The small villa in which I lived was part of the same property as the Viceregal residence and this situation saved me. I feigned extreme disappointment as I explained that the Viceroy did not allow women to live within the precincts of his residence; it was for this reason, I said, that my staff was all male – valet, cook and chauffeur. I expressed sincere regret at being thus obliged to refuse the generous offer made by the ras.
The interpreter was completely nonplussed and scratched his head seeking, but not finding, a solution to this knotty problem. His Highness did not permit? He blinked his eyes, pushed out his lips, perplexed in the face of such an unexpected obstacle. Of course, if His Highness did not permit there was nothing to be done. Almost as though he expected the Viceroy to appear in the doorway at any moment, he hurried the singer out of the room, out of the house, and pushed her into the dilapidated Ford. With a sigh of relief I watched them drive away.
Two days later I found the ras waiting for me in my office. He did not mention the singer, but invited me to go and live with him. I could take my servants with me and if I desired he would supply me with others. The cook whose ability I had so much appreciated should be placed at my disposal, and a garage was ready for my car. He was ill, he said, and I would be doing him a favour if I would live near him. With the greatest difficulty I managed to make him understand that my functions did not permit me to leave the Viceroy, that I could not for any reason be absent. I promised him that if he called me by telephone I would run to his bedside at any hour of the day or night. With protestations of eternal friendship and undying affection I managed to avoid hurting his feelings and to pack him off, disappointed but not offended.
About three weeks of relative tranquillity followed – not taking into account, that is, the sporadic arrival of monumental dishes of chicken, guinea fowl, bustard, goat and mutton swimming in fiery sauces. These masterpieces of Abyssinian culinary art were a continual threat to my excellent digestion and I should certainly have succumbed to them if my faithful henchmen had not come to my aid by consuming large quantities of birds and goats with an appreciation even greater than my own.
But where the ras was concerned peace was short-lived. On my return from the office one night I found Jemberié and the cook on the steps leading to the house. The cook – even blacker than usual – informed me that he was leaving and would like a reference. Jemberié was extremely glum and said that matters were ‘not good’ – words that, on his lips, were equivalent to the announcement of a major catastrophe. Annoyed, I collared him and ordered him inside. The cook assured me that he would not enter even if I covered him with gold, and Jemberié tried to excuse him by saying, ‘Him poor fish very frightened.’ Before I had time to ask for explanations a low roar came from inside the house, so powerful that the window-panes still vibrated some seconds after the sound had died away.
In the lounge a very healthy leopard greeted me with the stupid and villainous grimace which is peculiar to its kind, and displayed a set of what seemed to me unnecessarily large claws. There was an iron collar round its neck and two stalwart keepers held the ends of two chains soldered to the collar.
The keepers bowed deeply and the leopard, which seemed to be in an uncomfortably playful mood, jumped from side to side and pawed the air as though it wished to shake hands with me. One of the keepers handed me a letter bearing the seal of the ras, as large as a saucer.
The letter said that the ras sent me the leopard so that it could cheer my solitude. It was positively morbid the way my solitude seemed to worry the noble prince.
It was now past midnight. I had a leopard in the house and the truck on which it had arrived had gone again. The cook had also gone. Jemberié, with a gun in his hand, was keeping an eye on me through the half-open door. I struggled to keep calm and to think.
I decided to telephone to a friend in the police. After several unsuccessful attempts, I managed to find him; he was dancing at the Imperial Hotel. He advised me to have the leopard stuffed and send it to a natural history museum. When at last I made him understand that I was not joking he agreed to come at once and concoct a plan of defence, although he did not consider that the affair came within his functions as a police official. With the arrival of the police some order returned to my devastated home. It was arranged that for the time being the beast and its keepers should be housed in an empty shed and that the army mess would provide half a goat for the animal’s supper. Next day we found a valiant native battalion which was delighted to adopt the leopard as its mascot and so they took it away.
