It's a thin month, with the bike chained up and no money for a licence, but speaking of tracks further afield, soon, where green grows and the air is clear and the landscapes of religion and history become more manageable with distance.
There is time, then, with poverty and disaffection, for the things that should have come earlier. Evenings trundling up and down the pool of the local hotel, evenings reading, evenings scribbling illegible ramblings on multicoloured papers that metamorphose, caterpillar-like, into a satisfying butterfly flourish of envelopes with red-and-blue airmail wings. Does my letter-writing style speak somehow of my character – incoherent, mercurial, unreadable, lost in the post? Evenings ditching dear Jeanne d'Arc for the less splendiferously named but far more effective (and dangerously delightful) Michel, who takes you through Beyrouth on the back of his bike and up and up marble stairs to a lean-to bedsit in a roof garden in Achrafieh. Basil plants grow round and about, palms arch below, a rug is spread out for smoking narghile on and elegant windows in the air beside are golden-lit from within. He teaches me Arabic in French and by the end of the evening I feel properly Lebanese, my head a fractured mess of three different languages, incapable of expressing myself properly in any of them.
It's time, too, to seek out the spaces that are warm with the colours of art and of curiosity. For even if in Zouk narrow-minded attitudes are immovable and creativity limited to an eight-foot dancing Santa in the supermarket, elsewhere people are talking and thinking and writing and taking photos and campaigning and making films about it all. Happily for one always disposed to watching obscure and miserable accounts of man's inhumanity to man, Beyrouth's artistic scene and violent past has attracted enough similar souls to sustain a fantastical parade of art house films from the miserable to the magical and everything in between.
So, to the Metropolitan Sofil, where the festivals are held – European or Documentary or Animated – for LL3,000** a throw. Here, the farmer in the One Man Village documentary talks lovingly to his cows and refuses to speak about family deaths in the war. He has a photograph of his parents on the wall of his house – “but they were never actually photographed together. This was a picture of my father with his cow, and we took a picture of my mother and placed her where the cow used to be. But it is still good, no?”. Here, Fly by Rosinante is a truly mad but largely hilarious film about a travelling Romanian opera troupe and Zelary is beautiful Czechoslovakian hills and the vileness of men and the impossibility of war and time. Here the arrogant, insensitive American pontifications of Car Bomb make me even more susceptible to the sensibilities of Sa'at Sa'at and Mother, Lebanon and Me, two beautiful films about war and sadness and old age and diseased minds and history that send me back to Zouk fuzzy with ideas and with melancholy. To the Empire Sodeco, whose names in lights and red velvet armchairs would grace any screen in 1950s Hollywood, were Julie & Julia is colour and fun and food and the breath of Paris and of home, and the dark eyes of the heroine in Melodrama Habibi glow with all the intelligent bemusement of a thirty-five-year-old single woman in Lebanon, while her boss's chauffeur's embonpoint steals every scene it appears in. To the ArtLounge, in a dark warehouse full of pink lamps off La Rue d'Armenie, where on Sunday nights people come to drink beer, curled into a collection of podlike armchairs or squatting on leather pouffes, and to watch free cycles of cinema from Persia, from Hong Kong, from Bollywood. Here Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham cuts from a Mumbai palace to the hero and heroine inexplicably writhing in see-through clothes in front of the Pyramids, and the people in their armchairs fall about in exultation.
Even to City Mall, to ABC and the rest, where you can disappear among neutral decorations and designer shops for a popcorn-fuelled ninety minutes of Johnny Depp and his ilk shooting each other glamorously and forget that you are in Lebanon. To all of these, to sit in the dark and see the people around laughing and nodding as you do, and to emerge into the night feeling restored by trips to different worlds.
And afterwards, in the quiet dark, walking between buildings grubbily beautiful or buildings with the beauty bombed out of them, even the clicks and hisses that seem to come constantly from arrogantly loitering men grate less, and the fuck-off finger you direct at the ever-present kerb-crawlers lacks the proper outrage. It seems, then, that there are always worlds outside Zouk, and outside Lebanon, and that those worlds are good.
But in the dislocation between the celluloid and the everyday, I realise for the first time that I miss the company of the very few people in this world who I like without reservation. And for no particular reason I remember, yet again and by no means less so for being in Lebanon, how far and insurmountable the distance is between who you want to be, and who you are.
* The vast majority of people in this area are more or less evangelical supporters of the Lebanese Forces, a phalangist Christian militia (reinvented as a political party after the war) responsible for the massacre and rape of somewhere between 300 and 3,500 Palestinian men, women and children in Sabra and Chatila after the agreed evacuation of PLO forces from Lebanon in 1982 – an incoherent but deadly revenge for the assassination of president-elect Bashir Gemayel.
** About £1.50
No comments:
Post a Comment