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 ache 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.
So we had each received the other’s story. We had acted as spillover containers for each other. I couldn’t think of a deeper or more profound act of service. What else could we do but bear witness for each other? Receive each other’s testimony and believe it, regard it, and preserve it lovingly? This trip, too, I thought, like the time we’d spent in Jerusalem, had become yet another thread that connected us through time and space.
In my mind’s eye, I could see my teenage self—thin, tanned, my hair long, my eyes brighter, my movements more hesitant—swimming across the lake, Omar struggling to keep up, eventually pulling me back by the ankles and pressing his body against mine. It was strange, I thought, that I could remember so much about his body—the lean musculature of his legs, his wide chest, the precise shade of his skin, the taste of his mouth—but I couldn’t remember the length or girth or shape of his penis or how it had felt in my hand or against my body or inside of me. It was eternally lost to me no matter that I would spend the rest of my life haunted by it. That very forgetfulness, I thought, as we were called to exit the hammam—our ninety minutes were up—revealed my lack of experience, my innocence, my naïveté, my powerlessness against Omar. I had hidden from my fears, suppressed any awareness of my vulnerability, a strategy that had allowed me to survive all these years. For the first time, I felt gratitude toward my mind, its discernment and natural intelligence, its hardwired will; my mind had known to let some things recede into the distance, to discard what I could not, and would likely never be able to, bring myself to hold. There was a power in forgetting I hadn’t been able to acknowledge before.
That night Ellie and I slept soundly without stirring or waking to use the bathroom, without remembering where we were. We slept a true sleep, a profound, transformative sleep, and woke up feeling refreshed, ready to take on the day. We had plans to get breakfast—café con leche and pan rayado—and head over to the Alhambra. We would finally walk through its glorious halls, take in all of its divine beauty.
What we didn’t know but would soon discover was that most people had reserved their tickets months in advance. We weren’t going to be let in. We hiked up and down the hill in the heat and asked every vendor, every guided-tour office—we even asked other tourists if they would consider selling us their tickets. Nothing. We stood at the arched gate of the Alhambra dumbfounded, in utter disbelief. Then we walked over to the mirador and looked down at Granada, at its white houses and green trees and clear-watered river. We sat there for a long time, staring out, crestfallen, shut out by our failure to grasp that the Alhambra was now the most popular tourist destination in all of Spain. “How odd,” we said to each other, just as we had the previous evening, the realization so utterly absurd that it warranted repeating. “How strangely dissonant the world is. Islamophobia was rampant. It had been singing its deadly tune steadily since 9/11, and now, almost twenty years later, hatred of Arabs and Muslims the world over was so common, it was considered normal. And yet here was our civilization’s ghost being celebrated.”
“Let’s just go,” Ellie said. She was breaking into a rash from the heat.
“My pale pumpkin,” I said, and leaned my head against hers.
She looked at her phone for other sites we could go to and found the Palacio de los Olvidados, the Palace of the Forgotten. We laughed heartily at our own strange fate as we made our way back down the hill and across the river to look at the recovered artifacts of Jewish families who had been tortured and banished from Spain’s frontiers.
We were the only ones there. The entire museum was ours, empty; all we could hear was the gorgeous Sephardic music playing over the loudspeakers and our own distressed footfalls as we walked through the exhibition, taking in Torah scrolls, challah covers made of embroidered velvet, wine goblets, menorahs, children’s clothes. We took in the framed deeds. We took in the torture devices used in the Inquisition: skull crushers, the famous doncella de hierro, the Judas cradle, with its pointed pyramid that ripped victims in half, knee splitters, waterboarding devices, brass bulls in which suspects were burned alive, their remains exiting the bull’s nostrils as plumes of smoke. We drew sharp, purposeful breaths before a set of metal “masks of shame” that were shaped like wild boars’ faces, with long metal beaks and muzzles that made it impossible to eat. Women were forced to wear them in public until they eventually starved to death. I saw that the wild boar, my wild boar—her soft animal body, which had never been given a chance to grow, her heart, like my own, unable to graze the green pastures of childhood—was omnipresent. She had always been there with her piggish face, her frightful gaze, her uncertain gait, tortured, hounded, hung upside down and denuded, skinned, hacked into pieces, and fed to men, not a being unto herself but a tool for satiating the hunger of others just as we women had been: edible, interrupted beings whose bodies were overpowered, whose lives were lives of service no matter our will.
I thought I saw the shadow of my wild boar sliding across the walls of the museum. I thought I saw her weaving her way between the artifacts. No—I did not think— she was there. We stood side by side looking at the boar masks mounted on female mannequins, our chests aching in equal measure. I breathed alongside her. I felt the rhythm of her hot, heavy breath synchronize with the beating of my heart, my two hearts. I saw myself running through time with her and knew that she would always break the laws that separate the living from the dead to pay me a visit. She would be most welcome. I would eternally salute her.
