I woke up breathing forcefully, wheezing and wincing, a disturbingly acute smell of rot, sewage, mold, and dirt all around me. The room smelled rancid. The odor was overpowering. It stung my nose. It seemed to be released from the walls, the floors, and the ceiling, which appeared lower than it had before I’d gone to sleep, as though it were descending on me with cunning subtlety, moving in nearly imperceptible degrees. I could feel the walls sliding, shifting, drawing back to reveal my private ruins, the barren foundation of my youth, the parentless desert of my adolescence. I lay there in a frozen state, unable to tell if the dream had contaminated what small modicum of reality I held on to or if the smell was real and had seeped into my dream. Perhaps, I thought, it doesn’t matter. Perhaps there is no clear line to be drawn between waking life and sleep, between reality and perception.
It was dawn. I forced myself to sit up in bed and look out the window. The darkness was reluctantly giving way to morning. A rose-colored hue clung to the edges of the sky, nudging the screen of night apart. Soon we would all be vertical again, the streets packed with the machinery of moving limbs. I caught my reflection in the windowpane. My features were stiff with bewilderment, my mouth open in an O. I looked through myself to the trees. They looked as they always had: little scaled and silky tufts of golden hair sticking out of the bark, the fronds suspended in the air, flapping tenderly in the wind. The lanterns in the street were cupping the sky with their soft light. Soon, I thought, trying to distract myself from the assaulting images of my dream, the trees will be loaded with singing birds.
I opened the window to air out the room and returned to bed. I reached for my cigarettes. I’d left them on the nightstand along with my lighter and an ashtray Ellie had found in the kitchen, the same pale-green ashtray I’d used at seventeen. I lay there smoking in a nicotine-induced anesthetic fog. The smoke dissipated the smell, cutting through to the apartment’s musty air, the smell that had settled into the seams and the walls throughout the years the place had been empty, bereft of inhabitants. There hadn’t even been a stray visitor, a distant friend or cousin who’d requested the keys for a family vacation. The apartment seemed to have a will of its own, an energy that coursed through its stained walls, repelling anyone who might enter. Only I had remained trapped here. The apartment, I considered, drawing in the warm smoke, watching it float in rivulets up to that menacing ceiling, had threatened to annihilate me with the most tender trick of all: love’s oblivion.
I had tried to masturbate on and off through the night. Each time I awoke, I reached down to touch myself in the hopes that an orgasm would ease my breathing and help me glide back to sleep. But I felt nothing. I was numb and indifferent to my own touch, so I gave up and instead lay there in a state of disorientation thinking of all the times I had fantasized about Omar, his broad chest, his hands guiding me onto his hips, his encouraging voice as I rode him in the afternoons. I wondered what our days of lovemaking had meant to him. Did he rewind the tape of his life to relive those encounters while he was masturbating? Did he fantasize about me, too? The thought disturbed me. Yet, at the same time, it had a soothing effect: it cut through the gnawing pain of being discarded. But only for a moment, a brief flicker of a second.
I felt my blood bubble up at the base of my heart. I felt the old rage return at the thought that he’d consumed me only to dispose of me. That he’d thought of me as refuse. I placed the ashtray on my stomach and flicked the burned end of my cigarette into it. I sucked in all the smoke I could hold in my lungs in a single inhale and felt its warmth spread across my chest. I remembered lying on the carpeted floor of my college dorm room with my friend, a soft-spoken man from Thailand who’d been disowned by his family for being gay; we’d gone into the clinic together to get tested for HIV. The night before we were to receive the results, we’d lain there, side by side, wide awake, staring mutely at the ceiling. I’d been seized by a delirious terror, convinced that I’d contracted HIV from Omar. I’d gotten away without getting pregnant. There’s no way, I’d thought then, that I could have escaped from him physically unscathed. I was searching for a tangible consequence of our affair. I needed my body, which felt so dirty to me then, so despicable, to be my witness. I was tired of standing at the edge of an abyss, of the hollow well that had opened at the center of my life because I knew, even then, that emptiness cannot be combated; you have to learn to live with its sting, to bare the raw surfaces of your buried wounds. But I didn’t have the strength. I’d wanted visible evidence. See, I’d say, stupidly, thoughtlessly waving my test results, Omar and I are linked in the negative. Here, I would say, is confirmation that he had entered my body and changed it forever, left it in disrepair. What a fool I had been.
