Darling by Richard Rodriguez Read Free Book Online

restaurant continue their conversations. The proprietress of the place turns a page of the book she is reading.
    At four o’clock in the morning, the swimming pool is black. The hotel is asleep and dreaming. The neon ignites. The old man picks up his microphone to rend our dream asunder.
    It is better to pray than to sleep.
    The voice is not hectoring; it is simply oblivious. It is not like one’s father, up early and dressing in the dark; it is like a selfish old man who can’t sleep. The voice takes its permission from the desert—from the distance—but it is the modern city it wakes with enforced intimacy.
    The old man’s chant follows a tune; it is always the same tune, like a path worn through a carpet. And each day the old man becomes confused by the ornamental line—his voice is not agile enough to assay it. His voice turns ruminative, then puzzled. Finally, a nasal moan:
    Muhammad is the prophet of Allah.
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    River Jordan water runs between my toes—a breathtakingly comfortable sensation. I have taken a bus tour of Galilee; the bus has stopped at the Yardenit Baptismal Site, which resembles a state picnic grounds. I watch a procession of Protestant pilgrims in rented white smocks descend some steps into the comfortable brown water.
    Protestantism is the least oriental of the desert faiths. Protestants own little real estate within the walls of Jerusalem. They own nothing of ancient squabbles between the Holy Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman Empire. Protestants are free to memorialize sacred events without any compulsion to stand guard over mythic ground.
    For example, the traditionally venerated site of Christ’s baptism is near Jericho. After the Six-Day War in 1967, that location was declared off-limits to tourists. And so this place—Yardenit—of no historical or religious significance, was developed as a place to which Christians might come for baptism ceremonies. The faith of evangelical pilgrims at Yardenit overrides the commercialism that attaches to the enterprise (
Your Baptism videotaped by a professional
). One bank or the other, it is the same river, and pilgrims at Yardenit step confidently into the Bible.
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    Distance enters Abraham’s seed with God’s intimacy. A birth precedes the birth of Isaac. There is domestic strife of God’s manufacture. For God also arranges that Sarah’s Egyptian servant, Hagar, will bear Abraham a son. That son is Ishmael; the name means “He Listens.” Sarah soon demands that Abraham send Hagar and her son away.
I cannot abide that woman. She mocks me.
    So Hagar and Ishmael are cast into the desert of Beersheba as Abraham and Sarah and the camels and tents and servants and flocks flow slowly away from them like a receding lake of dust.
    Abruptly Haim tells me to stop. “Listen! The desert has a silence like no other,” he says. “Do you hear a ringing in your ear? It is the bell of existence.”
    Not far from here, in Gaza, missiles are pitched through a blue sky. People who will be identified in news reports this evening as terrorists will shortly be killed or the innocent will be killed, people who even now are stirring pots with favored spoons or folding the last page of the morning paper to line the bird’s cage.
    I hear. What do I hear? I hear a truck shifting gears on a highway, miles away.
    God hears the cry of Ishmael: God finds Hagar in the desertand rescues her dying child by tapping a spring of water—a green silk scarf pulled from a snake hole. God promises Hagar that Ishmael, too, will be a nation. From Ishmael’s line will come the Arab tribes, and from the Arab tribes, the Prophet Muhammad.
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    Mahdi, my Palestinian guide, pulls off the main road so I can see the Monastery of the Temptation in the distance. (Mahdi has been telling me