Tannous, dynamite man, tractor, proud, fertile imagination, philosophy, village of Tartaij

Lebanon Art, virtual art gallery

Tannous, the Dynamite Man

Alfred, who drove a tractor leveling the ground on our property, came up to a rocky shelf that needed to be broken up, removed and filled in with good earth suitable for crops. So he asked me to find a dynamiter to deal with the layer of rock. As I personally knew nobody who practiced this trade, I told him to go and find somebody suitable himself.

Arriving at the site next day, I found a workman about fifty years old who was boring holes of 60 or 100 centimeters in the slab. Once he had made about thirty of them, he put his automatic drill in his old car and then, cautiously carrying a sack, he set about his specialist task. I should add here that in order to obtain TNT one has to apply at a special office of the Army, which will give upon request the amount of explosive needed. My good fellow placed in each hole a capsule with the necessary TNT, the two being connected by a fuse.

Once he had everything in place, Tannous, for that was his name, shouted warnings on all sides, crying at the top of his voice “Baroud, Baroud (Powder, powder)! Fire! Fire!” The other workers scurried away and then he lit the fuse before running off himself to a safe place, from where he watched the charges exploding one after the other. He counted them, “One, two, three,...” and so on to make sure that all had gone off. The explosions continued, throwing fragments of rock a distance of several yards.

When the danger was over, he strode back to make sure that all had gone well and told the driver of the bulldozer that he could get on with his job. The latter had no difficulty scooping up the remains of the slab and dumping them elsewhere. Now the work could go ahead; the rocky and sterile ground could be cultivated, for nowadays with modern machines and techniques the work, which used to cost so much time and effort, is easy and soon done.

Once upon a time the ground had to be prepared with pick and shovel, everybody working together. The whole village would set about the task, building terrace walls, removing the boulders and spreading the good earth over the surface. The earth was turned over and plowed and then time was needed for the formation of a humus that that would protect the soil like the skin on the human body.

The earth is like a living being that needs to be protected. Our ancestors knew this and worked on the land with love. The land that fed them was part of themselves. There is the old story of a hard-working peasant who, feeling his death drawing nigh, called his children together and told them that he had hidden a precious treasure in his land. When he had passed away and been buried, the children decided to start digging to find the treasure. They began to work away with pick and shovel, to dig and to arrange the property all around. After several days of sweat and toil and effort they still had found nothing. So they made up their minds that as the soil was already worked over, all that was left was to sow seed, plant and cultivate. They did this with enthusiasm and as a result there was an abundant harvest, worth far more than any imaginary treasure! It was then that they understood the real meaning of their father’s last will and testament to them.

Tannous saw me hard at work on the site and asked Alfred, “Who is that fine workman? I have never seen anybody so keen, full of life and energetic! And how kind he looks!” Alfred replied, “When you get to know him you will be still more surprised!”

I had now seen at last the famous Tannous. How can I describe him? He looked like one of those rocks he tore up from the ground. His movements were slow and thoughtful, and he always appeared to be meditating. His shoulders were broad, muscular and strongly built for prolonged effort. He seemed to measure every gesture and movement and word. Brown and sunburned, he let nothing hold him back. His sparse hair left a wide and bulging forehead, under which were quick eyes and thin lips. There was a steady rhythm in his ways despite the fag-ends that hung from his lips all day long. One might say a circus lion leaving its cage in order to perform. He was almost illiterate, but in what way could education be of any use to him? Better his proud and upright stance, as I saw him at our first meeting.

He dropped in on us two or three times a week to see if we had any need of him. Then I would invite him for a cup of coffee and in this way I came to know his little world and his family.

He had an inventive spirit, as if he were a kind of Leonardo de Vinci out of his age, having a lively and fertile imagination. He had a broad general knowledge touching everything, medicine, mechanics, building, agriculture, commerce, religion, anything you might think of.

An unstoppable pioneer, he loved to discover, develop and improve things. He was ready to accept anything new that would serve to better the condition of mankind, and few are the people that I have met of his measure. He was also simple, friendly, helpful and kind, incapable of doing anybody any harm; he was uncomplaining and courageous in facing up to life.

