An imposing Moor pressed the jagged point of his dagger to my spine and took me away. We arrived at a remote part of the palace, an enclosure that consisted of a square of soil surrounded by tall walls. A wooden plank raised by chains indicated the entrance to a cell dug in the ground. “Get inside,” the man said. As he lowered the plank, the cell was so shallow I had to crouch on the bare soil with my knees pressed to my chest. The humid hole reeked of urine, shit, and dried blood. A crack on the plank was wide enough to allow a sliver of sunlight to enter. The only comfortable position for me in that dungeon was lying flat on my back.
The following day, my jailer uncovered the plank and handed me a cup of water and a piece of bread. I was terrified that the feeding was just a prelude to a lashing. I chewed and drank, staring at the ground.
“Don’t you remember me, Miguel?” The man spoke with a Cordovese accent. I was surprised he had addressed me by my first name. The Moor smiled; he looked vaguely familiar. “It’s me, Abu. We were childhood friends in Córdoba.”
I spat out the hard piece of bread I had been chewing. The last time we had seen each other we were children. “Abu,” I said, as if to make sure I was not dreaming, “I wondered what had happened to you.” I was too astonished to move from my spot.
Abu extended his hand and pulled me out of the hole. Then he embraced me.
When we moved away from each other, I said, “I thought you died in the insurrection in the Alpujarras.”
“No, we left Spain when all the Moriscos were expelled. We went to Morocco first. My father died of a broken heart. Spain was his country, the place he loved, where his family had lived for hundreds of years.”
“I’m sorry to hear about your father. Is your mother here with you?”
“Soon after my father died, my mother followed him. She had left her heart in Córdoba. After she died, I came here and found employment working for Arnaut Mamí.”
I shook my head. My misfortune was nothing compared to what had happened to my friend’s family. “And Leyla?” I asked.
“She married a merchant; they live in a village in Tunisia, on the coast.” After a pause Abu added, “You’d better get back in the cell. We should not be seen talking to each other. Spain is no longer my homeland. We are supposed to be enemies now. But I will always be your friend, Miguel. Every day I will lash you a few times, and then will lash the ground. You must cry as if I am lashing you, just in case there’s anyone nearby listening.” He pulled out of his pants pockets a frayed copy of Lazarillo de Tormes and handed it to me. “I brought it from Spain. It’s the only book I have in Spanish. I know you enjoyed stories. You can borrow it to keep you company while you’re a prisoner here.”
* * *
During the brief hours when a thin shaft of afternoon sunlight pierced the darkness of my dungeon, I read and reread Lazarillo’s adventures until I memorized the little book. It was Lazarillo—more than the much-appreciated handfuls of food that Abu provided with some regularity—that sustained me and sweetened the hours in that fetid hole and made time move faster. Lazarillo’s picaresque adventures took me back to the Spanish soil from which I had been uprooted so long ago, and his tribulations and unbreakable peasant spirit alleviated momentarily the wretched conditions of my existence.
Confined to that damp, shallow grave, I learned to experience the passage of time in a new way. There was light—never more than a thread of it—and then there was monotonous gloom. Sometimes the darkness, and the eerie silence that accompanied it, seemed to last so long that only my bodily functions, and the chilling screams of the tortured in the dungeons of Arnaut Mamí, reminded me that I was still alive. I learned that I could illuminate the innumerable hours of soul-killing darkness with my glowing memories of Córdoba. So I revisited in my memory that city whose name was synonymous with pícaro; the city where alluring women sat knitting while facing each other on their window seats and pretended never to lift their dark eyes off their needlework—but when one of them met your gaze, great passions were awakened and men could lose their minds; that city of fabled leather artisans where the making of wool and silk was a great talent; that city that always resounded with tapping tambourines, shaking cymbals, and the piercing wails of the Moorish flutes imploring to the heavens. In my torture cell in Algiers, where water was more precious than gold, I remembered the city of my childhood whose cool streams flowed down from the springs in the Sierra Morena, making song as they splashed out of Córdoba’s fountains and then rushed down mosaic-lined channels in the Alcázar, filling the ponds that teemed with fat orange fish, and irrigated the flower beds in their gardens and the fruit trees in their orchards. The waters of the sierra brought with them cool breezes that felt like the caresses of hands oiled with balsams imported from the New World.
