Together, they made a forward movement, and, with her two hands extended, Khadidja precipitated the bronze lamp against them, which collapsed noisily, plunging the room into darkness and spreading a nauseating odor of oil and burnt wick.
There were imprecations. Khadidja felt the grip of two hands under her armpits. She slid like a snake. Her hair came undone. She ran to the right and the left, bumping into the walls, pursued by the arms, which swept the air, brushed her, gripped her, let her go and seized her again. A handful of her hair was torn out with a noise of crackling sparks; she fell, got up, and ended up flattening herself against the wall, where she remained motionless.
She heard the panting of the three men, and their insults. One of them suddenly grunted with satisfaction. “I have my briquette,” he said, while the others repeated: “Quickly! Quickly!”
At the same movement, Khadidja’s hand, extended along the wall, encountered the handle of a door. She had perceived that door when she had darted a first circular glance around the room, but she had lost its direction. In any case, it was doubtless locked.
It was not. At the same time as the briquette, with its little star of light, illuminated three terrible visages, the door opened and Khadidja fled.
She had a few seconds start, no more, for the three brothers launched themselves on her heels, but an inconceivable surge impelled her light form. She traversed a room, descended a stairway, ran over sonorous paving-stones that had to be those of a vestibule, passed without seeing it a door that opened to a garden, climbed a stairway that the moon filled with delightful hues and almost fell into a room where a man was standing...
She was exhausted. Her heart was hammering in her breast.
“Save me!” she cried. “In the name of the Prophet, save me!”
Soleiman had heard the noise and had got up in order to go and see what was happening. He suddenly found himself facing Khadidja and his three brothers, breathless and haggard, but all the more possessed by their desire.
So this was what had awakened him from the ecstasy in which he was plunged, and in which he was seeking to confound his soul, final purified, with God! It was for this that the Prophet had appeared to him and had guided him on the path of renunciation! He had believed in the secret promise that no speech had formulated but that he had heard during the nights of spiritual exaltation: the promise of pardon.
The face of the Prophet had lied; there was no pardon.
By an inexplicable spell, a hallucinatory witchcraft, the past was revived before his eyes. As in the atrocious scene of old, he saw his brothers drunk, he saw a woman in torn garments who was looking at him with green eyes widened by fear and, with the same voice, it seemed to him, begging him in the same words.
No redemption for sins! Lust was eternal, as well as the love of making the weak suffer and shedding their blood. No redemption! No possible redemption! Like the movement of the tides, like tempests, criminal instincts come back into the souls of men who had believed themselves momentarily to be illuminated by the sun.
Well, he would abandon himself to the Law. He would reawaken he old ferocious beast asleep within him, he would kill and he would drag his victim by the feet again, he would tear out her tangled hair and he would dig a grave, laughing.
He was already laughing. He snatched a dagger from the belt of one of his brothers and threw away the sheath.
But the three panting lepers understood his intention. They remembered a similar scene. They did not want their prey to escape them. Woe betide Soleiman if he lost his reason and put his pleasure into death.
They threw himself upon him together in order to disarm him. Khadidja took advantage of that to get up. She had nothing to expect from the fourth insensate leper, who was laughing as he fought with his brothers, with a shrill and savage laughter. There was another door at the back of the room. That door gave access to a narrow stairway, which she climbed. She went up very high. The stairway was never-ending; it must be the stairway of a tower. She finally arrived in a rather vast room which the moon illuminated dimly, and she closed the door behind her. She drew the bolt and uttered a sigh of satisfaction.
But she examined the door. The wood was not every thick, and could not resist any attempt to break it down for long. Her respite would not be of long duration.
She looked at the place where she was. Against the wall there were the glints of weapons: spears, scimitars and arquebuses were lined up on all sides; that isolated room almost at the top of the tower contained the unused arsenal of the ancient dwelling.