He got into the way of visiting me almost daily, having a coffee, helping the household staff and making himself generally useful.

He must have been some fifteen years older than I was, but he called me Boss and had a great admiration for me as a painter and artist. He started to chat about art and design, saying that it was a vocation for which few had the necessary ability, as this was a gift from God. He saw art as an imitation of Nature, recasting the work of the Creator. Tannous was by no means loquacious; he was a university professor gone astray. He created “Faculties” to his own measure and I agreed with everything he suggested, for, after all, he was a kind and helpful individual.

I gave him permission to do any work he deemed necessary, for he was instinctively enterprising, with a sense of team work. He proposed my ending paying for work on a daily basis, for this dragged on. “Boss,” he said, “with my team I can finish everything in a couple of days; you can take things easy and the work will go quicker.” I accepted. Not far from the house there was a hectare of land that had been leveled by the bulldozer and just needed the stones and pieces of rock cleared up.

The very next day I heard shouting and noise; In the distance I saw Tannous with his team, or rather his family, four boys, a girl, his wife and himself, working like ants, cleaning the place and tidying it up to allow the tractor to go over it with the plow for the first time. After this was done, the place had to be cleaned and gone over again several times so that when all the stones had been removed it was possible to spread organic fertilizer, generally manure from the goat pens. The spectacle fascinated me and I was happy to see the progress that was made. The family team of Tannous was one of the strangest, a team that never discussed but simply shouted, quarreled and insulted. Tannous had no authority over this troop of badly brought up children, for he lived in another world, one of philosophy and research. His children, were each in their own way experts.

My great surprise was the wife of Tannous, called Badr, Full Moon, exactly like the pictures one sees in books about the cave men of the Stone Age, the earliest Homo sapiens. With Badr one was back in the past a hundred thousand years. If you asked her a question, she answered with another, or answered not at all. She too had no authority over the children, but simply insulted them from time to time or threw a stone at them. I thought to myself, “I am going to train and domesticate these savages, a long, hard job!”

Badr held me in deep awe and if I issued a request or an order to her children and they did not obey on the spot, she went at them with stones and blows, not because she did not love them, but because she hovered over them like a mother hen. There was no playing with Badr. I managed to speak with each one of the family separately, spending much time in an effort to change it into one that was more human and sociable.
In winter, the children went back to school but what a problem they were for the teachers and the management! Several times I had to go along myself to help and solve their problems and also to encourage them to study, to show respect and politeness, and to keep to the commandments of God and the Church. At this time too, a daughter was born into this remarkable family.

I was due to be the godfather and my daughter Marina the godmother. The baptism took place at the monastery of Saint Sharbel at Annaya, with all the family surrounding me. In this way there was a spiritual bond knit between us, the girl being named Madonna after my younger daughter. And now, before going into detail about the twenty-odd years that Tannous and his family were associated with me, I shall give some facts about them.

Tannous came from the village of Tartaij, higher than the cedars of Jaj, over 1,500 meters up. This was a village that was abundantly watered, with small streams bubbling up everywhere, among the terraces and among the rocks. The soil was difficult to work, and in winter the houses were often covered with snow and the roads blocked, although now there are snowplows on all the routes ready to keep them open.

Four or five thousand years ago, all this region had been planted by the Creator with cedar trees that the kings of Byblos sold to the pharaohs of Egypt and to the kings of the Hebrews. An Egyptian emissary of the high priest of the god Amoun once came to ask for resinous trees such as cedars, pines, firs, yew and cypresses. King Zaker of Byblos sent two hundred woodcutters to fell the trees and meet the order, while King Hiram of Tyre did the same for Solomon. There are about fifteen cedars over a thousand years old still existing in the area.

As a child Tannous had never been to school. He helped his father in the fields, hewed wood, pruned the trees, built walls, made terraces, irrigated the land, and herded the flocks.

Once grown up, he told me, he was drawn toward trade. He bought and sold various commodities; he brought hay on a truck from the plain of the Beqaa and sold it for livestock and purchased grain and cereals to sell off in the area at a time when supermarkets still lay in the future.

Renting motor vehicles was a costly affair, so for his comings and goings with his wares he bought a donkey, which he loaded with the stuff that he stocked in his poor and simple dwelling.

