A belle in love appropriates the female jinn’s potential and turns the desert head over heels. A man who loves a beautiful woman appropriates the secret of the male jinn and in his pursuit of his true love turns the desert upside down.
2
He did not capture her heart by mastering poetry, the way Lotharios are wont to do, and did not win her affections with his brawn, since his mates had criticized his physique and had even sarcastically and derisively nicknamed him “Grasshopper.” He did not take her with the edge of his sword or by any feat of heroism, because he had not received from the heavens any of these attributes. Thus he was not amazed when he fell in love, but he was astonished when his love was returned. How, after all this, did they expect him to fall in love and then forget his true love, the way most lovers did? How could they expect him to refrain from loving his true love a second time and even a thousand times?
3
Yes, yes … he fell in love with her and she loved him too and reciprocated his affection. Then he decided to reward her love with eternal affection and to repay her love a thousand times. He roamed the open countryside for a long time before discovering a ploy. He withdrew from society for a lengthy period while he consorted with Barbary sheep, gazelles, and desert lizards. He settled as a neighbor to the Spirit World’s residents and conversed with the jinn’s priestesses and the Spiritual Kingdoms’ sages before he discovered the talisman and returned to share with her the glad tidings that were his prophecy. He told her he had absented himself for a long time to search for an answer to her question about what it meant for a person to love someone a thousand times over. Then she wept with longing and recited verses to him about her desire to hear this prophecy. He wept too and told her he had heard the mountain peaks, the jinn’s priestesses, and the body language of all the beasts repeat a single phrase in response to this question. He told her that the desert’s creatures had all agreed that loving someone a thousand times means living as if the only being in the desert of whom you are conscious is your beloved.
Oh! If only the Spirit World had granted him poetry’s muse, he would have recited the most exquisite verses about how captivating it is to love someone a thousand times.
4
En route to his thousandfold love, however, he inevitably encountered a ghoul.
It was not an ordinary desert ghoul but a unique type of ghoul previously unknown in the desert’s history. The ghoul was one of a kind, because thousandfold love is unique, as his ancestors had told him in tales. Unlike all the other ghouls, the one that stands guard over thousandfold love cannot be slain by a hero’s sword. It is the sole ghoul that can only be vanquished with treasure, because it safeguards treasure.
The ancestors had warned him about this in their tales too.
5
He set out to gain control of the treasure that would free his thousandfold love from the ghoul’s imprisonment.
The jinn whispered in his breast, and the voices of all creation repeated the jinn’s refrain. The wind hissed the talisman’s secret in his ear. They told him that he would never succeed in gaining the treasure unless he possessed the amulet known as strategic planning. They also told him that this treasure was itself the fruit of strategic planning and that for this reason it would be necessary to rely on strategy to reclaim its offspring.
When he investigated, he realized that caravans traversed the continent, crossing the desert from each of the four directions, bringing from the north loads that were put down en route in oases to exchange for local produce. Then they proceeded further south and marketed their goods within the forestlands’ borders. There they exchanged merchandise from northern and central kingdoms for that coquettish dust. Then they returned by the same route with their find. In the markets of the oases they would display part of their stash, and wizardlike artisans and men with furnaces and hammers would seize the opportunity to transform this dust into gold and to shape the gold into jewelry and coins. Thus the metal increased in brilliance, beauty, and sordidness. The merchants carried their new commodity, their lethal wares, goods that are the only motivation for any conspiracy, the sole reason for which a woman would deceive her mate, a brother would raise a hand to slay his brother, or a prophecy would die on a diviner’s lips. They proceeded with their terrifying wares that had been transformed by wily smiths into a genuine treasure they could proffer as they stormed the central oases and northern kingdoms. He witnessed how it slipped into the oasis and studied the way it drove people insane, disturbing residents’ minds and stripping wisdom from the heads of the wisest sages. He saw its impact on people and believed in its power. Its magic convulsed him, and he began to tremble anxiously whenever he witnessed its gleam. He heard disquieting voices repeat the refrain that the secret’s wares were the market’s destiny. Then someone appeared who claimed these goods were the destiny of oases. Finally, propagandists went even further and avowed that the secret’s wares were life itself. Then he nearly choked in distress, and slipped away from the strongholds of the oasis as though fleeing from a ghoul.
