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THE GENTLEMAN WHO OPENED the pension door stared at us. He had one freckled hand on the door, the other wrapped around a wooden cane, and glanced at our faces with an empty gaze. He was wearing a wool cardigan over a checkered button-down, slacks, house slippers lined with fleece.
It was terribly hot outside. We’d arrived in the high heat of late morning, and were parched and tired. I asked if we could be let in; I explained to him that we had a reservation for a room with a private bathroom and two single beds, and I immediately heard an unsettling of chairs in the back of the house followed by whispers directing him to let us in.
As we stepped across the threshold into the cool interior, he returned to the living room with strained movements and turned the television off. He worked his way back into his armchair and, once there, hung his head and stared at a half-eaten apple and a bowl of shelled pistachios that had been, we presumed, placed on the table for him by the woman who’d told him to bring us inside. The woman was wearing her house clothes: a blue floral cotton dress and a white apron stained with grease, tomatoes, turmeric, saffron.
“Aquí tienes las llaves,” she said, handing me the keys and pointing up a spiral staircase to the second floor. “Puerta 2C.”
We had already paid. The room had cost us only thirty-two dollars for the night, so we knew not to expect much by way of service. All we wanted were clean sheets and a corner to shower in.
“This place is so strange,” Ellie said, as I unlocked the door to our room.
“Stranger than the apartment?” I asked.
Ellie rolled her eyes with complicity then sighed in relief.
“I can hardly believe we escaped,” I said.
She laughed tenderly.
I thought the pension was charming. It was familiar to me, legible, as were the ambivalent manners of its elderly keepers, who were mainly concerned with balancing their books. I’d spent the night at a place just like this all those many years ago and remembered that even then I’d marveled at the careful construction of Spanish homes, their cold walls and buffed marble floors, their wooden floor-to-ceiling shutters and narrow terraces wrapped in delicate ironwork; these homes were so intelligent—so what if their keepers seemed indifferent to the world, shut out of life as if by a great and lasting shock. The buildings were designed to keep the heat out in summer when temperatures could reach more than a hundred degrees. We were in the high nineties that day, the heat dry and persistent enough to whittle our veins and shrink our appetites even late into the afternoon. Ellie’s face was flushed.
She collapsed onto the bed closest to the door, and said, “Do you care if I take this one?”
I told her I didn’t. “Don’t you know that I prefer sleeping next to the bathroom?” I teased, as I removed my sandals and stared down at my swollen feet. “The heat!” I said, peeling my damp clothes off my limbs. “It’s unbearable.”
“I don’t think I can move,” she said. “Can we start the day over again in a few hours?”
“Yes, please!” I exclaimed, observing that my bare legs were covered in red patches from having sat in the window seat on the bus. The sun had been unrelenting.
We agreed to wait out the worst hours and sleep until the late afternoon. We’d both learned early in life to reset the day with a long nap, to take a break from reality so we could gather the strength to enter its harsh gates again.
Ellie got under the blankets and rubbed her face. “What’s wrong with me?” she said in an aching tone. “I’m so tired!”
I wondered if our days at the apartment had introduced us to a new register of disorientation, a disorientation that had pierced through our calloused skin, left us raw and exposed in ways we hadn’t fully experienced since our adolescence. I told her that perhaps being exposed to so much grief in our youth had numbed us; we were still in the process of recovering, tragically exhausted from carrying the burden of our pasts, but at least now our lives were pleasurable to inhabit and buttressed by the support of friends who had become, as we were to each other, family.
“Remember that saying we had?” I asked, as I got under the sheets and rested my head on the worn pillow. “Because there are no fixed points in the desert, it is not possible to get one’s bearings.”
“Yeah,” she said, looking up at me in delight. When we’d lived in Amherst, we’d gotten into the habit of speaking to each other in maxims whenever one of us was down, and this particular refrain was one of our all-time favorites.
