“But that’s writing,” she’d countered, “an attempt to keep pace with life that, while doomed, was not useless.” She told me that I had to lean into the pain with all my weight because truth resides in the darkest corners, hidden from view.
I conceded that she was right, that when it comes to writing there are no guarantees, no guarantees that I—or, for that matter, anyone who takes pen to paper—will make it out the other end. There’s even no guarantee that there is an end or that, hitched to that end, there’s another beginning waiting for me to arrive.
But that, I reminded myself, as I watched the sun recede and the faint predusk light fill the sky, is not what writing is. Writing is not an insurance policy; it is not about drawing conclusions that will cordon us off from our pain. It is, I thought, an invitation to live with our pain and pleasure together, to honor them as equals.
I saw Ellie coming back up the promenade. She was carrying a plastic bag full of groceries. She’d likely bought a moka pot, coffee, dates, oil, and cheese and olives. Her face, ordinarily pale, was flushed with the effort of walking down the steep road to the corner store and back up, a distance still more strenuous after a sleepless night and an unnecessary bus trip in the baking sun. I watched her turn then pause to study the building on the corner, an expression of doubt on her face as she searched for the plaque that indicated the street name. Once found, she boldly set forth again. The buzzer worked. I let her in. I heard the door click shut and her footsteps, heavy with fatigue, coming up the steps. I considered my options again, or perhaps to be more accurate, my expectations of language vis-à-vis life’s most indigestible experiences. I worried that my attempts to document in words an experience that had always been, for me, inexpressible might be entirely futile. I worried that I would run out of language before I could get to my teenage self, to resuscitate her. What, I often wondered, was the point of giving expression to this lost version of myself twenty years later? Of exposing myself to the violence of the retelling? And what would I do with her if I succeeded in drawing her out into the world through language?
Perhaps, I mused, as I opened the door to let Ellie in, writing is a record of the unspeakable. Perhaps language is mutable, ghostly, ephemeral; it’s not meant to be conclusive, to deliver us from our pain, to heal us. But it can bring us closer to ourselves, to the parts we hide even from ourselves. It allows us to dramatize the hidden geographies of our souls, to reach beyond the boundaries of our bodies. Our voices can change with us, because language is infinitely wise, unstable, as mercurial as life. I hugged Ellie as she came in. I told her I couldn’t wait to have coffee with her in the morning, that I was grateful to her for going out to buy us food. Then I returned to the window to watch the night gather in the sky like a bruise; the city, for a moment, lay wasted, ravaged, consumed beneath it.
5
DARK. THE SKY WAS an unbroken tapestry of black. An overwhelming darkness gnawed at the edges of the two lights in the apartment that turned on at all—one in the kitchen, the other in Ellie’s bedroom. She’d left the door open so some of the light could spill out into the corridor, and she was now busy airing out the fridge, putting the groceries away. She was walking back and forth across the apartment, spreading her stuff in the bedroom and the bathroom, taking up space, claiming ownership.
“Close the window,” she ordered. “I’m cold.”
She appeared to be floating in the feeble light of the kitchen, her features slightly blurred, blended together so all I could see was her outline and her lips, painted dark pink. The intense rose of her lipstick reminded me of the bougainvillea growing gently over the city’s stucco walls.
“In a minute,” I told her, and lit another cigarette.
“The last of the day?” she asked.
I promised.
“Did you hear me before?” she asked. “When I said there was no coffee or when I said we need to get groceries?”
I told her I had.
She reminded me that I’d responded to most of her demands, all of them reasonable, by telling her that I would get to them in a minute and that she recognized this strategy as one I often used when I wanted to pass the buck, so to speak.
