4
NEXT MORNING I was eating breakfast and arranging papers and pens with a view to working on some pages of my letters when I heard a gentle tap on the door. The warden told me that he was sorry to disturb me but it was something important. I opened the door and welcomed him.
"Forgive me, Sir," he said, looking unusually flustered. "`Isa al-Aftasi has packed up and gone back to his family in Granada. He did not dare wake you up, but he made me promise to convey his thanks to you and his enormous gratitude for the way you managed to cure him of his illness. He has now made peace with the image in the mirror and confirmed that man is indeed more capable and noble than the ape. He no longer addresses such creatures with `hail to myself.' Things have reached such a point that he has now adopted a monkey and keeps telling it that he is himself, and the monkey is itself too. Cordiality and play are the only two things that bring both of them together."
"This comes," I commented, "as a result of God's grace and favor."
"There's a young man at the door," he went on, "who insists on seeing you. I haven't been able to keep him away. He claims that he's bringing you a message."
The young man stood in front of me and hesitated to say anything. The warden said his farewells and left. I invited my visitor to sit down and reveal his message. The tone of voice and gestures he used both failed to conceal his effeminate manner.
"My mistress has instructed me to convey her letters to you without comment," he said.
After handing me the sealed letter he disappeared like a flash of lightning. I broke the seal with eager anticipation. The letter was written on expensive paper in an elegant Maghribi script. The writer began by expressing her praise and thanks to God, then went on as follows:
"My eyes fell on you, and yours on me. But I was the first to do so, and so my delight is double. By contrast yours is just one, but the second remains with me as a form of compensation. Whenever you desire it, my servant will guide you to me. If you so wish, be at the port either tomorrow or any morning. If a week goes by and you feel no desire to respond, then be prepared to acknowledge, you handsome and resolute man, that I have made contact."
I read the letter again, sentence by sentence and word by word, the way I always have done when reading the choicest aphorisms, prophetic accounts, and major source-texts. Once I understood the import of the message, I dropped everything else and gave free rein to thoughts about its potential implications. It felt as though I had just been taxed with a highly complicated juridical or mathematical problem. I proceeded to assess its precedents and parameters and exercised my mind in recreating a sequence according to the principles of both congruity and clarity. I was hoping thereby to reach some mental conclusions, in the light of which I could determine what should be my posture and course of action. However, truth to tell, after expending considerable energy contemplating the event from every angle and putting it through the grinder of my thought processes, I discovered that I was no further forward in deciding either what it all implied or what was the best solution to the issue. Once again I came to the firm conclusion that anything connected with humankind and questions of love and passion will always resist attempts to apply pure logic and similar approaches to its solution. Perhaps that is what God is saying in the Qur'an: "Humanity is the most disputatious of things" [Sura 18, v. 54].
I had no problem working out that the woman's messenger had trailed me from the port to Jabal Musa and had thus discovered my hiding place. It was equally easy to guess that my addresser was a woman, one with no male person to tend, guard, and interrogate her. But how was I supposed to know for sure that her goal was something other than getting me into trouble? To be sure, the fact that she had taken the initiative by looking at me and sending the letter was nothing unusual in the women of our region and era, and yet women with those characteristics fell into two categories: the first were free and high-minded, but the second were deceitful trollops. So to which of these two categories did this woman belong, who was now preoccupying my attention and distracting me from my primary goal in coming to this remote mountain spot?
I stood up to pray and perform my obligations. I tried to write something, but failed; when I tried to read, I found I could not concentrate. I told myself that I could overcome the mood I was in by taking a promenade around some of my favorite spots, in the hope that the gorgeous vistas they offered would provide me with some consolation and distraction. But, even though I implemented such a plan, the walk did me no good and the vistas totally failed to enchant me or put an end to my bewilderment. Retracing my path to the zawiya, I was fully intending to find some people to talk to so I could avail myself of some diversion and means of forgetting. But, although I searched in all the halls and corridors, I could only find a tiny portion of the residents. Avoiding the wing where the observers of silence were housed, I headed for the mosque to perform the evening prayer with the others. And so it happened, although this time I made a point of greeting many of the worshippers, but without finding any effective way of engaging them in a conversation. All of which confirmed what Abd al-Barr, the warden, had told me previously, namely that the majority of people were only staying in this lofty zawiya to put their own affairs in order, something that required them to separate themselves from the rest of humanity, squelch their desires, and refrain to the extent possible from both food and conversation.
As I was making my way back to my room, I noticed `Abd al-Barr rushing in my direction. He told me that a Christian had arrived that day and was lodging in the transients' quarters. He had requested that, before he resumed his travels, he might seek the opinion of a Muslim sage concerning something that had happened to him in his own country. The warden gave me the kind of look that begged me to take on the task. But how was I supposed to take on such a charge, when what I really needed badly was to forget the past and find consolation elsewhere? Even so, I indicated that I would be waiting for his guest in my room and requested that he send over some food and drinks.
An hour later or less I heard someone knocking on the door. I stood up to welcome my visitor and invited him to sit down with me. Like me he was in his thirties, with a beard thicker than my own and somewhat threadbare Castilian dress. His remarkable eyes had a fiery sparkle to them, and his hoarse voice wavered between ebullience and softer tones. He told me that his name was Pedro DelCastio. He was a discharged soldier, unmarried and with no children. Few of his original family in Toledo were still alive, and he had spent much time traveling between the domains of Christians and Muslims.
The servant brought us a pitcher of milk and a bowl of assorted fruit. I invited my guest to partake, but he declined. In order to give him the opportunity to talk, I kept my own mouth occupied by eating.
"Sir," he said, "I am wracked by diseases, ones that trouble my soul, not my body. I have been married three times and divorced. The Castilians dragooned me into their infantry, but I found that I was neither able to grant death to anyone nor did its own assaults manage to sweep me away either. One day when I was in a central church in Cordoba belonging to my sect, I encountered a counselor monk, Father Paulo, and explained the way my conscience was troubling me.