“You have always detested your niece.”
“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about, Maryam. Every day your ideas become stranger and stranger. You know that Saleh and Hamsa are in the same nursing home. They hardly know each other, much less who I am. And certainly they have forgotten who you are. My niece is a godsend.”
“So if Verónica is irreplaceable, why is she coming?”
“I am her only remaining family. I have asked her to come to spend time with me. You might find this difficult to understand, but I am in mourning. I have suffered a death. My marriage has died.”
Once again Maryam decides not to engage him. He is always trying to provoke her, jabbing at her as they move around the shared areas of the apartment like wary boxers in a ring. When they first married, they would often play backgammon at night, and a common tactic of Samir’s was to leave one of his chips vulnerable to see if she would abandon her strategy simply to land on one of his men. After a few losses, she learned to ignore his ploys and play her own game. And she often won.
“I suppose you’ve told her about the trouble between us,” she comments as she continues to flip cards.
Samir takes out the gold watch from his vest pocket and looks at the time. “There’s no trouble between us, Maryam. You’ve simply betrayed the trust of our marriage. But to answer your question: I won’t deny that I’ve told her about your affair. Why keep it a secret? She is as disgusted as I am. What else would you expect?”
“I won’t tolerate her interference.”
“Well then, why don’t you just mind your business and let her come to spend some peaceful time with her admired uncle?”
Maryam almost chokes on the word admired. Samir has such an inflated image of himself, as if he were some kind of brave corsair or fighter pilot, and not the owner of a hardware store in a part of town even buzzards have abandoned. “If she feels anything for you, Samir, it must be hate. She knows that you are mean and despicable, and that you are cheap: you don’t lift a finger to help her parents even though you easily could.”
Samir ignores the comment. “She is coming in on the TACA flight tonight. It would be nice if you were to accompany me to the airport and at least pretend that we are capable of being civil to one another.”
“Will you grant me a divorce if I come?”
“Not on your life.”
“I’m sorry then, Samir, but you will have to pick her up alone.” Maryam gets up from the table and starts walking to her bedroom.
Samir shuffles over to the table where the cards are and sees that Maryam has beaten the odds. As she exits he says to her: “It seems you’ve won at solitaire. It is a game that is appropriately titled for your situation — a woman all alone, bereft of companionship. Congratulations.”
“Sometimes it happens,” she replies unguardedly.
Before she closes the door, he says loud enough for her to hear, “What I wonder is if you won honestly or had to cheat.”
* * *
Torrential rains begin as the sun goes down. The flight is expected in at eight p.m., but will be delayed. Maryam feels a bit tired and eats a leftover chicken leg with tabouleh for dinner. Once she is sure that Samir has left for the airport, she calls Guillermo.
She recounts her conversation with her husband. Guillermo merely listens. They talk for about twenty minutes and then Maryam cuts the call short to get ready for bed.
At around ten thirty she hears voices. If she were polite, she would get out of bed and put on her robe to greet Verónica. But why should she? She hears them speaking loudly in Arabic, perhaps even arguing. Maryam hears him say, Ibn sharmoota. Her niece says something back, which obviously angers him — she imagines Verónica is telling Samir that Maryam was a whore from the beginning, or that he should do more to care for her parents.
Then she hears the unmistakable sound of a slap in the face.
Verónica screams a saying in Arabic that roughly translates, You have a penis for a nose, a common insult she has heard before. What a family, lacking a corpuscle of decency.
* * *
Ibrahim’s day has begun normal enough. His chauffeur dropped him off at the front door of the textile factory and then went back home to do some household chores. Ibrahim plans to spend the whole day meeting with his employees in groups: the machine operators, the foremen, the sales personnel, the cleaning staff. He wants to make sure they are all content, because in the coming year they will be challenged by the recession in the United States. Orders are also way down, thanks to the ferocious competition from Bengali and Haitian sweat shops. Ibrahim can hardly compete. All he can do is offer quality, timely service at a premium to his customer.
* * *
Maryam rises earlier than usual to avoid confronting both Samir’s probing eyes and her niece’s interrogation at breakfast. She eats a bowl of sliced papaya and melon with homemade yogurt standing at the small kitchen table, then goes to a nine a.m. exercise class at the World Gym on Los Próceres. After exercising, she decides to swim fifty lengths in the pool and take a quick sauna. Exercise is her way of dealing with the tensions at home.
The swimming and the hot sauna weaken Maryam more than usual. Maybe she should have exercised less, given her condition. She drinks several glasses of water and then takes a long cold shower, hoping the change in temperature will refresh her.
The gym isn’t far from home. She needs to go home to change before picking up her father at the factory at twelve thirty for their weekly Wednesday lunch. Ever since she admitted her affair to Samir, Maryam and her father have been going to his apartment for lunch instead of hers. She doesn’t want to risk Samir joining them, for fear he may begin hinting about her affair with Guillermo. Jokes about Maryam’s infidelity would kill her father. It’s very Lebanese to avoid awkward issues, she tells herself — better to hide and pretend to be lighthearted.
The shower has not helped, and Maryam still feels faint from the exercise. She prays that Samir has left for work and that Verónica has gone out for a walk.
No such luck. “You look very pale,” Verónica greets her, and plants a kiss on each of her cheeks. “Come, give me a hug. I hear you have been running around a lot. You shouldn’t put your health in jeopardy. ”
Maryam doesn’t know how to take this. Is Verónica making a reference to her affair or is she actually concerned about her well-being? She hugs her niece a bit stiffly and says, “I’d like to lie down, but I have to go pick up my father and bring him over to his apartment for lunch.”
“Why don’t you take it easy? I can drive him.”
“You wouldn’t know where to go. You have no idea where the factory is or where he lives. Because he has a driver, he stopped paying attention to where he was going long ago. He doesn’t even know his way around the streets of Guatemala.”
“Well then, just have your father’s chauffeur drive him from the factory to his apartment.”
“I should really go.” She does not want to miss seeing her father. She insists on treating him with the same respect and deference as always, if only to prove that nothing has changed despite what Samir may have told him. She wants her father to know she will continue to dote on him, no matter what. It is a Lebanese custom to neither discuss nor feign ignorance of what both parties know. But in truth she feels too lightheaded to drive to the factory, and doesn’t know what to do.
Verónica has read her mind. “Why don’t we go together? You can sit in the passenger seat and give me the directions. If I can drive in Tegucigalpa, with its crazy drivers and steep hills, I can certainly drive here.”