A Cure for Serpents

by Alberto Denti di Pirajno

  * * *

  The Berbers were reluctant to come to the dispensary, and in particular they believed that to bring children there was to expose the small patients to the evil eye.

  Therefore, when Harshah the weaver sent to tell me that her child was ill, I made my way as soon as the dispensary was closed down the steep steps into the courtyard, and knocked at the door of her troglodytic dwelling.

  The cradle was a hammock slung from wall to wall. As I laid the child down again after having examined it, Harshah, who was holding the lamp, searched my face in silence and then quickly bent over the child which had begun to cry. Turning her head slightly in my direction she whispered in a terror-stricken voice, ‘This is the third which has died like this …’ Leaning against the rough wall of the grotto, I tried, in simple words and giving examples to illustrate them, to impart the elements of child nursing to this young Berber woman who habitually drowned her offspring in her milk which was too rich for organs already inflamed by summer enteritis.

  Huddled under the niche in which the smoky lamp was burning, my pupil endeavoured, wrinkling her forehead, to follow the sense of what I was saying but her mind was occupied more with her thoughts than with my words. Suddenly she asked me anxiously whether burning the belly of the child with a hot iron could cure it.

  I had to begin all over again, without any show of impatience, for that would have frightened her and made it impossible for her to take in what I was saying.

  No fires on the belly, no. Little ’Abd el Qadar was like an overburdened camel: when a camel was exhausted after carrying too heavy a load, the camel-herd let it rest and lightened its load when it took the road again. In the same way, ’Abd el Qadar’s stomach must be allowed to rest and the load must be lightened. The mother nodded her head to signify that she had grasped the allusion, and smiled when I explained that she must prepare a ‘dummy’ of gauze dipped in sweetened water so as to relieve the hunger of the child without irritating its disordered intestine. After three days of sweetened water he could take milk again, but the feeds must be very short and repeated every three hours. Harshah opened her eyes and joined her hands in a gesture of supplication as though I were asking her to kill the child. But by this time I had her under my influence and could dictate.

  ‘You must do as I say because I know more than you know. The feed must be very short: if too much water is put into a water-skin does it not burst? The same happens to the stomachs of children who are put to the breast too often and for too long a time.’

  ‘You are not going to give me any medicine?’

  That I had to promise – it was unnecessary for the little patient but indispensable to the prestige of the physician.

  In the twilight of the evil-smelling lamp the woman gave a great sigh of relief. She had spent so much on amulets which were to have worked miracles and which had done nothing whatever for the child. She had spent so much, and she was so poor. She put out a hand to rock the cradle – her arm was devoid of bracelets, without even a miserable mugyas of horn.

  ‘You know, my husband is a government spahi; he earns eight liras a day and must feed his horse. The government is crafty; it has forbidden the issue of barley and only gives oats, so that we cannot even make bazina with the horse’s ration. It was the only advantage we had.’

  Not only was she poor, but she was also virtuous – and therefore no one made her presents of bracelets. Oh yes – if she were like Manubia, the wife of Said el Maraghni, she too could go to the well loaded with silver …

  ‘And what does Maraghni say?’

  ‘Everyone knows that he is blind when it suits him to be so.’

  At the thought of all that silver displayed with such impudence, Harshah’s tongue began to run away with her: the rancour of the girl who is poor but young and with beauty to offer against the middle-aged woman, overblown but rich in experience and able to play her cards skilfully, got the better of Harshah’s discretion.

  Yes – Manubia had a lover. A lover without land or livestock. And the lover was Shoushan. Of course I must know Shoushan. He was called Shoushan because his mother was from the Fezzan – a dirty negress from the Fezzan. But his real name was Daud, and when he was not out in the pastures or with the caravan he always came to the dispensary to have his eyes treated. I knew him well. Could that ragged scarecrow of a Shoushan really be making presents of silver bracelets? Harshah laughed at my wide-eyed surprise. Why, yes, indeed, he could.

