An Unnecessary Woman

by Rabih Alameddine

  My great-niece needs the help of her brother, sans sunglasses, to carry the plastic basin of hot water—a red circular tub the size of a car wheel, with four Lipton tea bags floating like water lilies, their yellow tags conspicuous. My sister-in-law’s chopping reaches mayhem proportions. I hope a juicy turnip is among the things she’s torturing. The siblings bicker as they lower the water wheel to the floor, my great-niece insisting her brother should listen to her because she knows what we’re doing.

  What are we doing?

  My mother’s feet barely reach the water. Her toes dive below the surface and curl, wishing to drown; the arch of her foot retracts, wanting no part of this forced baptism.

  “This won’t work,” my great-niece says. “She’s too small. We have to move her forward.”

  “No,” my mother says, quite succinctly, if you ask me. She is suddenly alert. “Go away.” If eyes are windows to the soul, then my mother has a pretty angry one right now. “Leave me be,” she tells my great-niece, her weak hand flicking in a dismissive, despotic gesture, “and tell your mother to find you a decent husband.”

  “She’s busy,” my great-niece snaps. Her upper lip curls inward, almost disappears—not so attractive.

  Her brother considers this the greatest of jokes. “I can find you a husband,” he says, “a big, fat, ugly one with no sense of humor.”

  Without thinking, I glare over my shoulder. He looks suddenly a little guilt-ridden, less enamored of himself than when he walked in, a disheveled quail of a boy; his hands behind his back, he rocks hesitantly on his heels. His sister bores into him with a homicidal stare, but that doesn’t seem to be the cause of his concern. My mother holds him with her glittering eyes. Maybe she objects to the lack of humor in a husband.

  “We can raise the basin,” the boy says, his singsongy voice alternating oddly between high and low notes. “That’ll solve the problem.”

  We place the red tub of water on a stool, and I kneel on the floor, luckily carpeted by an old cheap Turcoman similar to its sisters on the walls.

  My mother’s feet are broad, the toes stubby, the toenails corn yellow with kernels at the center, the ankles prominently veined but not swollen. Mottled discoloration runs the length of her legs, from the tips of her toes to the knees and probably higher. The pigments of her skin are no longer properly mixed.

  She sighs as I guide her feet into the water.

  The boy claims his sister’s old spot on the sofa and begins a dialogue with the laptop. He lights a cigarette and within seconds fades into an uneasy cumulus of smoke. My great-niece kneels beside me, asks if she can help. I admit that I don’t know what I’m doing. Wash her feet and trim her nails? She can take the right foot and I the left.

  I lift my mother’s foot out of the water, all bones and no meat. With my hand I wash the foot slowly, build a milky lather before passing the bar of soap to my great-niece. Once tectonic plates, her calves are now emaciated, striated with boysenberry-purple veins. She used to have the strong legs of any of Javier Marías’s female characters. I knead the tendons and knots around her anklebone, massage her toes, run my fingers through the gorges between them. I feel the flow of her blood.

  My great-niece mimics my every step. We arrive at a gentle rhythm, slow and anodyne, the rocking of an old porch swing on a summer afternoon.

  My mother’s eyes are shut, her lips as well, and probably her ears. Calm spreads over every wrinkle of her face. She cares little that I’m the one who’s washing her feet. She cares even less about my bleating conscience. More than content, she seems happy. She’s no longer present in the room. I don’t know what to do with her, what to say. I continue with my menial task. She is lost to me once again.

  “Maybe I’ll dye my hair blue,” my great-niece says.

  Rain streaks the small window—lazy, untroubled rain, sure of itself, which tells me I should reconsider my plan to walk home.

  The troubled sky reveals

  The grief it feels.

  O Longfellow, what will happen to me if I live long enough that I lose my ability to walk long distances? Will I still be able to wash my feet?

  My mother’s foot balances on the side of the basin, but I feel its weight on my thighs, a tight knot in the back of my neck, a burden on my shoulders. Up her foot, down, across, the water remains warm; my fingers turn pruney, their folds and furrows more intricate than their counterparts on my mother’s.

