The Angel of History (5 page)

Soon after Auntie Badeea finished painting her lady face, she’d joke with the customers, ruckus and raillery and merriment in broken English, goad the undecided into choosing the right girl for his next orgasm, and sit me on her lap, well, on her thigh since she was usually odalisquing. Blow on my face, my sweet Ya’qub, the powder has to dry, sing for me, she’d say, recite Abu Nuwas, I love his poetry but not as much as I love you. When the audience thinned out, she carried me to the kitchen, fed me, made me read aloud to her while I stuffed my mouth with her cooking,
poetry, light puerile rhymes first, quite more adult as I grew up, but always rhymes, Arabic poetry always rhymed. She put me in her bed and I slept long before my mother finished satisfying for the night.

Auntie Badeea usually woke to find me inventing the most elaborate games while sitting on the floor outside my mother’s door, serving tea to Sultan Ahmad, who entertained King George of Britannica, the latter so enthralled by my tea-serving prowess that he wished to steal me from my master, while I demurred and blushed and covered my mouth and giggled. After my fairly ritualized morning ablutions, brush my teeth, wash my face, under my arms, I was forced to read and write in the kitchen while Auntie Badeea sang and hovered around pots heating atop the woodstove like a mother hen with her chicks. Old Egyptian recipes she cooked, flavored with old Egyptian folk songs, she even sang Yemeni folk songs that she learned during her short stay, lovely songs, not like Ofra Haza, remember her, the Israeli singer you used to like to dance to, whom I couldn’t stand, and you insisted she was singing Yemeni songs that she heard while growing up in Tel Aviv, because that’s what the album cover said in clear lettering, yet I hadn’t heard any of those songs before, and you accused me of being insensitive and racist even, and you made me listen to her over and over and over so I couldn’t get the songs out of my head even though I hated them and I hated her, until she died of AIDS, just like all of us, she was just like us, and I felt so guilty for hating her, and I forgave her sins, but I couldn’t forgive mine. Ofra’s songs did not compare well with those of Auntie Badeea, couldn’t measure up, because Auntie’s voice was gravelly like sea pebbles on the beach, ideal for
those old melodies. Auntie Badeea’s singsong melodies bore me across the grooves of childhood.

I sat at the kitchen table with my book or papers, waiting, on the wall an old-fashioned ticking clock, the only visible one since the brothel had Vegas rules, no customer should be able to see the time. I waited, time aged at a chelonian pace when I was a child, I stared at the black hands of the clock, willing them to move, to no avail, I would count to agonizing infinity and back and look up and barely a minute had passed. I remember that clock, round, the size of a salad dish, Arabic numbers on a subdued light gray, an oyster-colored background, I remember the pages in front of me, writing the alphabet slowly, the alef, the standing line, trying to make it fit within the predetermined boundaries, and glancing up at the clock once more and again, understanding that my mother had not woken up. My aunties would stir awake one by one, come down for the late lunch, and my mother would always be the last, always the last. She would be happy to see me, ruffle my most unrufflable hair, but she wasn’t a day person and it would take her a few hours to regain full cheerfulness. Her jellabiya was
puce,
I still see it so clearly, Doc, so clearly,
puce
is the French word for flea, it’s the color of bloodstains, and was Marie Antoinette’s favorite because if you squashed a flea on it, you couldn’t see the stain, but even though the whorehouse certainly had its share of fleas, I doubt my mother ever considered the connection. She rarely considered much else than what was directly in front of her, which was where I tried to be. I buzzed around her like a hummingbird around its zinnia, Look at me, look at me, her head was usually down, hair covered her face, she would grunt, hum, ah-huh, and yes to
everything I said, until she stabbed my heart with an Enough now, or a Can’t you see I’m tired, and I would slouch and begin my second phase of waiting, waiting until she recovered and bloomed.

