Beyond Babylon Read online

  They told me that menses is the color of blood, that it was blood. It isn’t really. It looks like it, but it isn’t. I remember this from a lecture Professor Gentili gave on human anatomy. She taught us a lot so that we’d know our bodies well, how they work and what they’re for. “Don’t ignore your bodies!” she’d say. I happened to see her again on a bus when I was in my third year of college. She was smiling into the void. She was always very smiley, perhaps because she didn’t neglect herself. In hindsight, menses does look a little like blood. It’s red.

  I only know this through hearsay. When I look at what’s on my underwear I only see a speck of gray. I’ve asked around, “Is it actually red?” They look at me sympathetically. They all thought I was color-blind. I made them believe I was. It would take too long to explain that I lost colors. I’d like to see that trickle of red flowing down my legs. Something flows, I know, since I get cramps. But I still can’t see red. I’ve only seen it on that pilgrim’s head. Ah, what I’d give to watch it run down my legs from my pussy. I would feel almighty. Doctor Ross is enthusiastic about the writing. She says it’ll make menstruating less painful. “It’s stress, dear.” She says I accumulate too much.

  Viscous moisture. A heat spray. I’m burning up, sweating. The temperature isn’t extreme, but it casts a devious wind, the kind that makes you catch an off-season cold. A violent gust blows, wallahi billahi, a vicious gust. And if I say wallahi billahi you must believe me. I’m hot, I’m sweltering. The humidity increases, I’m drenched…drenched in myself. It’s too early for me to be menstruating. My period is knocking at the door well in advance. I hectically rummage through my bag. No pad, no panty liner, not even some nasty tissues. Just my luck! In a little while I’ll ruin these wonderful slacks I bought from Momento. They cost me an arm and a leg. That’s how I am with pants, I prefer buying them large, comfortable, sort of trendy. If you want comfort, they make you pay for it. Otherwise, they cling to you and you try your best to fit into an anorexic’s pants.

  I’m not anorexic. But I was bulimic. I eat normally now. I don’t eat Montebovi donuts early in the morning anymore. When I was a teenager I adored those donuts. One morning I made myself a big, fat grilled steak. At the time there was no mad cow disease, no nada de vaca loca, nada de vida loca, so grilled steaks were plentiful. I’d found a nice juicy one in the fridge. It was enormous. I had to go to school. I looked at the clock. I had a good two hours to figure this mess out. The morning was just starting off and I could still finish it. I grabbed a frying pan and cooked a fabulous steak, placing a nice egg beside it. I ate every single bit. Five minutes later, I went to the toilet and vomited every single bit. I brushed my teeth and went to school. During the physics lesson on vectors I realized vomiting such an expensive steak wasn’t a very nice thing to do. Actually, it was a dick move. I stopped being bulimic that day. Then I started eating sloppily, or I forgot to eat. For the duration of college, and even now since I work part-time, I can get by on breakfast alone.

  Doctor Ross says it’s all owing to the lack of colors. But now I’m damp; I feel bloody, coagulated scabs along my inner thighs. I’ll ruin my pants. And it’ll bother me because I don’t like anorexic pants. I’m slim, but I have an African behind. I want to be comfortable. I like the pants I’m wearing now. I don’t want them to get ruined.

  I want a pad. I search frantically. I look insane. I dig through my purse as though a miracle is waiting for me there. I look and look again. Then I realize mine is just any old bag, somewhat banal, black with tit-shaped pockets, medium size—I like carrying my world at my side like the nomads. But it’s mid-size, nothing like Mary Poppins’s bag. All I know is that I’d like a pad, and I don’t have one. I’m getting damper, stickier, sweatier.

  A girl next to me smiles. Her hair is curly, black, and wild like mine. She’s similar to me in other respects—nose, mouth, and butt. Her face is more relaxed, her back straighter. Her eyes are illuminated by a glimmering frame of Swarovski jewelry. There’s an exaggerated coolness about her. She looks me in the eye. She’s not afraid of confrontation. Her gaze is glue. It follows me everywhere and won’t let me breathe. She’s a vigilant, curious girl. We even have the same skin tone.

