Beirut Hellfire Society

by Rawi Hage

  Pavlov nodded.

  I thought as much. By the way, your father did mention you on a few occasions. As I recall, a peculiar humorous story is attached to your name…about how, as a small child, you noticed a starving dog lingering around the door of the mortuary, so you reached into a scrap bucket and threw entrails to the dog just as churchbells rang out a burial tune. Your father described how, over the next few weeks, every time the bells rang for a funeral the dog would appear at the door and you would feed the creature. That’s when he began to call you Pavlov, isn’t it?

  Well, in any case, my dear Pavlov—if you will allow me to drop the formalities and call you Pavlov? We in the Society are the ones who built and paid for the crematorium that was added to the house in the mountains. And we put your father in charge of it. We also allowed him to use it for his own project. We never minded his altruistic tendencies so long as everything was kept secret.

  But, dear Pavlov, allow me to tell you my life story. I present myself as a prototype for the Hellfire Society membership. I think you will have gathered by now that we are, save your late wonderful father, what one might call hedonists, heathens, idolaters, infidels, Kouffar—even, I would proudly say, happy debauchers. I personally take pride in all these defamatory labels. I routinely frequent forbidden, clandestine places and live by these liberating principles. I embrace both ways, if you know what I mean, so my appetite for bodily experiences has always been ferocious. But let me share with you a few highlights of my life. I do hope that I am not taking too much of your time. Will you tell me to stop when you need me to go?

  Pavlov simply nodded again.

  My dear man, I have lived the life of a libertine. From my father, I inherited a fortune. And later, through a few business endeavours along with my teaching career, I enhanced that fortune. People consider me a vain, selfish person. And I admit I am what you might call an egotistical hedonist, or at best a selfish human being—or so I have been described by former lovers, foes and friends. (Here El-Marquis was overcome, for several seconds, with laughter.) For many years I taught French literature at the Jesuit University of St. Joseph of Beirut. Educating others might well be considered a moral act of giving, but I consciously sought to corrupt the youth, and not only by the Socratic method. My pedagogical approach was different—unorthodox, if you will, and hands-on, to use the vulgar American expression. I taught my students by challenging them, conversing with them, seducing them. Yes, I slept with many of my students and colleagues, in the full knowledge that it was against the social and academic norms. Inside the Jesuit university I taught literature and history, but I believed that teaching should also take place outside of institutions, and with a good dose of intimacy. Your father told me that you are fond of the Greeks. So you must understand that the pedagogical and the sexual are not exclusive. With the Greeks, sometimes it enhanced their thought, solidarity and, consequently, their might.

  El-Marquis laughed again, unleashing a deep cough that soon drove him to stand up and move to the bathroom. Pavlov heard him coughing again through the door, then spitting, and finally twisting the rusty faucets. Then El-Marquis swayed his way back to the large chair he had adorned with his hat, cigarettes and leather purse. He said, Where was I? Oh, yes.

  Many of my students went on to become accomplished in their careers and to live interesting lives, and I consider that this taste of sexual liberation and close intellectual encounters was my most precious epistemological gift to the youth. I say this with utmost sincerity and humility. (He tapped his cigarette delicately on the edge of the ashtray.) I watched them flowering in my arms—male undergraduates liberated from their latent inhibitions, and young, intelligent women who suffered from the inadequacies of the younger men, who were unable to converse with or properly court these beauties, or meaningfully exchange both thought and body fluids.

  Let us take as an example my past student, Florence. Florence, whom I seduced when she was just eighteen. She was une femme-enfant, as the French say when describing a woman who retains the charm and devious behaviour of a child. I set out to perform for her my role as a creator of wonders, histories, literatures, a student of antiquity and a teller of stories—stories of violence and love, and violence in the name of love, and love for the sake of violence, et cetera. I exposed her, as I did all my students, to the poetry of love and my love for poetry. Of course, I started by recommending books and pretending to need to meet in cafés for educational purposes. And yes, I slipped my hand between Florence’s thighs after a few weeks of courting. After that I introduced her to an appreciation of wine, and the benefits of smoking hashish while reciting Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal. Allow me to share with you the following line from this sublime poet—and have no fear, my dear man, I have no intention of seducing you, however nice that might be: Sur l’oreiller du mal c’est Satan Trismégiste…Ah yes, this brings back memories of getting drunk in bed while reading poetry on summer days as the shouts of paddlers on the river, the screams of gamblers from down the road, the play of kids at recess in schoolyards, the occasional August breeze—all these ornaments of seduction entered our open window, and all merged with images from elsewhere, creating the necessary escape for the young and eager to learn.

