things up if she learns you’re involved with someone. So keep your zipper closed until she’s hooked up with another guy.
Sage advice, I’m certain, and after two marriages wholly consonant with my current feeling about getting involved with women. That’s no doubt why it has been easy for me to swear off of them for the duration. Problem is, meeting Aisha makes it seem as if the duration is up.
2
Aisha
You can’t imagine what a pleasure it was to be in Spain, a country where I didn’t have to worry about my name, where I didn’t have to pretend and hide or get annoyed or angry at all the stupid questions Americans are always asking. Where are you from, with a big smile, as if it’s their business. People you meet on the street or in a supermarket or the new teller in the bank or hiking on a trail in the hills or even in an editing room or on location and even if you’re the one in charge, everyone has the right to ask just because they are a blonde: where are you from? And if you answer Los Angeles they laugh or look at you funny and shake their heads and say No where are you really from, where are you originally from, where were you born, where did you grow up, where did your grandparents live, and their grandparents, and all I am hearing is What are you a brown person doing here when you should be somewhere else maybe in a jungle or a desert or on a bare mountain top because this is a country where only blondes belong, even if they aren’t blonde, even if they are Chinese or Jewish and darker than me. It’s no better with Latinos. They come up thinking I am one of them and speaking to me as if I am a sister, asking questions or saying something habla this and habla that, and I answer in perfect English, well, almost perfect, I’m sorry I don’t speak Spanish, and they look at me as if I am betraying our mutual heritage, pretending to be Anglo when I am really one of them, and it doesn’t help one bit if I answer in Dari or Arabic or Urdu, they just turn away babbling in Spanish. I am studying the language now and it’s a nice language that I like very much, it’s sweet and musical. But not in Madrid. Here the hotel clerks spit words at you as if they are firing machine guns. It makes you wonder about the reputation of Spanish lovers, Don Juans, but that’s probably another cliche in a world full of cliches. You certainly wouldn’t want someone to sound that way in bed, but that’s something I will never get to find out.
The afternoon I meet Benjamin in the Plaza Mayor is my first time alone since arriving in Madrid the day before and being given a kind of royal treatment that one does not expect as the director of a documentary, but I was far too jagged and lagged and sleepy from the flight to appreciate it. A middle-aged woman named Immaculada who speaks English and seems to be a sort of a hostess and chaperone combined meets me at the airport by holding up a sign, Aisha Sultani, and after a warm greeting and kisses on both cheeks she takes me in her car to the Hotel Reina Victoria where I go directly to bed and sleep sixteen straight hours. Early the next day Immaculada woke me early and took me off to the screening of a film, something about lesbians and bisexuals with psychological issues, and my reaction is something like God you sometimes wonder what these Westerners these Europeans these American women are thinking with all their closeups of piercing and cutting and vomit. Don’t they have anything else to make films about? I’ll never understand. They’re too rich and spoiled and what do they know about life? They haven’t been invaded, they haven’t been bombed, they haven’t had their uncles pulled out of a car and shot at a roadblock, they haven’t had mullahs telling them they had to hide their faces, they haven’t had brothers disappear one night, never to return, they haven’t seen the flares go up over the city or the terrifying but beautiful tracer bullets fired from rooftop to rooftop or huddled in a basement waiting for the artillery explosions to stop. And they haven’t had lovers either, not real lovers, haven’t had sweet words whispered over a phone line in the middle of the night when everyone else is asleep, haven’t strolled with girlfriends across the schoolyard and seen Him sitting in his father’s car across the street, looking so proud and handsome waiting there just to see you and that feeling flies back and forth in the air, that love in his eyes meeting the love in your eyes, even though you have never been alone together, only have seen each other up close at huge holiday gatherings with all the cousins, and yet you know, both of you know that this is True Love.
Sometimes I have to wonder why we always so much admired the West. Europe. England. America. Where everything was modern and clean and up to date, like the Siemens fixtures in our bathroom and appliances in our kitchen in Kabul. In the West things worked and everyone was rich. No goats herded through the streets, no heaps of animal or human dung, no ragged peasants, no blind men with their hands out for baksheesh, no two wheeled carts pulled by boys, no carcasses of sheep and cows hanging in front of butcher shops, covered with flies and dripping blood into the dust, no run down stores with shop keepers sitting over tiny coal heaters, cooking soup, looking up and calling Come into my store and you’ll get the best deal. Sometimes Kabul seemed horrible. I always wondered when we came back from a period abroad why my country was so poor, so dirty, so primitive. Why couldn’t we be like the rest of the world, if not Europe than at least Turkey or Egypt.
Twenty years in America and I have begun to learn, begun to see the two worlds, Sharq and Gharb, East and West, as centuries apart. Yet the violence these young filmmakers show is fake because they don’t know the real thing, don’t have a clue. Violence is what they give you instead of love and they don’t have a clue about that either. Women who don’t accept the fact that men are different from us. Women who complain about men as if men were supposed to feel and act as we do. Women who have not for the life of me ever felt a tenth of what we feel with that single wave across the schoolyard or a few words whispered in a hallway during a feast like Eid el fitr which marks the end of Ramadan.
One of the wonderful things in Madrid is that so far nobody has asked me where I am from. They think I am an American, that’s it, even if a lot of them have to know because my background has been mentioned in all the publicity—our first Afghan American director!! and almost always with the exclamation points. I am here because I have put my community on the screen and so I represent multi cultural America, where everyone always asks you where you are from. But here nobody asks not even those who don’t know. Maybe they simply aren’t curious or maybe they look at my face and think the Moors are back, better not mess with her or they’ll be another invasion. That much Spanish I could understand: No que es su pais natal, senorita. It’s an easy language, a lot easier to learn than Arabic and a lot easier than English, which I learned so long ago. My father was smart. He knew even back then that English was the language of the future and so while he and mother stayed in New Delhi, they bundled us off to school in Missoura, an old British hill station, where the Nuns made us say Hail Marys before I cried myself to sleep. It was so cold, the Nuns didn’t believe in heating, it made you soft they said, and that’s why we had all those cold baths in the morning which were supposed to be good for you. The best part was on Saturdays when all of us in the school, marched two by two, holding hands, sandwiches and fruit in our brown bags, down the hill to the movie house to see cowboys and Indians or the real Indians from India, some jumped up version of the ones around us in the streets, only on screen they were dancing and singing, the women rolling their eyes like huge billiard balls and skipping across fields, almost but never quite kissing their handsome boy friends for just as their lips draw near and they look deep into each other’s eyes another song begins and away they whirl in yet another dance, dozens of women in bright saris in vivid green fields or boulder strewn mountains or in the courtyards of marble palaces.
The festival has put us in a wonderful and elegant hotel, with huge bay windows looking out on a green plaza across the street, and textured, flowery wallpaper, and thick carpets in the hall that caress your feet. Today I am free in the afternoon for what they call siesta, only after sixteen hours of sleep I am plenty rested and I want to make good use of my time in Madrid. Maybe I shouldn’t be wearing such thin soled sandals, but it’s gloriously warm this afternoon and my feet are the only place I dare feel naked, covered up as I am like a boy, with dark, silky pants and a long sleeved blouse,
