Chapter 32 The flexibility of Love
Chapter 32 The flexibility of Love
Many years had gone by since the two men had seen each other. The Havana émigré who had left the country at eighteen was now thirty-two. His former teacher was seventy-two, a respected figure, certainly, but a very controversial one as well. The Catholics in the village openly detested him, for even after all these years they still couldn’t understand how the son of the good priest Gerjis could have espoused heretical beliefs and—to add insult to injury—brazenly converted the priest’s house into a Protestant house of worship. On Sunday mornings, when the preacher rang the bell he had placed on the outside wall to summon “his” faithful to the service and a good number of villagers came streaming out of their homes in their best clothes, there were those for whom this was plainly the work of the devil, a sign that Heaven had abandoned this country of sinners for good.
Yet Khalil did not proselytize aggressively. He always avoided any confrontation with the other communities and merely doggedly followed his own path. In the family archives, most of the documents bearing his handwriting are lists of the needy. Indeed, he made it his habit to travel to all the Mountain villages and inquire after the most destitute; then he requested help on their behalf, either from the Anglo-Saxon missionaries or from a few wealthy men of his acquaintance. He took no account of the recipients’ religion and never asked for anything in return. When these people, to whom no one else paid any heed, saw the diligence of this man month after month, they were eventually attracted by the sound of the new bell, and the Protestant community grew in number.
Teaching had long been Khalil’s other activity. But after spreading knowledge for a few years, his pioneering school, which had benefited Botros, Gebrayel, and dozens of other children from our village and the surrounding area (including, incidentally, the family historian, Issa, author of The Tree), he had been forced to close it down. For Khalil this was worse than a defeat; it was the death of a dream.
As I have mentioned, he had completed advanced studies in Abey, Souk-el-Gharb, Beirut, and elsewhere, and had held various positions of responsibility in Protestant institutions. He then returned to our village and founded his school on the American model, receiving American aid as well as aid from Presbyterian missions from Scotland. This was a highly ambitious project. The missionaries were almost like people from another planet, and they had a golden rule, adopted by their local disciples, including Khalil: the pupils were not to be given a third-rate education; they were to be given exactly the same education as pupils in Boston and Edinburgh, and the teachers were to be just as demanding with them as with young people of the same age in the United States or Great Britain.
This meant that the new school would be unlike any previous school in the village. Until then, meaningless sentences were mumbledad infinitum in the same droning voice—the same sentences that had been mumbled by generations of illiterate ancestors under the menacing stick and bored gaze of a priest. For Khalil, it was a point of honor to have the best textbooks sent to him, to recruit the best available teachers, and to impose the most rigorous standards on his students.
Alas, the experiment didn’t last, in spite of the villagers’ very favorable reception. Why did it fail? I won’t dwell on the reasons here, for in any case, I was only able to get a rough idea. He had to contend with the Catholic clergy’s hostility. After having been caught short, they eventually launched an effective counteroffensive. I shall come back to this later. He received only weak support from the missionaries, for they saw these kinds of schools proliferate throughout the mountain area and wanted to sponsor only the most successful, meaning the ones in the largest villages. For Khalil, however, the most serious setback was the fact that his own kin “deserted” him. Not one of his five sons seemed willing to take over from his aging father as headmaster of the school. In fact, not one was interested in teaching. Worse still, none of them wanted to stay in the village, or in the country for that matter. They all dreamed of settling overseas. Some had already done so; others were getting ready to do so.
Wounded in his pride, he decided to close down the school, bring his long teaching career to an end, and start a new career in … silk. Yes, raising silkworms. He planted white mulberry trees all around his house, for their leaves are the food of silkworms, and he built a silkworm-rearing house in an isolated spot, to keep the odors at a distance. According to The Tree, he applied “the method recommended by Pasteur” and produced “the most valued cocoons in the whole region.”
I can easily believe this. Khalil was rigorous in everything he did—a quality I value, even if I can’t help smiling as I describe his strange transformation. On the one hand, rigor counteracts laxness, mental nonchalance, carelessness, and vague approximations—in sum, all the scourges that have had a debilitating effect on the Orient for too long. On the other hand, rigor equals inflexibility and moral rigidity, attitudes that undermine the gentle art of living enjoyed in our lands.