  To escape the war when it broke out, we impersonated Parisians and researched the names of charlatan poets who had swindled royal ladies in aristocratic salons out of food and money. I remember asking Florence if she would have slept with one of those unbathed French poets, or would have passed out from the smell of their pungent armpits and unwashed genitals coated in perfume and powder. She smiled and said, They can’t be dirtier than you, and we laughed and we kissed. We would try to guess by these poets’ verses who would have been the filthiest of them all. It must have been Rimbaud, she said, because he hardly ever left his bed. But he was in a closet homosexual relationship with a fellow called Paul, I said. Just imagine the perfume Paul must have enjoyed! And yes, of course, I was the one to touch her virginity, and who better than a person who has esteem for slow, penetrating thoughts and deep inquisitions of the mind? Though I realize a refined sensibility and intellectual stamina don’t always translate into sensuality and good sex. But puritanism and religiosity, we both agreed, was our enemy, and how pleasurable and facile it was to disrupt it. Puritanism always destroys itself from the inside out because, for the puritan, only the exterior, that shell of morality, is washed and kept clean. Puritanism, I told Florence, is a self-serving lie created by the perverse, those who secretly long for filth.

  Are you saying that all purists are masochists? she asked me.

  Yes, dear, indeed, I replied. There is a deep perversity in withholding sex and pleasure. These puritans wait and wait, anticipating the most profane, cosmological, celestial orgasm. Alleluia!

  At this, El-Marquis laughed loudly and coughed a little more, his madness surfacing—or was it drunkenness, Pavlov wondered, even as he enjoyed this encounter. He smoked, smiled, and listened to his visitor in white, this friend of the father Pavlov adored.

  Resurrection after a long sacrifice, that’s what sexual deprivation is all about, El- Marquis proclaimed, waving his cigarette in the air. Dear Florence, I said, ask yourself why these religions teach collective deprivation. I will tell you why! So that when the grand and holy orgy of Resurrection arrives from above, everyone will be so desperate that great, lustful, immortal fucking will occur, with the chattering of teeth and sweat behind the knees. Bodily fluids shall irrigate the heavens and the earth, offering bliss to agrarian cultures and thirsty saints, and pious villagers will finally get their reward in a fruitful abundance of tufted, hay-soft pubic hair. At last the meek shall be riding on the clouds of debauchery and flying horses…Alas, none of us in the Society will be invited—or not me, at least, because I have never deprived myself, I have never withheld…Oh, how greedy those puritans are, so patient and so greedy. I envy them…Oh, the howls…oh, the celestial howls…The open calls and the selection of wide-open orifices�
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  El-Marquis sighed, then continued.

  Dear Pavlov, a revelation came to me one night when Florence mentioned the Marquis de Sade (it is from him I get my borrowed name, but I am assuming you already guessed that. Your father said that you’re a reader, perhaps even a laconic, silent little scholar…) In any case, when the name of de Sade was evoked, it took the relationship with Florence to a different level. Sexual transgression became our way of dealing with the boredom that is so widespread in our traditional society, with its omnipresent war, its meek religiosity. Our nation lives within a culture of shaming and shame, and we decided to challenge it by committing the most daring acts of transgression.

  My dear Pavlov, I had the idea to rent a small studio that sat just inside the front line. And I met with Florence in that studio. It was in the city centre and close to the Green Line, where, as you know, the most vicious battles take place. In the midst of falling bombs and fighting we would drink, and smoke the best hash in the world, and fuck for hours. The thrill of fucking in close proximity to bullets and bombs was, in my opinion, the most appropriate political act one could engage in. But our daring escalated. We started fucking at the window and watching the bombs fall, and the little bursts of smoke here and there from the bombs as they landed excited us even more. Once, on the roof, when Florence pretended to misbehave, I whipped her with a khayzaran, and then she turned and sucked me and stuck her finger up my ass, and later wiped it on a page of a holy book while bombs and bullets were landing and penetrating every wall and window around us. It was sublime, the emptiness—a whole city and not a single sound from any human or animal. The city’s cowardly inhabitants were hiding in shelters like rats, and finally this nation of loquacious mercantile mutts was silenced. But Florence and I, my dear Pavlov, we were on the roof and close to the sky. We hoped for an encounter with a fighter who would spot us, join us or kill us…

  But war was always one step ahead of us with its transgressions, profanity and cruelties. War is the master fucker, and no matter how we tried to degrade our bodies, war always degraded it more, and won. Its omnipotence was unsurpassable, its capacity to burn, to mutilate, was far superior to and more courageous than anything we could achieve in our fucking encounters. So what could we do but obey it and worship it? We had no choice. On a day of extreme heat, I walked to an arms dealer and asked for a rifle with a scope. I told him that I wanted to hunt deer, and the dealer chuckled and said, Yeah, everyone is hunting deer these days. If you walk down this street, there at the end of the yard, you will encounter a large container and a few burning tires and sandbags, the kind that deer love to chew on. Be quiet, be patient and wait, this merchant of weapons said, laughing, and the deer will come by. Here, take a few more packs of bullets. I’ll give you a good price and, one of these days, you’ll invite me for venison stew and a glass of arak.

  The next day, Florence and I were in the rented studio. I was inside her anus, holding the rifle at my side. I handed the weapon to her and she aimed it in the direction of the highway. She started shooting indiscriminately at passing cars on distant roads. She would say, Now, and I would push myself farther then pause my thrusting, and she would pull the trigger on innocent drivers. Later, we would turn on the radio to hear the news announcer warning about snipers on that distant highway.

