De lo que aconteció a la mente de la mujer muy fuerte y muy brava que se casó con el mancebo

by Mitchell Harrison

Content Warnings: Violence Against Animals, Sexual Content

“Si al comienzo no muestras quien eres
Nunca podrás después, cuando quisieres.”
Don Juan Manuel, El conde Lucanor

Al-Andalus, 1031

In the first place—the primary unmovable place where motion was once and suddenly stimulated—we can locate the sole statement towards which my nature—precarious and accidental—may be reduced: I render my thanks to Allah, for the supremacy of His creation, the sheer abundance of His benefits.

In the second place—this humble peasant house where my new husband is at last at rest, blood caking the expanse of his face, his rough hands, his turquoise rings and previously golden ceremonial sleeves—I find recourse in devices, old and new.

My plump body, ravaged and spent, feels corpse-like.

My mind, having been atomized by delirium-inducing fear, is a little husk of dead matter, the shy twin sister of the cute pleasure point—that minuscule territory as mysterious to Ibn Sina as a thousand celestial spheres—that has been my sole companion.

It is my eyes that remain alive, banging around in my skull, motivated by the raw potency of the universe of dreams that have on this night, my wedding night, been exposed to me.

That I have comprehensively grasped the violent heart of this man without words or logic and only with desire seems significant. I possess a looking glass capability with which I can peer with precision into the masculine past and untangle the self-conscious web of its future.

🝊

Father and son were heaped in a playful tussle bound for escalation on the dirt floor of the home that would later be the setting of my transformation. The dog circulated the scene, yelping. The cat simply stretched, lazy and spoiled. Outside, the horse regarded the heavens or otherwise munched on hay.

The battle had been provoked by the elder, a show of errant strength, in the dominant manner of his past incursions, but unlike those skirmishes, out of which he always rose the victor, his son had for once gained the upper hand. 

Which is to say that the boy, gripping his father’s hair and pressing the leathery face of the man—verging on old age—into the dirt, had come to symbolize the totality of failure that had been the father’s peasant life, his silver and gold robbed from him by misfortunate speculation and invisible schemes, his strength wrested from him by a cruel twist of paternal fate and a, “Have you had enough?”

The father tacitly acknowledged defeat, his mind secretly scanning opportunities to turn the tables on the boy. The boy read these machinations through scheming currents in the old man’s grey hair and therefore did not release his grip without adding, his voice cracking, childlike still and disproportionate to his manly body,  “You will not try this again. I have surpassed you.”

“Get your hands off me!” 

The boy’s hand spidered across his father’s face, pressing it infinitesimally deeper into the dirt, to where congealed matter might give way to broken bone. Pain flourished in the old man’s cheek and nose and he let out a mute wail. Only then, on the knife-edge of real violence, did the boy release his father’s head. 

The two stood, the old man wiping the dirt off his face, the son off his threadbare clothes. They sat down at the table, in front of a meager meal of pulse stew. 

The boy stared into the murky soup as if it were a mirror into the future and caught a bored vision of field labor. Capable now, it would soon break his back and his spirit. What he needed a mirror for to appreciate this when his father was across the table, I do not know. He responded by throwing the bowl out the window at his beloved horse.

“What is it now? The stew too cold, the sun too hot, the dirt too tough, the work too hard?” The father said.

The boy replied, “We are too poor.” 

“You might improve our fortunes by leaving this village, joining some campaign or procuring us some cattle.”

“I’ll have my fortunes here.”

The father slurped his soup. “How unlike you to limit yourself.” He chuckled to himself. 

“I’ll marry the boss’ unruly daughter,” the boy said. 

The father laughed again and, looking at his son’s stone-like face, intuited that the boy had been serious. “You think that if someone less fortunate than even you could have improved their lot in life by marrying that wench, they wouldn’t have managed it by now? She’s poison! Any position you gain, she’ll topple it with her bad behavior. If she doesn’t discombobulate you with jealousy, she’ll destroy your reputation with shame. You’ll end up right back here in my place where you belong,” said the father, memories of his absent, dark-eyed wife and her licentiousness imbuing his opinion with sharp bitterness. “She is not fit to marry.”

“She is fit to fill the pockets of new clothes, so you will arrange it with your old war buddy, who Allah graced with innumerable wealth, and I will marry the disobedient tart who has been the true price he has paid for his riches.”

“Allah, help him understand,” the father appealed to the wood beams. To his son he said, “That tart will rip you to shreds!”

“Tonight is the last night I lift a ringless finger! Go to her father in the morning and arrange the wedding.”

