Abulafia, however, was in no hurry to return from his journey, but extended it considerably on his own initiative. When he learned that people in the Christian country of Catalonia were eager for such hides as he had brought from the desert, he contained himself and did not sell the merchandise in Granada but traveled north and crossed the frontier of the faiths near Barcelona so as to meet Christian merchants, who indeed leapt upon his wares and doubled his profit. Instead of returning at once to Tangier, the young trader decided to exploit the breach he had made. He sent the proceeds back to his uncle with a pair of trustworthy Jews from Tarragona and requested fresh merchandise, while he himself pressed on into the villages and estates of southern Provence to identify new customers and gain a sense of their wants, taking advantage of the protection afforded by the signing in those years of a new treaty among the Christians known as the “Peace of God,” which was made with the aim of protecting traders and wayfarers. He did not inquire about the baby he had left behind. It was as if she did not exist.
This may have been the secret reason for the rapid success of Ben Attar’s trading network, whose head was in the Bay of Tangier while its two arms embraced the Atlas Mountains in the south and Provence and Gascony in the north. Afraid and ashamed to return to his native town and grateful to his uncle for looking after the infant, Abulafia had resolved to repay Ben Attar, his benefactor and employer, with feverish energy and imaginative resourcefulness, which year by year widened both the circle of his customers and the range of his merchandise. Abu Lutfi could no longer make do with his traditional spring journey to the northern Atlas but had to penetrate deeper into the valleys and the villages, and even inside the nomads’ tents, in search of polished brass ware, curved daggers, and pungent condiments, for the smell of the desert sufficed to attract and excite the new Christian customers, who began to remember as their millennium approached that their crucified Lord too had come to them from the desert. Meanwhile, the Ishmaelite nurse stayed with the bewitched child, who had been forgotten by everyone except Ben Attar, who looked in occasionally to check that she still existed and that he was not paying money to maintain a ghost.
But the baby, despite her many defects, did not seem to want to turn into a ghost. She insisted on remaining as real as always. Even though she was very backward in her development and limited in her movements, and her eyes remained bulging and blank, as though she belonged to a different race, nevertheless she increased the range of her movement so that the stern-faced Ishmaelite nurse was obliged to take great care to see that there was no loophole in the house through which her charge might accidentally escape into a world that was not expecting her. At this point the uncle’s uncle, the sage Ben Ghiyyat, intervened, when he went in the spring to prepare Abulafia’s house for Passover. Whatever might have been the Creator’s purpose in forming such a creature, the covenant made at Mount Sinai still embraced her too, and her father who begot her could not be replaced by an Ishmaelite nurse, who owed nothing to the God of Israel except her inferiority. And even though Ben Attar was by now accustomed to the responsibility he had taken upon himself, and feared that if Abulafia were forced to take his child back his sense of guilt would be diminished and with it his energy and resourcefulness, which in the past two years had made Ben Attar into one of the grandees of the city, he did not wish to disobey his great uncle, who at fifty-five years of age seemed to frighten death itself. Although Abulafia could not be compelled to return to Tangier and take back his offspring, Ben Attar decided to take her to her father himself, in person and without prior warning.
And so, ten years before the millennium, Ben Attar and Abu Lutfi set out on their first journey from Tangier to the port of Barcelona. Although they repeated the journey summer after summer, increasing the number of ships each year, the memory of the first trip was engraved deeply in Ben Attar’s heart, and not only because of the novelty of the voyage, which showed him close up how the natural forces—the sun, the moon, the galaxies, the wind, the waves—contended silently opposite the lazily moving shoreline, but because of the intimacy that grew up in the narrow confines of the ship between him and his fellow travelers, especially the strange, dumb child, for even though she was attached by a cord to the nurse who accompanied her, it was not short enough to prevent her from toddling to him from time to time and attempting to thrust her little fingers into his eyes. Sailing slowly among the bolts of cloth, hides, and oil jars, against the background of the monotonous prattle of a Jew from Barcelona who was traveling with them, he forged a bond with Abulafia’s child, so that occasionally he even let her snuggle mutely against his chest and watch the forms of the two Ishmaelite sailors, who in the midday heat removed their clothes and stood on the prow as naked as on the day of their birth. Occasionally, when they camped in some desolate bay on the way and he saw the child walking slowly along the shore in the evening twilight, he remembered her mother, who despite everything had bequeathed something of her great beauty to her defective child—a soft line on the cheek, a certain hue, the molding of a thigh. Indeed, on this voyage Ben Attar thought a great deal about Abulafia’s suicidal wife, as though he too bore some guilt, until one night on the sea, in pain and desire, she burst into his dreams.
