Tariq Ali - The Stone Woman

Some months after the twins were born, Catherine had informed Halil that she did not want any more children. He was upset, but accepted her choice. He never pushed or pressured her in that direction. Soon afterwards she refused to share his bed and rejected his advances. She informed him that she had been very shaken by giving birth to twins and now the very thought of the reproductive process filled her with nausea. She advised him to find another wife or concubine or whatever he wished. She would accept anything provided they left each other alone. At this point I had interrupted Zeynep.

“Tell me,” I asked her, “did he not open his notebook and consult the list?”

Zeynep remained serious. “No. Please. Don’t try to be funny. Don’t try to be funny. It’s very bad.”

What had made it bad was Catherine’s decision to move to Cairo and take the children with her. Halil had wanted the boys to stay with him. He felt that their education at the lycée was being disrupted, but Catherine would not listen to reason. She disapproved of formal education and felt the twins would learn much more through travel. She had taken them back to Cairo and they had been there for a year, but the boys wanted to return to their father and their friends. She had promised they would be returned to Istanbul in the summer and could stay with their father, but their arrival was delayed, which angered Halil. He had rushed to Istanbul the minute he heard they were back. He had got his children back.

There was something else as well. Zeynep had prepared a list for him and she wanted him to view the first three names on it so that he could have a woman again.

What Catherine told the Stone Woman ten years ago

‘IT WAS THOUGHTFUL OF Nilofer to send me to you. I’ve brought my easel and my oil paints. I’ll paint you as I talk. I hope you don’t mind. It’s not going to be easy to get the colours right. You must have noticed me trying to mix them for the last hour. You look so different when the sun hits you directly. When I first heard about you from Halil, he described you as a goddess, but you’re just a large rock. I’m not even sure whether you were ever carved. Perhaps you were. There are a few traces here and there. Could this have been the remnant of a woman’s breast? Perhaps. That makes you more interesting. I think I’m going to paint you just as I see you. The colour is not exact, but I’m going to start.

What do you think of this family, Stone Woman? Do they ever mean what they say? I’m beginning to wonder why I ever got married. Halil is a nice man and he understands me. I have no complaints, but I can no longer bear his touch. I never enjoyed intimacy with him and I feel I’ve done my duty by producing two healthy boys.

It was so painful when they were born, Stone Woman. I thought my agony would never end. I lost so much blood that the midwives began to whisper to each other in worried tones. I thought I was going to die. None of my maternal emotions would come to the surface. I felt nothing. I was just a frightened girl and it didn’t help when I found a child being placed on each breast. It was a strange sensation. I felt like an animal. If two women had not been found to breast-feed my boys I would have sunk slowly into oblivion, but much of the worry was, mercifully, removed from me. I don’t think I was intended to me a mother, Stone Woman. I feel affection for these little boys, but I am not overwhelmed by love for them any more than I was for their father.

Did you say something, Stone Woman? I could have sworn I heard you ask why I married him. The dilemma confronting me was simple. Either I found someone of my own choice in Istanbul or returned to Cairo and faced the humiliation of having a man imposed on me by my mother, just as all my childhood friends had. I would rather have died.

My mother was completely opposed to the idea of my being an artist. It was my father who encouraged me. I learnt German so that I could go and study art history in Vienna, but my mother threatened to commit suicide and my father, foolishly, chose to believe her. She never really cared much for me. She had four sons who were all “settled in life”, as she used to say. They were married. Their wives had produced children. Why couldn’t she leave me alone? The agreed compromise was that I could study in Istanbul, because the Caliph of Islam resided here. One of my sisters-in-law who, like the others, is very fat, but unlike them is not so stupid, wrote and warned me that my mother was busy assembling suitors for the great day. Stone Woman, I panicked.

I discussed the problem frankly with my friend Maria, the Countess Galfalvy. She advised me to accept Halil’s offer. She knew this family of old and said they were quite unconventional in their own way and would never obstruct my career. I was young and Maria had become a mother to me. So I accepted her advice. He seemed a very nice man. When I looked at him closely to see which part of him I could paint, it was his expressive and meaningful eyes that appealed to me. Unlike most men of my acquaintance, he did not like hearing the sound of his own voice. I felt he would never be unkind to me. He was not the man I had been looking for all my life, but that was because I did not think of men, only of being a painter. When I was still in Cairo, my friends would point to good-looking boys and giggle. I was unmoved by these encounters.

After I was married I found sexual intimacy very intrusive. I knew it had to be done. I had to lie down and let him put his little stick into me, but Stone Woman, I promise you: there was no enjoyment in this for me. None. When I told some women friends they thought there was something wrong with me and I grew tense and unhappy. There was no lack of passion on his part, but his touch simply left me cold. When I felt the need to be touched between my legs, I preferred to help myself. It was far less messy and much more pleasurable. I confessed this to my closest friend in Istanbul, who is also a painter, and she joked that it was like preferring the first rough sketch to the finished oil painting. I thought of this remark for a long time and it almost made me abandon oils.

I have not been intimate with Halil for three years now, ever since the children were born. I do not feel the urge to find another man. In fact I do not feel any urge that needs another person to fulfil it. I am content with my work.

One day I told some of this to Maria, imagining she would be horrified, but to my surprise, she understood perfectly. She told me some women are passionate and others are not. She herself had been very passionate in her life with Count Galfalvy, but she was lucky. She told me there was nothing to be ashamed of in this situation. Then she looked at me closely and asked me a question that, believe me, Stone Woman, shocked me deeply. Maria asked if I preferred physical contact with other women to intimacy with men. I must have gone red in the face because she burst out laughing and told me not to worry if that was the case. Istanbul was full of women who preferred each other and it was not a big problem.

I was so shaken by her question that I avoided her for a few weeks. My studio was still at the top of her house so I couldn’t keep away for ever. One day when I arrived to paint I found a young woman waiting for me. She, too, was from Cairo and came with a letter from my father. She was the daughter of one of his most valued customers (my father, Stone Woman, is a merchant of antiques) and wanted to be a painter. She was spending a few months in Istanbul with her uncle prior to her departure for Florence.

Rachel, some years younger than I was, deserved to be in Florence. She had a beautiful face framed by thick, golden red ringlets, the loveliest face I had ever seen. At that moment I knew what I wanted most in this world. I wanted to paint Rachel. I wanted to paint that face in very great detail, not missing a single freckle. And, Stone Woman, I wanted to paint all of her both with and without clothes.