The impotent insect stepped out the door and these floors had never had to feel his feet again.
Photograph: © Jim Goldberg from the book Open See published by Steidl
Aaliya by Rabih Alameddine
My father named me Aaliya, the high one, the above. He loved the name, and I was constantly told, loved me even more. I did not remember. He passed away many months before my second birthday. He must have been ill for he died before impregnating my mother with another as he was supposed to, expected to, particularly since I was female and first. My country in the late 1930s was still trying to pull itself out of the fourteenth century, not sure if it ever succeeded in some ways. We did install running water. My father was twenty when he died, my mother sixteen. Barely eighteen when he married, my mother fourteen, they were supposed to spend eons together. It was not to be. What to do with a young widow? The families convened. The wife's family had thought they had one less mouth to feed, yet now had two more. It is said that my mother's grandfather hinted that they were given a defective model. In any case, the families decided that my young mother would be married off to her husband's brother and try once more, except she would not receive a second dowry, her wedding gift. Three months after my father passed away, my mother knelt obsequiously before a sheikh and watched as her father and second husband signed the contracts. I was presented with five half-siblings, none of whom I was particularly close to.
My uncle father was kind, if not particularly loving or affable. He paid little attention to his children. When he died, as all of us sat in his room, he called on each of his children to offer final wisdom, but he forgot to call on his youngest daughter or me. She was devastated, and all tried to comfort her. I wasn't and none comforted me. He had no wisdom to offer me, none of my family ever did.
I was married off at sixteen, plucked unripe out of school, the only home I had, and gifted to the first unsuitable suitor to appear at our door, a small man, in stature and in spirit. We moved into this apartment and it took less the four years for him to stand before me, as the law required, and declaim the most invigorating of phrases: You are divorced. The impotent insect stepped out the door and these floors had never had to feel his feet again. Young as I was, I shed not a tear. I did what my nature demanded. I cleaned and scrubbed and mopped and disinfected until no trace of him remained, no scent, not a single hair, not a touch. I soaked the mosquito net in bleach. Last I heard, and that was quite a while ago, the listless, biteless fly had remarried twice and remained childless. Woman, you are divorced. Of course, he could have married over me, and brought a new wife to join our crumbly nest. My mother wanted me to be grateful. He divorced you. You could remarry a gentle widower or a suitor of the more seemly who had failed a few times. Consider yourself fortunate. She couldn't conceive that he would have been unable to keep me in his life. He thought of me as the inchoate cause of his humiliation and probably continued to blame his other wives for his impotence. He couldn't risk having us talk to each other.
I would have loved to chat with his second wife, or his third. Could have asked: In all the years of marriage, had you ever seen his penis? Had that shrivelly appendage ever reached half-mast? When did he surrender, when did he end his fumbling humiliation in the dark? Was it a year, six months, a month? I hazard it was merely a month. He pursued the charade for seven months with me.
As a young woman, I was so frustrated that I had never seen a man naked, I used to wait until he snored before lifting the covers, lighting a match, and examining his body under his buttoned cottons. Ah, the disappointment of discovering the worm in place of the monster. This what I was supposed to be afraid of? This, the forge of fertility? Yet, I couldn't reign in my curiosity. Ecce Homo. I looked every chance I had, by the light of a match, not a candle, because when quickly extinguished its smoke was not as incriminating. The steady snores, the deep breathing, the lost world of sleep. Never caught once, never discovered. ·
Monday, 20 July, 2009
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