A Cure for Serpents

by Alberto Denti di Pirajno

  I knew very well that his father was still chained to his bed even though his kidneys had begun to function again and the œdema had decreased – but I wanted to lead the boy on, so, after having expressed my satisfaction at the restored health of his father, I asked him what he was doing here in such a remote part of the city.

  He confided to me with an air of great mystery that, in association with an Armenian friend, he managed a café which was frequented by the most beautiful girls in Massawa and at which one could get the best ‘mastica’ (a brandy made from leaves of the mastic tree) in the whole of the Red Sea. He gave me a knowing wink and proposed that I should accompany him to this haunt of delight.

  The fonduq, which boasted the high-sounding name of ‘The Acropolis’, was at the end of a sordid cul-de-sac. The impression made by the brothel-like red lamp which hung in the doorway was accentuated by the spectacle presented in the three rooms where about twenty men and a dozen or so women were drinking and smoking, huddled on mats or seated on low, rickety divans which ran round the walls. There were Eritrean Arabs, Arabs from the Negd and from Yemen, pilots of boats that plied across the Red Sea, a zaptivé in civilian clothes, a few Greek tradesmen, three gloomy Copts, and two or three negroes.

  The women were prostitutes of all ages: veterans emaciated with the years and with disease; florid sharmoutas from the coast and from the uplands; young recruits flaunting their beauty in full bloom.

  I sat down in a corner at a table about six inches high. The Armenian proprietor, a pot-bellied man as smooth as a eunuch, approached me and I ordered a coffee flavoured with orange-flower. As I drank it, the Armenian’s wife – a small woman with fine eyes, a letter-box mouth and a nose like a toucan’s beak – led three musicians into the room: a blind man who scraped the rebāb, a pipe-player, and a boy who banged on the tambour. The boy was evidently a friend of Bughesha’s for the two went into a corner to talk until the music began; Bughesha then slid quietly out of the establishment.

  The proprietor, seeing that I was alone, came to talk to me, and having mentioned the drought and the fact that business went from bad to worse, he asked me how I came to know Bughesha. I told him of the father’s illness and of my meeting with the boy in the street outside his house.

  ‘Ah – now I understand,’ said the landlord. ‘It seemed impossible, and my wife also say “but, Mother of God, it cannot be”.’

  He spoke a peculiar Italian interspersed with French and with the accent of a conjuror in a variety theatre. His name was Dorkoyan, and when I told him that Bughesha had informed me that he was his associate and part-owner of the café, he went purple in the face and put two fingers inside his collar to prevent himself from choking.

  ‘Everyone know that accursed boy world’s biggest liar. If he not being with you, he have not enter my door. Ah no! Or I skin his behind, by God!’ And sweating with indignation, he called his wife to tell her of this latest outrage.

  The players were now doing their best to drown one of the girls who had begun to sing out of tune in a high, ear-splitting voice. Seeing that conversation was impossible in that din, I was led into what Madame Dorkoyan called her boudoir, which was, in fact, a little hole between the lavatory and the storeroom, full of a pungent odour of sewers. Four armchairs were set round a table under the dim light of a lamp.

  Here, husband and wife told me of the shameful exploits of Bughesha, interrupting each other, shouting each other down, contradicting and embroidering each other’s stories. He was capable of anything, this diabolical boy. He was the friend, confidant and procurer of every prostitute in Massawa; he amused himself by making trouble between these unfortunate creatures and their clients, protectors and exploiters; he repeated gossip and calumnies, altered and added to conversations he had overheard, or invented others – delighted when he managed to provoke a quarrel or a fight. He was hand-in-glove with all the smugglers and thieves of the port; he associated with all the fake beggars with which Taulud pullulated; he was the go-between of every scoundrel in the city. Everyone knew he was a bad lot – but at the same time no one could resist his charm.

