These were the choicest hours of her life and she never let anything interfere with themânot her health, when it failed her, nor anyone else's. It was then, just after lunch, that my mother would take me to her mother's.
Often, a neighbor, friends, Aunt Flora, or others would sit
on the balcony outside of the Saint's dining room, and everyone would talk quietly under the delicate shade of a striped awning, hardly a breeze fluttering, with sunlight shifting so slowly that it could be hours before everyone would pick up their chairs and move to an adjacent balcony to resume conversations filled invariably with gossip, tears, venom, and self-pity. When one of the women was moved to cry, she would do so softly, quietly, her face folded into her chest, holding a crumpled handkerchief against her mouth, not because she was ashamed of crying in front of the others, but so as not to wake up Monsieur Jacques, who did not like having his naps interrupted by women whom he lumped together dismissively in the category of
sales comediennes,
sobbing or no sobbing.
Thus the summer hours would linger, and the Sudanese boy servant, who had taken forever to bring out the rainbow assortment of sherbets, seemed to take yet another eternity to come back to clear the sticky dishes from the balcony. And even then, there were still so many more of these afternoon hours before dusk set in that, in Aunt Flora's words, Egypt had the longest hours in the world.
“How time passes,” my grandmother would say in one of her unworried moments, thinking that this is how she wanted to end her days, with her friends, her family, her home, her piano, whiling away the hours in the peaceful glow of the noonday sun. This is what she meant by preparing herself for a sound old age,
une bonne vieillesse
. In her case,
une bonne vieillesse
did not just mean healthy, vigorous old age, free of ailments and worldly cares, with plenty of time to put her things in order and never ask
anyone for anything;
it had also come to mean the sort of old age that allows one to be taken by a friendly hand and, preferably in mid-sleep, ferried across to the
other side
, having been spared both the shame and indignity of dying.
“There she is,” one of the four or five women on the balcony would finally interrupt as soon as they noticed the Princess turning the corner of Rue Memphis and heading home. “Already six o'clock!” someone would exclaim. Instinctively, the Saint would tell me to go inside. “How are you today, madame?” she would shout, her voice flying from her balcony, eager as she always was to be the first to greet anyoneâa habit that invariably left you feeling remiss by comparison. For couched in the joy that lit up her face whenever she saw you on the street was the mild, unspoken reproof that your tardiness in seeing her either betrayed a desire to avoid speaking to her or that, if she always noticed you first, it was only because she thought of you more often than you did of her.
This time she greeted her neighbor with exceptional zeal, precisely because, with me in the house, she had every reason to avoid greeting her. She had stood up too swiftly, her flustered expression belying her nonchalant pose against the banister. “Ah, I didn't see you, Madame Adèle,” said the Princess, stopping exactly under the balcony. From within the living room, through the space between the open French window frame and the door jamb, I spied her familiar handbag and folded fan, watched her raise an awkward hand to block out the sun from her face. “And what are you doing later?” asked the Princess. “Me? Nothing. I was thinking of buying some clothâmy tailor is coming in a few daysâbut with this heat, I doubt I'll ever go now.” “If you wish, I can walk with you.” “I don't know, perhaps another time.” They said goodbye.
“She always fights with her husband,” whispered the Saint to one of her guests. “You should hear the horrible things they say to each other at night.”
Then she would change her mind, and still confused and
dazed in her thinking, would shout out to the Princess, “
Attendez
, wait,” from the top of her balcony after the other had already crossed the street and was about to open the wrought-iron gate to her garden. “Maybe I will buy cloth after all. There are so many receptions this fall, and my clothes are so old, Madame Esther,” she would lament, hinting for the nth time that she had not yet been invited to the Princess's mother's centennial ball that was to take place early that autumn.
“Do you want me to come upstairs, then?”
“No, no, I'll be down in a jiffy.” Then, turning to my mother, she would say, “Wait until we're gone before leaving.”
Five minutes later, the two mazmazelles could be seen hobbling down the street toward the Camp de César station, one with an unusually wide-rimmed hat, the other carrying a folded fan in one hand, her handbag and a white glove in the other, chattering away in the language that had brought them together and which, despite their repeated reminders to themselves and everyone else in the world that they had absolutely nothing else in common, despite their rivalry, their barbs, their petty distrust of one another, would always rescue a friendship that remained close until the very, very end.
The Saint's conversation was mostly plaintive, with a repertory of unflagging complaints: her health, her son, those daily reminders of unrest and turmoil in Egypt, the servants, who robbed her down to the last tablespoon of sugar, and her daughter, my mother, whose deafness had robbed her of the best years of her life. Since she was always scattered and vague in her speech, once the mood for complaining had set in, she would digress from one woe to another, weaving a never-ending yarn filled with subplots in which the principal villains were her ailments, heartaches, and humiliations, with herself
cast in the role of the hapless victim fending off adversities as best she could, a medieval martyr tied to a post surrounded by advancing dragonsâall of it leading up to the gallstones that would drive her out of bed at night with never a soul to complain to except the wind on her balcony, which was where she sat all night, staring at an emptied Rue Memphis, heeding the tick of the pendulum in the hallway with its occasional, subdued gong announcing, as she always feared it might, that it was still very early, and that the hours would crawl into dawn before she heard the quiet, welcome steps of Mohammed coming in through the service door. For now, there was just the stillness and the tireless caterwauling, rising and subsiding in waves, as glinting cats' eyes flitted about in the dark, crossing Rue Memphis, turning toward her balcony with defiance and suspicion, followed by a limping
chienne
whom everyone feared. “My nights,” she called them.
