by David Unger
chapter twelve
an arabic ballad: habiba, sharmoota
When Guillermo tells Maryam what has happened, she is very much surprised. All along she has assumed that she would have to be the one to take the first step if there was ever a chance for her and Guillermo to be together. Now Rosa Esther has acted and Maryam gives her lover the necessary space to figure things out. It is a difficult period because so much has to be done quickly, and there is no time to get together.
Within a week of Rosa Esther’s return, Guillermo puts their apartment up for sale. Property in Zone 14 is selling like hotcakes because there are armed guards patrolling the residential areas and rich Guatemalans want security above all else.
He lists the apartment at four hundred thousand dollars. Guatemala is flush with drug money, and within two days he finds a buyer who will pay in cash.
Guillermo gives Rosa Esther her half and then signs a lease for a compact two-bedroom apartment in a new nine-floor rental building in Las Cañadas. As the first occupant of the building, Guillermo gets a large discount on his rent for the first year. He likes that it is a rental: it reflects the impermanence that characterizes his new life.
Rosa Esther hires a moving company, which will transport the kids’ belongings and some pieces of furniture to Mexico City by land. On the day of the move, she insists that Guillermo be at work: she doesn’t want him around to interrupt any emotions she might want to express.
When he comes home, he discovers he has been left a bed, a bureau, and a couple of end tables and lamps. The living room has one chair, the dining room is completely empty except for the pole lamp in the back corner and a modern crystal chandelier in the center, both leftovers from his father’s store. The walls have shadows where hangings and paintings once were displayed.
With no family to fill up his nights, Guillermo is lonely. But he is stuck here for another week before he can move into his new, smaller quarters. He is surprised by his feelings of loss, something he hadn’t anticipated.
* * *
One late afternoon, days after Rosa Esther has left for Mexico, Guillermo and Maryam are lying in bed in the apartment in the Plazuela España drinking Chivas on ice and munching almonds after having made love. Their sex is always an unpredictable adventure, with a newness that Guillermo no longer questions, but clearly loves. Maryam swears she has been faithful to Samir all these years, but as she has aged, she has become aware of her increased sexual drive and her desire to have it quenched. Her years of reading Playgirl have helped her realize what she wants in bed.
“What’s next?” he asks, caressing her hair.
Maryam looks at him quizzically. “What do you mean?”
“What are we going to do?”
“That’s a big question. Have you even told my father that Rosa Esther left you?”
Guillermo stops stroking her hair. “I told him that my marriage was ending. I didn’t have the nerve to tell him that Rosa Esther had moved to Mexico.”
“Well, I can’t tell him!”
“Next time we meet I’ll tell him. Though I’m sure it won’t make him happy. Your father likes order.”
“And what am I supposed to do with Samir? Am I to continue happily married?”
“I hope not,” Guillermo says, tipping his drink at her. Maryam is lying with her head on his lap, looking up at him, holding her own glass in one hand. She sits up whenever she wants to have a sip, which is what happens now.
“You don’t love him.”
“I don’t, it’s true. But I am afraid of him,” she says, taking a sip of her drink and stirring the ice with her tongue. “He may seem calm to strangers, but he has a violent temper. I’ve seen how he screams at the workers in his store. At times he isn’t even aware of it. And he sometimes screams at me.”
“Do you think he would ever hit you? If that’s the case, then we should tell him together.”
“That, Guillermo, is a horrible idea. It’s one thing for me to tell him privately, another to have his replacement bearing witness as I tell him. I mean, how would you feel if you were told by Rosa Esther and her new lover that she would be leaving you?”
“I would want to kill them both—on the spot.”
“Exactly. It would be better if I told him. I just need to find the right moment.”
“When?”
“Not now.” She is thinking. “Maybe in a couple of weeks.”
“Maryam!”
“You have to give me a few weeks.”
* * *
Ten days after Rosa Esther has left, Guillermo gives up the furnished flat in the Plazuela España building. Why pay the extra rent when he is now living alone and Maryam can visit him in his apartment at any time? He never thought he would escape his marriage; furthermore, he never thought he would be interested in living together with another woman. If he did ever leave Rosa Ester, he’d always imagined living alone.
But the weeks pass. When he tells Ibrahim that his wife has left him with Ilán and Andrea and is now living in Mexico, Guillermo is surprised at his client’s response: Ibrahim is taken aback, but asks no questions, says nothing other than to offer his condolences. He must suspect that there is more than a friendship between his daughter and his lawyer and is wondering what might happen next.
Maryam says nothing to Samir. Guillermo is incensed by the lack of progress. He trusts Maryam, but wonders why she’s so hesitant to simply tell Samir that she no longer wants to live with him—it’s not as if they have kids together.
Guillermo fills his nights working on cases, especially Ibrahim’s. After months of nearly perfect reports with no suspicious withdrawals, he notices new discrepancies in the Banurbano monthly accounts, but now in increasing quantities. Something tells him that while other money-laundering channels are being shut, there’s added pressure to use the bank as a way to move funds and to support programs that have not received legislative approval. Guillermo feels a bit out of his element since he is not an accountant and doesn’t fully understand certain transactions, but he knows that something illegal is going on.
