As for the people we longed to see every week, on Sunday mornings when they showed two movies, no three, for the price of one – or excerpts of the films rather – at a reduced rate, they weren’t anything like our relatives. They were short-statured heroes like Eddie Murphy or masked men like the Lone Ranger and his stubborn horse, or more obscure faces like Jack Palance who stirred our emotions when they were victorious. We clapped and cheered for them just as we did all of Easter Week when, in addition to us, the theatre was taken over by numerous members of religious brotherhoods and zealous mass-goers wanting to see The Life and Passion of Christ. It was dubbed in Arabic, with the exception of the scene when Christ crucified calls to His heavenly Father and the dubber decided to say it in Aramaic, ‘Eloi, Eloi, Lama sabachtani.’ There would be huge applause every day from Monday to Sunday when Mary and the women went to Jesus’s tomb and found the stone had been moved away and the tomb was empty. For reasons that weren’t clear, there seemed to be a link between religious piety and the cinema. The owner of the theatre, for example, would hire a man to carry movie advertisements accompanied by a boy ringing a bell. One day he went into one of the inner neighbourhoods holding a picture of Ava Gardner. It was May, the month devoted to the Virgin, and some of the women thought it was a procession with an icon of the Virgin Mary so they stopped what they were doing to make the sign of the cross.
We remembered the theatre sometimes more than we remembered the movies. The owner named it after his son, Marcel, and we would wait until the film started before going up to the ticket window and offering the few coins we had in our possession and he would reluctantly let us in.
When we divided into two quarters and no one but those who had acquired a high level of neutrality dared travel between the two, a second movie theatre opened up for those who were banned from Marcel Cinema. The same films, however, were shown and circulated between the two theatres under agreement of the two owners. And when one of us would miss one of those adventure films when it was shown in the Lower Quarter theatre and heard us talking about it in glowing terms, he felt as if he would suffer an eternal deprivation if he didn’t see it, and so he would go out at night to the Upper Quarter to see it. And although no one there ever recognised him, he’d return to us as if from a successful clandestine military operation, and we would want to congratulate him on his bravery.
They would say that gambling and women revealed a man. Expounding this wise saying might be a lengthy exercise, and even then it wouldn’t reveal how it was possible for the game of Quatorze to have ‘revealed’ Madame Almaaz, one of the most famous of those ladies who fell in love with card playing. She competed with men, outlasting them all night and into the early hours of dawn. To a certain small group of women, playing cards was evidence of their membership in a tight knit circle that frequented the homes of the upper echelon, and it also marked their liberation from housework and other household concerns. For an eligible bachelor aspiring to marry, however, to never have touched a deck of cards was a highly praiseworthy achievement. After all, gambling was one of the quickest ways down the path of domestic destruction.
With the exception of backgammon, with its Turkish words for counting numbers, the new card games, roulette and the rest, came with an extensive French vocabulary, one that also enriched horse racing and betting on horses. Some people specialised in Paroli or unofficial betting offices that doubled winnings and losses. There were also those who became embroiled in horse ‘tugging’ and jockey bribing. And alongside gambling, ‘alongside’ meaning ‘in proximity to’ the poker and baccarat tables, they also practised what they themselves called ‘interest loaning’, in other words, they kept cash in their pockets with which they could instantly cover a losing gambler’s loss so that he could keep playing, in return for very high interest. And they either demanded a promissory note from the debtor or they advanced it to him based on knowing who he was and the certainty that the revolver the lenders carried at their hips guaranteed repayment of the loan, plus interest. Their visits to the Casino du Liban area, where they stationed themselves in anticipation of customers eager to continue placing their bets at the classic roulette table, gave them the chance to meet a class of people they would not otherwise meet. There were sons of rich families from Beirut or Aleppo spending their inheritance and draining the big bank accounts their forefathers had accumulated through profits made in early trading in pharmaceuticals, or household appliances, or cars. And there were all sorts of journalists, poets, and artists who lived out a nightly drama in front of electronic gaming devices or with the hope of getting a ‘zero’ at the roulette table.
There was a story people told about the WWII years about an English soldier in the Upper Hariq district, where the English had a military base, who chanced upon a watchman in one of the olive groves famous for their excellent oil and red soil. The watchman was whipping a poor horse that had refused to budge so hard he made him bleed. The soldier immediately shot the horse in the head and then swung his heavy fist at the watchman’s face so hard it knocked him to the ground, where he left him lying, nearly unconscious, beside the animal, not knowing what crime he had committed. People said that the English soldier had done that because he wanted to put the animal out of the misery it had been suffering at the hands of its ‘barbaric’ owner. At least that was how the locals explained the actions of the soldier who never said a word about it himself.
