* * *
Very often Tara, the chief’s wife, would call me to her tent so that I could examine and treat a selection of her women friends, all of whom seemed full of the fancies of sickness. So one stiflingly hot afternoon I found myself on my knees in front of an elderly woman who sat cross-legged on the floor, holding her head back so that I could put drops in her eyes, the lids of which were swollen with conjunctivitis.
Tara ult Isakàn sat beside us and followed the operation with great attention. So far, she had translated the patient’s Tamahàk into Arabic, but when I had finished and finally sat down the patient spoke directly to me and I could hardly believe my ears, for the Tuareg woman spoke French. Putting a hand on my knee, she said, ‘Merci, mon vieux: t’es un frère’.
Tara did not understand the words, but seeing my astonishment she broke into a Homeric laugh which made her breasts and stomach dance. The patient laughed also, but silently, her shoulders heaving, her hand over her mouth as though she knew it was no longer beautiful.
When their hilarity had subsided a little, Tara informed me that this woman not only knew the language of the frangi but had also crossed the sea and lived a long time in their country. ‘Ask her how many Christian frangi she held in her arms when she was in a state of asri.’
There was no need to question her in order to hear her story. She was so amused at my surprise, so pleased with the joke she had played on me, and so delighted to be able to speak the language of her youth that no insistence on my part was necessary.
Damesa ult Adu did not belong to the Azdjer people; she was of the Taitôk clan and had been born far away in the Kudia, in the Algerian Sahara.
She was born in troubled times when the whole desert was ablaze with civil war and when the caravan routes were infested with brigands. The French authorities had only just begun the excellent work of penetration which was to lead a few years later to the pacification of the whole territory.
Surprised by the incursion of a squad of Sahara police which descended upon them from Ain Salah, the Taitôk put up a desperate fight but, armed only with swords and spears, they could not stand against the rifle fire. Damesa saw her parents, her brothers, her friends fall around her, and she herself was picked up by a French sergeant who carried her off to Algeria as the spoils of war.
He was, she said, a good enough fellow, except when he had been drinking (which was practically always) or when he was jealous, and then he became very violent. Damesa was therefore not sorry when a lieutenant took advantage of his seniority to commandeer her and take her with him to Rabat in Morocco.
He had evidently been the ‘grande passion’ of Damesa’s life. Women whose lives have been filled with men often hold tenaciously to the memory of an early lover whose image the subsequent crowd of anonymous and vaguely remembered faces is powerless to erase. Perhaps because it is an image which symbolises their youth.
Damesa could not remember how long her idyll with the lieutenant lasted. He was a blond young man with eyes of ‘bleu horizon’ and whiskers soft ‘comme la soie’. Neither did she remember anything of Rabat – it was all too long ago. She could recall only the little house outside Bab al Alu from which she could smell the sea; it was above the Christian cemetery, which at that time boasted very few crosses.
Damesa accompanied the lieutenant when he was transferred to Oran, but some months later he was sent home. He provided for her with a generosity that freed her from economic preoccupations. He also suggested that she should return to her country, to her own clan, but Damesa was too young to appreciate the wisdom of such advice.
The semi-conjugal life she had led had left her with too much unsatisfied curiosity; her passionate temperament was not yet satisfied, and her feminine instinct and the innate rapacity of her race made it difficult for her to forgo opportunities to which she felt her beauty would open the door. She therefore left Oran and went to Algiers.
She was a little vague about her reasons for this decision. Undoubtedly the blandishments of a mature and seemingly respectable lady from Spain who had brought a collection of model dresses to Oran had a great deal to do with it. She was a woman of vast experience, full of advice, ‘who passed for my aunt but who was not really an aunt at all – tu me comprends, n’est-ce pas?’
