Guapa Read online

  “That’s why the Dead Sea is salty,” the teacher explained.

  Basma raised her hand.

  “Is that where louti comes from?” she asked. “From the Prophet Lot?”

  The teacher glanced at the official from the president’s office, who nodded his head. “Yes, louti derives from the name of the Prophet Lot,” she said.

  “What does louti mean?” Maj asked.

  The teacher paused and looked at the official again. Once again he nodded his approval. She cleared her throat, opened the Quran, and began to read: “ ‘Do you commit such indecency in a way that no one has preceded you in the worlds? You approach men lustfully instead of women. Truly, you are a nation who exceeds in sin.’ ” She looked up at the class triumphantly.

  The students groaned.

  “Maj, are you originally from Sodom?” asked Hamza.

  The class snickered. I raised my hand.

  “So that means it’s haram, right?” I asked.

  “Are you trying to be funny, Rasa?” the teacher said.

  “No —” I began.

  “Don’t be a clown,” she snapped.

  Louti. I went back home, turned on the faucets, and said the word in front of the bathroom mirror: “Ana louti.”

  Sodomite. No, it was too religious. All it did was remind me I was going to hell.

  One morning a few weeks later, we sang the national anthem in assembly and then filed into a neat line to march back into the school building. Hamza was shadowing me from behind, treading on the back of my shoes with every step I took.

  “Khawal,” he snorted in my ear whenever I tripped. I ignored him and kept walking. He tripped me again. “Khawal.”

  This continued for some time, until my curiosity got the better of me. I turned around.

  “What does khawal mean?”

  Hamza caught my eye and mouthed “Baneekak” — I will fuck you. He did not say this like it was a good thing. The look in his eyes made my cheeks burn with shame. He will fuck me. I quickly looked away.

  At lunch I went into the office of Mr. Labib, our history teacher, an older man with kind eyes who always had two white blobs of dried spit at the corners of his mouth. I asked him what khawal meant.

  “Where did you hear that?” he asked. He spoke very slowly, as if studying each word before letting it out. I shrugged. He sighed and licked his lips, the dried spit gleaming. “Khawal refers to effeminate men. A long time ago the word referred to male belly dancers. But it’s not used for that anymore.”

  “Is it used for gay?” I asked.

  “What … what did you say?” he stammered.

  “Gay.”

  “Don’t use that word here,” he said, eyes narrowing. He licked his lips, stood up from behind his desk, and ushered me to the door.

  I went back home and stood in front of the bathroom mirror.

  Ana khawal.

  “Rasa, the water’s been running for ten minutes,” Teta warned from the other side of the door. “You’re going to bring a drought on this country.”

  Maybe I was a khawal. I recalled my actions leading up to Hamza calling me a khawal. Was it my wrists, which often hung limply under my chin when I was engrossed in what the teacher was saying? Or was it my voice, which, when I forgot to control it, would escape from my mouth in a higher pitch than what is normal for the other boys in school?

  Perhaps khawal was an aspect of who I was. A sissy. A girlie-boy. But it didn’t encompass everything.

  My obsession with finding the perfect word continued. It was funny that both English and Arabic have so many words that explored every dimension of what I was feeling, and yet not one word that could encapsulate it all. I suppose it’s no surprise I became an interpreter, given my early days spent deciphering the meaning behind words in front of a foggy bathroom mirror.

  In the end, it all boiled down to the fact that I did not want to be different. I needed to belong somewhere, even if it was between the syllables of an obscure word in the dictionary. I needed to belong and I needed our lives to return to being the same as everyone else’s. I needed to be back in the western suburbs, with Maj and Omar. I needed Baba and Mama to come back and bring with them everything familiar that they had taken away: the smells of apple-flavored hookah and Mama’s heavy perfume, the Ramadan soap operas and the sounds of excitable sports commentators shrieking “GOAL!” reverberating through the apartment, the parent-teacher meetings where Mama would ardently defend my bad handwriting by explaining that “Einstein also had bad handwriting.” Now it was only Teta, at home and at those parent-teacher meetings, her hair tucked behind her ears as she quietly maneuvered through the crowds of younger parents, her slim brown cigarette hanging from her wrinkled lips, a cigarette she insisted on smoking in the classrooms, ignoring the teachers’ objections.