Slowly she perked up and began to smile, and as soon as she was able to pay me some mind, the muezzin’s call would echo from the masjid four streets away, time for evening prayers, the only ones that the entire house observed, the prayer rugs unrolled, Auntie Badeea owned the most intricate and my favorite, fine wool woven to depict a white mosque, its blue minaret topped by a delicate golden crescent, my mother’s barely a step up from a straw mat, the women all lined up facing toward Mecca, their foreheads and noses pressed the rugs thrice, while I remained still behind the murmuring hive so as not to distract their humming hearts promising devotion, I waited impatiently for the ritual to finish, hoping for a few seconds of attention, since the end of prayer was the time to get ready for work and the cycle.

The eternal return, the men returned, my aunties preened, evening in full bloom, Auntie Badeea descended the stairs, the laughter, the merriment, my mother left with a man, other couples paired up in rooms, and Auntie Badeea showered me with adoration, What poem shall you recite for me this evening, she would ask, take care of your Auntie Badeea who loves you most of all. She loved me and she showed it, I loved her right back, but not enough, not enough, because even then, when the Austrian or Australian finished fucking my mother, when the Englishman had left a deposit in one illicit container or another, when the Russian returned to the lounge to wait for friends, to settle up his
bill or gather his wits, then the American noticed me, I was there with Auntie Badeea. Such a cute boy, the German, the Swede would say, so adorable. The man looked slightly less kempt than when he walked in, more sated, he exuded confidence and I-fucked-your-mother from every pore, he smiled at me, a smile stronger than destiny, such a cute kid, such a sweet boy. I loved Auntie Badeea, I loved my mother, but I worshipped the man, I made him my religion.

“Forgetting is good for the soul,” Death said. “Not just good, but necessary. How do you expect them to go on living if they disremember not? We have to forget, we all do. Do you not recall the boy from Fray Bentos, Funes the Memorious? Borges claimed that the boy remembered everything, every minute, boring detail: the shape of mammatus clouds on Tuesday afternoon at two, the rotation of the waterwheel and its circumference, the color of each hair on a mare’s mane. It would take the impoverished boy a whole day to reconstruct the previous one since he could forget nothing. In the replete world of Funes there was nothing but detail. He could create nothing, invent naught. The pain of it all, the pain of not forgetting.”

He looked around for somewhere to dispose of his shrinking cigarette. His nicotine-stained fingers had been
flicking ashes, which formed an arc, a single-hued rainbow on the hardwood before him.

“I dislike nonsmokers,” he announced as he stood up and walked toward the kitchen. He stepped solidly, claiming the parquet in the living room as his, the harlequin-patterned linoleum in the kitchen. He opened cabinet doors and slammed them shut. He kicked a folding chair that was leaning against the wall. A startled Behemoth rushed back to the closet. Death returned with a cereal bowl containing the cigarette’s remains.

“Did you expect him to stay sane once you dredged up all he had kept interred for years?” Death asked. “You have awakened the bitter memory of what he was, what is, and, worse, what must be. He is hanging by an Atroposean thread, a pair of her scissors will be dangerous enough and you come in swinging an ax.”

“Sanity is overrated,” Satan said.

And Death said, “It is when a man remembers that he calls on me.”

“Of course,” Satan said. “But enough about that. Tell me about his childhood, about Cairo.”

“You believe the city saved him, don’t you?” Death said. “I know how you think. And I disagree. I think it would have been better for him to have remained in one of those asinine Yemeni villages where his greatest excitement would arrive every Friday: to wear a pair of Adeni shoes that went
clack-clack
as he walked and to take them off when he prayed at the mosque. He would be so proud as he lined them up outside with the other men’s shoes, his would look so trendy and fabulous, and that would have provided the faggot with all the happiness he could ever have wished
for. He’d marry a nine-year-old virgin from the village and spend his time masturbating in the bathroom. That would have been a better life than what you stuck him with.”

“And his nine-year-old bride would have had an easier life,” Satan said.

