by Jan Potocki
The elder addressed me in Castilian: ‘Señor caballero, we are grateful for the kindness you have shown in accepting our invitation to share this light repast. If I am not mistaken, you must be in need of it.’
She said these last words in such a mischievous way that I almost suspected her of having contrived the abduction of my pack animal; but the proffered meal was such a good substitute for my provisions that I could not find it in my heart to be angry with her.
We sat down to table; the same lady moved an oriental bowl towards me and said, ‘Señor caballero, you will find in here an olla podrida9 containing all sorts of meat with one exception, for we are of the number of the faithful, that is to say, we are Muslims.’
‘Fair stranger,’ I replied, ‘I think you have spoken the truth; you are indeed of the number of the faithful, but of those who profess the religion of love. Please satisfy my curiosity before my hunger, and tell me who you are.’
‘Please eat, Señor caballero,’ said the Moorish beauty. ‘We will not conceal our identity from you. I am Emina and this is my sister Zubeida; we come from Tunis, but our family is originally from Granada, and some of our relatives have stayed behind in Spain, where they continue to profess in secret the religion of their fathers. We left Tunis a week ago; we came ashore near Málaga on a deserted beach. We travelled up into the mountains between Loja and Antequera and have since come to this isolated spot to change our attire and to take such precautions as are necessary for our safety. As you can see, Señor caballero, the fact that we have journeyed here is an important secret which we have disclosed to you; we rely upon your discretion.’
I assured the two ladies that they had no indiscretion to fear on my part, and began to eat, somewhat greedily, it is true, but with the restraint and good manners which befit a young gentleman finding himself alone in the company of women.
When it was clear that the edge of my hunger had been blunted and that I had turned my attention to what in Spain are called los dulces, 10 Emina told the negresses to perform for me the dance of their country. There could have been no command more agreeable to them; they obeyed with an abandon which approached licentiousness. I even believe that it would have been difficult to bring their dance to an end if I had not asked their beautiful mistresses whether they also did not occasionally dance. They did not reply to my question, but rose up and asked for castanets. The steps they danced resembled the Murcia bolera and the fofa as it is performed in the Algarve. I say this to give people from those places an idea of their dance; but even then they will not be able to picture the charm which the grace and beauty of the two African strangers, enhanced as it was by their diaphanous garments, added to their movements.
I watched them for some time almost dispassionately; but their movements became more rapid and insistent, and everything both in me and around me – the hypnotic effect of the Moorish music, my heightened senses inflamed by the unexpected repast – conspired to befuddle my mind. I no longer knew whether I was in the company of women or of seductive succubi. I neither dared nor desired to watch them; I covered my eyes with my hands, and felt overcome by dizziness.
The two sisters came over to me; each took one of my hands. Emina asked me whether I felt unwell. I assured her that I did not. Zubeida then asked me what the medallion was she saw on my chest and whether it was a portrait of my beloved.
‘It is a locket,’ I replied, ‘which was given to me by my mother, and which I have promised always to wear; it contains a fragment of the true cross.’
I saw Zubeida recoil and grow pale as I uttered these words.
‘You are upset,’ I said to her, ‘but the true cross only inspires dread in the spirit of darkness.’
Emina replied on her sister’s behalf and said, ‘Señor caballero, we are Muslims, as you know; you must not be surprised that my sister was visibly distressed. I am also troubled; we are both extremely displeased to discover that you, our closest relative, are a Christian. I see that my words have amazed you; but was not your mother a Gomelez? We are members of the same family, which itself is but one branch of the Abencerrages. But let us sit down on the sofa, and I will tell you more.’
The negresses withdrew. Emina had me sit on one end of the sofa, and sat down next to me, her legs folded under her. Zubeida sat on my other side, leaning on my cushion. We were so close to each other that their breath mingled with mine.
For a moment Emina seemed lost in thought; then she looked at me with great attention, took my hand and said, ‘Dear Alphonse, there is no point in hiding from you that it was not chance which brought us here. We have been waiting for you; and if fear had made you choose another route, you would have lost our esteem for ever.’
‘You flatter me, Emina,’ I retorted. ‘What possible interest could you have in whether I am courageous or not?’
‘We take a deep interest in you,’ the Moorish beauty replied. ‘But you may well be less flattered when you learn that you are practically the first man we have ever met. What I have just said has astonished you, and you seem to doubt it. I promised to tell you the story of our ancestors; perhaps it would be better if I began with our own.’
THE STORY OF EMINA AND HER SISTER
ZUBEIDA
We are the daughters of Gasir Gomelez, the maternal uncle of the reigning Dey of Tunis; we have no brothers, we did not know our father and have been kept confined within the walls of the harem, so that we have no idea of what men are like. However, we were both born with an extremely affectionate nature and have always loved each other passionately. This attachment began in our infancy. We would cry if people tried to separate us, even for the shortest of times; if one of us was scolded, the other would burst into tears. We would spend whole days playing at the same table, and we slept in the same bed.
