A Cure for Serpents

by Alberto Denti di Pirajno

  ‘Lion is lion and Christian is Christian,’ he announced with deep disgust on one occasion when he found Neghesti lying on my bed.

  One morning, his curiosity having been aroused by Omar’s description of the lioness’s behaviour when I awoke in the morning, he came to see what happened, watching through the half-closed door. From that day he never failed to accompany Omar and Neghesti at a respectful distance, his nose and brow wrinkled in perplexity at our dialogue and her show of affection.

  He was now puzzled as well as displeased for, in addition to being an element of disorder in the house, Neghesti had become a strange phenomenon which he could not understand.

  One afternoon, while I was reading in the sitting room, Jemberié called me and led me on tiptoe to the door of my bedroom, signalling me to keep quiet. Neghesti was sitting in front of the long mirror: she bent her head over her shoulder, studied her profile, looked at herself full-face, and then, sitting on her haunches, her eyes half-closed, carefully combed her whiskers.

  On another occasion, Omar summoned Jemberié to see what the lioness was doing in my room. She was sitting facing a wall, gazing with a rapt expression at a portrait of my mother which hung beside my bed. She barely turned her head at their approach, and returned to her ecstatic contemplation of the photograph.

  When he told me of this, Jemberié could no longer keep his thoughts to himself. With many a roundabout phrase he confided to me that he did not believe Neghesti was really a lioness at all: he was sure that she was an earthly form my mother had taken in order to return and protect her son.

  He had watched her day after day, he said, and had come to the conclusion that there was no other explanation of her behaviour. Certainly, he said, no such ambessa had ever been seen before. Even a child knew that the ambessa was a wild, ferocious and evil-smelling animal which sprang at men and devoured them. And there was Neghesti, serious, dignified, moving about the house like a great lady, and with never the slightest smell of the wild beast about her. Jemberié had noticed other things too: not only had Neghesti clearly defined ideas with regard to the social position of the people around her, but she made other perspicacious distinctions between them. She loved to frighten Tabhatú, said Jemberié, because she realised that she was just a timid, silly woman; she played jokes on Tesemmà, and frollicked with Omar because the giant had remained a child and did not know how to do anything else. While Jemberié had looked upon her as just a lioness, Neghesti had never taken the slightest notice of him: she passed him by as though she did not see him, and if he entered a room in which she was, she did not even lift her head. But since he had begun to suspect the truth, said Jemberié, Neghesti’s attitude had changed, and now she looked him in the eye, watched him as he moved about the room, and more than once he had had the impression that she was about to speak to him.

  He had given a great deal of thought to these portents, but, knowing himself to be too ignorant to get to the bottom of the question, he had consulted a cashi, a Coptic priest, who had a profound knowledge of the mysteries of life and death; and this learned man had removed all shadow of doubt. Neghesti’s morning greetings could be no other than manifestations of a mother’s joy on her son’s awakening – her son as an infant, of course, because sons are always infants to their mothers, even if they have grey hair. The worthy priest had an explanation for all Neghesti’s prodigious doings. It was natural, he said, that Neghesti should look at herself in the mirror: even butchers’ and plumbers’ wives looked at themselves in the mirror, and therefore a great lady would certainly wish to do so. Neither was there anything surprising in the fact that the lioness had remained in ecstasy before the portrait in my bedroom. Of course she had taken no notice when Jemberié and Omar had entered: great ladies did not notice servants – and in any case, at that moment she was far away from them, far away in time and space: she was in her own country; she saw again her human form, lived again the days when her son was small and at her side. Even the distaste for women visitors was understandable, since the lioness reincarnated the mother who wished to stay always with her son: these women were frivolous, young and thoughtless and might be dangerous for her son, to whom the years had not given overmuch wisdom … Jemberié stumbled, tried to pass this off, apologised and explained that that, of course, was what the priest had said.