Sometimes he burdened his animal with two to four wooden boxes full of grapes. In those days there were not all the different kinds that there are now, only four or five, the most widespread being a delicious white grape that was good to eat and had a high level of glucose, a fact which explained why it could go through the winepress for fermentation and distillation. At present there are dozens of kinds of grapes planted that are suitable both for the table and for making wine that is among the best in the world, so viticulture is developing fast.

Tannous, that is to say Anthony in English, sold his grapes retail round about. The housewives waited to his cry announcing his passage and his products. He loaded his donkey with dried figs that the womenfolk made into delicious jam.

In autumn he sold olives or oranges or vegetables. Sometimes he rented out his donkey for transporting the various harvests from the fields to the road, where a truck picked up the crops and took them to market. He also loaded his beast with firewood for the hearths to provide winter warmth.

Up to the early twentieth century there was not a home that did not have its own donkey, its goats and perhaps its oxen. Neither channels for water nor proper roads existed, so the donkey had to serve for everything.

Tannous wanted to be an entrepreneur, ready to turn a hand to anything. He dug wells, tanks for holding water and the foundations for buildings. As all this supposed the use of explosives, Tannous became an expert in the matter.

He was fond of Nature and avoided any useless destruction. If he caught a snake, he would soon let it free; he would put a scorpion in the palm of his hand without any fear; he never hunted, never had he killed a bird.

Everywhere he was thoughtful and meditative, except in his own home and among his own family, where it was Badr who was boss. His children went to the little village school, but often repeated their classes as they were never under any control.

In Lebanon you find superb scholastic institutions that have no equal anywhere in the world. All the teaching congregations are here with their schools, the Marist Brothers, the Brothers of the Christian Schools, the Jesuits, the Protestants, the French secular Lycées, and the local religious orders, male and female. The level of instruction is very high, with excellent results, and at the time of writing thoroughly up-to-date. In addition to these, there are the small neighborhood schools.

For Badr, I was the goad, the friend-in-need. Raising children like those of Badr and Tannous was forced labor, an unending struggle; they were headstrong, eccentric, self-centered and with no respect for any principle. Tannous knew that it was a waste of effort to argue and to try to educate, so he lived in his own world, lost in dreams and imaginings in every domain. Seeing the plasterers at work on a wall of mine, he came to me and said, “I can invent a machine that will cover the four walls of the room and the ceiling in five minutes instead of wasting whole days.” He described to me an invention that was absolutely utopian, while the workmen listened with curiosity, making a thoroughly amusing scene.

The Lebanese have always had a passion for planting flowers and greenery on their balconies, windowsills, and doorsteps. Sometimes Tannous would bring me a pot with a plant that he had decorated, taking the opportunity to water and weed the other pots around.

The whole cosmos was of interest to Tannous, and I taught him to distinguish the planets from the stars, some of whose names he learnt. Flying machines fascinated him, planes, helicopters, rockets and all the rest. Once after deep thought he suggested to me that as the earth was turning round, it was not necessary to travel. All that was needed was to stay fixed in a helicopter in one place and wait for the country of destination to come round. “My dear Tannous,” I said, “Have you forgotten that the atmosphere revolves with the earth at the same speed?”

He often came to me with a newspaper or magazine in his hand like some intellectual who had just finished reading a book. Poor Tannous, unable to make out the meaning of one line, he the thinker who had never been to school, the university man and searcher who had known no university other than his own!
His car was the family’s mobile home into which they were all packed. On Sundays, the Day of the Lord, they all wore their best clothes and went into church all together. They came to say Hello! to me to show off how smart they were.

As for their house just a few miles away, it was a home for all, chickens, goats, cats and dogs. The donkey was tied to a mulberry tree, another dominant character. All these inhabitants took their liberty in one large room. The chairs and few odd pieces of furniture were scattered here and there, under a tree or against a wall. There was neither indoors nor outdoors. All made up one collective self. The books and school satchels also were scattered all over the place, under the trees, near the hens, on a sofa. If anybody wanted a shirt, Badr would take it down from some branch of a tree. In this family anarchy reigned supreme.
In such a household one could always find hidden cupboards, depots where this family kept what was most necessary for existence, money, food, precious possessions, identity cards and suchlike.

