Yalo (27 page)

Gaby said that men did not understand desire, that they thought of it as a circle fixed around the head of their member. “That's why men finish before they start. They don't know the feeling of the wave that rises inside, taking your body to unknown places with infinite zigzags.”

“I didn't want anything from Elias. My father misunderstood everything. It wasn't about sex, it was about tenderness. I knew he couldn't marry me. It's true that I suffered a lot and I hated him when he told me about his wife and children. I told him, “Please don't speak of this because I can't stand it, these are things that I already know, but I can't stand to hear you speaking about them. When you talk about your wife and her illnesses, I hate you and I hate myself.”

Gaby said that she forbid him from talking about his family because when he started talking about Evelyn, his wife, he became another person. He lost his manhood and his attractiveness and became a middle-aged man giving off the rotten stench of his false teeth.

Gaby told no one this.

How could she say what could not be said? How could she say that she no
longer remembered anything of that day except for the scent of the man's words that had spread over her body? How could she say that when she was naked in his arms, she emerged from the darkness? She rose like a hidden sun from the darkness of her shroud-like clothes.

Gaby was eighteen when she went to learn her trade in Elias al-Shami's tailor shop, and it was there where love blossomed to the point of dominating her whole life.

She remembered that he had said something about the need to sew a new dress. It was a November evening with dusk falling, but Elias al-Shami did not turn on the electricity. The two assistant seamstresses had gone home, and Gaby was busy with the day's last chores in the shop before going home. She sensed Mr. Elias at her side saying that he wanted to make a new dress for her and that he had found a beautiful piece of fabric just for her.

“For me?” asked the young woman.

“Of course for you. I want you to wear a dress that shows off your beauty. It is a crime that you wear these old clothes that hide you. Clothes aren't supposed to cover the body, they are made to be an extension of the body. That is the secret of dressmaking. That's what makes it an art. Come closer so I can see,” said Elias.

The young woman came closer hesitantly. He took the measuring tape and started to take her measurements. He measured her height and then her hips, he then brought the tape measure to her breasts and she saw her dress fall to the floor without her even feeling the hands that had undone the buttons in front. The dress fell and Gaby stood in her underwear under the gaze of the tailor, a gaze that crept across her body and never left her. She crossed her arms as if to cover herself, but actually she was trying to calm her body hair, which stood on end as if a magnetic field surrounded her.

He left her standing there before him and drew her body with green chalk on tracing paper, then looked at her breasts and said, “What kind of
camisole is that? Tomorrow I'll buy you a new one.” Then he sat down on the chair and asked her to come to him.

The camisole fell to the floor, and Gaby saw herself standing before the seated man. She felt his breath on her breasts. He put his head between her breasts and took a deep breath. He said that he smelled flowers. She felt his lips taking in the nipple of her left breast before starting to suck the nectar. That's what he would later say whenever he brought his lips to her breast. “I want to suck the soul of the rose.” The young woman felt her breasts between the man's lips crawl, climb, retreat, and advance. Something deep within her rose up and then sank down again, and made her tremble.

His head pulled back, and he rose from the chair and went into the next room. Gaby didn't move, not knowing what to do. Her insides throbbed with contractions that came and went. Time stood still as she stood motionless. Then she bent over, picked up the camisole and her dress and put them back on. When she saw him coming, she said, “Do you need anything, sir? I'm going.” She felt that she was hearing her own voice for the first time; her voice emerged like the voice of another woman. It felt deep and rose straight from her chest. She asked him if he wanted anything. He shook his head but said nothing.

Suddenly night fell. She bent over to retrieve her camisole, and while she was putting it on, night fell. When she'd bent down, a pale white glow was enveloping everything, but when she picked it up and stood in front of the mirror to put it on, she saw only darkness and no longer could see herself in the mirror. She was not in a hurry and decided to go back home. She saw him standing at the door of the room like a phantom and asked him if he needed anything, and hearing her own voice, she went out. Once at home, she went into the bathroom and washed, and when she covered her breasts with soapsuds, the sensation of the magnetic field that had taken her to faraway places now came back to her and made her discover that the
kokina
anchored with safety pins no longer suited the beauty of her nakedness and that from now on she needed her long hair in order to possess her own shadow.

In the days that followed, Gaby felt frustrated. Every evening after she finished sweeping and straightening up the shop, she waited for the green chalk and the dress project. But Mr. Elias ignored her as if she didn't exist, as if he hadn't taken her breasts in his hands and said that her beauty tormented him. “Your beauty is tormenting me, and you, is all this hurting you?” he asked her after waiting several days. He saw her as a little girl and was afraid for her. “I swear to God, I feel like a sinner. You're my daughter's age. I don't know what I'm doing with you.”

She waited for him for more than a month before he came back to her with the new dress. She had finished up her work and was getting ready to leave when she saw him coming toward her carrying the yellow dress that glistened like the sun.

“What do you think?” he asked her.

“Oh, how beautiful,” she said.

She took the dress and turned her back to him so that she could undress and try it on. She heard him say, “No, not like that,” and he asked her to bathe before putting on the new dress. He pointed to the bathroom.

Gaby looked worriedly to where he was pointing.

“I'm supposed to bathe here?”

“. . .”

“But I don't have my things with me.”