I reassured her that I’d heard her, that I’d do better by morning, and I again thought to myself, as I had when she’d mentioned that there was no coffee, that I had been raped. Oh, how I loathed that word. It felt so heavy. It shut everything down, descended on me like a boulder; I felt annihilated beneath its weight. Rape, such a small and simple word. And yet I feared it was capable of fixing things in place, as if it alone were capable of carrying this story forward, as if it alone could decide everything in advance, communicate all that there is to communicate, retroactively assign a lucid understanding to a set of tenebrous transactions. Rape. I felt steamrolled by the word. I wanted something to rise up in me, something equally strong, equally powerful, so I could push back against the pressure the word inflicted on me—but I was unable to form a response.
I told Ellie that I was sorry, that I felt as though I were walking through mud, that when it came to Omar what disturbed me the most was that there were things I remembered and things I didn’t. Some incidents stood in stark relief in my mind, all of their contours clear, while others were muted by an impenetrable darkness. I told her that it was painful to realize that I’d hidden certain facts of my own life from view so expertly that I could no longer retrieve them. My inability to remember, I considered, made me shudder all the more at the sound of that word—rape—as if the word itself were as murderous as the act, insufferably potent. I felt a surge of anxiety. I was afraid that there was nothing left for me to recover from those dark corners, nothing with even a tremble of life left inside it. I began, once again, to feel the futility of returning here, the uselessness of this exercise in memory. I descended further down the steep planes of my existence. I began to doubt that anything had happened at all, that I had ever met Omar. And if nothing had happened, what were Ellie and I doing here now?
I thought again of the injured face of the person I would have become if I’d dropped out of high school and stayed on as Omar’s lover—his object, I reminded myself, because that’s what I was, all I had turned out to be, an object that provided him with a shameful release. Her face came forward in my mind—blue, wounded, eyes stretched and raw—as it had come forward momentarily in the mirror. I thought of her blemished face and realized that nested within that face were my brother’s pulverized cheekbones, his smashed nose. I winced with pain at the memory of his assaulted features, of the blow of those punches, so potent that they’d gone through him and landed on me. His attacker had battered my soul. I believed that I’d stayed in Marbella, despite the fact that my father hadn’t joined me, because I’d wanted to be there. I’d gone there in the first place to get away from my mother, her oppressive, tyrannical obsession with protecting me following my brother’s departure. And I’d stayed because I was in love with Omar. That soiled narrative of love had offered me respite; I’d thought that love would render the word rape meaningless. But that, too, had been an error of judgment; the word rape waxed again as I waned.
Ellie looked at me tearfully, and said, “I know, I know you’re suffering.”
That was all she could say. That was all anyone could say.
I put out my cigarette, shut the window, and boldly, furiously marched toward the door of my old room. The gloomy air of the corridor clung to my bones. I reached for the handle. I heard Ellie say something to me from the living room, but I couldn’t make out her words. All I could hear was the sound of my blood coursing through my ears, my veins pulsing with the rush. I leaned my ear against the door. I was convinced that I could hear the moans of two people in the throes of love. A simpering that escalated into breathless cries. I could hear Omar’s panting, the contraction of his muscles followed by a generous, groundless release.
My hand grew warm again, burning just as it had when I’d held my old Speedo. I wondered again what cri
es Omar had vocalized in his life. What screams of anguish he’d suppressed. I felt my hand acting on its own accord, joining with Omar’s hand to turn the knob. The door clicked open with a subtlety and ease that filled me with horror. I turned the light on. It worked.
There was no one there. The shutters were drawn, the walls mute. I looked at my old bed. I needed to cry, to scream, to heave out tears of grief, but all I could feel was a searing sensation in my chest and gut, that old constriction of my throat. I closed the door behind me and sat on the edge of the bed.
I’d had so many dreams about Omar in that bed. I remembered how thin I’d been that summer, how tan, how I’d draw my hair back into a tight ponytail, how the winter prior I’d worn the same pair of jeans for months, jeans that, come summer, I’d cut into shorts. They were my only pair of pants. I’d wanted it that way, wanted that feeling of scarcity, of wearing something down, of putting it to use until it had nothing left to give. I was, I believed, exercising a politics of austerity. I was, I believed, resisting extravagance.