  A few ulcerations on the carpet hanging to my right catch my attention. I didn’t notice them at first. It seems that someone sewed the tears with a timid thread and then covered them with cheap paint. There is a portrait hanging on the fake Turcoman itself, an old picture of my uncle-father. Now I remember what he looks like. The cataract subsides, if momentarily.

  He is younger, the way he was when I was a child. He wears a suit and a fez, trying without much success to appear respectable for eternity. An odd photo, his skin is a dovish hue, but I can’t tell whether the grays have deteriorated through the years or whether the photograph was developed in those unnatural tones. Tufts of black hair protrude from his nostrils to mix with his mustache. He has too long a chin and a cucumber nose. He and I have a similar protruding brow, which probably means he and his older brother looked alike. I can’t tell whether we have the same eyes because he’s squinting at the camera as if trying to read it. I remember that he needed glasses but never owned any, or visited an ophthalmologist for that matter. He lived and died squinting at the world.

  How he managed as a tailor’s assistant is beyond me.

  He looks displeased, as if something is irritating him. Maybe he knows that the photograph will make him look peculiar, maybe he believes his face is unattractive; he seems, I don’t know, discontent with the sum of his features. I remember him as irascible but not unreasonably so. He looks like someone who is ready to leave the party, forever disgruntled and wishing to return home.

  I remember him now.

  I flash to a memory of him holding my hand to cross the street. I must have been ten or eleven, old enough to be conscious of what he was thinking. There were cars, buses, trams, and mule carts on the street, hence the need for hand-holding. I held his right hand, my half brother the eldest his left, but all of a sudden he switched us around. I would be the first to encounter oncoming traffic.

  Could I find fault with that? I was his stepchild—his brother’s daughter, his wife’s child, not his. I most certainly blamed him then.

  On the other hand, I remember that he used to make my half brother the eldest kiss the leather strap he was going to use to whip him, but not me—my stepfather never punished me.

  “I didn’t even know she had another daughter,” my great-niece says. “Grandfather hasn’t mentioned you either. He might have when I wasn’t around, but I don’t think so.”

  I pare my mother’s toenails, we both do. We allow the clippings to drop into the water. I massage a thin layer of Vaseline onto her skin and cover her foot with a sock that catches on a small, sharp protrusion. I should have filed the toenails smoother.

  I’m not that far from home. The rain has halted, but the lowering, evil-looking clouds threaten, their congealed masses pushing across the sky, their color mirroring that of my stepfather’s skin in the portrait. I will risk walking in the cold. I need to clear my head, dispel the ant farm once more.

  Does one have to fulfill a promise made to an unconscious person? I told my mother that I’d return, but she couldn’t possibly have heard me. My great-niece was a witness, though.

  Nancy? What an odd name. Who would have thought someone from this family would give a daughter a Western name?

  Beirut changes its dazzling accessories more often than its society ladies do; she certainly has more color highlights. She sparkles. According to the time of year, the time of day, the weather, and numerous other variables, her streaks of light morph. The sparkle—real, not metaphorical—is a result of location, between iridescent Mediterranean and mountains. A headland
breasting the sea, Beirut stands as a gaudy sentinel, Horatio and Marcellus bedecked in shiny baubles. Élisée Reclus once called Byblos voluptuousness deified, but that’s probably a more apt descriptor of my Beirut.

  Whereas most people will tell you that they prefer the city on spring afternoons when she fills her lungs with briny air, when bougainvilleas, purple and crimson, and wisterias, lavender and white, begin to bloom, or during summer sunsets, when the water is decked with a panoply of gold and hyacinth so vibrant that the city practically rocks on her promontory, I prefer her in this subdued light, under roiling gray clouds, rain-filled but not raining, when the neutral air gives contrast to the authentic colors of the city. These clouds prevent me from seeing the brilliant new white on the mountain peaks, but they offer spectacular city sights as compensation.

