The Lebanese village of Magdaluna, where I grew up, had none of the modern conveniences. It was stuck somewhere in the eighteenth century until after the Great War, when my father returned from the army with his beat-up radio. When I was a child, we had no running water in our homes, electricity was unheard of, and our toilets were holes in the ground way out in a field. It was a time of flickering candles, sooty kerosene lamps, and rusty tin lanterns. The nights seemed excruciatingly long, because they were so dimly lit and full of shadows. The fickle lights inside the house were never bright enough for me to feel safe, and the dark outside was filled with hooting and howling and the sound of stones crunching under the paws of foul-smelling hyenas. To make matters worse, the Presbyterian cemetery lay just across the gravel footpath in back of our house; only a low, broken-down stone wall separated me from a host of cold and unclean things. This was the night world of my early childhood.
One chilly November evening, I was sitting at the kitchen table doing my Arabic-grammar homework with a quill pen dipped in ink when my father called to me from the east room, where he was listening to the news on his new radio. “Son, I am out of cigarettes,” he said. “Go over to Ibrahim’s and ask him for a pack of Bafra. Tell him I’ll give him a fresh pack tomorrow as soon as I get a chance to go to the dikkan” — the general store.
I immediately ran outside to see if it had gotten dark yet. I was lucky; the sun had set, but the western sky was still blood red with the waning light of the autumn day. I had just enough time to go to Ibrahim’s and back before the dead and the jackals came out.
I could have taken the gravel footpath to Ibrahim’s, but to save time I went across the field and over the wall that separated our property from his. The low spot in the wall was easy to find, being right by the carob tree.
Ibrahim’s house was dark and silent — it had been so since his mother had died of a stroke the summer before. Hearing a noise from behind the house, where Ibrahim kept his beloved cow and three chickens, I walked around and saw him closing the rickety wooden gate. “Good evening, sir,” I said, and I relayed my father’s request and his promise to pay Ibrahim back.
In the dim twilight I could not clearly see Ibrahim’s weather-beaten face, but I could hear him swallow. He always swallowed hard when he was asked for something. I could not make out his eyes either, but I knew that they had narrowed down to thin slits. Ibrahim was a notorious skin-flint.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” he said.
I was sure it would be longer than a minute — maybe longer than five or ten — because Ibrahim moved like a lizard in winter. I prayed that he would hurry up, so I could return home before it got too dark to see, but it took him forever to produce that damn pack of cigarettes. I think he kept me waiting on purpose, hoping that I would give up and leave.
When he came out, Ibrahim handed me a pack of Bafra so old the cellophane wrapper was brittle and crumbly. “Thanks,” I said, snatching the pack out of his gnarled hand and bounding back in the direction of my house.
Just before I reached the carob tree by the stone wall, a strange sight stopped me dead in my tracks. Something about the tree wasn’t quite right. I knew the number of its branches and all their knots, having spent the summer playing in them, and in the near darkness I could tell the tree’s silhouette was . . . different. The trunk looked shorter — no, thicker: about twice as big around as it should. Then it moved.
I thought of calling out to Ibrahim for help, but quickly abandoned the idea. Whatever was lying in wait for me under the carob tree would tear me to pieces long before slow-moving Ibrahim got there. There was no point in calling for my father and mother either, because they were too far away on the other side of the wall to hear my cry. So I did the only thing left to do: I started praying. “Hail Mary, Mother of God. . . .” I was raised Presbyterian, but had secretly learned this prayer, against my father’s wishes, in Catholic summer school.
The Virgin must have heard my plea, because a full moon — the biggest I’d ever seen, big as a schoolhouse — suddenly burst from behind the massive black hills above the Monastery of Christ the Savior, flooding the field with its silver light. By the enormous moon, I could see that it was no beast or ghost lurking under the old carob tree but only a man, a mortal soul like me.
Still, to be on the safe side, I continued to pray under my breath as I headed for the low spot in the wall, my portal home. As I got closer, I suddenly wished to God that the thing lying in wait under the tree had been a bear or a wolf or the ghost of a dead enemy. I stood a better chance with any of them than with Wadi, the village lunatic.