The ghoul standing guard over her treasure, however, eventually forced him to plunge into her strongholds. The ghoul standing guard over her treasure demanded a treasure in exchange for releasing her treasure to him, because a treasure is required to buy treasure, and the only way to escape from the ghoul is to seek refuge with the ghoul.
6
Two days before he burst into the ghoul’s cave, he stole into his beloved’s house. There he found the guardian hovering around her ward’s chamber like a she-demon from the wilds. She gestured to the woman that they wanted to be alone; the crone cast her a threatening look before retreating behind the wall. That night she told him the schemer had decided to grant him only forty days to bring her what she demanded. If luck did not favor him, she would consider herself absolved of her promise and would sell the girl to the owner of a shop for hides and linen in the blacksmiths’ market.
This was a despicable proviso from a despicable creature, but it would not have unnerved him so much had he not seen in his wretched true love’s eyes a lethal pain he at first thought he had never seen before in a living creature. Then this pain reminded him of the eloquent expression in the eyes of a gazelle kid he had surprised in a Barbary-sheep gulch. He had grabbed hold of it with both hands, and it had resisted him for a very long time, trying to escape. When it finally gave up and started shivering silently, he had seen the same expression and the same pain he now witnessed in his beloved’s eyes. It was a look of impotence born of a loss of strength and power and of desperate surrender that discounted any deliverance short of a miracle. It was a pain that surpassed other pains, a despair greater than other types of despair, and a surrender beyond other forms of surrender. What was the significance of this look? What should a person call this type of pain? Was it a calamity or something even greater than that? Yes, yes … in the gazelle’s eyes and in his beloved’s was something even greater than a calamity, because it contained some of the Spirit World’s majesty, the certainty of recluses, the purity of those who expect no boon or beneficence from the world or from worldly people. In it, regardless of everything, there was a mysterious rapture washed with prophecy’s nectar. He bolted from the house as if a snake had bitten him and then slipped into the ghoul’s cave.
7
He saw nothing, felt nothing, and thought nothing till they seized him.
Within him stirred a beast he had never encountered before. It flew him to the treasure’s abode the way the jinn fly desert prophets to the desert’s end. This was a bold soul mate. In its impetuosity, zeal, and nonchalance, he detected the daring of a person who has taken charge of some matter, any matter, oblivious to any shame that might accrue should the matter go awry. He asked himself at once about the provenance of such a soul mate in a desert where the Law disapproves of daring. A man there must inevitably mull over every issue a thousand times and question the diviner time and again before taking a single step forward followed b
y a step back, in order to overcome at last the whispered insinuations. When he decides to throw his full weight into the struggle, he discovers—too late—that the combat has ended, that the dust has settled, and that only the battle’s debris is left on the field. The reason for this behavior is not a fear of loss. It is, rather, an ancient, age-old dread of the ghoul named dishonor. For this reason he was amazed by the impetuosity of this mysterious soul mate and felt certain, beyond a doubt, that it was a creature from another lineage not affiliated in the slightest fashion with those of the wasteland.
This brute, who excited his admiration and whose feats and heroic deeds astonished him, left him, however, and disappeared the moment he was arrested.
8
They cast him before the leader, who sentenced him to banishment.
He set forth with the first caravan, and they dropped him off in a harsh, dead, lethal patch before the next oasis, because the law governing banishments decrees that the condemned person should not serve his exile in another oasis after he has been convicted of a crime in the previous one. They left him in a deadly wasteland with water, dates, and some barley and continued on their way. He walked along with the caravan for a distance and then stood watching till it reached the horizon, where a mirage swooped toward it, tearing it limb from limb.
