The Angel of History (17 page)

I did not kill her, Satan said, I was not even there, these people stone a few walls and think they’re hurting me, I, who withstood a storm of sulfurous hail, you can’t blame her death on me. The Devil appeared to Abraham the Prophet wishing to tempt him, the Angel Gabriel said to him, Pelt him, and Abraham threw seven stones at Satan so that he disappeared, then he appeared once more, and Gabriel said, Pelt him, so Abraham pelted him with seven stones and Satan vanished, but returned for a third time, and Gabriel said, Pelt the deceiver, so Abraham shot seven stones using an old-fashioned sling, and Satan withdrew. Satan’s roaring laughter hurt my ears, I love that story, he said.

I could hear my mother in my head, her voice had never faded, but her face sometimes eluded me, like crickets at night in Cairo, I heard them every night, but my imagination had to construct what a cricket looked like, Auntie Badeea told me they were small, not much bigger than a bee, my mother said their color was pale green, Auntie Badeea disagreed, she thought it was light brown, the color of earth, male crickets chirped by rubbing the top of one wing along the teeth at the bottom of the other and lifting both like sails to disperse the sound into the night air, the song restless and unending, females had their ears on their forelegs and they sought the males whose longing sounded the most beautiful,
only when they joined would there be quiet, my mother told me they looked like grasshoppers, I could paint the image of a cricket in my head long before I saw one. Why didn’t you look it up on Wikipedia, Satan asked, YouTube must have hundreds of videos with crickets, the number of chirps in thirteen seconds plus forty gives a reliable estimate of the outside temperature in degrees Fahrenheit.

I e-mailed my father last week for the first time in years and years, grandfather to five now, he had married a Finn by the name of Tuula, which excited his parents since they wished for nothing more than to purify their bloodline, to rid it of Arabness, I wanted to know if he had a picture of my mother, I thought he might, it took him a whole week to reply, something about two of his European grandtots staying over, he apologized for he could find only one photograph, and it wasn’t a good one, from the same hajj, he shouldn’t send it because it was silly, but he scanned it, it showed my mother posing for the camera with about thirty other women, she was veiled, only her eyes showed. This morning I spent more than an hour looking at the just-received photo on the screen, with a felt-tip, my mother had drawn a curving red arrow that descended from stringy cloudlets within a blue sky and pointed to one woman covered head to toe in white, her, I presume.

Stridulation, that was the word, I rubbed my wings in longing.

“I can’t be sure what happened to his mother,” Death said, his voice phlegmy and burlapy after so many cigarettes. A hoary cloud of smoke had settled above his head, making him appear even grimmer and gloomier than usual. “I too drink from Lethe every now and then. I am unable to keep track of everyone.”

“It would help Jacob if you could bring yourself to remember,” Satan said. “This remains an open wound.”

“I don’t do wounds,” Death said, “or windows, for that matter. Ask one of your saints.” The flick of his hand caused his cape to drop from his shoulder. It remained wedged between his back and the chair. “Why do you care? When did his mother disappear, forty years ago? So he forgets about her for decades, then you prod him with your spade-fork? You stress him out, and now you
need help relieving him of said stress. And people think I’m the one who’s uncaring. Listen, do you know how many of those working ladies he grew up with in Cairo disappeared? A woman would go to the store one day and never return, another would visit home, and whoopsie, we no longer know where she is. The aunties were interchangeable, and most of them had more time for the boy than his mother did. But no, a million times he should ask
her
pardon, five million ways the cats meow about how much he missed
her.
How poetic! How pathetic! Spare me, please. Do you know how many Arabs vanish every day? Every prison in the region is filled with breathing corpses who were once human, with full lives or semi-full, since they are Arabs, you know. Syrian jails, Moroccan, Israeli, Saudi, Iraqi, all overflowing with the they-were-once-human. But no, he wants his mommy. How ridiculous! Remember Joseph, the boy’s tormentor in school? You must remember him, the one who always ran pencil lead under his fingernails hoping to appear less bourgeois, a reverse French manicure. He disappeared after the war. He tried to pass for a civilian, the idiot, and the Syrians simply snatched him and left the taxicab he drove on the side of the road. He has been rotting in Mezzeh for over twenty years, but who pays attention to someone like him? No, your boy makes sure to paint
her
face in his memory. Why? Because he’s not sure he remembers her as she was, all he has is an impression, as if anyone’s remembrances are anything more than fuzzy impressions. He suffers because it’s his mother, the same one who sent him away to the lands of oblivion.”

