by Raja Alem
“All right, then. We can at least look forward to seeing The Burial of the Count.” She opened the window to enjoy the first breath of release. The soft music, the wind in her air, the endless countryside; it soothed her and she allowed herself to consider the path her life had taken. She’d stumbled from one holding pattern to another, passing by two true loves as she chose a third, leaping blindly into the unknown. Ever since she was a child she’d harbored that suicidal instinct. The only lover she wanted now was herself—it made her laugh how dramatic she was being, but honestly what was wrong with learning to love herself? Had she done all this to punish—who? Her father? Herself? She was young when she’d learned that one wrong turn could take you past the point of no return. She’d called it life’s minefield: one careless step and—boom! Was that what she’d stumbled over during her one and only trip to Nazik the Turkish woman’s basement studio? From now on, she was going to walk the walk and talk the talk—whatever that meant. If the only thing she had left was a last shred of determination, she was going to put it to work to keep herself from going back to where she’d started. At the same time, she knew that the idea of going back to where she’d started was a fantasy. There was no such thing as going back to what had been. If she ever did try to return to her birthplace, she’d find that the city and everyone in it had moved on, in thought and in deed. Nothing was waiting for her exactly as she’d left it; she wasn’t even the same person who’d left. She was in the place best suited to her new and shockingly modern configuration, an island that had shot up to the surface from the bottom of the sea, propelled by a volcanic eruption. She could do nothing except continue to live in places that resembled her, and it was by no means a given that the place that resembled her would be the city in which she’d been born.
She realized that Rafi was watching her. The only thing he could see through the windshield was a single nagging thought: this is a race. His mission wasn’t to take Nora away from her past like she’d asked him to, but the opposite. He had to try to stitch together a moment from her past with a moment from the past of a city that she’d never known, like Toledo. He knew where the connection would come: through art. Or through the suffering or death contained within the art. The constant movement, which resembled her, whose revolutions she fit perfectly like a gear, where she was made whole. He was certain that the only way she could have peace of mind was if she could see herself as a cog in a machine she knew well, the machine that created her dreams and made them come to life. The point wasn’t to go back into the past but to catch up with it at some point in the future. The eternal journey alongside and away from an event that was headed in the same direction as her dreams, as part of that eternal process of change and transformation. She had to have some trust. She knew she couldn’t run away, couldn’t get her hands on people or things. All she could do was hop on at a station and ride through countless moments past.
As they approached Toledo, they saw the red mountain looming on the horizon surrounded by the blue of the Tagus River, which had repelled invaders from time immemorial. The city was like an island atop the great mountain. Rafi could see that Nora was struggling to take it all in.
“Toledo was one of the most important cities in all of Spain during the so-called Golden Age. It was once part of the Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba, but King Alfonso the Sixth of Léon and Castile captured the city in 1085. Toledo later became known as a holy city in the seventeenth century, and gained a reputation for being open, tolerant, Eastern …
“It’s full of treasures from when it was the capital of the Spanish Empire. Lots of important historical figures were born here or lived here: El Greco, King Alfonso the Tenth—they call him Alfonso the Wise because he was learned, and started the translation movement in the thirteenth century. They translated Islamic learning into Latin and helped spark the European Renaissance. Toledo was a center of culture and home to three monotheistic religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. At one point, they lived together in harmony, but then came ghettoization and finally in 1492 the Jews and Muslims were expelled. Any who remained were forced to convert to Christianity in 1500. They used to call these people Moriscos, ‘little Muslims’—another way of saying heretics. Of course, the Christians discriminated against the converts and that’s when they started coming up with ideas like pure bloodlines and heresy trials. From the second half of the fifteenth century onward, they suppressed Islamic-looking architecture and the Gothic style began to dominate the city.”
“‘Little Muslims,’” Nora repeated. Everything he’d said rang a bell; it was as though he’d been recounting a history that Nora knew intimately. He pointed toward the gate up ahead.
