Meanwhile, the young slave was clearing away the remains of the Jew’s meal. Before he threw the fishbones overboard, he could not help kneeling and praying secretly to them to have pity on him now that they had met their appointed end. The soft tinkling of the bells on his lithe body betrayed him to the men on deck, but they were all too weary to rise and cut short his forbidden prayer. Perhaps now that they were about to enter the Frankish kingdom, it would be best not to disdain any possible source of salvation, even if it was disguised in the form of a fish’s skeleton. Straight ahead of them, not far from the place where the mouth of the river must be, a fire had been burning since nightfall, as though someone on the shore had already spotted the strange ship and was hastening to wreathe himself in fire in preparation for the meeting.
What form would this meeting take? The eyes of the men on the deck gazed fixedly at the bright red sign. Up to now the voyage had been pleasant and safe, as though the God of the Jews and the God of the Muslims had combined their forces upon the sea to supply each other’s lack. Nature had smiled upon the travelers, and if occasionally the skies had darkened and the ship had been lashed by showers of rain, these had been short-lived and refreshing, and had not deterred the captain from spreading the great sail to the favorable winds and garnering their full blessing. Nor had they been troubled by the curiosity of passing craft, for despite the ship’s unusual appearance, it was immediately apparent that she was a stray, threatening no harm. Even though the signs of her previous military career could still be discerned, her rounded belly betokened peace, and even those who had been so consumed by suspicion that they had come aboard to inspect what was truly hidden in the ship’s bowels could find no menace in the camel skins or brassware, or in the dried figs and carobs that they were promptly offered. Taking the packet of salt that Abu Lutfi offered them wrapped in thin paper, the visitors would depart with thanks, not imagining the concealed daggers, curved and lovingly honed. True, the sight of a woman or two in colorful robes and fine veils, strolling on deck or sitting on the old bridge, might have aroused some unease in the minds of the curious, but even this was a personal, not a religious or military, worry.
But now, as they left the open sea behind them and sailed upriver into the heart of the continent, they were bound to attract hard looks from the local inhabitants on either bank. How should they comport themselves? Should they display all the passengers on deck so as to reveal, besides their commercial aims, the domestic harmony that prevailed, or should they dissemble the luxurious character of the human and material cargo that they were bringing from the prosperous south of the Maghreb, leaving visible only a handful of tough-looking sailors hanging from the ropes like long-armed monkeys, to deter anyone who might attempt to meddle with them? Ben Attar, Abu Lutfi, and the captain debated the matter anxiously, for despite their great combined experience, not one of them had ever sailed farther north than the Bay of Barcelona.
They had been to the Bay of Barcelona once a year for the past ten years, at the beginning of August, in sailing ships laden with merchandise, to meet Abulafia, partner and nephew to Ben Attar, who came to meet them from Toulouse. He crossed the Pyrenees on his own, disguised sometimes as a monk, sometimes as a leper, the better to conceal in the folds of his robe, whether from the extortionate customs men of the little duchies on his way or from genuine robbers, the silver coins and precious stones that he had received in return for the merchandise he had distributed the previous year throughout Provence and Aquitaine.
These meetings were very pleasant for Ben Attar, because the joy of seeing his dear nephew was combined with the flash of gold and silver coins from the Christian states in the north. Abu Lutfi too was excited each time to discover afresh how the brassware, jars of oil, camel skins, perfumes, and condiments that he had gathered so busily in the villages and hamlets of the Middle Atlas had been transformed in the space of a year into shining silver and gold coins. No wonder, therefore, that year by year the two partners became more and more impatient. So fearful were they of leaving Abulafia alone for a single minute in the meeting place with his hidden treasures that they brought forward their departure, leaving Tangier before the end of July, and covered the intervening miles in six or seven days’ travel, with short night stops in deserted coves along the Iberian coast. As soon as they reached the Bay of Barcelona, they left the new merchandise in a stable adjoining a tavern belonging to a local Jewish trader by the name of Raphael Benveniste, and paid the sailors’ wages with a cargo of timber that they loaded onto the ships for the return journey. Not only did the partners not entrust their return to the same sailors who had brought them, but for fear of treachery they refused to return by sea at all. Lightened of their merchandise, they would hire a pair of fine horses and ride up a nearby hill. There, in a charming, secluded wood, stood the ancient, partly ruined inn where they would meet Abulafia. Some said that the last Roman emperors, six centuries earlier, had passed the autumn there. In the darkness of its large dank rooms the two partners first tried to sleep, exhausted as they were from the fierceness of the sun, which had scorched their eyes and seared their flesh during the long hours they had spent suspended between the blue of the sky and the blue of the sea. But this sleep did not last long, for all too soon their anxiety for Abulafia woke them, dispelled their tiredness, and sent them running to the paths all around, trying to determine by which route he would come. After five or six years, this good-hearted man had taken to being not only a day or two but three or four days late, generally with the pretext of real or imagined fears that had forced him into hiding or made him change his disguise repeatedly so as to evade whoever it was who was secretly planning to harm him, or so he thought.
So strong had Abulafia’s love of disguise become that he began to deceive not only menacing strangers but even his two anxiously waiting partners. He tricked them not only with his disguises but also with his angle of approach to the meeting place. Even though Ben Attar and Abu Lutfi would comb every possible path to intercept their partner, he would outwit them and slip past without their spotting him, so that it was only in the evening, when they returned, disappointed, to the inn, their souls consumed with fear for his safety and that of the gold and silver he was carrying, that they discovered to their amazement that he had already arrived and had even finished his supper and was now resting from his stratagems, sunk in a deep slumber. But later in the night, unable to restrain himself, Ben Attar would creep into the sleeper’s room, smiling at the discarded disguises scattered around the bed, and without a word would gently lay a hand on the curls that reminded him so much of his late father’s, so that Abulafia, forced to abandon his pretense, would open his smiling eyes and begin to talk.
Then the stories would start to flow like a gushing spring. Abulafia would begin with a highly colored account of the eventful journey from Toulouse to Barcelona, boasting particularly about how he had succeeded in outwitting the border guards of the little counties and duchies, who imposed a heavy tax on all those who entered or left so as to sustain those who remained. Despite the lateness of the hour, Abu Lutfi would hasten to join his two Jewish partners, asking Abulafia to show him at once the silver and gold he had brought and to tell the story of each coin, its value, where it had come from, and for what it had been traded. Because the Arab had an excellent and precise memory of the merchandise he had entrusted to Abulafia the previous year, he was on his guard when he demanded it back item by item, and it was necessary to concentrate hard to track the fate of each, since most of the goods had not been sold outright but exchanged repeatedly in a succession of strange and complicated deals. To satisfy Abu Lutfi’s inexhaustible curiosity, Abulafia recalled each and every one of the purchasers, identifying them by name, relating where they dwelled, what their business was, how they had haggled, on what they had compromised, and he was even persuaded in the course of his account to describe their facial appearance and their dress. Occasionally he also expatiated upon their beliefs and opinions, and by the time dawn broke, the destiny of the merchandise had become inextricably entangled with the destiny of the world. So it was that the men from Tangier learned of this count or of that duke, born in Gascony, Toulouse, or the Valley of the Loire; who was stubbornly fighting on, and who had wearied of war and sued for peace; which river had flooded the previous winter, or what plague had broken out in the spring; what the monks were thinking, how the nobles were comporting themselves, and whither the Jews were migrating. And the most important thing of all, what had and had not changed in people’s taste and in women’s whims, so that they would know what to seek out and bring with them the following year.