An Unnecessary Woman

by Rabih Alameddine

  “I understand why you chose to do it,” Fadia goes on. “I’m with you, my love. But I say six months—six months is more than enough. I loved my husband, everyone will vouch for that, but I couldn’t keep wearing black.”

  “I didn’t mind the black,” Marie-Thérèse says. A loud car horn from the street obscures her next sentence.

  “It’s better that you took it off,” Joumana says. “He’d have wanted you to. Your husband hated black.”

  “And don’t wear those black nylons anymore,” Fadia says. No car horn, no backfiring truck or rumbling motorcycle, is able obscure her voice. “Although they do cover a lot.”

  “Fadia!” Joumana admonishes.

  “What? Don’t look at me like that. Fadia tells the truth. You know that. I think we could all use a little depilation. That’s all I’m saying. Am I lying? Tell me. No, I most certainly am not. We all need a good pedicure as well. Am I right? Am I right? This evening we’ll all go to the salon. Just the essentials, that’s all. Top to bottom. And you know, my love, unshaved legs are contagious. If we don’t do something about yours, who knows what will happen to mine? It’s even worse with unpedicured nails. Look, look.” Fadia’s voice hoots and shrieks. “The color is chipping as we speak. We need an emergency intervention.” Fadia, who always enjoys her own joke, laughs, the crackling falsetto.

  “Girls’ night out,” Joumana says.

  “We can be young again,” Fadia adds.

  At sixty-two, Fadia is the eldest of the three. I, of course, am much further along. She isn’t aging gracefully; she fights every slight sign of decay with vigor and bitterness. Her makeup keeps getting thicker and her fashions more adolescent, a late desperate grasp at a fondly recalled youth. Even so, she looks younger and fresher than Marie-Thérèse, ten years her junior, who is aging without bitterness and with obvious resignation. Her elbows have collected as many furrows as a walnut, as many furrows as mine. She’s become a paltry imitation of what she once was. Her eyes settled into incuriosity a long time ago.

  Marie-Thérèse has an inscrutable face, a life-is-but-a-dream look giving the impression that she wishes not to be disturbed by disturbing realities—a mask, really, for the impression is not true, the facade doesn’t match the house it conceals. For some reason she reminds me of the girl Fernando Pessoa tried to befriend, the single romantic liaison in his life. I can’t tell you why. I don’t know what that girl looked like. I’m not sure anybody does. I can’t even remember her name—Blanca, Maria, Francesca? My memory wishes to frustrate me this morning. The girl worked in the same import-export office as my poet, and he considered asking her out, or whatever hopeful twosomes did back in 1929 Lisbon.

  I must say, I imagine that Marie-Thérèse looks like that girl as she aged, not as she was when the genius considered her.

  Of course, Pessoa didn’t go out with that girl, didn’t do whatever they did back in 1929 Lisbon. Her name was Ophelia Queiroz. I am growing senile. Forgetting an Ophelia? The liaison’s brevity was due to the malicious interference of none other than Álvaro de Campos, Pessoa’s own creation, one of the seventy-two literary identities he used, the bisexual dandy who loathed Ophelia and believed her to be a distraction to Pessoa’s literary ambition. He wrote the poor girl and told her to flush any ideas she had about a relationship with Fernando down the toilet.

  There is no evidence, at least none that I know of, that Ophelia had any idea who Fernando was, let alone that he spent his time inventing literary personas that wrote some of the great masterpieces of the twentieth century. She worked in the same clerical office, but I can’t imagine that they ever exchanged words. I can’t imagine him exchanging words with anybody.

  Fernando died in relative obscurity, a virgin and a recluse.

  I thought I’d be reading a new book today, but it doesn’t feel right, or I don’t feel like it. Some days are not new-book days.

  After reading Sebald yesterday, I realized that translating Austerlitz was an easier project than The Emigrants, possibly because the latter laid the bitumen, smoothed the ride, for Austerlitz. A troublesome issue arises in translating Sebald into Arabic. His style, drawn-out and elongated sentences that wrap around the page and their reader, seems at first glance to be an ideal fit for Arabic, where use of punctuation is less formal. (Translating Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis was a relative breeze.) However, Sebald’s ubiquitous insertion of Jacques Austerlitz’s tongue into the unnamed narrator’s first-person narrative was difficult to convey precisely, since Arabic, like Spanish, drops pronouns more often than English or German. Sebald’s I spoke for at least two people.