During those times when I began to lose hope—the only thing I possessed—I remembered too, with gladness in my heart, that city in whose gardens countless doves sang in unison all morning long, their music rising with the heat of the day, until your head was so swollen with it that you felt lost in the crescendo created by their feverish chorus; that city where flocks of swallows swelled at sunset, flying in such great numbers and so tightly together that they resembled airborne carpets sweeping the cross-topped towers of the churches and the needlelike tips of the minarets of the mosques. But foremost, I remembered that Córdoba was the birthplace of Seneca, whose philosophy of stoicism became important to me as I grew older, helping me on many occasions to take the blows of adversity with equanimity and forbearance.
In the darkness of the hole in the ground where I spent my days and nights, I found a measure of solace remembering my favorite place in Córdoba, the magnificent former mosque. Córdobeses did not care to notice that the spirit of the place was not Christian. My mother took the whole brood there to Sunday Mass. But I enjoyed much more visiting it with Abu, whose family had converted to Christianity. I was transported by Abu’s stories about the learned Arab rulers who had built the mosque, men whose exotic names—Abd Ar-Rahman, Al-Hakim II, Al-Mansour—seemed more fitting for mythological creatures than for human beings. As we walked around admiring the arches laminated in gold leaf and lapis lazuli hugging the columns of cool and smooth pink granite, dazzled by the imbricate designs of the panels of mosaics, and the patterns that the sunlight made on the tiled floors as it filtered through the circular stained-glass windows, the building became an enchanted place created not by mortal men for other mortals, but by magicians for a people who worshipped color and elegant design as elevated manifestations of the divine.
Abu also told me about the treasures hidden in the ruins of Medinat Alzahara, the fabled city not far from Córdoba that had virtually disappeared five centuries before, leaving few traces. During school holidays we searched the region, hoping to unearth a treasure that was said to be as great as that of El Dorado. It would take us hours to walk from Córdoba to the slopes of the Sierra Morena, where Medinat Alzahara once stood. For all our zeal, we uncovered only fragments of ancient glazed ceramics. I would carry these pieces in my pocket, fingering them often and dreaming of a city that Abu said had been the most beautiful and civilized in Europe.
The Moriscos were forbidden to use Arabic in public, but Abu’s family spoke it at home. He had one sister, Leyla, older than us by a few years. She had blond hair and golden eyes, like many Moorish women in Algeria. Sometimes the women of the household got together to dance for each other, and Abu and I spied on them. Leyla moved with the grace of a feral cat. Her eyes were like almonds dipped in honey, and her arched eyebrows and eyelashes were as black as the hairs of a panther. Swathed in transparent veils, shaking her tambourine, she transported me to the gold-colored desert dunes of Arabia, and to lush oases that could have rivaled the Garden of Paradise.
Abu’s parents were as poor as mine. To help out his family, after school he worked in the hammam where the old men paid boys a few maravedíes for scrubbing and massaging them. I started frequenting the bathhouse wi
th him. I was entranced by the world of the Arab baths, centuries old, built by the Romans, where men exposed their nakedness without shame. In Algiers, in the rare occasions when I had a few extra coins, I had visited its hammam, which reminded me of those early and happy times. In Córdoba’s bathhouse there were three pools—one icy; one warm, like the waters of the Guadalquivir in August; and one hot, like boiling soup. My favorite corner of the building was the steam room, where people seemed to vanish and flit about like naked ghosts.