There is a story that after a long day’s hunting, the nineteenth century Emir Bashir II, the Great, was unable to reach his palace and so sought shelter in the humble dwelling of nearby peasants, asking them to let him spend the night there. Having recognized him, they wished to receive him with all the honors, so they prepared to set him out a fine meal for which they would slaughter a sheep. The prince cut them short. The householder finally agreed to set the table without lighting the fire, that is to say presenting simply what he had in store, in a day when there was neither electricity nor refrigerator. So for dinner there was lebneh, goat’s cheese preserved in brine, arisheh, another kind of cheese, olives both black and green, awrama (mutton conserved in fat and very tasty), thyme with olive oil, salads and vegetables, jams and honey, in fact a mezzeh fit for a prince, with dried fruit, almonds, hazelnuts and pine seeds, all of which led Prince Bashir to make his famous remark, “A peasant living in obscurity is a sultan for himself.”

Next day, however, there was celebration, with the whole village taking part. A fire was lit and there were roasts and stuffed meats and every kind of enjoyment. Likewise, however poor the house of Tannous looked on the outside, it was always open to receive a friend. The Lebanese have always been generous, stocking provisions for the long winters and for any unexpected guests.

Emir Bashir used to hunt partridges in this region, but he always gave orders for the protection of a hundred pairs of birds so they would always be an abundance of them. The partridge is followed by a dozen chicks, which when they are small can be caught and raised in the houses, and once domesticated they can be allowed out, after which they will return to their cage.

Once upon a time there used to be a certain intimacy between human beings and their animal brothers. From an early age the children lived beside the animals, for in every house there were nightingales, blackbirds and partridges, as well as cats and dogs and stable animals. The animal was a part of oneself and entered into the daily life.

Badr treated her children like she treated her domestic livestock, feeding the goat or her own daughter Hanan, speaking to the dog Baroud (TNT) or with Tannous or one of her children without thinking about it, for in that household there was no distinction. All were living creatures, so why make any difference between them? At home everyone went barefoot, running around in the surrounding grass. All were one with Nature and threw themselves into her arms. Meals together did not exist. Each individual served himself with whatever he found on the fire and ate his fill in some corner. It was a family come out of the past, from twenty thousand years ago surviving into the end of the second millennium.

The language of stones was familiar to all, and the only one who did not use it was Tannous himself. As for Badr, if she wanted to call any of her children and the child did not answer, it was an avalanche of stones that she hurled at the rebel. With Badr, there was no fooling, for she struck without pity. Any number of times Tannous and I took a child in haste to the Emergency. Did our remote ancestor Lucy act in this way?
It was certainly a weird family, hard to domesticate, and Tannous used to come to complain to me that Badr was bringing her children up wrong. In fact Badr should have been treated in a psychiatric hospital, for only looking at her with her behavior, her expression, her look, her hair, or her general condition, one could see that here was a being who not at ease in her skin.

I asked my own children to play with the children of Tannous, to show them some care and affection and friendship, to invite them to take some food, to lend them books of stories with pictures so they might begin to show some interest in study, but all to little or no avail. However, one of the boys, Beshara, and one of the girls showed some interest. In fact later I met the young fellow and he asked me to find him work in some electronic and communications store; I knew he was ambitious and was studying at the university. I also came across the youngest daughter, Madonna, who was preparing her papers to emigrate to Canada.
It is a fact that in the places that receive immigrants, America, Europe, Africa, Australia, the Arab countries and Asia in general, in fact in the whole world, there are ten times more Lebanese than there are in Lebanon itself. It is our mission, to be the yeast in the dough of mankind around the planet. Further, the alphabet we created three thousand years ago has gone ahead of us and spread like a light in minds illuminating the paths of the future.

