It was Isabelle de Solis that he had just seen, mounted on a white mule, in the midst of several Moorish soldiers. The one who appeared to be the leader had his hand on her breasts and was laughing in a vulgar manner. Almazan noticed the slightly stooped back of the man and his unkempt beard. Isabelle de Solis was also laughing, and looking to the right and left with a puerile curiosity at the white houses of the city that she was penetrating for the first time.
The group was already some distance away along the quays of the Darro when the horse of a soldier who had stayed behind and was trying to catch up with his companions reared up in front of Almazan.
The latter took advantage of that to ask the rider: “Who is that woman? What is she doing with you?” And he added, authoritatively: “I’m the Emir’s physician.”
The soldier became anxious. Moors and Spaniards lived in peace, but it was impossible to prevent, on either side, raids on livestock, and incursions into villages in which women and children were abducted to be sold as slaves. Abul Hacen had instructed the Alcaides of the frontier towns to punish Moorish marauders severely.
“We haven’t done any violence to that woman. She’s a Spaniard, but the chief doesn’t intend to sell her as a slave. She was hiding in a wood near Martos. It was her who appealed to us. She claims to be the daughter of the Alcaide of the city. According to her, her father would have taken her by force to Seville, had her whipped and locked her in his castle. Is the story true? One never knows with women. In any case, she showed us the traces of the whip on her back.”
The soldier started to laugh bestially, and at a gesture from Almazan he departed in the direction of his companions.
The distant mountains were covered by a bloody light. On the highest tower of the Alhambra the silhouette of a Moor was outlined, whose head and shoulders were covered by a sparkling hood that removed the human character from his form and rendered it similar to a sort of fire-spirit. He sounded the trumpet several times and, as if they had been waiting for that signal, the first prayer of the muezzins were intoned at the summit of the mosques. The sky had the appearance of a vast torn robe and Granada awoke, sighing with enjoyment.
Then Almazan recalled the words of Massar, who was prophesying while gazing into a turtle-shell:
“Death will enter Granada. It has adopted the disguise of lust.”
VII. The Slave-Market
For a long time Abul Hacen had been mourning his youth. He had not got used to growing old. Toward his fiftieth year, in a sudden and very rapid fashion, as if by a malignity of nature, his hair had begun to turn white. At first he had tried to dye it. But mention had been made to him of a certain Emir of Tlemcen who had gone blind because of the pernicious influence of the black coloring in the optic nerves. Since his childhood, it had been one of his weaknesses to fear incessantly the loss of his sight. He also feared dust and lightning flashes, and there was always a little lamp in his bedroom, in order that he would but have the sensation, when he woke up, of having gone blind. He had therefore retained his white hair and he sensed it on his cranium like the torturing force of time.
But he had begun to get fat. His chin hung down, his belly protruded, he panted when he walked. He did not admit it to himself. He felt that he would only be irremediably fat on the day when he recognized the fact. He continued to eat and drink enormously, lulled by the lies of his entourage, who said that in him, by a fortunate exception, nourishment did not cause plumpness. He further imposed that opinion by the terrible authority of his gaze, and the suggestion that he radiated when he asked, every morning: “Haven’t I got thinner?”
And he interrogated the Hagib who came to talk to him about the affairs of the kingdom, the Alfaquis who wandered in his gardens and commented on the Koran, the guards at the doors, and even a mute who followed him everywhere and made approving signs while laughing as soon as he pointed a finger at his belly.
He had chosen for a companion in his walk Hamet Moktar, the grand master of the public schools, who was as fat as him and whom he mocked on that account. He made him walk rapidly and for a long time, so as to be able to say to him: “You’re getting fat, my poor friend, you can’t keep up with me any longer!”
Abul Hacen claimed that he liked to wander around Granada incognito, in order to listen to his subjects talking, in imitation of Haroun al Rachid in Bagdad. Modestly dressed, followed by Ali, the mute, he went through the bazaars with Moktar and to the markets, but as he was vain he could not help looking at the passers-by arrogantly, until they had recognized him and prostrated themselves. Then he feigned a great ennui at not being able to pass unperceived.
