A Cure for Serpents

by Alberto Denti di Pirajno

  In all my wanderings across Tripolitania, from Buerat el Hsun to Misurata, from Nàlut to Ghadames, Jemberié Igzaou was my faithful shadow. When, after some years, I entered the colonial administration, he resigned from the army in order to stay with me. He went with me to Tripoli, where I ended my first period in Libya, and when I was assigned to Eritrea he followed me and was with me during all the years I spent between Massawa and Agordat.

  When, in Asmara, I had an attack of septicæmia and for several days was hardly expected to live (we were still far from the discovery of penicillin), Jemberié never left my side. He refused to eat or sleep and when I was convalescent I hardly recognised him: his face seemed all eyes, and instead of being black had taken on a look of marshy green.

  It was in Asmara too that he informed me he was about to be betrothed. I congratulated him and asked him what type of marriage he was contemplating. He gave me a stern and scandalised look and said that, naturally, he admitted none but the canonical, regular and indissoluble form of marriage.

  In explanation of my question and of Jemberié’s answer it should be mentioned that among the Copts there are three forms of marriage: the religious marriage which is indissoluble, the civil marriage which can be dissolved on payment of a fine, and the temporary marriage for a stipulated period, against payment. Jemberié, however, informed me that God Himself only recognised one of these forms – that which joins the two parties for life. To clinch the matter still further, his future father-in-law was a cashi, a very austere priest extremely scrupulous about the observance of the divine laws.

  Jemberié’s few remaining relatives were far away at Bourieh in the Gojjam and, in any case, his father had been dead for some time. It would therefore be necessary, he said, for me to take the place of his deceased father at the ceremony. He took it as the most natural thing in the world that I should do this; he did not ask it as a favour but merely spoke to me about it so that I should know what I had to do, and make my preparations in time.

  Of Jemberié’s wedding, celebrated in a stuffy little church at the gates of Asmara in the oppressive heat of the dry spell between two rainy seasons, I have only a very hazy recollection in which the predominating elements are blinding sunlight, torrid heat, clouds of reddish dust which dried the throat, the smell of fermented honey and water, of rancid butter, and dense clouds of incense.

  I had learnt my part very carefully. I was surrounded the whole time by a group of young men who, in the nuptial choreography, represented the friends of the bridegroom, including Jemberié’s future brothers-in-law – robust peasants from Anseba. Fortunately for me, the half-caste wife of an Italian tradesman who was a friend of mine was also taking part in the proceedings, and in the ceremonial ritual to which the women were admitted, or when the father of the bridegroom had to address his daughter-in-law, it was Eleanora who acted as interpreter and often prompted me in what I had to say.

  After having drunk some tech, the native beer, with the men of the bride’s family – who pretended to be unaware of the reason for my presence and continued to assure me that they did not know the whereabouts of the girl I was looking for – I was led by the women into a hut close by, where I found an enormous bundle of clothes piled on the floor. It was the bride. She was parcelled up in about a dozen shamma. The women, singing something composed entirely of trills, lifted her up from the floor and removed her wrappings one after the other until she was dressed only in a long fūta which fell from her face to her feet, completely concealing her form. On her head, pulled down to the level of the eyes, which were the only part of her still visible, she had a wide-brimmed straw hat of the kind worn on the beach by ladies of fashion.

  Supported by her women friends, the girl knelt down in front of me and I spread my hands in blessing on the crown of her straw hat. We then formed a procession outside: preceded by a chanting priest, I walked at a slow pace with a guiding hand on the shoulder of the bride at my side – the two of us under the shade of a parasol which an enormous and vociferous man held over our heads, his arm stretched straight out in front of him.

  I had a vague impression of looking extremely ridiculous and dared not catch the eye of Eleanora who, beside me, was covering her mouth with her handkerchief – either to smother her laughter or to protect her throat from the dust. All round us the bridegroom’s friends sang and shouted at the tops of their voices; the occasional joyful crack of a rifle added to the noise, and the wind blew so hard that we were enveloped in clouds of red Eritrean dust.

