A Cure for Serpents

by Alberto Denti di Pirajno

In our vain search for freedom we shall all lose ourselves in ‘the void’; we must renounce what is dearest to us; we must forgo what we thought essential to life; we must suffer the anguish of delusion.

  The song ended on the solemn note:

  ‘Ua la shauk fel-Qiyàma: and the resurrection is certain.’

  It was more than Massauda could have told me.

  Chapter Five

  THE SOLITARY ONE

  AFTER the French Revolution it was said that those who had not lived before the September massacres could not know the joy of living. It is certain that no one who did not know the Eritrea of twenty years ago can possibly understand how fascinating some colonial territories could be.

  In those days Eritrea was governed by a man who was undoubtedly endowed with excellent qualities, but who also had his shortcomings. To begin with, he was honest, and this at once put him in a bad light and made him unpopular. In addition, he was not a politician and had passed his life in the colonial service, starting at the bottom and rising at last to the position of Governor. Because of this he knew all the tricks in the game, and neither regional commissioners nor district officers could pull the wool over his eyes. It was useless to resort to those innocent stratagems which they used to ease their lot when forced to submit to the authority of eminent persons from Rome – men who knew nothing of Africa and for whom the simoom might be a cannibal tribe or a monkey, for all they knew.

  However, to offset his unpopular knowledge of his job, the Governor had an excellent appetite and liked women.

  The presence of a dyspeptic and misogynist Governor can be a disaster. I have myself witnessed occasions on which a mere dish of ice-cream, or a highly seasoned sauce, or even an innocent tartlet of caviar has upset the whole life of a colony for a week. As for the catastrophic consequences of a Governor whose sex instinct is suppressed by that sense of inferiority which leads some austere and disciplined men to abstain from women … I remember an occasion on which the effect of an over-audacious décolletage on an abstemious and highly-strung Catholic Governor was such that a third of his officers asked to be repatriated.

  The Italian Government allocated twenty million lire a year to Eritrea. Salaries were absurdly low, but a goat – if you gave the skin back to the goatherd – cost one lira.

  The number of military personnel was restricted and the civilian officials were fewer still. But team-work between civilians and Army was perfect. They mixed readily at the Merlo Café; civilians were welcomed with open arms in any officers’ mess, and any officer on mission in a remote area knew that he would find a place at table and a bed in any Commissariat or Residency. At the Asmara Club, officers and civilians danced quadrilles together, under the direction of an archivist who had been in Eritrea for thirty years and who spoke in a mixture of French and Benevento dialect which only the initiated could understand.

  There still remained a few of those officers – unknown to Italy – who had built the Colony. They were old, and it was easy to make fun of their peculiarities. In general they were not highly cultured and they all belonged to the ‘desert fever’ class. But they had worked in the Colony when colonial life was a real adventure; they had organised the people without any police force; they had set up the territories without anyone’s help, and without any State allocation they had succeeded in creating an administration which still, decades later, constituted the backbone of the Colony. The younger officials, stuffed with doctrine, were nonplussed and ceased to ridicule these old hands when they found, for example, that the plan for the development of Keren would have to follow exactly the lines traced thirty years before by Colonel Fioccardi; when they heard Colonel Talamonti talk of the people in the upland regions; when they realised that if they wanted to know something about the Baria and Cunama peoples they would have to consult Alberto Pollera’s volume on the subject, of which in twenty years there had been no reason to alter a line.

  Asmara was a small centre, as yet untouched by imperialistic dreams. The natives went barefoot, attended school and got themselves employed in Government offices without expecting to be appointed Ministers of State.

  The thousand or so Italian residents were content to pass their time as pleasantly as possible, working, hunting and making love. The extraordinary thing (extraordinary in these days) was that, in spite of the inevitable scandalmongering in a small community, where everyone knew everyone else’s business, these few Italians got along very well together. They agreed, naturally, in maligning the Governor, but he was too intelligent and had too much colonial experience to be upset by that; he accepted the sarcasms and criticisms philosophically and with a smile.

