A Cure for Serpents

by Alberto Denti di Pirajno

  Mohammedan canonical law held no mysteries for the Bishop; his knowledge of it was such that the High Court often submitted to him the most complicated questions, asking for his opinion.

  The first time he invited me to his house he refused to let me examine him, talked to me of his diabetes as though it had no connection with him, and finished by telling the history of Môhy ed-Din ben Aràbi, a famous Arab mystic of about the year 1200, of whom I had never heard, but of whose life he knew every detail.

  I had already lost the thread of this story when the Cādī entered with a packet of papers under his arm. They put their heads together and began to talk rapidly in lowered voices. The papers were passed from one to the other, turned over and back, while with their forefingers they ran along the lines of text, stressing phrases and words. Every now and again the Bishop struck the papers with the back of his hand, exclaiming that there was no doubt at all: the case was exactly that. The Cādī assented and then whispered some suggestion which started the examination of the case all over again.

  Suddenly the Bishop turned to me and announced that it was absolutely indispensable to know the exact formula used by the husband to repudiate the wife: although there were formulæ which left no doubt, there were others which were only valid in certain clearly defined situations; there were expressions which signified repudiation in the opinion of some commentators while for others they were merely a reproof without any juridical significance. It was, however, inadmissible, he said, that a man could repudiate his wife by the use of the words reported by these witnesses.

  He puffed into his beard, raised his shoulders, spread out his hands and wagged his head. Furthermore, he went on, this was a case of conditional repudiation and – what made the whole thing extremely ticklish – the condition was difficult to prove: the question lay in the terms used and it was useless to cavil.

  By this time my head was swimming and I was grateful when the Cādī interrupted him to point out that in the case under examination the husband wished above all to prove that he was the offended party.

  The Bishop replaced the papers on the table, and in an even tone declared that on that point the husband was indubitably in the right, since the one thing about which there could be absolutely no argument was that the husband belonged to the category of cuckolds. He repeated the word, savouring it between tongue and palate.

  * * *

  To disease, the Bishop put up a passive resistance. He followed the prescribed diet as scrupulously as though it were one of the many limitations laid upon him by the monastic rule – for with a certain pride he maintained that his position as Bishop did not exempt him from any of his duties as a monk.

  For some reason or other he took a liking to me. The incorrigible vulgarity of my speech in Arabic amused him. In a fruity voice, with his hands on his hips, he would ask me in what low haunts I had picked up such unorthodox expressions.

  One day as I copied the title of a collection of elementary Arabic prose which lay on his desk, he snatched the note from my hand and asked if I was not ashamed to write Arabic so badly. I replied that I was not, seeing that I had had no teacher and had taught myself by copying out of a dilapidated Koran school spelling book, with the help of an old sergeant of a Libyan regiment. The Bishop remained silent and thoughtful for a moment and then, with a brief, authoritative gesture, invited me to sit down at his writing-table. He put a piece of squared paper before me, placed my fingers round the pen to show me how it should be held, and began to dictate to me the letters of the Arabic alphabet. When the letter was well formed and contained exactly within the square, I heard a grunt of approval at my shoulder – but more often I heard a threatening rumble that warned me I had better begin again. Sometimes he took the pen from my hand, wrote a letter which seemed printed, and then I did my best to copy it.

  These lessons became a habit which I would have enjoyed even more but for the pedagogic methods employed by my unusual teacher. I was evidently his first adult pupil and he applied to me the methods he had used in the Franciscan schools in Palestine and Syria where, many years ago, he had taught children the first elements of writing, rapping their knuckles with a ruler when they made a mistake or allowed their attention to wander. I was amused – but only up to a point. When I did not succeed in joining the lām to the alif in the proper way, or in giving the right curve to the tail of the sīn, a ruler would descend like lightning on my knuckles. He did it with such Olympian unconcern that although I swore under my breath I was never able to bring myself to the point of asking him to desist.

  As time went on, I realised that this unusual patient did not consider his illness as real: to him it was simply a tiresome idea which would go away if he refused to notice it. This, no doubt, was why he spent hours debating with the Cādī or giving me lessons in Arabic caligraphy, or reading abstruse books, giving full rein to his extraordinary versatility.

  Whenever I asked him questions which, as his doctor, I had to ask, his brow clouded with annoyance.

  ‘There – I was feeling so well. I was just re-examining these photographs of twelfth-century Selyuk coins. Do you notice the reproduction of the traditional Greek and Byzantine designs? Look at this wonderful piece of Kaykosroway II: he was so much in love with his wife that he had her features stamped on his silver coins. It is magnificent. And then you come in with that professional air which I detest and spoil everything with your questions. You force me to think about my complaint and make me feel ill all at once.’

  Numismatology was one of his specialities.

  For him every coin represented a piece of history with which he was familiar. Tossing a Septimus Severus sesterce or a Persian dinar in the palm of his hand he would discourse of dynasties, of peoples, of wars and invasions, of vanished civilisations and of those which had replaced them to disappear in their turn, of artistic traditions passed down from one minter to another. In the fringe of a cord, in a device or in the details of a figure, he would discover an echo from a buried epoch, the influence of powers that have ceased to be.