Outside in the milky moonlight, the barren plots studded the land. The boy joined his horse and petted it with bewitched affection. The creature had up to this moment been the sole symbol onto which he displaced his ambitions, a tired workhorse whose yield was restrained by basic arithmetic. The boy had his dreams affixed to multitudes. 

Inside by spurious candlelight, the father stewed over his stew and divided his witlessness into a single, pitiful sentiment from the strange developments that had struck between this dawn and dusk. 

What will pass, will pass.

🝊

My name is Muhja bint al-Mustakfi—poetess, mathematician and amateur astronomer—and I came into this world holding such silence in the air that my father began preparing me for burial, spraying my body with perfume and covering it in a shroud, when at last the first whimper from my mouth was expelled in the form of a bleat. For this, during my innocent spring, my parents and servants called me their little goat. Nobody calls me this anymore. They wield cruel and misinformed diminutives. The little brat is emitted with bountiful derision. As for being a brat, I have been long prepared to expand my horizons and I’m not afraid to say so! The little whore is a favorite under the breath, though there is nothing at all whore-like about me (whores, of course, feel no desire for the act that makes their economy and I am rich with desire). 

Who would not flower into desire in such a decorous, splendorous house that sits on the brow of frenetic Córdoba? 

I’m told I advanced in the art of crawling, standing, walking, sprinting faster than the average baby, and this is because this geometry demands to be explored and its explorations doubled, tripled, repeated endlessly. Crepuscular tiles line the halls. Unnatural, cellular stalagmite hangs above the magic portals that give unto the colonnaded garden—where my father often lurks, attending to his flowers—quartered by thin pools of contemplative water in which I nightly, nakedly bathe. The marbled columns are adorned with verses from the Qur’an, which I have read a thousand times and have memorized and written on the walls of my interior palace in pretty calligraphy. The arched window of my room frames the lunar city. 

My first encounters with desire were marked by a juvenile fixation on the fruit that marked Adam’s temptation and then with morose attachment on Eve’s instrument, my little point of pleasure. Instructed in the art of self-pleasure by a pretty slave girl—who was jealously beheaded after my father discovered her private tutelage—I became a master at it and it has served me with unmatched comprehension. Unmatched, that is, till this night, my wedding night. I have held in my arms many men reduced to boys. One boy elevated to a man in a single night joined both the fleeting primary and sustained second pleasures of my life into delicious sensation. May Allah forgive me.

To cure me of my supposed ills, my father consulted the myopic canon, examined my urine and the pistachio color of my stool, and once ridiculously drew from these observations some idea of a foreheaded excess of black bile that plagued me with a dog disease. He attempted to balance my lasciviousness with marriage which only spurred my capacity to undo the fragility of the men who would otherwise make a match. When it was clear I had no desire for tradition, he sought to diminish me overall by inundating me with knuckled suppressants. The truth is, no matter his methodology, my desire multiplies against his more brutal techniques into something altogether wonderful, dark and strange. A new passageway into the fire-lit chambers of my mind, carved into the hill under the palace, unadorned with arabesque markings. 

My father, of course, has his own diseases. He is no Imam and like me lacks spiritual fulfillment that he compensates for by engaging in sexual proclivities with the slave girls. He covets me because he believes he cannot have me. This belief stirs ill-humors inside. His diagnoses and treatments are therefore not for me but for him. It is yet another divisor that splits me into plain chunks of matter. When he arrives at my star to practice his medicine, an abundance of possibilities lies impotent between us, teased yet abandoned, the fruit plucked and left to rot. And yet, I am partially to blame. I treat him with the same courtesy I would a physician. I allow myself to be examined, split apart, my vulgar insides displayed, my inner pungencies filling the air. Him, I do not explore. I know nothing of how he looks on the inside, how he really smells behind the civet with which he perfumes his beard. Here I find my true wickedness. Incuriosity. 

May Allah forgive me.

🝊

The boy’s father approached on the winding path lined with orange and oak and could be spied from my horseshoe window. His indecision, his sweaty brow, his nervous demeanor indicated another of my father’s peasant pals, one of that fallen sect of sidekicks that campaigned with him against Umayyad pretenders. Even without my new perceptions, the nature of his visit was clear. So too, the low station he inhabited on this plane despite a feeble stab at cleanliness. I perceived in his dizzy gait the slight juncture of riches, in his dirty forehead the fickle nature of victory. I was awash with a feeling that control over your destiny was a vanity that was quick to fade.

