Raja Alem - The Dove's Necklace

Around him, morning overflowed with warm sunshine and faces gathered in the garden and on the terrace of the Ritz Hotel. The white cane furniture in the garden made the sunshine brighter and the atmosphere more cheerful. Rafa sat at the table closest to the twin curved staircases which led up to the hotel lobby. From there he could see the whole area around his client, Nora, who was sitting opposite her female assistant, tasting the breakfast tapas, sipping a morning coffee and quietly watching the laughing customers mingle with the lush greenery. He examined her like he examined his own face in the mirror every morning: it too was masked, by a U.S. Marines — style crew cut and a gleam that hid the truth of forty years of life and disappointment. The name Nora was more than a veil, though: it almost gave away a past that hovered like a shadow at her temple and neck and covered her entire chest. Rafa felt like he was watching two people, one trying to peel the skin off the other. Nora’s perfection lay in her unawareness of that duality, the unconscious rebellion beneath an acquiescent surface. Nora, he felt, was outside of time, sitting there anachronistically in Madrid’s grandest hotel as if waiting for a sign that would allow her to slip back into the past.

Rafa observed with wry amusement the interest that Nora aroused among the hotel guests. The beauty of Arab women is legendary, he thought to himself. The myth has crystalized over thousands of years of civilization, and yet still they seem exotic and ancient to most men. Out of reach. The kings and princes they deserve now only exist in fairy tales. There are no men like that for them today. And so they’re a doomed race. Most Arabs around the world have lost the special halo that once surrounded them; they’re like any other race now, ordinary or worse.

Rafa looked away, attempting to resist the control she exerted over the whole scene. Sometimes for a brief moment, he’d stop being her bodyguard and she the object of threat. She’d become — in her absolute frailty — the threat itself. Like that morning two days before when she couldn’t wake up. She’d slipped straight from sleep into a coma and had to be rushed to the hospital where she lay unconscious for a whole twenty-four hours before waking up, as if nothing at all had happened, showing no signs of functional impairment or any other damage. She came back from the dead, the doctors said matter-of-factly. And now here she was sitting indomitably before his eyes, fresh out of the whirlpool bath, bearing no resemblance to the apparition he’d escorted to the hospital two days before.

Without any warning, Nora got up to leave and Rafa jumped up to follow her. He performed his duty, like a shadow at her side, moving ahead and falling back to seek out any potential dangers that may have snuck into the lobby. She was a mere human being but she had an air of importance about her. He escorted her back to the royal suite where he cast an eye over the heaps of flowers. She was allergic to them all, but that didn’t stop them arriving, without cards, from her absent lover, who was nevertheless present in every glance she cast around her, in the pretty fullness of her lips and in the avidity of her gaze, whose fatal potential she was wholly ignorant of. This was a woman always on the brink of disappearing with the next look. He looked across at her; her eyes were closed. He’d almost memorized this strategy of hers: she would close her eyes sweetly, then after a moment’s lapse or retreat to somewhere inside herself where no one could reach her, she would surface with that look of loss in her eyes as she gazed around her, exposing how alienated she felt. Rafa thought the coma must have been an attempt to escape from that loss, a break from the piles of flowers that arrived in a steady stream and the servants and bodyguards who formed a cordon around her — around this girl in her twenties who was staying in a 5,000-euro-a-night suite in the fanciest hotel in the heart of old Madrid, a few steps from its most important museums — the Prado, the Reina Sofia and the Thyssen-Bornemisza — and the Teatro Español and Teatro Real.

Rafa waited patiently in the corridor outside his room, which was adjacent to Nora’s suite, and then sprang to life again when she reappeared for her long morning walk around Madrid.

He’d been working for her for two months. He came programmed to please and he was used to working for Gulf millionaires who drove around in convoys just to attract attention. He hardly had to look at the very young woman to know that he was there to play his part in another of those displays of status. He would sit in the front seat watching everything that moved, and then he’d jump out before the car had even stopped so he could open the back door for her, and accompany her as she headed off into Madrid’s streets, cafes, and squares, vigilant protector of her image. Until one morning, when a wry smile hovering at the corner of her lips unmasked him. She’d been perching on the banister at the side entrance to the Museo del Prado, which was already closed by the time they arrived. Sitting there, she was taller than him, and he’d taken a few steps backward into the plaza, so that the moving traffic of the Paseo del Prado was to his right and the calm greenery and Nora were to his left. He stole a few seconds to look at her. What was it he was supposed to be guarding? Jewelry? Another kind of valuable? She didn’t seem to be obsessed with jewelry like the other women he guarded for the sheikh, whom people called the Emperor of International Investment. He couldn’t make sense of the loneliness that enveloped her; she was a tiny gazelle trapped inside a glass paperweight.

That day, she’d been in a flighty mood — every day was different, as if she were a droplet of quicksilver that could never be pinned down to a particular psychological state. As she sat on the bare flight of stairs leaning back against the wall of the museum that towered over her like the wall of a temple, Rafa tried to read what was beneath her faint smile. He could’ve sat down but he preferred to stand; some sixth sense had him in a state of alert. He was observing her delicate teenage face and the sharp contours of her eyebrows, when she broke her constant silence to ask him a question: “Rafa, you escaped the war to come and do what? Guard people like us?”

“My name’s Rafi, not Rafa.” It wasn’t just his name that had changed over more than ten years in that job; when Rafi looked at Rafa these days he almost didn’t recognize him. “I didn’t escape the war,” he explained. “I left Lebanon when the last thing tying me to the country died.” He looked away; he’d said too much. It would have been a big professional no-no to expose himself like that, to confess that the death of his mother, whose cancer they’d fought side by side, was what caused those ties to be severed. Nora didn’t press him.

After that brief exchange, they’d dropped the bodyguard ritual, tacitly agreeing that she didn’t really need a guard by her side the entire time. From then on he’d always left a few paces between himself and her, following and watching, giving her the space to wander around and mingle, so long as she remained in sight. Whenever she sat at a cafe, like she’d just been doing, he’d pick a table a little way away, at the back, where he could still see her.

“You think you’re guarding me sitting back there?” He wasn’t expecting her to pounce again. He hadn’t even gotten over the shock of her first question when she hit him with the second. “What are you protecting me from, anyway?”

“That depends. What are you scared of?”

The look she gave him slammed against his face and slowly slid off, like a bird against a windshield. He could feel his pulse throbbing in his neck as he hurried to apologize, “I’m sorry, ma’am.” She looked away and his words trailed off on his lips.