  I should ask for help. She’s offering it freely. Yes, I should tell her something, anything, some bullshit, a thought. I’m not sure. I’m reluctant. Why should I tell her something so intimate? I mean, do I even know her? Does the fact that we have the same skin color automatically make us sisters? She does look a lot like me, to be fair. She’s always touching her wild hair and smiling. She has an open book on her lap. I try reading the title but can barely see. The cover is blue, I can see that. It’s only red I don’t see anymore. The blue book has many pages, and it seems engaging, judging by the girl’s posture. She has earbuds in. I can’t hear a damn thing or tell what the music is. She stops staring at me like she was before. She’s gone back to her book. I’m becoming more moist. The pants are screwed. Can you imagine if the pilgrim came now? He’d see me immersed in my own menstrual blood. Immersed in liquids, damp, sticky, sweaty. I only see gray, though. My menstrual blood flows, but I don’t see brilliant red like everyone else. Only a speck of gray, goddamn it.

  The girl is rocking. The music must be great. Maybe she’s in heaven. I shouldn’t disturb her. Now that she’s not looking at me, I wish she would. I wish she’d bother me with her womanliness. Perhaps when Doctor Ross speaks of the feminine, she means the vitality that girl exudes. I wouldn’t know. She’s not looking at me anymore and it’s tearing me apart. Look at me, damn it, I’m here, I’m here, don’t you see me? I’m here, look at me, please. I need your eyes. I need you and your gaze. Take your eyes off the book. I don’t know if it’s telepathy or coincidence. She looks up and plants her eyes on me. It’s a beautiful feeling. It makes me feel alive.

  “Do you have a pad?” I ask her.

  “I have a tampon, is that okay?”

  I say yes, that would be fine, it’s all the same. But I’ve never put in a tampon in my life.

  She gives me two. I go in the restroom in Ara Pacis. It’s clean, not too bad. Public restrooms are hell on earth. Dirt, visceral liquids, festering feces, assorted filth. This one had only a vague odor of use. You could smell the cleaning personnel’s air freshener. I’m shaking. I don’t even know where to begin. Why didn’t I look for a drugstore? Then I’d have a nice pack of convenient pads that I’d know how to use. But I’d have soiled myself before reaching that phantom pharmacy, I know it. And now? I have this thing in my hand. I kept the other one in my purse, in case this attempt fails. It’s in my hand. I observe what seems like a surgeon’s tool to me. There’s something vaguely threatening about it. The girl gave me the instruction sheet. I grabbed it, muttering a hushed thank you. She shouted from a distance, “I’m here, if you need me.” Yeah, she knows I’ve never used a tampon in my life. How embarrassing. Does she know about the colors too? Did she understand that I can’t see red?

  The instruction sheet frightens me. There’s a drawing of a chick nonchalantly stretching her vagina with two fingers. The drawing makes the vagina out like a monster. I don’t like it. There’s writing in every language saying I need to remain calm. Antes de empezar, relájate. Não fiques nervosa. Prenez votre temps et détendez-vous. Rilassati. Rilassati. Relax. It’s written everywhere. A mantra. They say that if you’re tense, your muscles stiffen and the tampon doesn’t enter, the body won’t allow it. But if you shut your eyes and stop acting like a baby, if you begin to see yourself as a woman and act naturally, then the tampon dances inside you and you can hardly feel it. It’s important to keep the string outside. I was almost starting to believe it would be okay when I read about toxic shock syndrome. I was about to reach nirvana, shit, and now there’s TSS? They say it’s an allergic syndrome or something like that, that some people, only a handful, may be allergic to the tampon. If you are, you can go into a coma. If you feel unusual discomfort, it’s best to remove the tampon. This news about TSS w
asn’t what I needed. Now I’m tense again. Then I reread the instructions in the more harmless section and it’s the same thing as before. It tells me that I need to relax and I can’t be tense. It’s a bit like making love. The man enters you tenderly and tells you, “My love, I won’t hurt you”—in the movies they always tell virgins that. My pilgrim will say it to me. “My love, I won’t hurt you.” And I’ll believe him. They aren’t all like that flaky-skinned uncle. He wanted to see me suffer, to see me hurt. He drowned me in his white scum and laughed like a sadist. My pilgrim, though, will love me, wallahi I feel it, he will cherish and respect me. He will drown me in respect, wallahi, respect.