And as blows resounded upon the door, she was stuck by a sudden thought. That door had a rather large judas-hole. It would be easy enough for her to open the judas, place an arquebus therein, and fire at the lepers at point-blank range. Her father had once taught her to handle an arquebus. She knew how to make the serpentine swing over the detonator. She unhooked one of the weapons and examined it. The weapon was an old model but in good condition. She was saved if she wanted to be.
But she did not want it. She set the arquebus down gently in a corner.
Once, in Malaga, her old master Abou Lahab had sent several days in sadness and had made a vow not to leave his house again because he had crushed a sleeping lizard while walking. It was Abou Lahab who had told her that it was necessary to traverse gardens with precaution on rainy evenings because of snails the color of earth that could not be seen. Even respiration was a danger for many small creatures. It was necessary to be incessantly careful not to destroy the life that surrounds us. No, she would not kill those lepers to save her life.
Then a great lassitude overwhelmed her. The blows that were resonating seemed to be hammering in her brain. She was so exhausted that she was obliged to evoke the horror that menaced her in order to drag herself a little further away.
There was a narrower stairway at the back of the room from which gusts of fresh air were coming. When the judas had been smashed and the door was about to be broken down, Khadidja dragged herself into that stairway and closed another door behind her.
The lepers’ cry of victory, as they erupted into the armory, was followed by a howl of rage and the same sound of a lock shaken and blows struck. Followed by that tumult, Khadidja, feeling faint and aiding herself with her hands, climbed a few more steps.
Suddenly, she felt her hair flying around her head. She was enveloped by the freshness of the wind and the brightness of the sky. She had reached the ultimate terrace of the tower and all the perfumes of the gardens of Granada were reaching her from a distance like the subtle message of her past. The familiar stars were bursting forth above her head. She believed she could see the pulp of the magnolias inflating, the crazed water jets dancing, the cypresses meditating. She leaned avidly toward the night.
From the height where she was, the mute city of the lepers was merely a feeble patch of shadow. The plain of the Vega, beneath the extraordinary brightness of the moon, was like a hallucinatory sheet of silver, a mysterious lake from which the masses of hayricks surged here and there like motionless golden ships, clumps of trees like islets beaten by a silent sea, and the cupolas of houses like fabulous swans asleep for eternity.
Far away, she could see the enormous circle of Granada, with its thousand and thirty towers, where red beacons were alight like countless sad eyes. Beyond the line of the ramparts there was an accumulation of superimposed terraces, miradors, turrets and colonnades. The houses seemed to be climbing on top of one another, accumulating on the flanks of the hill of the Alhambra, all the way to the Alhambra itself, which dominated Granada, crushing it with its square framework and its towers looming up like horns.
And the entire city, with that redoubtable Alhambra, was reminiscent of a monstrous beast, like the ones that would fall to earth when the angel Israfil announced the last judgment. The livid moon sometimes caused the porcelain of a dome to shine like scales, or showed the opening of a mosque like a jaw, and an alignment of pillars like teeth. That was the terrestrial beast who
se breath is suffering and which digests the love and hatred of men untiringly.
And suddenly, Khadidja saw the enormous beast move. It turned on the horizon, and sometimes disappeared, as if it had plunged into a lunar flood. Then it emerged, to run again, to make its claws sparkle, to opens its maws, to elongate its teeth. But that beast did not frighten Khadidja any more than the increasing tumult behind the door to the stairway through which the lepers were about to surge.
She was swaying with the tower in a vertiginous space. She was far away, very high amid the inaccessible azure, in a region of icy crystal and dead sapphire, in an incomparable solitude more terrible than terrestrial fears, more torturing than Hell.
Almazan did not love her. He had never loved her. She had nourished herself on the lie of her imagination, and she was about to die all alone, perfectly alone, without a thought of amour, at the summit of a stone tower overlooking a city of lepers. That was where the folly of her dream had led her, her dementia of beauty.
And then she heard, clearly and distinctly, a voice that rose above the tumult of a struggle, a voice that came from the stairway and cried: “Khadidja!”