  Harshah came close to me and whispered a story which, if there was any truth in it, had serious implications. It was a muddled story of places far and near, on both sides of the frontier; a story of mysterious and unexpected meetings with Shoushan when he was supposed to be with a caravan elsewhere; of a camel he guided which, with nothing on its back, was nevertheless extraordinarily heavy.

  ‘Harshah, are you sure of this?’

  The woman insisted vehemently, somewhat impatient at my reluctance to believe what everyone knew. On the head of little ’Abd el Qadar, of course it was true. Shoushan, who only pretended to be a fool, was really the boss of the whole traffic. When everyone believed him to be on the Sinawen route or in the Saniet er-Rejel pastures, Shoushan and his associates were at the frontier selling arms and ammunition to the rebels who had taken refuge in Tunisia. From there, by a roundabout route through the ‘western territory’, the arms and ammunition crossed the frontier again and reached the Zintan, Rojeban and Imanghassàten rebels.

  ‘If you do not believe me, in the name of God stop Shoushan when he leaves for Tgutta and see what he has inside his pack-saddle.’

  The lamp in the niche flickered. ’Abd el Qadar was asleep in his cradle. Outside the grotto, in the quiet of the summer night, the entrance to the subterranean dwellings seemed like spent craters of the moon. The dogs barked huskily on the ramparts above.

  A month later, Daud ben Messaud, alias Shoushan, was stopped by the zaptivé and packets of ammunition poured from his pack-saddle as they tore it open. He certainly had no idea that his misfortune bore any relation to the lack of bracelets on a woman’s arm, or to the fact that a child had found it impossible to digest its mother’s milk.

  * * *

  I was obliged to keep in touch with a great number of people who had no plausible reason for coming to Nàlut and whose presence there would have been immediately remarked – people who wandered along the frontier and often crossed it to reappear in the most unlikely places.

  To gather information from these wanderers I often made long journeys to meet ‘patients’ who generally awaited me at some well along the frontier or under a group of palm trees on an unfrequented route. On one of these trips I stopped at the Aulad Sellam wells where the Mohâjerin, a small tribe of Arabs, had pitched five tents.

  Formerly, the whole tribe had taken refuge in Tripolitania to escape French justice, for a price had been put on the heads of the most troublesome among them. They were rebels by instinct and brigands by vocation, and they wandered from one territory to another carrying their curse in their name: ‘Mohâjerin’, the outlaws.

  They were in perennial revolt against all constituted authority, but they also quarrelled among themselves, so that their tents never formed a single camp but were scattered right along the frontier from the mountains to the sea. In me they saw only a physician – albeit a physician with somewhat peculiar ways – but since the time when I had cured the mother of the Sheik Abd en-Nebi I had been treated with a respect they did not accord to everyone.

  The chief’s mother was a decrepit old lady who had by some miracle managed to keep very young eyes in a face as creased and wrinkled as a baked apple. She was a valuable ally because she knew all the people and territories between Sfax and Nàlut, and the men of her tribe obeyed her without a murmur. In addition, she had begun to take an interest in the game I was playing because the missions I entrusted to her served to break the unbearable monotony of her life in a territory where the police nipped every illicit enterprise in the bud
.

  There had been a time, she told me, when life in Tunisia was very different: something happened every day. With a rapt expression she described the nocturnal excursions of the men, when the women of the camp spent the night in a fever of waiting; the precipitous flights amid the crying of children and the groans of pregnant women as they bumped about on the backs of camels; the exhausting marches from one pasturage to another; the fights with other goatherds and camel herds, jealous for their own animals; the innumerable halts at the wells belonging to sedentary tribes, and the struggle to obtain water; the days of stark poverty alternating with periods of plenty when raided livestock poured into the camp. Ah, those were the days worth living!

  She spoke in a quiet voice, without gestures, but her eyes lit up and a reminiscent smile played over her mouth as she recalled the stormy and violent days of her youth.