I told her that I felt as though the apartment in Marbella was a kind of desert, a decentered, shifting landscape where death was imminent, where it was impossible to let one’s guard down. Her exhaustion would pass, I was sure, at a pace in keeping with our growing distance from that wretched nonhome.
She said that she wasn’t so sure her fatigue stemmed exclusively from the apartment, that she’d been feeling this way on and off for months ever since she’d moved to England to take the job at Oxford. She told me that being one of the only Middle Eastern faculty members and one of the only women who specialized in reading the concealed archives of Middle Eastern history—the contents of which had been lost or displaced due to war and colonization and the annihilating logic of empire—left her feeling perpetually alone and exhausted.
She could hardly keep her eyes open. She reached for her shirt, which she’d taken off in a desperate attempt to lower her body temperature, and spread it on her face to avoid the light coming through the window.
“Sleep tight,” I said. “I’ll nap in a second.”
I lit a cigarette and took in a deep drag. The bitter taste of the tobacco, the warmth it spread down my throat into my chest, was the sweetest feeling in the world to me. I got up and went to the window. I stared down at the street. It was empty. I traced the long rectangular shadows the buildings cast on the stone-paved road. The view was so finely geometric, all gray and yellow; the dazzling play of light and dark gave the place the appearance of a gorgeous abstract painting. The lines were so straight, the angles so sharp, the sky above so blue. It was the picture of clarity. All of the dimensionality of the space seemed to have collapsed into a single plane, an essential image that contained both surface and depth.
I thought of the deep history of these streets, how thousands of Muslims and Arab Jews secretly practiced Islam and Judaism after the Christian reconquest of Spain—performing their rituals of Sabbath, eating on the floor, carrying out the ritual slaughtering of animals, washing and burying bodies in their traditional ways, hiding Quranic writings and Torah scrolls in false walls and pillars. I thought again of the questions Ellie had been asking herself for years through her work: How can we read a history that’s been erased? A history on the verge of vanishing? How do we relate to our own histories’ disappeared contexts, to lifeworlds that no longer exist because the landscape was destroyed and its inhabitants banished? Al-Andalus, I considered, breathing in the dry, coarse air, is one such place, a space from which Muslims and Jews were purged. It is, I thought, glancing up and down the empty street, a place where their bodies and forms of life, their rituals and architecture and language and foods, are only apparent as a disappearance, as an end, an end that returns, that haunts with the perfumed waters of its fountains, its waterways, its lush gardens, its underground conduits, its Mudejar architecture, its leftover wall writings, its Torah scrolls found in false floors and ceilings, the Arabic and aljamia engravings in this or that arched passageway.
How, I wondered, can we bear witness to their disappearance? To all the ways, public and private, in which we are forced to lose parts of ourselves? I thought about how, on a smaller scale, I had been severed from myself by Omar’s hands in that dreadful apartment, separated from the artifacts of my past, from my body and the language that belonged to that body. I considered again the fate of Muslims and Arab Jews around the world today; I considered the fact that our difference had been repeatedly turned into a deviance that called for punishment and felt my heart ach
e for us all, for myself and for Omar, who was, irrespective of everything that had come to pass between us, my brethren.
At that, I felt Omar’s hand on the nape of my neck once more. I felt a shiver go down my spine and down the spine of the girl I’d been as a teenager. I felt an intense sexual energy course through my veins and blend my body with hers; we were indiscernible from each other; in that moment of erotic desire, we were one and the same. I wished then that I could smell Omar one last time, that I could return to his bedroom as an adult and make love to him, to the person he’d been at forty, tall, handsome, powerful, a man as decided, lithe, and ardent as he was adrift and playful. This was a familiar desire, to bend the laws of time so he and I could meet as equals, as fully embodied human animals eager to exchange pleasure, to give and take, to feed and be fed. I’d always thought that the fantasy served me; it did, after all, allow me to momentarily diminish the damage that had been done to me, at least in my head, and perhaps even dissolve some of Omar’s pain, too, the shame that isolated him, that kept him moving restlessly around the globe—most likely, I thought, either to avoid being caught or to fish in fresh waters, to feed on fresh meat.
