Nora was caught off balance, tongue-tied. Rafi took the spotlight off her by drawing Señora Mirano into a conversation in Spanish. By the time the waiter arrived with the Italian salad she’d ordered, Nora had regained her composure. The four looked like any other group of friends out to dinner. “Bon appetit!” Señora Mirano said.
Nora reveled in the rhythm of the artworks on the wall, the conversations of the regulars around them, each with their distinct, individual features, and in the fragrance of herbs, the taste of thyme, virgin olive oil, bread freshly baked in a wood-fired oven, and seafood. When the plates were cleared, and cups of coffee and Nora’s chamomile tea appeared, Nora took her folder of papers out of her bag. Señora Mirano found her glasses and began to look through the papers with interest; Rafi translated for Nora.
“Your lines are very mature, it’s like you’ve spent a lifetime struggling with these greedy pen strokes, almost tearing the paper. Look at this violence, Rafa, how the lines dig and scratch… The force of the retreat, the spontaneity of the movement. This is lust, appetite, desire, veils being torn off all over the place! The human torso is spread out here like a thunder-filled sky, exploding as if in lovemaking …” Rafi was too embarrassed to translate the last part for Nora. The woman eventually stopped exulting, but a look of surprise remained on her face.
A gypsy appeared on the narrow street, playing the violin in a red dress that was partly covered by her black shawl, its tassels trembling every time her bow slid over the strings.
“Ah! Madrid’s night moves in time with the ebb and flow of the second movement of Bach’s violin concerto … Music is like Arabic: poetic but highly disciplined. The structure of harmony is like the system of patterns in Arabic, like the verbs composed of three letters which form the roots of the whole language. Chords are made up of either three or four notes, you know, and they can be arranged to create infinite variations, just like Arabic letters. The mysterious secret behind Bach’s compositions is just like alif-lam-ha, the letters that make up the word ‘God’; Bach thought his compositions proved God’s very existence …” Sinatra, Picasso, Bach: these were names that struggled desperately to steady themselves, but could find no foothold on the slippery walls of the empty water tank that was her mind.
“Bach wrote forty-eight preludes and fugues, using all twenty-four major and minor keys, just to prove that it could be done. He wrote so much, and for so much, like a real Sufi, convinced that numbers mattered. The Goldberg Variations were written for an insomniac prince who wanted Bach to compose a piece that he’d never get bored of listening to on nights when he couldn’t sleep …” Nora realized at that moment that her own insomnia was not the product of an overburdened memory but an empty one. It stemmed from the aridity of the place she came from, a place that was becoming amnesiac even though it knew that the rest of the world was testing and examining and rebuilding itself through debate and criticism, that there were places like Madrid where arts and sciences and architecture and music collided with people going about their everyday business in a civilization that had managed to retain its noble exterior. All those names and their achievements, of which she knew nothing, caused Nora to feel a sense of loss.
Her train of thought was interrupted by Señora Mirano’s laughter. “It’s no wonder, is it, that they included his Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 on the ‘golden record’ that they sent into outer space on one of the Voyager probes along with other examples of sounds, languages, and music from Earth.” If they’d sent that record to the city where she was born, would the people there recognize it as the sound of their Earth, Nora wondered.
“This is Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 5 in F major, the Spring Sonata. The difference between him and Bach is that Beethoven broke the rules, though that doesn’t mean that Bach wasn’t one of the most important rule-abiding composers.”
Nora knew that it would be a huge undertaking for her to absorb this encyclopedia of human achievements, and that she was embarking upon it at a relatively late age. The gypsy violinist outside had dropped a coin and was groping for it on the ground. It was only then that Nora had realized she was blind. Nora was blinded by her own pity.
“How do you feel about preparing for an exhibition? Not necessarily here — maybe in your own country?” Nervously, Nora fingered the edge of her scarf, looking at the gypsy woman’s tasseled shawl as the ninety-something Señora Mirano went on, “I came from a nomadic gypsy background too, and I learned that art in all its varieties can make the world a safer place for us. Art’s like a planet that grants us citizenship and gives us papers of its own, different from those of real nations.” Nora felt naked; the more this woman looked at her drawings, the more her internal life, which she herself didn’t dare confront, would be uncovered.
“But I don’t have the knowledge to produce anything that could match that kind of art,” murmured Nora, surprising even herself. “I didn’t learn to create art by studying it. I drew this”—she fingered her sketches—“because I needed to push the walls away and create some space. To create balance.”
“That might be the best description of what art is that I’ve ever heard: opening a place up into infinite spaces in the total creative consciousness! Maybe this need is what compels primitive peoples and children to create the art that has always been such an important part of human creativity. After he became famous, Picasso said he wished he could go back to drawing like a child. You must break through and exhibit something. Open up your innermost self to audiences and let them walk around in it, examining your deepest secrets …”
“I appreciate the suggestion. I’ll think about it,” she whispered into the corner of her scarf, and without thinking she tied the corner for the promise she’d made, twisting the fabric into a knot the size of a pigeon’s eye.
“Where did you learn this gypsy magic?” asked Rafi affectionately. Nora’s face shone. The features of the three people around her looked like part of the clay and ceramic tableau behind them, illuminated by the magic of the dim lights floating over the violin strings mixed with the longing of lute strings, which night drew toward the depths of the soul; there was her second mother’s hoarse voice and her headscarf with knots in each corner like a rabbit’s teats.
“The woman who raised me taught me to tie a knot in my scarf for each wish I made. We were supposed to make big wishes, and tie a knot for each one, and only undo the knot when the wish came true, as our joyous ululations rang out across the rooftops. The bigger the wish, the wider the votive knot and the more people who’d benefit from your offering. Never leave your headscarf without a knot, she said.”
There were so many knots in her second mother’s scarf, every one representing a different joy awaiting her down the road: Nora’s graduation from primary school, her first period, finally managing to memorize the Surah of Sovereignty, which warded off the approach of hell as one slept, learning to sew properly.
“Like this gypsy’s shawl, with hundreds of knots,” she observed. “Do you think each one of them is for a wish or a dream?”
“Sometimes one dream is enough,” ventured Rafi.
“One dream?!” she exclaimed. She thought for a moment, and then she added, “Yes, maybe — maybe even one would be too much.”