Leo Africanus

~ ~ ~

I was your age, my son, and I have never seen Granada again. God did not ordain that my destiny should be written completely in a single book, but that it should unfold, wave after wave, to the rhythm of the seas. At each crossing, destiny jettisoned the ballast of one future to endow me with another; on each new shore, it attached to my name the name of a homeland left behind.

Between Almeria and Melilla, in the space of a day and a night, my existence was overturned. But the sea was calm, and the wind mild; it was in the hearts of my family that the storm was swelling.

Hamid the deliverer had performed his duty well, may God pardon him. When the coast of Andalus was no more than a thin streak of remorse behind us, a woman ran towards our corner of the galley, stepping eagerly over both luggage and travellers. Her joyful step was in strange contrast with her appearance; her veils were so sombre and thick that we should have been hard put to recognize her if Mariam had not been in her arms.

The only cries of joy were uttered by my sister and myself. Muhammad and Warda were struck dumb with emotion, as well as by the hundred curious glances which beset them. As for Salma, she held me a little more tightly against her breast. From her restrained breathing and the occasional sighs which escaped her I knew that she was suffering. Her tears were probably flowing beneath the shelter of her veil, and these were not misplaced, as my father’s unbridled passion would soon bring us all to the edge of catastrophe.

Muhammad the weigh-master, at once so serene and so uncontrolled! It so happened that I lost him in my youth, only to find him again in my maturer years, when he was no longer there. And I had to await my first white hairs, my first regrets, before becoming convinced that every man, including my father, had the right to take the wrong road if he believed he was pursuing happiness. From that time I began to cherish his erring ways, just as I hope that you will cherish mine, my son. I wish that you too will sometimes get lost in your turn. And I hope that, like him, you will love to the point of tyranny, and that you will long remain receptive to the noble temptations of life.

The Year of the Hostelries

900 A.H.

2 October 1494 — 20 September 1495

Before Fez, I had never set foot in a city, never observed the swarming activity of the alleyways, never felt that powerful breath on my face, like the wind from the sea, heavy with cries and smells. Of course, I was born in Granada, the stately capital of the kingdom of Andalus, but it was already late in the century, and I knew it only in its death agonies, emptied of its citizens and its souls, humiliated, faded, and when I left our quarter of al-Baisin it was no longer anything for my family but a vast encampment, hostile and ruined.

Fez was entirely different, and I had the whole of my youth to discover it. I have only hazy memories of our first encounter with the city that year. I came towards it on the back of a mule, a poor sort of conqueror, half-asleep, held up by my father’s firm hand, because all the roads sloped, sometimes so steeply that the animal only moved with a shaky and hesitant step. Every jolt made me sit bolt upright before nodding off again. Suddenly my father’s voice rang out:

‘Hasan, wake up if you want to see your city!’

Coming out of my torpor, I became conscious that our little convoy was already at the foot of a sand-coloured wall, high and massive, bristling with a large number of menacing pointed battlements. A coin pushed into the hand of a gatekeeper caused the door to be opened. We were within the walls.

‘Look around you,’ insisted Muhammad.

All round Fez, as far as the eye could see, were ranges of hills ornamented with countless houses in brick and stone, many of which were decorated with glazed tiles like the houses of Granada.

‘Down there, in that plain crossed by the wadi, is the heart of the city. On the left is the quarter of the Andalusians, founded centuries ago by emigrants from Cordoba; on the right is the quarter of the people of Qairawan, with the mosque and the school of the Qarawiyyin in the middle, that huge building with green tiles, where, if God accepts, you will receive instruction from the ulama.’

I only listened to these learned explanations with half an ear, because it was the sight of the roofs in particular which filled my gaze: on that autumn afternoon, the sun was made milder by thick clouds, and everywhere thousands of people were sitting on the roofs as if on terraces, talking to one another, shouting, drinking, laughing, their voices mingling in a tremendous hubbub. All around them, hanging up and stretched out, was the washing of the rich and the poor billowing in the breeze, like the sails of the same boat.

An exhilarating rumour, a vessel which sails through storm after storm, and which is sometimes wrecked, is that not what a city is? During my adolescence it often happened that I passed whole days gazing at this scene, daydreaming without restraint. The day of my entry to Fez was only a passing rapture. The journey from Melilla had exhausted me, and I was in a hurry to reach Khali’s house. Of course I had no recollection of my uncle, since he had emigrated to Barbary when I was only a year old, nor of my grandmother, who had left with him, the oldest of her sons. But I was sure that their warm welcome would make us forget the horrors of the journey.

Warm it certainly was, for Salma and myself. While she disappeared completely into the all-enveloping veils of her mother, I found myself in the arms of Khali, who looked at me for a long time without saying a word before planting on my forehead the most affectionate of kisses.

‘He loves you as a man loves the son of his sister,’ my mother used to tell me. ‘More than that, since he only has daughters, he considers you his own son.’

He was to prove the truth of this to me on several occasions. But, that day, his solicitude had awful consequences for me.

After having put me down on the ground, Khali turned towards Muhammad.

‘I have been waiting for you for a long time,’ he said in a tone full of reproach, since no one was unaware of the embarrassing idyll which had delayed the weigh-master’s departure.

Nevertheless, the two men embraced each other. Then my uncle turned for the first time towards Warda, who had until then kept herself in the background. His gaze did not alight upon her, but veered off into the distance. He had chosen not to see her. She was not welcome in his house. Even Mariam, adorable, smiling, chubby little girl, did not have the right to the least display of affection.

‘I dreaded this welcome, and this was why I was so unhappy when Warda appeared on the boat,’ my mother explained to me later. ‘I had always put up with Muhammad’s misdemeanours in silence. His behaviour had humiliated me in front of all the neighbourhood, and in the end all Granada made fun of his passions. In spite of that, I always told myself: “Salma, you are his wife and you owe him obedience; one day, when he is weary of fighting, he will return to you!” While waiting I resigned myself to bow my head patiently. My brother, so proud, so haughty, could not do so. He would certainly have forgotten the past if the three of us had arrived alone. But to welcome under his roof the Rumiyya whom all the world accused of having bewitched his brother-in-law would have made him the laughing stock of all the émigrés from Granada, of whom there were not less than six thousand in Fez, all of whom knew and respected him.’

Apart from myself, showered with attentions and already dreaming of delicious little treats, my family barely dared to breathe.

‘It was as if we were taking part in a ceremony which a baleful jinn had changed from a marriage into a funeral,’ said Muhammad. ‘I always considered your uncle like a brother, and I wanted to shout aloud that Warda had fled from her village to find me, risking her life, that she had left the land of the Rumis to come to us, that we no longer had the right to consider her as a captive, that we did not even have the right to call her Rumiyya. But no sound issued from my lips. I could do no more than turn round and go out, in the silence of the grave.’

Salma followed him without a moment’s hesitation, although she was almost fainting. Of them all, she was the most affected, even more than Warda. The concubine had been humiliated, certainly. But at least she had the consolation of knowing that henceforth Muhammad could never abandon her without losing face, and while she was trembling in her corner she had the soothing feeling of having been the victim of injustice. A feeling which wounds, but which puts balm on wounds, a feeling which sometimes kills, but one which much more often gives women powerful reasons to live and to struggle. Salma had none of this.

‘I felt myself crushed by adversity. For me that day was the Day of Judgement; I was about to lose your father after having lost the city of my birth and the house in which I had given birth.’

So we got back on to our mules without knowing which direction to take. Muhammad muttered to himself as he hammered the beast’s withers with his fist:

‘By the earth that covers my father and my ancestors, if I had been told that I would be received in such a fashion in this kingdom of Fez, I would never have left Granada.’

His words rang out in our frightened ears.

‘To leave, to abandon one’s house and lands, to run across mountains and seas, only to encounter closed doors, bandits on the roads and the fear of contagion!’

It was true that since our arrival in the land of Africa misfortunes and miseries had not ceased to rain down upon us, indeed since the very moment our galley drew up alongside the quay at Melilla. We thought that we should find there a haven of Islam, where reassuring hands would be stretched out towards us to wipe away the fatigue of the old and the tears of the weak. But only anxious questions had greeted us on the quayside: ‘Is it true that the Castilians are coming? Have you seen their galleys?’ For those who questioned us thus there was no question of preparing the defences of the port, but rather of not wasting any time before taking flight. Seeing that it was for us, the refugees, to offer words of comfort, we were only the more anxious to put a mountain or a desert between ourselves and this coast which presented itself so openly to the invaders.

A man came up to us. He was a muleteer, he said, and he wanted to leave for Fez immediately. If we wished, he would hire his services to us for a modest sum, a few dozen silver dirhams. Wishing to leave Melilla before nightfall, and probably tempted by the low price, Muhammad accepted without bargaining. However, he asked the muleteer to take the coast road as far as Bedis before striking due south towards Fez; but the man had a better idea, a short cut which, he swore, would save us two whole days. He went that way every month, he knew every bump like the back of his mule. He was so persuasive that half an hour after having disembarked we were already on our way, my father and me on one animal, my mother on another with most of the luggage, and Warda and Mariam on another, the muleteer walking alongside us with his son, an unpleasant urchin of about twelve, barefoot, with filthy fingers and a shifty look.

We had hardly gone three miles when two horsemen veiled in blue suddenly came into view in front of us, holding curved daggers in their hands. As if they had only been waiting for a signal, the muleteer and his son made off as fast as their legs would carry them. The bandits came closer. Seeing that they only had to deal with one man protecting two women and two children, and thus feeling themselves in complete control, they began to run experienced hands over the load on the backs of the mules. Their first trophy was a mother-of-pearl casket in which Salma had unwisely packed all her jewellery. Then they began to unpack one superb silk dress after another, as well as an embroidered sheet which had been part of my mother’s trousseau.

Then, going up to Warda, one of the bandits commanded her:

‘Jump up and down!’

As she remained dumbstruck with fear, he went up to Muhammad and held the point of his dagger to his neck. In mortal fear, the concubine shook herself and gesticulated like a contorted puppet, but without leaving the ground. Not fully comprehending the seriousness of the situation, I let out a loud laugh which my father silenced with a frown. The thief shouted:

‘Jump higher!’

Warda threw herself into the air as best she could, and a light tinkling of coins could be heard.

‘Give all that to me!’

Putting her hand under her dress, she drew out a small purse which she sent rolling on the ground with a disdainful gesture. The bandit picked it up without taking offence, and turned towards my mother:

‘Your turn now.’

At that moment, the call to prayer rang out from a distant village. My father glanced up at the sun standing high in the heavens, and deftly pulled his prayer rug from the side of his mount, spreading it out on the sand, and then, falling to his knees, his face turned towards Mecca, began to recite his midday prayer in a loud voice. This was all done in the twinkling of an eye and in such a matter-of-fact manner that the bandits did not know how to react. While they were exchanging glances with one another, as if by a miracle a thick cloud of dust appeared in the road less than a mile in front of us. The bandits just had time to mount their horses before making off in the opposite direction. We were saved, and my mother did not have to do their bidding.

‘If I had had to do that, it would not have been a jingling that would have been heard but a regular fusillade, because your father had made me carry hundreds of dinars, sewn up in ten fat purses, which I had attached all over me, convinced that no man would ever dare to search so far.’

When the providential arrivals on the scene caught up with us, we saw that they formed a detachment of soldiers. Muhammad hastened to describe to them in detail the stratagem to which we had fallen victims. Precisely for such reasons, their commander explained with a smile on his lips, he and his men had been ordered to patrol this road, which had become overrun with brigands since the Andalusians began to disembark by the boatload at Melilla. Generally, he said in the mildest of tones, the travellers would have their throats cut and the muleteer would get his animals back as well as the share of the booty which would have been left for him. According to the officer, many of the people of Granada travelling to Fez or Tlemcen had met with similar misfortunes, although those making for Tunis, Tetouan, Sale or the Mitidja of Algiers had not been bothered.

‘Go back to the harbour,’ he advised us, ‘and wait. When a merchant caravan forms up, leave with it. It will certainly be guarded, and you will be safe.’

When my mother asked whether she had any chance of retrieving her precious casket, he replied, like any wise man, with a verse from the Qur’an:

‘It may be that you detest something, but that it shows benefit to you; it may be that you rejoice over something and it brings harm to you; because God knows, and you, you do not know.’

Before continuing:

‘The mules which the bandits were forced to leave with you will be much more use to you than the jewels; they will carry you and your baggage, and they will not attract thieves.’

We followed this man’s advice to the letter, and it was thus that we arrived at our destination at the end of ten days, exhausted but safe. To find that our relatives refused us hospitality.

It was thus essential to find a roof under which we could shelter, which was not easy as the Andalusian emigrants, arriving in wave after wave in Fez, had taken over all the houses available. When Boabdil had landed, three years beforehand, he had been accompanied, it was said, by seven hundred people, who now had their own quarter where life was still lived in the style of the Alhambra, pride apart. Normally, the newcomers would put up for a while in the houses of their closest relatives, which we would certainly have done without Warda. As things were, there was no question of spending a single night in Khali’s house, where my father considered, with justice, that he had been held up to ridicule.

There remained the hostelries, the funduqs. There were not less than two hundred of them at Fez, most of them very clean, each with fountains and latrines with swiftly running water flowing through them, taking the sewage towards the river in a thousand canals. Some had more than a hundred and twenty spacious rooms, all giving on to corridors. The rooms were let out completely empty, without even a bed, the landlord only providing his customers with a covering and a mat to sleep on, leaving them to buy their own food, which would be cooked for them. Many made the best of such places, however, because the hostelries were not only for the accommodation of travellers but also provided dwelling places for certain widowers of Fez, who had neither family nor sufficient money to pay for a house and servants, who sometimes lodged together in the same room to share the rent and the daily tasks, and also to keep each other company in their misery. We had to set up house ourselves in this way for several days, the time it took to find more suitable accommodation.

It was not, however, the proximity of these unfortunates that upset my father, but the presence of a very different group of people. Having visited Fez in his youth, he still remembered the reputation of certain hostelries, which was so disgusting that no honest man would cross their thresholds or address a word to their proprietors, because they were inhabited by those men who were called al-hiwa. As I have written in my Description of Africa, the manuscript of which remains at Rome, these were men who habitually dressed as women, with make up and adornments, who shaved their beards, spoke only in high voices and spent their days spinning wool. The people of Fez only saw them at funerals, because it was customary to hire them alongside the female mourners to heighten the sadness. It must be said that each of them had his own male concubine with whom he carried on like a wife with her husband. May the Most High guide us from the paths of error!

Far more dangerous were the outlaws who frequented these same hostelries. Murderers, brigands, smugglers, procurers, those engaged in every vice felt themselves secure there, as if they were in a territory outside the kingdom, freely organizing the sale of wine, kif-smoking sessions and prostitution, combining together to perpetuate their misdeeds. I wondered for a long time why the police at Fez, always so ready to punish the greed of a shopkeeper or the hunger of a man stealing bread, never went into these places to grab hold of the criminals and put an end to activities which were as displeasing to God as to men. It did not take many years for me to discover the reason: every time the sultan’s army left on campaign, the innkeepers were made to supply all the staff necessary to cook for the soldiers, without being paid. In exchange for this contribution to the war effort, the sovereign left them to their own devices. It seems that in all wars order is the natural accomplice of disorder.

To be sure not to find ourselves in one of these infamous places, we had to find a hostelry near the Qarawiyyin mosque, where rich travelling merchants used to stay. Although the price of rooms there was more expensive than elsewhere, these establishments were never empty; whole caravans of customers would take them over at a time. The evening of our arrival we had the very good fortune to find a lodging in a hostelry run by an emigrant from Granada. He sent one of his slaves to the Smoke Market to buy us some small fried fish, meat fritters, olives and bunches of grapes. He also put a pitcher of fresh water on our doorstep for the night.

