Savage Tongues

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Savage Tongues Page 12

by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi


  I thought again of my brother, of his vulnerability. I went over the incident in my head. He’d been viciously charged at from behind while walking home from school, first with vulgar racist remarks then with punches that pounded his skull against the sidewalk. His attacker had crawled on top of him even after he’d passed out and continued smashing his brain against the concrete. I thought about how my brother had left us as soon as he’d physically recovered. How now, years later, he’d taken to disappearing, vanishing for weeks or months at a time. His absence cleaved my mother in two. She barely spoke while he was gone. Throughout my high school years, when I still lived with her, she wept in bed for hours every morning. When she finally did get up, I’d make her bed. I’d dry out her pillowcase, which was always wet with tears. I tried to fill the dent her head had left in the pillow. We spent our days waiting for my brother in a silent state of dread, unsure if he was dead or alive.

  It hadn’t taken long before my mother had fallen into a deep depression, a monolith of confusion and grief punctuated by moments of intense panic. She’d become so fearful of losing me, the only proof left in the world that she was a mother, that she’d ripped children from her womb and nursed them with her own milk, that she never let me out of her sight, not even to cross the street to CVS to buy nail polish with my friends. She would drop me off at school and pick me up promptly after swim practice. It was a life of tyranny, a dry life, empty of love or laughter, a life in which pleasure had turned into a distant memory.

  When my brother eventually reappeared months later, he was a different person. He had wild eyes and a suspicious gaze; he hallucinated, had turned violent. It took my mother nearly a decade to rehabilitate him. By then, I had faded into the margins. I was strong-willed, stubborn, impatient, quick on my feet. My mother believed that she could afford to look away from me while she focused on my brother’s pain, pain that had taken just a few moments of a skinhead’s life to cause but that we would spend the rest of our lives contending with. My brother (and I by extension) had horrified that skinhead. Our presence in school and around town terrorized him because, even though we had white skin just like he did, we also had Persian accents and wore clothes made in Turkey or Iran: flowered vests, neatly pressed shirts, shoes with beads or bells on them. We were not “quite white,” or we were too white, or not white in the right ways.

  Until he had laid his hands on my brother, I considered, his was a nuanced, concealed racism. Difficult to prove until the moment he’d raised his fist but nonetheless palpable to those of us on the receiving end of its toxic waste. I know now how to recognize this grade of racism. I can feel the air pressure change. It’s a racism that persists, that leans into the stereotype that Iranians, whose history is intertwined with Russia, Turkey, Mongolia, Greece, the Arabian Peninsula, and elsewhere, are either too dark or not dark enough; our brand of whiteness, if we can even call it that, has nothing in common with the entitled whiteness of America. What this kind of racism claims, I considered, is an exclusive and proprietary right to whiteness; it considers whiteness as a privileged status that belongs to Europeans exclusively, and to their American descendants, who have flung themselves so far from the annals of history that they’ve deliberately repressed the truth of their own immigration, their own otherness. Whiteness, the skinhead taught my brother and me just weeks after we’d landed on US soil, is a performance the standards of which we failed to meet. We, with our near-white skin and our un-American manners, gestures, clothes, and gait, were tainting his whiteness, reducing its stock value, lowering the profitability of his biggest asset.

  I took off my clothes and got in the ocean. I’d made sure to wear my swimsuit in case the water called me to it. It was cold, colder than I’d expected; for a moment, I couldn’t breathe. I felt as though my lungs were being squeezed. I swam to warm up. I was still a strong swimmer, capable of doing a thousand yards without stopping to take a break. I was always most at home in the water.

  When I finally stopped, I turned around, treaded water, and stared back at the empty shore. The air turned heavy. I heard a rumble in the distance. A heavy mass of compressed air was rolling down the cordillera, a gloomy avalanche that expanded as it approached. I was cold. My lungs stung. I could barely feel my fingers; they were as stiff as twigs. A darkness descended upon me; I watched the metallic light of the sky disappear from the sea. All I could see was night. I was alone in a world apart. My life, I thought in a surge of panic, runs parallel to the lives of others. I felt a rising sense of trepidation, the sense that I was about to be carried out to sea never to be seen or heard from again. My heart ached with loneliness.

