Aphrodite by Isabel Allende

Author:Isabel Allende
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2021-07-23T00:00:00+00:00

The Harem

Although it seems unimaginable, there once was a time before television. I grew up playing house with rag dolls and reading anything I could get my hands on, especially serials, which my grandfather abominated but nonetheless made their way into the house as contraband. It was in serial form that I read classic novels and countless romantic tales, most of them set in past epochs and exotic climes. The only one that left its mark on my mind was the tragedy of a noble Englishman whose sweetheart was stolen from him by Turkish pirates on the Mediterranean Sea. The author must have found his inspiration in the story of Aimée de Rivery, a young French cousin of Josephine Bonaparte kidnapped by Levantine pirates on the high seas toward the end of the eighteenth century and sold as a slave into the harem of the sultan Abd al-Hamid I.

After many adventures, the hero of my romance discovered that his beloved had been bought for the seraglio of the sultan and determined to rescue her with the complicity of a Jewish merchant who had access to the inner courtyard of the palace, where he went to offer his rich cloth, although he was always closely watched and separated from the women by screens and curtains. My noble Englishman shaved off his beard and dressed as an odalisque—an entire chapter was devoted to the description of babouches embroidered in pearls, a belt of gold, silken harem pants, brocaded vest, all his veils and jewels—and, swinging his hips like a sultry charmer and modestly covering his face with a veil, he was able to deceive the Great Black Eunuch, the maximum authority in the harem.

Once inside the gynaeceum—another long chapter about the opulent rooms, the women, the baths and gardens—he found his sweetheart, just in the nick of time, and saved her from being led to the bed of the depraved sultan; they then escaped by leaping walls and eluding Janizaries, a feat that would have been impossible in real life but that launched me, with no turning back, into the vice of exaggeration and adventure.

What man has not had the fantasy of having a harem? And what woman with a lick of sense has not thought of it as her worst nightmare? I say this from the perspective of my mature years, because at eighteen, when I was working at a job copying forestry statistics, I used to dream of being the fourth wife of an Arab millionaire who would appreciate my buttocks and allow me to spend my life eating chocolates and reading novels. Feminism saved me from the traps of imagination. Great painters such as Ingres and Delacroix idealized on their canvases the exotic and secret beauty of those immured women, birds in their golden cages, whose only fate was to satisfy the whims of a master and give him male offspring. At the midpoint of the last century, when accessible routes were opened to North Africa and Asia, many

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.