Instead of staying there a few days, we passed six weeks in this inn, until the landlord himself found us a narrow house at the bottom of a cul-de-sac not far from the flower market. It was half the size of our house in Granada, and the entrance door was low and somewhat sordid, the more so as one could not get inside without wading through a muddy puddle. When he suggested it to us he explained that it had been lived in by an Andalusian merchant who had decided to move to Constantinople in order to develop his business. But the reality was quite different, as our neighbours hastened to inform us: our predecessor, constantly confined to his bed, unable to carry on his business, and not having known a single day’s happiness during the three years he had spent in Fez, had simply gone back to Granada. Two of his children had died of the plague and his eldest son had contracted a shameful disease known as ‘the spots’. When we arrived, the whole of Fez was living in fear of this disease; it spread so quickly that no man seemed able to escape it. At first those who were afflicted by it were isolated in special houses, like lepers, but their number soon became so great that they had to be brought back to the bosom of their families. The whole town became an enormous infected area, and no medicine proved effective against it.

Hardly less deadly than the disease itself was the rumour that surrounded it. The people of the city whispered that it had never been seen among them until the arrival of the Andalusians. The latter in their turn defended themselves by claiming that ‘the spots’ had been spread, without any doubt, by the Jews and their women; they in their turn accused the Castilians, the Portuguese, sometimes even the Genoese or Venetian sailors. In Italy, this same scourge is called ‘the French evil’.

That year, I think in the springtime, my father began to talk to me about Granada. He was to do so frequently in the future, keeping me at his side for hours, not always looking at me, not always knowing whether I was listening, or whether I understood, or whether I knew the people or the places. He used to sit cross-legged, his face lit up, his voice softened, his tiredness and his anger abated. For several minutes, or several hours, he became a story-teller. He was no longer at Fez, no longer within these walls that breathed plague and mould. He travelled back in his memory and only came back from it with regret.

Salma watched him with compassion, with worry, and sometimes with fear. She considered that his moods were not brought on by homesickness nor the difficulties of his life in exile. For her, my father had ceased to be himself since the day that Warda had left, and the return of the concubine had settled nothing. Those absent eyes, that self-conscious voice, that attraction towards the land of the Rumis, these obsessions which made him act against all common sense all led her to suppose that Muhammad had been put under a spell. She determined to rid him of it, even if she had to consult all the soothsayers of Fez one by one.

The Year of the Soothsayers

901 A.H.

21 September 1495 — 8 September 1496

When the honest women of Fez have to cross the flower market they quicken their step, wrap their veils more closely around themselves, and glance to left and right like hunted animals, because, although the company of myrtle or narcissus has nothing reprehensible about it, everyone knows that the citizens of Fez have the strange habit of surrounding themselves with flowers, both planted and picked, when they give themselves over to the forbidden pleasures of alcohol. For certain pious people, the very purchase of a perfumed bouquet became only a little less reprehensible than buying a carafe of wine, and the flower sellers seemed to them to be no better than the innkeepers, the more so as both were very often Andalusians, prosperous and dissolute.

Salma herself always quickened her pace as soon as she passed across the square in which the flower market was located, though less out of bigotry than out of a legitimate concern for her respectability. I had eventually noticed that she quickened her gait, and as if to amuse myself with a new game, pretended to challenge her to a race, trotting along by her side.

One day that year, as we were crossing the square, my mother quickened her pace. Laughing my head off, I began to run, but instead of holding me back as she usually did, she began to run in her turn, more and more quickly. As I could no longer keep up with her, she turned round for a moment, swept me up in her arms and ran on with even greater vigour, screaming a word into my ear which I could not catch. It was only when she stopped at the other side of the square that I understood the reason for her haste and the name she was calling: ‘Sarah!’

Gaudy Sarah. I still often heard her speak of the Jewess, but her features no longer said anything to me.

‘God Himself has sent you to this country,’ gasped Salma as she caught up with her.

Sarah gave her an amused pout.

‘That is what our rabbi says every day. As for me, I’m not so sure.’

Everything about her seemed bizarre to me: her pealing laughter, her many-coloured clothes, her gold-filled teeth, her voluminous earrings and above all the overpowering perfume which hit me full in the nostrils when she clasped me to her bosom. While I stared shamelessly at her she began to tell the tale, with a thousand gestures and a thousand exclamations, of what had befallen her since she had left the quarter of al-Baisin, a little before our own departure.

‘Every day I thank the Creator for having pointed me towards exile, because those who chose baptism are now victims of the most dreadful persecutions. Seven of my cousins are in prison and one of my nieces was burnt alive with her husband, both accused of having remained Jews in secret.’

She put me down on the ground before continuing in a lowered tone:

‘All the converts are suspected of continuing to be Jews; no Spaniard can escape the Inquisition unless he can prove that he is of “pure blood”, that is, that he can count no Jew and no Moor among his ancestors, as far back as his family goes. Even so, their King Ferdinand himself has Jewish blood, as has Torquemada the Inquisitor. May the flames of Hell pursue them until the end of time!’

Thus Sarah did not regret having fled to Portugal with her family, although she soon realized that only rich Jews could take up residence there, and then only on the further condition that they showered gold upon the king and his advisers. As for the poorer members of the community, they were soon to have to choose, as in Castile, between conversion and flight.

‘So I hastened to take ship for Tetuan, where I stayed several months. Then I came to Fez with my eldest daughter and my son-in-law, who had decided to set himself up here with an uncle who is a jeweller. My second daughter and her husband went, like most of our people, to the land of the Grand Turk, our protector. May the Most High prolong his life and grant him victory over our enemies!’

‘That is what we all devoutly hope,’ said my mother approvingly. ‘If God has the goodness to give us back our country one day, the Grand Turk will be His instrument.’

Revenge upon the Castilians was certainly one of Salma’s most cherished desires. But at that moment her thoughts were less concerned with the fate of Granada than with that of her own family circle. If she was showing so much joy at having found Sarah again it was because she remembered how successfully she had assisted her to get Muhammad back when he had nearly eluded her shortly before my birth. This time a magic potion would not suffice; Salma wanted to consult soothsayers, and as her mother was seriously ill and could not accompany her, she was counting on the reassuring presence of Gaudy Sarah.

‘How is your cousin?’ asked Sarah.

‘As God disposes him to conduct himself!’

The ambiguity of this formulation was evidently not lost on the Jewess. She put her hand on my mother’s arm. Glancing at me at the same time out of the corners of their eyes, they took a step aside and spoke to each other in low tones, so that I could hear only occasional snatches of the conversation. The words ‘Rumiyya’ and ‘sorcery’, perhaps also ‘drug’ kept appearing on Salma’s lips; the Jewess was attentive and reassuring.

The two women agreed to meet again in the same place two days later to go the rounds of the soothsayers. I knew about it that day because my mother had decided that I should accompany her. Perhaps she did not want to leave me with Warda; perhaps she judged it more fitting, in the eyes of my father and the neighbours, to take a child with her, as living proof of the honesty of her comings and goings. At all events, for a seven-year-old boy it was an experience as wonderful as it was unexpected, and, I must admit, sometimes agonizing as well.

Our first visit was to a clairvoyant named Umm Bassar. It was said that the sultan of Fez would consult her at each new moon, and that she had put a spell upon an amir who had threatened him, striking him blind. In spite of her renown, she lived in a house as modest as our own, situated in the perfume suq, at the end of a narrow arcaded gallery. We had only to push past a hanging to make our way inside. A black maidservant made us sit down in a small chamber before leading us down a dark corridor to a room which was only a little larger. Umm Bassar was seated on an enormous green cushion, her hair covered with a scarf of the same colour, fringed with golden threads. Behind her back was a tapestry with a picture of the twenty-eight tabernacles of the moon; in front of her was a low table on which there was a glazed earthenware vessel.

My mother sat opposite the clairvoyant and explained her business to her in a low voice. Sarah and I stayed behind, standing up. Umm Bassar poured some water into the vessel, added a drop of oil, and then blew on it three times. She recited several incomprehensible formulae, and then thrust her face towards the vessel, saying, in a cavernous voice:

‘The jinns are there; some come by land, others by sea.’

Suddenly she turned towards me and beckoned me:

‘Come closer!’

Suspicious, I did not move.

‘Come, don’t be frightened.’

My mother gave me a reassuring look. I came up to the table timidly.

‘Lean over the table!’

The sight was, I swear, astonishing enough. The dancing reflections of the droplets of oil on the polished surface of the amphora gave the impression of ceaseless movement. Looking at it for several seconds, and allowing one’s imagination free rein, one could make out all manner of beings and objects.

‘Did you see the jinns moving about?’

Of course I said ‘Yes’.

I would have said yes whatever the question had been, but my mother was all ears. For the objective she had in mind, and for the price she was paying, she did not want to be disappointed. At Umm Bassar’s command I returned to my place. The clairvoyant remained for several minutes without moving.

‘We must wait until the jinns become calmer; they are too troubled,’ she explained in a confident voice.

There was a long period of silence, and then she began to talk to her jinns. She murmured questions to them and then leant over the vessel to observe the gestures they made with their hands and eyes.

‘Your cousin will return to you after three periods of time,’ she declared, without specifying whether it would be three days, three weeks, three months, or three years.

My mother took out a gold piece and left, pensive and bewildered. On the way back she asked me not to tell anyone about the visit, not even my father, for fear of seeing the jinns climbing on top of me in my sleep.

A week later we met Gaudy Sarah again on the square close to our house. This time our visit led us to an imposing residence situated not far from the sultan’s palace. We were received in an immense lofty room, with a ceiling painted azure and gold. There were several women there, all fat and unveiled, who seemed not at all pleased to see me. They talked about me for several minutes, and then one of them got up heavily, took me by the hand and led me to a far corner of the room, promising to bring me some toys. I did not see a single one, but I had no time to be bored, because after a few minutes Salma and Sarah came back to fetch me.

I must say immediately that I had to wait several years before I learned the truth about what happened that day; I only remember my mother and Gaudy Sarah grumbling incessantly as they left, but also that between outbursts of anger they joked with each other and laughed out loud. I also remember having heard mention, in the salon, of al-Amira, the princess.

She was a strange person. The widow of one of the sultan’s cousins, deeply versed in all the occult sciences, she had founded a peculiar circle, formed only of women, some chosen for their gifts of clairvoyance, others for their beauty. People with great experience of life call these women sahasat, because they are accustomed to use one another, and I know no more appropriate term to express it. When a woman comes to see them, they make her believe that they have friendly relations with certain demons, whom they divide into several species: red demons, white demons, black demons. They themselves alter their voices to make it seem as if the demons are speaking through their mouths, as I have set forth in my Description of Africa. These demons often order their fair visitors, if they are of comely appearance, to take off all their clothes and to exchange loving kisses with themselves, meaning, of course, with the princess and her acolytes. If the woman is prepared to go along with this game, whether out of stupidity or inclination, she is invited to become a member of the sisterhood, and a sumptuous banquet is organized in her honour, at which all the women dance together to a negro orchestra.

It was at the age of sixteen or seventeen that I learned the story of the princess and the demons. It was only then that I guessed what it was that had made my mother and Sarah take flight so quickly.

In spite of this misadventure, Salma had no wish to interrupt her quest. But for her next visit she showed greater circumspection in her choice of soothsayer. Hence, some weeks later, the three of us found ourselves at the house of a highly respected man of the city, an astrologer and bookseller who kept a shop near the Great Mosque of the Qarawiyyin. He received us on the first floor, in a room which was furnished only with books along the walls and a mat on the floor. He was at pains to point out as soon as we arrived that he was neither a magician nor an alchemist, and that he sought only to decipher the signs sent by God to His creatures. In support of his words he cited these verses from the Qur’an:

There are signs on earth for those whose faith is solid.

There are signs in yourselves, do you not see them?

There are also good things in Heaven which are destined for you.

And also those by which you are threatened.

Having thus reassured us of his faith and his honesty, he asked us to withdraw to the far corner of the room, rolled up the mat and traced several concentric circles on the floor with a piece of chalk. He drew a cross in the first one, and indicated the four cardinal points on the extremities of the cross, writing the names of the four elements on the inside. He then divided the second circle into four quadrants, and each quadrant into seven parts, making twenty-eight altogether, in which he wrote the twenty-eight letters of the Arabic alphabet. In the other circles he put the seven plants, the twelve months of the Latin year and various other signs. This procedure, known as zairaja, is long and complicated, and I would not have remembered the slightest detail if I had not seen it done three times in front of me. I only regret that I did not learn to do it myself, for of all the occult sciences it is the only one where the results are not open to discussion, even in the eyes of certain ulama.

After having finished his drawing, the astrologer asked my mother what she was seeking. He took the letters of her question one by one, translated them into numerical values, and after a very complicated calculation, found the natural element to which the letter corresponded. After an hour’s scribbling, his reply came in the form of a verse:

Death will come, and then the waves of the sea,

Then the woman and her fruit will return.

My mother was so upset that her words choked, and the man tried to calm her:

‘If one seeks to know the future, one must expect sometimes to encounter death. Is death not at the end of every destiny?’

Salma found the strength to reply, trembling, almost beseeching him:

‘At the end, probably, but here it appears at the very beginning of the prediction.’

The man’s only reply was to turn his eyes and his palms towards heaven. No more words passed his lips, and when my mother attempted to pay him he refused with a gesture which brooked no argument.

The fourth visit was to be Salma’s undoing. This time it was to one of those people known as mu‘azzimin, famous for their ability to cast out demons. My grandmother, may God take pity upon her! had praised this man exceedingly; according to her, he had solved a thousand problems far more complicated than our own. In fact, he was so sought after that we had to wait two hours in his antechamber while he dealt with six other clients.

As soon as Salma explained her situation to him a condescending smile came over his face, and he swore that within seven days her problem would be forgotten.

‘Your cousin has a tiny demon in his head which must be cast out. If he were here I would cure him immediately. But I shall pass to you the power to exorcize him yourself. I will teach you a spell which you should recite over his head while he sleeps tonight, tomorrow and the next night; I will also give you this phial of perfume. You must pour out a drop when you pronounce the spell.’

The first evening, my father slept in Salma’s room, and she had no difficulty in reciting the words and pouring out a drop of the elixir. On the second evening, however, there came to pass what any intelligent being might have foreseen. Muhammad was with Warda, and my mother slipped trembling into their bedroom. She was about to pour out the liquid when the concubine let out a piercing cry, at which my father awoke, and with an instinctive movement seized his frail aggressor by the ankle. Salma fell sobbing to the ground.

Seeing the phial in her hand, Muhammad accused his wife of sorcery, of madness, and of attempting to poison him. Without waiting for dawn he at once cried out to her three times in succession: ‘Anti taliqa, anti taliqa, anti taliqa’, declaring thus that she was henceforth free of him and divorced.

The Year of the Mourners

902 A.H.

9 September 1496 — 29 August 1497

That year, Boabdil himself came to our house for the condolence ceremonies. I should say to Khali’s house, because I went to live with him after my father had repudiated Salma. The deposed sultan entered the room, followed by a chamberlain, a secretary, and six guards dressed in the style of the Alhambra. He murmured various appropriate words to my uncle, who shook his hand for a long time before giving him his high divan, the only one in the house. His retainers remained standing.

My grandmother had died in the night, and the Granadans resident in Fez had begun to gather since the morning. Boabdil had arrived unannounced, well before the midday prayer. None of those present had a particularly high opinion of him, but his titles, however hollow, continued to make a certain impression upon his former subjects. Furthermore, the occasion was not a suitable one either for recriminations or for the settlement of accounts. Except, that is, for Astaghfirullah, who came into the room shortly after the sultan, but did not favour him even with a glance. He sat down on the first empty cushion, and began to recite aloud in his rasping voice the Qur’anic verses appropriate to the occasion.

