My mother had an unnatural fondness for cats as well, as I may have mentioned. Mind you, she had little tolerance for pampered pets. Once, during a dutiful visit to a distant family member when I was nine or ten, a fluffy cat sauntered into the living room. My mother pointed at it, scowling in disgust, and the hostess, my mother’s second cousin, stood up in apologetic horror and scooted the cat out of the room. My mother would have hated Maysoura, so coddled and pretty. She cared only for the homeless and orphaned cats of the neighborhood.
I understand her obsession, and I did even as a child. Granted, I may have felt some envy, a sense that the cats had waylaid any maternal instinct and caretaking that should have gone to her daughter, but I’m writing about a time before animal care or control ever descended upon the Beiruti conscience. Feral cats were hounded, hunted, even tortured if caught by young boys. I witnessed a couple of atrocities as a child. If my mother, champion of the feral that she was, saw a boy trying to trap a cat, or the butcher kicking one that sniffed too close, she became a short bundle of wrathful frenzy, berating the heartlessness of the offender.
She chopped chicken into small pieces, fried them in salted lamb fat, and folded them in sheets of wax paper. As discreetly as she could, since she didn’t wish to be known as the crazy lady—too late, one might think—she unwrapped these feasts on walls and Dumpsters, high enough so dogs couldn’t reach them.
The aroma of fried lamb fat was a siren call for any feline within a two-street radius. That aroma, muted and less pungent, followed my mother even when food wasn’t upon her person, a lingering faint smell that became hers. Her charges knew she was coming long before they could see her.
The mangier the cat, the bigger her portion. I remember one cat that was doing so poorly her fur was nothing more than discontiguous splotches of hair. My mother fed her every day until she transformed into a calico queen with a coat of unearthly sheen. The cat allowed me to pet her. My mother didn’t try to touch her. Not one cat ever became my mother’s companion. She never had one of her own.
When I asked my mother how she knew the queen was a female, she explained that males could be no more than two colors. Females had no such limitation.
During the winter of 1986, Beirut was passing through one of its many phases of shedding its humanity and its humans. A war raged—sects killing one another, militias strangling the population—and my mother was worried about a cat. I was imprisoned in my apartment for seventeen straight days. On a clear day, upon the first hint of a cease-fire, I left my hideout to forage for food and dropped in to check on her. She was unwilling to discuss anything but what had happened to this infernal feline. The fighting and shooting had forced the animal into a deserted apartment in the building next to my half brother the eldest’s. My mother heard the mournful meowing night and day. She risked her life by taking food across the street, snipers be damned, to seduce the cat into returning with her to her building, where she could feed her regularly. As soon as my mother broke into the empty flat, the cat went mute. My mother searched the entire place and found the cat stuck atop a high dark walnut armoire, with barely enough space under the ceiling to crouch in. My mother pleaded and cajoled and the cat hissed and retreated. The ignorant cat wouldn’t accept help, my mother said. She dragged a chair across the room and climbed on it, which drove the cat even more insane. My mother tried every trick she knew and a couple she made up.
“I even turned my face away from her,” my mother said, “and put my hands on the ledge of the ugly armoire so she could use my arms to climb down and run away. Nothing worked. The stupid, stupid cat refused to be rescued. She couldn’t understand that I was giving her an out. I was forced to leave the food on top of the armoire and go home.”
For a few days, whenever there was a brief silence between bullets, missiles, and mortar shells, my mother heard the cat’s calls, which went on and on, on and on, until they finally stopped altogether. When the break in the fighting arrived at last, right before I made my appearance to inquire about her, she rushed across the street and found the apartment ransacked—she’d assisted the militia boys who looted it by destroying the lock, advertising that the place was uninhabited—with furniture topsy-turvy and no cat.
The coffee klatsch has come to order. I must crane my head out the door and thank Fadia for last night’s dinner before she climbs the stairs back to her apartment, before the three weird sisters end their matins. I must. I try to stand but I sway, beset by a vertiginous nausea.