He was fond of directing his excursions to the slave market, because he hoped to discover an exceptional beauty there that he could immediately take to the Alhambra, for the desire for women tormented him all the more as he felt it diminishing within him. He attached himself to it as the surest proof of his manly strength. Women fatigued him now, but he sought them out anyway. He dreamed of new embraces that would procure him new ardors.
The slave market was held early on the Plaza de Bibarrambla. The slaves stood in tows, between which the buyers circulated. A few were sitting on a little wooden box that contained all that their former master had left them. Some laughed in order to appear sympathetic. The suppliers of the galleys examined their teeth with care in order to know whether they could chew the biscuit, which was very hard. Those who had fled from Spain in order to be slaves among the Moors and be better treated were recognizable by the scars covering their bodies. They made signs that it was indifferent to them whether they were sold to one man or another, finding themselves among people who would always be more humane than the cruel Christians they had quit. Some raised their hands in the air to show by means of the calluses by which they were covered that they were accustomed to laboring in the fields. And Africans, holding their knees between their arms, stared sadly at the sky, remembering the natal desert.
Almost all of them came from Tunisian and Algerian corsairs and had been brought from Almeria or Malaga by correspondents of the corsairs who, sitting on Persian rugs and covered with jewels, left the care of the sale to their agents and affected a great importance.
All that made a variegated crowd, sordid and magnificent, in which were mingled quarrels, haggling over prices and glorifications of the merchandise. But there were hardly ever any but aged or ugly women there, the pretty ones being kept in neighboring apartments by entrepreneurs who charged a ducat just to show them. They also kept overly handsome young boys destined for pleasure and ran right and left seizing passers-by by the sleeve and giving them descriptions in loud voices of firm breasts and opulent hips, hollow torsos and straight necks.
That morning, Abul Hacen cut through the crowd at a rapid pace. He was in a bad mood. He had heard a child designate him by the nickname that his enemies gave him: the Old Man!
Cries resounded in front of him. The market flowed away like a wave. The Kaschefs ran forward to restore order but, recognizing the Emir, they cleared the plaza before him with blows of the rod, so that Abul Hacen, increasingly furious, found himself involuntarily at the center of a gesticulating and vociferating mob.
A woman of short stature was in the middle, holding a dagger. She had snatched it from a frontier Adalide and was threatening him with it, as well as two other men whose rich embroidered gandourahs indicating the métier of slave-merchants.
It resulted from the clamors of the audience, the insults and threats of the woman and the protestations of the merchants that the Adalide had sold a Spanish woman as a slave, for a hundred gold mitcals, without having the right to do so, since they were not at war with Spain. The woman was shouting that she had confided herself to him freely in order to go to Granada, that she had been brought here by surprise without knowing where she was going, and that the sale was not valid. But almost all those who were present shrugged their shoulders and said that it was not worth the trouble of paying attention to the shrieks of a Chri
stian. The two merchants had counted out the hundred gold mitcals and affirmed that the sale was definitive.
“Let this young man be the judge!” said Isabelle de Solis, throwing her dagger at Abul Hacen’s feet. “I put myself under his protection.”
Did she say that by virtue of a genius for the penetration of the human heart, or, as some witnesses later claimed, did she actually say “Let this fat man be the judge” and the word fat was misunderstood because of the Spanish accent she had in expressing herself in Arabic?
It seemed to Abul Hacen that the heavens had tipped over like a vast cup in order to let an embalmed liquor fall into his soul.
Silence fell. The Kaschefs were motionless, maintaining the crowd with their raised rods.
Abul Hacen darted a triumphant glance at his companion Moktar. He felt slim, light, just and omnipotent.