Guillermo does not confess his confusion regarding some of the bank transfers to Ibrahim, since the older man relies on his judgment and has staked his reputation on making the bank’s transactions completely transparent. When Guillermo reports the irregularities, Ibrahim tells the other members of his advisory board. When their response is muted, he tells them he is considering discussing his findings with the press, since he doesn’t trust the president and the judiciary doesn’t seem to care about his allegations.
An appeal to the people might lead the Banurbano managers or even the president to make a public clarification of what’s going on.
Guillermo, aware of how the government can manipulate the truth, advises otherwise; he feels that proof—not accusations—is what they need. He advises that they should collect more evidence, but Ibrahim is incredibly stubborn and impatient—he feels the moment has come.
What follows is ominous. After delivering his threat to the board, Ibrahim receives an increasing number of hang-up calls and anonymous threats. Someone wants him off the board, pronto.
Obviously the president or his wife won’t ask him directly to resign. Oddly, Ignacio Balicar has stopped defending presidential pet projects at the meetings; he seems to be waiting for something. Nothing is done directly in Guatemala. It is all subterfuge, behind smoke screens, curtains, clouds, blankets. It is clear that something cataclysmic is about to happen—this is the calm before the storm—but Ibrahim wants to go public
* * *
Meanwhile, Guillermo is feeling greater and greater loneliness. He is deeply in love with Maryam, but old ways die hard. One night after work he gets together with Araceli at the Stofella, but it is pretty much a disaster. In fact, he has a hard time keeping his erection even when she is touching him. She suggests the little blue pill, which pisses him off.
He doesn’t need the little blue pill. He needs Maryam.
That ni
ght he texts her.
Can you talk?
I can’t.
Why?
I am writing to you from the bathroom. No matter where I go, Samir shows up. He is tailing me in our own apartment!
You have to tell him about us.
Maybe he already knows. I can smell the change in him.
Maryam, I can’t take this any longer.
She does not text back any words of assurance.
* * *
And so one night after Samir and Maryam have had a light dinner of Lebanese mezzas and their maid Hiba has left, she decides the moment has come. Later, she blames her precipitated actions on Assala Nasri’s voice, as if her songs were responsible for the confession.
They are sitting in the living room, with walls decorated in framed campy photographs depicting images from the Lebanese homeland: olive fields, jagged mountains, the American University campus; all touristic scenes from their trips, separately and together, to Beirut.
Maryam is wearing a dark blue dress. She looks like a nineteenth-century milkmaid, and is on the sofa reading an article in Poder discussing Barack Obama’s election and how it will affect Israeli and Arab relations. Samir is stretched out on the Barcalounger, with his bare yellow feet up in the air. His eyes are closed. He wears a smoker’s robe over his clothes and he might be dozing.
They are listening to Assala Nasri’s latest recording of plaintive Arabic ballads on the CD player. Something about the way Nasri sings about love, adoration, and her terribly broken heart in an Arabic that Maryam does not fully understand unhinges her. She feels her heart is like the River Jordan about to overflow its banks.
She walks over to the CD player and lowers the volume. There are tears in her eyes.
“What’s this?” Samir says, startled, sitting up.
“I need to talk to you about something.”
Her husband shakes his head. “Why is it always when I am enjoying something and in a state of blissful happiness that you feel obliged to interrupt my pleasure? Is the music bothering you? Do you want me to use my headphones?”
Maryam’s heart is pounding. They are both listening to the same music, but their reactions are so dramatically different. She is thinking of Guillermo’s long and powerful legs, how the hair grows in mild grassy ridges along his chest, how his hands are so sure when he is stroking her. How he knows how to move his penis inside of her so that she is constantly being surprised by where it takes her and what she feels. And the way she comes.
And she cannot imagine what Samir is thinking. Perhaps he is recalling the love he once felt for his wife, long dead after twenty-two years of marriage, or his childhood in Sidon. Maybe he is thinking about the shortage of pliers and extension cords in Guatemala. The price of brackets or tortillas.
But this is the moment. How can she bring it up? Should she cast her love for Guillermo by explaining her unhappiness in sharing a life with an old, unattractive husband? Can she actually blame Samir who she knows might resort to calling her a woman with a fickle morality or, plain and simple, a harlot? Or should she begin apologetically, instead: admit her guilt as something beyond reason and control, plea for release, and accept the fact that she has acted duplicitously and has betrayed her nuptial vows? Should she say that there is something wrong with her, that she has always felt she was born defective and that in actuality she is self-centered, numbed, impulsive?
In the end, she opts for the raw truth, couched in what she feels are the kindest of words, even though she knows as she begins speaking that he will not reward her for this kindness.
“Samir, I am no longer happy sharing a life with you.”
He closes his eyes and gets a pained and sour look on his face, now creviced with moles and deep gullies. There is nothing attractive about him. He pushes down on the footrest of the Barca so that he can sit up properly, a bit hunched over.
“We have been sharing more than a life together, my habibati.” He puts his feet into the leather slippers at the foot of the recliner, even though he will not stand up. He lets out an amused laugh through his thin, discolored lips. “Am I interpreting your words correctly: you want to break your vows, to divorce me?”