“You mock me,” Satan said.

“All in good fun,” Margaret said, ever immaculate and self-possessed.

She jiggled the string in her hand, and above her the baby dragon balloon flapped its wings, changed colors from red to iridescent green depending on the angle. The cross at the end of her staff lay upon her lap, within the folds of her skirt. The helium dragon’s flight called their attention to the window and its sky: cold blue and grays, ordinary, the sun on its deathbed, indifferent and lukewarm, bankrupt.

“This interview would be better if it were raining, don’t you think?” Margaret said. “I would prefer a day more remarkable, for the boy’s sake, if nothing else, more memorable.” Her gaze left the window and fixed on her interviewer. “I must say I did not quite like the way cruel Death went on and on about Jacob’s mother, and moreover, he was quite wrong. Jacob’s remembrances of his mother shaped him the way the outline of a shore is crafted by its ocean. They resurfaced often. You can ask me. I know. I was there. Maybe the lord of heartlessness meant that the boy did not spend enough time with his remembrances, did not contemplate them much or wallow in them, but isn’t that Death’s work? He rarely takes souls in full bloom. People give him pieces of their souls gladly, and continue doing so until the end, when they no longer have much of their life to keep, so little to fight him with. Here, take this part of me, I don’t like it, take this memory, you can have that trait.”

“Whenever someone mentions him,” Satan said, “a little piece of me dies.”

“Clever,” Margaret said. “I like that. When the boy’s mother disappeared, he thought about her every day, every moment. His memories were still fresh, and then too, a year or so after, Badeea sent him a parcel filled with memorabilia. So on top of the sophomoric Stockholm snow globe, he had photographs, few as they were, anklets, the besequined veil, the sleep mask. Those items were easily able to prompt recollections, to revivify his sense organs: the touch of her lace, the scent of her veil, the feel of her lush lipstick on his lips.”

“His mother’s blood flooded his eyes,” Satan said.

“Exactly,” she said. “But then those things were taken from him. The shoe box with the black-and-white snapshots was the first to vanish. Those lost items transformed into little more than impressions, their effects on his senses much diminished. Some items were misplaced, some mispacked, others taken, but it was not his fault. It wasn’t. After those horrid classmates assaulted him at graduation, he was flown out of Beirut in the middle of a civil war, flown to Stockholm never to return. His belongings were packed for him, the poor boy. Death cannot blame him for this.”

“And yet he does,” Satan said. “May I ask why you are defending the boy so earnestly?”

“I loved his mother,” Margaret said. “I thought you knew that. She could have been one of mine had she called on me while pregnant. She should have been mine. I failed her. The poet was born on the day he discovered her disappearance.”

“Oh, yes,” Satan said. “Remember this:

One of my favorites.”

“I miss that boy terribly.” Margaret gazed out the window once more, the wrench of tears could be seen in her eyes, but none dropped. “Yes, I would have preferred a rainy day to this, thick irrational rain as in the days of Noah.”

“How many rains must fall before the stains are washed clean once more?” Satan asked.

Atop her bosom, the antique medal depicting her and a majestic conquered dragon lifted up and down with each long breath.

“Bring him back,” she said.

“He gave up on poetry,” Satan said.

“What poet hasn’t?”

“He is writing prose now,” he said.

“Just ramblings,” she said.

“The flights of a mind on its last wings.”

