A Cure for Serpents

by Alberto Denti di Pirajno

  Salma, who had accompanied her to the dispensary and had been present during the treatment, imitated Mabrouka’s shrieks as I had sewed up the wound: ‘Ah—oo—ah—oo!’ Mabrouka took offence; she could see nothing funny in the incident: according to her, she had fractured her skull. ‘Is it not true, tebīb, that I had a big hole in my skull?’ Salma made a face and clapped her hands in protest. But Mabrouka was not to be denied and, kneeling in the middle of the room, she parted her blonde curls so that everyone should see the terrible scar – a fine red line about three quarters of an inch long. She remained thus, her hands raised to her head, her small breasts firm under her surīya, miserable because they were making fun of her, because nobody took pity on poor Mabrouka.

  The summer afternoon’s languor, after the Pantagruelian meal, slackened the limbs and made the eyelids heavy. No one took any notice of Gmera who – always rowdy – was shaking her savage locks to a dance rhythm.

  Rebecca snored in a corner, sunk deep among the cushions, her chin on her chest, her head lolling. Two flies buzzed round the drops of sauce which had fallen on to the mat.

  Mné was sleeping, her head still against my knees; I slipped a cushion under her, gently, so as not to wake her: her face as she slept was disconsolate and wet with tears.

  At last, on the tips of my toes, stepping over the bodies of the sleeping girls, I made my way out of the room; in front of the door the cook was lying flat in a strip of shade, fast asleep and grunting.

  But my precautions were in vain: as soon as I put my foot into the street, Rebecca’s flock wakened and overtook me. The stifling air hit us like the heat from a furnace; the girls were blinded by the strong light, but with their fingers to their lips they made me the formal farewell speeches:

  ‘God be with you in the evening.’

  ‘May your night be happy.’

  ‘May God prosper you.’

  ‘God keep you in health.’

  ‘Fare you well.’

  ‘Farewell.’

  Chapter Three

  BERBER COUNTRY

  IN 1927 I was transferred from Misurata to the Berber territory in the mountains near the Tunisian frontier, and for the first time I was to add political activities to my medical functions.

  My field extended over a very wide area. It included the whole territory from the mountains in western Tripolitania down to Ghadames and the Sahara, a region which we had not yet occupied but where we were already in touch with local leaders. Contact was also maintained with the distant oasis of Ghat, far to the south, where lived Bubaker ag Legoui, king of the Azdjer Tuaregs.

  The population was entirely Berber. These people are said to be the descendants of the ancient Libye who once inhabited the North African coast, but there are many highly coloured stories concerning their origin. An Arab historian of the thirteenth century even affirms that the Berbers came from Palestine, where their king Goliath was killed by David. One fact is certain: the Arab invasions of the seventh and eighth centuries broke the dominion of the Berbers, who were driven southwards, into the Sahara and the fortified mountain villages.

  Although for twelve centuries they have lived in close contact with other peoples, the Berbers have never been absorbed by their conquerors, and even today, although they may speak Arabic outside their homes, in their family circles they still preserve their own tongue.

  The two peoples live side by side without any serious trouble, but they cordially detest each other. The Berbers consider the Arabs obtuse, thieving and treacherous, while the Arabs maintain that the Berbers are ‘as hateful as Jews, as poisonous as asps and as immoral as prostitutes’. Possibly they each tend to exaggerate the defects of the other.

  My new headquarters were at Nàlut, the chief town of the Jebel Nefusah, on the brow of the mountain which dominates the desert.

  The dwellings – with the exception of the Turkish fort and a few government buildings – are some of the most curious in the world. They are cut in the rock and to reach them it is necessary to climb down steep steps also cut in the rock. There is an open space in the middle which serves as a kind of common courtyard for all – like a collection of molehills.

  But the grottoes of Nàlut were typical of this mountain country; everything here was rock: there was not a plant or a tree to be seen.