  He had presented a valuable collection of Alexandrian coins to the Jerusalem museum. When I asked him why he had parted with it he replied, with a smile, ‘You forget that I am a Franciscan’ – adding more seriously and with great simplicity, ‘In any case, those coins had nothing further to tell me.’

  He had an exceptional capacity for seeing the grotesque and humorous aspect of people and of situations, and this contrasted strangely with his grave appearance, his dignified bearing and the solemn episcopal vestments with their amethyst-coloured buttons.

  The Jewish community had at its head a Rabbi who was universally respected for his integrity and for the soundness of his doctrine. This worthy Talmudist was afflicted with a nose of such melancholy proportions that it overhung his mouth. Added to an unfortunate arrangement of the wrinkles on his face and to a chronic inflammation of the eyelids, it gave him such a permanently desolate expression that he always seemed to have just left the Wailing Wall. I asked the Bishop why the Rabbi had such an unhappy air and what could be done to console him.

  ‘Nothing,’ he replied, with a grave shake of his head, ‘absolutely nothing. This man, who knows the Talmud as very few know it, has every reason to look like that. I wonder how many times you have pulled a long face waiting for a train which was half an hour late? Well – you can hardly expect light-heartedness and jollity from someone who has been waiting thousands of years for the Messiah.’

  * * *

  It was the same Bishop who introduced me to his best friend in the town – the Arab mayor of Tripoli.

  The friendship between the Bishop and the pasha was one of the most extraordinary I have ever seen. I have never met two men who were, on the surface, more directly opposed in temperament, and rarely have I come across a deeper and closer friendship. The Italian was of modest origin, the Arab the head of a princely family which had once ruled the country; the Bishop held to the simple and pure faith of St Francis of As
sisi, the prince was a fervent and practising Mohammedan; the humble Christian had an encyclopædic erudition, the Moslem nobleman was illiterate.

  For a long time I pondered this friendship, trying to discover the mysterious affinity which undoubtedly bound two such utterly different beings together. I did not know either of them well and for a long time I saw only the superficial differences which divided them without discerning the deep similarity which bound them together.

  The pasha did not know how old he was. He knew that he was old, very old – but he did not trouble to fix the exact number of years: perhaps eighty-five, perhaps ninety. He counted on his fingers, and in order to get somewhere near the truth he would mention incidents of many years ago, trying to guess what age he was when this or that happened. He must certainly have been about ninety, but he was as straight as a rod and had a constitution of iron. What on earth was the use, he asked, of cudgelling his brains to find out his age when he was in splendid health, could still ride a horse and, he added, with a prodigious wink and digging me in the ribs, when he still knew what to do with a woman?

  This man who, somewhere about his ninetieth year, still talked of his relations with women, had been a virgin until he was forty. I was never able to discover the reason for his abstinence, or why at a mature age he had changed his regime. When I asked him, he replied jokingly that he had wanted to conserve his forces in order to be able to feel young when he was old. On other occasions, he would say that God caused men to act in different ways and that it was useless to try to find out why he led his creatures along one path rather than another.

  At that time many of his sons were still small, and I often met him walking along the seafront holding one or two of them by the hand. Sometimes I joined him and we would sit down at the foot of the castle where, until the last century, his people had lived as sovereigns. Here I would listen to his talk, while the boys amused themselves throwing stones into the sea.

  I treated him for a mild attack of influenza which for a few days had given him aching joints and a fever. When the attack had passed I advised him to stay at home and rest until he had regained his usual strength, but it was impossible to keep him quiet during the period of convalescence, and he seemed to make a special point of going to his office, of visiting relatives in the country, or walking about the town. He was surprised when I reproved him, and seemed to think I should be grateful to him for being so active, because – he assured me – if he had remained shut up in the house people would have said that the physician had been unable to cure him, whereas, seeing him about they thought: a great physician has cured him, a wise man has strangled the disease and prevented it from growing.

  Sometimes when he boasted of his age and strength, he would take my hand in a grip of iron and defy me to free it. With the pleasure that old men find in recalling the past, he would talk of remote events, of the pomp and splendour of the courts of the Constantinople sultans; of the days when there was a slave market in Tripoli; of the Corsair pirates who infested the Mediterranean long ago.

  He never refused alms to a beggar, but he became irritated if the beggar recognised him and called him sīdī, ‘my lord’. Then, with a gesture of impatience he would wave the mendicant away, muttering with annoyance, ‘Your lord, my lord, is Allah.’

  He was not rich, and his trousers were often a little threadbare at the knees – but every day food for about forty poor people was prepared in his kitchen.

  On one occasion I met him as I was on my way to a suburb to visit an old patient, a camel herd, who had just gone down with an attack of malaria. The old man wished to accompany me, and protested loudly when I suggested calling a carrozzella so that he should not tire himself. He walked with me along the dusty road which borders the oasis, and at a point where I began to be uncertain of the way it was he who piloted me under the palm trees, through the maze of alleys, to the fonduq where, behind a courtyard crowded with men, camels, saddles, sacks, waterskins, my patient, his teeth chattering, was laid out on a mat.

