Diabolic Digest
Khaled Diab
Losing Face
A
date with Miss Piggy
It was Mo who had driven the prize piglet to the
fair that morning. Sven won the baby pig and lost the date, much to his
chagrin. After the prize-giving ceremony, he surprised himself when he
approached Tanja on the bustling village square, the piglet in somewhat
reluctant tow.
Her gemstone eyes twinkled and glittered green
in the late afternoon sky, he noticed appreciatively. And, as the crescent of a
smile waxed across her face, the sun, as if in an eclipse, was overshadowed by
the sombre veil of her hair.
Opportunely, Sven’s trance was rudely broken by
the grunting swine he’d been lumbered with. “Tom de Wolf gets to have dinner
with you, I get a date with a pig,” he almost snorted.
“I’m sure you and Miss Piggy will have a great
time together,” Tanja opined unhelpfully. “And the good thing is she won’t mind
if you live in a pig sty.”
“Actually, I was hoping that Miss Piggy would
morph into you and you’d join me for dinner some evening.”
“Well, if you kiss her, she might do just
that,” Tanja challenged, waving an imagery wand. To the astonishment of
everyone around, he bent down and placed a kiss on the perplexed piglet’s head,
who then grunted in apparent disapproval. Tanja opened her purse and handed him
her card: “Call me,” she said before meandering like a gentle stream through
the crowd, with pleasant waves rippling through her thin summer dress.
Ever since his tour de force, Sven was
never entirely able to grasp what it was that had drawn Tanja to him.
“Chemistry was never my strong suit at school,” she’d joked once when he’d asked
her to explain what she saw in plain old him. “But when I met you, you just set
off the right reactions.”
But, for our Sven, Tanja’s answer wasn’t
entirely satisfactory. And, over the years, the question grew and, with it, the
doubt. Love is like faith – you need to believe in it wholeheartedly. It is
also like art – abstract, sublime, intangible. Too many “whys” pierce the
beautiful vision.
Why him over all the other men she could have
had was not a question she could answer easily. You cannot objectify the
subjective.
Perhaps it was the mathematician in him, or may
be it was the emotional vacuum in which he had been raised, or his disquiet at
the beauty deficit caused by his belief that most people thought he didn’t
deserve her. In any case, Tanja’s failure, in Sven’s eyes, to articulate her
intangible feelings soon caused an invisible and subtle barrier to grow between
them. Although he tried to keep it under wraps, it sometimes manifested itself
in defensive jealousy or coldness.
Rebuffed and shut off from his inner self,
Tanja began to feel rejected and a little unloved. She could not fully
comprehend why Sven was keeping her at bay. Whenever she tried to pierce his
shell or melt his defences, he refused to be drawn – he would not confide his innermost
feelings to her.
Sven tapped into the years of practice he’d
received at bottling in his emotions in the cold no-boys-land in which he had
grown up, caught between the devout piety of his Catholic mother and the pious
discipline of his police sergeant father. Both of his parents dedicated their
lives and beings to serving a higher authority, forgetting that their son also
needed their attention.
From an early age, only “weighty matters” could
be brought up in his parents’ company – the burden of which was sometimes too
much for his narrow shoulders to bear as they shook tearfully in his bedroom
late at night. Personal feeling and emotions, uncertainties, doubts,
ambiguities, were not matters worthy of their haughty ears.
Girl troubles were also off the agenda. Even on
the rare occasions when he plucked up the courage to have a man-to-man with his
dad, all he got was the old man’s uncomfortable stuttering – a voice robbed of
its normal authority.
Sven’s father got his kicks out of being a
larger-than-life figure of strength and reliability, a pillar of law and order
holding up their small community. His mother was so full of unconditional –
and, Sven thought, unrequited – love for the Lord and his Son that her own
children and husband had to crowd together in some dusty antechamber of her
heart. Not that this bothered his father whose camaraderie with his fellow
officers took pride of place amongst his sentiments.
Sven could not remember a time when his parents
had slept in the same bedroom and he wondered when the last time they had had
sex was. In fact, he sometimes wondered how they’d had him – did they do it the
conventional way, was it an early experiment in IVF, or was his mother in the
Immaculate Conception business? Not that he was ever made to feel like a
godsend.
As a boy, he always sensed that his parents
viewed him as a consolation prize they had settled for following the flight of
his older brother and sister. A year before Sven was born, Bruno, at the age of
18, decided to rebel against their father. Although he often dreamed about
slapping some fatherly sense into the village sergeant, the man was still his
father and he could never bring himself to raise a hand against him, even when
the old man asked him, “Where’s the girly boy going, tonight?” Fighting back
tears of frustration, he could not understand how his earrings could elicit
such derision from his own father, despite the fact that he was over 190 cm.
One night, on his way to pick up his girlfriend
to go to a gig, he was stopped by a young police officer who wanted to check
his licence. “I take it you’re going to Man-2-Man to join all your pretty
boyfriends,” the policeman said, letting his wrist flop mockingly, as he
scanned Bruno’s dyed fringe, jewellery and leather trousers. Already close to
the edge, Bruno leapt at his father, his tormentor, knocking him to the ground.
Swinging rapid-fire punches at the man, he yelled repeatedly: “The only man
I’ll be fucking tonight is you.”
Their father was first in line to reprimand
Bruno for putting the young policeman in hospital, despite his son’s
protestations that the cop was a “fascist in uniform”. He was beside himself
that his then only son had thrown away a future career in the police force with
his recklessness. Not that Bruno would have ever joined the police, even if his
father had spent years “building him up physically and mentally for the job”.
“What have I done to deserve this,” he lamented
to his wife as she moved her fingers expertly from one rosary bead to the next,
drawing comfort from the soulful repetition of a silent prayer. “I spent my
life serving and upholding the law in the streets, and I raise a lout and a
criminal under my own roof.”
In court, his father, the fine upstanding
citizen – the cold stone pillar of the community – that he was, pleaded with
the judge to give his son the maximum penalty. The judge, who had been willing
to show leniency in deference to a respected officer of the law and in
recognition that this was Bruno’s first offence, faltered and handed down an
18-month sentence.
Once Bruno was released from prison, he came to
get his stuff and never set foot again in his parents’ house. Deciding he
needed to get as far away from their madhouse as possible, he sought asylum, shortly
after Sven’s birth, in the Congo, where he worked as a French teacher for 13
years. In the lead up to the 1994 genocide, he went to Rwanda to help in the
humanitarian effort. He received a stray bullet in the chest for his efforts.
The whole of Voeren turned out for his funeral
and the king and prime minister honoured him posthumously. While his mother
wept for days in remorse, his father’s ice-pick composure held and he refused
to grieve. “At last, he did something honourable for a change,” was the best he
could manage.
His sister, Anne, who had been very close to
Bruno, never managed to forgive her parents for driving her older brother away,
although she was proud of what he had been doing in Africa.
Being a lesbian had been every bit as tough as
she had feared it would be. Terrified at how parents would react, she kept her
sexuality secret, even from herself, for some years. Without Bruno around and
given her parents wrath at his unspeakable crime, not to mention Sven’s birth,
Anne pushed the demon deep into the magma core of her mind where it throbbed
and burnt distantly – for a while.
Desiring a purposeful silence – as opposed to
the corrosive one in which she lived, one which was only punctuated by her
toddler brother’s first words and occasional tears – she joined a trappist
order – became a trappistien – in Westvleteren, at the age of 19. Several
months of quiet reflection made her realise that her denials were in vain: she
was what she was and the thing that was making her dirty little secret sordid
was how she was keeping it cooped up inside, where it was growing stale and
rancid.
When she phoned to tell them she was coming
home, they were aware that she’d broken her hermit’s silence. But they were
wholly unprepared for the other silence that she was about to shatter into a
million shards of righteous confusion on her way out of the closet. A jagged,
poison-tipped silence assaulted the room, pushing the normally void silence to
cower and whimper in the corner.
Besides her occupation with the sin factor,
Anne’s poor mother, for whom sex was largely a procreative activity – although
she did sometimes allow herself the indulgence of enjoying it and without her
clothes on – could only just grasp recreational sex among heterosexuals, if it
was used as a means of lightening the burden of multiplication.
Anne found an immediate ally in Bruno whom,
besides loving his sister, didn’t see her sexuality as any big deal. He also
found it amusing that his father had always called him a fag because of the way
he looked, but it was innocent-seeming, retiring Anne who delivered the
knockout punch. “I wish I’d been there to see the shock on their face when you
told them,” he wrote in a letter for Kinshasa.
Anne moved out shortly after her thunderbolt and,
years later, following Bruno’s death, she could hardly bring herself to face
her unremorseful dad – every occasion was a painful ordeal: she could see
Bruno’s ghost, warm even in death, fluttering like a candle against her
father’s weathered and frosty features, and she could hardly bear to think that
the only thing this heartless man shared with his eldest son was a fleshbound
resemblance.
As she wasn’t allowed to bring any of her
girlfriends to visit, and her parents never again mentioned the love she dared
to name, Anne felt little motivation to go to Voeren, except to snatch
surreptitious visits to her brother, Sven.
In the dozen years since her revelation, Sven’s
mother offered up a prayer every day to the Lord urging him to pardon her
misguided daughter and lead her to the righteous path. Without either of his
siblings at home and with his parents’ constant, if largely unspoken,
disappointment at how his brother and sister had turned out, Sven really did
feel like a step-in, a sub – a semi-retired sperm had been called off the
substitutes’ bench and pushed out on the playing field, unprepared and
un-warmed up, in extra time to score a goal for the team.
ã2004 K. Diab. Unless otherwise stated, all the content on this website
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