Читать книгу Tales of Yusuf Tadros - Adel Esmat - Страница 14

Yusuf Tadrus says:

I spent one year in Alexandria. My mother was nervous and happy and calling relatives who lived in Alexandria to tell them that Yusuf was coming to study at the College of Fine Arts. She introduced me to Rida Boulos, a scion of a family long in the leather trade. He was in his third year of studying architecture and lived in an apartment in Sidi Bishr. We agreed I’d live with him. I was anxious that summer, frightened of my mother’s overwhelming desire to get me away from the life of the alley.

My relationship with Rida Boulos eased the air somewhat and, perhaps for the first time, set the idealistic life of the Ankh Society against another way of living. Rida’s presence that summer gave me the vigor I needed. Despite his seriousness, he was preoccupied with girls like we were. We went out often, to weddings and parties. I’d boast about how girls were attracted to me, and he’d look at me with childish glee and say, “You lucky dog, Yusuf.” But I feared that attachment and avoided it. I tried to show it didn’t matter to me. We’d categorize the girls together: that one was like a princess, this one a saint. This other one was like the wicked witch, and that one might bring you to ruin and go through your pockets every night.

Rida was cheerful and outgoing, and wore his religion lightly. His heart wasn’t home to vague fears and anxious questions. He felt comfortable in the world and easily did things I thought required a slew of preparations. He’d pack a big suitcase and a tent and go to Sidi Abd al-Rahman alone to stay in the desert a few days. He’d do his share of work for his family. He’d travel to Upper Egypt. He went to Paris twice.

His way of acting and talking, his perpetual urgency, and his feeling that he shouldn’t waste one second stood in contrast to the lackadaisical life in the alley, which revolved around managing everyday affairs. And it was also obviously different from the philosophers of the Ankh Society. He’d laugh when I’d tell him about the society’s sessions every Thursday.

“They’re not living on this earth,” he’d say. “Life isn’t talk; it’s action, movement.”

He studied architecture and painted, and wanted to learn to play the lute. I introduced him to Amm Farid. I wondered how he could find the time amid his work to learn to play the lute.

He laughed. “I’ll keep at it until circumstances intrude and stop me,” he said. “At least I’ll have gotten something out of it to help me listen better.”

He had his own ideas, not formed from books but created from his own experiences and thoughts.

It was the first time the secretive salon and closed world of the Ankh Society was shaken. The contradiction added to my angst. I spoke with Bilal about it one day, and he said confidently that my friend was superficial, flaky, and didn’t live the authentic life—he lived by mainstream thought, not his own personal thought. The authentic life was something else. This idea of the “authentic” life preoccupied me. What was it and how could one live it? There was no manual. The plan they’d drawn up for it started to show cracks when confronted by the other worlds that opened before me.

That summer the covert war began between my mother and older sister. Futna was my father’s true mistress. She took care of everything, knew all the expenses, and amassed wealth she kept far from him and us. My mother’s aspirations began to run up against the parsimony with which Futna managed life. My moving to Alexandria and the expense of the College of Fine Arts sparked long discussions. Khawaga Tadrus didn’t get involved in them, leaving the conflict between the two women to work itself out.

Futna would reel off the costs of residency, living expenses, clothes, and college needs: that was a lot for an old man whose sight had gone. My mother would minimize things, saying she’d help with expenses from the stipend she got from the Holy Bible Association. She was fervent, and the conflict was settled.

On the eve of my travel to Alexandria my fears began. Rida had gone before me to take care of some business, and when I reached the Sidi Gaber station at night, the expanse of the square scared me. I’d visited Alexandria several times with my mother, and now I was standing at the station gate, feeling so small in that sweeping place. I took the tram and reached the apartment, and then I spent the night walking along the Corniche, unable to sleep. For the first time in my life, I was far away from the bosom, from the alley, from my father’s throat-clearing and my mother’s mumbled prayers. I was a child being weaned. Is that how to understand the pain of that year? Maybe there was something else I didn’t realize. Maybe I didn’t want that spaciousness and freedom.

In the first days at college, the fear grew. I had to push through the days.

“What is it, Yusuf? Are you made of wood?” Rida would tease.

But he misspoke—I was made of clay. The cause of my yearning for light was my earthy nature. I was from the alley, and I loved to play in that muddy water. I stayed up at night practicing painting fingers, faces, and feet. I’d study the anatomy of the skull, the shape of the eye, the details of neck muscles. Sometimes I’d long to paint something cheerful. I’d set up the easel and prepare the oils and start painting an ashtray on a small table.

