Yalo lived in the night of Ballouna, not because he was afraid, but because he was looking for safety. Even if he was afraid, what was the crime? It was his right to be afraid. Who among you, sir, does not get frightened? It was Yalo’s right to be frightened or upset because he stole money from the Georges Aramouni Barracks and left for France. That was the truth he did not tell M. Michel Salloum. He bathed in the residence in Paris and shaved his beard, put on clean, pressed clothes, drank a glass of French red wine, and told M. Michel Salloum that his friend had stolen the money and fled. The gentleman laughed and said, “A thief who steals from a thief is like someone inheriting from his father. Good for him!” Yalo tried to explain that he was not a thief, but M. Michel did not want to listen and gave the impression that he knew everything but decided to close his eyes.
The truth was that Yalo was covered by the night because he did not feel safe. The war, when it ended, left an immense void in his life. The war locked its doors, and the vague fear of the fighters started. The war was like a great barricade they hid behind, and when the barricade fell, every one of us felt naked. It is very difficult for a human being to find himself naked. Madame Randa taught me that. She got naked when her lust began to gleam in her eyes; she stood before the mirror, contemplating her tan skin that shimmered with lust. And when everything was over, she covered herself with the blanket and refused to get out of bed until Yalo had left the room because she was ashamed of her nakedness. We were like Mme Randa, sir — when the war was over, we felt ashamed of our nakedness, and we went looking for cover.
No, sir, I was not afraid, because the war was over and there was no one to hold me accountable for the stolen money. I had stolen it and then it was stolen from me, no one could accuse me of a thing. I covered myself with the night because I felt naked, not out of fear. Even with Mme Randa, Yalo ended his relationship with her fully clothed. The relationship ended as it began, with clothes. The first time she took everything off, but he only took off his pants and found himself shooting inside her very quickly. That day Mme Randa stood before the mirror contemplating the beauty of her nakedness, and Yalo discovered the difference between a cooked woman and a raw woman. He told her she was a woman cooked and she burst out laughing because she thought he was joking. Yalo smelled the fragrance of sun and spices and he saw how a woman ripened in her desire. That’s how he started the process of classifying women, which he never told anyone about.
Now, sir, even as he is suspended between the earth and the sky, the rapture runs through Yalo’s veins when he remembers the difference between a cooked woman and a raw woman. This theory was devised by my grandfather, God rest his soul. No, sir, my grandfather had no women, for he was a man riddled with complexes, but he divided food into two categories: meat and vegetables. After giving up the eating of all variations of meat, he assigned vegetables to three categories: defective, uncertain, and perfect. The defective do not ripen to be fit for consumption until they are cooked over the fire, like zucchini or beans or okra, and so on. The uncertain also ripen by fire even though they can be eaten raw, like eggplant, spinach, fava beans, and chickpeas, etc. As to the perfect, they ripen in the sun and need no flame, because they have interior fire. These were all varieties of the finest fruit, grapes, figs, and tomatoes. My grandfather chose the perfect vegetables, and he ended his life eating nothing but raw vegetables. He even gave up eating bread. He began to shrink, he got very thin, his bones grew as pourous as clay, and his flesh grew as rough as bone. He died with the intention of becoming a clay figure, that is, earth baked by the sun.
These are digressions, and there would be no need to bring them into the story of Yalo’s life had his grandfather’s culinary theory not played a decisive role in defining the young man’s view of women. I can affirm that one of the causes of his voyeurism was his desire to see cooked women. Yalo’s theory did not have the same symmetry that his grandfather’s theory had. The cohno hated the cooked and preferred the raw ripened by the sun. Yalo preferred the cooked. Cooked women ripened over the fire of their desire. The raw ones had no fire in them. What he hated most were the efforts raw women made to ripen themselves artificially using makeup or silicone, which had become so prevalent in Beirut after the war.
Yalo had mulled over his grandfather’s words at length, and in the end adopted that view himself without realizing it. Cooked women did not require external fire; the sun of their desire sufficed to ripen them, and in this they resembled perfect vegetables, which were ripened by their inner fire.
When Yalo found a cooked woman, he was struck with an irresistible desire, and in those cases he did not rob or in any way insult the man escorting her, but showed a resolute desire. The other man understood that he must retreat, otherwise his life would be in danger.
So I can say for sure that when Yalo found himself with Shirin — and Shirin was a raw woman in every sense of the word — he felt no desire. The gray-haired man fled, abandoning the young, light-skinned girl, thus forcing Yalo to take her to his cottage. In the cottage all his and his grandfather’s theories about fruit and women dropped away. He smelled the fragrance of the incense coming off the girl’s outstretched arms, grew intoxicated, and entered the passionate unknown that led him to his miserable end.
I question him, but his face turns away as if he is living in another world. Once he wanted to ask Mme Randa her opinion about men and whether they could be divided into two kinds, the raw and the cooked, but he was embarrassed so didn’t ask.
Yalo did not give up his theory. He considered Shirin to be an exception, and believed that women, too, categorized men the same way. Of course, I believed that I belonged in the cooked category, and I wanted to hear that from a woman. Yalo didn’t bring up the subject with Shirin because she forbade him to talk during sex. Even when they went to the seashore and ate fish and he put his arm around her waist so that she could lean back to await his kiss, even at that moment when he felt on top of the whole world, he didn’t ask, afraid that Shirin would get upset. For the young girl was vulnerable and easily hurt.
How had this angelic creature become his adversary?
In the interrogation room, Shirin wore a mask of cruelty and indifference. The tenderness was gone from her eyes, and her small nose, which ran as much as her eyes teared, was like a thorn planted in her face.
Why did her nose suddenly get bigger?
His grandfather, God rest his soul, complained in his final days of his nose and ears. Every part of him had shrunk, he was shorter, and his skin hung on his bones because he was so emaciated, but his nose grew bigger, and his ears grew wider and longer. He gazed with disgust at his face in the mirror. Once he said that he wished he could trim his nose and ears the way people trimmed their fingernails. That frightened me. I, who had never been afraid in my whole life, was afraid of the cohno’s nose and ears because he said that they were the marks of death. A person’s body parts stopped growing, except for the nose and ears. Death was a mercy, for if a man kept living, he would turn into just a long nose and two giant ears, that is, a cross between an elephant and a donkey. God forbid.