A Cure for Serpents

by Alberto Denti di Pirajno

  We crept in and placed ourselves behind the boards of a disused storeroom so as to see without being seen. About seventy women were crouching on the ground in a wide circle, in the middle of which was a tub full of water. A woman’s voice was chanting – such low notes that they seemed to come from a ventriloquist – to the accompaniment of a dull beating of drums and ringing of invisible bells.

  The women swayed from their hips to the rhythm of the drums, their heads falling now on to one shoulder, now on to the other, as though blown by the wind. A continual murmur of prayer rose from the congregation, and at times swelled into groans and cries which dominated the singing and the beating of the drums.

  This had been going on for some considerable time. It was hot, and what with the monotony of the voices and the hypnotising effect of the rhythmically waving heads, my eyes became heavy and, seated as I was on the ground with my back to a wall still warm from the sun, I must have fallen asleep when a sudden silence woke me with a start.

  Hajj Belgassem had appeared in the doorway and was standing at the top of the six steps leading down into the courtyard. He seemed to me more insignificant than ever as he slowly descended, followed by an old woman with a bundle tied in a coloured handkerchief.

  He sat down in the front row between two women who hastened to make room for him. The old woman untied the knots in the handkerchief and took out a large frog with henna-tinted legs which she set down reverently in front of the faqīh. ‘That is his spirit,’ whispered Mahdi in my ear, adding that it was the jinn which gave him his thaumaturgic power.

  All eyes were fixed on the frog. The singing had stopped and the drums and bells were silent. I became aware that I too was staring stupidly at the creature. It lay there with legs outspread and eyes closed – so torpid and motionless that, except for the perceptible beat under its jaw, it might have been stuffed.

  The old man made a sign with his hand and the women again began swaying and crying out, the drums began to beat furiously and the singer resumed her singing with renewed vigour.

  The whole crowd was now shrieking invocations, and the singer was doing her best to hold her own against the combined racket of the women and the drums.

  This hellish din had continued for an hour or so and my head was beginning to ache when suddenly a girl sprang to her feet in the corner of the courtyard. Her eyes were open wide in an expression of stark tragedy. She stepped quickly over the women in front of her, flung herself into the open space and began to throw herself about in the most savage manner, stamping her feet, jerking her shoulders, agitating her arms and shaking her head so violently that the braids of her hair broke loose, and silver ornaments and bangles, amulets and little red woollen tassels flew in all directions. Gasping and panting, she took great leaps into the air; she drew her head into her shoulders, thrust it forward and then flung it back with such force that it seemed she must dislocate her neck. She had progressively dispensed with hāik, bodice and trousers, and was now covered only in her shift, tied at the hips with a coloured scarf.

  These contortions continued for an hour; the girl became soaking wet; her shift clung to her body, her hair stuck to her face and lips, and a stream of foam and sweat ran down from the corners of her mouth.

  Suddenly she stopped in front of the faqīh and fixed her eyes on him, wrinkling her forehead as if she were trying to remember something. Then, with a piercing shriek, she flung herself on to the ground. The dust clung to her wet arms and legs as she writhed and twisted, dragging herself on her stomach along the ground which was strewn with beads from her broken necklace. At this point, two powerful and bony negresses picked her up and removed the last remnants of the tattered shift which hung from her shoulders. Naked, the girl seemed to be made of ivory as she hung between the smoke-black arms of the negresses who carried her towards the tub. For a moment my view was obstructed by the crowd and I only heard the sound of a body plunged repeatedly into the water. When I saw the girl again, she was wrapped in a blanket and her expression was completely altered. As the women flocked around her she smiled ecstatically and cast her eyes heavenwards; she kissed the singer on the head and smilingly received the congratulations of her friends, as they led her to the magician’s feet.