As for the lesson, if that’s truly what the soldier was after, it was useless, because we went on hitting donkeys with mulberry sticks to make them move and lit fires under mules’ tails if they stumbled or bit their ears to make them get up. We shot at migratory birds, so much that it was said they eventually instinctively altered their migratory pattern to avoid our town, used sticks of dynamite to fish in the river, and kicked tomcats the moment they tried to gain our affection and come inside our circle. When it got to where we set up barricades in front of each other in 1958, we became reckless to the point of strapping dynamite onto dogs or donkeys and sending them across the frontlines in the hope of causing as much destruction as possible, but they’d die half way and their loads would blow up, taken down by the bullets fired at them from behind the opposing barricades. When we wanted to characterise someone as having low morals or as being inferior, we called him a dog, and the best way to defame someone was to write on the walls in the main square that so-and-so was ‘the biggest donkey in all of Syria and Lebanon’. We may have added Syria to Lebanon in order to broaden the geographic circle and thereby include a huge number of people and increase the insult.
For us there were only two types of dog. One was the mongrel – that is, the ugly stray kind of dog that was of no use and had no name. It was filthy and children were afraid of its bite; the worst thing in the world was if the dog was afflicted with rabies. These dogs disappeared little by little from the inhabited areas and eventually only a few, select dogs remained, kept by shepherds. The other kind of dog was the clean and coddled hunting dog that had a name and responded to it and to its owner’s whistle by perking its ears. It was part of a man’s equipment, and men built these dogs wooden kennels in the yard and fed them a balanced diet. Training them became so extensive that one man even taught the dog to fetch his gun from its hiding place whenever he heard an unexplained movement or rustling sound and prompted him to get ready to fight.
Then came another type of dog, which made its way into the homes of the spoiled daughters of dignitaries who attended the elite nuns’ school in Beirut. When they first appeared, they were small and could be held and patted, and there wasn’t anything surprising about the matter until the big shock we had the day we saw a young man from our town walking down the main street. We knew the young man was one of us and it was clear he resembled us, and even if he had been away from the town a little while, he was still one of us. We saw him walking down the street leading a strange-looking dog on leash. It was a miniature dog one might say, and he had stitched a little embroidered harn
ess for it and attached something that dangled from its neck. Some of the young men whistled at him disapprovingly, but what made the shock an even bigger blow was that he didn’t show the least bit of concern. Actually, and perhaps in an act of bravado, he motioned to the little doggie and it jumped up into his arms. He picked him up and walked away while the dog looked in wonder at us with his little eyes from over his owner’s shoulder, protected by him from the harm he instinctively felt we might inflict on him. From that day forward we had our suspicions about that man’s manhood, considering his preference to befriend a little dog over us, but a much deeper feeling struck us even if we didn’t reveal it, which was that the world was changing and there was nothing we could do to stop it.
Chapter 11
Eliyya set out into the streets of New York and, for more than twenty years, never slowed down. Like a toddler he discovered the pleasure of walking by himself and savoured it, the way a swimmer savours plunging into water. No wonder he didn’t last more than a month in the mechanical engineering course that, in accordance with his original plan, he registered for the moment he arrived. Those dust-ridden professors’ lectures soon reminded him of dull physics lessons from high school. So he quit the university and though he didn’t need the money, he answered a classified ad he saw in the subway and took a job in a fast-food restaurant in one of the city suburbs. In the backroom bathroom there, he experienced his first kiss. He kept his eyes closed while kissing one of the waitresses, who told him that she preferred to see his eyes open when he kissed her, because that excited her more.
After learning how to make every kind of pizza, he decided he’d had enough and started taking German lessons from a blonde American teacher he dreamed of dating. He tried every trick in the book, but in vain. At his first lesson she asked him in English why he had chosen to learn the language of Goethe, so he told her he was preparing himself to major in philosophy and made a facial expression suggesting that was understandable. That spontaneous answer of his may actually have driven him to attend lectures on Hegel’s philosophy he otherwise never would have dreamt of attending. He stuck with it despite not understanding much, or rather without understanding anything, though he refused to admit he hadn’t been able to grasp concepts like Begriff or Aufhebung. He stayed put as if nailed to his chair, not understanding a thing and making sure not to give the impression that he did understand, in case the lecturer asked him a revealing question he couldn’t answer. After a month’s time, however, he was able to pick up some imperfect expressions and ideas that reverberated in his head and enabled him to pretend he was an expert in German philosophy.
To compensate for the theoretical imprisonment that nearly sucked out all his emotions, he joined the New York Knicks basketball team fan club with a sweeping and excessive enthusiasm that was comical coming from a newcomer to the giant city. For an entire season he didn’t miss a single game, sometimes travelling with the Knicks to whichever state their schedule took them. A deep-seated desire to learn began to consume him again whenever he became idle for any period of time, as though his life had come to depend on resuming the lifestyle of the Gang Quarter kids balanced with a desire for every aspect of knowledge, the one making amends for the other in one way or another. And so Eliyya headed back to the university, but primarily as an auditor, convinced from the outset that his stay there would not be long.
