I Sweep the Sun Off Rooftops (2 page)

But I hesitated, not knowing where to start. Should I tell them that I had been content like any wife, firmly convinced
that life was marriage, children, running a house, sex from time to time, and secretly retiring inside myself when I wanted to question my feelings, or a certain melody made me happy or sad? I had begun to snatch some time to draw and paint, and eventually another man had come into my life. He used to watch me regularly as I sat facing the sea, trying to transfer the color of it onto the paper in front of me, and would pick up everything I left behind me, even raking up the colored chalk dust with his fingernails, seeing this scavenging as hugely important. I could feel that my life had changed, and everything around me began to have some meaning: the temperature of the seawater lapping around my feet; his liking for the misshapen nail on my little toe; the glass of fruit juice in his hand; silence interspersed with talk, sleep with anxiety. The time came when he could pass his hand over my face without touching it, and I would feel a great warmth suffusing me and my heart beating faster, and when I stopped being able to force myself to leave these sensations behind as I reluctantly entered the other world which was in full swing at home. Although all aspects of this world—from the salt cellar and pepper pot to the place of my burial when my time was up—ran through everything I did, everything except breathing freely from the heart, I decided to loose the threads from the cocoon of marriage one by one, taking great care to ensure that none snapped or changed color. What I really wanted was for my
husband to discover that he had no choice but to leave me.

I began by handing him the soap, pretending to forget that this is said to be a sign of an imminent parting. I kissed his eyes while he slept, disregarding the song that says, “Don’t kiss me on my eyes, or tomorrow we’ll be separated”; I took care that the toes of his shoes were always pointing toward the front door. Nevertheless, my husband continued to live his life as normal both at home and at work, so I had no choice but to make him revolted by me. Without much effort I turned myself into a human dustbin: I drank milk as if it were water, although I was allergic to it. I encouraged my guts to swell up with it, and with the cabbage, cauliflower and pulses that I also ate in large quantities. I swallowed garlic cloves as if they were pieces of chocolate, crunched onions as if they were, sweet-smelling carrots, and then went to bed without brushing my teeth. While I was waiting for my husband to join me, I belched incessantly, releasing the pent-up gases whose odor spread through the surrounding air.

However, I always found my husband at my side when I woke up in the morning. He stayed, despite my acts of rebellion and constant questioning of my life with him. Why did nature not do its job and make him disappear, or rescue me from the pit I was in and cast me out into the world?
When nothing changed, and after periods of thought that were agitated, calm, logical and reckless by turns, I decided upon madness.

But I did not disclose all this to them now; I found myself confessing to them in a low voice, articulating very clearly, that I was not mad, but afraid and ashamed because I had fallen in love with another man and wanted a divorce so that I could marry him. I asked them to forgive me for pretending to be mad because my husband’s good-heartedness and generous nature had stopped me from telling the truth, which was that I had never loved him all the time I lived with him and had feared that the knowledge of this might fester inside him, a wound refusing to heal. My conscience had eaten away at me on account of my unfaithfulness to him, and I had believed that my contrived madness would prompt him to remove me from his life without any qualms—indeed, he would welcome the prospect. I added that I was determined to ask for a divorce but wanted nothing from them, not even the Beirut apartment, which was in my name. As I said this, I realized that my mother-in-law was the one I feared most. Then I forced myself to look up and confront them. All the time I was giving an honest account of myself I had been staring at the floor. Now I fixed my eyes on their faces to prove to them how strong and brave I was, whatever their reactions might be. I waited for
one of them to respond, expecting reproaches, physical blows, retribution of some kind, convincing myself that I would escape from them, regardless of the outcome.

Then his mother was clasping my hand, twisting her mouth into a grimace of pity and murmuring, “She’s crazy, poor thing. Nothing can be done for her.”

My husband collapsed, burying his face in his hands and repeating sadly, “Poor thing, she’s so young. I swear to God, I’ll take her anywhere in the world to find a cure for her.”

Even though
the occasion was so important to me, I tried to avoid it. I woke up in the night, boiling hot, certain that I had a temperature. I wanted desperately to be ill enough to have to stay in bed, to shiver and have aching joints and a headache so bad that I could think of nothing else but how to relieve the pain. But my daughter’s call from the States meant I didn’t have the opportunity to play the sick ostrich. My conversation with her forced me out of bed, and I dragged myself across the room and pulled a
dress out from the bottom of the wardrobe, where winter and summer clothes lay jumbled together with shoes, handbags and jewelry.

I chose a dress my husband used to like on me, and thought how my daughter’s absence had made it easier for me to live in this mess. I blessed it as I saw the empty hangers and thought of the creeping chaos in various parts of the house.

I wanted to be able to wake up happy after good dreams or panic-stricken after nightmares with no one watching me and telling me to cheer up all the time. It was too easy for people to dismiss the angry or the vulnerable with phrases like “Take it easy” or “You’ll have forgotten about it before long,” I thought, as I pulled the dress on. It was many months since I had worn it and I felt throttled by it; I tore it off as if I were detaching a leech from my skin, dropped it on the floor and burst into tears. Then I picked it up and put it back on, forcing myself to be calm: I was trying to keep my thoughts under control but I couldn’t help imagining my husband looking out on the gathering from a house or a car. The idea made me desperate, but unexpectedly my thoughts took a more positive turn, and I felt the urge to take some trouble over my appearance so that I wouldn’t have to listen to my family saying, “What have you been doing to yourself?” or “If only she’d do something about herself. It’s hard to believe we raised her.”

