Beirut 2020: Diary of the Collapse

July 11

I first thought that the sudden disappearance of all those anti-mosquito coils you burn to get rid of insects was linked to the general shortages in the supermarkets. Then Nayla made me realize that it probably had more to do with the fact that it was impossible for many households to use the usual devices that you plug into a power socket, since there is hardly ever any electricity at all in many neighborhoods, especially at night. So we’re back to using the good old burning coils, which have now disappeared from the market because of high demand — collateral damage of the economic crisis, but also of the COVID-19 pandemic. For I am firmly convinced that the worldwide slump in industrial activity and the lower pollution levels that allowed nature to reboot during the three months of lockdown all over the world have given a new unexpected vigor to plants and insects.

And so now we are suddenly defenseless against the bugs. A few days ago we were having dinner with Gilbert Hage and his wife at their place, and Gilbert, who is always easygoing and good-natured, with the girth of Winston Churchill and a chewed cigar permanently hanging from his lips, disappeared for a moment inside the house, then came back into the garden where we were having our meal, holding one of those coils which he lit up with the end of his Partagás. I told him this was a strange thing to do. He retorted, with his usual offbeat and unpredictable humor, that these coils were now so exclusive that you couldn’t possibly do them justice with a simple matchstick. I then told them how the smell of these strange green products, whose smoke rises slowly into the air like incense, had been part of my childhood, especially during my summers in the mountains. Everyone around the table seemed to have the same memory. Then I recalled reading in Gabriel García Márquez that in the West Indies they used to burn dried cowpats to get rid of mosquitoes. Gilbert said that the burning green coils were in fact made out of compressed cow dung, with an artificial fragrance. The economic crisis in Lebanon, I said to myself, has led to the not-so-fortuitous encounter, at the home of a great photographer, of Churchill and a coil of compressed cow dung.

F

or the thirty years of the second republic, one of the most coveted contracts was for trash collection, and even more so for the management of public dumpsites. Obviously the tender involved endless manipulations, nontransparent transactions, and clientelistic maneuvers. The dumpsites were finally awarded to someone close to the Hariri family — who has since become a billionaire, along with the rest of his entourage — who respected almost none of the terms of his contract, notably regarding the sorting and treatment of the waste material. The landfills turned into huge mountains of trash, cliffs of filth collapsing into the sea at several points along the coastline, with a smell that throughout the years has often spread all over the towns and the whole seacoast like the malevolent spirit of a power that is rotten to