by Igiaba Scego
I couldn’t admit that I was wrong. My summer crush was a mistake. Now I avoid him.
Tonight at the party the tremor started. Once again I let someone touch my body who shouldn’t have. Orlando’s kiss reminded me of Aldo and the elementary school. Orlando isn’t Aldo. Orlando has bad breath, but he’s a good boy. He turned into Aldo in my head. He brought the fear back. He hurt my soul.
I’m thinking about my mother. I wonder if she’s ever loved someone. Mom, why have you never told me about my father?
If I had a normal family, if I hadn’t gone to boarding school, if Aldo hadn’t come to work sweating that day, maybe I’d like Orlando’s kisses now. I feel guilty.
I was conceived in the seventies. In technical jargon, I should say that my mother Maryam Laamane had intercourse with a person of the masculine sex and begot me. A biblical fornication. She was also married, she told me, to the man who gave her his sperm. But, damn, if only she’d let his name slip. She didn’t let a miserable vowel out, not a hint of that unimaginable sound.
I learned about fathers in school. Before that, I thought only Maryam Laamanes existed. Sure, there were people in the background during those first years of my life. I remember a green parrot that obsessively screeched the word “blond.” It didn’t say anything else. It belonged to the owner of the apartment where we lived in those first years in Italy, in the Nomentana district. I remember nothing else. I want to remember something. I want to remember my papa and not the stupid parrot that kept dreaming about some unattainable shade of yellow.
I thought children came out of their mothers’ heads. I thought they were their mothers’ dreams. Someone at school explained to me that it took two to dream. Two dreams and not one. I was small and none of my companions had learned about the birds and the bees. We still believed in a world of colorful fables. I believed it at the time. It didn’t last long. I grew quickly. Too quickly.
Well, in the seventies, Maryam let a man’s schlong skewer her. She couldn’t have enjoyed it at all. Surely not! I can’t see Mom enjoying herself. Even if I could imagine it, she can’t. They took away her clitoris in Somalia. They do it to everyone. Stitched her up like a roulade. Somali women like roasted things.
Not me. The pendulum is still inside me. They did stitchwork in my head. In the end, the result is the same. I don’t take pleasure in anything.
Now I’m the big star in the scene. I’m still bent over the toilet. There are other actors, but I’m the protagonist. How many of them are there? Hey, I tell the others, you can’t steal my scene. What I’m saying is, move out the way, fuck. I’m the big star. The scene is mine, goddammit! Mine alone. Don’t you see me hugging the toilet? You think I’m doing this for fun? This is the climax, the culmination, the peak, the reason why people pay the ticket price. There aren’t many scenes like this. Gloria descending the stairs, Marilyn’s flying skirt, Audrey looking into Tiffany’s window shop, Denzel reading the Quran’s opening sura. You get it? You can’t be here. Only I can be here. Now get, go away and fuck you, okay?
What does it mean that I’m unwell? What does it mean that you won’t leave me? Are you all my friends? What does it mean that you are all afraid I’ll die, that you feel my heart leap, my guts heave, my mouth grimace? Tell me. I don’t get it.
Who are you? I see a pale woman. She looks dead. I saw her in my mabit. Deader than the suicides Ophelia and Virginia Woolf. Pale like the women in Pre-Raphaelite paintings. This little cousin of Morticia lives in the mabit. She’s Spanish. One night she made us paella, which was shit, too much chili pepper, too much salt. It was godawful. You can get it better at the supermarket, you can buy it beautifully prepared in the freezer and stun your friends with special effects. Then I see the masculine mulatta, the half-black lesbian, the one who gave me the tissue when the fake Muslim Italo-Tunisian bitch said that absurd thing to me about my pussy and its maintenance. And then there’s her. Oh yes, I would share a million and one scenes with you, dear sweet poetess of my heart. You would be my celluloid Scheherezade. You and I, friends forever. Oh, Miranda. Your face is drawn, your hair messy. A beautiful green dress. You are the best dressed, the best coiffed, the best of the best dolled up whores in this shitty city. You’re a whore, I know it, you know it, all your readers know it. You said it in Calle Corrientes. How did you say it? Puta virgen derrama sangre en la calle, virgin whore spills her blood on the street / puta virgen quema en su pesadilla, virgin whore burns in her nightmare/puta, virgen, mujer, muerta, Amen.