  But I wasn’t alone. I was bathing under Omar’s gaze. I could feel him hovering over me. I felt something move over my skin, crawl up my limbs. I started to gasp for air. I thought to myself, Calm down, search the water. But the darkness was complete, impenetrable. I dipped my head under, reemerged, wiped my face and eyes. I took in a deep breath. My heart was beating furiously. I heard Omar’s voice; I heard my name. “Arezu, Arezu.” He was searching for me, calling my name as if it were a question, an existential plea he was making to the universe only to be greeted with silence. So he, too, was lost. I steadied my nerves. I thought, He has come to me because I have searched for him, for who we had been, for all of the ways we’d bent each other’s will. He’d bent mine to a much larger extent than I had his, and yet we’d each of us been susceptible to the other, willing to transgress any sense of propriety that our families and society had instilled in us in order to be near each other.

  I closed my eyes and felt something swim over me. It was his hand, and it was crawling up my back to my neck, turning me over. He pulled me toward him. My hair tangled like soft rope in his fingers. His breath was hot against my face. That boyish smile of his sent a shiver down my spine. I looked up. It was a different sky altogether: a pure electric-blue sky with just a few wispy clouds careening down to the sea. We were high up in the lakes again; the water that was dripping off his chin into my mouth was sweet. The air was sublime. The world, I felt, was aflame with pleasure and the danger of deceit.

  Who knows what would have become of me if I hadn’t met Omar? We’d laughed together and played in the mountains like they belonged to us and us alone. I was willing to give him my sex in exchange for that. Or so I’d thought then. I’d thought that Omar had shocked me back to life. Until I met him, I’d been standing on the great hungry lips of death, prepared to sacrifice myself to its insatiable appetite. Omar, while bringing into center stage the knowledge of my mortality, had also jolted me back into existence, into being. It was a delicate trade: a return to life as a teenager that would drain me of vital energy in the future. He had deposited such a surplus of fear in me that I would need the rest of my life to parse through it. The fear hadn’t been palpable to me then. Or perhaps it had been so all consuming, so much larger than I was, that I couldn’t see or recognize or name it. What I did know was that he’d made me laugh my way back to the world of the living that summer. And for that I was eternally grateful to him.

  I got out of the water and pulled my jeans on and peeled my swimsuit top off. I didn’t care. Most of the women tanning on the beach were already topless. I let my breasts dry off in the wind and then put my shirt back on and began to make my way back to the apartment. Ellie would be up by now, and I wanted to bring her down to the beach with me. I felt exhausted, drained. It was my turn to rent a sun bed, to luxuriate, to order bottle after bottle of rosé, to eat shrimp out of an impossibly tall martini glass, to pluck olives out of a dish with a toothpick. I wanted to get drunk. I wanted to spend the day fantasizing about having unprotected sex with a stranger. For a brief moment, I forgot that I was married, that I had left Xavi with a lump in his throat that was only somewhat assuaged by the fact that I had agreed not to go to Marbella alone, to allow Ellie to come with me, because according to him, and to her, too, returning would be more difficult than I could ever predict. I couldn’t say that the
y’d turned out to be wrong. I could never have guessed that Omar’s ghost would be here waiting to greet me, that I’d be retracing my footsteps under his gaze.

  Halfway to the apartment, I decided to cut through the blind alleys of the old city, to climb up through its shaded streets and stout houses, their windows gazing at one another coyly, to the Plaza de los Naranjos. I remembered an old woman who ran a shop in the far corner of that plaza; we’d chatted once or twice. I wondered if she was still alive. She was thin and had a wrinkled face, a humped back, but nevertheless she was elegant, attractive, a woman with a poised demeanor, pearls in her ears, and hair meticulously combed into a chignon pinned together with silk flowers.

