A Cure for Serpents

by Alberto Denti di Pirajno

  As soon as we were alone, he drew his chair close to mine and asked me if I knew that in France they sold women at fixed prices?

  I was not sure what he was getting at and suspected that someone had been pulling his leg, so I asked him to explain. With great seriousness he assured me that in Paris there were shops in which attractive young women could be bought, and that people living outside France could send the money and the shop undertook to despatch to them the goods selected.

  As the Cādī’s Italian was somewhat halting he interspersed Arabic phrases and words when he found himself at a loss for the exact expression. He now insisted that the women were chosen from teswîra, that is, photographs. I asked him where he had seen the photographs and he replied that there were dozens of them of magnificent creatures; that each had a name and that these lovely girls were to be had for the price of a loaf. Purple with excitement, he fixed his piggish, shining eyes on my face.

  I asked him who had given him this information. He replied that he had the advertisement and the photographs, but that Gabriele would give me details.

  Gabriele was a young clerk, intelligent, who spoke perfect Arabic and French. He had a quiet, reserved appearance and those who did not know him did not suspect that under this harmless exterior he hid an excessive vivacity.

  In the meantime, the Cādī had brought out the advertisement and photographs from under his hāik. It was a three-year-old dress catalogue from the Galeries Lafayette which had somehow arrived in Nàlut. The dresses were worn by models and under each was a name – Simone, Arlette, Yvonne – and the price.

  This had obviously been Gabriele’s little joke; and patiently I began to explain to the Cādī the facts about western commerce. But the old satyr was bitterly disappointed. He had expected more of Paris …

  * * *

  Sassi, the Cādī’s scrivener, did not always act in that capacity: he fulfilled also the humbler functions of beadle and doorkeeper, and sometimes I borrowed him to keep order for me when there was a crowd at the dispensary.

  He had a large family which he supported partly with his earnings and partly with the produce from a small field of palm trees which he let out every year for the extraction of the legbi, the palm wine. He was always serene and smiling, so that I hardly recognised him on the evening when he asked me to go to his grotto to see his son who was sick. In answer to my questions he merely shook his head and sighed as though he would like to say more but could not; his face was ashen and drawn, and casting up his eyes to heaven he gesticulated as though unable to express the anguish that was bursting his heart. His son was ill, very ill. He was the only son God had given him – because the others whom I knew were not his sons.

  When Chalifa ben Asker, the rebel, took Nàlut, Sassi was one of the tyrant’s first victims. Even now Sassi seemed unable to give any explanation as to why he had been singled out for such persistent persecution. Perhaps it was an instinctive dislike, perhaps, he said, he had failed to offer dates, perhaps he had been slandered by someone seeking to ingratiate himself with the new chief. But perhaps also there was a reason which Sassi did not wish to discuss.

  In any case, Chalifa wasted no time: first of all he killed Sassi’s sheep and goats, then he sequestered his camel, and finally he threw him into prison.

  In prison Sassi had an opportunity of trying out the diet which Dr Guelpa recommended for diabetes – consisting of fasting and Janus water – with the difference that Sassi had to substitute basins of brackish ooze for the beverage so widely prescribed by the French clinician. Every two days he was given a piece of bread, but every three days, to even things up, he was given fifty strokes of the whip.

  As Sassi was not diabetic and as beating is not, in any case, included in any pharmacopœia, after two weeks of this regime he was in a pitiable condition.

  One day when he had been beaten with more than usual enthusiasm, Sassi, on the floor of his cell, prayed that God would take his life and thus put an end to his sufferings. All at once the hand of a woman appeared between the iron bars, and immediately disappeared again. An instant only, but time to throw him a handful of dates. Then the hand reappeared and threw him three fritters still hot and dripping with oil.

  Every day this woman brought him some fruit, bread or a sweet, and Sassi in his cell waited for the hand as one waits for the moon of Ramadān.

  The woman was Chalifa’s wife.

