Her nose was a dead giveaway. It said she longed for better things. It was a thin, disdainful nose, perched warily upon her peaked face. Her set-back hazel eyes might yearn toward sky or lose themselves in wish-dreams far too nebulous to focus on, but it was her nose that seemed to demonstrate a stance of sorts, even as a barrier to shut the stink out of our bedbug rooms, our tenement’s dark urine-smelling halls. Perhaps her eye searched Heaven for a never-never land because the one that she inhabited was hopeless with her gang of kids and not a prayer that a prince’s carriage would pull up beside our ruined stoop.

My father railed at Heaven, hurling dinner-plate grenades against the peeling wallpaper because of who knows what displeasure with his life, his food, with her -- Miss Faraway -- and would go raging through our cubicles, a rodent trapped by sagging buildings pressing down on him.

At ten I was the oldest of the lot of us. My father used my mother as a mattress which, miraculous, produced us kids. In 1921 this was the norm of things in our closed universe, a paradigm, it seemed to us, for life beyond these walls where cruel nature rained on you at whim, and then, sometimes forgetful, let a random shaft of sunlight in.

I was a runt, a copy of my father, fair game for larger or more daring kids. Whatever shmatehs I was clothed with, scrounged from God knows where, were ripped when I’d come home from scuffles in the school halls, stairwells, in the yard. It was the way of things. When you were small or poor or helpless, life took pains to pile more woes upon your back like Johnny on a Pony One, Two Three. Even then I was aware there was some trick you had to know to break the rock of circumstance, make Fortune smile on you.

Movies were invented for my mother, transporting her to some dim fantasy unfixed before, but suddenly made visible, perhaps not very different from the way she viewed her life. She’d clutch my hand in the dark of the tiny theatre, involved. Oh, see the cozy home and kids invaded by that howling, savage Sioux with tomahawk. That mustached villain, forcing into marriage bed some beauty far too sensitive for him.

And then into her life came Rudolph Valentino in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. For me it was a film about the war. For her it was love at first sight. She was his captive from the moment he appeared onscreen. When he tangoed with Alice Terry my mother tensed at this so cruel hoax, as though it should be she he tangoed with, she he turned his searchlight eyes upon to plumb her soul, he alone who was the mate her dreams all led her to. She’d strain against my arm as though to get herself to him. The tale itself held some redemption for this wastrel who becomes a hero of the War. But on the spot this lover, tangoist, became redemption for her self.

Not that my father couldn’t dance the tango. All five foot four he knew the latest steps, wore spats to work in sweatshops, and planless used whatever tool would come to hand to break the rock of circumstance. Of course he failed, and bloodied, nursed his grievances until he jimmy-rigged some other tool he thought would do, to learn again that rock is obdurate. Without the trick of looking at things new, brute strength or strategy or pretty face, it’s better sometimes not to leave the house. In our cramped dungeon of a hole when he was in a mood to dance, with all of us in watching clumps along the wall, with the Victrola playing and my mother meekly in his arms, how skillfully my father moved her on the bare wood floor this way and that.

And yet who was she thinking of? It was clear then that her heart was lost, her lids at half-mast, white flag struck. Could there be any question that those Latin eyes had searched her bosom, there to find the tenderest sensibilities, brooding eyes that penetrated to her self, her own true self? Perhaps this reverie of hers was all the sweeter since there was no ugly coupling in the valley of a sagging bed and the consequence of yet another mouth to feed.

I write this now with knowledge unavailable to me when I was ten. And yet -- did I not see the most of it, the seething hate that passed between them, their defeat, his drive, her hope, the formless anger at their circumstance beneath?

*

And he? The hero of her dreams? At eighteen Valentino had been spit like bilge from out the belly of a scow, propelled from steerage to the foot of Liberty and Wall, bearing names more weighty than the lire he had carried with him here, lamming it before the father of the pregnant girl could get his shotgun out: Rudolpho Alfonzo Rafaelo Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antonguolla. Finished finally with all the stink of mange his father’s fingers wore from nursing ailing animals! Who needed worthless paper anyway when New York offered gold? Farewell, Castellanetta and its dreary, narrow-alleyed world! Here is a face a hundred girls have given their virginity to love, grown up to be as beautiful as this.

