The Journeyer

Eden introduced sexual pleasure into the world, and that therefore sexual pleasure is wrong and ugly and abominable. We Muslims put the blame where it belongs. Not on the inoffensive snake, but on Eve and all her female descendants. As the Quran says in the fourth sura, ‘Woman is the source of all evil on the earth, and Allah only made this monster that the man should be repelled, and turn away from earthly—”

“Ciacche-ciacche!” said my uncle.

“Pardon, master?”

“I said nonsense! Sciocchezze! Sottise! Bifam ishtibah!”

Looking shocked, Nostril exclaimed, “Master Mafio, you call the Holy Book a bifam ishtibah?”

“Your Quran was written by a man, you cannot deny it. So were the Talmud and the Bible written by men.”

“Come now, Mafio,” my pious father put in. “They only transcribed the words of God. And the Savior.”

“But they were men, indisputably men, with the minds of men. All the prophets and apostles and sages have been men. And what sort of men did the writing of the holy books? Circumcised men!”

“I beg to suggest, master,” said Nostril, “that they did not write with their—”

“In a sense, they did exactly that. All those men were religiously mutilated in their infant organs. When they grew to manhood, they found themselves diminished in their sexual pleasure, to the degree they had been diminished in their parts. That is why they made their holy books decree that sex should be not for delight, but solely for procreation, and in all other respects a matter for shame and guilt.”

“Good master,” Nostril persisted. “We are only divested of foreskin, we are not pruned to eunuchs.”

“Any mutilation is a deprivation,” Uncle Mafio retorted. He dropped his camel’s rein to scratch his elbow. “The sages of ancient days, realizing that the trimming of their members had blunted their sensations and their enjoyment, were envious and fearful that others might find more pleasure in sex. Misery loves company, so they wrote their scriptures in a way to ensure that they had company. First the Jews, then the Christians—for the Evangelists and the other early Christians were only converted Jews—and then Muhammad and the subsequent Muslim sages. All of those having been circumcised men, their disquisitions on the subject of sex are akin to the singing of the deaf.”

My father looked as shocked as Nostril did. “Mafio,” he cautioned, “on this open desert we are terribly exposed to thunderbolts. Your criticism is a novel one in my experience, perhaps even original, but I suggest you temper it with discretion.”

Unheeding, my uncle went on, “Their putting fetters on human sexuality was like cripples writing the rules for an athletic contest.”

“Cripples, master?” Nostril inquired. “But how could they have known they were cripples? You contend that my sensations have been blunted. Since I myself have no exterior standard alongside which to measure my own enjoyments, I wonder how anyone else could possibly do so. I can think of only one sort who might qualify to judge even himself. That would be a man who has had experience, so to speak, before and after. Excuse my impertinence, Master Mafio, but were you perhaps not circumcised until midway in your adult life?”

“Insolent infidel! I never have been!”

“Ah. Then, excepting such a man, it seems to me that no one could adjudicate the matter but a woman. A woman who has given joy to both sorts of men, the circumcised and the uncircumcised, and paid close heed to their comparative heights of enjoyment.”

I winced at that. Whether Nostril spoke in snide malice or sheer ingenuousness, his words hit very close to Uncle Mafio’s true nature and probable experience. I glanced at my uncle, fearing he would blush or bluster or maybe knock Nostril’s head off, and thereby confess what he had so far kept concealed. But he bore the seeming insinuation as if he had not noticed it, and only continued to muse aloud:

“If the choice were mine, I should seek out a religion whose scriptures were not written by men already ritually maimed in their manhood.”

“Where we are going,” my father remarked, “there are several such religions.”

“As I well know,” said my uncle. “That is what makes me wonder how we Christians and Jews and Muslims dare to speak of the more Eastern peoples as barbarians.”

My father said, “The traveled man can look with a pitying smile at the crude pebbles still treasured by his home folk, yes, for he has seen real rubies and pearls in far places. Whether that also holds true for the home-kept religions, I cannot say, not being a theologian.” He added, rather sharply for him, “But this I do know: we are at present still under the Heaven of those religions you so openly disprize, and vulnerable to heavenly rebuke. If your blasphemies provoke a whirlwind, we may not get any farther. I strongly recommend a change of subject.”

Nostril obliged. He reverted to his earlier topic and told us, at stupefying length, how each letter of the Arabic fish-worm writing is permeated by a certain specific emanation from Allah, and therefore, as the letters squirm into the shape of words and the words into reptilian sentences, any piece of Arabic writing—even something as mundane as a signpost or a landlord’s bill—contains a beneficent power which is greater than the sum of the individual characters, and therefore is efficacious as a talisman against evil and jinn and afarit and the Devil Shaitan … and so on and on. To which the only rejoinder was made by one of our bull camels. He unfurled his underworks as he strode along, and copiously made water.

5

WELL, we did not get annihilated by any thunderbolt or whirlwind, and I cannot recall that anything else of significance happened on that journey until, as I have remarked, we did come to a second green oasis in that dun dreariness, and again made camp, intending to luxuriate there for two or even three days. In keeping with my resolve, I did not this time let Aziz out of my arm’s reach while we drank our fill of the good water and watered the camels and topped up our water bags and—especially—while we bathed our bodies and laundered our clothes, during which time he and all the rest of us were necessarily naked. And when again we were disposed to pitch our tents privily apart from each other, I made sure that his and mine were side by side.

We did, however, all cluster together around the camp fire for our evening meal. And I recollect, as if it were yesterday, every trivial incident of that night. Aziz took his seat across the fire from me and Nostril, and first my uncle sat companionably close beside him, and then my father plumped down on his other side. While we gnawed gristly mutton and munched moldy cheese and dipped shriveled jujubes into our water cups to soften them, my uncle gave arch sidewise looks at the boy, and I and my father cast wary looks at both of them. Apparently unaware of any tension in the group, Nostril casually remarked to me:

“You are beginning to look like a real journeyer, Master Marco.”

He was referring to my new-grown beard. In the desert, no man would be fool enough to waste water on shaving, or vain enough to endure a lather that must get mixed with abrasive sand and salt. My own beard was by then of a manly density, and I had ceased even to use the easy depilatory of the mumum salve, letting the beard grow as a protection for the skin of my face. I took only the trouble to keep it clipped to a tidy and comfortable shortness, and I have worn it so ever since.

“Now you may realize,” Nostril chatted on, “how merciful it was of Allah to give whiskers to men, but not to women.”

I thought about that. “It is clearly good that men have beards, for they may have to go into the scouring desert sands. But why is it a mercy that women have them not?”

The camel-puller raised up his hands and his eyes, as if in consternation at my ignorance. But before he could reply, little Aziz laughed and said:

“Oh, let me tell him! Think, Mirza Marco! Was it not considerate of the Creator? He did not put a beard upon that creature who could never keep it shaven clean or even trimmed to neatness, because her jaw waggles so!”

I laughed, too, and so did my father and uncle, and I remarked, “If that is the reason, then I am glad for it. I would recoil from a whiskered woman. But would it not have been wiser of the Creator to create females less inclined to wag the jaw?”

“Ah,” said my father, the proverbialist. “Wherever there are pots, they will rattle.”

“Mirza Marco, here is another riddle for you, Mirza Marco!” chirruped Aziz, merrily bouncing where he sat. The boy was admittedly a soiled angel, and in many respects more worldly-wise than any adult Christian, but he was, after all, still a child. His words almost tumbled over each other, he was so eager to get them out. “There are few animals in this desert. But there is one to be found here which unites in itself the natures of seven