Several lips followed the prayers, while others seemed set in a dreamy pout, amused at times, while still others chattered incessantly. In the men’s reception room, only Khali was weeping. I can see him still, as if he was taking shape before my eyes. I can see myself too, sitting on the floor, not happy, certainly, but not particularly sad either, my dry and carefree eyes roaming avidly around the company. From Boabdil, who had become immensely fat, to the shaikh, whom exile and the years had rendered skeletal and angular. His turban appeared more immense than ever, out of all proportion. Every time he became silent the raucous screams of the women mourners rang out, their faces damp with sweat, their hair dishevelled, their faces scratched until the blood came, while in a corner of the courtyard the male mourners dressed in women’s clothes, clean-shaven and made up, were feverishly shaking their square tambourines. To make them keep quiet, Astaghfirullah began to chant again, more loudly, more off key, with greater fervour. From time to time a street poet would get up and recite in a triumphal tone an elegy which had already been used for a hundred other departed souls. Outside, there was the clanging of cooking pots; the women of the neighbourhood were bringing in food, since nothing is cooked in a house where someone has died.

Death is a celebration. A spectacle.

My father did not arrive until midday, explaining rather confusedly that he had just learned of the sad news. Everyone eyed him curiously, thinking themselves obliged to greet him coldly or even to ignore him. I felt mortified; I would have wished that he had not been there, that he were not my father. Ashamed of my thoughts, I went towards him, leant my head against his shoulder and stood there without moving. But while he slowly caressed the nape of my neck I began to remember, I do not know why, the astrologer-bookseller and his prediction.

So the death had taken place. Without really admitting it to myself, I was somewhat relieved that the victim had been neither my mother nor my father. Salma told me later that she was afraid that it would be me. That which she could not voice, even in the very depths of her heart, only old Astaghfirullah dared to put into words, in the form of a parable.

Raising himself up to pronounce an elegy for the departed, he addressed himself first to my uncle:

‘The story is told that one of the caliphs of long ago had lost his mother, whom he cherished as you used to cherish your mother, and he began to weep without restraint. A wise man came up to him. “Prince of the Believers,” he said, “you should give thanks to the Most High, since he has favoured your mother by making you weep over her mortal remains instead of humiliating her by making her weep over yours.” We must thank God when death follows the natural order of things, and trust in His Wisdom when, alas, it is otherwise.’

He began to intone a prayer, which the company murmured in time with him. Then without any transition he picked up the thread of his discourse:

‘Too often, at funerals, I hear men and women believers cursing death. But death is a gift from the Most High, and one cannot curse that which comes from Him. Does the word “gift” seem incongruous to you? It is nevertheless the absolute truth. If death was not inevitable, man would have wasted his whole life attempting to avoid it. He would have risked nothing, attempted nothing, undertaken nothing, invented nothing, built nothing. Life would have been a perpetual convalescence. Yes my brothers, let us thank God for having made us this gift of death, so that life is to have meaning; of night, that day is to have meaning; silence, that speech is to have meaning; illness, that health is to have meaning; war, that peace is to have meaning. Let us give thanks to Him for having given us weariness and pain, so that rest and joy are to have meaning. Let us give thanks to Him, Whose wisdom is infinite.’

The assembly gave thanks in unison: ‘Al-hamd ul-illah, al-hamd ul-illah!’ I noticed that at least one man had remained silent; his lips cracked, his hands clenched together; it was Khali.

‘I was afraid,’ he told me later. ‘I thought to myself: “If only he can restrain himself!” Unfortunately I knew Astaghfirullah too well to nurture the least illusion in that direction.’

In fact, the sense of the allocution was beginning to change:

‘If God had offered me death as a gift, if He had called me to Him instead of letting me live through the agony of my city, would He have been cruel towards me? If God had spared me to see with my own eyes Granada falling into captivity and the believers into dishonour, would He have been cruel towards me?’

The shaikh raised his voice sharply, startling the company:

‘Am I the only one present to think that death is worth more than dishonour? Am I the only one to cry out: “O God, if I have failed in my duty towards the Community of the Believers, crush me with Your powerful hand, sweep me away from the surface of the earth like some baleful vermin. O God, judge me even today, for my conscience is too heavy to bear. You have entrusted me with the fairest of Your cities, You have put in my hands the life and honour of the Muslims; will You not summon me to render my accounts?” ’

Khali was bathed in sweat, as were all those seated near Boabdil. The latter was deathly pale, like a turmeric stalk. It might have been said that his royal blood had abandoned him so as not to share in his shame. If, acting on the advice of some counsellor, he had come to re-establish his links with his former subjects, in order to be in a position to ask them to contribute to the expenses of his court, the enterprise was ending in utter disaster. Another one. His eyes roamed desperately towards the way out, while his heavy body appeared to have collapsed.

Was it out of pity, or exhaustion or simply by chance, that Astaghfirullah suddenly decided to interrupt his accusations and to resume his prayers? My uncle regarded this, he said, as an intervention from Heaven. The moment that the shaikh pronounced the words ‘I bear witness that there is no other God but God, and that Muhammad is the Messenger of God’, Khali seized the opportunity literally to jump out of his place and to give the signal for the departure of the cortège to the cemetery. The women accompanied the shroud to the threshold of the gate, waving white handkerchiefs as a symbol of desolation and farewell. Boabdil slipped away through a side door. Henceforth the Granadans of Fez could die in peace; the flabby silhouette of the fallen sultan would appear no more to plague their final journey.

The condolence ceremonies continued for another six days. What better remedy is there than exhaustion for the pain caused by the death of a loved one? The first visitors would come at dawn, the last would leave after nightfall. After the third evening, the relatives had no more tears, and sometimes forgot themselves sufficiently to smile or to laugh, which those present did not fail to criticize. The only ones to behave properly were the hired mourners, who sought to increase their pay by intensifying their wailing. Forty days after the decease, the condolences resumed once more in the same fashion, for three further days.

These weeks of mourning gave opportunities for my father and my uncle to exchange various conciliatory words. It was not yet a reunion, far from it, and my mother took care not to cross the path of the man who had repudiated her. But, from the vantage point of my eight years, I believed I could discern a glimmer of hope on the horizon.

Among other matters, my father and my uncle had discussed my future. They had agreed that it was time for me to start school. Other children went to school later, but it seemed that I was already showing signs of precocious intelligence, and it was pointless to leave me at home all day in the company of women. I might grow soft, and my virility might suffer. They each came to me in turn to explain this, and one morning they both solemnly accompanied me to the local mosque.

The teacher, a young turbaned shaikh with a beard which was almost blond, asked me to recite the Fatiha, the first sura of the Book. I did this without a mistake, without the slightest hesitation. He appeared satisfied with this:

‘His elocution is good and his memory is precise. He will not need more than four or five years to memorize the Qur’an.’

I was not a little proud, since I knew that many pupils took six years, even seven. After having learned the Qur’an by heart, I would be able to enter the college, where the various sciences were taught.

‘I will also instruct him in the principles of orthography, grammar and calligraphy,’ the teacher explained.

When asked what payment he required, he took a step backwards:

‘My only payment comes from the Most High.’

However, he added that each parent gave what he could to the school on the various feast days, with a more substantial gift at the end of the final year, after the Great Recitation.

Promising myself to memorize the hundred and fourteen suras as soon as possible I began to attend the shaikh’s classes assiduously five days a week. There were no fewer than eighty boys in my class, aged between seven and fourteen. Each pupil came to school in whatever clothes he pleased, but no one would have thought of coming to school dressed in sumptuous garments, silk, or embroidery, except on special occasions. In any case, the sons of princes and of the grandees of the kingdom did not go to the mosque schools. They received the instruction of a shaikh in their own homes. But with that exception, the boys who attended the school came from a variety of backgrounds: sons of qadis, notaries, officers, royal and municipal functionaries, shopkeepers and artisans, even some sons of slaves sent by their masters.

The room was large, and arranged in tiers. The bigger boys sat at the back, the smaller ones in front, each with a little board on which he would write the day’s verses, taken down at the master’s dictation. The latter often had a rod in his hand, which he would not hesitate to use if one of us swore or made some serious mistake. But none of the pupils held it against him, and he himself never harboured a grudge from one day to the next.

On the day of my arrival at the school, I found a seat in the third row, I believe. Close enough to see and hear the teacher, but far enough away to protect myself from his questions and his inevitable outbursts of anger. Next to me sat the most mischievous of all the children of the quarter, Harun, known as the Ferret. He was my age, with a very brown complexion, with clothes that were worn and patched but always clean. After the first scuffle we became inseparable friends, bound together in life and death. No one who saw him would fail to ask him for news of me, and no one would see me without being astonished that he was not with me. At his side, I was to explore both Fez and my own adolescence. I felt an outsider; he knew the city was his, created for him, only for his eyes, for his limbs, for his heart. And he offered to share it with me.

It is true that he belonged, by birth, to the most generous of companies.

The Year of Harun the Ferret

903 A.H.

30 August 1497 — 18 August 1498

It was in that year that Melilla fell into the hands of the Castilians. A fleet had been sent to attack it, but found it deserted, abandoned by its inhabitants, who had fled into the neighbouring hills, taking their possessions with them. The Christians seized the city and began to fortify it. God knows if they will leave it one day!

At Fez, the refugees from Granada became afraid. They had the sensation that the enemy was at their heels, that he would pursue them to the very heart of the lands of Islam, even to the ends of the earth.

My family’s worries increased, but I was still only slightly affected, absorbed in my studies and in my budding friendships.

When Harun came to my house for the first time, still very shy, and when I introduced him to my uncle, mentioning the guild to which his family belonged, Khali took my friend’s hands, more slender than his, but already more roughened, in his own, and pronounced these words, which made me smile at the time:

‘If the fair Scheherazade had known them, she would have devoted a long night to telling their story; she would have added jinns, flying carpets and magic lanterns, and before dawn, by some miraculous means, she would have changed their chief into a caliph, their hovels into palaces, and their penitential garb into ceremonial robes.’

These were the porters of Fez. Three hundred men, simple, poor, almost all of them illiterate, but who had nevertheless managed to become the most respected, most fraternal and best organized of all the guilds of the city.

Each year, until today, they appoint a leader, a consul, who regulates their activities down to the minutest detail. Each week he decides which of them will work and which will rest, according to the arrival of the caravans, the situation in the suqs, and the availability of his fellows. That which a porter earns for his day’s work he does not take home, but deposits the whole of it in a communal chest. At the end of the week the money is divided out equally among those who have worked, except for a part which is kept aside for the good works of the guild, which are both manifold and munificent; when any of their number dies, they take over the responsibility for his family, help his widow to find a new husband and take care of his children until they are of an age to have a profession. The son of one is the son of all. The money from the fund is also used for those who marry; all the members contribute to assure them of a sum which will enable them to set up house.

The consul of the porters negotiates on their behalf with the sultan and his advisers. In this way he has managed to secure their immunity both from tribute and the salt tax, and to ensure that their bread is baked for them free of charge in the municipal ovens. Furthermore, if any of them should by some misfortune commit a murder punishable by death, he is not executed in public like other criminals, in order not to bring the guild into disrepute. In exchange, the consul must make a rigorous and unbiased examination of the probity of each new candidate, to exclude anyone who might be suspect. In this way the reputation of the porters has become so high that the merchants are obliged to have recourse to them to clear their stock. Thus the vendors of oil, who arrive in the suqs from the countryside with containers of all sizes, resort to special porters who will themselves confirm the capacity of the containers as well as the quality of the contents, and even give guarantees for the purchasers. In the same way, when a merchant imports a new kind of cloth, he asks the criers among the porters to proclaim the high quality of the merchandise. The porters charge a fixed sum for each of these functions, according to a scale fixed by the consul.

No man, be he even a prince, ever dares to lay hands on any of their number, because he knows that he would have to fight against the entire company. Their motto is a sentence of the Prophet’s: ‘Assist your brother, whether he is the oppressor or the oppressed,’ but they interpret these words in the same way as the Messenger himself, when someone said to him, ‘We shall assist the oppressed, that goes without saying. But in what way should we come to the aid of the oppressor?’ And he replied: ‘By getting the upper hand over him and by preventing him from doing harm.’ Thus it was rare for a porter to start a fight in the suqs of Fez, and there was always a wise man among his brothers to reason with him.

Such were these men. Humble, yet proud, impoverished, yet generous. So far from palaces and citadels, yet so capable of running their affairs. Yes, this was the stock from which my best friend sprang.

Every day at first light Harun the Ferret would call for me to walk at my side the few hundred paces which separated Khali’s house from the school. Sometimes we told each other tall stories, sometimes we repeated the verses we had studied the previous evening. Often we said nothing at all, walking in companionable silence.

Opening my eyes one morning I saw him in my bedroom, sitting at the foot of the box bed on which I slept. Fearing that I was late for school, I jumped up, already thinking of the teacher’s cane about to whistle down across my calves. Harun reassured me with a smile.

‘It’s Friday, the school is closed, but the streets are open and the gardens too. Take a piece of bread and a banana and meet me on the corner.’

God alone knows the number of expeditions we made together after that. We often began our walks at the Square of Wonders. I do not know if that was its real name, but that was what Harun used to call it. There was nothing for us to buy there, or pick, or eat. We could only look around us, breathe in the air, and listen.

In particular, there were those pretending to be ill. Some pretended to be affected by epilepsy, holding their head in both hands and shaking it vigorously, letting their lips and jaws hang down, and then rolling around on the ground in such a practised fashion that they never even scratched themselves or upset the begging bowl by their side. Others pretended to be plagued with stones, and moaned incessantly, apparently in the most fearful pain, unless Harun and I were the only spectators. Still others displayed wounds and sores. From these I swiftly turned away, for I had been told that the mere sight of them was enough to become similarly afflicted oneself.

There were numerous tumblers on the square, who sang silly romances and sold little pieces of paper to the credulous, on which were written, so they claimed, magic spells to cure all manner of illnesses. There were itinerant quacks, who boasted of their miraculous medicines and took care not to appear twice in the same town. There were also monkey-keepers, who delighted in frightening pregnant women, and snake charmers who wound their creatures around their necks. Harun was not afraid to go up to them. But for my part I was as much frightened as disgusted.

On the feast days, there were story-tellers. I particularly remember a blind man whose stick danced to the rhythm of the adventures of Hallul, the hero of the wars of Andalus, and the renowned An tar ibn Shaddad, the most valorous of the Arabs. On one occasion, when he was telling the tale of the loves of black Antar and the fair Abla, he stopped to ask whether there were any women or children in the audience. Greatly disappointed, the women and children withdrew. I waited several moments to soothe my dignity. A hundred disapproving eyes were turned towards me. Unable to brazen it out, I was about to leave, when, with a glare, Harun signalled that there was no question of our doing so. He put one hand on my shoulder and the other on his hip and did not move an inch. The story-teller continued his tale, and we listened until the last embrace. Only after the crowd dispersed did we resume our walk.

The Square of Wonders was the crossroads of a number of busy streets. One of them, which was cluttered with the stalls of booksellers and public letter-writers, led to the entrance of the Great Mosque; another accommodated boot and shoe shops, a third the vendors of bridles, saddles and stirrups, but the fourth at last was the one we always had to take. Here were the milk sellers, whose shops were decked out with majolica vases far more valuable than the goods they sold. But we did not go to these shops but to those who would buy up unsold milk each evening at a low price at their doors, take it home, let it curdle overnight, and sell it the next day, chilled and diluted with water. A thirst-quenching and satisfying drink which strained neither the pockets nor the consciences of the Believers.

