by Raja Alem
Rafi took the book about El Greco out of a paper bag and handed it to Nora. “Oh, you shouldn’t have!” she said, and it sounded like she was saying, I needed to own this! She flipped the pages, possessively, giddily, and there, between the pages, she found a slip of paper with the phone number for the house that was for sale. She smiled and pressed it deeper toward the spine of the book.
“Don’t mention it. I’ll just put it on your bill.” The words floated through the air that separated them, meaninglessly; they weren’t intended to burst her happy bubble. Rafi was watching her, as if with a sixth sense, trying to decipher the small reactions behind her natural smile and between her exuberant chatter and heavy silence.
They finally traced their steps back to the Church of Santo Tomé, which held the painting depicting the burial of the man who was Count of Toledo and Lord of Orgaz in the fourteenth century. Rafi could tell that she was uncomfortable letting him pay for the tickets. “Don’t worry,” he said. “This is on me.”
They walked into the hall, which looked to them like a vestibule, and stood, awestruck, behind a rope that separated them from the painting, which stretched from floor to ceiling. They looked down on the gently lit burial scene and the Count of Orgaz’s body.
“Humans wearing heavenly faces. This painting shows two saints known for being lavish and vibrant, Saint Augustine and Saint Stephen, descending from heaven to attend the burial of the departed nobleman. One stands at the man’s head and the other at his feet as they lay him in the earth. It’s as though this is the miracle that the worthy can expect to receive when they die. It was a way of getting the people of Orgaz to donate liberally to the church,” explained the guide, who was himself under the painting’s spell.
She stared at the gold embroidery on the robes of the saints laying him to rest while the messengers of death themselves became obscured. Then Picasso’s painting Evocation, The Burial of Casagemas, which she’d seen in the Museo del Prado one morning, materialized before her eyes. The Burial of the Count of Orgaz was overlaid with Picasso’s painting, the blue of Evocation cast over the heavenly gloom of the angels descending to carry out the funeral rites. There was another body where the count’s body had been, but it wasn’t the body of Picasso’s friend Casagemas. It was someone else, someone Nora felt she knew. Naked women took the place of the angels, and there were two who stood out in particular. They were wearing sheer thigh-high stockings: one in red, the other in black. They both looked like they’d just walked out of a cabaret. They stood, watching the macabre scene below. Then, the two women turned to look at Nora. The woman in black stockings looked just like her; it was like looking at a mirror. When she turned to examine the woman in red, her heart stopped.
The Devil’s Horns
“THIS TRIBE IS LEGENDARY—people call them the Devil’s Horns,” al-Ghatafani cried out to us, “but they may be nothing more than a mirage created by our own fear …” We slowed down to interpret the terrifying sight: mountaintops pricked the sky like devils’ horns, blocking the horizon. The giants took the lead, urging our camels to hurry forward and penetrate the rocky slopes by way of narrow hidden passages carved out by goodness knows what. The camels rushed along in a frenzy, scratching themselves against the rock, so excitable that they threatened to throw us off. They were bloody by the time they reached the open space that materialized behind a wall of rock. There was an entire universe hidden behind that abominable rock face: palm trees, grazing animals, people—all the same sandy color—surrounding an enormous idol of blazing black. A shiver ran through the devil’s horns around it, adding to the stench of burnt flesh that it gave off. Our worst fear had risen up out of the sand.
Pages and pages of the parchment were missing, and Yusuf had to skip lines obscured by patches of blood or henna.
THEY PULLED ME FROM THE SAND and threw me at the feet of their leader, who watched me struggle. He caught hold of my right hand and examined my birthmark, a vein that ran across my palm from my index finger to my wrist, where it disappeared into the bundle of veins there.
Their leader’s body was a fierce sandstorm; it ravaged me for nights and days during which my eyes never closed once. I fulfilled that sheikh’s every desire, as the blood boiled in my eyes. My screams were even louder than those of al-Ghatafani coming from whatever hell they were subjecting him to.
