Guapa Page 3

  I hailed a taxi outside Maj’s house and got into the backseat, as Teta directed me to do when riding in taxis alone. The man behind the wheel was young, though I couldn’t make out his age: perhaps eighteen, maybe twenty. He was wearing a tight red T-shirt that gripped his body. He drove without speaking. A familiar pressure inside me began to build. It was a terrible choking sensation that had been growing in the months since I lost my parents. I had no control over my destiny, and everything around me could suddenly die or run away.

  I rolled down the window and pressed the back of my head against the leather seat. The crisp November air felt cold against my face, releasing the pressure somewhat. Through the streetlights, which lit up the inside of the car in recurring waves, I saw that the driver’s forearms were potholed with scars. I admired the way his T-shirt stretched tightly against his chest. His arms broke out in large goose bumps.

  “Shut the window, it’s cold,” he said. I rolled up the window, feeling the choking sensation close in on me once more. I watched the muscles in the driver’s arms tighten as he shifted gears. The large veins running under his skin awoke a sensation inside me I had never felt before. I wanted to connect with him in some way, to be closer to him somehow.

  “Is this your taxi?” I asked.

  “My brother’s,” he said. His jaw clicked as he chewed a piece of gum. He sighed and put one arm behind the passenger seat while steering with the other. I looked at the hand resting behind the seat. His fingers were decorated with gold and silver rings. Dark black dirt was wedged underneath his fingernails. I glanced down at my own fingernails, which Doris had clipped earlier that day.

  I tried to imagine what this man’s life was like, outside of this taxi. His rough accent meant he probably lived in al-Sharqiyeh, maybe in a tiny room that smelled of fried onions and cigarettes, because that’s what I imagined al-Sharqiyeh would smell like. How much did we have in common, he and I? If I knew then what I know now, I would have put our differences down to a complex algorithm of class and culture. But back then I did not know about any of that, so I stuck to what we had in common: the car we were both sitting in.

  “Do you drive this taxi often?” I asked.

  “One or two nights a week,” he replied, making a turn into the side street that took us off the highway and toward my new neighborhood downtown.

  “Do you enjoy it?”

  “Enjoy what?” His eyes flicked up to look at me through the rearview mirror. His eyes were a cool gray, almost silver.

  “Driving the taxi,” I said, holding his gaze as I played with the dog-eared corners of the history books on my lap.

  “It’s just a job,” he said, turning back to the road.

  “Well what do you like doing when you’re not driving the taxi? Do you watch television?” Teta fed me on a diet of dubbed Mexican telenovelas, American television shows, and an endless stream of news. Perhaps his television set also showed those channels.

  “I don’t have spare time. When I’m not driving, I work on a construction site.”

  The next turn would take us to my street. I felt a sudden panic. I wanted to spend more time with this man. We were moving closer to something new and exciting. I wanted to be his friend. And not just any friend, not like Maj or Basma, but a friend who would always be around, someone I could hug and be close to. My insides were buzzing. I wanted him to keep on driving, to take me out of this sad town, far away from that empty apartment with Doris and Teta.

  “Is that why you have big muscles?” I scrambled to find a way to delay our separation. He glanced at me, studied my face for a while, clicked his chewing gum. Then his lips turned to form a crooked smile.

  “Come up here and sit next to me,” he said.

  I hesitated. It would be eib to say no, although it also felt eib to say yes. Stuck between two eibs, I left the books in the back and climbed into the passenger seat. We drove past Teta’s apartment. He took a right into a dark street and parked the car between two large trees. He unzipped his jeans and pulled out his thing. It stood between us, hard, like an intruder to an intimate conversation. Instinctively, I reached out and grabbed it, and he let out a slight moan. I studied the thing in my hand, feeling it grow in my palm.

  “Yalla,” he whispered as his eyes scanned the area.

  “Huh?”

  “Put your mouth on it,” he said impatiently.

  I swallowed and bent down. He smelled sour and hot. I put his thing in my mouth and looked up for further instructions.