In the house of the Spanish woman in Algiers Damesa made the acquaintance of soldiers, civilians, Arabs, Jews, Frenchmen and other foreigners. It was a prosperous period; money circulated freely, and Damesa, thrifty and parsimonious, put by the golden Napoleons, the blue French banknotes, the European jewels, and the Arab ornaments of gold wrought by Jewish goldsmiths. When she became aware that the Spanish dowager kept the lion’s share of all that her admirers offered her, she set up on her own account. ‘Après un an j’étais dans mes meubles et la maison et le jardin étaient à moi,’ Damesa informed me.
Stockbrokers who became rich after a morning of shouting and gesticulating on the exchange, shipbuilders who made large sums by cheating over their contracts, Government contractors who knew how to get in by the back door – all contended for her favours. She could have lived at peace, made the most of her good fortune, put her money in the bank where it would have earned more money, shut her jewels away in the safe (after getting them valued, of course): but no – when one is young one is foolish, said Damesa.
Unfortunately for her, however, she began to see her men as they really were. In the country of the frangi if a woman wishes to make the most of her chances she must learn to look at men without seeing them. She, Damesa, had not had the wisdom to do that. She observed that her rich Greek merchant was bald; that the Moslem notability was ridiculously pot-bellied; that the Armenian banker stuttered when he was excited. And she suddenly found that she could no longer put up with baldness, obesity or stuttering.
She was in this state of mind, dissatisfied with herself and with everyone else, when an impresario offered her a part in a colonial exhibition which was about to open in Marseilles. He promised her sea and mountains and appealed to her vanity by assuring her that an authentic Tuareg – ‘a desert princess’ – would create a furore and be the principal attraction in the North African pavilion.
She signed two pieces of paper, and the next thing she knew was that she was on a ship which skimmed over the water puffing smoke and gurgling like a lovesick camel.
It seemed she was a born sailor. She ate ravenously, was delighted when the prow rose on the crest of a wave, laughed at the flying fishes and tantalised the middle-aged captain by telling him the secrets of Tuareg love-making – compared with which, of course, love as Europeans understand it is, she said, ‘de l’eau pure’.
Her work at the exhibition was not onerous, but she had never imagined it could be so boring. She passed whole afternoons and evenings in a vast room filled with cheap carpets, stools and tables inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and trashy Moorish lamps. In the midst of this medley of oddments, dressed according to the popular conception of a sultana, covered with heavy ornaments and false jewels, Damesa was required to sit, stand, take tea, recline in languid attitudes on piles of cushions, and play the lute – while the public, from which she was separated by an enormous glass window, gazed at her as they would have gazed at a monster at their local fairs, and drank in the inventions of the showman who presented her as the ‘Sultana of the Blue Mountains’.
There were moments, she said, when she would have liked to scream, tear off her multi-coloured garments, pull faces at the spectators, break the glass window and spit in the faces of the louts who stood staring at her open-mouthed, as though she were a two-headed calf.
When, in the next room, from which only a thin partition separated her, they installed some Moroccan girls who from morning to night performed their indecent native dances to the accompaniment of strident piping and the enthusiastic hand-clapping by the lecherous onlookers, she could bear it no longer. She broke her contract, paid the penalty, and found herself alone in the great unknown city.
But sh
e was not alone for long.
While she was in the ‘Desert Pavilion’ Damesa had noticed a dark young man, very shiny and spruce, who smiled at her through the glass, winked and made signs which she did not understand. A few hours after she had left the exhibition she came face to face with him, more highly polished than ever.
He was very young, with the soft, velvety eyes of a woman, and with a sinuous walk which made the Tuareg woman – hypersensitive after three months of seclusion – ready to swoon. When he proposed an excursion to the Riviera she was delighted and consented at once.
They were glorious days. She was not in love, she assured me, but the little man from Marseilles was very polite and knew how to treat a woman. ‘Il me clouait au lit toute pantelante’, Damesa informed me – and she was an expert in subtle technical distinctions.
