André Aciman - Out of Egypt - A Memoir

“I know,” said the Princess, who would try to steer her neighbor clear of unhappy thoughts, which wasn’t so difficult, for just as the Saint was known to drift from one shoal to the other, with some steering she could be made to sway into the opposite direction and seek out cheerful islands in the sun — as though what ultimately mattered to her when she spoke was not so much her inventory of woes and heartaches as the right to digress, to lose her thread, to say what came to mind, which is exactly what none, particularly her husband, ever allowed her.

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, while she sat alone on her balcony, nursing the gallbladder pain in her side — years before they met over red mullet — the Saint would watch the lights suddenly go on in the veranda across the street, and out would come the Princess wearing a bathrobe, carrying a large cup in one hand, with something like a flat hot-water bottle in the other, followed by my grandfather, his hair undone, staggering about the porch till his unsteady hand grasped the banister and he dropped into an armchair.

Facing one another across Rue Memphis, my grandparents-to-be would sometimes wonder what secret ailment kept the other awake, for neither dared speak, much less inquire into the other’s health by way of neighborly conversation during the day.

“It would have been so indiscreet,” said the Saint when asked by the Princess’s husband why she had never even waved at night.

“I’m a refined woman,” she added with mild apology in her voice.

“ I’m a refined woman ,” he mimicked and right away would slip in a word or two in Ladino. “Sit here and don’t move,” he said, himself seized by the intimacy that had sprung up between the two women. “You are one of the very few people here who speak Ladino well. The others belong to my wife’s family, and they’re too stuffy to speak real Ladino. Do you think I’ll let you go now that I’ve found someone to speak with?”

Phrases like “sit here and don’t move” set the tone for a friendship that was to last until the day my grandfather died — he always pretending to want to shock her, she pretending to tolerate someone who was too much of a scalawag to be taken seriously, and the Princess, always fast to find fault with her husband’s manners, forever eager to shield Madame her neighbor from her husband’s wanton humor. It was an easy familiarity that came as much from the city and the world where they were born as from the language they spoke in it. To the three who had discovered one another, Ladino spoke of their homesickness for Constantinople. To them, it was a language of loosened neckties, unbuttoned shirts, and overused slippers, a language as intimate, as natural, and as necessary as the odor of one’s sheets, of one’s closets, of one’s cooking. They returned to it after speaking French, with the gratified relief of left-handed people who, once in private, are no longer forced to do things with their right.

All had studied and knew French exceedingly well, the way Lysias knew Greek — that is, better than the Athenians — gliding through the imperfect subjunctive with the unruffled ease of those who never err when it comes to grammar because, despite all of their efforts, they will never be native speakers. But French was a foreign, stuffy idiom and, as the Princess herself would tell me many years later, after speaking French for more than two hours, she would begin to salivate. “Spanish, on the other hand, réveille l’âme, lifts up the soul.” And she would always slip in a proverb to prove her point.

The Saint and the Princess met at least twice a day, once in the morning on their way to the market, and once after the Princess had come back from her sisters. Since her husband was rarely in his billiard hall after six, all three would regularly have tea in the Princess’s garden, under an old linden tree whose perfume filled the late afternoon air until it was time to move indoors, where more tea was served.

The Saint’s husband, a Jew born in Aleppo who spoke no Ladino, would often return from work and peek through the wrought-iron fence into the arbor. Sometimes, having opened the gate to the Princess’s garden and made his way past the guava trees, Monsieur Jacques would look through the living room window and knock at the glass door with something of a grudge. “It is time to go home,” he would tell his wife after perfunctory pleasantries with the owner of the pool hall. “Just when we were beginning to enjoy ourselves,” someone would say. “Spanish, Spanish,” the Aleppid would mutter as he and his wife crossed Rue Memphis on their way home, “always your damned Spanish,” while she apologized for not being home yet, trying to explain to a man whose native tongue was Arabic why she had tarried past her usual hour.

“But it’s only a quarter to seven.”

“I don’t care. By eight o’clock I want to have supper.”

“But Mohammed is cooking it at this very moment,” she protested. “What’s the matter with you?”

“What’s the matter? I’ll tell you what’s the matter . I don’t like having to come looking for my wife in another man’s house, that’s what.” He was working himself into a temper, and the more he felt his anger rise, the more he was convinced he was right.

Monsieur Jacques was the type of husband who was jealous of his authority, not of his wife, just as he loved his comforts, not those who provided them. He despised Ladino because everything about it conspired to exclude him from a world whose culture was foreign to him, as much by its customs and sounds as by its insidious niceties and clannish etiquette. The more his wife delighted in speaking it, the more repulsive it became, and the more it pleased her to remind him — as her father had reminded her to remind him — that Arabic may have been Arabic, but Spanish was always going to remain Spanish!

To him Ladino was a form of cackling, and he called his neighbors’ home a chicken coop, a poulailler, referring to them as the “owners” of the “henhouse,” not knowing that they had come to regard his inability to enter into their world with the stately arrogance of erstwhile Ottoman masters. “Syrian hypocrite” and “dirty Turk” were bandied about behind everyone’s back, all of which inevitably devolved late one Sunday afternoon, as both men were returning from their respective cafés, into a face-to-face confrontation in which the degenerate turc barbare called the juif arabe a “dirty, scoundrel Jew.” Stunned, the bicycle shop owner, who was quite devout, said thank you, thank you, which was how the insulted taught the insultor a lesson in good manners, reminding the pool hall owner that he was truly tempted to insult him back but had decided otherwise, seeing that the Turk’s own wife, as the entire neighborhood could hear clearly enough when the Princess lost her temper, did so better than anyone else in the world.

Everyone was sufficiently hurt and shamed, including the Princess, who found herself implicated in a quarrel that should have stayed strictly between the men. Monsieur Jacques vowed never to set foot chez les barbares, Monsieur Albert thanked him for staying out of people’s homes, and both resolved never to say bonjour whenever they happened to meet on Rue Memphis. Only the Saint was left untouched, though she was the most perturbed of the four, and would continue to do everything to bring about a reconciliation between both families. “You may say whatever crosses your mind when you’re angry, Monsieur Albert,” she chided, a few days after the incident, “but that — never! Never!” she repeated, her nether lip quivering, her eyes welling up. Her simple, stainless soul had peered into an ugly, scurrilous world from which her strict upbringing had always protected her.