I couldn’t paint anything properly. The proportions escaped me, as if my training had been poured into a void. When trying to place mass in a space, an essential skill for anyone who wants to be a painter, I felt like a blind man.

Rida Boulos liked some of the paintings and said I’d be an artist. Sometimes he’d set up his own easel and paint a teapot or chair with me, or an empty bottle. One day we painted three onions against the lead-gray wall of the room. I was worked up that day. I painted the three onions on a green tablecloth against a fire-red background. The painting captured the details faithfully but had a surrealist feel to it. Rida looked at it.

“I’m giving up painting, Yusuf,” he said.

And from that day, or maybe a little afterward, he no longer painted, like he’d made a decision. Despite his encouragement, I couldn’t continue. I saw the flaws more than my abilities.

Rida helped me my whole life. At that early stage of our acquaintance, he was bewildered by my nature and my neuroses. He’d say I needed to smash everything and paint whatever I wanted, whatever gave me pleasure, whatever I gravitated toward. I thought he was naïve—Bilal had equipped me with the proper geometric calculations for every good painting, and we’d often applied them to the work of the great artists, from the classical arts down to Egyptian artists. I was miserable because I couldn’t free myself of the manual I had brought with me from Tanta—of the special formula for evaluating artistic paintings—and I started to believe I wouldn’t be able to paint as long as I was incapable of creating the equilibrium and correct proportions that Bilal al-Sheikh had prescribed.

With time, I discovered that Alexandria was vaster than I’d imagined. Every day it expanded more and I grew smaller, until I imagined I’d vanish. Midyear, the problems between my mother and sister started because of my school expenses. The college was far beyond my family’s capacity, and my own psychological capacity. You need living expenses and clothes and other things. Rida Boulos’s sympathy confused me and made me feel indebted and paralyzed. I couldn’t bear it any more, and the situation became more difficult when I discovered Lamiya’s attraction to me.

One day Fatin sent a message with Rida. He seemed embarrassed when he gave it to me. He was prepared to help me in any way, but he was duty bound to give me the message first. He said Fatin had visited him suddenly at home and had spoken to him about my family’s circumstances. She told him my father was blind and couldn’t shoulder this burden for five years. It would be better, she said, if Yusuf returned to Tanta and helped with the business. He could study at any college there and it wouldn’t cost so much.

That excuse was enough for me to perceive that I wouldn’t stay in Alexandria. Then the long winter days set in and I found myself blindly drawn to Lamiya. You know Raphael’s paintings? Lamiya was one of Raphael’s women, an angel come down to earth. She would stay by my side from the moment I set foot in the college to the end of the day. She’d help me, with that ethereal quality of hers that was so unsuited to me. I’d grown up in an alley. I knew carnal desires. I’d come from a coarse world suffused with the intimation of sexuality, with flirtatious banter and caresses everywhere. I couldn’t handle such proximity to the sublime. And then she was from a very wealthy family. I know myself and I know my family—there was no way.

I tired of that intolerable existence. I feared I’d lose my already precarious balance and find I’d done something disastrous. One day I’d found myself kissing her in the middle of the studio.

I felt I was on the verge of disaster whenever we were alone anywhere, even in the college halls. One day I stayed late in the studio. I looked around and found myself alone with Lamiya. I made a hasty exit, leaving her there to ready her supplies with the same ethereal refinement with which she did everything else.

Like I said, the place was bigger than me. I’d known it from the first moment, but hadn’t immediately recognized it. When I recall how I stood at the gate of the Sidi Gaber station on my first night in Alexandria, I know my feelings told me the truth. That night I saw myself small in that place. The cars seemed to pass farther in the distance than normal, the buildings were taller than normal, sizes bigger than they really were, and I was smaller than my true size. The cold air had an impersonal, salty smell. Even the blue tram swayed in a stately manner as it entered the station.

Years later, I understood the meaning of my feelings. I was coming from the alley, and my size in the alley was right for my status. Things were close by, within arm’s reach, and I was virtually surrounded with attention. The alley was like a womb—I had an organic link to it. When I stood at the gate of the Sidi Gaber station, it was a birth I couldn’t bear, so I returned to the warmth of the womb.

