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Sand and Fog and Cupcakes

By Alexa

So, gente, think you would eat a cupcake with chili peppers, cinnamon and bitter dark chocolate?

Banana and guava cupcakes with plantains?

Pretty zesty, no? I think there's an unspoken competition among tween mamis and Lawd haf mursy on the pobrecito who brings chocolate cupcakes, even with sprinkles or anything made from a quick mix to play/study dates. The real sin is store-bought. Never is it a reflection on the child, but on the mom who doesn't "think outside the box" and experiment with flavors and colorful fondants and sugar pastes. We seem to have a lot of study dates in Casa Avila and I don't think it's my nonexistent algebra skills, but the way we try to make each guest feel truly welcome, as though their visit adds something special to our lives because, well, it does.

Of course the moms are busy. We're all busy. But baking and decorating are the rewards we mamas (and papis) earn after the early years of spooning pureed vegetables into squinched-up little mouths and having 'em spit back at us (at least once, it's some very colorful vegetable . . . and it's our best silk shirt, on the day we weren't careful with the mom-bib.) You don't need anything but a bit of imagination to surprise and delight your family and your guests with a little treat you made just for them. If I sound like a Mormon housewife, hopefully blueness will shoot me out of my misery, but baking is a Main Thing, a deep and abiding pleasure for me.

My second big dream, I'll tell you about, una momento, but here's the birthday cake I made for my daughter this past week.

Amy's birthday happens to be a day of national mourning for the past 7 years. When she was younger, she stopped wanting birthday parties. I think she knew, somehow, that having a celebration of her special day on the date that meant so much suffering for others would be looked askance by some. Mijita, almost too sensitive to the feelings of others, painfully shy, is no dummy about the uses of fear, and how September 11 has been fine-tuned into a political agenda. But no birthday party for her on the actual day, ever -- at her insistence.

The "big" gift (1) she asked for this year was a book not written for "young adult" readers. A serious, good book. At 14, I was a lot more, shall we say . . . wordly? yes, wordly; best to leave it at that, than my Amy.

I was at the time reading The Garden of Last Days by Andre Dubos III, who always puts me in a spell. Inside his pages, I want only to stay there. Now, The Garden of Last Days isn't getting the kind of critical review I believe it deserves. Look at the presidential polls and tell me it could be any different in this polarized nation.

One of the main characters in this story, which takes place just days before 9/11/01, is in fact one of the hijackers of planes/terrorists. I felt a resistance toward any impulse to understand the character or find him simpatico in any way. Perhaps the reviewers feel the same. The book is well worth reading, though, for here is something new and compelling, and you will be challenged, I'm sure, by this book.

"The novel began with this image of cash on the bureau," Dubus says. "I didn't know where it came from but it soon became clear that it belonged to one of these women I had read about after the literal and figurative smoke cleared after 9/11. I remember reading a couple of brief references to the terrorists being seen in strip clubs and wondering what that was about. But what captured my curiosity even more is what it would be like to be a stripper and realize that some of the money on your bureau is from one of these guys who went on to kill 3,000 innocent people."

--BookPage

Racism, sexism, classism are interwoven into this stunning narrative so skillfully that even knowing how the book will end, as the ending has been the cornerstone of US foreign policy for seven years now, I didn't want to put it down for a minute.

But in The Garden of Last Days one of the main characters is a composite of the real 9/11 hijackers who did real harm to real people. It is only fair, therefore, that the reader have some idea what is factual in this novel and what is fiction.

The experience of Bassam al-Jizani is consistent with all that we know of these young men: the touchstones of their childhood, their disaffection, their drift into Islamic extremism, their actual training, vows to one another, and route from Saudi Arabia to the United States. While most of the names are fictionalized - Bassam al-Jizani is a name I made up but which is consistent with family names from the southwestern province of Saudi Arabia - those of Mohammed Atta and Osama Bin Laden are not. Atta was called Amir by close friends and family. Bin Laden's men call him Abu Abdullah, which means Father of Abdullah, a common way to address a man in that part of the world, to call him the father of his oldest son.

