by Eurydice (c) 1995

Home, Strange Home

     EU grew up in a secluded mansion with vaulted hand-painted ceilings and cool shiny tiles.  Her family owned villages, villagers, animals, huts and acres of land.  It took pride in its nine centuries of pure blood, although intermarriage took its toll. 
     Her maternal grandfather was the High Priest of the Coptic Church, bishop and godhead, reputedly the most handsome man in the nation, magnificent in his flowing gold robes and biblical beard.  His large piercing eyes, pale lips, soft fingers, tall powerful body and talent with words of any kind, made him a lady-killer.  Before God called him to His path via a recurrent macabre vision (his castration by nuns), he was a narcissist and a bisexual playboy.  As proof of his conversion to Christianity, he married his only cousin, Penelope, a meek, God-fearing creature who bore him nine children all of whom died but the last: a tiny girl whose premature birth finally killed poor Penelope. 
     Grandfather played the organ in church so divinely that tears flowed from the eyes of all who listened.  Crowds flocked to hear him sing hymns in the voice of the old Sirens.  He found a miraculous fragrant icon of the Pink Virgin in a hot spring on the day EU was born, led by another blinding vision; he built a cathedral on that spot in the Virgin's honor.  Pilgrims brought Her mounds of silver votive puppets.  She specialized in curing the blind.  Her portrait, done in mosaic, decorated the holy sanctuary.  EU had posed for the baby Jesus held in Her arms. 
     EU's paternal grandmother, Penelope's sister, had sold her soul to a moneylender and then stolen the contract. She'd married and murdered nine rich men of various nationalities and amassed a vast fortune. She led the Resistance in both wars, took thousands of lovers, ran in the national elections on her own ticket and, if it wasn't for the peasant majority, would have won.  She was famous for her charity, her terrifying tantrums, and for being the most sexually active woman of her class.  She had frightening green eyes, a biting tongue, a tremendous hunger for everything, an iron will, and disarming charisma.  EU was named after her.
     EU's father was a passionate irresponsible artist who sacrificed a promising career and a famous string of European mistresses, to live in isolation with the wife his revered mother arranged for him in order to preserve the familial purity and longevity.  He wore torn overalls, drank wine and cognac all day and loved to eat and dance. He was hairy, tanned, muscular, bare-chested, affectionate and      spent his time developing photographs. 
     EU's mother was an otherworldly, self-contained, virginal girl who had no interest in the world outside her room, and no activities other than singing, bathing and resting.  She wore exquisite gowns every day, was never in the sun, had impeccable intricate manners, ate sparingly, spoke rarely and fainted daily.  Technically, she had died at birth, but she was resurrected in her coffin 3 days later, after Grandfather locked himself inside his church and threatened the Virgin that he would set himself on fire if She did not deliver a miracle.  Thus EU came to be born. 
     Young EU was given absolute gratification.  No rules were placed upon her.  But she abstained from worldly pleasures and spent her days in the seclusion of the best possible world: life happened in her head.  She had no patience for the surrounding forests, orchards, streams, the purebred horses, the ancestral traditions or her tutors.  Daily life revolved around her as comedy.  She was lauded as the gift from heaven.  Dad called her a jewel, a miracle, his life's joy, his only hope, the familial raison-d'etre.  She suspected a grand elaborate trap hid behind his words.  The trap was the world.  The bait was love. 
     Had she believed in their words, she would have become a mere idol.  But she resisted, preferring to make herself into the most lonely of creatures: a creator.  From early on, the simplicity and passion of other people bewildered her.  Their endless fussing over her, and her own caressed and protected little body, displeased her.  Hundreds of peasants came to offer her ritual blessings, predict her fate, bury her in flowers and kiss her feet every day.  Her birthday was celebrated with exorbitant fiestas, where the locals were so honest in their joyous worship of her she assumed they expressed the sentiments of all humanity. 