Have you figured out yet that I dislike being around people? Can it be that I haven’t mentioned it earlier?
Some believe that we are created in God’s image. I don’t. I am not religious by any means, though I’m not an atheist. I may not believe in the existence of God with a capital G, but I believe in gods. Like Ricardo Reis, aka Fernando Pessoa, I am a pantheist. I follow the lesser gospel, now deemed apocryphal. I worship—well, I worshipped, past tense, for this morning I don’t have the stomach to believe in anything—at the shrines of my writers.
I am in large measure a Pessoan.
“Isolation has carved me in its image and likeness.” Pessoa said that. He also wrote: “Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me.”
In A Short History of Decay, Cioran wrote: “life in common thereby becomes intolerable, and life with oneself still more so.”
The presence of another person—of any person whatsoever—makes me feel awkward, as if I’m no longer me. It wasn’t always that way. Not that I was a social butterfly flitting from acquaintance to delightful acquaintance, but I didn’t always have such a high level of discomfort around people. I used to be able to spend time with my friend and companion, Hannah, quite comfortably; my customers didn’t bother me at all. I talked to salesclerks in stores. I got by. As I aged, as life isolated me more and more, I found myself discomfited by others. “Isolation has carved me in its image and likeness.”
Merely thinking that I have to talk to Fadia, however briefly, irritates me, makes me feel a bit edgy, maybe even nervous. I can and do overcome those feelings, of course. I’m not completely helpless. I am a functioning human being. Mostly.
Just so you don’t make too much fun of me, the mostly above refers to functioning, not to human being.
The isolationists Fernando Pessoa and Bruno Schulz had worse problems with people, much worse than mine. Schulz was terrified in large groups, discombobulated around people he didn’t know, childishly timid. He behaved like a two-year-old separated from his mother. He had a sad habit of worrying the edge of his jacket, stroking the fabric. Compared to them, I’m an extrovert.
I think it’s safe to say that contact with other people has never been my strong suit, but lately, in the last eight or nine years, or ten, it has produced a mild anguish that’s hard to define. These days the presence of other people derails my mind. I can’t seem to think clearly, or behave naturally, or just be. These days I avoid people, and they in turn avoid me.
“The healthy flee from the ill,” wrote Kafka in a letter to Milena Jesenská, his unrequited love, “but the ill also flee from the healthy.”
Being around so many people yesterday unhinged me, unhinged my soul. The essential calm of habit and ritual was disturbed. Granted, being around my mother would unhinge most, and I wouldn’t wish her screaming on anyone, not Benjamin Netanyahu, not even Ian McEwan. But being around all those people was not a pleasant experience. It never is these days.
Still, I must offer Fadia thanks for her generosity. I wouldn’t forgive myself if I didn’t.
Before putting my talking head out the door, I change out of my coat and nightgown. I can’t face the witches in the same nightgown I was wearing yesterday morning. However, before I brave the firing squad I must look something up.
I don’t think the Bruckner and Mahler story is accurate; something about it is off. I remember that someone else was there as well, some other composer. I did tell you that I thought it was apocryphal, but I want to check. I wrote
down that particular story, copied it from a longer article. I know I read it in a magazine less than ten years ago, which means that the notes are in the box of miscellany in the maid’s bathroom, not the oceanic darkness of the maid’s room. I will not need candles or a flashlight to find it.
Find it I do, and right I am, or I am right that I was wrong. How my memory distorted this story.
The third’s premiere was horribly received because it was horribly conducted, the original maestro having dropped quite dead right before the concert, an event not atypical considering Bruckner’s ubiquitous misfortune. During the performance, Bruckner was understandably lost in his own score because he wasn’t trained as a conductor. The audience, as lost as Bruckner, drifted, but didn’t boo or storm out. The other musician in the audience, who was with Mahler and who was just as dumbfounded, was Hugo Wolf (I like his Italian serenade). There is no mention of weeping, I’m afraid. Mahler and Wolf went on to become Bruckner’s students. For the rest of his life, Mahler spent the royalties he earned from his own music to publish Bruckner’s scores.