  On the highest point of the promontory rose the castle, almost part of the rock itself. Within it, along corridors the width of a man’s shoulders, hundreds of minute cells had been carved out of the limestone, one upon another. Each family rented one of these for the storing of its provisions which were deposited in the keeping of a guardian.

  Under the Italian administration there was a native body composed of wide-awake local notabilities through whom it was possible to exercise efficient control over the whole region.

  The head of these native officials was Messaud ben Aissa, a man who had preserved the Turkish title of Kāymakām. He was a massively built Berber, with a child-like face camouflaged by a fierce-looking beard that gave him the appearance of a brigand. In reality he was a mild, good-natured man for ever indulging the whims of a capricious wife and somewhat under the thumb of an authoritative sister.

  During the rebellion, the rebel chief Chalifa ben Asker, who did not trust this fat, comfortable, keen-brained, but goblin-faced man, kept him for several weeks tied hand and foot to an old Turkish cannon. The mere mention of those days reduced Messaud to a jibbering condition; he was quite unable to express his feelings on the subject and lost all control over words and gestures. Now his days passed evenly and placidly between the not very onerous work in his office, interminable discussions with the Cādī, and verbose descriptions of the varied but always harassing symptoms of his arthritis. He lived in an attractive subterranean house the inner walls of which had been hewn with a pick-axe; shelves and cupboards had also been cut into the rock and then fitted with wooden doors.

  His sister was a sturdy mountain type with a pleasant face and a perennial smile which disguised the indomitable energy lacked by her brother. One day, when I was taking tea with Messaud’s wife, this sister – while busy about the house – opened the door of one of the chests in the wall and out sprang a horned viper which bit her on the chin. At her cry we ran to see what was the matter. I immediately injected permanganate of potassium all round the bite – knowing that owing to the slackness of the Italian Government the Pasteur Institute’s phials of anti-serpent serum always arrived at the dispensary at least three months after the potency time-limit had expired.

  Zilukha bent Aissa did not die, but for many months she was not the same person. The active, strong-willed woman who had ruled both her own family and that of her brother with a rod of iron and, surrounded by daughter-in-law and grandchildren, had always been the autocrat of the clan, now passed her days in a torpid dream, seated by the brazier with her hands in her lap, staring into space, while those who had depended on her pottered uselessly round, unable to take the initiative or decide anything for themselves.

  Rahima, the wife of the Kāymakām, tried to take the place of her sister-in-law, but the remedy was worse than the disease and her impulsive interventions only added to the confusion. Messaud ben Aissa, who was nearly as dazed as his sister, moved about the house like an automaton and came constantly to see me at the dispensary or at my office to ask with exasperating regularity when Zilukha would recover. He asked with some diffidence if I was quite sure that the viper which had bitten his sister had been really a viper, because it was a well-known fact that female evil spirits could with the greatest of ease assume the form of any animal. With some hesitation and embarrassment, like a child caught out in a misdemeanour, he confessed that he had tied round his sister’s neck a little bag of miraculous powder that a witch doctor had sold him for a gold piece, but that the effect of even this powerful remedy seemed to be slow in showing itself.

  In reality, although Zilukha’s harassed relatives who saw her every day failed to observe it, her condition was slowly
but steadily improving; after a time I noticed at each visit that her brain was clearing and that very slowly she was beginning to take an interest again in what was going on around her.

  The first time she reproved a grandchild, her complaint was greeted with joy and they began to hope. Slowly her bad temper reasserted itself, and when she was again nagging at her brother and making her daughters-in-law, sons, sons-in-law and grandchildren tremble before her, Messaud announced, delighted, that his sister had recovered.

  * * *

  During my early acquaintance with the Kāymakām, I did not know what to call him. ‘Messaud’ seemed to me too familiar and ‘Kāymakām’ too formal. For some reason or other I decided that his rank entitled him to be called ‘Bey’. When I first addressed him by this honorary title, however, Messaud began to laugh and exclaimed, ‘Ala limîna yā Bey: to the right, O Bey.’ Seeing that I was puzzled, he told me the story of the unfortunate Bey of Fassato.