  The above problem has invaded my thoughts like algae this morning. I’ll reread my translation of The Emigrants, which I haven’t looked at in years. I must examine how I solved the problem then. But first I must bring it forth out of storage.

  I don’t wait to finish my tea before searching for a flashlight—from the dark I come and into the dark I return. I have two flashlights, but can’t find either. Both are in the kitchen, I’m certain of that. I count to ten before searching once more, repeating every step in case I missed something the first go-around, returning to where I’ve been before. In vain. I down my tea, place the cup in the sink, and wax two candles onto the saucer. The rim of the saucer’s depression is lightly discolored—a dusting of rust and red and brown, remnants of teas gone by that did not wish to be washed away, refused to be forgotten, the age rings of a small plate. The maid’s room, barely larger than the boxes stored in it, is in the back of the kitchen behind the maid’s bathroom. I live in an ambitious building: all four apartments have identical layouts, with midget maid’s quarters, yet no resident has ever had a live-in maid that I know of. The room has no light; its ceiling bulb expired years ago. I am tall, but I’m uncomfortable with heights. I depend on a handyman to change high lightbulbs, hence the need for a flashlight or candles.

  I begin the march toward the room, saucer and candles in hand, a breath of smoke and sulfur in my nostrils.

  Crates fill the maid’s bathroom. No need for candles in here. No shower, no bathtub, just a low metal spigot and a drain, toward which the tiled floor is slightly angled. A street-facing lofty window, a wedge of early northern light, illuminates the cartons of manuscripts. The toilet has three boxes stacked atop one another. These aren’t what I’m looking for; these are boxes from the last ten years, overflow from the maid’s room.

  The windowless maid’s room devours light and messes up my circulation. It has been more than a few years since I’ve opened the door—since the room overflowed into the bathroom, I no longer enter as often. The room induces an irrational heart. Sometimes upon entering, my heart works so hard it reaches the point of seizing. Other times, it thumps so joyfully it approaches the point of bursting. On still other occasions, it slows to the beat of torpor and dies out. This morning the veins in my temples throb with a big, blooming, buzzing confusion.

  “Irrational heart”—I love the phrase, read it in Murphy years ago, and it carved itself a prominent place in my memory. I could also have written that my heart behaved “like a rocket set off,” from Welty’s “Death of a Traveling Salesman.”

  I’m unable to translate Beckett because he wrote in the two languages that I don’t allow myself to work from. Early on, I decided that since some Lebanese can read English or French, I wouldn’t translate writers who wrote in those languages; might be a somewhat arbitrary decision, but a necessary one I felt. Restricting choices is not always a bad thing. I have never translated a French writer, an English writer, or an American one. No Camus, no Duras, no Faulkner, no Welty, no Hemingway (thank the Lord), and not the young writers I admire, Junot Díaz (wonderfully macaronic language) or Aleksandar Hemon (macaronic in a single language). My self-imposed rules meant that I couldn’t translate some African writers, say J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, or Nuruddin Farah, since they wrote—write—in English. No Australians, not Patrick White, whom I adore, not David
Malouf. I can’t translate Milan Kundera, the Czech, because he wrote and rewrote the French versions of his books, nor can I work on Ismail Kadare, because the English versions of his novels were translated from the French, not the original Albanian.

  However, I’m fluent in only three languages: Arabic, English, and French. So I invented my own special system: to achieve the most accurate representation of a work, I use a French and an English translation to create an Arabic one. It is a functional and well-planned system that allows me to enjoy what I do. I know this makes my translation one step further removed from the original, like Kadare’s English novels, but it is the method I continue to use. Those are the rules I chose. I became a servant, albeit voluntarily, of a discipline, a specific ritual. I am my system, and my system is me.

  I wouldn’t translate Beckett’s Murphy even if it were written in another language, say Serbo-Croatian, because I dislike the novel. I’ve read Waiting for Godot three times and I still can’t tell you what it is about. If, as some critics claim, it is about being bored while waiting for God to return, then it’s even duller than I thought.