  The faqīh had not moved at all throughout the séance, except to take on to his lap the frog with the henna-tinted legs. The girl knelt before him and asked his blessing, his baraka. As Belgassem placed his hands upon her head, Mahdi and I slipped out of the courtyard: we had been there several hours, and the evening shadows were already falling.

  Chapter Two

  A CURE FOR SERPENTS

  IN 1926 I left Buerat el Hsun and set up a dispensary in Misurata, further along the coast. In those days Misurata was almost entirely cut off from its hinterland. The revolt of the Arabs was recent and still smouldering, and only a few miles away there were tribes which had not yet submitted to the Government and were sitting on the fence wondering which way to jump.

  In Misurata there were bullet marks on the walls of many of the houses; the regular clients of the town’s only bar recalled days not so very long ago when they were obliged to enter the premises on all fours to avoid the attentions of the solitary sniper perched on the top of a palm tree in the oasis.

  A few at a time, the scattered inhabitants returned to the town and the number of patients presenting themselves at the dispensary grew daily. It was quite a different clientele from that at Buerat el Hsun: it was composed for the most part of men – nearly all Arabs – either from the town, or belonging to wandering tribes. There were no Berbers, but a good many negroes.

  In the family encampment at Buerat, which had consisted almost entirely of women, a kind of military discipline had been imposed by the older matrons among them. Here in my dispensary it was I who ruled. I represented that magical figure which holds sway over all primitive communities: the Possessor of Knowledge, raised on high and supported by those two columns upon which any self-respecting dictatorship rests: ignorance and fear.

  However, as I had no need to curry popular favour, it was not necessary for me to behave like a tyrant and I could permit myself the luxury of a fatherly affection for my subjects. They turned to me believing that I could free them from pains of whose nature they were ignorant, and cure diseases caused by they knew not what, so that they might perhaps postpone the day fixed by Allah when he would call them, his creatures, to himself again.

  In my small realm I had two ‘ministers’ and a kind of female public health officer to assist me – and a ‘chief of police’ to maintain order. My two ‘ministers’ were the two male nurses, Mohamed ed Dernàwi and Aissa ben Jahia. Mohamed had attended a native school for nurses and had worked for several years in the hospital at Tripoli. He was a native of Cyrenaica and considered himself very advanced; he regarded the ignorance of his co-religionists with condescension, smiled pityingly at their superstitions and spoke with benevolent indulgence of bigots who believed in marabouts and holy men. One day when he was suffering from a mild bronchitis which made him cough like an old asthmatical horse, I told him to undress so that I could examine him. Tied under his armpit I found a very small leather case containing a strip of paper on which was written in a painstaking hand a line of the Koran to keep away malignant spirits. Mohamed was extremely mortified and for several days turned his head away whenever I looked at him.

  Aissa was less capable and less intelligent than his colleague and his pretensions were not nearly so lofty. He was as ugly as an ape, with a pock-marked face, and his conversation was always of what he had just eaten or of what he was about to eat; he laughed uproariously on the slightest provocation, exposing the decayed remains of a deplorable set of teeth, and when he spoke of an attractive and not too virtuous woman he clicked his tongue and exclaimed ‘mashi’ – untranslatable into Italian and therefore certainly not to be rendered in English, but approximating to a more colourful version of ‘oh boy!’

  My ‘chief of police’ was Mahmud Ferj
iani, nicknamed Burâs, meaning ‘big head’. He was as massive and obtuse as an ox and he acted as porter, watchman and odd-job man in the dispensary. On crowded days he kept order by rolling his eyes ferociously and hurling fearful threats at offenders: ‘Hi! you, snubnose; do you want to be strung up by your guts?’

  Lastly there was Ehlia, a stockily built and ageless Jewess who took charge three times a week when we checked up on the girls of the local brothel.

