Aladdin

by Paulo Lemos Horta

  While they were sitting there, the magician unfolded a handkerchief that hung from his belt, where he had concealed all sorts of cakes and fruits, and which he spread out on the edge of the fountain. He shared a cake with Aladdin and let him choose from the fruit. As they ate, he advised the boy to part ways with his childish friends and instead to seek the company of wise and cautious men. “Soon,” he said, “you will be a man like them, and it is never too early to learn from their example.” When they had finished their meal, they got up and proceeded through the gardens, which were set apart from each other only by the slim furrows that marked their borders without impeding access; such was the good faith of the city’s inhabitants that they needed no other boundaries to protect themselves from trouble. By degrees the magician led Aladdin out of the gardens and into the countryside, until they had almost reached the mountains.

  Aladdin, who had not walked so far in his life, was weary.

  “Uncle,” he said, “where are we going? We have left the gardens far behind us, and all I see now are mountains. If we walk any farther, I am afraid I would not have the strength to go back to the city.”

  “Take courage, my boy,” said the false uncle, “I want to show you another garden, which outshines all those you have seen. It is only a few paces from here. When we arrive, you will tell me yourself what a shame it would have been to have missed it, having come so close.”

  Aladdin yielded, and the magician took him much farther still, beguiling him all the while with stories.

  At last they reached a narrow pass between two mountains. It was to this strange place that the magician had sought to lure Aladdin; now he could realize the dream that had brought him from the edge of Africa all the way to China. “We will go no farther,” said the magician. “I want to show you rare and wonderful things. But first, gather up the driest brushwood you can find while I kindle a fire.”

  The undergrowth was so dense that Aladdin had soon collected enough in the time the magician took to light a flame. As the wood burned, the magician scattered a few drops of fragrant oil over the fire. A thick column of smoke rose up, which he swayed this way and that with a sweep of his hand, muttering words Aladdin did not understand.

  At that moment the earth trembled and cracked, revealing beneath its surface a stone, about a foot square, laid flat and fitted with a bronze ring by which it could be lifted. Aladdin, terrified, tried to flee, but the magician detained him, and in his anger struck him so hard across the cheek that he fell to earth. There flowed from him such a quantity of blood it seemed that his front teeth had been knocked clean out of his mouth.

  “Uncle!” poor Aladdin cried, trembling and tearful, “what have I done to deserve your blows?”

  “I have my reasons,” replied the magician. “I am your uncle; I may as well be your father. You are not to talk back to me. But fear nothing,” he said more softly. “All I ask is your obedience, if you are to be worthy of the great reward that will soon be yours to enjoy.”

  These promises appeared to ease Aladdin’s fears. When the magician saw that he had regained his trust, he went on.

  “Beneath this stone is a treasure destined for you, which will make you richer than the greatest kings of the earth. No one but you is allowed to touch the treasure; even I am forbidden from going near it. But to find it you must do exactly as I say.”

  At the thought of the treasure, Aladdin forgot his fears. “I will obey,” he said. “What should I do?”

  “Take that ring,” said the magician, “and lift up the stone.”

  “But I am not strong enough,” said Aladdin, “I need your help.”

  “You do not need anyone. Besides, nothing would happen if I helped you. You must lift it alone. Say the names of your father and grandfather when you take hold of it, and you will find it no weight at all.”

  Aladdin did as the magician said and lifted the stone with ease.

  The space beneath revealed a set of steps leading into a vault three or four feet deep.

  “Go down,” said the magician. “At the foot of those steps is an open door leading into three large rooms. There you will find many bronze vessels full of gold and silver, but you must go through the rooms without touching anything. Not even your cloak must brush the walls; keep it wrapped close around you. Otherwise you would die in an instant. The third room will lead you into a garden of fine trees heavy with fruit. Walk on until you see a flight of fifty steps. At the top is an alcove, and in the alcove, a lamp. Take the lamp, throw out the oil it contains, and bring it to me. Do not worry about staining your cloak: the fuel is not really oil, and the lamp will be dry as soon as you have poured it out. As for the fruits in the garden, you may pick as many as you wish. That is not forbidden.”