At that realization, my desire for him, soft and seductive at first, primal and bodily, transformed into a deep repulsion. I felt my heart turn heavy, its newfound density dragging me down, forcing me to lower my head in shame. It would always be like that, I thought; my feelings about Omar would always be in flux, shifting from leftover pangs of desire to pain; they were a reflection of my mutilated identity.
I was finally ready to reset the day, to leave behind the tireless march of the afternoon and start over. Ellie was breathing so deeply that I could tell it would be a few hours before she would wake. I fell asleep quickly; I felt as though my body were falling through the mattress and soon I was dreaming. I dreamt that I was back in the apartment, that Omar had laid the bloodied rags over my face. I was naked. He was penetrating me; I could hear him breathing heavily with pleasure, grunting as he pushed his own body through mine. But he couldn’t see my face. I couldn’t see his. I started to sob in the dream, and I could feel my tears being absorbed into the rags. The dried blood came alive; it spread over me as if the blood, like my tears, had been freshly spilled. I was drinking the blood, choking on it while Omar carried on unaware, indifferent, or perhaps even turned on by my suffering—his creation.
I woke up gasping for air. There were shafts of the late afternoon light coming through the window. I looked at the clock. We had slept for hours.
“Ellie,” I called, and she stirred in her bed. “Ellie, wake up!”
She turned toward me and opened one eye.
“I had a terrible dream.”
She reached her hand across the gap and I held it. I told her that I’d dreamt I was dead. She gave me a squeeze.
“Don’t say that,” she said. “I can’t imagine being in the world without you.”
We got up quietly. Once we were dressed, once we’d combed our hair and brushed our teeth, I opened the window, and we leaned our faces into the electric-blue air of twilight.
“Look,” she said. “A fruit stand.”
We made our way down the stairs and handed the keys to the woman who’d shown us in, stepped into the street, and made our way to the fruit vendor, who was leaning against the wall, whistling a quiet tune to himself. We bought peaches and grapes and oranges and dates and almonds, then we walked through the streets, past the cathedral and down Gran Vía de Colón, gazing open-mouthed at its elegant buildings, their reserved, dignified facades; the lush greenery that punctuated the sidewalk; the sky overhead that was acquiring the texture of silk and turning pink, a deep rose interrupted by streaks of purple and amber that dazzled us. Before we arrived in the Albaicín, we caught sight of the Alhambra. We stared at it breathlessly. It was seated regally in the bright-green foliage of the densely forested hills, and beyond it, the Sierra Nevada’s sharp peaks, barely visible in the darkening sky, seemed to be keeping guard over its ancient stones.
“Ah,” Ellie sighed. “I can’t wait to walk its corridors and gardens. We need a palace full of light and love to cleanse ourselves of that apartment!”
I hooked my arm around hers, and we entered the Albaicín. The streets turned steep and narrow; the lanterns had already come on to buttress what little bit of light slipped through the gaps between the buildings.
“There are so many worlds inside this city!” I exclaimed.
There were tourists everywhere. We wanted mint tea. We wanted hummus with freshly baked pita bread. I wanted to eat baklava between drags of a cigarette.
“What could be better,” I said, as Ellie glanced at the shops, their colorful glass lanterns hanging from the ceilings, glowing like tropical fish in the evening light, “than to balance the bitter taste of tobacco with the sweet aromas of ground nuts and phyllo dough soaked in floral honeys?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing could be better.”
For a brief moment that left us both feeling foolish; we pretended we were home among our people, that nothing had been lost. We walked through a pair of hand-carved wooden doors into a tea shop so covered in tapestries that it smelled of camel hair and wet wool. I loved that smell. It was so familiar. It was the smell of my childhood. We sat in a wooden booth near the window and draped our bodies over embroidered pillows. There were mirrors hanging between the tapestries that reflected the passersby examining tajines, key chains with the dangling hands of Our Lady of Fatima, keffiyehs, babouche slippers, and silk scarves in the tourist shops across the steep alley.
