An Unnecessary Woman (20 page)

One of the things I have in common with the incredible Faulkner is that he didn’t like having his reading interrupted. He was dismissed from his job as a post office clerk at a university (a position his father obtained for him) because professors complained that the only way they could get their letters was by rummaging through the garbage cans, where unopened mailbags all too often ended up. He is said to have told his father that he wasn’t prepared to keep getting up to wait on customers at the window and to be beholden to “any son-of-a-bitch who had two cents to buy a stamp.”

I didn’t like having my reading interrupted when I worked either, but I was beholden to every son of a bitch and his mother who walked into the bookstore, whether or not they had two cents to buy a book. I couldn’t afford any complaints. Most days I had few customers, and I spent my time sitting behind my desk reading. I was conscientious. I did earn my measly salary.

I fear I’m digressing again.

I try to get back to my reading, but my mind can’t seem to concentrate. I lay
Microcosms
aside. I must listen to something, music to clear the cobwebs, rattle the ant farm. I turn on the record player. I own a CD player—I broke down and bought one eight years ago, only to discover that everyone had moved on to digital music players—but most of my music is still on old albums. I choose Bruckner’s Symphony no. 3 conducted by Günter Wand, which I haven’t heard in a long time, probably three years.

Here’s a charming tale about Bruckner that I love, though I believe it must be apocryphal. When he conducted the premiere of this same third symphony, the audience abhorred it. Personally, I can’t imagine why. Not only is it beautiful, but if it has a flaw, it may be that it’s a little melodramatic and kitschy, two attributes that audiences tend to love. But who can account for tastes? The audience booed violently and stormed out of the hall. I imagine the composer looking back in abject sorrow at the honeycomb of heads in the theater before exiting and locking himself in the conductor’s room, alone as he would always be. Forlorn and forsaken, Bruckner remained by himself until everyone had left the building, at which point he returned to the pit for a last farewell. He saw a young man still sitting in his seat, a young composer so overcome that he’d been unable to move a muscle since the symphony began, not a twitch. The young Mahler had been cemented in his seat for more than two hours, weeping.

I am not a young Mahler. Today, the music doesn’t move me, and I do not find it soothing.

Wave after wave of anxiety batters the sandy beaches of my nerves. Oh, that’s a bad metaphor if there ever was one. Just horrible.

Nothing is working. Nothing in my life is working.

Giants of literature, philosophy, and the arts have influenced my life, but what have I done with this life? I remain a speck in a tumultuous universe that has little concern for me. I am no more than dust, a mote—dust to dust. I am a blade of grass upon which the stormtrooper’s boot stomps.

I had dreams, and they were not about ending up a speck. I didn’t dream of becoming a star, but I thought I might have a small nonspeaking role in a grand epic, an epic with a touch of artistic credentials. I didn’t dream of becoming a giant—I wasn’t that delusional or arrogant—but I wanted to be more than a speck, maybe a midget.

I could have been a midget.

All our dreams of glory are but manure in the end.

I used to imagine that one day a writer would show up at my door, someone whose book I had translated, maybe the wonderful Danilo Kiš (
The Encyclopedia of the Dead
), before he died, of course. He the giant, me the speck with midget dreams, but he would come to thank me for caring about his work, or maybe Marguerite Yourcenar would knock on my door. I haven’t translated her, of course, because she wrote in French. And what French. In 1981 she was the first woman inducted into L’Académie française because of her impeccable language. She would appear to encourage me, to show solidarity, us against the world.
I, like you, isolated myself. You in this apartment in this lovely but bitter city of Beirut, I on an island off the coast of Maine. You’re a forsaken, penniless translator who’s able to remain in your home by the grace of your landlord, Fadia, while I am an incredible writer whose girlfriend, heir to the Frick fortune, owns the entire island. I am respected by the world while you’re mocked by it. Yet we have much in common.

I had dreams. I would invite Danilo into my home.
Please, come in. Share a cup of tea. Smoke a cigarette.
He’s always smoking in his photos. Maybe I’d offer him a comb for his eternally unruly hair.

But my dreams would shatter against my failures, if not my shabby furniture first.
Look around. Sit, Danilo, sit. I’m sure you can appreciate a navy chenille armchair with frayed fringes and tattered tassels. Yes, that’s the shape of my derrière sculpted into the foam. Yes, that minisofa in the corner is real pleather, haha. A love seat, they call it. Marguerite and I often plop down on it together. Do sit and tell me about your work. Do you write in the morning?

I’m such an idiot.

I used to dream that one day I’d have friends over for dinner and we’d spend the entire evening in sparkling conversation about literature and art. Laughing and cavorting and making merry, Wildean wit and sassy, delightful repartee parried back and forth across the room. My salon would be the envy of the world, if only the world knew about it.

In one of his poems, Brodsky suggested that “dreams spurn a skull that has been perforated.” A spectacularly thick drill bit has punctured mine.

This morning will pass—at a sad and sluggish pace, but it will pass. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace.

There’s no urgency in Marie-Thérèse’s cat call, which is growing louder but carries no trace of concern. Her cat has yet to return but she has made a habit of this. She disappears after she’s fed dinner, to who knows where, and returns sometime after the sun rises, but that’s an approximate schedule. She’s a Mediterranean cat, after all. I think Marie-Thérèse loves her cats, particularly the wayward Maysoura, more than she loves her children, and definitely more than she loved her departed husband.

My mother had an unnatural fondness for cats as well, as I may have mentioned. Mind you, she had little tolerance for pampered pets. Once, during a dutiful visit to a distant family member when I was nine or ten, a fluffy cat sauntered into the living room. My mother pointed at it, scowling in disgust, and the hostess, my mother’s second cousin, stood up in apologetic horror and scooted the cat out of the room. My mother would have hated Maysoura, so coddled and pretty. She cared only for the homeless and orphaned cats of the neighborhood.

