quicker than it should be.
No car will slow down for me to cross—none ever has, none ever will. I zip in between vehicles, dancing the Beiruti Hustle to the other side. What will happen when I’m too slow to do this? Will I someday lose the ability to get all the way across the street before the light changes?
Will I live long enough to see a fully functional traffic light in Beirut?
I pass what used to be Mr. Azari’s grocery, now a strange store selling unnecessary electrical widgets: old-fashioned irons, neon tubes, light fixtures that are supposed to look like candles, the stems dripping permanent plastic wax, vibrating filaments within tapered flame-shaped bulbs. The store stands next to a Starbucks filled with youngsters, future married couples, preening and chatting and flirting, all of them lounging in seemingly uncomfortable and unsustainable positions, all drinking lactescent swill. A street cleaner in a green jumpsuit picks up cigarette butts off the pavement. Across the street is another one. These street cleaners of Beirut, the Sisyphuses of our age. The one before me is an East African, a young man with an old demeanor.
The city belongs to the young and their apathy. That is no country for old men. Or old women for that matter. Byzantium seems so distant.
Beirut is the Elizabeth Taylor of cities: insane, beautiful, tacky, falling apart, aging, and forever drama laden. She’ll also marry any infatuated suitor who promises to make her life more comfortable, no matter how inappropriate he is.
In the early pages of his gorgeous novel Sepharad , Antonio Muñoz Molina writes: “Only those of us who have left know what the city used to be like and are aware of how much it has changed; it’s the people who stayed who can’t remember, who seeing it day after day have been losing that memory, allowing it to be distorted, although they think they’re the ones who remained faithful, and that we, in a sense, are deserters.”
Certainly a beautiful sentence, and a lovely sentiment, but I respectfully yet strenuously disagree. There may be much I can’t remember, and my memory may have become distorted along the way, but Beirut and how she was, how she has changed through the years—her, I never forgot. I never forget, and I have never left her.
Why did my mother scream? Why did she do that?
I can’t allow myself to dwell on it. Unfettered perambulation isn’t permitted on the ant farm today.
I feel a little dizzy. I press my hand against the Starbucks window to steady myself. White dots and grayish striations flitter and quiver across my eyes, so I rest my forehead against the glass, as I used to do when I was a child, rest my skull against the wall whenever my boisterous half brothers grew too irksome, whenever my mother reminded me over and over to stop at the bakery on my way back from school. “Don’t forget the bread,” she used to harp. “Remember bread, bread,” and my head would need a rest.
A taxi driver leans forward and yells out his window, “Taxi?”
I take a deep breath, pull my head back. Sisyphus pretends not to notice me as he collects butts with a pair of extra-long tongs. Two youngsters behind the clean glass, a boy and a girl with Bakelite thighs, interrupt their duel of saliva to regard me quizzically, suspiciously. Their hands and bodies touch along many points, a languorous contact that speaks of desperation.
Touching, so alive, so bright, these teenagers. Before them, on the glass, my pale, silvery reflection superimposes itself. I recoil. Immortal age beside immortal youth.
But thy strong Hours indignant work’d their wills,
And beat me down and marr’d and wasted me.
A Diored woman sporting noteworthy high hair and wasp-stung lips slows her steps, hesitates near me, lifts up her sunglasses, concern showing on her face. I smile, grimace really, my ever-nervous gesture. I shake my head, indicating that I’m all right. Mild geriatric disorder is what this is, nothing
No car will slow down for me to cross—none ever has, none ever will. I zip in between vehicles, dancing the Beiruti Hustle to the other side. What will happen when I’m too slow to do this? Will I someday lose the ability to get all the way across the street before the light changes?
Will I live long enough to see a fully functional traffic light in Beirut?
I pass what used to be Mr. Azari’s grocery, now a strange store selling unnecessary electrical widgets: old-fashioned irons, neon tubes, light fixtures that are supposed to look like candles, the stems dripping permanent plastic wax, vibrating filaments within tapered flame-shaped bulbs. The store stands next to a Starbucks filled with youngsters, future married couples, preening and chatting and flirting, all of them lounging in seemingly uncomfortable and unsustainable positions, all drinking lactescent swill. A street cleaner in a green jumpsuit picks up cigarette butts off the pavement. Across the street is another one. These street cleaners of Beirut, the Sisyphuses of our age. The one before me is an East African, a young man with an old demeanor.
The city belongs to the young and their apathy. That is no country for old men. Or old women for that matter. Byzantium seems so distant.
Beirut is the Elizabeth Taylor of cities: insane, beautiful, tacky, falling apart, aging, and forever drama laden. She’ll also marry any infatuated suitor who promises to make her life more comfortable, no matter how inappropriate he is.
In the early pages of his gorgeous novel Sepharad , Antonio Muñoz Molina writes: “Only those of us who have left know what the city used to be like and are aware of how much it has changed; it’s the people who stayed who can’t remember, who seeing it day after day have been losing that memory, allowing it to be distorted, although they think they’re the ones who remained faithful, and that we, in a sense, are deserters.”
Certainly a beautiful sentence, and a lovely sentiment, but I respectfully yet strenuously disagree. There may be much I can’t remember, and my memory may have become distorted along the way, but Beirut and how she was, how she has changed through the years—her, I never forgot. I never forget, and I have never left her.
Why did my mother scream? Why did she do that?
I can’t allow myself to dwell on it. Unfettered perambulation isn’t permitted on the ant farm today.
I feel a little dizzy. I press my hand against the Starbucks window to steady myself. White dots and grayish striations flitter and quiver across my eyes, so I rest my forehead against the glass, as I used to do when I was a child, rest my skull against the wall whenever my boisterous half brothers grew too irksome, whenever my mother reminded me over and over to stop at the bakery on my way back from school. “Don’t forget the bread,” she used to harp. “Remember bread, bread,” and my head would need a rest.
A taxi driver leans forward and yells out his window, “Taxi?”
I take a deep breath, pull my head back. Sisyphus pretends not to notice me as he collects butts with a pair of extra-long tongs. Two youngsters behind the clean glass, a boy and a girl with Bakelite thighs, interrupt their duel of saliva to regard me quizzically, suspiciously. Their hands and bodies touch along many points, a languorous contact that speaks of desperation.
Touching, so alive, so bright, these teenagers. Before them, on the glass, my pale, silvery reflection superimposes itself. I recoil. Immortal age beside immortal youth.
But thy strong Hours indignant work’d their wills,
And beat me down and marr’d and wasted me.
A Diored woman sporting noteworthy high hair and wasp-stung lips slows her steps, hesitates near me, lifts up her sunglasses, concern showing on her face. I smile, grimace really, my ever-nervous gesture. I shake my head, indicating that I’m all right. Mild geriatric disorder is what this is, nothing
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