So. The unconventionally handsome tanned guy with gap-toothed smile, British accent, and a camera slung around his neck? The one following twenty-nine-year-old me around a nocturnal Alhambra ablaze with oil lamps and candles (and champagne)? Turned out he liked to wear my underwear.
Ladies, he was Bad Love Incarnate. In or out of my lingerie, in any sense you would like to take that phrase, I have spent years musing over metaphor so I’m game for whatever you’ve got.
Also turned out that the charming elderly couple to whom Bad Love Incarnate introduced me when we returned inside to the bar (from gazing out over Granada from the ramparts of the Alhambra, the city ablaze, ourselves ablaze, everything ablaze and so we were thirsty) were… his parents.
With whom he lived. In a converted schoolhouse in a tiny Andalusian town—no sea view, up in the mountains—named Vélez-Málaga (if you know where that is, then you really know Spain). They had dubbed the house, imaginatively, La Escuela. There were two guest houses. Bad Love Incarnate had set up housekeeping (sort of) in one.
I decided the other one was for me.
Now that I have you hooked, all three of you dear, dear, dear readers, ‘ere long I needs must leave you, because I have a dinner date. With the ex-husband. One of them, anyway.
No, no, no, no Bad, Bad Love with him. There will be none of that, believe me, I just need to get him to sign the tax return: he’s my ex in the eyes of everything but the law. He continues to mooch health insurance off me, or more properly said, off my employer, all perfectly legal because we’re still married on paper… I just need to look good enough to get him to sign on the dotted line (*I* get the $$ because *I* earned it in the first place), which means I actually have to brush my hair for the first time today. So I gotta go.
But next week, I promise, promise, promise, a nice long entry about Bad Love Incarnate, alcohol and drugs, and Bad Love Incarnate’s father. Who was born in Gibraltar, who spoke Spanish like a native of Andalusia—Bad Love Incarnate was worse than useless in that language; however messed up we were, my Spanish was always, always, always pretty much perfect so I talked for both of us. And who (the dad, id est) was a British spy in North Africa during WWII.
And we have to tell about Bad Love Incarnate in order to get us to Husband #1 (tonight’s activity involves #2), who will, in turn, I promise, cross my heart and hope to die, get us back to Kurt-not-Kurt, which is, I know, all you care about, the only reason you ever stop by this little inter-place. I know. Don’t worry, I don’t take it personally.
But before I go upstairs to brush my hair, or at least attempt to untangle it, I will leave you to ponder why we like love to hurt so much. Why we—the human race—have always liked love to hurt so much…
All the way back to the fourteenth century, they liked love to hurt so much. Witness this love lyric penned by one who knew the nocturnal Alhambra well, in all its fourteenth-century glory, being a favorite among the Sultan’s guests… he’d probably enjoyed the very same glittery view Bad Love Incarnate and I contemplated on that fateful night. And he was probably just as drunk as we were—the idea that medieval Muslims did not drink is a very, very mistaken one. Anyhoo…
The blooms of beauty in the garden
Were ripped asunder by their howdahs,* as they took them for their sleeves;
She bewitches; she can, if she wishes, on the day of defamation,
Throw a lance that will make shudder [as it hits its mark].
For her, man’s reason is booty,
That of those who died honorably from love’s swiftness.
Whenever she wills our drunkenness,
She gives us a draught of bad omens, instead of wine…
Among that which love had left to me is a flash of lightning—
They imagined it glimmering from between the teeth of a smile,
And the breath of a breeze, coming from the armor…
From the caravan, where they die of thirst…
–court poet Abū Ishāq Ibn al-Hajj, Granada (maybe even the actual Alhambra), 14th c.
**NB: A howdah is one of those litter things, like a little carriage with silken curtains balanced on the backs of camels. Inside, the dark-eyed beauty who’s just eaten the poet’s heart for dinner, and now is off ‘cross the cruel sands of the Arabian desert to the next way-station, buh-BYE.
That there poem was translated from the Arabic—the medieval Arabic, no less—just for y’all (okay, also for an academic publication, with footnotes that I took out because people don’t like footnotes on blogs, but it was cut and pasted ‘specially and uniquely for your delectation), by your friend the Redneck Scheherazade. Who has to go brush her hair, like, right now. And maybe her teeth too.
Catch you next Friday. Till then, love lots and love badly. If you can’t do lots, then at least do badly.