Elias Khoury - Yalo

He asked her the question but she did not know what to say.

She thought of saying that it was velvet. The tailor used to love velvet so much, he used to ask her to put on blue velvet slacks so that he could unbutton the buttons, and let his hand wander between the velvet of her slacks and the silk of her white breasts.

“Look in the mirror,” he said when they had finished making love. “Look how beautiful you are, look how beautiful love makes you.”

She said he was a dog. “Dogs are the most important thing. It’s dogs who come out of mankind’s navel.”

No, he said, and the little hollow that sliced through his right cheek expanded. Gaby used to love this scar that was the mark of her teacher’s manliness, when he was struck with a razor on his cheek by a swindler playing a shell game in Bourj Square. Elias told his story of the shell-game player many times, and each time the story ended with the blood that streamed down his face, and how he successfully arrested the swindler and drove him to the police station. Then he’d touch his cheek and say, “Ouch.”

But now she no longer responded with “May God be with you,” because she no longer cared. Love was waning and expectations were gone, and all that remained was a deathly feeling of solitude with a man she couldn’t leave because she didn’t know how.

Gaby told no one that she felt an indescribable yearning for the man and that the yearning began in her arms; a shudder would invade her arms, which would become nearly suffocating waves pressing against her rib cage. She didn’t understand this sensation, since she hated him and hated his odor. “At first smelling his odor disgusted me,” Gaby said. She did not realize that through all those years it was her own odor she was smelling. When she was near the man, she gave off a feminine smell that overwhelmed everything else. When Gaby’s desire died, she began to smell his odor, the odor of cracked skin mingled with decay.

Yalo, no.

Yalo smelled his own odor only here, when it mingled with his excrement. Yalo realized suddenly that he might be unable to prove his innocence, and he grew terrified of the words he was writing.

Yalo said that he had to get out of prison in order to accomplish one goal. He would go to Shirin so that he could smell the fragrance of the incense that her arms gave off. That fragrance was love, and Yalo wanted to remember love to restore the scent of life. He tried to write everything, but he wrote only very little. He read the pages and felt the lashes of the whip and the electricity that tore out his fingernails and toenails. The interrogator would grab the pages and throw them in his face because he had not written his whole life story. Yalo did not know how any person could remember his whole life story, and even if one could remember it, the time needed to write it down would be no less than the time it took to live it. Yalo smiled at that thought. He would say “Yes, sir” before explaining his theory about how no one in the world was capable of writing the whole story of his life. Even Jurji Zaidan, whose books Gaby brought home but never read, even Jurji Zaidan, all of whose books about the history of the Arabs Yalo had read, wrote a million pages about others, and then when he wrote his memoirs, he had nothing to say.

Yalo did not understand why they tortured him this much, or why there had to be the period of waiting before more unimaginable torture set in. Was this because of Shirin and the cars, the night in Ballouna? Why didn’t they prosecute the whole Lebanese people? Yalo was sure that everyone in Lebanon made love in cars. So why just him? Why were the other lovers not prosecuted? Was it because he stole? And who didn’t steal? His grandfather told him that everyone stole, and that one of the saints wrote that all the rich were thieves, so people could get rich only by stealing from others. “Look, my boy,” said the cohno . “Look well. Everyone is putting his hand in someone else’s pocket. Look well, my boy. You have to see behind things, and a man cannot see what is behind things unless he has the grace of the Gospel. Look, and learn how to accept grace, and then you will see. And when you see, you will discover that the greatest curse on mankind is the hand. Sin lies in the hand, and when a man puts his hand in his neighbor’s pocket, and the neighbor into yet another’s pocket, and so on, then that is society. That is why the saintly fathers withdrew from the world.”

“And you, Grandfather, why didn’t you withdraw?”

“Because I’m not a saint. I am just a poor soul. I don’t know why my life has unfolded as it has, or if it has any meaning.”

Yalo laughed when he saw how the fear of God make his grandfather’s hand tremble. For Yalo knew that things were different; the discovery that Yalo made in Ballouna was greater than all his experiences in the war. The war taught him death, but Ballouna taught him that everything was death, or resembled death, and that the hand was in fact an extension of the penis. He learned this with Randa, before discovering the darkness in the forest where the differences between the parts of the human body were erased. The lovers in the cars taught him that man could be like a sardine covered in the oil of sex. The cars were like sardine cans, and the people were curvy fish swimming in oil. He liked this idea and decided to add it to his first idea about writing. He took out a blank sheet of paper and wrote. This was the first time he had written anything beyond what the interrogation required.

He wrote, first, that a person could not write his life; he had to choose between living and writing. Yalo had chosen to live; therefore he wrote what the interrogation required. But he did not want to end as Jurji Zaidan had ended, excavating the lives of others; he preferred that writers excavate his life, that is if they wanted to write a love story unlike any other.

He wrote, second, that everyone desires everyone, and that his experience had taught him, as he observed the lovers in Ballouna, that most lovers committed betrayal or accepted it. And that even he himself, when he loved Shirin, would betray her when he got the chance, because “the scent of treachery is the sweetest scent.” He had stolen this idea from Madame Randa, who told him during one of her randifications with him that betrayal was the sweetest thing, and that she had begun to worry that she would get used to it and would no longer feel treacherous when she was with him.

Third, he wrote that all ideas were stolen, and that people spent their time stealing ideas from one another.

Yalo was cheered as he wrote down these three thoughts in the form of three consecutive sentences:

1. No one is capable of writing his life.

2. Desires are in desires.

3. All ideas are stolen.

He felt a strange relief, and decided to revise the story of his life. He would write it in a condensed and clear form and would offer two versions to the interrogator the next day: a detailed version, and a condensed version eloquently relating his life.

He sat behind the green table puffing at his pen as if he were smoking a cigarette, and began.

Sir, respected judge.

I want to add these pages to the story of my life that you requested me to write, and which you will find in the personal file of the accused, Daniel Abel Abyad, called Yalo.

Sir, I want to seek a pardon. For in the two months I spent in solitary confinement, with nothing but white pages and the Holy Bible to keep me company, I discovered that I am not Yalo the criminal.

No, no, I am not pleading insanity as criminals do to escape the noose. No sir, I am no longer that Yalo. I discovered, as I was writing the story of my life, that I am no longer him. The days I spent in interrogation, and my reading of the Bible, made me discover that I was reborn. For this, sir, I go back to the Gospel and all the holy books. When they say, In the beginning was the Word, that means the word was the first thing. And when I wrote the story of my life, I discovered the word that created me anew. I do not know how to explain that in plain Arabic, but as I saw my entire life pass before me from beginning to end, I was convinced that I had become a new man, just as I was convinced that the old Yalo was not conscious of the things he did. I mean, he did not fashion his life as he would have liked, he was like a hypnotized person and it would not be fair for a man to pay the price of deeds that he did not chose to perform. Yalo the tall phantom in a black overcoat, who descended upon lovers’ cars, Yalo who fought and killed, laughing all the time — he is gone for good.