She chopped chicken into small pieces, fried them in salted lamb fat, and folded them in sheets of wax paper. As discreetly as she could, since she didn’t wish to be known as the crazy lady — too late, one might think — she unwrapped these feasts on walls and Dumpsters, high enough so dogs couldn’t reach them.
The aroma of fried lamb fat was a siren call for any feline within a two-street radius. That aroma, muted and less pungent, followed my mother even when food wasn’t upon her person, a lingering faint smell that became hers. Her charges knew she was coming long before they could see her.
The mangier the cat, the bigger her portion. I remember one cat that was doing so poorly her fur was nothing more than discontiguous splotches of hair. My mother fed her every day until she transformed into a calico queen with a coat of unearthly sheen. The cat allowed me to pet her. My mother didn’t try to touch her. Not one cat ever became my mother’s companion. She never had one of her own.
When I asked my mother how she knew the queen was a female, she explained that males could be no more than two colors. Females had no such limitation.
During the winter of 1986, Beirut was passing through one of its many phases of shedding its humanity and its humans. A war raged — sects killing one another, militias strangling the population — and my mother was worried about a cat. I was imprisoned in my apartment for seventeen straight days. On a clear day, upon the first hint of a cease-fire, I left my hideout to forage for food and dropped in to check on her. She was unwilling to discuss anything but what had happened to this infernal feline. The fighting and shooting had forced the animal into a deserted apartment in the building next to my half brother the eldest’s. My mother heard the mournful meowing night and day. She risked her life by taking food across the street, snipers be damned, to seduce the cat into returning with her to her building, where she could feed her regularly. As soon as my mother broke into the empty flat, the cat went mute. My mother searched the entire place and found the cat stuck atop a high dark walnut armoire, with barely enough space under the ceiling to crouch in. My mother pleaded and cajoled and the cat hissed and retreated. The ignorant cat wouldn’t accept help, my mother said. She dragged a chair across the room and climbed on it, which drove the cat even more insane. My mother tried every trick she knew and a couple she made up.
“I even turned my face away from her,” my mother said, “and put my hands on the ledge of the ugly armoire so she could use my arms to climb down and run away. Nothing worked. The stupid, stupid cat refused to be rescued. She couldn’t understand that I was giving her an out. I was forced to leave the food on top of the armoire and go home.”
For a few days, whenever there was a brief silence between bullets, missiles, and mortar shells, my mother heard the cat’s calls, which went on and on, on and on, until they finally stopped altogether. When the break in the fighting arrived at last, right before I made my appearance to inquire about her, she rushed across the street and found the apartment ransacked — she’d assisted the militia boys who looted it by destroying the lock, advertising that the place was uninhabited — with furniture topsy-turvy and no cat.
The coffee klatsch has come to order. I must crane my head out the door and thank Fadia for last night’s dinner before she climbs the stairs back to her apartment, before the three weird sisters end their matins. I must. I try to stand but I sway, beset by a vertiginous nausea.
Have you figured out yet that I dislike being around people? Can it be that I haven’t mentioned it earlier?
Some believe that we are created in God’s image. I don’t. I am not religious by any means, though I’m not an atheist. I may not believe in the existence of God with a capital G, but I believe in gods. Like Ricardo Reis, aka Fernando Pessoa, I am a pantheist. I follow the lesser gospel, now deemed apocryphal. I worship — well, I worshipped, past tense, for this morning I don’t have the stomach to believe in anything — at the shrines of my writers.
I am in large measure a Pessoan.
“Isolation has carved me in its image and likeness.” Pessoa said that. He also wrote: “Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me.”
In A Short History of Decay, Cioran wrote: “life in common thereby becomes intolerable, and life with oneself still more so.”
The presence of another person — of any person whatsoever — makes me feel awkward, as if I’m no longer me. It wasn’t always that way. Not that I was a social butterfly flitting from acquaintance to delightful acquaintance, but I didn’t always have such a high level of discomfort around people. I used to be able to spend time with my friend and companion, Hannah, quite comfortably; my customers didn’t bother me at all. I talked to salesclerks in stores. I got by. As I aged, as life isolated me more and more, I found myself discomfited by others. “Isolation has carved me in its image and likeness.”
Merely thinking that I have to talk to Fadia, however briefly, irritates me, makes me feel a bit edgy, maybe even nervous. I can and do overcome those feelings, of course. I’m not completely helpless. I am a functioning human being. Mostly.
Just so you don’t make too much fun of me, the mostly above refers to functioning, not to human being.
The isolationists Fernando Pessoa and Bruno Schulz had worse problems with people, much worse than mine. Schulz was terrified in large groups, discombobulated around people he didn’t know, childishly timid. He behaved like a two-year-old separated from his mother. He had a sad habit of worrying the edge of his jacket, stroking the fabric. Compared to them, I’m an extrovert.
I think it’s safe to say that contact with other people has never been my strong suit, but lately, in the last eight or nine years, or ten, it has produced a mild anguish that’s hard to define. These days the presence of other people derails my mind. I can’t seem to think clearly, or behave naturally, or just be. These days I avoid people, and they in turn avoid me.
“The healthy flee from the ill,” wrote Kafka in a letter to Milena Jesenská, his unrequited love, “but the ill also flee from the healthy.”
Being around so many people yesterday unhinged me, unhinged my soul. The essential calm of habit and ritual was disturbed. Granted, being around my mother would unhinge most, and I wouldn’t wish her screaming on anyone, not Benjamin Netanyahu, not even Ian McEwan. But being around all those people was not a pleasant experience. It never is these days.
Still, I must offer Fadia thanks for her generosity. I wouldn’t forgive myself if I didn’t.
Before putting my talking head out the door, I change out of my coat and nightgown. I can’t face the witches in the same nightgown I was wearing yesterday morning. However, before I brave the firing squad I must look something up.
I don’t think the Bruckner and Mahler story is accurate; something about it is off. I remember that someone else was there as well, some other composer. I did tell you that I thought it was apocryphal, but I want to check. I wrote down that particular story, copied it from a longer article. I know I read it in a magazine less than ten years ago, which means that the notes are in the box of miscellany in the maid’s bathroom, not the oceanic darkness of the maid’s room. I will not need candles or a flashlight to find it.