The curandero laid his burning twigs aside in a dish and moved to the head of the bed. He took Alexi’s head in his hands and stood silently, with his eyes shut, in an attitude of intense concentration.
Sabir, who was not used to squatting, could feel his thighs beginning to constrict with the tension. He didn’t dare to move, though, for fear of breaking the curandero’s trance. He glanced at Yola, hoping that she might somehow deduce his problem and offer him some guidance, but her gaze remained firmly fixed on the curandero.
Eventually, Sabir allowed himself to slide backwards down the wall of the caravan until he ended up with his rump on the floor and his legs stretched out beneath the bed. Nobody noticed him. He began to breathe more freely again. Then the cramp hit him.
Grasping his left thigh with both hands, he squeezed for all he was worth, writhing away from the bed, his teeth locked together in a rictus of pain. He wanted to yell, but didn’t dare to disrupt proceedings any further than he already had.
Like a plastic match unravelling, he turned first on to his front, one leg stretched out behind him and then scissored over on to his side when the cramp came back.
He was beyond caring what anybody else thought of him by this time and began to drag himself, like a slug, towards the door, beyond which the ever-watchful Sergeant Spola no doubt awaited him.
***
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disrupt proceedings like that. Only I got the cramp.’
Yola sat down beside him and began rubbing at his leg. Sabir was by now so far indoctrinated by gypsy custom that he looked guiltily around in case any of her women friends might see her and be outraged at her polluting - or being polluted by (he still didn’t quite understand which) - a gadje.
‘It’s all right. The curandero is very happy. You took away much of Alexi’s pain.’
‘I took away Alexi’s pain? You’ve got to be joking.’
‘Yes. Under the curandero’s hands it transferred itself to you. You must feel very close to Alexi. I had thought that it would transfer to me.’
Sabir was still in far too much pain to even consider laughing. ‘How long does this transfer last?’
‘Oh, a few minutes only. You are a…’ Yola hesitated.
‘No. Don’t tell me. A conduit?’
‘What is that?’
‘Something which leads to something else.’
She nodded. ‘Yes. You are a conduit. Unless the pain finds somewhere else to go, it will stay with Alexi. That was why I came to help. But the pain would not necessarily find me. It might find another target, that could not deal with it. Then it would return, much stronger and Alexi might die. The curandero is very pleased with you.’
‘That’s big of him.’
‘No. Don’t laugh, Damo. The curandero is a wise man. He is my teacher. But he says you, too, could be a curandero. A shaman. You have the capacity inside you. You only lack the will.’
‘And any understanding of what the heck he’s talking about.’
Yola smiled. She was beginning to understand Sabir’s gadje diffi dence by this time and to attribute less importance to it than heretofore. ‘When he’s finished with Alexi he wants to give you something.’
‘Give me something?’
‘Yes. I have explained to him about the eye-man and he is very worried for us both. He picked up the evil on me that the eye-man left and he has cleaned me free of it.’
‘What? Like he was cleaning Alexi?’
‘Yes. The Spanish call it una limpia - a cleansing. We don’t really have a word for it, as no gypsy can be cleaned of their ability to pollute. But evil that another has planted on us may be taken off.’
‘And the eye-man planted evil on you?’
‘No. But his own evil was so strong that his connection to me - the relationship he forged with me when I was standing on the stool, waiting to be hanged - this was enough to pollute me.’
Sabir shook his head in disbelief.
‘Listen, Damo. The eye-man read a story to me at that time. A story of a woman being tortured by the Inquisition. This was a terrible thing to hear. The evil of this story settled on me like dust. I could feel it sifting through the bag covering my head and settling about my shoulders. I could feel it eating into my soul and blanketing it with darkness. If I had died straight after hearing this story, as the eye-man intended, my lacha would have been tarnished and my soul would have been sick before God.’
‘Yola, how can someone else do such a thing to you? Your soul is your own.’
‘Oh, no, Damo. No. No one owns their own soul. It is a gift. A part of God. And we take it back to Him when we die and offer it to Him as our sacrifice. Then we are judged on the strength of it. That is why the curandero needed to clean me. God works through him, without the curandero knowing how or why it is done, or why he has been chosen - just as God worked through the prophet Nostradamus, who was chosen to see things that other men could not. The same thing happened with your cramp. God chose you to take Alexi’s pain away. He will be well now. You’ve no need to worry anymore.’
Sabir watched Yola walk away from him and back towards the caravan.