I had always been this way; I had always carefully monitored my needs. I was teaching myself to be self-reliant, which, due to my age and lack of resources, meant little more than learning to live with the absolute minimum. Now I could see how terrible that was, how dangerous, that all it taught me was to take up as little space as possible. It left me wide open to Omar’s wickedness. All he’d had to do was nudge me over the edge, twist the weakness he’d seen in me, the weakness that I’d deluded myself into believing was a strength, a roughness at the edges, an eroded innocence. I had, I suppose, a consumed look that turned him on, a hardened gaze. I was careful not to smile too much. Not to invite warmth, intimacy, conversation. I didn’t want to appear in need. Lacking. Pitiful. I took on the look of a fatalistic child, a bold child, an adult in jest.
I opened the shutters. The light from the moon and the street lamps slid through the gaps between the shutters into the room. The clouds must have parted. I could hear the drone of the cars in the distance. I leaned back on my bed. It was so small, so narrow. I closed my eyes, felt my heart pound wildly against my chest. I brought a hand to my stomach. It was still flat. I barely ate. I ate a proper meal once a day. The rest of the time, I grazed. I grazed even though life had administered its lessons, had taught me again and again that one should eat and take up space while one can. I was allegedly free.
I heard life reproaching me. What are you making of your freedom? it asked.
“I’m here, aren’t I?” I whispered back.
“Are you talking to yourself?” Ellie asked from the other side of the door. She’d been standing there just in case.
“Yes,” I said. I told her that I was having a Socratic dialogue with life. I told her to let me be.
“Don’t be a sour plum,” she admonished. This was her best attempt at cheering me up; it always worked.
“Someone has to be the sour plum,” I said, aware that I owed her a joke, a smile. “We can’t all be sweet plums all the time.” I told her that this would be boring, dishonest. “What could be more tiresome than a monolith of happiness?” I insisted.
“A monolith of happiness,” she repeated from beyond the door, giggling.
Neither one of us knew what any of this meant—sour plum, sweet plum—this naming of each other, this assignation of language, but it always gave us a lift.
I drifted off again. The image of a plum—egg shaped and silver—came to mind followed by that of a shriveled prune: black, shiny, wrinkled. How long, I wondered, does it take for a plum to turn into a prune? For it to collapse, become dehydrated, shrunken. Irreversibly transformed. I remembered dreaming night after night that I was pregnant, that another life was growing inside of me, that Omar had made way inside of me for a baby, a second life, a being who would haunt me, who would herd me about the house, a remorseless being who would snap at my heels and demand repeatedly, Come back from the dead and mother me! I used to shiver with fear until Omar entered the dream. He always appeared. He would sit—his body stately, elegant—at the foot of my bed, bend over me lovingly, reassure me that I couldn’t be pregnant, that we hadn’t had unprotected sex. But it was a lie. We always had unprotected sex. And yet the dreams felt so real, they frightened me. For days, I confused them with reality. In that moment before waking, I’d convince myself that he really was there at the foot of my bed telling me not to worry, that there was no way I could be carrying his child. Our child. And I’d open my eyes expecting to see him only to be startled by his absence.
Even then, after all these years, that word—our—caused me such torment. I was gutted by it. We hadn’t shared anything. We had never been equals. I had been plundered, exploited, then refused, cast aside, discarded like an empty bottle. I got up and stood over my bed. I took the bed in again. It looked so sterile. Unused. The sheets were gray, the mattress lumpy. There was no pillow, no place to lay my head.
