“What are you doing?” Ellie asked. I realized that my face must have looked contorted.
“I think I’m afraid to leave,” I said.
She stared at me with a vacuous gaze that betrayed her lack of comprehension.
Even I could not understand what I was feeling. I had barely wanted to come to Marbella, and once we’d arrived, I’d wanted to leave at every turn. But now that our hour of departure was approaching, I was feeling reluctant, fearful, ambivalent. I explained to Ellie that I was breathing through a difficult feeling.
“What feeling?” she asked, tilting her head to one side and softening her gaze.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m afraid of abandoning the life I led here, the person I was back then.”
“You’re not abandoning anything,” she said.
I explained to her that the thought of leaving my former self, the ghost of the girl I’d been, alone again in this dreadful apartment, this apartment that seemed capable of mauling everyone and everything, frightened me; it left me riddled with guilt. That I had realized while walking around Puerto Banús that I would have to find a way to take my teenage self away from here. That I couldn’t leave her here to be consumed by the ashes of history, to erode with time.
Ellie listened quietly. Then she said, “I can help you pack as soon as we’re done with this. Maybe it will help if we do it together.”
I told her that I wasn’t sure what would help.
We sat there quietly for a moment, crestfallen. Then she leaned over and put her hand on mine and reminded me that we’d purchased tickets to Granada, that our bus was scheduled to depart first thing in the morning. I looked at her, and for a brief second, a millisecond, I saw my own teenage face come forward in hers. She had a pleading look in her eyes. She looked terrified, and yet she was calm, resigned to her fate and speechless. I remembered how quiet I’d been as a teenager. How utterly alone. I could feel my lips trembling. I could feel tears rising up in my throat. I tried to swallow, but it hurt. Ellie squeezed my hand.
“How about I take care of this and you go pack,” she said. She added that she thought it might do me good to walk through the apartment alone knowing that she was there sitting quietly on the living-room floor.
I felt my mind catch on the word pack. It was as if the fabric of my thoughts had snagged on that consonant-heavy syllable—pack—that word that made the sound of a punch or a tear, that frayed the fabric of my thoughts. I inhaled and exhaled slowly, deliberately. I kept thinking that I have to remove the person I used to be from this bereft, miserable place. Then I thought that I am still that person. She is a part of the person I have become. It occurred to me that perhaps, unbeknownst to me, I had returned to Marbella to gather myself, to take myself—her—out of here, to salvage what was left of her, to lift her out of this savage place. I wasn’t afraid of what would happen to me once I left the apartment. No. I would be free of its walls, of its crushing weight. But I was afraid of leaving her alone in this greedy enclosure. I felt as if I were forsaking her to the darkness once again, but this time as an adult, with all of the insight I’d gleaned in the passing years, and that was unforgivable. What would she do here, trapped in these brutal walls? I took in the harrowing hallway that led to the bedrooms, which would soon be as dark as a tomb because the electricity had been shut off, likely forever. My thoughts turned and spun. Stay here and do what? I considered. Keep vigil over the ghost of Omar, the ghost of the person I’d been as his lover?
I felt the pressure give way to an intense sadness, a sadness that I found almost soothing; it was a feeling that had evaded me for years. I’d never felt sad for the girl I’d been. I’d never felt the scope of her loneliness. I’d only felt her stubborn defiance, her arrogance, her self-destructive nature. Her claim to freedom and untethered wildness. The feral bent of her character. She’d mocked me in the mirror. And now, on the cusp of my departure, she was showing me a softer side: her vulnerability, her pain, her exhaustion. So my presence had been helpful after all, I thought. I felt my strength slowly return to my limbs. I lifted the last few items and placed them neatly in Ellie’s suitcase.
“I’ll help you finish this first,” I said.
She nodded, and we got off the floor in silence, a silence that felt almost sacred, and we closed the suitcase and zipped it shut.
“At last!” Ellie exclaimed, and stared adoringly at her sealed suitcase for a long moment.
I asked if she wouldn’t mind walking through the apartment, closing all the windows and lowering the shutters, drawing the curtains, folding the towels and placing them back on the rack, removing the trash, emptying what little food we had in the refrigerator so I could take a moment to gather myself, all of my parts, and all of the possessions that belonged to those parts. We wouldn’t have time to close up the apartment in the morning. She agreed.
I made my way to my bedroom and sat for a moment on the edge of my bed. I heard a whooshing in my ear, a hollow drumming sound; I remembered the symphonic rain that had poured throughout the night the first time Omar had kissed me. “He had kissed me,” I murmured to myself. He knows the truth, I thought inwardly, and he knows that I know it, too. There are no fools left in this story, I thought, and got up as if on autopilot.
I walked toward the closet and reached for my ruined two-piece purple Speedo. Every time I touched the elastic—salt-eaten and exposed by the holes in the fabric—it cracked some more. I lifted it gently, carefully, and brought it to my nose. I smelled it like I’d smelled the flowers. They were the same color: a deep, joyous purple. I opened my luggage, which was still half-packed, and placed the swimsuit in a silk bag that I’d used to carry a few of my earrings and necklaces (accessories I’d forgotten to wear) and returned it to my suitcase. I reached for my sunglasses, my old red sunglasses, and placed them on my head.