  For a while my secret cage contained only the taxi driver, stored away like an exotic bird. By the time I was sixteen the cage had stored secret crushes and fantasies and obsessions and the images of various body parts of male classmates that were etched into my mind. I captured these thoughts until I was alone in the bathroom and could take them out to fly for a few hours before Teta began banging on the door and I would have to carefully lock them back inside.

  Nightmares of marriage traumatized me. While I felt affection toward many women, I could never imagine myself with one. Whatever attraction I felt was due to the social acceptance that courting a woman might bring. I resigned myself to the inevitable prison sentence of marriage. I would marry and have children and live every night in fear, curled up in the far corner of the bed, anxious at the thought of touching my wife. I would be unhappy and alone, and any future children would be nothing more than a gift to Teta for her years of hard work.

  In my final year of high school, I discovered POLSKASAT. It was Omar who, in excitable whispers over the phone one day, first told me about the obscure Polish channel that you could get on the satellite if you knew the exact frequency. That Saturday night, after Teta yawned and announced she was going to bed, I waited until her snores traveled across the quiet house and then scrolled through the channels until I arrived at POLSKASAT.

  The channel was broadcasting a Hollywood movie, Thelma and Louise, except the voices of all the characters were dubbed by a bored-sounding Polish man. After what seemed like an eternity, Thelma and Louise finally drove off the cliff. The credits rolled on and on. When the final name scrolled by, the screen flickered for a few seconds, and then a woman in a pink dress appeared. She was an icy blonde with perky breasts. A number rolled across the screen, surrounded by flashing Technicolor words: CALL ME, SEXY GIRLS, PARTY. European techno music blasted from the television as the woman, her face plastered with makeup and desperation, made a “Call me” sign with her hand.

  In the back of my mind I knew this was only sending me further into the harshest levels of hell, but I couldn’t stop. I watched, transfixed, as these women appeared one after the other, each of them urging me to call. One wore a long red dress, a few appeared to be at a slumber party, playfully hitting one another with pillows. While walking a fluffy white poodle in the park, one woman was wearing nothing but a pair of knee-high boots, her breasts glistening in the sun. I divided my attention between watching these women and listening for any noises coming from the house. Every time I thought I heard something I flipped to the next channel, which was broadcasting a Turkish game show.

  An hour later the screen flickered again. A dark-haired man in a suit sat in an office, his feet resting on his desk as he leaned back to read a newspaper. I inched closer, my nose nearly touching the television screen. A woman with bright red hair walked in. They spoke, their voices dubbed by the same Polish man who spoke on behalf of Thelma and Louise.

  The man began kissing the woman’s neck as my eyes darted between the screen and the dark hallway. He took off her shirt and began gnawing at her breasts as she leaned back and moaned. I watched the man closely as he explored her body, his excitement amplifying
my own. When he was done she turned toward him and began to take off his shirt. The man unbuckled his belt. I held my breath as he dropped his trousers, waiting to catch a glimpse of what was beneath it all.

  Except the camera panned out in perfect timing and refocused on a new scene where, by now, the man was plowing into the woman. The cameraman skillfully navigated their gyrating bodies to avoid the man’s nakedness. I pleaded with the cameraman to give me a glimpse of a bit more of the man, tilted my head to the right, upward, to see if maybe the editors might have missed something. That damn cameraman, we were locked in an eternal battle, he and I.

  POLSKASAT became my ritual and my education. The excitement would begin on Saturday morning and grow over the course of the day. I would spend the afternoons lying on the floor in my bedroom listening to George Michael on my Discman and counting down the hours until POLSKASAT came on. The excitement would be almost unbearable in the final few hours of Teta’s wakefulness, when she would be watching the evening news.

