I am cursed. The great History has been avoiding me, playing hide and seek with me since the beginning. Although I was born in Paris and had lived there practically forever, when Notre-Dame burned, I was in Syria. I witnessed the fire while watching TV from my room at the Sheraton in Damascus. I had Dora on the phone, she was there, amidst the screams and the smoke and the Parisian stupor. I was missing this event, all to go see what Syria at war looked like, to be at the heart of the news, under the pretext of attending “The Horse Festival” engineered by the regime to make people believe to the return of normality, of peace, of definitive victory over the terrorists. We were four French people to be received with little fanfare, four “useful idiots” to the supposedly hippophile regime of Bashar al-Assad. And me, the perfidious pain in the ass, taking notes in order to publish when I return Four idiots in Syriawhich I wanted to be ironic and purifying. Above all, I was bitter about having missed the burning heart of Parisian Christianity and international tourism. Like a celestial test. Not a dead person. May the rich bless us with their tax exemptions.
During the ten days spent visiting this country devastated by war, eaten away by lies, half-emptied by fear, and molded to the bone by fifty years of institutionalized torture, ten days meeting local leaders to bullshit us nonsense about the eternity of the “Arab sun”, during these ten days of impapaouting, we only talked about one thing: Notre-Dame de Paris. “Did you see that!” Even the Syrians talked to us about it, since they were not allowed to talk about themselves: “Notre-Dame! France! Paris!” They only had that to tell us about their misery… As if it were theirs, one more. Or for some, in subtext, as if it was well done for us, Christians with our filth of religion, of capitalist democracy. The day before our departure, two of us escaped the surveillance of our police guides, left the hotel, hailed a taxi on the Place des Omayyades, they wanted to go to the souk. The taxi has not gone 500 meters when the driver receives a phone call: “You stop immediately, a car will come and pick up the French.” And everything like that.
The foam of events
Five years later, I am still on bed, but in Paris, and this time alongside Dora, watching the resurrection ceremony of the cathedral, after Emmanuel Macron managed to read, badly, because he’s definitely a bad actor, a speech for once quite well written. Dora falls asleep in front of the soporific mass, the Church has not reformed its liturgy, the communicant bishops should be informed that since Pius XII we have invented television, and that boredom has changed the length of time, the flock no longer have the same patience. Meanwhile, in the middle of the night, the rebels entered Damascus, liberated the Syrians from Bashar al-Assad, whose statue they demolished, an old custom.
At 5 a.m., I get up, I discover the news on my cell phone, I wake up Dora: Bachar is on the run!
There is not a Lebanese in the world who has not smiled, cried, sighed with relief, under the age of 70 they have only known that. To the point of hating the invading Syrians, despising them, hating them, as if all of Lebanon’s misfortune came from the Syrians. For the most part, this is true. Will the surprising zozos who apparently succeeded in one week in destroying a half-century-old dictatorship succeed in rebuilding a country, like our brilliant craftsmen rebuilt Notre-Dame? Shouldn’t you dream? And why not dream for a few hours, a few days, dream that the wing movement of the Syrian butterfly will shake the entire region until it brings down the Iranian mullahs, and therefore Hezbollah, Hamas, and Netanyahu, and Putin.
We dream while watching the images from Al-Jazeera, the hollow, decapitated head of the statue of the tyrant passing through the hands of young men (no women yet), but all young, who run between the cars going in circles around the Umayyad Square, and I said to Dora: “There, that’s where my hotel was! Do you remember, when I told you on the phone: ‘It’s going to fall, the arrow is going to fall !’ and the arrow fell?!” Of course she remembers. And now I’m still 4,000 kilometers away from the world event. It started with May 68: too young to climb the barricades, having to content myself the next day with walking up rue Gay-Lussac, among the adults who caused riots, revolutions, general strikes, while the Arabs repave the road. The foam of events, always the foam. And writing as consolation.