  Under the Turkish rule, an ambitious and purposeful man of Fassato made up his mind to obtain the title of ‘Bey’. Prepared to make any sacrifice for the satisfaction of his vanity, he went to Tripoli and began to look up old connections, to make the acquaintance of other and more influential people, to noise abroad his own good deeds and to invent them when there were none to talk about. However, he soon became aware that all this talk was getting him nowhere, and that if he was to obtain what he desired, a great deal of grease would have to be applied to the wheels of the complicated Ottoman administrative machinery. The commissionaire at the door, the secretary, the chief administrator, and even the governor himself were all ready to hold out their hands for tips and presents, the bakshish that opens doors, obtains favours, speeds up the signing of important documents.

  Thus, in order to propitiate this crowd of vampires great and small, the stocks of barley at Fassato were exhausted, the fields, olive-groves and orchards were sold, and the goats, sheep and camels left the Jefara pastures and made their way to market.

  At last the unfortunate man obtained the imperial signature, complete with the imposing stamp of the Sublime Porte and the august seal of the Padishah, which conferred upon him the title of ‘Bey’. Then he returned to his mountains where his relatives, friends and neighbours came to meet and congratulate him. They addressed him by his new title and the vain simpleton’s heart swelled with pride: his life’s dream had been realised.

  The first rains had fallen and the ground needed ploughing. The authorities in Tripoli, in their benevolence, had left him with a small parcel of land; but he no longer had any servants and there were no horses – he had not so much as a scabby old camel for the heavier work. He appealed to his brother, who agreed to guide the plough. But the ‘Bey’ himself had to wear the yoke and drag the plough over the ground.

  The rope cut into his shoulder; his feet slipped in the soft earth; the sweat poured from him as he pulled desperately with all his strength, heaving, panting, and stumbling at every step.

  But he had one comfort: when, bent double in his efforts to drag the plough along, he lost his sense of direction and swerved from the straight course, he heard the voice of his brother respectfully calling, ‘To the right, O Bey. To the right.’

  * * *

  Though the Berbers were often rewarding patients, physically tough, quick to react to drugs, and loud in their praises when cures were effected, there was one whose cure turned out to be less than a blessing – in fact it almost broke up a marriage. The case was that of Meriem bent Yusuf, the woman with the coral gloves.

  Some months before, I had treated her brother, Issa ben Yusuf, for a particularly nasty wound. At that time I employed a certain number of spies who kept up a shuttle service across the frontier from Tunisia to Tripoli. They included Seân camel breeders, Mohajerin livestock thieves, itinerant vendors, army brothel girls, and caravaneers who carried on contraband activities under the pretext of transporting goods and grain and who, for safety’s sake, acted as informers on both sides of the frontier.

  Issa ben Yusuf belonged to this last category. He was a tall, spare youth without an ounce of fat on his bones: the muscles of his torso, shoulders and hips were as clearly drawn as on an anatomical chart and gave an animal vitality to his body.

  He did, in fact, possess the vitality of a wild beast. They had brought him in to me with a great gash running from his collar-bone to his ribs, made by the spear of an Imanghassaten Tuareg. He had travelled for two days in this condition, first on the back of a camel and then for fourteen hours on a bed of empty petrol tins in the back of a lorry. When he arrived at the dispensary he was the colour of ashes from loss of blood, but he was alive.

  Five weeks later he had recovered and his friends came from Dehibat, the first French military post on the route to Medenin, to fetch him. They opened their eyes when they saw the scar, laughed, embraced Issa and thumped him on the back with a force that must have put the finishing touch to his recovery.

  One morning, several months later, a young Berber woman entered my dispensary and, gracefully removing her headscarf, announced, ‘I am Meriem bent Yusuf’ – as she might have said, ‘I am Greta Garbo.’