     EU never knew that she was a child.  She was a tiny well-dressed girl with burning eyes and tangled hair, who was prone to ecstasies, had the final word in all family decisions, and asked those she met if they knew God's true face or if they knew how to fuck.  She was impatient to have sex, but, despite her demands, no servant dared humor her, for fear of God.  She recited Homer at four. At six she fell in love with Rimbaud. At nine, with Gertrude Stein.  After that, she lost all interest in words.
     Squatting in the dark for hours, young EU created a world more exciting than the one outside her: she flew across the sky, her suitors hang themselves from trees; islands, rocks and seas called out her name in need, and she emerged out of nowhere in flowing scarlet veils and killed in one blinding blow a thousand savages.  She thought with elation: "I am All and I am Nothing; I am the Fear of fear, the Ruler of destiny, the Destroyer of fact!  I require no one else for my happiness.  I am alone through eternity, for I remain free for ever.  If the universe tumbles down around my ears, what is that to me?  I am the peace."
     When EU was nine, her family was forced to flee to Europe, persecuted by one of those blind fits of nationalism to which Arabs are prone.  They ran for their lives in secret, leaving 900 years of history behind to be confiscated by the mob.  No longer the center of a vast fortune, a venerable name and an adoring population, EU suddenly became an anonymous foreign entity who had to compete and survive in a vulgar world.  She had only been trained in the exercises of the imagination. But now she required pedestrian skills, secular weapons, and foreign languages.
     She was shocked to meet other children.  EU abhorred their primitive groups that shared the same jokes, games, enemies and preoccupations.  The democratic chaos of school?with smart, slow, clean, dirty, big, small, meek, mean, ugly, pretty, rich and poor students piled together and subjected to common rules?struck her as ludicrous and incomprehensible.  But alienation, EU's family heritage and her natural mode of being, was an insult if it was imposed from outside; so she had to abandon it. 
     EU's humiliation: on her first day in school, there was an excursion to an olive grove on a rocky hill.  During tag-and-freeze an ugly boy chased her.  She ran fast, cursing her untrai-ned pampered body.  He caught her with a smirk; his thick fingers and dirty fingernails touched her on the left breast.  According to the rules, EU froze on the spot under a deformed olive tree. 
     She realized then that the world was full of nonsensical regulations and she vowed never again to share the laws of the masses.  Aware of a burning hole between her legs, she spent that hot afternoon in defeat: a woman turned into a pillar of salt. 
     She ran home to the mirror and made faces into it.  Her mirror showed her that she was a surprised abyss who to everyone else was a surprised angel; that she would never jump at the sight of her shadow; that she needed no excuses.  She wrote with lipstick on it: "The world will never know me," "The world is too small for me," "I will fool the world, and it will make me into a saint."  That day she switched from thumb-sucking to a mature addiction: masturbation.  It was her new act of freedom.
     The next day in school she lurched into speech as a woman dying of thirst dives into the mirage of an oasis.  The correct words came out of her mouth without hesitation or zeal.  Her public moments were inspired delaying tactics for self-preservation, comic maneuvers designed to stay her terror as she rebelled against her needy new world.  She prevailed by her innate cocki-ness as an heir apparent; and she suffered as any actress. 
     EU's spoiled body betrayed her in school: she caught colds, children's diseases; she didn't run, jump or aim adequately.  Her body was a burden, an obstacle.  Her frailty separated her from the others; she felt like a message trapped in a bottle at sea. 
     She persuaded her classmates that their physical activities were absurd; as a result, her class failed P.E. en masse. She led a boycott of the national holiday parade on the grounds that the PM whose refusal to the Nazis' ultimatum was celebrated, was himself a fascist responsible for the deaths of countless democrats.  The protest became an annual tradition in the capital, though EU's initiative was born from her terror of marching in line.  