One day he’d understand all this, surely? One day he’d re-attain the simplicity that he’d lost as a child - the simplicity that these people he loved appeared to have held on to in the face of every last obstruction that life cared to put in their way.
69
The curandero still travelled by horse-drawn caravan. He had found himself a pitch at a riding stables about two kilometres out of town, on the right bank of the Etang des Launes. His horse presented an unnatural slash of brown amidst the predominant white of the gardien ponies in the corral.
As Sabir approached, the curandero pointed to the ground outside his front steps. Yola was already squatting there, an expectant expression on her face.
Sabir gave a vehement shake of the head, one eye still fixed on Sergeant Spola who was lurking near his car at the roadside. ‘I’m not squatting anywhere. Believe me. I’ve never had cramp like that before. And I don’t want it again.’
The curandero hesitated, smiling, as if he didn’t quite understand Sabir’s use of the vernacular. Then he disappeared inside the caravan.
‘He understands French, doesn’t he?’ Sabir whispered.
‘He speaks Sinto, Calo, Spanish and Romani-Cib. French is his fifth language.’ Yola looked embarrassed, as if the mere subject of how much the curandero might or might not be able to understand was subtly out of order.
‘What’s his name?’
‘You never use his name. People just call him curandero. When he became a shaman, he lost his name, his family and all that connected him to the tribe.’
‘But I thought you said he was the cousin of your father?’
‘He is the cousin of my father. He was that before he became a shaman. And my father
is dead. So he is still the cousin of my father. They called him Alfego, back then. Alfego Zenavir. Now he is simply curandero.’
Sabir was saved from further bewilderment when the curandero re-emerged, brandishing a stool. ‘Sit. Sit here. No cramp. Ha ha!’
‘Yes. No cramp. Cramp a bad thing.’ Sabir looked uncertainly at the stool.
‘Bad thing? No. A good thing. You take pain from Alexi. Very good. Cramp not hurt you. You a young man. Soon gone.’
‘Soon gone. Yes.’ Sabir didn’t sound convinced. He backed on to the stool, stretching his leg carefully out ahead of him like a gout victim.
‘You married already?’
Sabir glanced at Yola, unsure what the curandero was getting at. But Yola was doing her usual trick of concentrating intensely on the curandero and pointedly refusing to notice any strategies Sabir might care to use to gain her attention.
‘No. Not married. No.’
‘Good. Good. This is good. A shaman should never marry.’
‘But I’m not a shaman.’
‘Not yet. Not yet. Ho ho.’
Sabir was beginning to wonder whether the curandero might not in fact be short of a few marbles - but the stern expression on Yola’s face was enough to disabuse him of that notion.
After a short pause for prayer, the curandero felt inside his shirt and drew out a necklet, which he placed around Yola’s neck. He touched her once with his finger, along the parting of her hair. Sabir realised that he was speaking to her in Sinto.
Then the curandero moved across to him. After another pause for prayer, the man felt around inside his shirt and drew out a second necklet. He placed it around Sabir’s neck and then took Sabir’s head in both his hands. He stood for a long time, his eyes shut, holding Sabir’s head. After a while Sabir felt his eyes closing and a rather comforting darkness obtrude itself upon the surrounding day.
With no apparent effort, Sabir suddenly found himself watching the back of his own eyes - rather as an intruder in a cinema might find himself staring at the reverse image on the rear of a projection screen. First, the approaching darkness turned to a roseate hue, like water that has been imbrued with blood. Then a tiny face seemed to form itself a long way away from him. As he watched, the face slowly began to approach, gaining in precision the closer it came, until Sabir was able to make out his own features clearly imprinted on its physiognomy. The face came closer still, until it passed clean through the notional screen in front of him, to disappear via the rear of Sabir’s own head.
The curandero moved away from him, nodding in satisfaction.
Sabir opened his eyes as wide as they would go. He felt tempted to stretch himself - rather like a cormorant drying its wings on a rock - but for some reason he felt physically abashed in front of the curandero and contented himself with a series of small circular movements of the shoulders. ‘I saw my own face approaching me. Then it seemed to pass right through me. Is that normal?’
The curandero nodded again, as if what Sabir said did not surprise him. But he seemed in no mood to speak.
‘What is this?’ Sabir pointed to the necklet resting just above his sternum.
‘Samana’s daughter will tell you. I am tired. I will sleep.’ The curandero raised a hand in farewell and ducked in through the doorway of his caravan.
Sabir glanced down at Yola to see what effect the curandero’s strange behaviour might be having on her. To his astonishment, she was crying. ‘What is it? What did he say to you?’