  A week ago, it seemed, he had sold a packet of cocaine to a Yemenite, saying that he distributed it on behalf of Dorkoyan, and the next day the Arab had rushed into the café shouting like a maniac and demanding his money back because he had discovered that the powder was bicarbonate of soda. And after that, the miscreant had had the audacity to return to the café under my protection!

  Then, while Madame Dorkoyan, confused and simulating disgust, whispered to me that the accursed boy was often seen with Greeks who were well known to be pederasts, the door of the café flew open and Fatma, a Somali woman, burst in, followed by Bughesha.

  Fatma was still a very fine woman, the colour of milk chocolate. Two years before I had treated her for a skin disease, caused by eating shellfish, from which she had been suffering for many months. Wherever she might be, Fatma had to be noticed; she was only happy when she was the centre of attention and her entrance had to be theatrical, even when it was merely into a miserable Armenian café.

  She burst in boisterously with a rustle of silk skirts, a clatter of necklaces and a jingling of bracelets, ear-rings, bangles and armillæ. Her face, surrounded by a gold-spangled veil, expressed delight, surprise and disgust all at the same time. The players and the singer ceased as she entered, and her voice rang through the rooms so that everyone in ‘The Acropolis’ might know how she, Fatma, with her sensitive nature, was feeling.

  In the first place, she was pleased to see me: I was her father, her benefactor, and she invoked Allah’s protection for me; I had cured her of the disease which had been eating her skin. She held me in her embrace but addressed her remarks to the four corners of the café as though she were haranguing a vast crowd.

  I was in Massawa and no one had told her; I came there every evening to drink ‘mastica’ and no one had informed her. At this point she shot a glance at Dorkoyan and raised her voice still higher. No one had told her, she said, because Massawa was full of poisonous snakes, of miserable creatures who did not wish her to meet her father, her healer. There were many scoundrels but, fortunately, there were also still a few of God’s creatures, a few guileless souls – and she threw a tender look in the direction of Bughesha who stood, humble and self-effacing, in the shadow of a corner, his shoulders against the wall.

  She left me and turned to the café proprietor who gazed at her in astonishment and alarm. She shook her fists in his face, saying, ‘You go around saying that I am a dirty, foreign prostitute and that the tebīb cannot be seen with such filth. I know – the boy has told me everything. You dog! This man touched me when my skin was falling from my body, when I smelt like your breath and when even the negroes who wash the offal at the slaughterhouse would not come near me. Do you understand? Listen, tar face: watch out for your horns and do not slander me, if you value your health. And what’s more – stop beating this boy to death when he refuses to go to bed with you.’

  While the Armenian furiously denied her accusations, but more by gesture than by word because he was speechless, the woman grabbed Bughesha by the shoulder, pushed him into the middle of the room, turned him round and lifted his shirt to show us the violet, blood-stained weals from two whip strokes (probably self-inflicted) which lay across his back.

  ‘Do you see that, you dog?’ she thundered.

  She came back to me and embraced me again, assuring me that she would come and see me next day, and then swept out noisily, dragging the little innocent after her and leaving an overpowering wave of perfume behind.

  Dorkoyan, overcome by so many insults, had collapsed panting into an armchair; he kept raising his hands to heaven and calling upon God and the blessed Armenian martyrs, while Madame Dorkoyan fussed around him shrieking like a goose that is being plucked.

  About a year after that meeting in ‘The Acropolis’, Bughesha disappeared from Massawa.

  Dorkoyan, who was in any case prejudiced, assured
me that Bughesha had left with his lover, the pilot of a sambūq. Fatma, weeping, told me that the little dear had been kidnapped on account of his beauty, taken to Arabia and sold as a slave. Much later, when I came across him again, Bughesha himself explained that he had left because the Imam of Yemen had sent for him; that he had travelled on a dhow made of cedar wood and that he had held a series of high offices at the court of Sana’a.

  It is much more probable that the shadow merchant, chasing the shades of his own fantasy, moved by his irresistible desire for adventure – and possibly in order to avoid a deserved beating – cadged a free passage by telling God knows what kind of story to a nakuda who did not know him, or who liked the company of boys with smooth skins.