This strong attachment seemed to grow as we did; it was strengthened by an incident which I shall tell you about. I was then sixteen, and my sister was fourteen years old. For a long time we had been aware that there were books which my mother carefully hid from us. At first we paid little attention to them, being profoundly bored by the ones used to teach us to read; but as we grew older, we became curious. On the first occasion when the forbidden cupboard was left open, we seized our opportunity and removed a small book which turned out to be The Loves of Madjnoun and Leila,11 translated from the Persian by ben Omri. This sublime work, which describes in ardent terms the joys of love, inflamed our young imaginations. We were not able to understand it perfectly, because we had never encountered members of your sex, but we tried out on each other its expressions. We learned to speak the language of these lovers, and resolved eventually to court each other in the way they did. I played the part of Madjnoun, and my sister took that of Leïla. First, I declared my passion for her by arranging flowers in a certain way; this is a sort of secret code much used throughout Asia. Then I made my glances eloquent, I prostrated myself before her, I kissed the ground where her feet had trod, I begged the gentle breezes to carry to her my amorous complaint; I even thought that I could set them alight with the ardour of my sighs.
Zubeida faithfully followed the lessons of the author and allowed me to meet her. I threw myself down before her, kissed her hands, and bathed her feet with my tears; my mistress began by resisting gently, then allowed me to steal some favours and finally abandoned herself altogether to my eager passion. Our souls seemed really to melt one into the other and even now I do not know what could make us happier than we were then.
I can’t remember for how long we enjoyed these passionate interludes, but in the end we allowed calmer sentiments to take their place. We acquired a taste for study, especially for the study of plants, which we pursued in the writings of the celebrated Averroës.
My mother, who believed that one couldn’t do too much to ward off the tedium of harem life, saw with pleasure that we had acquired a taste for occupying ourselves. She summoned from Mecca a saintly person whose very name, Hazareta, meant ‘most holy’. Hazareta taught u
s the law of the prophet in that pure and harmonious language which the tribe of Koraish12 speak. We could never grow tired of listening to her, and we learned by heart almost all the Koran. Then my mother taught us herself about the history of our family, and placed in our hands a great number of memoirs, some in Arabic, some in Spanish. How odious your law seemed to us, dear Alphonse! How we hated your priests and their persecutions! And how strongly we sympathized on the other hand with their many illustrious victims whose blood flowed in our veins!
Sometimes our hearts went out to Said Gomelez, who suffered martyrdom in the prisons of the Inquisition, sometimes to his nephew Leiss, who for a long time lived a primitive life in the mountains which was scarcely different from that of a wild animal. Such persons predisposed us to love men; we would have loved to meet some, and we would often climb up to our terrace to gaze from afar at those embarking on the lake of La Goulette, or those on their way to the baths at Hammam Nef. And if we hadn’t altogether forgotten the teachings of Madjnoun the lover, at least we did not rehearse them to each other any more. It even seemed to me that my love for my sister no longer had the character of a passion, but a fresh incident proved to me that I was wrong.
One day my mother introduced an older lady to us who was a princess from Tafilet. We received her as best we could. After she had left, my mother told me that she had asked for my hand for her son, and that my sister would marry a member of the Gomelez family. We were thunderstruck by this news, and our shock caused us to lose the power of speech. Then the misery of living apart from each other impressed itself with such force on our minds that we gave way to the most terrible despair. We tore out our hair, and filled the harem with the sound of our sobbing. Eventually these demonstrations of our distress became so extreme that my mother was alarmed by them and promised not to force us to do something contrary to our desires. She assured us that we could either remain unmarried or both marry the same man. These assurances brought us a measure of calm.
Some time later, my mother came to tell us that she had spoken to the head of our family, who had given his approval that we should marry the same husband, provided that he was of the Gomelez blood.
We did not respond to this at once, but as the days went by, we grew more and more attracted to the idea of having the same husband. We had never seen a man, whether old or young, except from far off, but as young women seemed to us more pleasant than old women, we decided that we would like a young husband. We hoped also that he would explain to us some passages of ben Omri’s book whose meaning was not clear to us…
At this Zubeida interrupted her sister, and, clasping me in her arms, said, ‘Dear Alphonse, what a pity it is that you are not a Muslim! What a pleasure it would be for me to see you in the arms of Emina, to add to your raptures, to join in with your embraces! For, dear Alphonse, in our family as in that of the prophet, the maternal line has the same rights as the paternal one. You could perhaps become the head of our family, which is dying out, if you decided to. All you would have to do is to acknowledge the holy truths of our law.’
This seemed so much like a temptation of Satan himself that I almost believed that I could see horns sprouting out of Zubeida’s pretty forehead. I stammered out a few religious phrases. The two sisters drew back a little.
