Raja Alem - The Dove's Necklace

Rafi parked his car at the foot of the mountain. Side by side, they made their way up the stone steps, which took wild and sudden turns, watching the city come to life, smelling the coffee brewing behind stone walls. “There’s something magical about entering this city on foot; there’s nothing like it. I always feel like one of the invaders who scaled its defenses and destroyed them. Here, this way.”

Nora flew ahead, her ankle-length white cotton dress billowing around her as she surrendered herself to the rhythm of the mountain, allowing the cramped stone passageways to slip through to her heart, ascending from the foundation of one house to the roof and then the foundation of another. Suddenly she found herself before several narrow paths paved with red stone, which led up to the summit. She teetered at the edge.

“Be careful,” he said. “This city takes artists prisoner.” The sun rose just in time to receive her laugh. He looked at her for a moment. She might have flown away on the wings of that smile.

“El Greco himself became one with the city. He was born in Crete, but he felt at home here. He did everything here: he was a sculptor, painter, architect. He was the first person to see art as a process of discovery. We can go to the El Greco Museum and see his house while we’re here.” He looked at her in profile: thick eyebrows, long, dark eyelashes pointed downward as if she were being pulled sleepily to the point of no return. Rafi wanted nothing more than to pull her up out of the abyss. He wanted her to explore the city as though it were one of its many painted avatars.

“El Greco was actually just passing through, but the city took hold of him. The rebel inside him found the freedom he’d been searching for in these peaks. He had a lust for life and he was constantly chasing after beauty so he found it depressing to be as lonely and independent as he was. He put it all into his paintings. Even his death seemed to carry a message: he died a poor man in large empty rooms, surrounded by his meager possessions. All he had was his books and paintings and artists’ fancies, nothing substantial. That was what he valued and needed; that was how he lived. He never had the money to fulfill his grand ambitions so he fulfilled them in art.”

She felt life tingle in her fingertips as she ran her hands over the red stones warming in the sunlight. He was telling her all this to try to distract her from what she’d come to look for.

“It’s as if money has the last word, even in art and dreams.”

They lingered in the square between the rooftops and his words reached deep inside her. In the dark corners of her mind, she sensed an accusation. She let out a hot breath she’d been fighting back.

“Is that so?” She said as if sticking her tongue out at him before hurrying daintily forward, climbing up, as he followed. He’d never seen her happy before.

By arriving in the city so early, they had the magic of sunrise all to themselves, and it lingered in the glow of Nora’s astonished face for hours.

“So, you’re going to take me where the sheikh went, right?” He hadn’t expected the tone of implicit command.

As they approached one of the silent stone houses, a woman popped out from behind a wooden door. She was mesmerizing, dressed all in white. She gave them an exaggeratedly warm greeting. “Don’t tell me. You’re on way your way to the El Greco Museum?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I think I know you,” she said to Rafi. “Have we met?” He was afraid she’d remember that he’d visited her school with the sheikh some months back. He gave Nora a look of warning, and tried to divert the woman’s attention.

“Do you know when it opens?” He asked her in Spanish.

“Follow me. It’s in the Jewish Quarter. I know a fantastic route we can take.” She walked them over as if they’d had a longstanding appointment. She would walk two meters ahead and then turn around and walk back to say something about the sights, like a tour guide they hadn’t employed. “This is when I usually have my coffee, and I hate it when people interrupt me and spoil my tranquil mornings.” They had no choice but to follow her. Her thin body was stuffed into white cotton trousers and a top tight enough to suffocate, with a gold design on the front. They could barely keep up with her as she teetered up and down slippery paved paths in stiletto heels — a terrifying sight. She was so light that the constant stream of chatter that poured out from between her dark-red painted lips threatened to blow her away. It was as though she were dying to talk and she mixed her own personal history in with that of the city.

As he translated what the woman was saying for Nora, Rafi slipped in a word of warning. “The sheikh met this woman, but he didn’t get the answer he was looking for. So we need to gain her trust.” She took them across slopes and up hundreds of steps to show them the conflict between modern and ancient architecture. She made them stop in front of the Arts Center and the City Hall, hulks of concrete isolated in the midst of all those stone buildings, to lament the victory of modern brick. She showed them secret passageways that led to the heart of that bloody mountain, taking them all the way up to the summit. She didn’t let them stop, not even at the Church of Santo Tomé where El Greco’s The Burial of the Count of Orgaz hung.

“El Greco is life itself,” she opined. “He was a Jew who disguised himself as a Christian and some people say he was the real author of Don Quixote , rather than Cervantes. He was a literary character as well, like in the story of Sidi Hamid Benengeli , the Arab historian who was the inspiration for Cervantes’ character Hidalgo or the melancholic knight, who’s identical to El Greco. El Greco’s paintings are all about how art can transform human beings into something holy and he was always trying to commemorate the beauty of Toledana women.”

There was a sudden tragic note in her voice. “We are very sad. I don’t mean us women, I mean those of us who are life’s missionaries. People who have a message don’t really live in this world so much as in a world of ideas and disguises. They’re cut off from life and desire and all petty things.” She’d make some comment on art and then politics and her own personal tragedies, before turning to religion and architecture. Her conversation dizzied them.

“Here’s an example of religious architecture in the Islamic style from the Almoravid period. This is Puerta Bab al-Mardum and that’s the Church of Cristo de la Luz. This piece of artistic genius was brought here by the Almoravid ruler Yusuf ibn Tashfin in 1086 when he came to the aid of the party kings at the Battle of Sagrajas and took Toledo back from Alfonso the Sixth of Castile. Look at the imposing gates and the decoration on the roofs. It reminds you of the exquisite architecture of Marrakesh, Fez, and Tlemcen.”

Without even pausing to take a breath, the woman led them over to the Synagogue of El Transito. “This synagogue was built in 1356 as a family synagogue for the king’s treasurer. It’s the oldest synagogue in Toledo, but it was turned into a church in 1492 after the Jews were expelled from Spain.” She led them to the center of the synagogue, where through two arching windows a mosaic of sunlight fell over their faces. She paused in front of three gypsum arches. “Here we see where my forefathers and yours, Jews and Muslims, came together to create a most outstanding example of Sephardic artwork.” She drew their attention to the intersecting web of plaster with Hebrew and Arabic calligraphy, Islamic motifs, and the name of God repeated many times. She sighed. “If only all this hadn’t been suppressed, mostly in the sixteenth century, you would’ve been able to see the variety of religious architecture for yourselves. Art used to fight over this city. Whoever set foot in Toledo would fall in love with the city immediately, and it didn’t matter how protective the city’s other lovers were, how they plotted to keep the city for themselves and eliminate their rivals.” Nora giggled suddenly, her laughter as slight and airy as the woman herself.