  We passed through a crowded entrance into the semi-darkness of another hut. Suddenly I was amazed to find that there were apparently two brides – absolutely identical, with the same wide straw hat, the same sack from head to foot. In fact, the second turned out to be Jemberié, adorned in exactly the same way as his betrothed. They were of the same height and it was impossible to distinguish between them.

  I blessed the couple. Jemberié’s father-in-law made me a speech in Tigrinya and passed to me the authority over his daughter which he had exercised until that day; I in return embraced him, kissing him on both cheeks and on the forehead. We emerged in procession once more; I was now between the bride and bridegroom and we all three carried lighted candles. At the door of the church, priests under great, multi-coloured umbrellas offered us crucifixes to kiss and led us into the crowded, malodorous church where the rising clouds of incense made everything nebulous and indistinct.

  The ceremony began. All the priests started to shout at once, reading from their bibles and making a terrific din. Huge black acolytes greeted each climax in the ritual by blowing loud fanfares on twelve-foot trumpets. Meanwhile, the bride’s girlfriends, by whom I was surrounded, never ceased their singing and screaming for one moment. All this continued without pause for an hour or so, and I remember nothing but the noise. But the couple at last were wedded, and they symbolised the fact by turning round and blowing out the candles which we all held in our hands.

  After the ceremony we emerged into the red glare of the afternoon sun and sat ourselves in the great tent which had been erected in the churchyard. In my role as the groom’s father I was the guest of honour and I sat on a mat between the bridal couple with the bride’s father crouching opposite. The air in the tent had reached a pitch of sweltering suffocation; all kinds of delicacies floating in red pepper sauce were served and we washed them down with tankards of native beer.

  At last the serving girls brought in a whole roast lamb and this was set ceremoniously before me. Nobody moved; all waited politely. Then the bride’s father stuck a finger into one of the lamb’s eyes, skewered it forth, displayed it for all to see and placed it in my mouth. The eye, which appeared to be my perquisite, certainly tasted better than the finger that accompanied it. This little ceremony being completed, the feast could now begin, and everyone set to. We ate solidly for four or five hours.

  Gorged, dust-choked and weary from the heat, it was a relief when the time finally arrived at which the bride and bridegroom could decently retire. We, the men – the brothers of the bride, the father of the bride and I, the father of everybody – conducted them to their hut. Everyone kissed hands, and the bridegroom shut the door. It was over; I could now go home and take a bath.

  * * *

  On the eve of the war in Abyssinia I went back to Italy, and as I took leave of Jemberié on the quayside at Massawa, in the shadow of the liner which was to take me home, he asked me whether we should ever meet again.

  Eight months later, recalled to the Colony, I disembarked at Mogadishu and from there went by plane to my new station in Harar.

  Harar had only recently been taken by General Graziani’s columns; sniping was still going on in the mountains; the Abyssinians dominated the Chercher, and military ambulances journeyed by night bringing the wounded into the city. There was no regularly constituted government, Governor Nasi had not yet arrived, and my functions were of a universal nature which imposed upon me all kinds of responsibilities and left me wi
thout a moment to breathe.

  There were no houses and in order not to live in the official government building I took up my abode in a native tukul which the military engineers had converted outside the city, on the slopes towards Faïda. I had taken on as personal servant a Galla boy of the name of Digaro’ who was as stupid and as lazy as a marmot.

  I had been in Harar a month when, returning home one evening, I came upon Digaro’ huddled on the footpath, blubbering and holding his behind. He seemed not to hear my questions, and kept repeating that he was not a slave, that he was not a bastard. I could get nothing else out of him and so, losing patience and having called him the few improper names I knew in Galla, I continued towards the house. Digaro’, still blubbering and holding one side of his buttocks, followed me at a respectful distance.

  There was a light in the window of the tukul and when I opened the door I was struck speechless: in the one and only room, Jemberié was remaking my bed and preparing it for the night.

  He turned and came towards me and, without the slightest fuss and with his usual inscrutable smile, shook my hand and asked – for all the world as though we had parted yesterday – ‘You well, signore?’