  So I was welcomed at the Aulad Sellam wells and given dinner there by the Mohâjerin. I ate with three tribesmen who informed me that they were to all intents and purposes corpses, having been condemned to death in the neighbouring Regency for armed revolt. They roared with laughter and teased the youngest of them, who was about to be married. What was a young woman to do with a corpse in her bed? they asked him. She could hardly be blamed if she turned her attention elsewhere, to something more virile.

  But my stay with the Mohâjerin had to be short because any prolonged absence from Nàlut on my part without a clearly defined reason might give rise to suspicion. Moreover, I had to see Madhun the next day.

  Madhun was a young Berber without any fixed abode who travelled by night, slept on the ground, and washed when he happened to think of it. Nevertheless, he was quite a dandy, and his name meant ‘the pomaded one’. He was also my best informer from over the border.

  I had arranged to meet him at sundown by the crossroads at Bir el Mitt, and next day I set out to keep the appointment. He was there punctually, accompanied by Aissa ben Ramadan, a jack of all trades, and by Ibrahim, a lad with a stupid, freckled face whom I had never seen before.

  The rain poured down and made us shiver under our coats as we huddled around a smoky fire of twigs. The light of the sun had disappeared from the sky; the horizon had vanished behind a veil of rain, and a heavy, leaden bank of cloud stretched from west to east. Close by stood the horses, heads down, their manes sparkling with raindrops, their eyes following the movements of a bird as it drank from a puddle; in the distance a tethered camel was just visible through the rain, raising and lowering its neck behind the misty bushes.

  The reluctant flames flared up occasionally among the damp brushwood, illuminating the Saracen features of Madhun wrapped in his dark uàsra. Aissa had put the tea kettle on the fire and, with a row of glasses turned upside down in front of him, waited patiently till the water began to boil.

  Madhun screened the glasses from the rain as the tea was poured into them. The tinkle of the preparations wakened a greyhound which had been sleeping under Madhun’s cloak, and the sharp nose of the bitch protruded from beneath his arm. The light of the fire was reflected in the golden irises of its eyes and shone in pupils that were no more than black, scintillating pinpoints.

  The tea was deplorable: the well water was brackish and the sugar failed to disguise its unpleasant flavour. Aissa told us that the well had a bad reputation and that a long time ago a man was drowned in it: last year a camel herd, on drawing up his leather bucket, had found a human arm tangled in the cord.

  The serious talk was finished and the boy Ibrahim, who had stood apart, now came and squeezed his small person between the two men, huddled up in his hāik with only his face, hands, and the points of his sandals visible. Madhun asked him a question about himself, and without waiting for further encouragement the boy began to tell his story. He spoke softly, and every so often paused in order to throw a twig on the fire or blow on the ashes.

  Ibrahim, it seemed, was an orphan without any brothers. Madhun had nicknamed him ‘Sheik ed-diâb’, the chief of the jackals. Every evening when he was not with a caravan he set traps under the sand in the river beds and along ways which only he knew, working carefully and employing the techniques which long experience had taught him. These traps closed with a snap as soon as a paw or foot touched them. In the morning he inspected his traps and collected the foxes and jackals which had been caught. He sold the animals’ pelts in the market, and his wife cooked the carcases, which formed his staple diet.

  This child had a wife?

  The boy laughed, exposing an uneven set of teeth. He was not a child, he said, being probably over twenty, and his uncle, the Mudir of Jossh Kebir, had given him a wife two years ago.

  And he ate jackals?

  Ibrahim was surprised at my surprise: jackals, he said, were very toothsome, and foxes even more so. They must be cooked twice – once to remove the overstrong flavour of wild game from the flesh, the second time in order to impregnate it with the herbs and spices.

  He explained to me that foxes and jackals are possessed by evil spirits, so that he had no compunction about killing them, whereas not for anything in the world would he have raised his hand against a gazelle or a dove, which were sacred, mràbet. He spoke very seriously, convinced of these things, and there was an awestruck expression on the small face framed in the hāik. His knees were drawn up under his chin and as he talked his hands moved in brief and fluent gestures.

