About My Country

My acquaintance with the heroine of this tale is an old one: I rented a part of her house after the Great War, and in the course of that summer I had occasion to come to know the hardiness of the mountain woman and to understand the spirit of this creature raised among the rocks, branching out over the hills of my country.

She was then not yet twenty, and her mother's will had decreed that she marry a man already come to middle age. The event, in those days, would have seemed to me an ordinary one—people in my country, in marrying off their daughters, aim at securing their material future... But that aging man was not one of the men of broad standing; he had not prospered in life, had not managed to become even a merchant of any note in the village; and beyond his middle age in years he was aged in spirit. And what a flagrant contradiction between the mind of that man, who seemed bound with strong chains to the trunk of a sturdy oak, and that child bride, brimming over with energy, life, and ambition, her mind open upon new and distant horizons!

There was also in the house a mother-in-law, narrow of vision and kind of heart, whose joy at her son's marriage turned into an abiding gloom and a settled care. For the bride disappointed her hopes when, nine months after entering that house, she had not laid in her lap the child she had waited a lifetime to see.

The bride's crime, in the eyes of this simple old woman, was that she would not be still long enough for a child to settle in her womb...

And in truth she never was still: she was forever in a constant burning and a motion that never ended.

She was, you see, the daughter of a notable of the village, and her sisters' husbands were in easy circumstances; so she disdained to go to the spring—in the days when much water was needed—and would wait until after ten o'clock, and keep on till dawn, carrying the jars away empty and bringing them back full. And she would not allow the old woman to help her: if the latter took up her jar and made to follow her, she would push her back sharply and say:

"Go to your bed. Do you want the watchman to see you and say of me that I put my mother-in-law to work after midnight?"

As for that house, never in my life have I seen a house cleaner than it. She scrubbed its flagstones every day with water and soap, and came back after they had dried to polish them with a dry cloth. On washdays, if I rose from sleep at dawn to the sound of water being poured out and the crackle of firewood in the hearth, I would take delight in that delicious sight: the sight of her beside the basin, scrubbing the sheets till you would think they were coming apart under her hands, her sleeves rolled above her forearms, her dress open upon a neck and bosom full of bewitching young vigor! And if I rose after sunrise, there were the lines laden with clean clothes, white as jasmine blossoms.

All this while her mother-in-law looked at her askance and withdrew into corners, glowering and indignant; and sometimes she would come into my quarters to pour out her trouble to me, saying in a low voice:

"By your daughter's life, counsel her to be still."

But my "friend" was not still. Yet in spite of ceaseless late hours and toil she was blessed with children, and by them her cares increased, and her exhaustion, and her wakeful nights, and her resentment against her days... She grew ever more convinced that poverty is degrading, and that this creature has no dignity unless his livelihood is ample, his house full, and his children refined and educated "like other people's children."

And she never left off rebelling against her husband, content as he was to get from his world the seventy Lebanese piasters his day's work earned him, until she imposed her will: she sold her gold bracelets, the furniture of her house, and her diamond earrings, and carried her husband and her children off to Brazil... to the far shore!

She heard of my arrival when I went, in 1939, to a town near the border of the state of Minas, and she came to visit me, all eagerness, and invited me to the city where she lives.

When I went to her I found her in a fine house she had built room by room, with hot running water at every hour of the day, and beside it a shop where she works with her husband from dawn to night, leaving it only to cook the food or wash the clothes. As for her children, the eldest is at a college in the capital and the rest are in the secondary and primary schools. She called them and they came, and she said, pointing to the older ones:

"These came with me; but this one, the fifth, was born here in Brazil."

Then she told me her story—and every emigrant has a story. She said: We arrived in trouble and misery, and my husband never left off reproaching me at every

hard hour. And she laughed, showing her clean white teeth, the moment she recalled her mother-in-law:

"Do you remember how my mother-in-law used to bewail her luck and say I would never let her see a child in her house? Here they are—five! Do you suppose she has had her fill?"

Then she told me the tale of the fifth child's birth. She said:

We were then—our house like the houses of the destitute—with no capital to work with, and we did not know the language of the country! Some relatives had given us temporary help, and we had rented a wretched little shop. When I felt the pains of labor come on, I had nothing by me to meet the next day's expenses! I got up at once, lit the fire in the hearth, and set the tin of water upon it. My husband came and said:

"Let me call our kinswoman So-and-so for you."

I said:

"Stay where you are. Here—outside the room, by the door."

My pains grew worse, and the terrible hour drew near, and he began calling to me, keeping to his place:

"Woman, have pity on me! We have four children—what will become of them if you die?"

"Nothing. They will live, or they will die, and that will be the better for them."

"You good woman! God preserve your people to you—let me call a midwife for you."

"I told you to stand fast where you are and leave me be."

At noon exactly the child cried out, and I did what midwives do at such an hour. Then I called my husband to bring the hot water, while he kept shouting to me to let him call "So-and-so."

I washed the child and dressed him in his clothes, which I had set within reach of my hand. Then I changed my own clothes and the sheet of my bed, and said to my husband:

"Go now, and bring me whomever you please."

By then it was nearly one o'clock and my children had had no dinner. So I got up and went to the hearth, where the beans were simmering slowly, put on more wood, made ready the seasoning, and then fluffed the rice. After that my husband came in with "So-and-so," who began crying out: What a cruel woman you are!

My husband said: "Have you ever seen, good people, a woman as stubborn and hard-headed as this one?"

I said: "Don't talk so much. Be quiet and feed the children."

My dear lady readers, this tale is a true one; if it lacks something of splendor in its details, it lacks not one grain of truth! Do you think us incapable—we who are of the stock of this heroic mountain woman—of inspiring in our men what Dr. Constantine Zurayk urged in his two recent lectures to the women of Lebanon, when he spoke to us of our duty to "create heroic men"? Do you think we should fail if we clasped hands and vowed to push aside this "indifference" and set in its place a living, well-guided awareness, so that our little house might become the happiest nest in your Lord's world?