All the young woman’s words were true. The Adalide’s crime was flagrant. It was monstrous to try to sell a Spanish woman when they were at peace with the Christian kings. He would only pardon the two merchants on condition that their transactions would be marked henceforth with the seal of equity. The hundred gold mitcals would be paid by way of compensation to the offended woman. The latter was invited to go without delay to the Alhambra, to recount the whole story in detail.
Without any delay! Ali the mute was charged with not losing sight of her and conducting her.
The Kaschefs took the Adalide away and, while climbing the sloping streets that led to his palace, the Emir repeated, laughing to the grand master of the public schools:
“How you’re panting, my poor friend. You can no longer keep up with me. And then, I’ll wager that you’ll lie down to sleep as soon as you get home, while I...”
It was the Hagib himself who took Isabelle de Solis to the Almocaden of the prison of the Alhambra.
A knowing smile brightened his jaundiced face.
He interrupted the Almocaden’s surprise with a gesture.
Yes, the Emir had judged that it was necessary for the first functionary of the kingdom to introduce a young foreigner into the cell of an Adalide imprisoned the day before. But there was no petty mission for a faithful minister, and Allah was the sole judge of the caprices of the great.
The prisons occupied the bottommost floors of the Alcazaba and one reached them via a long spiral stairway.
The Almocaden marched ahead, holding up a lamp, and sometimes pointed out a worn step to the visitors. On the way he exchanged a few words in a low voice with the Hagib. They had treated the singularity of the Emir’s taste in the matter of women and the rapidity with which he fell in love in spite of his age.
The Almocaden related what the Adalide had said in the prison about the person he was guiding with so much respect. The prisoner had declared that he believed himself to be authorized to sell her because of the facility of her mores. He had given details. He demanded to be heard by the Cadi, or even the Emir.
They had arrived at the entrance to a long corridor. The Almocaden opened a door and Isabelle de Solis questioned him with a smile: “Is the cell illuminated?”
“Yes, he replied. “There’s a barred window overlooking the Darro.”
The Hagib was about to ask whether she wanted him to witness the interview, but she had already slipped into the cell.
He and the Almocaden did not see anything of what happened. They supposed that on seeing the young woman, the Adalide, whose hands and feet were enchained, and who must have been sitting down, got up and prostrated himself, face down, to beg for mercy. They heard him exclaim in a stifled voice: “O Zoraya!”—meaning light of the dawn, a name that he must have called her at a very different moment.
Then, for a few seconds, there was a singular groan. They were about to push the door when Isabelle de Solis emerged, her eyelids fluttering and her lips pinched. She said imperiously to the Hagib: “We can go up again. I’ve punished that man for his calumnies.”
And she launched herself on to the stairway.
The Almocaden darted a glance into the cell and saw that the Adalide was still prostrate, and would not get up again. A small dagger plunged into the nape of his neck had struck him dead.
He ran up the stairs shouting furious words, in which there was mention of justice and his responsibility with regard to the prisoners confided to him. He only caught up with the Hagib on the platform of the Alcazaba. The latter had turned round and in his black gandourah, in the sunlight, he was more jaundiced than usual.
He considered the Almocaden severely, and even with slight scorn. He gestured to him to shut up.
“Justice!”
With a movement of the head, he showed him the feminine silhouette that was drawing away rapidly, beneath her aureole of golden hair.
“Zoraya!”
VIII. The Nightingale’s Tomb
Almazan could not sleep. Every time he closed his eyes and began to sleep it seemed to him that a being devoid of material form but warm, naked, mobile, animate and audacious covered him, enveloped him with caresses and bathed him with living breath.
He extended his hands and took account of the fact that there was no body beside him. What he experienced was a sensation of contact that was not localized and went beyond touch, from the roots of his hair to the tips of his feet.
Sitting up, he breathed in deeply, believing that he could scent a strange perfume in the room. It was none of the essences whose fabrication rendered Granada celebrated, nor was it the rose of Bagdad nor the aloes of Constantinople, of which it was said that the secret had been lost since the Turks had entered that city and had massacred the master perfumers. It was an insipid odor but very light, the odor of a woman who had just been kneaded by masseurs, an odor of washed hair and skin through which the first desire is passing. It was mingled with an unexpected taste on his moist mouth, as if the saliva of a kiss had remained there.
