Guapa Read online

  Copyright © 2016 Saleem Haddad

  Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 267 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Names: Haddad, Saleem, author.

  Title: Guapa / by Saleem Haddad.

  Description: New York : Other Press, [2016]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015039123 | ISBN 9781590517697 (softcover) | ISBN 978-1-59051-770-3 (e-book)

  Subjects: LCSH: Gay men—Arab counties—Fiction. | Interpersonal relations—Fiction. | Self-actualization (Psychology)—Fiction. | Arab countries Social conditions—21st century—Fiction. | GSAFD: Bildungsromans.

  Classification: LCC PR6108.A34 L37 2016 | DDC

  823/.92–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015039123

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  I. Castrating Donkeys

  II. Imperial Dreams

  III. The Wedding

  Acknowledgments

  Notes and Credits

  For Rosette Bathish (Teta) and my mother

  It is part of morality

  not to be at home

  in one’s home.

  —Theodor Adorno

  I. Castrating Donkeys

  The morning begins with shame. This is not new, but as memories of last night begin to sink in, the feeling takes on a terrifying resonance. I grimace, squirm, dig my fingers in my palms until the pain in my hands reflects how I feel. But there is no controlling what Teta saw, and her absence from my bedside means that she doesn’t intend, as she had promised, to file away last night’s mess in a deep corner of her mind.

  On any other morning my grandmother’s voice, hoarse from a million smoked cigarettes, would pierce my dreams: Yalla Rasa, yalla habibi! She would hover over me, her cigarette by my lips. I would inhale, feel the smoke travel to my lungs, jolting my insides awake.

  On any other morning Doris would be beside her, pulling up the shutters in my room in a quick and violent snap. Removing a bandage to ease the pain of sunlight. One final yalla, then Teta would pull the sheets away and toss them aside. She took particular joy in doing this on cold winter mornings, relishing the way my skin broke out in goose bumps as I leaped across the room to snatch the blanket.

  This is not how I wake up this morning. Getting up today involves battling demons more powerful than sloth. There is everything that has ever happened, and then there is this morning. I’ve crossed the red line with Teta.

  My mobile rings. I roll over in bed and pick it up.

  “Where the fuck are you?” Basma barks. “You should have been here twenty minutes ago. I’ve got to meet a South African journalist who wants to interview some female refugees and the office is empty.”

  I clear my throat and rub my eyes. “Basma, I’m sorry —”

  “Don’t be sorry, be at the office. And I suppose I’m your ride to the wedding tonight, yes?”

  The wedding. The wedding, the wedding, the wedding.

  “Yes?” Basma asks again.

  “I’m not feeling well,” I croak. “I don’t think I should go.”

  “I’ll pick you up at eight.”

  I put the phone down and reach for my cigarettes. The cigarette will stimulate my brain. Thoughts will begin moving. I light one and inhale. My throat is raw from last night’s pleading, and the smoke burns as it makes its way down.

  I thought you were doing drugs. It didn’t even cross my mind …

  I had woken up a few times already, but the air still felt heavy. I wasn’t ready to leave my dreams, so I plunged my face in the pillow and willed myself to sleep. After three or four or a thousand times I could not do it anymore. My eyes were shut but my brain was wide-awake. So here we are. I have no choice now but to face whatever the day may throw at me.

  I sit up. Doris has placed a cup of Nescafé on the floor beside the bed. I take a large gulp. The coffee is weak and cold but lubricates the smoke’s passage, leaving only the faint buzz of the nicotine and the silkiness of the tar on my tongue.

  Open the door. Open the door right now.

  What compelled her to look through that keyhole?

  Taymour. He always reminded me of a young Robert De Niro. Those honey-colored eyes, those thoughtful lips. I need to see him again, run my fingers across the soft hair on his forearms. I was so foolish to ignore the signs, to believe in a future that would never exist. Now it’s just me here, alone in bed. But I can’t part with him this way, on these terms. Last night can’t be the last we have together. I need to hold him, whisper in his ear that we can get past this. Can I not turn back the clock, turn that damn key in the lock to block the view?

  Against my better judgment I send him a text message: We need to talk about last night.

  Taymour. The banging. Teta’s screams. I can hear it all again. My stomach turns at the thought of his name. In the three years we’ve been together, this is the first time I cannot bear to think of him. I need to speak to him, to hear his voice, but his name brings back all the shame. I’m an animal, dirty and disgusting, madly hunting after my desires with no care for what is right and wrong.

  Repulsed, I jump out of bed and survey the bedroom. I had become careless, and now I’ve paid the price. I need to get rid of everything to do with him. I lift the mattress and grab my journal and toss it on the bed. I flick through the pages, tearing out the ones that mention his name. But his name runs through the sentences of every page, like a virus through the bloodstream. I rip out page after page until I am left with the last entry I wrote only a week ago. My eyes fall on the words written on the paper.

  He’s making a mistake. I just know it. He tells me I’m unreasonable, that I am expecting miracles. Maybe it’s me who is unrealistic, but I know he can change. Is it okay to force change on someone if it is for the better?