  Once she was safely tucked away, I would flip to POLSKASAT and watch, fixated, the volume turned so low that I had to strain to hear the barely audible moans, and my finger preemptively on the Channel Up button of the remote control, listening for the sounds of footsteps coming down the hall. Occasionally I would close a door or put a chair in the way to alert me when Teta was coming. On most nights, however, her midnight forays were only to get a glass of water or to deliver a slumberous complaint about my late-night TV habits, which rarely delved into any sustained interest in what it was I was staying up late watching in the first place.

  One Saturday evening a few months into this habit, I had become cocky and my impatience began to show.

  “It’s getting late,” I told Teta after the evening news had finished and she had poured herself another glass of arrack.

  “I’m staying up tonight,” she said.

  “What for?”

  “I wasn’t born yesterday, habibi. What channel is it? Don’t make me go through all the channels.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I persisted, nervous now.

  “It’s those dirty Soviets, isn’t it?” she asked, scrolling through the Eastern European channels.

  My protests were futile so I gave in and told her. She flipped to POLSKASAT and we sat watching the last thirty minutes of Ghost, dubbed into Polish. To calm my nerves I busied myself with trying to explain the film’s story line to her.

  “He’s a ghost? Really this is stupid,” she insisted. I explained to her that it was a sad movie but she could only see the humor in it, which wasn’t helped by the bored-sounding Polish man who dubbed all the characters.

  “She’s very pretty, but she’s so stupid to cut her hair like a boy,” Teta noted, as Demi Moore said her final goodbyes to Patrick Swayze.

  Finally it was time. The credits rolled, always to the very last name. Then the familiar flicker, that brief pause, the black screen, and finally the first woman appeared.

  “Oh, Rasa.” Teta sighed as she lit a cigarette and watched a blond woman in a Lolita uniform suck on her thumb. “Is this sharmoota what you stay up all night for?”

  The next clip featured a woman on a bench. She pursed her lips as she gave us a knowing smile. The camera zoomed in and out of her skirt as she opened and closed her legs. I watched Teta from the corner of my eye, hoping she would get bored before the movie began, when suddenly the woman’s legs opened and something happened that I had never seen before.

  “Is she?” Teta gasped, leaning forward in her chair. “No! She is. Oh my God, she’s pissing.” Teta’s mouth gaped open and then she began to cackle. “Look at her, look at this sharmoota, like a dog, opening her legs and pissing on the park bench.”

  “It’s really not usually like this,” I explained, jumping up and turning the television off. The screen went from a pale yellow stream of urine to an abrupt blackness.

  “Is this what you stay up late to see?” She cackled, laughing so hard she had a coughing fit. “Pissing in the park like a dog … a bitch!”

  I could not really watch POLSKASAT after that. I knew that if I were to ever stay up late, Teta would know exactly what it was that I was up to, and the shame of it sapped any enjoyment I may have felt. It was not just that I was going to hell, but now Teta knew I was going to hell. But at least, I secretly thought, Teta believed I was a healthy young man.

  After a few months, someone somewhere in the Ministry of Culture must have heard about POLSKASAT. Perhaps the minister himself had walked in on his son watching a POLSKASAT movie and demanded something be done, I don’t know. All I know is that one night, out of curiosity, I flicked to POLSKASAT and sat through until the Hollywood movie had finished. The titles came up and then the channel suddenly went down, leaving a gray static. The glorious days of POLSKASAT were over.

  “Pardon, do you have a lighter?” a young woman asks me, half of her face hidden behind gold-and-silver sunglasses. She has shoulder-length black hair ironed so straight it plunges like daggers down the sides of her face. She is cradling a phone between her ear and her shoulder.

  I noisily slurp what is left of my Slush Puppie and hand her my lighter.

  “He told me this over dinner last night,” she speaks into the phone as she lights her cigarette. “And I am so tired of it all. The agony of waiting … No, no, I’m not that kind of woman. Either you marry me or you don’t.” She returns the lighter to me and walks away.

