31 May - 6 June 2001
Issue No.536
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 31 May - 6 June 2001 Issue No.536 |
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When nature conspires
Summertime, and the living really isn't all that easy. But then try as you might it has always been impossible to fall in completely with the words of popular songs. You get closest, perhaps, when intoxicated by love or liquor, but it is this sort of folly, rather than pride, that invariably precedes the fall.
The most obvious problem with summer is the heat. Its impact, naturally, varies from person to person, though the result, in the end, tends to be one in the same. Summer in Cairo is enervating and whatever variety there is is restricted only to the degree of enervation felt by individuals.
I have problems sleeping. The options are a) to sleep with the air conditioner on or b) leave the windows open. The first, unfortunately, is no option at all, since the only air conditioner my bedroom boasts is of the antique kind. That it looks as if it would be more at home in a science museum is not really an issue. The far from sleek design would be easily forgiven if it managed quietly to produce a continuous stream of deliciously cool air. The problem is that it sounds as if it would be more at home in a museum than in a modern home. It sounds, in fact, rather more like a steam train than an air conditioner. Not just any old steam train though, but a freight train pulling several hundred wagons of particularly heavy freight.
Nor is b) any real option, not when you live near a 23-storey hotel under construction, a hotel with building contractors obviously facing a stiff penalty clause. They are going to meet their deadline come what may, and what comes, most days, are four eight hour shifts. Dot on midnight the concrete mixers arrive to mix their concrete somewhere not far from my bedroom window, and after mixing the concrete proceed to pump the stuff through a Heath Robinson-like contraption of pipes to whatever storey is currently being floored. Open windows, in addition, court that other summer joy, the mosquito. So just in case I do manage to get to the point where I just might nod off, along comes that annoying little kamikaze whine in the ears and, hey presto, wide-awake again. The mosquito, I have always thought, really shouldn't have any place at all in God's creation. And even if, for some reason I haven't fathomed, parasites of this sort serve some purpose -- a ready metaphor, perhaps, for the kind of people (in England it is the tax man or the traffic warden) you really wouldn't want to have to dinner -- why on earth can't they go about their business in some less annoying way. If they have to suck blood, can't they do it without first whining and then injecting some noxious anti-coagulant that causes delayed swelling.
So there are no options really, and the result of this sleeplessness, not surprisingly, is exhaustion, the kind of zombie-like exhaustion that leaves you to get through the next day on automatic pilot. Luckily, if you happen to be in my business, summer is a dry season, the time when the galleries close, when that quaint anachronism, the artistic season, slowly winds down and grinds inexorably to a halt. So even if one felt inclined to rush around from this to that event -- and believe me, when the temperature hits forty or more, the inclination to run around is seldom strong -- as the summer progresses the events themselves get fewer and further between.
Yet pages have to be filled, even culture pages. And so last night, with this column in mind, I decided to watch a film in the hope that it might furnish material, or at least a modicum of inspiration, for the weekly grind that is a thousand words. There was a lull in building works and nothing but silence outside. I threw the windows open, inserted the video, pressed rewind, and then retreated to the kitchen to make what felt like a well-earned cup of herbal tea.
In retrospect I would have to admit that this series of actions would probably furnish a reasonable opening sequence for the kind of horror film I do not normally go out of my way to see. They would serve to establish a perfectly ordinary domestic routine, one with which, unless I am very much mistaken in my notions of domesticity, many viewers would be able to identify. The kettle whistles -- a close up here, I think, of steam, with the shrill scream of boiling water alerting the viewer as to the genre. And then a long, lingering shot, as the unsuspecting victim, i.e. me, walks down the corridor, cup of herbal refreshment (what could be more innocent?) in hand.
I open the door. It does not creak on its hinges, for this is no gothic tale. But the television screen is black. It is black, it takes me several moments to realise, not because it is broken, but because it is smothered by several layers of enormous, winged black ants. They heave -- here, I think, another close up. And suddenly I know exactly how Tippi Hedren felt in Hitchcock's The Birds. I turn on the overhead light and immediately a swarm of brown ants, also winged, takes flight from I know not where to whir around the chandelier casting the entire room into sinister chiaroscuro. I retreat, closing the door firmly behind me. No films this week for this column.
And so summer continues. The heat wave has broken, for the time being at least. It is only June -- it will take another couple of months before the roads start to get squishy underfoot. But the living ain't easy, and there is absolutely no hay to be made while the sun shines. And suddenly I feel perfectly sympathetic to the priests who tried to erase all memories of Akhenaten (inset), that mad, bad Pharaoh who thought that simply because the sun shone, beating down mercilessly every day, it really ought to be worshipped.
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