An Unnecessary Woman (8 page)

Apollo, ever the alchemist, still sails his chariot in the skies of Beirut, wielding a philosopher’s stone. Into gold I transmute the very air.

You must change your life.

The surprising sound of Marie-Thérèse’s strapless sandals floats through the window—surprising since my downstairs neighbor hasn’t made the trek upstairs in a long while. After she passes the window, I lean over to observe. She doesn’t seem to be dragging her shadow and isn’t wearing a mourning dress. It takes me a moment to remember that this is the day after the one-year anniversary of her husband’s death. As my heels return to the floor, I realize my neck has stiffened.

Fadia’s voice descends from above. “Well done, my love, well done. I’m proud of you.” The voice sounds invigorated, as if its owner has been dunked in an Italian fountain of joy.

The coffee klatsch is reuniting this morning. Good for them.

The three witches have been having syrupy coffee together every morning for almost thirty years. On the third-floor landing, in front of Joumana’s apartment, my neighbors gather around the round brass tray, smoking, gossiping, and getting ready for the day. Marie-Thérèse hasn’t sat on her stool at all in the last year—a bit too much mourning, if you ask me, but understandable. That she’s making the trek upstairs is a grand occasion.

“You light up the day,” Joumana calls down. Her voice rings out along the stairwell and drops right into my kitchen.

It’s a glorious, gilded Levantine morning.

The acoustics in the building are such that in my kitchen I hear every word spoken on the landing. Every morning, I hover intimately among my neighbors. I hear the clink of cups on their saucers, the clank of saucers on the brass tray, the pouring of the coffee, their sacred ritual—“irrigating the Garden,” Joumana calls it. I hear them chatter and gossip: Have you heard this? Can you believe that? They curse enemies and laud friends. I hear every sigh and giggle. I listen to them make plans, compare notes, exchange recipes, and exhibit every newly purchased inessential.

Years of conversation.

So many mornings: Fadia unleashing her frightening trademark laugh, a crackling falsetto exhalation that makes her elongated throat swell and undulate like a baker’s bellows, a wild and epidemically infectious laugh, and she’s prodigal with it. Joumana’s husband putting his head out the door; he good-mornings the women, jokes with them, and shouts down to Mr. Hayek, Marie-Thérèse’s husband and tormentor, in the apartment below mine to make sure he’s ready for their walk to the American University, where they both teach. Joumana teaches at the university as well, but she drives her car and never rushes her coffee. She pokes fun at the men because most days they walk in a dawdling mosey and she picks them up along the way. “They want exercise,” she says, “but not perspiration.”

Poor Mr. Hayek no longer makes that walk.

I pick a fragrant mandarin out of the bowl, poke a hole in its bottom with my finger, and begin to peel. I pour myself a second cup of tea.

“I’m so happy you’re out of mourning,” Fadia says. “A year is too much.”

I concur, of course. A year is too much if you loved your husband. It is much too much for Mr. Hayek.

“I understand why you chose to do it,” Fadia goes on. “I’m with you, my love. But I say six months—six months is more than enough. I loved my husband, everyone will vouch for that, but I couldn’t keep wearing black.”

“I didn’t mind the black,” Marie-Thérèse says. A loud car horn from the street obscures her next sentence.

“It’s better that you took it off,” Joumana says. “He’d have wanted you to. Your husband hated black.”

“And don’t wear those black nylons anymore,” Fadia says. No car horn, no backfiring truck or rumbling motorcycle, is able obscure her voice. “Although they do cover a lot.”

“Fadia!” Joumana admonishes.

“What? Don’t look at me like that. Fadia tells the truth. You know that. I think we could all use a little depilation. That’s all I’m saying. Am I lying? Tell me. No, I most certainly am not. We all need a good pedicure as well. Am I right? Am I right? This evening we’ll all go to the salon. Just the essentials, that’s all. Top to bottom. And you know, my love, unshaved legs are contagious. If we don’t do something about yours, who knows what will happen to mine? It’s even worse with unpedicured nails. Look, look.” Fadia’s voice hoots and shrieks. “The color is chipping as we speak. We need an emergency intervention.” Fadia, who always enjoys her own joke, laughs, the crackling falsetto.