We wondered what they were going to do with all of their souvenirs.
These people, we told each other, have no qualms about buying goods made in North Africa and sold by a new wave of Moroccan immigrants, immigrants who are essentially being commodified as stand-ins for the ghosts of Granada’s waylaid past. But in all likelihood, the tourists’ political attitudes toward Muslims—attitudes they would likely reclaim as soon as their vacation in Granada was over—revealed a mistrust and upheld a stereotype of Muslims as unpalatable and dangerous, as though inside each Muslim lay a terrorist waiting to be unleashed. That, we concluded, as we put in our order, was capitalism’s dissociative and predatorial nature. It spared no one. Even we were active participants. There we were, after all, waiting for our order in a room full of tourists covered in Arab paraphernalia.
A few minutes later, our tea arrived, followed by our food. We ate ravenously. We barely exchanged a word. When we were done eating, we sat there and took in the darkening folds of night through the windows. Then we paid for our meal and made our way out of the Albaicín toward the city center. We found ourselves standing in front of a great stone building with carved wooden doors; at either side stood two women with long black slick hair and rosy skin. They welcomed us in, regaled us with sensuality. It was a hammam designed to recreate the illusion of Andalusia’s Moorish past, another destination on the path of nostalgia tourism.
“Should we go in?” Ellie asked, her eyes wide with the anticipation of pleasure.
“We might as well,” I said.
“I’m still so tired,” she said. “All I want to do is soak my body in water.”
We entered the hammam and were led by a second pair of women down a series of steps into a humid room that smelled of musk and rose. They handed us checkered Turkish towels and told us that we had ninety minutes to enjoy the baths, that they asked guests to speak in a low whisper. We walked through arched passageways lit with candles; the air was thick with moisture. There were trickling fountains at every turn, and dazzling tile work surrounded the pools. There were rooms lined with hot stone benches where the steam was so intense that we could only see each other’s extremities. It felt incredible to bake in those rooms. To sweat. To purge ourselves of the apartment.
We eventually made it to the central pool. It was located directly beneath a domed tower that had holes shaped like stars carved into it. Through those
holes, we could see the real stars in the night sky; we could see the moon in portions. We floated on our backs, staring through the openings in the dome for what felt like a long time. All I could hear was the pressure of the water against my eardrums. I felt as though I were within myself and beyond myself all at once. I felt light, supported, as if all the tension in my body was being released, dissolving in the warmth of the water.
Ellie swam up to me. “Hey,” she whispered, cupping her hand under my head and lifting it so I could hear her. “I was thinking about how, in the mystical Jewish tradition, reading histories that have vanished, that have been hidden from view through time’s erasure, through the systemically concealed violence against our people, is considered an approximation to nothingness, to Ein Sof, to the divine. So maybe interrogating a space like Al-Andalus, like the apartment, however wretched it was—a place where the past exists as an eternal disappearance—is like entering the void itself, the place where language feels divine because it is capable of naming that which has been made to disappear, of articulating the unspeakable. Do you think that’s possible?”
I told her I did. I told her that I thought language was its own taking place, that it had its own historicity full of continuities and disruptions, and that what I’d been doing, what I’d been trying to do, was to trace the history of my relationship with Omar across time through language; to translate its annihilating effects, its mercurial shifts, its hard facts, its eternal contradictions into words so this text would exist as a context unto itself, as a second taking place that both mirrored the original event and further complicated it.
She looked at me steadily for a long time. “You know,” she said. “I spent my thirties processing the years I lived alone on the street in Israel. Every time I had to work through a violent episode in therapy, I made sure you were in the room with me; the therapist would ask me to pick someone who made me feel safe and pretend that this person was there next to me. You were my safe person,” she said, then she dipped her head underwater to rinse her hair and face.
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