The fetishists, p.15
The Fetishists, page 15
To the east and north the haughty mountain peaks rose in a chain with tapered heads that patiently yielded to their destiny. The mirage drew on them legendary crests, which undulated and glowed submissively. The ancient forefathers had inhabited the isolated mountains, carving out caverns in their hearts. Then they felt desolate, and a longing for the Unknown pervaded them. So they drew figures, colors, and imaginary scenes on the surfaces of the boulders. Unable to sleep nights, they amused themselves with legends. Soon they began drawing on the walls as well, but their yearning for the uncanny, for the Unknown, and for their origin never diminished. Then one morning they awoke to find themselves drawing goddesses and gods. They discovered the treasure they had been seeking for ever so long and felt tranquil and reassured enough to sign their paintings. They also wrote comments beside their drawings, using the Tifinagh alphabet. They recorded the locations of treasures and wells with symbols, drawings, and letters. They relished this activity and expanded their range, decorating every boulder in the great desert with their designs. No one would believe today that everything started with one nomad who secluded himself in a cave and tried to express his eerie sorrow for his origin.
The dervish did not realize that he would rescue this role from annihilation eight thousand years after this adventure began.
He was resting quietly below the boulder, trying to catch a breath of the air that had been slain by the executioner with its fiery scourge, when he observed the miracle. He gazed at the stone with his crossed eye, and the empty sphere in his chest leapt and pulsed. The contents returned to the empty gourd, and he ceased his attempts to grasp breaths of air like an asthmatic. He sat up and propped his body on his elbows, leaning back. The princess stood before him. She had descended as a phantasm from the heavens and settled on the stone as a guest. In stone, she was svelte, slim, proud, and mournful—looking exactly as he had last seen her. There was the same astonishing color on her lips, the virgin color of taftast, which is the virgins’ amulet and twilight’s secret. He crawled toward the boulder and placed his hand on the rock. The drawing was a bas-relief and had been carved into the boulder’s surface. With trembling fingers he traced its carved proportions. The first lover had drawn the first goddess in profile; she lifted her head dismissively, looking at the barren land, toward the haughty, distant, melancholy peaks.
He placed his index finger on her lips, which were colored with the ancestors’ secret pigments, and then descended, shuddering, cautiously, to her rounded chin and her long, ivory neck. When he traced her swelling bosom, the blood froze in his fingers, the seeds flew from the gourd, the sphere leapt from his chest, and tears flowed from his crossed eyes. He continued tracing the limbs of the carved goddess, weeping profusely, till his fingers had felt every member of her body. His tears were as hot as the water in the skin, and the goddess’s body was a searing fire.
He decided to extinguish the flames of the stone goddess with the tears—as hot as blood—of a cross-eyed man.
He wet his forefinger with his eyes’ moisture and ran it over the body of this stone goddess. He whispered spontaneously, “Tenere . . . t . . . e . . . n . . . e . . . r . . . e . . . e.”
13
Udad was also devastated.
How could the Promised Event have devastated everyone? It had plundered their souls and taken them to the Beloved, perhaps to the Unknown? Taffawut was devastated; he had seen that in her eyes. The princess was ravaged, and her soul was rushing toward . . . Udad! Okha was ravaged by the princess. He was despoiled and. . . . The last thing he would have expected was seeing wild Udad ravaged. He had detected the same gleam in his eyes as in the others’. What about him . . . he, the dervish . . . had not he also been seized? The sphere in the cage shrank, and he remembered that there was one creature that had not been ravaged—the stone goddess!
He wiped off the saliva and remarked out loud, “That’s why she didn’t lose the hauteur of the gods—unlike everyone else, unlike those of us who attach ourselves to human creatures and give ourselves to them. We all are extinguished—abducted. Only the princess has remained haughty and luminous—like the stone goddess, even though she offered herself to the songbird of paradise. Is that because Udad isn’t a terrestrial creature?”