  Complete calm reigned now in the area immediately surrounding the town. Our military commander was an old colonial of vast experience who had passed most of his life in Africa and had served at one time in the Belgian Congo. This man was working, without haste and with great good sense, to win over some of the uncertain, dissident and rebellious elements that roamed the hinterland. Like the old African fox that he was, he neglected no opportunity, left no stone unturned, despised no stratagem which might bring over to the Government’s side the neutral tribes in the pastures of the no-man’s land. He knew, among other things, how to turn the work of the medical officer to good account in this operation of slow persuasion.

  In the territory where declared rebels dared not penetrate and where it was undesirable that the Government should intervene until the time was ripe, roamed the Seraxa, a tribe which had previously given a lot of trouble. They no longer supplied the rebels with arms but they had not yet decided to submit to the Government. The men of the tribe came to Misurata to sell their goat hair mats and leather belts in the market, and those who were sick but able to walk came to the dispensary – which harassed Mahmud Burâs not a little, for to him they were all bloodthirsty bandits.

  In fact, these fearful brigands gave me no trouble at all; they waited their turn patiently and when I questioned them they answered timidly; keeping a wary eye on the stethoscope or on the apparatus for taking their blood pressure. When they asked me to visit the women and children in their encampment, the military authorities gave me every facility and I was usually accompanied by one of the two male nurses.

  One evening I arrived at the wells of Dufan, where the Seraxa were encamped, and was led to a tent in which a strong, massively built man was crying out from the pains in his legs. He was lame as the result of a gunshot wound which many years before had splintered his shin-bone, but it was not this that was causing the pain. Neither did there seem any reason to suspect the machinations of Tab’a, the lady who had treated Lalla Saida so roughly. The trouble was that an old syphilitic infection had suddenly reappeared and was nightly giving him a foretaste of the punishment that probably awaited him in hell.

  This sturdy cast-iron specimen was Abdullah es-Salahi Belhajj, the tribal chief. I stayed with him ten days and when I left I promised him a safe-conduct pass so that he could come to Misurata and follow a course of treatment which – if it was God’s will – would cure him.

  During my stay in his tent I had noticed an old carpet which much impressed me. It had a graceful, multi-coloured, lozenge-shaped design woven on a white ground, and the chief explained to me that it was an authentic example of the old Misurata carpet – vastly different from the vulgarised products which were now being made to satisfy modern taste. I asked him if the women of his tribe could make me a carpet like it, about six yards square, and after a moment’s thought he said he would speak to his mother about it.

  A week later, when he arrived with his entourage at the dispensary to begin a course of injections, he brought me the reply. They had made the most meticulous calculations: they would need so many okka of sheep’s wool, so many of goat’s wool; for the colours, so much of this plant, so much of that. The estimated price would be three hundred lire and the work could be finished in about fifty days. I remarked that fifty days seemed to me very little for so much work, but Abdullah raised his shoulders and assured me that if his mother had said fifty days, fifty days it would be.

  Two months later, the promised carpet was unloaded off a camel at my door. When I unrolled it, there in the centre, pinned by a palm needle, was a twenty-five lira note. It was the amount left unspent from the three hundred lire I had advanced and the chief’s mother had therefore returned it to me.

  During my earlier visits to the tents of the Seraxa I had made the acquaintance of this magnificent old woman. She was tall, very thin, with a delicate profile, and her air of authority, her bearing and movements and the tone of her voice, all made it clear that she was the chief’s mother. It was obvious, too, that all the members of the tribe, not least her son, were her devoted subjects. She rarely smiled; her commands were given more by gesture than by word, and she had eyes like gimlets that penetrated one through and through.

  My first encounter with her was when her son had taken me to her tent so that I might examine a grandchild suffering from conjunctivitis. I had hardly recognised Abdullah: in his mother’s presence he was dumb and moved about in a timid and self-effacing manner: when his mother spoke to him, he bowed his head as a sign of reverence before replying.

  On that first occasion my visit was short: after I had treated the child’s eyes we withdrew and I returned to Misurata. On subsequent visits, however, I was nearly always pressed to stay to dinner. During these banquets, at which kids stuffed with aromatic herbs and roasted whole over braziers were placed before us, I noticed that the old mother never took her eyes off me. She followed the conversation in an absent-minded way and kept watching my hands; sometimes she stopped eating altogether and turned right round the better to observe me.

  One evening after coffee it seemed she could no longer contain herself. She spoke in a low voice, and in order to make the pill more palatable, she called me ‘my son’ instead of addressing me by my professional title.

  ‘Listen, my son: has no one ever told you that you eat like a camel-herd? You use both hands, and look what a mess you are in. Your mouth is covered with grease – and even your nose. And you have stained your shirt. My son, whoever taught you your table manners?’

  She was as shocked and pained as an old duchess who, having invited the bailiff of her estate to dinner, sees him eat his peas with a knife.

  So it was from her that I learned to take my food with the right hand only (at table the left hand is non-existent, since it performs the ‘secret ablutions’) and not to use more than three fingers. I learnt how to make little balls of semolina, rice or meat of the right size using only my thumb and first and second fingers, without dirtying the other fingers or the palm of my hand. From her I learnt (seated cross-legged on the carpet) how to lean from the hips towards the central dish, just close enough to take a mouthful, without dropping grease either on the mat or on my clothes. I also achieved the art of two-finger feeding, of popping the ball of food into my mouth without touching my lips, thus avoiding a greasy mouth or nose. I think I may say that I was a very apt pupil.

  When, some months later, I met the Seraxa in the Gheddahîa pastures, the chief’s mother again invited me to supper. This time I passed the test with flying colours. The formidable old lady regarded me with immense satisfaction and approval, and during coffee, with one of her rare smiles, she said, ‘Now, my son, you may eat even with a sultan. May Allah bless and prosper you.’

  * * *

  An even harder nut to crack than the Seraxa were the Qouafi – a sprawling, more numerous tribe who wandered deep in the hinterland between the mountains and the coast. Although they had avoided fighting openly against us and it was now eight months since they had taken any part in the rebellion, they were a bellicose and turbulent people. It was said that their chief had quarrelled with the leaders of the revolt and – more wily than they – had called a halt until he saw which way the wind was likely to blow. Little was known about them, and on all the official maps the word ‘Qouafi’ appearing on the various pasture areas was always followed by a question mark. Some informants had met prominent members of the tribe almost at the gates of Misurata, while others asserted that they had seen their camels as far away as Shemek, well over a hundred mile
s from the coast.

  One day I received an urgent summons to headquarters. A message had been sent by the head of the Qouafi to say that his only daughter was ill, and asking that a doctor be sent immediately with everything necessary to restore her to health.

  I went, of course. The rainy season was just over; the scent of jasmine rose from the dry walls and gibbet-like well-heads, and the palm trees stood dark and clear against the cloudless night sky as my little caravan moved out of the oasis of Zawiet el Majoub. At first there was not a glimmer of light in the east, but after some miles the sun rose suddenly and in the distance, among palm trees and bushes flooded with honey-coloured light, we saw the tents of the Qouafi.

  The deep dawn silence was suddenly broken by the braying of a donkey and the barking of dogs, and between two sand dunes figures dwarfed by the distance and indistinct in the golden morning mist began to move about the wells.

  Inside the Bedouin tent I found a girl lying flat on her back, her glazed, dark-ringed eyes, in which the night’s delirium still flickered, staring unseeing into space. Every now and again the word ‘water’ came from her cracked lips.

  The mother was bending over her, watching every breath and movement; she gripped my hands and arms with a force that surprised me in such a thin and seemingly fragile woman.

  I had never met the chief of the Qouafi but I knew that he was reputed to be an aggressive and violent character, and a source of considerable concern to the Government. At that moment there stood before me only a man bowed down and stripped of all pride, a man in the grip of fear, who started at every sound, and who watched in anguish where his daughter lay, prostrate between life and death.