Indeed, this manhood was now shamefully soft, limp and weeping. Although it feared to approach the sole wife in this state, for she might already have despaired of it, it knew that its only hope of redeeming itself was through real contact, which would bring consolation if not consummation. So the owner of the ship went down on his knees in the dark and cautiously felt with his lips along the woman’s naked body to locate the right and proper place in which to bury this shamefaced object. And there, in the wide space between her breasts, Ben Attar felt a moistness in his beard, so that for a moment he was startled by the idea that the woman, having despaired of his manhood, was attempting to suckle him. Cautiously he reached out his hands and brought her two nipples close to his ears, perhaps to hear the sound of this new flux. But the hillocks of sweetness that gently tickled his earlobes were dry, and to judge by their soft limpness, desire was still far from them. Only then was the man who had led the arduous expedition from the south to the north obliged to recognize that the tears he had held back so stubbornly for so many days were now pouring un-stoppably from his eyes.
Ben Attar could not have imagined how wonderful and sweet the woman found the man’s tears flowing between her breasts. She kept quiet, careful to give no sign that might cause them to stop. Sometimes it is precisely when manhood fails and gives way that maleness takes on a sweet and attractive taste. Even though she knew the tears were for the second wife, who was lost forever, for whom henceforth he was precluded from finding a substitute, she was neither offended nor angry. On the contrary, she felt proud that the tears for a woman who was lost were not lost themselves, but flowed between her own breasts and dripped into her navel. She had a hope that the second wife’s tears might moisten her own desire and enter in all purity into her womb, this womb that now parted its lips to whisper with its little tongue the sole wife’s announcement that she did not want the man’s fantasy but only his real presence and his love.
The spirit of the imagination can not only be extended, it can also run riot, as it did now among the women waking each other up in the woodcarver’s cottage at the sight of the young visitor, who had been drawn in the depths of the night to worship naked before the representation of his own image. First they laughed a little and jabbered in their own language at the sight of the ebony figure standing in silence and seeking the lines of its face wrestling with the white flesh of the wood, but slowly their eyes seemed to widen in sweet dread at the sight of the neat groove dividing two dark gleaming buttocks carved by a perfect hand, until the white-haired woman sighed deeply and put her little hand to her mouth to bite it.
The woman’s open display of desire, instead of making her friends snigger in embarrassment, swept away any anxiety over pleasure at the sight of this nocturnal tempter standing in all the splendor of his youthful manhood. The innocent devotion with which the African stranger stripped himself before the old craftsman inflamed the lascivious imagination not of one woman alone but of all three, opening a dark breach to a new, disturbing, but infinitely degenerate horizon.
Already a flash of lecherous complicity passed from one woman’s eyes to the others’, and was silently aimed at the elderly master of the house, to check whether he still needed the visible image standing motionless before him, or whether the young man might now be requisitioned for another need, neither artistic nor religious but full of the wonderful sap of life. The old woodcarver, whose spirit was so amused by the women’s excitement filling his cottage that it seemed to be infecting him too, laid down his chisel, dusted the wood chips off the block of wood struggling to find its wounded identity, then covered it with a piece of cloth as though to hide from its view the orgy that was about to break out. Then he withdrew to his cot in a dark little corner, but he did not cover his face before he knew which of the three women was favored by fate in the draw.
It emerged that the three women were unwilling, or unable, to wait to draw lots, preferring to cast in their lot together in unbridled licentiousness. Before they could strip off their garments they approached the youth, whose black flesh gave them the freedom to pass him from hand to hand, from mouth to mouth, from lust to lust, as though he were an animal rather than a human. The more the triangular desire raging in the third watch of the night intensified in its brazen savagery, the more the wonderful thrill that transported the crumbling virginity of the son of the desert became blended with sorrow and pain. From the groans of pleasure bursting from his mouth, resembling the sound of a wild camel, he knew that to the end of his days he would have no rest from the fury of his longings, which would always draw him and his descendants to make their way from the south to the north.
Surprisingly, with the first glimmer of daylight on the horizon, the same tones of sorrow and pain were intermingled also in the thoughts of Esther-Minna, whose heart was pierced by a fine new longing. Unlike the slave who was being tossed about in the old woodcarver’s cottage on the right bank with the kisses and bites of three unbridled women, the painful longing in the Jews’ house in the Rue de la Harpe next to Saint Michael’s fountain aimed gently and compassionately in the opposite direction, from north to south. Ever since that night when Ben Attar first appeared in her house with the boy, she had ostensibly been waiting only for the moment when she would finally be freed from the nightmare of the southern expedition that had come to turn her world upside down, but now, as the moment of their departure came closer and closer, Mistress Abulafia felt a certain sadness at losing her discomfited visitors, perhaps especially because of her new anxiety about the Andalusian child who had finally sunk into a deep sleep in her husband’s bed. For after he had finished mumbling and groaning his confession in the outlandish, impenetrable language of the Ishmaelites, he began, this time in the familiar and holy tongue of the Jews, to recount his fears concerning the imminent sea voyage.
Esther-Minna had never before had a real child whom she could train in the paths of righteousness by day and watch over by night, and so when Rabbi Elbaz’s outline appeared in the doorway of her bedchamber with the first breeze of morning, she hurried out to meet him, to prevent him from depriving her of this graceful, curly-headed little boy who had finally found rest in sleep. She intensified her description of the past night’s fever, and made the father promise to let her atone for what she had occasioned with devoted nursing and suitable vigils. Yes, now she felt regret for the obstinacy of her repudiation, if not for any sin. And the rabbi from Seville rubbed the sleep from his eyes in amazement, for ever since he had first disembarked from the old guardship in the port of Paris, he had never heard a word of regret from his elegant opponent, whose blue eyes now reminded him of the blue sky of distant Andalus, which he did not know if he would ever see again.
Mistress Abulafia hastened to the tabernacle to waken her brother from a night’s sleep sweetened by the command to dwell in booths and by the rustle of the breeze in the greenery and the scent of the citron that lay beside his couch. With unusual firmness she asked the befuddled Master Levitas to allow the rabbi to lead the prayers for the day of the Great Hosanna, so that he could be the first to strip the willow by beating it with all his might in memory of the ruined Sanctuary and its worship. And so it was. To the accompaniment of the raindrops that had been skipping on the surface of the Seine since dawn and the voices of the Frankish travelers on the river, Rabbi Elbaz was the first to begin the recitation of the hosanna: May you be delivered and saved from war and from famine, from captivity and from pestilence, and from all manner of destroyers and from all manner of punishments that are experienced in the world. May you all go up to Jerusalem the pure, and may your feet trample upon those who hate you, and may your feet dance in the court of the sanctuary, and may you raise in your hands the fruit of the citron tree, palm fronds, myrtles, and willows of the brook, and say, “Hosanna, Lord saveus!”