At first he recoiled from her, not only because he did not feel ready to make love so precipitately, and in a strange room, on the bedding of his hosts, his kin, with whose hearts and minds he still had to engage in battle, but also because he did not know where or how far away the other wife was. But when he tried to push her away with a strangled whisper of affection, she caressed him all the harder and her sighing turned into moaning, so that he was obliged to stop her mouth with one hand while the other tried to soothe with caresses the heavy, inflamed breasts that pressed against his face and flooded him with a fresh smell of soap. But now, in this curved chamber in this strange city, he discovered that the long voyage had made the first wife, like the second, stronger than he. While the anxieties of the journey had sapped the marrow of his bones day and night, the two women sitting on the old bridge had been freed of all responsibility, and with nothing to do, poised between sea and sky, they had accumulated strength flavored with a hint of wildness, so that this woman now grabbed handfuls of his hair and pulled them hard toward her, not only to force the obstructing hand to release the sounds of her desire but also to enable her more easily to remove the robe that covered his virility. Because of the existence of a second wife, he owed her more than if she had remained the only one.
Dazed and unready, at first he struggled silently with the desire of his first wife in the darkened room, until his heart longed for her and he took her, placing his mouth on hers in place of his hand to confine her moans. Afterward he hastened to cover her, wondering about the whereabouts of the second wife and thinking of what he had to do and wanted to do to preserve the perfect love that he had been forced to demonstrate here in double proof. But when he attempted to rise, he discovered that the creeping fatigue that had overcome the other travelers since last night had reached him too. So again for a while he laid his head between the first wife’s strong thighs, inhaling once more with surprised curiosity the smell of Mistress Esther-Minna’s soap. Within the curved walls of the chamber, whose tiny windows admitted the pink light of the Parisian sky blended with a gay, guttural babble from the nearby riverbank, he closed his eyes, taking care not to fall asleep, so as not to lose control just now, when the babble outside was joined from inside the house by the clear voice of its excited mistress.
Gently, Ben Attar released himself from the warm, warming trap. While the first wife, thus innocently released, curled up and went back to sleep, he rose and dressed, trying to smooth his crumpled robe, and crept in quietly for his next encounter with Mistress Esther-Minna, who was sitting red-faced where she had been before, with her old maidservant, the yellow parchment of the song of Moses spread between them as though the shared contemplation of the Jewess and the gentile might soften the angry menace of the words. Now the mistress of the house did not hasten to rise and retreat from her guest, perhaps in part because she realized that her generous hospitality had left her no private corner of her house to withdraw to. And so she remained, looking at him. Had she been able to, she would have made him too, wash his body, which smelled not only of the salty ocean but also of a heady reek of spices and animal skins. Moreover, from the soft, thick look that clouded his eyes, and perhaps also from the presence of a telltale stain on the edge of his robe, she was suddenly pierced, as by a painful knife thrust, by the knowledge that, having just made love on her own bridal couch, he was now roaming in search of his second wife, so as to prove to the mistress of the house that she was both misguided and ignorant.
A powerful shudder shook her, as though the vengeful desert god who had just cursed the world in the last song of Moses were trying to test her too, not in the faraway desert but here in her own home, in her innermost chambers, revealing to her what was forbidden and outlawed in the new edict from the Rhineland as one might expose a child to a sexual act. She lowered her head and put her fist to her mouth in a childlike gesture. And the blue of her eyes shone in deep amazement, which made them sparkle like true sapphires among the fine wrinkles that adorned the corners of her eyes. As Ben Attar looked at her, he could feel her shudder with moral revulsion against him, but when he remembered what Abulafia had told him by the campfire in the Spanish March about the pleasure that he extracted from her, he said nothing, except to ask her gently for the whereabouts of the second wife.
From here he strode along a narrow, very dark passage to a cubicle between whose bare gray walls the girl’s bewitched spirit still wafted, even though she herself had been taken away that morning. The twilight that was beginning to descend on the island played slowly on the profile of the young second wife, who had been caught up in the universal slumber. Although Ben Attar had neither the strength of spirit nor the desire to draw her up from the depths, he did not relent, because he knew that on the other side of the door a woman who was seeking to convert her failed repudiation into a full-blown ban was waiting for him, and until the rabbi from Seville should wake from his sleep and know what to say to her, it was up to him to show her with deeds, not with words, that she was mistaken, and that love was possible at any time or at any place where the lover was present. And so, exhausted as he was, he roused himself to rouse the woman who was lying before him. But the second wife was young enough to cling fanatically to her sleep, and when he tried to wake her with his kisses, she pushed him frantically away, apparently still unconsciously, defending her slumber with as much determination as though it were her virginity.
He did not relent, despite being so tired and hungry, for his desire for food was greater now than his desire for a woman. Since through the haze of tiredness he imagined that he had been ravaged by the first wife, he allowed himself to ravage the second one, and slowly he struggled with her while dragging her up from her depths, kissing every part of her body that might be kissed, which meant every part of her body. At last she took pity on him, licking his eyeballs to make him close his eyes and enter into her slumber and be embraced in her breathing, so that when he took her he would not know whether it was reality or a dream.