For Harun and I the discovery of Fez was just beginning. We would uncover its layers veil by veil, like a bride in her marriage chamber. I have kept a thousand memories of that year, which take me back to the carefree candour of my nine years each time I evoke them. But it is the most painful of them all that I feel obliged to relate here, since, if I did not mention it, I would be failing in my role of faithful witness.

That day, the walk had begun like any other; Harun wanted to nose around, and I was no less curious. We knew that there was a little suburb called al-Mars lying to the west of the city, the mention of which always brought a troubled look to our schoolmaster’s face. Was it far off? Was it dangerous? Others would have asked no further; we were happy to set out.

When we arrived at this suburb around midday, we immediately understood its function. In the streets, women were lounging against the shopfronts, or by the open doors of establishments which could only be taverns. Harun mimicked the beckoning stance of a prostitute. I laughed and imitated the swaying gait of a stout matron.

And what if we went to see what went on in the taverns? We knew that it would be impossible for us to go inside, but we could always have a quick look.

So we go towards the first one. The door is half open, and we poke our two little heads inside. It’s dark, and we can only see a crowd of customers. In the midst of them a shock of flaming red hair stands out. We see nothing else, because someone has already spotted us, and we quickly take to our heels, straight towards the tavern on the adjoining street. It’s no lighter, but our eyes adjust more quickly. We count four heads of hair, about fifteen customers. In the third we have time to make out several faces, a number of gleaming cups, several wine jars. The game continues. Our reckless heads dive into the fourth. It seems lighter. Quite close to the door, we make out a face. That beard, that profile, that stance? I pull back my head and begin to run along the street, fleeing neither the tavern keepers nor their bully boys. The image which I want to leave far behind me is that of my father, seated in the tavern, at a table, with a shock of hair at his side. I have seen him. Harun has certainly recognized him. Has he seen us? I don’t think so.

Since then it has happened to me more than once to go into taverns and streets more sordid than those of al-Mars. But that day the earth opened beneath my feet. It might have been the Day of Judgement. I was ashamed, I was in pain. I did not stop running, the tears pouring down my cheeks, my eyes half closed, my throat hoarse, choking for breath.

Harun followed me, without speaking to me, without touching me, without coming too close. He waited until I was exhausted, until I sat down on the steps of an empty shop. He sat down by my side, still without a word. And then, at the end of an interminable hour, during which I gradually came to myself and calmed down, he stood up, and directed me imperceptibly towards the way home. It was only when we came in sight of Khali’s house at dusk that Harun spoke for the first time:

‘All men have always frequented taverns; all men have always loved wine. Otherwise, why should God have needed to forbid it?’

The very next day, I saw Harun the Ferret again without pain; it was meeting my father that I dreaded. By a happy chance he had to leave for the countryside where he was looking for a plot of land to rent. He came back several weeks later, but by then destiny had already drowned my sufferings and his own in even greater miseries.

The Year of the Inquisitors

904 A.H.

19 August 1498 — 7 August 1499

That year, Hasan the deliverer died under torture in one of the dungeons of the Alhambra; he was no less than eighty years old. There was none more skilled than he in obtaining the release of a captive, but when it came to his own liberation his words seem to have lost their weight. He was a devout and pious man, and if he sometimes made errors of judgement, his intentions were as pure as those of a child until his dying day. He died poor; may God now reveal to him the riches of Eden!

Thousands of others were tortured at the same time. For several months the most dreadful news had been reaching us from our former homeland, but few foresaw the calamity which was to engulf the last Muslims of Andalus.

It all began with the arrival at Granada of a party of inquisitors, religious fanatics who immediately issued a proclamation that all Christians who had converted to Islam should return to their original religion. Some of them reluctantly agreed, but the majority refused, pointing to the agreement concluded before the fall of the city, which expressly guaranteed the converts the right to remain Muslims. To no avail. As far as the inquisitors were concerned, this clause was null and void. Any man who had been baptized and who refused to return to Christianity was considered as a traitor and thus liable to be condemned to death. Several pyres were erected to intimidate the recalcitrant, as had been done for the Jews. Several citizens recanted. A lesser number told themselves that it was better to take flight, even at this late stage, before the trap closed on them again. They were able to take with them only the clothes on their backs.

The inquisitors then decreed that anyone having a Christian ancestor must be compulsorily baptized. One of the first to be affected by this was Hamid, whose grandfather was a Christian captive who had chosen to declare himself for the Witness of Islam. One evening some Castilian soldiers, accompanied by one of the inquisitors, came to his house in our quarter, al-Baisin. Warned in advance, the old man’s neighbours went down into the street to try to prevent his arrest. In vain. The next day, a number of people, including two women, were arrested in other parts of the city. Each time, crowds gathered and the soldiers were obliged to draw their swords to force their way through. Most of the incidents took place in al-Baisin. A newly-built church not far from the house where we used to live was set on fire; in return, two mosques were pillaged. Everyone’s faith was like a raw nerve.

One day, the news came that Hamid had succumbed in his dungeon as a result of the tortures inflicted upon him by the inquisitors. He had resisted conversion to the end, insisting upon the agreement signed by the Christian kings.

When the news of his death became known, appeals to resist resounded in the streets. Alone of all the notables of al-Baisin, Hamid had stayed where he was, not to make accommodation with the enemy, but to continue the mission to which he had devoted his life, to free the captured Muslims. The noble nature of his activities, the fact of his great age, and the suppressed hatreds coming to the surface combined to provoke an immediate reaction on the part of the Muslims. Barricades were put up; soldiers, civil servants and clergy were massacred. It was an insurrection.

Of course, the citizenry was in no condition to take on the army of occupation. With a few crossbows, swords, lances and clubs they managed to prevent the Castilian troops from getting into al-Baisin, and tried to organize themselves into a small army to wage the holy war. But after two days of fighting they were wiped out, and then the massacre began. The authorities proclaimed that the entire Muslim population would be executed for rebellion against the sovereigns, adding insidiously that only those who would accept conversion to Christianity would be spared. Thus the population of Granada became baptized by whole streets. In some villages in the Alpujarra mountains the peasants struck back; they managed to hold out for several weeks and even, it was said, killed the seigneur of Granada who led the expedition against them. But even there it was impossible to resist for long. The villagers were forced to seek terms; several hundred families were allowed to leave, and set themselves up in Fez; some took refuge in the mountains, swearing that no one would ever find them; all the others were baptized. The words ‘Allahu akbar’ could no more be pronounced upon the soil of Andalus, where for eight centuries the voice of the muezzin had called the faithful to prayer. A man could not now say the Fatiha over his father’s corpse. At least, that is, in public, for the Muslims who had been forcibly converted refused to repudiate their religion.

They sent heart-rending despatches to Fez. Brothers, ran one of their letters, if, at the time of the fall of Granada, we failed in our duty to leave, this was simply because of our lack of resources, because we are the poorest and weakest in the land of Andalus. Today, we have been obliged to accept baptism in order to save the lives of our women and children, but we are afraid of incurring the wrath of the Most High on the Day of Judgement, and of suffering the tortures of Gehenna. Thus we beseech you, our exiled brothers, to assist us with your counsel. Enquire on our behalf of the doctors of the Law what we should do, our anguish has no end.

Deeply moved, the Granadan exiles in Fez held a number of meetings that year, some of them in Khali’s house. These were attended by both notables and common people, but particularly by ‘ulama’ learned in the Law. Some came from far away to deliver the fruits of their research and their consideration.

I remember having seen the mufti of Oran arrive one day, a man of about forty, with a turban only a little less impressive than that of Astaghfirullah, but worn with a good-natured air. More deferential than usual, my uncle came out to the end of the street to welcome him, and in the course of the meeting those present simply put questions to him without daring to argue with him or to challenge his answers. Of course the problem as it presented itself required great mastery both of the Law and of the Traditions of the Prophet, as well as great daring in interpretation; it was impossible to accept that hundreds of thousands of Muslims should forsake the faith of the Prophet, yet it was monstrous to expect an entire people to go to the stake.

I still remember the first words of the man from Oran, delivered in a warm and serene voice:

‘Brothers, we are here, may God be praised, in the land of Islam, and we bear our faith with pride, like a diadem. Let us be wary of condemning those who have to bear their religion like a burning ember in their hands.’

He continued:

‘When you send messages to them, may your words be prudent and measured; remember your letter may light their pyre. Do not seek to blame them for their baptism; ask them simply to remain, in spite of everything, faithful to Islam, and to teach its principles to their sons. But not before puberty, not before they are old enough to keep a secret, for a child may, with an incautious word, reap their destruction.’

And what if these unhappy ones should be forced to drink wine? And what if they are invited to eat the flesh of swine, to prove they are no longer Muslims?

‘Then they must do it, if they are forced to do so,’ said the mufti, ‘but they must protest in their hearts.’

And what if they are made to insult the Prophet, may God surround him with His prayers and His salvation?

‘Then they must do it, if they are forced to do so,’ repeated the mufti, ‘but they must say the opposite in their hearts.’

To those who, through having not left their land, had to endure the cruellest tortures, the mufti gave the name of Ghuraba, Strangers, recalling the words of the Messenger of God: ‘Islam began as a religion for outsiders and it will become once again a religion for outsiders just as it began. Blessed are the outsiders.’

To launch an appeal to Muslims of the world to save these unfortunates, the Granadan community of Fez decided to send emissaries to the great sovereigns of Islam, the Grand Turk, the new Sophy of Persia, the Sultan of Egypt and several others of lesser importance. Because of the functions which he used to exercise at the court of Alhambra, Khali was chosen to compose these letters, using the customary formulae; he was also charged with carrying the most important of these messages, the one addressed to the lord of Constantinople the Great. After he had been sounded out about this mission, my uncle paid visits to the Sultan of Fez and to Boabdil, and obtained letters of recommendation and credit from them both.

Each time that I recall that journey, I feel the pain of anguish, even today, although I have since then come to know the strangest lands and the most inaccessible places. I had always dreamed of Constantinople, and on hearing that Khali was to go there, I could scarcely contain myself. I turned it round and round in my head, asking whether I could possibly hope, at the age of ten, to take part in such a journey. Rather diffidently, I confided in my uncle. Great was my surprise when he replied, his arms open wide in welcome:

‘Where could I find a better travelling companion?’

In spite of his ironical tone, he was clearly captivated by the idea. It only remained to convince my father.

That year again, Muhammad was often away from the city, still looking for a plot of land to rent where he could live peacefully away from noise, gossip and reproachful eyes. For two long weeks I waited for him every day, asking Warda and Mariam incessantly for news of him, although they knew nothing. Like me, they were waiting.

When he finally returned, I threw myself upon him and began to talk so fast that he had to make me start again several times. Alas, he refused immediately in a manner which brooked no further questioning. I should perhaps have waited for Khali to broach the subject of the journey in his own way, as he would have known how to extol the advantages of such a journey with eloquence. Perhaps Muhammad would have agreed so as not to annoy my uncle, with whom he had just become reconciled. But to me he could say ‘No’ straight out. As a pretext he pointed out the dangers of the journey, told me of people who had never returned, mentioned my studies, which I would have had to interrupt if I went away. However, I think the real reason was that he felt that I was too close to my uncle, and to my mother’s family in general, and that he feared that he would lose me. Unable to argue with him, I begged him to talk it over with Khali, but he refused even to meet him.

For a whole week, I woke up each morning with my eyes bloodshot and my pillow damp. In an effort to console me my uncle swore that I would accompany him on his next journey; he would keep his word.

The day of his departure came. Khali was going to join a caravan of merchants which was leaving for Oran, where he would take ship. From first light the Granadans came in great number to wish him luck on his mission and to contribute several gold pieces for his expenses. For my part I was moping in my corner until an old man with impish eyes came and sat down next to me. It was none other than Hamza, the barber who had circumcised me. He asked for news of my father, and lamented the death of the deliverer whom he had seen for the last time in our house in al-Baisin. Then he asked after my studies, about the sura which I was studying at the time, and even began to recite it. It was pleasant to be in his company, and I chatted to him for an hour. He told me that he had lost the bulk of his fortune by going into exile, but that by the grace of God he was still able to look after the needs of his womenfolk. He had begun to work again, but only as a barber, because his razor was no longer sure enough for circumcisions. He had just rented a part of the local hammam in order to ply his trade.

Suddenly, an idea lit up his eyes.

‘Wouldn’t you like to give me a hand when you aren’t at school?’

I accepted without demur.

‘I’ll pay you one dirham a week.’

I hastened to say that I had a friend and that I would very much like him to come with me. Hamza had nothing against it. He would receive the same pay, there were lots of things to do in the hammam.

When, some minutes later, Khali came to give me the traveller’s kiss, he was surprised to see my eyes dry and smiling. I told him that I was going to work, that I would earn one dirham a week. He wished me success in my labours; I wished him success in his.

The Year of the Hammam

905 A.H.

8 August 1499 — 27 July 1500

‘When I think that all these people are washing themselves with manure!’

It took me a few moments to grasp what Harun had just said. Then we both broke into loud peals of laughter. My friend was quite right, because it was indeed manure that was used to heat the water in the hammams of Fez.

That day we were paid to know it, as the owner of the bath had sent us, equipped with a pair of mules and several dirhams, to go the rounds of the stables of the quarter and buy up the accumulated manure. Then we took it outside the city, to a place to which he had directed us. A man was waiting there to receive the load; his task was to spread out the precious harvest to dry it, a process which took a month in summer and three months in winter. On the way back we brought a pile of manure with us, as hard as wood and ready to burn; it was with this that the boiler of the hammam was fed. Of course, once we had delivered the final load, Harun and I had about us the colouring and the smell of the stuff we had been carrying.

So we hurried to scramble out of our clothes and run into the warm water chamber. Our trip had been fun. Whenever we recognized a friend in the steam room we would delight in asking him whether the water did not seem different that day.

For all the people of the city, the hammam was the most pleasant of meeting places. They left their clothes in cabins near the entrance door, then met together naked, without the slightest shame. Young schoolboys would chatter about their teachers, and tell each other about their pranks, passing over their beatings in silence. Adolescents would talk about women, each accusing the other of pining for one woman or another, each boasting of his amorous exploits. Adults would be more circumspect on that subject, but would exchange advice and recipes to improve their bodily vigour, an inexhaustible topic and a gold mine for charlatans. The rest of the time they would talk dinars, discuss religion and politics, out loud or in low tones according to the opinions they held.

The men of the quarter would often meet at the hammam for lunch. Some would bring their meal with them, while others would send the steam-room boy to buy something at the neighbouring market. But they would not begin their collation directly; they would go to the tepid room, where boys would wash them and rub them with oil and unguents. They would rest a while, lying on felt carpets, their heads on a sort of wooden bolster, also covered with felt, before going into the hot room, where they would sweat. Then they would go back into the warm room to wash themselves again and to rest. It was only then that they would go into the cool room and sit around the fountain, to eat, gossip and laugh, and even sing.

Most of them would remain naked until the end of the meal, except for important persons who would not deign to show themselves thus, keeping a towel round their waist and only removing it in private reserved rooms, which were always impeccably maintained. In these rooms they received their friends, or were massaged, and the barber would also come there to offer them his services.

And then there were the women. A certain number of hammams were kept entirely for women, but most of them catered for both sexes. The same places, but at different times. In the place where I used to work, the men would come from three in the morning until two in the afternoon. For the rest of the day, the steam-room boys were replaced by negresses, who put a rope across the entrance to show the men that they could not come in, and if a man needed to say something to his wife he would call one of the women attendants to deliver the message.

Each time we had to leave, each time that we used to see the rope across the entrance and the women arriving, Harun and I would ask each other what could possibly happen in the hammam when it became the women’s domain. The first few times we tried to convince ourselves that exactly the same things happened as we knew from the men’s sessions, the same massages, the same rubbings, the same chatter, the same feasting, the same towels to cover the notables. However, watching the entrance in the afternoons it was clear that not only did a great number of market women arrive with their shopping bags, but all sorts of mysterious women, fortune-tellers, healers, perhaps even magicians. Was it true that they were distilling magic elixirs, putting spells on men, piercing wax figurines with magic pins? It would be an understatement to say that we were intrigued; it became an almost unbearable obsession.

