English lady who had become attached to him. His feelings toward her were strong and contradictory. One time when she was not feeling well, he visited her as she lay in bed every day for a week to check on her. There was no doubting that he loved her, although not in the usual sense of “love” between a man and a woman. By dint of their sexual exertions, he had managed to uncover the real Rosa, and he felt for her the sort of affection that one might feel for a work colleague, and when they were not having sex, he treated her with all due respect and enjoyed her company. Sometimes it even seemed to him that he was doing a sort of favor for a close friend, the way he might help someone tidy up or move some heavy furniture around. He did, so to speak, a bit of heavy lifting around the place to keep her happy and, once finished, would go and sit in his comfy chair. Occasionally, after they had finished lovemaking, he would feel a storm welling up inside him and an urge to get away. In those moments, Rosa was nothing more to him than a haggard old woman, pretending to be younger than her age, and he, young enough to be her son, was no more than a lad who had been seduced into fornication. With that, he felt a sudden resentment and wished he had never met her. Such sudden bouts of aversion might make him snap at her, but he would soon come back to himself and apologize, refusing to leave until he was certain that she had forgiven him. The waves of repulsion stemmed from his feelings of guilt. Mahmud had always been too lackadaisical and lazy to follow the strictures of his religion in an organized manner, except for going to say his Friday prayers, but sometimes his conscience would prick him.

  “How will I be able to stand before God when I have been so sinful?”

  One time when he was particularly encumbered with such feelings and wanted to get things off his chest, he went to see to his best friend, Fawzy (the only one to whom he ever told his innermost secrets). Aisha told him that Fawzy was up on th
e roof, and there Mahmud found him sitting in the dark, in a white galabiyya, rolling hashish cigarettes at a small table, of which Fawzy handed him one as he gestured at him to take a seat. Mahmud tried to refuse, but Fawzy pressed the cigarette on him. He lit it for him, and as it glowed, it started to give off the telltale aroma.

  “Listen, mate,” he said, “hashish is a panacea. May God never let it dry up!”

  Fawzy took a drag on the fat spliff and held it in, allowing it to have a strong effect. Then he coughed and looked at Mahmud with bloodshot eyes.

  “What’s up, chump?”

  They were sitting by the wall of the roof terrace with the hustle and bustle of Tram Street stretching out in front of them. Mahmud opened his mouth to say something, but his dark face suddenly grimaced.

  “Fawzy!” he said, his voice quivering as if he were on the verge of tears. “I’m fornicating with Rosa. It’s a cardinal sin, and I’m afraid of God’s punishment.”

  “You,” said Fawzy, pursing his lips and shaking his head, “are a complete idiot.”

  “Why’s that?”

  Fazwi placed his hand on Mahmud’s shoulder and then, as if explaining something to a child, said, “Why look a gift horse in the mouth? Rosa is an English lady who likes you and looks after you. Or would you rather run after those putrid girls and have to fork out a fortune on them?”

  “It’s wrong, what I’m doing with Rosa.”

  “So you’ve turned into a shaykh? And didn’t you kiss those girls too?”

  “The sin of kissing is different from the sin of fornication. Uncle Darawi, the shaykh at the mosque, said in his sermon on Friday that fornication is one of the cardinal sins.”

  Fawzy thought it over for a moment.

  “All right, then,” he said. “Go and marry Rosa.”

  “Marry someone my mother’s age?”

  “Do a traditional oral marriage.”

  Mahmud did not seem to understand. Fawzy heaved a sigh and explained gently, “In the old days, Mahmud, do you think they had officials and documents? No way. In the old days, people got married just by saying they were in front of two witnesses. No need for papers. So get married like they used to do way back then. I’ll go with you, and we’ll find as a third guy someone from the triangle. You just tell her, ‘I take you as my wife,’ and she tells you, ‘I take you as my husband,’ and we say, ‘We have witnessed the marriage.’ That way everything will be perfectly aboveboard.”

  Mahmud shook his head. “I can’t do that,” he said decisively.

  “So you don’t like the idea of fornicating, but you don’t like the idea of getting married either?”

  “I’ve never heard of a marriage without papers or a contract. That would be a total sham.”

  Fawzy took a deep drag on his spliff and, after another fit of coughing, continued, “All right. Forget it. Do you want to hear another idea?”

  “Go on.”

  “Listen up. Years ago, when the Muslims fought against Europe, didn’t the victorious army take the women of the defeated as concubines? After every war there would be concubines left on both sides, Muslim concubines for the Franks and Frankish concubines for the Muslims. We learned that in history at school, don’t you remember?”

  “I was never any good at history.”

  “Think, Mahmud. Had you lived in those days and been in a war and taken a woman from the enemy army, you would have been entitled to use her as a concubine and sleep with her without having to get married, and it would have been perfectly permissible according to our religion.”

  “So what’s that got to do with me?”

  “Just imagine that you lived five or six centuries ago and that you have waged war against the Franks, defeated them and taken Rosa as your concubine. It would be well within your rights to sleep with her.”

  “First, I am alive today and not five hundred years ago. Second, I haven’t fought the Franks. And third, I don’t want any concubines, and even if I did, I would never take one who is sixty years old. What’s all this shit about concubines and Franks? You’re just stoned and spouting garbage.”

  “Actually, I am stoned,” replied Fawzy calmly, rolling another spliff. “But I am speaking sense. Listen, Mahmud. However tormented you might feel, don’t leave Rosa. She has taken the bait, and now you have to reel her in and find the fortune.”