“Existential conflicts are embedded in the soil of this red mountain like fossils. They go all the way back before the Muslim conquest to the Goths and the Romans and the Christians, actually all the way back to Heracles of Libya and to Tubal, Noah’s grandson who became the first king of Spain.”
Rafi parked his car at the foot of the mountain. Side by side, they made their way up the stone steps, which took wild and sudden turns, watching the city come to life, smelling the coffee brewing behind stone walls. “There’s something magical about entering this city on foot; there’s nothing like it. I always feel like one of the invaders who scaled its defenses and destroyed them. Here, this way.”
Nora flew ahead, her ankle-length white cotton dress billowing around her as she surrendered herself to the rhythm of the mountain, allowing the cramped stone passageways to slip through to her heart, ascending from the foundation of one house to the roof and then the foundation of another. Suddenly she found herself before several narrow paths paved with red stone, which led up to the summit. She teetered at the edge.
“Be careful,” he said. “This city takes artists prisoner.” The sun rose just in time to receive her laugh. He looked at her for a moment. She might have flown away on the wings of that smile.
“El Greco himself became one with the city. He was born in Crete, but he felt at home here. He did everything here: he was a sculptor, painter, architect. He was the first person to see art as a process of discovery. We can go to the El Greco Museum and see his house while we’re here.” He looked at her in profile: thick eyebrows, long, dark eyelashes pointed downward as if she were being pulled sleepily to the point of no return. Rafi wanted nothing more than to pull her up out of the abyss. He wanted her to explore the city as though it were one of its many painted avatars.
“El Greco was actually just passing through, but the city took hold of him. The rebel inside him found the freedom he’d been searching for in these peaks. He had a lust for life and he was constantly chasing after beauty so he found it depressing to be as lonely and independent as he was. He put it all into his paintings. Even his death seemed to carry a message: he died a poor man in large empty rooms, surrounded by his meager possessions. All he had was his books and paintings and artists’ fancies, nothing substantial. That was what he valued and needed; that was how he lived. He never had the money to fulfill his grand ambitions so he fulfilled them in art.”
She felt life tingle in her fingertips as she ran her hands over the red stones warming in the sunlight. He was telling her all this to try to distract her from what she’d come to look for.
“It’s as if money has the last word, even in art and dreams.”
They lingered in the square between the rooftops and his words reached deep inside her. In the dark corners of her mind, she sensed an accusation. She let out a hot breath she’d been fighting back.
“Is that so?” She said as if sticking her tongue out at him before hurrying daintily forward, climbing up, as he followed. He’d never seen her happy before.
By arriving in the city so early, they had the magic of sunrise all to themselves, and it lingered in the glow of Nora’s astonished face for hours.
“So, you’re going to take me where the sheikh went, right?” He hadn’t expected the tone of implicit command.
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nbsp; As they approached one of the silent stone houses, a woman popped out from behind a wooden door. She was mesmerizing, dressed all in white. She gave them an exaggeratedly warm greeting. “Don’t tell me. You’re on way your way to the El Greco Museum?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I think I know you,” she said to Rafi. “Have we met?” He was afraid she’d remember that he’d visited her school with the sheikh some months back. He gave Nora a look of warning, and tried to divert the woman’s attention.
“Do you know when it opens?” He asked her in Spanish.
“Follow me. It’s in the Jewish Quarter. I know a fantastic route we can take.” She walked them over as if they’d had a longstanding appointment. She would walk two meters ahead and then turn around and walk back to say something about the sights, like a tour guide they hadn’t employed. “This is when I usually have my coffee, and I hate it when people interrupt me and spoil my tranquil mornings.” They had no choice but to follow her. Her thin body was stuffed into white cotton trousers and a top tight enough to suffocate, with a gold design on the front. They could barely keep up with her as she teetered up and down slippery paved paths in stiletto heels—a terrifying sight. She was so light that the constant stream of chatter that poured out from between her dark-red painted lips threatened to blow her away. It was as though she were dying to talk and she mixed her own personal history in with that of the city.
