Yalo (32 page)

I
want to write the story of my life from start to finish.

My life is over. Now I understand, sir, that I was unable to write because I was clinging to a cord of hope. I was convinced it was possible, that something could change, maybe Shirin, M. Michel, or Mme Randa. Maybe one of them would take pity on me and help me rid myself of this torment.

Now it's over. Hope is gone, and it is up to Daniel George Jal'u, and Yalo Abel Abyad, to write his story from start to finish.

Yalo is on the throne, as if it were a minaret, and his three eyes are beams of light reaching the end of the story. He sits on the column like St. Simeon Stylites, who sat on his column a thousand years ago in Aleppo, the city of my father, George Jal'u, a city I have never seen except through the closed eyes of Master Salim Rizq.

Yes, sir, I see Yalo there and I envy him, I mean I envy myself, because my soul knows how to contact the souls of the dead and to talk to them, and discover that
vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas
. Man lives in a lie and believes in lies, and makes of his life a lie to add to all the others.

I write now about Yalo, whom you elevated atop a bottle called “the throne.” Yalo is on the throne, like the King of the Dead. Yes, sir, I see him dead, and the dead do not write because they are dying.

You were wrong to ask him to write the story of his life. Yalo cannot write
because he has gone to another place, where they do not write, where they have no need to write. I, Daniel, am writing, and will write everything you want about him and about me and about everyone. But Yalo, no. I want to be frank with you and say that Yalo left me and went far away. I am body and he is spirit. I suffer and he soars. I got down off the bottle while he still sits on the throne.

I see him before me. I approach him, question him, but he doesn't respond. He says that his words no longer understand his words. He mixes Arabic with Syriac with languages I do not know. So how can I understand him?

I write in Arabic, not only because you asked me to, but because I am an Arab. For even if George Jal'u of Aleppo is not my father, Elias al-Shami of Damascus is. There is no third possibility. I lean toward the second option, even though this is an issue of no importance to me. My mother kept the secret from me. She said many times that she would tell me something, but she was afraid it would shock me. Every time she began the story she would stop with the disappearance of her husband or with his departure, and when I asked about the secret she would yawn. I never knew a woman who yawned like that; she hid the secret in her open mouth, which she would cover with the palm of her hand, then she'd walk through the house bent over as if she were looking for something she had lost.

I know that my poor mother was no longer able to see her image in the mirror because she wanted to erase her secret. She thought that her life had been in vain because Mr. Elias had not proposed marriage to her. But when I asked her, she said that she had not wanted him. She said that she wished he had asked her to marry him so that she could have refused him, but he never asked. How strange, Gaby – is it possible that the sorrow of your life was that you were not given an opportunity for refusal?

Yalo did not pay much attention to his mother and her problems because
he was seized with the idea of leaving Lebanon. We must understand him, he is a victim, sir, and a victim will become even fiercer than the torturer when he finally gets the chance. The war was Yalo's chance. I agree with you, the civil war and the chaos are detestable, but imagine with me the situation of this kid whose father was his grandfather, and his mother his sister; imagine with me what the war could do to him. The war was his chance, but he lost it, and instead of straightening himself out as many others did, he dropped everything as it was and left for France.

I do not think that my mother's tragedy was because of Elias al-Shami; Elias was the result. For the cause, we have to look to Cohno Ephraim, a maniac obsessed with delusions and the idea of death. Gaby lived with him after the death of his wife, and became his daughter, his wife, and his mother. Gaby knew Syriac but preferred to speak Arabic. She told me that Syriac was like a rosebud that blossomed and became the Arabic language. She would close her five fingers into a fist and then open them as she told her only son not to cry when his grandfather beat him for not remembering Syriac words.

Yalo fell in love with Shirin the day he met her on the mountain. I prefer to say that he met her because I do not like to use the word rape, which you have imposed on the poor guy. Yalo did not rape Shirin, because a man is not capable of loving a woman he has raped. Rape, sir, is an abominable thing. Ask me, because I know. Yalo knows the meaning of rape because he engaged in it. I did it and regretted it, but not with Shirin. I loved Shirin because she reordered my soul and my body.