He left her standing there, hesitant, and returned with a towel and underwear, walking ahead of her to the bathroom. She followed him as if entranced. He turned on the shower in the tub, the hot water shot out, and the steam rose. The man leaned over, put liquid soap in the water, agitated it with his hand, and the soapsuds frothed up, and with it the fragrance of
apple. Gaby felt intoxicated. The steam got in her eyes and enveloped her in a white cloud. Two damp hands removed her dress and underwear and she stepped into the water. The man knelt at the edge of the water, picked up a bath sponge, and began to rub her body with it. If Gaby had been able to recount it, she would have said that she saw a man bent over as the branches of a tree bend, over and around her. Her body slid into the suds and fragrance and swayed to the rhythms of the water. He then took her by the hand to help her stand up and began to kiss her, lower and lower, as if discovering her with his lips and eyelashes. He pulled her out of the water and embraced her, and the water dripping from her body stained his shirt and pants. Gaby had not seen him naked. Her eyes were closed, but she felt his nakedness, and how he was united to the water. She became, with her medium height, her white body and fragrance, an extension of the man who stood embracing the woman's body freshly emerged from the soapy water. He dried her off bit by bit, then dressed her in her new clothes and asked her to look in the mirror. Gaby saw how her image was born in the mirror and a new woman emerged, one with a new body, new eyes, and a new voice. She stood in front of the mirror and undid her chignon, letting her hair hang loose down to her ankles.

“What's this?” asked Elias al-Shami. “Come, come, you need another shower.”

She started to tie up her chignon again and asked him not to touch her hair.

“What are you doing?”

“I'm tying up my hair.”

“You're crazy!”

He said she was crazy. He said that this hair needed to be draped over her shoulders, and when she tried to explain to him that she could not because her hair had to stay tied up in a bun to crown her head, and that it was let
down only for the miracle of the Epiphany or her wedding day, the tailor laughed and said, “What nonsense! Hair is the soul of a woman.”

She tied up her hair again, fastened it with several pins, and wrapped it around her head. “Incredible,” the tailor said. “Incredible, you should leave it loose.” “It's not done, Master Elias, it's not done!” she replied.

She wrapped her
kokina
and left without looking back, but she discovered that her heart had fallen on the ground and she felt the urge to bend over and pick it up, but she got hold of herself and walked home.

And so Gaby began. She renounced the old Gaby, and put on a new image along with her yellow dress. She would discover in the street that led to Talaat Shahhada Street, where the tailor's shop was located, in the Syriac Quarter where she lived, that the sound of her footsteps on the street had changed. She felt her hips and the curve of her pelvis, and her neck that drove her forward.

Elias al-Shami initiated her into the secrets of the world where her navel became the secret of life. There he had begun, explaining to his young love that the art of tailoring began at the navel. For when man first tied a baby's umbilical cord at the moment of birth, he discovered that he could knot hides, devise fabrics and fibers. He told her the story of the navel and the dog. He said that he had read it in the Epistle of Barnabas. When the girl asked her father about this Gospel, the
cohno
cursed Satan and spat, and told his daughter to spit on Satan.

Spitting on Satan was a custom of the Abyad family in Beirut, and Yalo carried on the custom everywhere. Even here in prison, when he wrote a sentence wrong or he had an inappropriate thought, he'd feel a strange taste rising in his throat, up to his tongue, and would say, “I spit on Satan!” and spit. Shirin hated spitting, and her features contracted in disgust whenever Yalo cleared this throat to prepare his spit. When he tried to explain to her that he had to spit on Satan, because he was the one who had first spit on
humankind, the look of disgust around her eyes grew even more intense. But Yalo felt that he had to spit in order not to vomit. Then he understood that he had earlier suffered from stomach ulcers. The ulcers were accompanied by his scalp turning dry and scabrous, and both conditions derived from terror. Yalo did not deny that during the civil war, he had begun to distinguish between terror and fear. Yalo could never forget his first night at the Sodeco checkpoint on the Green Line in Beirut when the shooting started and he felt unable to control his bowels and that his knees were going to give out. He crept over to the corner of the checkpoint, squatted, and defecated. No one saw him. All the guys were busy fighting while he was busy shitting, as Alexei told him the next day when the odor was obvious. The word
shit
would have become part of his name had the Goat Battalion not withdrawn from Sodeco and taken up a new position near the museum. There, at the museum line, Yalo learned how to be afraid without losing control of his bowels, though at the beginning of every exchange of gunfire he felt the need to urinate. He controlled himself in the beginning, then when he was nearly losing control, he joked to the guys that he was going to piss on the enemy. When he saw their looks of bewilderment, he came out from behind the barricade, squatted, and pissed under the volleys of bullets.

“Why do you piss that way, like the Bedouin?” asked Tony.

Yalo replied that this was the humanitarian way to urinate: “We have to squat rather than flaunt what God has given us,” said Yalo, repeating his grandfather's saying.

It was during the war that Yalo learned the difference between fear and terror. A fighter might be afraid, but an ordinary person would be terror-struck. That was why Yalo chose to be a fighter. He fought to inflict rather than feel terror. It's true that he was afraid, but fear was nothing compared to the terror that paralyzed a man and made his mind a blank.

When Yalo was eleven, and a shell landed in the street where he was playing, he was not afraid, but he was terror-struck and froze on the spot. A few days after that, white scabs formed on his scalp and everyone said that he was in danger of going bald, and a burning taste was coming up from his stomach. His mother took him to the doctor, who said it was caused by terror. He asked Yalo what had happened, but the boy could no longer remember. The image of the girl Najwa, with whom he had been playing ball in front of his house, had been erased from his memory when the shell landed and the girl had been torn to pieces. Yalo didn't remember the incident. He listened to his mother tell him about it. She told the doctor that her son had been deaf and dumb for two days, then began to vomit a green fluid and the white patch started to grow on his scalp.

The doctor said it was terror and prescribed a yellow ointment for Yalo's head and a black liquid for him to drink every morning before breakfast for the ulcers. This was the cause of the small white puncture prominent on Yalo's right temple, which he called his third eye.