As he translated what the woman was saying for Nora, Rafi slipped in a word of warning. “The sheikh met this woman, but he didn’t get the answer he was looking for. So we need to gain her trust.” She took them across slopes and up hundreds of steps to show them the conflict between modern and ancient architecture. She made them stop in front of the Arts Center and the City Hall, hulks of concrete isolated in the midst of all those stone buildings, to lament the victory of modern brick. She showed them secret passageways that led to the heart of that bloody mountain, taking them all the way up to the summit. She didn’t let them stop, not even at the Church of Santo Tomé where El Greco’s The Burial of the Count of Orgaz hung.
“El Greco is life itself,” she opined. “He was a Jew who disguised himself as a Christian and some people say he was the real author of Don Quixote, rather than Cervantes. He was a literary character as well, like in the story of Sidi Hamid Benengeli, the Arab historian who was the inspiration for Cervantes’ character Hidalgo or the melancholic knight, who’s identical to El Greco. El Greco’s paintings are all about how art can transform human beings into something holy and he was always trying to commemorate the beauty of Toledana women.”
There was a sudden tragic note in her voice. “We are very sad. I don’t mean us women, I mean those of us who are life’s missionaries. People who have a message don’t really live in this world so much as in a world of ideas and disguises. They’re cut off from life and desire and all petty things.” She’d make some comment on art and then politics and her own personal tragedies, before turning to religion and architecture. Her conversation dizzied them.
“Here’s an example of religious architecture in the Islamic style from the Almoravid period. This is Puerta Bab al-Mardum and that’s the Church of Cristo de la Luz. This piece of artistic genius was brought here by the Almoravid ruler Yusuf ibn Tashfin in 1086 when he came to the aid of the party kings at the Battle of Sagrajas and took Toledo back from Alfonso the Sixth of Castile. Look at the imposing gates and the decoration on the roofs. It reminds you of the exquisite architecture of Marrakesh, Fez, and Tlemcen.”
Without even pausing to take a breath, the woman led them over to the Synagogue of El Transito. “This synagogue was built in 1356 as a family synagogue for the king’s treasurer. It’s the oldest synagogue in Toledo, but it was turned into a church in 1492 after the Jews were expelled from Spain.” She led them to the center of the synagogue, where through two arching windows a mosaic of sunlight fell over their faces. She paused in front of three gypsum arches. “Here we see where my forefathers and yours, Jews and Muslims, came together to create a most outstanding example of Sephardic artwork.” She drew their attention to the intersecting web of plaster with Hebrew and Arabic calligraphy, Islamic motifs, and the name of God repeated many times. She sighed. “If only all this hadn’t been suppressed, mostly in the sixteenth century, you would’ve been able to see the variety of religious architecture for yourselves. Art used to fight over this city. Whoever set foot in Toledo would fall in love with the city immediately, and it didn’t matter how protective the city’s other lovers were, how they plotted to keep the city for themselves and eliminate their rivals.” Nora giggled suddenly, her laughter as slight and airy as the woman herself.
“It’s time for my morning coffee.”
They insisted that she let them take her for a coffee. She sat across from them in a cafe on the Plaza de Zocodover and told them her story. “You know the building where we met? It’s sort of a home-cum-school for orphan girls, run by the Church. They provide them with all their basic needs until they’re old enough to get married and then they move on to a different life. I was one of those girls, except for one small difference. I spent my entire life in that dark, bare school and although I could’ve left its austerity behind by getting married, I was too scared to go out into the world when I finally grew up, so I became a teacher at the school. A prophet of austerity, in a way, but I at least hope I’m able to teach the girls to be braver than I was so that they can go out and have their own lives. In the midst of that asceticism, I preach the gospel of escape; I feel like an infiltrator. I’ve taken my vows to be a spiritual hypocrite.” Rafi looked deep into Nora’s eyes as he translated what the woman had said. She was prepared to spend the whole day with them, talking and listening, as if she loved nothing more than filling the time with her own stories as they climbed through the city like she didn’t even have to breathe; and, of course, it was intoxicating to hear herself being translated into another language. She insisted on writing her address at the school for each of them in her severe handwriting, paying most of her attention to Nora.