I have already mentioned that the ras was the son of a king and that he wielded more authority and enjoyed greater prestige than any of the other chiefs. I have also said that the political situation at that time demanded that any high-ranking dignitary should be treated with particular consideration. It will therefore be realised that there was every reason for me to control myself and not to let my feelings get the better of me. The effort I made to this end was so great, however, and the resulting nervous tension so severe, that I began to suffer from all the phobias and obsessions that afflict the psychasthenics. I developed the habit of telephoning home before leaving the office, to see if anything had happened. I tried to persuade myself that this was a perfectly natural thing to do but the fact was that I lived in a continual panic, trying to guess – to foresee – what diabolical idea would next occur to the ras as a way of showing his gratitude.
One day, towards two o’clock, the morning’s work being done, I put my papers in order, locked the drawers and telephoned home. In answer to my enquiry Jemberié replied in an unusually cheerful tone of voice, ‘Little one come, make laughing everybody.’
Shaking with agitation, imagining that the ras had made me a present of a son, I asked if the ‘little one’ was a child and Jemberié, laughing, said it was not and that the ‘little one’ had a tail and sang. Relieved, I replaced the receiver: evidently it was a bird, I thought – perhaps a parrot.
When he opened the door to me, Jemberié was not alone. At his side, reaching no higher than his elbow, stood a hideous little monster making faces at me.
It was certainly not a child. Black, tough hairs grew out of its chin and upper lip, under a flat nose. It – he – was dressed all in green; at the back his tunic reached to his buttocks and then stood out like the eaves of a roof, draped over a bunch of bulrushes which he wore like a tail. Waddling about on his short, crooked legs, with an obscene movement of the hips, the horrible little monster wagged this outgrowth from side to side. As though his disgusting deformity were not enough, he sang in a shrill and at the same time croaking voice which made my flesh creep. Whatever obscenities he sang about appeared at least to be amusing because the normally impassive Jemberié could hardly restrain his laughter and the cook was doubled up in the doorway, wiping his eyes on his apron. Still singing, the repulsive little abortion hung on to my jacket with his horrible, monkey-like hands, and pulled me here and there in an attempt to make me dance with him.
He was the ras’s jester. The letter which had come with him was categoric: the little monstrosity was to keep me company and cheer my solitude. His name, I was informed, was Tellaé – which in Amharic means ‘My joy’.
I sat down, all the spirit gone out of me, and resigned myself to my fate. ‘My joy’ turned cartwheels and somersaults all over the room. My resistance was broken: I had no alternative but to keep the creature, much to the ras’s satisfaction.
But although it was necessary to keep him, I was determined never to set eyes on him. I gave strict orders: he was to be treated well and watched to see that he played no tricks; he was not to go beyond the servants’ quarters – he could disport himself in the courtyard; on no account was he ever to be permitted in the sitting room, dining room or in my bedroom; and above all he was to be kept out of my sight.
Unfortunately, the rumour spread that I had a jester and whenever I had guests there was certain to be a lady who, her eyes bright with curiosity, wou
ld ask if she might not see him. So ‘My Joy’ had to be sent for and would arrive, wagging his ignoble hindquarters. He made faces at everyone, imitated the noise made by a hen laying an egg, climbed on the furniture, ran on all-fours under the table snapping at the legs of my guests, and performing any other devilish trick that occurred to him.
If anyone danced after dinner, Tellaé followed them skipping and jumping at their heels and tugging at the lady’s skirt. Sometimes he sang at the top of his hair-raising voice, and at others, sitting on the knee of some attractive woman, he would drone out sentimental airs, gaze wistfully into her eyes, and run his hand up and down her bare arm. Men usually found him repulsive, but I was surprised – and mystified – to find that women were almost always interested in ‘My Joy’. He was allowed to kiss their hands and they took him on their laps without repugnance, laughing at his caresses, finding his tricks amusing, combing his curling mop of hair with their fingers or pulling his beard playfully as they might have pulled the beard of a goat.