But then again, I considered now, just as I had considered then, on the few occasions when I’d dared talk about Omar even I couldn’t believe my own story. It seemed untrue, made up. The words seemed false. Suddenly, upon hearing them, I would feel cut off from myself, oddly detached, a single thought repeating endlessly in my head: that I had been both repulsed and compliant, a participant in Omar’s ruthless behavior; that I’d helped that exceptionally handsome man take advantage of the fact that I was only partially conscious of my sexual power, to contaminate me with his actions, his motives, his aberrant desire, so I would be the one to spend the rest of my waking life considering these pitiable flashbacks and wondering if it was then, during that strange lonesome summer when I’d had no one to consult, when I’d pushed even my own mother away, if it was then that my life had been cleaved in two, each horn forking and reforking until my future resembled nothing more than a maze.
I ran my hands through my hair. I lifted a few strands and let them drop back down onto the pillow. My hair had been a source of drama in my life, covered in Tehran with a scarf, always pulled back and tucked away. I had come to consider it a sexual organ of sorts. Why else would one need to hide it from men? I thought of Omar grabbing my hair from behind, twisting it around his fist to draw my head back. I remembered shaving my hair off in college. I had wanted to begin again, to erase the convoluted labyrinth that had taken over my life. I had wanted a smooth, round surface ready to have new lines drawn across it. I’d driven to Supercuts and asked the hairdresser to shave my head. She’d refused. She was Iranian.
“What will your mother say?” she’d asked, bewildered.
“Should I ask someone else?” I said tersely.
She’d finally agreed, reluctantly. I watched her face in the mirror. As my hair dropped in thick strands to the floor, her eyes grew darker, the lines around her mouth deeper. Her brow was furrowed from the distress she imagined my bald head would cause my mother. And it had. She’d buried her face in her hands and sobbed at the sight of my shaved head.
“Why? Why? Why?” she’d asked, as she gasped for air, even though she had known why before I had ever mentioned a word about it. She had intuited what Omar had done to me while it was happening, and her premonition had been confirmed by my remoteness, my despondence, the embittered silence with which I had greeted her upon my return that summer.
But her question had hung unanswered between us. I didn’t know why I’d shaved my hair. Or I did, but I had lost my grip on language, was unable to articulate my needs, to build a coherent story to justify my impulses. It was only now that understanding was sliding into place.
I put out my cigarette. Beyond the window, the black canvas of the night sky had faded into a dull pinkish gray. There were a few birds chirping in the trees, announcing the imminent arrival of daylight. I could hear the shopkeepers opening their stores, lifting the metal shutters, stacking their piles of leeks and onions and apples, the red globular pomegranates, the bright bushels of herbs arranged in plastic bins on the sidewalks. I thought about how lonely I’d been in college. I’d refused to have sex while I was at university. I couldn’t have verbalized this then, but I’d become fearful of the frontiers sex offered me, of the yawning emptiness it opened inside of me. Perhaps, I thought
, the sex I’d had with Omar had burned up my full reserve of teenage desire. Perhaps I was punishing myself for having misused my sexual energy. I’d watched my friends brag about sex while I shaved my hair and took shower after shower. During my sophomore year, I’d showered constantly. Sometimes three or four times a day. I’d sit in the tub and let the water run over me until it turned cold, then I’d get out shivering, my toenails and lips blue. I felt perpetually dirty. I was often constipated. Once, I remembered, I had to stick my finger up my ass and pull the shit out myself. It was so painful, I almost fainted. It hadn’t occurred to me to go to the pharmacy to buy laxatives or make an appointment with a doctor. I hadn’t wanted to deal with anybody. I’d recoiled at the thought of being touched by a stranger. I suffered quietly.
I got up. I felt restless, likely from the nicotine surging through my veins I thought as I got dressed. I grabbed my cigarettes and wallet, and headed out. I closed the door lightly so as not to wake up Ellie. Neither of us were ever sharp in the mornings, never eager for conversation. We had that in common. We tended to let each other be until noon.