I employed a slave girl to invite him in and lead him to the garden where my father would shortly arrive to attend to his sickened olive. As she led him down the hall, I trilled a dreadful giggle from a secret corner, startling him into asking the girl for the source of the distressing ululation. “It is nothing, sayyidi.” I sent it again and he asked again. “It is perhaps a bird, sayyidi, but I don’t know anything about the songs of birds, so I can’t really say which it is.” It is no bird, it is the wheezing of some devil, he roughly said. “If it is anything at all, sayyidi, I’m certain it is not that.” The slave girl left him in the garden to dwell on the machinations of fear and the precariously fluid nature of lordship. He, no doubt ashamed of how his drowsy appearance diminished the magnificent courtyard, withdrew to the comfortable shadows of the loggias and awaited his once bloodthirsty and presently starved friend.

There I made my approach, swathed in silence, pregnant with mischief. “And who do we have here?” I whispered behind his back, startling him to such a degree that he leaped up and spun around in the air to face my impish grin. 

“It’s you,” was all he said. I pretended to pout and admonished him for his disappointment. “Where is your father, little one? I remember when you were as tall as my knee.”

“I’m not so little anymore. At this hour, my father is nowhere to be found.” I stepped towards him and he stepped back with caution, as if I were a hot branding iron. 

“I can take you to him, if you’d like,” I said. 

“You can point me in the right direction.”

I raised my eyes, “This place can be a maze to the uninitiated. Shall I initiate you in her mysteries?”

“That’s quite all right, my dear.”

“My dear! How sweet you are with me.” Still, I approached and still, he maintained the distance between us. I stepped aside and he mirrored himself into a corner where I held the key to all exits. “Maybe you can help me with something,” I stepped as close to him as possible without touching him. He tried to slip out, but I raised my arm and pushed him back with planetary influence. “I’ve been having these awful dreams and I need to unburden myself.” I smelled his dirty beard. It smelled like dust and camphor. It was not not intoxicating. His features were charred and overall exhausted, a scar threatened periodically to open under his left, waning eye, his nose bore the crookedness of a thousand blows and the lines on his forehead were sharp signifiers of a life of disappointments. But he was not not attractive. “Father, perhaps you can help me. Can I call you father?” I put my hand on his chest, which stirred within him a rush of suppressed desire. 

“Well, I am not your father, though I am here to see him.” His resistance to my pressure was admirable. With my free hand, I took a handful of delicate, swelling matter. He squealed with a curious mixture of delight and pain. 

“You are not my father, but you are strong like him. Perhaps stronger!” I dug my hand inside and took his erect penis in my hand, squeezing it. He said nothing, but only closed his eyes. “When my father beats me, I make like I’m shocked, hurt, and broken by his lashes and all his yelling. But really it excites me! With each strike—” I started to massage his penis “—my excitement grows. I curl up in a little ball and I cry out, ‘Why papa, why!’ With my hand between my legs I await his response, ‘Because you are little more than a common whore!’ How pleasurable it is to hear those words! He thinks I’m in pieces, crying on the floor, and in a sense I am, but not how he thinks. He thinks, ‘this time I’ve shown her! This time I’ve broken her! There will be no next time!’ But I am not shaking and writhing on the floor in pain and by the time he leaves, I’m already planning my next mischief!” He ejaculated in my hand. 

I will pause here to add that I am of the belief that one of the most pleasurable forms of love can occur without ever setting eyes on the beloved. I first experienced this faceless affection after overhearing my father admonish the works and character of a scholar thrice my age. What struck me was his description of the scholar’s silent, piercing gaze, the power of which dumbfounded his detractors and clearly struck my father with jealousy. When I at last met the scholar’s famous gaze, after months of imagining it on my body, it shied away when it ought to have been transfixing. The illusion was shattered. This kind of love either is everything you imagined it to be or nothing at all.

I took my hand out of the man’s tattered clothes and in the yellowed semen pooled up in my palm, I saw a small, ugly, and idiotic young husband. 

I allowed him to slink away and I retreated into the shadows where I tilted my hand and let the ethereal material that might have transformed into deformed skin and bone and a dull mind, reflectively drip with a leaden thud on the marble floor.  

Soon my father arrived to attend to his dying olive tree and the man surprised him with his presence in the garden. They hugged like the old companions they are, the present degrees of difference proffered by fate melting away. The man made his case to my father’s shock—he broke a branch of his olive tree when the man had finished babbling about his son’s intentions. 

The calculations were readable on my father’s face. What it might do for him to be rid of me written in a pleased, relieved smile. What it might do to him to lose me written in a drunk measure of sadness. The advantages won out against the disadvantages. My father would be cured of his melancholy, the man would be raised above his current station to give some impression of an equal arrangement and I would be given away to a lowly creature born of liverish semen.  

That is—roughly—how I became betrothed to the boy. 