These explanations came after the fact as an attempt to silence the anxiety and my feeling that I’d made a mistake by wasting the chance to study at the College of Fine Arts.

In April, I decided to return to Tanta. Rida Boulos was agitated that day.

“You’re losing out,” he said, angry and serious. “Trust me, you’re losing out.”

“I don’t know,” I told him. “Maybe it’s for the best.”

We remained in contact and would meet whenever he returned from Alexandria, but he was sad. He seemed to honestly believe he was responsible for me.

It was a victory for my sister. Two days after I arrived, my mother came down with a severe cold, then a high fever. I went to the pharmacy on Ghayath Street to buy medicine. I met Dr. Hani, an acquaintance of hers, and he asked about her. I described her condition.

“It could be something other than a cold,” he said. “Let me take a look.”

He came with me to the house. When he entered her room, she looked at me in reproach, because I’d brought in a stranger while she was sick. He didn’t examine her. He said hello and put his palm on her forehead.

“Take her to the fever hospital quickly and I’ll catch up with you there,” he said.

At the hospital, Dr. Hani found she had typhoid.

“Your mother’s a good woman and you were about to lose her,” he said.

In the ghostly air of the fever hospital, she looked at me with blame, asking silently why I’d returned from Alexandria. Her silence and melancholy settled in my depths—not because of my failure to complete an arts education, but mostly because of her defeat by my big sister.

The time in the hospital deepened the private bond between us. We were alone in a long ward, among peasant women ailing from different kinds of fevers, surrounded by an unending solitude.

Those three days stretched out in a dark area of my depths. We were alone in the universe, and her hopes that I would turn out to be something were lost. She grieved because I had been the equivalent of giving herself to the Lord; she had only abandoned that path to give birth to Yusuf. I hadn’t imagined my return from the arts college would have such a traumatic effect on her.

She had an illuminated area of her soul that got her through those moments. A little later, she started explaining my return from Alexandria in a way that enabled her to preserve her image of me: Yusuf was sacrificing his future to put an end to my problems with his sister. He was helping me live. He only came back from Alexandria to stop the quarreling and humiliation over his expenses. Yusuf didn’t want to burden me beyond my capacity.

That was how she construed it, and she began to accept my presence in the alley.

But things didn’t stop there. The nagging set in: it’s not right for Yusuf to sit around idly in the alley watching the women all day. His father’s blind; he’s got to help with the work. My older sister set this poison loose in my father’s mind.

He asked me to escort him to work every day, his hand grasping my shoulder, silent most of the time. A barrier grew up between him and me in that period, an invisible barrier that kept me from any sympathy for him. I’d stay by his side all day and sometimes I’d find I’d left the display line without a word and gone, walking in the streets aimlessly. I wouldn’t go home until after midnight.

Those days were bland, tasteless and formless. My mother’s anxiety ballooned when they told her Yusuf had gone off his rocker and would spend a full day without saying a word.

In this wilderness, she took action. She called her relatives and used her connections with someone to get me a job teaching art classes at a private school, as if she intuited the link between the creation of pictures and me. I worked at the school throughout my studies. The free time offered by the College of Humanities allowed me to work, and so I stopped going to the chickpea stand and left behind the world of my father and sister.

At that time I was afflicted with self-loathing because I hadn’t been able to live in Alexandria, as if there were something ruined in me, a lack of some sort. How could I refuse the open life and smooth roads? Getting to know major artists? How could I so easily squander all that? How could I be an artist if I couldn’t bear life away from my family? I was utterly lost and didn’t know where life was taking me. Even my relationships with my pupils at school were bad. I was standoffish and viewed the children with hostility. Though I often thought of Mary Labib and her love, it wasn’t enough to improve my mood.

My work at the school put me up close to the girls, to the intimacy and gaiety of their lives, their small tales, and their dreams of finding a husband. It also allowed me some dalliances, not all of which were innocent. Urges would suddenly erupt and you’d find yourself in a fervor you couldn’t easily escape. I was infatuated with Nabila with the dimples, Theresa with the budding chest, and Mary and Mona. Sometimes the joking would turn into a brief escapade in a courtyard or next to an apartment door. I wasn’t alarmed by the idea of sin like my colleagues at the school. I was drawn to happy-go-lucky girls unfazed by such lapses. They were engaging in a little trivial fun, and we agreed it wouldn’t transgress the rights of any future husband.