When they returned to Marseilles, the spell continued but the money was finished. In order that the dazzling smile of her friend should not be dimmed, she began to draw on what she had saved in Algiers. Even when that was finished the young man continued to smile, because although the money was gone, he said, there was still Damesa – and Damesa in his expert hands would be a goldmine.
In a short time the Tuareg woman (made to look half European and half African) became the queen of all the haunts of doubtful reputation, the night clubs, dance halls, gambling houses and brothels which, during the first war, sprang up at every street corner. It must have been in this period that Damesa enriched her vocabulary with those terms which are the ordinary jargon of the French underworld but which I found so disconcerting in the Wadi Buhan. I was, for example, thunderstruck when I heard her call five franc pieces ‘thunes’, women of the street ‘pierreuses’, their occupation ‘turbi’ and their clients ‘mecs’.
They called her the ‘Queen of Silk’ but she was really only a poor cotton queen, for it was her friend from Marseilles who pulled all the wires, decided which were the most profitable of her admirers, supervised the work and pocketed the proceeds. The ideal lover of the nuptial trip among the palm trees of the Riviera had vanished and in his place was a slave-driver of the type for whom each country has its own name and which, in Marseilles, is called a ‘nervi’. He was all smiles and sweetness when affairs went well and when the Queen of Silk was docile, but when there was a thin period, or if the unfortunate woman showed any reluctance, he immediately became brutal. More than once Damesa had gone to bed covered with the bruises inflicted by the young gentleman. One evening he did not return home. He had been caught in an unauthorised gaming house and the police had put him in the cooler. When Damesa went to the police headquarters in the neighbourhood to ask for news, she too was arrested. She never saw the smart young gentleman again, for a few days later she was ordered to be deported.
Her return journey in the middle of the war, at the prow of an unlit cargo boat, was depressing in the extreme, and she found the sight of Algiers, in the pouring rain, equally so.
She was without a penny; but she still had the house, furniture and garden, and of her past magnificence there remained a few silver ornaments, a necklace, a pair of ear-rings, a bracelet or two. These she was obliged to pawn immediately. Her former friends had disappeared: some had gone to another country, some had married, a few were dead, and quite a number had gone bankrupt.
She was too tired to begin all over again to compete with a younger generation which was moving forward to the assault with short skirts and shingled hair. Even though her mirror assured her that she was still pleasant to look upon, she had sufficient common sense to know that youth – real youth, that indispensable thing – had gone.
Moreover, she felt tethered, like a camel to its grazing ground. Her compulsory repatriation papers described her state of asri in a way which deprived it of all romance and placed her in a category of women who were continually under the eye of the police. This was new to her, and she found insupportable both the incursions of the police into her home and the sanitary check-ups. It was at this point that the advice given her long ago by the blue-eyed lieutenant with the silky whiskers returned to her mind. It now no longer seemed a crazy thing to do, and she turned the idea over and over in her mind, considering ways and means.
The increasing difficulties with which she was faced due to the continually rising cost of living eventually decided her to take action. She sold everything she had and departed.
It was a journey full of incident, with sudden halts, unforeseen delays and hurried flights. Southern Algeria was in revolt, the great majority of the Tuaregs were on a war footing again, and communications with the Sahara regional centres were constantly interrupted for long periods.
After an enforced and prolonged stay at Ain Salah, on the edge of the desert, during which she was the joy of the officers’ mess, the chance to buy some contraband camels presented itself. It went against the grain to pay the price they asked for three scabby beasts, but she bought them, and on a night when there was neither moon nor stars she managed to slip past the military guards and reach the route which led, through Arak and Inniker, to her homeland, the Kudia mountains.
She broke off her story to tell me of the strange sensation she had experienced on feeling the camel rise on its four feet beneath her, on placing her bare foot on the beast’s neck and feeling the crisp, warm hair between her toes. In that instant the years fell away from her – her conjugal life at Rabat and then Oran, her state of asri in Algiers, the fantastic and unhappy life in Marseilles – everything melted away as a dream disappears on waking.