It’s in your first book, my favorite. They didn’t understand what kind of monster it was—poem, prose, or delusion. It was like me on paper. Sometimes people don’t really understand what I am either. We’re colleagues, you know that Miranda? I wrote a few stories under a pseudonym. Some people read them. I’m a badass intellectual, like you, like Virginia Woolf. I don’t care if it was five nerds who read me. I wrote stories, that’s good enough. Stories of strange women. I scrape by at Libla, you know. I earn a living, a subsistence. Remember this Miranda, everyone remember: I’m a badass intellectual.
It seems like serious work if I associate the word “income” with the word “Libla,” but serious jobs no longer exist. My generation took it in the ass. I was born in the seventies. Maryam Laamane allowed a blind spermatozoa passage into her kingdom. The spermatozoa entered her ovum by chance. I think it took the wrong road. I was happenstance. My birth, the spermatozoa that followed the wrong road, my mother who went to bed with a man. I can’t see my mother sleeping with anyone besides herself. People born in the seventies are losers by nature. We grew up with the myth that studying led to permanent employment. The truth of the ’00s, though, was somewhat different. Depression, barrenness, abuse, profit at our expense, at the expense of our bodies, our minds. Exploitation.
I’m a stocker. I go from one department to another. I put anti-shoplifting devices on CDs and DVDs that other people buy. Lovely things pass through my hands. I’m tormented. Sometimes an unexpected kleptomania takes hold of me. I want to steal and get fired. Yes, steal, and get caught by those security guard boys. There are a lot of security personnel in Libla. It doesn’t seem like it. Normally you see the three at the main door and don’t know about the silent (or almost silent) group that spends day and night in the store, watching over the merchandise as it sleeps. They pretend to be customers. They pass calmly from the nonfiction section to the children’s books. When their minds stop working, you see them with some improbable book in hand. An avidly leafed-through astrophysics treatise, or something photographic. Artistic desires? No, pornographic. Many photography books are on the cusp of good taste. Everything exposed, everything violent. But if I buy them at a newsstand they call it pornography? The Japanese are masters at this, better than the Americans or Europeans. The Japanese have a special flair for fishing around in the dark. I wonder if virgins exist in Japan. I wonder if Akane, whom Ranma Saotome has to marry, I wonder if she’s really a virgin like she says. Ranma is a cartoon, we could never be together. I love him, but he’s made of paper. I can’t come that way.
I’ve lost my patience. I’m tired. Clinging to the toilet for no reason, sweating. Maybe I smell, I don’t know. I can’t control my armpits. They feel sticky.
It’s my scene. Me, the toilet, the light, the sweat. Lights, camera, action.
Ladies and gentlemen, a star is born. A najma, an estrella, a star. A larger-than-life star, the only big star in this fucking world.
I’ve had an epileptic fit, Miranda explains.
The girl, the semi-black butch lesbian asks me, “Is it the first time?”
Distorted sounds come out. It’s my voice, it seems. My new voice. I recognize it. I sound like an awful dubbing of some horrible Lord of the Rings orc. I don’t speak. My throat is dry. My face hurts. My cheekbones, teeth, lower jaw, upper jaw.
I hear the half-black girl’s voice. “So…you’ve never had anything like this happen before today?”
Affirmative. I make an up-and-down movem
ent. They’ll understand that it’s a yes. They turn me over like a newborn. They put a damp rag on my face. Miranda sings. I know that song. It’s from the Chilean Victor Jara, “Alfonsina y el mar.” Victor. When the soldiers took him, they cut off his hands, his beautiful musical hands. Then they executed him. A tear falls down my face.
I don’t like when people see me cry.
I don’t have epilepsy. But I do have fits, sometimes, as though I were epileptic. They told me that it’s because I tend to tighten up. The therapist told me that “it can happen to girls who…” Wait. Stop. I don’t want to hear anymore. I know what happened to me. I don’t want to start this chapter. Do I always have to go there to protect myself every time I’m unwell? I’m tired. We’ve been talking for a year, Miss Therapist. You’re a legend. Without you I’d be dead, but what’s the point of bringing it up? My stomach is upset. I have diarrhea. You’re making me speak ill of my mother. I know, she’s not perfect. She’s something of a child. But I love her. I can’t stop loving her. You’re not asking me to do this, are you, Miss Therapist? That’s a relief. I have to admit that Mom deserves some of the blame if… I mean, do I really need to accuse her? Don’t ask me to do that. You’re stronger than me. I can’t do it. My mother is a little girl and she cries. She cries like an infant. I’m the mama, I’m the strong one, the one who doesn’t cry. I can’t deal her this blow. Oh, Miss Therapist, Mom never has to know. I can’t. Don’t ask me to. I’m the strong one. If she sees me cry, she’ll collapse. Please, don’t make her cry. Don’t make me cry.
