RUTHFULLY YOURS

Is it because of 3/4 time, that sweetly narcotic sound of the waltz? Or perhaps due to the white, elbow-length gloves, ball dresses and tiaras? As Beatrice, Nadine and Layal walk up the staircase — smiling as they hold up the shimmering folds of their gowns — they seem lost in reverie. Even the rebellious Gaelle, with her braided armbands and shorter hair, says what everyone is saying: how excited she is to be a princess for an evening. And all in white!

That some might find a ball like this, in light of the situation in the country, a bit galling is nothing but a misunderstanding, says Fenianos. Though the circumstances are serious indeed: Opposing camps in the north are firing at each other almost daily, car bombs explode frequently in the south, the economy is in free fall and a fifth of Lebanon’s current population is made up of refugees from the Syrian civil war.

“We know what’s going on,” Fenianos said at the dress rehearsal on the day before the ball. “But we are showing the real Lebanon! We have been holding this ball for 16 years and nothing can stop us, neither crises nor bombs. We also danced in 2006, two months after the war with Israel!”

The Cost of Distinction

Despair, on the afternoon before the ball, was an emotion felt only by the dancing instructor, whose pupils were constantly looking at their smartphones or calmly making calls during the dress rehearsal. One doesn’t talk about politics in her circles, says Madame Fenianos, with her ever-present smile, though her face seems slightly frozen from too many Botox treatments. “Alors, the First Lady will also be here! And we even have a prince!”

Which prince?

“Well, Prince … Latifa, what’s his name again?” The ladies shrug their shoulders. “The … well, the prince! Some European!”

The casino is in a magnificent location, at the end of the bay and with a view of Beirut. The modernist structure, opened in 1959, now looks like the set of an early James Bond film, complete with Maseratis pulling up to drop off some of the debutantes. They could just as well have been Ferraris, but no woman in an evening gown could step out of a Ferrari gracefully.

Or at least not with the kind of perfect form displayed by Beatrice Bakhache as she minces up to the steps to the ballroom. The 18-year-old daughter of a businessman from Tripoli is well aware of the cost of distinction. “It’s hard to be perfect all the time, the hair, the behavior, the right friends,” friends who must pass muster with her mother before Beatrice can go out with them.

Camera teams with Future TV, a private station, accompany the parade of debutantes. Fenianos brought the idea of a debutantes’ ball to Lebanon from Brazil, where she lived for many years. “I always wanted to make this dream possible for my daughters,” she says. In the end, though, she never had any daughters, just three sons, but she initiated the annual Beirut debutante ball nonetheless. And like etiquette classes in French and Louis XVI chairs, the ball conforms to the tastes of the Lebanese upper crust, a group determined to be more European than any European — and one that feels lost between the poor and the nouveau riche.

Salva Choukheir refers to the latter group as “the Mafiosi.” She is the grande dame of the Rotary Club in Lebanon and one of the patrons of the ball. “A society needs two generations of peace to grow. But the rich of today all became wealthy in the war. They leave astronomically high tips and send their Filipino nannies to parent conference days at their children’s schools.”

The Waltz of Politics

The young women making their debuts on this evening come from important Lebanese families like the Boulos, Khoury, Younis, Harb and Hobeika. But they are not the country’s most important family names. Families like the Gemayel, Hariri and Berri have no need to demonstrate that they are part of Lebanon. Instead, they assume that the country belongs to them. But the names of some of the attendees have also played important roles inLebanese history. Debutante Tamara Hobeika is a distant relative of Elie Hobeika, the commander of the Christian “Forces Libanaises” in the 1982 civil war. Under the eyes of Israeli soldiers, Hobeika had hundreds of Palestinians massacred in the Sabra and Shatila camps. Then, as if nothing had happened, he then served the other side, the Syrian occupiers, as minister for refugee affairs. He was killed by a car bomb in 2002, but the assassins were never found. Hobeika had ordered his underlings to murder people in various camps, including Palestinians, Iranian diplomats and Lebanese clerics; there were plenty who wanted to see him dead.

Attacks have become commonplace again, and self-appointed neighborhood guards are patrolling Beirut districts. Everything repeats itself, but little changes. It’s a continuation of 3/4 time with different means. The waltz, that dizzying delight, “saved Vienna from revolution,” a biographer of composer Johann Strauss once wrote: “swirling and swirling and forgetting everyday life.” Lebanese politics is no different.

The first dance of the evening is reserved for fathers and their daughters. But hours pass before the dancing can begin. The evening starts with a fashion show. After that, the two ambulances that are being donated to the Red Cross with the ball’s proceeds roll onto the stage, their lights flashing. Footage of the most recent attacks in Beirut is projected in an endless loop onto a screen in the background.

“We don’t ignore the hardships of others,” insists Salva Choukheir, whose Rotary Club members also attend to the needs of the Syrian refugees in the country. “We help them as much as we can!” says Choukheir — even if she professes not to understand why they fled their country in order to live voluntarily in tents. “During our civil war, we died here or we went to Paris!”

Then Fenianos, the evening’s mistress of ceremonies, presents the debutantes, who are led through the room on their fathers’ arms. First Lady Waafa Sulaiman is presented with a rose, and then the ladies curtsy before Emanuele Filiberto Umberto Reza Ciro René Maria of Savoy, Prince of Venice and Piedmont, a grandson of Italy’s last king.

‘We’re All Lebanese’

The debutantes are all Lebanese. But when they are introduced, it almost sounds as if they were attending a United Nations ball. About a third of them live in the United States, Saudi Arabia, Brazil and Africa. Nadine Omais and her mother flew in from Senegal, where her family has been living for three generations.