I’d always feared crazy people, those tortured inhabitants of the mind’s dark and slippery places. I was terrified of their incoherent speech and their inscrutable doings. But what frightened me most was their eyes, which seemed to focus intently on something I couldn’t see and didn’t dare imagine. And when those demented eyes fixed on mine, I felt like a butterfly impaled on a collector’s cold steel pin. Their stare held me captive, and refused, no matter how much I pleaded, to let go.
When I saw Wadi, I was too scared to run; it wouldn’t have done me any good, anyway. Wadi was in his twenties, young and athletic, and on top of that possessed the strength and speed of the insane. Instead, I resorted to my only strategy for manipulating grown-ups: I became very polite. This was a trick I had learned from my cousin Albert, and it almost always paid off. I could only hope that it worked as well with madmen as it did with the sane.
I said solicitously, “Good evening, sir. Beautiful moon tonight, isn’t it?” My voice was so loud it startled me. (But then, you had to raise your voice when talking with crazy people — to make sure they understood.)
Wadi snorted, walked over to me, and grabbed my arm just above the elbow. His hand was soft but cold. My heart fluttered like a bird caught in a net.
“Whose son are you?” he asked, sounding as if a lot was riding on my answer.
I tried hard to suppress my fright, having been told that madmen, like dogs, could smell fear. I cleared my aching throat and said, “I am the son of Fuad, the son of Hassan, the son of Suleiman Accawi, sir.” I hoped that giving several generations would help him to make a connection.
Wadi leaned over and brought his face so close to mine that I could feel his warm breath on my forehead. “I know your father and grandfather,” he said. “They’re good men. Tell your father that I’m back, and that I’m coming tomorrow to play him a round or two of backgammon. You will do that, now, won’t you, son of Fuad, son of Hassan?”
I replied quickly, “Yes, sir. I sure will. I promise.”
He let me go and helped me over the wall, instructing me again to be sure to tell my father that he was coming. I swore that I would. Once on the other side of the wall, I flew home.
That night, my sleep was filled with nightmares, and I woke up in a cold sweat, begging for protection from Wadi’s insane blue eyes.
When I’d recovered from the dream, I tried to reason with myself: Wadi was not the horrible creature I had made him out to be, but a basically harmless man. It wasn’t his fault that he had been driven over the edge by a failed romance and a long run of bad luck. I also reminded myself of the many good things my grandmother and my mother had told me about him. They said that he had been sweet and gentle before the devil entered him and took over his mind. A woman, they said, hanging their heads and sighing in unison, had come into his life and wrecked it.
Wadi was only eighteen when it happened, and had just finished his freshman year at a Presbyterian college in Sidon. He’d had a little trouble with his French, so Muna, the Reverend Salman’s youngest daughter, offered to tutor him. She, too, was home from college for the summer, and she thought that helping this good-looking young man with his schoolwork was only the Christian thing to do. Muna was two years Wadi’s senior, very beautiful, and given to the habit of slowly raising her skirt to massage her aching knees, which seemed to ache and need massaging whenever there were young men around.
That summer, Wadi’s mother died. Almost immediately, he fell deeply in love with Muna. Because his father was dead, too, Wadi begged his older brother, Jameel, to ask the Reverend Salman for his daughter’s hand in marriage. When Muna heard about it, she rolled her large brown eyes, laughed, and, with a measured wave of her hand, dismissed such a silly notion.
That evening, Wadi put on his best blue shirt and white slacks and jumped into the forty-foot-deep cistern in his front yard.
Im Sameer saw him jump as she was walking home from our house, and she raised a shrill cry, like the crack of a bullwhip. Abu George, the blacksmith, Abu Asaad, the mule skinner, and Abu Wajeeh, the gunsmith — three of the biggest, strongest men in the village — responded immediately. Abu George and Abu Asaad found a thick rope and used it to let Abu Wajeeh down into the well. Abudi Wajeeh had to wrestle Wadi to get the rope around him so they could pull him out. Wadi emerged looking wild, his eyes as big as saucers, and put up another fierce fight, trying desperately to throw himself back into the well. It took all three men to drag him into his house.