He wandered through the open terrain, which was strewn with rough stones of comparable height and size. These were copper-colored and scattered across expanses stretching in all four directions, limited only by horizons swamped by the tails of mischievous mirages. No rise of earth burst from the plain and there were no dips. There was no hint of a hill and no promise in the distance of a mountain or an acacia. As far as the eye could see, the earth’s surface did not decline downward in a gulch or ravine and showed no willingness to reveal any hint of life through a blade of grass or even a dry tuft of weeds. It did not provide the least indication of good will. Indeed, to the contrary, it confronted him—scowling, threatening, and hostile—the way it does any wretched stranger ignorant of its secret. However, it is absurd to think that the desert’s ruses would dupe a creature born of the desert. It is absurd to think that a mother would deceive a son whom she had carried in her belly, fondled at her breast, and borne on her back. It is absurd to think that the ruse would trick a being whose entire training in strategies was provided by the desert, whose only passion in life was for the desert, whose first and only world was the desert, a person who never recognized a flesh-and-blood mother until the desert granted him permission, because she was not a mate, a mother, or a beloved. A creature who was not part of the desert but the desert itself—could this being defile the law of existence and plot against himself? Would he accept—like doltish travelers—that what he saw was what recluses refer to as annihilation? Would he believe that the first mother might one day reject her ancient offspring and cast before him snares woven from death’s ropes? Would he not be the first to know for certain that what seemed to outsiders a scowl was actually a smile, that what fools deemed sternness was diffidence on her part, and that what terrified strangers in her hostile expression was actually a promise and a renewal of a covenant? Did she not once tell him that she is a belle who gives herself only to those who have been faithful to the covenant and who only find themselves and discover their lost spirits when they rely on her and unite with her?
9
He rushed off, trailing the playful liquid that bubbles up in the wasteland to tempt fools, strangers, and masters of ignorance. He pursued it for a day and a half and spent the night in the heart of the obstinate maze that spreads and extends in every direction without ever promising anything. He passed the night but did not lose heart. Indeed, to the contrary, his smile never left his lips while he stretched out on his back, lying in wait for information from the life of storms. He was spying on the desert and listening to her mysterious voice. She was menacing her prodigal son—as was her wont. She was chiding the son who had ignored her and had followed the tribes that adopted houses not unlike stone prisons for their residences. She threatened, browbeat, and brandished the penalty in his face.
He listened humbly to the anger of this most ancient of mothers but smiled surreptitiously and enigmatically, because he knew this language in the same way he knew the mirage’s trajectory. He knew the language of mothers. He also knew the hearts of mothers. He knew that the language of mothers is one thing and the hearts of mothers are something else. He knew that strangers, or even relatives, grow angry and then hurt you when they threaten. He knew that only a mother instructs when she threatens or punishes; so he smiled. He smiled at the wretchedness of the deluded and began to read his mother’s messages in the stars’ trajectory, because she had once taught him to read her reports in the heavens’ storms, in the prevailing tendencies of the Qibli, or in the murmurs of the Spirit World’s inhabitants. He carried his reading to the extreme. The Camel captivated him and he followed behind her until he spotted the Calf fastened by a weak thread spun from colored wool. The poor fellow was hungry and thirsty for the mother’s teat, and the mother was inflamed by longing for the Calf, but for the mother to meet the Calf would cause the destruction of the desert and the heavens. The Calf’s escape from the wool tether is the mothers’ extinction and the sons’ annihilation. Can fragile wool thread prevent the Calf from escaping? Will the mother bear separation from the Calf for long? Or—were the sorcerers right when they declared that the era when a thirsty calf takes the camel’s dug, when the Camel consents to meet him, is our own era, the era of us creatures of dust, because in the law of the higher spheres, this era lasts no longer than the wink of an eye, whereas in our reckoning it seems a timeless eternity?