And a challenge.

‘I’m going tomorrow, whatever happens. D’you want to come?’ said Harun one day.

I looked at his eyes. He wasn’t joking.

‘D’you want to come?’

It took all my courage to say no.

‘Better still,’ said Harun. ‘I’ll go on my own. But be here at midday, at this very place.’

The next day it was dark and rainy. I took up my post at the place we had agreed, from which I could see the entrance to the hammam without being seen. I had not seen Harun all day, and I wondered whether he was already there, or whether he would be able to get inside. I was waiting for him to be thrown out, I was also afraid that he would leave pursued by twenty women at his heels, and that I should be forced to flee through the streets in my turn. The one thing that I was sure of was that the Ferret had not given up his mad plan. From time to time I looked up at the sun, or rather at its outline visible through the clouds. I was becoming impatient.

There was no unusual movement at the entrance to the hammam. Some women were going in, others coming out, some enveloped in black or white, others with only their hair and the lower part of their faces covered. Little girls accompanied them, sometimes even very small boys. At one point a fat woman came towards me. When she drew level with me she stopped for a moment, inspected me from head to foot, and then set off again murmuring incomprehensibly to herself. My furtive air must have made me seem suspicious. Several minutes later, another woman, entirely covered from head to foot but much more slender, came towards the place where I was waiting. I was most uneasy. In turn, she stopped and turned towards me. I was going to take to my heels.

‘You’re here, in perfect safety, and you’re trembling?’

It was Harun’s voice. He barely left me the time to express my surprise.

‘Don’t make any sign, don’t make any noise! Count to a hundred and then meet me at the house.’

He was waiting for me at the door.

‘Tell me!’ I exploded.

He took his time before replying, in the most careless tone:

‘I arrived, I went in, I pretended to look for someone, I went round all the rooms and then I came out again.’

‘Did you undress?’

‘No.’

‘Did you see anything?’

‘Yes, lots.’

‘Tell me, may God shatter you into pieces!’

He said nothing. His mouth did not express the slightest smile, the slightest grin. But his eyes sparkled with satisfaction and malice. I was crestfallen. I wanted to beat him black and blue.

‘Do you want me to beg you, to press my forehead against your slippers?’

The Ferret was not in the slightest impressed by my sarcasm.

‘Even if you beg me, even if you prostrate yourself at my feet I shall tell you nothing. I have taken risks which you refused to take. If you want to know what goes on when the women are there you must come with me next time.’

I was aghast.

‘So you’re thinking of going again?’

This seemed so obvious to him that he did not even deign to reply.

The next day I was in position, and I saw him go in. He had improved his get-up considerably. He was not satisfied with wrapping himself in a thick black robe, but he had a white scarf around his neck which covered his hair, a part of his forehead and his cheeks, with its ends tied together under his chin. Above this was a transparent white veil. The disguise was so perfect that I would have been taken in a second time.

When I met up with him again he seemed bothered. I asked him to tell me about his escapade, but he refused to do so, in spite of my insistence and my pleas. He remained obdurately silent, and I soon forgot the whole thing. However, it was Harun himself who would remind me of it, many years later and in a way which would remain for ever in my memory.

Towards the end of that year my uncle came back from his travels. When they learned of his return the Andalusians of Fez came in groups, one after the other, to hear what he had to say and to inform themselves of the results of his mission. He told them in detail of his sea voyage, his fear of shipwreck and pirates, the sight of Constantinople, the palace of the Grand Turk, the janissaries, his travels in the lands of the Orient, in Syria, Iraq, Persia, Armenia and Tartary.

However, he soon came to the most important part.

‘Everywhere my hosts declared themselves convinced that one day soon the Castilians will be beaten, by the leave of the Most High, that Andalus will become Muslim once more, and that each one of us will be able to return to his home.’

He did not know when, or under what circumstances, he admitted, but he could testify to the invincible power of the Turks, of the terror which the sight of their vast armies would strike in the heart of every man. He was convinced of their profound concern for the fate of Granada, and their desire to deliver it from the unbelievers.

Of all those present, I was not the least enthusiastic. When we were alone together that evening, I insisted on asking my uncle:

‘When do you think we shall return?’

He seemed not to understand what I wanted to say.

I told myself that he must be weary after his journey.

‘To Granada, isn’t that what you were talking about?’

He looked at me for a long time, as if sizing me up, before saying, in a slow and emphatic voice:

‘Hasan, my son, you are now in your twelfth year and I must speak to you as if I were speaking to a man (he hesitated a moment further). Hear me well. What I have seen in the Orient is that the Grand Sophy of Persia is preparing to wage war against the Turks, who are themselves primarily preoccupied with their own conflict with Venice. As for Egypt, she has just received a consignment of corn from the Castilians as a token of friendship and alliance. That is the reality. Perhaps, in several years’ time, things will have changed, but, today, none of the Muslim sovereigns whom I have met seemed to me to be concerned with the fate of the Granadans, whether of ourselves, the exiles, or the poor Strangers.’

In my eyes there was less disappointment than surprise.

‘You will ask me,’ Khali continued, ‘why I should have told those people who were here the opposite of the truth. You see, Hasan, all those men still have, hung up on their walls, the key to their houses in Granada. Every day they look at it, and looking at it they sigh and pray. Every day their joys, their habits and a certain pride come back to their memory, and these things they will never rediscover in exile. The only reason for their existence is the thought that soon, thanks to the Great Sultan or to Providence, they will find their house once again, with the colour of its stones, the smell of its garden, the water of its fountain, all intact, unaltered, just as it has been in their dreams. They live like this, they will die like this, and their sons will do so after them. Perhaps one day it may be necessary for someone to dare to teach them to look unflinchingly at their defeat, to explain to them that in order to get on one’s feet again one must first admit that one is down on the ground. Perhaps someone will have to tell them the truth one day. But I myself do not have the courage to do so.’

The Year of the Raging Lions

906 A.H.

28 July 1500 — 16 July 1501

My sister Mariam had grown up without my being aware of it. Two long separations had turned her into a stranger. We no longer shared the same roof, or the same games. When I crossed her path our words had lost their old complicity, and our glances no longer said anything to each other. It was only when she called out to me from the back of a mule that year that I came to see her again, gaze at her and remember the little girl whom I used to love and fight until she wept.

It happened in early summer in an olive grove on the road to Meknes. My father had decided that I should accompany him, together with Warda and Mariam, on a tour of the countryside behind Fez. He was still looking for suitable land to rent. His plan was that with the assistance of some Andalusian agriculturalists whom he knew he would introduce various crops which were little known and poorly cultivated on African soil, notably the white mulberry, the food of the silkworm.

In the most minute detail, he told me about a huge enterprise in which one of the richest men in Fez would take part. Listening to him I had the impression that he had somehow emerged from the despondency and world-weariness which had afflicted him after he left Granada behind, a terrible wrench which had been made worse by the loss of one of his wives after the other. Now he was scheming, challenging, his fists ready to fight, his eyes once more alight with purpose.

For the journey, he and I were on horseback and the women on mules, which meant that we had to go at their pace. At one point, Warda came alongside Muhammad. I dropped back level with Mariam. She slowed down imperceptibly. Our parents drew further away.

‘Hasan!’

I had not addressed a word to her since we left Fez four hours earlier. I gave her a glance which meant at most ‘Is your animal being a nuisance?’ But she had taken off her light sand-coloured veil, and a sad smile covered her pale face.

‘Your uncle cherishes you as if you were his own son, doesn’t he?’

The question seemed pointless and out of place. I agreed brusquely, not wanting to discuss my relations with my mother’s family with Warda’s daughter. But that was not her purpose.

‘When I have children, will you love them as he loves you?’

‘Of course,’ I said.

But my ‘Of course’ was too quick, too gruff. And embarrassed.

I was afraid of what might follow. It took a long time. I glanced towards Mariam; her silence irritated me only a little less than her questions. She no longer looked at me, but she had not put on her veil again, in spite of the dust of the road. I turned towards her and looked at her properly, for the first time for a long time. She was no less appealing than on the day when I saw her coming towards me in her mother’s arms in the galley which brought us into exile. Her skin was no less pink, her lips no less shining. Only the kohl on her eyelids gave her the air of a woman. And her silhouette. As I looked at her, she sat up, and I could make out the line of her bosom. Her heart was beating, or was it mine? I lowered my eyes. In a single year, she had ripened, she had become beautiful and arousing.

‘When I have children, will you love them?’

I should have been annoyed, but I smiled, because I suddenly remembered her habit, since she was a year old, of asking for the same toy three, four, ten times, in the same tone without giving up.

‘Of course I shall love them.’

‘Will you also talk to their mother like your uncle talks to Salma?’

‘Yes, certainly.’

‘Will you visit her often? Will you ask her if all is well with her? Will you listen to her sorrows?’

‘Yes, Mariam, yes!’

She pulled sharply on her bridle; her mule reared up. I stopped; she looked straight at me:

‘But why do you never speak to me? Why do you never come and ask me if I weep at night? I must fear all other men: my father today, my husband tomorrow, all those who are not related to me and from whom I should hide myself.’

She gave the mule its head, and it set off at a trot. I hurried to stay at her side. I still did not speak to her, but oddly enough, I was frightened for her, and a sudden affection for her radiated from my eyes. It seemed as if some danger awaited her.

Halfway between Fez and Meknes we stopped for the night in a village called ‘Ar, Shame. The imam of the mosque offered to accommodate us in returh for a donation for the orphans whom he looked after. He was without great learning, but with a very pleasant manner, and lost no time in telling us why this village should have such a name.

The inhabitants, he informed us, had always been known for their greed, and used to suffer from this reputation. The merchant caravans avoided it and would not stop there. One day, having learned that the King of Fez was hunting lions in the neighbourhood, they decided to invite him and his court, and killed a number of sheep in his honour. The sovereign had dinner and went to bed. Wishing to show their generosity, they placed a huge goatskin bottle before his door and agreed to fill it up with milk for the royal breakfast. The villagers all had to milk their goats and then each of them had to go to tip his bucket into the container. Given its great size, each of them said to himself that he might just as well dilute his milk with a good quantity of water without anyone noticing. To the extent that in the morning such a thin liquid was poured out for the king and his court that it had no other taste than the taste of meanness and greed.

However, what I remember of my stay in that village had nothing to do with the incurable fault of its inhabitants but far more with the indescribably frightening experience which I had there.

The imam had received us well, and suggested that we should sleep in a wooden hut near the mosque, which had a pen next to it for our animals. Warda and Mariam slept inside, while my father and I preferred to sleep on the roof, where we could take advantage of the cool air of the summer night. So we were there on the roof when, around midnight, two huge lions, evidently attracted by the smell of the horses and the mules, came up to our door and tried to tear down the rough fence of thorns which protected our beasts. The horses began to neigh as if possessed, and threw themselves against the walls of the hut, which threatened to collapse with each charge. This continued for two hours or more, until one of the lions, no doubt enraged by the thousands of needles which pricked him every time he tried to get over the fence, turned towards the door and began to scratch it and slash at it with his claws. My father and I watched all this, powerless to intervene, knowing full well that the animals might break their way through to the women and eat them up without us being able to do anything other than watch from the roof, apart from wanting to throw ourselves at their jaws as a matter of honour. From below we could hear Mariam’s screams and Warda’s prayers, calling upon the Madonna in Castilian.

In a trembling voice, Muhammad made a vow: if we survived, he would break his journey to make a pilgrimage to the village of Taghya, and place an offering upon the tomb of wali Bu ‘Izza, a saint famous for his many miracles involving lions.

I do not know whether it was the intercession of the saint or that of the mother of the Messiah which was the more effective, but in any case the lions eventually seemed to become weary and lose interest, and in the first glimmers of dawn they went away, although their roars, which were only a little less frightening, still reached us from the nearby mountain. It was only when the village came to life in the early hours of the morning that we had the courage to leave our shelter. However, before continuing our journey, we had to wait for a long caravan to come past. Determined to fulfil his vow immediately, Muhammad wanted to find a group of pilgrims at Meknes who were leaving for Taghya.

Arriving there a week later, and seeing the vast crowd of people who, like ourselves, were visiting the wali’s tomb, I understood the perpetual dread which lions strike in the hearts of the inhabitants of Africa. I was to experience this even more profoundly during my travels. How many times, on arriving at a village, have I seen the inhabitants gathered together, in deep distress, because a family has just been devoured by these savage beasts! How many times, when wishing to go in a particular direction, have the guides directed me another way, simply because a pride of lions had just decimated a whole caravan! It has even happened that one of these beasts alone attacked a detachment of two hundred armed horsemen, and managed to kill five or six of them before beating a retreat.

Certainly, the lion is the bravest of all animals, and I say this unreservedly, because I bore the name of this beast for the eight years of my stay in Italy. However, I must make it clear that those who live in the cold lands are far less fierce than those who live in the hotter ones. In order to silence a braggart in Fez, one says to him ‘You are as brave as the lions of Agla; even the calves can nibble at their tails.’ It is true that in the place of this name a child only has to run shouting behind a lion for the latter to run away. In another village in the mountains, called Red Stone, the lions wander between the houses to eat the bones which are left out for them, and everyone mixes with them without fear. I have also heard that when a woman finds herself alone witji a lion in an isolated place she has only to uncover a certain part of her body in front of him for the animal to roar loudly, lower his eyes and slink away. May everyone be free to believe what he will!

On the way back from this makeshift pilgrimage, I remembered the vague feeling of apprehension that I had experienced for Mariam. A premonition of the lions’ attack on our hut? For the time being, I thought so. At the age of twelve I still believed that as between beasts and men the former could do the most damage.

The Year of the Great Recitation

907 A.H.

17 July 1501 — 6 July 1502

Mariam’s fiancé was four times her age and twice her height, had an ill-gotten fortune and the smile of those who have learned at an early age that life is a perpétuai swindle. At Fez he was called the Zarwali, and many envied him, since this former shepherd had built the largest palace in the city, the largest, that is, after that of the ruler, a piece of elementary common sense for anyone who wanted to make sure that his head remained attached to his body.

No one knew how the Zarwali’s fortune had grown so vast. For the first forty years of his life, it was said, he and his goats had roamed over the mountain of Bani Zarwal in the Rif, thirty miles from the sea. Many years later I happened to pay a visit to the area, where I observed a strange phenomenon. At the bottom of the valley there was an opening in the earth, rather like a cave, from which a huge flame issued continuously. All round it was a brownish coloured pool full of a thick liquid with a pervasive smell. Many travellers came to marvel at this wonder, and threw in branches or pieces of wood, which were burnt up on the spot. Some believe that it is the mouth of Hell.

Not far from this intimidating place, it was said, were the secret wells where the Romans had buried their treasure before leaving Africa. Had the shepherd accidentally stumbled on one of these hiding places while pasturing his flocks? That was what I had heard at Fez long before the Zarwali burst upon my life. Whatever the truth was, having discovered his treasure, instead of squandering it at once as happens to so many who become rich unexpectedly, he slowly worked out a long-term strategy. Having sold off part of the treasure bit by bit, he appeared one day, richly accoutred, at the public audience of the Sultan of Fez.

‘How many gold dinars do you obtain from the Bani Zarwal each year?’ he asked the monarch.

‘Three thousand,’ replied the sovereign.

‘I will give you six thousand in advance if you will farm the taxes to me.’

And our Zarwali got what he wanted, including a body of soldiers to help him collect the taxes, extracting all the savings of the local population by threats or torture. At the end of the year he went back to the monarch:

‘I was mistaken. I managed to get twelve thousand, not six thousand.’