  In addition to the Italian men, there were also – though they were less numerous – some Italian women.

  The British say that east of Suez anything is permissible to a woman. Let me say at once that the Italian women took advantage of this concession with great moderation. Nevertheless, since a complete change of surroundings will in time alter even the shell of a crustacean, it is inevitable that frail white women suddenly transplanted from their native country to Africa will also undergo some change. A colleague of mine, Professor Tedeschi, surgeon of the Mogadishu Hospital, in a monograph called The Psychology of the Inter-Monsoon Period (Psicologia del Tangabili) which the instinct of self-preservation prevented him from publishing, made a study of these changes from the viewpoint of the scientist and the experienced colonial.

  The pretty wife of a diligent archivist or a worthy accountant (the latter for some unknown reason always enjoyed the reputation of being congenital idiots – so that they had applied to them the Neapolitan saying that ‘He who is born a fool dies an accountant or a post office official’) or of a junior officer, born and brought up in a simple, middle-class home, began, as soon as she set foot on the ship which was to take her to Africa, to glimpse a world which both overawed and fascinated her.

  On board, all the men introduced to her kissed her hand – homage to which she had not been previously accustomed but which was de rigueur in our colonies. At tea-time (‘But, my dear, what a curious and disgusting drink!’) an enterprising young lieutenant or a romantic district officer whispered to her that she had the eyes of a femme fatale; at sea on a moonlight night a daring young man kissed her under cover of a ventilator in a way that left her stunned and swooning. She inevitably began to believe that romance had come her way and to make insidious comparisons which placed her husband’s obesity in a ridiculous light and made repulsive the tufts of hair which stuck out of his nostrils.

  In those days there was a mania for nobility in the colonies. When Suez had been passed, the women who had been to her friends sciura Rosetta, sora Rosa or ‘a gna’ Rusidda, found she was now being called ‘Donna Rosa’; by the time she arrived at Assab she was ‘Donna Rosanna’ to the ship’s officer who read d’Annunzio, and when she disembarked at Mogadishu there was every probability that she would have become ‘Contessa’.

  In the African Residency she was liable to be the only woman among about ten officials: there were never more than half a dozen Italian women in the small centres, and even in the capital the women accompanying their husbands were always so far outnumbered by the men that a young and pretty new arrival inevitably drew down upon herself the acid disapproval of the plainer and older women, and inspired feverish desire on the part of any male compatriot from the age of twenty to sixty.

  Can we in all conscience blame the sora Rosa or ‘a gna’ Rusidda if sometimes in the Barentù Residency or at Hafun she became a little dizzy among so many famished males, who kissed her hand ten times a day, and if she ceased to be wholly responsible for what she did? I myself am infinitely indulgent, but I do not think that even the most severe judges will deny that in such a case there might have been extenuating circumstances.

  In the older African colonies there were women who had been born in Africa, daughters of the first colonisers, of officers of the first expeditionary forces: wives, daughters and nieces of pione
ers who for decades had devoted themselves to their difficult task.

  Kipling, in a justly famous poem, sings his compatriots who, like him, were born in distant possessions of the British crown. Their fathers, says the poet, acquired the territory by legitimate conquest, but the sons possessed it by right of birth and learned by their ‘own good pride’ to ‘praise their comrades’ pride’.

  We are poor devils without much ambition, and a very short belt will go round our empty stomachs. Nevertheless, although I am no Kipling, I would like on a humbler note to sing the praises of the unknown Italian women born and bred in our colonies.

  White or half-caste, they added savour to success when it smiled upon their men, and rallied their spirits when they were felled by adversity. They remained at their husbands’ sides – even though those husbands were not ‘men of a million acres’ but worked their little plots with a faith to which the presence of these women added an aim and purpose. Even today, when everything appears to be destroyed and profaned, it is still these women, staying on in the lost territories, who sustain the courage of those who fight a daily battle for existence, who keep alive the flame which in the motherland has blackened into soot, who pray on the graves of the assassinated.

