I don’t know how, but when I heard the story, I had a feeling that I’d heard it before. Mr. Elias had been a presence in my life, even though he rarely visited us. My mother would take me to the amusement park, and he would be there. I would always ride the Ferris wheel, and they’d stay down below. I would spend an hour or two looking out at the sea and the city from above. As the world twirled around, they sat down there drinking coffee and talking.
Once, I got lost. I remember it now as if it had happened to another person. I had thought that the idea of this other person who resembled me was just a childhood thing, I mean, when I remember my childhood, I feel that the child who was me, was some other person. But now, after my experiences being imprisoned and tortured, I began to see Yalo’s whole life as if it were someone else’s. I do not know how to describe these feelings, sir, but they are true feelings. I look at myself in the mirror of my self and I see a different man and fear him, his thoughts, and his acts. No, I do not say this to dodge my responsibilities, because I know that I am now paying the price of my sins, and I seek the pardon of Almighty God.
I do not seek the pardon of people, nor do I write these lines in order to gain the favor of his honor the judge, because life no longer concerns me. I know that I will be sentenced to death on the charge of planting explosives and killing innocent people, but I am innocent, I swear to God, innocent. Even so, I will accept most willingly the sentence handed down against me. I tell myself that this is my destiny, that it was written well before I was born. I can’t do a thing. I see my grandfather crying before me and I ask him to intercede with me with St. Ephraim the Syriac. All I ask for myself is mercy and relief in the next world.
I got off of the wheel, or the whirl — I don’t know what that ride is called — and could not find my mother or Mr. Elias below. I began crying and people gathered around me and asked me whose child I was and where I lived. I didn’t know how to tell them where I lived, but I told them I was from the Abyad family and that we lived in the Syriac Quarter, that’s all I knew. I kept on crying among people who didn’t know what to do with me. I was crying. Then someone I didn’t know recognized me and said, “That’s the priest’s son,” and took me home in his car. And there was my grandfather, and the scandal that bound me to him. It was then that my grandfather realized my mother was still involved with the tailor.
In Paris I was very afraid. Suddenly I found myself on the street in a city where I knew no one and didn’t know the language. So I resorted to the art that I did know. I took a piece of cardboard from Madame Violette, who ran the hotel, and wrote in beautiful Naskh script this phrase: “I am a Lebanese youth, homeless and alone. I seek mercy because I cannot afford the price of a crust of bread.”
I sprawled out with my cardboard in the Montparnasse Métro station and stayed there several days, and all I had to eat was a dry piece of bread given to me by a French tramp, homeless like me, drinking wine straight from the bottle, his body giving off a putrid smell. It was there M. Michel met me and saved me. He brought me back to Lebanon, gave me work, treated me well, God bless him, and I betrayed his trust. A man who trusted me with his home and his wife and yet I did not deserve his trust. Instead of being his watchdog, as he asked of me, I became a stray dog and started a life of my own. I began by spying from the pine forest located below the St. Nicholas Church.
I want to tell the truth for the sake of my conscience. In the beginning I had no desire to rob people or rape women. Everything started when I discovered by chance the cars that parked in the forest. I monitored them to guard the villa, thinking that there might be suspicious things going on here, and my duty as a guard was to be aware of everything. But the activities turned out to be sex and necking. I could not see things clearly from far off, but the glimpses I saw and the shadows of men over the shadows of women set my imagination aflame, sir.
My story began with a love of voyeurism, no more and no less, then I made my decision to go down to them, to get closer to the scene for a better look. Why did I do the things I did after that? I don’t know.
I know that the first time I went down I was carrying a Kalashnikov rifle and a flashlight, and I saw how fear overwhelmed the lips of the man sitting in the car, and I learned that fear started at the lips. I rapped at the car window with the muzzle of the rifle and the man opened the window and tried to talk, but he couldn’t speak. His lower lip trembled. Then he reached into his pants pocket and gave me a handful of dollars and Lebanese lira. It was not part of my plan to rob him or force him to pay. I had no set plan, all I wanted was to watch. He reached out his hand with the money and I took it, and stood there by the window. He took off his watch and ordered the woman beside him to remove her watch and gold necklace with the cross hanging around her neck, and he gave them to me. I took them and remained at the window, and heard the voice of the woman saying, “Please God, don’t hurt us, sir.” I don’t know why I responded, “Shut up, whore,” and instead of her getting upset, or the man getting angry or getting out of the car to defend her, the man bowed his head as if in consent, and the woman smiled, a kind of grimace. At the moment I lusted for her but I didn’t do anything. I was strangely aroused, but I walked back to my house below the villa and heard the sound of the car skidding in the dirt and speeding off.
After that things developed naturally, and I began to hunt once or twice a week, no more, because I wasn’t that ambitious. I was afraid that if I overdid the hunting, people would stop coming to the forest. My prey was always the last car, I mean, the car that lingered the latest at night.
I saw things I cannot describe, which taught me so much about human nature and made me understand my mother’s madness. My mother was an unfortunate woman whose misfortune was loving a man who wasn’t worthy of her, and she went all the way with her love. I take after her in that. It is true that it is disgraceful to compare my stupid behavior and my despicable desires to those of a respectable woman who was a victim of love, but God fated me also to taste love, and to be a victim of love, and for my life to end the opposite way it began. For I began in sin in the forest, and ended in love. I am my mother’s opposite and an extension of her. She drowned in the mirror, and I don’t need a mirror. She no longer saw her image in the mirror, and I can see my image without one.
I saw a few things, sir — how can I say it — some of them came in broad daylight, but those were the minority, of course. One of them came at ten in the morning. He must have been the most shameless man in the world. He came in broad daylight, parked his car by the huge sycamore tree, and had sex with the woman. I could see her big breasts through the branches. He didn’t get her totally naked. He opened her blouse and her breasts came out and he slept with her on the seat of the car. He sat on the seat to the right of the steering wheel and she got on top, and her breasts jiggled. They arrived, with her beside him, in a red Peugeot. He got out of the car and undid his pants. She opened her door and stood waiting for him. He sat down on the seat, then she got back into the car and straddled him.
One of my first experiences was with this woman. I saw her open the car door and stand there waiting for him, and I could not control myself. The sun was everywhere, I saw myself holding the rifle, pulling my cap down low so that my face was hidden, and charging toward them. I didn’t rob them. I got to her before he did, he saw the gun and froze, I gestured for him to get lost, and he went away without putting up any resistance. I sat down and ordered her to get on top of me as she had got on top of him. I undid my pants and pulled her breasts out, and took her exactly as he had done. I left the car then to go back home and I saw the man return to the car and leave.