  I walked resignedly through the streets now, jostled by crowds of chattering tourists, by young men in leather jackets, their motorcycle helmets hanging off their forearms, the odor of alcohol wafting from their armpits as they staggered home from the clubs. As I looked at them, I felt an intense, searing heat crawl up my throat. It was Omar’s name rising to my lips. My eyes grew moist. I felt as though steam were rising from the center of my being, forcing its way up and out of my eyes, ears, nose. It was time. The hour of sobbing had arrived. I didn’t want to submit to my tears. I didn’t want to succumb. I feared I would collapse, turn to liquid, be unable to put myself back together. So I swallowed his name. I willed it to drown. And for a moment—a brief minute—I experienced relief. Perhaps, I considered, I could hardly bear the thought that Omar was still there, in that recondite twist of alleys, hiking through the brush and bramble of the mountains, drying herbs on his terrace, because I feared that, if given the chance, he would work his way through my body again. I shook away the thought. I pushed his name down.

  I entered the shop and asked for the woman. Rosario. Her name had come back to me the second I crossed the threshold. I said it over and over to myself—Rosario—a prayer bead, an incantation, shoving Omar’s name further down with each repetition. Rosario. The man who was minding the shop looked at me with expert eyes, then looked down at his desk, which was crowded with objects—saltshakers shaped like tuna fruit, tiny olive and almond and salt platters with flowers painted on their glazed yellow surfaces. Slowly, without raising his gaze from his desk, he told me that Rosario was his mother, that she’d passed away nearly ten years prior, that the shop was his now. There was a grandfather clock standing against the wall behind him. The clock was wheezing like a pair of lungs. I stared at its swinging pendulum. It seemed to be whispering something to me. I felt a hot breath on my neck. Omar. There it was: his name trembling on my lips, more powerful than I was.

  “I want you naked,” I heard, “as the day you were born.”

  “Excuse me?” I asked Rosario’s son. He had a concerned look on his face.

  “I was just asking,” he said, “if you were looking to buy something.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes.” Nervously moving about the store, I picked out a candleholder, a beautiful centerpiece delicately carved and painted a regal blue. I told him that I was looking to light some candles, paid him, and quietly left.

  Outside, I sat on a bench. The ache in my stomach had worsened; the pain had become unbearable. I felt as though someone had turned up the pressure in my gut. I felt ready to burst. I needed to take a moment to breathe before walking the rest of the way to the apartment. There were two men standing a few meters behind me. I directed my attention to them in order to distract myself from the tears working their way out of my body, tears I was afraid would be toxic. I swallowed hard. I shoved everything that was rising up in me as far down as I could. Listen to their conversation, I told myself, and my old habit of obedience kicked in; I resigned myself to listening. They were talking about women, marriage. I heard one of them say that he preferred his women to be ugly because the ugly ones made more competent housewives. They’re better cooks and don’t complain when it’s time to mop the floors and deweb the ceiling. Besides, he added, he could always go down to the beach and stare at the foreign women, their bodies overflowing with sexual offerings, their habits and tastes indiscriminate. “Obscene women,” he said. “Women who spread their legs for anybody.”

  The other man laughed and clapped encouragingly.

  “What happened to women cutting their hair short when they got married and letting their waists thicken and being happy in their house slippers and aprons?” the first man asked. “They used to go down to the butcher looking like that, and now they all want to be appreciated; they want us to cup their breasts as if they were pears carved from gold by the hands of Jesus,” he exclaimed happily. “Forget it. Give me an ugly wife or nothing.”

  His friend went on clapping, applauding what he kept referring to as a timely sermon.

  It dawned on me then why all the women called one another guapa here. It was a code of solidarity, a rallying against the abusive language catapulted at them by certain men. It was a collective affirmation of their dignity.

  I’d closed my eyes. When I opened them, I saw that Rosario’s son was standing before me. He was holding out his arm. He said, “You forgot your change.” He opened his palm to show me a five-euro bill.

