I Sweep the Sun Off Rooftops (9 page)

Souad had therefore taken bets with the men that in the
end Ingrid would become one of them, just as she was in the process of doing now in the room next door.

Nobody apart from Souad believed, or even hoped, that this miracle would come to pass except Mahyoub, and that was because he had been head over heels in love with Ingrid since the moment he first saw her.

Souad finished making the drinks and decided that she would not remind Ingrid of the bet until she had been married for a while, or perhaps she never would. But she couldn’t forget the occasion when she had first told Ingrid’s fortune in her coffee grounds: “You’ll marry one of us and forget your ideas and your stories.”

Ingrid had shaken her head, laughing: “Never. I shall never marry and that’s definite.”

And Souad had taken Ingrid’s hand and said, “You will get married, and you’ll marry a man from this village. I’ll bet my life on it.”

The woman
whom I was used to fleeing with from place to place was lying looking up at me, unable to believe what was happening to me. For the first time since we had met several years before, we knew that our lovemaking would not be abruptly halted, and yet she could feel me freezing on top of her.

“Did you hear something?”

Our ears would have to accustom themselves to disregarding what they heard, for together we had become over
sensitive to any noise, and I don’t mean my wife causing a commotion, or someone shouting outside, or a car stopping suddenly, or even laughter floating through an open window: we jumped if the breeze lifted the light curtain, or if either of us took an unexpected breath.

Once we had become tranquil again we would retrieve the feeling of heat that we had left hanging in the air and down around the lower parts of our bodies and become reabsorbed in it, oblivious to everything. Because of the atmosphere of panic and guilt, our bodies were like empty rooms, waiting to be filled quickly, while our minds rushed to keep pace with this thirst, amazed at the strange and wonderful scenes that came crowding into them. We used to exchange these images afterward when our hearts were still beating and our loins throbbing, as they take longer to subside and become ordinary bits of the body again, like a hand or a lock of hair. The woman recounted that she had seen herself sliding over a waterfall and I said I had been a juggler in a circus. Then she whispered that she had seen the branches of a banana tree entering her, and I told her that I had been opening a basket and shutting it again, opening it and shutting it.

I still don’t know whether we saw these images because we were being pursued by my wife, nor have I ever understood how she always guessed where we were. Every time
she Forgave me once again, she would say without affectation, in a voice full of pain, “My misery led me to you.”

I would look at her. trying to decide whether she was a prophet or a devil. I couldn’t believe that misery never lost its way around the winding roads, disappeared into the valleys, or got caught on a cactus plant. When she tracked me down, she cursed, shouted, wept, mewed like a cat, howled like a dog, reinforcing this barrage of sounds with kicks to hotel room doors, my car, the woman’s car, hired cars. She had developed a huge voice with thick roots reaching deep inside her, and she seemed to use it to pick up a place and shake it, and shake the bed we were lying on. I would clench my fists in rage, resolved not to mend my ways, but to create a hideaway that nobody would be able to find. Nevertheless, charged up with anger and uncertainty, I would mount the woman as if she were a mare I had long been deprived of. She therefore became absolutely convinced that my desire for her was the result of a game being played by me and my wife, and that she had fallen into our trap; I left signs and markers for my wife on purpose—if not, how could I explain my short bursts of wild excitement after she had caught us, at a time when her desire had temporarily abandoned her? She tried to persuade me of the truth of her theory without success. Recalling conversations with my wife, I was sure that I had not left any signs, other
than telling her that I had an inexplicable passion for this woman’s body that didn’t interfere with my love for her. I swore to my wife that I had never kissed the woman’s hand, nor held her gently in my arms, or passed my finger over her lips, and my conversations with her were limited to details about the color of flesh, pores, pubic hair, or expressions of purely physical ecstasy. My wife covered her ears at my declaration of love. She pulled her hair and slapped me and shook me, as if she hoped my heart would jump out into her hand.

After that she had cosmetic surgery to make her breasts the shape of brandy glasses. She did exercises religiously until her stomach was flat. She wore an endless variety of nightdresses which were made of such fine silk that they were almost illusory. She tried to establish a relationship with my genitals that had nothing to do with me. But they always became cerebral and refused to let her play with them, leaving the talking to me, so that I had to assure her as kindly as I could, and lightheartedly, to dispel her feelings of loneliness, that she had become a part of me.

Now the woman was trying to regain my interest, moving in a way that was unfamiliar to me, but which exuded desire, while I wondered why I had come here when we no longer had to hide. Why was the square where the hotel was situated called Place de la Catastrophe and what exactly
was the disaster that had given it its name? It really didn’t go with the little houses there, in their tangle of tree branches and brightly colored climbing plants, or the washing spread out to dry on the balconies and the narrow bridge that linked the houses together.

I closed my eyes, urging myself to reach the end of the bridge, to remember what happened when I was inside her. But I couldn’t go any farther.

