A Guide for the Perplexed

by Jonathan Levi

  Forgo all pride. Do as I advise. I will lead you to the path of wisdom. Honor intelligence as a father and wisdom as a sister.

  Moses ben Maimon

  “Adultery!” I jumped.

  “And immorality,” Carranque added.

  “And immorality.”

  “Strong words.”

  “Strong words,” I agreed, wanting him to get to his point, “for the time and place, I imagine.”

  “Because he’s talking about a human being.”

  “His daughter.”

  “The wife of his favorite pupil.” Carranque put his glasses away and squeezed the bridge of his nose. “And adultery is a grave crime.”

  “For that time and place,” I repeated, not wanting to offend a man I had met, after all, in a whorehouse.

  “Do you think it is possible, Señora Hanni”—he raised his hand from his face into a sky-pointing lecturer’s pose—“for there to be other adulteries—adulteries other than those of the body?” I had been up all night. I didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about.

  “Could you give me a hint?”

  “Adulteries of religion—a woman is unfaithful to her God.”

  Sarah painting the town with Baal? Miriam and the Golden Calf? “A conversa, for instance?”

  “For instance”—he nodded—“adulteries of ideas—a man forsakes a longtime belief for the latest theory that shakes its formula in his face.”

  “But adultery?” I protested. “An open mind is hardly an open marriage.”

  “Listen to this story: A young man travels a great distance in search of a renowned teacher. Like all young men, like all men, by nature, he has the desire to know. Word has spread throughout the Mediterranean that in Egypt lives a teacher of tremendous wisdom, a man who possesses a secret of extraordinary power.

  “ ‘Teach me the secret,’ the young man begs. But the teacher insists that he first study the Torah, learn the written law from front to back, from back to front. That he saturate his very soul with Faith. And the young man does.

  “ ‘Teach me the secret,’ the young man repeats, some time later. But the teacher insists that his pupil first study Talmud, the oral law, ask questions, peer around every corner, underneath every carpet of every question. And the young man does.

  “ ‘Teach me the secret.’ The teacher insists that the pupil first study the philosophy of the Greeks, the astronomy of the Arabs, the medicine of the doctors of Spain. He insists that the young man learn to apply the scrutiny of Reason to the Heavens and the Earth. Not only to the works of Science, but to the works of Scripture.

  “The more the young man studies, the more confused he becomes. He is fascinated by the movement of the stars, the study of navigation, the physics of creation. Too fascinated, in fact, to move. The teacher has given him two powerful tools, Faith and Reason. He doesn’t know which one to pick up first. Wisdom loses its virgin, Grail-like glow. Bewildered, he becomes …”

  “Angry,” I said.

  “Angry,” Carranque repeated. “He uses words of passion—‘adultery,’ ‘immorality,’ ‘infidelity.’ He accuses the teacher of desertion.”

  “And the teacher responds with anger.”

  “In part,” Carranque said. “But the teacher is, after all, the teacher. He knows there is something missing—the spectacles that will show his student that they speak of one and the same thing. What is missing is the translation that will demonstrate that the six days of creation are compatible with the Big Bang of physics, that Faith and Reason are inextricably linked in any apprehension of Wisdom. What is missing is a guide that will interpret, sift, coddle, lead the pupil through his confusion.

  “The teacher sends an angry letter, then sits down to write a thoughtful book.” Carranque paused to sip his maté, now ice-cold.

  “A Guide for the Perplexed?” I asked.

  “Exactly.”

  “The pupil is Joseph and the teacher Maimonides?” I asked.

  “And the year is 1190 of the Common Era.” He smiled.

  “But what about Kima?”

  Carranque laughed and put his cup carefully down on the lip of the fountain. “I speak only of Kima.”

  “I mean Kima the daughter of the teacher, the daughter of Maimonides, my great-great-great-whatever.” Could Joseph have been as confused and angry as I was?

  “My dear Hanni.” Carranque lifted me by the hand from the steamer trunk and pointed up to the brightening, starless sky. “There is your Kima.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “A parable, a symbol. Kima was the scientific wisdom Maimonides had given his pupil. Joseph, far away in Aleppo, had difficulty reconciling this newfound mistress with his faith in a God-created universe.”

