Title: To Arabia
Author: mao
Disclaimer: Moulin Rouge! characters, original plot lines, and likenesses belong to Craig Pierce, Baz Luhrmann, and everyone else who was involved on that marvelous project.
Author's Notes:
Warnings: Some violence.
Dedication: to Yvi, who got me into Moulin Rouge fandom in the beginning.
When she was little, people used to spit at her in the streets. She'd known she looked different, but couldn't figure out why people would treat her badly because of it. Like any little Parisian girl, she scrapped with the other children in the streets. It was good-natured fighting, for the most part, meant to occupy the time they didn't spend begging. But as they grew older, the others began to realize she was different - the thickness of her hair, the olive tones in her skin - leant them to teasing her and making cruel jokes of her, and she began to stay in the house more.
Her family wasn't poor, but it wasn't as if they had lots of money - or at least, that's how she'd always known it. Her mother, a beautiful woman with olive skin, granddaughter of a slave, worked as a maid in the house of a wealthy count. She - her name was Sophia then - had three brothers - one older and two younger. At the age of fourteen, she asked her mother one day as they cleaned, why exactly they didn't look like the other people she usually saw in Paris.
"Because," her mother answered slowly as she scrubbed the floor, water soaking the knees of her neat blue dress. "My family comes from Arabia, and your father's doesn't. You are a mulatto." Sophia left the conversation confused and uncertain as to what that meant, but understanding better now her plight.
Young as she was, she understood that she and her brothers were illegitimate. She remembered seeing the Count going to her mother's room late at night, but had merely assumed that he needed something. After all, she and her brothers weren't actually employed by him. They simply worked for something to do, more than anything else. Their mother was paid a little extra for their labor, and they had work that kept them from being teased and tormented on the streets.
After that, she began asking her mother about their heritage. Her mother told her stories that had been passed down through their family to finally make it safely into Sophia's mind.
"What is it like in Arabia?" Sophia would ask. And her mother, who, of course, had never been there, would tell her about how the sunlight there was warmer than any sun in France, and the fruit more luminous and tasteful. Sophia began to dream of Arabia, of people with olive skin like her mother, with black eyes and hair, who outlined their eyes in kohl and wore sheer clothes to keep the heat out.
It was that year that she also began to notice men - young and old and in between - eyeing her as she ran errands. No longer did they tease her about her skin - now they asked her when she would go to bed with them, if she would keep them warm during the coming winter months. She would simply tug her cloak tighter about her body, look into her basket as if there was something interesting there, and hurry past, praying they wouldn't follow her.
It was one cold day with ice under her boots that she slipped and found herself cornered in the alley outside the servants' entrance of the count's home by several of the local louts. The largest stepped in close to her, blocking the door, and knocking her basket from her arms, the clean linens spilling like snow across the cobbled walk. The mud sucked them up hungrily, spreading brown water across the pristine white threads. The young men - dirty from their work as porters or haulers, some beginning to sport a growth that vaguely resembled a beard - advanced on her, their boots leaving dirty impressions on the linen
The first one grabbed her hard by the shoulders and forced her back against the wall. Another grabbed her skirts roughly and lifted them up - ruining neat stitching of the brown hem, the stitching Sophia had spent hours putting into place by candlelight - and gazed at her legs, trembling and cold and tawny brown against the red brick of the building. And then they lifted it higher still, and she raised her head, raised her eyes to meet those of the one who held her roughly against the wall.
His eyes were green, she noticed as she glared at him, determined to keep her dignity no matter what they chose to do to her.
And then he slapped her, hard, his hand leaving a huge glowing welt against her dark skin. He held her back with one hand as he undid the buttons at the top of his pants, then forced himself into her. She kept her eyes on the linen as each one came to her, slapped her and bruised her, slammed into her and scraped her back against the brick wall, dye from the brick and blood mingling in her scrapes, her cries muffled by a wad of the muddy laundry stuffed into her mouth.
They left her with a few coins in her pocket, laughing at the joke, laughing at having paid her for what should have been hers to give.
She was beaten for the dirty linens, and the cost of having them cleaned again was taken out of her mother's pay. Her mother, when she tried to explain what had happened, told her she should have screamed, should have kicked, should have done something other than simply take it. Her mother took the money wordlessly and put it away.
The other maids became cruel to her - they would tease her in the halls when no one would notice, would tell her that she would never find a beau now, would leave her the worst jobs, such as emptying the master's night soil in the mornings.
Sophia began to go out in the afternoons. At first, her youngest brother, Marcel, would follow her and she would have to wander all over Paris to lose him. She'd finally end up by the Seine, thinking of Arabia as she watched the water, pockmarked with trash and junk, move sluggishly out of the city.
She'd stand on the rock wall right above the water and contemplate falling in, moving along like so much garbage out of the city, gradually to the ocean, and away, forgotten by all who'd known her.
She never had the courage to jump into the water and be whisked away, but she kept returning to the Seine to stand there. Which was why she was confused when she arrived there one afternoon and found a faire going on, with music and dancing and stall after stall of goods to be sold by the side of the river. She let the crowd direct her movements, watching a juggler here, then wandering down the main fairothrough until she came across a stall hung with bright red and yellow cloth. The woman inside was clearly French, with her pale skin and plain hair, but she had the most extraordinary eyes Sophia had ever seen.