The wife of an American engineer begged me to let her have him. In return she offered me a refrigerator.
My ignorance of the monster’s language made it impossible for me to discover whether the creature was really an idiot or whether he was intelligent and astute enough to pretend idiocy and make the most of it. Jemberié was always evasive on this point; he was too much of a peasant to betray Tellaé, who came from his own country. Once, being hard pressed for an answer, he announced that even idiots have heads – and, in fact, this aphorism might explain much of the little monster’s behaviour.
In the meantime, the ras’s debt of gratitude, according to him, became incalculable. He came to my house one day and called for Jemberié who, hearing himself addressed by the son of the former king of his country, lost his head completely. It seemed that what the ras had to say to me was extremely confidential and knowing Jemberié’s attachment to me, he trusted him more than his own interpreter.
We were all in a nervous condition: the ras on account of what he had to tell me; Jemberié on account of the incredible honour done to him, and I myself because I already foresaw further misfortunes as a result of this interview. Jemberié held his breath while the ras talked. It is a pity I cannot reproduce the conversation word for word. Jemberié’s Italian was always more or less of his own invention but on this occasion the awe inspired in him by the ras, as well as the delicacy of the subject, caused him to mix his metaphors in the most astounding manner and to light upon the most unheard-of comparisons.
The gist of the matter was this: the ras was no longer young and his desires outran his performance. Was it true that there were medicines which renewed youth in old men? Although hardly prepared to play Mephistopheles to this unfortunate Faust, I felt that it would be cruel to deny him the pleasure of an illusion. Having ascertained that his kidneys and heart were in good order, I sent him a preparation which I discovered tucked away in the stockroom of the Swedish hospital. The extraordinary thing is that – according to the ras – this preparation worked a miracle. It was a compound of vegetable extracts, often advertised on the back pages of German newspapers, and well-known in medical circles for its absolute inefficacy, and I have never found any explanation of the fact that it appeared to restore to the ras some semblance of his lost youth. If he had been a young man suffering from what, for want of a better term, is called sexual neurasthenia, it might be supposed to have been the result of auto-suggestion – but on the dust and ashes of seventy years, suggestion has as much effect as a poultice on a wooden leg. Nevertheless, the ras was exultant and his gratitude became almost frenzied and positively dangerous.
One evening as he served at table, Jemberié informed me that the hunchback’s sister was in the courtyard, having come to pass a couple of hours with her brother. My jaw fell and I sat with my fork in mid-air, between plate and mouth, struck dumb with terror: in my mind I saw my peaceful little house transformed into a shelter for all the abortions of nature, full of whole families of monsters.
But Tellaé’s sister was not deformed: she was tall and beautifully built, and she smiled at me timidly as though excusing herself for the subterfuge her master had forced her to adopt. I recognised her at once: she was the Shoan girl who had served as a leaning-post for the ras when he was ill.
It was the last attempt. Twenty days later I left for Asmara on my way to Massawa where I was to embark for Italy. The ras was among the group of friends who gathered to bid me farewell. As he strained me to his heart in a suffocating embrace, the hunchback jumped round us wagging his tail, and the interpreter, almost completely dissolved in perspiration, gabbled panting interpretations of the blessings and good wishes and salutations and thanks which the ras showered upon me.
I never saw my fantastic patient again but I have not forgotten him. With his glowering, unprepossessing countenance that could nevertheless smile so graciously, he was not a type to be easily forgotten. Though he plagued and tormented me I bear him no grudge. In my life as a doctor in Africa he occupies a place apart: the barbaric prince of a fabulous country in which I once lived.
* * *
Eighteen months later I was back again in Africa and the world had changed. The war had come, and Libya was a battlefield; meanwhile, I had been sent out to Tripoli to assume the Governorship of that city. I arrived during the retreat from Sidi Barrani, while our Headquarters were wondering why the British were such a long time in coming. They were expected any day. In fact they did not reach Tripoli until two years later.