“I know,” said the Princess, who would try to steer her neighbor clear of unhappy thoughts, which wasn't so difficult, for just as the Saint was known to drift from one shoal to the other, with some steering she could be made to sway into the opposite direction and seek out cheerful islands in the sunâas though what ultimately mattered to her when she spoke was not so much her inventory of woes and heartaches as the right to digress, to lose her thread, to say what came to mind, which is exactly what none, particularly her husband, ever allowed her.
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, while she sat alone on her balcony, nursing the gallbladder pain in her sideâyears before they met over red mulletâthe Saint would watch the lights suddenly go on in the veranda across the street, and out would come the Princess wearing a bathrobe, carrying a large
cup in one hand, with something like a flat hot-water bottle in the other, followed by my grandfather, his hair undone, staggering about the porch till his unsteady hand grasped the banister and he dropped into an armchair.
Facing one another across Rue Memphis, my grandparents-to-be would sometimes wonder what secret ailment kept the other awake, for neither dared speak, much less inquire into the other's health by way of neighborly conversation during the day.
“It would have been so indiscreet,” said the Saint when asked by the Princess's husband why she had never even waved at night.
“I'm a refined woman,” she added with mild apology in her voice.
“
I'm a refined woman
,” he mimicked and right away would slip in a word or two in Ladino. “Sit here and don't move,” he said, himself seized by the intimacy that had sprung up between the two women. “You are one of the very few people here who speak Ladino well. The others belong to my wife's family, and they're too stuffy to speak
real
Ladino. Do you think I'll let you go now that I've found someone to speak with?”
Phrases like “sit here and don't move” set the tone for a friendship that was to last until the day my grandfather died âhe always pretending to want to shock her, she pretending to tolerate someone who was too much of a scalawag to be taken seriously, and the Princess, always fast to find fault with her husband's manners, forever eager to shield Madame her neighbor from her husband's wanton humor. It was an easy familiarity that came as much from the city and the world where they were born as from the language they spoke in it. To the three who had discovered one another, Ladino spoke of their homesickness for Constantinople. To them, it was a
language of loosened neckties, unbuttoned shirts, and overused slippers, a language as intimate, as natural, and as necessary as the odor of one's sheets, of one's closets, of one's cooking. They returned to it after speaking French, with the gratified relief of left-handed people who, once in private, are no longer forced to do things with their right.
All had studied and knew French exceedingly well, the way Lysias knew Greekâthat is, better than the Atheniansâgliding through the imperfect subjunctive with the unruffled ease of those who never err when it comes to grammar because, despite all of their efforts, they will never be native speakers. But French was a foreign, stuffy idiom and, as the Princess herself would tell me many years later, after speaking French for more than two hours, she would begin to salivate. “Spanish, on the other hand,
réveille l'âme,
lifts up the soul.” And she would always slip in a proverb to prove her point.
The Saint and the Princess met at least twice a day, once in the morning on their way to the market, and once after the Princess had come back from her sisters. Since her husband was rarely in his billiard hall after six, all three would regularly have tea in the Princess's garden, under an old linden tree whose perfume filled the late afternoon air until it was time to move indoors, where more tea was served.
The Saint's husband, a Jew born in Aleppo who spoke no Ladino, would often return from work and peek through the wrought-iron fence into the arbor. Sometimes, having opened the gate to the Princess's garden and made his way past the guava trees, Monsieur Jacques would look through the living room window and knock at the glass door with something of a grudge. “It is time to go home,” he would tell his wife after perfunctory pleasantries with the owner of the pool hall. “Just when we were beginning to enjoy ourselves,” someone would say. “Spanish, Spanish,” the Aleppid would mutter as he and
his wife crossed Rue Memphis on their way home, “always your damned Spanish,” while she apologized for not being home yet, trying to explain to a man whose native tongue was Arabic why she had tarried past her usual hour.
“But it's only a quarter to seven.”
“I don't care. By eight o'clock I want to have supper.”
“But Mohammed is cooking it at this very moment,” she protested. “What's the matter with you?”
“What's the matter? I'll tell you
what's the matter
. I don't like having to come looking for my wife in another man's house, that's what.” He was working himself into a temper, and the more he felt his anger rise, the more he was convinced he was right.
Monsieur Jacques was the type of husband who was jealous of his authority, not of his wife, just as he loved his comforts, not those who provided them. He despised Ladino because everything about it conspired to exclude him from a world whose culture was foreign to him, as much by its customs and sounds as by its insidious niceties and clannish etiquette. The more his wife delighted in speaking it, the more repulsive it became, and the more it pleased her to remind himâas her father had reminded her to remind himâthat Arabic may have been Arabic, but Spanish was always going to remain Spanish!
To him Ladino was a form of cackling, and he called his neighbors' home a chicken coop, a
poulailler,
referring to them as the “owners” of the “henhouse,” not knowing that they had come to regard his inability to enter into their world with the stately arrogance of erstwhile Ottoman masters. “Syrian hypocrite” and “dirty Turk” were bandied about behind everyone's back, all of which inevitably devolved late one Sunday afternoon, as both men were returning from their respective cafés, into a face-to-face confrontation in which the degenerate turc
barbare
called the
juif arabe
a “dirty, scoundrel Jew.” Stunned,
the bicycle shop owner, who was quite devout, said thank you, thank you, which was how the insulted taught the insultor a lesson in good manners, reminding the pool hall owner that he was truly tempted to insult him back but had decided otherwise, seeing that the Turk's own wife, as the entire neighborhood could hear clearly enough when the Princess lost her temper, did so better than anyone else in the world.