Once inside, Wadi stopped kicking, biting, and scratching and just sat there, wet, disheveled, and defeated, and looking smaller than he had before he’d jumped into the well. He was calm, but it was an eerie calm, as if he’d gone into some secret chamber and shut the door behind him forever.
The village feasted on Wadi’s story for a week, embellishing it with ever more gruesome details. The rumors would surely have continued to fly for months had it not been for Salam, the wife of Jawad, the village bully, getting caught behind Im Yussef’s olive-oil press in the arms of big Habeeb, the goatherd’s son. The only thing that takes people’s minds off a scandal, it seems, is an even juicier one.
After the olive-press incident, just about everybody in Magdaluna forgot about Wadi except for my father and me. We couldn’t have forgotten if we’d wanted to, because Wadi’s brother, Jameel — like Wadi and my father — was a serious backgammon player, and he came to our house regularly to challenge my father. During those long matches, my father and Jameel would talk about Wadi’s “condition” — or, rather, Jameel would talk and my father would grunt and uh-hum. Eavesdropping on them, I discovered that Wadi was not getting any better; in fact, he was getting crazier. Jameel said Wadi had been talking to himself, and complained that his brother’s long, rambling monologues were keeping him awake most of the night. He also said that Wadi had developed a habit of washing his hands and ears frequently, and that recently he’d been asking for a walking stick.
That last item really piqued my curiosity. Why in the world, I asked myself, would a young man like Wadi need a cane?
A few days later, in the late afternoon, I was heading to Abu Fareed’s dikkan to buy a soda, with fifteen copper piasters strung on a shoelace around my neck, when I rounded the corner of Ibrahim’s house and came upon Wadi pissing against a stone wall. I ducked out of sight and waited. Then, very carefully, I peeked around the corner.
Wadi was still there, buttoning up his pants. When he’d finished, he grabbed his cane (which his brother had gotten him just to shut him up, I supposed) and wagged it at something or someone only he could see. Then I heard him say to whatever it was, “Move before you get your feet wet.”
I froze like a sparrow in the bush. Here was one of those monologues I’d heard Jameel complain about, only this wasn’t a monologue; Wadi was arguing with someone, and whoever — or whatever — it was seemed to be angry. Wadi’s “familiar” (as my grandmother called such unseen things) was mad, because Wadi had been thinking about forgiving Muna and getting on with his life. His familiar did not go in much for forgiveness. Wadi tried vehemently to defend himself. For a moment I thought he was going to strike his invisible companion with his cane, but then Wadi slowly returned the walking stick to his side and, muttering to himself, disappeared into the Presbyterian cemetery.
About a week later, I was going to Im Sameer’s to play with her walleyed son, Rafeek, who was about my age. To get to Im Sameer’s, I had to pass Wadi’s house, and, as I did, a racket came from inside. I crouched by the window to investigate.
Wadi’s back was turned to me, and he was having another argument with an unseen thing, only this entity was clearly bigger than the one I’d seen him contend with before, because Wadi, a tall man himself, was looking up at it. Then Wadi turned to his left and started yelling at someone else; perhaps this was the familiar he’d threatened with his stick. He was having a time keeping up with these two when several more tormentors joined in. Now Wadi shook his cane at a roomful of invisible creatures. Seeing that he was outnumbered, he angrily flung his cane at them and fell on his bed with his hands over his ears, screaming, “Yes, yes! I will, I will! You can’t stop me!” And he sobbed, his face buried in the pillow.
I felt sorry for Wadi, but I also hated him, because he frightened me now more than ever. From then on, whenever he came to play backgammon with my father, I stayed away. The few times I had to go into the house while Wadi was there, I overheard him and my father talking about politics and hunting and — of all things — books. It seemed Wadi liked somebody called Mark Twain, and he talked a lot about some other writer from France named Anatole, or something like that. He must have known some good jokes, too, because he made my father laugh until he nearly fell off his chair. My father seemed to enjoy playing with Wadi more than he did Jameel.
