1.9.8
When the company had heard his claim and seen through to his hidden aim, they laughed at his raving and decided that the correct response to his misleading words, simply for the sake of the wrangle, should be to address the matter from a different angle, so they snubbed him, saying, “Shame on your opinion and God damn you! If all the people of a place sang the same refrain, the land would become corrupted, honor be blighted, and no vestige or smidgen of decent behavior remain. But the fault is the cup’s, which has made off with your brain and revealed the corrupt thinking of your kind, the ignominy of your mischief-ridden mind. Perhaps, when you sober up, you’ll be guided to what’s right, and, after your gross falsehood and irresponsibility, see the light.” The man decided then that silence was a safer course for him than discussion and back-and-forth, or bickering and getting cross, and that the mass outranks the one, even if the latter’s well-guided and full of wisdom, the former in the wrong. He swallowed therefore their rebuttals and took fearful account of their monitions and the company dispersed without having come to a consensus as to who is the happiest of men or which the most easeful of conditions, finding that for each trade there was a fly in the ointment, for every state a disappointment, and every dish was accompanied by its own form of indigestion, albeit to many a condition of men they’d paid no attention, the time being too short to allow its mention, just as this chapter has been too short to allow a computation of all the arguments they made or their enumeration. Halt with me, then, at this portion that I’ve outlined, and let us return together to the story of the one I’ve left behind. Farewell.
CHAPTER 10: ANGERING WOMEN WHO DART SIDEWAYS LOOKS, AND CLAWS LIKE HOOKS
1.10.1
Rhymed prose is to the writer as a wooden leg to the walker. I must be careful therefore not to rest all my weight on it every time I go for a stroll down the highways of literary expression lest its vagaries end up cramping my style or it toss me into a pothole from which I cannot crawl. Indeed, it seems to me that the difficulties of rhymed prose are greater than those of poetry, for the requirements regarding linking and correspondence set for lines of verse are fewer than those for the periods of rhymed prose. In rhymed prose, the rhyme often leads the writer from his original path to a place he would never have wanted to reach had he not been subjected to its constraints. Here our aim is to weave our story in a way acceptable to every reader. Anyone who likes to listen to language that’s entirely rhymed and chimed, with metaphors and metonymies adorned and primed, should go to the Maqāmāt of al-Ḥarīrī175 or the Nawābigh176 of al-Zamakhsharī.
1.10.2
Thus we declare: after our friend the Fāriyāq had lived for a while in the state that we’ve described, he was obliged by the conflicts and quarrels that occurred between him and his grandfather177 to abandon what he was at and adopt another means of making a living. Fate ordained he should become tutor to the daughter of an emir, and a bonny lass was she, her features pleasing to a degree, with a body in which naught was awry, and a sleepy eye178 (which doesn’t mean that she was unable to see anyone who loved her, as would be the case with one who was actually sleepy; it means that she had an eye that was “dried up.”179 And even that doesn’t fully express what I’m trying to say, because it gives the false impression that she was dried up, when, in fact, she was tender and full of sap. No, what I’m trying to get at is that she would seem to be, as we say, “given to looking through half-closed eyes [taḥshīf]”—but the whole entry for ḥ-sh-f in the dictionary is repugnant to me: it contains the senses “dryness,” “baseness,” and “mediocrity,” plus something else that pretty girls are too dignified to speak of.180 What I really mean is that, when looking, she would open her eyelids a crack — but even “crack” isn’t the right thing here. In the end, I don’t know how to to convey to the reader what I’m trying to get at. Perhaps the most appropriate way of saying it would be “she shot arrows from her eyes.”)
1.10.3
Her youth was no impediment to her “tenderizing” a man’s heart with her glance, for the heart attaches itself as easily to the small-breasted girl as to the big-busted grown woman, not every passion being a prelude to prostitution. Men have fallen in love with pictures, with the remains of the beloved’s campfire, with her footprints in the sand, with outward forms, with a beloved land. Some have fallen in love at the sight of a hennaed hand, a lock of hair, a dress, a pair of drawers, a drawstring, or whatever. I know a man who fell in love with a woman’s cat and would play with it, led by passion to imagine that he was playing with its owner; often it would fasten its claws in him and draw blood, which pleased and delighted him, either because he took pleasure in being tormented as part of his love for the beloved or because of his belief that toying with a woman was likely to lead to scratches and blood-letting so in the end it would come to the same thing, whether the wound was inflicted personally or by proxy. One who had loved was asked to what lengths his ardor had gone and he said, “I used to find pleasure in the wind if, coming to me from the direction of the beloved, it carried with it the smell of carrion.” Most loves of the people of these lands are of this sort: when one of them is in love he goes into ecstasies over anything associated with the beloved, such as a handkerchief, a flower, a letter, or, especially, a lock of hair, which he will sniff and hug, kiss, turn over in his hands, and hold to his chest, in accordance with the words of the poet who said,
Verses, like hair, are summoners to love,
A lock of hair, like a line of verse, a relic to be hoarded.
The only way to feel him close when he’s not there
Is through a verse or through a lock (the latter the less oft accorded).
1.10.4
If it be said that they only love such relics out of hope of union with the beloved who has been so generous as to give them these favors, not because they feel any fondness for them in and of themselves, I reply, “There’s nothing wrong in loving a young girl in the hope and expectation that she will grow into a mature woman. Without hope’s broad horizon, how narrow life would be, and many a hope is sweeter than a triumph. People of experience know that he to whom God has denied beauty for a purpose of which he is unaware is more than equally recompensed by Him with sharpness of intellect and insight, powers of visualization and imagination, and acuity of intuition, and as a result is quicker to fall in love and more solicitous of those who possess beauty, for the further a person finds himself from the desired object, the greater his longing for it and the more powerful his infatuation with it.” The point of all of this is to provide an opportunity to say that the Fāriyāq was aware, from an early age, that he was himself far removed from beauty, that from his childhood he venerated those who possessed it and favored them above all others, and that the ugly man is to be excused for loving pretty girls. As the poet says,