  Jemberié was convinced that from the moment he had believed her to be the incarnation of a woman Neghesti had altered her behaviour towards him, and he was unable to see that the real change was in his own attitude. He was no longer suspicious of her, and began to treat her with the utmost respect; he placed a mirror in her cage and sprayed her every day with my hair lotion, and when she wished to make her exit from a room he opened the door for her with great deference.

  Neghesti was already full grown when one morning I awoke with my tonsils swollen and inflamed. After two days the germs were circulating nicely and the thermometer showed a hundred and four. As the fever rose and I began to shiver from head to foot, Neghesti sprang on to my bed and refused to leave it. Omar called her, entreated her and tried to force her out of the room, but he might as well have talked to the wall: Neghesti seemed to be unaware of his presence, and when he tried to push her off the bed she looked at him indignantly with scintillating eyes and showed her teeth with such a savage growl that the poor creature was quite upset. Jemberié, who was present at the scene, led Omar away and sent him to tell Eleonora that I was ill.

  As soon as Eleonora entered the room, Neghesti ran to her and looked at her with an expression of such desperate anxiety that Eleonora took her in her arms and whispered words of comfort and reassurance to her. Neghesti licked her face two or three times and then returned to the bed, resting her nose on my shoulder.

  There were a number of physicians in Eritrea at that time, some of them very capable, but my physician was a vet – a young biologist of wide culture and great modesty who was at that time directing the Eritrea vaccine-producing Institute and who is now teaching in an Italian university.

  When he came to see me, he stopped dead on the threshold. Neghesti, deciding that I needed protection, had lain down on top of me, with my head between her paws, and was glaring at those around me in a threatening manner.

  ‘How do you feel?’ asked the doctor tentatively.

  ‘I feel awful,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a fever.’

  ‘Well what d’you expect me to do … with a lion on your bed?’

  But Neghesti would not budge. Omar’s calls, Eleonora’s entreaties, Jemberié’s respectful exhortations left her unmoved: she fixed her eyes on the doctor, and when any of them tried to insist that she remove herself, she emitted a low roar which reverberated through my chest.

  Eventually, hardly able to stand on account of the fever, I was obliged to put on a dressing-gown and slippers and go out into the garden. Neghesti followed me like a dog, allowed herself to be shut in the cage, and let out a desperate wail as I left her. The next day, however, they had to bring her back to my room because she refused to eat, and only when she was beside my bed, having reassured herself that I was still alive, did she decide to put her nose into her dish of raw meat and eat.

  I was in bed a week, and during the whole of that time Neghesti lived, slept and ate at my bedside; when the doctor arrived, I took her back to the cage, where she watched impatiently for his departure, roaring furiously if they did not then bring her back to my room immediately.

  Months passed. The light rains had fallen and ceased, and the dry, red earth, cracked by the sun and reduced to a fine dust, was covered by green shoots. The great rains had followed and were now drawing to a close and the season of damp heat and swollen rivers was upon us.

  It was afternoon and I was alone in my sitting-room with Neghesti. I had returned from the office and was sitting at the window, looking at the rain which fell from the heavens in great sheets: the garden was water-logged and visible only through a diaphanous vapour; rain poured from every leaf, and rivulets and w
aterfalls cascaded in all directions.

  Since the days of Herodotus all travellers’ tales have been received with a certain amount of scepticism; Marco Polo’s compatriots were so unbelieving of his wonderful adventures that his book was given the title of Il Milione – meaning, the million tall stories which they refused to swallow. My experiences in partibus infidelium have nothing of the prodigious about them, and anyone who refuses to believe the following story about Neghesti has my full sympathy, for I have myself no explanation to offer.

  On this particular afternoon I was sitting looking at the rain with Neghesti at my feet. Jemberié entered, bringing the day’s letters: on the tray were a newspaper, a post-card signed by a group of friends who had thought of me when they were dining together, and a letter.