Deeply impressed, the master of Fez farmed the whole of the Rif to the Zarwali, and assigned him a hundred bowmen, three hundred cavalrymen and four hundred foot soldiers to assist him to fleece the population.

For five years the amount of tax extracted was higher than it had ever been, but the people of the Rif gradually became impoverished. Many fled to other provinces of the kingdom; some of the coastal cities even considered handing themselves over to the Castilians. Sensing that things might begin to change for the worse, the Zarwali resigned his office, left the Rif and set himself up at Fez with the money he had extorted. Having retained the trust of the monarch he set about building a palace and began to devote himself to all manner of business. Greedy, pitiless but exceedingly clever, he was always on the lookout for new schemes.

My father had got to know him through a rich Andalusian émigré, and had told him about his plan to raise silkworms. Showing great interest, the Zarwali had plied him with questions about the caterpillars, the cocoons, the slime and the spinning, and asked one of his advisers to make a note of all the details. He declared that he was delighted to work with a man as capable as Muhammad.

‘Well,’ he said with a laugh, ‘it’s a partnership of money and brains.’

When my father replied that all Fez knew how astute and intelligent the Zarwali was, the latter replied:

‘Don’t you know, you who have read so many books, what the mother of one of the sultans of long ago said when her son was born? “I do not want you to be endowed with intelligence, because you will have to put your intelligence at the service of the powerful. I want you to have good fortune, so that intelligent people may serve you.” That’s probably the same thing as my mother wanted for me when I was born,’ laughed the Zarwali, showing all his teeth.

My father was encouraged by the meeting, although the Zarwali asked for some time to think it over. He wanted to inform the monarch about the project, obtain his consent, and consult various weavers and exporters. However, as an earnest of his genuine interest in the matter, he advanced Muhammad four hundred pieces of gold and also held out to him the dazzling prospect of a marriage alliance between the two families.

After several months, I think in Sha‘ban of that year, the Zarwali summoned my father. He told him that his project was accepted and that he should begin the preparations, choosing various fields of white mulberries, planting others, recruiting skilled workers and building the first cocooneries. The king himself was full of enthusiasm for the project. He wanted to flood Europe and the Muslim lands with silks, to discourage the merchants from going as far as China to import the precious material.

My father was ecstatic with joy. His dream would come to fruition, on a scale which went far beyond his wildest hopes. He already saw himself rich, lying on immense silken cushions in a palace covered with majolica; he would be the first among the notables of Fez, the pride of the Granadans, a confidant of the sultan, a benefactor of schools and mosques…

‘To seal our agreement,’ pursued the Zarwali, ‘what better than a blood alliance? Don’t you have a daughter to marry?’

Muhammad immediately promised his backer Mariam’s hand in marriage.

It was quite by chance that, several days later, I came to hear about this conversation, which was to change many things in my life. Gaudy Sarah had been to the harem of the Zarwali to sell her perfumes and trinkets, just as she had done in the houses and palaces of Granada. All through her visit, the women had spoken of nothing else than of their master’s new marriage, making jokes about his inexhaustible vigour, and discussing the consequences of this latest acquisition for the favourites of the moment. The man already had four wives, the most that the Law would allow him to take at the same time; he must therefore repudiate one of them, but he was used to doing so, and his wives were used to it as well. The divorcee would get a house nearby, sometimes even staying within the walls, and it was whispered that some of them even became pregnant after the separation without the Zarwali showing the least surprise or taking offence.

Naturally, Sarah hastened to my mother’s house the same afternoon to tell her the gossip. I had just come back from school, and was munching some dates, listening to the women’s chatter with only half an ear. Suddenly I heard a name. I came closer:

‘They’ve even had time to give Mariam a nickname: the silkworm.’

I made Gaudy Sarah repeat her story word for word, and then asked her anxiously:

‘Do you think my sister will be happy with this man?’

‘Happy? Women only seek to avoid the worst.’

The reply seemed too vague and evasive.

‘Tell me about this Zarwali!’

It was the command of a man. She gave a rather sardonic grin, but replied:

‘He hasn’t a good reputation. Crafty, unscrupulous. Immensely rich…’

‘It’s said that he plundered the Rif.’

‘Princes have always plundered provinces, but that has never been a reason for anyone to refuse them the hand of his daughter or his sister.’

‘And how does he treat women?’

She looked me up and down from head to toe, looking intently at the light down on my face.

‘What do you know about women?’

‘I know what I ought to know.’

She began to laugh, but my determined look interrupted her. She turned towards my mother, as if to ask her whether it was all right to continue a conversation about such matters with me. When my mother nodded, Sarah took a deep breath and laid her hand heavily on my shoulder.

‘The Zarwali’s women live shut up in their harem; young or old, free or slaves, white or black; there are no less than a hundred of them, each intriguing ceaselessly to spend a night with the master, or gain some privilege for their sons, a carpet for their bedroom, a jewel, perfume, an elixir. Those who expect the affection of a husband will never have it, those who look for affairs end up strangled, but those who simply want to live in peace, protected from all want, without having to make any effort, without cooking or chores, without a husband asking them for a water-cooler or a hot water bottle, such women might be happy. What category does your sister belong to?’

I was fuming with rage:

‘Don’t you think it’s scandalous that a little girl of thirteen should be given away to an old merchant as a goodwill gesture to seal a business arrangement?’

‘At my age, only naïveté still manages to scandalize me sometimes.’

I turned towards my mother aggressively:

‘Do you also think that this man has the right to filch the money of the Muslims, to take a hundred women instead of four, to hold the Law of God in such contempt?’

She took refuge behind one of the verses of the Qur’an:

‘Man is rebellious as soon as he sees himself well off.’

Without even saying goodbye to either of them, I got up and went out. Straight to Harun’s house. I needed someone around me to show indignation, someone who would tell me that the world had not been created so that women and the joys of life should be handed over to the Zarwali and people like him. The frown which came over my friend’s face at the mere mention of the name reconciled me with life again. What he had heard about Mariam’s fiancé differed little from that which I had heard myself. The Ferret gave a solemn undertaking to make enquiries among the porters of the guild to find out more about him.

To be friends at thirteen, with just the suggestion of a beard, and to declare war against injustice; from the distance of twenty years it looks like the picture of bliss. But at the time, what frustration, what suffering! It was true that I had two sound reasons for throwing myself into the fray. The first was the subtle appeal for help which Mariam had made to me on the way to Meknes, whose suppressed anguish I could now fully measure. The second was the Great Recitation, an occasion to inspire my adolescence with the pride of knowing the precepts of the Faith and the determination that they should not be ridiculed.

To understand the significance of the Great Recitation in the life of a believer, one must have lived at Fez, a city of learning which seems to have been constructed around the schools, the madrasas, just as some villages are built around a fountain or a saint’s tomb. When, after several years of patient memorization, one reaches the point of knowing by heart each sura and each verse of the Qur’an, when one is pronounced ready for the Great Recitation by the schoolmaster, one immediately passes from childhood to man’s estate, from anonymity to fame. It is the time when some start work, and others are admitted to the college, the fount of knowledge and authority.

The ceremony organized on this occasion gave the young Fassi the sense of having entered the world of the might. That was in any case what I felt on that day. Dressed in silk like the son of an amir, mounted on the back of a thoroughbred, followed by a slave carrying a large umbrella, I passed through the streets surrounded by the pupils in my class singing in unison. At the side of the road, several passers-by waved at me, and I waved at them in turn. From time to time a familiar face: Khali, my mother, two girl cousins, some neighbours, Hamza the barber and the boys from the hammam, and, a little to one side under a porch, Warda and Mariam.

My father was waiting for me in the reception room, where a banquet was to be held in my honour. He was carrying under his arm the new robe which I was to present to the schoolmaster as a token of gratitude. He gazed at me with disarming emotion.

I looked back at him. All at once, so many images of him clustered in my head: moving, when he told me the story of Granada; affectionate, when he caressed my neck; terrifying, when he repudiated my mother; hateful, when he sacrificed my sister; pitiable, slumped at the table in a tavern. How many truths did I want to shout down at him from the back of my horse! But I knew that my tongue would be tied once more when my feet touched the ground, when I would have to return the horse and silks to the person who lent them, when I would cease to be the short-lived hero of the Great Recitation.

The Year of the Stratagem

908 A.H.

7 July 1502 — 25 June 1503

‘The Zarwali was never the poor shepherd that he claims. And he never discovered any treasure. The truth is that for many years he was a bandit, a highway robber and a murderer, and the fortune he started off with was simply the result of a quarter of a century of plunder. But there is worse to come.’

Harun had ferreted wonderfully week after week, but, in spite of my frequent entreaties he had refused to give me the slightest inkling until he had completed his investigation.

That day he had come to wait for me in front of the Qarawiyyin Mosque. I had a lecture from three until five in the morning given by a learned Syrian who was visiting Fez. Harun had given up his studies and was already wearing the short grubby habit of the porters; he was just about to begin his day’s work.

‘The worst thing,’ pursued the Ferret, ‘is that this character is insanely jealous, always convinced that his wives are trying to betray him, particularly the youngest and most beautiful ones. A denunciation, a slander, an insinuation on the part of one of her rivals is enough for the poor unfortunate to be strangled. The Zarwali’s eunuchs then make the crime look like an accident, a drowning, a fatal fall, an acute tonsilitis. At least three women have died in circumstances which are suspicious to say the least.’

We paced up and down under the arcades of the mosque, which were bright with the light from countless oil lamps. Harun remained silent, awaiting my reaction. I was too overcome to make the slightest sound. Admittedly, I knew that the man whom my sister was going to marry was capable of many misdeeds, and it was for that reason that I sought to prevent the marriage. But it was now no longer a question of sparing an adolescent girl from a dull and dreary existence; it had become a matter of saving her from the grip of an assassin, a bloodthirsty monster. The Ferret was no less worried than I, but he was not the kind to waste time in lamentation.

‘When is the ceremony to take place?’

‘In two months at the most. The contract is signed, the preparations are already under way, my father is collecting the dowry, he has ordered the sheets for the bed and the ceremonial mattresses, and Mariam’s dress is already made.’

‘You must talk to your father, to him alone, for if anyone else becomes involved he will become obstinate and nothing will prevent this evil coming to pass.’

I followed his advice, except in one small detail: I asked my mother for confirmation from Sarah that Harun’s information was correct. Gaudy Sarah indeed confirmed it in its entirety a week later, after having made me swear on the Qur’an that I would never mention her name in any connection with the matter. I needed this additional evidence to be able to confront my father without the least shred of doubt lurking in my mind.

In spite of this I spent the whole night turning in my head how I could best first bring up the subject, then withstand the attacks which it would provoke, and finally, if the Most High showed Himself understanding towards me, somehow carry the day. A thousand arguments and counter-arguments went backwards and forwards in my head, from the cleverest to the tritest, but none remained convincing until morning, so that I had to face my father the next day without the slightest idea, without even the beginnings of a case.

‘I want to say something to you which may displease you.’

He was in the middle of eating, as was his custom every morning, his bowl of wheat gruel, sitting on a leather cushion in a corner of the yard.

‘Have you done something stupid?’

‘It has nothing to do with me.’

I took my courage in both hands:

‘Ever since people have become aware that my sister is going to marry the Zarwali, I have been told the most disturbing things about him.’

The bowl at his lips, he inhaled loudly.

‘By whom? There’s no lack of jealousy in this town!’

I turned a deaf ear.

‘It’s said that several of his wives have been strangled!’

‘If anyone says anything like that to you again, you can teli him that if those women were punished, they deserved it, and that in our family the girls have always been beyond reproach.’

‘Are you sure that Mariam will be happy with —’

‘Mind your own business.’

He wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve and got up to go. I clung to him miserably:

‘Don’t go like that! Let me speak to you!’

‘I have promised your sister to this man, and I am a man of my word. Furthermore, we have signed the contract, and the marriage will take place in a few weeks’ time. Instead of staying here listening to these lies, make yourself useful! Go to the mattress-makers and see if they are getting on with the job.’

‘I refuse to have any part in anything to do with this marr —’

A slap. So violent that my head went round and round for several long seconds. Behind me I heard the muffled cries of Warda and Mariam who had heard the entire conversation, hidden behind a door. My father held my jaw in his hand, gripping it tightly and shaking it feverishly.

‘Never say “I refuse” to me again! Never speak to me again in this tone!’

I do not know what came over me that moment. I was as if another person was speaking through my mouth:

‘I would never have spoken to you like that if I had not seen you seated in a tavern!’

Seconds later I regretted what I had said. To the end of my days I shall regret having pronounced those words. I would rather he had slapped me again, that he had beaten me all over, than see him collapsing on his cushion with a dazed air, his head in his hands. What good would it have done to try to apologize? I went out of his house, chasing myself away; I walked straight on for hours, not greeting anyone, not seeing anyone, my head empty and aching. That night I slept neither at my father’s nor at my uncle’s. I arrived at Harun’s house in the evening, lay down on a mat, and did not get up again.

Until morning. It was Friday. Opening my eyes, I saw my friend staring at me. I had the impression he had been in the same place for hours.

‘A little longer and you would have missed the midday prayer.’

He was scarcely exaggerating as the sun was high in the sky.

‘When you arrived last night you looked as if you had just killed your father, as we say.’

I could manage only a twisted grimace. I told him what had happened.

‘You were wrong to say that to him. But he is at fault as well, and more so than you, because he is handing over his daughter to a murderer. Are you going to let him commit a crime against your sister to make up for your own offence?’

That was precisely what I was about to do. But put like that it seemed despicable.

‘I could go to Khali, he will find ways of convincing my father.’

‘Open your eyes, it’s not your father who has to be convinced.’

‘But Mariam can’t refuse to marry him! If she dared to make the slightest sound he would break her bones!’

‘There’s the fiancé.’

I didn’t understand. I mustn’t have woken up properly.

‘The Zarwali?’

‘Himself, and don’t look at me like that. Get up and follow me.’

On the way, he explained his idea to me. We were not going to knock on the rich bandit’s door, but on the door of an old man who had nothing whatever to do with my sister’s marriage. But who was the only one who could still prevent it.

Astaghfirullah.

He opened the door to us himself. I had never seen him without his turban; he seemed almost naked, and twice as gaunt. He had not been out all day, because he had been suffering from a pain in his side since two Fridays past. He was seventy-nine years old, he told us, and he thought he had lived long enough, ‘but God is the only judge’.

The arrival of two downcast-looking boys puzzled him.

‘I hope that you have not come to bring me bad tidings.’

Harun began to speak, and I let him do so. It was his idea, and up to him to take it to its conclusion.

‘Bad tidings, indeed, but not a death. A marriage against the Law of God, is that not bad tidings?’

‘Who is getting married?’

‘Hasan’s sister, Mariam…’

‘The Rumiyya’s daughter?’

‘Her mother doesn’t count. Since the weigh-master is a Muslim, his daughter is also a Muslim.’

The shaikh looked at the Ferret approvingly.

‘Who are you? I don’t know you.’

‘I am Harun, son of Abbas the porter.’

‘Go on. Your words are pleasing to my ears.’

Thus encouraged, my friend explained the purpose of our mission. He did not linger over the fate of the Zarwali’s wives, because he knew that this argument would not strike home with Astaghfirullah. On the other hand, he mentioned the fiancé’s debauchery, his relations with his former wives, and then he dwelt at length on his past, on his massacres of travellers, ‘particularly the first emigrants from Andalus’, on his plunder of the Rif.

‘What you have said would be enough to send a man to the fires of Hell until the end of time. But what proofs do you have? Which witnesses can you summon?’

Harun was all humility.