“No,” Margaret said, “not last. Tired wings—the flights of a mind with exhausted wings. A poet is tormented by the horrors of this world, as well as its beauty, but he can be refreshed, reborn even; he can take to the sky once more. Think phoenix, not Icarus.”

That dark-haired boy with the censer in the church, his name was Yusuf, but of course that was not what he went by, Joseph was what he wished to be called. I felt the change to Joseph was a shame, for Yusuf of the Quran was the most beautiful. He was the only boy I recognized, so I gravitated to him, a mistake, of course, like a stray meteor, I always sought the wrong planet to crash into. But the first day or two were fine, he talked to me, he too needed an ear, before he found out mine was too foreign, I listened.

On the second evening, I accompanied him to the secret smoking area behind the old rectory, which had been turned into the school library, and he surgically extracted a single cigarette from a plastic pen case, It’s a Kent, he told me proudly, the match both lit and shadowed his beautiful face, he did not offer me one. He had a mother who loved
him, he made sure to tell me between shallow puffs, but his father had died and the family needed help so he was boarding for only a while, not that he needed to, but, you know, the education was better than anything in his village, he chose to be at the school, and once he soaked up all the great influences he was heading back to his real home, where he would be welcomed with open arms and the most astounding meals this side of the celadon Mediterranean.

He was thirteen, an adult in my eyes, but not physically, for he had yet to mature, and before he stopped talking to me, before he joined the pack of ardent imbeciles who peed on me in the common shower room, he told me that he was born blond and his hair darkened to black, but he made sure to inform me that he was anxiously awaiting the majestic arrival of his pubic hair since it was guaranteed to sprout quite blond, just like the virgin hair he was blessed with at birth. I believed him, but he insisted that I examine the location for myself, I was not averse to that, as you can well imagine, Doc. There was some light, the moon was a weak silver, plump as a carp, presaging autumn, and he unbuttoned his pants and bade me kneel before him, before the smooth wedge of doughy flesh, Look, he said, look, and even though I could see his cock, I knew that was not what he wished me to notice, I told him I could not see any hair, which made him inexplicably happy, smug even, You would be able to see the hair if it was black, he explained, but not if it is light.

I wanted to explore further but I did not know how then, did not understand what I wanted, what I needed, but I felt the longing, the stirring of that elusive enigma we demystify by naming it desire, one whiff and the tectonic plates
of that mystery shifted, delicately, subtly, they rearranged themselves. I was frightened, Doc. He above, me below, my natural place, we looked at each other and we both knew. I was frightened by what I saw in me, he repulsed. I was not a boy like him, I was not like any other boy. He buckled up and strutted away, left me there bound to the earth, my stained knees on browning pine needles that had gone soft from being crumpled, the night and my body darkened.

The psycho shower incident occurred at the end of that school year, when the boys who ignored me all the time discovered that their assumption that I was a simpleton was erroneous, egregiously so, if you ask me, that my schooling, whoreschooling if you will, was not so ludicrous, I was taught by Auntie Badeea and her pathetically broken French was easily correctable, her English better than most of the nuns’, and her Arabic, forget about it, I was Sœur Salwa’s favorite as soon as I set foot in that French colonial parody, and the converted old rectory that was the library with its lively spiders and broken beams, its torn ribs and dangling struts, I may have been unwelcome anywhere else on those grounds, but I lived and loved in that hive of words, the only one there I was, the earnest reader. Placed in the class for the weakest students when I arrived,
la classe des cons,
as it was called, I was moved up twice in two terms, and I aced the end-of-year exams, which was the signal for the guardians of the social order to remind me of my place in this world. I was part of the group that showered on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday nights, no showers on Sundays, five showerheads, five boys at a time, I knew I was in trouble as soon as it was my turn because the four who joined me were the standard-bearers of popularity,
the deciders of right and wrong, as soon as we were within the dank, peeling gray walls, while a number of hooligans watched from the entrance, their shadows conjoining into a grotesque silhouette, the naked pack pushed me to the floor, four-cornered me, to the north, south, east, and west of me, yelling all kinds of insults and unimaginative curses, mostly variations on the whoredom of my mother and her blackness, and the gargoyles proceeded to spout pee on me as I hedgehog-huddled atop the swale of the drain.