  I am old enough to remember when this neighborhood was nothing more than two sandstone houses and a copse of sycamores, their carpet of tan leaves acting as their garden. The development of our metropolis began in the 1950s and went completely insane in the 1960s. To build is to put a human mark on a landscape, and Beirutis have been leaving their mark on their city like a pack of rabid dogs. The virulent cancer we call concrete spread throughout the capital, devouring every living surface. I’m not sure how many sycamores remain, how many oaks or cypresses, but I can now walk for half an hour without encountering a single tree, and when I do, it’s usually a foreigner, a eucalyptus, jacaranda, or bottlebrush—nice but not satiating. If I happen to come across a garden these days, I burst into bloom.

  I mention this now because, miraculously, one of those two houses has survived. Amid the proliferation of unsightly buildings, this crumbling Ottoman house with its triple arcade and red tile roof stands out as starkly as a woman in parliament. There are a few of these houses strewn here and there in the city, but none is as decrepit or as defeated as this one, none as beautiful.

  Here I stand, your slave,

  A poor, infirm, weak and despised old man.

  Unlike the homes that look down upon it, the house is uninhabitable, and hasn’t been lived in for at least a generation, definitely not since the beginning of the war in 1975, probably even earlier, not since 1972, the year Hannah passed away. Pockmarked and perforated, disemboweled, roofless and doorless, it allows entry to all manner of trash, yet it appears majestic, to my eyes at least. Encroached upon by bigger, taller, mightier armies, it is poor, infirm, weak, and despised, but unlike Lear, it remains defiant, remains regal, probably till the end. It stands alone.

  I remember another wreck from long ago. In the early seventies I was walking to my bookstore, taking a route not far from here—not far at all. This Ottoman house was in much better shape then, of course. The war hadn’t started yet, although signs of it were beginning to pop up here and there. I saw a bright orange BMW 2002 refuse to slow for stalled traffic, its driver probably a self-important young man who would soon be ordering his inferiors to murder, maim, and pillage. He swerved to the right to pass a couple of cars and ran right into the back of a mule-drawn cart full of vegetables, primarily cucumbers and tomatoes. No one was hurt, the mule unperturbed, but the wooden cart was crushed. The cart driver fell to the ground, his seat collapsed, fell on his buttocks as if he were in a Charlie Chaplin movie. The BMW driver, the militiaman to be, was covered in vegetables and embarrassment.

  I was an hour late opening the bookstore because I couldn’t force myself to leave the scene. Even then I realized that I was seeing something extraordinary: new Beirut crashing into old, young driver and old street vendor, modernity rushing in, an orange car covered in red and green, German steel jumbled with Lebanese pine, and everyone in shock. I was spellbound.

  I leave the sandstone house behind me. I remember that on the top floor it used to have lovely arched stained-glass windows with abstract whorls and curls of bright red, orange, and deep-fried yellow. Whether they were broken or spirited away in the middle of the night, I do not know. They’ve simply disappeared. They live only in my memory now, my Proustian memory.

  The last book that Hannah read was Proust’s, which she didn’t finish. She’d read Du côté de chez Swann very early on, but didn’t pick up À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs right away, not on her first try at least. Every time she decided to continue, she felt the need to return to the first volume and reread it in order to get the full experience. She’d begin rereading Swann every few years and give up before the second volume or during the third, always before reaching the end of all ends. I don’t know which volume she was on by the time she passed away, but she’d gone further than she ever had before. I thought she’d be happy.

  If during those last days she had written in her diary instead of going silent, I might be able to know whether Proust killed her, whether she encountered something in the text that unnerved her, something the great dandy wrote. I wish I could know. I desire more explication.

  I do know that she wanted to finish all the volumes to please me. I’d read through the whole thing twice, and I used to go on and on: Marcel, the spectacular writer, my idol, and so forth. I used to blather endlessly about why I adored him, how he, the desperate socialite and party hopper, the inveterate pleaser, was actually the outsider par excellence, how he could be amid all the people he’d always dreamed of befriending yet remain alone in the universe, the loneliest speck of all.