  The letter came from far away, and it was written in large handwriting on blue notepaper: it announced that someone dear to me had committed suicide.

  When we suddenly hear of the death of someone who has been near to us, whose life and affections we have shared, it seems in that moment that a part of ourselves has ceased to be. If the friend who has preceded us into the next world is younger than we are, the whole thing seems incongruous and we have the impression of having lived too long. When, in addition, the death has been self-inflicted, we are shocked by it as by an injustice: there is a sense of betrayal.

  It was this tumult of feelings, this comfortless bitterness of heart, that prevented me from noticing Neghesti’s furious nudges. Finding me so absorbed in my thoughts, she stood up at the side of my armchair and began to ruffle my hair with her nose and paws. I pushed her away roughly, reread the letter and remained with my elbows on my knees, looking into space.

  I do not know how long I stayed like that, but at a certain point I heard the door of the sitting-room open and, raising my eyes, I found a small group in the doorway. Jemberié was there, and Tesemmà with a terrified expression and one hand still inside the shoe he had been polishing, Tabhatú, ashen, with her fingers in her mouth, and over the heads of the others Omar peered at me, awestruck and apprehensive.

  For a moment no one said anything. Then Jemberié, seeing the letter which had fallen to the floor, asked: ‘Bad news?’

  I nodded automatically and then after a moment, surprised, I asked him how he knew.

  The sound of my voice broke the spell and they all came forward together talking and gesticulating in the direction of Neghesti who had entered behind them and who now lay beside me, watching the group of servants and sweeping the floor with rhythmic movements of her tail.

  It seemed that while they were all in the pantry adjoining the kitchen, each about his business, Neghesti had leapt in through the window and, lashing her tail like one possessed, had thrust them all with her head and her shoulders towards the door. She preceded them across the dining room but, seeing that they were hesitating, she returned and again pushed and hustled them towards the door which led to the sitting room.

  Jemberié recounted the details in a low, respectful tone and the others confirmed his statements with awestruck pantomime, rolling their eyes and opening and closing their mouths in astonished assent.

  When we were alone, Jemberié came close to me and remarked in a hushed voice that obviously the ‘Signora’ had suffered unbearably at the sight of her son’s distress; she had not known what to do to console him and had, therefore, called the servants. Jemberié then left the room, bowing his head respectfully as he passed in front of the lioness.

  By this time, everyone was convinced that Neghesti was an animal only in outward aspect. Tesemmà did not dare dispute Jemberié’s interpretation and when he retired from a room in which the lioness was, he moved backwards to the door and made his exit without turning his back, keeping his eye on Neghesti who thoroughly enjoyed the spectacle of Tesemmà walking like a crab. Tabhatú was a Catholic and the idea of a Christian incarnated in an animal shocked her deeply; nevertheless, Neghesti’s conduct was so extraordinary that in spite of herself she could not help admitting that there was something human in the lioness; moreover, the miracles of the saints as narrated by the good sisters at the Mission led her to accept marvels without argument. One thing was certain, however: she no longer feared the lioness, she no longer ran away from her, and often she passed a timid hand over her head. Omar was of a different opinion because, as a good Moslem, he did not believe that a human soul could enter the body of an animal – but he did believe Neghesti was more than an animal: he thought it very probable that she was a jinniyah, a female spirit from the lower regions which had taken on the form of a lioness in order to be near me. Was I sure I had never been loved by a jinniyah?

  The colony was changing: it was being prepared as a jumping-off ground for our advance into Ethiopia, and the civilian element – which was thought to be unadapted to what became known as the clima eroica – was swamped by the military.

  In the preparation for the conflict, the Information Services were naturally of vital importance. We are, however, a naturally exuberant, Latin people and we could not be content with one Information Service: we had six.

