Yalo closed his eyes and saw with his third eye. He felt a tremor move through the muscles of his arms and legs, and spat on Satan. In prison Yalo had learned how to spit in his heart, he no longer puckered his lips to eject a clot of phlegm onto the ground. Now it was enough to say “I spit on Satan” and promise himself that the day he was free of this nightmare, he would spit on all the devils he had been forced to deal with. He said “I spit on Satan” to stop the tremor in his heart and muscles, but the trembling spread in gentle waves through the body of the tall specter from his head to his toes. And before the interrogator had spoken a single word, Yalo understood that he had fallen into a trap.
“What’s this — you’re the king of sex?” said the interrogator, spacing out his words to suggest that his words implied a variety of threats.
Yalo was not afraid, or so he convinced himself; after all this what could he fear? What could be more terrifying than the sack, than the feeling of being castrated, than being rolled like a ball under boots? So why should he be afraid? He put his hands firmly on his thighs in an attempt to stop the tremor in his body, but in leaning over he heard a cracking in his neck. How had the interrogator gotten behind him so fast to slap him? Yalo straightened up again and saw the short interrogator standing behind him, waving the pages.
“You’re screwing with us, huh, king of sex?” the interrogator said, circling the tall, bewildered man, who didn’t know where to look to acknowledge the words of the interrogator. Yalo spat on Satan and closed his eyes. He thought of suggesting that the fat-thighed, round-faced interrogator stand on a chair to face him so that they could communicate. But before Yalo could open his mouth, the interrogator punched him in the stomach so that the air was cut off from his lungs and he doubled over, his mouth wide open as if begging for some air to breathe before closing his eyes to die.
Yalo would say that he felt death coming on. When he was in the sack, under the whip, in the leg braces for a beating, or in the pool of water, he had not felt final death. Perhaps he died without knowing it, but he was certain that he would make it, but now, faced with the circling interrogator holding the pages, punching him in the stomach and kicking his buttocks, Yalo entered the labyrinth of death, despising himself for being unable to draw a breath.
The interrogator went back to his chair behind the table and his head reentered the fluorescent white. Yalo found himself trying to reconnect the words coming from the interrogator’s mouth so that he could grasp their meaning.
Yalo heard the names Michel Salloum and Randa several times and gathered that the interrogator was asking him about the few pages he had added to his confessions. However, he did not understand the question sufficiently to answer it. He heard the names splintering between the interrogator’s thin lips.
“Why aren’t you answering me, you dog?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“You don’t know? So who does know?”
“Sir, I wrote that I would start my life over, give me a chance. I swear to God, it’s over.”
The interrogator said that he understood the game, and that Daniel was going to taste whatever torture would force him to tell the truth.
“You think you’re pretty smart, huh? You think that you can screw with us, you dog? We gave you paper so that you could write the truth, not so you could make up stories, make accusations against honest people and destoy their families. Do you dare tell me, bastard, that you slept with Madame Randa? Go ahead, say it! What are you afraid of?”
Yalo said nothing, but he felt the urge to dance, for the interrogator sputtered his sentences as if he were singing along to discontinuous music from his throat. A smile formed on the lips of the thin specter.
“Are you laughing, you son of a bitch?” he asked, signaling with his hand.
Three giants appeared. Yalo had not been unaware of their presence in the room. The fluorescent light gave a yellowing glow to the inspector’s mass of gray hair falling into his round face. Yalo gazed for a long time at this face and suddenly a shudder of fear ran through him. It was as if this face, the crack in whose lower half emitted words, was not a real face at all. Yalo had never before seen a face like this one: a soft nose that blocked the lips, as round as a ball. His activities in the forest had made him an expert when it came to faces. He could tell a good face from a wicked face with no trouble: a big nose meant fear, thin lips meant wickedness, a fat face meant surrender, and so on. . He would judge them by their faces, which he’d read in the light before deciding how to proceed. Should he use violence? In that case, he’d frown with his eyebrows and rap against the window with the muzzle of his rifle. Or should he be polite, lowering the rifle and signaling with his head? Or perhaps be apathetic, lowering both his rifle and his head? Yalo knew all the faces, but this face. . Before, he hadn’t looked at the interrogator’s face; he had been the prey and the prey does not see the hunter’s face. But that day, after Yalo had written his story so many times, he shivered with fear when he saw the interrogator’s face: a soft nose that disappeared in the fleshy, round face, lips like two lines drawn in green, oval eyes that didn’t appear to have pupils, and a voice coming from some mysterious slit in this ball resting on the table.
When Yalo finished writing the story of his life, he felt sure that his journey through torture had ended. He wanted the story to end so that he could go back to the life he had left behind. Yalo discovered, when he sat behind the table, broken by physical and spiritual pain, that his life had been unreal. The life he had written down came to him like dismembered, incomplete stories. He saw himself in these stories as someone else, and so Yalo hated writing and hated himself. “Shit!” He closed his eyes and said, “Shit! This Yalo whose story I am writing will go from these pages to the hangman’s rope, will stand under the noose, will dangle from the end of the rope like an unreal specter.” This is how he saw himself, as if in a nightmare, and now he was coming out of his sleep and standing before the interrogator. He would say that he had written down everything and that he had nothing new to add, so there was no need for torture.
Yalo stood before the interrogator to tell him that he wanted to become a real person again and leave the stupor where his memories and the story of his life had taken him. He had become a shadow like his grandfather Abel Ephraim Abyad. The grandfather, who had become a shadow of himself in his last days, used to talk about his life as if it were not his own, and Yalo would listen to him with only half an ear. Here in the cell, Yalo discovered that he had not been able to listen to him because the cohno was dying, and the living could not listen to the dead unless they died with them. But fragments of his grandfather’s voice came back to him in his solitude, and he heard in his cell the words that his ears had refused to hear, and lived with death, and his story became a shadow of his life. Yalo lived in the shadows and hated the color black that spread ink on the page, but then, all at once, he decided to come back to life.
He stood before the interrogator to speak, but the interrogator didn’t look like a real man. His head was on the table and he spoke in a soft, almost inaudible voice. Yalo felt that he was still ink on paper, and that his soul had not yet come back to him, so he closed his eyes.
The interrogator did not shout at him, telling him to open his eyes as he had done previous times, he left him in the dark. But the young man sensed the three large men standing directly behind him. He saw them with his third eye, which suddenly came back to him. Since his arrest, this eye had gone dark and no longer saw. In prison he tried to make it see the way it had seen in the forest when he’d felt like he was an elevated tower looking down on the world and seeing in every direction. Was it true that he really saw himself that way, or did the idea come to him there in the café in Achrafieh when he was trying to convince Shirin to believe in him and in his love for her. There he told her how this third eye of his had grown, and how he had tried to see through it after he’d heard the cohno tell his daughter that the boy had a third eye, and how he would close his eyes so he could see with this new eye. Shirin laughed, and her small eyes would widen. There Yalo had become a tower; with Shirin he had three eyes, and could see what he liked. He carried himself as if he were an elevated tower pouncing on its victims, and was full of visions that mingled with his desire to possess all the women in the world.