For a month she wandered about from mountain to mountain, but her people, the Taitôk – what remained of them – had gone. They had migrated towards the south and were lost among the Shaamba, the people of the Tuat, the Senussite Arabs and all the rabble that had poured into the Sahara to increase the anarchy that had turned the country upside down.
Homeless, tribeless, Damesa made her way cautiously east, dropping down out of the mountains through the Abalesse Pass, and mounting again up the Wadi Minhero as far as Tarat, where she discovered a group of the Imanghassàten who received her kindly. They were the Teghehé n’abbar, the clan of Tara ult Isakàn, who befriended her. Among these people she became again the Tuareg woman she had been before, the woman she had never ceased to be at heart: ‘Une femme taitôque avec le visage barbouillé d’ocre et la bouche rouge de safran; oui, oui, une femme taitôque, rien que cela …’
* * *
Meanwhile, a new governor had arrived in Tripoli.
It seems to be in the nature of all new Governors to deplore their predecessors’ mistakes and to hasten to justify their own existences by introducing some would-be epoch-making innovation in the hope of thus achieving immortality.
Immortality is a harmless desire so long as its manifestations are confined to the scratching of tourists’ names on the columns of Greek temples; but the bee becomes really dangerous when it gets into the bonnet of an ambitious governor.
Of course, the erratic behaviour of new administrators could also be due to the fact that the various governments of Italy seemed to go out of their way to appoint as governors of overseas territories distinguished men with no very precise ideas concerning Africa. Their knowledge of the coloured races was usually confined to what they had gathered by watching swarthy acrobats in circuses or the dark-skinned doorkeepers of cinemas.
On this occasion, the new Governor of Libya’s opening gambit was to decide that a report should be drawn up on industrial and agricultural activities during the twenty-five years of the colony’s life. And I, having passed during that period into the ranks of the colonial administration, was called to Tripoli to compile this report.
I was reluctant to leave the Berbers of the mountains and the desert – for the simple reason that I have an incorrigible habit of getting interested in my work, however modest it may be. Moreover, the provincial town atmosphere of Tripoli irritated me, and I was not at all pleased at the idea of a longish stay there.
Jemberié,
on the other hand, was delighted with the change and happily installed himself in the new house, although he deplored my choice of an Arab fonduq near the oasis, in the area where later the garden city was to spring up. Mortified at his master’s strange and vulgar tastes, Jemberié was much astonished when, on opening the door one evening, he found himself face to face with the Bishop of Tripoli, who had come to visit me. The idea that such a high dignitary was ready to enter a newly whitewashed fonduq quite upset him, since he could not decide which was the greater – the honour of such a visit or the shame of being obliged to receive such an eminent person in a hut until recently used only by camel herds. The Apostolic Vicar, however, was not bothered by such considerations.
He was a man of over fifty, thickset, obese and shortnecked. He looked at people through half-closed eyes behind thick glasses, his nose raised like a hound on the scent and his fingers, on one of which he wore the episcopalian ring, combing his bushy beard. After he had listened to an argument and made up his mind about it, he would join his hands as if in prayer and in a deep, ponderous voice, would define the situation or give his view in a few precise and unadorned phrases which admitted of no further argument.
He had an excellent knowledge of Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Albanian. No one in the whole city, with the exception of the head of the Muntasser family, was able to converse with him in classical Arabic, which was a delight to hear. When the chief’s nephews were present, they listened open-mouthed without understanding a word, and the Bishop would turn to the chief and, speaking in the local dialect, say that he was astounded to find young Moslems unable to understand their own tongue; feigning indignation, he would call attention to the fact that he, a Christian and foreigner, knew Arabic better than they, who were Arabs and Mohammedans. The old Muntasser was greatly diverted and rubbed his hands with glee at their discomfiture.
A Cure for Serpents Page 15