But not all my memories of Córdoba were pleasant. In Mamí’s torture cell, where all my fears multiplied like maggots feeding on carrion, I also began to relive the terrors of my childhood. My great-grandfather, Ruy Díaz Cervantes, was the first member of our clan to settle in Córdoba. For generations, the Cervantes family was known as makers of wool and cloth, an industry normally reserved for Jews. My grandfather Juan Cervantes had inherited a handsome fortune, which had dwindled over the years. His round, black eyes regarded the world and its creatures through the lenses of scorn and bitterness. I remembered my mother saying that he had the face of an old vulture that had “feasted on poisonous snakes all his life.” Even as a child, how I pitied my grandmother who had to share a bed with a man who excreted hatred through his pores. My father was the special target of his bile. It’s true that Father was impractical and reckless, but he was also kind and brimmed with gaiety. Grandfather Cervantes showed publicly his disappointment in his son, who was a failure as a doctor, and even as a barber. Frequently the cupboards in our kitchen were bare. Ham bones were saved for weeks, and boiled with cabbage and onions in salted water until they were as white as pebbles in the river. Many days that was our entire sustenance. Often, my mother had to ask for my grandmother’s charity and suffer the ridicule of my grandfather. One day my grandfather came by our house at suppertime and said to Father in front of all of us, “Look at your miserable children. They are as uncouth as a herd of wild pigs. And the girls, wearing those wretched rags, look like washerwomen. They will never get married.”
* * *
I was getting physically weaker, and my spirit was as shattered as it had ever been, when one day Abu said to me: “I have good news for you, Miguel: I heard from a man close to my master that you will soon be released from this cell. Arnaut Mamí will probably ask to see you before you are sent back to the bagnio, so I will have to increase your lashings—it’s better for both of us if you look like you’ve been receiving your punishment. But don’t worry, I’ll soften the strokes so you are not killed.”
As the lashings increased, it was no use trying to hold back my screams. I could not block out the excruciating pain inflicted on my flesh. My back became swollen and the skin began to tear. The lashes would have hurt more if I hadn’t known they were coming to an end soon. As I bled, I lay with my face resting on the ground, breathing in the stench of the blood-soaked earth.
One morning soon thereafter Abu informed me, “My master left Algiers a few days ago. I have orders to release you from the cell today. I will walk you back to Bagnio Beylic.” Then he handed me a little blue bottle. “Apply this balm to your skin, Miguel. It will prevent the wounds from getting infected with maggots and will make them heal soon.”
Abu gently helped me to get up, but my legs would not hold my skinny frame. With my friend’s help I took a few steps. The chains around my feet had never felt heavier. I dropped on my knees to the ground. After a while, the fresh air began to revive me. While I sat still on the ground, Abu left the enclosure and returned with a large bucket of water and a bar of soap. As he helped me to remove my rotten garments, I handed him back his copy of Lazarillo.
“I heard you laugh in there many times,” he said. “I knew that if you could laugh, you’d survive.”
Abu poured water over my naked body while I soaped myself. The pain in my wounds made me moan and contort. I tried to soap my head, but my hair was so matted that water would not penetrate the thick shell. When I finished washing, Yessid handed me the two pieces of clothing given to all prisoners when they were released.
On the way back to Bagnio Beylic, I was so weak I leaned on Yessid’s arm. The outside world seemed unreal. At that moment I thought I understood what Lazarus must have felt like when he returned from death. Before I passed through the doors of the bagnio, Abu said, “Take good care of yourself, Miguel. Despite the circumstances, I thank Allah that we met again. But remember, we cannot be friends in Algiers. If we ever run into each other in the casbah, you must not talk to me. If my master finds out that we are friendly with each other, I will lose my employment and be punished. Who knows,” he added, “we might meet again someday, away from this country, in a place where Moors and Christians can live side by side in peace.” He turned around and walked away so fast I did not have a chance to speak.
* * *
Weeks went by before I was strong enough to wander into the casbah. How I missed Sancho; I had no idea how much I had come to depend on the fat man. I survived this period after my release thanks to the generosity of my fellow inmates, to whom I became a symbol of our resistance. They gave me any bits of food they could spare. One man gave me several sheets of paper and an inkpot. “Write about this place,” he said. “Make sure the suffering of our martyrs has not been in vain.”
