The Invention of Solitude

case, and the genie agrees to stay his execution. But in exactly one year the merchant must return to the same spot, where the genie will mete out the sentence. Already, a parallel is being drawn with Sherhzad ’ s situation. She wishes to delay her execution, and by planting this idea in the king ’ s mind she is pleading her case—but doing it in such a way that the king cannot recognize it. For this is the function of the story: to make a man see the thing before his eyes by holding up another thing to view.
    The year passes, and the merchant, good to his word, returns to the garden. He sits down and begins to weep. An old man wanders by, leading a gazelle by a chain, and asks the merchant what is wrong. The old man is fascinated by what the merchant tells him (as if the merchant ’ s life were a story, with a beginning, middle, and end, a fiction concocted by some other mind—which in fact it is), and decides to wait and see how it will turn out. Then another old man wanders by, leading two black dogs. The conversation is repeated, and then he, too, sits down and waits. Then a third old man wanders by, leading a dappled she-mule, and once again the same thing happens. Finally, the genie appears, in a “ cloud of dust and a great whirling column from the heart of the desert. “ Just as he is about to drag off the merchant and slay him with his sword, “ as thou slewest my 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