Текст книги "Gate of the Sun"

Автор книги: Elias Khoury

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Текущая страница: 32 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

When she was with me I’d forget that she’d disappear in the morning and that I’d have to start the adventure all over again.

My question is, Yunes, where’s the sincerity in this relationship?

Is Shams Shams?

Is this woman that woman? Do I know her? Why did the smell of her body cling to mine and the sound of her voice hum in my head?

And by the way, Yunes, why doesn’t the lover feel he’s a man like other men? Why to prove our masculinity are we forced to take refuge in lies and pretense, stuffing our days with idle talk and boasting of fictitious adventures and then, when we approach the woman we love, we become like women?

Why does something like femininity awaken within us?

It’s true, the lover becomes like a woman.

I confessed. Yes, confessed. I tried to explain it to her, but she didn’t understand, and even if she had. . what good would it have done? Even if she’d loved me – and she did love me – or if she’d betrayed me – and she did betray me, then what?

Come to think of it, why did she want to marry Sameh? Why didn’t she say she wanted to get married? I was prepared to marry her. I was I don’t know what. It’s true. . why didn’t I ask her to marry me? I can say now that I didn’t dare, that the story she’d told me about her former husband blocked my ability to think, and that her troubles with her daughter, Dalal, stopped me from thinking about marriage.

How do you propose to a woman whose sole concern is to organize the abduction of her daughter? She said she’d have no peace in her life till she’d taken Dalal from Amman and brought her to Beirut, and that she needed a man to help her. And when I said I was at her disposal, I saw a trace of pity in her smile.

“You, my dear, are a doctor, and are of no use. I want a real man. I want a fedayeen fighter.”

Was Sameh the man she was looking for?

Didn’t she tell me in a satisfied moment, “You’re my man”? How could I be her man and not be a real man? And how can you ask a woman to marry you as she’s telling you she’s looking for another man? But no, I’m not sure, I don’t believe she talked about Dalal with anyone but me. She’d forget her most of the time; her daughter would only come alive for her after we’d made love. I’d light my cigarette and take my first sip of cognac, and along would come Dalal and set up an impenetrable barrier between us. Words would die and Shams would become a knot of tears – a woman who’d tell stories about her daughter and curse life and fate. Then suddenly she’d jump up and say she was hungry. I don’t know how she didn’t get fat. She devoured enormous quantities of food in my presence.

“Why aren’t you eating, Qais?”

She used to call me Qais: “You know I’ll treat you the way Laila did her Qais. I’ll drive you crazy.”

But Qais, I mean I, would only eat a little. Once I told her I didn’t eat because I was in love? And do you know what her reaction was?

“What an absurd notion! ‘Seduction requires strength.’ Eat, eat! Love needs food.”

I was incapable of eating even though I was hungry. I was like someone who couldn’t chew food. It was enough for me to keep her company and look at her devilish eyes stealing glances at me and apologizing for her insatiable appetite.

But maybe not. Maybe the reason I didn’t ask her to marry me was that I was afraid of her. Strange. Tell me; don’t you think it’s strange? Not you – it’s impossible to make a comparison with you because Nahilah was your wife and that explains everything. I don’t want to trespass on your life.

But why didn’t you do what Hamad did?

Like you, Hamad was a fighter in the Sha’ab garrison – don’t tell me you don’t know him. Umm Hassan told me his story. She said his sister refused to hold a wake for him after he died in her house in Ain al-Hilweh, so the wake was held in Umm Hassan’s house in Shatila.

Umm Hassan said they were complete fools: “They say he is Israeli. What does that mean? When we’re humiliated and imprisoned for the sake of our children and our land, does that make us traitors?”

I won’t tell you the story of Hamad’s return to his village in Galilee because I’m sure you know it. I just wanted to say that maybe you also were afraid of love.

Take any love story, Brother. What is a love story? The story we call a love story is usually a story of the impossibility of love. People only write about love as something impossible. Isn’t that the story of Qais and Laila, and Romeo and Juliet? Isn’t it the story of Khalil and Shams? All lovers are like that; they become a story of unconsummated love, as though love can’t be consummated, or as though we fear it or don’t know how to tell about it, or, and this is the worst, we don’t recognize it when we’re living it.

What did Qais Ibn al-Mulawwah do? Nothing. They stopped him from seeing his sweetheart Laila, so he went mad.

