the following is an excerpt from The Enchantress of Florence, which yes, I'm still reading. i'm telling you about it because it's the perfect love story/metaphor, and it made me giggle. wanna hear it? here it goes:
That night the emperor dreamed of love. In his dream he was once again the caliph of Baghdad, Harun al-Rashid, wandering incognito, this time, through the streets of the city of Isbanir. All of a sudden he, the caliph, developed an itch that no man could cure. He returned swiftly to his palace in Baghdad, scratching himself all over throughout the twenty-mile journey, and when he got home he bathed in asses' milk and asked his favorite concubines to massage his whole body with honey. Still the itch drove him mad an no doctor could find the cure, though they cupped him and leeched him until he was at the very gates of death. He dismissed those quacks and when he regained his strength decided that if the itch was incurable the only thing to do was to distract himself so thoroughly that he stopped noticing it.
He summoned the most famous comedians n his realm to make him laugh, and the most knowledgeable philosophers to stretch his brain to the limit. Erotic dancers aroused his desires and the most skillful courtesans satisfied them. He built palaces and roads and schools and race tracks and all of these things served well enough but the itching continued without the slightest sign of improvement. He has the whole city of Isbanir placed in quarantine and fumigated its gutters to try to attack the itching plague at its source but the truth was that very few people seemed to be itching as badly as he was. Then on another night when he went cloaked and secret through the streets of Baghdad he saw a lamp at a high window and when he looked up he glimpsed a woman's face illuminated by the candle so that she seemed to be made of gold. For that single instant the itching stopped completely but the moment she closed her shutters and blew out th candle it returned with redoubled force. It was then that the caliph understood the nature of his itch. In Isbanir he had seen that same face for a similar instant looking down from another window and the itching had begun after that. 'Find her,' he told the vizier, 'for that is the witch who has hexed me.'
Easier said than done. The caliph's men brought seven women a day before him on each of the next seven days, but when he obliged them to bare their faces he saw at once that none of them was the one he sought. On the eighth day, however, a veiled woman came to the court unbidden and asked for an audience, saying she was the one who could ease the caliph's pain. Harun al-Rashid had her admitted right away. 'So you are the sorceress,' he cried. 'I am nothing of the sort,' she answered him. 'But ever since I caught a glimpse of a man's hooded face in the streets of Isbanir I have been itching uncontrollably. I even left my hometown and moved here to Baghdad hoping the move would ease my affliction, but it was no use. I have tried to occupy myself, to distract myself, and have woven great tapestries and written volumes of poetry, all to no avail. Then I heard that the caliph of Baghdad was looking for a woman who made him itch and I knew the answer to the riddle.'
With that she boldly cast off her veiling garment and at once the caliph's itches disappeared completely and were replaced by an entirely different sentiment. 'You too?' he asked her and she nodded. 'No more itching. Something else instead.' 'And that, too, is an affliction no man can heal,' said Harun al-Rashid. 'Or, in my case, no woman,' the lady replied. The caliph clapped his hands and announced his forthcoming marriage; and he and his Begum lived happily ever after, until the coming of Death, the Destroyer of Days.
Such was the emperor's dream.
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