in the pool of humid half-light, I leave her she leaves me with a resounding kick in the balls, in those organs the cause of our meeting, the circle was closed, my testicles source of my passion ended up getting their comeuppance, crushed under Marianne’s shoe until they shot up and hid at the bottom of my throat, she had punished the ones responsible for the initial mistake and we each took a different train a much faster train than the one that gamboled through the Egyptian countryside between those thin downy cows called gamous, in the midst of dovecotes and farmers whose swing-ploughs and hoes haven’t changed since Ramses, one more train, in Venice I had begun reading, reading passionately, withdrawing from the world and burying myself in the pages, whereas in two years of war I hadn’t held one book in my hand not even a Bible in Venetian apathy I stuffed myself with adventure novels, maritime novels, stories about corsairs pirates naval battles whatever the Francophone tourists abandoned in hotels on the lagoon and ended up at the little bookseller’s behind the Campo Santa Margarita, thrillers, spy novels, historical novels and aside from my nocturnal expeditions and my conversations with Ghassan I spent the best part of my time lying on the sofa reading, Marianne was obsessed with the war, more than me maybe, she wanted to know, questioned me endlessly, read treatises about the former Yugoslavia, she had even started learning Croatian which infuriated me, I don’t know why, her accent, her pronunciation irritated me, I needed silence, I needed her body and silence, the only person I managed to talk about the war with was Ghassan: indirectly, little by little, by commenting on the qualities of some rifle, a certain brand of rocket-launcher we began, the way lovers create intimacy little by little, exchanging anecdotes, war stories, and comparing our lives as soldiers, they were nothing alike—Ghassan the handsome warrior, sunglasses, new outfit, M16 in hand, sat in state at a roadblock or hung out at the beach in Jounieh with his comrades, the confrontations were violent and quick, the war lasted for ten years and was well-run, as he said, the only real battle in which he took part was against the Lebanese army in February 1990 in the Metn and at the Nahr al-Kalb, bloody final butchery, from one hill to the other the artillery massacred the fleeing civilians, the fighters threw themselves at each other in a furious melee: Ghassan told me how he had killed his own cousin, a private in the army, with a grenade thrown at his Jeep that was transporting ammunition, the three occupants were blown away in a spray of flesh, metal and fire, over there no one knows that I’m the one that threw that grenade, said Ghassan, how am I supposed to talk normally to my aunt after that, he remembered hurtling down hills shouting to give himself courage, pissing on the barrel of a machine gun to cool it down, without success, putting an armored vehicle out of commission with a LAW 200 meters away and seeing the commander of the tank manage to extricate himself from the carcass but burn like an old blackened shoe bent double over the barrel, crying for hours on end (he said laughing) after a horse died, accidentally knocked down by a volley of fire, and above all, above all he told how he had been wounded, how he had thought himself dead, cut up all of a sudden by dozens of pieces of shrapnel after a bomb exploded, he had seen the jacket of his uniform burst open with machine gun fire, he was suddenly covered in blood pierced from ankle to shoulder by countless bites, a foul viscous substance covered his entire right side, Ghassan had collapsed in spasms of pain and panic, convinced it was the end, the shell had fallen just a few meters away, the doctors removed eight foreign teeth and seventeen bone fragments from his body, debris of the poor guy in front of him volatilized by the explosion and transformed into a human grenade, pieces of smoking skull propelled in a plume of blood, the only metallic shard of which was a gold premolar, Ghassan did come out of it, he still got shivers up his spine and bouts of nausea from disgust, he said, just thinking about it gives me the creeps, I didn’t know if I should laugh or cry at this story, Ghassan transformed into a living tomb the martyr’s relics enshrined directly in his skin, the union of warriors married by the magic of explosives, Ghassan’s story wasn’t a unique case, strange as it may seem, in Syria Larrey surgeon of the Great Army tells of having removed from the stomach of a soldier a piece of bone stuck straight in like a knife, sharp as a bayonet, horrified we thought for a moment, he says, that the cannons of the place had been loaded with bones, before learning from the very mouth of the wounded man that this fragment came from the dried corpse of a camel, scattered by a cannonball—Marcel Maréchal the cellist also