  When I asked her where she was from, she looked at me in astonishment and said that of course she had come from Tunisia and that her brother sent me greetings and Allah’s blessing; she was the sister of Issa ben Yusuf, the young man with his chest torn open by a spear which I had sewn up so well that the scar was hardly visible and his chest did not hurt, not even if he thumped it with a closed fist, and she was called Meriem and her husband was a well-digger: I must certainly have heard of him because he was the best well-digger in the whole region and I could not possibly not have heard of Ramadan et-Tugar, who was the son of Hammuda ben Hamed who was the cousin of the husband of Zilukha, the sister of my friend the Kāymakām, and she was to stay with Zilukha who would keep her until the treatment was finished; oh yes, she had come to Nàlut to be treated, because she was ill, very ill, and even the baths at Ain Numin had not cured her.

  I finally managed to stem the flood of words and to ask her what ailed her. Silent at last, she unwound her outer garment until she was dressed only in her chemise, and extended her arms towards the window so that I could see them in the full light.

  They were beautiful arms, round and smoothly joined at the shoulders without any looseness at the arm-pits, whence the firm, pure line of the breast began. But she seemed to be wearing gloves. A most amazing erythema covered the forearms with variegated nodules ranging in colour from violet to scarlet, and in places the skin seemed to have changed to coral.

  During the next two to three months I saw Meriem bent Yusuf five times; under the eye of the Kāymakām’s sister she followed the treatment very scrupulously and kept meticulously to my prescriptions. Her previous experience of medical treatment had been confined to burning with hot irons and verses from the Koran, so that there was no resistance to drugs and the response to the treatment was incredibly rapid; the injections, the salicylates and liniments acted so effectively and in such a short time that at a very much earlier date than I had expected I was able to tell her that she was cured.

  Meriem looked at her arms and her joy took away her power of speech – a phenomenon all the more remarkable in such a talkative woman. She passed and repassed her hands over the smooth skin, smiled at her cousin Zilukha and then turned to me. She would have liked to thank me but became confused and stopped in embarrassment.

  I asked her to convey my greetings to her brother, to the police sergeant of Dehibat, to the Mudir and the Cadi, to Sidi Drahib the oil merchant, and to my various friends beyond the frontier. Meriem, blinking her eyes and nodding rapidly in assent, promised that she would remember me to everyone, stammered out the farewell formula and ritual benediction and was gone.

  The months passed, the seasons changed. With the spring, gusts of hot wind from the desert blew around the rocky promontory from the top of which the castle of Nàlut gazed out from its empty sockets.
Spring brought no grass or flowers to this bare mountain, but the air became heavy with a scent as of new-baked bread and the sky was full of swooping swallows preparing for departure.

  Issa ben Yusuf, the smuggler, was taking a cup of green, aromatic tea with me in the dispensary. He had come to pay his respects during one of his periodic visits to Nàlut, before joining the caravan for Tunisia. He had talked a great deal about men and events beyond the frontier and now he spoke to me of his own people. His sister was well, her arms quite cured. As he said this, he lowered his eyes to the cup in his hand, shook his head and laughed. He was evasive when I asked him why he laughed and at first became embarrassed and silent. Finally he decided to explain.

  His brother-in-law, the digger of wells, was a good fellow but ignorant and I must excuse him; everyone knew that he could find water, that he dug excellent wells and that the wells dug by him never collapsed; but everyone knew also that he was an ignorant fellow, so that when he talked nonsense no one took any notice.

  The fact was that this excellent digger of wells was feeling none too pleased, indeed he was furious. Daily he bewailed his wife’s cure and cursed the power of medicine. Slowly, evasively, stumbling for words, Issa ben Yusuf explained the reasons for his brother-in-law’s displeasure. It appeared that when his wife embraced him the nodules caused by her complaint had given him the most delicious sensations on the nape of his neck. Now he felt them no longer, for her skin was healthy and smooth. He was furious with the tebīb for having robbed him of this subtle satisfaction. It had been the main joy of his life.