Today the street where my mother used to live was going to be named after her. She had been one of the leading figures on the stage, famous for her acting and her extraordinary personality, even though she had been married and divorced four times and her fifth husband was roughly my age. Her talent and the fact that she was serious about her work had saved her from attacks on her private life. I had been told that a representative of the government would be there and someone from the ministry of arts. I wondered how they were going to fix the nameplate on the wall. Life was unfair. They appreciated creative artists either when they had one foot in the grave or after they were dead. My mother had not taken it in when she had been given an award for her acting, even though she had still been alive as far as those around her were concerned. In her own mind, she had as good as died when she learned she had an incurable illness. I remember holding her hand and thinking it felt like a bunch of bones. She had begged me not to let anyone come into the room.

Everything about her had changed, even her facial features, to the extent that she no longer recognized herself in the mirror. When I put the award down beside her, I thought she was snoring or giggling until she murmured, “I’d gladly exchange it for one hour without pain.” Then I realized she had been crying.

I stood in the street, enjoying the company of theatrical
Friends of my mother whom I had known since childhood, and was glad that I hadn’t managed to be ill, until various members of my family started to appear. Among them were my mother’s brothers, who had broken off relations with her for many years following her decision to go on the stage, and then made it up with her when she became famous. There they were, sipping their fruit juice proudly and reveling in their status. They tried to approach me and I avoided their eyes, afraid that they would invite me back to their homes after the ceremony.

I had no desire to hear them telling me how uneasy they were at the kind of life I was living. I was among friends, people my mother had been on stage with and all her ex-husbands; the traffic in the surrounding streets and curious children, who wanted to drink the juice but had no idea what was going on, provided a protective blanket of sound. But I felt the sting of their sidelong glances, and my conversation faltered as I wondered whether to pretend to look overwhelmed by the event or cheerful and relaxed, and wavered uneasily between the two. Although the idea horrified me, I couldn’t help scanning the mostly familiar faces, then raising my eyes to the windows and balconies searching for my husband. He was out of my mind only briefly when the audience burst into enthusiastic applause.

The government representative fixed the sign to the wall. “Amina Salim Street,” it said. A woman standing be
side Tante Samia let out a trill of joy and tears came into my eyes. Tante Samia herself clapped her hands as vigorously as a young woman. The government deputy climbed down off the chair he had been standing on with some difficulty, almost losing his balance, and Tante Samia rushed to take advantage of his discomfiture, seizing his hand and then whipping off her spectacles to show him her eyes. I heard snatches of what she was saying to him: “… cataract … operation … times are difficult … the country ought to remember its old artists.”

They were certainly old. All those who were able to travel had attended the ceremony. Public transportation was bad enough for the healthy, so what must it be like for the old and sick and poor? They were happy to be there, although some of them were unable to express it because they were ill or wretched or caught up in remembering the past and their youth. They looked like a troupe of wandering players without a stage or an audience or even the price of a ticket to go from one place to the next. They weren’t the same as the rest of the guests: their faces looked different and they wore strange clothes that, although they were old and shabby, still had an air of nobility and a touch of the fantastic about them. Perhaps they were clothes they had worn on stage, Amm Badir’s in particular: he wore a baggy white suit, spotted with rust, and a straw hat without a brim.

When darkness had fallen and the guests were leaving. Tante Samia put her arm around me and said. “Come on! Let’s go to your place. We must tell Amina what’s been happening. It’ll cheer her up a bit.”

I turned to look at her in alarm. Had she too begun to mix up people and events? Recently I had grown used to hearing the strangest and most wretched talk from friends of my mother’s whom I met by chance. They would take my hand and ask me if Amina was getting better, even though they had been at her funeral, or when I introduced myself to them they wouldn’t know who my mother was. Tante Samia refused to let go of me, and in the end I found myself welcoming her persistence because members of my family were pressing me to be with them that evening and I was able to assure them that I had to stay with her. They looked at me reproachfully, unable to believe that I preferred her company to theirs, and she must have seemed a pathetic creature to them: she wore a fox fur draped around her shoulders, whose face and ears were eaten away, and whose hairs were molting all over her clothes. One had come to rest on her lower lip, and most of her front teeth were missing. Then their accusing eyes shifted to Tante Samia’s friend, Nazik, who was having difficulty staying upright, much less walking, in her platform shoes.

I didn’t know how to reply to Tante Samia when she kept saying how happy she was that she would be able to
take the news to Amina. To change the subject I lied and told her I was thinking of writing a biography of my mother. What did she think of the idea?

“You’re a dutiful daughter. I’ll do what I can to help. I’ve got lots of memories, cuttings, photos.”

I felt ashamed of myself for doubting her sanity, or thinking she might be mixing my mother up with my daughter, who was also called Amina.

“We can tell her you’re going to write a book about her too,” she added.

Again I decided she must have lost her mind, and felt suddenly annoyed and tired. I wished I could escape from them without causing offense, and began complaining of my aches and pains.

“We’ll give you a massage,” she exclaimed tenderly, “and make you some mutton broth to help you sleep.”

I felt sorry for them, but I was secretly amused at the thought of their old hands massaging me. As we walked along I told her that I felt much better, and that it must have been all the standing about. I remembered what a mess I had left the flat in as I unlocked the door, but reassured myself with the thought that Samia’s mind was confused and her sight poor, and I didn’t know Nazik.