“The woman who bears this birthmark will carry the demon who will inherit the earth. Through him, our spawn will penetrate all tribes and become ageless demons that roam the earth, breeding with the survivors of storm-struck caravans and ships on the shores of the Gulf of Suez and the Persian Gulf …”
Burial
“SOMETIMES I GET WOKEN UP BY A DEEP FEELING OF REMORSE. ABOUT WHAT, I don’t know … There’s always the same idea jammed in my head: ‘You’re a fighter,’ it says, but it sounds more like criticism than praise.” She fell silent, trying to hear the reproachful voice replay itself. The two paintings, the Picasso and El Greco, had fused in her mind, and it disturbed her. “I’ve never fought for anything. Not for principles, or a better life, or love of country. None of that matters to me. Now I’m fighting for the sake of my silly little whims. I embarked on a total of one battle—for love—and it vanquished me.” She waved the dream away with a flick of her hand.
“The only thing I ever fought for was the love of a man who was aging with frightening speed. His body grew weaker by the minute, everything except his heart, which was cast iron and sealed shut. It ticked assiduously but never to the bigger beats that cause hearts of flesh and blood to tremble. My father was proud to be a descendant of those striving men of rock-hard conviction who’d fought both for and against the unification of the Arabian Peninsula. I had to learn to live with that iron heart, to make important decisions on my own, without letting my emotions get in the way. The first emotion I ditched was fear, because nothing mattered.” Her voice quavered at the bruising words.
A tourist bent down, smiling politely, to pick up the book that had slipped from her hand and fallen in front of the grave, setting it beside her. She placed it gravely on her lap, open at The Adoration of the Shepherds, who were arrayed reverently around the child and his mother Mary. It was El Greco’s last painting; he’d intended for it to hang over his grave in the Church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo. Her words flowed, barely above a whisper, bringing the past to life, and Rafi strained to listen, not wanting to miss a word, as the infant in the painting cast a glow onto Nora’s face as well as those of the shepherds around him.
“Some mornings you wake up and you know it’s not like other mornings. You’re on top of the world, everything you dreamed of the night before is waiting for you just outside the door, you just need to push it open with your toes and everything will rush in, climb into bed with you, right into your lap. That morning, it was her lap that was overflowing. I froze; the moans she was suppressing were coming from my body. ‘Help me …’ she begged. Pleas, sweat, bloody-tasting tears: I had no idea what to do, and the contractions were coming thick and fast, there was no time to think.
“‘How did you hide this the whole time?!’ A spasm of pain and my reproach was batted away; her water broke at my feet. The stink of bloody water covered my limbs, blinding me. I could feel the heat of the fetus against my thighs as it swam in that water. I was pressed up against her thighs, face to face, as a storm tore through my body. I had no time to look for help; it was just me and that laboring belly and the world closing in on us.
“‘No one can know …’ The breaths she wasted on that plea closed the womb around the baby’s thighs. I don’t know how long the child had to wait on the threshold of the world like that until I slipped my fingers inside her. Even today, my hands tremble when I reach for something …” She raised her trembling fingers in the air.