  “Wet your mouth, wet your mouth,” he hissed. “Your tongue is like sandpaper.”

  I swallowed a few more times until my mouth was wet, and this time the process went more smoothly. He seemed happy with this and sighed. He pressed down on my neck but he remained alert, his head darting back and forth as if following a game of tennis. I was down for a few minutes when my excitement began to disappear, replaced with a strong sense of guilt that I was making a terrible mistake. I struggled, concentrating on breathing through my nose and not gagging each time he pushed my head down. I wasn’t sure how long this would last. He groaned. My mouth filled with salty slime. The warm hand at the back of my neck disappeared.

  “Get out now before someone sees,” he said, zipping his trousers up. I wiped my mouth, took my books from the backseat, and got out of the car. The man started up the engine, reversed out onto the road, and sped off.

  I looked around. There was no one. The awkward feeling slowly disappeared, and the memory of what happened seemed sweeter. I stored bits of it for later: the warm hand on the back of my neck, the sour smell, the shape of his thing in my mouth. I relived those memories as I walked home.

  Teta looked up when I came through the door. I was terrified to face her. She always seemed to know everything. This was something she should never know. She was sitting in her nightgown, cracking roasted sunflower seeds between her teeth. On the television the news showed footage of bombs dropping on a busy neighborhood.

  “You found a taxi?” she asked, picking at bits of seed lodged between her teeth.

  For a moment I thought she might be able to tell just by looking at me, or that she would smell the taxi driver on my clothes and face. I swallowed hard, feeling the salty slime slide down my throat. It felt scratchy, like I was coming down with a cold.

  “Yes, but he took the long way,” I said, trying to look as natural as I could. I took a deep breath. This was the first lie I had ever told Teta, and as I said this a part of me split from her forever. The gooey liquid in the back of my throat felt far away from the words coming out of my mouth. I was two people now, in two separate realities, where the rules in one were suspended and different from those in the other.

  “Look at this shit,” the driver says, bringing me back to the car, which is smoky with cigarettes and summertime. He points to a truck crammed with what seems like hundreds of men and women in tattered clothes. They are crushed against one another like tobacco in a cigarette. Chairs, suitcases, and torn plastic bags are squeezed in the spaces between them.

  For so long I thought I was immune to this. I could look at the refugees and feel pity that they have nowhere to go and are reliant on the goodwill of others. Today I feel just as stranded as them. I want to grab my own belongings and hop onto the back of that truck, let it take me wherever it is going. I could probably help these people, share some of my savings, my English skills, direct them to the good NGOs, the right UN agencies. I could be of use to them somehow. They would take me in.

  The driver points to a boy tapping on the window of the car in front of us. “What has this revolution brought us? Children have been arrested and tortured, families have lost their homes. Where is there left for refugees to come from? They’re still coming but they don’t realize we’re all going to be refugees soon, just running from place to place. Back to our Bedouin roots.” He chuckles bitterly. “We’ve destroyed the country, and for what? Castrating donkeys, I tell you.”

  “Things will get better,�
�� I say.

  He looks at me and lifts an eyebrow.

  “You must not be from around here.”

  Tell me we’re okay. I can’t lose you to what happened. We might not have our bedroom but we can find new places to be together. We can figure out the logistics later but for now just tell me we’re okay —

  “Everything is falling apart,” Nawaf announces, peeking his glistening bald head through the door of our shared office.

  I close down the e-mail I’m writing to Taymour and open the document I’m supposed to be translating. The document is about the need to stabilize the fluctuating exchange rate. I’ve translated six papers for this company in the past week, liberally misinterpreting sentences I find distasteful.

  “Where’s Basma?” Nawaf asks, squeezing himself into the chair across from my desk.

  “She called me this morning … there’s a new journalist in town … South African, looking for a female interpreter. She should be back soon.”

  Nawaf pours us each a cup of Turkish coffee from the flask he carries with him. The cheap fabric of his white shirt stretches over his belly. A few stray hairs poke out as the old buttons struggle to keep the material together.

