Authors: Pico Iyer
“I do,” he said. “I’m glad to hear about it.”
Then, as if he’d sat down in a seat that was being kept for someone else, he said—his formal voice again—“I think I should be going now. I have something to do.”
They walked back out into the street, and he said something implausible about having to check up on an Islamic building in some distant corner of the city. He tried not to look at the man trudging back to the hotel alone. The brief encounter had shaken him in some way he couldn’t explain to himself—like walking into a friend’s house and coming upon the friend in the kitchen, in a deep embrace, eyes closed.
He wandered around, to clear his head, following this lane, and then that one, into a very different area from the one he’d seen before, and everywhere around him were bolted doors and unlit lanes. He turned into a smaller street and felt as if he were walking past a line of fortresses. Just before a crossing, though, there was a sliver of light from behind a door, and, going up to the entrance—it was a small church—he pushed at the heavy bronze door; to his surprise, it gave.
He walked into a tiny, cold chapel, thick with the smell of incense.
At the altar was a body of thin white candles, wavering; around the sides of the place, taller, thicker candles, illuminating old canvases of Judas, Peter, the Last Supper. The Madonna’s sad, undefeated eyes followed him as he walked in and around the pews.
Then, sitting down—he needed to catch his breath, to put the evening behind him—he closed his eyes, and suddenly she was there, inches away, eyes narrowed and her hair let loose. She was working at something with her fingers, unclasping, unbuttoning, and her voice was at his ear, saying his name over and over.
He opened his eyes again, and there was nothing. Just a row of sacraments at the front of the altar—he hadn’t noticed them before, behind the candles—and the pictures of the Virgin on every side. Pulling out a postcard he’d bought in the hotel—the archways of the mosque in Córdoba, hidden inside the Catholic cathedral—he wrote, as before, without thinking:
Yearning makes the heart deep.
—AUGUSTINE
He had a few hours free before the train to Granada the next day, and, pulling out the letter he’d brought with him from California— the faded seal at its top more faded than ever—he called the operator to find the number of the Arabic Department at Cádiz. When he dialed the number she had given him, a woman answered, and, disconcerted by his fumbled Spanish, she transferred him to another woman. This woman seemed to have even less time for him, and soon he was back at the first. Finally, another voice came on, more commanding, male.
“
¡Hola!
Hello?”
“Yes. Professor Espinoza,
por favor.
”
“Digame.”
“Yes. You don’t know me, but I’m here for the conference in Seville, I’m a student of Sufi poetry, and Adnan Khalil . . .”
“You study in England?”
“In America, at the moment.”
“Where in America?”
“In California, as it happens.”
“You study in Santa Barbara?”
“Yes, for now. But what I wanted to ask you was . . .”
“I am sorry.” The voice closed every door he might have imagined open. “Please give my regards to Javad. I am very busy at this moment. I wish you success with your researches.”
The phone came down into his waiting ear.
He’d told himself he’d use his one day off to go and see the Alhambra, the most powerful reminder of Persia, so they said, still visible in Spain. He knew it was best to go when nobody else was around— you can only see the Alhambra when you can’t see very much. So he waited till the early afternoon to take the train to Granada. When he arrived, in late afternoon, he lost himself in the narrow whitewashed lanes of the Arab quarter, boys in thick sweaters kissing one another noisily on the cheek, and following with their eyes every woman who walked past.
From inside the cafés came the scratchy, plaintive sound of Arab love songs: a man crying out for his beloved, and ready, in his desolation, to start a riot.
The light fell slowly over the city, and when it was almost dark, he got up, paid for his mint tea, and began the long ascent of the hill. The hotels on both sides were full of noise and animation—the excitement of people who had made the building’s acquaintance— but the street itself was surprisingly deserted; few people knew that the palace opened its doors again on certain nights in the summer.
He walked up into the dark, towards what presented itself as a citadel, and as he came within a few hundred yards of the kiosk where they sold tickets—a tired face behind the bars—he saw a smaller building between the hotels, with a light still on. A young man, shaven-headed, was standing under a dim naked bulb, appearing to be reading. There was no one else in the place; it had the feeling of an afterthought. Drawn towards it by its very emptiness, he opened the blue door—a bell jangled dully above him—and walked in.
The man barely looked up, gave an almost imperceptible nod from the cash register next to which he was standing. As the visitor took stock of the shelves around him, he saw what seemed to be books about secrecy and love; a worn piece of paper on one of the shelves read, in fraying handwriting, “OCCULTISMO.” He picked one of the books up and opened it, and saw what seemed to be diagrams of human evolution, and whole sentences written out, too emphatically, in block capitals. Pieces of the text were in Aramaic, or some other esoteric language, and here and there there seemed to be astrological charts for what looked to be whole cultures.
“There is an Interworld,” he read, in a book in French (though it had been published in Geneva), “that belongs neither to the realm of gods nor to that of mortals. It is a separate zone, not real and not allegorical, and in it each one of us has a daemon, a guardian angel, if you will, who watches over our higher self while the lower struggles through its duties.” These things are known only to the elect, it went on, and at some point he felt as if he’d come upon the love letters of an acquaintance; he put the book back, feeling he’d stepped too far.
Then, walking towards the back of the shop, where works in English seemed to be kept, he ran his eye quickly along the shelves devoted to tomes in his native tongue. As he did so, almost perfunctorily, he happened to see the book he’d been looking for all along.
Poems of Shiraz,
said the title—gold lettering on a crimson spine, dating, he guessed, from around the turn of the century. He passed it by and quickly examined all the other titles, lest his ever-eager eyes be deceiving him. Then, at the same volume as before, he saw it once again:
Poems of Shiraz.