  No one, alas, will write a convivial ode in honour of these women.

  * * *

  As soon as I arrived in Eritrea, in 1930, I was appointed Regional Commissioner for the western lowlands, a vast territory populated by seven different races, bounded on the west by the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and on the south by Ethiopia from which it was separated by the River Setit.

  In Agordat, where I had my residence, I occasionally deputised for the regional medical officer, who was a crack motor-driver and sometimes took part in races either in the Colony or in the Sudan. On the whole, however, I was too busy to give as much time as I should have liked to dispensary work.

  Nevertheless, it was at that time that I was obliged to run a long way after one patient – a patient I had never seen and who did his best to escape me. When, after a month’s search, I finally caught up with him, guided by the traces of his torment and agony, he was dead. But even had I arrived in time I could have done nothing for him.

  It was the period immediately preceding the war against Ethiopia which so scandalised the outraged virtue of the European colonial powers. The atmosphere in Africa was already tense and the Abyssinians, as though conscious of the gathering storm, were busy on the frontier, relieving their anxiety by making constant raids into our territory.

  On one such raid two of the bandits – slaves who had escaped from their master to seek refuge in Eritrea – had killed a baby elephant in order to take his milk teeth, and had emasculated four children of a Cunama village because the people refused to help them.

  With the aid of the armed bands of the Barentù and Tessenei the raiders were chased back over the River Setit and their chief, a half-caste named Zaccharias, was killed. As, however, some of the shifta still seemed to be in the frontier zone, I set out to comb the territory from the Setit to Mount Talasuba with the help of about fifteen armed men of the Cunama and Baria territories, four others from the uplands, led by a sergeant and Shumbāshī Gabremariam.

  It was not till the fourth day that we began to find the traces for which we were seeking. Then, in the direction of Motilè, we came upon the remnants of a recent fire and in the scattered ashes there was the imprint of an Abyssinian sandal. My men, who had begun to doubt the presence of the bandits and were becoming irritated and discontented at being asked to look for something that did not appear to exist, took heart at once like hounds. They spread instinctively in all directions, climbing up the slopes, sliding down rocks, following barely visible tracks under the acacia trees, pushing through grass as high as a man and forcing their way among thorn bushes which the rainy season had adorned with large white waxen flowers. At about mid day, Lance-Corporal Taddé Bocú returned in a high state of excitement, stuttering, incoherent, and quite unable to relate what he had just discovered. After an effective bout of cursing on the part of Gabremariam and some show of annoyance on mine, Taddé Bocú managed at last to put some sort of order into his tale.

  In private life Taddé Bocú was an elephant tracker and this was a day of days, for he had found the tracks of an elephant.

  Gabremariam was beside himself, and only my presence prevented him from jumping at the throat of the idiot who had not yet understood that we were looking for bandits and not elephants.

  The unfortunate Lance-Corporal tried by gestures to stem the flow of his superior’s curses and to beg leave to speak. Finally he was allowed to explain. He no longer stuttered; his musical Cunama speech flowed easily and was illustrated with such pantomime that the services of an interpreter were almost superfluous.

  As the elephant tracker began his story Gabremariam became attentive and from time to time nodded his head, his brows drawn together. At intervals he signed to the man to stop and turned to me to interpret the extraordinary tale.

  It seemed that after three hours’ march to the east of the Shogotah marshland, Taddé Bocú had come upon the tracks of the Abyssinians. There were four of them, but there was also a fifth man who walked barefoot and whose left foot lacked the third toe. This was clearly Anto Alimatú, known in the Lakatakura as a man who prided himself on being an expert tracker, whereas his fellow countrymen, who knew him well, had nicknamed him ‘tila acoishah’ which, in the language of the Cunama means ‘the hunter of fleas’. Three of the Abyssinians, according to Taddé Bocú, were of medium height, and one very tall and heavily built because his foot-marks sank into the earth, the left more than the right. The lance-corporal did not wish to commit himself entirely, but he thought that a wound in the leg or foot made him limp, for alongside the foot-marks there was also the mark of a stick on which the bandit probably leaned, particularly in the difficult places – and under a bush the Cunama had found a strip of blood-stained fūta which he proceeded to wave under our noses.