Maryam is disgusted by his mocking tone, but tries not to wrangle with him. “I want to leave you. I don’t make you happy.” She wants to put all the blame, with dignity, on her own shoulders, but then backtracks. “We can’t give one another what we need anymore. You don’t please me. And I can’t give you what you need.”
“And what is it that you think I need, young lady?”
Maryam can feel that she is on the verge of losing control, but tries to stay on course. Under no circumstances can she refer to any of his shortcomings, which he is sure not to acknowledge, or digress to his level of sarcasm. “What you have always needed: a woman to admire you, to comfort you, to mirror your being.”
Samir lets out a little laugh that is beyond scorn. “You have never mirrored my being, habibati. When we first married, you were a sweet pretty thing, simpleminded, to be sure—like a strip of plain, shiny copper. I assumed that your heart had never opened itself to any man, but I thought because of the respect I held for your father, and the respect you had for me, that you would be faithful. This is all I wanted.”
“I did open up my heart to you,” she confesses, dropping her head in penance, avoiding the issue of faithfulness. “I have been a good wife.”
He scrunches one eye as if this will allow him to see better. His voice rises: “These last few months you have slipped away from me like a doe jumping over a fence at night who returns in the morning with its fur soiled. You may claim innocence, but the facts speak for themselves, my habibati.”
“My intent was never to betray you.”
“Of course it was, let’s not be insincere. Betrayal is the perfect word. If anything, you have attempted to destroy me with your insolence and your unwillingness to fulfill the simplest of your marital obligations to me while hiding behind a false smile. Am I so abhorrent to you?”
She peers at Samir, a shrunken, nasty-looking man now, who often goes days without shaving the white hairs that sprout like icy weeds on the hollows of his cheeks. There’s a bit of spittle at both corners of his downturned mouth, and his teeth have yellowed at their flattened tips. He reminds her of Yassir Arafat, who she always found utterly unattractive. She thinks of Guillermo, with his elegant face, the dark wavy hair, the intensity of his eyes. His eyes have fire, for her at least, wildfire, while Samir’s eyes are nestled in sleepiness.
“I can’t go on like this. I feel that I am dying, little by little.” She sees his wrinkled penis in its thicket of gray hairs, dozing, moldy. In contrast to Guillermo’s rising tusk.
Samir nods his head. “I see, I see. It’s not that I am simply so abhorrent that you cannot lie with me as a woman should lie with a man. I make such few claims upon you and have even stopped asking you to open your legs to me. But that I am sending you to the grave now . . . how horrid a man I must be to put someone as innocent and pure as yourself into a landscape of so much suffering . . . But let me ask you a practical question: how do you plan to live without me?”
“I have my father’s money.”
Immediately Samir smiles. “You have forgotten that when we were married, your father gave me your dowry. The money you had is now mostly ours. I have him and you to thank for that generosity.”
“I have considered that. I am sure my father will take care of me, habibi.”
“Please! Do not say that word. It is blasphemy in your mouth.”
“Yes, Samir.” There are tears again in Maryam’s eyes. It is an existential moment: she never thought it would be this hard to ask for her freedom.
“From the moment you leave me, because you are the one who must leave this house, I will not give you a single cent of support. What do you say to that?”
“I understand these conditions.” She knows she will initially have to rely on her father or even Guillermo for support
, but she also knows she has the talent, the skill, the perseverance to live on her own, without props. She can admit her sins, her inability to love him, but she will not crawl to him. How stupid it was to put all the money in their name, sanctified by a marriage contract. “But I must tell you again that I am not happy. Isn’t my happiness worth anything?”
Samir now stands up. He wants to lord it over her, to express his triumph. “Do you have a rich lover? Is that what it is? It’s the most common thing, and it’s what I have suspected all these months. Some younger, stupid-looking man, I would imagine, with sentimental eyes, who is as common as you are.”
“You know nothing about it,” Maryam flares back, and immediately realizes she has said too much.
“Ah, so it is as I expected. I have exposed a raw nerve in my little hamama,” he says in a surly voice. “It must be someone I know. Yes, that’s it. Someone from our church. A Lebanese man half my age. Or perhaps an associate of your father’s?”
“There’s no one,” Maryam says, trembling, certain that her voice betrays her words. She has allowed Samir to unhinge her.
“Oh, but there must be. You would not have the courage to confess your lovelessness unless you had someone else. I’ve suspected something all along, knowing how untrustworthy you are. Why, you are just like your father.”
“Please, don’t bring him into this. My father has nothing to do with it.”
He grabs her wrist. The magazine with Obama on the cover falls from her lap to the floor. He is twisting her arm with his own spindly limb. “Do you think Hiba is beholden to you, simply because you are both women? She has served my family through two wives for thirty years. Do you think I’ve not known all along what has gone on here while I have been hard at work? That lawyer must have had an easy time fooling your father with his charm and his arguments. Or has your papá enjoyed taking on the role of a pimp so that the two of you could create a situation in which your legs, must I say it, are spread wide open to a stranger even as your heart is now closed to me?”