  There were the military Information Service, the Information Office, the Counter-Espionage Service, the Carabinieri Service, the Customs Officers’ Service, and the Service attached to the Department of Foreign Affairs. Each of these organisations was hermetically closed against all the others: each worked on its own account to collect information from beyond the frontier, and each was obsessed with the idea that the information so obtained might fall into the hands of the other Services. The man who brought the news of the presence of three Galla goatherds at the Cuddago wells might so easily pass this invaluable information to someone else and thus another Information Service would learn that three Galla goatherds, armed with two lances and a Mauser gun, had spent the night at the Cuddago wells. Naturally, in spite of the threats which were supposed to seal the lips of informers, they took the same useless tales – or the same lies – to all six Information Services, cashed in on all of them, and departed over the frontier to inform the local Abyssinian chief about the real or invented movements of our troops.

  But this was not confusion enough. Men well known for the ability with which they had organised the military Information Services on our Alpine frontier were brought to Eritrea, and the authorities thought they might as well make use, too, of colonial officers who had for some time directed regional Commissariats on the Abyssinian frontier or acted as consuls at Adowa, so these were also called in.

  These two measures were the last straw. The new arrivals from the Alpine frontier had for the most part never been in Africa before and made up for their lack of experience by the disconcerting originality of their methods. It was difficult to make them understand that methods which had given excellent results in Europe were not advisable on the Ethiopean border, but when at last they were convinced that they must change their ways, their ingenuity knew no bounds.

  When I heard that one of the counter-espionage aces from the Ventimiglia-Modane frontier in Italy intended sending a Chinese, whom he had discovered in Massawa to Abyssinia to collect news of the movements of the Negus’s bands in the Tigray, and that the man was to go on the pretext of selling ties to the natives, I felt that, after five years in Eritrea, the moment had come to ask for repatriation.

  To go back to Italy was a simple matter. I had only to go down to Massawa and take ship. But what about Neghesti?

  I could not leave her in Asmara, and even though the journey did not present any difficulty, I did not see how I could keep a full-grown lioness in an Italian hotel or in a flat without a garden, nor could I see myself taking her for daily walks in the Villa Borghese. Neither did the idea of presenting her to the Zoological Gardens attract me – with the prospect of paying her a visit every Sunday surrounded by admiring maidservants out with their corporals.

  Neghesti was in the room when I told Jemberié that I would be leaving the Colony next month and that I did not know what to do with her.
She laid her head on my knees and looked into my face with eyes the like of which I have never seen in any other animal. Jemberié threw me a significant glance, but said nothing. Later, when we were alone, he remarked very seriously, ‘Not speaking when Signora listening: yesterday Omar saying bad word and she hitting so hard his middle with her head so he falling down.’

  The days slipped by. Open trunks stood about in the hall and lent a depressing air of imminent departure. Good-bye visits; farewell dinners; my successor already in my office, criticising my work and itching to change everything; requests from ladies to take letters and messages to their friends; natives stopping me in the market to say, ‘I hear you leaving …’ All these things made me feel I had nothing to do with the person I had been for so many years of my life. All at once that life lost its interest for me and in thought I was already back in Italy. I had already returned in imagination to the old haunts, found old friends; I began to call to mind faces dear to me which had become indistinct with the passage of time.

  But what about Neghesti?

  One morning I awoke and realised that in five days’ time I must leave. Sitting up in bed, I smoked and turned over in my mind every possible solution to the problem of the lioness. Suddenly Omar burst into my room and threw himself on his knees at the bedside, weeping loudly and knuckling his head. I immediately imagined that his faithless girl friend had deceived him for the hundredth time – and now that I was no longer interested in the zighini I decided that perhaps it was the moment to reveal to him the dreadful truth about that black-skinned Messalina. But it had nothing to do with the woman. Neghesti was dead.

  The news was so unexpected that I was struck dumb and sat looking at Omar who was huddled on the ground, sobbing. Jemberié arrived followed by Tessemà, and Tabhatú in tears put her head in at the door. Neghesti was dead.