  Crates, crates, boxes, and crates. The translated manuscripts have the two books, French and English, affixed to the side of the box for identification. Tolstoy, Gogol, and Hamsun; Calvino, Borges, Schulz, Nádas, Nooteboom; Kiš, Karasu, and Kafka; books of memory, disquiet, but not of laughter and forgetting. Years of books, books of years. A waste of time, a waste of a life.

  Sebald’s box lies atop Nooteboom’s, under three other translations. I place the saucer of candles on a pile. I take the top boxes down, making sure they don’t fall on me. Sebald is weighty, as if it added heft during its perfectly sedentary lifestyle all these years. I can barely carry it, so the saucer is out of the question. I blow out the candles, throwing the maid’s room into darkness, just the smell of smoke and must and dust.

  After one of the Palestinian fighters defecated on the floor of this bathroom, a hand’s width south of the drain, I spent hours on my knees cleaning the soil of the soldier, the silt and dregs. I used a coarse wire scrubbing brush, like a blackboard eraser, most innocuous of instruments. Out, out. Even though no trace remains, I always step over the spot as if it were an Israeli landmine—upborne with indefatigable wings over the vast abrupt. The passel of Palestinians didn’t steal much, there wasn’t much to steal—there was never much of a market for books.

  I place the heavy box on the floor next to the reading armchair. With a slightly damp cloth, I wipe off the dust. I tear open the masking tape and remove the lid. The reams of paper are there, of course, just as I left them so many years ago. I remove a short stack from the top. The first page has the title of the book in Arabic written in indelible ink, Sebald’s full name, and mine, Aaliya Saleh, below it, a bit smaller. The sheet is slightly brittle at the edges, nothing too worrisome. I stretch my back and consider whether I want another cup of tea before delving into Sebald’s world of melancholy.

  I shouldn’t have opened the door, should have looked through the peephole, but I certainly wasn’t expecting my half brother the eldest to appear. I haven’t seen any of my half brothers in years, and none has been to my home in a decade or more. Yet I should have known it was he. I’d heard Fadia’s voice say, “Trouble,” when my doorbell rang. From the landing, she has an unobstructed view of my door, my comings and goings. He rang the bell, and because my movements have slowed and it took me a few extra seconds to get to the door, he rang the bell once more, a longer, more persistent ring. My half brothers, like so many men and boys, have the impatience of the entitled.

  He bristles with fury in the doorway, carrying two old-fashioned suitcases, aged but not worn. His wrinkled face is deformed by unchecked emotion and fat, his body by the weight of the suitcases. He huffs and puffs, displays the anger of Achilles and the countenance of the little pig. His square head, his face, and his neck flush and blotch with red—a bloated, color-saturated Cubist figure. He storms in, drops the suitcases, slams them onto my floor.

  Even under nonhostile circumstances, each of my half brothers has the ability to induce jitters in me. This is more than simply hostile. I can feel the room’s temperature rise. My tongue tastes of copper, which means I’m overbreathing, getting ready for fight or flight, ready to pick up my sword or jump on my horse. I slow my inhalation. I focus on calming myself.

  I gently ask him what he’s doing.

  “Dropping off your mother,” he replies. “It’s your turn. We shouldn’t be taking care of her. She’s your responsibility. You’re her daughter and you don’t have a family. You were supposed to be taking care of her for all these years. It’s time, it’s your turn. We can’t do it anymore.” He doesn’t yell, but waits for me to contradict. He wants a reason to shout.

  I don’t give him one.

  He takes a cigarette from a pack in his shirt pocket, holds it between his dry lips, dangling weakly, but he doesn’t light it. He’s a once-strong man reduced to mere rough and vulgar: doughy neck, broad shoulders, soft chin, eyes ringed with fatigue, distracted comb-over. His brown polyester pants, from a different suit than the jacket and vest, flap and squeal as he paces the foyer. He stares me down, waiting for me to cower. I do.

  I cower because even though he looks like a parody of a tough guy—always did—I knew him once to be dangerous and menacing. At the beginning of the civil war in 1975, he put on the cheap camouflage outfit of one of the militias, a tragicomic dress rehearsal. Don’t ask me which militia. I didn’t care then and I don’t now. He looked like a caricature, his spindly torso (not fat then, just slightly convex) decorated with medals and his shoulders with betassled epaulettes, triumphantly imitating Napoleon, the Corsican Comet.

