“I told you not like that. Sit and don’t move.”
She asked him to close his eyes and her lips began to ascend his face, then he felt a lip come between his lips and the flavor entered his mouth. He felt her tongue and began to feel dizzy. The lips withdrew and he heard Elvira’s voice asking him to open his eyes and kiss her as she had just kissed him. She closed her eyes and leaned back on the edge of the sofa, Yalo’s lips approached her face and began to scale it slowly, reaching her lips. He tried to put his upper lip between hers but didn’t succeed. Opening his lips and taking hers inside his, he wanted to devour her two red lips. He felt her hand pushing him back, but he did not retreat. He took her mouth in his, and his lips entered the kissing game. He kissed her and was not sated until pain spread throughout his lips. Elvira waited for his kisses, resting her head on his arm, her eyes closed, inviting him to the banquet of her lips.
“Ouch,” said Yalo. “My lips are sore.”
She got up and said she would make some tea. Yalo stood up and hugged her. At that moment, when his body clung to hers, he ejaculated, and Yalo shivered with the desire that had unfurled before he began. He felt the ache in his thorn and kept clasping the waist of the girl who whispered a request for him to move back a little.
“Please, please, you’re staining my dress.”
He moved back and saw the stains on his pants and the wet halos on her dress. She kissed him hurriedly and asked him to leave before her mother came home and saw him this way.
“What am I supposed to do?” he asked her.
“Don’t do anything,” she said. “Go for a walk before you go home, and your pants will dry out.”
Walking had become his mandatory workout with Elvira. He’d walk her home and hug her behind the gate at the entrance to the building, then he’d walk around for a whole hour so that his pants would be dry before he went home.
Everything changed when Elvira took him to a discothèque called Le Quartier Latin in Ramlet al-Baida near the Egyptian Embassy. And there, in the dark, while they were dancing the tango in the dark, he felt his thorn grow and she told him, “No, not like this, today.” She went back with him to the darkened corner where they had been sitting. She asked him to unzip his pants, she took the thorn in her hands and put it between her thighs, and there, in the dark, he saw her, he saw the short shorts and the girl who jumped with the flying ball, and his heart opened up and he wanted to shout, but she put her hand over his mouth and asked him to come. “Go ahead, love, come.” When he heard the word “Come,” everything exploded, and his white blood spread over her thighs. She snatched a paper tissue and wiped up the spilclass="underline" “You’re a true stud!” she said, wiping off the thorn and restoring it to its place inside his pants.
Yalo picked up the glass of wine in front of him to take a drink. “No,” she said. “Not now. Now give me your hand.” She took his hand and pulled it under her skirt, and began to move and moan, and asked him to kiss her ear.
“No, not here. Put it between your lips.”
She put the curve of her ear between his lips, and he licked it with his tongue, and heard Elvira’s suppressed cry, but kept following the movements of his fingers.
“That’s enough,” she said. “Hands off. It hurts.”
He withdrew his hand, drained the glass of wine in one swallow, and told her that he loved her: “I love you more than anything in the world.”
“You’re still new at love,” she said. “Enjoy it now and later on we’ll see.”
They started to go to the discothèque once a week, after her game. He would wait for her at the La Gondole Café, while she’d go home to shower, and then they’d head for the darkness of the dance floor.
Once he made love with her this way with the lights on. That was the day she informed him of her decision to marry Isa.
“But he’s much older than you,” he said.
“I’m older than you,” she said.
She asked him to get dressed and go home. He left without having to walk through the streets; he left feeling his tongue. That day he had kissed and licked her breasts all over and discovered the map of her body. But she left him to get married. He went home to his mirror and tried to remember the black widow, burning with the fire of jealousy of a man he didn’t know.
Yalo woke up looking at boots. He reached down below to make sure that his member was there, that the cat had not devastated it. He bent over, kissed the boot, and declared that he was prepared to confess everything.
“Do you confess to the rape?” the officer asked.
“I confess.”
“And that you are agents of Israel?”
“I confess.”
“And that you received orders from Abu Ahmad al-Naddaf.”
“I confess.”
“That you planted the explosives in Antilias and Achrafieh?”
“I confess.”
“That you directed the network in Beirut and Mount Lebanon.”
“I confess.”
“Great. Now that you’ve confessed to everything, we’re going to move you to detention. I’m sure the court will take into consideration the fact that you cooperated with questioning and will find cause for mitigating factors.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Now you’ll sign your statement, and later on the real sessions will begin.”
“There are still more sessions, sir? I confessed just as you wanted.”
Yalo had said that he wanted to confess to everything to get it over with. He said it was over, and the inside of his mouth tasted like rubber. He said that he was hungry, that he was thirsty.
“I’m thirsty, sir, and hungry, too. May I have something to drink?”
“You ate everything and you’re still hungry?”
“I’m hungry, but whatever you say.”
“You may eat and drink,” the interrogator said, “but first you need to sign these papers. We’ll read your confessions to you, and if you consent, you sign, and then everything’s okay.”
“I’ll sign whatever you want. There’s no need to read them. I’ll sign everything.”
The voice began to read. Yalo heard his name and his father’s and mother’s names. He heard about Ballouna and Shirin, about Emile Shahin and the explosives gang. He heard the names of the victims, and nodded in agreement.
The officer leaned over, handing him some sheets of paper and saying that the real sessions would pass in solitude, since he would be required to write the entire story of his life, from start to finish, omitting nothing.
In the cell, Yalo had been unable to write. He felt that he had fallen into a well and could not breathe. For after the exhausting interrogation sessions that had concluded with his admitting everything, Yalo could no longer remember anything. On top of that he didn’t know what to write, what could he write? In the Paris Métro he had written on a placard and sat beside it like the beggars, under the merciless eyes of the passersby. There he felt the savagery of language. The French words whose meaning he did not understand landed on his head like the blows of a whip. He missed his mother, and he longed for anyone who might speak to him in Arabic, the only language he knew. In that Metro tunnel, Yalo wept when M. Michel Salloum spoke to him in Arabic, he wept because he heard the sounds of Arabic and smelled the scent of Lebanon. But here, in his solitary cell, he felt that he didn’t know how to write.