  It’s one thirty in the afternoon. I’ve been trying to ignore the fact that Taymour is having his family lunch in a restaurant just across from the shopping complex, but before I know what I am doing I have walked there. It is one of those fancy restaurants, with a huge hall filled with tables that fit thirty to forty people. Some are slowly clearing out as families finish their meals. I hover by the entrance, looking for him, when a waiter dressed in a sharp suit comes up to me.

  “Can I help you?”

  “A table for one, please,” I say. He gives me a strange look, confusion transitioning toward disdain, but I repeat my request in English and he is more receptive. As he leads me down the hall I scan the tables for Taymour. Finally I see him, sitting in the center of one of the large tables. There are at least twenty others with him, his family, midway through the meal. Taymour is wearing a white shirt. Their waiter has just placed a large platter of barbecued meat on the table and the family digs in, unaware of the tall, pitiful figure watching them. Taymour carefully hangs an orange napkin from his collar and grabs a few pieces of shish taouk from the platter. An older woman (his mother, or perhaps an aunt?) leans over and puts a barbecued tomato on his plate. Taymour shakes his head and feigns anger, his mouth, those beautiful lips glistening with oil, mouthing “No, no,” but he does not make any attempt to remove the tomato from his plate.

  “Are you coming?” the waiter asks impatiently, a few meters ahead.

  “Yes, sorry.” I follow him to a table. I sit down and position my chair so that Taymour’s view of me is blocked by a marble pillar and the plastic branches of a fake tree. Regardless, the family is so consumed in their meal, laughing and talking and clinking glasses, that they would likely not notice me if I were to stand at the end of their long table like a lonely ghost.

  “What do you want?” the waiter asks.

  “An apple hookah and some Turkish coffee, medium, please.”

  “That’s it?” he asks tiredly.

  “Some baklawa, too.”

  After the waiter leaves I return to watching Taymour. My view is restricted by a fat bald man sitting across from him, who moves his head too quickly and too often for me to settle into one position. Taymour is clean-shaven, his hair gelled and combed to one side. His shirt is stretched across his shoulders and arms. How I love getting lost in his arms. I thought seeing Taymour might make me feel better but it only makes me feel worse, because the Taymour sitting across the room from me is the Taymour that society wants, the one who is responsible and hardworking, the good
citizen who would never disobey his family or the government. And I would never be invited to sit at the table with that Taymour, to meet his family and share a meal with them, laugh alongside them as I force a barbecued tomato onto his plate. I feel so far away from him, and to think only last night we had our arms around each other.

  The waiter brings me my order. I inhale on the hookah and the smoke further obscures my face. I take out the photograph of Abdallah from my bag. His eyes stare back at me, challenging me to find him. In which prison cell in the city are these eyes locked away? There is sadness in those eyes, of a life that did not come easy. Or am I reading too much into his gaze, drawing out lives where they do not exist? I turn the photograph over and grab a pen from my bag. If I cannot say what I want to say to Taymour, if I cannot walk up to him and blurt it out, then I will write it by hand, so that at least he will know how I feel. I will record our history on the back of this photograph and it will stay with us. I’ll give him the picture of Ahmed and Um Abdallah’s son, with my words scrawled on the other side, and as he reads my words, his hands touching the same photograph I touched, the same photograph Um Abdallah and Ahmed touched, Taymour will recognize that we are worth fighting for, and we will all be connected somehow. As I begin to write, in tiny letters to fit it all in, Taymour’s table bursts into a roar of laughter, clinking glasses and cheering.

  Habibi Taymour,

  I know you don’t like me to call you that, to call you habibi. But if there is one time I can do so let it be in this letter, which you can burn after reading if you wish. No one will ever know that you are my habibi. And you are, whether you like it or not, my habibi. I want to write to you because I do not know if you will let me speak to you again after last night. I do not mean it in the sense that you would not speak to me at all, no, no, I mean that I am no longer sure if you will allow us to be truthful, if we will ever have our barriers down as we did last night, and the night before that, and on that first night we met three years ago. How can I begin to tell you what it meant to meet someone I could talk to, someone I could confess everything to.