His languages, or half-languages, became quite numerous, infringing on each other and getting all tangled up. He realised how strange his condition was when ideas and questions started coming to him in French while other ideas enticed him in English or even in German. And he embellished these languages with some phrases in Latin, too, while little by little the influence of Arabic began to diminish. He was happy with this polyphony and actually worked as an interpreter for the scientific delegations that never stopped coming to New York. He also worked as a security guard at an amusement park and as a taxi driver in order to gain life experience, as he said, referring to a scene in a movie he saw three times but whose title he didn’t know, having arrived too late to the cinema each time to catch the opening credits.
Likewise, he constantly changed his residence. He moved from one apartment to another, taking some paintings, two boxes of books – mostly dictionaries – and a basketball signed by Magic Johnson with him. He changed his residence as often as he changed his glasses, tiring of the wide frames in favour of thin lenses and dark sunglasses before settling on contact lenses. Public libraries, especially university libraries, never failed to provide him with the perfect backdrop for his activities. It did not take him long to discover that he had a quality that girls found comforting. He always found himself surrounded by humanities students who were more attracted to a man’s intellect than his broad shoulders. Eliyya went overboard with alluring talk and whenever he discussed any topic, he was a master in the art of suggesting he knew more than he was saying. To this end he resorted to embarrassing others with statements like, ‘You must know, of course, that Picasso was stingy’ or ‘Soon the neo-Trotskyites will rule the United States, as you well know,’ leaving them with a blank stare of ignorance and in awe of Eliyya’s unquestionable superiority.
Early on he began collecting literary and philosophic quotations. Short sentences he picked up here and there, from Saint Augustine to Jacques Derrida, and wrote down in a notebook and tried to memorise for future use, things that would have a strong impact when needed and give the impression he had a saying for every occasion. That was one of his methods of seduction. And during that period, before he went to sleep each night, he always wrote down at least one sentence he dug out from his personal feelings, even if it had become difficult to distinguish his own thoughts from those he’d memorised from the geniuses of the world. He promoted the idea sometimes that he was the last of the romantics and other times the first of the numerologists, publicising his preference for French surrealist painting by dropping the names of obscure artists and poets as if they were his close friends.
At the other end of the spectrum of human desire, cooking was his chosen method of seduction. He learned how to cook from books and practised preparing dishes with a high level of patience that always rewarded him. He studied food in books and if the topic was brought up in conversation he shocked anyone listening with his uncanny ability to differentiate between the ingredients used in Thai cuisine and the basic ingredients in Korean cooking. He memorised a long list of the names of gourmet restaurants in all the New York neighbourhoods. But despite all that, he remained a lone performer who had happily left his family only to tumble all alone into the very place his ancestors had landed a century before him and where their names are still recorded in the register at Ellis Island.
He remained a lonely hunter. His relationships with men and women did not last long because he wasn’t good at managing friendships amidst all those disparate and varied autobiographies which he told about himself. He gave many different answers to any question related to his personal life, to the point where he was afraid to make a mistake and preferred to stay away from anyone he felt he had filled up with imaginary accounts of his life, lest they reveal his illusions. If he met a friend he hadn’t seen in a long time, he sometimes had trouble remembering what profession he had claimed for his father . . . the father who ‘was still alive and well and in the prime of his life’. Or what fate he had chosen for his mother, who he sometimes said had been stunningly beautiful and was now dead. And so in order to avoid a mix-up, he preferred to stop meeting with that friend altogether.
To his arsenal of methods for influencing girls’ minds, he added numerous stories about his childhood, a series of anecdotes that were almost totally fabricated. One such story, which was basically an altered version of the plot to a movie he had just seen, made him out to be of Italian origin, though he didn’t speak his native tongue. He had supposedly been born in a popular neighbourhood in Naples, the one with the steps leading down to the sea. His mother had whisked him away to the
United States for fear he would get caught up in the mafia when he grew up, because his uncles were all involved in it and topped the Carabinieri’s most wanted list. Or, in a turn to the East, he claimed to be originally from the Yemeni city of Taiz and to have been raised between two deserts – the Empty Quarter and Badiyat al-Sham. His father was supposedly an elder in the Shammar tribe who had been convinced by an old English friend from Her Majesty’s Secret Service of the benefits of higher education and so he sent his son – Eliyya that is – to America. This father of his had had the final word at the legendary meeting convened under a tent, where coffee was served to the seated guests, who chose their words carefully as they discussed the issue of whether to lend their support to the government in Sana’a or send secret envoys to hold talks with communist rebels in Aden.
Eliyya’s constant attempts to escape getting caught forced him to change his phone number frequently, until he finally stopped giving his number to anybody and requested to have his name removed from the phone book. And when email became widespread he made up countless email addresses for himself so no one could reach him. He would create an address one day, send messages from it, and then abandon it and switch to another address to avoid receiving the replies. Soon afterwards he created a website under a fake name, though it was derived from his real name – the same website the Gang Quarter kids had discovered – and avoided befriending anyone with any connection to the land of his birth.
June Rain Page 14