My notes shed more light on the strangeness of the life of Anton Bruckner. He lusted after little girls but did not, could not, act upon his perversion because he was a devout Catholic. He was not a priest. Of his own accord, he checked himself into a local institution to treat his predilection—his pedophilia, not his Catholicism. He composed his Mass in C Minor to thank God for curing his ignoble illness. Of course, this minor mass is a mess of monumental orchestrated earwax, a religiously pubertal intoxication of sounds. Let’s just say it’s childish.
Anton Bruckner died a virgin at seventy-two.
Piet Mondrian also died a virgin a month before he turned seventy-two.
I am seventy-two, but I’m not a virgin and not dead yet.
Hannah, however, died a virgin.
I will thank Fadia.
In the kitchen, I listen to what the witches are discussing on the landing. I don’t wish to interrupt them at an inappropriate juncture. Joumana is dominating the conversation. She’s announcing that her daughter, the once-loud one, has finally finished all her course requirements and all that’s left is the dissertation. The ladies are ecstatic, happy for her and immensely proud. The sounds cascading from above have a feel of rampant euphoria.
I surprise myself by feeling happy for Joumana too. I’ve watched her daughter, heard her, grow up. Joumana moved into the building while pregnant with her. How can I not be happy for the girl, and for Joumana? Her daughter—that irritating, loud, obnoxious girl who sucks all the oxygen from any room she enters—will make something of her life. She will bowl over anyone in her way—or out of her way, above, below, on the side—and she will amount to something. She’ll be happy. I’ll be happy for her.
I wait for a second before I open my door, allowing them the privacy to be happy together. In my head, I practice. I have something important I’m working on, urgent, that requires my attention, I only wanted to thank you for your wonderful okra stew. I will eat what I couldn’t finish yesterday for lunch today.
“Thank you,” I call up to Fadia, but I intend it to be for the three of them. “That was a mouthwatering stew. I am grateful.”
The three witches have a lot of hair atop their heads this morning, having obviously made it to the salon last evening. Even from below, I note the plucked eyebrows, the manicures, though I can’t tell about the leg waxing—their legs are out of sight from the landing. Joumana, her hair rice brown with crisscrossing streaks of blond highlights, holds a coffee kettle, about to fill Marie-Thérèse’s cup. Bad timing on my part.
“Let me pour you a cup of coffee,” Joumana says. “Come join us.”
The witches must have decided on a complete makeover. Fadia sports dark red hair. I’m trying to compare it to another color in order to give you an idea, but I can’t. Like Faulkner, her hair color today is sui generis.
My white hair has little company in Beirut, my blue hair even less.
“Why, thank you,” I say as I back just a tad into my doorway, “but I’m afraid I can’t. I’m working on . . .”
Something. Just say the word something. You don’t have to explain.
Rain falls behind the witches as if surrounding them; there is no wall at their backs. They regard me with some concern. I notice that their seating arrangement has changed recently—recently, meaning in the last two years, since that was the last time I saw the coffee klatsch. Witches should be heard and not seen. Fadia, not Marie-Thérèse, claims the middle position now, and moreover, she has given up on the wooden-legged soft-twine stool. Draped today in a palette more Sgt. Pepper than Yellow Submarine, she reclines sideways, reposes, on an outdoor chaise longue, a pre-impressionist odalisque, paying homage to the goddess of indolence, Greta Garbo (though Fadia doesn’t want to be alone).
“Urgent,” I say.
I am becoming incompetent, an aphasic stutterer.
So much hair, so many hair-care products. Short hair is rare in Lebanon; possibly one out of fifty women keeps her hair above shoulder length, something to do with perceptions of femininity, I assume. None of us wishes to look different. My hair is up, clasped in a semi-bun right now, as it is practically every day. Rarely is it loose or down, yet I don’t consider cutting it short.
I don’t, even though I do look different. I can feel the witches inspecting me. Our delightfully gawky neighbor, see how wonderfully she straddles the border between woman and giraffe.