  I tear out the final page, crumple it in my hand, and continue the cleansing. Scattered around the room are old mix CDs he made for me, his handwriting scrawled on the silver discs in red and black marker pens: Taymour summer mix; CHILL OUT; GOOD music 4 Rasa (4 a change). I throw them all on top of the journal. Under my bed I find a postcard he had sent from Istanbul last year. The picture on the front is of a clear blue sky over the Bosphorus. He had sent it in a brown envelope so nobody would read the words he had written on the back:

  Final day. Bought some shoes from Asian side. Laces snapped as I tried shoes on and shopkeeper said, smiling, that I must be an angry man. Wanted to tell him there is a lot to be angry about, but then thought of you. How can I be angry when I have you? Outside it was raining hard. Looked out shop window and a seagull swooped in, snapped at a cat sitting by the door. Flew off with a tuft of fur. Writing this on ferry. Rain sliding down window, boats navigating choppy waters, an old man sits next to me reading a newspaper.

  I can’t get rid of this, of us. Can I? Maybe it’s best to just hide all this stuff for now, to not throw everything away just yet. I toss the postcard on the g
rowing pile on my bed. Scooping the pile of Taymour’s stuff in my hands, I reach for the top shelf in the closet and dump his things in an old shoe box hidden behind a stack of books. With her bad knee, Teta can’t climb on a chair to get to the top shelf, and even if she could, she won’t be able to move the books with one hand while supporting herself with the other.

  I put on an old T-shirt, some trousers, and some socks from the pile of clothes on the floor. When I’m ready, I open the door and step onto the ancient carpet in the hallway. Teta’s door is shut, and the house is still. I start walking down the hall, and when I’m certain no one is around, I turn back to the room, bend over, and peer through the keyhole. There’s a clear view of my bed in the middle of the room, like a crime scene. Above it, shards of sunlight pierce the cracks between the wooden slats of the shutters and shine against the dust particles dancing in the air. The white walls are ridden with mosquito carcasses.

  Teta could see everything from here. Last night she told me that after looking in, she tried to go back to sleep but tossed and turned for a while before getting up again and pounding on my door. But what exactly had she seen? Was it when we kissed, or while we were entangled in each other, or maybe afterward? Perhaps she had peered in as we lay naked in bed, forehead to forehead, whispering?

  No. I can’t think of this anymore.

  There’s a sound of water hitting porcelain. Doris is washing dishes. She looks up when I walk in. She’s wearing an old T-shirt of mine, which has the name of the college I went to in America.

  “Good morning, sir,” she chirps. Beyond the citrus smell of washing liquid I scan her face for knowledge and allegiance. She must have heard the screams last night, but did she understand enough to know what they were about? There is little I really know about Doris. She has a degree in criminology from the Philippines but has spent the past twenty-five years of her life cleaning our house. How have years of mopping floors and washing dishes shaped her views on love and morality? Where would she stand on what happened?

  “Thanks for the coffee,” I say, watching her movements for clues that might answer some of these questions. She smiles, adjusts her ponytail, then plunges her arms back into the soapy water. She doesn’t give anything away. She must know. After all, aren’t housekeepers the bearers of all family secrets?

  I walk through the living room, past the portraits and photos of my father hanging on the walls in identical black frames. When we moved here after his death, Teta hung every picture she had of him up on the walls. Every day there was a new photo she found somewhere, and up it went in a black frame. Now the house is a shrine to him. Like a spiritual leader, he looks down on us from every wall. There’s a photo of Baba in the seventies, with a large mustache and bright orange shorts, a cigarette in his hand; Baba at his graduation from medical school, his arms around the neck of a friend. Photos shot in studios over the years, one of him and me when I was five, him tickling me, my head thrown up in the air, laughing hysterically. The photos hanging on the left-hand side, where the morning sun hits them, are yellow and faded. There is one of him and Teta, both of them staring solemnly at the camera. He is resting his hand on her shoulder. Another of the two of them, Teta looking straight at the camera with an amused smile on her face, Baba reaching out toward the lens, half his face cut from the shot. Who would have taken that photo? Maybe it was me. Perhaps I intended to conceal my father’s face.

  The only picture of Baba not hung up in the main rooms of our house is a portrait my mother had painted. In it my father is holding the hose of a hookah in one hand and cradling his chin with the other. He is glancing off to the side, a restrained smile on his face. Teta hated that painting. When Mama had finished painting it, Teta stood in front of it for hours, pointing out mistakes. His hands were painted too delicately, like the hands of a woman. His mustache was lopsided. His nose was drawn too bulbous. The shading of his skin made him look jaundiced. After Baba died the painting plagued Teta with a conundrum: to hide an image of Baba or to showcase a memory of Mama. In the end she compromised by hanging it in a dark corner in Doris’s room.

