Out of Egypt (8 page)
Authors: André Aciman
“She's serene and priceless, she is,” added the Princess. “And rich too. Her father's in bicycles.”
“She's stunning,” continued her son.
“Stunning or not, it still wasn't kind of you to play that nasty trick on her at the door. You should have apologized.”
“But I did apologize. So I played a little trick on herâ”
“It would be just like you not to have noticed,” she said.
“Noticed what?” he asked.
“Noticed that she's deaf.”
“But I spoke to herâ”
“Deaf all the same. That loud voice you hear from across the street is hers.”
The son looked totally bewildered. His mother watched him and, reading his mind, hastily added, “Stay away. She's a good girl.”
Soon someone rang at the door; it was the friend her son had been expecting for more than an hour.
“They're celebrating at the French Consulate tonight. I've been invited.”
“But I haven't.”
“It's all right, I'm inviting you now. Hurry. Everyone is celebrating.”
“Won't it be too crowded, though?”
“Of course it will be too crowded, come on.”
When he returned late that night, my father wrote in his diary that he had
finally
met
her.
He did not portray her as the woman of his dreams, nor as the most beautiful, nor did he describe any of her features. Superstitious as ever, he even avoided mentioning her name. She was simply and so clearly
her
that the need to capture her on paper or to probe the more elusive aspects of her personality proved too elaborate a task for the man who had merely written:
I want to think of her.
He did not write what he felt upon first setting eyes on her or what he thought of each time he caught his mind drifting toward her. He merely described her gray skirt and maroon cardigan and the way she crossed her legs when she sat behind her mother, the skin of her knee pressed against the edge of the card table as she kept her eyes glued to her mother's cards. At one point she had smiled when she caught him looking at her, a kind, indulgent smile filled with languor and mild apology.
finally
met
her.
He did not portray her as the woman of his dreams, nor as the most beautiful, nor did he describe any of her features. Superstitious as ever, he even avoided mentioning her name. She was simply and so clearly
her
that the need to capture her on paper or to probe the more elusive aspects of her personality proved too elaborate a task for the man who had merely written:
I want to think of her.
He did not write what he felt upon first setting eyes on her or what he thought of each time he caught his mind drifting toward her. He merely described her gray skirt and maroon cardigan and the way she crossed her legs when she sat behind her mother, the skin of her knee pressed against the edge of the card table as she kept her eyes glued to her mother's cards. At one point she had smiled when she caught him looking at her, a kind, indulgent smile filled with languor and mild apology.
She tapped him on the shoulder later that evening on the crowded patio of the French Consulate. People brimmed over into the garden and onto the street, where the city's French, Greek, Jewish, and Italian youth were gathered about in a chaos of standing bicycles and car horns, singing. Everyone had come to celebrate. The same, it appeared, was happening farther off at the Italian and British consulates.
“You're not dancing?” she asked, when he turned around. He couldn't understand a word she said.
“Isn't it too crowded?” he said, thinking she had asked him to dance. Do the deaf dance? he thought, conjuring a grotesque picture of a waltz danced like a tango.
“It's such a wonderful evening,” she said. She was wearing a sleeveless white cotton dress, a thin necklace, and white shoes, her ruddy tanned skin glistening in the evening light. With a touch of makeup on, and her wet hair combed back, she looked older and more spirited than the shy neighbor's daughter who all during her visit earlier that evening had kept her schoolgirl eyes riveted to her pleated skirt and her mother's cards. There was even a suggestion of self-conscious elegance in the way she carried herself, holding her champagne glass with both hands, her elbows almost resting on her hips.
Yet the absence of stockings and a handbag and the white outline of what must have been a missing man's watch on her tanned wrist betrayed a hastily dressed or vaguely underdressed quality, as if after spending all day at the beach, with barely a few minutes to make it to the ball, she had put on the first thing that came her way without drying her hair or feet. Her toes were probably still lined with sand. Somewhere, he thought, watching the dimmed evening lights play off the liquid sheen of her white gabardine dress, was a wet bathing suit, hurriedly taken off and left crumpled on a wooden bench in a friend's cabin.