  “His newfound mistress?”

  “Kima was a daughter, a wife, a mother, a constellation, but only in story. As useful and beautiful an image as the six days of creation, and just as metaphoric.”

  “My Kima, Mama’s Kima, is just a metaphor?” I was afraid to look down from the sky. If Kima didn’t exist, if Kima had lost face, breasts, and womb, then what about her son, what about Mama, and me, and my son? I willed, I willed a miracle, I willed the appearance of seven stars on the blue morning sky.

  “Then why”—I turned on Carranque with a ferocity that scared the hat from his head—“did the Alcalde de Córdoba send Mama an invitation to return? Why did he write to her as a descendant of Maimonides?”

  “There are many people who believe exactly what they read,” Carranque said. “It’s a reasonable mistake.”

  I have never believed in God, Benjamin. But in those few minutes, those few words of the Peruvian travel agent, I was shaken as hard from a belief I never knew I held so strongly, shaken as hard as any Lubavitcher who eats pork and lives.

  “Think of yourself as the young pupil, Hanni.”

  “But I know nothing about Torah or Talmud or Orthodoxy,” I said. “I barely know my name in Hebrew. Even if I were an observant Jew, you forget, I am a woman. Who would teach me?”

  “My dear Hanni,” Carranque said, folding the letters back into the portfolio and threading the lace through the eyehole. “Even in the English language, debates do not survive the centuries over an unfaithful wife or an errant husband. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, survive because of metaphor, because of story. They survive because wise men are able to recognize parables, arguments, theories, intangible lessons, in the tales of these warm scriptural actors.”

  Just as I had achieved certainty, just as I had smelled the warm baby smell of connection, of the knowledge that my son, my gift to the line of Kima, was nearby, the sky of doubt was bearing down, the ground of confusion opening, the great wings of metaphor were flapping in my face, talons open and clawing. Carranque caught me.

  “I am here to lead you to another guide.”

  “Benjamin?”

  “The taxi’s waiting.”

  HOLLAND—REMEMBER, REMEMBER

  Dear Ben,

  I almost doubt. I almost believe that I lay down to sleep on the Naugahyde benches of Colón and dreamed until, through, past, this stumbling, heel-wrenching, wheel-snagging chase down the crumbling alley below the Villa Gabirol.

  La Subida. The name on the still-shadowed alley sign. The Rise. Yet, I drop. I fall. I read from right to left. Neither steps nor street, neither inhabited nor deserted. No lights, no glass, knotted clotheslines, many cats, the smell of human droppings, the sound of flies. And far below, every wave of her long-maned head drifting her farther away—Isabella, my daughter, Isabella.

  Here is the story:

  I occupied the larger part of the autumn and winter of 1977–78 in the company of our mutual friend, Hook. During the day, he worked for me, or more specifically, worked in my office on assignment from our American affiliate. Between the hours of six p.m. and midnight, between the days of Monday and Saturday, between the months of October and February, he pitched tent in my front parlour. Dinner, drinks, and Sandor we
re the programme. No furtive kisses, no subterranean exploration. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

  So you can imagine my surprise when, one frozen February Monday, I walked into my GP on suspicion of the flu and walked out with the news I was pregnant.

  I drove at unsafe speed to the Cromwell Hospital, where, one year before, as a still-married woman, I had been diagnosed as irretrievably infertile. This was the rosy-fingered dawn of British obstetrics, the Moon Shot Morning of In Vitro Fertilization, when the obstetricians of the Realm rose to the invigorating strains of “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Test-Tube Daughter.” Though British dentistry, surgery, oncology, and gastroenterology were the laughingstock of the Third World, the Cromwell boasted a baker’s dozen of the finest Tube and Womb men in the Universe. I marched into Obstetrics, past a sputtering duty-nurse, and into the first hi-tech examining room. Three bearded doctors turned around.

  “Three months,” said the first.

  “Fifteen weeks from conception,” said the second.

  “Where did you buy that jumpsuit?” asked the third.

  “John Lewis,” I said.

  “Fourteen weeks, then.” All protest was useless.

  “Fertility is a strange and wonderful thing,” the first called. I was already in the lift.