  “You’re speaking in riddles.”

  “It’s your brain that isn’t working.”

  “Just leave me alone.”

  Fawzy moved over to him. “I know what will make you happy again,” he told him as if imparting a dangerous secret. “And I’ll tell you, on condition that you do exactly what I say without further discussion.”

  SALEHA

  On Friday morning, Abd el-Barr sent some of his staff over with enough presents for an army—meat, vegetables and cakes. Said went with him to say Friday prayers in the Sayyida Zeinab mosque and then brought him to the apartment. I was in my bedroom having Aisha put the finishing touches to my face. I had taken in my new blue dress a little to accentuate my curves and had put polish on my fingernails and toenails. I had put makeup on and done my hair in ringlets with a kiss curl on my forehead. In the mirror I thought I looked quite good.

  “May the name of the Prophet protect you,” Aisha said, laughing. “By the Prophet, you look stunning!”

  We made our way to the sitting room, Aisha and my mother and me walking between them. Mahmud had been waiting in the hallway to join us.

  Aisha raised a finger to her mouth, threw back her head and let out a resounding ululation, but a withering look from my mother silenced her. I felt breathless with excitement and almost lost my balance a few times as I tried to walk in my high heels.

  I will never forget the moment I entered the sitting room. It was a very bright day, and the sun was flooding in. Abd el-Barr, who was seated between Kamel and Said, jumped up to greet us. At that moment I felt terror turn into astonishment. I had a fixed image of Abd el-Barr in my mind as a fat camel merchant in a galabiyya and a turban, speaking volubly as he spat on the ground, a great big wallet stuffed with banknotes sticking out of his pocket. That was how I had imagined him, but instead I saw a decent-looking, polite man in a smart blue suit, a white shirt and red necktie. He was olive-skinned and handsome. Abd el-Barr ate lunch with us and stayed until just before dinner. We sat and chatted. He made such a good impression on us all that even Kamel, the one most against the marriage, could not say a word against him. Had Abd el-Barr looked or behaved badly, it would have been much easier to refuse him, but his successful visit just made the situation more complicated, and the discussions about him raged on. After he left, Aisha, Fayeqa and Said pressed me hard, with my mother remaining neutral and Kamel trying to make me turn him down.

  “Our late father,” he kept telling everyone, “dreamed of seeing Saleha as a university teacher.”

  “If he were still alive,” Said retorted, “and saw Abd el-Barr, he’d be the first to commend him.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Can you deny that Abd el-Barr is a really fine guy?”

  “I have nothing against him, but I’m against Saleha getting married at this time. She is working so hard and doing so well. It would be criminal for her to give up school and become a housewife.”

  “Listen, brother, she can finish her studies after she gets married. Lots of brides complete their baccalaureate at home.”

  “If Saleha gets married, she won’t have time to study.”

  “If that’s the case, then she’s stupid and not cut out for studying,” Said said.

  I looked at him and made no comment. I wanted to point out that he was the one who could not get into university.

  “Saleha,” Kamel said, “it feels uncomfortable talking about your future with you sitting there saying nothing.”

  “I need to think it over,” I said.

  “There you are, getting all hoity-toity. Who do you think you are?” barked Said.

  �
�As a daughter of the Gaafar clan,” interjected my mother, “she can be as hoity-toity as she wants!”

  “Well, Abd el-Barr could marry a hundred girls better than Saleha.”

  “By God, if he were to search the whole world, he wouldn’t find anyone as good.”

  “Shit. It’s the blind leading the blind here!”

  “Watch your language, Said!”

  I thought that Said was going to launch into another argument, but he got up, and as he left the room, he shouted, “Throw away the opportunity of a lifetime if you want. I’ll give you two days before I go and apologize to Abd el-Barr. For all I care, little Mademoiselle Saleha can go to hell.” He slammed the door behind him, leaving his words lingering in the air.

  The next day I couldn’t concentrate at school. When I came home, I sat down to lunch with my mother. Kamel and Mahmud no longer ate lunch with us since they started working at the Automobile Club. Suddenly I blurted out, “Mother, I’ll marry Abd el-Barr.”

  She sat saying nothing, as if trying to absorb the shock. Then she advised me to think it over very carefully, because marriage is not a game. I repeated my decision, and she looked at me and then got up and hugged me. I could feel tears on her face as I clung to her and kissed her forehead. That evening, Kamel came into my bedroom, and with the barest trace of a smile, he muttered, “Congratulations, Saleha.”

  “I know you’re against it, Kamel.”

  “I pray God it turns out for the best.”

  “I know you want the best for me. But I promise you, I’ll finish my studies after I get married.”

  “I wish you every success, please God.”

  He then scuttled off, not wanting to talk about it anymore, having lost the battle. The next day, Said went and announced our official agreement to the marriage. Why had I agreed? No one pushed me into it. I was not sacrificing myself for the sake of our family’s future, as happens in the movies. Had I turned him down, no one would have forced me. Perhaps I felt that it was my mother’s wish that I marry him, even if she had not said so explicitly. Perhaps I was sure that I would be able to finish my studies. Perhaps because Abd el-Barr was actually quite attractive. Or perhaps because I wanted to be a bride, or perhaps it was for all those reasons. Abd el-Barr was so happy at the news that he showered us all with expensive gifts. Even Kamel, who was clearly opposed, received a beautiful Swiss watch. Abd el-Barr spent money like water, and I was dazzled by his generosity.