“Did you come all by yourself?” he asked, making sure he was facing her when he spoke.
“No, with friends.” Perhaps she wanted to dance.
“Would I know them?” he asked.
“No, but I'll introduce you,” she said, not thinking he had no interest, taking his hand as she threaded what seemed an endless path through the crowd until they reached the other end of the large terrace, where a group of young men was waiting for her. One of them, leaning against the balustrade, was holding a maroon cardigan very much like the one she had worn earlier in his parents' home. Was he holding it for her, or had she borrowed it earlier that day and given it back to him? She made the introductions, describing how she had kept her neighbor's son waiting outside his own home. Everyone laughedânot at her error, this time, but at the way she had closed the door in his face.
“She's done much worse,” said one of them.
“We're leaving,” another broke in. “People are waiting for us at the British Consulate.”
“Want to come?” she asked.
He hesitated.
“You might enjoy it.” She smiled again.
“Oh, I don't know.”
“Another time, then.”
Turning to the young man who had been holding the cardigan, she motioned for the car keys.
“No. I'm driving,” he replied.
“My car, I drive,” she said peremptorily.
My father followed them mechanically to the end of the garden. She opened the door to her car, got in, leaned all the way across to unlock the other doors for her passengers, and then rolled down her window with jerky, determined motions, one foot still resting on the pavement as she fumbled with the
keys. “My respects to your mother,” she said as she closed the door and started the engine.
keys. “My respects to your mother,” she said as she closed the door and started the engine.
Without budging, he watched the car silently roll out from the consulate grounds, inching its slow, quiet way through the milling crowd and the parked cars and the row of tall palm trees dotting the alleyway, gliding further downhill until, before even reaching the gateway, it took a bold, accelerated turn past the gatekeeper's hut and suddenly shot outside the compound toward the Corniche.
All that remained of her as he stood on the spot where her car had been was the memory of that white satin shoe resting on the pavement, tilting sideways as she struggled to unlock the other doors, then resting back on the gravel as she searched in the dark for the key to the ignition. Perhaps, before closing the door, she had even thought of leaving her shoe behind.
And perhaps she had. For later that night, when he suddenly found himself unable to think of her, or when he felt the memory of her features starting to fade from his grasp, like an anthropologist reconstructing an entire body from a mere bone fragment he would think of that shoe, and from the shoe work his way around her foot, and from her foot, up her legs, her knees, her gleaming white dress, until he had reached her lips, and then, for a fleeting instant, would coax a smile on a face he had been seeing for years across the street but had always failed to notice.
A few days later, early one Sunday morning, he saw her walking past his garden.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“To the beach,” she replied, pointing to the north. “Are you coming?”
“Maybe. Who are you going with?”
“No one.”
“Wait, I'll get my bathing suit.”
They arrived early enough to swim, lie on the sand, talk, and then leave just in time to avoid the churchgoers, who started to arrive after Mass. On their way back, they stopped at a small pastry shop, where he bought her a cake and a lemonade. She had an ice cream as well. She said next time it would be her turn to pay. Amused, he repeated “Next time.” When they reached Rue Memphis, they stopped at her doorstep. He waited for her to disappear into the dark, sunless entrance, stood awhile there, then crossed the street, opened the front door to his parents' home, and, to his surprise, saw that he was still in time for breakfast.
At about two-thirty in the afternoon, when the sun started pounding on the veranda floor and he was wondering whether to nap for a few hours or take a chair out under the trees and read a Russian novel there until dark, his mother, looking quite flustered and surprised, rushed out to tell him that Madame Adèle wished to speak with him on the telephone.
