Yalo (15 page)

“
Lo. Lo
.”

“What was his name?”

“I was telling you about tears. Father Joachim said that baptism is not complete without tears. He was old, like your grandfather now, and when he spoke Syriac with me his tears would fall, and I had to hold my laughter back. Then one day I understood, and when you grow up you will discover the importance of the baptism of tears.”

The
cohno
, whose face had been invaded by an immense white beard, sank into his final baptism. Yalo did not understand, nor did he dare to approach that sacrament of which it is said that the greatest event in the life of a man is his death, and that the
cohno
had woven his shroud with his tears, and raved about the mullah that wanted to bequeath him blood. Father Joachim revealed to him that the common legacy of humankind was its tears.

He asked his mother about tears, but she hushed him. “Do not speak anymore of this. We shouldn't be asking questions now. We should just be helping your grandfather.” Yalo told his mother that he did not understand. She told him, “Later. Someday when you're grown up you'll understand.” But he grew up and still did not understand.

On January 6, 1975, the eve of the war, when Yalo was thirteen, his mother asked him to help her take the
cohno
to the beach at Ramlet al-Baida. At first Yalo refused, saying that the man would be unable to bear the cold weather, that he might die, but eventually gave in to his mother's insistence.

“You still believe in fairy tales,” he told her.

“Shut up. He can hear you,” she answered. “Come on, take his hand and follow me.”

They went in the night and the rain. On the beach, under a hard rain, as hard as bullets, the woman let down her hair and took her father's hand, and walked with him into the sea. The old man stumbled, fell into a wave,
swallowed the water and the salt and cried intensely, then he was quenched. Gaby cupped her hands and took some seawater to make the
cohno
and her son drink, and she said that the water had become sweeter than honey.

“I have seen the miracle,” she said.

“Look at my hair, how it's become golden,” she said.

“The water has become pure and sweet as honey,” she said.

“Christ the Lord, peace be upon him, has said that you will be healed, Father Ephraim,” she said.

But the
cohno
was collapsing. His feet were no longer able to support him, so Yalo and his mother worked together to carry him to the street, where they brought him home in a taxi.

“Don't die, I beg of you!” shouted his daughter.

Ephraim lived after the Ramlet al-Baida incident, after which fever struck him for a whole week. He died a year later, but Gaby lived the rest of her life with a bad conscience.

“I killed him,” she said, “I killed the
cohno
. After that outing he couldn't walk anymore. He was consumed by weeping, his eyes shrank, as if he didn't even have eyes anymore, as if they had been rubbed away with only two black dots left, two little wells from which tears flowed, as if he had just bathed himself in his tears and died.”

And Yalo now, or rather there, when he was extricated from the sack, sank into his tears. Yalo now, there, found that he was like his grandfather and like Ishmael, he traversed the baptism of tears and sank into his eyes.

He placed the white sheet of paper in front of him and decided to write, but he could not; yet there was no escape. The interrogator awaited him, as did his own fear. It was true that Yalo suffered greatly during the days of writing, but no suffering in the world could be compared to the pool of cats that had stormed over his lower half and cast him into a deep abyss.
The sack remained in his memory. As he wrote he saw two sacks, one above and one below.

The first sack was no problem, it was the war sack, the fighters controlled this sack and Yalo was one of them, so he did not fear this first sack they put over his head when he was arrested. He closed his eyes inside it and went with them. Of course he fell to the ground and felt that his legs had become blind, but he was not afraid. He knew that the game of shadows was part of the game of war, and that he was now entering the other side of a scheme in a world he knew all too well. He would say that he fled Beirut for Paris because the war nauseated him and he was utterly weary of the screams of the victims. But he did not say that. He was the son of a war that never lied because it never spoke. In the barracks he entered at the age of fourteen, Yalo learned not to talk, because the war camouflaged its words behind other words which fell to the ground like banana peels that people would slip on. The sacks were masks that covered everything. He wore the first mask after two weeks of training in the forested land around a mountain village whose name he had forgotten. He had gotten used to the mask. Then he discovered that speech wore a mask too, and that was a long story he would experience when he wrote the story of his life, as the interrogator had demanded of him.