🝊

Of course, the boy is not at all equal to my seminal vision. Where my mind’s eye intuited a gangly, hair-less monster, the man before me, full beard, giant arms, and long, dark hair, was not abandoned by the sculptor before the work was done. His face was a little ugly, but in tune with my secret preference for gapped teeth, shallow eyes, and long noses. Rough, swollen fingers with finely treated nails fell out of the sleeves of his healthy, cream-colored jubbah. He bore none of the father's rugged, albeit faded, handsomeness, but was instead a horizon of beauty I had yet to encounter. Perhaps, I girlishly considered, this is how the men of Cairo, Baghdad or Tabriz look.

The ceremony was as brief as it was bewildering. I had not been given the opportunity to dismantle the affair in advance and was thus abruptly wedded to a stranger. 

As is customary, the bride spends the first evening in the groom’s home. 

My father, stepmother and the boy’s father accompanied us to the humble house on the fringe of weathered territory. My stepmother, that villain, approached and whispered in my ear, “Try to be good this once.” Never! 

My father and his sturdy companion, with hidden odds as to the survival of my new husband, devised a scheme to get drunk and ask Allah for forgiveness later. With these dubious portents hanging in the air, the boy took me by my silk adorned arm and led me inside, the rickety door quivering shut behind us, favoring darkness.

The slaves who set the dinner table with leg of lamb, rice, dates, grapes, filled a water basin with clear water from my father’s garden and took their leave. It was only the boy and me at the table breathing by candlelight.

A beggar dog sat at the boy’s side, impatiently awaiting scraps, a lazy cat stretched on a nearby bench, and outside the window, I could see a malnourished horse grazing in the parched fields. The room smelled faintly of rat shit and wet, animal hair. Webs mapped each corner with the inane routes of trigonometric instinct. The skirt of my delicate silk stuck to the splintered chair and tore when I adjusted my ass. “I’ve clearly benefitted from this marriage,” I joked. The boy was not amused. He sat perfectly still, his piercing eyes stabbing the silence that settled between us like dust in a suddenly airless room.

“Dog!” He shouted, startling me in my seat with the blunt force of his hammer-voice. “Bring me the bowl of water, so that I might wash my hands before dinner.” 

The dog tilted his head and gave my husband a bewildered glance. “I will not ask again,” he said.

“If it’s water you need, I’ll collect it for you,” I replied, aware of the ridiculous task he requested of his canine. 

He ignored me, stood swiftly and lunged towards the dog, who scurried away in fear. My husband cornered him, unsheathed his sword and… well, I covered my face with my hands when the slashing and hacking began in the shadowed corner. Deathly yelping swarmed my ears and abruptly ceased, followed by the muted thud of the dog’s head as my husband dropped it on the dirt floor. 

He ensheathed his sword and sat back down at the table. 

My fingers fell away from my eyes like cloth and I beheld the blood-smeared edifice of my husband, a dull, locked-away look on his face.

“You’re trying to scare me. I’m not scared of earthly violence,” I lied. 

The same, unmoved, dull face met my resistance. 

“Cat!” I jumped as if he were commanding an imitation. “Bring me the bowl of water, so that I might wash my hands before dinner.” 

The cat lay on the bench, as still as my husband’s fierce anger. “I should have known, you’d be a traitor too, Cat!” 

He stood and unsheathed his sword. He pressed the cat by the belly into the bench and… the hacking and slashing began. The cat’s shriek drew my hands to my ears. I shut my eyes firmly, but briefly saw the sword, wild and bent, glittering like lightning in the dark sky. Again the all-encompassing silence of death filled the room, followed by the minute thud of a children’s ball bouncing on the dirt. 

He ensheathed his sword and took his seat anew. I shouted, “You’re just putting on a brave face to frighten me into submission!” I wanted to believe this, but in fact I cowered against the brutish behavior of this man I had been forced to call my husband. I looked over at the dog’s body, its head resting crudely in front of her own nipples. A tingling sensation grew in the back of my head, as if my hair was infested with lice. My intestines suddenly stuffed with the fecal stuff of fear. I persisted in futile rebellion, “A cat and a dog make an easy sacrifice!”

“Horse! Get in here and fetch me a bowl of water so that I might wash my hands before this first supper with my wife.” My eyes darted to the window. The delicate creature grazed, unfazed. 

“Traitors all!”

 He stood, knocking the table over, food flying in upsetting directions, and unsheathed his sword. He flew out the back, trailed by a gold-fringed shadow. Moved by the loco-motion of my own fear, I took to the window as the hacking and slashing began. The horse made no hideous remark, but only exhaled as if to say, ‘About time.’ In the moonlight, the blood sprayed out from the horse’s neck in a black spray, which read as less violent than the red puddles that accumulated under the necks of the cat and dog. I suddenly understood the virtues of assassinating by night.

