The wars of my youth

Photo taken in 1976, when I was a member of the “Guardians of the Cedars” in Lebanon

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Testimony from a reader received yesterday:

Mr. Michel Santi,

I would like to warmly congratulate you on your book, which I recently had the pleasure of reading. I was deeply moved by the richness of your memories, particularly those related to Lebanon, which you describe with such delicacy and sensitivity.

The encounters with important figures that you recount are fascinating and told with rare humanity. Your writing truly transported me, and reading your work was a moment of genuine joy.

Thank you for sharing your journey and your memories with such generosity.
With all my admiration and respect.

Order your Order your personalized signed book : https://michelsanti.fr/

Passage from the book:

Throughout this first part of my life, all I’ve done is let people down. My mother first, who never kept count – the blessed woman – of all the times I abandoned her. My father, by returning abruptly to Lebanon, leaving my school behind in the process. Gilles and the young soldier, both in rather disgusting ways. Lebanon, which I was absolutely right to flee from, multiple times. I also, overnight, disappeared in the eyes of those young militiamen of the Guardians, who for a time had become my comrades – I listened to them, cared for them, sometimes lifted their spirits. Without a single word of explanation, while I locked myself away just a few meters from them in my room and replaced them with books. Many of them surely worried, and most of them fell. I deserted Paris and my medical studies, both of which – for me – were sources of fulfillment. I agreed, in just a few short minutes, to let myself be expelled from Jerusalem, even though I could have – and maybe should have – resisted Peres, with whom I might well have worked something out. Who knows: why would he have refused to let the young soldier and me leave that bitter city of Jerusalem to isolate ourselves somewhere around the Sea of Galilee, or near Jericho? Each of those decisions, each of those voluntary abandonments – of a person or a place – sent my life in a direction I hadn’t anticipated.

What would I have become if I had obediently stayed in Arabia with my father? I probably wouldn’t have any story to tell today. What would I have become without that encounter with Sandy – entirely owed to my return to Lebanon in 1976 – since it was thanks to him that I experienced what would undoubtedly be one of the foundational events of my life: my meetings with Imam Khomeini. In fact, that 12-year-old boy who, without hesitation, took up the challenge of going to Mecca with a distinguished stranger was already programmed for a disordered, yet unbelievable life. Would Gilles have contracted AIDS if I had refused that trip to Lebanon he wanted so badly? Might he still be alive today if we had returned together to Paris from Cyprus, where he was waiting for me like a loyal soldier? Would the young soldier have deserted without meeting me, without that magical night we spent together in my mother’s bedroom? Should I not have involved my father, or Sandy, or someone… to try to save him from a certain arrest – and therefore a certain death – instead of running off and leaving him there, crushed? At the very least, should I not have gone back to Paris, tried to reconnect with Gilles – who would have easily let himself be won back – instead of flying off like a coward to Switzerland? How paradoxical, that the only person I returned to, several times, of my own free will, was my father. The one who treated me so carelessly, trampled my sensitivity, forced me to lie, who put his own life and pleasures far above those of his youngest son.

I have bent my path, altered my destiny many times – and those of others too – often upending their lives. At the start, I expected nothing. At the start, I knew nothing. I naturally imagined that my mother would join us, my father and me, in Saudi Arabia, that we would return to Lebanon for holidays, that I would finish my studies there once it was safe again. At worst, I would return for university. At the end of these seven and a half years, a new life begins for me. “The conclusions of great novels are new beginnings,” tells us René Girard. Aware of being forged from different, incompatible, haphazard alloys. I am 19. In a city and a country I do not know, I will continue. Light-hearted. As if nothing had ever happened.