  He slipped a ring off his finger and gave it to Aladdin, saying it would protect him from harm. “Go now,” he said, “and be brave. We shall both be rich for the rest of our lives.”

  Aladdin went into the vault and passed through the rooms with great caution, afraid of death. He crossed the garden like the wind, flew up the stairs, took the burning lamp from its niche, threw out the wick with the oil, and, finding it as dry as the magician had said, put it in his cloak. Back down the steps he went, pausing only to consider the trees, which were bright with extraordinary fruit: there were white fruits, others clear and smooth as crystal, and red fruits, some darker than others, and also green, blue, violet, and yellowish fruits, and other colors too. Looking closer, Aladdin saw that the white ones were pearls; the clear and smooth ones, diamonds; the red were rubies, some darker than others; the green, emeralds; the blue, turquoise; the violet, amethysts; the yellowish ones were sapphires, and so it was with the others, all of them jewels. Their size was unimaginable and their beauty without description. Aladdin, who had no idea of their value, was not struck by the sight of these fruits, and was not drawn to them as he might have been to figs or grapes, or any of the other fine fruits that grow in China. Nor was he old enough to know their worth: he thought them nothing more than colored glass. And yet he was compelled, by their beauty and size, and by the variety of their colors, to pick them from the trees. He filled both his pockets with these fruits, as well as the two new pouches which the magician had bought with his clothes, and even wrapped some in the fabric of his belt, which was a long bolt of silk, to keep them from falling.

  Unaware of the riches he carried, Aladdin hurried back through the rooms with the same caution as before and arrived at the mouth of the vault, where the magician stood ready to meet him.

  “Please,” said Aladdin, “give me your hand and help me up.”

  “First give me the lamp,” said the magician. “It might weigh you down.”

  “Forgive me,” replied Aladdin, “it is no weight at all. I will hand it to you as soon as I am out.”

  The magician insisted on having the lamp first, but Aladdin, who had buried it beneath the piles of fruit he carried, refused. The magician went into a dreadful rage, and, throwing some of his oil on the fire, he spoke a few magic words, and the stone rolled back over the vault, and the earth closed over the stone.

  NOW, THIS MAGICIAN was not, as he had claimed, the brother of Mustafa the tailor. It follows that he was no uncle of Aladdin’s either. He was, in fact, from North Africa, where he had been born, and since the Maghreb is a place more given to magic than any other, he had applied himself to it since childhood. After forty years of spells and study, of divination by sand and by smoke, he had discovered the existence of a magic lamp, which would make him more powerful than any ruler in the universe if he could only become its owner. His last geomantic reading had revealed to him that the lamp was buried underground in the middle of China. Certain of this revelation, he had left the edge of Africa, and after an arduous journey had arrived in the town that lay closest to the treasure.

  And yet, though he had discovered the lamp’s location, it was not permitted to him to remove it, nor to enter the underground chamber himself. Another had to g
o in his place, find the lamp, and bring it back to him. For this purpose he had picked out Aladdin, who seemed to him a boy of no consequence, and determined, once he had the lamp in his hands, to perform the sorcery I have described and sacrifice the poor fool to his greed, so that there should be no witnesses. By striking him on the face and imposing his will, he sought only to encourage in Aladdin a habit of fear and submission, so that when the magician came to ask for the lamp, Aladdin would hand it over at once. But the opposite ensued. In the end he betrayed Aladdin sooner than he had intended, fearing that if they argued any longer, someone might overhear them and make known what he had tried to conceal.

  When the magician saw his great hopes dashed, he had no choice but to return to his homeland, which he did the very same day. He took a circuitous path to avoid the city he had left with Aladdin, fearing that he would be seen returning without the boy.