“Will you send me a postcard? You will? I don’t believe you. I want to have a collection of postcards from the world outside. Places I don’t dare to go myself. I hope you come from somewhere very far away so I can hear a voice from the other side of the world.”
“I’m from Mecca. The city that Noah visited to retrieve the bodies of Adam and Eve from the floodwaters just as his grandson would later visit Toledo.” It was the first time Rafi had ever heard Nora mention her hometown.
“O merciful God!” the woman said before standing up and walking off—without acknowledging them at all—ducking into the first lane she came to. Rafi knew they’d missed their chance to ask what the sheikh had come looking for. He settled the bill while Nora went into the cafe to look for a bathroom.
As she was washing her hands, the woman in white appeared beside her all of a sudden. “Did you really say you were from Mecca? Meeting you and you promising to write to me on this beautiful, sunny morning is the highlight of my life.” She pressed yet another piece of paper with her address on it into Nora’s palm.
“Please write to me a lot. Write with the dust and the sweat and the dreams of your city. Maybe I’ll give your postcards to my students. It’s good for them to imagine different cities, different religions.” She turned to leave, but then she turned back again. “Are you another one of those religious types that come here pretending to be tourists? Deep down, we all suffer the burden of our religions. A city like this attracts people in disguise from all over the world. Here, being this high up, we’re closer to God, so we don’t need all the different names religion goes by. God himself is near to us and nameless. We can free ourselves from our masks and ambitions; it’s enough that we’re meek. Here we can forget about the world down below and stop caring about life.” She walked away again, no explanation given, no response expected. Nora hadn’t understood a word of what she’d said, of course. Rafi was astonished to see them walk out
together. The woman leaned down over the table.
“The El Greco Museum is closed on Mondays, but you can still go see The Burial of the Count of Orgaz in the church.” As soon as she stepped away from the cafe, her expression became humorless once again. She was preparing to reenter a world that knew everything there was to know about her and about which she, too, knew everything.
“Should we follow her?” There was enough skepticism in Nora’s voice that Rafi felt able to acknowledge that it wasn’t worth it.
“I think she must be insane, that woman. That’s the conclusion the sheikh came to.” At that altitude, the sheikh had begun to matter less. Nora was swept up in the moment; she wanted to pursue an adventure that would take her far away from everything she’d left behind.
They walked along, winding their way back through the Roman and Islamicera buildings along stone alleyways, which seemed always to ascend. Nora stopped in front of a house, which looked to them like a spearhead at the tip of the other houses, like a river between sloping banks. It was a small stone house with an old arabesque door, inlaid with brass. The door knocker was in the shape of a circular constellation.
“For Sale—Please call,” Rafi read the sign that had been posted on the wooden shutter.
“If he forgets me and I end up—maybe we should write down the number, just in case …” Her request took him by surprise, but her enthusiasm was electric. He jotted down the number: 37 63 29.
As they crossed back through the Plaza del Ayuntamiento, Nora stopped in a small bookshop. When she found a book about El Greco that she wanted to buy, she realized that she hadn’t brought any money with her. She put it back. Nothing could spoil her mood on that sunny morning.
All around them, as if out of nowhere, a flood of tourists and flashbulbs appeared and they were pulled along in their wake. They ate paella with snails, topped with black beans, at a table with four chairs and a loud orange umbrella. The umbrella didn’t really shelter them so when the sky began to sprinkle, raindrops stuck to her hair and gave off a scent of passion in her heart. It was raining hard suddenly, a downpour, and then equally suddenly, it stopped. The sky folded the rain clouds and tucked them under its arm as it watched them from the edge of the precipice where the orange umbrellas ended.