  Had Sassi known her before? Sassi lifted his eyes to heaven and swore that he had not known her before. Sassi was a gentleman.

  When the Italians arrived, Chalifa was hanged. Sassi married the widow of his persecutor and became the father of his sons.

  But he had desired from his wife sons who should call him father ‘not only with their lips but with their blood’. Sons came, but God had taken them all back except one, and now this one was very ill.

  Sassi shook his head and silent tears coursed down through the wrinkles of his drawn and withered face. He lowered his voice and told me that the other night near his grotto the cry of the nightbird that kills children had been heard. Seeing my incredulity he became eloquent and assured me that there was indeed a bird that killed children; that everyone knew of its existence and that the mothers of Jebel Nefusah went in terror of it.

  The story is one of a married man who tired of his wife. She had lost her beauty and, after giving him a son, her health too; nor had she passed her health on to the son, who was wasting away beside his faded mother.

  Being tired of his wife with the pale and sunken cheeks, the man took a second wife who entered the sad, silent house and filled it with boisterous gaiety. She laughed at the prematurely aged woman who had seen the sun set on her husband’s love, and who now trembled for the life of her son which flickered like a flame in a lamp without oil. When, after a painless pregnancy, the second wife gave birth to a son, she announced with a triumphant laugh that the master had been born, and extending her right hand with the five fingers outspread, she cursed the first wife’s son.

  The child died the following night.

  Then the mother too prayed for death. But she could not die as believers die: she knew that she did not merit hell but she knew also that no paradise could purge her hatred, so she called to her aid the demons, the sprites, the jinns and the spirits of evil; by the use of their spells she was transformed into a bird and her desire for revenge taught her to fly.

  She flew away – and she still flies, even today, over houses where mothers fear for the lives of their children or exult over the beauty of their sons as they rock their cradles. Since even Allah cannot restore to her her lost son, this unhappy mother, to whom sorrow has given wings, desires that all mothers shall know her anguish and become crazed with the same pain that tore her heart.

  Her cry in the night is an omen of disaster, and when the irreparable has happened she laughs at the tears that are shed.

  Sassi had heard the cry of the nightbird, flying above his home. Now he sat silent, waiting for the inevitable and wondering why Allah, who is gracious and merciful, permits such things to happen.

  * * *

  Every two or three months I passed a few days in the Ghadames oasis, the important junction south of Nàlut on which converge all the caravans from the coast, from the Fezzan, from Tunisia and Algeria. I have covered the two hundred miles between Nàlut and Ghadames by ’plane, car, motor-lorry and caravan – and although it may not be the most comfortable, there is certainly no finer way of travelling over the sunbaked tracks than on the back of a slowly moving camel. No one who, after many days in caravan, has at last emerged on to the brow of the el Bab plateau and gazed from the back of a camel over the oasis of Ghadames spread out in the light of the setting sun, can ever forget that moment.

  Ghadames is a strange country.

  There is a saying that it was once a prostitute, and in the local dialect it is, in fact, called Bembaka, which means just that. Like all prostitutes, in order to live it needed protectors. The Tuaregs – ‘th
e veiled family’ (the veil covering the men’s faces while those of the women go shamelessly naked) – set themselves up in this role.

  They escort caravans going to Ghat, to the Fezzan and to the Sudan, and accompany those coming from the country of the blacks across the Sahara. It is they who control the ‘traffic routes’ and guarantee the safety of the trade on which Ghadames lives. In fact, Ghadames is so grateful for this protection that if a Tuareg assaults a Ghadamese, or steals a camel, or rapes a woman of the oasis, it makes no protest but smiles at its protectors – who may be light-fingered but who are always indispensable.

  Yes, Ghadames is a strange country, and I learnt many things in the shade of its palm trees.

  The Ghadamese speak Arabic with the Arabs, Tamahàk with the Tuaregs and Haussa with their servants, but among themselves they use a Berber dialect which no one speaks outside the walls of the city. The population is housed on three levels: the servants on the street level, the free men on the upper floors and the women on the terraces above, from which they descend only on very rare occasions after sunset in order to go to the mosque.