When they were done, cheerful and laughing, they began to shower. I shrugged, got up, showered, and went to bed. I was mildly traumatized, but I had been expecting the attack forever, and when it finally arrived it was minor, they peed on me in the showers, for crying out loud, how witless was that? In some of the bars I frequented in later years, I found men who would pay good money for that privilege, they knelt, sat, or lay in tubs or on the floor and begged to be showered by the patrons’ recycled beers. I was afraid, on edge for my entire time at l’orphelinat de la Nativité, a condition that seemed to satisfy both the boys and the nuns, no further abuse was needed, or at least not much more.

Remember the time I slept at Lou’s when a Kaposi lesion made its first appearance on his inner left thigh, remember? Well, we spent the entire night talking instead of resting, he could not sleep and nursed a mild buzz, sipping anodyne wine, finally regaled me with his hellish anecdotes of high school. What a night, death a glimmer not yet mature, Bach measured stirring counterpoints and cool intervals, Lou looked so lovely in yellow pajamas with an Elmer Fudd print, his brown hair still lush, incarnadine cheeks under soft
light, Yusuf of the Quran, the most beautiful of all, yes, like Satan before his fall. Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till femininity was found in thee. On Lou’s lips a trace of pinot and out of them poured tales of acts of viciousness worthy of the great Lucifer himself, stories told through the night, the tortures, the beatings, the broken bones, every school has its Tigellinus, but his had more than one and each with followers, all-American boys who delighted in discovering how much pain a soul could withstand, two suicide attempts and all his parents and school could do was try to make Lou change his behavior, his behavior, his behavior,
his, his, his,
to modify his being just a bit. It gets better, Doc, fucking gets better, no one dared suggest that maybe the family and the school should change, or heaven forbid, that it was the all-Americans who should be modifying their beings, no, the homo should grin and bear it dumbly, punch me harder now because when I grow up I’ll be working for Google.

My time in school was pleasant in comparison, I was shunned and shunted to the periphery, not one boy wished to spend time with me, no student could think of a worse calamity than being assigned as my bunkmate, I was kryptonite, I was the plague, I ate my miserable lunches and dinners in Cain-marked isolation while the boys mocked me and guffawed, but no violence, at least not till graduation day, and that beating turned out to be a blessing more than anything else since I ended up in a hospital in Stockholm.

When I was with the whores in Cairo, if I needed to be admonished, Satan entered the conversation, if I ran too fast, I’d risk tumbling into Satan’s domain, Iblis would enter the room if I left its door open, when I was with the
nuns in Beirut, if I needed to be admonished, it was forever my mother, if I spoke out of turn, I would grow up to be impetuous like her, if I was tardy, unreliable like my mother, if I did not confess my sins. I could grow up to be evil like Satan or my mother, why not both, I ask you.

I ate alone for years, always alone, boys came and went, new boys, graduating boys, no one sat next to me during breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Joseph and his brothers graduated, they passed the Lebanese baccalaureate, not the French, don’t ask me how because their combined intelligence could not outwit an ass, he returned to the orphanage a few years after, while the Lebanese civil war was in full glorious swing about us, to proudly exhibit his plumes, his militia outfit and phallic weapons, Joseph even allowed the young boys to play with his loaded revolver and its six-chambered cylinder, much to the consternation of the nuns, who, like me, watched the armed criminal from the sidelines, the man they used to cane on a biweekly basis, he in full gloat, his eyes excited and hashish-dull, he asked loudly how my mother was, and not thinking I answered rashly, I wish I knew.