In the distance, the ramparts of Granada had resumed their immobility. The plain of the Vega unfurled around her, immense and clear-cut under the moon, and she had sat down, with her torn garments and her scattered hair, on the granite balustrade that bordered the trace of the tower.
She listened, and she ran forward. Behind the door, neither hoarse clamors or savage cries were resounding any longer. There was only one voice, slightly anguished, but increasingly loud, which was calling her by name—and it was the voice of Almazan.
He had known! He had come to save her! Everything was not illusion in her story of amour, then; Fatima’s messages were real; Almazan really had given her a rendezvous this evening and he had nothing to do with the trap that had been set for her. He loved her, and he had come to find her.
She was about to open the door, to extend her arms to him.
One more minute! Her veils were soiled and torn! She strove to arrange the pleats and to twist her outspread hair over the nape of her neck. She no longer had vertigo now. She was leaning on the stones of a tower as solid as the certainty of being loved. A great joy flooded from the depths of her soul like a wave unfurling on a beach, coming from the horizon if the sea.
Yes, yes, she would open up. She was there. There was nothing to fear.
She raised her eyes toward the sky with a thought of gratitude for the good Gennis who must be floating there, and what she saw seemed extraordinary.
The sky had many more stars than before. It was bright, it was streaming, pouring out floods of luminous heavenly bodies. And it was not distant; it was very close to her; it was descending with its planets, its constellations and its Milky Way, like a river of gems, and the crescent of its moon, like the prodigious symbol of Islam.
Khadidja had within arm’s reach everything she could desire to repair the disorder of her garments, to show herself to the man she loved with an unparalleled ornamentation.
She took handfuls of emeralds and scattered them in her hair, and those starry emeralds shone with a green fire such as she had never seen. She twisted the rubies and topazes of the Great Bear into a chain and made a bracelet of them for her right wrist. She wrapped her legs in armfuls of diamonds and stuck the pole star on her forehead like a blue-tinted drop of unique light. But she required to veil her breasts the great scarf that was the Milky Way. She threw it over her shoulder and let it trail behind her like a supernatural stream.
In truth, it must have been Azrael himself who was holding out to her, from the depths of the bright and empty night, the robe of the celestial Houri of Houris, the one that summarizes the perfection of form and which has no name to be invoked.
She scaled the rim of the tower, for the divine fabric was not yet close enough.
At that moment, the door burst into shards and Almazan appeared on the threshold, covered in the blood of the lepers that he had just killed.
Khadidja smiled at him. She felt lighter than the azure. She made a gesture to seize the flap of the Milky Way that was floating alongside her, and disappeared from Almazan’s sight, as if she had been absorbed by the splendid night.
“Poor Isabelle!” said Abul Hacen, when Almazan had told him the story of the death of Khadidja, when he told him how, having a presentiment that she was in danger, he had come to prowl in the gardens of the Generalife, and how, on the indications of the Moroccan guard, he had divined that Khadidja had been taken to the city of lepers, how he had found Soleiman dead next to one of his gasping brothers, and Khadidja on the terrace of the tower, hurling herself into the void.
“Those are the machinations of which women are the target,” said the Emir. “Isabelle might also be deceived in that fashion. Watch over her, as you have watched over Khadidja.”
Almazan was the only man for whom Abul Hacen had any affection. The affection in question augmented from that day on. But the Emir soon measured the extent of the annoyances that Khadidja’s death would cause him, and its fatal consequences for the destiny of the kingdom of Granada. The taciturn El Zagal would not forgive his brother Abul Hacen for not having protected the daughter he had confided to him. When it was necessary to take back Alhama, of which the Spaniards had just taken possession, he had sent neither troops nor cannons. He had remained enclosed in Malaga and left his brother’s pressing appeals without response.
