The flow of her past was suddenly interrupted by the appearance of the woman from the morning. “O merciful Father, you’re here! I was worried you’d left!” she cried, still panting. Rafi couldn’t hide the shock from his face; some deep presentiment told him the woman’s appearance would bring evil.
“I’ve been all over Toledo looking for you. I knew this place was my last chance to find you.” When she took Nora’s hand, Nora didn’t start; the woman pressed it to her own, upturned so as to read the palm. With her left hand she dabbed the sweat from her temples and wiped it on her pants, passing its dampness on to Nora’s palm.
“Your face has been in my mind since I left the two of you. I knew I’d seen it somewhere before.” The movement around them stopped, and the red of the setting sun darkened, throwing sinister shadows across the walls and gargoyles. Neither Nora nor her companion uttered a breath; Rafi felt like he could do nothing to stop the fates that were being entwined around Nora.
“Come with me, I have something to show you.” She gave them no chance to object and set off, leading them back toward the Mosque of Cristo de la Luz. When they got there, they gazed up at the decorated brick facade and the series of arches that called to mind the mosque in Cordoba.
“This mosque dates back to the year 999, but it was converted into a church in the twelfth century. A statue of Christ that had been bricked into the wall to avoid profanation was re-discovered in the time of Alfonso the Sixth and El Cid.” She grasped them by the arm and stopped them in the threshold, where they could see both the watching silence inside and the redness of the setting sun, which was unable to penetrate into the mosque. “That was when this transept was added, and with it a Mudejar semicircular apse.”
The woman kept them there under the three arches of the door for what felt like a long while. The mosque felt totally deserted, like it was holding its breath. There wasn’t even a janitor or imam there. To Nora, it seemed like a toy mosque with its cuboid shape and fine decorations. Rafi retreated a few steps to read the Arabic inscription in the brick facade: “In the name of God, Ahmad ibn al-Hadidi built this mosque at his personal expense, desiring God’s reward. With God’s assistance, and that of the architects Musa ibn Ali and Sa’da, it was completed in the month of Muharram in the year three hundred and ninety-nine.”
The woman took advantage of Rafi’s preoccupation with the inscription to whisk Nora inside the mosque and slam the door behind them, leaving Rafi outside. With devilish suddenness Nora found herself alone with that woman in the empty apse. The silence drowned out Rafi’s angry knocking.
Nora hesitated, wondering whether to escape. Was it the unhinged gleam in the woman’s eyes, or the newfound recklessness that had taken hold of her that had Nora so excited? Nora wanted to be swept to the very limit of danger. She followed the woman through the calm emptiness of the mosque silently.
The dark red sunset pooled in bloodlike darkness between the successive keyhole arches. Nora avoided looking up at them; they looked like open doorways leading to death. The woman’s besieging eyes could read her reaction to the call of the place and its spirits.
The nine square vaults on the ceiling followed their steps like the eyes of giants. The woman made Nora stop and listen beneath each vault; Nora stole furtive glances at the beautiful square structures, not daring to look closer for fear she’d be sucked into their darkness. Stopping Nora under a vault that featured a seven-pointed star, the woman forced her to look twice, and said, “Before we go any further, remember that what I’m about to reveal to you concerns the rivalry between our two great ancestors: mine, Samuel ibn Nagrela, and yours, Ali ibn Hazm. The Jew and the Muslim, who both believed that man’s fall did not take place when Adam and Eve fell from Paradise but when Cordoba fell and the centuries of harmony that had existed between the different religions was lost.” It dawned on Nora that the woman was speaking to her in fluent Arabic.
“You’re not imagining it. My Jewish ancestors used languages as the key to their fortunes, and one of those languages was your own. My ancestor Samuel displayed a remarkable talent for the Arabic language and calligraphy. That was what brought about the great change in his fortunes.” Nora sealed off her thoughts against this woman who seemed to be able to read them so easily.
“After the fall of the Berber kingdom and the wars between the party kings, the two men’s fates took different paths as they each searched for a door that would take them to the Paradise they’d lost here on earth. Ibn Hazm sought refuge near Seville, mourning Cordoba and its green revolution, and the destruction of its massive library, for which caravan-loads of books on astronomy, astrology, the sciences, and nature had been brought all the way from Baghdad. Ibn Hazm chased the dream of a resurrected Caliphate and the universal civilization it had nurtured. He believed that it was key to the door of Paradise and that was what made him side with the underdog in every conflict. He spent his life between exile and prison, an itinerant; after he was released, he isolated himself to write — on theology, matters of doctrine, and philosophy, trying to record the contents of that great lost library. He was way ahead of his time. He wrote a series of books comparing the three religions — the key to the faiths — which culminated in his book The Necklace of the Dove. Love was the only thing that could bridge the gaps between people, he discovered.
“Ibn Nagrela, on the other hand, was a physician from Cordoba, who was welcomed by the royal court in Granada, an Andalusian city that was home to the largest mixed community of Jews and Muslims. He lived two lives: one, in Arabic, as the ruler’s secretary and general of the Granadan army, leading campaigns against the neighboring kingdoms; and another in Hebrew, the language of his community in which he wrote poetry. Both men mourned the loss of their earthly Paradise in al-Andalus, the end of coexistence. They both spread the wisdom of eleventh-century Cordoba, whose scholars had been killed and whose library had been destroyed.”