I understand her obsession, and I did even as a child. Granted, I may have felt some envy, a sense that the cats had waylaid any maternal instinct and caretaking that should have gone to her daughter, but I’m writing about a time before animal care or control ever descended upon the Beiruti conscience. Feral cats were hounded, hunted, even tortured if caught by young boys. I witnessed a couple of atrocities as a child. If my mother, champion of the feral that she was, saw a boy trying to trap a cat, or the butcher kicking one that sniffed too close, she became a short bundle of wrathful frenzy, berating the heartlessness of the offender.

She chopped chicken into small pieces, fried them in salted lamb fat, and folded them in sheets of wax paper. As discreetly as she could, since she didn’t wish to be known as the crazy lady—too late, one might think—she unwrapped these feasts on walls and Dumpsters, high enough so dogs couldn’t reach them.

The aroma of fried lamb fat was a siren call for any feline within a two-street radius. That aroma, muted and less pungent, followed my mother even when food wasn’t upon her person, a lingering faint smell that became hers. Her charges knew she was coming long before they could see her.

The mangier the cat, the bigger her portion. I remember one cat that was doing so poorly her fur was nothing more than discontiguous splotches of hair. My mother fed her every day until she transformed into a calico queen with a coat of unearthly sheen. The cat allowed me to pet her. My mother didn’t try to touch her. Not one cat ever became my mother’s companion. She never had one of her own.

When I asked my mother how she knew the queen was a female, she explained that males could be no more than two colors. Females had no such limitation.

During the winter of 1986, Beirut was passing through one of its many phases of shedding its humanity and its humans. A war raged—sects killing one another, militias strangling the population—and my mother was worried about a cat. I was imprisoned in my apartment for seventeen straight days. On a clear day, upon the first hint of a cease-fire, I left my hideout to forage for food and dropped in to check on her. She was unwilling to discuss anything but what had happened to this infernal feline. The fighting and shooting had forced the animal into a deserted apartment in the building next to my half brother the eldest’s. My mother heard the mournful meowing night and day. She risked her life by taking food across the street, snipers be damned, to seduce the cat into returning with her to her building, where she could feed her regularly. As soon as my mother broke into the empty flat, the cat went mute. My mother searched the entire place and found the cat stuck atop a high dark walnut armoire, with barely enough space under the ceiling to crouch in. My mother pleaded and cajoled and the cat hissed and retreated. The ignorant cat wouldn’t accept help, my mother said. She dragged a chair across the room and climbed on it, which drove the cat even more insane. My mother tried every trick she knew and a couple she made up.

“I even turned my face away from her,” my mother said, “and put my hands on the ledge of the ugly armoire so she could use my arms to climb down and run away. Nothing worked. The stupid, stupid cat refused to be rescued. She couldn’t understand that I was giving her an out. I was forced to leave the food on top of the armoire and go home.”

For a few days, whenever there was a brief silence between bullets, missiles, and mortar shells, my mother heard the cat’s calls, which went on and on, on and on, until they finally stopped altogether. When the break in the fighting arrived at last, right before I made my appearance to inquire about her, she rushed across the street and found the apartment ransacked—she’d assisted the militia boys who looted it by destroying the lock, advertising that the place was uninhabited—with furniture topsy-turvy and no cat.

The coffee klatsch has come to order. I must crane my head out the door and thank Fadia for last night’s dinner before she climbs the stairs back to her apartment, before the three weird sisters end their matins. I must. I try to stand but I sway, beset by a vertiginous nausea.

Have you figured out yet that I dislike being around people? Can it be that I haven’t mentioned it earlier?

Some believe that we are created in God’s image. I don’t. I am not religious by any means, though I’m not an atheist. I may not believe in the existence of God with a capital
G
, but I believe in gods. Like Ricardo Reis, aka Fernando Pessoa, I am a pantheist. I follow the lesser gospel, now deemed apocryphal. I worship—well, I worshipped, past tense, for this morning I don’t have the stomach to believe in anything—at the shrines of my writers.

I am in large measure a Pessoan.

“Isolation has carved me in its image and likeness.” Pessoa said that. He also wrote: “Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me.”

In
A Short History of Decay
, Cioran wrote: “life in common thereby becomes intolerable, and life with oneself still more so.”

The presence of another person—of any person whatsoever—makes me feel awkward, as if I’m no longer me. It wasn’t always that way. Not that I was a social butterfly flitting from acquaintance to delightful acquaintance, but I didn’t always have such a high level of discomfort around people. I used to be able to spend time with my friend and companion, Hannah, quite comfortably; my customers didn’t bother me at all. I talked to salesclerks in stores. I got by. As I aged, as life isolated me more and more, I found myself discomfited by others. “Isolation has carved me in its image and likeness.”

Merely thinking that I have to talk to Fadia, however briefly, irritates me, makes me feel a bit edgy, maybe even nervous. I can and do overcome those feelings, of course. I’m not completely helpless. I am a functioning human being. Mostly.

Just so you don’t make too much fun of me, the
mostly
above refers to
functioning
, not to
human being
.

The isolationists Fernando Pessoa and Bruno Schulz had worse problems with people, much worse than mine. Schulz was terrified in large groups, discombobulated around people he didn’t know, childishly timid. He behaved like a two-year-old separated from his mother. He had a sad habit of worrying the edge of his jacket, stroking the fabric. Compared to them, I’m an extrovert.

I think it’s safe to say that contact with other people has never been my strong suit, but lately, in the last eight or nine years, or ten, it has produced a mild anguish that’s hard to define. These days the presence of other people derails my mind. I can’t seem to think clearly, or behave naturally, or just be. These days I avoid people, and they in turn avoid me.