I looked one last time at the masks of shame. I thought of my mother, of all of our mothers. I thought of my father, of how his presence in our lives was made through absence. What is a father? I wondered. What is fatherhood, motherhood, brotherhood? I wanted to reach out and comb my brother’s hair. To whisper in his ear, Not everything is absence; let’s hold on to this life together. I’d been forced to bury the brother I had known while he had gone on living, a ghost of his former self. How confused I’d been. How utterly wrecked. How plainly disoriented. And yet I wouldn’t change anything that had happened. What’s the point of wishing for the impossible? The only way forward is to surrender to fate, the fate that had been made for me and the fate that I’d made on my own. It was all exactly as it needed to be. I was not alone. Neither was Ellie. We were bonded to each other, to our mothers and grandmothers and sisters and aunts across time, and while we could not change the wrongdoings of the past or fix the errors of others, we could hold hands and purge ourselves of the shame of our perpetrators. We weren’t the ones who should be wearing those masks of shame. No. They did not belong to us. Maybe they didn’t belong to anybody. Maybe we weren’t meant to experience shame at all. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Xavi had said to me in the early days of our relationship when he had intuited that I was holding back some internal darkness to protect our relationship. He, too, like Ellie, had softened me, had helped me to accept the shape of my life, to love it even. Xavi, who had learned my story, who had become my witness through it all. I missed him terribly. I needed to hear his voice. I needed his kindness. I needed to return to him and sit by his side, to feel him breathing next to me.
We walked up to the last floor of the museum. It was a partially covered terrace with a bench facing a gallows pole, a window looking out to the Alhambra. We sat down.
“Even here,” Ellie said, “there’s no historical context provided, no information plaques acknowledging the violence of the Spanish Inquisition, the expulsion and torture of Arabs and Jews. The hanging instrument, used to execute Jews and Muslims alike, is just sitting here, facing the Alhambra, without having been properly encased. There are no boundaries around it to imply its anachronism, which suggests it is still a tool that can be employed spontaneously.”
I told her that it seemed positioned in the most sinister way, as if to suggest that our death as Muslims and Jews was and would always be imminent.
She pulled out a bag of leftover peaches from her backpack.
“You’re going to eat those here?” I asked.
“I am,” she said, and bit into one of the peaches. “It’s delicious and I’ll take my small pleasures where I can.”
I remembered sitting on Sahar’s roof in Bil’in, drinking tea, eating fruit, smoking hookah after hookah as we watched Israeli tanks roll through the streets, the trash being set on fire, dogs being beaten by frustrated kids. We had waited for days for the water to be turned back on. We hadn’t left her house more than once in the five days we’d been there. Eventually, we’d gone down the street to buy bottled water that had been brought in from the other side of the security wall. That terrace, I thought, was Sahar’s open-air prison. That was the last time we had seen her. She was no longer a part of our lives though we thought and spoke of her often. She was another vanishing point, another absence unaccounted for; we carried her memory with us even after she’d disappeared from our lives. I closed my eyes and took in a deep breath. I heard the tap-tap-tapping of the baby wild boar’s feet on the tiled floors again. I could smell her. She’d smelled of earth and dirt and mud, and I thought to myself, She, too, was my witness and I would forever be hers.
Ellie spat the pit into the palm of her hand. “Look,” she said, spreading her palm for me to see. “This pit is both an end and a beginning.”
“It is,” I said. “It truly is.”
We sat there staring at the gallows pole for a long time. We sat in silence. I thought to myself that in certain respects I had been beheaded by Omar, my identity interrupted. I’d had to invent myself anew after him. And I had. I had managed to look at my death head-on. I’d tried to venture toward what was concealed from me. I had tried to trace through language the accumulated erasures to which he had subjected me. But beneath these erasures, I had found others, just as within each verse in a poem is hidden another poem. So, as it turns out, I thought, I hadn’t written a book about Omar or me. I had written a book about the savage ghosts of history, about the dead whose pain continues to be recycled through this earth because we refuse to acknowledge our wrongdoings. I had created language, this language, as an offering bestowed to others, an offering of the simplest truth of all: that Omar and I and my mother, my brother, my father, his mother and father, and so on and so forth, every one of us, we are all caught up in this vortex of cruelty together; there were no victors, no victims; we were caught in a web we had woven together. We are all of us implicated, all of us responsible. That the betrayals we commit on others we first commit against ourselves. That we go down and rise up as one single organism. The undoing of one of us is the undoing of us all. How are we to contend with our fragility? We who are so reckless, so impatient, so perpetually obsessed with our unfulfilled needs? I hadn’t the slightest clue. The answer, I thought, looking at the sky beyond the window, a pearly pink lifted by a wild golden glow, was beyond my reach. It was beyond grammar. Beyond language. Beyond the spoken word. And then, looking one last time at the Alhambra in all of its glory and beauty past and at the gallows pole that had been used to annihilate that past, looking at the tool of death superimposed on this architecture that so thoroughly celebrated life, I thought, isn’t it possible to transform the cruelty that had connected Omar and me back again into love?