He discerned the sign in the sphere. He received a prophecy from the history of the Camel and the Calf. He perceived the omen and realized that the immortal mother would on the morrow open her arms to him.
In the morning he picked up his meager provisions and set forth before the sun could surprise him.
He did not change course the way careless people would. Instead he chose the same direction he had selected the day before, because setting a new course is an error the desert will not forgive. In the wasteland’s language, insistence on a new route is called oscillation, hesitation, loitering, and walking in place. A traveler who wishes to reach a destination does not circle around an area unless he wants to become that area’s prisoner. An area’s prisoner is not called a traveler in the desert’s customary law; he has become a stray.
Overhead, the sun’s tyranny persisted. In the barren land the mirage’s floods spilled forth, but the eternal, copper-colored wasteland was intolerant and unyielding and did not waive its threat. Into its immortal expanse a new sign descended. In its severe calm a new signal appeared. In the wasteland, in its competition with itself, with its rough body, which continues endlessly and never stops regenerating itself, a new prophecy appeared, borrowing a new veil woven from hurtful indifference. This indifference, which ignored beings and mocked the fates of creatures, paid no heed to whether those afflicted were people or livestock. This indifference is a snare for strays, because it terrifies and disorients them, making them feel desperate. Then they defeat themselves, because they submit to their destinies even before those destinies have judged them. The latent cause is always their ignorance of the desert’s modus operandi. These wretched intruders do not know that when the desert dons a veil of indifference this is a sign of contrition. If the naked landscape disguises itself and hides behind indifference, then the exile, which is multiplied and threatens to endure, struggles against the banished man’s death agony.
He smiled mischievously beneath his veil and surrendered to the expanse the way dry weeds surrender to the wind’s assault or the way straw yields to an unruly flood. He abandoned himself to allow the naked land to lead him to any country it wished. He allowed himself to become the naked land’s pawn, because he knew that the noble wasteland would never renege on a covenant made with a person who surrendered
himself as its hostage. He had learned that—from time immemorial—progress through the desert has been like swimming through water, like floating in the spring-fed ponds of oases. You must relax and give your body totally to the water if you want to stay afloat. In the desert, too, arrogant people who act obstinately succumb. In the desert those who think they have been granted enormous knowledge and who therefore debate and resist will perish. The desert takes vengeance on this group with its labyrinth. The other group, those who surrender control to the wasteland and seek the desert’s protection against the desert, survives.
10
His assumption was not mistaken.
At midday, the labyrinth suddenly fell away and he found himself overlooking the lip of an expansive, deep valley. The side from which he had approached was a very high, mountainous cliff, and the far side of the valley was too distant for him to see. In the flat land at the bottom he not only observed dense trees, which twisted through gentle valleys that curved as they ran south, but caught sight of areas covered with plentiful, intensely green grass. These spread along the borders of the clefts in magnificent swaths and encroached on the sides of the gentle valleys that branched off from the main valley, the far side of which was out of sight.
Exile died, and paradise came into view.
With the skill of a Barbary sheep, he descended from the craggy summit, and the scent of flowers, moisture, and fresh grass greeted his nostrils. Overcome by a trancelike vertigo, he thought about the miraculous desert clouds that baffle even the most cunning shepherds—where they originate, how they collect, what route they follow, where they empty their load, or in which sky they then dissipate. These experts not only do not understand the clouds’ nature but are amazed by their ability to flaunt the law of the seasons, because they pay no attention to whether it is winter or summer, spring or fall. They hold back in winter when people expect them, denying their blessing, while generously bestowing their rainfall in a season when sunshine is at its most searing, as in summer. Thus aged shepherds clap their hands together to announce their incompetence when they exclaim, “Not even the wiliest diviner can predict the course of the desert’s rains.”
The Puppet (Modern Middle East Literature in Translation) Page 9