relates, in his Memoirs of the War of ’14, that a pocket watch from Besançon, a baptism medal, and two fingers (forefinger and middle finger, still attached to each other) landed on his knees after the explosion of a torpedo in the embankment, and that he didn’t know what saddened him more, the flesh or the two objects, infinitely more human, in the midst of the butchery, than the simple bloody knuckles—Ghassan still had under his skin, in his neck mainly, minuscule fragments of bone that were invisible or practically invisible to X-rays which, no one knows why, years later, manifested from time to time in the form of cysts and boils that he then had to have lanced, what annoyed him most was having to explain to the doctor why his body was vomiting ossicles the way others do shards of glass from a windshield: poor warriors’ bodies, I had been lucky, aside from a few scrapes, superficial burns, and a sprain I had gotten out of it pretty well, my flesh didn’t remind me of the war all the time, I have two little scars but they’re in my back and behind my shoulder, I never see them, I’d need two mirrors to examine them at leisure—Sashka caresses them with her finger, I know, when I’m lying on my stomach, she never asked me where they came from, unlike Marianne and Stéphanie who questioned me so often, the story of Ghassan’s wounds reminded me of my seafaring novels, on the ships the wounded were crammed with wood shards, from the gunwale, the pulleys, the tackle, the masts, the cannonballs, or grapeshot chopped up the deck hurling thousands of splinters, so many savage needles that stabbed the crew, like the ones that landed in the left hand and thorax of the arquebusier Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra at Lepanto on October 7, 1571, on board the vessel Marquesa, held in reserve in the rearguard of the Christian fleet and engaged in combat around noon to counter the bold attack of Uluj Pasha the brave, he was trying to turn the center held by Don John of Austria the commander of the Holy League who had gotten up in a good mood that day they say, at dawn around six in the morning, one fine fall morning, and this even though the season was already advanced, in the revolting stench of the galley where over 300 people lived piled on top of each other, Don John of Austria had put on his breastplate and his armor when, around seven in the morning, the first Turkish vessels were sighted, within range in two hours more or less, which left the young twenty-five-year-old bastard time to organize his fleet, the day will be long, the opening of the Gulf of Patras sparkles due east in the rising sun, it has become a deadly trap where 208 Turkish galleys and the 120 light vessels that accompany them are enclosed, carrying 50,000 sailors and 27,000 soldiers, janissaries, spahis, volunteers, in twelve hours 30,000 corpses or over 1,800 tons of flesh and blood will have joined the fish in the peaceful blue water, I told Ghassan about the Battle of Lepanto when we visited the arsenal of Venice the tranquil warrior, which without a qualm would negotiate a separate peace with the Ottomans a few years later, thus putting an end to that famous Holy League commanded by Don John of Austria the first bastard of Charles V, hard to imagine the foul smell spread by 500 galleys and their slaves, the illnesses, the parasites, the vermin they transported, the first cannon thunder around nine in the morning, average speed five knots, let’s not rush ourselves, let’s try to preserve marching orders, in the rearguard on board the Marquesa Cervantes is feverish, in bed, he insists on taking part in the battle, on deck—better to die standing up in the open air than be drowned or burned alive in a fetid forehold, Cervantes goes back to his arquebus, the enemy galleys are a few miles in front of him, behind the center of the Christian camp where the Austrian’s flagship sits in state, it fires a cannon and raises its flag to identify itself, the Turkish standard-bearing vessel the Sultana with Ali Pasha on board does the same, customs are chivalrous, men less so, before long they’ll massacre each other forgetting all the courtesies of war, already the Venetian galleys, veritable battleships of the time, loftier and better armed, break the Turkish central lines and cause terrible damage, it is 11:15 in the morning, the Christian left wing is under fire and seems on the point of being turned round, Barbarigo its commander is hit with an arrow in his eye, his nephew and officer Contarini is already dead, sunk with the Santa Maria Maddalena—on the right, facing Andrea Doria the clever condottiere, Uluj Pasha moves to the south, so as not to be outmaneuvered Doria follows him, leaving a void in the line of defense, the galleys of the rearguard advance to fill it, from his arquebus Cervantes sees Don Álvaro de Bazán give the orders: the oarsmen strike the flat sea, the speed increases