Gaby did not believe her son when he informed her that he decided to quit his studies for good. She thought it was just a whim. But the lad stamped his feet nine months after the death of his grandfather, and said “That's it!”

My mother lived like a lost soul in her new house, after the war forced
her to move from West Beirut to East Beirut. And there, the outskirts of East Beirut, Yalo decided to join the war. He never returned home without smelling of blood. Gaby lived alone. She wended her way around the houses in her new neighborhood to revive her career as a seamstress. Elias al-Shami had vanished from existence; she didn't look for him, but she asked around and was told that he had bought a house in Ballouna along with others from their old neighborhood who had all left Beirut.

Yalo's story, sir, has a name – war.

How can I describe to you what happened to Yalo after M. Michel Salloum in Paris offered him a way back to Lebanon and a job as a guard at his villa in Ballouna? At the time, Yalo saw this village as a word written on the forehead of the middle-aged tailor. He saw the specter of Elias al-Shami that had occupied his youth with the smell of his false teeth, a smell like that of rotted mint, and he was afraid. Yalo wanted to refuse M. Michel's offer, but he had no other option.

But the truth, sir, the truth that only God knows, is that my memory is distorted and I don't know. Did Yalo hear from his mother that Elias al-Shami went to live in Ballouna, or did he hear the name of this Kesrouan village for the first time from M. Michel? But for some obscure reason, he associated that Kesrouan village with the tailor, that was the association in his head. His mother gave up the tailor when she fled West Beirut for the al-Mrayyeh neighborhood in Ain Rummaneh; she said that she thought that he had gone to Kesrouan, but it wasn't certain she had actually named the village. So why had Yalo seen the name of the village written on the man's forehead? Why had his feet led him to commit his first offense one month after starting his new job?

I should clarify things so that we understand what happened. When Yalo returned to Lebanon with Michel Salloum, and lived in his little cottage,
he lived his life at night, because night was his cover. In daylight he felt naked, and his long black overcoat was not enough to hide him. He went out during the day only once, in order to get the equipment necessary to fix Mme Randa's wooden chair. The mistake which was the beginning of all mistakes was the one he made in church. No, sir, the mistakes did not start with Shirin. All he did with Shirin was to be totally naked under the light of day, as if he were unaware of the dangers surrounding him. For love blinds and leaves on our faces tracks of foolishness. The mistake started in church. What made him go that Sunday morning, wearing his long black overcoat, to the Orthodox Church in Ballouna, to look for Elias al-Shami? Had he really wanted to kill him as he claimed when he told Shirin about his love of killing? Of course not. Yalo lied to Shirin all the time. He lied and believed his own lies. I swear to you that he lied, which is why there was no need for the torture party he endured when he was tied to a chair for three days without having the natural right all of God's creatures have, from animals to humans, to discharge his need. That torture was useless. I lied to Shirin. I told her that I went into the church carrying a gun and a hand grenade because I wanted to shoot Elias al-Shami then throw the grenade at his corpse to blow it into pieces. Yalo was not carrying a pistol or a hand grenade when he went into the church and drew a few looks. Entering the church was his first mistake, then this mistake was linked to the confessions of Mr. George Ghattas, a resident of Ballouna, about a man wearing a long black overcoat whom he had previously seen in the church. He suspected him of being the same man who attacked him when he was in his car with a woman named Georgette. It never occurred to Yalo that a resident of Ballouna would fool around in the forest of the town where he lived. But what would bring someone like that to church? He fooled around, and then came with his wife to mass? What shamelessness! said Yalo, before receiving
a barrage of slaps and kicks. Truly shameless, sir. What do you want with M. Ghattas? I am ready to confess to everything, because things no longer have any meaning.

The interrogation about the church was trivial, and forcing Yalo to confess that he intended to kill Elias al-Shami and blow up the church was meaningless. Yalo went to the church to see the man who might be his father, but he saw nothing. He went into the church when the priest was moving around with his censer among the worshippers, so all he saw was smoke. He began to cough and his eyes teared up before he made the sign of the cross and left.