“Girls’ night out,” Joumana says.

“We can be young again,” Fadia adds.

At sixty-two, Fadia is the eldest of the three. I, of course, am much further along. She isn’t aging gracefully; she fights every slight sign of decay with vigor and bitterness. Her makeup keeps getting thicker and her fashions more adolescent, a late desperate grasp at a fondly recalled youth. Even so, she looks younger and fresher than Marie-Thérèse, ten years her junior, who is aging without bitterness and with obvious resignation. Her elbows have collected as many furrows as a walnut, as many furrows as mine. She’s become a paltry imitation of what she once was. Her eyes settled into incuriosity a long time ago.

Marie-Thérèse has an inscrutable face, a life-is-but-a-dream look giving the impression that she wishes not to be disturbed by disturbing realities—a mask, really, for the impression is not true, the facade doesn’t match the house it conceals. For some reason she reminds me of the girl Fernando Pessoa tried to befriend, the single romantic liaison in his life. I can’t tell you why. I don’t know what that girl looked like. I’m not sure anybody does. I can’t even remember her name—Blanca, Maria, Francesca? My memory wishes to frustrate me this morning. The girl worked in the same import-export office as my poet, and he considered asking her out, or whatever hopeful twosomes did back in 1929 Lisbon.

I must say, I imagine that Marie-Thérèse looks like that girl as she aged, not as she was when the genius considered her.

Of course, Pessoa didn’t go out with that girl, didn’t do whatever they did back in 1929 Lisbon. Her name was Ophelia Queiroz. I am growing senile. Forgetting an Ophelia? The liaison’s brevity was due to the malicious interference of none other than Álvaro de Campos, Pessoa’s own creation, one of the seventy-two literary identities he used, the bisexual dandy who loathed Ophelia and believed her to be a distraction to Pessoa’s literary ambition. He wrote the poor girl and told her to flush any ideas she had about a relationship with Fernando down the toilet.

There is no evidence, at least none that I know of, that Ophelia had any idea who Fernando was, let alone that he spent his time inventing literary personas that wrote some of the great masterpieces of the twentieth century. She worked in the same clerical office, but I can’t imagine that they ever exchanged words. I can’t imagine him exchanging words with anybody.

Fernando died in relative obscurity, a virgin and a recluse.

I thought I’d be reading a new book today, but it doesn’t feel right, or I don’t feel like it. Some days are not new-book days.

After reading Sebald yesterday, I realized that translating
Austerlitz
was an easier project than
The Emigrants
, possibly because the latter laid the bitumen, smoothed the ride, for
Austerlitz
. A troublesome issue arises in translating Sebald into Arabic. His style, drawn-out and elongated sentences that wrap around the page and their reader, seems at first glance to be an ideal fit for Arabic, where use of punctuation is less formal. (Translating Saramago’s
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
was a relative breeze.) However, Sebald’s ubiquitous insertion of Jacques Austerlitz’s tongue into the unnamed narrator’s first-person narrative was difficult to convey precisely, since Arabic, like Spanish, drops pronouns more often than English or German. Sebald’s
I
spoke for at least two people.

The above problem has invaded my thoughts like algae this morning. I’ll reread my translation of
The Emigrants,
which I haven’t looked at in years. I must examine how I solved the problem then. But first I must bring it forth out of storage.

I don’t wait to finish my tea before searching for a flashlight—from the dark I come and into the dark I return. I have two flashlights, but can’t find either. Both are in the kitchen, I’m certain of that. I count to ten before searching once more, repeating every step in case I missed something the first go-around, returning to where I’ve been before. In vain. I down my tea, place the cup in the sink, and wax two candles onto the saucer. The rim of the saucer’s depression is lightly discolored—a dusting of rust and red and brown, remnants of teas gone by that did not wish to be washed away, refused to be forgotten, the age rings of a small plate. The maid’s room, barely larger than the boxes stored in it, is in the back of the kitchen behind the maid’s bathroom. I live in an ambitious building: all four apartments have identical layouts, with midget maid’s quarters, yet no resident has ever had a live-in maid that I know of. The room has no light; its ceiling bulb expired years ago. I am tall, but I’m uncomfortable with heights. I depend on a handyman to change high lightbulbs, hence the need for a flashlight or candles.

