And that is precisely what happened. My mother woke up and started washing and putting on makeup. Neatly dressed, elegant, and full of energy, she spent the entire day dealing with household matters. She was particularly concerned about me and my affairs. Just before I went to bed, I took my sister aside and asked her what she thought about this man Al-Khidr.
` Abd al-Haqq," she replied in a tone full of confidence, "our dear mother adores Al-Khidr. This fine man nurtures her spiritual affection with considerable integrity and kindness. When her condition gets worse, he comes at once. What you witnessed yesterday has happened before without your even being aware of it."
"What about our father, Zaynab? Does he know about this?"
"Yes, he knows. He is absolutely convinced that the doctor is a decent person, and that stops him from feeling jealous or angry."
She rubbed her hands together, uttering a prayer that He protect my mother and her innocent adoration from any taint of sin or fall from grace.
At noon on the following day, I can recall paying a visit to Al-Khidr in a monastery he used to frequent in a suburb of Murcia. I was anxious to confirm that the man was indeed devout and pious. He greeted me warmly, but was immediately aware that I had something on my mind. As he invited me to sit down and talk, he asked me gently what I wished to discuss… and yet, as I revert to the days of my youth and turn things over in my memory, I can only recall a tiny fraction of the conversation I had with him. One thing I do remember is that I asked him about the people in Spain and the sorry state of affairs that had now beset them. All I can recall about his response was what he had to say by way of conclusion:
"My boy, I can say for sure that our presence in the Iberian Peninsula is heading, albeit gradually, for an unprecedented era of disintegration. One can see sign after sign that should serve as harbingers of the fissures developing within our domains; and they are working their relentless way into our own existential and intellectual fabric as well. You can start saying funeral prayers for our Muslim Spain, a society that is bound for destruction unless the mighty miracle occurs."
It was with my own mother's passionate devotions and her relationship with him in mind that I asked him about faith.
"My boy," he replied, "as far as I am concerned, there are three proofs-and how very rare and remarkable they are! — to bolster the nature of true belief-
"First: In my view, assemblies, weddings, and the joyous occasions during our life in this world for the most part all lack any sense of either fruition or warmth. So why should I not propose instead a different world for the spirit, one that is both more radiant and ideal, indeed something that no eye has seen, no ear heard, and no human heart even contemplated?
"Second: within the framework of ongoing delays and missed opportunities, I have destroyed all comparable records and reached the very summits. In the long run, I have become convinced-but then, who can know for sure? — that this may well be the means whereby I can wager this faulty world of ours against another one that is more beautiful, compact, and enduring.
"Third: after a good deal of thought and contemplation I have come to believe firmly in resurrection and the Day of Judgment. The reason is that everywhere in this world of ours I witness so much violence and cruelty. Crimes remain unpunished. That is something that I find completely intolerable and unbearable.
"By way of commentary on these three proofs, I secretly invoke the following entity: mankind. Man knows full well that his body will become food for worms. While still alive, all he can do is devote his entire attention to sympathy for himself. For that reason he provides another domain for it, one that is eternal and pure, something totally in keeping with his limitless arrogance and the precious qualities of his spirit.
"Beyond these three proofs, I can see no others, even if we include the wager of Al-Ma`arri,* the blind poet, whether it be less subjective or more evidentiary."
I asked my companion what exactly was Al-Ma`arri's wager, and he recited for me the poet's two verses:
I can also recall asking this man so beloved of my mother about love and its characteristics, in the hope that he might gradually lead me toward my desired goal without his even being aware of it. He talked to me about it, but I was so young that I found it absolutely impossible to follow his train of thought. His wonderful phrases were all reasonable enough, but they did not make any sense. Then I forgot them completely.
Al-Khidr's words as a whole were characterized by their boldness and profundity, and I set about memorizing snippets by heart. It was those snippets that I had remembered and put down, along with some remarks of my own, that are in my missing manuscript.
It was barely a month after our meeting that news spread to the effect that he had completely disappeared. Stories abounded. One stated that he had been killed and his body had been buried, at the hands of men who were afraid for the honor of their wives and daughters. Another claimed that he had died a martyr, one of the last defenders of Cordoba. Still a third claimed that he had traveled to the East in order to fight the Franks and to seek help and support for the people of Spain. Two months after his disappearance, my mother died one dark night of a fever that caused her terrible agony. My father soon followed her into the next world. Verily it is to God that we belong and to Him do we return.
"Retrace your steps and immerse yourself in your past as much as you can." Those were the instructions of my Jewish fortune-teller. Well, in spite of the occasional pearl of information, the results of that process of immersion had provided scant nourishment, singularly useless and uninformative. Viewed in the mirror of my missing manuscript, it was all the mere embryo of something much larger, something separated by various phases and stations from what I had previously recorded with all due clarity and understanding regarding my early days (about which I knew neither my name nor my identity), regarding my mother who loved and Al-Khidr the object of her love, and regarding a variety of other things, the primary supervisor of which was God and man in the firmament of the unity of all existence and the ascent toward that which is the essential, the luminous, the sublime.
2
ONCE I HAD FINALLY DESPAIRED of ever recovering my missing manuscript, along with its unique basic content and its initial luminous framework, I decided that the best plan was to forget about it; that and nothing else. In other words, my plan was to become more involved in that phase of my life that had been part of my earlier experiences, a phase that I called my period of frivolity and discourses on love, one that I had indulged in during my teenage years. As I noted earlier, this was a time when erotic desires were my primary endeavor, duly followed by a number of verbal contributions, both perverted and elusive.
An endless text, that is woman!
In your quest for a copy of the perfect woman, was it not the case that each example was bound to lead you to another, either through a process of imitation or else in a gradual progression toward something yet more beautiful? Such was your quest-did you but know it-that no one lifetime would have been enough to fulfill it, even supposing that you focused entirely on research, observation, and a good deal of sighing, and converted your own bed into a haven for fascinating, buxom women of temporary residence.
As a way of both guarding against mental collapse and erasing my sense of loss after such a tragedy, I told myself that I needed to assume that genuine reality was actually different from the one on whose basis and within which I had been operating up until that point. I would need to collect images of the world that were contrary to the ones I had been perceiving with my five senses and to strengthen my personality through various kinds of exercise, all that before I could embark upon the process of spending time meeting people.