He inhaled the mountain air and shouted with the inspiration that his marabout ancestors suddenly revived in the empty gourd: “Alas, alack! Any man who binds himself to a woman is ravaged. Anyone who binds himself to gold is ravaged.” Itinerant Qadiriya shaykhs had frequently turned up and warned people about the ability of these two ghouls to seize control of a person’s soul. They had affirmed that the jinn take possession of the person they haunt and plunder him of his soul, using either a woman or gold. In the encampment, people said that the order’s shaykh had himself spread this doctrine, warning and cautioning people against these two idols at the beginning of his era. No one knew yet how he could have disregarded this principle and accepted that ill-omened chest from the merchants’ hands. Wandering Qadiriya adepts had spoken about the soul’s ability to change and turn into something different, explaining that it was comparable to a hunter turning into a Barbary ram (or gazelle) if he attempted to hunt this prey at twilight.
The dervish had himself seen a hunter from the camp abducted and thrust into the body of a Barbary ram! The camp knew that Amasis was their most skillful Barbary-sheep hunter. Whenever he went to the mountain, he returned with camels laden with two or three ewes. Before his metamorphosis, everyone had noticed a change in his behavior. The wretch had started hunting to excess and had decimated the herds of the slopes of Akakus. He was no longer satisfied with a ewe or two to share with his household and the neighbors. He had begun to spend days, which could stretch into weeks there. Then he returned with dozens of ewes on his camels. He would skin them, salt them, and hang them to cure in a corner of his dwelling. He would sell the meat to caravan merchants in the open-air market. He stopped giving meat to his neighbors, and it was said he was even stingy with his children and niggardly about their need for meat. His wife revealed this secret to her neighbors some months later. She explained that her husband had decided to become rich and would soon realize his dream!
A few days later, Amasis returned to her from Akakus at twilight—squeezed into the matted hide of a morose Barbary ram. A necklace of his leather amulets dangled from this ram’s curved horns. The dogs chased him, driving him away, but he returned that night. His wife said the next morning that Amasis had been able to dodge the dogs and slip through the gloomy darkness to their dwelling. He woke her when he was kicking the pots and plates and licking the faces of their children, who were sound asleep, with his sticky tongue. Then he approached her and told her with his eyes about his cruel transformation. He communicated many uncanny things that she was unable to fathom clearly, because it was very dark.
At dawn she heard the dogs bark viciously and chase him toward haunted Idinen. When she opened her eyes to dawn’s firebrand, she found Amasis’s amulets on her lap!
As regards Amasis, no trace of him was ever found in the Akakus. Men followed his tracks and found blood stains where he had shot his prey with an arrow. Then they found his clothes hanging from a wild tree on the mountain slope. They brought the female diviner a sample of the victim’s blood mixed with sand, and she said he had tried to hunt a pregnant Barbary ewe.
Amasis’s wife poisoned the dogs and waited for her husband to return as a ram. She toured the barren countryside and the wadis and climbed Akakus, where she searched the caves, crevasses, and boulders. She went back there with their children, trying to inflame his heart and using them to lure him. The ram, however, had left his amulets in her lap and . . . disappeared.
The herders related that they had seen him scale haunted Idinen, slip between rough boulders, and enter the rectangle of slabs that rise vertically to the sky. Commenting on this report, the diviner declared, “No creature in the desert has ever entered that sanctuary and returned!”
14
The fiery disc budged from its seat and continued its journey westward, pulling the twisted whips of its infernal fire behind it. Then the air moved, and the desert caught its breath. The shadows of the boulders advanced and extended till they descended into the wadis. The flame lifted from the earth’s body and flew through space in vapor-like diaphanous veils. The lizard emerged from a crevice in the rock and rested in the shade, gasping and watching the veil of fire with alarm. The acacia trees continued to bow toward the scorched earth, patiently and dejectedly, refusing to lift their crowns, because they did not believe that the sky’s order had been issued to postpone the rites of eternal chastisement till the morrow. A breeze blew from the north, and they captured it with their crests, sucking up moisture and deriving life from it. In withered, gray thickets, the first wild bird trilled resurrection’s call. Then creatures in Tadrart felt sure that the lifeline had not been severed. So they emerged, called to one another, and repeated the glad tidings in the face of annihilation to show that life truly was continuing.
