“The two of them died, one a few hours after the other,” she would say, staring at me grave-faced. I see her look at me like she did her father who’d been half paralyzed, unable to speak or move. I’m sure he was behind her kindness toward me, her sympathy for me, and her accepting my presence in the house that she inherited and furnished, fully and completely, so that I didn’t have even the least contribution to make to it. I believe she chose this corner for me thinking, gratefully, that I was an eye needing vision exercises. So she put me across from things with different dimensions to look at, thinking that I had a narrow sight line only a few steps from the balcony adjoining the neighbors’ balcony and part of their washroom, adding on a respectable amount of the street. This street was shaded by two cinchona trees, the last of their kind, I believe, in all of Gemmayzeh, if not in all the surrounding areas too, indeed perhaps even in all Beirut. And not-negligible patches of the blue sky penetrated their greenness, certainly enough to activate the muscles of this last organ which remained alive and raging in me.
A fly announced its entrance into my field of vision, buzzing at my left side. It circled around a little, confused, before leaving quickly. I heard my wife moving behind me. She was wearing her red shoes with the high heels that she keeps in a cloth bag and only takes out for special occasions. The clock on the wall indicated ten minutes past four o’clock. This isn’t the usual time for parties. The fly returned once more, on my right side this time, before landing on one of the yellow chrysanthemums. A random idea came to me: Do bees recognize the taste of all different flowers, or do they just haphazardly taste the ones where they land?
My wife moved around the house with a nervousness not appropriate to the mood of half past four in the afternoon. The fly too was dismayed to discover that the field of chrysanthemums tasted like cloth and cold glass. My wife then appeared in my range of vision. She calmed down after taking off her shoes with the noisy heels. She came over and kissed the eye. I could only see the space between her breasts and the embroidery on her red bra. They’re color-coordinated. The bra and the shoes.
My wife picked up the eye and dragged it to the bathroom. She put it in the bathtub and started rubbing it with soap and water. She rinsed it with warm water and then did the same again. She said that its smell has become a stench. The eye could only smell expensive perfume mixed with the sweat between her breasts. My wife took off her dress and kept on her camisole. The heat — flames of hot water and the fire of her movements — was making her feel suffocated. Her red bra rose up and made her quavering breasts dangle before they calmed down and stared at the eye.
My wife helped me, using a loofa saturated with soapy foam to reach its back. Her erect nipple approached the eye as though challenging it. Her breast touched the eye gently, perhaps it was tickling the nipple, and perhaps the eye woke and responded. But no. The eye can’t touch the breast — it is fully aware and cognizant of the fact that it isn’t a hand, mouth, or tongue. My wife was angry at the eye and pushed it under the water, leaving it there for a few seconds. The eye thought that its moment of salvation had finally arrived and rejoiced. My wife pushed the eye with her foot after she herself entered the bathwater naked and stretched it out onto its back. The eye relished the feel of her soft skin, but didn’t blink. Her warm belly moved, rising and falling, coming and going, with soap bubbles tickling, breathless and quivering.
The phone rang and my wife picked it up, saying fuzzy words into it, including shoes and four o’clock and useless appointments and something about the importance or the disease of forgetfulness. Meanwhile, the eye submissively waited naked on the towel atop the cold tiles. My wife stopped talking, hung up the phone, and noticed that I’d turned blue, so she held me up to rub me, dry me off, and put on my underclothes while humming a tune, expressing her tender mood of joy. She took me up to the bedroom, swaddled me in my clothes, and asked me if I’d enjoy stretching out on the bed. The eye answered, “No,” so she returned me to my throne on the red sofa.
Our neighbor was standing on the balcony. His face was twitchy as he gazed at our balcony and from there to the street. My wife went out onto the balcony but didn’t raise her glance at him. There was something different in her gait and posture. She picked up the hose and watered the potted plants. She watered them the day before too, the eye thought. Their roots will be worn out if she keeps on like this. Had she perhaps forgotten? Or was something disturbing her and preoccupying her mind? What a question. How could she not be preoccupied when she was feeling the loss of her husband who she loved, cared for, and was devoted to?
Certain words, images, and ideas are mixed up for me, as if I’ve come across them at the very moment they are changing or taking shape. I can discern only one specific detail without an essence from a voice, color, or form. It’s as if a giant hand cast a veneer of whiteness over the world with barely recognizable things looming behind its tiny holes.
Therefore I feel I should name and enumerate. Anything. Everything. What falls within my range of vision and what I guess or imagine in its surroundings. And I can make a list: leaves, clouds, footsteps, cubed tiles, birds — individually and in flocks — jets of rain, electricity wires, yellow chrysanthemums, the people living in the little screen, curtain rings, electric switches, passersby, lines, spots, dots, cars, electricity poles, voices, potted plants, colors... everything. Anything.
I list them so I don’t forget, so I don’t grow too distant from a world whose mayhem still reaches me and whose chaos still confuses me. I still have to reside here, even if only for a while. I rely on my exercises to pass time, chewing on a language as if I’d never learned it, as if it had suckled me, turned on me like a serpent, to bite off words whose taste had died long ago and whose return continues to hover within my range, like the whispering of water. Capturing the wind. A memory that wobbles on the edge of the tongue. A city hidden by sand where a fragment of a vase finally revealed a thread linking it to the urban fabric. I am the specter of a language swaddled by the wind.
I hear: “Alif, ba, ta, tha’” (“A, B, C, D”)... I see letters themselves repeating. I see them passing against a black background, like train carriages, hand in hand, and I wait patiently for one letter after another to cross my optical screen. But only emptiness, silence, and silly letters start forming themselves again in combinations not organized by meaning or name. Thus passed “the years of my absence,” as my wife liked to call the period when I was away from her. The expression makes me laugh and I pity her when I remember her saying it, her tongue faltering breathlessly, scared someone might clarify it or a rude guest might correct her.
During “the years of my absence,” I used to sit in the darkness of my soul and count. Counting relaxed me and it still does. It circulates through me like drugs. Numbers penetrate deeply, then begin to bubble up from inside like soap. They bubble up, ossify, and increase until they fill me, scraping the sticky viscous muck and everything that hurts, disturbs, and sickens. Places with no light, sound, or breeze whatsoever help me concentrate. I don’t complain about staying in places that can barely accommodate my feet if I stretch them out. I can stay squashed up on top of myself, eye closed, absorbed in numbers until passing out, not sleeping, after which I start trying to keep track of how long I was out.