Her mother understood nothing about this explanation — a future mixed with an inversion of measurements that advance backward toward tomorrow from bottom to top — and even less about the link between the hourglass and her daughter’s illness. Until then, she had connected her daughter’s illness to her father’s death, on January 20th, 1992, a few days after the purchase of the hourglass. Seeing the object was when the troubles with her motor skills became apparent, but her paralysis didn’t declare itself until the funeral. Just a little before, Hanane had struggled to even walk past the hourglass. Each time she came near it her breathing became constricted. Sometimes nausea followed her dizziness. Violent headaches took hold of her. She felt she was being sucked into a hole. Sometimes she’d scream, “No, not inside! Not into the hole! I refuse to move, the past is dead!”
Her father would lecture her: “Have you finished your tantrum? Move on.”
Hanane would stagger forward.
A few hours before he died, on that January 20th of 1992, Hanane struggled really hard to brave the living room door and walk toward the fireplace. Coming right up to the object, she took a deep breath, quickly grabbed it, and put it away in the dresser drawer next to the wall.
When her father came back home, he took off his shoes as usual, breathing a long, satisfied sigh. Then, sprawled in his armchair — one hand on the armrest and the other fingering his rosary — he looked at the fireplace. Seeing the flat surface of the mantelpiece, as empty as it was smooth, his breathing slowed and, without any sound at all escaping from his mouth, a pain in his chest pinned him down right where he was. If it hadn’t been for the sound of the rosary falling onto the marble-tiled floor, her mother wouldn’t have realized that he died. When she saw her husband’s body spread out, his head tilted backward, she moved quickly: she phoned the doctor, called her daughter, phoned the doctor again. Powerless, she’d witnessed the first heart attack in a series that her husband would eventually succumb to that very night.
Hanane observed the scene with equanimity. It was from that day on that she started making preposterous statements, accompanied by reverse body movements her mother couldn’t recognize. It was now impossible to make her put one foot in front of the other. As soon as the period of receiving condolences was over, her mother did two things that to her mind were urgent: she took her daughter to a shrink, and she put the hourglass back in the same spot where her husband had placed it before his death. Superstitious, she associated it with his death and feared that removing it would mean that long years of unhappiness would befall her and her daughter. The shrink indeed had to concede on this point, finding it wise that his patient should stay in contact with some kind of object that measured time, despite the symptoms from which she was suffering.
“Births, I hate births. Out of birthing spasms, my father was born, right before my eyes.” This is how Hanane told the story of her father’s death to her shrink the next day. She pointed her finger behind her to indicate tomorrow and wrote down her next session on pages of her daily planner that had already passed. He stared at her, while her movements remained all entangled, disjointed. Even the war had no impact on how entrenched his patient was. The mounds of dead bodies on TV elicited no compassion in her whatsoever. She feared living much more than dying, and showed no response to destruction. The few times that she revealed any interest in life during these nineteen years were in an effort to not upset her mother. She knew very well that her illness was making her mother sad. She would have really liked to take her in her arms, to tell her to stop calling upon “the Lord’s help in this curse.”
Hanane couldn’t bear to see her mother selling her soul to an eternal being in this way. Eternity is only nothingness, she told her. “She prays to God, do you realize that?” she told the shrink. “She prays to an eternal being who depends on her.”
Hanane didn’t plan anything. At the age of thirty-five, after nineteen years of therapy, things erupted inside her abruptly. She could launch into endless monologues and then right in the middle of a sentence sink into a silence heavier than a ton of leaden weights, then not move anymore, not speak anymore. At times, she would extract her little scrap of paper from her pocket and would pass the rest of the session feverishly scrunching it up. Eventually the shrink knew exactly when Hanane would take out this crumpled scrap of paper that she carried with her everywhere. Since she’d been in therapy, she was never separated from it.
It was the therapist who had, at first, introduced the concept to her, inviting her to write down everything that crossed her mind. He had hoped in this way to make her regain contact with a chronological perception of time. “This is part of the game,” he told her at the beginning of a session, putting a sheet of A4-sized paper down in front of her. On that day, the forty-five minutes elapsed like that. Hanane didn’t say one word and was content to stare at the paper without moving. She had the impression that the page’s emptiness had spread throughout the room, devouring the shrink, his pipe, and the smell of tobacco. She shook her head a few times. Aside from several televised newsflashes, she didn’t think of anything that she could write down.
Just before the end of the session, she grabbed a black pen resting on the desk and wrote diligently: January 20, 1992 = the death of my father = the arrival of the hourglass. Then, without warning, as though she’d never simply just stopped walking, she got up out of the wheelchair, betraying no sigh of surprise, and left.
When she saw her daughter walking, the mother had to restrain herself from raving. The shrink had directed her not to show any signs of keen interest in anything in front of her daughter, for fear that too overt an allusion to her illness might block her anew. In any case, for him, victory resided above all in his client’s regaining her perception of time.
For the first time, Hanane connected an object of time measurement to facts and dates. From this day on, she started writing down all events related to January 20 that came after the arrival of the hourglass. In her eyes, no other date in the year deserved to be identified. For nineteen years she only marked down 20th of Januaries. The shrink tried in vain to try to transform this exercise into a daily ritual, telling her that there were 365 days in the year, but nothing worked. Hanane only played this game on the 20th of January each year. This date was marked by different events between 1992 and 2010. Audrey Hepburn died January 20, 1993; Barack Obama was inaugurated president of the United States in 2009; George W. Bush was inaugurated eight years earlier; Arafat’s victory after the first Palestinian general elections in 1996; the former Argentinian dictator Reynaldo Bignone was arrested in 1999... She even found it useful to compile an inventory of deaths caused by the avian flu epidemic on January 20, 2007.
Hanane is feverish. The shrink fills his pipe. Their silence is interrupted by the sighs that rise in a crescendo. Hanane knows that the neighbor on the third floor has found a client. “Orgasms are a noisy hobby. And useless.” The shrink is surprised that she says this... she who is so focused whenever he appeals to her sense of perception. She even refuses to confirm the existence of her own body, each time that he tries to draw attention to the fact that she herself has aged since she started coming to him. Hanane would prefer to be outside of time and of her body. The sighs continue to reach them. She has to speak or plug her ears. She can’t stand the upstairs neighbor’s small cries. She has to cover them up. She twiddles her fingers and starts talking. He doesn’t like it when she speaks in bursts. He doesn’t like her fingers either.