A former President of the Legal Association (Ordre des Bâtonniers) told me that in Japan ten years after its capitulation a small group of soldiers who were comrades were hiding between the forests and the shores, protecting themselves in the wilderness. Not knowing that the war was over, they approached a beach hut in which they heard people conversing. One of the soldiers was a Lebanese who had joined the Marines and ended up in Japan. He realized that the people in the hut were speaking the Lebanese dialect of Arabic and so he rushed through an opening to meet those inside. They told him that an armistice had been signed and that now there was peace. What a coincidence! The attorney wished to make me understand that, even in the event of war and in faraway Japan, Providence had brought about this meeting so that the fugitives were able to go back to their respective countries and homes. He wished to show me that ever since their inventions in navigation and their creation of writing the Lebanese were to be found everywhere.

I have had a similar experience myself. In 1976, just a year after the outbreak of the civil war, when we had passed so much of our time in shelters, being bombarded, confined to our own districts, I made up my mind to go on a tour of the planet, starting with America. Like Europa, the daughter of Tyre, I contacted the captain of a cargo ship in the port of Jounieh, took down about fifty of my paintings. I hugged and said goodbye to Andrée and my children and the next evening I was aboard ship bound for Cyprus, the Piraeus in Greece and finally Marseille. Wherever I landed I went all over the place, to the Parthenon, to the art galleries and to the museums, where I made useful contacts, took addresses, and presented my CV with photos of my works. At Marseille all the Customs men did me the honor of looking at my canvases one by one. There also I spent a whole day visiting the town and the house of the Marist Brothers, my old friends. I turned to Grasse in the Côte d’Azur where there was a French friend of mine, who put me up for a week while I visited the Art Galleries of the Coast, with one of which at Cannes near the Carlton Hotel I made an agreement for the Festival period. While in France I got an express visa for Sao Paolo.

I went on to Paris, where I paid visits and made contacts in order to plan an exhibition after Cannes. I went through Grenoble and there fixed a date for a show at the Tour de Morestel. Then at Paris I found my visa waiting for me at the address I had given. So after a week of activity in this wonderful city that is Paris I took the plane for South America. Arriving there late in the night I found some friends and the consul himself waiting for me at the Rio de Janeiro airport. In short, I held an exhibition in Rio while preparing another at Sao Paolo, where the Lebanese are numerous and influential, another at Bello Horizonte, where I had friends, and three more in succession in different states. I did at least fourteen portraits of different people and received a number of orders, so the months passed in South America were full! As telephone lines to Lebanon were not working, for six months I was unable to contact my children at home, except once by amateur radio.

Retracing my steps, I passed through France to confirm my appointments, but to reach Lebanon there was only one way, to buy a second-hand car and to cross France and Italy to reach the Greek port of Piraeus again. To reach the Christian port of Jounieh from there, I took a cargo passing via Larnaka in Cyprus, from where our Muslim brothers would go either to Tripoli or to Sidon. So each had his full share of adventure. To be Lebanese is to be universal, with an opening and a love for every nation and race. The Maronites in particular, feeling themselves to be the heirs of the Phoenicians and the Canaanites, have always stood up for the rights of man and for independence. At the time of the Ottoman massacres between 1840 and 1860 emigration was easy, requiring only courage and the inborn spirit of adventure.

I should add that after this round trip of less than a year I returned home with over fifty thousand dollars in my pocket, having left works of mine scattered here and there around the world and ready to launch out on other journeys, this time in the direction of the Emirates and other Arab countries.

I found Madonna, the daughter of Tannous, preparing to travel, and if the circumstances had allowed Tannous himself to emigrate and exercise his genius elsewhere I think he might have been a Gulbenkian, a Rothschild, a Niarcos, a Kennedy or an Onassis. Living in what was the wrong time for him, Tannous was a sturdy pioneer, always on the lookout for new discoveries. He should have been on one of the three ships that sailed under Christopher Columbus. He was misunderstood by his rebellious family, particularly the wildly eccentric Badr, and stood a little outside his environment, this man who always carried high explosives in the back of his car. He found refuge with me, and I for my part understood and admired him, for he was conscientious and honest, capable and courageous. He was good-hearted and utterly faithful; even during my absence abroad he came to our home, noted whatever was missing or was not in order, drank his coffee and took his lunch, sometimes helping the servants or giving them orders or reading in the coffee dregs what the future held for my wife, who for her part took care of his family and taught his daughter to sew and to cook. Teaching her mother Badr was hopeless, as she was incapable of understanding anything.