The window was open in my room. I suddenly felt a cold breeze rush through it, an icy draft that caught me off guard. I walked to the window and stuck my hand out into the open air. It was warm, even balmy. When I stepped back again, I felt the draft, a cold spot hovering over my suitcase. I reached down and lifted the silk bag out of it. The bag was cold, almost icy, as if it contained the submerged memory of a corpse. I was taking the girl I had been away from everything she knew. I’d gathered her things; I’d packed them alongside my own. Perhaps, I thought, she’d gone cold in response. Even if she’d known nothing but cruelty here, it would be impossible for her not to cling to her darkness; we’re all attached to our pain and the circumstances that have brought it about. We become tethered to our oppressed selves; we learn to identify with our servitude, to the ways in which we’ve become habituated to sacrifice ourselves to the needs of the powerful.
I wished desperately that there was something more I could do for my former self, the version of me that I had left behind—that everyone had left behind. I wished it with my whole being, more than I’d ever wished for anything. Then I heard a whisper, a suggestion so subtle I couldn’t be sure if it was coming from within me or beyond.
“I am just a ghost,” the voice said.
I had uttered those words to Omar. I had told him, “You are just a ghost.”
And he was. As was I. But now my ghost needed to come with me. I needed her to leave the apartment.
“This,” I told her, “is Omar’s domain.” I could feel her listening intently. “This is his lair.” I told her that she no longer needed to live in the feeble light of this ruin. I told her that she had nothing to feel ashamed about. She had nothing to fear.
She listened warily.
I placed the swimsuit in the suitcase again. This time the temperature remained steady, so I walked over to my closet and grabbed my linen dress, my dirty underwear, the sweater I’d lent to Ellie. Who knew what had become of my jeans, I thought, my Dr. Martens, my T-shirt, my copy of Lorca’s ballads, my toothbrush, all the other items I’d used that summer.
When I was done packing, I walked to the window an
d stared one last time at the view, at the church tower extending out of the hill and piercing the sky, at the Roman and Arab and Visigoth ruins, at the palms and aloes resting against the old stone walls. I felt as though I’d become two different people. As if I were staring out at the city with the eyes of the girl I’d been and the eyes of the woman I’d become. My vision felt doubly powerful. Her heart was beating alongside mine. It was trembling, fearful, unsure of itself, but also eager to leave. I could feel her resolve rising to match mine.
“I haven’t left this apartment in twenty years,” she confessed.
I told her that I understood her reluctance. And I added that I’d been out there all along; I had a pretty good read on the situation. She laughed, and I laughed with her. Then I closed the window. I lowered the shades and sealed the curtains. The room went dark, like a stage at the end of a play. I walked out with my suitcase in tow. I felt the room slide off of me. I felt its weight remain anchored in place. It didn’t follow me, didn’t wrap its black tentacles around my ankles and draw me back into its hysterical folds.
“Done?” I asked Ellie.
She was sitting on the couch.
“Done,” she echoed.
I walked into the kitchen to grab a glass of water. The flowers were still on the counter, but they didn’t look the same. They had gone limp and wrinkly. I stared at them, astonished.
“They wilted,” Ellie said in a bewildered tone. “I don’t know how they could have wilted so fast, but I felt a sudden cold that left me shivering; it was like an icy wind had moved through the apartment. It was just for a second. It was so strange, I thought it was just my imagination. But then I walked into the kitchen to put the flowers in a vase and noticed that the leaves had hardened. They’d almost crystallized, as if they were frostbitten. When I picked them up, the petals collapsed. They drooped down. I’m sorry, I don’t know what I did wrong.” Ellie was apologizing as if she’d stirred the cold gale that had entered the house.
“This place is hideous,” I said. “It’s not you.” I told her that I was sure the flowers would regain their vitality the second we left the apartment. I observed the irises. They were limp, lifeless. I let out a little laugh. The symbolism was too simple; it aligned too easily with my circumstances. There was nothing left to read between the lines. I laughed again. Then I placed the flowers in the vase.
Ellie came up behind me. “What’s so funny?” she asked.
We both peered down at the wilted flowers. And then she laughed, too. She saw what I had seen: the lack of irony, the sincerity and simplicity of death, the facility with which the vital energy of life wavers and becomes diffuse in the face of evil. Then, as if a long corridor stretched between my birth and the present moment, a corridor through which I could walk back and forth, that contained within it all of the stages of my personality, all of the episodes of my life, season after season, I remembered a certain man, much older than I was and famous, a man of a certain social standing, a documentary filmmaker. I remembered his hot, heavy breath as he leaned into my ear and said: “If you don’t use that flower of yours, it’s going to wilt.”