  That should have been the last anyone heard of Aladdin. But the man who believed he had erased him from the earth had also supplied him with a means of escape. Indeed, the ring was to be Aladdin’s salvation, and it is a wonder that its loss, along with that of the lamp, did not drive the magician to despair. Yet magicians are so accustomed to setbacks and disappointments that they never give up on their lifelong diet of dreams, smoke, and visions.

  The Slave of the Ring

  When Aladdin found himself buried alive, he called out to his uncle a thousand times, promising to give him the lamp, but he could no longer be heard, and there he remained in darkness. At last, after giving some release to his tears, he went down to the bottom of the vault to seek light from the garden he had just crossed, but the door leading to it, which had opened by magic, had now been conjured shut. He groped ahead of him, right and left, but the door was gone, and his tears returned as he sat on the step, and he lost hope of ever seeing the light again. Soon, he thought, he would slip from this darkness into the shadows of death.

  Aladdin spent two days in this state, without eating or drinking. On the third day, as he considered his inevitable death, he submitted to God, and, joining his hands in prayer, he said: “There is no might and no power except with God!”

  As he held his hands together, he inadvertently rubbed the ring which the magician had slipped onto his finger and whose power he still did not know. At that moment an enormous jinni with fearsome eyes rose up from the earth until it filled the vault, and said these words to Aladdin: “What is your command? I am here to obey you as your slave, and the slave of all those who wear the ring, I and the other slaves of the ring.”

  Aladdin might have been struck silent by such a vision, but now, concerned only with the danger he was in, he replied without hesitation: “Whoever you are, get me out of this place, if such is your power.” At once the earth parted and he found himself outside, precisely at the spot where the magician had led him. Aladdin, who had spent so long in the darkest gloom, struggled at first to face the light of day. When his eyes adapted to the glare, he was amazed to see no opening in the earth and could not understand how he had been so swiftly ejected from its bowels. Only by the traces of burnt brushwood could he mark the spot where the vault had been.

  Turning toward the city, he caught sight of it among its outlying gardens, found the path they had walked, and followed it back, thanking God all the while for returning him to the world he thought he had left for good. He reached the city and staggered home, but the joy of seeing his mother again conspired with the effects of his fast, and he fainted. His mother, who had already wept over his death, did all she could to revive him. When at last he came around, he said he had been hungry for three days, and his mother brought him what she had, warning him not to eat too fast in case he harmed himself.

  Aladdin followed his mother’s advice: he ate slowly and drank in proportion, and when he finished, he said: “Mother, I could take you to task for abandoning me so easily to the mercy of a man who wanted to destroy me, and who is so sure of his success that as I speak to you now, he must be convinced that I have either lost my life or will lose it by morning. But you believed he was my uncle, and I had no reason to doubt it. What else were we to think of a man who covered me in gifts and promises? Yet you must know, Mother, that he is nothing but a traitor and a wretch. His favors were only a means to get rid of me without exciting our suspicion. I can assure you that nothing I did gave him the slightest reason to mistreat me. You will be of the same opinion when I tell you all that I have suffered since we parted.”

  Aladdin began to relate to his mother what had happened since Friday, when the magician had taken him to see the palaces and gardens outside the city, and all that took place on the way, until they reached the point between the mountains where the magician was to carry out his deed; how, with a little oil on the fire and a muttered spell, the earth had parted to reveal a vault, which led down to a fathomless treasure. He made sure to mention the blow he had received from the magician, who, having softened a little, had lured him, with promises and the ring on his finger, into the vault. He was careful to report everything he had seen as he crossed and recrossed the three rooms, the garden, and the alcove where he had found the magic lamp.

  He showed her the lamp and the fruits he had gathered in the garden. These fruits were precious stones, which shone like the sun even in the bright room, but Aladdin’s mother knew no more about such things than her son. She had grown up in poverty and had never had any jewels, nor seen them worn by friends, so it is no wonder that she saw little use in them, besides the pleasure they gave the eye with their many colors.