It was seven in the morning now. I stood near the neighbor’s door. I no longer knew who lived there. Likely an older woman with whiskers, a lady in the habit of wearing oil-stained aprons, a woman who fries food—potatoes and breaded cod—for her grandchildren all day.
I felt as though I’d been stopped in my tracks. I was being assaulted with memories that seemed to be surging forth of their own volition. When I was living in Brooklyn, I thought, deep into my relationship with the chef, I mostly stopped eating. We were both lean, not an ounce of fat on our bodies. But whenever he developed a new plate—chocolate foie gras, venison with plum sorbet and eucalyptus air, lobster decorated with lemon verbena bubbles—he would have me come into the restaurant to try it. He worked at a three-Michelin-star restaurant in Manhattan, and it was easy enough for me to get there from Brooklyn. There were always famous people loitering at the bar, drunk actors who came in followed by a herd of young women in short sequined dresses, their hair ironed and shining like a leopard’s skin, high heels like weapons, mouths painted bright, fake lashes they expertly batted. They were so loud, they often ruined everyone’s meal, but they brought in the cash, stashes of money spent on the finest food and wine. No one dared say a word to them. That’s how we lionize the wealthy, I thought.
I would eat like a queen on those nights then wait for my boyfriend to finish his shift at three or four in the morning, at which point we would ride the subway all the way down the spine of the island and back across the bridge. The only words we’d exchange would be about the showmanship of his food or the moon hanging over the river, sometimes as round and bright as a peach; the sky in New York always seemed to keep one eye open. We would walk quietly to our rat-infested apartment. Sometimes, just to take the temperature of our relationship, I would try to seduce him, and he would go stiff, likely from exhaustion but also because he’d probably had sex in the dry pantry—like I said, his mouth often smelled like another woman’s vagina. I didn’t care much. I was too busy writing, trying to make my own way; in that regard, we were a good match. When it came to art, we held ourselves to the highest standard and weren’t afraid of a life of discipline and resolve. We pushed each other to succeed, which is, I suppose, its own kind of high.
I remembered that the chef had gone through a phase of dreadful nightmares; a faceless man would rape him and he would wake up whimpering, defenseless. He’d lean into me and sob. But then suddenly, with a terrifying resolve, he would get up and go to work and come home with a distant, self-protective air that, if I tried to puncture it, would only lead to a confoundingly cruel exchange. The sexual transgressions he had likely suffered would remain beyond my reach. I could neither soothe him nor relate to him to ease my own suffering. I could only listen during the rare moments he allowed himself vulnerability. One time, he told me, he’d dreamt that he had two penises and that he was fucking me with both his dicks and that it felt amazing, that he could have stayed in that dream forever. I joked that I was sure he would eventually run out of steam. I didn’t know what to say. It had been months since he’d approached me with the singular penis of his waking hours; I couldn’t understand the chasm between the reality of our sexless relationship and his erotic flights of the night. I suppose any psychologist would say that I’d stayed with him to avoid having sex, a simple enough conjecture I couldn’t entirely refute even if at times I felt so tortured by the lack of desire in our relationship that I considered cheating on him. But I’d had my fill of lies. I didn’t want to live a double life. It’s incredible, the capacity we have for living with someone for years, for rearing children with them, without ever letting them in or extending ourselves to know them, without ever truly understanding the source of their grief. I suppose the tangled web of our future is imprinted upon us long before we learn to speak; it’s no easy task to trace our behavior, all of our impulses, to the network of disturbances in which we were raised. I suppose that’s not even the answer, or is only partially the answer, to our inner turbulence.
A loud noise—a broken plate or a fallen glass—startled me out of my reverie and I realized that I’d been standing there, stupidly staring at the neighbor’s door for quite a while. I decided it was time to get some coffee and head down to the beach. Once I was on the street, I turned left onto the main road that descended sharply toward the water. Light had broken, but the sky was overcast. A mild fog hung at the lit windows of the shops. The hills in the distance looked blue in the opaque light; the palms appeared to be made of steel; the air, still and dense, was firmly set against their fronds so they appeared to have been covered with silver varnish. I could hear the fierce howling of dogs in the distance. There were seagulls perched on the serrated edges of the old city’s fortified walls. The gunmetal sky seemed to exhaust everything, to mute the colors of the roads, the native plants, to drain the blood from the faces of the few people who were out on the streets.