  Fucked by a cliché, I thought. Because you have to understand, Ben, I had last slept with a man, I had last had sexual intercourse with a man—my ex-husband, to be precise—on September 1, 1977, over five months earlier. And I had never—to the envy of my friends, and the shame of my adolescence—never, ever menstruated.

  But I could still do simple maths. One hour later, parked across the street from my house, I calculated back fourteen weeks. Early November. I rummaged for last year’s Economist diary, still note-pocked and rubber-banded in the silty bottom of my shoulder bag. November 8th, a Tuesday, my first day back at work—a form of penetration, but not a satisfactory explanation. November 7th, a recital at St. John’s Smith Square with Liaden. The sixth a blank. November 5th.

  Remember, remember, the fifth of November. Certainly you, a cosmopolitan Yank, must know the rhyme. Guy Fawkes Day. Gunpowder and Roman Catholics, a seventeenth-century plot to blow up Parliament, a twentieth-century celebration for shopkeeper, yuppie, and skinhead, a chance to forget the C. of E. and go Druid around a bonfire.

  I stared out the driver’s window of my Volvo, past the withered grass and blasted plane trees of the Heath, through the dull February afternoon, to that November Saturday. Hook rang my doorbell—must have rung my doorbell—at six o’clock. I cooked him dinner, God remembers what. We talked, we always talked, most probably we talked about my inescapable return to the Beeb. We had just settled down in the front parlour for our evening ritual of Sambuca and Sandor when I noticed a crowd gathering on the far side of my window, on the far side of the street. I insisted, far too strongly, that we delay custom, that Hook join me and experience our quaint British bonfire, touch a happy moment of childhood.

  A crowd of small huddles were scattered about the meadow, greeting acquaintances at a visibility of ten feet. The sulphur light of the streetlamps, the weak pub lanterns of Jack Straw’s Castle at the top of the rise, travelled only to the frontiers of the camp. At the center, in vague silhouette, a ten-foot pile of broken doors, bits of shed, scrap lumber, claw-fingered branches, and a growing boneyard of hand-stitched effigies of Guy Fawkes squatted at the junction of the random bicycle paths that stumbled out of the wood. Each new committee brought its own Guy—pillowcases stuffed with newspaper, burlap sacks filled with woodchips, charcoaled and rouged grimaces, amateur, crude victims—as English as Christmas Panto and Cumberland Sauce.

  The stroke of ten from the bell at Ivor Heath rang its instructions. We became coherent. We became a circle. As the numbers grew, we stepped back from the center to accommodate. I held Hook’s long fingers with my left hand, the fatty paw of a schoolboy with my right. At the farthest arc, the circle broke, and a figure emerged from the wood bearing a flaming torch. The torch shone through the warm breath of the man, shone over the scattered limbs of the Guys, spread-eagled, upside-down, twisted, on the pyre. We all breathed in. Silence.

  With a whup, all was ablaze, the flames fifteen, twenty feet above the highest Guy. The pop of sap, the roar of burnt autumn air. Otherwise, not a sound, not a movement, no rustle of trees, no traffic behind, no whispers around, nothing but the heat of the fire and the two hands. Hook shifted. I shook him to be still, never questioning the orthodoxy of our British ritual. His shifting continued. The schoolboy’s family muttered in a way only the English can, and frankly, I agreed with them.

  Hook disappeared. One moment there—the next, the hand of my Pakistani greengrocer. I stayed for another moment, and then another. It could well have been half an hour before I crossed back over the far side, to find Hook drinking in the dark, curtains drawn, an A-minor scale of Sandor.

  I said nothing. I curled my feet up under me on the sofa. For the first time, the music lulled me into a daze—or perhaps merely fortified the light hypnosis of the bonfire—to a point where I was conscious of sound, yet as paralyzed as in my deepest sleep. As always, the music stirred a cauldron between my thighs, this time with even greater force and heat. From the driver’s seat of my Volvo, three months later, I could almost convince myself that Hook had scaled the sofa and made delicate, yet effective, love to me that night. But as I looked out the window to the Heath, the ashes of Guy Fawkes Day three-months blown from Primrose Hill to Golders Green, I could almost convince myself that one, and perhaps more, of those faceless, poorly stitched De Chirico Guys had floated on fire and smoke across the road, through a keyhole, into my parlour. Almost.