15
They sat opposite each other on two boulders at the summit. Udad’s protruding, bloodless cheeks were visible as he journeyed with his eyes to the far horizon, toward the distant east, where the other mysterious summit rose. He observed, “You’ve changed a lot since we last met.”
“Hee, hee, hee. . . .”
“Even your health isn’t the same.”
“Hee, hee . . . you’ve changed too. You seem emaciated and . . . ravaged!”
“Ravaged?”
“Who remains a man after pawning his heart to someone else?”
The northern breeze stirred. Udad took a deep breath as if wishing to monopolize the air. Musa also filled his lungs and drew in his share. Udad covered his mouth before resuming a conversation that had stopped when he received the message from the princess. “But Okha stands between me and her.”
The dervish protested, “She has chosen you.”
“. . . .”
“I don’t know what the Shariah says precisely, but. . . .”
“The Shariah doesn’t interest me. There is something more powerful than the Shariah. . . .”
“. . . .”
“There’s nobility. Have you forgotten nobility, Musa?”
The dervish bowed his head. Then he said shyly, “Leave the language of nobility to the nobles. Why don’t you speak the language of the vassals? I think that’s easier. . . .”
“Nobility is the heart’s language. The princess understands that. I would insult her if I didn’t act chivalrously with Okha.”
The dervish slapped his palms together and jumped off the boulder. Then he addressed the void: “Nobility, chivalry. Alas . . . alack. . . . Everyone hides behind nobility. They hide their weakness behind nobility. They even count their breaths according to nobility—men, youths, shaykhs, women, old ladies, and children. My head hurts.”
He took a stone and tossed it in the air. Then he shouted, “I asked the leader once whether our lost constitution was written in the language of nobility. He said that Anhi was written in life’s language, which only ancient sages understood. A different language. . . .”
He approached Udad, seized his wrist, and asked, “Do you know what language the shaykh termed the ‘language of life’?”
He wiped the saliva from his mouth with his sleeve. He trembled but finally discovered what he had tried for a long time to express: “The language of life is the language of music, lyrics, and the imzad. It’s your tongue that you learned from the songbird of paradise, from the wind’s thrumming at the mouths of caves, the breeze’s rustling through the long-suffering acacia. Hee, hee, hee. . . . It’s . . . it’s that delightful musical performance the princess’s fingers borrowed from all the paradises. Alas, alack . . . I have a headache!”
He spat. The contents spilled from the gourd. His heart contracted in its cage and became once more a colocynth boll. He shouted, “Why hide behind nobility—like a fool?”
“The desert’s Law?”
“There is no Law of the desert.”
“The Law . . . people, in the desert.”
“What is your relationship with people in the desert? You’re a Barbary ram from the mountain, a gazelle from the wilderness, a songbird from paradise. I’ve never heard you talk about the people’s Law before.”
“Since I have decided to descend to their plain, I must obey the Law of the plain.”
“Do you intend to challenge him to a duel? Hee, hee. . . . You won’t get any help from your neighbors, the hawks.”
He filled his lungs with air. Standing erect, he jutted his jaw out like a lizard trying to frighten its young and scanned the horizon as if he meant to fly off or leap from the summit. He muttered to himself, “Singing is the Law of the desert, and nobility . . . there is no nobility. People of the desert all confound nobility and pride. Why do these besotted people call pride ‘nobility’?”
With both hands he struck his meager turban, the end of which dangled till it almost touched the rocks, and continued his dialogue with himself: “They inflate their chests proudly the way they pad their bodies with clothing, claiming they do that pursuant to rules they’ve inherited about nobility from their fathers and grandfathers. Slander! Slander! Do you realize they are slandering the dead?”
He adjusted the lower edge of his veil and leapt next to Udad in one bound. “It’s a lie; the Law of the ancestors was sung. Our ancestors have bequeathed us only singing and the imzad, because that’s what they learned from the desert. Alas, alack. . . . You resemble arrogant Okha, who wraps his head with a piece of cloth seventy cubits long and stands by the mouth of the well, looking as swollen as a dead camel. . . . Hee, hee. . . . Your nobility is a betrayal of the desert’s Law, the Law you learned from the bird of the peaks and paradise.”