“I can still feel her vagina and the baby drenched in water. I tried to free a tiny leg trapped by a tear in the vaginal wall, and I pushed the left leg, which was in a hurry to step over the threshold, b
ack against the right so they could slip out together; I was afraid the frantic leg would tear the pelvises of both mother and child. In those hours, which felt to me like a single viscous second, I sank inside the woman who’d been my only friend; the only person who could read me like a silly poem memorized in school. I’d never been more than a flimsy imitation of the passion and tenderness that she imposed on the world around her through books and words … There, on the knife-edge between life and death, I lost the ability to communicate with her slow rhythm. She was in no hurry to push that child out, despite the fear of scandal; if anything, maybe she was hoping to keep the baby hidden inside her. But then a violent spasm in her womb decided the matter: the baby was out. He didn’t cry. With two bloody masses on either side of me, I waited: for her placenta and for the first breath to blow open his lungs. For a moment, I allowed her to die, worried that the walls of the womb had collapsed around the placenta, but then out of the corner of a terrified eye, I saw her belly contract as she squatted, and the placenta slithered slowly out on to the ground. I was conscious of nothing but the tiny, slippery, utterly mute body in my hands. I had nothing to cut the umbilical cord with, so I sealed it off near the belly with a bobby pin, and instinctively turned him upside down and rubbed his body between my palms so the lungs would open and drink air. For a few moments, time stopped: the tiny body in my hands watched me silently with closed eyes that peered through me, and then, in an instant, my lips were on his blue lips, my forefinger parted them, and I sucked deeply. The taste can’t be described in words—it wasn’t salty, it wasn’t bloody—it was the taste of life. The liquid filled my throat, and it still does; I often wake up coughing in the middle of the night, trying to spit it out. A last desperate suck at what was behind those lips and a shudder convulsed the little chest. He cried! Joy gripped me, but fear, too, fear that someone might hear, and he sensed it too and fell definitively, finally, silent. Living and dying in the space of a moment.
“How long did we sit there, those two heaps, once living, now dead, lying between us? I felt guilty for the vitality that had come over me. I couldn’t bury him; he was still lying against my chest, his blood clotting on my nipples. When she got up, limping her usual slight limp, she pulled the placenta to her chest; I followed her, and we walked almost pressed side-by-side. Under the stairs, I dug with one hand and with the other held the baby firmly against my chest. All my longing to give birth was embodied in that pliant bundle of life, and when the hole was long enough I let her snatch him from me. I ignored his male organ, preferring to bury him gender-less, and turned and went upstairs before the soil could touch him.”
On those naked steps high in Toledo, Nora and Rafi sat in silence, the radiant energy of the painting of the child and shepherds animating the dance-like figures of the tourists around them. The striking contrast between the degrees of dark and light in the painting and the city heightened the drama of the scene. The long shadows of tourists, the laughter of a girl sitting on the shoulders of a young man with long hair, the babbling of an old woman who’d begun dancing, alone, to the melody of the violin played by a homeless man in colorful gypsy clothes. Nora’s voice blew toward them like wind from a distant time and place. She absentmindedly stroked the naked infant among the shepherds on the page.
Nora got up, as if fleeing from that birth, and Rafi followed her. They walked through the brilliance of the clashing darkness and light in the painting, and their feet led them to the fourteenth-century bridge of San Martín. The Gothic surroundings were the most beautiful setting for a sunset in all of Spain.
“I snuck under the stairs with my paper and charcoal, that night, and drew that baby in dozens of sketches, but none of them pulsed with the warmth of the tiny body that had died on my chest. None of them tasted like that water. I couldn’t bring myself to breathe a single word for months after that, it might have been seven months, or maybe more—I was afraid I’d lose the taste in my mouth, the taste of the inside of a woman from a child’s mouth. It was my secret taste, and without it the world would drop dead and abandon me. That child should have been born from my womb so he could shatter this worry of infertility. I never dared to ask what had made a married woman deny that she was pregnant.”
Around them the violin’s song blended with the crimson sunset and the bodies around them began dance, everything swayed as though drunk in the sunset, and Nora fell silent. It only added to the feeling that they were still walking through The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, the distorted proportions of human bodies that dominated the painting mingling ecstatically with the tourists on the bridge, whose faces had become exaggeratedly tragic or comic, their laughter shriller and their silences more profound, as longing floated in the air above like a blood smear that dissolved the city in the red peaks of the mountains.
The disc of the sun looked like an oil painting pinned to the horizon. Stone Toledo loomed above them, its head in the sky and its feet in the waters of the Tagus. Time froze. Nora was like a creature from a different era, stamped—no matter how she tried to shake it off—with features of primitiveness and imminent extinction. A voice inside her explained to her what she was seeing around her.
