It’s strange to walk again, to move freely inside a structure of blood and bone and muscle. We’re strolling in a lemon grove just under the tower where I was imprisoned — not the enchanted tower, but the actual tower that’s been restored. Susan has a guidebook to the Alhambra in her bag, and occasionally sits down on a stone bench and gets it out and reads to herself. This makes me restless. I’ve been cooped up so long, I want to run and stretch and feel the blood running down to my toes. Her toes. She’s wearing sandals and her feet are dusty and poorly manicured. She needs to soak in a scented bath full of rose petals, and that frizzy hair — I can feel it prickling my neck — needs to be oiled and combed. I have not yet seen myself in a mirror, so I have no objective view of what I look like yet, only her own hazy memories of herself floating about in our shared brain. She thinks of herself as tall and willowy and young, with raven hair, though she must be forty if she’s a day, an old woman for my century. But I had no choice. It was either her, or that ginger cat stalking in the brush, or complete dissipation into the atmosphere.

Fuente de la Salud
BY Isidoro Marín Gares
(Granada, 1863-1926)
FROM El Albayzín, Inspiración de Pintores,
Granada, AA. VV. Bajo Albayzín, 2001
Biblioteca Provincial de Granada

I find that I know all about Susan, just as if I really were her. I have complete access to her past through her visual and verbal memories. She grew up in the Midwest of that country called America, had brothers and sisters (unlike me) and studied Spanish in college. To my delight, her current strongest memories, stirred up by being here, of course, are connected with the Alhambra, for she came to Granada for a semester abroad, and used to leave the noisy city and walk up the Cuesta de Gomerez into these gardens. She was in love with a Spanish boy back then, and they met up here, but after she went home he stopped writing to her. She was miserable, but got over it. Now she’s married, with two children who are off at some music camp in Michigan. She’s come back to the Alhambra with her husband, but she’s thinking a lot about that old romance.

Susan looks up at my tower — or rather, the new restored tower that resembles the one I remember before my enchantment imprisoned me in the invisible duplicate, and the actual tower fell to ruin. I used to lean on my elbows and look out that narrow window near the top, trying to get a glimpse of Prince Ahmed lounging in his silk robes in the gardens below. This was after he’d used the magic carpet from Solomon’s throne to carry off a beautiful Christian princess from Toledo, and I knew my love was hopeless. He refused to take another wife, and even though he knew I was pining for him, he never stopped to pick up the roses I flung down, and he wouldn’t answer my letters. That’s when I made the terrible error of consulting an old sorcerer, who gave me an incantation to make myself irresistible. But he was either too dithery to get the words straight, or I recited them wrong, for as soon as they were out of my mouth I fell into the deep sleep of an enchantment.

Susan sighs deeply. That isn’t my sigh, for I gave up that useless activity centuries ago. But she thinks she’s imagining my life as she looks around the gardens of the Alhambra, that the details of my past flitting across her brain are something she’s making up. She’s even drawing a parallel between her love for that Spanish boy with a common name, Juan something, and my great passion for Prince Ahmed.

Absurd!