Collected Prose

son, the darling of my heart!,” the first old man steps forward and says to the genie: “If I relate to thee my history with this gazelle and it seem to thee wonderful, wilt thou grant me a third of this merchant’s blood?” Astonishingly, the genie agrees, just as the king has agreed to listen to Sherhzad’s story: readily, without a struggle.
    Note: the old man does not propose to defend the merchant as one would in a court of law, with arguments, counter-arguments, the presentation of evidence. This would be to make the genie look at the thing he already sees: and about this his mind has been made up. Rather, the old man wishes to turn him away from the facts, turn him away from thoughts of death, and in so doing delight him (literally, “to entice away,” from the Latin delectare ) into a new feeling for life, which in turn will make him renounce his obsession with killing the merchant. An obsession of this sort walls one up in solitude. One sees nothing but one’s own thoughts. A story, however, in that it is not a logical argument, breaks down those walls. For it posits the existence of others and allows the listener to come into contact with them—if only in his thoughts.
    The old man launches into a preposterous story. This gazelle you see before you, he says, is actually my wife. For thirty years she lived with me and in all that time she could not produce a son. (Again: an allusion to the absent child—the dead child, the child not yet born—referring the genie back to his own sorrow, but obliquely, as part of a world in which life stands equal to death.) “So I took me a concubine and had by her a son like the rising full moon with eyes and eyebrows of perfect beauty….” When the boy was fifteen, the old man went off to another city (he, too, is a merchant), and in his absence the jealous wife used magic to transform the boy and his mother into a calf and a cow. “Thy slave died and her son ran away,” the wife told him on his return. After a year of mourning, the cow was slaughtered as a sacrifice—through the machinations of the jealous wife. When the man was about to slaughter the calf a moment later, his heart failed him. “And when the calf saw me, he broke his halter and came up to me and fawned on me and moaned and wept, till I took pity on him and said … ‘Bring me a cow and let this calf go.’” The herdsman’s daughter, also learned in the art of magic, later discovered the true identity of the calf. After the merchant granted her the two things she asked for (to marry the son and to bewitch the jealous wife, by imprisoning her in the shape of a beast—“else I shall not be safe from her craft”), she returned the son to his original form. Nor does the story quite end there. The son’s bride, the old man goes on to explain, “dwelt with us days and nights and nights and days, till God took her to Himself; and after her death, my son set out on a journey to the land of Ind, which is this merchant’s native country; and after a while I took the gazelle and travelled with her from place to place, seeking news of my son, till chance led me to this garden, where I found this merchant sitting weeping; and this is my story.” The genie agrees that this is a marvelous story and remits to the old man a third part of the merchant’s blood.
    One after the other, the two remaining old men propose the same bargain to the genie and begin their stories in the same way. “These two dogs are my elder brothers,” says the second old man. “This mule was my wife,” says the third. These opening sentences contain the essence of the entire project. For what does it mean to look at something, a real object in the real world, an animal, for example, and say that it is something other than what it is? It is to say that each thing leads a double life, at once in the world and in our minds, and that to deny either one of these lives is to kill the thing in both its lives at once. In the stories of the three old men, two mirrors face each other, each one reflecting the light of the other. Both are enchantments, both the real and the imaginary, and each exists by virtue of the other. And it is, truly, a matter of life and death. The first old man has come to the garden in search of his son; the genie has come to the garden to slay his son’s unwitting killer. What the old man is telling him is that our sons are always invisible. It is the simplest of truths: a life belongs only to the