I felt as if there was somebody behind me, coming between me and her, distancing me from her hands clinging to my back. I looked around and the room was peaceful. I told myself I was imagining things and that this was the first time after …

But I heard a faint kicking, a feeble mewing. Anxiously, I turned around again, but when I saw that the urn on the dressing table was still I relaxed, determined to give my full attention to the woman, whose legs and arms continued to be wrapped tightly around me. However, the kicking grew stronger, the mewing louder and my car horn gave a shrill blast. I jumped to my feet in a panic. This must all be coming from the urn, my wife’s new home. She had insisted that she wanted to be cremated, not buried, when she died, and had begged me never to leave her alone. I had promised at the time, placating her, weeping at the pain which was eating away at her, that I would never leave her for a moment
and would take her with me wherever I went. I saw the urn kick the table and was wary of the feet inside it. I heard the mewing and shrieking and was convinced the voice had put down its roots there, and when I involuntarily hid my face in my hands I was certain her eyes were watching too.

Living in an oil company
compound in the middle of the desert, we needed to see a color that was different from the color of the sand, to touch something other than the layer of dust on everything, to enjoy a sound that wasn’t the wind, the air conditioner or the chatter of other children. One day our servant, Bus, brought us the thing we longed for without knowing it, or at least he brought it to my little brother. Although I was glad myself, I wondered if Bus’s plan was to find another way of being close to my
brother, and I began to feel suspicious. His hands were all over him. touching his shoulders, his neck, his face and playing with his hair, and I thought of the Indian goddess with many hands. He wanted me to think he was being fatherly when he adjusted the towel around my brother’s waist, but watching him, I decided that he was keen to see him in his bathing trunks. He insisted on having my brother on his lap when he was showing him how to steer a bike or car. Sometimes he would tell him he had a present for him in the pocket of his apron and I would watch my little brother’s fingers reaching into the pocket in search of a bar of chocolate or a toy car.

I knew boys had to be careful as well as girls. The boys at school exchanged stories about “perversions” and repeated their parents’ warnings to watch out for strangers, but to be especially on their guard against the male servants who almost lived in the houses where they worked. Although I looked up what
perversion
meant in the dictionary, my mind registered the word differently after I had seen photos of two men embracing in a magazine my mother received by post at the beginning of every month. This magazine, which was as thick as a book, rarely contained pictures and when it did they were usually vague black-and-white drawings that didn’t mean a thing to me. I revealed my misgivings about Bus to my brother, who was five years younger than me, and fetched my mother’s magazine to help
him understand. As I showed him the photos, I felt he wasn’t taking it in, and sure enough he said, “But Bus doesn’t look like either of those men.”

Bus was about my height, and very skinny, and if it hadn’t been for his wrinkled forehead and gold teeth, he would have looked younger than his years; the two men embracing, on the other hand, were handsome and as tall as bamboo plants, passionately intertwined. They were both dressed in formal suits and ties, like two presidents.

“They must be crying,” said my brother. “Maybe one of them’s mother died, or his dog.”

I sighed in exasperation and showed him another photo. Their faces were touching and they were looking into each other’s eyes with love and tenderness like a man and woman in a film.

“Do you see?” I egged him on, pointing at their faces. “Do you understand what I mean?”

But my brother’s eager answer fell on me like a cold shower. “Is it a doctor looking at someone’s eyes?”

I threw the magazine aside and pointed a warning finger at him, and told him that if Bus touched him on any part of his body, he would be in agony and might even die.

From that moment on my little brother went to great lengths to avoid Bus: he wouldn’t meet his eye and refused to stay alone in the same room as him, especially at night when our parents went to visit friends and Bus babysat for
us. My little brother clung to my side while we watched television and ate our supper and when I went to the toilet he came too. This annoyed me as I couldn’t go with him there even if he turned his face away and looked at the door.

It never occurred to me to reveal my doubts to my mother, even before Bus arrived with the thing that changed our lives. He cut the potatoes in the shape of pears, was an expert at making birthday cakes, helped me color in maps, drew faces like a professional artist, embroidered cherries on my blouse, and besides, I knew how much my mother depended on him. She hardly did a thing in the house, and sat looking at books all day. How then could I ever have complained about him once he had brought the rabbit?

It was a white rabbit like a ball of wool. He built it a hutch and we played with it after school every day and put it back in the hutch before we went to bed. It learned to bang against the door with its forelegs to make us open it. Being an intelligent rabbit, it knew that life was more interesting outside the cage than inside. We let it wander around the house and I followed it, picking up the black pearls it left behind so that my mother wouldn’t find them, and shooing it away from her plants. Once it was too quick for me and gobbled half a leaf. It became part of the family, until one evening Bus picked it up by the ears, despite my
brother’s protests, and said he’d never in all his life seen a rabbit grow so fast, and praised us for our efforts. It was true that we’d stolen extra rations of carrots and lettuce for it behind my mother’s back. To our astonishment Bus dropped the rabbit into a basket with a lid that he usually kept fixed to the back of his bike, saying that he wanted to mate it with another rabbit. My brother let out a shriek, not understanding what Bus meant, but Bus immediately pulled out another, smaller rabbit from the basket. My brother only hesitated a few moments before transferring his affection from the old, familiar rabbit to the new, little one.