Aixa the Horra, as well as her son Boabdil, had received orders not to come out of the tower of Comares again. A faithful Almocaden had been charged with the care of guarding them, and soldiers were stationed at the two doors connecting that tower to the Alhambra. From the room where he was accompanied by Isabelle, throughout the first evening of that captivity, Abul Hacen heard his son playing the flute, as he was accustomed to do interminably. He played badly, and that irritated the Emir, who as a musician.
Late into the night, the Almocaden went to sleep to the sounds of that distant flute, which reassured him regarding the possibility of an escape. In the morning, the flute was still resonating. The hours passed and it did not stop. The Emir, exasperated, sent someone to his son to beg him not to play any longer. At the same time he learned that all of Granada was in uproar because of Boabdil’s escape. During the night, Aixa had made a rope with garments and he had fled through one of the windows overlooking the Darro while a slave played his favorite tunes as badly as him.
Boabdil went to join his partisans at Loxa and had himself proclaimed Emir of the Moorish kingdom. Henceforth, he had the means to satisfy his passion for treason. He entered into relations with the kings of Castile to fight with them against his father, intending to deceive them when the moment came. He sent false promises of his uncle El Zagal. He wondered how he could betray his mother, whose blind amour had saved him so many times.
He astonished the inhabitants of Loxa because he went by night, alone, to the ramparts of the city, in order to play the flute, while turned in the direction of Granada.
XVI. The Treasure of Jerusalem
The refugees from Alhama and the villages captured by the Spaniards were camped in the open air along the ramparts. A few had erected tents, others built fires alongside their carts, and others showed their rags and depicted their misery to the rich inhabitants of Granada who had come to help them.
Almazan had spent the day caring for the sick. He was getting ready to go down the Rua de Elvira in order to return to the Alhambra when he saw Aboulfedia. On seeing him, the latter quit the little man to whom he was talking precipitately. Almazan recognized that man by his singular thinness and his hands the color of wax. It was Anan ben Joshua, the scholarly rabbi of Granada.
Several times, he had encountered Aboulfedia in the Alhambra, where the Jewish physician came to see Zoraya almost every day. The favorite had introduced him to the Emir as a sort of clown, in whose company she amused herself, and he also took young Rebecca, who had adopted
the title of dancer, and Rodriguez, who was passed off as a guzla player.
Aboulfedia did not seek out Almazan’s company. He even avoided him. But today, he took his former pupil by the arm and started walking alongside him. His little eyes were glittering more than usual beneath his enormous brow. Almazan could not help complimenting him, smiling, on the change that must have taken place in him. He was often seen with the rabbi Anan ben Joshua. Now that rabbi, a celebrated Talmudust, was a man of an extraordinary purity of mores. If he was frequenting Aboulfedia, it must be that the latter was not as exclusively attached to pleasure as he had claimed.
“You’re no longer a Christian,” said Aboulfedia, “but you’re not yet a Muslim. I, however, am a Jew.”
Almazan looked at him in surprise. He had thought Aboulfedia above all religion.
Aboulfedia shook his head. “Look,” he said. And with a gesture, though the Puerta de Elvira, he indicated the lamentable cortege of the refugees from Alhama, who were continuing to flow toward Granada on donkeys, mules or on foot. “The time of the Arab race is over. Its power is only apparent now. The Jewish race is going to seize in its turn the torch that will make the savages of Spain, France and England recoil.”
“How will that be possible?” said Almazan, increasingly astonished. “How can that people, dispersed over the earth…?”
Aboulfedia interrupted him. “There’s no dispersion but that of the spirit, and the Jewish spirit has remained one, indivisible and unalterable. How many sects are there among the Christians? How many heresies? Even the inquisitors can’t count them. Aren’t the whole of North Africa and Persia covered with false prophets come to replace Mohammed, and who find thousands of followers? Like a block of diamond whose facets radiate in all directions, however, the unique law of Moses has endured. Law is force. What does it matter whether men are in one country or another? The earth isn’t so vast. They’ll find one another when the appeal sounds.”
The Angel of Lust Page 25