Didn’t you make me a promise, heart,

You’d give up Laila if I did so too?

Behold – I’ve given up my love for her.

How then, when her name is said, you swoon?

Nice words and lovely poetry, but the man was crazy and his beloved married another man.

And Romeo, what did he do? He killed himself.

And what about all the other lovers? All of them loved at a distance and lived their love in separation, so they became impossible stories.

Don’t you agree?

Is it because love is impossible that every time Shams left me, my mouth would become as dry as kindling?

Was it because I couldn’t stand to be parted from her?

Do you know that beautiful verse from the Koran? “They are a vestment for you, and you are a vestment for them.” How are we to become vestments for one another – I mean, how are we to become one?

That’s what love is, which is why we can’t talk about it. We talk only about its impossibility or its tragedy, its victims and its fatalities.

And when lovers are together, it’s impossible to describe. In fact, it may be that none of us lives it and that’s why we invent reasons why it’s kept from us.

It might be that love has no language. It’s like a smell. How can you describe a smell? We describe it in terms of what it’s not, and we don’t give it a name. Love’s the same. It has a name only when it isn’t there.

I don’t mean to belittle the importance of your love for Nahilah. I know that you loved her and that your infatuation was great. I know that she dwelled in your bones. I know that you’re dying today because of her.

But why didn’t you go back, the way Hamad did?

How was it that Hamad went to prison and succeeded in returning to his house and his wife, and such a possibility never occurred to you?

Don’t tell me you sacrificed yourself for the revolution, I don’t believe it’s that.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I don’t want to denigrate your history. Your history is my history, and I respect you and honor you and hold you in the highest regard.

But tell me, wasn’t there an element of fear of Nahilah in your decision? Didn’t you prefer – unconsciously perhaps – that she be where she was and you where you were? That way your story could continue and survive across space and time. Every time you went to see her, you put your life in danger. Every time, you purchased your love at the cost of the possibility of your death. Isn’t that extraordinary? Isn’t that a story like no other?

Tell me, when you were walking the roads of the two Galilees, of Palestine and of Lebanon, did you feel that your thorn-lacerated feet bore a love story like no other?

As for me, though, what a letdown!

I know my story doesn’t deserve to be put alongside yours. I’m just a duped lover; that’s what everyone thinks. But no, Shams isn’t so simple; you can’t sum her up by saying she betrayed me. And “betrayed” isn’t accurate. I wasn’t her husband, so why did she come to me? If there hadn’t been love, she wouldn’t have come; if there hadn’t been love, her presence wouldn’t have bewitched me; if there hadn’t been love, I wouldn’t have hidden like a dog in this hospital out of fear of revenge. I confess I was afraid and I believed the rumors about the people of al-Ammour vowing to take revenge on their daughter’s killers. But that time has passed.

If they’d wanted to kill me, they’d have killed me. I live in the hospital because I’ve gotten used to it, that’s all. I could go back home if I wanted to, but my house is near the mosque and I don’t like cemeteries.

None of Shams’ family put in an appearance except Khadijeh, her mother. She came to the Ain al-Hilweh camp, took her daughter’s things, and went back without making contact with anyone here. I heard that nobody visited to pay their respects. She didn’t stay in the camp more than twenty-four hours. She went into her daughter’s house, shut the doors and windows, and came out in the morning carrying a large suitcase. She spoke to no one, and at the Lebanese Army barrier at the camp entrance, the one we still call the Armed Struggle barrier, she turned around, spat, and left.

There’s nothing to fear. The woman came and went, and I’m here not out of fear but out of habit.

Plus, I want to review my life in peace and quiet.

You want the truth, right?

I’ll try to tell you the truth, but don’t ask me, “Why did you accept?” – I didn’t accept. No, I didn’t. And no one consulted me. I found myself in the maelstrom and I almost died, and if Abu Ali Hassan hadn’t been there, they would’ve executed me. That’s right, executed.

No, not Shams’ relatives, the Ain al-Hilweh camp’s militia. They supposed, wrongly of course, that I was the one who instigated her murder to get rid of Sameh and have the woman all to myself. They didn’t believe what everybody was saying – that Shams killed her lover herself. They assumed someone else had been involved, and arrested me.