There are many details in this novel that are historically accurate: these young men were seen in gyms and on mopeds on beaches in the same Florida towns depicted here; before leaving Florida just days before the attacks, they wired thousands of dollars back to Dubai; once in Boston, some stayed at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, the hotel in the novel. Others stayed across the Charles River in Boston, and two there are known to have hired a prostitute; the wording of the The Last Night comes directly from the actual document found in the hotel rooms left behind; and after the attacks, agents from the Sarasota office of the F.B.I. did interview some of the women who danced for these men.

I stayed loyal to the historical record here so that I could more deeply and honestly become Bassam al-Jizani. I had no desire to write about September 11th. But to write stories is to paint our dream world, to move through shadow. There is a saying from the ancient Chinese: "If the mad dog comes at you, whistle for him."

-Andre Dubus III

And certainly, after Dubus' House of Sand and Fog, almost any subsequent effort on his part would disappoint some critics. How could this most magical of books ever be "topped?" One of my all time favorites and perhaps yours, too.

Among the embarrassment of riches in House of Sand and Fog, the vivid characters and the reader's changes in allegiance to each made this very memorable. With House of Sand and Fog, you literally get much more than you bargained for in terms of emotional expectation. A sucker punch to the solar plexus, this book.

Initially, my sympathies were with the young, drifting female protagonist, Kathy, who is lost on a very profound emotional level when she loses her home due to a bureaucratic error at the county tax assessor's office. Little by little, though, I became very drawn to Colonel Behrani, and his sorrow and shame at his "fall" in life affected me deeply. Colonel Behrani was a rich and powerful man in the time of Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran. In America, he was reduced to a life of pretense, working as a "garbage soldier" and 7-11 night clerk.

In the beginning I would enter the hotel through the carpeted lobby. At this time of day there is only one employee at the desk, a man of forty years with very short black hair and a large black mustache. He is dressed in a fine suit, but pinned in one of his ears is a tiny bright diamond. Each day he would regard me in my work clothes dirty from road dust, wet with my sweat, and each time he would ask, "May I help you, sir?" Soon enough I stopped explaining and simply pointed to the elevator I would take to the garage.

But one afternoon, when there was a well-dressed lady and gentleman settling their account at the desk, the diamond man, the kunee, the one who gives ass, who in my country would be hanged, he looked over their shoulders and asked very loud of me: "May I help you, sir?" The lady and gentleman turned around, and I could see they were tourists, perhaps Germans, but they viewed me no longer than a man would take for a dead insect upon his windshield while driving.

And for the thousandth time in this terrible country I wished to be wearing my uniform, the perfectly tailored uniform of an honorable colonel, a genob sarhang in the King's Air Force, the King of Kings, Shahanshah Reza Pahlavi, who three times in my career his hand I kissed, twice at formal gatherings at Sadabaad Palace, once at the grand home of my dear friend General Pourat.

But of course my uniform then, in the lobby of the Concourse Hotel, was damp work clothes with blades of grass on my lower pants, dust on my back. So I did nothing but move quickly away, once again the hot blood of a killer dropping from my heart to my hands.

Excerpt from House of Sand and Fog, by Andre Dubus III. Copyright © 2000 by Andre Dubus III.

This is the book I gave Amy for her birthday, her first "grown folks' book."

We celebrate our birthdays together because they're just a little more than a week apart -- and honestly, I'm saving every dime I can before her birthday. We both wanted something new to read and no party, but then, someone surprised me in a way I never expected.

Have you ever seen me blush? These past two weeks, you wouldn't have known who was that pink-cheeked, surprised at yet another delivery of gifts, heart beating a little too fast, whispering "again? for me? cono!" person I have become.

Mark Twain said a girl can't be ruined by a book. This girl has been ruined by the unexpected daily deliveries of gifts for two weeks, thoughtfully selected gifts I adore, from someone right here at NION. (I won't say his name; if he wants to, he can.) Ay, Madre Dios. This kind of generosity is enough to make me blush permanent and deep, for I'm used to being the giver, not the recipient. The very careful selection of each item that he knew would make me smile with childlike delight, that is How To Ruin A Girl. I truly love everything, but it's much more the actual items. It's the thought that someone cared enough to make me feel like Queen For A Day every day that touches my heart so deeply.

(1) of course she wanted tiny technical gadgets that are not even in a language I can comprehend, too. my personal "electronics experience" stopped with I-Tunes; in terms of technology, that was light years ago.

Full post as published by Never In Our Names on September 14, 2008 (boomark / email).