  But please don’t think I’m suggesting that she killed herself because she failed to finish the gargantuan novel. That’s silly.

  Hannah aged prematurely; gray hairs began to sprout when she was in her early thirties. She appeared to be in her sixties while in her midforties. Many Lebanese women of her generation had similar problems; these days most resort to plastic surgery and no one is able to gauge how old anyone else is. I don’t think she concerned herself much about it, at least I didn’t think so in those days. Her mother had aged similarly. I remember her mother as being rather seasoned when I met her, and she was much younger then than I am now. In her journals Hannah wrote impassively about being elderly when she reached forty. She simply expected it. She jokingly wrote that as an old woman she could eat whatever she wanted without worrying about her looks, not that worrying ever stopped her from eating.

  I can tell you that she suddenly began to have trouble sleeping sometime in her forties, and that caused a great deal of concern. Her most fervent fantasy was to experience an uninterrupted night of sleep. I began having similar sleeping problems in my sixties, not my forties. She first tried old folk remedies. Hot milk and honey, green tea, anise, chamomile—all were of little use. She placed a sachet of lavender under her pillow, she placed two, then three. She tried spending the night in my apartment instead of hers. Nothing worked. A doctor prescribed Valium, but as little as five milligrams turned her into a walking corpse the following day. She took Seconal, but that didn’t induce slumber so much as grogginess and bewilderment. She told me she fought off sleep and spent the night terrified because she wasn’t able to recognize herself or what she was doing.

  She spent her remaining days and nights troubled by the lacerating paralysis of insomnia.

  As she approached fifty in 1972, the Valium and Seconal pills would become part of her story, though not in the way one might assume. She plummeted—she dove into her abyss before Beirut dove into its own.

  I was a fool. I was young, a child in my midthirties, but I shouldn’t offer that as an excuse. I should have been paying attention. The end of the year was fast approaching and I was about to begin a new project. I was distracted.

  She was changing. I thought it was temporary, a phase. She’d mentioned that she missed her mother, thought of her often, missed both her parents. I thought that perfectly normal. She still had her brothers, her nieces and nephews, and the full glory of the lieutenant’s family. She was a moon orbiting a multitude of planets. She’d filled her life with people and relationships, people who were not in my life at all. She’d carved her name into many a heart, or so I had
assumed.

  That trumpery, hope, allowed me to dupe myself. I desperately wished her to be less alone, less solitary, than I was—alone as she had always been, alone as she would always be.

  Hope is forgivable when you’re young, isn’t it? With no suspicion of irony, without a soupçon of cynicism, hope lures with its siren song. I had my illusions and she had hers—she certainly had hers.

  Exactly a year before her first suicide attempt, the lieutenant’s mother, my mother-in-law, had passed away. I had not considered associating the two events together until after Hannah’s death. She kept vigil with the family at the dying woman’s bedside. She told me that my ex-husband kept glaring at her, but wouldn’t say anything because his mother had specifically asked for her to be there. It seems that Hannah was the last person the lieutenant’s mother spoke to.

  “You have given me, my dearest daughter,” she whispered in a slow, raspy voice, “some of the happiest moments of my life. Your presence in our family has made the absence of my son bearable. I promise that once all three of us are in Heaven, I will not be forced to make the impossible decision of choosing between the two of you.”

  Hannah, happy as could be, relayed all this to me the following day. She so appreciated that on her deathbed, with her last breath, the lieutenant’s mother acknowledged her as a daughter. She mentioned that last sentence but glossed over it, laughed it off even. Choosing between the lieutenant and her? What choice? Later, when I received the journals, I saw that she’d written down the first two sentences the dying woman spoke, but hadn’t recorded that disturbing promise.

  She moseyed along through her life for quite a while after that, nine or ten months, but I imagine that like a mosquito buzzing in your ear, that last sentence, vague as it may have been, wouldn’t let her sleep. A buzz of doubt that became the roar of the crowd at the Colosseum?