I was too embarrassed to tell you about my arrest. The only thing about it that sticks in my memory is their insulting references to “horns” and the way they treated me as a nobody. But that was what saved me, and it only happened after Abu Ali’s intervention. Can you believe it? He intervened on my behalf to make sure that I was humilated. There was no other way out – humiliation or execution. Abu Ali saved me; if it hadn’t been for his intervention, they’d have killed me as they killed Shams.

I won’t tell you about the interrogation. A man came and delivered a letter from the Ain al-Hilweh militia inviting me to visit them, and I went. They escorted me directly to the Ain al-Hilweh prison, where they threw me in a dark underground vault, full of damp and the smell of decay, and left me.

I rotted in the vault for ten days, which felt like ten years – time got mixed up in my head, and I lived underground as though I were floating on the entire night of my life.

They took me out for the interrogation. A man came holding the kind of pick we normally use for breaking up blocks of ice and started jabbing it into my chest asking me to confess.

He’d stab me with the pick and ask, “What did you do with Sameh, dog?” and I’d ask him who this Sameh was. He’d repeat his question as if he weren’t expecting an answer from me.

A stupid interrogator, you’ll say.

But no, he was neither an interrogator nor stupid. He was just a criminal. Crime has spread everywhere in our ranks. We’ve watered it with blood and stupidities. We’ve wallowed in error, and error has consumed us.

How is it possible?

They arrest you and throw you into the darkness without asking a single question? They throw you into an underground vault where you live with your waste and the next thing you see is an ice pick in your chest. Then they ask you about someone you don’t know and don’t wait for an answer?

Ten days in nowhere, and if it hadn’t been for Abu Ali, God knows how long I’d have remained there. Abu Ali Hassan was a comrade of mine from the days of the base in al-Khreibeh in 1968. He told me later he saved me because he was certain of my innocence. He believed “the whore” had fooled me.

They escorted me to the interrogation and there contemptuous looks and sarcastic smiles fell upon me, and I understood. Instead of being furious, however, and trying to defend my honor, I was afraid for Shams and possessed by a single idea: how to rescue her from their hands. I could read the decision to execute her in their eyes, and I didn’t want her to die. At the time I didn’t know what life taught me later, that death is the lover’s relief.

Nothing can save you from love but death.

If I’d known that, I’d have killed her myself.

At the interrogation, however, I was possessed by fear for her, and instead of going home and back to work when I was released, I decided to look for her to try to save her. I went to the outskirts of Maghdousheh, east of Tyre, where the fighters had established bases. I knew she commanded a military detachment there that carried her name and that she refused to accept orders from the military command in the south because they were directly under the command of Tunis. That’s what she’d told me and I didn’t believe her, but when I went to Maghdousheh I found out that this time she hadn’t lied. There really was an armed detachment known as “Shams’ group,” but it wasn’t at Maghdousheh. I was told they had withdrawn toward Majdalyoun.

I went to Majdalyoun but didn’t find her.

I was like a blind man, wandering the roads of the south, searching for her but not finding her. Everywhere I went I was assailed by the same strange looks, as though everyone knew the story.

I searched and found nothing. I crossed Majdalyoun, went to the house they told me was the headquarters of Shams’ unit and found it empty – a five-room house surrounded by a garden with fruit trees. I went in and found blankets on the floor, plastic bags, pans, and the odor of rotten food. It looked as though they’d evacuated the place in a hurry without time to organize their departure. I lay down on a blanket and felt like crying. I was besieged with tears, yet I found myself without tears, without emotion, without feeling. Nothing. I existed in the nothing and in tears, and I knew she was lost.

Shams was lost, and I didn’t know how I’d fill the gaps in my life without her.

I closed my eyes, squeezed them closed as hard as I could, and the darkness filled up with gray holes and despair overwhelmed me.

My son, Yunes, do you know what it means to feel incapable of living?

Once I told her I couldn’t imagine life without her, and she patted my shoulder and picked up Mahmoud Darwish’s collected poems and started reading –

Take me to the distant land.

Neverending is this winter – wailed Rita.

And she smashed the porcelain of day on the window’s iron,

Placed her small revolver on the draft of the poem

And threw her socks on the chair, breaking the cooing.

She went, barefoot, toward the unknown, and the hour of my departure had come.

Naked on my bed, she read. The pages gleaming in front of her, her voice bending, branching off, and blushing. I looked at her and failed to understand. I heard the rhythm of her voice mixed with the rhythm of the rhymes, and I saw her body shimmering.