I remember the details. I’ve had one of my worst episodes.
My body is funny when it acts up. I’m like a breakdancer from the eighties. Shakes and spectacles. Shakes and enthusiasm. I never twitch the same way twice. Every part of me twitches in its own way. My body is a frenzied orchestra, a jazz orchestra, a jam session. Voice, tenor sax, trumpet, piano. She sets the tone. The voice for me is always Dinah Washington. I see blacks on the dance floor and whites watching enviously. A black woman, when she gets going, doesn’t need instructions. My inner self feels the rhythm. It believes in it. It lets go. We dance a wild lindy hop.
I read about the lindy hop in Malcolm X’s autobiography. Before becoming Malcolm X—a proud black man, a black Muslim negro like me, with the gift of speech—Malcolm was somebody else. More foolish, less sophisticated, certainly more frustrated. Malcolm burned his hair and danced the lindy hop. He says the same word. There’s a hop in the middle. And yes, he made hairy pussies prance, they always gave him a little something in return. White pussies, too. Even then sexual tourism existed, you just had to go to Harlem or some other black ghetto in the city. These days you go to Jamaica or Cape Verde. The same pimps. And in Tunisia, here, where I’ve had my episode, where they built this cursed toilet, there are sexual tourists. I think my friend Lucy does it, too—but that’s impossible. Not her. For her, it’s love. It’s love for the others as well. But does love exist when economic power is in the middle? Damn Lucy, you too? Why?
My fit and I are seasoned dancers. We haven’t danced together much, but now we know the moves. I do a little move, a wobble, and it comes behind me. We dance facing one another, moving in a circle, a few sidesteps and then improvisation. Malcolm had done it with Laura, that woman who, had she never met him, maybe wouldn’t have fallen to ruins. Malcolm was terribly sorry to have pushed her to the abyss. Malcolm wasn’t Muslim yet. He hadn’t gone to Mecca. He made mistakes. Don’t blame yourself, Malcolm. My mother also made mistakes with me. Do I blame her? And does she blame me? Do I perhaps blame myself? Yes. That’s why I think I’ll always have these fits. I howl into the silence.
We dance. We tremble. The twitch extends from my hand to my chest, to my stomach, to my face. Oh yes, the fit goes there too. My face deforms. The makeup liquefies. I can’t close my mouth anymore. My tongue curls. I manage to bring my hands to my chest. I ask for help. They don’t hear. Maybe they don’t understand.
Mar is here, the half-black butch. She’s beautiful for a dyke in pants. I like her. I learned at this party that she’s Miranda’s daughter. Miranda is here too. I feel hands, hers, taking me. Someone comes in. I see a death glow. I’m afraid. Is it the Grim Reaper? No, only Morticia from the mabit. She’s helping. She tries taking my tongue out. They tinker around with me. I can’t believe it, I’m letting those hands touch me. Did they at least wash them?
I allow myself to be touched by dirty hands. I don’t mean the women’s hands that are busy with my body right now. The horrible hands are different. They’re a man’s hands, may God curse that son of the serpent Iblis. They are Aldo’s hands. Now I know. It’s the memory of Aldo that caused the fit. Today, when Orlando kissed me, I should’ve said that’s enough because I didn’t like it. I’m still like I was when I was a small girl. I still don’t know how to shout. I don’t know how to save myself.
The lindy hop dies out in an aborted leap. The fit worsens. It gives me the cold shoulder. It spits in my face. It leaves me. I’m powerless next to the toilet. The hands left me. They weren’t the dirty hands, I know. I apologize to these industrious women.
I remember what happened now, what happened before the lindy hop, before this senseless fit. I let myself be touched. The hands were absolutely filthy. They belonged to the pig halouf.
Didn’t I like that boy?
No, the halouf has nothing to do with it. Those hands are much older. I was small and the hands profaned me. I heard an echo in the halouf. I was afraid that my pleasure might transform into that echo. I gave up on the halouf. I gave up on love. I fled.
But didn’t I like the halouf? Didn’t I like the white boy earlier?