The second sack, however, was different. The sack below was not a mask; it was an instrument of revelation, of scandal, of sorrow. Yalo awoke from what seemed like a coma and could not find the sack covering his lower half. He saw himself amidst his urine and feces; reached his hand between his thighs and felt a familiar warmth, he remembered Shirin and his tears began to flow. He understood at that moment the meaning of love and felt her tears in his own eyes, and the trembling of her lower lip in his lip, and her warm knee within his knee. He placed his hand on his own knee and
the ghost of a smile appeared and as he saw how he had reached out to her small knee and rubbed his palm along it.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I'm lathering my hands. I like to be clean when I see you, and the best soap is your knee. Your knee is a bit like a little round soap, no?”

Her small eyes looked at him and a half smile escaped her lips before answering, “Yes, it's true.”

Yalo laughed and Shirin asked him to remove his hand from her “soap” because they would be seen.

“I don't care about being seen. All I care about is you.”

“Fine. Then for my sake, remove your hand.”

He did so and rubbed his face with both hands as if he were scrubbing it with soap. Shirin screamed for him not to take his hands off the steering wheel, so he put his hands in the air, leaving the car to glide on its own on the Jounieh highway, before regaining control by seizing the wheel with his left hand, leaving his right hand on the seat, seeking her hand.

Yalo swam in his excrement, as he would say later, alleging nausea, but there in the middle of the pool where he found himself, he felt capable of doubling over against himself; he rolled up and became an infant, shrinking as if returning to his mother's womb. He reached out his hand, hungry and thirsty. He reached out and sucked. He closed his eyes and swallowed the sticky liquid, and craved sleep. He saw his mother's face and Alexei's face, and vanished amidst the tears.

Gaby tied up her loose hair in the kitchen and cried over her son who had sucked the life out of her and gone on to war and destruction. Yalo stood in the kitchen doorway and told her that he did not want to study and become a
cohno
like his grandfather. His mother had put him in the Atchaneh School near Bikfaya, but he escaped and went home to Ain Rummaneh. And from Ain Rummaneh he joined Tony and went off to war.

Yalo stood in the kitchen door listening to the woman tell her story. Why was she talking this way, saying she had eaten shit?

“For your sake, you little shit, I ate shit. My life is shot, what an idiot I was. When you were a kid I ate your shit, and now you want to feed me your shit again. Forget it!”

“Mother, please calm down. I'm like this because all the guys are like this.”

Yalo's childhood had been full of the story of his mother, who had made a vow so that she would be blessed with a son. She went to the Church of St. Severus and made a vow. She was pregnant and sensed that her husband would not stand by her. He was like a phantom: “I knew he'd bolt, and I wanted nothing from this world except to have a son. I knew from the beginning, from the moment I married him. He was strange, he said he wanted to go to Sweden, and later on he'd send for me. I understood him all right. I understood that he'd leave and never come back. I made a vow standing before the icon of the Virgin. My father overheard my oath; he reprimanded me and said that was blasphemy. The peak of blasphemy. It was not blasphemy, it was despair, the peak of despair. I swore that if God gave me a son I'd eat his shit, and God answered my prayer, and I ate it.”

Gabrielle spoke of the taste of milk, that “the taste of shit was milk, with something of my smell, because I was nursing you at my breast. And as I uttered my vow, there was the taste of milk in my mouth.”

