Edition: U.S. / Global

'Diary of a Djinn'

Published: March 9, 2003

Adjinn skips from body to body and dies for none. The body is to a djinn its human bottle when it accepts for a time the limit of one person and one life. A spirit is locked in one for the precise purpose of undoing its knots-all the deviations on the path of blood or breath and the impulse of nerves. I wake up and come to life within its humid membranes, the palpitation of cells.

Talking about "myself" is like peering endlessly into a handful of air. If I stare long enough I begin to see shapes and what I see as I see it and put it into words is as indisputable as a current-you could say it should have gone to the right or to the left, should have been warmer or cooler, but none could have stopped it from blowing altogether.

Past and future tug me backwards and forwards trying to take over whatever room "I," that is the present, may occupy. But the present is the only piece of ground on which one is permitted to stand, the air around a body and in it. . . .

One of the little-known sights of Milan, of its chic, was a hippopotamus that was kept in its diminutive zoo in the center of town, steps away from the arch that heralds the way to Via Manzoni which leads straight to the Hotel Milan once the house where Verdi composed several operas, down further to Piazza della Scala and just before reaching it on the left was the bookstore where I bought the newspapers and foreign books that alone made me feel the city had not yet swallowed me whole and I would never emerge to make myself known in any other part of the world. A corner of my coat was recalcitrantly exposed, begging for attention, hoping to be caught in a wild current and borne to a land far from this low-lying swampland. For we, my families, had lived a vagabond life, series of lives, from Spain to Turkey, Rhodes and Egypt only to end up in this pit at the foot of mountains that gathered all the fog of the region, a city saved by the electric light and where most people become very pragmatic because the lack of light and nature makes them suppose that all that happens rests on their shoulders. They work hard, go to sleep early, count their earnings, as the government takes greater and greater shares of it in taxes and health insurance of which they will never receive the benefits. That the Milanese are ordinary human beings is proved by the fact that when they return from their summer holiday in August, their faces are filled out, for a fortnight they smile and look as though they look forward to the day ahead and take pleasure in rubbing shoulders with their fellow beings. Then it stops: their light is turned off and they return to principles of duty and human decency but instinct is forgotten between layers of efficiency and striving and good sense and you can't help but become extremely fond of so much withstanding withstood without complaint, the stoic good humor, the brave grimness of it. Shopkeepers never fawn or smile but their greeting when after several years they begin to take you as one of the regulars of the city will make you feel more of an insider than any other. The hippopotamus was such an insider: he breathed the city's smog every day and he had learned to eat rosette, Milan's crusty buns that are divided into sections around a central one. He stood by the railing of his meager open-air paddock with his mouth wide open and waited for the dry rosette to be thrown into his mouth but he did not chew them immediately: he waited for several to be deposited before bringing up his massive lower jaw to his upper in a single chewing motion then let it drop again and one saw with amazement that the dozen or so buns had been flattened into a white paste that stuck to the surface of his tongue. His hunger was unsatisfiable as, one felt, was his nostalgia. I went to him to have a sense of kinship with another exotic-we came from much the same part of the world since I was born in Egypt-yet we had both become pale renditions of what we might have been. He must have yearned for nature-his very hide seemed slackened and puffy from the lack of oxygen. I didn't know what I yearned for, only that I was in a perennial state of yearning. I was very ignorant then of the simplest fundamental things: it never struck me till much later, when I had left Milan, that I suffered from a lack of light, the obscurity of myself to myself.

Yet in Milan I felt very much a foreigner because there the first questions always asked were "Where are you from? Are you American? Your name is not Italian." And they were not wrong because my explanation when I still felt it was my duty to provide one was always long and contrived and I never felt that I had done the question justice. I was always caught between the need to answer and so to respect the curiosity of the person asking and not tasking his or her limit of endurance and interest for what might after all have been a fleeting curiosity.

Whenever I could, I headed straight for my uncle's penthouse apartment on Corso Monforte and there I was sure of the welcome I would receive from Wally which in Italian was pronounced "Valli." She was a lively blonde and had she had an education she would have run a corporation or a country or done anything she set her mind to. As it was, she infused the role of housekeeper with every extra her very ingenious disposition could muster: diplomatic abilities, imagination, grace. She had a family but one felt it belonged to some other less-enchanted area of her life in which she kept one foot firmly planted when it came to their economic and daily needs.