When Abu Lutfi returned and asked Abulafia during their summer meetings to draw a new map of his peregrinations and locate the places that would suck in so lustily the other, lighter, more valuable merchandise, Abulafia became confused, and each map he drew for Abu Lutfi was different. He had particular difficulty fixing the precise place of Paris, the port town in the midst of the river that so attracted and excited him even though he had not yet been there. It is hardly surprising that this confusion kindled antagonism and suspicion toward the city and its surroundings in the breast of the Muslim partner, for with his keen mind he understood that the further the Jew pressed northward, the further he, the Muslim, would have to push desertward, so as to supply him with the light but valuable merchandise that would capture the hearts of the new customers. Ben Attar too, who always tried to achieve a compromise between his two partners, sometimes wondered where Abulafia’s adventurous spirit would lead them. Unlike Abu Lutfi, however, he did not oppose his partner’s northward thrust, not particularly out of commercial considerations, whose benefits were still in the realm of speculation, but in the hope that the further Abulafia traveled from North Africa, the easier he would find it finally to give up a strange, childish delusion that had pervaded his soul since he had abandoned his native town: that he would amass enough money, return to his town, and avenge himself on all those who had mocked his wife, particularly his mother. This was why, even after crossing the Pyrenees and entering a new world, he had chosen to avoid the company of Jews, who might enmesh him in the coils of a new marriage and undermine his vision of a vengeful homecoming. In the first year Ben Attar had feared that someday the young widower might return, not from nostalgia or because he missed the little girl who had stayed on her own, but to sully the escutcheons of those who had forced him to bury his beloved wife outside the fence of the graveyard. Consequently Ben Attar rejoiced retrospectively that he had responded so swiftly to the advice of his wise uncle to travel to Barcelona and return the child to her father, because apart from the discovery of the pleasant summer voyage and the importance of the face-to-face meeting with the man who was disseminating his goods, he hoped that the contact between the child and her begetter would teach Abulafia to face up to the facts, so that the purposeless delusion of returning like an avenging spirit to his native town might be moderated and weakened.
Weakened, Ben Attar said to himself, but no more than that. When Abulafia’s mother, his own elder sister, suddenly took to her bed, Ben Attar was in no hurry to tell her son, and even in their summer meeting in the Roman inn he concealed the seriousness of her illness, lest the morose son hasten to her sickbed to poison her last days with words of reproach. Only after her interment did Ben Attar dispatch a special messenger, who pursued the orphan along the highways of Provence for many days to take him news of her death, which was received as expected, without tears and even with a slight smile. Then indeed Ben Attar asked Abulafia to return, even for a short visit, to execute his mother’s will and perhaps, who knew, to make his peace with his kinsmen, to whom he shortsightedly ascribed the blame that was his own. But Abulafia, who had lost the sweet kernel of the vision of his great revenge, was still far removed from any willingness to make his peace with anyone else, so he sent word to his uncle to sell his share of his mother’s estate on his behalf and bring the proceeds with him to the next summer meeting.
By this time Ben Attar’s heart was deeply moved by the loneliness of his kinsman, the balance of whose mind was disturbed by the combination of guilt and love for his wife. He had even begun to wonder whether he had behaved correctly in extracting his nephew from the hold of the ship bound for the Holy Land, for the sanctity of the ancestral land might possibly have sucked some of the poison out of his innards and imposed order on confusion. Even more he regretted the alacrity with which he had executed his famous uncle’s orders to restore the child to her father, for her deformed presence repelled marriage brokers and continued to keep her mother’s memory alive. Bound hand and foot, Abulafia’s wife remained engraved on the memories of others too, including Ben Attar himself, who that terrible night on the seashore had been unable, despite himself, to avert his eyes from the naked woman who lay so wonderfully beautiful upon the sand. Since then, such were the thoughts that Ben Attar pondered in his heart: If I, who saw her so degraded, cannot forget her beauty to this day, what must her husband feel?
However, Ben Attar also recognized the benefit of the younger partner’s loneliness, which delivered a special impulse to business, for a salesman who has no wife to draw him homeward but is tempted by every new place, however remote, in the hope of discovering there the reflection of the beloved image, goes where no other trader will go, and even if the goods he has for sale are strange and unneeded, the mere fact of their appearance there compels their purchase. The demand for Moroccan merchandise did indeed increase in Provence, so that every summer they were obliged to add another ship to the convoy setting sail from Tangier, and if ten years before the millennium, at the first meeting, when they brought the child and her nurse, one ship sufficed, now, five years later, five ships were scarcely enough. True, it was not only Abulafia’s energy and resourcefulness that had achieved this, but also the rise in the Christian population, for as the millennium approached the dying strove to defer the day of their death and babies hastened their birth, so as to ensure their presence in the year that was said to bring an abundant quickening of the dead.
Yet despite the rapid enrichment of the three partners, or perhaps because of it, Ben Attar grieved for his nephew’s loneliness. Refusing to give up hope, he persisted in seeking among his nephew’s innumerable tales and plans the rustle of a woman’s skirt. And so, when the evening of the ninth of Ab arrived, after Abu Lutfi mounted his steed and vanished into the afterglow of sunset on the long mountain path that wound its way to Granada, Ben Attar began to describe to his beloved nephew and business partner, carefully and delicately, using two interwoven languages, the terrible wilderness of loneliness that his stubbornly maintained widowhood would condemn him to. But in that summer of the year 4755, which was year 385 of the Hegira according to the Mohammedans, five years before the millennium of the Christians, when the lamentations for the loss of the twice-destroyed Temple had softened and sweetened the souls of the two Jews and at their feet in the ashes of the dry grass of late summer the flames of the campfire had become a fragrant Cyclops’ eye, Abulafia wrapped his head in his scarf and laid it on a stone, thrust his legs out in front of him, and, still fingering the hidden purse of coins that had been given to him a few hours earlier and fixing his eyes on the glimmering sea of stars overhead, began to speak again of Paris. But this time he spoke not only about the town but also about a woman who lived there.