Yalo did not remember the story in words, but as a sepia photograph. A woman standing before a baby cradle, she was bending over, putting a finger in the diaper, and then sucking it. After bathing her baby and before putting him to her breast, she bends over her breasts, smells the odor, and is intoxicated by the two odors: the smell of her son and the smell of her milk. The woman kept up this rite of hers until the doctor told her that the child required real food: fruits, vegetables, and eggs, so she fed him and lost him,
– once he ate, the smell of his feces mingled with new odors. She began to sense the distance between her and her son; she could not smell the odor of shit, and she could no longer keep her vow. So she decided to disobey the doctor's orders and began giving her son nothing but milk, though the new odor had taken over the baby's body and feces so that she could no longer bring Yalo back to her. She felt that her son was separated from her.

Yalo saw himself now, that is, there, and saw the weeping. He was swimming in his own liquids and saw the tears streaming from his eyes, when he saw Alexei. What brought Alexei to this wakefulness that was so like sleep?

Blond Alexei, they called him. Tall, hulky, and blond-haired, he left the barracks to train on bodybuilding at the Sennacherib Club in Achrafieh. He enjoyed sodomy and formed suspect relationships with the young men he brought to the barracks on the pretext of training them to carry weapons. He denied the accusation and spoke only of his relationships with married women. He said that married women were practiced. “A woman has to be well-rounded, she has to be picked like an orange,” he said, and he cupped his palms as if picking two small breasts and began to gobble them up and lick his lips as if orange juice were dripping from them. Yalo did not believe the tales of his married women, but he made sure not to tell him about Thérèse.

It was true why, when he listened to the stories of Alexei's conquests, he saw Sister Thérèse as if she were his tale, and he forgot the shop which smelled of wood, and over which revolved the blind man's eyes. He went with Thérèse to a faraway hotel, where the engineer Wajih had taken her, and discovered love and sex with her. Sister Thérèse's face was like a white light shining from the folds of her black clothing, pulling Yalo into it. Her soft white hand slipped into his black shorts and reduced the whole world to a fist holding the shaft of life that burned with desire. Thérèse had become
his own story. He told no one, and the secret that he never experienced became his personal secret, which he was proud of without ever putting it into words.

Blond Alexei was crazy and could not keep a secret. Yalo did not know how Thérèse's name had slipped off his tongue in front of Alexei, but the blond Russian began to refer to Yalo as “Thérèse's thing,” and when the guys asked him about it, he did not talk as if he were hiding a deep secret. Then the name slipped out again in front of Shirin, but Yalo would not write about Thérèse when he wrote the story of his life. Once he told Shirin that she looked like Sister Thérèse and she asked who that was and he told her that she had been a nun who had taught him in school and that he was enthralled by her beauty and had a crush on her. He did not dare tell Shirin the true story.

Alexei was like a madman that awful night. No question, he had taken a serious hit of cocaine; otherwise why would he act like that? Yalo told Tony their first night in Paris that God would not forgive them because they forced that old man to eat his own feces. Tony laughed and shook his head, then he disappeared. He disappeared because he did not believe in anything. He stole the money and the language, leaving Yalo alone in that city.

Alexei appeared with cocaine powder traced in the red of his protuberant eyes, and told Yalo to come with him. They went to the underground floor of a building near the Hotel Dieu. They went down a flight of stairs and Alexei opened the door of the cellar with a key he had on him. There Yalo saw a lone blindfolded man, kneeling in the dark. Alexei trained the beam of his flashlight on the man's head, and the man looked uneasily toward the light but said nothing.

Then Alexei began his game. He fired his pistol in the cellar. The sound was like a cannon shot. The kneeling man started trembling. Alexei approached him and put the hot muzzle of the pistol against the man's
temple and began to threaten him. When Alexei told the man that the hour of execution was approaching so he needed to prepare to meet his Maker, the man trembled and then sat back and stretched his legs out in front of him, and emptied his bowels. The stench spread quickly. Alexei approached the man, holding his nose, and ordered him to stand up. The man began to cry and plead, but when the muzzle of the pistol approached again he put his hands on the floor to push himself up, and Alexei saw the shit.