“Exactly. She would have remained a virgin, an eternal blossom. We should name her.”

“Balqees,” Satan said. “A nice Yemeni name.”

“Lovely,” Death said. “I tell you this: every move this boy has had to make ended up causing him more anguish, and that’s just him. If we consider the other people in his life, the suffering these uprootings caused was immeasurable.”

“Poor little Balqees.”

“You understand nothing,” Death said.

“So can you tell me about Cairo?”

“Fuck Cairo.”

The saint would not sit down. He walked around the two-bedroom apartment, picked up various objects, turned them around in his surprisingly delicate hands before putting them back: a small fruit bowl in the kitchen, a hand mirror in Jacob’s room, the imitation Tiffany Mission lamp on the nightstand in Odette’s. Brown eyes in a fierce, sad pugilist’s face inspected everything. He held every object carefully as if he wished to grasp the heart of the thing; he examined each, hoping to recapture a feeling. An exile’s long-anticipated return to his homeland: familiar and foreign, wondrous and disappointing.

“We were taken from here as soon as his lover died,” Eustace said, moving from corner to corner. “Uprooted and expunged, our sea lost its shore. Once more we were judged superfluous.” He sighed as he riffled through a dresser drawer. “We were with him since he was a stripling cherub, healed him through illness, comforted him during a plague. Yet when we were purged, did he see fit to call us back? No, he condemned himself to the everyday world. And now you, adversary to God and man, see fit to ask me here, to call upon me?”

It was Satan’s turn to sigh—a long-drawn-out sigh. “I was banished for a long time as well, but you don’t see me still nurturing grievances.”

Tall and muscular, almost filling the entire doorway, Eustace faced the living room. He cleared his throat, raised his left eyebrow and an ample brassiere held between thumb and forefinger.

“It belongs to the roommate,” Satan said. “I’m surprised it’s still here since she isn’t anymore.”

“He has not seen the light, then?” Eustace said.

“He has seen many a light and you know that,” Satan said. “You ran roughshod over his dreams. Was it all fourteen of you so-called Holy Helpers or just you? The stags, the hunt, the quarries, all so well lit. Instead of visions, Jacob is having nightmares.”

Satan turned on the mini recorder on the coffee table. A thumbprint bloomed where he had touched the glass top. He gestured toward the seat opposite him. “Come now, let us begin.”

“Yes, of course,” Eustace said, “commence we must,” but he did not move from under the casing, nor did he let
go of the brassiere. He held it against his tunic, then strung it on his belt next to the sword.

“I can’t believe you’d suggest that Jacob hasn’t seen the light,” Satan said. “We’re here to help the fellow. I need your attention.”

“Why me?” Eustace said. “I wish to help, but he’s having a psychological crisis. I have little experience in that domain. Should you not begin with one of the others? Maybe Margaret or Catherine? Cyriac?”

“I prefer to think of it as a spiritual crisis,” Satan said. “He has forgotten so much. I called you in to remind him. He wants to check into St. Francis, thinks it will be three days of rest and recreation.”

“Francis is an idiot, and our boy is not much smarter.” Eustace rumbled across the living room, suddenly dithyrambic in his movement, and plopped down on the sagging armchair. “We must rescue him.”

“We must,” Satan said.

Behemoth poked his head out from behind the closet door to investigate the foot stomping. He seemed engrossed, fixed his eyes on the saint, the Roman helmet and its halo. He prostrated himself, arched his back in a languid stretch before coming into the room proper.

“Why would he think that ending up in the hospital is going to help him?” Eustace said. “Is he blinded by depression?”

“Horribly so.”

“What is dark in him we must illumine, what is low, raise and support. How can I help?”

“Tell me about Jacob,” Satan said. “What I hear he remembers, what I remember he hears. Remind him of himself.”

“Shall I tell you from the beginning?”