  “Cheers,” he raises his cup in the air. “The country is falling apart and my love life is in ruins. I really think this is it, Rasa. I really do.”

  “With the al-Sharqiyeh crisis or with your girl?”

  “Crisis? Is that what we are calling it now? A crisis? No, not the crisis, man. The girl! It’s all a terrible, sad mess.” Nawaf sighs and sucks on his cigarette hungrily. “She’s playing games with my poor, weak heart … oh, what’s the use? You’ll never understand. Look at you, tall and handsome … the only thing that will ever break your heart is that cigarette you’re smoking … Take my advice, Rasa, never place too much hope on matters of the heart because women are ruthless.”

  “What’s happened now?” This is not the first time Nawaf has announced that it is all over for him.

  “We had plans to go to the cinema —”

  “What film?”

  “Never mind what film now … all week she’s playing hot and funky with me … phone calls in the middle of the night … text messages … I can’t wait to see you … I miss you. Honey. Baby. Fire! Fire, I tell you. We had plans to go to the cinema yesterday … all day, morning to night, I try to get in touch with her like a silly donkey … telephone, message, e-mail, Skype, Facebook. Nothing. Finally she calls me at midnight … sorry, she says … I’m confused, she says.” Nawaf coughs and rubs his face with a leathery palm. His head is a good shade or two darker than the rest of his body, which makes his face look like an overcooked pancake. “She says why marry a translator when she can marry a doctor or an engineer. What would people say, she says.”

  “She sounds like my grandmother.” Teta was not happy I had become a translator. Then again, nothing short of becoming Baba would have satisfied her. Habibi, she might begin. Every day you’re looking more and more like your grandfather. And you make stupid decisions like him as well. You should never have come back from America. You should have stayed and found a job there but they didn’t give you the passport. God knows why. It’s their loss. But there we are. What can we do? All this education and you are an interpreter.

  I turn to Nawaf. “You know she still pesters me to get a job in the Gulf. To do what? Work in some soulless air-conditioned office on the millionth floor of some skyscraper and fall asleep bored and horny, without even the solace of alcohol to keep me sane?”

  “They have great Russian girls there, though,” Nawaf says. “Apparently they organize the brothels like a supermarket. One room has all Russian, one room all Thai, and you even have a room with just African girls if you’re in the mood for something spicy. I’d listen to your grandmother if I were you.”

  “Perhaps,” I say. When I returned from America I had thought I could do something more useful than the Gulf. Become an aid worker maybe. Or a revolutionary. I was so optimistic back then, and anyway when I came back I saw that nothing had changed.

  I turn to Nawaf. “Anyway, mark my words. When our company starts turning a profit your girl will be begging you to marry. Besides, if she loved you she wouldn’t treat you like this.”

  “Love is never enough, you idiot. Anyway, how is your girl?”

  “Fine,” I say, perhaps too quickly. I hesitate. I had told Nawaf about “a girl” after his persistent questions.

  “You still won’t tell me her name? Not even her family name? Is she still insisting on keeping everything secret? Who is she, Rihanna?”

  “I told you a thousand times, her parents are very traditional. Eib.”

  “We stick our heads up our asses and call ourselves traditional.”

  It pains me not to be able to tell him Taymour’s name. I have considered feminizing it, perhaps as “Tara” or “Tamara,” but, like picking at a knotted piece of string, introducing a first name would inevitably lead to questions about a last name. Then comes the name of a father and the village they are from. People pick and pick with their questions. Eventually the entire thing unravels.

  Taymour’s name is embargoed under a cloak of eib. The closest word for eib in English is perhaps “shame.” But eib is so much more than that. The implication of eib is kalam il-nas, what will people say, and so the word carries an element of conscientiousness, a politeness brought about by a perceived sense of communal obligation. Eib is an old cloak that Teta draped across my shoulders many years ago. After Baba’s death she wove an intricate web for the two of us. In public we were stoic, navigating social obligations like pros. When it was just us, unspoken words rotted in our mouths. Teta hid her grief behind a pinched nose, a tight smile, and her ever-growing list of eibs. It’s eib not to go visit the neighbors during Eid. It’s eib to miss a wedding, even if you hate every minute of it. It’s eib to pick your nose in public. Accepting a second helping of food on the first offer: eib (“Shoo, I don’t feed you enough?”). It’s eib to ask a woman how old she is or to ask someone what religion they are. It’s eib for a young boy to play with Barbie dolls. I’ve come to realize that if worn correctly, the cloak of eib is large and malleable enough to allow you to conceal many secrets and to repel intrusive questions. For example, it’s eib to ask me my girlfriend’s name if I don’t offer it to you first.