This is ridiculous. I am playing the fool. I take a long, calming breath.
“I’m sorry, Joumana,” I say. “I can’t have coffee right now. I appreciate the invitation, truly do, but I’m working on something, something I need to finish before leaving in an hour. I can’t spare the time at this moment. Thank you, though.”
Now I have to leave my shelter within an hour.
She should ask again, or at least suggest that I come up another day—any one of the witches should. But they don’t.
As I begin to withdraw—one step and I’m back in the comfort of my apartment—Joumana announces loudly, “My daughter finished all her course work for the Ph.D. program. All she has left is to write the dissertation, and defend it, of course.”
“Dr. Mira,” Fadia says, a bit too excitedly. “I like the sound of it. Dr. Mira. We have a doctor in the house.”
“That’s wonderful news,” I say, as if this is the first I’ve heard of it. “I’m very happy for you. That’ll be quite an achievement.”
“May I tell you the subject of her dissertation?” She asks the question not forcefully but insistently.
She interrupts my head chatter. As if involuntarily, I feel a minuscule grin crease my face. I do in fact want to know.
Joumana’s face brightens. “Tombstones,” she says. “She’s studying tombstones, particularly the relationship of the shape of the stones to the inscriptions and icons.”
The gravestone, upon its body, shall begin to consider where my name is to be inscribed.
Why do such thoughts cross my mind?
“That’s an awful subject,” says Fadia. “It’s so morose. Gravestones? Why would she be interested in something like that?”
“That’s incredible,” says Marie-Thérèse. “I think it could be very interesting.”
“Have you told your daughter the truth, dearest?” Fadia says. “That she’s adopted? She can’t possibly be yours. Gravestones?”
Joumana seems to hear neither of her friends.
I say, “Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo.”
“What was that?” says Fadia.
“Latin,” says Marie-Thérèse.
“Do you know the language?” Joumana asks.
“Latin? Me?” I don’t know why the question sounds preposterous. “No, I don’t speak it.”
“I do.” Joumana looks elegant this morning, a cross between the society matron she isn’t and the college professor she is. “What I mean is that I read it, of course, not speak it. Who speaks Latin anymor
e? I studied it in college.”
Do I react slightly, or it is possible she’s overly sensitive to her audience? In any case, she hesitates right after the last word.
“I wanted to read some of the classics in the original,” she says.
Yes, I want to say. Yes. That would be so lovely. If only.
“Virgil,” Joumana says.
“What’s that?” Fadia says.
“Ovid,” I hear myself say. I even hear a whispery wistfulness in my voice, a lilt of longing. Latin, or maybe Greek. Almost everything that men have said best has been said in Greek.
Then again, Latin.
“Tacitus,” Joumana says. She places her hand on the kettle, hesitates for a few seconds, then pulls it back to her lap. “In the original. I thought it would be good.”
You can also read a French translation of the original, then an English translation, then work as hard as you can, do your best, manage your frustrations, and translate it into Arabic before you store it in a box in the maid’s bathroom.
“Congratulations,” I say as I withdraw. “You must be so proud of your daughter. I wish you and her nothing but the best.”
If I am to leave my apartment soon, I must bathe first. I should probably eat something as well. In my kitchen I hear them being confrontational—not arguing, but challenging one another. Marie-Thérèse says something about her two companions, suggests that they were the ones who ignored something, the subject most probably being me. I move away. I wish not to listen.
Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo.
I was not, I was, I am not, I don’t care.
It is the most common text found on Roman graves.
The texts you find on Muslim stones are primarily ones extolling God and His prophets: “In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. Praise be to God who created Heaven and Earth. Prayers and blessings to Gabriel, all the angels, Abraham, Ishmael, Muhammad, all the prophets, Muhammad’s daughter, his wives, his cousin, his best friend in high school, his pharmacologist.” I jest, of course. I have seen exquisite inscriptions on Muslim graves.
An Unnecessary Woman Page 15