“Al-Shaybi never stopped coming here. I used to think he was in love with me, but he was actually coming to sift through every single poem that Joseph ibn Nagrela had left behind, believing that the key had been smelted and cast in poetry, and that he would find it hidden in a single verse … He and I went through every poem Joseph ibn Nagrela brought back from the temple of Almaqa, hoping we might find an image of the key. Here, look.”
She opened a yellowed manuscript in front of them. “This is a collection of the poems of Joseph ibn Nagrela, who was moved to write poetry by love.”
The room got darker as the woman continued talking. The two tried to focus on what she was saying, hoping that she might finally get to the point of all this. Nora felt lost amidst the cascade of words; she imagined figures in nuns habits slipping into the cellar and watching them surreptitiously from behind the shelves.
“I buried half my life in these poems, and ruined my sight. I remember one night, the night of my fifteenth birthday, when al-Shaybi and I were leaning over our work with our foreheads touching, we were so tired after hours of reading and re-reading a single line of a long poem in search of the key that we fell asleep right there. The line was: Exile is the ink in the book of God with which every straying soul is written and in which every soul searches for a mouthful of bread. That poem and the promise it carries returned to me when I saw your face this morning, Nora.” The deranged gleam in her eyes shone on Nora’s face.
“I dreamed of your face. When they introduced you, they said ‘This is the one who fled from the ink of doves and pigeons, the one who was delivered from the greed that surrounds the House of God.’” She brought the lamp closer to Nora’s face. “In my dream, a war waged around you and over you. That’s what brought you here. As if you were kidnapped.”
Frozen as if made of marble, each squeezing themself against the other’s ribs, Nora and Rafi stared aghast at the face that wouldn’t stop talking.
“I spent half a decade dreaming of you. Your face harassed me every single night, and then you suddenly disappeared. You were absent from my dreams for another half-decade. How naive was I to think that I could ever forget your face. I did forget it, but this morning, your features looked familiar to me. It just goes to show that even the lucky ones in our midst scarcely notice when they meet their dreams walking down the street.”
Her gaze bored through Nora as she repeated her words, slower this time and with a crazed edge. “I dreamed you in war.” Nora’s face was drenched in the purplish glow from the old building’s night-soaked stone walls. “In fact, the whole world awaits war …” She shifted her warning gaze back and forth between them, impressing her fear on them.
“In our books we call him the Savior, the one who will appear to lead us into the war that will open the door between the four rivers of Heaven and allow them to flow on earth, running together as one, purifying the earth before the descent of the Messiah, peace and glory be upon him, who will unite humanity in peace and the word of God, the word that will resurrect the dead and transform your deserts into a Cordoban paradise.” She took Nora’s hand, spreading it against her own left hand, and closed her right hand over the poems.
“We’re all hiding our faces behind other faces, but not all faces are burdened with as many contradictions as yours. I see fortune and death in yours. I’ve dreamed about you so often — too often. So often that your features became tattered and worn.” She said it like an accusation.
Rafi and Nora looked like wax figurines in the dim light of the cellar, like the miniature models of sheep clustered around the infant Christ on the shelf. The air moved thickly when the woman reached out for a book on the table and opened it. It was about the gardens of the Alhambra.
“I knew you by your smell. The measure of a garden in al-Andalus was always its sound and its scent. That’s why our ancestors always made sure to plant great beds of scented flowers where nightingales, peacocks and doves would roam. Soon, your deserts will flow with perfumes and songs, as one body from one word.”
She stared piercingly at them, urging them to say something. Rafi shook his head. “The fall of Cordoba was the fall of the whole world’s dream.”
The woman looked toward the door in surprise; this time, Nora was sure there was a figure in a nun’s habit moving about, watching them through the shelves. The woman raised a trembling hand and picked up a small book, which she handed to them.
“Take a little of me with you in this book, even though you’ll never be able to read it because it’s in Hebrew. It’s a copy from a manuscript of Ibn Hazm’s book The Necklace of the Dove, a book about love: love as a door that opens at first sight onto the heart of the other, love as a place of being, as a race, as blood that flows through us, bringing all bloodlines together, giving us an eternal, heavenly body … A look of love is magic capable of transcending masks and veils. It is the key or the door to a supernatural creature hiding forgotten inside of us.” She fell silent for a moment, listening to the darkness as if straining to follow the sound of footsteps.
“Don’t forget that love, like life, begins as a game but ends gravely. It’s contagious, it can be passed on by voices and scents, so there’s no point in us fighting it. We must open our senses and hone them to receive its assault. We must surrender when it remolds and transforms us …”
A minute that felt like an age passed slowly before the woman led them up the stairs and out. She took a good look around in the doorway to check there was no one spying on them and then leafed through The Necklace of the Dove and took out a sheet of canvas showing a small charcoal drawing of the El Greco painting The Burial of the Count of Orgaz.
“This is a copy of a real sketch.”
Darkness ran in a shiver from the woman’s touch to Nora, and they sensed even more strongly the stir of watching figures around them.
“As I told you, al-Shaybi spent a quarter-century in the Mosque of Cristo de la Luz, communing with our ancestors in his dreams and his waking hours, hoping they would show him the key. They accused him of disturbing the dead. He used to dream about El Greco. He fell entirely under the artist’s spell and claimed that he was a Don Quixote fighting windmills so as to open doorways to eternity in these peaks. Al-Shaybi spent entire days making copies of The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, looking for the door. He made countless sketches, including this one. He added many details to the scene, but what comes up most often is this.” She looked around, checking again that no one was listening, and then raised her lamp beside the sketch. She traced the strokes of charcoal. “He inserted this key into many of his drawings, perfecting it over time. He would place it on a shoulder, or tuck it into the folds of a gown or the curls of a cloud. But — look — here the key’s in a very prominent position, and it’s almost the size of a man, it dominates the whole scene. See, in the outstretched right hand of the celestial figure reaching up to Mary’s lap. They said the Meccan was possessed by what he called the ‘master of all keys,’ whose bow was shaped like three interlocking mihrabs. It pursued him in his dreams, but he never managed to find it when he was awake; and yet, al-Shaybi never stopped predicting that soon there would come a time when God would close His house and His mercy in the face of erring believers, and no treaty or war could open them back up. Only that key, in the hand of the right man, could re-open the doors of heaven, and the doors between life and death … They say that al-Shaybi was on his way back to Mecca when he was found dead outside the gate of the outcasts’ cemetery in Madrid, completely naked, clutching a forged key to his chest. It had been cast for him by the most famous blacksmith in Toledo to fit the description revealed to him in a dream by Joseph. Al-Shaybi was forty-three or fifty-three when they buried his body in that same cemetery without epitaph or name — without anything at all but a forged key that was fixed to the tombstone right above his heart. That was seventeen years ago now.