I begin the march toward the room, saucer and candles in hand, a breath of smoke and sulfur in my nostrils.

Crates fill the maid’s bathroom. No need for candles in here. No shower, no bathtub, just a low metal spigot and a drain, toward which the tiled floor is slightly angled. A street-facing lofty window, a wedge of early northern light, illuminates the cartons of manuscripts. The toilet has three boxes stacked atop one another. These aren’t what I’m looking for; these are boxes from the last ten years, overflow from the maid’s room.

The windowless maid’s room devours light and messes up my circulation. It has been more than a few years since I’ve opened the door—since the room overflowed into the bathroom, I no longer enter as often. The room induces an irrational heart. Sometimes upon entering, my heart works so hard it reaches the point of seizing. Other times, it thumps so joyfully it approaches the point of bursting. On still other occasions, it slows to the beat of torpor and dies out. This morning the veins in my temples throb with a big, blooming, buzzing confusion.

“Irrational heart”—I love the phrase, read it in
Murphy
years ago, and it carved itself a prominent place in my memory. I could also have written that my heart behaved “like a rocket set off,” from Welty’s “Death of a Traveling Salesman.”

I’m unable to translate Beckett because he wrote in the two languages that I don’t allow myself to work from. Early on, I decided that since some Lebanese can read English or French, I wouldn’t translate writers who wrote in those languages; might be a somewhat arbitrary decision, but a necessary one I felt. Restricting choices is not always a bad thing. I have never translated a French writer, an English writer, or an American one. No Camus, no Duras, no Faulkner, no Welty, no Hemingway (thank the Lord), and not the young writers I admire, Junot Díaz (wonderfully macaronic language) or Aleksandar Hemon (macaronic in a single language). My self-imposed rules meant that I couldn’t translate some African writers, say J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, or Nuruddin Farah, since they wrote—write—in English. No Australians, not Patrick White, whom I adore, not David Malouf. I can’t translate Milan Kundera, the Czech, because he wrote and rewrote the French versions of his books, nor can I work on Ismail Kadare, because the English versions of his novels were translated from the French, not the original Albanian.

However, I’m fluent in only three languages: Arabic, English, and French. So I invented my own special system: to achieve the most accurate representation of a work, I use a French and an English translation to create an Arabic one. It is a functional and well-planned system that allows me to enjoy what I do. I know this makes my translation one step further removed from the original, like Kadare’s English novels, but it is the method I continue to use. Those are the rules I chose. I became a servant, albeit voluntarily, of a discipline, a specific ritual. I am my system, and my system is me.

I wouldn’t translate Beckett’s
Murphy
even if it were written in another language, say Serbo-Croatian, because I dislike the novel. I’ve read
Waiting for Godot
three times and I still can’t tell you what it is about. If, as some critics claim, it is about being bored while waiting for God to return, then it’s even duller than I thought.

Crates, crates, boxes, and crates. The translated manuscripts have the two books, French and English, affixed to the side of the box for identification. Tolstoy, Gogol, and Hamsun; Calvino, Borges, Schulz, Nádas, Nooteboom; Kiš, Karasu, and Kafka; books of memory, disquiet, but not of laughter and forgetting. Years of books, books of years. A waste of time, a waste of a life.

Sebald’s box lies atop Nooteboom’s, under three other translations. I place the saucer of candles on a pile. I take the top boxes down, making sure they don’t fall on me. Sebald is weighty, as if it added heft during its perfectly sedentary lifestyle all these years. I can barely carry it, so the saucer is out of the question. I blow out the candles, throwing the maid’s room into darkness, just the smell of smoke and must and dust.