Black... Sister!!

The last thing Fouad Suleiman wrote

"On one of the first nights of December, Fouad Suleiman grasped the pen trembling between his shaking fingers and wrote with effort, on the bed of his mortal illness, this piece, which he drew from his sister's consoling of him... After it he wrote four lines of a second piece, and the pen stopped, in the darkness of the death agony":

May you be kept safe for your sister, brother... safe be your sweet letters at the fingertips of your pen. Never, brother, have I read among letters the like of your letters, nor among tales the like of your tales of our villages!!

It is as though you bind your letters to your heart, or bind your heart to your letters, my little one.

Have pity on yourself, little one whom I reared... Spare your heart, little one!

From where will you strip your letters, my little one, after today, now that you have stripped your heart away from your letters?

And from where will you bring light and color anymore, when your brush has spent all its color and light and melody?

From where, little one of us all, do you bring these tales?

Spare your heart, my darling!

*

— There are still tales, sister, that no letters in my heart have yet fastened down!!

What letters would dare to tell, sister, the tales of our mountain?

Whence should I have the glory and the power, sister, to recount in my letters the tale of the wind and the rain and the thunderbolts and the oaks and the nights in the mountain country?

Sister!

Listen, from among the tales of the mountain storm, to this tale:

The wind comes to us, sister — at times the wind comes to us, from every land, from every sky... shaking, shaking... blasting and crashing... black, sister, black... tearing the night shred from shred... pulling with a violent, dreadful pull...

From where does the mountain wind come like this, sister? Thunderbolts piled one upon another... a roaring out of the vaults of space... out of the depths of the forests... from the sea and the night? From the mountain and the valley!

*

"The red lamps

"Do not go out, do not go out, O lamp of our little house!

"O you who did not go out when the stars went out...

"The tale of the long night — that is what you are, our little red lamp..."

*

...Thus far — and the pen struck two points of light that had frozen, black, in the pupils of his eyes!