  After I had attended to him, the caravaneers wished us to take tea. They knew the pasha by name but they had never seen him, and they sat round us, keeping their distance and not daring to address him.

  The prince knew their countries: the mountains in the heart of the desert, the oases, the wells, the routes that converge upon the city at the coast. He had talked with the fathers and the grandfathers of their chiefs; he had met face to face the legendary bandits of former times. As they listened to his perfectly natural references to people who to them were mythical figures and legendary heroes, the youngest among his audience stared with the same amazement I myself experienced when, as a boy, I heard the centenarian Count Greppi describe how, on entering the diplomatic service, he had had an audience with Prince Metternich.

  The old man talked of the rough, wearing and solitary life of the nomads as though he himself had wandered ‘in search of rain’ along the routes between the mountains and the sea. Almost a century of experience, together with an imaginative understanding of human nature, enabled him to enter naturally into other men’s lives, however poor and wretched they might be, and to grasp all their implications.

  He talked with the caravaneers – who now flocked around him devouring him with their eyes – with a natural simplicity as though he had known them all his life. In fact, he had always known them: his religious sense of the oneness of all creation, the human sympathy which enabled him to recognise a reflection of himself in every son of Adam, made it natural for him to treat these ragged, bare-foot, lice-ridden caravaneers as his equals – and that without detracting an iota from the respect due to him.

  On that occasion I was able to appreciate to the full the infinite variety in Arabic of the familiar form of address in the second person singular, which may be used to a sultan or to a beggar. The word he used when chatting to the head of the caravan was not the same as the form he employed when addressing the boy who offered him a glass of tea; the one he employed when he spoke to me was yet another – but the form by which the caravaneers themselves addressed him had all the solemnity of an invocation.

  Before leaving the fonduq the pasha expressed a wish to say a word to the sick man, and as he left him he put into his hand all the silver and copper coins he had in his pocket.

  * * *

  I had often asked the Bishop about his friendship with the pasha, endeavouring in my curiosity to discover on what it was based. He was always evasive in his reply; sometimes he did not reply at all, and confined himself to raising his shoulders and blowing into his beard.

  The more I came to know the Arab nobleman, however, the more I discovered what they had in common – for example, their indifference to illness, their complete disregard of material considerations, their deep understanding of human suffering and misery, and their charity, which was unsmirched by egotism and knew no limits. Both of them submitted to a higher will with the blind faith of children.

  At a certain point I realised that, just as the various elements in a mosaic form a single design when pieced together, so the mental attitudes of the two friends were parts of a single spiritual conception which I was at last able to recognise.

  One day, as I was helping the Bishop to put his books in order on his library shelves, I announced that I had finally understood why he and the pasha were such close friends; I said that their friendship was a friendship between Franciscans. He continued to turn the pages of a volume he held in his hand, as though seeking a reply there. After a few moments of silence he closed the book and said in a gruff tone, almost annoyed, ‘You express yourself badly not only in Arabic but in Italian as well. You ought to know that a Moslem can’t be a Capuchin friar, and I myself am too unworthy of the robe I wear to call myself a Franciscan. Suppose we leave St Francis out of it: he is too far above our miserable concerns. The pasha is a man of great heart and exemplary humility who practises the three canonical virtues in a most admirable manner, even though he follows the law of a chieftain
who was never a prophet. If I, on the other hand, have been privileged to know the Truth it is by the grace of God and through no virtue of mine. I have learnt much from this man; that is why we are friends. I think you might have arrived at that simple conclusion without any help from me.’

  The younger of the two friends died first.

  Suddenly the uncertain equilibrium of his metabolism was shaken and the Bishop who had remained a simple friar collapsed.

  I was far away from Tripoli when it happened, and only later did I learn how the Apostolic Vicar had died serenely, surrounded by confrères and nuns, gripping the hand of his old friend the pasha who in his sorrow seemed turned to stone; while in the cathedral, in the mosque, and in the synagogue men of differing creeds prayed that God would postpone the appointed hour.

  * * *

  By 1930 my work in Tripoli was finished and I was next ordered to Eritrea, which to us in Libya was another world.

  Just before I left I received a message from Massauda, one of Tripoli’s high-class sharmoutas, the biggest in both fame and frame. She had heard of my impending departure and wished to see me in order to read my fate in the coffee grounds. It would be unpardonably impudent, she said, to go into a strange country without knowing what Destiny had in store for me.

  I never knew more than Massauda’s first name, but it was enough. I had known her for some time – ever since I had treated her for an attack of hay fever. She had remained grateful, and always sent me an invitation whenever she heard that I was passing through Tripoli. She had no secrets from the tebīb, and spoke with a disconcerting frankness of her love affairs, recent and remote. She showed me photographs and gave me letters to read which demolished the few illusions concerning my brothers in Adam to which I still clung.

  As a girl her figure was superb, but she gradually put on weight and when, during the last war, I returned to Tripoli and found her again, her body had gone to pieces, her legs bulged and her face was like a loaf; her soft, luminous eyes were the only remaining element of her vanished beauty.