She closed the book and asked, “What’s wrong? Don’t you like poetry?”

“I like it, I like it,” I said. “But you’re more beautiful than poetry.”

“Liar,” she said. “My ambition is to become like Rita as Mahmoud Darwish wrote her. Have you heard Marcel Khalifa’s song, “Between Rita and My Eyes There is a Rifle”? I’d like to be like Rita, with a poet coming along and putting a rifle between me and him.”

She shot up suddenly and said she was famished and was going to make some pasta.

I didn’t tell her I wasn’t always that way. I love poetry, I know entire poems by heart. But in the presence of a wild outpouring of beauty, words are no longer possible.

Though in those moments that I spent alone in the house in Majdalyoun, surrounded by traces of her, I could smell the aroma of pasta inside the gray spots dancing in front of my closed eyes, and I felt my death. Believe me, without her I’m nothing – alone with the nothing, alone with what’s left of her things, alone with her ghost.

And I sunk into sleep within the odors of decay that fumed from the blankets of that abandoned house.

I slept and floated over mysterious dreams, as though I were no longer myself. I saw her. Shahineh, wearing khaki trousers and a khaki shirt, like Shams. She was caught in the rain. Ropes of rain tied the ground to the sky, and she was standing under a flowering almond tree.

“How can the almond tree flower in the middle of winter?” I asked her.

The branches of the tree shook and the blossoms started to fall. I ran to gather them, and she pointed her rifle at me. “Go back,” she yelled. “The Jews are here.”

I was a child. No, I became a child. No, I saw myself as a child. Anyway, I started jumping to stretch my body to its normal height because I wasn’t a child and it wasn’t Shahineh, it was Shams.

“Why are you doing this to me, Shams?” I shouted.

Shahineh said she was going.

I went up to her and the earth started to open up beneath my feet – I was drowning. I was a child drowning in the rain. The huge drops struck me. It hurt.

“Mom!” I cried.

And I saw Shahineh – who looked like Shams – turn her back and disappear into the water.

The dreams are all mixed up in my head now, but when I woke there to the sound of their footsteps, I wasn’t afraid. I felt feet kicking me and rifles pointed at my head, so I curled up into a ball to avoid as many of the blows as I could.

They stood me up against the wall and told me to put my hands up. Then they turned my face to the wall and frisked me while I stood like a zombie. I didn’t resist because I no longer resisted.

Since the day at the stadium, when I’d decided I wasn’t going with the ones who got on the Greek ships, I’d told myself, “Enough.”

But where are we to find this enough?

You say, “Enough,” and then blind history drags you by the hair back to war.

I said, “Enough,” and sunk into the massacre. I said, “Enough,” and the War of the Camps encircled me. I said, “Enough,” and found myself crucified on the wall of an abandoned house in a village of ghosts called Majdalyoun whose inhabitants had been driven out.

And now I say, “Enough,” and I find myself with a child in whom death dances exultantly, as though we were born, and die, in death.

I was standing against the wall, the weariness spreading through me, and with the image of Shahineh in Shams’ body as she left me in the rain. Why did she leave me to drown? Is it possible to leave a child calling for help? Even in a dream, it would be shameful. I was standing, the man was patting down my body as though he were detaching my bones, one by one. Then he ordered me to turn and face him. I saw four young men, the oldest not more than twenty. They were like children at play. That’s war – it should be like a game; when we stop playing we’re afraid, and when we’re afraid, we die.

I stood against the wall awaiting my death, but they didn’t kill me. Their boss showered me with questions, but I didn’t answer. What was I supposed to say? Was I supposed to tell the truth and make myself look laughable and stupid?

When the commander despaired of my face, with its sheen of sleep, he ordered them to take me away. One of them came forward, undid the buttons of my shirt and pulled it up to cover my face. They put me into a Land Rover and took me away. Within the jolts of the furrowed roads, sleep returned to cradle me. I wanted that woman. I wanted to give her the almond flowers I’d gathered for her.

But sleep wouldn’t come. I found myself in a dark cell like the one I’d been held in before. My guess is that they’d forgotten about me and left me to live out my three days in prison as though in the belly of death. Now I am Jonah, not you. I lived in darkness for three days without food or water. I was sure they’d forgotten me and that I’d die inside that dark vault, and no one would know what had become of me.

On the third day, however, they took me out of the cell to interrogate me, and the interrogator burst out laughing in my ear.