  I took the bill and thanked him.

  He walked away, dragging his feet, head hanging, his eyes on the ground. A man who was afraid, who had likely always been afraid, of making eye contact with women. There are all kinds of men in this world, I thought. All kinds.

  As soon as he was out of sight, I began shaking. I tried to push the surge of tears back down. I swallowed. I begged. I negotiated with the heavens. But nothing worked, and soon I had given in to a long bereft fit of weeping. It hurt. My throat and the backs of my lids hurt. I cried until my head throbbed. My lungs were exhausted and sore, my lips raw, but I couldn’t stop. It was as if a great flood were moving through me. A terrible earthquake. A shifting of the fault lines in the oceanic depths of my life. I thought of Ellie, reminded myself that I wasn’t alone. I just had to get myself to the apartment. I just had to make my way to Ellie. I got up and walked downhill through the old quarter. I could hardly see straight. My vision was blurred with tears that were collecting faster than I could unload them. I walked down a narrow street flanked by the puckered walls of the Arab ruins; great tufts of lavender and capers were growing out of the cracks and seams. I stopped halfway down the road and clung to one of those bushes. I nearly yanked it out of that great ancient wall, those stones that were as rough as sandpaper. The street was deserted. There was no one in sight. I heard my mother’s voice. I heard her utter that saying she had so often repeated: “God is our only witness.” I didn’t even know if I believed there was a God hovering in the heavens, crowning our heads.

  I couldn’t wait to get home to Ellie. I thought of the healing power of friendship as I made my way down that empty street, a street as old as time. Friendship, I thought, is a form of witness. She had received my testimony. She had held it with tenderness and love. She had taken care with my story. If it hadn’t been for her, I would have never been able to receive Xavi. I could feel myself—my whole body—rushing toward Ellie. I thought of her contagious laughter, how we’d doubled over laughing in the middle of an empty maze of streets behind the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem, the air thick with the smell of incense and the sound of murmured prayers because I, who did not even know if I believed in God, had been turned away from the Al-Aqsa Mosque that morning by two Israeli soldiers in green fatigues and combat boots, bullet belts strapped to their chests. They were holding machine guns. “You are not Muslim,” they’d said in unison, as if channeling God herself. I was wearing a full hijab. I’d wanted to go into the mosque, to pray, to press my forehead against its well-worn floors as a way to be near my mother and her parents, to salute their deep religiosity despite my own confused ambivalence. I had been raised, after all, to greet God every morning, to thank God every evening. “Recite the Ash-Shura,” the soldiers commanded, stroking their guns. And I had. I stood there with a fire in my eyes, holding back my pain, h
ardening my face so it wouldn’t show my sorrow or anger. I recited the verses. I recited them for myself. I recited them for the soldiers, for the collective humiliation that we had been forced to perform. For the Palestinians whose relationship to the divine was eclipsed by the Occupation, a form of psychological and spiritual torture, not to be allowed to access the sacred sites of one’s culture. And as I recited the Ash-Shura, in that moment, against all odds, I had suddenly believed there was a God. I had felt heard, accompanied by an invisible fleet of bodies that had gathered at my back to support me. I was sure my ancestors were standing behind me, placing each verse of the Quran in my mouth to be uttered. Halfway through the prayer, the soldiers grew impatient and let me in. And my privilege in comparison to the Palestinians to whom this land and its sites belonged was not lost on me. What business did I have entering the mosque while they, who were devoted to the mosque, were cut off from its holy walls? I almost turned away, but the soldiers waved me through the arched passageway with their guns and a nod of their heads, and I walked, aware that I was a target, that all my life there had been a gun pointed at my back. I walked through the courtyard of olive trees, beneath a blue sun so bright that it appeared to have been lit from below, past men and women dressed in simple robes, toward the golden dome of the mosque, and left my shoes at the door. I’d needed to cry but hadn’t been able to.

 

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