The Book of Madness and Cures

CHAPTER 26





Make His Entrance Wide

In the dim morning light, as I pushed open the granary door, I found my motionless father on his side upon the straw—an infant curled in sleep. Then, as I looked more closely, he was a lion, teeth bared, arrested midstride while running, front legs (his arms) drawn back to meet hind legs in readiness for the next bound. Oh, Papà! You’ve leapt into the other world.

Were you waiting for me in the wilderness of memory, so you could finally go? Yesterday we laughed together.

I could touch him now without fear.

I placed my hand on his cold body. An impenetrable chill, dense as iron. My father, dead in this hot clime, lay colder than Lorenzo had been in the mountains. I didn’t cry. I numbly washed him, then put on his spectacles, which I’d carried from Tübingen, and his fine shoes, which I’d brought from Leiden. (I kept his calipers from Tremp, for wasn’t he a measure of my life?) My father lay strangely restored by his things in death.

I must have been sitting there for a long time, for Malina entered and asked, “Where have you been? I’ve…” And then she saw my blue father in the corner, his livid skin the color of a guttered flame. “Oh!”

“He’s gone,” I said.

“Oh, Daughter,” she murmured, kneeling beside me. “He suffers no more.”

Yousef stood in the entry, drawn by her cry. “The man has left us, then?”

“Yes.”

“Oh Allah, forgive our living and our dead,” he recited in prayer.

“Have mercy on him,” Malina continued as I sat with my hand on my father’s hand. “Keep him safe and sound and forgive him, honor the place where he settles and make his entrance wide; wash him with water and snow and hail and cleanse him as a white garment is cleansed of dirt. Make his grave large and fill it with light.” Then she rose and left me, closing the door.

I didn’t know if an hour or three had passed, for the cool interior of the dark granary registered no lapse of time, but Malina and Yousef returned with a bolt of linen cloth. “This is our custom. Do you wish to wrap him?” she asked quietly.

I paused a moment, seeing my father as he would have been in Venetia, encoffined on a black gondola draped with mourning swags, as two men rowed us to the cemetery island. The sound of the oars rose and fell like rhythmic gusts of wind slapping the palm fronds. “Yes, let us wrap him.”

But I did nothing and only watched my two companions deftly binding my father. Malina knelt and held the linen bolt with her arms folded into it like a spool. Yousef, no longer afraid of him, unwound a portion of cloth, tucked it neatly at the feet, then wound it around my father, enshrouding him all the way to the head, then back again to the feet, then once more to the head, shearing the cloth there neatly with the knife I lent him from the sheath at my waist and tying it off.

In the early evening we put him on a cedar cart to carry him out into the desert. Yousef hitched one of the mules and tossed two shovels next to the corpse, and along with the village gravedigger we wended our way through the narrow streets toward the main gate. Townsfolk hurried inside their dwellings and latched their shutters when they saw us approach. Some murmured prayers. The lopsided wooden wheels of the cart clattered round and round and no one spoke. As we passed beyond the red town walls of Taradante, the sands moaned with a low gray wind. We moved toward an isolated rise above the spreading fingers of a wadi.

“Before he disappeared, he liked that place,” Malina explained.

I liked it too, for one could sit there and view the whole river valley, the red mud villages, the mountains and the sea in the distance.

Malina insisted that we bury my father quickly or his soul would linger in the granary and cause trouble. “We return the dead to their mother as soon as we can so they can find peace.”

“It is not our way, but this is not our place,” I said.

She touched my shoulder. “I am sorry, Daughter.”

When we reached the rise, I observed, “He will like this sky.” The darkening violet expanse overhead met the blur of colorless sand. Dark red mountains presided.

The men dug.

We were all silent, but the shovels chucked sand and rang loudly against the stones. I didn’t cry. I’d been releasing my father strand by strand from the dense weave of my heart for a long time. But the final cut was at once so severe and so small that it seemed impossible he could slip away from me as he did.

A man with red hair in a pale blue djellaba sat watching us from some distance. The child within kicked hard. I felt my father leave, and I was free.