  Inserting a tampon is a little like making love. I must relax, but I’m so scared. I put it in. Easy. I placed the applicator in my vagina until my fingers touched my body. Then I pushed the plunger, pushed it slowly, with extreme delicacy. Calmly, you might say. I was restless, but love is a restlessness that grants peace. In that moment I made love to myself. I treasured me. I was gentle like the pilgrim will be when he arrives. I pushed. The tampon entered and now it dances inside me.

  The girl is sitting in the same place as before, with the book open. She’s made progress in her reading. It looks like the book is open to a different page. It must be engrossing, she’s completely rapt.

  “It’s in?” she asked, suddenly looking up.

  “Yes,” I said. What should I have said?

  “It was hard for me, too, the first time. I can tell you were braver.”

  Should I have said something?

  I remained silent.

  “Do you know Tinariwen?”

  Should I have replied?

  I shook my head.

  “They’re a band from the desert.”

  She put the earbuds in my ears. Her iPod is a striking shade of blue, matching the book. The girl presses play and a song begins. I understand the first few words. The man who’s singing says something like oualahila. It sounds like my wallahi. Maybe the words are related. People are clapping. The man has a chorus behind him. Guitars underscore the words. Oualahila, he keeps saying. Oualahila, his people say. They’re telling a story. It’s a story I’d like to hear. I also clap in the emptiness. The rhythm transports me into a cosmic chaos that appears to be my own. I clap my hands, move my shoulders. I see the girl watching me and smiling. My hint of movement becomes frenzy. I look like a lunatic in touch with herself.

  The song ends.

  “They’re good,” I say.

  “Oualahila ar tesninam…,” the girl sings.

  “What does it mean?”

  “What does it mean to you?” she asks.

  “I heard the word ‘God.’” I don’t know what else to add.

  “Yes, ‘God.’ He’s saying, ‘Oh God, you’re unhappy.’”

  “But the music is happy,” I say clumsily.

  “Sadness has many rhythms. Like bliss.”

  “And will he come out of his sadness?” I ask.

  “Yes, by describing it. Through stories, he emerges from sadness.”

  “And what story are they telling?”

  “Yours, I think.”

  “Mine?” I say, dumbfounded.

  “Yes, the one you’re writing, the one you’ve had inside for a while. Why don’t you continue?”

  “It’s too tiring…”

  “Keep on going.”

  “But I don’t have time, I’m waiting for…”

  “It will wait for you, if it’s worth anything. You, on the other hand, must carry on. And stop making excuses.”

  And that is how I, Zuhra Laamane, opened the first page of red notebook number eight. The pen rolls smoothly over the tiny squares. The tampon, in the meantime, dances happily in my menstrual sea.

  ONE

  THE NUS-NUS

  C’è qualcosa nella morte che assomiglia all’amore.

  Spoon River Anthology, page 103, the version sold in kiosks, stuck inside a newspaper. Which one? Mar didn’t remember anymore. Parallel text. Mar only bought poems with the originals beside them. She reread the verse in English: There is something about death like love itself.

  The rhythm was as deep as the pistol barrel inside Patricia’s mouth.

  She frightened her. Mar was sitting in the middle of nowhere in Villa Borghese. Children played around her, young couples kissed, and drug addicts hoping to score their next fix pickpocketed on the 490 bus.

  Life flowed freely around Mar. The sky was limpid as in some German TV series. Aimless clouds. Faltering birds. Nothing pierced that great blue facade. Rome seemed like a movie set, like an MGM lot during the Golden Years. Maybe it was only Cinecittà. At every corner, unexpectedly, Visconti, Magnani, or Alberto Sordi could appear. Or why not, the remarkable Federico Fellini with an Ekberg and a fountain, with a Mastroianni and a showgirl. Federico Fellini shooting his new picture with Mar Ribero Martino. A black girl. Too black. With an Italo-Argentinian-Portuguese white mother. Hers was a family of errors. A family of lunatics.

  Mar got her name from a poem by Rafael Alberti, a man who had to flee his own country, Spain. Rafael had come to Rome. Perhaps he’d also sat in Villa Borghese. Mar didn’t like the poem. She didn’t even like her name. But she respected Rafael. He had suffered more than others.