He picked the book off the shelf and for a moment did not open it. He was shaking, as he did whenever he was coming closer to an answer that might end a quest. Then, very carefully, he opened the cover, and began turning through the pages. There were poems on every one, through almost the whole length of the book. Poems by Hafez, turned into English by Gertrude Bell. Beautiful poems, mysterious and deep, he could tell, yet tamed somehow in their Edwardian quatrains, reduced into something a clergyman might read to his sister before retiring for the night.
He put the book back and considered himself chastised.
To step into the Alhambra after nightfall is to step into patterned moonlight. No one else was visible except for the woman at the kiosk, and nothing could be heard but the sound of water everywhere. The occasional footsteps of a guard, making his regular patrol.
He stepped into the first room, to find it lit by a single candle, so that as much was in shadow as in light. An arched window let in the smells of the night, a faint breeze; far below, the lights of the city. The next room was a little dimmer, and the next one darker still; he felt as if he were on his recent drives again, the nights in Santa Barbara, each room less well lit than the last, and for that reason more mysterious, inviting.
He walked in from chamber to chamber. The doors were set at the sides of the rooms, and their archways—Damascus again—were low; so low he had to bow to walk through them. The sound of water everywhere, like a reminder of something you forget at your cost.
When he came to what seemed to be the innermost chamber, a candle at each side of it, he sat down against a wall. The steps of the guard approached, and then receded. The smell of oranges came from the garden. The sound of water. “It’s weird,” she’d said, not long before she fell asleep. “Did you ever notice there’s a ‘Camilla’ hiding out inside ‘Macmillan’?”
Pulling out a piece of paper, he wrote:
Dear Anagram,
Can you hear the sound of water, from the courtyard? Smell the orange trees outside, feel the early night wind? Can you hear the guard in the distance, almost as if you were here?
I hope you can, because you are.
Fondest regards,
John
When he stepped out of the terminal in Los Angeles, she was, of course, nowhere to be seen. There was a girl with long fair hair, stepping into a dark man’s Porsche; another in a sky-blue dress, leading along a child who stopped to gawk at every foreigner. People bumped into him, as lost as he, perhaps, and then apologized; a girl was saying, “I’m sorry . . .” in just the way she did, but it was someone different, darker-hued. She must have got distracted, he thought, or suddenly frightened; her life seemed to shoot forwards and then stop again like a car in the stop-and-go traffic.
He waited for a bus that would take him home, and when he stepped into the house, three hours later, the light flashing on the machine had a plaintiveness that might have been hers. “Hi,” the recording said, “I didn’t know if you were coming. Or if you’d decided you were done with me. If you haven’t, I’m at 818-416-3775.”
He dialed the number and she answered on the first ring; she’d been waiting.
“It’s you,” she said. “You’re back.”
“I am. I said I would be.”
“I know. But I thought—anything could have happened.”
“It did. It didn’t. I’m here.”
“Will you tell me about your trip?”
I’ll put away my fears, the voice said, if you’ll say goodbye to yours.
He opened the door at the sound of her knock—night had fallen, and the ocean was just foam around the rocks—and when she came in, for a moment he didn’t recognize who she was. Jet lag, he said to her wearily, but it was the effect she often had on him; as if—he thought to himself—he needed to turn and turn the lens till it came into sharpest focus and the blur resolved itself into a person he knew.
She was wearing a long black dress, with a heart-shaped piece of jade around her throat. When she hugged him, perfunctorily it seemed, he felt her trepidation: a sister looking in on a brother with whom she’d never much got along.
“You look well,” she said, though not happily.
“I am. It was really something.”
“I’m glad,” she said, and then looked away from him, as if to orient herself and remind herself where she’d come.
“Scared, too.”
“Scared? Why should I be scared?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “You tell me.”
He looked at her, but she was browsing, with ostentatious casualness, through the book he’d left by the armchair.
“You said something about a production of
Emma,
” he said. “You were trying out for the lead?”
“Don’t change the subject. It won’t make it go away.”
He took a deep breath. “Orange juice? Some wine?”
“You tell yourself you’re not frightened and then it’s worse. It rules you from the dark.”
She was like someone who drives two hundred miles, he thought, to have someone say, “I don’t want to see you.” And he, no more mature, like the person at the other end, who says, “I do want to see you. You’d better go home.”
He went into the bedroom, brought out the book he’d bought for her—the story of Ibn Arabi’s encounters with Sufism and romance in Seville—and when he handed it to her, she smiled briefly and put it down.
“Do you want to take a drive?” In the car, he knew, she could let her defenses fall away a little; there seemed less danger of sudden closeness.
She nodded, and they went out to where he’d parked, and drove towards the south. When they hit the freeway, she sat back and closed her eyes, and he could almost see her settling back into herself, and taking off a layer of camouflage. The light backstage that made one put up with the acting.
The fog was coming in from the ocean by the time they rounded the great open turns that led to the Rincon; there was almost no traffic, and it was as if the whole great stretch of coastline was about to close down for the night. The little huts above the beach looked like birds, looking for their next perch, and the faroff pier, in Ventura, the branch on which they could alight. But by the time they drew closer to it, even the houses were gone from view, and all they could sense through the fog was the ocean, coming to shore a few feet away.
They drove through the sleeping town, and then he turned off the freeway and they followed a country road down to the neglected main street of Oxnard, its sad line of fallen pool halls and cantinas. The workers had come in from the fields long since, and from out of the bars and jukeboxes came songs of
palomas
and
sueños.
As if he’d just turned off the main street in Seville and ended up in an orphaned side street.