“I’m saying that the venerable elder Emmamma is the only creature who will not contest sovereignty with us — not because he isn’t interested in the earth’s thrones but because he exists outside the physical world.”
“Ha, ha, ha … I admit this is a sordid plan!”
“This will shield us from the error we committed the day we made Aggulli our leader, and repeating mistakes is a foul deed that ill befits the people’s sages.”
“Bravo! Bravo! Now the council can cheer with me, because thanks to this judicious plan, we won’t merely obviate a matter that has caused us trouble all this time, we will also be able to say that we’ve achieved an epiphany.”
He turned to face the council, gazing happily, comprehensively, and childishly at its members. Then he shouted, “Rejoice at the good news: from today forward you, collectively, are the governor. Ha, ha…. Each of you from today on is a leader. We’ll grant the title to the venerable elder, because that poor man won’t need anything but the title. We’ll retain the amulet and divide up the booty. What a plan! What a scheme! Ha, ha…. I admit once more that you are a grander schemer than all the others. But … but, why weren’t we able to hit upon this division of power before?”
He continued to guffaw as the edge of his lower veil slipped down. The linen revealed an ugly mouth that looked like a female bosom. On top, it was bounded by a bushy mustache streaked with gray. Below, it was besieged by the jungles of a bushy, very gray beard. Anyone who saw this mouth understood the secret reason for the desert people’s invention of this wrapped veil, which became their trademark among all the tribes.
He extended a trembling hand to hide a crack the Law had reckoned tantamount to genitalia even before people came to see it as disgraceful.
He shouted again, “Send at once for the venerable elder!”
4
The venerable elder is said to have adopted a litter for a bed long before old age vanquished him and he was no longer able to walk. So he had become the first to recline on a wooden frame supported by the necks of slaves.
Apparently this invention aroused the admiration of the noblemen and the lords of commerce in the oasis, because they adopted it from him and competed with each other to accessorize it with rows of lucky charms, other amulets designed to ward off evil, wild animal skins imported from the southern forestlands and adorned with symbols of gods, magical designs, and celestial bodies outlined with colored beads. The nobles climbed onto these wooden frames and had slaves and mamluks carry them on their shoulders as they toured the alleys, markets, fields, and plazas to flaunt what they owned. Such opulent litters put to shame the venerable elder’s meager, bare sticks, which had been crisscrossed into a lattice by admirers’ hands and covered with a glabrous old goatskin mat. Thus Emmamma’s convoy no longer attracted the attention of passersby or sparked curiosity in the breasts of the masses, as it once had, when their eyes spotted this load transported on the heads of two dark, bare-shouldered mamluks of different heights.
Even when the sorcerers’ prophecies came true and the inhabitants of the oasis saw with their own eyes the unfolding of those phases this coterie believe are a gambit concealed in the life of each person who is destined to live a long time so that he may be born a second time, and when people witnessed the transformation in the venerable elder’s body (which sprouted black hair and teeth with a gleam, whiteness, and soundness that rivaled those of boys and which shed its pathetic skin that resembled a mass of palm-fiber rope or wrappings made from acacia bark, sloughing it off the way a serpent sloughs off its scales for a new skin that seems so alive it resembles the temptation leaping from belles’ faces), this glorious birth, this “second birth” as sorcerers call it, could not persuade Emmamma to descend from his mobile throne and to dismount from his glorious litter, which was supported by the necks of sturdy men. His refusal to walk was not because of the custom that turned free men into slaves and not because he thought himself more entitled to the throne that he had created one day than copycats who had adopted it and then had soon started competing with each other to adorn it the way women’s hands adorn the bride’s face on her wedding night — even boasting that they owned it and bragging to people about its beauty the way they vaunted their possessions and children.
The slaves, instead, reported a different view from their master. They said Emmamma would not abandon the stretcher — which had become his bed, house, homeland, and bride by night and day — until this second birth also provided him with the energy of a boy who can hop through the open countryside on one foot. The set of poles represented for him — at that time when he had absented himself from time and retreated into eternity’s tenebrous obscurities — the sepulcher of everlasting solitude. A man who has a natural propensity for generously making sacrificial offerings can forget everything and sacrifice everything but does not forget the person who consoled him in a time of trial and does not sacrifice the prop that has protected him from his fear of chaos in a time of forgetfulness.
The citizens did not understand the allusions of the venerable elder’s language, nor did they ever comprehend the ring of pain in his immortal moan. Similarly, on that day they did not understand his cryptic prophecy, which he released to the face of the oasis after returning from the realms of the Unknown: “I wish I had never seen you. I wish I had never known you and never known your world. I wish I had never lost my world. I wish I had never returned. I wish I had never been born. I wish I had never been born. I wish I had never been born.” Inquisitive minds asked him which birth he was referring to: “Today’s birth or yesterday’s?” His only reply was his time-honored, distressing groan, the secret meaning of which no one could ever decipher — neither in the generations living in the time of his first birth nor in the subsequent generations who were contemporaries of his second birth.
The nobles were the only ones who did not acknowledge any rebirth for the venerable elder.
The nobles described second birth as a superstition and qualified it with the adjective “purported,” to disparage the masses’ claims and to mock the exaggerations of people whose thirst for a prodigy was never quenched and who concocted one canard after the other.
The nobles said that the body’s transformation, the skin’s change, the growth of teeth or hair (or any other such phenomenon), which were characteristics they often found in desert trees and in species of camel, were no proof of a man’s rebirth — as the coteries of sorcerers had claimed. Because they frequented the venerable elder more than anyone else, and as time passed learned his secret better than anyone else, they were able to assert today, too, that the venerable elder had not returned from exile in the everlasting, had not migrated from the nook of forgetfulness, had not fallen back even one step into the world of human beings, and that his phrase — which many tongues repeated and in which simpletons detected a prophecy that expressed disgust at the horror of a return after an absence — was a phrase that might be heard from the mouth of a crazed person, the throat of a feverish man transported by a trance, or the breast of a poet overcome by yearning.
The elders said that the real treasure was the intellect and that they were the men who had repeatedly conversed with Emmamma and had attempted to find in him the purported rebirth that commoners discussed but had never harvested from his tongue any trace of a rebirth of his intellect. They were justified, therefore, in ignoring the masses’ claims just as they always ignored their rumors and other assertions, and had grown used to ignoring the venerable elder’s distressing moans over the past years, leaving him in the corner as an ornament and protective amulet for the council — as they always said.