Chapter 43 Cat´s eyes
Chapter 43 Cat´s eyes
I shall never know, from the last survivors or the departed contemporaries, who this Kathy was, rescued from complete oblivion in a parenthesis. Was it she who had sent that mysterious gift from the United States that my grandfather covered with passionate kisses because she had touched it? Had she been one of the reasons he had left for the “American lands,” or had he met her during the trip he completed that year?
I don’t feel that I have any right to speculate or build castles in the air. In any case, the suitor’s love affairs were not what made Khalil hesitate about giving his daughter away—except insofar as these affairs revealed a “fickle” tendency that manifested itself in many different ways and made him seem not very dependable, at least not as a future husband and family man. We should remind the reader that when Botros asked for Nazeera’s hand, he had been unemployed for three years and had no permanent residence; he had also been hatching dubious projects that most people probably laughed at and his close relatives must have viewed with anxiety.
Once again, I can’t help comparing his career with that of his brother Gebrayel. Gebrayel left for New York at eighteen. There he met Cuban exiles with whom he became friends, so much so that he adopted their language and their struggle, followed them to Havana, and settled among them for good. In 1899 he founded his Havana company, La Verdad, to which he devoted every minute of his time, and it eventually became one of the most prosperous businesses on the island. Steadfastness, more steadfastness, and determination. And what was my future grandfather doing during that time? First, he couldn’t make up his mind about whether to remain in the mother country or leave. Then he finally decided to leave, only to return four or five years later, lambasting emigration and claiming he had never contemplated settling abroad. After that, he went back to teaching, a profession he claimed to hate, in Zahlé, a city he cursed for being small and provincial. And predictably, after only three school years teaching at the Oriental Secondary School, he couldn’t stand it anymore. Once again he inveighed against his profession and bitterly regretted all those years “lost between notebooks and inkwells.”
From Khalil’s point of view, the two suitors, though brothers, were completely different, even quite apart from Gebrayel’s social success. As a future son-in-law, the émigré offered a sense of security; Botros did not. He was unstable, irascible, unemployed, and already relatively old.
Nazeera’s father had made up his mind; he wasn’t wavering between yes and no. He worried only about how to turn Botros down in the least hurtful manner.
When he broached the subject with his wife, he was not surprised to find that she was even more opposed than he, and actually frankly hostile. For Sofiya, the suitor’s unreliability and vile temper were mere trifles compared with his other grievous—indeed unforgivable—fault: his lack of religion. Coming from a rigid and humorless Protestant family, she didn’t at all like Botros’s cavalier attitude toward matters of faith. And this was before she even knew what he was “hatching” on this score.
The preacher asked his wife not to reveal her feelings and to leave the settling of this thorny matter to him. He went to Beirut to see his daughter, who was a boarder at the American School for Girls, and he had a long conversation with her. He explained to her his and her mother’s point of view in detail, and he was relieved to find that she wholeheartedly agreed with them. On his way home to the village, he worked out a satisfactory answer in his mind, a way of turning down Botros’s proposal without humiliating him.
As soon as he saw his former pupil, he told him, in the same prim tone of voice he used for his homilies, “My daughter is a gifted student, and she has vowed to pursue her studies as long as possible. I am sure that an eminent educator like you can only encourage such diligence.”
Botros didn’t immediately grasp that he had just been rejected. When he deciphered the message a few seconds later, he almost exploded. Then he mastered himself, managed to look impassive, nodded his head politely, and said, “I’d like to talk to her …”
“She’s bound to tell you the exact same thing. I just saw her!”
But the suitor insisted on having a conversation with her, and Khalil couldn’t refuse, given their long-standing friendship and their more recently forged ties of close kinship. In any case, Khalil had no fear; Nazeera had made her decision after giving it careful thought, and she wasn’t the kind of girl who changed her mind overnight.
Botros had a face-to-face conversation with her a few weeks later when she returned to the village for the summer vacation. At the end of their talk, she told her parents that after careful reconsideration, she was in favor of this marriage. The parents were trapped, particularly since their daughter made it clear that this time she wouldn’t change her mind. Khalil felt he couldn’t withhold his consent, regardless of his misgivings. His wife, on the other hand, never resigned herself to it.
I shall never know for sure what Botros could possibly have said to Nazeera to convince her to marry him. These kinds of intimate exchanges, so distant in time, are seldom passed on in families, and even less in mine. However, on rereading the old documents, my guess is that the suitor did not set down a long misty-eyed poem at his beloved’s feet. This would not have swayed her.