  Aladdin completed his story by relating how, when he returned to the mouth of the vault, ready to step out of it, as he refused to give his uncle the lamp he wanted, the vault had closed over in an instant by the power of the oil the magician had thrown on the fire, which he had been careful to keep alive, and of the words he had spoken. But Aladdin could not go on without faltering: in tears he described the misery he suffered from the moment he found himself buried alive until he was returned to the world thanks to his ring. “You know the rest,” he said. “Such were my adventures, and the dangers I faced since you saw me last.”

  Aladdin’s mother sat patiently through his astonishing story without interrupting. At those moments, however, where the magician’s treachery was most apparent, she could not help but give voice to her outrage, and as soon as Aladdin had finished, she flung a thousand curses on the impostor, calling him a traitor, a wretch, a barbarian, a murderer, a cheat, a sorcerer, and an enemy of the human race.

  “Yes, my son, a sorcerer. They traffic in spells, the devil’s trade. Praise be to God, who did not let the magician’s wickedness get the better of you! You must thank Him well for that grace. You would not be alive today had you not remembered Him and begged for His help.” She said many more things, never straying far from the hatred she bore for the magician, but as she spoke, she noticed that Aladdin, who had not slept in three nights, needed to rest.

  She put him to bed, and retired herself soon after.

  The Slave of the Lamp

  Aladdin, who had not rested a moment in his underground prison, spent the night in a deep sleep and did not rise until late. When he woke, he asked to eat.

  “Alas,” said his mother, “I have not even a piece of bread to give you. But I have a little cotton thread left over, which I will sell to buy bread and something for our dinner.”

  “Save your cotton,” replied Aladdin, “and give me the lamp I brought yesterday. I’ll sell it instead. It will provide us with breakfast and lunch, and perhaps supper too.”

  Aladdin’s mother fetched the lamp. As it was very dirty, she took some water and a little sand to clean it with, but hardly had she begun to rub it when a jinni, hideous and gigantic, appeared before her and roared: “What is your command? I am here to obey you as your slave, and the slave of all those who have the lamp, I and the other slaves of the lamp.”

  Aladdin’s mother was in no state to reply. She fainted at the first
sight of the jinni, but Aladdin did not wait to act. He seized the lamp, and, speaking for his mother, he said: “I am hungry. Fetch me something to eat!” The jinni returned in an instant bearing a large silver tray on his head, on which rested twelve silver dishes containing fine meats, six white loaves of bread, and two bottles of exquisite wine. In his hands he held two silver cups. He laid everything down on the sofa and disappeared.

  When Aladdin’s mother came to her senses, she was amazed at the feast laid before her. “Who have we to thank for this abundance?” she asked. “Could it be that the sultan has heard tell of our poverty, and has had mercy on us?” “Mother,” replied Aladdin, “let us eat.” During their meal, Aladdin’s mother never tired of admiring the tray and its dishes, though she could not be sure if they were made of silver or some other material. In truth, since she was unaware of their value, it was only their novelty that held her admiration, nor did her son know any better.

  It was noon when they sat down to their meal, and they did not rise before evening. They decided that since the dishes were hot, they may as well combine breakfast, lunch, and dinner, all in a single sitting. When they had finished their extended meal, Aladdin told his mother about the jinni. “In all my years on earth,” she said, “I have never heard of anyone seeing one. How could this spirit have appeared to me, though he had appeared to you in the vault?”

  “Your jinni,” said Aladdin, “is not the same as the one who appeared to me. They are alike in size, but their manner and dress are entirely different: indeed, they belong to different masters. If you remember, the one I saw called himself the slave of the ring I have on my finger, while yours said he was the slave of the lamp. But I do not believe you heard him: you fainted as soon as he began to speak.”