New York with all its spires and possibilities was Heaven to this country bumpkin fresh from cow manure. And yet New York was Hell of clawing others striving toward some prize still cloaked in mystery, requiring a step toward any grasp upon a ladder, never mind how tenuous, a foothold on a magical escarpment leading up to untold miracles. Not everyone could find that purchase, just a few. Perhaps he thought that he would be that one -- with his imposing names, his pretty face, his trick of lowering his eyes, though anyone could dream the dream. What does it take to vault above the crowd? How does one coax dear Fortune to be kind? Experience with watering his father’s roses brought Rudolfo luck. He got a job in Central Park as gardener.

Ill-paid, he never had an empty bed. One glance from his half-louvered eye, one graceful movement of his finger or his head and women fell in love. He took it as his due or his good luck but hadn’t yet discovered it was this, this tug on women stronger than the moon, this tug which he inhabited and which invested him, that was to be his talisman, his open sesame.

And there he was in no time flat, a nightclub dancer, then almost in a straight line to the top, advanced, propelled by debutantes, their mothers, dowagers with fortunes that they lavished happily. He hadn’t been in town three years.

Then just as sudden as his rise, he had to take it on the lam again -- these women and their eggs, their terrible propensity for swelling up. He caught a touring company en route to somewhere west. He left, retreating to regroup, without a backward glance of those mesmeric eyes that were to win my mother in her turn so short a time from then. This future Sheik!

*

We live in separate worlds, the most of us, each one constructed by ourselves. My mother lived in hers. But in another place, three thousand miles away, real sheiks existed, some more shakily enthroned than others, as it’s always been. The threads of sheiks will circle back to Valentino once we have dealt with history. For in a harbor as the 1800s wane, in what is now Kuwait, there lived a former Sheik, Abdul Aziz, son of the Wahabi sect, Ibn Sa’ud as he now is known. He too inhabited his private world, dangerous at that. His father’s father’s fathers had once ruled the Nezd, and now he had been forced to sojourn in this place, this busy port, beneath the watchful eye of Al Sabah, as treacherous as khamsin, cruel as the frigid sand, brutal as the sun.

We can see the harbor in our mind’s eye as he saw it, under rainless skies: in the kut the boums slice water the way bared scimitars leave severed heads behind them in their wake. If carelessness is cruel think of desert sands no farther from this port than camels travel in a day, sands acid-cold by moon, a grill beneath the ardent sun.

The lowliest in such a hostile land know this: who is to master cruelty must take his satisfaction from the discipline of suffering, must eat it with the omnipresent grains of sand in roasted camel’s rump, and drink it with his salty camel’s milk, accept its blows unflinching underneath the battering of howling khamsin cannonading eyes with sand.

We can imagine how Aziz had plotted his revenge on Clan Rasheed behind his hooded eyes, the Clan Rasheed who turned a ghazzi into harb. He pondered rules of chivalry. Were they not clear? In violating them did not we call in question everything? A ghazzi’d always been a raid where men count coup as did Apache braves, while harb is war. The escalation with which Clan Rasheed had bested Clan Sa’ud – was that not grave affront to all stability, the way of things, as it is written?

Here we can picture this young man who takes still one more wife to demonstrate his potency in ways his Bedouins will understand so that they’ll follow him. Allah in His wisdom has bequeathed us women as His gift! We split and open them and plant our seed. Over all of them our sword of Damocles.

Sa’ud has nurtured his revenge just as a favored wife would feed the son she plots to make the heir. And now he ponders how to slew this game around with forty fickle Bedouins, some horses and no funds.

He comes inevitably to: the trick in dicey circumstance -- ride out!! What do men do to break the iron rock? When you are poor risk everything! What do you risk but life -- a worthless asset, honorless.

Ride out! He nodded sagely to himself. Not in a ghazzi but a harb, and die in battle like a man or split the enemy in two as if he is a woman you have lain with and no longer want.

In the event, when Riyadh fell before his slaughterous attack he set upon the Nezd. The passage of a dozen bloody years, coinciding with Rudolfo heading west, and hawk-nosed, dark, Abdul Aziz, the Sa’ud’s son in white burnoose, rules all Arabia, although what was there to it then but empty, shifting sand?

*

We’re almost ready for the entrance of our ersatz Sheik! Meanwhile my mother’d waxed as if she battened on his Latin beauty, lowered eye. At first my father thought that he himself had blown her up again. But she was regular as rain -- as though, now armed with hope around the corner in the cinema where she would tryst with Valentino in the early afternoons, she was impervious to sperm, dismissive words, my father’s absences at night. Could she have known she had a random place upon a line ten million women long who yearned like her for just a touch, a sight of Valentino, lover nonpareil, no closer to their dream than she?