  Enclosed within their oasis and isolated in the vast desert, the Ghadamese nevertheless maintain contacts all over the world; they combine the flabbiness of sedentary people with the broad vision of the nomads. The Ghadamese tradesman, huddled in his little hovel stuffed full of goods, will talk with the greatest simplicity of his stays in Paris and London, or of the letter he has just received from his representative in Marseilles or New York.

  Ghadames is indeed a strange country.

  Hajj et-Talatin was the most important and authoritative merchant of Ghadames. He was a man no longer young, but robust and extraordinarily active, although he gave quite the contrary impression. He seemed lazy because he never hurried, and he watched the world through great, slow, bovine eyes: when he was listening, he lowered his tinted lids so that his glance filtered through a mere slit. In Ghadames it was said that Hajj et-Talatin could see even when he was asleep – and that the man was not yet born who could get the better of the old fox.

  I had treated him, and continued to treat him, for a number of ailments great and small, due to his age, his sedentary life, excessive coffee-drinking and smoking, and previous infections. When I arrived in Ghadames it was always difficult to refuse his hospitality and maintain my freedom of movement.

  On one occasion (after we had known each other for about a year) he told me that one of his wives was ill and asked me to visit her.

  He accompanied me up to the terrace of his house. His short, square figure preceded me along dark corridors punctuated by streaks of white light from the narrow high-walled courtyards, across ramparts outlined against the fiery glow of the sunset, and up narrow stairways cut into the walls or passing externally from one floor to the next. Finally, passing through a large, whitewashed room, we came out on the highest terrace of all.

  I was invited to sit down on a pile of carpets the top one of which was a rough Bedouin hammâl. Lifting a corner, I observed underneath it the bright colours of a Kayruan rug; underneath that I found the long, soft hair of a Moroccan carpet, and underneath again my hand encountered the silk texture of a Shiraz. Last of all, I discovered a wonderful peach-coloured Bokhara decorated with roses worthy to be strewn before the feet of a sultana.

  The delicate sensibility of these people delights to place beautiful things before guests and then to leave them the joy of discovering them for themselves. From the terrace there was a view of houses, terraces and covered ways, of the surrounding oasis and beyond the sea of palm trees the desert glowed in a golden haze that veiled the horizon. From the distance the murmur of prayer floated up to us, the lament of a beggar, the voices of the servants round the Jumenta fountain.

  A cushion was placed for me. On my right was a dried-up old woman whose face I could not see because, in order to hide her embarrassment, she remained bent over the teacups or busied herself with the tea kettle and stove. In front of me sat two young women with their heads and faces covered.

  Hajj et-Talatin threw away the stump of his cigar and took leave of me without deigning even to glance in the direction of the women. Perhaps he wished to devote himself to evening prayer or perhaps, leaving me alone with his women in this way, he wished to make me understand that he considered me as a brother.

  The departure of the master of the house, however, made the silence even more embarrassing and when I pronounced the words of greeting I received only an indistinct murmur in reply. For a split second, over their veils, the women scrutinised this phenomenon they would never have believed possible: a Christian on their terrace!

  Which of the two women was the patient?

  When I put the question to the old woman she replied without raising her head that the patient was not there but that she would come. The younger women seemed to exchange a significant look. Finally, one made an effort and informed me that, God be thanked, she was well and she wished me prosperity. As she spoke she uncovered the upper part of her face and I saw with astonishment that her eyes were green.

  These two women were Hajj et-Talatin’s first two wives; the sick one was the third. They were pale-complexioned women, whiter than many Europeans. The wife with the green eyes had beautiful hands, plump in comparison with the hands of Arab women. When I called her ‘Signora foreigner’ she exclaimed and clapped her hands with surprise. How had I guessed? She was indeed a foreigner, she said; she was born in Morocco on the Rif mountains. Removing her head covering she showed me that she had red hair.