I don’t like him anymore. I never liked him. It was an illusion. I feel dirty. I want to cry, yet I’m condemned to laugh.
Mom called me before the party. She simply said to me, “Howa Rosario is dead.” I didn’t cry, though I wanted to. The things I want frighten me.
THE PESSOPTIMIST
A boy entered a girl’s heart. A romantic story of longing stares and caresses.
It’s this story that Maryam Laamane tells her daughter, Zuhra.
Maryam was sitting on a wicker mat in front of the recorder. Zuhra, her daughter, was temporarily studying in another country. On the tape, the dispersed traces of a life.
The mother and daughter didn’t know one another well. Only obligatory exchanges between them: the smell of the uterus, breast milk, admonishing stares after a prank.
Interactions between them were few, and those few very out of focus. Since she was a teenager, the daughter had seen her mother lost in a bottle of straight gin. A mother overcome by the foul odor of exile. A mother who, in that new country, Italy, had abandoned her principles and dreams. The mother had suffered much. She knew she’d made others suffer. While Maryam pursued memories and gin, the daughter slowly rotted in elementary school and suffered the worst pains of any hell.
That ludicrous period had passed. She had to rearrange the melody of the present. Now mother and daughter are getting to know each other little by little, centimeter by centimeter. Life was a novelty, and often the occasion for a grand party as well.
This was why the mother recounted to her daughter her sole, devastating infatuation. It was motivation for her sweet girl to believe that, soon, even she would fall in love and feel the stars dance inside her little stomach.
The daughter was wounded, like Howa Rosario in her time or many women today. Someone, without permission, had violated Zuhra’s intimacy. Sexual molestation. Carnal violence. Words that circumscribe a chasm, fear bordering on repugnance. Maryam Laamane could not forgive herself for this. Back then, she, the mama, didn’t know, didn’t suspect. Zuhra’s gaze, a gaze which never watched the horizon, worried Maryam. “Allah al-Kareem, spare this girl the shortcomings of love.” The mama cried in silence. “Allah al-Kareem, make sure she doesn’t become like my friend Howa, who was never warmed by human arms.” Sometimes the woman saw Howa’s same stubbornness
in Zuhra. This concerned her.
In these moments, her maternal guilt grew to the point of paroxysm. She hadn’t paid attention. She’d been a stumbling drunk around Rome and someone had stolen love from her daughter without her knowledge. It wasn’t easy now making that same daughter believe the stars could dance inside her stomach again. Maryam Laamane wanted to try, she wanted to feel like a good mother again, or at the very least she wanted to be useful to Zuhra. That was why she sat stone-faced and cross-legged on the wicker mat. It was a battle position. She began narrating into the recorder about a girl and a boy, about their love and the stars in their stomachs. She wanted to make Zuhra understand that the miracle could also happen to her.
So then, a boy entered a girl’s heart.
It was the seventies. Young people around the world dreamed of every possible future.
“I hastily made a promise to Howa Rosario. Not just any promise, Zuhra. Not something you swear lightheartedly.”
Maryam promised her best friend that she would marry the son of the seamstress Bushra in her place. He was her nightmare, the seamstress’s son. Poor Howa didn’t sleep at night. She was no longer herself when she thought about that man and the impending marriage. As a little girl, Maryam didn’t understand her friend’s fear, but as an adult she thought no one should force a woman to do what she didn’t wish to do.
“If you don’t like it, tell him. Period. No one is forcing you.”
Howa, though, had already demonstrated that sometimes a woman’s will didn’t have any authority when placed in a dangerous situation. Her stepfather had taken her virginity, her nose, and the best years of her life in one go. Who could assure her now that it wouldn’t happen again? Howa didn’t trust people anymore. She learned at her own expense that a woman’s life is always hanging by a thread. This thread could snap at any moment.
Maryam didn’t quite understand her friend’s resistance to the marriage. She didn’t know about the stepfather, nor how devastating violence could be, not yet at least. She only knew that all women, to her knowledge, enjoyed getting married. The thought of being a queen for a day inspired girls’ fantasies. Being well dressed, revered, pampered. They dreamed of long processions of women ushering the bride-queen to her throne at the wedding, incense and oils and a huge reception, hip bumps that told the bride the secrets of the first night. The thing everyone talked about was the ceremony; the ones getting married hardly mattered. The important thing was having a lovely wedding. That’s how people thought of it everywhere.