     Her male teachers fell in love with her even though she was only ten.  They held her hand, cried on her lap, told her their secrets and begged her to run off with them.  The female teachers tried to pass on to her the wisdom of lives wasted as good daughters, wives, mothers and patriots. The schoolgirls imitated EU's ways and ruthlessly competed to serve her.  The boys followed her in troops, slept on her doorstep, accused and injured one another or themselves in desperate macho feats meant to impress her.  Her name was carved on every tree and every desk.  Older high school boys scrawled "EU I love you" on their arms with knives and ran to show her the bleeding incisions.  They wrote on the city walls in huge black signs: "I LOVE EU" and "EU: I AM YOURS!" 
     The admiration of the crowd did not penetrate EU.  They love me, she thought, feeling nothing of it.  They know that it won't come to any good, but still they give themselves over to me.  There is more of me than this, she thought as she saw them coming to her.  She saw no image of herself in the world.  At ten, EU had already formulated her basic approach to people:
     1. Show them love, appear open and remain opaque. 
     2. Never believe what they say. (I don't know how to believe.)
     3. Have no sympathy for easy victims and take no prisoners.
     For fun, she practiced hallucination.  She 'saw' a rowdy brothel in place of a Byzantine church, an immense phallus held by screeching griffins on the Liberty statue, a family of fat hermaphrodites involved in complex orgy during math class, centaurs galloping on the city highways with their manes loose in the wind or a pink bubbly parlor at the bottom of her teacup.  As long as life was not real, life gave her joy and solace.
     Late at night, she crossed alone the wide silent boulevards inhaling deep breaths of freedom and libido, feeling that she was the maker of everything she saw. She squeezed under the wires and into the ancient ruins to lie on the hot rocks.  She peered into every lit window.  She knelt and stared into the basements of the poor.  She watched sailors argue in bars, gypsies bellydance in their camps, drag queens bargain their asses in the square, tired whores sit with rippled open thighs on top of steep staircases, ghostly nightclub singers eat lamb soup at dawn, calm opium users share pipes at the outskirts of the forest and, deep in the forest, young couples perform rape or love.  She hid from cops, cabbies and kind-hearted strangers. She learned to move silently, see and hear sharply, judge fast. Those she saw became characters in her fantasies.  She felt her "subjects" love her through the mist of her imagination; a love that gave her space and solitude.
     She imagined what her subjects thought, desired, concealed.  Their acts gave unpredictable directions to her stories.  Her new fantasies were live!  She saw girls give birth to stones or hogs, a massive underground factory that churned out fake humans, and surveillance insects patroling the sky.  She warned no one of it.
     Soon EU became a familiar figure of the night, greeted by men exposing themselves behind the bushes, their eyes glowing in the shadows with triumph, lust and fear; as she stopped to watch their plight, they bowed to her and jerked off.  She befriended queens who hustled for tickets to gay conventions, fled from the sirens and strolled on the cobbled pier where soccer players ran after them, attacking their shaved asses like pastries. 
     She joined anarchist activists and leftist parties, spied on nuclear arms and political prisoners, covered the city monuments with illegal slogans and posters, wrote soul-searching songs with old men drinking grappa beyond the curfew hours.  She enjoyed the meaninglessness of politics?the endless labyrinths of words that were never penetrated by the light of the outside world.  She loved the arrests, the handcuffs, the bloated guards, the orange uniforms, and the forlorn parasites who lived in the prisons. 
     When EU was twelve and had just been elected school presi-dent, she first discovered that dancers, acrobats or construction workers could give her profound physical pleasure.  She dedicated herself to developing her cunt.  It was the most exciting time.  She changed partners like panties, or like words.  Every time the lights went on, she found herself with a new lover trying out a new position.  She did not suspect then that the overflooding in her cunt might one day become redundant, nor that she could not survive forever with a bottomless cunt she couldn't understand or control.  She loved her new rootlessness.  The world was a live show produced for her delight.  Her life was not different from dreaming awake.  Let the waters part, she told her mirror.  May her Wheel spin forever!  So she went around the world in search of release...