“So, Mr. Horns!” he said. “What were you doing there?”

I said I’d gone looking for her.

“And why were you looking for her?”

“To understand.”

When I said “to understand,” the man burst into a long, hysterical laugh and started coughing and choking on his words. Then, in the middle of his coughing and laughing, he gestured for them to throw me out.

So that was how I was twice arrested for her sake and twice released.

I went home, leaving Shams to her fate. Don’t say I didn’t try to save her. I went home and waited for her death, and she died.

What else do you want to know?

I swear I don’t know anything else. All I see in front of me now is a question mark. Why did she come from Jordan? And how did she become an officer in Fatah? And how did she put her military group together?

Questions I don’t know how to answer. All I know is that I know nothing.

Do you want to hear the story?

I’ll tell you as long as you don’t tell me it’s unbelievable. Believe first, then I’ll tell. I no longer feel the need to determine the truth of stories or the absence of it. None of our stories are believable, Uncle, but does that mean we should forget them?

I believed it because it resembled your story, but your story, and those of Reem or Nahilah in Sha’ab, and Adnan’s in prison or in the mental hospital, are all unbelievable stories, yet they’re still true. You know them, I know them, everybody knows them.

My question is. .

No, no. There is no question.

But let’s suppose there were a question. The question would be why don’t we believe ourselves? Why do I feel that the things that have happened, to me or to others, have turned into shadows? You, for instance – aren’t you the shadow of the man you were? And that man – was he a hero, a lie, or an illusion?

I know I disturb you when I throw this kind of question at you, and I know you’d rather be on your own now, because now you’re. . God, how beautiful you are! If you could open your eyes just once to look at yourself in the mirror. An old man opening his eyes and seeing himself as a child, seeing his body liberated from the sack holding his life. You’re the one who came up with that theory, remember?

You used to say that the years a man lived were a sack he carried on his back, but we couldn’t see it because no one can see his own life. Our life is like a dream: Life trundles us along and time trundles us along and we have no idea. Then suddenly, when we reach forty, we start feeling it, as though time had built up inside a large sack on our backs and were weighing us down.

Do you remember the day you returned to Nahilah, exhausted and wounded, from the Israeli ambush you fell into and by some miracle managed to escape?

You found yourself bleeding in the valley. You picked yourself up and went to her. As you made your way heavily toward the cave, you were certain you were on your way to death. And you didn’t feel sorrow. You told me that when you tapped on her window, all the images and memories halted in your eyes, and you saw yourself as a shadow walking toward its shadow.

You came around to find Nahilah before you, covering your head with her white headscarf, wiping your wounds with oil and rocking you as a mother rocks her child. Nahilah tried to remove the bullet lodged in your thigh but couldn’t, and you got better with the bullet in its place. I feel it under my fingers now when I bathe you. The bullet is getting bigger and you are getting smaller, there’s no need to remove it. We’ll let it accompany you to wherever you go off to.

That day you told Nahilah that the sack was getting heavy on your back, you asked her about her sack, she smiled and said nothing.

Nahilah would smile and say nothing, hiding her secret in that broad smile of hers that transformed her eyes into a grove of olives, into night.

That day you told her that age was the cross of man, you talked to her about Christ. She listened to you and loved what you said. She told you that you spoke like your mother, who hid an icon of the Virgin Mary under her pillow.

You told Nahilah that Christ was crucified on wood his own age, years he didn’t live, for life is like the cross – in the end we’ll find ourselves hung upon it.

Nahilah said you’d started to talk like a philosopher and smiled.

Your sack had started to weigh you down, making you bend. No, your back wasn’t hunched, because you were active to the end, but that accursed sack bent your neck a little, and you started to walk with your eyes to the ground.

Look now and see how beautiful and new you are! You’ve cast it off your back, and your childhood has commenced. You’re an ageless child again. The years that were behind you are now ahead of you.

No one will believe me.

I tell Dr. Amjad or Kamelya or Zainab, and they think I’m mad. It’s as though they can’t see. “Look!” I say, but they don’t see. Standing at the head of your bed, Amjad says the danger is now in the heart; at any moment it could fail.

I know more about medicine than he does. I know the chances of a heart attack. But nobody wants to see or believe; even you have become like them. I implore you to open your eyes just one time and look in the mirror, and you’ll see the surprise. You’ll see how a person can cast the sack of years off his back, return to his childhood, and start over from the beginning.