  I fired a string of questions at him and he answered me with the greatest simplicity that at Addis Ababa he had heard of my arrival at Harar and, naturally, had come to resume his service with me. The shadow of a smile passed over his face: obviously, he told me, the great ape he had found in the tukul was not the kind of servant for me.

  Through the open door, the great ape in question could be seen spying from behind a tree, and Jemberié made a motion of disgust in his direction. ‘I find great ape behind tukul and say him: “What you do in master’s house?” He say me: “Go away Abyssinian. Now Galla give orders here.” I kick his behind and say him: “Shut your mouth, you ugly bastard negro slave.” Throw him out and shut door.’

  We remained for about a year at Harar and when Mangashà Ubié, the Ethiopian governor of the western territories, left I was sent to replace him and to organise the politico-administrative districts in the vast region along the Sudan frontier, extending from Kaffa to the Blue Nile.

  During that thirty-four days’ odyssey from Addis Ababa to Gambela on the Sudanese frontier, Jemberié never left my side. We journeyed five hundred miles across regions without roads, with thirty-two motor lorries and six caterpillars, preceded by hordes of men armed with poles, scimitars, pruning knives and pickaxes whom the village chiefs, notified in advance, had sent to improvise a track over which our column moved no faster than a snail.

  Jemberié stayed with me throughout my time in the western territories and followed me in all my vagabonding through the country of the Anouak and of the Nouers, in the Anfhillo forest, across Wallega, into the Beni Shangul in the sultanate of the legendary Sheik Khôjeli, and on up into the region where the Blue Nile (which constituted the northern limit of my territory) crosses the frontier and flows down to Khartoum to mix its waters with those of the White Nile.

  It was a period of intense and ceaseless work. There were interminable caravan excursions on mules over almost unknown country, among people of different races, tongues, customs and degrees of civilisation.

  Slowly but surely, the organisation of the territories began to take shape: Commissariats were established, and to them the Residencies were attached. As the government gradually extended its political and administrative control, the country began to settle down and to adjust itself to the new order.

  The various regions were acquiring their own individual physiognomies and I was just beginning to see the first results of my work, when the Tall Young Man – with whom I had spent those previous years in Libya – was appointed Viceroy of the Empire, and was good enough to express the wish that I be attached to him not, this time, as his physician, but as his chef de cabinet.

  It was a great honour, but I was sorry to leave the work I had only just started – and in my heart I had some misgivings: I felt that the tall crusader was taking upon himself responsibilities which, in my possibly antiquated orthodoxy, I considered unsuited to a prince of the blood. Jemberié, however, was not afflicted by any such doubts and lived in a state of complete beatitude.

  ‘After sweating like navvy you now real gentleman,’ he told me, with immense satisfaction.

  He had always found it extremely mortifying that I had been obliged to pass months at a time in caravans with hordes of Galla and packs of negroes, travelling on the back of a mule in all weathers, sleeping very often under the stars with a pack-saddle for my pillow. Now that, after my nomadic and uncomfortable existence in the western territories, I lived in the villa of the Empress Menen, on the same property as the ghebi in which the Viceroy had taken up residence; now that I slept in an enormous four-poster bed with a canopy bearing the lions of the Negus’s coat of arms; now that I had engaged the ex-cook of the dissolved American Legation, Jemberié at last considered that my way of living was suitable to my rank.

  Moreover – and this completed his satisfaction – he had been promoted bölük-bashi. To mark the occasion he had bought himself a tarbūsh at least three inches higher than the regulation measurement; on his sleeve he wore the insignia of his new grade, and in honour of my position he had considered it necessary to tie round his middle a regimental scarf of pure silk.

  The only fly in his ointment was the increased expenditure in which we were involved. ‘Here money run like water,’ he grumbled, shaking his head. I had to keep up appearances to a certain extent, and as I received invitations to dinners and receptions I was naturally obliged to return them. Moreover, my new cook was an artist, and the guests did full justice to the dishes he produced. Jemberié however was shocked at such prodigality. On the morning after a particularly successful supper party he brought in my coffee with a funereal air and said in a lugubrious voice, ‘Yesterday everyone very pleased, eat everything. Lady with red hair eat two helpings sweet. Very expensive; nothing left. Cook he say, “My cooking very good.” Perhaps better he cooking badly so people eat not much and not come again.’