Pinto died peacefully during a violent night of storms, a garnet-colored sack above his hospital bed. As per his request, the doctors had turned the machines off, his mind was morphined, his pain alleviated. Strangely carved features adorned the thinnest face he had ever had, badged with the purplish lesions of martyrdom. Pinto’s emotional-support volunteer wept alone in one corner, younger than all of us,
he was new to all this dying stuff, Pinto used to tease him by suggesting that his dying was deflowering the virgin. Such a boy he was, stooped upon himself, his hands covering his face, crying silently, it was true, he was no longer inexperienced, my memory of him is foggy, tender hands, freckles, brown eyes, and long lashes, I can’t recall his name.

I rubbed lotion onto Pinto’s dry feet, the streetlamp lit the rain from below as in a Romero horror movie, I watched through the picture window until forked lightning distorted the effect, a flood, a deluge to commemorate the passing. I felt a little guilty because I had sent Jim home, offered him the choice of not being there and he grabbed it. He had walked fifteen blocks to the hospital, arrived soggy and haggard, his mind a bit drifty, not morphined like Pinto’s, doped up on Jah’s blessing. Go home, I told him, go home, please, I’m here, Greg’s here, you don’t have to be, he would understand, and by he I meant either dying Pinto or his lover who had died not ten days earlier.

As soon as Pinto’s heart halted, his face turned green and uninhabited, not even a ghost of him remained, just his remains, I kissed the top of his head, smelled a whiff of sour sweat, tasted a hint of peat moss and earth, the Dormition of Pinto. Water collected in clear sumps on the lower lids of Greg’s eyes, his left dropped a tear before his right.

After Pinto had his first bout with pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, the death sentence, he began to joke about wanting to be buried ass up, offering the world the choice part of his anatomy, he wanted an open-casket funeral so the men who had spent weeks and days and hours and hours worshipping his ass could pay it final tribute. He was joking,
of course, but I believe he also meant it. In some ways, the fact that he had what most men consider an impeccable asset was what defined him, his pride, so of course that was one of the first things the disease deprived him of. After that first bout of PCP he descended a spiral of weight loss, and his butt shrank, melted, the seats of the designer jeans that used to hug and highlight began to flap when he walked, not long after he lost so much fat that his derriere floated in the denim as if it were in a bathtub. He loathed inchoate hip-hop and its sagging pants, it made him furious.

He made me promise not to bury him in Colma, Anywhere but Colma, he said, I’m a San Francisco boy, I can’t end up in the suburbs, God, the indignity. We cremated him. Poor Pinto.

I couldn’t write, I couldn’t write, stop all the clocks, poetry has gone and left me and the days are all alike.

I was left alive so I could be lonely, bereft of any company but that of ghosts and automatons in this vapid city where I walked until the early dark deepened and a light sheen of mist formed on the leaves of trees, a little crepuscular promenade, my mind filled, to the exclusion of all else, with Satan’s voice saying, Pick up the pieces, numbnuts, pick up the pieces, you need a spring cleaning if not a colon scouring, you need an upheaval, a revolution.

The first revolution was Egyptian, of course, the Seth Rebellion of 2740 BC. That’s stupid, Satan said, the first rebellion was mine, I, the angel of light, I, all pulchritude and glory and blazing fire, I rejected blindness, I broke the chains of conformism, and you’re still paying for that one, all else fails and pales in comparison. I shrug you off, Satan. Shrug me off as much as you want, Satan said, but until you remember that the first sin is oblivion, your poetry will remain shit.

I decided to give up, poetry, that is, I should have a long time ago, I gave up on life, why not poetry, I ask you.

A man who does not engage life should not engage poetry, Satan said, accept Lucifer as your muse, when Adam, still unstained by guile, first bit into his luscious apple of gold and wax red and licked its juice dribbling down his chin, poetry came to life, through a dilating crack he and his buxom consort were hurled into this sunlit world of contrast, when they were tossed out of banal Paradise like yesterday’s used condoms, the serpent of old offered life and verse and art.

I hear you not, Satan, I hear you not.

I miss Eve, Satan said, she’s my homegirl.

I pelt you with stones, Lucifer, father of lies.

Listen to me, Satan said, his eyes infused with flames, get thee out of Eden, poetry can never be unstained.