“There’s an eternal process of displacement, a constant concealment, in which people are forced to hide their religion, their loyalties, their pregnancy, their reality, their battles, even their gender. People disguise themselves as something other than what they are: man as woman, genius as idiot, Muslim as Jew as Christian, debaucher as prig, fundamentalist as liberator, so they can guarantee that they’ll be accepted, or so they can worm their way into people’s hearts or places or positions of power, or just so they’ll be left alone to live in peace.” The people around her, and Nora, herself, were part of that human flock, in a state of denial, hiding, masking. All those living creatures, minerals, humans were nothing but masks of the Divine Power, who became visible in extremes of infidelity and faith, piety and sin, moving away from Himself to practice His wholeness. The alley of her childhood was all about unmasking; that truth had come to her early, when she was still a child, though she may not have been able to translate it into words at the time. How many masks had been pulled off in that faraway alley? There, when a passerby felt certain that they were alone, silent and unseen, they would play out their reality, revealing their face for God alone to see without judgment or punishment. The difference between seeing and seen would dissolve. Tragic and comic storylines were acted out in that alley, and only the doves replayed the same act over and over when they answered the sound of her lover’s motorbike with a flutter of their wings and flew in a complete arc over the alley like passion flowing. Her heartbeats quickened, warning of exposure, and she stuffed the masks inside her breast though she longed to release them. The departure of the motorbike, more than that of the man, was what had caused her to feel a tyrannical urge—like exhaust fumes—to flee and spread.
The flow of her past was suddenly interrupted by the appearance of the woman from the morning. “O merciful Father, you’re here! I was worried you’d left!” she cried, still panting. Rafi couldn’t hide the shock from his face; some deep presentiment told him the woman’s appearance would bring evil.
“I’ve been all over Toledo looking for you. I knew this place was my last chance to find you.” When she took Nora’s hand, Nora didn’t start; the woman pressed it to her own, upturned so as to read the palm. With her left hand she dabbed the sweat from her temples and wiped it on her pants, passing its dampness on to Nora’s palm.
“Your face has been in my mind since I left the two of you. I knew I’d seen it somewhere before.” The movement around them stopped, and the red of the setting sun darkened, throwing sinister shadows across the walls and gargoyles. Neither Nora nor her companion uttered a breath; Rafi felt like he could do nothing to stop the fates that were being entwined around Nora.
“Come with me, I have something to show you.” She gave them no chance to object and set off, leading them back toward the M
osque of Cristo de la Luz. When they got there, they gazed up at the decorated brick facade and the series of arches that called to mind the mosque in Cordoba.
“This mosque dates back to the year 999, but it was converted into a church in the twelfth century. A statue of Christ that had been bricked into the wall to avoid profanation was re-discovered in the time of Alfonso the Sixth and El Cid.” She grasped them by the arm and stopped them in the threshold, where they could see both the watching silence inside and the redness of the setting sun, which was unable to penetrate into the mosque. “That was when this transept was added, and with it a Mudejar semicircular apse.”
The woman kept them there under the three arches of the door for what felt like a long while. The mosque felt totally deserted, like it was holding its breath. There wasn’t even a janitor or imam there. To Nora, it seemed like a toy mosque with its cuboid shape and fine decorations. Rafi retreated a few steps to read the Arabic inscription in the brick facade: “In the name of God, Ahmad ibn al-Hadidi built this mosque at his personal expense, desiring God’s reward. With God’s assistance, and that of the architects Musa ibn Ali and Sa’da, it was completed in the month of Muharram in the year three hundred and ninety-nine.”
The woman took advantage of Rafi’s preoccupation with the inscription to whisk Nora inside the mosque and slam the door behind them, leaving Rafi outside. With devilish suddenness Nora found herself alone with that woman in the empty apse. The silence drowned out Rafi’s angry knocking.
