Rabih Alameddine - I, The Divine

My grandfather named me for the great Sarah Bernhardt. He considered having met her in person the most important event of his life. He talked about her endlessly. By the age of five, I was able to repeat each of his stories verbatim. And I did.

My grandfather was a simple man

At the age of thirteen, the age of discovery, I was moved from an all-girl Catholic school to a boys’ school. My father decided I needed to have English, not French, as my primary language, so he transferred me to the best school in the city. It was all boys until I showed up. They wanted to integrate it and I was the guinea pig. What a guinea pig.

I was not the only girl in the school, but I was the only one in my class, all five sections. The four other girls were in the upper classes. It was life-changing culture shock.

In October of 1973, I arrived for my first day of school

Nineteen seventy-three was a strange year. I cut my hair short, which drove my stepmother crazy. The Lebanese army went nuts and started bombing the PLO, a harbinger of things to come. I left those wacky Carmelite nuns and entered an American-bankrolled school where I was the only girl in the whole class. I also met Fadi, who changed my life forever.

I had always been a little odd, which people blamed on my mother, but she was not at fault. My sisters were normal. People could not blame my father. My half-sisters turned out to be more normal than normal. Except for being gay, my little brother was probably the most normal of us all. I was the strange one.

When I was little, we had a nanny from the Seychelles named Violet. I remember her showing us a picture of her family — her parents and all her sisters. I pointed out a white girl in the picture and asked Violet who she was. She said that was her sister. Surprised, I asked how that could be. She said, “My mother went astray.” That sentence stuck with me. I had always thought my mother “went astray” when conceiving me.

I was different, but not nearly in Fadi’s league. We met my first day in class. I arrived ready for battle in jeans and sweatshirt, prepared to fight any boy who dared make fun of me. Fadi did. When I sat behind him, he turned and whispered, “If you’re a lesbian, I know just the right bar for you.” My mouth dropped. The boys were supposed to be the crème de la crème. How had this boy slipped through?

He was disarming. His face had a combination of mischief and innocence that to this day I find attractive. He was not handsome, but an unearthly intelligence shone in his eyes. Years later they would dull, and after the gendarmes beat him senseless, an eye patch would cover one of them. He became a shell of his former self, a walking shadow. I try to remember him as he was at fourteen, the boy who turned my world upside down.

At the age of thirteen, the age of discovery, I was moved from an all-girls Catholic school to a boys’ school. My parents had thought an English education would be better than a French one. It was the first year of integration for the school, and for the first couple of years, I was the only girl in my class. At the school, I met two people who were to become primary influences in my life: Fadi, my first boyfriend, and Dina, my best friend, who appeared at school two years later.

I met Fadi on my first day in class. I sat behind him, where his first question to me was “Are you a lesbian?” My response was swift: “Your mother’s cunt, you brother of a whore.” The Lebanese dialect is filled with delectable curses, a luscious language all its own, of which I was a true poet, trained by none other than my father. He thought children’s use of adult curse words tremendously amusing and trained all his children in the art of insult. I grew up an avid practitioner.

Fadi’s reaction was an ear-to-ear grin, hands coming together for one clap, and a look signaling welcome-to-my-world. We became fast friends, at first because he would not leave me alone. The first couple of days, I could not move anywhere without him tagging along, trying to involve me in some activity he was cooking up. We became friends and partners in crime.

Fadi was not a handsome boy, nor did he mature into a handsome man. He had a long, pale face, with medium-long black hair, eternally unkempt, slightly frizzy. Depending on how the sun hit it, you could see single hairs sprouting independently out of the mess. His nose was long, downward, not outward, like the noses in ancient Greek drawings. His chest, skinny and caved in, as if malnourished. He was cute; all in all, not a particularly erotic package, but I always had peculiar tastes, somewhat exotic. Of all the boys in class, and I could have had my pick, being the only girl, he caught my fancy. His smile was his best and most memorable feature. Appearing quite natural, it was actually meticulously studied, its apparent innocence perfected in an attempt to confuse anyone who might suspect him capable of any of the acts he committed. I fell for his façade early on. I assumed he was a gentle, amazingly intelligent, studious boy. He was all that in a way, but as Miss Nahhas, our science teacher, once said, he was also the devil incarnate.

Fadi’s intelligence was remarkable. We were both the top of our class, but the difference between first, him, and second, me, was immeasurable. He had an understanding of mathematics that bordered on genius. I excelled at mathematics but I was not even in the same league. My grades were close to his in the nonsciences, English, Arabic, French, history, geography, and civics, simply because he did not care about these subjects. He winged it in all the exams, never studying, and still he got higher grades than I did most of the time. He was a mechanical wiz. The first contraption I saw him make was a motorized bicycle. He took a motor from a scooter, attached it to an old bicycle. I thought it was such a magnificent feat, only to be more impressed when he confessed to having stolen both the bike and the motor. We became soul mates.

I remember the first time I caught a glimpse of his Mephistophelian side, early October, the beginning of the school year. It was a hot day, the ceiling fan circulating stale air. The building was more than a hundred years old and had no air-conditioning. Fadi sat in front of me as usual. French class and Mr. Assiss drunk and trying desperately to control the class. Without looking back, Fadi told me, “Duck when I say duck .”

“What?” I asked, confused. Assiss was rambling on about subjunctive something or other. Utterly bored, I was carving my name into the desk with a Bic pen. “What do you mean?”

“Just duck when I tell you.” I noticed he was clasping something black between three fingers. It took me a while to figure out it was one of the rubber stabilizers used under each of the legs to keep the chair from sliding. The instant Assiss looked away, Fadi threw the rubber stabilizer up toward the fan, saying “Incoming,” in English. Half the class ducked under their desks. When the rubber stabilizer hit the fan, it ricocheted with such force, I heard the whoosh followed by various other sounds as it hit desks and walls. Assiss looked around, wondering what had happened. We pretended nothing had happened, so he pretended with us. Assiss continued with his boring lesson.