She realized that Rafi was watching her. The only thing he could see through the windshield was a single nagging thought: this is a race. His mission wasn’t to take Nora away from her past like she’d asked him to, but the opposite. He had to try to stitch together a moment from her past with a moment from the past of a city that she’d never known, like Toledo. He knew where the connection would come: through art. Or through the suffering or death contained within the art. The constant movement, which resembled her, whose revolutions she fit perfectly like a gear, where she was made whole. He was certain that the only way she could have peace of mind was if she could see herself as a cog in a machine she knew well, the machine that created her dreams and made them come to life. The point wasn’t to go back into the past but to catch up with it at some point in the future. The eternal journey alongside and away from an event that was headed in the same direction as her dreams, as part of that eternal process of change and transformation. She had to have some trust. She knew she couldn’t run away, couldn’t get her hands on people or things. All she could do was hop on at a station and ride through countless moments past.
As they approached Toledo, they saw the red mountain looming on the horizon surrounded by the blue of the Tagus River, which had repelled invaders from time immemorial. The city was like an island atop the great mountain. Rafi could see that Nora was struggling to take it all in.
“Toledo was one of the most important cities in all of Spain during the so-called Golden Age. It was once part of the Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba, but King Alfonso the Sixth of Léon and Castile captured the city in 1085. Toledo later became known as a holy city in the seventeenth century, and gained a reputation for being open, tolerant, Eastern …
“It’s full of treasures from when it was the capital of the Spanish Empire. Lots of important historical figures were born here or lived here: El Greco, King Alfonso the Tenth — they call him Alfonso the Wise because he was learned, and started the translation movement in the thirteenth century. They translated Islamic learning into Latin and helped spark the European Renaissance. Toledo was a center of culture and home to three monotheistic religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. At one point, they lived together in harmony, but then came ghettoization and finally in 1492 the Jews and Muslims were expelled. Any who remained were forced to convert to Christianity in 1500. They used to call these people Moriscos, ‘little Muslims’—another way of saying heretics. Of course, the Christians discriminated against the converts and that’s when they started coming up with ideas like pure bloodlines and heresy trials. From the second half of the fifteenth century onward, they suppressed Islamic-looking architecture and the Gothic style began to dominate the city.”
“‘Little Muslims,’” Nora repeated. Everything he’d said rang a bell; it was as though he’d been recounting a history that Nora knew intimately. He pointed toward the gate up ahead.
“Existential conflicts are embedded in the soil of this red mountain like fossils. They go all the way back before the Muslim conquest to the Goths and the Romans and the Christians, actually all the way back to Heracles of Libya and to Tubal, Noah’s grandson who became the first king of Spain.”
Rafi parked his car at the foot of the mountain. Side by side, they made their way up the stone steps, which took wild and sudden turns, watching the city come to life, smelling the coffee brewing behind stone walls. “There’s something magical about entering this city on foot; there’s nothing like it. I always feel like one of the invaders who scaled its defenses and destroyed them. Here, this way.”
Nora flew ahead, her ankle-length white cotton dress billowing around her as she surrendered herself to the rhythm of the mountain, allowing the cramped stone passageways to slip through to her heart, ascending from the foundation of one house to the roof and then the foundation of another. Suddenly she found herself before several narrow paths paved with red stone, which led up to the summit. She teetered at the edge.
“Be careful,” he said. “This city takes artists prisoner.” The sun rose just in time to receive her laugh. He looked at her for a moment. She might have flown away on the wings of that smile.
“El Greco himself became one with the city. He was born in Crete, but he felt at home here. He did everything here: he was a sculptor, painter, architect. He was the first person to see art as a process of discovery. We can go to the El Greco Museum and see his house while we’re here.” He looked at her in profile: thick eyebrows, long, dark eyelashes pointed downward as if she were being pulled sleepily to the point of no return. Rafi wanted nothing more than to pull her up out of the abyss. He wanted her to explore the city as though it were one of its many painted avatars.
“El Greco was actually just passing through, but the city took hold of him. The rebel inside him found the freedom he’d been searching for in these peaks. He had a lust for life and he was constantly chasing after beauty so he found it depressing to be as lonely and independent as he was. He put it all into his paintings. Even his death seemed to carry a message: he died a poor man in large empty rooms, surrounded by his meager possessions. All he had was his books and paintings and artists’ fancies, nothing substantial. That was what he valued and needed; that was how he lived. He never had the money to fulfill his grand ambitions so he fulfilled them in art.”
She felt life tingle in her fingertips as she ran her hands over the red stones warming in the sunlight. He was telling her all this to try to distract her from what she’d come to look for.
“It’s as if money has the last word, even in art and dreams.”
They lingered in the square between the rooftops and his words reached deep inside her. In the dark corners of her mind, she sensed an accusation. She let out a hot breath she’d been fighting back.
“Is that so?” She said as if sticking her tongue out at him before hurrying daintily forward, climbing up, as he followed. He’d never seen her happy before.
By arriving in the city so early, they had the magic of sunrise all to themselves, and it lingered in the glow of Nora’s astonished face for hours.
“So, you’re going to take me where the sheikh went, right?” He hadn’t expected the tone of implicit command.
As they approached one of the silent stone houses, a woman popped out from behind a wooden door. She was mesmerizing, dressed all in white. She gave them an exaggeratedly warm greeting. “Don’t tell me. You’re on way your way to the El Greco Museum?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I think I know you,” she said to Rafi. “Have we met?” He was afraid she’d remember that he’d visited her school with the sheikh some months back. He gave Nora a look of warning, and tried to divert the woman’s attention.
“Do you know when it opens?” He asked her in Spanish.
“Follow me. It’s in the Jewish Quarter. I know a fantastic route we can take.” She walked them over as if they’d had a longstanding appointment. She would walk two meters ahead and then turn around and walk back to say something about the sights, like a tour guide they hadn’t employed. “This is when I usually have my coffee, and I hate it when people interrupt me and spoil my tranquil mornings.” They had no choice but to follow her. Her thin body was stuffed into white cotton trousers and a top tight enough to suffocate, with a gold design on the front. They could barely keep up with her as she teetered up and down slippery paved paths in stiletto heels — a terrifying sight. She was so light that the constant stream of chatter that poured out from between her dark-red painted lips threatened to blow her away. It was as though she were dying to talk and she mixed her own personal history in with that of the city.