  Bluster and hubris, that’s what he was, what he is, but that’s what makes him more dangerous in some ways.

  Think Bush—that indecent amalgam of banality and perdition.

  How nations sink . . .

  When Vengeance listens to the Fool’s request.

  An unpleasant thought.

  Whenever I think of Bush, I think of an image: a shattered visage in the desert sand.

  My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

  Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

  A more pleasant thought.

  My half brother the eldest frightens me. He didn’t while we were growing up; then, he only irritated me. We shared a mattress and I regarded him as nothing more than a space eater. He was obtuse, careless, and, according to my mother, infallible. He found inordinate pleasure in practical jokes and all manner of horseplay. He cultivated an obscene satisfaction in bullying his younger siblings.

  After my husband left me, my mother did her best to convince me to follow him out the door and leave my home. She suggested that I exchange apartments with my half brother the eldest—his was small, fit for a lonely one; mine was larger, fit for a still-growing family, which included her, of course.

  “Look at how many rooms you have,” she used to say. “How greedy do you have to be? How selfish?”

  At first, I argued with her, but then I noted that it was more effective to ignore her, to allow her tongue unlimited flapping until it flagged. When it became obvious that her words weren’t having the desired effect, my half brothers jockeyed into the conversation. Each began to involve himself when his family increased its numbers—irresponsible reproduction being the family’s ennui annihilator.

  My half brother the eldest first appeared at my door after the birth of child number two or three—I should know which because I was there at the hospital for the birth (I was still not ready to abandon the family completely). Bluster and hubris. He wasn’t able to talk then, to converse or negotiate, but simply began shouting, demanding that I do the right thing. I stopped opening my door when I knew it was he. My half brother the eldest banged his simian chest and cursed outside. He terrified me, an incontinent terror.

  He returned and returned, again and again, the big bad wolf scaring me with his obstreperou
s threats, but you know, that worked against him. You not only inure yourself against the fear, finding it bearable after a while and coming to terms with it, you also absorb it. I absorbed it. It belonged to me and I to it; faithful companions, sisters, my fear and I.

  I remained afraid, but I was no longer scared. Children get scared. With every return, with each bang on my door, my fear and I matured a little.

  Before the AK-47, I waited with a sharp chef’s knife next to me (I wasn’t much of a cook, but I found a chef’s knife the most versatile). I waited, walked in circles, ovals, and squares, moved from room to room in my spacious apartment carrying the knife. Just in case. I don’t doubt that had he ever broken into my home, I would have stabbed him. I was that afraid. The imbecile.

  My half brother the eldest’s first job was as a doorman at a three-star hotel. He loved it because of the uniform, felt it gave him some class, some cachet. The peasantry, when it wishes to escape peasantry, has always, for centuries, across all borders, escaped into a uniform. That was the only paying job he’s ever had, he loved it that much, but in the early days, he had a lot of problems with one of the managers, who mistreated him, he felt. Unfortunately, I may have unintentionally added to those problems. It seems the manager didn’t trust some of the employees, my half brother in particular. He’d wait at the employee exit and search certain people as they left, probably looking for towels, linens, or miniature toiletries. My half brother the eldest felt humiliated, and to his horror, one day as I was walking home from the bookstore, I saw him standing outside the hotel’s back exit, his arms and legs spread, the hotel manager kneeling before him patting him down.

  Rage veined his face when he saw me.

  Sad, because in that moment I felt sympathy, compassion even; in his vulnerability I identified with him, I saw him as family.

  By the time the war started in 1975, I’d stopped inviting my mother to my apartment. I’d call her and she’d join me in one of the cafés on Hamra Street. One day her son and a group of his friends dropped her off. They were wearing imitation military outfits, driving a beat-up convertible and not a Jeep. When the car stopped, my half brother the eldest looked my way and whispered something to his friends, who sniggered. They looked less like militiamen than like a group of fraternity brothers out on the town, naive hooligans, ill-mannered boys trying to look suave. I could see them in bright red suede windbreakers and flower-patterned silk shirts with wide lapels. My half brother looked to be the eldest of the group, a man playing at being a boy. He had already begun to collect medals.