He got up, lit a high lamp that illuminated the room, looked at the cushions on which he slept, his Moorish garments spared around, and the manuscripts brought to him from the library of the Alhambra. He was quite alone.
He remembered what Aboulfedia had once told him about incubi and succubi and the pleasures that a man learned in magic could obtain from them. There are beings that have the power to disengage themselves from their body by night and send their double to other beings whom they desire. They enjoy them unawares, but one can, by an effort of will, become conscious of the pleasure one receives, with the consequence that in the formless world there are invisible embraces and caresses all the more voluptuous for being immaterial.
Follies of sorcery! Almazan said to himself. And yet…might it not be that another desire had responded to his own desire, might not a double bearing two droplets of bright gold in her eyes have come to plaster her breasts against him, the breasts that he had held in Seville, her precious breasts, which he had seen clasped the day before by a Moorish soldier?
The story of the stabbed Adalide and the Spanish woman that the Emir was keeping in his apartments had run around the Alhambra. Almazan knew that Isabelle de Solis—Zoraya, as she was now called—was a short distance away from him, lying in the crimson brocade of Khorassan that covered Abul Hacen’s bed. Perhaps she had let herself fall amid the skins of white bears that came from the extreme north of Mongolia and was offering herself, laughing, to the King of Granada. Almazan’s active and precise imagination painted a scene in which no detail was forgotten, where there was the design of mosaics that he remembered, the alabaster basin from which the nocturnal jet of water sprang forth, and the narrow body of the woman he had seen, with the fullness of its curves, the amber of its hues, its shadows, and even its down.
But no! The reality was more frightful. He knew, by virtue of the man’s confessions to the physician, that old age, like a sad beast that never lets go, had attached itself to Abul Hacen’s senses and was weakening them by the day. And he knew by virtue of amicable confidences, the words freely exchanged in the evening, everything that t
he blasé master demanded of women in order to achieve pleasure. Woe betide the woman who had pleased him! There was no repose for her.
Almazan could not bear the exactitude of his vision. He picked up a manuscript by Alvaro of Cordova and strove to continue reading it, having commenced that morning. But he quickly threw it aside, angrily.
Was it not those books that had stolen the possibilities of his happiness? What sterile efforts! Pitiless thought devoured the body. Would it not have been better to be an ordinary man, devoid of pride, who slaked the quotidian human desires and did not think himself diminished thereby?
He got dressed. He went out. Walking, he thought, would calm him down. The silence of the Alhambra was heavy. On the silvery towers a Moroccan sentry was intoning a chant. The stars seemed higher than usual, and as inaccessible. He took the path between the ramparts and the walls of the palace and had the low door opened that led from the Alhambra to the gardens of the Generalife.
Her advanced in the midst of magnolias and fabulous roses. He climbed marble steps between files of cypresses and went along flower-beds arranged in such a fashion as to depict verses from the Koran. Sometimes, the enamel of a kiosk glittered in the midst of box-trees. An awakened swan slid into pool, went around a belvedere and disappeared in the myrtles, like an abandoned dream.
Almazan stopped, hearing a very soft music reaching him. It was a female voice singing plaintively while making the strings of a darbuka resonate. He had arrived on the ninth terrace at the entrance to the path of the Fountain of Laurels.
He looked in the direction from which the song was coming. A few paces away, beneath a minuscule cypress, a woman was sitting on a panther-skin. At first, Almazan could only make out a delicate face beneath an immense green turban, and the suavity of long, tapered hands. Seeing that the woman was not wearing a veil, he turned round and was about to draw away, but she looked at him without sketching the slightest gesture to hide her features. The emeralds on her fingers and those of her eyes darted equally incomparable gleams, and their glare enabled Almazan to divine that he was in the presence of Princess Khadidja.
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