  It was nearly five o’clock of that February afternoon when I climbed out of the Volvo and into a hot, but not too hot, bath in preparation for a serious chat with our friend Hook. My perfect new body gave up few clues, not even the merest hint of the active volcano ruminating beneath the surface. The unsought, the unhoped, was too new to frighten, excite, upset, affect. I pulled on a blouse and a pair of woollen trousers with no need to adjust belt or buttons. I brewed a pot of rose-hip tea.

  At 6.01 I panicked. At 6.05 I began to cry. At seven o’clock I phoned the police, at eight, the hospitals, at nine, the morgues. From ten p.m. until the seven a.m. sunrise I sat by the phone and listened to the ticking of the kitchen clock and the entire repertoire of the possibilities of time. By noon, it was clear that Hook had disappeared.

  When I ran to Liaden in Granada two days later, I was as lost as on the morning after my divorce. I needed guidance, someone to explain the children business, the love business, to me. The thought of abortion never crossed my mind, but neither did the thought of carrying the pregnancy to term. Physically, I was walking, flinging my arms about, feeding myself. Emotionally, I was in traction.

  The Beeb was relieved by my sabbatical and resisted any explanation. The police likewise. The gentle winter, the easy Granadine life, built a fence around my belly. My perfect body became perfectly pregnant. I read Elizabeth Bowen, Lorca in translation, a secondhand copy of Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra rescued from a kitchen cupboard. I walked whole days away, through the alleys of the Albaicín, up the hill of the Alhambra. I purchased a secondhand guitar. Sammy L., after a day out working the tourist trade, brought home cheese and fruit, lamb and shellfish. I cooked, we ate—sometimes together, more often not.

  I didn’t twig, until it was too late for action, that I too was part of the tourist trade, and that Sammy L. had quite subtly assumed the job of tour guide and was leading me to a gentle Andalusian birth. Our lives ran on such independent planes, in different time zones that twisted into only the most occasional intersection. There was a morning coffee on the tiny Plaza of San Miguel de Bajo. There was the evening at La Bulería. And there was the business at the Carmen de San Francisco.

  It was August, close to the end. I was large, very large, and very hot. I walked only to the shops and only in the
first hours of morning or after the sun had cast the Albaicín in shadows. I passed entire days under an electric fan, decorating my fantasies with floral advertisements from magazines and catalogues. My Hampstead dressing room could be wallpapered and draped for my tiny new friend. The guest room, without alteration, would delight the most discriminating au pair, should I return to a Beeb that seemed the height of tedium at the moment. Career anxieties had been pushed into the same crowded corner that now held my stomach, bladder, and intestines—acting up, now and again, but small and lethargic in comparison with the impatient baby.

  At eleven that morning, Sammy L. drove me to my final examination with the midwife at the Convento Santa Isabel. I stepped like a queen from the air-conditioned comfort of his Renault 4 into the gentle shadows of the arcades of the convent, secure in Sammy L.’s promise to wait. Sor Juana reached gently inside me, assured me that, large as I was, my cervix was well effaced—she would see me within the week, it would be an easy delivery. I walked out past the crumbling murals and looked up at the green-shuttered balconies of the maternity cloister—quiet, peaceful, my midsummer hotel.

  There was a message at the gate. Apologies from Sammy L.—an emergency. An invitation to dinner—ten p.m., the Carmen de San Francisco, a tourist, a client he wanted me to meet. Fine. I was in no rush to go home. The fastest route, in fact, was not by Sammy L.’s taxi, which had to run the circumference of the ancient Moorish fortifications, but downhill, down steps, down alleys. One of the sisters guided my belly home through the maze, on her way to teach geography at the boys’ school on the Sacromonte, past the caves of the gypsies. I invited her in for a cup of tea. She begged off, with a blessing I understood only much later: “You are truly a vessel sent from God.”

  I slept much of the afternoon and evening. I had been spared the morning sickness, varicose veins, constipation, and moodiness that Liaden had reported in pregnancies past. My only symptoms were growth and fatigue.