Things began taking on a new direction, for in addition to my first pleasure — observing people and robbing them — I had a second pleasure until God made me a passion addict.
I read many of the books I used to find in my mother’s room. But the book that especially influenced me was the book The Victims of Lovers. This was the only book I reread several times. On the first leaf of the book was an inscription in red ink: “To my little darling, so that she will know,” with a scribble that looked like an illegible signature. I don’t think my mother read the book, she did not like reading. She didn’t even read the newspaper. I believe the scribble was the signature of the tailor who loved my mother, but didn’t marry her. I used to tell Shirin when we met that I was a passion addict, and she would laugh because she did not understand what the words meant. I explained it to her and told her stories of lovers who had died for love, but she laughed at me and at them. That is how I imagined the tailor, too, telling my mother the stories in the book, with her laughing too because she didn’t understand.
I became the victim of this girl who filed charges against me and put me in prison. When I saw her in the Jounieh police station, I thought that revenge was her way of proclaiming her love for me — and this often does happen in love stories — because she was incapable of ending it with me except through revenge. So my love and passion for her increased. But when I saw her fiancé, Emile, that idiot jackass who knew nothing of the truth, I understood that her love was gone. I am sure that Emile was not with her. When I took her to my house, a different man was with her, a doctor in his fifties, I don’t remember his name anymore, but he’s a famous physician. Why didn’t they bring him to the interrogation? He would have told the truth, and then everyone would see I was innocent. I am not a rapist. Not really, I swear to God I don’t know. But now I confess before God and before you that I used to rape women, because you call this rape, and because after I fell in love with Shirin I discovered that it was rape compared to the beautiful sex that a man can have with a woman he loves. I slept with Shirin very little, but I made love to her whenever we met and it was a beautiful and wonderful thing and could not be compared to the sexual relations I had with women in the forest. Love is a humane thing, like praying, while sex in the forest was like war, and that’s what made her think it was rape. I confess that I did commit rape, and I seek pardon for that and mercy on my soul, for the sake of my poor mother who lives alone with no one to look after her. She really needs her son. And I’ll rededicate myself to her service.
I confess that I stole, plundered, and raped, and I am certain that God is punishing me through you.
As to the final chapter in the story of my life, it is the strangest one, sir, because I don’t know how I got involved in the affair. Haykal contacted me — I don’t know his family name — and was with us in the Georges Aramouni Barracks. He tempted me with money. He gave me five hundred American dollars and told me that it was from Ahmad al-Naddaf. He asked me to hide the stuff in my house, and I agreed. I never knew this Naddaf, but I had heard of him because he was famous in the border strip Israel occupied. He was in charge of explosives training, and he’d trained many of our guys. Haykal gave me ten kilograms of gelignite, twenty detonators, and five hand grenades to hide, and after that we started. Haykal came and told me that the job had started, so they took the explosives and went away. But I didn’t pay much attention to it. My only concern was Shirin, making dates with her and following her from place to place, and loving her. My plan was to marry her to put to an end to the dog’s life I was living. When my grandfather the cohno used to get angry at me, he would call me the son of a dog, and Monsieur Michel told me that he had not gotten a dog to help me guard the villa because his wife, the lady Randa, was afraid of dogs. I said to myself, I’d work with Haykal, make a little money, and marry Shirin, and we would live in Hazemiya, but before that I would have had to save a small amount of capital with which to open a woodworking shop, since I had learned the trade of dovetailing wood at Mr. Salim Rizq’s shop when I was young.
I now confess, and proclaim that I have decided to repent, and follow the path of my grandfather — God rest his soul — and take care of my poor mother. I have decided not to marry and to relinquish everything else. And I have decided to stop eating meat.
This is the whole story of my life, from the moment of my birth until now, written in prison in February 1992, and let God be my witness that I have been truthful in everything I have written. I am ready to repeat all I have stated in court.
Yalo read the pages he had written and put them aside with a feeling of deep relief. He had succeeded at writing the whole story of his life. Now, when he was summoned for interrogation, he would say that he had admitted to everything and written everything down, forgetting nothing.
He wrote about his boyhood, his youth, about the war and Michel Salloum. He wrote about his mother and her lover the tailor, and about the cohno. He wrote about Shirin, whom he had loved, and hunting in Ballouna. It was true that he had been compelled to write a fake story — the story about Haykal, Naddaf, and the explosives — but there, there was no avoiding fakery. Yalo felt that he had outsmarted the interrogator because he remembered the names of two men no one would ever find. Haykal had committed suicide in November 1991; it was said that he had hanged himself because he could no longer obtain cocaine. Naddaf had moved to Brazil and never been heard from again. Yalo had confessed, as they’d wanted, but he hadn’t opened up a crack allowing them to ravage his soul and his body again. The interrogator would read these names, research them, and decide to close the dossier due to the impossibility of following up the case with two men who no longer existed.
Yalo sat on the floor of his cell and rested his head against the wall, feeling hungry. It was as if the words he had written had opened up a gulf inside him that could only be filled with food. He saw a fish before him and his mouth began to water. He would have told Shirin, had she been there, that he no longer feared anything once he had discovered blood in fish.
He told her, or would have told her, about Munir Shammo, who had brought a big sea perch home, wriggling in the throes of death.
What happened that day?
As Yalo recollected the story for Shirin’s sake, he felt that speech was not possible without love. When he gave in to love, he felt the taste of speech. Speech was full of flavor when it was spoken with love. It was true that now he no longer loved her, and that he felt capable of killing her because she had shattered him by betraying him; written on her bare thighs in the interrogation room was a flagrant sign of her treachery. Yet now when he sat down to write, he felt her presence, and remembered how he had become an open book to her. He had tried to seduce her with words, with stories, true or fictitious, but she remained indifferent. He had written his life in front of her but she refused to read it. She was always in a hurry with her mind elsewhere, as if she did not understand or didn’t want to understand.
Now she was here, as if she were sitting beside him in the cell, listening to the story of the fish. But his mind strayed a little because of her lipstick. She began to eat, curling her lips so she wouldn’t smear the red; then, when she realized the impossibility of that, she wiped off the red with a tissue. Yalo cried, No! and wanted her lips. He imagined himself rubbing his lips against hers and licking the red from them. He knew she did not like Arabic songs or Arabic poetry, but he could not control himself, so he told her to listen, and Shirin put the tissue on the table and looked at him, waiting for him to go on.