Yola shook her head. She ran the back of her hand across her eyes like a child.
‘Come on. Please tell me. I’m completely out of my depth here. That much must be obvious.’
Yola sighed. She took a deep breath. ‘The curandero told me that I would never make a shamanka. That God had chosen another path for me - a path that was harder to accept, more humbling and with no certainty of achievement. That I wasn’t to question this path in any way. I was simply to follow it.’
‘What does he know? Why would he tell you such a thing? What gives him the right?’
Yola looked at Sabir in shock. ‘Oh, the curandero knows. He is taken away in his dreams by an animal spirit. He is shown many things. He may not influence events, however, but only prepare people to accept them. That is his function.’
Sabir masked his bewilderment with inquiry. ‘Why did he touch you like that? Along the hairline? It seemed to hold some significance for him.’
‘He was cementing both halves of my body together.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘If I am to succeed in what I have been chosen to do, the two halves of my body must not be split one from another.’
‘I’m sorry, Yola. But I still don’t understand.’
Yola stood up. She glanced uncertainly towards Sergeant Spola, then allowed her voice to drop to whisper. ‘We are all made in two halves, Damo. When God cooked us in His oven, He fused the two parts together into one mould. But each part still looked in a different direction - one to the past and one to the future. When both parts are reversed and brought back together - by illness, perhaps, or by the actions of a curandero - then this person, from that moment onwards, will look only to the present. They will live entirely in the present.’ Yola searched for the right words to convey her meaning. ‘They will be of service. Yes. That is it. They will be able to be of service.’
Sensing that they were finally aware of him once again, the ever-courteous Sergeant Spola raised his shoulders quizzically from over by the road. He had long acknowledged that he was way out of his depth with these gypsies, but as time trickled past, he was increasingly dreading the somewhat inevitable call from Captain Calque about his charges.
For Sergeant Spola had belatedly realised that he could never satisfactorily explain how he had allowed the girl to persuade him to abandon Alexi to his sickbed in favour of this visit to the curandero. Not even to himself could he explain it.
As he stood by his car, willing the gypsies to give up what they were doing and hurry back to him, he experienced a sudden desperate urge to return and check on his other charge in case someone, somewhere, had taken advantage of his good nature and was planning to land him in the horseshit.
Sabir raised a placatory hand. Then he turned his attention back to Yola. ‘And these things around our necks?’
‘They are for killing ourselves.’
‘What?’
‘The curandero fears for our lives against the eye-man. He senses that the eye-man will hurt us simply out of anger if we fall into his hands again. Inside this vial is the distilled venom of the Couleuvre de Montpellier. That is a poisonous snake that lives in the south-western part of France. Injected into the bloodstream, it will kill in under a minute. Taken by the throat…’
‘Taken
by the throat?’
‘Swallowed. Drunk like a liquid. Imbibed. Then it will take fifteen minutes.’
‘You can’t mean it. Are you seriously telling me that the curandero has provided us with a poison? Like the sort they used to give spies who risked torture by the Gestapo?’
‘I don’t know who the Gestapo are, Damo, but I doubt very much that they are as terrible as the eye-man. If he takes me again, I will drink this. I will go to God intact and with my lacha untarnished. You must promise me that you will do the same.’
70
Joris Calque was a deeply unhappy man. Only once in his life had he been responsible for breaking the news to a family of the death of their only son and that time he had been covering for another officer who was injured in the same engagement. He had been in no way responsible. Far from it, in fact.
This was another matter entirely. His proximity to Marseille, Macron’s home town and the fact that Macron had died violently, at the hands of a murderer and on his watch, made Calque’s job all the harder. It had somehow become a priority for him personally to deliver the news.
By mid-afternoon on the second day it was obvious to everyone that the eye-man had somehow escaped the net. Helicopters and spotter-planes had criss-crossed the entire area below the N572 Arles to Vauvert road - including the vast span of country delimited by the Parc Natiurel Régional de Camargue - and they had found nothing. The eye-man appeared to be a wraith. CRS units had inspected every building, every bergerie and every ruin. They had stopped every car going either in or out of the Parc Naturel. It was an easy place to seal off. You had the sea on one side and the marshes on the other. Few roads bisected it and those that did were fl at, with traffic visible for miles in every direction. It should have been child’s play. Instead, Calque could feel his position as chief coordinator of the investigation becoming more precarious by the minute.
THE NOSTRADAMUS PROPHECIES Page 36