Badr knew some of the great names of history, of physicians, healers, the precursor of Christianity and father of thought Plato (pronounced by him in Arabic Aflaton). Hannibal, and Alexander. In fact, he identified himself with all the great ones of mankind. He told me that one day he was in a bus during the disturbances when a checkpoint of sectarian militiamen barred the way. The frightened passengers were ordered to get out. As he emerged, Tannous snatched their weapons from the two militiamen, and roaring like a lion, courageously attacking without restraint, told the passengers to get back inside and the bus to continue on its way.

“What injustice!” he said to me, “We were in a Christian area, between Byblos and Batroun. The militiamen were Christians and the passengers of various sects and quite innocent.” It needed much persuasion for Tannous to hand their weapons back to their two bearers.

Once he accompanied me to present our condolences after a funeral and he gave me to understand that he could have cured the deceased by giving him a truly miraculous cure. I had to persuade him that the man would have had to undergo very dangerous operations and that Tannous’s cure, his herbs and herbal teas would have been quite useless, in fact that he was not Almighty God to raise the dead with potions that might be magical but were certainly not miracle-working. He was incidentally a believer in God.

He had to keep changing his place of residence, going from bad to worse, because he could never find premises whose owners were ready to accept his Noah’s Ark. I sometimes intervened to try to help him, but the neighbors protested against the nearby presence of children who were quarrelsome, brazen, impolite, meddlesome and aggressive.

Every time that he moved it was to go further away. Two of his children learnt and took on the occupation of their father, equipping themselves, however, with more modern tractors and bulldozers. Later when leaving a supermarket I bumped into one of his sons. When I asked him about how Tannous was getting along, the son told me that he had passed away, adding that the hospital doctors were murderers and (...!) I told him to be quiet, that it was God’s will, and that it was now up to him to look after Badr and the family.

That day I asked my daughter, who was a doctor working in the same hospital about the death of Tannous. She said that a very malignant tumor had brought him down and that the doctors had done all they could for him. The very next day I set about finding a new home for Badr. I found her a couple of hundred yards away from their old home, which they had bought and near which they had dumped all the material while waiting to build. They had rented an apartment on the first floor, where total anarchy reigned, like a caravansary. Hanan, Madonna, Beshara and Badr were all there. I refused an offer of coffee, saying that I felt for them as I had when Tannous was alive and that they could count on my help.

I then asked Badr how she had come to know Tannous and to marry him. She answered that Tannous had been dynamiting at her brother’s, who had said to Tannous, “You are a bachelor and my sister still unmarried, what do you say to taking her?” Just a few days later Tannous and Badr were married, little matter whether or not they loved each other, and in due course had a large family.

This reminded me of an old story going back to the early twentieth century. My in-laws had a day-worker who wanted to get married. He went with his father and mother to a nearby village to ask for a suitable girl. They agreed on a date for the marriage and went back home after a fine feast and a reception according to village tradition.

On the date fixed for the wedding, the young man Sharbel, his relatives, his friends and the village people waited for the bride, who would come riding one donkey and be accompanied by family and people of her village. Sharbel saw from afar the procession with in front the bride dressed in white. But what actually had happened?

In the bride’s home there were two daughters, an elder one Josephine, rather ugly, and a younger one whom Sharbel had liked. The parents had said they would marry off the elder one as her sister was young and good-looking and would easily find a fiancé in due course. So it was Josephine who had been put on the donkey and dressed up in white. Faced with the situation, Sharbel said, “It doesn’t matter much, I really want her for working and weeding our plot and milking our animals, it makes no difference, so let’s go!” This day-laborer Sharbel, whom I had known, and for whom I had made a very fine portrait, had nine or ten daughters and four sons, and a hundred grandchildren to love him. Josephine, whom I knew in her old age, told me want a wonderful life she had spent with Sharbel.

What can be said of Tannous and of Badr? Provided she was left alone, Badr was fair enough, and out of her caveman existence she could say, “Tannous obeyed me and did fine provided I left him in his world of his own.”

For me, speaking of Tannous and Badr evokes a certain nostalgia, for these two people were like no others on earth.