He carried the head inside and dropped it at my feet, before turning back and seating himself where the table ought to have been. “Wife!” He said. “Bring me water to wash my hands.”

I gazed into the back of his turbaned head, sculpted into a malevolent black ball. “You’re crazy,” I said.

“I am not crazy,” he said. 

“That’s what a crazy person would say,” I replied. A cloud passed over my moon, the candles flickered as candles do.

“Bring me the water to wash my hands, or I will cut off your head.”

Without a further thought given over to rebellion, I stepped over the horse’s head and crossed the room to the bowl. I bowed to pick it up.

I knew myself well, had drawn self-portraits in the sand, and at long intervals had taken in my features in polished silver. The moles that arched from cheek to cheek, my sunken eyes with their mismatched irises, my long, unflattering nose, my fleshy, chapped lips. Nothing had changed, and yet the reflection that I caught in the murkiness of the bowl’s water, was as unfamiliar to me as Christian verse. 

The golden crescent that dangled over my brow flashed brightly and there by its Andalusian moonlight, an incision was cut by an unpracticed hand, tissue torn away from rib, silk from limb, foul insides revealed, odorous and thickly coated in black bile. The outer self of the bride was refashioned by proficient stitching, identical in face and body but in spirit alone a new, mathematically promiscuous intelligence.

How to mark this passage that gives unto the courtyard of myself? It cannot be marked! It cannot be followed! It is stumbled upon. 

I lowered the bowl and turned to face the boy. His expression had not changed. I let fall my silk and my shiny black hair and approached as he unsheathed his sword. I sat on his lap, the sword against my throat. I looked into his animal eyes. 

He threw down the sword and took me into his arms, his hand between my legs, fingers overwhelming me with insertions. Like that, having returned me to the pleasures that harkened the end of my innocence, he carried me to the room. 

As the celestial sphere covered itself with a blue blanket, he turned to me and said, "After all this excitement, I don’t think I’ll sleep until morning leaves. Do not permit anyone to wake me after I’ve fallen asleep, or I will cut off your head and the heads of the others.”

“I believe you, my love,” I said, a smile thinly stretched across my color-deepened face.

🝊

He sleeps now at my side. I may never sleep again. My dreams have been made real.

When my parents and his father arrive and assess the damage, thinking first that it was I who undid him, my father bemoaning his ruined reputation and his loss of the horse, they will proceed through the rotten carnage into this bedroom and their shocked glances will reanimate me and I will raise myself delicately so as not to interrupt the dreams of my husband, that they may find reality too.

I will raise my fingers to my lips and whisper with believable falseness, “Quiet, you traitors! He will kill us all!”

🝊

My husband conducts the business he inherited from my father—who has occupied himself with the severing of chicken heads in a vain attempt to impress my new stepmother—with casual cruelty and is all over stalked by fearful associates that quiver when his icy words saunter out of his calculated mind. He never drinks. His poetry is severe, sad, and funny. The moon is my enemy, I cannot destroy it—he once scribbled. I am dark and strange, a bald ibis—he confessed in another verse. Your date is a sweet and decadent treat—he wrote to me in a private stanza. With this same poet’s care, he handles me with the abuses I require for stimulation but knowing I am ever-verging on deafness never aims to frighten me with the volume of his voice, as had my father in the years past. He frightens me only when I desire it and only then with echoes—and never repetitions—of his threefold sacrifice the night of our wedding. As if in repentance for his viciousness, he has been witnessed whipping servants that maltreat their horses. In the universe of our bedroom, he teeters on the threshold of violence, his sword ever at my throat but never piercing my skin. I read sacks and conquests in his ever-fiery glances and to him I say, “Yes, my love.” To me, he replies with loving distances and allowances that have flourished into a life of the mind that I share in the garden with great scholars, poets, mathematicians—masters all—who come from all corners of the Muslim expanse.

Day by day, Córdoba is transformed by infighting, but I know that the presence of factions and contention between them drive advances in science, mathematics and poetry. In my freedom, I will be there to meet these new ideas with the invigorating attention of my liberty—Praise Allah and praise Him alone!

Though my body is here in the garden with my illustrious friends, my spirit is in Mecca where I accept the chains again.

🜁🜄🜂🜃

Mitchell Harrison (he/him) is a writer from La Porte, Indiana. His poetry can be found in the Michigan City Review of Books and Slash Magazine. Fiction in the York Literary Review.