I wondered if my father knew how crazy Wadi was. Sometimes grown-ups didn’t notice how terrible things were, or maybe they just didn’t care. My father had to be blind not to have seen Wadi swatting at his invisible companions under the table. Or perhaps he thought Wadi was just shooing away flies.
One evening, I overheard my father and mother talking about Wadi. “You know, Nazira,” my father said, “I think Wadi would get better if he got married. All he needs is a good woman to make him feel normal again.”
My mother disagreed, saying marriage might do exactly the opposite. “And who would marry a crazy man,” she added, “on the chance that he might get well?” Sex, she pronounced with conviction, was not a cure for insanity, despite my father’s belief in its therapeutic powers.
My father only grunted in response.
As the days went by, I began to see changes in Wadi’s appearance. He looked different somehow, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Because he terrified me, I studied him carefully. At first, I thought his eyebrows were getting bushier. Then I thought it wasn’t his eyebrows but his brow ridges that stuck out more than before. Or maybe it was that his pale blue eyes had sunk deeper into their sockets. His back wasn’t as straight as a rod anymore, and the spring had gone out of his walk; he now trudged around with his feet at on the ground. His skin — especially on his face, ears, and hands — had become thin and shiny, and looked as brittle as rice paper. My fear of Wadi became so great that I began to wish he would die. It bothered me to feel this way about someone, because it was evil, but I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to be rid of him and those insane blue eyes that haunted me, awake or asleep.
Wadi went right on frightening me, though, and even developed new irritating habits. He started to blow his nose all the time, making it red and swollen. He began to wear his belt too tight, then gave up wearing a belt altogether and took to using a rope to hold his pants up. He tied that rope so securely around his waist that I found it hard to breathe just looking at him. And he would continually check the rope with his pale, nervous fingers, as if making sure it was still there. So when not washing his hands or shooing demons with his cane, he was blowing his nose or checking the rope around his obscenely thin waist. God, how I hated him. More than ever, I wanted him dead, or at least gone so that I did not have to see him anymore. He was a constant reminder that people were fragile, that each of us — my father, my mother, my sisters, me, everybody — could break.
To my surprise, I got my wish. Wadi’s brother, Jameel, had him committed to an insane asylum called Asfourieh — a hell from which no patient ever emerged, except feet first. My grandmother called it “the tombs.” Part of me was glad, though another part was unsettled by the apparent power of my desires.
I had almost given up thinking about Wadi when, a couple of years later, I got the rest of my wish: he fell to his death from a third-story window, trying to escape from Asfourieh and come home to Magdaluna. A hospital official in a grimy red fez delivered the news to Jameel, assuring him that Wadi had died instantly and hadn’t suffered at all. Everyone seemed to take great comfort in this — everyone but me.
Though I was finally rid of Wadi and his crazy blue eyes, I wasn’t relieved by his death. Instead, it stirred feelings within me, conflicting feelings I had never had before. I couldn’t sort them out. I didn’t quite understand why his death affected me this way; all I knew was that, after it happened, I wasn’t myself anymore. Something inside me — something delicate and fresh, like a rosebud on a June morning — was crushed when Wadi died. He took a part of me with him when he jumped from that window.
What I wanted more than anything was to tell Wadi that I was sorry I’d feared and hated him so; that, if it made him feel any better, I was suffering for it; and that I hoped he was happy, wherever he was.
Even today, Wadi’s shiny, well-scrubbed face still haunts me. His blue eyes are more real in my memory than those of many people I loved. I can still remember how his skinny knuckles looked wrapped around the smooth handle of his cane. I remember he wore tan shoes with little black patches over the toes. I remember.
“The Madman” is reprinted with permission from the forthcoming memoir The Boy from the Tower of the Moon, by Anwar F. Accawi. The book will be published in May by Beacon Press.
— Ed.
