And only then did she recognize that she was speaking not with the neighbor boy but with her vanished daughter. In her absence, her child had come home. Lubna. Salma. Ibna. Alexia. After all the news, this was the greatest news. “A favorable wind for the homeward journey”—who said that?
The two women remained silent. One as well as the other — yes, in Arabic there was a dual! — they pursued their thoughts in silence, each in her distant place: enough of being apart. Stay together, whatever it takes. That was what the story called for. So it was only a story? Only?
Then all this time her vanished child had been near her house, her home? Was that possible? And did the expression “my home” still exist? Vanished within eyeshot. And in a flash of thought it seemed possible to her that the half-grown boy from the porter’s lodge really was her own child, with a slightly altered appearance. Was that possible? Well, well, well! And at the end of their wordless conversation the aventurera felt herself to be absolved by her child: on the one hand because the girl was alive and well; and then by the simple fact of the child’s existence, that she had a child. Never again to feel she had to do something special for her. Just to be with her. The doing would happen by itself.
Was guilt rearing its head again? I would have expected a woman, and a woman’s story, to spare us and me, the author, who sees himself first and last as a reader, a reminder of our eternal guilt, or original sin. Adam and Eve were innocent. Oedipus or whoever was innocent. Enough guilt stories. Mystery, not guilt.
And in the end the aventurera and asendereada, “the pathless yet undeterred one,” had opened her mouth after all and recounted to her child, named after the patron saint of Toledo or somewhere, how a man had introduced himself to her as she made her way through the Sierra: “I live with my wife, my children, and my friends.”
And in the following parágrafo of the last chapter of the tale of the loss of images, the woman in the warehouse palace opened the large glass back door to the Mancha steppe: “door” and “chapter” were the same word in Arabic, bab. She raised her arm to throw the book, her child’s property, which had accompanied her on the entire journey, far out into the night, in Arabic laila.
One second before she let it go, it occurred to her, however, how every time she had thrown something — she had a passion for throwing, and almost always hit her target — her daughter had been horrified and hurt by the sight of the thrower, just as by the sight of her mother as a victor. “Don’t throw, Mother!” And so she laid the book on the ground instead, in the steppe grass, which glistened in the moonlight with dewdrops, some of them already hard, frozen. At that moment, on the horizon, ufuq in Arabic, perhaps precisely because she had broken off her throw, a feathered spear flew past the doorstep at eye level and would never fall to the ground.
The Mancha village, although many of its inhabitants had moved to the cities, turned out to be not so terribly deserted after all. From the solitary church out there on the steppe a small nocturnal procession emerged, with a baldachin borne on ahead, under which was the statue of Our Lady of the Snows: after spending the summer in the hermitage there, she was being moved, as every year, for the approaching winter, to another church in the heart of the village. That was how long the hike through the Sierra de Gredos had taken. It was October, and it was starting to get cold for our Señora de las Nieves out there on the savannah.
But the person who by contrast was not cold in the slightest was the ablaha there, the beautiful idiot. Barefoot, she went out into the scree of the old old Mancha. The many dark, symmetrical parts of her dress, rippling rhythmically as she walked, corresponded to the dark cavities and craters up there on the moon. And then she even ran, sprinted; hurled herself into the moonlit darkness.
In a film, that would have seemed like a flight. In the reality of the story I saw her run toward a group of gypsy musicians — was it still permissible to write “gypsy,” gitano? — that was accompanying the Madonna with flamenco tambourines, trumpets, and drums, and the cante hondo, the song from the depths, to the cathedral. Andalusia was not far from here in La Mancha.
In the following paragraph, one of the last in this last chapter, I saw the woman — the procession with the musicians now silent and gone with the wind — out on the Mancha steppe, going in circles, setting one foot deliberately in front of the other.
In a film that would have signalized danger. (Now and then, since I have been living abroad, away from my country and my people, I occasionally use such a foreign word.) But perhaps she simply liked walking here on that special Mancha earth, the best earth one could wish for, with firm, granular sand, scree, ash, slag, countless burned patches in the short grass, where the rain and dew puddles were just freezing, in the shape of arrows or giant feet, mirroring the night sky.
And suddenly I then saw her going backward, toward the Fugger warehouse with the glass door. In a film, that would have signalized “fear,” as if she had suddenly stumbled upon her place of execution. But now, already on the threshold, she hurtled forward again. So wasn’t she running toward something or someone instead? A film shot would have shown only her nocturnal eyes. All through the years she had run that way, and crossing the Sierra de Gredos had been her last running start. She flew forward, as only a female idiot in her idiot’s tale can fly toward a male idiot, who for his part flew toward her, could fly toward her. And that was as it was supposed to be. She released her hair net, black, longer than her long hair, as she flew forward.
Actually the song that she struck up as she ran in circles, after the disappearance of the procession and the gypsy band, should have been inserted into the previous paragraph. She sang it, not boomingly, like her singer-grandfather in his day, but almost inaudibly and, to my oversensitive ears, at times slightly off-key, but perhaps as it was supposed to be sung. And at first her singing appeared to imitate a child’s crying. And that song went more or less as follows:
I did not know what you were like
I did not know who your parents were
I did not know whether you had a child
I did not know where your country was
I did not know how many reals, maravedis, and dubloons you had
I did not know when you came into the world
I did not know what your intentions were
But I knew and knew and knew who you were
I knew the lines of your hand
I knew the length of your stride
I knew your scars
I knew your childhood diseases
I knew your passport number
I knew your voice
I knew your habits
I knew your tastes
I knew your circle of friends
I knew your rhythm
But I did not know, did not know you
I no longer knew the color of your skin