We’d been in Jenin in Palestine. Ellie hadn’t been with me. She’d cut her trip to Israel short and returned to America. She could handle being in Jerusalem only in short doses. Jerusalem was a site of pain for her, a living wound, just as Marbella was mine. I’d driven to Jenin with the filmmaker and another man, a young Israeli antioccupation activist. They’d pretended to be Israeli settlers every time we got to a checkpoint, putting kippahs on their heads and removing a Star of David necklace from the dashboard to hang on the rearview mirror, a performance that had made me extremely uncomfortable mostly because it had given us access to the Jewish-only highways in the occupied West Bank; we were actually headed to the Freedom Theatre, which recruited young men and women who had been training as suicide bombers in order to help them reestablish their relationship to life through acting. I’d spent the evening in an empty mansion on a lone hill overlooking the refugee camp in Jenin, a mansion I later found out belonged to a high-profile Palestinian leader who’d been on the IDF’s most-wanted list for years. Late into that evening, the filmmaker had crawled into my sleeping bag, pulled out his cell phone, and shown me a video of two of his ex-girlfriends fucking. The women kept grunting as they screamed out his name, and I could see the edge of his hairy distended stomach in the video. He was the one recording the event, the sex being performed in his honor.
At first, I’d frozen. I hadn’t known what to do. It was dark and we were on a remote hill, miles from the city center. Then it occurred to me that the best thing I could do was exit the situation politely, to leave so respectfully that he’d have the impression that everything was fine, that I would be right back so we could pick up where we’d left off. So I said nothing. I watched the video with sangfroid then told him I had to go to the restroom, that I would be right back.
I left the room and searched for an exit. There were other people—musicians, activists, lost youth—sleeping in the hallways, on the couches and the floors. I stepped over them as quietly as I could. I opened the door and walked up the stairs to the roof. It was cold. The air was crisp; a harsh wind whipped me in the face. Dawn was on the cusp of breaking. In the mild yolky light, I saw machine guns and empty cartridges abandoned on the roof. I stepped over them cautiously. There was a plastic chair in the corner. I sat in it and watched the sun rise over the green hills and the deformed houses of the refugee camp. All those lives, I thought, stacked one on top of the other. A literal open-air prison. There was nothing metaphorical about it. A ghetto, the infrastructure of ethnic cleansing in the works. I felt a deep ache radiate across my chest. The suffering of Palestinians was palpable, could be denied only from afar. An hour later, I heard the sound of a terrible explosion, as if the sky were being ripped from the earth. Israeli warplanes were flying overhead toward Lebanon, and the sound of the explosion repeated every time a new plane broke the sound barrier. I could hear that bang as clearly as if it were happening now, as if it were happening above the clearing Marbella sky.
“It’s getting dark,” Ellie said. “I’m going to rest. Try to get some sleep. We have to wake up at dawn,” she said.
“Okay,” I said.
It was late. For a second, I saw myself walking the long lonely miles to the center of Jenin and the bus station. What a strange world we live in, I thought, as I walked down the corridor one last time to my bedroom. A world where love and forgiveness and freedom, such expansive, ephemeral ideals, are so difficult to attain, impossible to hold or gift. That, I thought, is the strangest mystery of all: the propensity toward evil when love costs us so much less. It was a simple thought, perhaps even simplistic, but its execution required a level of empathy and self-assessment few of us can ever achieve.
The next morning, we lugged our suitcases and the wilted flowers up the road and passed the roundabout to the bus station. By the time we got there, we were covered in sweat; we were exhausted. We handed our suitcases to the driver, got on the bus, and sat quietly down. We leaned our heads together.
“Look,” I said. “The flowers are coming back to life.” It was true. The petals were firmer, the flowers perkier, the stems brighter.
Ellie smiled. “Unbelievable.”
“I know!” I exclaimed, deliriously happy at the sight of their color returning.
I put my old sunglasses on. The harsh early morning light of Marbella appeared dim through the lenses. I felt so strong. As strong as a bull. My two hearts—my present heart and the heart of the girl I’d been—were pounding as one. As the bus pulled out of the station, backing up slowly and beeping to warn the people walking across the street, I felt a deep sense of relief wash over me. I told Ellie how much I loved her. I thanked her for having come with me. I told her that I loved the girl she’d been during those lonely years she’d spent living on the streets of Israel, trying to break free from her family, from the oppression of a strict religious
life she didn’t feel belonged to her. She told me that she loved the girl I’d been as well. That it was the wildly lonely parts of each of us that had brought us together. We called each other by all of our names: sugarplum, potato, sour plum, pumpkin. “I love you,” we said. That was all we could say. That was all that was left to say as we left Marbella. We couldn’t wait to walk through the streets of Granada. To bask in its warm southern light. To smell the orange blossoms, the basil, the jasmine bush. We couldn’t wait to greet our common ancestors, the Jews and the Muslims who had lived there, who had built it up in all of its grandeur and beauty then been persecuted, cast out, banished from their homes. We felt it was still our home, our land, a place where understanding awaited us; it was as if our ancestors had buried our truth in the earth for safekeeping so we would discover it centuries later as mature adults.
Granada, I thought quietly to myself, city of gardens, city of fountains, city of light and water, city of lush fields of pomegranates growing under a wide blue sky. I couldn’t wait to be there. I couldn’t wait to return there with the girl I had been; I could feel her excitement beneath my own, her old sense of adventure, her appetite for life, her gentle understanding of pleasure. I was happy. I was so happy.
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