“I told you she’ll despise me if I don’t abide by the Law. You don’t know women.”
“Who told you their Law is the same as ours? She’s from Aïr, and our women are from Azjer.”
“Veiled men are veiled men, wherever they live. Their Law is derived from a single source—the desert!”
“They didn’t derive it from the desert. Okha’s awesome turban actually does resemble Tadrart’s peaks, but I see it as a form of disrespect for the peaks. Pride is a form of disrespect for the desert!”
The disc of fire blazed and almost bled as it neared the rim of the horizon in disarray. The incandescence went out, lost its arrogance, and became miserable, servile, and mournful. The desert does not allow any condition to become eternal. It even smashes the pride of the immortal executioner and causes it to set in miserable, shattered disarray.
Musa murmured, “The desert grants nobility. People themselves create pride to shackle themselves. What you’re discussing isn’t nobility.”
The desert hid behind twilight’s veil and spoke inscrutably.
16
The dervish fasted.
He refused food till his cheekbones protruded. His eyes sank, and the veins showed on his hands like desert trees’ sapwood. He was an ambulatory skeleton, and his complexion grew sallow as the blood drained from his cheeks till he looked green. This was the same astonishing color for which he had criticized Udad, the color that characterizes cave dwellers in Tadrart and Matkhandouch.
Inquisitive, experienced old women recognized the significance of his astonishing color. They all agreed that, by fasting, the dervish was in no way deviating from the conduct of his marabout ancestors (who used to rave, strike their chests with knives, and fast for months when they succumbed to passionate, divine love) or from the tribe’s traditions, according to which young men starved themselves when their hearts pulsed with passionate love for young women. Not even the shrewdest old woman, the one with the greatest experience of life and passion, however, could tell the tribe the object of the dervish’s passion. Was it God or some wretched, terrestrial creature? Many people asked the imam whether the Shariah said it was licit for a dervish to relinquish the heavens and part company with the lineage of Almoravid dervishes to descend to earth to yield to passionate love for some idiotic girl from the encampment, a woman who experienced happiness and sorrow, who wept and sang, who ate and answered nature’s call in the open countryside.
The imam answered those nosy parkers with the arcane language of adherents of the Qadiriya Brotherhood, speaking ad nauseum about hulul or incarnation. Then his foes accused him of deliberately addressing them in that jargon to conceal the secret and avoid expressing a forthright verdict about the truth and the Shariah, for fear he would be struck by the curse of the marabouts. The imam always sidestepped offending Sufi saints and dervishes.
The people of the plain believed that the dervish was not hungry, although he was fasting, because the angels would care for him and sustain him. They referred repeatedly to the Tijani Brotherhood novice who had visited Azjer and whom they had suspected of being a treasure hunter. He had lingered for a long time in Akakus and had lived in the caves of Tadrart, without any food or water. The herdsmen had reported him. Then Adda, the leader, had entertained him, slaughtering sacrificial animals in his honor. Blacks had brought in a wooden bowl filled with couscous and large chunks of meat. The men had hovered around their guest and lifted the covers from the food, releasing the meat’s aroma till the children and young men grew dizzy and wept as quietly as they could—hiding in a corner of the tent by the pegs, just waiting till they could claim the bones and other leftovers, at a time when the drought had prevented them from eating meat for a year.
The Tijani novice, however, had taught them a vital lesson in patience. He had gazed at the void with empty eyes like a blind man’s and had remarked with the frostiness of a man who had gone hungry for an age, “I have taken a vow to refrain from eating till I find Waw. I am a visitor from Zuwayla. I am searching for Waw. I am searching for Waw.” Everyone, including the imam, noticed that he repeated, “I am searching for Waw.” That day no one realized that Waw would actually be resurrected from evanescence and fantasy and that a city would rise from the legends to relieve the thirsty, clothe the naked, feed the hungry, and rescue the wanderer lost in the labyrinth. That day, their guest added a phrase that was no less enigmatic about his search for the Unknown Waw. He observed, “Ecstasy and repletion are incompatible, and I have chosen ecstasy.”