As it turned out, he was very careful not to let the least hint of this dream escape from his mouth, precisely because the meeting with Abulafia was so emotional, so brimming with love and friendship, that the three of them wept real tears. Yes, all three of them. Abu Lutfi was the first to give in and burst into tears as he embraced his long-haired comrade, who was waiting for them in a new black Christian habit at the entrance to the Roman inn, to which the Jew from Barcelona had taken them. The sobbing of the manly Ishmaelite was so surprising that Abulafia was carried away. Then Ben Attar too felt a lump in his throat, but not enough to make him forget the final return of the child to her father’s care. He gave a signal, and the large nurse, who was standing a few paces away, drew forth the child who was hiding in her skirts and gestured to her to approach Abulafia, who first of all uttered a cry of panic at the unfamiliar bird that was fluttering toward him but then closed his eyes in pain and clasped his child to his chest warmly, strongly, as though he had just realized that he too had been longing for her in her loneliness. But on the next day, in between talking about merchandise and rates of exchange, about merchants’ hopes and purchasers’ fickleness, it struck Ben Attar that Abulafia imagined that they had brought the child there only to see him, and that she would eventually return whence she had come. Delicately but decisively, he had to remind his nephew of his duties as a father, supporting his words with texts supplied by the sage Ben Ghiyyat. Abulafia listened in silence and read the texts, nodding his head, and after reflection consented to take the child back. Was it only from a simple sense of paternal duty, or was it also because Ben Attar shrewdly offered him promotion from agent to full partner, so he would share in the profits of his work? Either way, there is no doubt that the old Ishmaelite nurse’s agreement to go with Abulafia and continue looking after the child in his home in Toulouse until a replacement could be found also helped the widowed father reach his decision.
This furnished an excuse for a further meeting, since Ben Attar and Abu Lutfi promised the Ishmaelite woman that they themselves would come the following year to take her back to North Africa. Behind that promise no doubt lay the satisfaction and enthusiasm arising from the present meeting. After two years of new and exciting commercial business conducted thus far by means of occasional envoys, through letters, some of which had gone astray, and on the basis of unreliable rumors, Ben Attar now realized that there was no substitute for Abulafia’s living, gushing words, describing the adventures of each bolt of brightly colored cloth, each sack of rare condiments, each inlaid dagger, which was the source of a veritable saga of exchanges unwinding like a snake until the final transaction resulted in a coin of silver or gold, or a heavy precious stone. No orderly narrative delivered by a trustworthy and clever emissary could replace that leisurely, relaxed conversation with the agent, whose stories hatched a whole clutch of subtle insights, suppositions, and hopes, which persuaded the merchant from Tangier that there really was a change in the air and that the poor benighted souls of the Christians beyond the mountains wanted at this time to be joined to the south and the east by means of their hides, cloths, and copperware. To these practical factors must be added, of course, the joy of reunion of kinsmen and comrades in that pleasant spot steeped in the azure of the Bay of Barcelona and reached by a smooth, calm sea voyage. Now that uncle and nephew had become in a sense partners, although not yet equal ones, it seemed that a summer meeting of these members of a small but ancient faith on the frontier between two great faiths that sought to swallow each other would become a fixed custom.