Marie’s image was seared into the memories of the young men of the neighborhood as an oriental dancer swaying like a cobra to a musician’s melodies without ever tiring. This went back to what Edward used to talk about in front of Abboudi’s shop when he was drinking beer with the guys and talking about horse races.
She came carrying her son in her arms, and before she ate or drank, she put a little arak on her finger and let the baby suck on it. When he fell asleep, she put him in the bedroom. She started to drink and her body shone. Edward recounted everything. He said that in the beginning she refused to take off her mourning dress and he would sleep with her in her clothes. Then, little by little, she became less modest, “and finally when she took it all off, heavens, what a beauty, how white she was! She was wearing a red bodice and red panties, and she said that she was allergic to the color black. Some red and some white and bring on the dance! My God, how beautiful she was, as white as milk, white filtered through white, white on white that made me melt. Then it was over and believe me, I was sorry. I told her from the start that I couldn’t. The fact is I was afraid. I had decided to remain a bachelor, but then I don’t know what came over me, I said to myself, Why not? I’ll marry her. But then later, no, I couldn’t, it was surely she who killed her husband. Who could handle a filly like that? I never saw anything like it. You just got near her and you felt the water coming out of her — a well, I swear to God, she had a bottomless well in her. Oh God, what could be better? But I was afraid. She told me that people were starting to talk, that is, I had to marry her. I told her I can’t. I was afraid she’d kill me like she’d killed her husband. I asked her a hundred times how he died and a hundred times she didn’t tell me. But no one saw the guy in the living room, my friends! They say he died in the living room after he asked for a drink of water and a cup of coffee. We ran over when we heard the noise and went in, and found ourselves in the bedroom, the deceased was in bed and covered with a white sheet. He was wearing a white shirt up top but no one noticed whether he was wearing anything below. Marie was standing beside the bed with her hair down. When the doctor got there he ordered us out of the room, and allowed only Marie to stay inside. After a minute the doctor appeared and said, ‘May he rest in peace, it was heart failure.’ He was almost smiling. What did that mean? It meant, this was not about a cup of coffee. I asked her a hundred times, and she smiled like the doctor, and didn’t answer. She sipped from the glass of arak and something like fire came out of her chest. What did it mean? It meant, right, he died because he couldn’t stand so much beauty, so do you want me to marry her and die too?”
The talk attributed to the driver came after Marie and her son left for parts unknown. It was said that she went to live in the village of Choueifat, where she dwelled in a cottage near the Régie factory. But Edward’s account led to many fantasies among Yalo and his friends.
Marie’s appeal was her white complexion embellished with a beauty mark high on her neck. A woman of thirty, her white face sprinkled with freckles leading down toward her sternum, of medium height, her hair long and black, pulled back like a cap on her head, walking with her infant in her arms, and lust accompanying her all the way.
Yalo, Maron, and all the neighborhood guys continued to milk their desire for her even though she had disappeared from the neighborhood. Maron gushed white, and Yalo with the thorn that had grown between his thighs cried out her name and cried in pain.
With Marie, Yalo began to look at women differently. He was possessed by sex. When he saw a woman walking down the street, he imagined that she had just gotten out of bed; he saw her naked walking beside a man with blurry features and closed eyes. Closed eyes had sex with all the women in Beirut. His imagination took him away to distant places; he no longer distinguished between young and old women. In his imagination all the women were naked in bed with their eyes closed. Even his mother entered the picture. He saw Gaby, her hair bound up in a round kokina, sitting behind a sewing machine in her pale yellow blouse, with the tailor Elias al-Shami hovering around and having sex with her. Yalo saw nothing but a world crowded with desires. It was as if all women had become one woman with many heads. He would be walking down the street or playing with his friends, but everything was obliterated when he saw a woman, and nothing remained in front of his eyes but the color white.
When the white came into his hand, Yalo was alone, and it was not Marie, it was Elvira. On that spring morning, Yalo awoke to water washing his lower parts, with a foolish smile on his face. Years later, when Shirin asked him why he was smiling, he would answer that love made lovers foolish, and he asked her when she would be stricken with idiocy as he had been.
When had he told her that? And when had she told him that he made her laugh? When did he feel a violent love for her that tore apart his insides and made him have a milking session before he was to meet her so that he would come to her transparent, with his pure love?
Tossed here, isolated from the world, Yalo was confused as to how he should organize his memory. He was confused because things came to him all at once and the images intermingled in his head, times overlapped in his consciousness, as if he were an old man. The cohno had once told him when he was trembling over his papers that the final stage of life was like a long sleep, and that the Syriac St. Ephraim had awoken from the sleep of death when he succeeded in transforming his body into solid, dry clay — like our ancestor Adam before God breathed a soul into him.
“How did they bury St. Ephraim?” Yalo asked.
“They broke him up. They could not bury him before breaking him up into small pieces, and that’s how they lowered him into the grave.”
“. .”
“That’s how I am,” said his grandfather. “When life is over, a man becomes like clay, and can no longer distinguish between truth and illusion, or the past from the present. He becomes like a young child.”
His grandfather smiled as he told his grandson how the body of St. Ephraim had become like clay, and Yalo saw simplemindedness written on the face covered with white hair, and saw the clay taking over his grandfather’s hands, which emerged from the folds of the black robe. Old age was written on his grandfather’s hands like sunbaked clay. Dark spots, thin fingers, bones like an interior layer of clay, and the smell of earth. When his grandfather’s rheumatism worsened and his hands and feet got stiff, Yalo was frightened, seeing his grandfather as if he were a clay statue, and he began to imagine himself breaking up the clay body in order to put it into the casket.
Yalo’s nights began to be filled with visions of clay. He saw his grandfather in many different forms. He saw him as a huge corpse bloated with earth that the sun had leavened, then he saw him in small pieces arrayed on the bed. He saw himself with a huge hammer he used on the clay body to shatter it, with blood streaming down his hands and clothes.
Faced with Alexei, of whom nothing remained but his white bones and ragged clothes, Yalo saw his grandfather’s face as he grumbled at his daughter’s insistence on feeding his grandson morsels of raw sheep’s liver to cure him of the anemia he suffered from. His grandfather held his nose because of the smell of the blood overflowing from Yalo’s lips. Yalo was unable to push back his mother’s hands, which besieged his mouth with a piece of raw liver with green mint and white onion.