I stopped to have a coffee and a pan con tomate at the first bar that had sidewalk tables where I could smoke in peace. I was one of the only customers at that hour except for a few elderly men sitting morosely at the bar inside, busily reading their newspapers and dunking their croissants into their café con leches in semiautomatic movements. The intense smell of coffee wafted outdoors, and even from the sidewalk, I could hear the braying sound of the espresso machine. I sat in a red plastic chair with the Estrella Damm beer logo plastered onto it—those chairs were a hallmark of my adolescence—and faced the mountains. They looked beautiful in the subtle light of the morning. Their backs, carpeted in greenery, lent them an air of solitary grandeur. I could see the sky opening up in the distance, a ribbed sky that suggested the wind was picking up over the craggy rocks and would soon shear the fog that had settled overnight.
Finally, a heavyset woman walked over to my table to take my order. She stared rigidly ahead and was gesturing at a pair of chattering women who were walking their dogs across the street. Without turning to face me, she asked, “¿Qué te pongo, guapa?”
I had forgotten that in Spain, women often called each other guapa, a habit I treated with disdain because it suggested that our existence began and ended with our bodies, that we were undifferentiated, pretty face after pretty face, our personalities flattened.
Once I’d finished my coffee and toast, I headed to the beach. I crossed the main avenue and made my way down to the wide seaside promenade. A few steps led down to the beach, which was stark and empty at this hour, bereft of humans. Massive clouds were coasting above the sea. Little had changed since I’d last been there in the ’90s. There were putrid remnants of fruits and vegetables abandoned by the previous day’s beachgoers in the sand—tomatoes, orange rinds, sliced watermelon, pears left to rot. I observed the coconut-hair umbrellas staked into the blond sand, the sun beds with their white cushions lined up to receive the lazy bodies of tanners, tourists from Britain and the Nordic countri
es desperate for sun. They would spend their days lying on the beach, ordering expensive drinks poured into carved pineapples. Beyond the beach, along the promenade, beneath the shade of the awnings, shopkeepers were hanging bikinis and summer dresses out on racks next to stacks of sun hats and tanning lotions and bright extra-large beach towels.
The sounds of the city were still so faint that I could hear the birds cawing overhead. The sea, which I’d heard roaring from the apartment, as if water were on the verge of coming up through the floorboards, was silent now, still. I felt my chest tighten; my stomach began to ache. I heard the frenetic sound of a motorcycle in the distance and remembered the feeling of the hot leather seat pressing against my jeans as I clung to Omar on the Ducati while we whizzed through traffic. I was astonished that I hadn’t died. That we hadn’t wiped out or flown off a cliff. There were times when he’d gone up to two hundred kilometers an hour. The sheer force of the wind had opened my backpack once and my CDs had gone flying out; they’d scattered across the highway and gotten shredded to bits. The only thing left in my backpack was my passport, and that had survived only because I’d been cautious enough to tuck it into an inside pocket. I couldn’t understand how we’d never been pulled over, nor would I ever know why Omar lived so recklessly. What, I wondered, my stomach twisting itself into a knot, had his father been like? He’d disappeared during the war, but I couldn’t trace the effects of his absence on Omar. Had Omar’s father treated him like a feral animal before he’d died, prematurely weaned and left to survive on his own, as mine had? Had his mother become undone, left to raise her children alone during the bloodshed of the civil war? I had, at times, intimated the searing ache that moved like a great flood through him, but I had never asked him any questions about it. When the subject of family came up, his neck and shoulders would tense, his jaw would lock, and his gaze would turn simultaneously sad and vindictive. His whole body seemed to become armed in those moments, to turn into a weapon; and I, in order to avoid provoking him, instinctively kept quiet. While he discovered my body, revealed its limitless capabilities to me, shaped my desire and my peculiar perversions and longings, I had neither knowledge of nor influence over the dark passages of his life.
Savage Tongues Page 11