Whatever did she want with him, he wondered? And why the telephone? Then he remembered. Would she really have the bad taste to ask him never to presume to take her daughter to the beach again? Would she use that horrible expression “to compromise my daughter”? He began to regret that fateful moment when he had seen her walking holding a large blue-green towel inside of which she had neatly wrapped her bathing suit. Why did mothers have to meddle in the affairs of their daughters, and what could the two mothers have been saying to each other before summoning him to the telephone?
His throat tightened.
“Hello,” he said, a cold, leaden weight sitting on his chest.
“Hello, am I speaking to Monsieur Henri?” said the voice at the end of the line.
“Yes, madame.”
“Monsieur Henri, this is Madame Adèle, Gigi's mother, calling.”
So he was right after all. Might as well sit down, he thought, knowing it would ruin his day now. The woman was clearly about to start an admonitory tirade of the kind parodied so well in English movies. Who knows in what benighted, prudish cell of the Dark Ages these people still lived. Her father, it was rumored, prayed every morning and had even disowned his son for marrying a Catholic girl. Daintily, the Saint cleared her throat again.
“I am calling because of my daughter. She asked me to ask you if you wished to go to the movies with her this afternoon.”
“This afternoon?” His voice was quavering.
“Yes, this afternoon. It is somewhat last-minute of her. But that's how she is.”
“This afternoon,” he mused.
“Yes, this afternoon.”
“And at what time this afternoon?”
“Let me ask her.”
There was a moment of silence.
“At three, to be exact.” He heard mother and daughter conferring in whispers.
“What did she say?” he asked.
“She said she'll understand perfectly if you cannot.” Another moment's silence elapsed.
“Tell her I can be ready in five minutes. How long will she need?”
“Oh, she's ready now.” Again mother and daughter whispered at their end of the line.
“She thought you'd enjoy seeing
Gaslight.
Personally, I think it is a grotesque movie, but whoever asked an old lady like me?” giggled the mother.
Gaslight.
Personally, I think it is a grotesque movie, but whoever asked an old lady like me?” giggled the mother.
“But hasn't she already seen it?”
“No.”
The film was playing at a small neighborhood theater not far from Rue Memphis. In front of the ticket booth, he found her waiting for him with her glasses in one hand and two tickets in the other. “I only wear them for reading,” she explained, “and I need to read the subtitles.”
Later, on their way home, she looked up at her living room window and saw that it was dark. “My mother must be at your mother's.”
He opened the gate, and together they walked past the arbor where he knew he would have been sitting all by himself till now, reading Tolstoy until it got dark, hopingâas he always did on Sunday eveningsâto avoid meeting his father, who always urged him to put down his books and go out and “live” for a change. “All these books, and all these clothes, and all these pipes, but never a woman on Sundays!” the old man would jeer. No doubt, on seeing him with the girl tonight, his father would have stepped out into the balcony and whispered, “So, we're flirting with the neighbors now.”
The girl said she would be willing to go out another time. When he asked which films she hadn't seen, she almost laughed, she had seen all of them.
“The girl is beautiful, but don't forget she is what she is,” said his father three months later as they walked along the Corniche one evening.
“I know. And so?”
“Well, if it's going to be âI know and so?' we're never going to be able to discuss this thing rationally. You see, not only does she have to live with her misfortune, but so will you. If it's marrying you want, there is always Berthe Nahas. She's beautiful, she worships you, she has money, and her father can
set you up very, very nicely.” His father itemized each of Miss Nahas's attributes on a different finger of his hand. “As for love, well, either it comes naturally, or it comes later, or it never comes at all, in which case she'll be busy with the children and you'll be busy elsewhere.
set you up very, very nicely.” His father itemized each of Miss Nahas's attributes on a different finger of his hand. “As for love, well, either it comes naturally, or it comes later, or it never comes at all, in which case she'll be busy with the children and you'll be busy elsewhere.
“There is also Micheline Joanides, Arlette's daughter. You saw the face her mother made when she saw you speaking to Gigi. Or Arpinée Khatchadourian. Christian, that's true, but at least she can hear.”
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