  In any case, the fact is that towards the end of spring this young master of lies was in the Hodeida market, in Southern Arabia. The noisy crowd was composed entirely of men because it is the puritanical custom of the Zaydite sect, which predominates in the Yemen, to keep its women in strict seclusion.

  Bughesha had been lounging about the market for a couple of hours when a bearded, elderly man of severe aspect held out to him a bundle and basket and ordered him to follow him. The cobbler’s son obeyed, trotting along behind the austere beard through a maze of alleys and side streets. The elderly man stopped at a door in a windowless wall and took the bundle and basket from the boy. Only then did he observe the foreign appearance of his porter, and imprudently asked who he was and whence he came. Bughesha told him that he was the son of a Koran reader who taught in the Moslem schools of Eritrea; that his mother had died three years ago and that his father had immediately contracted another marriage with a girl from the uplands. His young stepmother had never liked him, and since she had given birth to a son of her own she had persecuted him unmercifully in order to force him to leave home and exclude him from his inheritance in favour of her own son; she used her beauty to influence his father against him so that his life had become unbearable. Finally, she had accused him of stealing some gold coins which the learned man his father kept in a box; his father had beaten him so unmercifully that he had been for a month in the Massawa hospital, and from there – in order not to return home – he had embarked on the first dhow leaving the port and had arrived at Hodeida.

  The merchant of shadows recounted this story without the slightest hesitation, frankly, with his limpid and ingenuous eyes fixed on those of the Yemenite; his story ended, he dropped his eyes to the tips of his sandals and stood, timid and modest, with his hands clasped in front of him.

  The pious man shook his head thoughtfully and looked at this son of a man of letters. ‘Only God is merciful,’ he muttered. How was this stranger, this boy, this poor defenceless orphan, to live among the dangers of an unknown city? God be praised: certainly in his present condition he would agree to act as servant without pay, contenting himself with food and lodging. The old man signed deeply, opened the door and entered, pushing the son of the Koran reader before him.

  When Bughesha was seen in the market each morning with the old woman who was servant to an important local official, Si Abdalla el Yèmeni, and when it was learnt that he was not paid and that he was fed on no more than a couple of onions, everyone admitted that once again old Abdalla had done himself a good turn. But gossip circulates quickly in small centres and is embroidered en route, and in a short time Bughesha had become the cousin of Sidi Morghani, the son of the Cādī of Port Sudan, as well as the nephew of the Sherifa of Massawa.

  The pious and learned Abdalla – an austere man – was unpopular, and so everyone sympathised with the boy who was so humiliated and who, perhaps, had the Prophet’s blood in his veins.

  In truth, Bughesha did not feel himself at all humiliated, but no one in Hodeida could possibly imagine how unutterably bored he was.

  He had been born and brought up in a world of thieves, receivers, procurers, beggars fake and real, smugglers, prostitutes, brothel proprietors and tricksters who lived a colourful life which their many difficulties failed to overshadow; where, in spite of bitter rivalries and savage disputes, each was ready to help the other out; a world in which the days of plenty were enjoyed to the full and where in the lean times you fell back on the mercy of God and disappeared quietly without complaint when difficulties became insuperable.

  Upon that strange world and its picturesque characters the merchant of shadows had unconsciously fed his fertile imagination, and now the memory of that kaleidoscopic life made the austerity of Hodeida unbearable. There were no brothels; smoking was prohibited; dancing and singing were not allowed; music – even the gramophone – was considered an invention of the devil. The air of such a virtuous city did not agree with him, and he felt himself suffocating.