“Not necessarily,” Satan said. “Linearity can be boring. Why not recall what is best about him, what jumps out at you from your well of memory? Is there something you feel most important?”

“There.” Eustace pointed at the floor between them, and Behemoth ambled to the spot. “Jacob prayed on his knees there. He called on me again, asked for my help, and I—no, we all came forth. He needed us.”

“Tell me,” Satan said. “Tell Jacob.”

“There,” Eustace said as Behemoth began to lick the old wood where he was pointing. “Jacob broke because of a drop of tainted blood—the shape of the stain was what crushed the poet.”

“Sing,” Satan said.

“It was the last time his partner the doctor left his bed,” Eustace said, “alive, that is. Jacob was exhausted and spent, surviving on fumes of air and methamphetamine. We too were weary. All fourteen of us could see that the doctor did not have much time left in this world. He was in that room there while Jacob tried to nap on the couch that is no longer here. The doctor called out. Even though his voice was weak, barely perceptible to humans, it was a dog whistle for Jacob, who jumped up to walk him to the bathroom. No one understood why Jacob had not put the doctor in diapers. The doctor would have refused, of course, but Jacob could have forced him. It would have saved him so much trouble and so much detergent. As Jacob was leading him back to the bed, he noticed that the doctor had a cut on the sole of his left foot, a minor wound, but blood too craves air, and it surged. Every step of the injured foot stained the hardwood floor. As an experienced caregiver, Jacob didn’t panic. Once
he had his lover in bed, he cleaned the cut, bandaged it, and filled a pail with soapy water.”

“As if he were back in that accursed Catholic school his father sent him to,” Satan said.

“Exactly!”

“As it was with the nuns,” Satan said, “so will it ever be.”

“He had washed floors on his knees before, but he’d never had to remove blood. He began to scrub the stains, sidling from one to the next, feeling more desperate and lonely after each, until he arrived at the seventh.”

“There?” Satan pointed to where Behemoth searched for blood wintering in the floor’s cracks.

“There,” Eustace said. “That stain was shaped unlike the rest, or you might say Jacob saw it differently. To him, it looked like a kerosene lamp, the one in the old rectory in Beirut where with an old, almost depleted click pen he wrote his first poems. He studied the stain for ten minutes, maybe more, as if he were sitting Zen and contemplating its mysteries. Then he broke—he wept, prayed, called us. As it was during the Black Death of the Middle Ages, when a sufferer called upon us, we appeared—we arrived, and he was curled up on the floor, fetal, enveloped in sorrow that should not be borne. We helped bear his grief. Agathius was the first to the floor as usual. Margaret wiped his tears. Vitus and I cleaned. I got on my knees and began to scrub the plague out, but when I tried to clean the lamp, he begged me to allow him some time with it. I must say that I would not have seen anything in that stain, let alone a kerosene lamp. It was a mere blob.”

Behemoth’s tongue would not slow down, as if the cat intended to uncover layers and layers through licking.

“Jacob saw the light of his childhood,” Eustace said. “He wanted to see it. Blessed lamp, an ordinary one with a slippery worm of a wick that kept sliding back into the fuel reservoir at its bottom. He would have to open the lamp and pull the kerosene-soaked wick out with a pair of tweezers. The shapely glass allowed him to see its inner workings—see through to the eternal secret. For the boy, the lamp illumined and mystified. It shed light and flickering shadows, warded off night demons and introduced gnostic ones.”

“You appeared,” Satan said, “the fourteen saints in all your glory.”

“Well, yes, but I was speaking metaphorically,” Eustace said. “You see, the boy may have been indoctrinated with more than one religion, but it was at that time, in that space, that he encountered spirit, the most fragile of all, as delicate as dandelion fluff. Accompanied by unreliable light, the boy read and wrote. In the old lamp’s cocoon he found a safe space, his secret garden. He left all that when he finally immigrated to America. The lamp was a shining allegory of what he lost, what he abandoned, dishonored.”