Nishan looked closely at the pictures and noticed that when he looked at them in the order they were taken, he could see the fatigue on Jorge’s face gradually increase. In photo after photo, his eyes wandered more and more and his facial features tightened as if he were suffering from a gradually worsening pain. Nishan concluded that the young photographer had sensed his impending death and thus tried as best he could to make the final moments of his life last forever, which led the Armenian to further conclude that Jorge either poisoned himself or was poisoned by someone and when he realised he was in the final death throes he decided to photograph his own death. It was an idea that was supported by the fact that in the pictures Jorge was wearing the same clothes he was wearing when they found him dead, and sitting on the same chair, the one he used to invite his customers to sit on.
His relatives divided up the contents of his house amongst themselves. Later, one of them tried to sell the photography equipment to Nishan, but he refused. Not only because he didn’t need it for his work, but because a strange feeling overtook him that he shouldn’t go near Jorge’s belongings; he felt they might be cursed and would rub off on him.
A Bigamist Caught!
Mrs. M.N. formally accused her husband, 54-year-old Mr. S.S., of attempting to marry another woman, in a fraudulent manner and in violation of the personal affairs law for non-Mohammadans. Mrs. M.N. made the accusations before a judge in Tripoli. Court police officers arrested the accused Mr. S.S. in the remote village of Abra, where he had persuaded a priest to lead the ceremony of his marriage to Miss T.F., a young woman twenty-five years his junior. When police arrived, the accused attempted to flee but tripped over the bride’s wedding gown, falling to the ground, right into the hands of the law.
(The Telegraph, 10 October 1959)
No one knew how Shafiq al-Semaani had been able to convince his wife that the reason for his persistent absence from home was to pursue profitable job opportunities. However, people who knew the wife, who was both obstinate and observant, said that there was nothing stopping her from knowing her husband’s true doings, but deep down she loved him and wanted him to stay away from the town out of concern for his life, even if everyone laughed at her for being so naïve. Shafiq cheated on his wife, but she was perfectly content. She was happy whenever he came home and then made it easy for him to take off again. She did his laundry and cooked his meals. In fact, some said she actually seemed proud of her husband’s success with the ladies and always had a smug smile on her face. One could not mistake her pride one time when a woman came up to her at Samih’s Bakery and whispered some advice: to watch her husband. She used to ask about the details of his escapades and wanted to know everything – names, places, how beautiful his lovers were – but she never confronted him about it. Above all else, she didn’t want him to go down the same path as his brother, Farid. Farid Badwi al-Semaani, the Bear Plum, who was versed in every manner of evil. She herself found it hard to believe that they were brothers, except when she looked at her husband’s face and saw the wart on his left cheek. It was in the exact same spot as the one on Farid’s cheek.
Shafiq loved pleasure and loved women and no doubt had discovered the quickest way to their hearts: enjoyment and laughter. He loved his ‘conferences’ as he called them. He had an insatiable appetite for re-enacting the same scenario whenever it was within his means: a banquet at some country restaurant or one with a view of a river or the sea, spread with a colourful, garden-like display of hors d’oeuvres. Food was to be enjoyed with the eyes, as he put it so succinctly, while gazing at all those appetising mezze dishes laid out on the table, waiting for his dinner guests to arrive, a handful of friends, none of them from Barqa. He would arrive at the restaurant before them in order to put his personal finishing touches on the feast.
He chose his friends from distant places, knowing they wouldn’t broadcast his news where he didn’t want it to go. The group would not be complete without the inclusion of some women at the table, even if they were generally much fewer than the men. And these women were unusual. They had loose tongues, smoked hookah pipes and drank arak. Undoubtedly they were of lowly backgrounds, women he alone knew how to coax out of their dens. As a general rule, he also made sure to befriend an oud player with a beautiful voice. He wouldn’t prompt him to start singing until after the spirits had had a chance to go to everyone’s heads a little, at which time he would pull out the oud from its cloth case, hand it to the singer himself and let the party begin.
In reality, despite the presence of waiters at the restaurant, he spent half of the evening standing, unable to refrain from serving his friends. That was the ideal he constantly tried to emulate, every day. Every action he undertook before and after noon, all of his daily activities, could be summarised as one long effort to prepare the table for dinner. And Shafiq got much more enjoyment from watching the others eat than from eating himself. Food was to be seen with the eyes, after all: all those dishes spread out on the table, and all the people eating it, too. He offered little bites to them and invited them to taste the various dishes carefully arranged. Those dinners, even though they took place in restaurants, were never without some dish he had brought himself. He would order the shankleesheh specially from Rahbeh, the village he knew was famous for it, or he would buy some green onions from a seller who planted them behind his house and gave them clean, fresh water. He didn’t care about what was going on in town, but if he was forced to put his two cents in he would say he loved everyone, everyone was his friend, and life was short and should be lived to the fullest.