  In a low voice, as though confiding a secret, he told us the extraordinary tale of a jackal that lived between Tiji and Zigzau and which three times had escaped from his traps; on the last occasion it had got away only by leaving a paw behind. Fifteen days after this miraculous escape Ibrahim met the jackal as he was returning alone from Sinawen after delivering barley there by caravan. It was a moonlight night and the jackal had recognised him, he said; it had followed him, running along the crest of the dunes; sometimes it went ahead and waited for him and then, as he passed, it had raised its mutilated paw and cried out in its language of howls and shrieks. No one understood this language, of course, but the jackal was certainly calling down curses upon him. Ibrahim, terrified, perched on his camel, had called upon the sacred marabouts for help and had beaten his animal to make it run. But there had been no need to beat the camel: it had clearly understood the jackal’s threats and curses and, no less terrified than its master, had careered along at a tremendous pace until the cries of the jackal died away in the distance.

  Madhun and Aissa, who had smiled at the beginning of Ibrahim’s story, became uneasy now; their mocking words died on their lips; their eyes flickered stealthily as they looked about them.

  Could it be that the soul of a man, perhaps some long-dead outlaw, inhabited the body of this jackal? It could be; it was possible; such things were known.

  The rain continued. Within the radius of the light from the fire the drops scintillated and hung like pearls on our clothes which steamed in the warmth of the flames.

  But it was time to go. The men began to move about among the horses; the gnome-like Ibrahim mounted his camel and disappeared silently into the darkness. Madhun brought me my horse and in a moment we were all in our saddles. As we moved off, Aissa trotted before me, his silhouette from his hood to his saddle-bags forming a dark triangle against the starless night sky.

  Behind us, the dying fire succumbed to the rain.

  * * *

  I think very few people in Nàlut ever knew the real name of the Cādī. When they addressed him they used his title, and when speaking of him they called him ‘Sleeping Belly’. I never knew the exact origin of this nickname, but I took it to indicate that type of vacillating man who is always unsure of himself, unable to take a decision, and for whom the Sicilians have a name: panza ’i canigghia (‘bran belly’).

  It was said that during the rebellion, when Chalifa ben Asker was ruler of Nàlut, he kept the Cādī beside him in order to enjoy his abject terror, and that for some time after the arrival of the Italians the unfortunate man refused to emerge from th
e well in which he had taken refuge, unwilling to believe those who told him that the rebels had fled.

  Although he was not greatly loved, he was esteemed for his knowledge and honesty. He was, in fact, an authority on Mohammedan canonical law and was able to argue the most subtle legal points, embellishing his disquisitions with excerpts from the most famous commentators and authorities with which his tenacious memory was stored.

  He often came to see me and was always accompanied by his faithful scrivener, Sassi. Sassi was a little man, with a hooked nose which curved over a fierce Corsair moustache, and he had a great respect for his master’s knowledge in his own particular field. So long as the Cādī talked on those matters Sassi stood behind him, immobile, with his eyes downcast and an air of humility. But as soon as the other launched into long, illogical discourses on all kinds of other subjects his attitude immediately changed: he smiled into his moustache, winked at me and sometimes even tapped his forehead with his finger to indicate that his master was not quite all there.

  The fact was that the Cādī was one of those men who are cultured without being intelligent; who are extremely erudite in the field in which they have specialised but who, as soon as they are confronted with subjects they have not studied thoroughly and methodically, collapse under their own innate stupidity.

  I realised then why the Kāymakām – who was ignorant, but intelligent – lost patience when he was discussing any matter with the Cādī.

  One evening, after having given me in detail the case history of a family of the Ulad Mahmud and explained why all the people concerned were guilty (the woman and the lover because they were adulterers, the husband because he connived, the mother-in-law because she had accepted money from the daughter-in-law’s lover, the husband’s uncle because, being in love with his niece, he had attempted to eliminate the lover – only by a fluke was the mule, on which the lover had made his escape, exonerated), the Cādī turned to Sassi and told him to leave the room.