  One day, the news reported that a man and a child had been killed on that road. Their deaths had occurred at the same hour when we had pulled the trigger and in the same place where we had aimed. Florence had hit the tires of a car and it had spun out of control and crashed into an electrical pole. Father and son had died. The kid had flown out the window and landed on the street.

  Florence left me that same day.

  She eventually married a rich man, unsurprisingly—a bore of a businessman who was just like most men in this dreadful, dull society. A philistine. He bought her everything and flew her everywhere because (or so I told myself) my private tuition had ended, and now she could have a life beyond these little escapades and small intellectual fantasies. She had walked away and was beyond poetry and debauchery. And of course, she could always take a sensitive, cultured lover—a poor poet maybe, to offset her mercantile, ignoramus husband—and let her husband cover the food and hotel bills out of his deep fat pockets.

  Why am I telling you this, my dear?

  Because today I am alive, but the next time you see me I won’t be so talkative…I am dying soon. I am a sick man, my dear Pavlov, and I am telling you my life story because I assume that when a good story is attached to a body, that body may be treated with more liberty and less care…Yes, less care, my dear Pavlov, because after my death I want my body to become a symbol of my life.

  Let’s have another drink, dear Pavlov. As you may have noticed, I had a few before my arrival here. I was eager to meet you. And I am not yet done with my stories, but you seem not to mind my intrusion into your sanctuary. Thank you, dear Pavlov, and pour some more please. I trust people like you, who always have a drink to offer…Where was I? Well, there was Chantal, after Florence left me—Chantal, the bourgeois Christian Lebanese from the Sursock neighbourhood who went through a phase of hating her name, her religion, her class, her parents and herself. She was ashamed of her French name and her French upbringing in that local, aristocratic Lebanese milieu. Oh, my dear Pavlov, she wanted to become one with the poor, a caviar socialist. She aspired to be part of the fabric of this region, to become a lower-class Arab, une militante, but alas, in her travels to Paris, the few times she met young impoverished Arab men she was repulsed by their provincial manners and ignorance. She despised how they exhaled their cigarette fumes through their noses and how their open shirts exposed their chest hair and how they wore ostentatious gold rings. And then, in the month of fasting, the smell of their empty stomachs was nauseating, as were their direct sexual advances.

  Still, she read Arabic literature and loved the language, and she equated being Arab with being leftist, with solidarity with the oppressed and the Palestinian cause. In Paris, she embarked on a fucking spree, screwing every young beur she could get her hands on. She would fuck Moroccans, Algerians, Sudanese, Yemenis. She supported them with her daddy’s money, and invited them to the family apartment, to the dismay of her francophile liberal father. Her socialite mother was wary of these street boys who would steal the jewellery and the toiletries, and gorge on the contents of the fridge, chewing their food with open mouths, propping their sneaker-clad feet on the coffee table. And then, once in a while, Chantal would come back to Beirut and ask me to read her a few verses of Baudelaire in my little studio at the front line. In my arms she would shoot up, weep, curse, cry and drink. She would hastily fuck me and then light a cigarette in the manner of a French nouvelle vague film star. She told me she had become a junkie because one day, in Paris, she had met a young Algerian from the banlieue. In a discotheque, he had grabbed her hand. She told me she had been dancing with her girlfriends and ignoring him, and then he seized her hand in a tight grip and pulled her closer to him. No one had ever pulled her close like that, she said, and she had never experienced such force and confidence. Her sensitive father, as she referred to him, was always gentle, tiptoeing around her emotions, careful about her feelings, never imposing anything on her…He wasn’t spineless, her father, she assured me; he was fierce in his business dealings, stern in public, exact and fair with his employees, and he was a good provider, but when it came to his daughter…I was untouchable, Chantal said, and he would melt at the sight of me. I grew up without opposition, totally laissez-faire. Then one late evening in a Parisian nightclub, a skinny, dark North African Arab grabbed my hand tight and looked me in the eye and I let go of everything. Malek, he called himself at first. Then he revealed that his real name was Idris. He loved me and insulted me. He called me la pute chretienne. He couldn’t understand how there could be non-Muslim Arabs who spoke, read and wrote Arabic better than he did. He would say, Tu n’es pas Arabe, tu n’es même pas musulmane. He was
illiterate, and had fought for everything in his life. He would preach to me about the superiority of Islam, but I knew Islamic history better than he did. My father, the Christian, read everything—our house was full of Arabic literature and Arabic poets. I had read everything too. Idris only knew rituals, fasting and prayers and hearsay—stories and mythologies. When I corrected him about his misconceptions, he would get mad…But the sex was amazing, it was raw and real. We started to shoot up and fuck in abandoned buildings until I got hooked. I was on heroin in no time and funding his addiction and mine…I would ask my father for money and spend it on us. We burned it all on spoons and needles. He slapped me when I couldn’t get him what he wanted…and then one day he abruptly turned to prayer. He was praying five times a day. He wanted to change, he said. He met an older man who taught him about Taqwa.