Yalo lied to Shirin, because – how can I say it – because love makes a man talk. Love is a fountainhead of talk. Without talk love does not exist. In order to keep talking, Yalo had to make up stories. Shirin spoke only rarely, which forced Yalo to perform alone on the high wire of talk. He made up stories for her so that love would continue. For talk is the bed in which lovers sleep. That is the truth, and that's the reason for the ambiguous situation in which the interrogation took place.

Yalo, up above, did not respond. His three eyes saw in all directions: north, south, east, and west, the past and the future. The future was clear to him: it was death, and Yalo needed no more than a small leap to get there, the Kingdom of Death. The past was a problem. The past frightened him and frightens me because events intermingled so strangely. He says yesterday and means twenty years ago, and he says a long time ago and means a week ago. It's this state of loss that I am experiencing and he is experiencing. Yalo's loss did not begin on the throne where he sits now, his loss began when he was not covered by the night.

Yalo lived in the night of Ballouna, not because he was afraid, but because he was looking for safety. Even if he was afraid, what was the crime? It was his right to be afraid. Who among you, sir, does not get frightened? It was
Yalo's right to be frightened or upset because he stole money from the Georges Aramouni Barracks and left for France. That was the truth he did not tell M. Michel Salloum. He bathed in the residence in Paris and shaved his beard, put on clean, pressed clothes, drank a glass of French red wine, and told M. Michel Salloum that his friend had stolen the money and fled. The gentleman laughed and said, “A thief who steals from a thief is like someone inheriting from his father. Good for him!” Yalo tried to explain that he was not a thief, but M. Michel did not want to listen and gave the impression that he knew everything but decided to close his eyes.

The truth was that Yalo was covered by the night because he did not feel safe. The war, when it ended, left an immense void in his life. The war locked its doors, and the vague fear of the fighters started. The war was like a great barricade they hid behind, and when the barricade fell, every one of us felt naked. It is very difficult for a human being to find himself naked. Madame Randa taught me that. She got naked when her lust began to gleam in her eyes; she stood before the mirror, contemplating her tan skin that shimmered with lust. And when everything was over, she covered herself with the blanket and refused to get out of bed until Yalo had left the room because she was ashamed of her nakedness. We were like Mme Randa, sir – when the war was over, we felt ashamed of our nakedness, and we went looking for cover.

No, sir, I was not afraid, because the war was over and there was no one to hold me accountable for the stolen money. I had stolen it and then it was stolen from me, no one could accuse me of a thing. I covered myself with the night because I felt naked, not out of fear. Even with Mme Randa, Yalo ended his relationship with her fully clothed. The relationship ended as it began, with clothes. The first time she took everything off, but he only took off his pants and found himself shooting inside her very quickly. That day Mme Randa stood before the mirror contemplating the beauty of her
nakedness, and Yalo discovered the difference between a cooked woman and a raw woman. He told her she was a woman cooked and she burst out laughing because she thought he was joking. Yalo smelled the fragrance of sun and spices and he saw how a woman ripened in her desire. That's how he started the process of classifying women, which he never told anyone about.

Now, sir, even as he is suspended between the earth and the sky, the rapture runs through Yalo's veins when he remembers the difference between a cooked woman and a raw woman. This theory was devised by my grandfather, God rest his soul. No, sir, my grandfather had no women, for he was a man riddled with complexes, but he divided food into two categories: meat and vegetables. After giving up the eating of all variations of meat, he assigned vegetables to three categories: defective, uncertain, and perfect. The defective do not ripen to be fit for consumption until they are cooked over the fire, like zucchini or beans or okra, and so on. The uncertain also ripen by fire even though they can be eaten raw, like eggplant, spinach, fava beans, and chickpeas, etc. As to the perfect, they ripen in the sun and need no flame, because they have interior fire. These were all varieties of the finest fruit, grapes, figs, and tomatoes. My grandfather chose the perfect vegetables, and he ended his life eating nothing but raw vegetables. He even gave up eating bread. He began to shrink, he got very thin, his bones grew as pourous as clay, and his flesh grew as rough as bone. He died with the intention of becoming a clay figure, that is, earth baked by the sun.