2.18.7
Then the Fāriyāq, after having paid his respects to the emir and wished him good health, returned to Cairo, where the affliction had died down. He asked after his logic teacher and was told that he was alive and not numbered among the dead,655 so he went back to him and completed with him what he’d started. When he reached the last step on the Ladder, he suffered another attack of ophthalmia and stayed at home. When he recovered, he decided to learn something of jurisprudence and the science of theology, so he started on the Kanz (The Treasure)656 and the Risālah al-Sanūsiyyah (The Senoussi Treatise)657 and fell ill. A French acquaintance asked why he was so weak, and he told him the story. “I shall cure you,” the other said, “God willing, but on condition you teach my son Arabic.” “With the greatest of pleasure,” he returned, and immediately he started teaching him and taking the medication from his father. This, however, will have to be set out in detail in another chapter, on its own.
CHAPTER 19: THE CIRCLE OF THE UNIVERSE AND THE CENTER OF THIS BOOK
658
2.19.1
This man was a famous doctor in Egypt, but his reputation for causing decease was greater than that for curing it, the reason being that, at an advanced age, he’d married a fresh young girl and fathered on her a daughter and a son. Thereafter he’d ceased to be able to give her her marital rights, so he made it his habit to humor her and flatter her, which is how men usually treat their wives in such cases — falling short of pleasing and satisfying her in this area, he increases his attentions, his demonstrations of affection, and his loving treatment of her, imagining that these will make up in the woman’s eyes for the other, and he does the same when he’s unfaithful to her and falls in love with another. Likewise, the wife likewise usually increases her demonstrations of love and passion for her husband by giving herself to him to the point that he becomes sated with her and his cup runs over, or she flatters him, if it’s she who’s being unfaithful.
2.19.2
In keeping with this logic, the doctor told his wife one day, “Good woman, I observe that my key has become too rusty for use in your lock and that your age and blooming good health require you find yourself a copulative instrument to amuse yourself with until my time is done and you marry another. If you don’t, I’m afraid you’ll come to hate me and fly away and leave me as does the dove. It would be easier for me to lose one part of you than to lose you altogether, for you are the mother of my children and the closest thing to my heart, and I could not bear to be separated from you. Choose whomever you’d like and I’ll drag him to you by his horns.” (The woman laughed at this.) Then he added, “And given that I am well known in this town to be a doctor, if the neighbors see a man, or even men, coming to me no one will suspect you” (the woman laughed too at his mention of “men”) “for people knock on a doctor’s door at night — even at midnight” (and here she laughed again). Having talked to her at length in this vein, he ended by saying, “Don’t think that I’m the only one who practices this custom. In my country, people like me do the same” (at which, she let out a great whoop of laughter).
2.19.3
His wife’s first thought, once he’d finished the rest of his speech along these lines, was that he was trying by this means to discover her inmost feelings and trap her into making a slip, so she wept with rage and said to him, “You must believe I’m a whore to confront me with such words and hold such a low opinion of me.” “God forbid!” said he. “I spoke to you simply of what nature requires. Think over what I said in a little while and let me know your answer.” The woman left him, scowling and suspicious. A good few days passed and the man neither fondled her nor mounted her nor played with her nor performed his husbandly duties with her. She, becoming worried when the situation promised to persist, was too annoyed to have the patience to desist, and started thinking about what her husband had said to her. One day, then, she dressed herself in the clothes that pleased him best, made up her face, put on perfume, and set off for his room, telling herself, “Today will be the watershed, the dividing line between what’s past and what lies ahead. If he doesn’t treat me like a wife, I’ll remind him of his words.”
2.19.4
He received her with joy and a beaming face and sat her down at his side, noting that she was aroused, for a redness had suffused her eyes, which glistened, while her voice had a tremolosity, which is to say a shake and a shiver, to it. When she’d settled herself, he started off by asking her if she had thought over what he’d said a few days before. “Yes,” she said. “But don’t you have a bit left that would relieve me of this matter?” He replied, “I swear I don’t have a drop or a pottle, the dregs of a puddle or the lees of a bottle, and I’ve no hope left of improving the situation with any aphrodisiac — not by the rubbing on of flesh of skink or fat of varan, nor by use of ginger or pepper or pan-leaf or saltwort or elecampane or betel-nut or cloves or spikenard or mastic or nutmeg or fennel, or of Spanish pelletory or pinenuts or chickpea or emblic or myrobalans or long pepper or sesame or alpinia or mace or balm-tree oil or ragwort, or in birds’ eggs or in iris oil or in colocassia or in narcissus root steeped two nights in milk or in celery whose seeds have been crushed with sugar and clarified butter or in wearing clothes dyed with Indian yellow or in eating mandrake root or in glasswort juice squeezed into fermented milk or in borax mixed with honey or in oil of jasmine or in Indian hazelnut or in fried hamqāq659 or in terebinth or in burdock resin or in musk blended with gillyflower oil or in salvia root or in carrots or in asparagus or in Indian gooseberry or in mughāth660 fruit or in fava-bean greens with ginger or in cassia ground with sesame and kneaded with honey or in mangrove gum or in bdellium or in terebinth fruits or in being censed seven times with lean meat of the Egyptian vulture mixed with mustard seed or in tigernut sedge or in safflower kernels or in rubbed red sand worms or in bananas or in wiping the soles of my feet with bats’ brains or in pigeon flesh or in cassia bark; otherwise I would have spurned no possibility of making you happy, for the excessive affection that you know I bear you.”
2.19.5
She replied, “If things stand as you say, sir, I choose a priest.” “And what wicked tempter has whispered this utterly evil choice into your ear?” he asked. “Firstly,” she answered, “it’s so that people won’t think badly of me when they see him entering my house every day, and secondly because they say that the priest has vital juices in abundance.” “You err. Also, I fear what effect he may have on my children, for he may try to seduce them into disobeying me, given that I follow a different creed than he. You had better choose someone else.” “You,” she replied, “are a doctor and know the sound from the sick, the strong from the weak. Choose me whomever you please, and with whatever contents you I shall be content.” “God bless you!” he responded. Then he kissed her, so joyful was he, and promised that he would do as he had promised the following day.