At that moment when my future was still so bleak, a human angel entered my life. I will preface her story with some verses by Ibn Hazn of Córdoba:
Were I to conquer your heart
The entire earth and the human race
Would be to me but motes of dust
And the citizens of this country, insects.
Her name was Zoraida; I called her Lela Zahara in the plays I later wrote about my years of captivity, and Zorayda in the story “The Captive’s Tale” in Don Quixote. There is no letter as rich or elegant as the last letter of the Spanish alphabet: it contains a 7, an L, and a sideways N. It is as much a portal as it is a letter, an initiation to a mystery. The first letter of her name contained the key to Zoraida, who was many things at once: Muslim by blood, a Christian in her soul, the most beautiful woman my eyes had ever seen, and the noblest Algerian.
Agi Morato, a Moor of high rank, was the alcaide of Bagnio Beylic. His residence shared a wall with our courtyard. It was a tall wall with two oval windows near the top; the shutters were always closed. The windows were too high up for any captive to try to escape through; they might as well have been sealed.
Following my failed escape attempt, I had acquired in Algiers a reputation as a valiant and fearless poet. Sancho had been right when he told me the night we met that poets and madmen were revered by the Moors as holy men. Nobody bothered me when I chose to stay alone in the bagnio writing my poems. It was at this time that I began to write down ideas for possible plays. One day my works would be performed, and from beyond the grave my writings would inform the world about what our men suffered in captivity. My works would incite the Christian nations to attack and destroy the Algerian pirates. These thoughts were my only consolation.
One morning in the courtyard, leaning my back against the wall of Agi Morato’s house, I was engrossed writing a letter to my parents when I heard little pebbles pelting the floor near me. I glanced around and saw no one nearby. I continued writing, and another pebble hit the floor. I looked up at the wall behind me: a rod emerged from one of the windows that was always shut; a thin rope dropped from the tip of it. It resembled a toy fishing device made by a boy. At the end of the rope was a tiny white bundle attached with a white ribbon. The guards were at their usual posts, but distracted by the life of the casbah. I placed my writing instruments on the floor and went to inspect the strange object. The bundle turned out to be a white handkerchief tied in a knot. I undid the knot, then the rope went back up immediately and the rod disappeared behind the window.
I returned to my writing place, sat down with my back against the wall, and drew up my knees, sheltering the handkerchief in the space between my legs and my chest. Inside w
ere ten small pieces of gold. Was this a dream? Was my mind playing tricks on me? I bit one of the coins—it was solid gold. From the window a woman’s hand waved at me and then was pulled back inside. The window closed again. It was as if the shutters had never opened.
What was the meaning of this? Should I move away from that spot and never come close to it again? Was Arnaut Mamí testing me? Was this a trick to draw me into conspiracy again? My achy bones, my scarred skin, and my despondent mind had not yet recovered from the months I had spent holed up. Who was this woman? Had Mamí asked her to lure me into a trap? It was best to resist the flights of my wild imagination. In case she was still watching me, I crossed my arms over my chest in the Moorish style, to show my gratitude.
I tied the gold coins in the handkerchief, which was made of the softest cloth and was delicately scented with a perfume of lotuses, and left the bagnio in a hurry. I hoped walking until I was exhausted would drain the intense emotions pent up in my body. In Sancho’s absence, there was no one with whom I could share the strange happening. Even the usual bustling life of the casbah could not dispel the woman’s hand from my mind. Was she an angel or a devil? And why had she selected me? Could she be an abducted Christian who had been forced to become a renegade and marry Agi Morato? It was known that his harem was filled with Christian women.
Not wanting to arouse the slightest suspicion, I refrained from asking questions about the woman. In Algiers I had learned not to trust even my thoughts. Superstitious captives feared that the agents of the beylerbey could read their dreams while they slept.
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