‘My friend and I are too young, we have only just completed the Great Recitation, and our word does not carry much weight. We do not know a great deal about life, and it may be that we are indignant about matters which appear perfectly normal to other people. Now that we have said all that we know, and now that we have acted according to our consciences, it is up to you, our venerated shaikh, to see what must be done.’

When we were outside again I looked at the Ferret dubiously. He seemed quite certain about what he had done.

‘I really believe what I said to him. We have done everything we could. Now we just have to wait.’

But his playful air indicated otherwise.

‘I think you’re gloating,’ I said, ‘but I don’t at all understand why.’

‘Perhaps Astaghfirullah doesn’t know me, but I have known him for years. And I have every confidence in his atrocious character.’

The next day, the shaikh seemed to have been restored to health. His turban could be seen circulating feverishly in the suqs, fluttering under the porticos, before sweeping into a hammam. The following Friday, at the hour when the largest crowds were gathered, he spoke in his usual mosque, the one most attended by the emigrants from Andalus. In the most candid manner he began to describe ‘the exemplary life of a greatly respected man whom I shall not name’, mentioning his banditry, his plunderings and his debauchery in such precise terms that eventually all the audience was whispering the Zarwali’s name although he himself had never mentioned it once.

‘Such are the men that the believers respect and admire in these degenerate times! Such are the men to whom you proudly open the doors of your houses! Such are the men to whom you sacrifice your daughters, as if to the deities of the time before Islam!’

Before the day was over the whole town was talking of nothing else. The words of the shaikh were reported to the Zarwali himself. Immediately, he sent for my father, insulted Granada and all the Andalusians, and, stuttering with rage, made it clear to him that there was no question of contract, marriage or silkworms, that he charged him immediately to pay back the dinars which he had advanced him, and that the weigh-master and all his family would soon have cause for bitter regret at what had come to pass. Utterly dismayed, Muhammad tried to protest his innocence, but he was thrown out unceremoniously by the Zarwali’s bodyguards.

Often, when a marriage is called off at the last moment in an atmosphere of resentment, and particularly when the fiancé feels that he has been made a fool of, he circulates the rumour that his betrothed was not a virgin, or that she had loose morals, to make it impossible for her to find a husband. I would not have been surprised if the rejected bandit had done this, such was his humiliation.

But never, in my worst nightmares, could I have imagined the vengeance that the Zarwali was contemplating.

The Year of the Knotted Blade of Grass

909 A.H.

26 June 1503 — 13 June 1504

That year had begun slippery, peaceful and studious. On the first day of the year, which came in high summer, we splashed through the streets which had been drenched with water during the preceding nights because of the festival of Mihrajan. Each time I missed my footing, at each muddy pool, I thought of my father, who so detested this festival and the customs connected with it.

I had not seen him since our dispute, may God pardon me one day! But I constantly asked Warda and Mariam for news of him; their replies were rarely reassuring. Having ruined himself to give my sister a rich dowry, and finding himself simultaneously deeply in debt, frustrated in his dreams and deprived of the affection of his family, he sought oblivion in the taverns.

However, for the first weeks of the year he seemed to be recovering slowly from the breach with the Zarwali. He had eventually managed to rent an old residence at the top of a mountain six miles from Fez. It was a bit ramshackle, but had a marvellous view over the city, and had ample land attached to it on which he swore he would produce the best grapes and the best figs of the kingdom; I suspect that he also wanted to produce his own wine, even though the mountain was part of the domain of the Great Mosque. These projects were certainly less grandiose than producing silk; at least they did not put my father at the mercy of a bandit like the Zarwali.

There had been no sign of the latter for months. Had he forgotten his misfortune, would he let bygones be bygones, the man whom it was said had the slightest insult graven in marble? I sometimes asked myself such questions, but these were passing worries which were swept aside by my deep absorption in my studies.

I spent my time in the lecture halls, in the Qarawiyyin Mosque, from midnight to half-past one, in accordance with the summer timetable, the rest of the day at the most famous college in Fez, the madrasa Bu Inania; I slept in the meantime, a little at dawn, a little in the afternoons; inactivity was unbearable, rest seemed superfluous. I was barely fifteen, with a body to shake up, a world to discover, and a passion for reading.

Each day our professors would make us study the commentaries on the Qur’an or the Tradition of the Prophet, and a discussion would commence. From the Scriptures we would often go on to medicine, geography, mathematics or poetry, sometimes even to philosophy or astrology, in spite of the ban on such subjects issued by the sovereign. We had the good fortune to have as teachers men who were learned in all fields of knowledge. To distinguish themselves from the common herd some wound their turbans around high pointed skull caps, like those which I saw worn by doctors during my stay in Rome. We students wore a simple cap.

In spite of their knowledge and their apparel, teachers were for the most part friendly men, patient in explanation, and mindful of the talents of everyone. Sometimes, they would invite us to their homes, to show us their libraries; one had five hundred volumes, another a thousand; yet another had more than three thousand, and they always encouraged us to pay careful attention to our calligraphy in order to be able to copy the most precious books, for it was thus, they said, that knowledge was spread.

When I had a moment between lectures, I would walk as far as the place where the porters stood. If I found Harun there, we would go and drink curdled milk or saunter around the Place of Marvels, where our curiosity was rarely disappointed. If the Ferret was away on an errand I would cross the flower market to go and see Mariam.

We had agreed that each time my father went to the country for the week she would put a knotted blade of grass in a crack in the outside wall. One day, towards the end of Safar, the second month of the year, I went past the house; the knotted blade was there. I pulled the bell rope. Warda shouted from within:

‘My husband is away. I am alone with my daughter. I cannot open the door.’

‘It’s me, Hasan!’

She explained confusedly that some men had come a few minutes before; they had knocked on the door insistently, saying that she must let them in. She was afraid, and Mariam, who looked pale and weak, seemed afraid too.

‘What’s going on here? You both look as if you’ve been crying.’

Their tears began again, but Warda quickly pulled herself together:

‘For the last three days it has been like hell. We dare not go out into the street. The neighbours come all the time to ask if it’s true that…’

Her voice choked, and Mariam continued vacantly:

‘They are asking if I am suffering from the illness.’

When people say ‘the illness’ at Fez they mean leprosy; when they talk of ‘the quarter’ without further designation they mean the leper quarter.

I still had not taken in what they had just told me when I heard a drumming on the door.

‘The police, in the sultan’s name! You are not alone now! A man has just gone inside. He can speak to us.’

I opened the door. There were at least ten people outside, an officer, four women veiled in white, the rest soldiers.

‘Does Mariam, the daughter of Muhammad al-Wazzan the Granadan live here?’

The officer unfolded a piece of paper.

‘This is an order from the shaikh of the lepers. We are to bring the aforesaid Mariam to the quarter.’

A single idea turned over in my head: ‘If this could be an ordinary nightmare!’ I heard myself saying:

‘But this is slander! She has never had a single mark on her body! She is as pure as one of the verses revealed in the Qur’an!’

‘We shall see about that. These four women have been appointed to examine her on the spot.’

They went into one of the rooms with her. Warda tried to follow them but someone stopped her. I stayed outside, my mind in a fog, but trying at the same time to make the officer listen to reason. He answered me calmly, appearing to see my point of view, but ended by replying to each of my outbursts that he was an official, that he had orders to carry out, and that I must speak to the shaikh of the lepers.

After ten minutes, the women came out of the room. Two of them were holding Mariam under her arms and dragging her along. Her eyes were open but her body was limp. No sound came from her throat; she seemed unable to take in what was happening to her. One of the women whispered something in the officer’s ear. He made a sign to one of his men, who covered Mariam with a coarse earth-coloured cloth.

‘Your sister is ill. We must take her with us.’

I tried to intervene; they thrust me roughly aside. And the sinister procession set off. At the end of the cul-de-sac a few idlers were gathered. I cried out, threatened, gesticulated. But Warda came after me, pleading:

‘Come back, by Heaven, you mustn’t bring out the whole neighbourhood. Your sister can never be married.’

I went back towards the house, slammed the door, and began to hammer the walls with my fists, oblivious to the pain. Warda came up to me. She was weeping, but her mind was clear.

‘Wait until they have gone and then go and talk to your uncle. He has good relations with the palace. He can get her back.’

She held me by the sleeve and pulled me back.

‘Calm yourself, your hands are raw.’

My arms fell heavily on Warda’s shoulders; I embraced her fiercely, without unclenching my fists, as if I was still hammering at the wall. She subsided against me. Her tears ran down my neck; her hair covered my eyes; I could only inhale her breath, burning, humid and perfumed. I was not thinking of her; she was not thinking of me. Our bodies did not exist for us. But they suddenly came into existence for themselves, kindled by anger. I had never before felt conscious of myself as a man, nor been conscious of her as a woman. She was thirty-two, old enough to be a grandmother, but her face had no lines, and her hair was jet black. I no longer dared to move, for fear I might give myself away, or to speak, for fear of sending her away, nor even to open my eyes, for fear of having to recognize that I was entwined with the only woman rigorously forbidden to me, my father’s wife.

Where did her mind wander during those moments? Did she feel herself drifting like me towards the intermingling of pleasure? I don’t think so. Was she just numb, body and soul all swollen up? Did she simply need to clutch hold of the only human being who would share her anguish? I shall never know, for we never spoke of it; never did our words or actions ever recall that a moment had existed in which we were man and woman, bound together by the pitiless fingers of Destiny.

It was incumbent upon her to withdraw. She did so imperceptibly, with these words of tender parting:

‘Go, Hasan my son, God will come to our aid. You are the best brother that Mariam could have!’

I ran, counting my steps to myself so that my mind would not dwell on anything else. As far as Khali’s house.

My uncle listened to me without showing any signs of emotion, but I could see that he was moved, more than I had expected, given the complete absence of relations between himself and my sister. When I finished my story, he explained:

‘The shaikh of the lepers is a power in the land. He alone is entitled to remove from Fez those who have been infected, and he alone has authority over the denizens of the quarter. Few qadis dare oppose his decisions, and the sultan himself only rarely takes it upon himself to interfere in his gruesome domain. Furthermore, he is extremely rich, for many among the believers bequeath their properties for the benefit of the quarter, either because the illness has afflicted their family, or because they take pity at the sight of these unfortunates. And the shaikh administers all the revenues. He uses part of it to provide food, lodging and treatment for the sufferers, but there are substantial sums left over which he uses in all sorts of shady ways to increase his personal wealth. It is highly likely that he has some business association with the Zarwali, and that he has agreed to help him to take vengeance upon us.’

I had distinctly heard my uncle say ‘us’! My surprise did not elude him.

‘You have known for a long time what I think of your father’s obsession with this Rumiyya. He lost his head one day, because she very nearly left him, because he thought his honour was at stake, because he wanted, in his way, to take revenge on the Castilians. Since then, he has never recovered his good judgement. But what has just happened concerns neither Muhammad nor Warda, nor even poor Mariam; the whole Granadan community of Fez is being held up to ridicule by the Zarwali. We have to fight, even for the daughter of the Rumiyya. A community begins to fall apart the moment it agrees to abandon the weakest of its members.’

His arguments mattered little; his attitude gave me new hope.

‘Do you think we shall be able to save my sister?’

‘Ask the Most High to bring you hope and patience! We have to fight the most powerful and devilish individuals. You know that the Zarwali is a friend of the sultan?’

‘But if Mariam has to stay in the quarter for long, she really will become a leper.’

‘You must go and see her, tell her that she must not mix with the others, and bring her turtle flesh to eat, which helps to fight the illness. Above all, she should always keep her face covered with a veil impregnated with vinegar.’

I carried these counsels to Warda. She obtained the appropriate items and when my father returned to town a few days later she went with him to the edge of the quarter. A watchman called Mariam, who came to see them. She looked disoriented, overwhelmed, haggard, with bloodshot eyes in her pallid face. A stream separated her from her parents, but they could speak to her, promise her a speedy deliverance and give her their advice. They gave the things they wanted taken to her to the watchman, slipping a few dirhams into his hand.

I was waiting for them in front of the door of the house when they returned. My father made as if not to see me. I knelt on the ground and took his hand, pressing it to my lips. After several long seconds he took it away, passed it over my face, and then patted my neck. I got up and threw myself into his arms.

‘Make us something to eat,’ he said to Warda in a broken voice. ‘We need to discuss the matter.’

She hastened to do so.

Neither he nor I said very much. At that point, the important thing was to be together, man to man for the first time, seated on the same mat, dipping our hands in the same fashion into the same dish of couscous. Mariam’s engagement had torn us apart; her ordeal hastened our reconciliation. It would also reunite Muhammad with my mother’s family.

That evening, Khali came to my father’s house, whose threshold he had not crossed since our arrival at Fez ten years earlier. Warda treated him as an honoured guest, offered him orgeat syrup and placed an enormous basket full of grapes, apricots, pears and plums in front of him. In return, he gave her kindly smiles and words of comfort. Then she withdrew behind a door to let us discuss the matter together.

The rest of the year was entirely taken up with endless undertakings and interminable secret meetings. Sometimes, people outside the family would join us, contributing their advice, and sharing our disappointments. They were mostly Granadans, but there were also two of my friends. One was Harun, of course, who was soon going to make my problem his own, to the point of taking it away from me altogether. The other was called Ahmad. At the college he was called the Lame One. Calling him to mind, I cannot prevent my pen from ceasing its tortuous scratchings, and to stop for a moment thoughtful and perplexed. As far away as Tunis, Cairo, Mecca, even Naples, I have heard men speak of the Lame One, and I always wonder whether this old friend of mine will leave any traces on the pages of history, or whether he will pass across the memory of men as a bold swimmer crosses the Nile, without affecting its flow or its floods. However my duty as chronicler is to forget my resentment and to recount, as faithfully as I can, what I have known of Ahmad since the day that year when he came into the classroom for the first time, greeted by the laughter and sarcastic remarks of the other students. The young Fassis are merciless towards outsiders, especially when they seem to have come straight from the province where they were born, and particularly if they have some physical infirmity.

The Lame One had let his eyes wander round the room, as if taking note of every smile, every grin, and then came to sit down next to me, whether because it was the nearest place for him to sit or because he had seen that I was looking at him differently. He shook me vigorously by the hand, but his words were not a simple greeting:

‘Like me, you are a foreigner in this accursed city.’

His tone was not questioning, his voice not low. I looked round with embarrassment. He started again:

‘Don’t be afraid of the Fassis, they are too crammed with knowledge to retain a drop of courage.’

He was almost shouting. I felt that I was becoming involved unwillingly in a dispute that had nothing to do with me. I tried to extricate myself, saying light-heartedly:

‘How can you say that, if you are coming to seek knowledge in one of the madrasas of Fez?’

He gave me a condescending smile.

‘I do not seek knowledge, because it weighs the hands down more certainly than a chain. Have you ever seen a doctor of the Law command an army, or found a kingdom?’

While he was talking, the professor came into the room, his gait dignified, his silhouette imposing. As a mark of respect, the whole class stood up.

‘How do you expect a man to fight with that thing wobbling on his head?’

I was already regretting that Ahmad had come and sat next to me. I looked at him in horror.

‘Lower your voice, I beg you, the master will hear.’

He gave me a fatherly slap on the back.

‘Don’t be so timid! When you were a child, didn’t you speak out the truth that the oldest ones kept secret? Well, you were right then. You must find the time of innocence in yourself again, because that was also the time of courage.’

As if to illustrate what he had just said, he got up, limped towards the professor’s raised chair and addressed him without respect, in a manner which silenced the slightest noise in the room:

‘My name is Ahmad, son of Sharif Sa‘di, descendant of the House of the Prophet, on whom be prayers and peace! If you see me limp, it is because I was wounded last year fighting the Portuguese when they invaded the territories of the Sous.’

