He gazed into my eyes for a long time. Then he looked away, toward the peaks of the southern mountains; over the peaks in fact, for he stared upward. His eyes shone with a look of longing. His chest growled nervously, and he swayed like someone in an ecstatic trance before proclaiming, “No one else is compensated like a person who demonstrates how to search for a father.”
“But I killed him.”
“What?”
“The she-jinni said I killed my father.”
He hummed with suppressed longing once more and allowed his eyes to roam the naked, eternal emptiness. His distress set his shoulders to shaking. The look of his eyes changed into real tears. He repeated, “No, no. You didn’t kill your father! You can’t kill your father. You slew a shadow and found your father. Believe me!”
Then he turned to his vassals and ordered them to fetch gifts: dried meats, clothes, skins, containers, and many other objects, the uses of which I only grasped later. As he piled these items at my feet, he declared, “You must have suffered a great deal.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Only those who suffer succeed. All my gifts to you count as nothing compared to what you have given me. Your gift has granted me life. Your gift will continue to afford life.”
I was going to object, but he stopped me with a gesture of his hand. “These meats are from creatures that will safeguard you from the meat of relatives.”
“The meat of relatives?”
“The prophet who guided us to you told me everything.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The prophet said you had set out to search for relatives but had almost perished from dehydration.”
“I went out in search of beauty.”
“Beauty? Did you kill beauty?”
“The thirst for beauty, master, is worse than the thirst for water.”
“But beauty’s not beautiful unless we touch it. Beauty’s not beautiful unless it touches us. Beauty’s not beautiful unless we envelope it and it envelopes us the way metamorphosis envelopes composite creatures.”
He turned to his vassals and ordered them to fetch two animals from the caravan. Placing their halters in my hand, he said, “This is a male camel and this a female. You will use them to help you bear the burdens of your world.”
He passed the night in my shelter. In the morning, he provisioned himself with water, loaded his goods onto the camels, and set off after embracing me and chanting for me a plaintive, passionate song of longing. I kept repeating it to myself so I could comfort myself with it in my solitary times.
7 Daybreak
THE SIGHT OF THE TWO CAMELS freely roaming the plains, as their bodies vanished up to their chests in grass the desert had generously offered, after being irrigated by the heavy, recent downpours, stirred in my soul happiness of the rare species that we can experience but fail to verbalize when we try. The mystery of this sensation frequently left me wondering whether its cause was the sight of the two beasts of burden, the vision of the lush grass, the temperate weather, my carefree existence, or the conjunction of all these blessings. I can testify that the sensation not only appeared suddenly but proved evanescent and ephemeral whenever I attempted to appropriate and detain it, to enjoy it longer. My subsequent disappointment was always bitter. Is happiness a vibratory hum that pervades us only while it is far from our thoughts, so that once we perceive it and attempt to grasp hold, it slips through our fingers and flees far away?
I attempted to outwit happiness so that I could hold onto it. One stratagem I tried was to pretend not to notice it, hoping in this way to ensnare it miraculously. Then I discovered that this beloved does not desire us if we desire it and does not yearn for us unless we choose some rival beloved. I would have to forget it, or to pretend to forget it, to bring off my miracle. I made a pet of the she-camel and fondled her in the animal yard each morning before I took her to the grazing lands. I would pluck bloodsucking ticks from her neck and clear away the stalks of straw that adhered to her hump, belly, and thighs. I would dress with herbal salves the wounds that thorns had torn in her flesh while she was craning her neck in the palm groves. I noticed that she enjoyed the feel of my fingers moving over her body even more than being liberated from the ticks, thorns, or straw. Soon I began to multiply my caresses and prolong my massages down her body, endeavoring with my fingers to express my affection and anxiety or even longing, so that she would be forced to respond. At first she fidgeted and shuddered slightly, as if importunate armies of flies had swept down upon her, for all camels shake their coats in self-defense then. Even so, this quivering of the skin was soon followed by a disquieting ardor. She would rock her long, white neck to the right and left, rearing it up. Her large, dark eyes would gleam like those of my darling gazelles, and then she would emit a profound, restrained, intermittent moan that left me wondering whether it was a complaint, an intimate aside, or an ecstatic cry. Then she would lower her neck till it rubbed my shoulder, hand, or face. With her snout, which was damp with froth, she would nuzzle my arms, fingers, nose, or head, not ceasing until I did. I once attempted to groom as well her mate, the male camel, of his ticks, thorns, and straw, but she avenged herself on me, deserting me until I stretched out to take a siesta under an acacia. Then she snuck up and stood towering over my head. When I awoke I found her standing there, her head stretched toward the horizon, which was limited solely by the sandy dunes north of the oasis.
She was breathing heavily and chewing moodily, as if brooding. Despair, anxiety, and malice were visible in her eyes. I stretched out my hand to stroke her front leg, but she pulled it away and thumped her chest a mighty blow. I drew myself up on my elbows, but she did not soften toward me. I was caught off-guard when she jumped in the air to begin pummeling me with her feet. She hit my head, my right shoulder, and my left knee, and had I not sheltered myself by the acacia’s trunk, I would not have escaped her mischief. I was obliged, in order to mollify her, to massage her body with both hands: once in the animal yard in the morning, a second time out in the grazing lands at midday, and a third time back in the yard in the evening.
This relationship was not destined to last long, however, for the leader of a caravan, wishing to lavish gifts on me out of appreciation for the water, deposited a woman beside me, saying that he had purchased her in the forest lands and had decided to leave her in my custody to assist me with my daily chores. She was of mixed race, a skittish, comely, jumpy, excessively wary creature, who seemed ready to flee or to pounce. I soon had to acknowledge that she had awakened in my heart the whispers I had forgotten since the spirit world separated me from my lost she-jinni from whom I once learned some things. So it was not long before I was searching for my forgotten reality in this new creature’s embrace, which did not bring me happiness. The new she-jinni did not trust me, despite her pretence at amiability. I observed how skeptical of me she remained over the course of the following days. I do not deny that I occasionally had pleasure with her, but I could not claim it was fully satisfying. Because she lacked the kind of beauty I had lost when I lost the gazelles, this pleasure was lackluster. In the beginning, I suspected that her indifference, skittishness, and wariness were symptoms of fear, perhaps a result of a longing for the solitude to which she was accustomed in her forest land. Subsequently I discovered that these characteristics were to the contrary a hankering to be close to other people and a desire for contact with villages. So she awakened in me my old sense of being an orphan, of solitude, and of being at my wits’ end. Then I punished her by avoiding her. I acted condescending and holed up in the caverns of the ancestors for two consecutive nights. I abandoned her, feigning disdain for her gifts. The truth was, however, that I was not as liberated from the suzerainty of her embraces as I had imagined, for whispered temptations troubled me both nights I spent in the caves of the southern cliff faces more than at any time before. I realized that this she-jinni had soothed me more than anyone I had ever known before. So I hastened to rejoin her as soon as I saw her at the edge of the wadi, after I had descended the mountain on my return to the oasis. Yet I pretended not to see her and went to pet the she-camel at the bottom of the valley, because I have discovered that a creature who thirsts for the beauty he once found with gazelles is fated to recapture his dream only with she-camels, whose eyes flash with the gazelles’ spirit.