Nothing muddied the purity of his pleasure except the daily reminder of his brother Farid’s propensity for fighting and guns. He had anticipated hearing the news of his brother’s murder right up until the day it actually reached him while he was on one of those outings of his through the towns of Mount Lebanon. His eyes filled with tears. He said he had been expecting that news for ages. He asked if Farid had suffered and was told he had died instantly, which gave him some solace before he headed home to his family. The killing of his brother Farid was a devastating blow to Shafiq’s life. The call to revenge beckoned him and along he went with his relatives. They tried to block roads and mount ambushes, but weren’t successful, so he started wearing a gun at his waist and justified it by claiming he had been struck. In other words, he’d been struck by the disaster that befell his brother. His carrying a gun was merely a way of showing his agreement with the basic premise of revenge, but actually going down the path that led to it was another matter altogether. He cut himself off from his buddies for about a month, but then little by little went back to his old ways.
It was clear to those close to him that what he was really up to was chasing after women, and all the organised get-togethers were nothing but bait to catch them. Indeed, he was able to achieve some success in that area, more than he had expected. And his record continued to improve despite his advancing age. As he got older his conquests from among the fairer sex were increasingly younger. He did have faults, such as winking to his friends about women in their presence and signalling his ability to lure them into his trap. Similarly, he used a multitude of hand signals and facial gestures suggestive of his indomitable sexual prowess. He was known for pounding his fists rapidly against his chest to express his pressing need to have sex – which he would have done right then and there were it not for the presence of his friends. On the faces of his companions, before whom he put all his sexual ambitions out on display, were tepid smiles feigning belief in his heroic escapades. It would get to the point where he believed them himself and began cornering some young woman and applying his seductions until he coaxed out of her the kind of response he was looking for.
However, one particularly beautiful and realistic country girl laid down the condition, as he pounded his chest with his fists in anticipation, that before she would submit to him he had to marry her. He had kept his personal life hidden from her completely, while she was good at stringing him
along with that natural instinct women possess, even those with little schooling. She was much better than him at plotting and scheming. She would let him hold her hand and let his hand stray onto her thigh only to burst suddenly into tears and claim she was being mistreated and men were always trying to take advantage of her innocence. He was just like everyone else, she’d say, interested in getting her now only to turn around and toss her aside later on. He was afraid of losing her, so he began to secretly plot to marry her, making sure to keep the plan from his friends. But eventually the girl talked and the plan fell on the ears of the spy his wife had planted among his friends. His wife had made an agreement with the spy to tell her only things that might put her husband’s life in danger or expose his family to ridicule or harm. And that was exactly what happened. He told her that her husband was going to get married on Sunday in Abra. She arrived right in the middle of the ululations, got out of the taxi, walked up to him and said, ‘Come on home.’ Then she turned to his bride with contempt and said to her, ‘Did you try him out first at least?’
Laying Claim to the Church and the Cemetery
The priest and parish council of the town of Kfarbayda have hired attorney Nasib al-Sawda to file a case in the North District Criminal Court against Mr. F.R., asserting that he counterfeited or aided in the counterfeiting of documents giving him the right to ownership of the plot of land upon which the town’s church – Saint Joseph’s Church of the Epiphany – is built. The plot includes the cemetery behind the church where the townspeople’s remains have rested for hundreds of years. Court documents indicate the defendant is outside Lebanese soil at the present time and has been served with a court summons.
(Al-Nafeer, 12 September 1961)
A thread of poor luck seemed to run through his entire life. In 1956 he almost won the special New Year’s grand prize draw in the Lebanese National Lottery, missing it by just one number. Of course, that was only because the people in charge of the lottery had fixed the results, having rigged them ahead of time in favour of their relatives and other people with whom they would split the winnings. ‘Crooks,’ he used to say, with emphasis and shaking his head like someone who knew what he was talking about. Then there was the time at the roulette table in the casino in Nice, France, where he had been a guest of one of those filthy rich people who enjoyed listening to his stories despite knowing they were a pack of lies, because they benefited from his talent with the ladies. The metal ball jumped onto number 14 after everyone around the table had been certain it had settled on 13; the number he had bet everything on. The only reason it jumped was to prevent him from winning big time.
‘It’s the mafia. They have magnets under the table to make the metal ball land wherever they want. It’s just not written for me to be comfortable . . .’
What he meant by ‘comfortable’ was being able to accumulate enough money to settle down. In Caracas, Venezuela, at the dog races, the same fate fell upon the animal he’d bet on. The dog had led for the whole race, way ahead of the pack, and then suddenly stopped. When he reached the final stretch, for some reason no one could understand, he stopped and looked behind, as if he were missing his friends and didn’t want to be so far away from them. He lowered his head and rubbed it in the sand while the other dogs sped past him and he ended up finishing last.
‘Who bets on a dog, anyway?’ he would ask himself. At the horse races in Beirut, he would lose on a photo finish.
‘I swear to God the jockey pulled the reins. I saw him with my own eyes.’
Then one day, because he accepted a friend’s invitation for a morning cup of coffee, he was late getting to the estate agent’s and missed the opportunity of a lifetime by fifteen minutes: a piece of land in the Al-Tall area of Tripoli that would have made him and his children’s children rich for generations. He never told of a single success in his entire life. He was just like a gambler who only tells you about his hard luck. Gambling was a losing game.