  Nor was the atmosphere of the house in which he lived less oppressive. Bazarà, the Massawa pearl merchant, told me about Si Abdalla whom he knew well through doing business with him. He was a great gentleman, said Bazarà, but close-fisted to a degree and as boring as a rainy day. He was a misogynist and detested the salacious stories which usually circulate among men: even a faintly licentious word provoked his anger. Bazarà attributed his capacity for being shocked and his gloomy outlook on life to the sect to which the pious man belonged, and also to his palsied senses. It was true he had married late in life, but the pearl merchant was certain he had taken the step out of respect for the Koranic law and not in order to satisfy the remnants of a virility which must in any case have petered out very early.

  When he heard that Bughesha was in Si Abdalla’s house, Bazarà laughed until he cried.

  Si Abdalla discovered that the boy knew his letters and could put them together and so – glad to do a good work which cost him nothing – he began to dictate to him so that he might learn to write quickly, and to teach him arithmetic. But the good work did not stop there: Bughesha was obliged at the same time to listen to interminable discourses on the moral life, on the spirit of self-denial and on the subjugation of fleshly desires, until the unfortunate boy, huddled on his mat, consigned the worthy man to a most inglorious end and swallowed continual yawns.

  Finally Si Abdalla would decide to look for his sandals in order to return to his office and, stretching himself like a cat, Bughesha would go in search of the old servant who was by now his staunch ally.

  The old woman was grateful to him because he helped her in the kitchen, accompanied her to the market, beat the carpets, washed the floor and tidied those rooms he was allowed to enter. She herself attended to the two rooms in which the master’s two wives lived, and from which the boy, of course, was excluded. She admired his intelligence and ready wit, and treated him with a certain consideration, for she too, without being aware of it, had fallen under his spell.

  In the evening, when Si Abdalla returned home, he drank a basin of sour milk, recited the evening prayers and then everyone went to bed. But the boy’s sleep was light – and he was desperately bored.

  Not two weeks after his entry into the austere household of Abdalla el Yèmeni, Bughesha discovered that by removing a grating on the ground floor he could slip out into the street unseen. Bughesha found, however, that even this nightly breakout was not worth the trouble. At night the city was empty: there was not so much as a dog in the streets; not a voice to be heard from the closed houses; no drunkard’s brawling broke the awesome silence. Alas, there were none of those cafés which animate a whole district, full of the same people every night and noisy with women’s laughter and the sound of singing.

  However, although the streets of a virtuous city may be silent and uninteresting at night, there is no knowing what is going on behind the closed shutters.

  One morning the old woman awoke to find herself crippled with rheumatism and almost unable to move. In spite of pain and high fever she dragged herself to the women’s rooms, but was obliged to return quickly to her bed. In the meantime she was thinking: it seemed to her that a child could perfectly well be allowed to put the prohibited rooms in order. She knew Si Abdalla well
and had no affection for him. The fever gave her courage and she decided that it was not a case where authorisation should be requested from a man who attached fanatical importance to the observation of the letter of the law. When the master left for his office, therefore, she grasped Bughesha by the hand and, stopping at each step on account of the pain, took him to the upper floor.

  No doubt the servant had already mentioned the son of the Koran reader to the two secluded women, but they must have been more than a little surprised when Bughesha began to talk of countries beyond the sea, of the strange world in which he had grown up, of the extraordinary things that had happened to him. He, of course, transformed reality beyond recognition and abandoned himself with enthusiasm to his inventive genius so that his story would certainly have become more and more highly coloured as the amazement and curiosity of his listeners increased.

  No one will ever know the exact effect which Bughesha’s lurid fantastications had upon the two women – one a freed slave, the other a Jewess from Taiz. Nor, unfortunately, do we know whether what happened later was due to the excitement provoked by Bughesha’s stories or to the initiative of the shadow merchant himself. There is no doubt, however, that from the time when he was first allowed into the women’s quarters by the old woman he had many opportunities for spending long hours of the day and night while his master worked or slept, completing his nefarious work of subtle undermining. The servant was unable to stop what she herself had imprudently started; she had so compromised herself by her initial misdemeanour that when the scandalous goings-on became known she was unable to report them to her master and was obliged to become an accomplice.