Emina then assumed a serious expression and spoke again. ‘Señor Alphonse, I have talked too much about my sister and myself, which was not my intention. I only set out to tell you the history of the Gomelez family, from which you are descended in the female line. This, then, is what I had to tell you:
THE STORY OF THE CASTLE OF
CASSAR GOMELEZ
The forefather of our race was Massoud ben Taher, brother of Youssuf ben Taher, who invaded Spain at the head of the Arabs and gave his name to the mountain of Gebat Taher, which you call Gibraltar. Massoud, who had contributed much to their military success, obtained from the Caliph of Baghdad13 the governorship of Granada, where he stayed until his brother’s death. He would have stayed there longer for he was much loved both by Muslims and Mosarabs, that is, Christians still living under Arab rule, alike. But Massoud had enemies in Baghdad who turned the caliph against him. Knowing he was doomed, he decided to leave. Massoud gathered his own men together and retreated to the Alpujarras mountains, which are, as you know, a continuation of the Sierra Morena range, which separates the kingdoms of Granada and Valencia.
The Visigoths from whom we conquered Spain had never ventured into the Alpujarras. Most of the valleys were unpopulated. Only three were inhabited by the descendants of an ancient Spanish race called the Turdules. They did not recognize either Muhammad or your Nazarene prophet. Their religious beliefs and law were contained in songs and were passed down from parents to children. They once had sacred books, but they had been lost.
Massoud won over the Turdules more by persuasion than by force. He learned their language and taught them the holy law of Islam. The two races intermarried and became mixed. We owe our high colouring, which is the distinguishing mark of daughters of the Gomelez family, to this mixture as much as to the bracing mountain air. Many Moorish women are also fair-skinned but they are always pale of complexion.
Massoud took the title of sheikh and built a castle stronghold, which he called Cassar Gomelez. He made it his duty to be always accessible to his tribe, to whom he was more a judge than a ruler. But on the last Friday of every month he took leave of his family and shut himself up in an underground part of the castle where he stayed immured until the following Friday. These absences gave rise to much speculation. Some said that their sheikh was conversing with the twelfth imam, who we believe will reappear at the end of time.14 Others believed that the Antichrist was kept chained in the cellars of the castle. Yet others thought that the seven sleepers of Ephesus were resting there with their dog, Caleb.15 Massoud took no notice of these rumours but continued to govern his little people for as long as his strength permitted. At length he chose the most prudent man of the tribe and named him successor. He gave him the keys to the underground part of the castle and retired to a hermitage, where he lived on for many years.
The new sheikh ruled in the same way as his predecessor and absented himself in the same way on the last Friday of every month. Everything went on on the same footing until the time when Córdoba obtained its own sheikhs, who were no longer subject to those in Baghdad. Then the mountain people of the Alpujarras who had played their part in this revolution began to settle in the plains, where they came to be known as the Abencerrages, while those who remained attached to the Sheikh of Cassar Gomelez kept the name of Gomelez.
The Abencerrages in the meanwhile purchased the best land in the kingdom of Granada and the best houses in the town. Their riches attracted public attention. There was speculation that the underground domains of the sheikh contained immense treasures, but it was not possible to establish this as the Abencerrages did not know themselves what the source of their wealth was.
Eventually, these fine kingdoms called down on themselves the vengeance of heaven and fell into the hands of the infidels. Granada was captured and a week later the illustrious Gonzalo de Córdoba entered the Alpujarras at the head of three thousand of his men.16 Hatem Gomelez was then our sheikh. He went out to meet Gonzalo and presented him with the keys of his castle. The Spaniard asked for those which gave access to the underground parts. The sheikh gave them to him without demur. Gonzalo decided to go down into them himself but he found only a tomb and some books there. He poured public scorn on the stories he had been told about them and returned to Valladolid, attracted by the prospect of gallantry and amorous intrigues.
Peace then reigned in our mountains until Charles V came to the throne.17 At that time our sheikh was Sefi Gomelez, who for reasons which have never been well understood sent word to the new emperor that he would reveal to him an important secret if he were to dispatch to him a trustworthy nobleman. Within fifteen days Don Ruiz de Toledo presented himself to the Gomelez in His Majesty’s name, onl
y to discover the sheikh had been murdered the day before. Don Ruiz pursued some individuals, but soon became tired of this and returned to court.
Meanwhile the secret of the sheikhs remained with Sefi’s murderer, whose name was Billah Gomelez. He called together the elders of the tribe and proved to them that such an important secret required new precautions to be taken to safeguard it. It was decided that a number of the Gomelez family would be told of it but that each one would only be initiated into part of the secret and then only after having given ample proof of his courage, prudence and loyalty.
Here Zubeida interrupted her sister again and said, ‘Dear Emina, don’t you think Alphonse would have been equal to all these ordeals? Who could doubt it? Oh Alphonse, why aren’t you a Muslim! Immense wealth might be in your hands!’
This sounded just like the work of the spirit of darkness. Having failed to make me succumb to the temptation of lechery, now it was trying to make me succumb to the lure of gold. Yet as these two beautiful creatures pressed closer to me it seemed to me that I was touching not spirits but flesh and blood.
After a moment of silence Emina took up her story again.
‘You will know well enough, dear Alphonse,’ she continued, ‘what persecutions we suffered during the reign of Philip, son of Charles V.18 Children were carried off and brought up as Christians. They were given the possessions of their parents who had remained faithful to the prophet. It was during this time that a Gomelez was received into the takiat19 of the dervishes of St Dominic and rose to the rank of Grand Inquisitor.’