Then news of him burst like some starshell in the Telegram. He was with this one. That. He’d marry. Shock! Jean Acker was the lucky lady. What!? His marriage in collapse upon his wedding night!!? What had Jean Acker done to him? Fed by the press each woman of the millions must have told herself if she’d been fortunate enough to have been chosen by this god she’d hold him safe and swaddled in her love and they would dwell in happiness forever and a day.

Now who in Heaven’s name was Natacha Rambova? Others were whispered to have had affairs with him but this one married him! And him still technically married to the Acker girl! Arrested on a charge of bigamy! Oh cruel, heartless men. How dare they place their callous hands on him? What rules of theirs need he obey? Could they not see the quality of man they disrespectfully had thrown in jail?

Somehow someone saw to it the charges went away. There was too much at stake to let this money-making star be sent off course by trifling bigamy. And in the latter part of 1921 The Sheik arrived, not just an adaptation of a lurid fiction but for my mother, women everywhere, epiphany.

*

Had Hollywood embraced the creed of cruelty as well, the truest means of breaking rock? Only in their way, of lawyers’ battles, stock manipulation, tossing those who hadn’t made it on the pyre of this day’s rushes, stills. If not, then what attracted them to King Sa’ud as he now called himself, this brigand, butcher with his shabriyeh, whirlwind on a horse? No, it wasn’t King Sa’ud the man they thought to capture, carry bound into the boudoirs of America. Not him, the harsh reality, the wog, the desert rat, but ah, The Sheik!

I am The Sheik of Araby
Your love belongs to me,
At night when you’re asleep
Into your tent I’ll creep

And yet -- who wouldn’t, leading humdrum lives, trade places with Agnes Ayres who struggled to protect her chastity, but not too hard, from violation by the Sheik? Oh take me, take me from this farm, this factory, this town, this tenement, this man who cannot understand my depths, my heart. Your eyes alone will ravish me. I’ll be secure, yet mad with love if you will come for me and take me with you to your silken lair.

There is some mystery to it that things discovered by a million folks at once impart a pride of ownership to each, so that each awestruck eye is certain it has been the first to see this rare phenomenon, this thing, this man. It didn't matter to a love-besotted world that Rambova had him. How could she keep a man like that, a flashing diamond such as he? Surely there must be a way to tear him from her greedy grasp.

My mother was now lost to all of us although she seemed to thrive. It didn’t matter that his later movies bombed, that beauties everywhere were linked to him. Of course they were. How could they keep away?

As I grew up my mother read each word about the man, then reread hungrily. My mother didn’t really need him to be hers, not physically, to feel his body mounting hers, supplanting husband who was by this time at her less and less. Her love was locked inside her heart where Valentino was her own more certainly than just his presence could provide. No one, no one came between. Their love was mutual, how she was sure of it. She had fulfilled her dream.

*

The headlines screamed that they had rushed him to a hospital! Pola Negri threw herself disconsolate upon his ailing body, nurses struggling to drag her off. His body! -- faced with dangers of disease. What could have gone so wrong with him, his body, it!!? Why hadn’t everyone used care?

I was fifteen the night he died of peritonitis. How simply he’d be cured these days when he could have died quite peacefully at my age, eighty-six, black hair completely white, skin cross-hatched with a thousand lines, one eye half-lowered by a stroke. But none of that took place in those dark ages of the doctor biz. He died. And for a moment the whole world stood still. And then the mourning rained in every kitchen of the globe.

My mother couldn’t eat, but sat in shock, until she heard there’d be a funeral cortege and so of course she went. We saw the pictures of it afterward in Pathé News and in the Telegram. The never-ending lines of women passing by the bier, each one now burying her own true love. When she returned to us she’d undergone a change. Sapped and listless now, us fending for ourselves, she’d lost all hope.

How could my father bear to watch her waste away before his eyes? And all for love of someone else? He didn’t mind. She was his country, his to overrun whenever he desired to. As for his dreams, by now he knew he couldn’t find or fashion needed tools. Perhaps he wasn’t harsh enough, or fierce, or else he had a dream too small to matter much, or concentrated on his lot instead of on a world to win, just grasps away.

And I, I’ve had my chance to break the rock of circumstance. There’s few of us who manage it.

 

This story was published by Thin Air (February 2001).