CHAPTER 12: A VOYAGE AND A CONVERSATION
3.12.1
The following day, the Fāriyāq went to the Chamber apprehensive about having to interpret the monster dream, but the master came to tell him, “The idea has sprung to my mind of making a trip to the Syrian lands for a change of air: the air of that clime is good and dreams dreamed there are true and easy to interpret. I see that you, like me, are weakened in your powers, thin of body. Prepare yourself then for the journey. May God smooth the path and we return in good health!” So the Fāriyāq requested the ruler’s permission to undertake the journey, and the latter, out of his kindness and generosity, granted that.
3.12.2
Then he went to his wife to bid her farewell and said, “My charge to you, my wife, is to remember, before all else, the roof. Let it be an incentive to you to keep your troth and your affection, and likewise, after I depart, to take good care of my son, in leaving whom in your keeping I leave my heart. Should any profligate bring you news of me, confirm it for yourself. In other words, should any of those who envy me for having you tell you, ‘Your husband died at sea and was eaten by a whale and nothing remains of him in the world of the living but his name,’ pay him no attention till you receive a letter from me that you can rely on.” “But how will you write to me if the news is true?” she asked. “I told her,” continued the Fāriyāq, “‘the master of the Chamber will write to you. But anyway, I hope to arrive safely and enjoy the sight of my family and yours and to pass on to them your greetings.’ ‘Won’t you set me a date by which you must have sent the letter?’ she replied. ‘Two months,’ I said. She said, ‘That’s as long as all eternity! What woman can wait two months?’ I said, ‘We shall be traveling by sailing ship. The doctor has told the master that it is more suitable than a steamship, because the latter smells of coal, which is bad for those with chest problems.’ ‘I shall do as you think best,’ she said, ‘but be careful you don’t recover and fall in love with someone else,’ to which I replied, ‘I’ll be careful only of the second, not the first!’ to which she said, ‘Nay, it’s me you’d better be careful of!’ ‘I only meant’ I said, ‘that I’d be careful not to fall in love.’ ‘Right!’ she said. ‘Be on guard against it, because it’ll only make you worse!’ I said, ‘The lands to which we are going provide less cause for worry in that respect than this island,’ to which she responded, ‘Men and women are the same in all countries, especially now that you’ll be wearing the garb of the stranger and that women everywhere go into ecstasies over exotic men, just as men do over exotic women.’ I said, ‘I understand what you mean, but don’t forget that a respectable woman can walk between two armies and emerge as she entered.’ ‘Indeed,’ she responded. ‘She goes in a woman and comes out a woman.’ ‘Where did the respectable woman go?’ I asked. ‘You appear to have struck her off the list.’ ‘She was in the preadamic period,’ she answered. ‘And what’s “the preadamic period”?’ I asked. ‘The age when mankind had yet to be created,’ she replied. ‘Where did you learn that odd word?’ I asked her. ‘I heard you use it once,’ she said, ‘so I learned it by heart, which is proof of that same infatuation with the exotic.’
3.12.3
“Then she was silent for a while, thinking, after which she burst into laughter. ‘What are you laughing at?’ I asked her. ‘Is it “preadamic”?’ ‘No,’ she answered. ‘I just thought of a story about a woman whose husband left her to go on a voyage, and I laughed.’ ‘And what story is that?’ I asked. She replied, ‘A woman was married to a man about whom she sometimes harbored doubts, but she wasn’t sure what about him made her suspicious. Now he happened to leave her to go on a voyage. She was sad to see him go but angry with him too, so sometimes she’d call on God to bless him and at others to curse him, telling herself, “If he’s innocent, the blessings will reach him and if not, the curses will!”’ ‘And do you intend to do as she did?’ I asked her. ‘God forbid I should call on God!’ she exclaimed. ‘Tell me “call on God to do what” exactly, to make the meaning clear,’ I said. ‘To curse you,’ she said. I responded, ‘I can see there’s no getting around you! Je t’adore!’ At this she turned to the door and said, ‘There’s no one there.’125 I said, ‘Don’t bother me, I beg you, with talk of patrons126 and who’s at the door: I’m about to set off on a journey.’ ‘Go,’ she said, ‘in God’s good keeping, and harbor no doubts. There’s a time for joking and a time for being serious, and a woman’s honor belongs to the latter.’ I replied, ‘That too contains an insinuation, as though you were saying it isn’t something to be brought to the forefront.’ Said she, ‘Put your mind at rest. Whether it belong to the former or the latter, you will find me as you left me, God willing.’”
3.12.4
He went on, “Then I bade her farewell, my tears bathing her neck, and she wept too to see me go, for it was the first time I had left her. It was part of her nature that when she wept, her face took on an arousing look and appealingly comely expression — and women are as attractive as can be when they cry (though these words shouldn’t be taken as an incitement to beat them: paralyzed be the hands of any who touches them in anger!).” Then he continued, “At the sight of her tears, mine increased too and at that moment I truly felt the agony of parting. We set sail and no sooner had the land disappeared from sight than pangs of desire rose in my breast and everything she’d said passed through my mind, tinged with misgivings and forebodings.” He added, “And stay-at-homes who never leave their houses and the scent of whose wives never leaves their nostrils know nothing of the pain of separation, after nights of hugging and love’s consummation, especially when it happens for the first time. It behooves me therefore to picture to the mind of our stay-at-home, ever nostril-fed friend something of the pain that separation brings the lover, so that perhaps his heart then may soften and he may pray that all those far from their loved ones may soon be at one with them, reunited. I therefore declare as follows:
3.12.5
“Separation — be it for a longer or shorter period, be its ending in sight or far off — consists of the detachment of one of two would-be lovers and his deprival of the joys of the company of his friend. His agony may be sharper than that of death, for separation from the dead is accompanied by regret and sorrow while separation from the living is accompanied by both of these plus jealousy, and, though comparable to the despair caused by separation from the dead, is yet more distressing. (The foregoing refers to married couples who are in love; when they hate one another, neither case brings either regret or sorrow.) Furthermore, if the departed lover, on leaving his beloved, finds in some other country an easy life, replete with delicious food to eat, a delightfully heady nightlife to enjoy and songs to listen to, wonderful novelties and gracious, sparkling, eye-catching faces to behold, the first thing he’ll think of will be his distant beloved and he’ll say to himself, ‘How I wish that he127 were with me now to share with me in this luxury! This day, I think, he must be bereft of all such things; nay, his heart may well be enveloped in a veil of grief and mourning. How can I sport and play while he grieves? How can I find food appetizing, drink refreshing, when he, at this very moment, may be too lonely and depressed to have any appetite for them?’ and so on and so forth by way of gloomy cogitations and sorrowful speculations.