I told you nothing about our story was believable. Shams, too, is unbelievable. But you have to believe me. I know that in telling Shams’ story, I’ll kill her. This time Shams will be assassinated by words. All those people who gathered in the hills of al-Miyyeh wi-Miyyeh failed to kill her because she’s still alive within me, the betrayal radiating from her hot body and her fingers, as if I were still holding her hand and watching her long, slender fingers, kissing them one by one, igniting her from her fingers.

Shams still burns, Yunes, but it seems the time has come. I feel I have to shroud her in the little sack of years that she carried on her back. I feel the time for her death has come. So I’ll tell you the whole story, from the beginning, and I’ll bury Shams with words, as we buried Nahilah.

Now it’s my turn.

I can no longer hold onto my woman. I have to bury her as people bury their dead and their stories.

Shams’ story begins in 1960, when she was born in al-Wahdat camp in Amman. Her father was Ahmad Saleh Hussein, her mother Khadijeh Mahmoud Ali. Ahmad had married Khadijeh in their village of al-Ammour, in the district of Jerusalem, in 1947. One year later, their first son, Saleh, was born. He died in 1970 in the September battles in Jordan.

Ahmad and Khadijeh found themselves with their baby, Saleh, who wasn’t yet a year old, in the throngs of inhabitants of al-Ammour who were expelled from their village in 1948, following the establishment of the State of Israel. The family took up residence in the caves near Bethlehem, as did all the people from the village, and would slip back to the village in search of provisions. Then everything came to a halt because collective border crossings became more difficult, and because provisions had run out, and all the houses in the villages had been destroyed.

In 1950, after a new child – whom they called Ammouri in hopeful memory of the demolished village – had been born, the family moved to the Aydeh camp, in the town of Deir Jasir. There, Ahmad found a job in a pasta factory owned by Abu Sa’id al-Husseini. His wages were a shilling a day, and the shilling was enough because the man used to bring enough pasta back with him to feed the family.

From then on, the family ate only pasta. Even after the factory closed and they moved to the camp in Amman, Ahmad kept making pasta at home. People even called them “the Italians” because all Ahmad talked about in the camp were the virtues and benefits of pasta and the greatness of the Italian people who’d invented it. Ahmad didn’t know that pasta was invented by the Chinese, not the Italians, but how could he have?

She was known as “the Italian girl” in Jordan, but it wore off in Beirut, and Shams, who hated pasta as a child, rediscovered it when I fell in love with her. She said that love had brought her back to her Italian roots. All we ate was pasta, except on the rare occasions when I’d cook, in which case I’d make fried cauliflower with taratursauce.

You see, there’s nothing unusual about Shams’ story so far, except for the pasta. We were all expelled from our villages, we all slipped back into them in search of food, we all stopped doing that after the houses and villages were destroyed, and all of us took whatever jobs we could find.

In 1960, the year Shams was born, Abu Sa’id al-Husseini’s factory closed. It’s said he went bankrupt when imported Italian pasta flooded the market and the national pasta industry collapsed because there was no tariff barrier.

Abu Sa’id al-Husseini closed his factory in Bethlehem, and Ahmad found himself out of work with a wife and five children (in the meantime a boy and two girls had been born before Shams). He decided to move from Bethlehem to Amman, to the Ras al-Ain district, where he worked on the stone crushers. Then after two years, he moved to al-Wahdat camp, taking up residence in the development area on the border and building a shack out of sheet metal, where he lived with his family. The house resembled a museum of advertisements of every kind and color. Ahmad Saleh got the metal sheets from the cans discarded in trash heaps along the roads and was not alone in doing so, most of the shacks in the development area were built from sheet metal. People would change the sheets according to the season, since some of them would wear out before others because of their exposure to the elements.

Shams’ house looked like an oblong billboard.

Shams said she lived a great part of her life in the multicolored hovel, a house that turned into an oven in summer and a freezer in winter. A father who spoke to his wife only to discuss the need to change this or that wall that was starting to rust. “I lived all my life in dilapidation: The house was wearing out, my father was wearing out, and everything was drenched in water and sun. My father would go off to his work at the stone crushers and return exhausted and at the end of his tether. The only thing he could find to amuse himself was to make pasta and yell at my mother because she hadn’t kneaded the dough properly.”