  There was more to come, however. At this point, Taddé Bocú again became excited and his speech was once more garbled and confused. The Sergeant lost his temper, and having an almost limitless vocabulary of injurious epithets drawn from Tigrinya, Amharic, Baria, Cunama, Arabic and Italian, he gave full vent to his feelings. Overcome, Taddé Bocú composed himself and continued his story.

  While looking for the bandits he had also come upon the tracks of an elephant. He described the beast as though he had seen it: an enormous male elephant travelling alone. There was something strange and hurried about him and he did not seem to be making for any precise destination; he was undoubtedly what the Arabs call el wāhido, the solitary one.

  When the head bull of a herd becomes too old for love-making and too weak to defend his right of selection; when the females no longer obey him and the young males parade their wives under his nose, he leaves the herd and becomes a hermit. No longer disturbed by passion, he resigns himself to solitude, living on the memory of the halcyon days when his virility was tireless and he passed from one love to another; when libidinous rivals fled at his trumpeting, or fell beneath the blows of his trunk and were trodden into the earth. Taddé Bocú was quite certain that the tracks he had found were those of el wāhido. He had had some doubts along the pebbly course of the torrent, but on the sandy river bed the marks were large and clear: in the middle of the bed the sand was disturbed and there were deep holes in which water lay: el wāhido, driven by thirst, had pushed his trunk into the sand and by blowing had created little wells into which the water slowly rose. The animal had then mounted the opposite bank and entered the wood, leaving an enormous pile of excrement which reached to Taddé Bocú’s thigh.

  Interspersed between the traces of the hermit elephant there were the marks of Abyssinian sandals and of the naked foot of the flea hunter who, for once in his life, said Taddé Bocú, was actually tracking an elephant.

  At the end of the wood he had found a sycamore tree from which a great piec
e of bark had recently been torn – the sap was still running. El wāhido had evidently rubbed himself violently against the tree and his rough, hard skin which the years had covered with warts and calluses, had acted like a huge file. Whatever was irritating the animal, it had made him furious, for the whole of the surrounding ground was ploughed up with tusk marks. But there was one curious factor: there were no parallel marks, and the elephant evidently had only one tusk.

  Taddé Bocú had followed the tracks of the Abyssinians as far as a stream where they had drunk and eaten; from there, he had made his way back to us as swiftly as possible.

  Gabremariam, mollified, patted his shoulder as a sign of approval and, overcoming his natural avarice, rewarded him with a minute piece of chewing tobacco.

  Taddé Bocú deserved it and more. In the first place he had traced the bandits. This was, of course, the important thing – but by his other discoveries and deductions he had furnished an explanation of the continued presence of the fugitives who, instead of taking refuge with their companions in Abyssinia, were marching in the opposite direction, getting farther and farther into Eritrean territory.

  It was obvious that the four had simply lost their heads when they came upon the tracks of the elephant. All their thoughts were concentrated on killing the animal, on acquiring the right to wear a gold ring in the left ear; already they saw themselves returning in triumph to their country carrying the trophies of the hunt; they saw themselves amid the festive fires, drunk with tech, stuffed with savoury sun-dried meat; acclaimed by the songs of the men and the ear-splitting notes of the women.

  After their first pursuit of the elephant, they must have lost track of him quite soon and then, disorientated by unfamiliar country and incapable by themselves of tracing the animal again, had entered the first village they came to and asked for a tracker. Anto Alimatú, either with a gun in his ribs or moved by a fatuous desire to show his countrymen that he was not only a hunter of lice, had been persuaded to help them. And now the bandits, with their eyes nailed to the ground, followed the elephant like somnambulists, unconscious of danger, insensible to fatigue, unaware of anything that was not a footprint, a pile of excrement, a sign of the animal which roamed through the country without aim or motive.