  A few times I have entertained the notion of ripping all of Baba’s photos off the walls. Not because I hate him. No, I loved my father. I just want to choose to love him, not have his memory shoved at me everywhere I look. Every photo of him seems to be like an order, “Love me! Love me!” Anyway I haven’t torn his photos off the wall, not just in fear of Teta’s reaction; if I throw away all his photos, leaving behind empty spaces, who would be our leader then?

  There are no photographs of my mother in the house.

  I step onto the small balcony with its cracked walls that have been weathered by years of sunlight. Antar, Teta’s canary, cocks its head and tweets at me from its cage. The city is heaving in the scorching July morning. In my head everything is jumbled. Cars have been honking since dawn, the air smells of jasmine and exhaust fumes. Apart from the faint sense of uncertainty, you would never think that change is brewing. This closed city. It feels too small.

  In the building opposite ours, Um Nasser is hanging up the laundry on thin metal wires that crisscross her balcony like an obstacle course. She waves at me and I cautiously wave back.

  “Where’s your grandmother?” she calls out.

  “She’s still asleep.”

  “That’s not like her. Is she sick?”

  “No, just tired.”

  Antar tweets, catching me in the lie. I flick at the cage and look down from the balcony onto the narrow alley below, where stray cats fight in the shade of the tall buildings and the sounds of fruit sellers calling out today’s prices echo in the air. This part of town, the old city, can be headache-inducing, but at least it has been spared from the mayor’s latest project, which was to install flashing pink and yellow lights along the roundabouts of the western suburbs, making the city look like it’s throwing itself a deranged party. For that, at least, I am grateful.

  We moved to this neighborhood when I was thirteen, a year after my father died. We had enough savings but no steady stream of income, so we sold our villa in the western suburbs for a fifth-floor apartment in this old building downtown. This left us with enough money each month to pay for our food and clothes, and to just about keep up appearances. The new building overlooks a main road with three mosques that drive me crazy with their wailing, a market, and a kindergarten. Our apartment is not large, only two bedrooms and a small laundry room, which was converted into a bedroom for Doris. The living room has a large window and a door leading to a small balcony, where I now stand. Although most of my friends still live in the western suburbs, I enjoy living downtown. It seems fitting that we would live here, at the point where the sprawling suburbs meet the slums in al-Sharqiyeh.

  I sit in Teta’s chair and light another cigarette. Teta positions her chair at the perfect angle on the balcony, which gives you a view of both the television and the streets. In her pink-and-white cotton nightgown, her hair blow-dried into a golden bob, she spends the first few hours of her morning on this balcony, with one eye on the news and the other on the neighborhood’s happenings. She drinks a cup of Turkish coffee and smokes two cigarettes as she watches the news programs on the crackling television set, the same stories told differently on state TV, the foreign-funded stations, those of the different opposition groups — which grow in number as the groups themselves divide and split — and she heckles each in turn. Meanwhile she greets neighbors as they wake up. She watches their comings and goings, eavesdrops on conversations. I swear, she collects gossip like the best investigative journalist you can think of. She then pieces these together into stories, and recounts them to the neighborhood women during their midmorning subhiyeh of coffee and cigarettes.

  Imagine if my story makes her subhiyeh this morning.

  You know that stubborn woman still refuses to congratulate them for the marriage? I saw her sulking on the balcony the other day.

  You would think they would have resolved their fight by now.
They’re not solving the Palestinian issue for God’s sake.

  We explained to her the wedding invitations were limited. Nabil asked his mother to keep the numbers low …

  He did marry a beautiful girl. Slightly dark, but …

  They are swimming in money …

  He’ll probably run off with the maid like his father did.

  When is Rasa going to bring you a nice girl?

  You would never believe this story, but I caught someone in his room last night.

  No! Who was she? Is she from the neighborhood?

  He was with a man!

  Ouf! Does the man come from a good family at least?

  No, I know Teta will guard this secret far better than Taymour and I had.

  Doris comes with an ibrik of Turkish coffee.

  “Have you seen Teta this morning?” I ask as she pours me a cup.

  “Still in room,” she says and walks away, her neon green slippers shuffling on the carpet. I take a sip. The coffee is hot and strong and helps me lose some of my empty feeling. I settle into Teta’s chair and turn on the television for the 8 a.m. news. A young woman in a pink veil is recounting today’s top stories. If Teta were here, she’d be muttering, Look at her! She wears a hijab but still covers half her face with red lipstick. She looks like a cat that has just eaten her own kittens.

  The woman on TV looks somberly at me as she announces the headline story.

  “At dawn this morning a group of terrorists, armed with foreign weapons, occupied vast swathes of land in the eastern side of the city, al-Sharqiyeh.” As she speaks footage is shown of masked men with heavy machine guns running through the empty streets of the slums. “Footage released by the terrorists show them massacring at least fifty army personnel stationed on the outskirts of al-Sharqiyeh.” As she says this more grainy footage is shown of a line of headless bodies on a dirt road. One of the masked men points his gun in the air and lets out a series of shots as the others shout “Allahu Akbar.”