Pictures and Memories

It was the eve of Holy Saturday, and people, keeping the vigil of the feast, were preparing for Easter.

The feasts in Latin America are "feasts" in their deep Christian meaning: feasts of worship, of celebrating the memory of the Nazarene's birth, his crucifixion, and his passion. The people there do not know the meaning of "showing off" at the feasts; they do not take the holy days as occasions for swaggering with volleys of gunfire, or for parading airs of heroism, or for cutting a figure in the eyes of the "qabadays" of the other communities.

Easter, there, is reverence, prayer, and worship. The processions cross the city streets with flowers and incense, in silence, and the great men of the state — presidents, ministers, judges, deputies, physicians — walk bareheaded, escorting the memorial bier. And whenever the procession reaches one of the quarters, it halts before the house of a lady known for piety and virtue; and there stands a platform which a girl mounts, representing the Magdalene... a slender figure draped in black, long fair hair, and a sweet, angelic voice chanting passages of the loveliest that the genius of Italy's artists has poured forth in the lament of the greatest lover for the greatest beloved.

•

It was the eve of Holy Saturday.

And I lay stretched on a bed in the Matarazzo Hospital, while a low, dull, unrelenting, stubborn fever — the kind that the germs in the well water of the distant inland villages present to people's bodies — gnawed at my patience, my endurance, my power of resistance, and my wish that the worms of Lebanon, not the worms of the emigrant land, should one day eat my body.

I had no cause to complain of exile in Brazil, where I had families of kinsfolk whom I loved and who held me dear, and women friends who surrounded me with every kind of care. I had no cause to complain of isolation and loneliness in Brazil, where I had five cousins with whom I had been brought up in one house; I had carried the little ones of them on my arms, and their memory was mingled with all

the memories of my youth and my first girlhood... And no sooner was I struck by the calamity of my brother's murder than they closed round me, a canopy of hearts that pitied and showed mercy, that grieved and consoled.

I was entering the hospital for the third time, and — over and above the illness — I was wearied by the trouble I had brought upon my people. I remembered that we were on the eve of the feast, and that my cousin would leave the affairs of her house and her children and come to visit me; so I dragged myself to where the telephone was, asked for the number, and said:

"Adla! Adoul! God be with you, cousin. I am well. Don't come today. No! Don't leave your house, God bless you. Come tomorrow, or the day after; but today, do me the kindness of not coming."

I went back to my room with her voice in my ears. It seemed to me that in her voice were gathered all the voices of the quarter where I grew up: the voices of the birds waking at dawn, the voices of the roaring waves in the middle of the night, the voices of my mother, my brothers, my daughter...

I took to my bed, aching with a thousand and one memories, while memories of tragedy upon tragedy pressed upon my throat; and outside, the rains were pouring down like brooks and streams.

•

In the room I had occupied when I entered the hospital the second time there was an icon of Jesus, very like our icons in the East. I used to take comfort in it, gazing at it long and addressing my secret prayers to the spirit of Him whose image it was — above all on a night when my condition worsened and I thought myself going... When I returned to the hospital the third time, the Italian benefactress, Mrs. Matarazzo, who superintended the hospital's affairs, had replaced these icons with modern statuettes of the new porcelain manufacture. My share, in my room, was a small statuette representing a beautiful woman with eyebrows lifted toward the temples, eyes following the eyebrows in their upward slant, and cheeks and an upturned mouth on which the artist had tried to bestow the beauty of the cinema girls. I hated this statuette, and I would ask Sister Susanna

to bring me the old-style icon of Jesus from room 264; and she would answer that the old icons had all been taken away and replaced by these modern statuettes — then she would laugh and say: "We must be 'à la mode'..."

That week the tender-hearted physician, Dr. Wadih Safadi, decided that I must have a companion to pass