That afternoon, alone, hungry, and thirsty, he made his way back to Paris. Every now and then he halted his horse, took out the pearls, and held them up to the sunlight, not only to compare them with each other but also to learn which hour of the day best flattered their pear-like character, which hour should also serve as the hour appointed for their sale. Preoccupied with thoughts of commerce, he entered his home, and was startled to see the quantity of merchandise being piled up in his courtyard by barefoot, half-naked Arab seamen carrying jars on their heads. Your uncle has put the verdict into effect very quickly, he said quietly to Abulafia, who was standing in the doorway of the house, pale and silent, casting a gentle, distressed look at his brother-in-law as though his whole fate depended on him alone. Abulafia hesitated to expose to Master Levitas the development that was tearing his soul apart and to seek his advice, as he was waiting to see whether the fast that he had imposed upon himself since that morning would annul his wife’s harsh decree. But she was already hastening to inform her brother as he entered the house about the status of “rebellious wife” that she had assumed to escape the affront and menace that were looming over her marriage, and she was now prepared to admit that her brother’s reservations about that marriage had not been unreasonable.
Master Levitas’s practical nature did not permit him to rake over the sins of the past so long as the urgency of the present threatened him and his home with heaped-up sacks of condiments and woven cloth, large earthen jars and brassware, which were arriving relentlessly from the Arab ship, filling his courtyard and cellar, and even beginning to intrude on the upper story. Nor was his house invaded from the outside alone, for Ben Attar’s wives were loading the large dining table with wonderfully colorful and exotically perfumed dishes, as though their love of cooking, held in check during the ocean voyage, had now burst forth in all its exuberance.
However, when Master Levitas turned to Abulafia to beg him to stop the invasion that was cascading from the ship to his house under the pressure of his partners’ commercial enthusiasm, Abulafia looked at him with a pale, staring face and extended his arms in the graceful, helpless gesture seen in images of the crucified god of the Christians, as though he too since that morning had been transformed into a tortured saint swaying between life and death. The soul of this man, who had spent so many years in solitary travel, had remained fundamentally emotional and shallow, and it was now torn between love and fear, duty and compassion. And this blend of emotions, in which there hovered also the sweet memory of the twin emissions of the night, made the man who had been deliberately starving himself since morning so dizzy that he was in danger of suddenly collapsing.
Before that could happen, Master Levitas hurriedly sent him to his partners’ ship to stop the flow of merchandise, the quantity and variety of which was alarming Ben Attar too. Despite the many days and nights he had spent on board the ship, he had not imagined how full his Ishmaelite partner had managed to fill it. Abu Lutfi, who had not only managed to pack whole worlds of merchandise on board but also remembered them, now scrutinized them minutely as they burst forth out of the darkness and were borne ashore accompanied by the singing of burly seamen, so as to fix them in his memory, ready for the meeting next summer, when he would demand payment for them from the third partner, who had returned repentantly thanks to the trial in Villa Le Juif. Although if he was really repentant, why was he calling to them now from the riverbank to halt the flow of goods that was inundating his house and his yard?
Ben Attar told Abd el-Shafi to halt the unloading and hurriedly joined his nephew, who was standing surrounded by throngs of Parisians crowded among the little old wooden houses on a bridge called the New Bridge. Abulafia tugged desperately at his stubborn uncle’s garments to pull him away from the curious crowd, and while the sunlight traced trailing purple marks upon the lovely peaceful river as it circled gently southward, Abulafia led Ben Attar deeper into the island, among the narrow streets packed at this hour with people returning home, some leading a lamb or a piglet on a cord for their dinner. From the dull look in his nephew’s large dark eyes, Ben Attar knew that some new torment was afflicting him.
Abulafia told him immediately about the rebellion that had broken out in his home, and how his wife had sworn in her distress to go far away to her native town on the Rhine, there to convene a new court of justice to compel Abulafia to divorce her. Although the Moroccan merchant appeared surprised at the news, he seemed to find in it a blessing that might deepen the partnership that had been so laboriously revived. Perhaps the time had really come, Ben Attar tried to inform his nephew obliquely, with roundabout hints, his arm around the shoulder of his beloved nephew, whose pallor lent an additional beauty to his black locks. Perhaps, the uncle speculated wildly, it was really the hand of the Almighty that had urged him to take an old guardship and sail it to this remote little island, which still seemed to him to be rocking in the midst of the river, to rescue a lost lamb. Surely Abulafia could spare the enthusiastic rebel the hardships of a journey to the land of Ashkenaz by simply asking Rabbi Elbaz to put into effect the wisdom of the Babylonian sages and impose the divorce that Mistress Esther-Minna so longed for. In this way Abulafia would be free to travel back not only to the Bay of Barcelona but to the golden shores of the rock from which he was hewn. Surely now that he had proved to everyone and especially to himself that the curse of loneliness within him was broken, he would be able to find a wife to his taste in Tangier, and even a second wife, if he felt inclined to love her too.
But Abulafia, weakened by his fast, merely stumbled and fell in the surge of horses and pigs and hit his head on the cobbles on hearing the fantastic projects that his uncle Ben Attar was planning for him. Ben Attar did not realize how much his very being was interwoven with his love for his new wife and everything connected with her, including even the cobbles of this narrow Parisian street, which had just made his head spin. It was fortunate that Rabbi Elbaz appeared on the scene, sent with his boy to the ship to get some salt and olive oil. He happened on the North African merchant just as he was helping his young nephew to his feet, after a fainting fit that had mimicked that of his fair-haired wife.
A few local Franks, who invested with a status of sanctity any incident of fainting because of the impact of the story of the crucifixion at Golgotha, also hurried up, and sprinkled Abulafia with fresh water from a nearby well and rubbed his temples with red wine before pouring more into his gaping mouth. Ben Attar, afraid to take the young man straight back to his home in the Rue de la Harpe, conducted him first to the ship. There, among the remaining jars and sacks, they laid the frail partner, who opened his beautiful eyes and smiled a smile that held a deep, sweet sadness. And this is what he said when he saw his stubborn uncle’s face bending over him: Uncle, if you cannot kill me, release me, for I shall never give up that woman. Then Rabbi Elbaz had to hear the story all over again, both from the point of view of the despair of Ben Attar, who was once more, at a single stroke, about to lose the object of his journey, and from the viewpoint of the pain of love that had pierced the young partner, who hoped that he would speedily think up a new compromise that would please Mistress Abulafia and Master Levitas.