O Friend of a Lifetime

From Santiago de Chile, the woman of letters Mari Yanni Ata Allah answered the call of The Woman's Voice and sent a word for the Salma Sayegh issue, into which she poured burning anguish and the tears of a bleeding heart... And who has more right to remembrance and to tears than the friend of a lifetime?!

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I never expected that you would be the first link to slip from the chain of schoolgirl friends that bound us to one another with the bond of love and sisterhood.

I learned of your departure this morning — dark as my heart — and I wept for you not as the rest of people weep for you, who do not know the depth of the love for all humanity that you treasured; no, I wept for you, Salma, as the dearest of my friends, the most beloved, and the most faithful.

We were companions of school and of life, and you were to me the beloved who knew no deceit or false show, and the friend who knew that love is too precious to be cheapened or sold.

Do you remember those delicious, immortal hours we spent together in Bhamdoun shortly before my departure, when we would wake in the morning to delight in the beauty of Lebanon and talk of its enchantment, which made us forget, for a while, the ills of living and the injustices of masters?

On those radiant mornings you were to me the holy priest who chants in my ears the canticles of love and peace and casts into my depths the verses of rest and reassurance — and you were also, above all this, the angel hovering in the sky of my life, teaching me by her patience and endurance how the adversities of life melt away before an indomitable will.

And today, Salma, after your departure people will come to know what a literary force we have lost, and what a magic quill the fates have shattered. Your pen was one among the noblest of pens: eloquence flowed from it, it sent forth inspiration, enchantment, and beauty; in every letter of it one tasted that celestial wine whose drinker grows drunk and is never sated.

Your words were like the refreshing drops of dew at daybreak on spring mornings — who will sing to us now, when the warbling nightingale has fallen silent and the melodious songbird has grown hoarse — and who will stir in our depths those feelings which only your quill knew how to rouse from their hiding places?

You were a song among the songs of eternity, a treasure among the treasures of time, whose worth the people of her own milieu failed to know, so that the powers of soul and body were melted away in her when necessity forced you to turn your moral powers into a struggle for daily bread — while to this day there has not been formed in Lebanon any society whose aim is to smooth the paths of life for the likes of Salma, who is a gift among the gifts of the rare generations, so that her powers might be turned to the general service of letters.

So if I weep for you today with bitterness and burning, it is because in you I weep for that great heart and that proud soul which stood firm against difficulties in every walk of life.

You lived your whole life, Salma, in a true struggle; you carried your cross and walked with it through the wildernesses of life, winning at times and stumbling at others, until you fell a martyr to the injustice of life and of men; and your sickness lay in that great heart, which bore and endured and persevered until it fell, slain in the struggle.

For this, Salma, I weep for you more than all people, because I knew you more than all people.

Would that you could know the sharpness of my pain because I did not close your eyes with my own hand, and bid your remains farewell with my tears, and tell the people who she was whom they were seeing to her rest.

And how I wished I could have been near you during your illness, to wipe from your brow the furrows of pain, and lift from your loving heart the clouds of sorrow.

We were parted, and we were certain we would never meet; yet never before today have I felt such a choking in the depths of my wounded heart. Perhaps it is because your spirit, which hovered in the sky of my life, cast into my soul a rest and a reassurance that are a kind of divine grace, enjoyed only by those who, like us, know the worth of that celestial friendship which bound us with its firm bond.

Had I been the first to depart, people would have heard from you a hymn such as neither men nor angels have ever sung — but you went before me and left me powerless to do you justice, save with this hot tear, which I send across these vast distances to moisten your pure tomb and to tell you of the terrible emptiness you left behind you in my life — promising you that I shall come back to you once more, O most faithful of friends and dearest of them to my heart.

Santiago — October 1953