Rabih Alameddine - I, The Divine

“Do you think they’ll go away?” Saniya asked.

“I hope so. Maybe I should go up and talk to them.”

“No. We don’t even know who they are. You can’t talk to them.”

“Maybe one of them is hurt,” Rana said. “Would they need our help?”

We sat silent, wondering if they would fight again. Whenever someone tried to say something, my father shushed them. After ten minutes of silence, the electric guitar was back at it again. Lamia stood up, leaned across the railing, and screamed down, “Stop making all that noise. We’re trying to think here.” She sat back down.

Il est des histoires qui ressemblent à un conte de fées. L’histoire de mon enfance, par exemple, semblait être tirée d’un conte de Grimm. Et pourtant, mon enfance racontée ne fut jamais une histoire à faire rêver.

L’on dit souvent que les contes de fées laissent libre cours à l’imagination de l’enfant. La mienne (mon imagination), stagnait à chaque fois qu’on me parlait de sorcières. Je ne me prenais jamais à imaginer diverses figures féminines au physique hideux et aux cheveux hirsutes. Les sorcières des histoires qui m’étaient narrées avaient un visage qui m’était douloureusement familier, des cheveux longs et lisses comme de la soie, une élégance recherchée, et surtout une jeunesse hantée et menacée par la mienne. Invariablement, dans mon esprit, toutes les sorcières se retrouvaient en une seule: ma belle-mère.

Elle débarqua un jour dans nos vies, belle, jeune et impitoyable. Elle me prit en grippe dès le début. Et je le lui rendais bien. Elle m’était détestable. A son arrivée, elle imposa un système de lois et d’interdits qui transforma notre maison en une institution hautement disciplinée. Mes deux soeurs se plièrent sagement à ses règles. Mais mon esprit rebelle se refusait de se soumettre à ce régime qui semblait doubler de sévérité à mon égard. Si elle était intransigeante avec mes soeurs, avec moi elle se transformait en un despote Nazi.

Mon père et mes oncles prenaient un malin plaisir à nous apprendre des gros mots. Et encore, au fur et à mesure que nous nous perfectionnions dans cet art, ils enrichissaient notre vocabulaire d’insultes à caractère pornographiques. Avant l’arrivée de ma belle-mère, nous passions nos soirées à nous lancer des insultes. Bien sûr les oreilles délicates de celle-ci furent choquées par notre vocabulaire qu’elle trouvait aberrant. C’est pourquoi mon père avait trouvé un compromis. Il nous permettait de laisser libre cours à nos injures durant les absences de ma belle-mère. Mes soeurs avaient tout de suite appris à éviter les dérapages compromettants en la présence de celle-ci. Quant à moi, je ne l’appris jamais. Et je dérapais souvent. Je me délectais dans mes dérapages qui faisaient surgir des expressions effarées autour de moi. En l’absence de ma marâtre, mes injures déclenchaient des fous rires. Quand elle était dans les parages, je recevais les piments. Mais je continuais à avoir ces lapsus quand même. J’en savourais la sonorité exquise.

I wanted my mother to see her grandson, but she refused. My son, Kamal, was born in New York. When he was a baby, I took him everyday across the park, from the Upper West Side to the Upper East Side, to visit Janet. Once he left New York, she did not want to see him again. Kamal lived in Beirut with his father, but he came every summer to visit me.

One day, in July of 1993, I forced the issue. I walked Kamal over to her building. I told Jonathan, the doorman, to tell my mother Kamal and I were coming up. I did not have to do that since Jonathan knew me well, but I thought it would be better if she was prepared for us. Janet told him she could not receive us because she was leaving. I said I would wait for her downstairs and see her on her way out. Janet entered the lobby twenty minutes later, still beautiful as ever. Like a well-behaved boy, Kamal stood up to greet his grandmother. She shook his hand.

“You’re a big boy now,” she said.

“He’s twelve, Mother.”

“Well, I can’t stay here and chat. I’m late for an appointment. We can do this some other time. Okay? Have fun you two.”

She turned around and walked out, not allowing us to say anything more.

“Your mother is crazy,” Kamal said.

“She’s your grandmother.”

“Sitto Saniya is my grandmother, not Janet.”

“Saniya is your step-grandmother. Janet is your grandmother. She’s your blood and you can’t forget that.”

“I’m hungry.”

I took him to a Greek restaurant across the street. We sat outdoors because I wanted to watch. He ordered pizza, the only thing he ate those days. Within five minutes of sitting down, we saw Janet walk back into the apartment building.

This, I learned from my father: “I don’t think any man ever loved a woman as much as I loved your mother. But it faded, eroded slowly. One day I woke up and I was not in love. There was nothing I could do. We did not have enough in common to have a comfortable life together, not like Saniya and I. Once the love was gone, your mother got on my nerves. With Saniya, I don’t love her as much as I loved your mother, but she makes me happy. Your mother made me crazy.” There you go. My father divorced my mother and sent her packing, not because she could not give him a son, not because she was a terrible mother to his girls, but because he fell out of love.

In my family, love, like religion and politics, was to be avoided, a passion that vanquished reason and caused endless pain and heartache. I grew up angry with my father because he destroyed the fairy tale. My parents, Mustapha and Janet, their glorious love had not ended up happily ever after; it withered and faded. Unlike Amal and Lamia, my older sisters, I never heard them tell their story lovingly, since I was two when my parents split up, never as the grand affair. I was told the story, but only as a didactic fable of the folly of youth, the craziness of passionate love.

Janet arrived in Beirut in 1955, an independent woman of twenty, wanting to explore the world, picking the American University of Beirut to finish her bachelor’s, which she never did. Fate intervened in the form of a medical student at the university, my father. My mother was a beauty and, according to her, had had a number of beaus after her in New York, but my father had an irresistible charm.

The story goes like this: On arriving in Beirut, Janet went to a Lebanese fortune-teller who read her coffee cup. The fortune-teller saw the man who was to be the love of Janet’s life. She told her the man was Lebanese, a healer who would save her from certain death, falling in love with her after curing her illness and then marrying her. They would live happily ever after.

Janet met Mustapha at the beach of the American University of Beirut (technically not a beach since there is no sand, only large rocks and cement walkways, making it a poor beach by Beirut standards). At the time, my father had a habit of walking around with a stethoscope, which identified him as a medical student and helped him talk to girls. Years later, he would apply the same principle when he put the stethoscope on his car’s sun visor, thereby avoiding serious trouble or minor inconveniences when stopped at the checkpoints during the war. Whether Syrian soldiers, Christian soldiers of the Lebanese Forces, or the Druze militiamen, when they saw the stethoscope they did not ask for his ID, opting instead for a diagnosis of their ailments.