She stepped closer, and saw that the woman's eyes were outlined in black, shaded and beautiful to look at. Her lips were painted red, and appeared rich and full of promise. The woman smiled at her and said, softly, "Cosmetics." Sophia frowned, confused.
"Let me show you, " the woman continued. She took Sophia's chin and and guided it so the light hit her face. "We'll just add a little kohl to you."
"I don't have any money," Sophia answered quickly. The woman dropped her hand and looked at her carefully, then shook her head.
"Doesn't matter. I haven't seen a face as extraordinary as yours in a long time." Gently, she began rubbing what looked like a stick against her finger. "See this? It's kohl. It goes around your eyes." She reached up and began tracing Sophia's eye carefully.
When she had completed both eyes, the woman held up a mirror. Sophia gasped to see herself so easily transformed - her eyes were mysterious now, heavy and beautiful. The woman pressed the stick into her hand and smiled. "I want you to take this."
"No, but, I can't. I mean, I haven't any money an-"
"You'll take it. And you'll be utterly fabulous." With that, the woman pushed Sophia back out into the crowd, to be pushed down the path.
That was the night she turned her first trick. A man approached her as she sat on the dusty ground, her back against one of the court buildings, and murmured something in her ear. When he mentioned the money, she got up immediately and followed him into an alley.
It wasn't as rough as it had been that first time. The man was elderly and she was aware from the first that she could have crushed him if she tried. When he left, the coins were warm in her hand and he smiled.
Sophia didn't tell anyone, and her mother didn't question the kohl on her eyes. Sophia stopped going out in the afternoons as her mother stopped speaking to her, and began leaving late in the evening, after everyone had gone to bed. She could do at least four or five before having to hurry back so she could get enough sleep that night.
And so, achingly slowly, a year passed in this fashion. During the day, Sophia emptied chamber pots and cooked meals, scrubbed floors and waxed tables. At night, she'd put on a bit of her precious kohl and go out. Her little pile of coins, held in a small sack she'd sewn for them out of scraps and place under her pillow, grew nightly.
Arabia, that was her goal. To get out of this cold, dank country, and away to the heat and the light of Arabia. It was one evening when she returned from whoring that her mother finally confronted her.
She was sitting by the table in the kitchen, sipping on a rare cup of tea, her hair in a thick braid about her shoulders. She wore her nightgown and tattered robe, and the pile of coins was spread out on the table.
"This can't go on," her mother said as Sophia hung up her coat. "It's one thing to do it discreetly, as I do. It's another entirely to do it as you do, hoarding coins and skulking out at night."
"What do you mean?" She stood silently by the door.
"You have to go," her mother said, turning to her like a wolf at the end of a hungry winter.
"But-"
"Out!" The older woman yelled, throwing the cup at her. It was empty, but the china shattered in a thousand pieces of red and white at her feet. "Out, you tramp! You whore!"
Her mother kept yelling as Sophia grabbed her coat and fled. The words bounced off the walls of the alley and resounded in her ears as she ran through Paris, seeking a place to sleep and food to eat.
She finally found herself stopped in front of a massive building she'd never seen before. She turned a circle and gazed around. None of it was familiar, from the Café Absinthe to the Lamark sign above a clothing shop of some sort. The glow of the electricity was so bright, she actually found herself shielding her eyes to see.
Slowly, she made her way to the Café, the money she'd made that night light in her pocket. She ordered a cup of tea and sat, watching the people around her. A motley group, dressed in a variety of ways. A woman dressed as a man, a midget dressed in a tutu, a dwarf dressed as a clown. A group of three women caught her eye for their relaxed laughter over their glasses of lime-green drink. As she looked at them closely, she realized they all wore kohl around their eyes as well, and that their lips and cheeks were rouged in various shades of red. One of them - a strikingly beautiful woman with a white streak in her hair, waved to her.
She sat with the three of them, and the skinny one handed her a glass of the green stuff.
"It's Absinthe, not poison. Drink up, honey," the blonde one urged her. So she drank it, feeling it burn its way into her gut and create a warm, comfortable home there.
"So what are you doin' here?" The skinny one asked. Sophia couldn't keep her eyes from watching the woman's lips - they were a dark, bloody red in contrast to her white skin and dark eyes, and they moved hugely, creating a gaping dark hole where her mouth was.
Slowly, over several more glasses of the drink, Sophia poured out the whole story. The others were good listeners - they asked good questions, and gasped in the right places, and snickered when Sophia told a joke. She soon found herself laughing, seeing the tale as almost funny. She was happy for the first time in a long time, and that fact was not lost on her.
Gradually, they came to ask her the question of her name. "Sophia?" The skinny one snickered.
"Araby would be better," the beautiful dark one told her. "For those eyes." The blonde one nodded her large head, her perfect, warm face in absolute agreement. "Come with us,:" the dark one asked her as the other three packed up. "We'll get you steady work, meals, and a great bit of fun alongside it."
And so she followed them into the Moulin Rouge.