  Mar had to go home. How long had she been sitting there? An hour, an hour and a half? The police eyed her. “They think I’m a prostitute, assholes. Idiots.” The girl’s legs decided not to move. They weren’t very rational. They were disconnected from her reality as a woman.

  It had been a month since her life had come undone. Ever since Patricia’s funeral, she’d felt scattered, like a broken thing shoddily restored. Patricia’s funeral was miserable, and she had been miserable attending it. Everyone dressed soberly and respectfully.

  Even the church Pati’s parents chose was sober and respectful. Mar had never been in that neighborhood. She and Patricia lived downtown, not in the suburbs. Pietralata was unknown territory, and that church was too, now more than ever.

  Pati’s mother, a chubby Roman from the Abruzzo, insisted on having her daughter’s funeral in that neighborhood, in that church. It’s where Pati was baptized, and her mother had always hoped to see her right there as the leading lady of another important ceremony. She dreamed of a wedding, certainly not a suicide’s funeral. It was because of this unforeseen and inexplicable pain that her husband, a gangly man from Valencia, supported his wife’s decision. It was also the only way to calm her. He was willing to do anything for her, and he’d already done a lot in retrospect. That gangly man from Valencia had moved to Italy for her, he’d ripped up his communist party card for her, he’d sternly disciplined that peculiar girl of theirs for her (though, early on, she’d gone to work in Spain). And for her he’d accepted a funeral for their daughter far from Valencia, where his family had been buried for generations.

  The church was built in a tacky modern style but the Gothiclike stained glass was stunning. One could see her own colorful reflection in it. Mar liked the idea of becoming red. She didn’t choose red for the funeral, however, but pink. Candy pink, to be precise, a disgusting color like the one used in chemical additives for sweets at the fair. She’d matched this with an equally ugly white purse, a red cloak, and high-heeled pumps. The crowning glory was a wide-brimmed hat, like those seen only at British weddings. Mar never wore hats. It was a funeral, though, Pati’s funeral, and that was worth making an exception.

  She felt her aching feet. Even on that day her mother had arrived ahead of time. She was always fifteen minutes early. Never ten, never twenty, never five. Always fifteen. For that reason, Mar got in the habit of arriving fifteen minutes late. Never ten, never twenty, never five.

  She was late to the funeral, too. She walked in, making noise, causing a scandal with her colors. The priest watched her, exasperated. She’d broken the spell of the seminal moment. Evidently he was reading something truly moving, perhaps one of the salvation stories of the New Testament in which Jesus was h
andsome, blond, and didn’t have a trace of sissy about him. Thirty-three years old and no women. Impossible. Jesus was a sissy, and a little hysterical, frankly: the episode in the temple speaks volumes, doesn’t it?

  Mar watched those in attendance. There were many people Patricia hated. Pati hated everyone, except Mar herself. She’d also hated their child, which is why Mar had to abort. And so they separated.

  She hadn’t thought about the abortion in six months. Now however, in the emptiness of Villa Borghese, every scene between her and Patricia resurfaced. The most endearing, the most dreadful, the ones she would never have wanted to film. What a flop that’d be, a movie with her and Patricia as heroines, a forgettable movie. Mar wanted to reshoot most parts of those scenes. Even the beginning. Even that first kiss on La Rambla in Barcelona.

  Mar stood up from the bench. The police had been watching her intolerantly, with an air of marked insolence. She got up, since the thought of being groped by a bunch of disgusting cops didn’t appeal to her. She headed for the 490 bus stop. She could’ve hopped on the 495. Either would take her to the Flaminio metro stop. Since Pati died, she couldn’t bring herself to ride her metallic green Honda SH anymore. She could still smell the scent of her bottom on the seat. Pati smelled of poppies. Her SH smelled of it also. She waited for the bus. Who knew how long she’d have to wait. She wasn’t in a hurry. She didn’t give a damn about time. She didn’t give a damn about anything anymore. She wanted to spend the entire summer drifting between her dump in Prati and Villa Borghese. Every day, back and forth, there and back. Every day, the eyes of heinous cops stuck to her ass or her large tits. Every day in the nothingness, remembering each moment of Patricia’s funeral.