Elias Khoury - Yalo

Alexei became a graveyard of his own, with nothing remaining of him but a set of bones and the ragged clothes around which gathered the sobs and exclamations of his horrified comrades.

Yalo saw himself as a tomb after the Alexei night, he saw his death in the form of shouts mingled with the claws that tore at his lower parts, and felt that death was a true mercy. The laughter of the officer who held the bamboo cane in his hand was like the echo of distant voices coming from beyond death. He tried to scream, but his voice came out as a feeble meow, then dizziness silenced him. There in silence he licked his excrement, unconsciously, as if consuming himself before sinking into the tomb.

That was the day Yalo confessed to everything.

What did he say? He no longer remembered, but he listened to his tremulous voice, knelt on the ground, and told the officer that he was ready to kiss his boots. He bent over the boots and kissed one. He did not see how the muscles in the officer’s face tensed with pride and exaltedness. The officer was enjoying his triumph over this man prostrate before him, who had become a heap of shit and piss.

“You are shit,” said the officer. “Listen to me. I’m asking you. What are you?”

“. .”

“Answer the question.”

“I’m shit,” said Yalo.

The officer’s guffaws spread through the room filled with a nauseating smell, they were like the lashes of the whip that had rained on Yalo’s back.

Yalo discovered that a man was capable of anything. That was what Madame Randa taught him. With her he discovered his body as separate parts for pleasure. She taught him how to kiss. No, the kiss was the first lesson Elvira had inculcated in him — Elvira who married Isa, the director of the Banca di Roma branch in Hamra, even though she loved Yalo. But the women of the war made him forget the taste of that kiss until Madame Randa came along and randified his lips.

Elvira told him that she loved him but was going to marry Isa because he was rich. Yalo was not sad. It is true that he loved this girl who was five years older than he was, but when she told him that she was going to get married, he felt as if he had already heard the words before, and that he had been expecting them for a while. He looked at her with sad eyes and then lifted her dress to give her tan thighs a farewell caress.

Yalo forgot Elvira the moment he was plunged into the war and its women. Where did they come from? Why was love like combat? And why did everything taste like sawdust?

The first kiss happened at the girls’ school. There Yalo and his friends spied on the girls as they played volleyball in short shorts that exposed their thighs. The boys’ gazes infiltrated the chain-link gate, generating the shiver that made their pants strain and erected the thorn that needed picking. Elvira jumped, her smooth tan legs glowing behind the iron network. There, Elvira taught him everything. She went back to the neighborhood with him, hanging back as if she were afraid. He waited for her in the afternoon every Saturday behind the school gate, and when the game was over she put on her short dark blue skirt and found him waiting for her. They walked together from Raml al-Zarif, where the school was located, to her house in the Syriac Quarter. She held Yalo’s arm and said, “You’re five years younger than me. My goodness, if Auntie Gaby knew that I had snagged you!” When he told her that he loved her, she stroked his back and said, “Go play with girls your own age.” She tightened her grip on his elbow and his thorn was inflamed with desire and he tried to kiss her on the neck. “Not here in the street,” she said. In front of her house she invited him up but he hesitated. “Come up, I want to show you something.” He went upstairs to find the house empty. He sat in the living room and she asked him to wait a little because she wanted to take a shower. She reappeared just after in a loose white dress, sat beside him, and kissed him on the lips. He bent toward her and put his lips on hers, and tensely imagined that this would be like a movie. Elvira pulled her head away and said, “Not like that. Close your eyes and don’t move.” He closed them and felt something probing around his lips. Again he pulled her close.

“I told you not like that. Sit and don’t move.”

She asked him to close his eyes and her lips began to ascend his face, then he felt a lip come between his lips and the flavor entered his mouth. He felt her tongue and began to feel dizzy. The lips withdrew and he heard Elvira’s voice asking him to open his eyes and kiss her as she had just kissed him. She closed her eyes and leaned back on the edge of the sofa, Yalo’s lips approached her face and began to scale it slowly, reaching her lips. He tried to put his upper lip between hers but didn’t succeed. Opening his lips and taking hers inside his, he wanted to devour her two red lips. He felt her hand pushing him back, but he did not retreat. He took her mouth in his, and his lips entered the kissing game. He kissed her and was not sated until pain spread throughout his lips. Elvira waited for his kisses, resting her head on his arm, her eyes closed, inviting him to the banquet of her lips.

“Ouch,” said Yalo. “My lips are sore.”

She got up and said she would make some tea. Yalo stood up and hugged her. At that moment, when his body clung to hers, he ejaculated, and Yalo shivered with the desire that had unfurled before he began. He felt the ache in his thorn and kept clasping the waist of the girl who whispered a request for him to move back a little.

“Please, please, you’re staining my dress.”

He moved back and saw the stains on his pants and the wet halos on her dress. She kissed him hurriedly and asked him to leave before her mother came home and saw him this way.

“What am I supposed to do?” he asked her.

“Don’t do anything,” she said. “Go for a walk before you go home, and your pants will dry out.”

Walking had become his mandatory workout with Elvira. He’d walk her home and hug her behind the gate at the entrance to the building, then he’d walk around for a whole hour so that his pants would be dry before he went home.

Everything changed when Elvira took him to a discothèque called Le Quartier Latin in Ramlet al-Baida near the Egyptian Embassy. And there, in the dark, while they were dancing the tango in the dark, he felt his thorn grow and she told him, “No, not like this, today.” She went back with him to the darkened corner where they had been sitting. She asked him to unzip his pants, she took the thorn in her hands and put it between her thighs, and there, in the dark, he saw her, he saw the short shorts and the girl who jumped with the flying ball, and his heart opened up and he wanted to shout, but she put her hand over his mouth and asked him to come. “Go ahead, love, come.” When he heard the word “Come,” everything exploded, and his white blood spread over her thighs. She snatched a paper tissue and wiped up the spill: “You’re a true stud!” she said, wiping off the thorn and restoring it to its place inside his pants.

Yalo picked up the glass of wine in front of him to take a drink. “No,” she said. “Not now. Now give me your hand.” She took his hand and pulled it under her skirt, and began to move and moan, and asked him to kiss her ear.

“No, not here. Put it between your lips.”

She put the curve of her ear between his lips, and he licked it with his tongue, and heard Elvira’s suppressed cry, but kept following the movements of his fingers.

“That’s enough,” she said. “Hands off. It hurts.”

He withdrew his hand, drained the glass of wine in one swallow, and told her that he loved her: “I love you more than anything in the world.”