In my Beiruti adolescence, I isolated myself from my parents and other people. I started seeking aesthetic inspiration from Edward Hopper paintings I discovered in a catalogue of his works among the books at our house in Sanayeh. Like the women in his drawings, I would sit on the chair or the bed, frozen all alone in time and place. The chair, the bed, and other things in my room were haunted by the shadows of inanimate objects, lit in the catalog’s pictures by an unknown source. They enticed me. It was the power of the deep pain in the women’s eyes staring out into that bleak, illuminated void, emanating from the emptiness that the paintings depicted.
Throughout my entire life in Beirut, nothing ever suggested that people in the city desired their time, bodies, things, and places — even their intimate ones — to be devoid of the presence of the noisy outside world and all its reverberations. Rarely did I come across someone accustomed to living in voluntary isolation — of the self, body, things — internally, in dark solitude. Whenever I recalled the Beirut which I left, it seemed to me that people lived, and I lived like that too, under the gaze of others — whether those people were actually present or not — haunted by other people’s words, looks, and echoes. I remember myself among them merely as a black bee buzzing inside a hive, as I would write on the first page of my diary days after arriving in Los Angeles.
Here I am now, in the living room of my small house, lighting a candle for my sixtieth birthday. One candle, one glass of champagne on the side table, and me in my exercise clothes, wondering what to do, where to sit in the weak light shining from the corner. It is as if I’m reliving exactly the same birthday for the second or third time: a candle, a glass of champagne... nothing. No one else but me, taking a long rest on the rocking chair, absorbed in my daydreams.
The light of the lamppost, which pours out brilliantly on the asphalt outside, keeps me company. It spills through my window, dim and evanescent on the furniture whose edges are embroidered by the nighttime shadows. For a long time I haven’t been able to bear beauty and its daytime colors, so I notice the darkness of the shadows in my house which don’t leave a trace, or a memory, for anyone but me. Even that memory of the public park has repeated itself since I started taking my evening strolls there years ago: Passersby exchange greetings and kisses. I’m used to their faces and they’re used to mine, leaving no memories or traces. Sometimes one of their faces appears to me like an image suspended in spacious, silent emptiness. It’s as if time has simply been standing still or frozen since I entered the park that first time.
On the rocking chair, I close my eyes, swinging back and forth until I lose the sense of direction, time, and place. With the rhythm of the chair’s two wooden rockers on the fur of the soft carpet beneath me, I swing and fly in the nighttime space of a city with few lights. I hear the echoes of my earlier, giggling laughter, which I imagined arose from my mouth and all of my body like crystal balls of air and light, illuminating the nightlife and the faces of the people I used to sit with in Beirut’s cafés. Was my face also illuminated during these sessions and evenings at home before the long nights of the wars in Lebanon?
Suddenly I remember the first man in Los Angeles whose bed I spent the night in. I forgot his name many years ago, but the years haven’t erased the memory of the morning in his kitchen where we drank instant coffee with milk. The silence was warm and thick in the big kitchen, resembling the sensation of sleep. My body relaxed in a dark calm. I was stretched out naked on the sofa, wrapped in a white sheet pulled back to partly expose my breasts and thighs, with luxurious and artificial negligence, like women in advertisements. My legs were resting on the chair close to the table on which the man whose name I’ve forgotten was sitting, naked except for his baggy, multicolored underpants.
I don’t know if my feelings of disconnect from the world truly date back to our morning session in the kitchen, or if they were from the long gap in time separating me from that moment we lived together. But here I am now on a rocking chair soaring above the scarce city lights on my sixtieth birthday. From the outside, our silent scene recurs in my mind; I hear the echoes of the man’s voice asking me if the day before had left strange feelings in me that perhaps the passing of days made even stronger and more present in my body.
That was the first time in my life a man had asked me such a question. It revealed his sensual desire for me, converting it into an old, fleeting memory. His question allowed me a sensual answer about a blurry, abstract thought which used to recur in my inner consciousness and which I couldn’t put words to: chance encounters lead us, we meet and we part with trivial memories, so that life is and remains trivial, just like a passing memory of chance encounters.
The man smoked greedily and ecstatically in those moments. It was as if the tobacco which filled his lungs and was exhaled through his mouth granted his feelings and words a redoubled strength, making our dark morning meetings in the kitchen a lust-filled ritual emanating from our strange bodies that had lain together the night before. I kept silently soaring in the eyes of this stranger. One time he got up from the table and approached me. I hadn’t anticipated that he would pour the milky coffee ever so slowly over my naked shoulders and lick it from my breasts with his orange tongue.
Sitting and snuggling, we came together on the sofa when I asked him in a faint lust-filled voice about his female colleague, the journalist who’d interviewed me while he was photographing me the previous evening at the Armenian Club, where my first exhibition of paintings in Los Angeles was opening. He whispered in my ear that they were siblings of Armenian descent and my whole body started trembling, reaching an orgasm for the first time in more than a year, since I had emigrated from Beirut. My spasms began transmitting like a storm in all my senses, every part of my body, followed by waning flashes of lightning that illuminated the darkened screen of my vision.
I postponed my shower for the second time. I turned on the computer and wrote: How long has it been since I’ve heard a voice, my own or someone else’s, in this house of mine? It’s as if I haven’t talked to anyone or heard anyone talking to me except outside for a long time.
An apparition of the Virgin emerged in my imagination; it stopped me from writing and made me laugh. The crown of thorns of Golgotha on the Messiah’s head, then on my mother’s head, and a bloody tear streaming down her pale, deathly white cheek. My father slowly ripping the Virgin’s dress off her chest, while she smiled at him, thrusting her tongue out and moving it between her lips, exactly the way I’d sketched her in my room a few days before my trip to Rome on a scholarship to study drawing. While I was outlining her angelic face, I kept hearing echoes of my mother’s words — that she would lose me, that I would lose myself, that I would disappear, all alone in Rome, and never be heard from again. That I would never come back. Her words made me laugh. An impudent smile hung on the face of the Virgin and I drew her tongue licking her lips.
The evening of my trip, I hung my picture of the Virgin on the living room wall. My mother was extremely anxious, but her sadness and trepidation were concealed behind a mask of happiness put on to greet well-wishers who flocked to our house. We sat together in the living room, with our entire family. I purposely sat under the picture of the Virgin that I’d drawn, and during certain moments that evening I tried out the expressions of the Virgin on my own face. That evening I met our Armenian neighbors and others, our relatives who I hardly knew, some of whom I’d never even met before. I stood at my mother’s side to receive and greet them, but from time to time that evening I had to rush to my room, so that I could unleash the laughter that took me by surprise and get control over it in order to answer the old ladies’ questions about what I would be doing in Italy: how would I live there all alone? They would look at my mother while directing these kinds of questions at me. But it was my grandmother who occasionally took charge of answering. One of the times when I left the living room I heard her say, “She will draw, she will study drawing, she will become a great artist,” and when I turned around I saw her pointing at the picture of the Virgin hanging on the wall.