“But of course we’re all Lebanese,” says her mother in astonishment when asked which country she considers her home. The Omais made their fortune producing blocks of ice for the Senegalese fishing fleet.

A photo of Nadine Omais, a beautiful 17-year-old, reached Fenianos through a dense network of aunts and mothers. She decided that Nadine was a “mratab,” the Lebanese term for a perfect match: beautiful, rich, from a good family and with no scandals to her name. And now she has come to the ball to be shown off, seen and introduced to Beirut’s better circles, which quietly despise those who are not from their ranks.

Crises, poverty and wars have driven the Lebanese away from their country for more than a century. There were Lebanese on board the Titanic, on their way to New York. Some 15 to 20 million people of Lebanese extraction live outside their country. There are 7 million Lebanese in Brazil alone, many more than Lebanon’s entire population of 4.4 million. Salva Choukheir, the woman from the Rotary Club, spent her best days in Paris. “People didn’t talk about religion or politics there. We felt at home in Paris! When I arrived in 1975, with only a few summer dresses, I thought we would stay for two months. It turned into 21 years.”

Those in the Lebanese diaspora are far more successful than the Lebanese in Lebanon. The world’s second-richest man, Carlos Slim, earned his fortune of about $70 billion (€50 billion) in Mexico. Joseph Safra, Brazil’s richest banker, worth about $17 billion, is from one of the large Jewish families in Beirut. Carlos Ghosn, the head of Renault and Nissan, has Lebanese roots, as does Nick Hayek, the son of the founder of the Swatch Group in Switzerland.

Obsession with Competition

Wherever they go, educated at the best universities of the Levant, steeled in the struggle for survival, smooth and sometimes cunning, they build successful businesses — just not at home in Lebanon. In their native country, the Lebanese are forced to mobilize all of their abilities in competition with one another, and the country itself is paralyzed by corruption, war and an obsession with competition. Put differently, Lebanon suffers from an overdose of its own character traits.

When they are successful abroad, they send money home and eventually build an imposing villa in their abandoned native country, which then remains empty for 11 months of the year.

This hopeless love-hate relationship between the Lebanese and Lebanon is not new. A century ago, Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran characterized the Lebanese as a nation worth pitying, one “that raises not its voice save when it walks in a funeral,” and is “divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation.”

But the faster the Lebanese tumble toward the abyss, the more raucously they celebrate — at least those who can afford to. The debutantes’ dance with their fathers is followed by a loud and lengthy fireworks display. Suddenly the large curtain is lowered, indicating that something isn’t going as planned. The audience can hear hectic voices coming from behind the curtain, and then smoke appears and the girls come staggering out of the hallway on the side of the stage, coughing and running as fast as they can in their stiletto heels. There is a fire.

There are other senseless ways to die in Lebanon than in attacks. In one case, the army accidentally blew up half a city block during celebrations on the national holiday. But being burned to death during the debutantes’ ball would be the most ironic of verdicts for enjoying waltzes and fancy hors d’oeuvres. As it turns out, the fireworks display set fire to some of the decorations and then the rear curtain. But the maintenance staff quickly put out the fire and rescue the debutantes.

It later turns out that one of the fathers wanted to avoid paying his portion of the sponsorship money and offered to handle the fireworks instead. Unfortunately, the man knew very little about fireworks and used those designed for outdoors instead of indoors.

The Dance Continues

The audience remains calm. After all, this is Lebanon. Even though the spotlights shine through clouds of smoke after the fire, and the debutantes need to spend some time outside in the fresh air, mistress of ceremonies Fenianos, her face frozen, continues standing in front of the stage, ordering around the personnel.

The music continues, midnight passes, and soon the climax of the evening approaches: the debutantes’ dance with their young gentlemen.

The air is still thick from the curtain fire, but the couples waltz across the dance floor nonetheless. Beatrice, a tall girl with a perfect smile, dances at the front, in the most prominent position. Next to her is Tina-Marie, who has made the trip all the way from Saudi Arabia — and now suddenly collapses in the middle of a waltz. A murmur goes through the crowd, she pulls herself together, her date holds her up and they dance a few more steps, but then she collapses on the stage once again. Even high heels can be a weapon.

The waltz comes to an end, at which point all the couples are supposed to make their way down from the stage and into the audience, but Tina-Marie refuses to take another step. To a roar of applause, the dancing instructor carries her from the stage in his arms. Her mother is in tears and her father has a furious look on his face. There are whispers that he paid a lot of money to ensure that his daughter could dance in the first row. But, as it happens, she simply isn’t as tall as Beatrice, so she wore the highest possible heels to make up the difference. “Eighteen centimeters,” the other debutantes say with respect.

But it was still a wonderful ball, says Nadine Omais’s uncle as they drive home through the city later that night. “It’s just a shame that they only spoke French. I didn’t understand anything at all. At least they could have offered an Arab translation. But hey, we survived!”

A few days later, Nadine and the other debutantes who flew in for the occasion are back in the air, en route to their ersatz homes in places like New Jersey, Saudi Arabia and Senegal. Meanwhile, in the land of their dreams, car bombs continue to explode every week, while Tamara Hobeika finally prevails over her personal enemy: her nose. “I hated it!” she exclaims. Now that she’s had the surgery, her nose is smaller — it’s “mratab.”The Hezbollah militia continues to wage war in Syria and refuses to tolerate foreign interference in Lebanon. Weddings are as glamorous as ever, but in Beirut’s southern suburbs they have begun stacking sandbags in front of shop windows.

The ball is over, but the dance continues.