  The other was a Ghadamese and dressed like one. She was laden with bracelets, armlets, necklaces and ear-rings that jingled as she moved; her hair hung in two coiled plaits at each side of her head, and on her forehead she wore a mrabba, a large tassel of red wool. She stretched herself from the waist with a feline movement, and looked at me out of the corners of her eyes; in execrable Arabic she informed me that she was ill, so ill that no medicine could cure her. She turned her head over her shoulder and in the local dialect said something to her companion which made the Berber woman blush. It was evidently something extremely improper, for the old woman swiftly reproved her in the same dialect and the young wife covered her mouth with her fingers pretending to be confused. But she smiled at me with her eyes.

  In order to relieve her embarrassment I asked her how many children she had. This simple question had a most disconcerting effect: the two whispered together and giggled, digging each other in the ribs. The old woman threw me a glance which was meant as an apology and in a vibrating voice let loose on the two women a torrent of words of which I was unable to understand a syllable. There was, however, no doubt about her authority, for the other two subsided at once and cast sulky looks in her direction.

  The old woman offered me a glass of tea and sought to distract my attention by asking me how long I had been in Ghadames; if the air suited me; if the water made me ill; if the climate was as I liked it. She served me with one glass of tea after another, varying the ingredients and aroma.

  Presently, at a sign from the duenna, the two young women withdrew. There was still no sign of the third wife and it seemed she had made it clear she would not come.

  When we were alone the old woman became more natural and talkative. The sick wife, she told me, was Sitta Mamuna, the youngest of Hajj et-Talatin’s three wives; he had married her eight months ago; she was a Tuareg woman, of the Ifoghas tribe. She was very ill because some months ago she had fallen a victim to the ‘spirit that sits on the shoulder’. The matron lowered her voice and spoke in a serious and worried tone. Did I know elli ’ala ktefha, the spirit that sits on the shoulder?

  Yes, I knew him – the turbid spirit of the women’s quarters, the unhappy symbol of all the aberrations of cloistered women. This perverse demon rides women in their first blooming – in fact, the Berbers say that he ‘takes only beautiful young girls’, and if an older woman complains of his torments, the young women turn their heads away and laugh.
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  The manifestations of the spirit’s malice are infinite: the woman who has him on her shoulder may fall into convulsions, suffer from the most peculiar sensory hallucinations, laugh or cry without cause, endure periods of madness during which she will remove her clothes and soil herself, or else imagine she is an omnipotent empress. She may even speak languages she does not know, or be taken with prophetic delirium.

  The duenna (who was a poor relation of Hajj et-Talatin, a distant aunt) informed me that Sitta Mamuna had had every kind of cure, but all had failed: even a composer of amulets had obtained no result from his magical formulæ; neither had any of her own remedies availed her. Perhaps in order to distract me from the subject which was worrying her, she went on to inform me that she knew how to cure many maladies and that she was famous throughout the country for her remedies.

  I made a show of being impressed by so much wisdom, and with a fleeting smile (did she believe it, I wondered, or was she laughing up her sleeve?) she told me the story of how the older women had learned witchcraft and acquired the power of curing diseases.

  In ancient times the matrons had decided to catch the devil and get rid of him.

  ‘How can we get him here among us?’ they asked.

  The devil always appears in the midst of fights, so the women began to shout insults at each other and to take one another by the hair. The devil appeared and immediately the imprecations turned to groans and lamentations.

  ‘Why do you weep?’ asked the devil.

  ‘We weep,’ they replied, ‘because the devil is dead.’

  ‘Rubbish! I am the devil.’

  ‘But we tell you he is dead. What do we know about you?’

  ‘But I say I am the devil. I ought to know. How shall I prove it to you?’

  ‘We don’t believe you. If you are the devil, prove it by getting inside this oil cask.’

  The devil entered the cask and the women popped in the wooden bung and sealed it with palm tow and wax.