They walked along, winding their way back through the Roman and Islamic-era buildings along stone alleyways, which seemed always to ascend. Nora stopped in front of a house, which looked to them like a spearhead at the tip of the other houses, like a river between sloping banks. It was a small stone house with an old arabesque door, inlaid with brass. The door knocker was in the shape of a circular constellation.
“For Sale — Please call,” Rafi read the sign that had been posted on the wooden shutter.
“If he forgets me and I end up — maybe we should write down the number, just in case …” Her request took him by surprise, but her enthusiasm was electric. He jotted down the number: 37 63 29.
As they crossed back through the Plaza del Ayuntamiento, Nora stopped in a small bookshop. When she found a book about El Greco that she wanted to buy, she realized that she hadn’t brought any money with her. She put it back. Nothing could spoil her mood on that sunny morning.
All around them, as if out of nowhere, a flood of tourists and flashbulbs appeared and they were pulled along in their wake. They ate paella with snails, topped with black beans, at a table with four chairs and a loud orange umbrella. The umbrella didn’t really shelter them so when the sky began to sprinkle, raindrops stuck to her hair and gave off a scent of passion in her heart. It was raining hard suddenly, a downpour, and then equally suddenly, it stopped. The sky folded the rain clouds and tucked them under its arm as it watched them from the edge of the precipice where the orange umbrellas ended.
Rafi took the book about El Greco out of a paper bag and handed it to Nora. “Oh, you shouldn’t have!” she said, and it sounded like she was saying, I needed to own this! She flipped the pages, possessively, giddily, and there, between the pages, she found a slip of paper with the phone number for the house that was for sale. She smiled and pressed it deeper toward the spine of the book.
“Don’t mention it. I’ll just put it on your bill.” The words floated through the air that separated them, meaninglessly; they weren’t intended to burst her happy bubble. Rafi was watching her, as if with a sixth sense, trying to decipher the small reactions behind her natural smile and between her exuberant chatter and heavy silence.
They finally traced their steps back to the Church of Santo Tomé, which held the painting depicting the burial of the man who was Count of Toledo and Lord of Orgaz in the fourteenth century. Rafi could tell that she was uncomfortable letting him pay for the tickets. “Don’t worry,” he said. “This is on me.”
They walked into the hall, which looked to them like a vestibule, and stood, awestruck, behind a rope that separated them from the painting, which stretched from floor to ceiling. They looked down on the gently lit burial scene and the Count of Orgaz’s body.
“Humans wearing heavenly faces. This painting shows two saints known for being lavish and vibrant, Saint Augustine and Saint Stephen, descending from heaven to attend the burial of the departed nobleman. One stands at the man’s head and the other at his feet as they lay him in the earth. It’s as though this is the miracle that the worthy can expect to receive when they die. It was a way of getting the people of Orgaz to donate liberally to the church,” explained the guide, who was himself under the painting’s spell.
She stared at the gold embroidery on the robes of the saints laying him to rest while the messengers of death themselves became obscured. Then Picasso’s painting Evocation, The Burial of Casagemas, which she’d seen in the Museo del Prado one morning, materialized before her eyes. The Burial of the Count of Orgaz was overlaid with Picasso’s painting, the blue of Evocation cast over the heavenly gloom of the angels descending to carry out the funeral rites. There was another body where the count’s body had been, but it wasn’t the body of Picasso’s friend Casagemas. It was someone else, someone Nora felt she knew. Naked women took the place of the angels, and there were two who stood out in particular. They were wearing sheer thigh-high stockings: one in red, the other in black. They both looked like they’d just walked out of a cabaret. They stood, watching the macabre scene below. Then, the two women turned to look at Nora. The woman in black stockings looked just like her; it was like looking at a mirror. When she turned to examine the woman in red, her heart stopped.
The Devil’s Horns
“THIS TRIBE IS LEGENDARY — people call them the Devil’s Horns,” al-Ghatafani cried out to us, “but they may be nothing more than a mirage created by our own fear …” We slowed down to interpret the terrifying sight: mountaintops pricked the sky like devils’ horns, blocking the horizon. The giants took the lead, urging our camels to hurry forward and penetrate the rocky slopes by way of narrow hidden passages carved out by goodness knows what. The camels rushed along in a frenzy, scratching themselves against the rock, so excitable that they threatened to throw us off. They were bloody by the time they reached the open space that materialized behind a wall of rock. There was an entire universe hidden behind that abominable rock face: palm trees, grazing animals, people — all the same sandy color — surrounding an enormous idol of blazing black. A shiver ran through the devil’s horns around it, adding to the stench of burnt flesh that it gave off. Our worst fear had risen up out of the sand.
Pages and pages of the parchment were missing, and Yusuf had to skip lines obscured by patches of blood or henna.
THEY PULLED ME FROM THE SAND and threw me at the feet of their leader, who watched me struggle. He caught hold of my right hand and examined my birthmark, a vein that ran across my palm from my index finger to my wrist, where it disappeared into the bundle of veins there.
Their leader’s body was a fierce sandstorm; it ravaged me for nights and days during which my eyes never closed once. I fulfilled that sheikh’s every desire, as the blood boiled in my eyes. My screams were even louder than those of al-Ghatafani coming from whatever hell they were subjecting him to.
“The woman who bears this birthmark will carry the demon who will inherit the earth. Through him, our spawn will penetrate all tribes and become ageless demons that roam the earth, breeding with the survivors of storm-struck caravans and ships on the shores of the Gulf of Suez and the Persian Gulf …”
Burial
“SOMETIMES I GET WOKEN UP BY A DEEP FEELING OF REMORSE. ABOUT WHAT, I don’t know … There’s always the same idea jammed in my head: ‘You’re a fighter,’ it says, but it sounds more like criticism than praise.” She fell silent, trying to hear the reproachful voice replay itself. The two paintings, the Picasso and El Greco, had fused in her mind, and it disturbed her. “I’ve never fought for anything. Not for principles, or a better life, or love of country. None of that matters to me. Now I’m fighting for the sake of my silly little whims. I embarked on a total of one battle — for love — and it vanquished me.” She waved the dream away with a flick of her hand.
“The only thing I ever fought for was the love of a man who was aging with frightening speed. His body grew weaker by the minute, everything except his heart, which was cast iron and sealed shut. It ticked assiduously but never to the bigger beats that cause hearts of flesh and blood to tremble. My father was proud to be a descendant of those striving men of rock-hard conviction who’d fought both for and against the unification of the Arabian Peninsula. I had to learn to live with that iron heart, to make important decisions on my own, without letting my emotions get in the way. The first emotion I ditched was fear, because nothing mattered.” Her voice quavered at the bruising words.