while he goes on about both groups never being taken for granted, but I am listening less to the meaning of his words and more to the sound of his voice. I have the impulse to ask why he isn’t wearing one of those little skull caps, but I restrain myself because who knows? it may be impolite, you never know with people’s beliefs, and to tell the truth, I am enjoying this back and forth, it’s a me I like, a freer than usual me, talking with a man who is, let’s face it, picking me up, if I wish to be honest about what is happening, and if mother told me one thing a million times it was that I should not talk to strange men for you never know what will happen but you do know that there is only one thing that they really want.
We have broken some sort of ice. We both know that as we sit in a warm silence, watching the sun disappear behind the buildings on the far side of the Plaza, the shadows stretching out to engulf a column of elderly Asian women carrying parasols, marching behind two young female guides in bright red suits, one of them holding a small triangular flag on a slender pole. They make for the bronze statue of the man on the rearing horse, stop in front of it, sort themselves it into three neat lines, as if they have been practicing this maneuver all their lives, shorter women in front, taller ones in the middle, tallest ones in back. The guides shoot photos, and then each woman in turn steps out of the group, points a camera at her comrades and a flash stabs through the dusk. After every one has taken a turn, they reform into a column and march towards a distant archway and out of the plaza.
Benjamin begins a lecture about the king on the horse, a Felipe with some number after his name who had this plaza built in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, and while I begin to wonder if he is going to ask me for a drink and I am going to accept, he goes on about the events they used to have here, horse races and bullfights and public executions and even something about Muslims and Jews being hung or burned, and I keep thinking why is he putting Muslims and Jews together when they are so far apart. Of course I wonder how come he knows so much and all kinds of odd thoughts go through my mind, like what if he is something strange like an FBI agent or a expert in guided missiles or some kind of sneak gas bombs or even maybe a rabbi. His nose sure looks like the nose of a rabbi, but I don’t know if there is there more than one kind of rabbi or are they just like mullahs, sort of the same except some are a lot smarter and better educated and a lot cleaner than others? That’s one of the things that’s wonderful about Islam, you have to be clean and there’s always the fountain in the courtyard of the mosque, a beautiful fountain with that lovely splash of water and you have to wash before praying to Khodajan, no dirty hands or feet or dirty anything when you pray. No he can’t be a rabbi, a rabbi wouldn’t go on talking to a Muslim woman, would he?
It seems like forever before he finally gets around to asking me for a drink. I say no, I don’t have time, because I don’t want to seem easy, but when he asks again I say okay, but only for a minute. This is Europe after all. That’s what you do in Europe, sit in cafes and talk about the kind of stuff Europeans talk about, men and women together, discussing art and literature and politics and sex, no doubt, they are big on talking about sex at least to judge from their movies, French films and even more Spanish films, for what does Almadovar ever have his characters talk about or do for that matter but sex. It’s not like back home, funny I still think of it as home after twenty years, like all over that part of the world where the men sit in coffee houses all day long, smoking from water pipes or cigarettes, Marlboros if they can get them, and if a woman walks in all eyes turn your way and all conversation stops, even the movement on the checker board halts, as if the presence of a woman would jinx the game, and if you are in a Western dress or heaven forbid, jeans, if you are in anything but a huge chadour or a burka, you will feel the eyes undressing you and unless you are seventy five you may as well turn around and walk right back out the door because nobody will serve you a coffee, not even a glass of water if you were dying of thirst.
I am conscious of Benjamin’s physical presence as we move across the square towards one of the outdoor cafes, taller than me but not tall, bulkier but not really bulky, a comfortable size, not like so many Americans, not like the guys in Kansas who were huge as elephants. That’s the way it seemed when we arrived and it was the same when I left four years later, only by then their size made sense for it went along with the baked potatoes that were big as soccer balls and the steaks that looked as if someone had hurled half a cow onto your plate. My introduction to America, straight from the bomb shelters of Beirut, where everything was closed in and dark, and people scurried furtively between buildings during lulls in the fighting, and then you are on a plane, evacuated to Kansas, where the horizon goes on forever, corn fields stretch to the end of the earth and maybe to the stars, and the men, the overgrown boys with bellies already beginning to hang over their wide belts, want to talk about nothing but beer and the size of their farms, or if they are pretending to be Hippies, the secret places they grow dope, and everyone talks about whether the Jayhawks can beat the Sooners this year.
He orders coffee for both of us, and something called churros, which are like thick bread sticks but made with soft donut dough, powdered with sugar, and very sweet on the tongue even if these are, or so he says, rather stale because you really have to eat them at breakfast, and best of all is to buy them from an outdoor vendor in a historic town like Granada, a vendor who cooks them while you wait, for the tastiest ones come from gypsies who carry on the heritage of the Moors. Sitting here in the twilight, couples at nearby tables touching hands, leaning heads close together, kissing on the cheek or lips, I look at him for the first time, see this man whose voice already speaks directly to something in me that I could confuse with my heart, his light summer jacket wrinkled, the white shirt without a collar showing off an elegant neck, not a young neck, to be sure, but one lined and beginning to go a touch scrawny with age. He must be close to fifty, twelve, fifteen years older than me, not young, not old, ripe maybe, old enough, but for what.
It’s not just the sound of the voice but what he is saying. Benjamin has confessed to being a history professor and he is doing what all men do, trying to entertain his female companion, not by talking about himself as they usually do but about history, my least favorite subject at school, though I don’t say that, it would be so impolite, and anyway it sounds interesting now, his words not about dates and kings and battles but about poetry, science, and medicine, gardens and fountains and palaces, the landscape of a bountiful land of milk and honey, and all due to Islam, the fanatic Berbers from the Atlas mountains who led by Arabs stormed across the Straits of Gibralter and stayed here for seven hundred years and left a legacy in music and architecture. He wants to impress me, that’s clear enough, with all these words about what is my heritage not his, though he keeps inserting Jews into the culture, but I don’t mind at all because it’s so rare to find an American who knows anything about Islam or my part of the world though twenty years in America makes it seem less like mine and more like something half remembered from a movie I saw a long time ago.
The interruption by the young Irani ruins my mood. Even here they can’t leave you alone, they close in on you and make demands as if you really were their sister. He starts out nice enough speaking Farsi with an accent that shows he has lived in Britain for most of his life, though I do find it a bit unnerving that he asks if I aren’t the Afghan director who has a film in the festival at the Filmoteca, but I fall into the oldest of my roles or should I say our roles, letting him intrude and forgetting about Benjamin and disappearing into fantasies about Islam and our world, weren’t we the greatest then but not mentioning a thing about the sorry state we are in now. It’s impossible to get over one’s upbringing, impossible to get over your training to always be the good girl and do the right thing even if in everyone’s eyes including my own I am at this moment the farthest thing from a good girl. Maybe that part of the world is still more with me than I know, for after all these years I still listen when a man starts to talk even if I don’t know him and know he is not really my brother and even if he is talking nonsense. Only when he gets nasty about my film, saying he’s heard it slanders my people, do I begin to feel annoyed and only when he asks why am I sitting with a kafir, how can I shame Islam by being with one of them, and only when he demands that I leave immediately, come with him, only then do I wake up to my current self and say It’s none of your business what I do and when he begins to insist Sister, think of our people, that’s when I tell him