  I suppose because of this secrecy, Taymour’s name holds an unexplainable power over me. It’s a name weighed down by secrets and implications, transformed into something much larger than its seven letters. I look forward to listening to people say the name with their unique inflections and tones. I analyze it, I spell it out. Sometimes I even whisper his name out loud when I can be certain nobody can hear. This satisfies me for some time but it’s never enough. No, I need others to say his name too. It makes the name real. It makes us real.

  “What’s wrong with you today?” Nawaf asks. “You’re inside your head. I can see the sadness in your eyes.”

  What can I tell him? That there’s a reason I always keep my phone beside me, never faceup on a table? That everything he saw of me before today has been a performance — from the zalameh jokes I tell to my throaty laugh and the concerted effort to deepen my voice. That there is no girl and there never was any girl? When I had Taymour by my side it was okay to hide behind all that, because at least I was hiding something. But am I even hiding anything anymore? We all tell lies to protect our solitude. We deny the truth and present a false image of ourselves to blend into society. It’s the same everywhere, but here the stakes are much higher. So I put on my mask and let out a roaring laugh.

  “Nawaf, you fat bastard, all you’re seeing is a reflection of your own miserable life.”

  “Suck my dick, Rasa,” Nawaf says, throwing a pen at me.

  Basma walks into the office and tosses her handbag on the desk.

  “Finally you guys show up. I’ve been running around the city all morning with a new client and the office has been empty. How can we star
t a business if two-thirds of us don’t even show up on time?”

  “I’ve had a rough morning,” I say, lighting another cigarette. “Don’t ask.”

  Basma pulls a baggie of hashish from her handbag and turns to Nawaf. “And you? Did you correct the spelling mistake on the website like I asked you?” The three of us have just set up a website for our sorry little company, and our home page currently promises “impaccable translation services.”

  “I’ve been meaning to call them all morning, but I’ve been busy.”

  “What are you busy with?” Basma says, sitting down on the table and rolling a joint. “We need to fix that spelling mistake.”

  “I was with John. Remember him, that British journalist? Rasa went with him to the interview he did with the tribes in the north?”

  “How can I forget.” Basma laughs. “Walking around like he’s Lawrence of Arabia, then he drank some dirty well water and was hospitalized for a week.”

  “Yes, well, you’ll be glad to know he’s better now. He called me this morning, last-minute, to translate a few meetings he had. I even went to one meeting with the head of the reform process. He interviewed him about the takeover last night.”

  “Shami?” I ask. “But he speaks English.”

  “Yes, yes, but John brought me along anyway as he needed a driver.” Nawaf turns to look at me. “You worked for Shami, no?”

  “Only for a few months when I first came back from America. I arrived with a suitcase full of dreams and he destroyed every one of them.”

  “Why?” Nawaf asks, picking up his phone. Basma lights the joint and takes a puff.

  “When I applied for a job with him, I sent him my thesis, which was all about the barbaric economic policies of the International Monetary Fund, how they made the rich richer and the poor even more desolate. The next day he called me into his office. You’re the one who likes the public sector, he tells me when we meet. I tell him yes and his big mustache, it’s like a broom on his upper lip, starts to twitch in excitement. He hired me the next day. My first task was to get a document signed at the ministry of something or other. The next morning I arrive at the ministry at eight thirty … the first employee comes in at eleven. Then I’m sent on a treasure hunt through the building … up and down the stairs … into countless offices and rooms looking for hundreds of stamps and signatures.”