Muhammad Abi Samra - Beirut Noir

Though the legitimate son now fucked regularly, he wanted to fall in love. He couldn’t, however, fall in love with one of his brother’s offerings — those women seemed too soiled. He resolved therefore to find someone himself, and undertook some very discreet research in vain. It happened by chance that the first morning after the summer vacation, he noticed a new female student in his class. He thought for a moment about sitting with her, but the cascades of sweat that poured out of him at this idea helped him to quickly abandon this plan. For the entire first semester, he was content with simply observing her from afar. He finally dared to speak to her and, after saying hello, she responded with a hello back. Possessed by an amorous frenzy, he repeated the same move every morning, but at the end of a month and a half, he understood that he should try something else; so he managed to exchange first names with her, and that was all. In desperation, he confided his love to his brother; the bastard then knew what the origin of his own torment was.

Indeed, in recent months, the legitimate son had somewhat cooled toward him. Helpless, the bastard could only passively watch the gradual enfranchisement of his slave. He deigned to be much nicer to him, to praise him in front of their friends, to offer him more women, but the other one — so preoccupied by his secret — hardly noticed anything. To his great surprise, the bastard felt totally impotent and sometimes woke up in the middle of the night with terrible rages that he could only calm by banging his head against a wall. And why did it matter so much to him? This was the question that never ceased to torture him and for which he couldn’t even find an initial response. Having tried everything, he resigned himself to it and fell into one of his usual deep melancholies, whose singular ridiculousness, so obvious to him in these circumstances, made it even more intolerable. He’d often thought of suicide before his brother finally came to find him, to confess his passion and ask his advice.

Keeping perfect control of himself and not showing any fragment of the anger that was devouring him internally, the bastard listened calmly right to the end. Then, after a brief moment of silence, he said to him in a way that he tried very hard to make sound as detached and nonchalant as possible, “Don’t kid yourself; she’s a bitch like the rest of them.”

The other, outraged by these words, protested with a touching naïveté that she was as pure and chaste as one could be.

“Whether or not she’s a virgin, I bet you I could fuck her in a couple of days!” the bastard cruelly threw out.

“No, no!” screamed the other before storming off, violently slamming the door behind him.

The idea of fucking her then seized the bastard’s entire being, to such an extent that putting it into practice became the central theme of his daydreams as well as his nighttime dreams. Was it simple vengeance or rather the hope of regaining his domination? He could hardly grant himself the opportunity to decide between these two alternatives, but, finding the idea still there one week later, he made a firm decision to put his plan into action. He first devoted himself to tedious and time-consuming speculation about how he might go about determining this girl’s identity, something that seemed rather difficult, since his brother, with his excessively shy and discreet nature, was not at all the type to let his intimate inclinations show, even to an expert eye such as his. Base and cruel spying, a process he abhorred, would at the end of the day prove to be the only possible recourse.

So he found himself diligently lying in wait for any unusual movement on his brother’s part — truly too infrequent to be of any use — peering through the windows of his classrooms, until he finally spotted his target. There was no doubt his brother had exquisite taste: she was an indescribable beauty. However, his hope for even the slightest connection with her would be no less than the incontrovertible proof of his total lack of experience in the world. He had to fuck her, to defile her: this would be the only remedy that would rescue his brother.

And one afternoon, putting on the seducer’s face that suited him so well, he waited for her, leaning against the wall of a hallway that she usually crossed when leaving class. Spotting her from a distance, he pretended to be looking elsewhere, then, after she had overtaken him by several steps, he caught up with her in one leap and whispered quietly into her ear words that made the blood rush to her face and extracted an almost imperceptible smile from her lips. She spent that night with him, though she felt some reluctance about sleeping in this low, little house on Assaad al-Assad Street. The next day, the bastard told his brother everything in minute detail. The legitimate son tried to punch him in the jaw but managed only to put himself in a hospital bed for two weeks.

With a broken nose, a bloated face, and a small crack in his skull, he was in an extremely anxious state waiting for his father to arrive from the village. What would he tell him? How would he explain his relationship with his brother? There had never been an explicit prohibition on it, but many hints had already allowed him to guess that his father would find all dealings between him and the bastard repugnant. And indeed he was not mistaken: as soon as his father heard him say the name of his supposedly illegitimate son, he almost extended his son’s hospital visit by a few weeks, but in the end managed to control himself.

A few clarifications are essential here: This old man in his seventies was a sort of leader of an ancient, powerful provincial family that still strictly observed certain tribal laws of its ancestors. Without dwelling too long on the details, suffice it to say that this family — made up of a number of branches — had for centuries subjugated all the other families in its village and lived according to a very strict code of honor. The changes wrought by this most recent era’s radical social transformations had deprived the family of almost all of its privileges, but this only meant intensifying its commitment to the honor code, taking it to the point of fanaticism. Thus our patriarch compensated for the decrease in his external power with in-house tyranny; he literally had the power of life and death over the some two hundred members of his clan. It was not on his own initiative that the bastard had finally broken with his family; rather, he had been forced to do so by a decree from his father, whose authority he had seriously and continually damaged. This banishment — that many considered too magnanimous a punishment — had fixed him very well: his family despised him, and he detested them so intensely he hoped for no money, no help, nothing at all. However, there was a certain bitterness lodged in his throat, recalling past humiliations and reminding him that he still had accounts to settle. The fortuitous encounter with his brother leaving the bar was in this sense a marvelous occasion for him, which he couldn’t help but fiercely hang on to with extended claws.

The old man thus refrained from breaking his big, knotted cane over the legitimate son’s head and was content with simply throwing him extremely irate looks while nervously twiddling his fingers around his mustache, under which a terrible grin had frozen. The poor young man, lying in bed and suffocating with terror, searched in vain for a point on the wall to stare at in order to avoid his father’s eyes. Finally, after lifting himself with difficulty off the armchair upon which he had been sitting and heading toward the door, the old man launched these words at him in a calm tone that nevertheless penetrated deep into the recesses of his soul and thwarted any retort in advance: “You will never see him again!”