I retrieved my luggage then promptly returned to my room and closed the door again. I opened my suitcase and removed my favorite sweater from the carefully folded pile: a black wraparound with a thin silk belt that I like to tie into a side knot. I caught my face in the mirror right before I left the room—my teenage face—and thought: it’s no accident that the backdrop to our affair was spectacularly breathtaking. And there was that word again: our. And right next to it the word affair—a second stroke. I was trying to extract meaning from this triangle of words: rape, then our—which is supposed to connote togetherness, unity, clarity of vision, but which instead drained me of any sense of direction and engendered a sense of foolish idleness, causing me to halt in my tracks, to stand motionless over the bed—and finally, the whispered third word, affair. I said it softly to myself, thinking that I must dissect it, that I must treat it to the autopsy it deserves. Affair. A word so light and atmospheric that it contains the word air. So deceptive. I was seized by the strange sensation that this sneaky triumvirate of words—rape, our, affair—had multiplied, that the words were all floating before me as a multiheaded beast, tempting me with the spirit of unruliness that had commandeered my life as an adolescent, a girl-child, a woman-girl, a heedless, curious girl whose lust and craving for danger overpowered her fear of being wickedly violated. A girl becoming—becoming what?
I gazed at the neglected walls. I tried to backtrack, to return to an earlier thought that I hadn’t quite finished collecting: that our affair was made possible by the beauty of the Andalusian landscape, because beauty, I had come to understand, engendered a false sense of trust; it calmed the nervous system. The land—this land—I considered, had claimed my body with all its eroded cliffs and stone; its dunes of sand; its native plants; its suckling, spitting sea. The landscape had acted as foreplay; it had helped Omar’s plans along. The mercurial moon, the jasmine bush, the orange blossoms. The piles of pomegranates—orbs of blood, life—stacked high outside the grocery stores. The influence of our forebears was visible all around us in the architecture, the old walls, the food, the flowers. The city seduced us with the magic of familiarity, the anthem of belonging, the forgotten memories of our ancestors who had resisted and survived persecution through subterfuge.
I felt a strong urge to air out the apartment. I walked down the corridor to the bathroom and paused to look at Ellie. She was trying to clean with a sponge she’d purchased at the corner store.
“What did life say?” she asked absentmindedly. Then she pointed out the grime that had settled on the tub, the loose seal around its edges, the rusted drains. She’d moved on before I had a chance to answer. “Isn’t this supposed to be the Costa del Sol? Why is it so chilly?” she asked. She smacked her lips.
I didn’t respond. I was afraid I would start crying, but it was a false fear; what I felt more than anything was numb.
I returned to the living-room window. I opened it again, a thoughtless act given how cold Ellie was. I looked out across the promenade at the arabesque windows of the homes on the hill. The sky had darkened enough t
hat people had turned on their lights. I lit another cigarette. Last one, I said to myself.
The tranquil streets, bathed in the funereal stillness of the fast-approaching night, seemed to suggest that nothing of consequence ever happened here. In the darkening sky, I tried to imagine the unique features of Omar’s face. But the sky was unsympathetic to my desires. I am not a canvas, it seemed to say. I am air, air, air.
As I listened to its murmuring, I saw through the telescope of my mind the bright lights of the carnivals I’d gone to with Omar and smelled again the sweet spice of the liquors we drank as we strolled between the booths, drinking, smoking, eating cheese to our heart’s content. I saw the donkey ride in Mijas, and for a brief, flickering moment, I felt my leg rubbing against the whitewashed walls of the village precariously perched on the rocky cliffs, the winding roads carved into the mountain’s side. I saw the grassy dunes of the beach where we lay kissing, the moonlit streets of Granada, the pomegranates we’d split on the rocks and fed to each other, the figs, the avocados, those tranquil lakes high up in the mountains, their glassy reflective surface. He the tireless strategist, I the whimsical fool. How expertly I had concealed my unease. How easily I’d justified his brutality. How easily I’d come to believe that we were in love. That we were equals.
Just as I felt the sky giving in, as I began to see the contours of his face form in the nebulous night air, Ellie said, “Did you open the window again?”
I shut it. I put out my cigarette. I grabbed the sweater I had removed from my luggage and returned to the bathroom. “Here, wear this; it’s thin but it does the job.”
She looked at me in the mirror. I stood there and watched her put the sweater on. She tilted her head to one side as she took in her image. She seemed satisfied. She moved on to setting her curls. She had gorgeous red hair, perfect curls.
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