Nevertheless he lived like a prince, refined and well dressed, a wide gold chain around his neck and an expensive gold watch on his wrist. He went to the dentist regularly, took good care of his fingernails, and was one of the first to dye his hair for fear of inheriting a family tendency to turn grey early. He was terrified of his hair falling out and the possibility of going bald. He never rested from his escapades into God’s wide world. He filled the pages of three passports, which he saved and bound together. He showed them off to everyone, visa after visa, from Costa Rica to Equatorial Guinea. Sometimes he would return to his hometown vanquished, with broken wings, so bankrupt that if he pulled his pockets inside out not a single lira would fall out. He’d sleep at a relative’s who would grudgingly take him in.
But soon enough he would disappear, after catching wind of things he didn’t like to hear, such as ‘The atmosphere in town isn’t clean,’ or ‘God help us from those two days . . .’ He knew the stories about killing and vendettas would start up again, too. They had been weaned on killing, he said that about them with a certain amount of pity, and then set off again. He would strike up a new plan, head in a new direction, as if he could sniff out money from afar. The moment his friends came into some money, he found out about it. The news of who’d won at gambling or who’d been lucky in the wheat market or selling diamonds would come out, and he would show up at the winner’s door while the money was still fresh. He’d show up with all his stories and his jokes.
‘Did you smell it or something?’ they would ask him, laughing.
He never asked for money, but he always got it. He knew the Lebanese communities by heart, naturally preferring the rich people if they were still in their youth and the gamblers if they were old. He sought the generosity of rich young men looking for women and the foolishness of gamblers, but he spent almost his entire life taking from the rich in return for charm and ladies and giving to the gamblers in return for an obscure form of pleasure only they could give him: the pleasure of losing. Sometimes, though, he would get cut off in exile. He would run out of money all of a sudden after a wild night of uncontrolled drinking and dancing on tables in Santo Domingo or Havana with a brunette capable of seducing the devil. In Cuba, he had fruitlessly tried to pursue an old aunt who was said to have come to the island by mistake on her way to the United States, decided to stay and made a fortune from tobacco farming.
However, he was not lacking in wiliness. He would go to Lima airport, for example, ask for a telephone book and search under ‘K’ for all the ‘Kfourys’, confident that there were members of the Kfoury family in every corner of the world. He wouldn’t hesitate to call one of the numbers which stood out to him, and after a short conversation in which he explained that he’d been forced to leave his hometown suddenly because of the violent events taking place all around him and that some relatives of his had been murdered there in the Burj al-Hawa incident and now revenge killings were being carried out in every nook and cranny. He’d come to the Peruvian capital to escape and now he didn’t know what to do. In fact, he knew well what to do, for he captivated them with his story. But no sooner would he catch a whiff of the palm of his own hand than he would start yearning to play poker again. No one knows how he found his way to those Lebanese who could not be cured of the vice of gambling no matter how far they travelled. He competed with them at tequila drinking and bluffing opponents and forcing them to fold, until one night he got lucky and won all the money on the table. One of them who was from a town near Barqa became furious. After losing all the money he had in his pocket, he pulled out some Lebanese property deeds and asked for their value in cash. Upon inspection he discovered they were very large parcels, so he gave him what he figured was a good percentage of what they were worth. He put them away in his suitcase and nearly forgot all about them, until he was down on his luck again and went back to his hometown. The situation had calmed down and people had gone back about their business. He was penniless again, so he fished out his newly acquired deeds with the intention of selling them and using
the money to set off again. He found a buyer willing to buy the deeds without carefully inspecting them, because he had offered them at a very low price. The buyer was afraid he might change his mind so he was quick to pay, requesting that he sign a bill of sale before the notary public to conclude the deal before the transfer of title to its new owner was listed on the real estate ledger. And once again, off he went into God’s wide world.
Chapter 15
Muhsin chose the millstone, the one in the nearby olive press. One day, when the first barricades were being set up, all the neighbourhood boys worked together to push the massive stone out onto the street and set it up as a barricade for him. But Muhsin wouldn’t go near it until all the olive residue was cleaned off of it, that job having been delegated to others so the fighter, who should not have to stoop to such menial tasks, could concentrate on the weapons and the attack. Regardless, when Muhsin later sat behind it throughout the days of the revolution, from April to September of 1958, he wouldn’t stop picking at the little black specks of olive residue and removing them with his pocket knife with its seven blades and seven switches, which he never parted with. He plugged up the hole in the centre of the stone with three small sandbags, leaving one small peephole through which he slid the nose of his long barrel rifle and took aim at the opposing barricade. At first they had given him what they called a ‘Model’ rifle, but he hadn’t warmed to it.
‘It doesn’t scope well,’ he said, without bothering as one might expect to explain this new verb. We had never it heard before and had no idea where he had got it from. It was possible he coined the term when he fired the Model rifle, missed his target and decided to blame it on the rifle.
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