But the advancing and retreating armies did not pass through my dispensary and I am, therefore, not obliged to talk about them. In the city we kept order, while the bombs sank the ships in the harbour, cleared vast open spaces in the crowded native districts of the town, and killed many women and children. In the meantime Rommel had arrived – that extraordinary Teuton from the fields of Germany, who passed untouched through the fires of battle almost as though the Gods of Valhalla had made him invulnerable. Rommel, Rommel, portami via con te, sang the Italian soldiers. But the song was not officially encouraged.
After their early successes, the British troops had to withdraw beyond the Egyptian frontier, but the Royal Navy retaliated by besieging Libya and cutting off its supplies. Simultaneously, interminable British convoys carried into Egypt, up the Red Sea, men and equipment whose vastly superior strength could not fail in time to break through from el Alamein to Quattara. The dam had finally broken and the flood swept towards us.
Italian units, beaten but in good order, passed in a continuous stream, sad and silent, through the streets of Tripoli towards the Tunisian frontier. The great mass of the German troops passed by on the outskirts of the town, and for several nights we heard the rumbling of their tanks and the scraping and creaking of the caterpillars on the broken asphalt.
Finally we were left alone – to wait.
We waited three days. Then, with Lucio Pagnutti, who was mayor of Tripoli, I passed the whole of the third night driving up and down the Gasr Garabulli road in the hope of meeting some British patrol through which we could inform the British Command that the town was now undefended, without army or arms, and that there was therefore no further justification for continuing the bombardments. We met no one but stragglers from the Italian divisions making their way painfully on foot.
Being ingenuous civilians, we had thought that the enemy would arrive from the east. Instead, while we ran up and down the coast road, Tripoli had been outflanked and the advance troops of the Eighth Army, marching over the lowlands, entered the city by the Porta Gargaresc. Neither Pagnutti nor I had had any training in military strategy.
Dawn was breaking when we re-entered the city, and as the mist rose we saw in the pale morning light a great, formless mass of armoured vehicles and tanks drawn up along the sea front from the Belvedere to the Castello.
Round the armoured vehicles moved men whose faces, hair and uniforms were all the colour of sand. Here and there a redcap broke the m
onotony of the colour and a shout from time to time broke the silence. It was a silence that seemed uncanny and inhuman – not a voice, not a laugh, not a song. Perhaps in that silence lay the secret of their victory.
On the camp stoves scattered along the roadside, the water was boiling for tea. Groups of men were eating standing up, chewing slowly, their eyes fixed on the waters of the port, on the masts of the sunken ships, the tangle of ironwork, the disembowelled shops, the shattered quays. Some of them, stripped to the waist, were washing at tubs full of water; others stood leaning against a wall or the trunk of a palm tree, gazing fixedly at nothing. The smoke from their cigarettes and pipes hung in the air.
Every now and again a dispatch-rider tore along the road, his motor-cycle sounding like a machine-gun, and the silence he left behind seemed more ominous than ever.
I had not slept for two nights and when I got back to my office I found it difficult to keep my eyes open. On my desk lay a note, three days old, in which the Command informed me that ‘for strategic reasons’ they were withdrawing to the west. I laughed as I read it, thinking of its authors who were following the course of the sun, and then I tore the thin paper very slowly into small pieces.
Now that it was all over, I was suddenly weary. After two years, the vain labour, the futile risks, the unprofitable anxiety weighed unutterably upon me.
In order to overcome the temptation to put my head down on my desk and sleep, I got up and went to the window. Opposite was the bishop’s house, peppered with white spots where the plaster had been blow away; on the asphalt in the middle of the road was a large white patch where an incendiary bomb had fallen. The cathedral square was deserted except for a dog which lay asleep in the central flower-bed.
A Cure for Serpents Page 26