And for a moment I believed again that it was nostalgia that had brought me here. But no. It was mere curiosity. While nostalgia is an emotion I connect with a concrete time: my late childhood, that sensitive adolescent phase when we have an infinite number of paths before us, but a few years later, when we reduce our choices to one, we feel a yearning for the time in which we could have chosen from among many different possibilities. That’s nostalgia for me.

Twenty years ago, as I drove to work in the morning, I would always glance to the left at the large brick-colored hill (Camelback Mountain) that reminds one of a camel’s hump and gives its name to the street where we then lived, just to be sure that the castle was still there. Someone had built a real medieval fortress that looked unnatural in this desert landscape, like a geographical misunderstanding, like an optical illusion . . .

Today, twenty years later, we were driving uphill, toward the castle, along narrow serpentines between villas, and then—in front of one of the gates, we caught sight of a stone sculpture of the Buddha adorned with gold chains. It had probably been dressed like this by children playing. The sculpture of a smiling (hip-hop) Buddha going to fetch water. A thirsty Buddha. I left him my bottle of tonic water and we went on our way. Buddha, admittedly, is not God, but that is just how God should behave. And as we drove toward the top of the mountain, I thought about the fact that God’s, Jehovah’s, and particularly Allah’s greatest shortcoming was that they were not prepared to let children decorate them or play with them in other ways.

The castle is being renovated. We saw its gate and walls from close up. But, sitting on its outer wall beside the steep road, I was able calmly to view the panorama of the city. Seen from above, the city itself seemed to me hidden: low buildings, stunted palms in a valley. Had it not been for a few skyscrapers in the center, I would have thought this wasn’t a city. It’s only at night, when the lights come on and stifle the stars in the sky, or become reflections of them, that the city reveals itself.