  I found that my position as chef de cabinet did not altogether exclude the tebīb. One afternoon the Viceroy felt ill and complained of pains in the stomach; I at once called in Professor Scollo. The next day, in white overall, mask and rubber gloves, I assisted him in one of the most delicate appendectomy operations I have ever witnessed. When he had opened the peritoneum, Scollo lifted the diseased appendix with the pincers and looked at me: it was perforated and discharging pus.

  Twenty-five days later the Viceroy was again at his desk, and as the organisation of the various departments of his office was now complete I felt that I could withdraw. I was offered other assignments in other parts of the empire but, although I was gratified, they did not tempt me and I preferred to go home. I was, however, very ready to accept an invitation from the Governor of Eritrea to spend two weeks with him in Asmara before leaving.

  It was three years since I had been in Asmara and I found that the town had spread like a drop of oil. The buildings had changed and thousands of unknown faces thronged the streets, making me feel a stranger, although the friendly hearts and smiles of the men and women I had known remained the same.

  Sad hearts they were, and dejected smiles. The romantic nineteenth century used to say: ‘Partir, c’est mourir un peu.’ I could not know that when I took leave of the empire I was abandoning a dying patient, but I was sad because I felt that another chapter of my life in Africa was closing for ever.

  After many years, I can still see the quayside at Massawa in the merciless June sun, and the arcade of the Magazzini Generali. Its columns and pillars provided shade but did nothing to cool the group of friends who had come to see me off and who took shelter beneath them. For even out of the sun the atmosphere was like an oven.

  The magnificent arms and shoulders of Donna Ly, my assistant’s half-caste wife, seemed to be modelled in bronze, and beside her dark beauty and Eleanora’s phosphorescent smile,
the bloodless pallor of the European women seemed almost unhealthy. All the men were dressed in white and looked like figures in plaster. Jemberié’s tarbūsh made a splash of scarlet.

  The steamship ‘Mazzini’ towered above us on the other side of the quay, and when the moment had arrived, Commander Matarazzo leaned over the side and made a sign to me.

  ‘When you come back,’ said Jemberié, ‘you say me and I come meet you in port.’

  From the bridge I watched my friends waving handkerchiefs, berets, caps – and beyond the others, against the background of the store’s white façade, I saw the flaming tarbūsh of Jemberié Igzaou. As the ‘Mazzini’ drew away the figures on the quayside became smaller and less distinct, but the splash of red remained there, immovable, and was lost to my sight only when the ship turned towards the Abd el Qader fisheries.

  That was the last I ever saw of my faithful friend. I never returned to those parts and so Jemberié never came to meet me at the port.

  In later years I returned instead to Tripoli, was taken prisoner and, after a time behind barbed wire, was repatriated to Italy.

  For several years after that I continued to write to friends in Africa and to question those whom I met, trying whenever I could to find out what had become of Jemberié Igzaou. I could obtain no news of him from anyone; it seemed as though he had been spirited away. Although various people thought they had caught sight of him at Massawa or at Asmara, no one knew where he was living. I finally came to the conclusion that he had returned to his native place in the Gojjam or had rejoined his wife in the Anseba valley.

  Then, in 1952, a letter from Eleanora in Asmara informed me that Jemberié had died fighting in the battle of Keren.

  As I held the sheet of paper and stared at the thin, upright handwriting in the style of twenty years ago, I was invaded by a vague remorse: excellent Jemberié – with my suppositions I had belittled him. He had neither taken refuge in his native country nor sought the peace and security of the Anseba pastures where he would have been safe from the storm that broke on his second fatherland. When the empire fell and Eritrea was invaded, when all was already lost, he rallied to the flag under which he had grown to manhood, and gave his life defending it.