He felt like he might spend his whole morning apologizing for having allowed himself to speak. “I’m sorry—”
She cut him off. “Do you have to be prepared to die for your clients in this job?”
“The job doesn’t usually require you to do more than mount a respectable defense.” He continued after a brief silence: “You might say the only requirement is keeping yourself and the client alive.”
“Against anything that could happen?”
When his job was put under the microscope of that question he didn’t really know how to put what he actually did into words. “To be honest I think we’re just here to send a message — this person is surrounded by people who can respond to any kind of attack. That’s usually enough to stop any attempts being made in the first place.”
“So you’re just there to prove that someone’s important?”
He shrugged, thought for a moment, and then added, “Maybe also to prove that someone belongs to someone prestigious.”
The look that accompanied his choice of words put her relationship with the sheikh under the spotlight, but she didn’t respond. “So do you actually keep people from getting killed?”
He smiled. “President Reagan was shot in the four meters between the entrance of a carefully guarded building and his armored car, while surrounded by elite bodyguards. Kennedy was assassinated in the middle of a high-security motorcade. Sadat was killed at a military parade by his own troops, Hariri bit the dust inside his own armored car, and Bhutto was flanked by bodyguards as she stood up in the American-made sunroof of her car. Keeping people from getting killed, like you put it, is a very romantic idea. Assassinations almost always happen in the most fiercely guarded places and you can never predict when one’s going to happen. In the end, it’s probably impossible to protect someone from that much anger and hatred.” As soon as he finished speaking, he began to worry that he’d said too much, so once again he apologized quickly. “Excuse me, ma’am, there are boundaries that shouldn’t be crossed in this line of the work, and one of those is irritating a client with silly conversations.”
“You got a Master’s in philosophy so you could do a job that requires you to keep your mouth shut?” She stood up and walked off; he followed.
Over the next few days, Rafa became more aware of the circle of silence that surrounded her, and he would listen in carefully whenever she talked to her assistant or to the sheikh on one of his fleeting visits, attempting to glean some information about who she was, something to explain the currents beneath the words on the surface. Her every expression was a puzzle. He observed her for long stretches to try to figure out why it was she needed his protection, what it was that threatened her.
“YOU WANT TO GO THERE?!” RAFA WAS SURPRISED AT THE BROCHURE IN NORA’S hand. “The British Cemetery?!”
The resentment in his voice made her want to go even more. “Why not?”
The brochure had caught her eye two days earlier. Sensing her interest, the sheikh pushed it under a pile of papers. The arrival of his barber gave her the chance to snatch the brochure and stuff it into her purse.
They went on a morning that reminded him of his American girlfriend’s words: “rain’s tiny kisses playing music on our faces.” Live, stinging kisses stirred their longing as they drove through the Carabanchel district in the suburbs. The grass in the cemetery was padded with water and squelched under Nora’s light footsteps. The wildness of the place answered a deep need for adventure inside her: a deserted oasis, shaded by cedar, cypress, and plane trees. Rafa was reluctant but had to follow the bewitched Nora, who flitted among the graves. Rafa was familiar with the cemetery, since he’d lived nearby for three years before he’d got a job, but it was so isolated he’d never been tempted to go in until the sheikh had visited it, and now Nora too.
He and the assistant had to hurry to catch up with Nora. They found her leaning against a cedar tree, looking alarmingly pale for a moment. The frailty was instantly masked by that grayish look, her soul absorbed in images of death. In the translucent drizzle, tombstones came to life, names and epitaphs emerged from the granite to share their silence. That morning, the usual void look was missing from Nora’s face; standing there she was a woman torn between two worlds and aware of the yawning gap that separated them. When she was ready to leave an hour later, a morbid silence had descended over the three of them.
To Rafa’s surprise, Nora woke up early the next morning to return to the cemetery. They were met there by bouquets of yellow flowers at the foot of each row of graves. It felt like they were floating on sunny death.
“There are nicer cemeteries to visit than this one,” said Rafa.
She had the feeling that he was trying to get her to leave and when he saw that she was suspicious, he hurried to add, “This is just a cemetery for outcasts.”
“Meaning?”
“It’s kind of sentimental. A morbid repository for people whose mortal remains couldn’t be sent home, but which didn’t belong in the local graveyard either, for reasons having to do with religion and culture. Like other countries in Europe after the Reformation, Spain didn’t allow people who weren’t members of the established Church to be buried in consecrated ground. Long before the Spanish War of Independence, the British and Spanish governments signed a treaty to provide cemeteries for non-Roman Catholics. One government sold the land to the other and the cemetery was inaugurated in 1854. Over the years, it welcomed the city’s dead: Christians — Anglicans, Protestants, and Orthodox — as well Jews and Muslims.”
“Look! There’s a line of Arabic poetry on that gravestone: ‘Tread softly over this earth for it is made of bodies.’” Like a child, she wanted to venture ever further, and he had no choice but to follow.
“It’s by the famous blind poet Abu l-Ala al-Ma’arri.”
Rafa’s attempts to put a stop to those visits just made them more alluring. Over the next few mornings, the death of those outcasts became a compulsive puzzle for Nora. Despite himself, Rafa joined her in discovering gravestones witness to nearly a thousand burials over 150-odd years, engraved with unique messages of love and bereavement in all sorts of languages: English, Latin, Spanish, French, German, Hebrew, Serbo-Croat. The cemetery became like a book, with each gravestone a granite page, and Nora the engrossed reader moving about, asking Rafa to translate for her, empathizing with the stories of adventurers who’d died far from home. She thought she too could die and probably feel at home there, where the boundaries separating the deceased had all been washed away. She might find a missionary lying beside a music-hall artiste, or an accountant or waiter or diplomat, nannies side by side with doctors, journalists, lawyers, teachers, and butlers. The cause of death might have been old age, war, sudden illness, traffic accident, or a plane crash, but they all ended up ruminating on the same serene death.
Nora made a ritual of visiting the cemetery. Every day she would choose a different grave to sit on, as if trying on dresses. Sometimes she would sit as she was sitting now, staring into space, but flinching back whenever something caught her attention. She’d blink and find herself in the distant past, then blink again and be back. Her mood changed most when she tried to communicate with the tombstones, tried to decipher their messages.
“Don’t you feel the urge to break through death with a message for all these spirits? I wonder how expressive they could really be. How well they could convey what they’re experiencing right now, in death. Doesn’t it blow your mind how we have this need to go on communicating and writing, long after death? Despite death?” Her question was more rhetorical than it was aimed at him, but Rafa responded by translating the lines written by Sophocles and spoken by Antigone: