A Cure for Serpents

by Alberto Denti di Pirajno

  The mother had turned back the girl’s hāik and tucked it under her armpits, but in her feverish tossing, unable to bear the heat, the patient had thrown off the covering; her hair was soaked with sweat and as she tossed her head this way and that the braids loosened, scattering coins, trinkets and the amulets worn as protection against the evil eye.

  I called her by name: ‘Fattûma, Fattûma …’

  She fixed her eyes on me and murmured: ‘Râsi yuja’ fīhā … my head hurts,’ and with difficulty raised her hand to her forehead.

  Her chest was marked with little inflamed patches and she groaned when I sounded it with my fingers, and shuddered at the contact of my cold ear on her breasts. Below the ribs the stomach was concave and there was a gurgling sound as I pressed it. The dark shadow between the legs showed that the hair had not been removed for a week: the girl’s brow puckered and in spite of her weakness she put out a thin hand to cover herself.

  The mother whispered to me that during the last few days the girl had lost a lot of blood from the nose. How was it, she asked, that the evil spirits had not also departed together with all that blood?

  I was only able to establish a very fragmentary case history but it seemed fairly certain that the evil spirit in this instance was the Eberth bacillus. There among the Qouafi camels it was not possible to carry out a laboratory test, but I had little doubt that the girl was suffering from typhoid or paratyphoid fever.

  It was seven o’clock in the morning, and the under-arm temperature was ninety-nine point five, from which I deduced that the disease was probably in the second week. Should I attempt the only treatment – a drastic one – that might arrest it? I again examined the girl from head to foot: I did not want any unpleasant surprises. The heart seemed in excellent condition and a summary analysis convinced me that the kidneys were functioning satisfactorily. We would try.

  Seated on the edge of the mat, I felt the girl’s arms to see which it would be better to use for the operation. I could feel the father’s breath on my hair as, tense and watchful, he followed my every movement; the mother’s eyes were fixed on me from the other side of the mat, and I tried to avoid them.

  Mohamed ed Dernàwi tied an elastic band round the arm I indicated. The vein protruded under pressure and I dabbed the copper-coloured skin with iodine. A syringe full of clear protein solution was ready; I stuck the needle into the vein and the blood flowed into the syringe, turning the contents red; I pressed the pump and the liquid became white again and, while Mohamed untied the elastic, flowed slowly, carefully, into the vein, leaving an opaque patina on the inside of the syringe.

  ‘And now …?’ asked the father while I washed my hands outside the tent.

  ‘Now there will be a high, a very high, fever,’ I replied, adding in answer to his troubled, bewildered look: ‘and the fever, if it is God’s will, will cure her.’

  The great chief bowed his head: ‘God is Compassionate and Merciful.’

  The hours passed and the fever mounted with exasperating slowness. By five in the afternoon it was little more than a hundred. After sunset, however, the first sudden rise set in, and at ten o’clock it touched a hundred and four. The girl was so hot that the warmth could be felt at a hand’s breadth from her body. The pulse under my fingers galloped at an increasing speed.

  As I sat on the floor I could feel the eyes of the mother and father drilling the back of my neck. Behind them were the servants, and the tent was filled with a continual low murmur of prayer.

  At midnight the thermometer registered a hundred and five point one. The girl’s body jerked convulsively up and down and the skin had become lifeless. It gave no reflection in the light of the lamps and was so taut and hot that it seemed it must split.

  Suddenly the crisis was reached.

  The pulse became less tumultuous, the arteries less turgid. Beads of sweat broke out on the forehead and the skin of the body began to shine and to become soft and wet. Rivers of sweat poured from the neck, under the arms, down over the breasts, gathered in the hollow of the stomach and ran over the thighs and legs. The heart became stronger, helped by the caffein.

  The mother continually wiped away the perspiration which now ran from every pore in the girl’s body; the mat had to be changed and placed in another corner of the tent because even the ground underneath was soaked. The chief tried to help, but the women pushed him out of the way into a corner: he was more hindrance than help, staggering about like a blind man, with a stunned expression on his face.

  At six in the morning the temperature had dropped to ninety-six point five.

  The fever did not recur during the next four days. I remained in the camp for another week, however, in order to supervise the feeding of the convalescent and because a persistent swelling of the spleen made me fear that there might still be a relapse, but my fears proved unfounded.

  When I declared the daughter to be out of danger the mother wept silently but the father kept his eyes on the floor and then suddenly raised his head, spread out his hands, palms upward as though they carried the open book, and in a voice suffocating with emotion recited the first sūra:

  ‘Praise be to God, Lord of the worlds!

  The Compassionate, the Merciful …’

  Allah had willed that his daughter should live, and five camels waited before my tent to conduct me back to the city.

  * * *

  Three years later, when I was again in Misurata, there was a sequel to this story.

  We were nearing the end of August, the hottest time of the year, when the wind blowing up from the south seems to come from an open furnace.

  My man servant, Jemberié Igzaou, shook me, and continued to shake me until I was properly awake. The darkened room throbbed with the heat and the pitiless Misurata afternoon sun filtered through the shutters, throwing a streak of light around which the buzzing flies circled incessantly on the dusty air.

  ‘Outside an Arab.’

  I was still sleepy and did not grasp what Jemberié was saying.

  ‘An Arab?’

  ‘An Arab.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have told him to wait until five o’clock?’

  ‘He say me he cannot wait.’

  ‘Well, why didn’t you tell him to come back this evening?’

  ‘He say cannot come back.’

  ‘But what does he want? Is he ill? Is he wounded?’

  ‘He quite very well.’

  By this time sleep had fled, and being completely awake and resigned to it, I told Jemberié to show in this Arab in excellent health who appeared to be in such a hurry.

  A Bedouin entered, tall and lean, wrapped in a kind of burnous widening over the shoulders and falling like a hood down the back. At a sign from me he sat on the floor in the middle of the room while I remained looking down on him from my vantage point on the edge of the bed.

  He seemed young, even very young, with delicate features and large, dark, velvety eyes, but the otherwise adolescent face was transformed into that of a warrior by the hooked nose, lean cheeks and jutting chin.

  After the first greetings he fell silent. From time to time he lifted his eyes, caught mine for an instant and immediately lowered his own again, repeating timidly, ‘Kef’ alēk … how are you?’

  When I replied that I was well, he placed his outspread hand on his breast and muttered, ‘El hamdullillāhi … God be praised.’

  Finally he made an effort and started to speak. He spoke hurriedly in a low voice, keeping his eyes half closed, as though reciting something he had learned by heart but of which he feared to forget a word or phrase.

  The chief of the Qouafi sent his greetings; he sent many greetings, and prayed that God would have me in his keeping and prosper me.

  When I questioned him, the boy raised his eyes and replied in his normal voice: being no longer the mouthpiece of his chief he could resume his ordinary tone.

  No, he did not belong to the Qouafi tribe; he was a Sirtic nomad; his name was Ali, son of Hajj Man
sûr, son of Abubekri, son of Hajj Idris, son of Said el Mālek. He threw in the four generations in a perfectly natural manner in order to indicate that he was not a nobody, but a ‘son of the great tents’ and the scion of a long line.

  After this brief parenthesis he relapsed again into his recital: the chief of the Qouafi sent me greetings, many greetings, and his blessing; the chief of the Qouafi was my son …

  I interrupted him again to ask where the chief of the Qouafi was, what he was doing, how he was.

  The chief of the Qouafi was with his people in the Bu Rêya pasturage; the chief of the Qouafi was well (more praises to God who protected the chief of the Qouafi and kept him in good health).

  The voice became less montonous and faltered a little: the chief of the Qouafi had a daughter, and he sent me a letter …

  I was not listening to him any longer. As I sat staring unseeing at the flies circling round and round in the streak of sunlight my mind had slipped back into the past.

  Only a few seasons had come and gone but I realised that until that moment I had completely forgotten those ten days spent among the Qouafi in the pastures of Zawiet el Majoub. And now, two words from this Bedouin had recalled the whole scene – I saw again the thin face and large, fevered eyes of Fattûma as though I had seen them that morning. I remembered too the desperate hunted look of the chief, and heard again the toneless voice of the mother speaking to me in monosyllables. I wondered what had happened to Fattuma. Perhaps she was ill and her father wanted me to see her again – for Ali ben Hajj Mansûr, observing that I was preoccupied with my own thoughts, was now patiently repeating that the chief of the Qouafi had a daughter and that he sent me a letter …

  And, in fact, the chief of the Qouafi had a daughter and he had sent me a letter. It was written in the hand of a teacher of the Koran; the signature of the chief in a corner was almost illegible, but his seal, lower down, made the message authentic. It read as follows:

  Greetings to our Lord Pirajno the physician.

  May God have him in His keeping. Amen.

  With regard to the following, so that your health is good, by the mercy of God and His blessing, we ask a good word from you by your grace.

  Who brings you this is our honoured friend Ali of the Ulad Sleiman, son of the pilgrim Mansûr, God protect him.

  Now he desires to marry my daughter who is our only issue.

  We are satisfied and may God’s will be done.

  But although Allah gave us a daughter, he also permitted you to give her a second life when death was upon her.

  So we ask that you listen to the request and tell us if the prayer for the betrothal may be said.

  And we wait for your decision.

  And God be with you.

  I looked up to find our honoured friend Ali, son of the pilgrim Mansûr, watching me with an anxious expression, endeavouring to read my thoughts. He could not guess just what those thoughts were.

  For I was touched to the heart. What caliph, I thought, what sultan of The Thousand and One Nights had ever rewarded his physician in a more princely manner?

  Ali ben Hajj Mansûr left with my consent to his marriage and a pair of silver khālkhāl for Fattûma’s ankles. I went with him to the door and with difficulty disengaged my hands which he kissed with vehement gratitude. When all the various formulæ of blessing had been exhausted, he leapt into his saddle and I watched him disappear in a swirl of dust which remained suspended above the road like a cloud of gold.

  * * *

  It is time to talk of Jemberié Igzaou.

  Jemberié Igzaou had followed me from Buerat el Hsun to Misurata and was my valet, general factotum and confidential servant.

  He was an Abyssinian of the Gojjam, enrolled in the mixed battalions composed of Amhara and Eritreans. He was short, as black as coal, and had certain negroid characteristics but, being a good Abyssinian, he was convinced that he was white and maintained that the whites were red, basing his conclusions on the colour of their ears seen against the light.

  In Amharic Jemberié means ‘My sun’, and Igzaou ‘may God guide him’.

  ‘My sun – may God guide him’ was of indefinable age; he seemed a young boy but could not have been less than twenty-five years old. His account of himself was somewhat confusing. According to him, he ran away from home at the age of six and went to Eritrea, where he was made director of the railway. In reality, as a boy he had worked as a stonebreaker along the railway line and after some time was promoted to foreman. He joined up as soon as recruiting beyond the frontier began, and at the time of our story he considered himself a veteran in the Askaris and was only surprised that he had not yet been promoted mumtāz or corporal.

  He was a Coptic Christian and very proud of his religion; he paraded among the Arabs adorned with a brass cross so large that an archbishop might have coveted it. He had a great contempt for all Mohammedans, although occasionally he might mention to me with a certain condescending approval some particularly educated Moslem or eminent local personality who happened to follow the Prophet, and he would treat a hardworking and honest Moslem craftsman with benevolence. Jews, however, male and female, of any age or condition, he abhorred without discrimination. All the laundresses of Misurata were Jewesses – and Jemberié insisted on washing all our linen so that it should not be contaminated by such an unclean contact. In the first house of the ghetto down towards the sea there was an exceptionally beautiful laundress who was undoubtedly a direct descendant of the women who did King David’s washing at the wells of Bethlehem. When I mentioned this lovely creature to Jemberié and suggested that he might allow her to come and take away my dirty handkerchiefs and wash them, he looked at me severely and said that never could I blow my nose on handkerchiefs touched by the hands that had crucified Jesus. In vain I sought to point out to him that obvious chronological factors made it impossible that the girl had had anything to do with it. He replied that all Jews were responsible for Christ’s death, even those then unborn.

  His ideas about disease and remedies were more or less those of primitive man. He was convinced that a stroke of lightning could make a woman pregnant, that a man became impotent if he touched a chameleon, and that to urinate facing the moon gave you venereal disease. When he had a headache he opened the vein across his forehead and, bending over a basin, let the blood flow until the headache ceased. He first began to respect medical science when he found that a white powder relieved his headache without any blood letting.

  He was of peasant stock and – like all peasants the world over – his reluctance to spend a farthing was positively sordid. But he was also an Amhara and, therefore, as vain as a peacock: when it was a question of appearances, of ‘making a show’, he did not consider expense and in order to adorn his tarbūsh with a huge and irregular silk tassel he would cheerfully spend three weeks’ pay.

  My incapacity to bargain with vendors and the ease with which they got the better of me inspired him with an angry compassion, for he was as avaricious with my money as with his own: nothing upset him so much as to find that I had myself gone to the market to buy a mat or a leather cushion. And it must be admitted that he was much more successful than I. When he had to buy a coffee-pot or a dish or a broom he went to the market in good time, entered the shop with a polite greeting for the proprietor, removed his tarbūsh and sat down. With a nonchalant air he would ask the price of the most dissimilar objects, none of which he had any intention of buying, and smile sarcastically at every price mentioned, saying that evidently the shopkeeper had risen in a good humour and liked his little joke. At a certain moment he would remove his sandals and ask for a cushion in order to make himself more comfortable.

  In the meantime, among the various objects offered to him, the dish or mat on which he had had his eye from the beginning would appear; on hearing the price he ceased to smile and began muttering something to the effect that the police should know better than to allow thieves to operate undisturbed in the city. He checked himself immed
iately, however, declaring that, in any case, he would not dream of buying such rubbish: his master, the tebīb, would throw it in his face if he dared to take it into the house.

  At this stage the shopkeeper would begin to weaken and to reduce his price, but Jemberié pretended to take no further notice and with a serious face would call attention to the fact that he had been sitting in the shop for more than an hour and so far no one had offered him a cup of coffee. When the coffee arrived, Jemberié would request a double ration of sugar in it, and a glass of orange-flower water, because coffee by itself upset his stomach.

  As he sipped his coffee he would sigh and make nostalgic references to the great cities in which he had lived – places where all self-respecting shopkeepers offered to those who deigned to enter a richly assorted meze – a tray filled with morsels of salted fish, pickled olives, pieces of roasted liver, small meat pies, roasted almonds, chickpeas, peanuts, and buns running with honey; naturally, such liberality was not to be expected in a miserable little market noted only for its rapacious and extortionate vendors.

  By now the shopkeeper would have realised that he was no match for such an adversary and so as to waste no more time he would spread out a mat or polish an object with his sleeve and name an even lower price. But Jemberié was still not listening: with his head thrown back he would sniff the air, wag his forefinger and whisper, smacking his lips: ‘Today you are eating eggs with cumin – I can smell them. They are good – eggs with cumin; I have a special weakness for eggs with cumin …’

  Desperate at these broad hints and at the horrid threat to his dinner, the vendor then threw up the sponge and pressed the dish, the broom, the coffee-pot – anything he liked – into the hands of the Askari, in order to get rid of him.

  Jemberié would return in triumph and display his purchases. Cheaper than you buy another week. Much cheaper. You have pay four lire; I pay one lire seventy, and maybe – maybe – he give it for one fifty, but I not want waste time.’