I don’t know if he was more closely related to the Messenger of God than I am; as far as his deformity was concerned, he had been lame since birth, as I was to learn later from one of his friends. Two lies, then, but they intimidated everyone present, including the professor.

Ahmad went back to his seat, his head high. From his first day at the college, he became the most respected and admired of all the students. He always went about surrounded by a host of devoted fellow students, who laughed at his jokes, trembled at his rages, and shared all his enmities.

And these were very tenacious. One day, one of our teachers, a Fassi from an old family, had dared to cast doubt on the ancestry to which the Lame One laid claim. This opinion could not be disregarded lightly, since this professor was the most famous in the college, and had recently obtained the honour of giving the weekly sermon in the Great Mosque. At the time, Ahmad did not reply, and simply smiled enigmatically at the students’ questioning looks. The following Friday, the whole class took itself off to hear the preacher. He had hardly uttered the first words when the Lame One was seized with an interminable fit of coughing. Gradually, other coughers took over, and after a minute or so thousands of throats were being noisily cleared in unison, a strange infection which lasted to the end of the sermon, to the extent that the faithful went back to their homes without having understood so much as a word. Henceforth the professor took care not to speak of Ahmad, nor of his noble but doubtful ancestry.

I myself never followed in the Lame One’s wake, and he certainly respected me for it. We only saw each other alone, sometimes at my house and sometimes at his quarters in the madrasa itself, where there were rooms reserved for students whose families did not live in Fez; his people lived on the edges of the kingdom of Marrakesh.

I must say that even when we were alone together, some of his attitudes repelled me, bothered me, even sometimes frightened me. But he could also appear generous and faithful, and that was how he seemed to me that year, attentive in my periods of dejection, always finding the right tone to get me back on my feet again.

I greatly needed his company, and that of Harun, even if they both seemed unable to save Mariam. Only my uncle seemed in a position to take the necessary steps. He met lawyers, amirs of the army, the dignitaries of the kingdom; some were reassuring, others embarrassed, still others promised a solution before the next feast. We only let go of one hopeful possibility to cling on to another, equally in vain.

Until, that is, Khali succeeded, after a thousand intercessions, in approaching the sovereign’s eldest son, Prince Muhammad, called the Portuguese, because he had been taken prisoner at the age of seven in the town of Arzila and led away to captivity in Portugal for many years. He was now forty, the same age as my uncle, and they stayed a long time together, discussing poetry and the misfortunes of Andalus. And when, after two hours, Khali brought up the problem of Mariam, the prince seemed very indignant and promised to bring the matter to the ears of his father.

He had no time to do so, for, by a strange coincidence, the sultan died the very next day after my uncle’s visit to the palace.

To say that my relations wept for long over the old monarch would be a pure lie, not only because the Zarwali was his friend, but also because the connections just established between his son and Khali seemed to augur well for us.

The Year of the Caravan

910 A.H.

14 June 1504 — 3 June 1505

That year was the occasion of my first long journey, which was to take me across the Atlas, Sijilmassa and Numidia, towards the Saharan expanse, and then towards Timbuktu, mysterious city of the land of the Blacks.

Khali had been commanded by the new Sultan of Fez to take a message to the powerful sovereign of the Soudan, Askia Muhammad Touré, announcing his accession and promising to establish the most cordial relations between their two kingdoms. As he had promised me five years earlier, at the time of his journey to the Orient, my uncle invited me to come with him; I had discussed it with my father, who, out of consideration for my beard, which was silky but already thick, no longer thought of standing in my way.

The caravan had set off in the first cool days of autumn, two hundred animals strong, carrying men, provisions and presents. We had camel guards to protect us for the whole length of the journey, as well as cavalrymen who would return when we reached the Sahara. There were also camel drivers and experienced guides, as well as enough servants to make the embassy appear important in the eyes of our hosts. To the official procession were also attached, with my uncle’s permission, several merchants with their wares, intending to take advantage both of the royal protection for the duration of the journey and of the favourable treatment which we would surely receive at Timbuktu.

The preparations had been too meticulous, too long drawn out for my liking. During the last days before departure, I could neither sleep nor read. My breathing was difficult and heavy. I needed to leave at once, to hold on tightly high up on the camel’s hump, to be engulfed in the vast wastes where men, animals, water, sand and gold all have the same colour, the same worth, the same irreplaceable futility.

I discovered very soon that one could also become immersed in the caravan. When the wayfarers know that, for weeks and months, they must proceed in the same direction, confront the same perils, live, eat, pray, enjoy themselves, grieve, and sometimes die, together, they cease to be strangers to each other; no vice remains hidden, no artifice can last. Seen from afar, a caravan looks like a procession; from close to, it is a village, with its stories, jokes, nicknames, intrigues, conflicts, reconciliations, nights of singing and poetry, a village for which all lands are far away, even the land one comes from, or the land one is crossing. I badly needed such distance to forget the crushing miseries of Fez, the relentlessness of the Zarwali, the faceless cruelty of the shaikh of the lepers.

On the same day that we left, we passed through the town of Sefrou, at the foot of the Atlas mountains, fifteen miles from Fez. The inhabitants were rich, but they were shabbily dressed, their clothes all stained with oil, because a prince of the royal house had built himself a residence there and overburdened with taxes anyone who gave the slightest sign of prosperity. Passing down the main street, my uncle brought his horse up level with me to whisper in my ear:

‘If anyone tells you that avarice is the daughter of necessity, tell him that he is mistaken. It is taxation which has begotten avarice!’

Not far from Sefrou, the caravan took the pass through which the road to Numidia runs. Two days later we were in the middle of a forest, near the ruins of an ancient city called ‘Ain al-Asnam, the Spring of the Idols. There was a temple there where men and women used to meet in the evening at a certain time of the year. Having finished the ritual sacrifices, they would put out the lights, and each man would take his pleasure with the woman whom providence had placed by his side. They passed the night together in this fashion, and in the morning they were reminded that for a year none of the women present was allowed to go to her husband. The children who were born during that period were brought up by the priests of the temple. The temple had been destroyed, and the whole city as well, after the Muslim conquest; but the name had survived as sole witness of the age of ignorance.

Two days later we passed near a mountain village which was strewn about with ancient remains. It is called ‘The Hundred Wells’, because there are wells in the vicinity of such depth that they are thought to be caves. It is said that one of them had several levels, with walled rooms on the inside, some large, others small, but all fitted out. That is why treasure seekers come specially from Fez to make the descent, with the help of ropes and lanterns. Some never come to the surface again.

A week after leaving Fez we went through a place called Umm Junaiba, where a curious custom survives: there is a water course, along which the caravans walk, and it is said that anyone who passes along there must jump and dance as he walks, otherwise he will be struck with quartan ague. Our whole company set to it cheerfully, even myself, even the guards, even the great merchants, some from a spirit of fun, others out of superstition, still others to avoid the insect bites, all except my uncle who considered that his dignity as ambassador prevented him from taking part in such pranks. He was to regret it bitterly.

We were already in the high mountains over which, even in autumn, an unpredictable icy wind blows from the north. In such high places, where the climate is so harsh, I did not expect to find people so well dressed and certainly not so well educated. In particular, in one of the coldest mountain ranges, there is a tribe called Mestasa whose principal occupation was to copy books, in the most beautiful handwriting, and sell them in the Maghrib and abroad. In one village alone, an old Genoese merchant living in Fez, Master Thomasso de Marino, who had come along with the caravan, and with whom I often conversed, bought a hundred of these volumes, each with marvellous calligraphy and bound in leather. He explained to me that the ulama and the notables in the land of the Blacks bought many such books, and that it was a very lucrative trade.

As we had stopped for the night in this area, I accompanied the Genoese to a dinner given by his supplier. The house was well built, with marble and majolica, with fine woollen hangings on the walls, the floor covered with carpets, also made of wool, but in pleasing colours. All the guests seemed extremely prosperous, and I could not forbear to ask my host, choosing my words with extreme care, a question which was burning on my lips: how did it come to pass that the people of this cold and mountainous country were so well endowed with possessions and knowledge?

The master of the house burst out laughing:

‘In short you want to know why the people of these mountains are not all boors, beggars or tramps?’

I would not have put it like that, but that was really what interested me.

‘Know, my young visitor, that the greatest gift that the Most High can bestow upon a man is to cause him to be born in a high mountain across which the caravans pass. The highway brings knowledge and riches, the mountain provides protection and liberty. You, the people of the cities, have all the gold and all the books within reach, but you have princes, before whom you bow your heads…’

He suddenly became circumspect:

‘May I talk to you like an old uncle talking to his nephew, like an old shaikh to a disciple, without deviating in any way from the teachings of life? Will you promise me not to take offence?’

My broad smile encouraged him to continue.

‘If you live in a city, you agree to set aside all dignity, all self-respect in exchange for the protection of a sultan, who makes you pay dearly for it even when he is no longer capable of assuring it. When you live far from the cities, but in the plains or on the hills, you escape the sultan, his soldiers and his tax-collectors; however, you are at the mercy of marauding nomadic tribes, Arabs, sometimes even Berbers, who overrun the country, and you can never even build a wall without fearing that it will soon be pulled down. If you live in an inaccessible place far off the highway, you are of course safe from subjugation and attack, but, if you have no exchanges with other regions, you end up by living like an animal, ignorant, impoverished and frightened.’

He offered me a goblet of wine, which I refused politely. He poured one for himself, and swallowed a mouthful before continuing:

‘We alone are privileged: we see passing through our villages the people of Fez, of Numidia, of the land of the Blacks, merchants, notables, students or ulama; they each bring us a piece of gold, or a garment, a book, to read or copy, or perhaps only a story, an anecdote, a word; thus, with the passing of the caravans we accumulate riches and knowledge, in the shelter of these inaccessible mountains which we share with the eagles, the crows and the lions, our companions in dignity.’

I recounted these words to my uncle, who sighed without saying anything and then raised his eyes to heaven. I do not know whether this was to put himself in the hands of the Creator or to observe the flight of a bird of prey.

Our next stage was through the mountains of Ziz, so called because a river of that name has its source within them. The inhabitants of that region belong to a formidable Berber tribe, the Zanaga. They are sturdy men, wearing woollen tunics next to the skin, and wrapping rags around their legs which serve as shoes. Summer and winter, they go about bare-headed. I can never describe these people without remembering something extraordinary about them, which seems almost miraculous: a vast number of snakes go round among the houses, as mild and friendly as cats or little dogs. When anyone begins to eat, the snakes gather around him to eat up the crumbs of bread and other food which is left for them.

During the third week of our journey we hurtled down the Ziz mountains, through countless palm-gardens full of delicious tender fruit, towards the plain which leads to Sijilmassa. Or rather, I should say, to where this town so admired by previous generations of travellers was located. It was said that it had been founded by Alexander the Great himself, that its main street used to run the length of half a day’s march, that each of its houses was surrounded by a garden and an orchard, and that it used to contain prestigious mosques and madrasas of renown.

Of its walls, once so high, only a few sections remain, half-ruined, and covered with grass and moss. Of its population, there remain only various hostile clans, each living with its chief in a fortified village near to the ruins of the former Sijilmassa. Their main concern is to make life difficult for the clan living in the neighbouring village. They seem merciless towards each other, going so far as to destroy the water channels, cutting the palm trees down to the ground, encouraging the nomadic tribes to lay waste the lands and houses of their enemies, so that it seems to me that they deserve their fate.

We had planned to stay three days on the territory of Sijilmassa, to rest men and beasts, to buy some provisions and repair some of our tackle; but it was written that we should stay there several months, since, the very day after our arrival, my uncle fell ill. He sometimes shivered during the day, although the heat was stifling, and sometimes sweated from all his pores during the night, when it was as cold as it had been in the high mountains. A Jewish merchant from the caravan, who was well versed in the science of medicine, diagnosed a quartan ague, which seemed a punishment for Khali’s refusal to make obeisance to the custom of dancing at Umm Junaiba. God alone is master of reward and chastisement!

I was constantly at my uncle’s bedside, attentive to his slightest movement, the smallest sign of pain on his face, watching over him sometimes for hours at a time, while he slept restlessly. I felt that he had suddenly aged, become weak and helpless, while two days earlier he had been able to hold an audience spellbound with his tales of the Rum, of lions or of serpents. Thanks to his gifts as a poet and orator, and also to his vast knowledge, he had impressed Muhammad the Portuguese, who had summoned him to his presence every week since his accession. There was talk that he would be appointed a counsellor, or secretary, or provincial governor.

I remember, one day when he came back from the palace, I asked Khali whether he had spoken of Mariam again. He replied in a rather embarrassed voice:

‘I am gradually gaining the sovereign’s confidence, and I shall soon be able to obtain your sister’s release without the slightest difficulty. For the time being I must act as delicately as possible; it would be a mistake to ask him anything at all.’

Then he added with a laugh by way of apology:

‘That is how you will have to behave when you go into politics!’

A little after Khali’s appointment as ambassador I had returned to the attack. He had then spoken to the sovereign, who had promised him that when he returned from Timbuktu the young girl would be at home once more. My uncle had thanked him warmly and had given me the news. I had then decided to go to the quarter for the first time to tell Mariam about the monarch’s promise and about my journey.

I had not seen her for a year, out of excess of affection, but also out of cowardice. She did not utter a single word of reproach. She smiled as if she had just left my side, asked me about my studies, and seemed so serene that I felt intimidated, contrite, off balance. Perhaps I would have preferred to see her in tears and to have to comfort her, even though we were separated by a stream. I told her triumphantly about the sultan’s promise; she reacted just enough not to upset me. I spoke about my departure, and she gave the appearance of enthusiasm, without me knowing whether she did so out of sudden playfulness or out of mockery. The water course, which a strong man could have crossed in two strides, seemed deeper than a ravine, wider than an arm of the sea. Mariam was so far away, so inaccessible, her voice came to me as if in a nightmare. Suddenly, an old leper woman whom I had not seen approaching put a hand with no fingers on my sister’s shoulder. I shouted and gathered up some stones to throw at her, telling her to go away. Mariam stood between us, protecting the leper with her body.

‘Put those stones down, Hasan, you will hurt my friend!’

I complied, feeling myself about to faint. I made a gesture of farewell, and turned to leave, with death in my soul. My sister called my name again. I looked at her. She came up to the edge of the water. For the first time since my coming the tears ran down her face.

‘You will get me out of here, won’t you?’

Her voice was imploring, but somehow reassuring. With a gesture which I was the first to be surprised at I put my hand out in front of me as if I was swearing on the Book, and delivered this oath in a slow loud voice:

‘I swear that I shall not marry before I have got you out of this accursed quarter.’

A smile lit up her whole face. I turned round and ran away as fast as my legs would carry me, because it was this image of her that I wanted to keep before me for the duration of my journey. The same day, I went to see my father and Warda to give them news of their daughter. Before knocking at the door I remained motionless for a moment. There in a crack in the wall, dry and faded, lay the knotted blade of grass which Mariam had tied together the day of her capture. I took it in my fingers and laid it stealthily on my lips. Then I put it back in its place.

I was thinking once more of this blade of grass when Khali opened his eyes. I asked if he felt better; he nodded, but went back to sleep immediately. He was to remain in this condition, hovering between life and death, unable to move, until the beginning of the hot season, when it was impossible to cross the Sahara. So we had to wait several months in the vicinity of Sijilmassa before continuing our journey.

The Year of Timbuktu

911 A.H.

4 June 1505 — 23 May 1506

My uncle seemed fully recovered when we took to the road again that year at the beginning of the cool season, towards Tabalbala, which lies in the middle of the desert of Numidia, three hundred miles from the Atlas, two hundred miles south of Sijilmassa, in a country where water is scarce and meat too, save for that of the antelope and the ostrich, and where only the shade of a palm tree occasionally alleviates the tyranny of the sun.

We had reckoned that this stage would take nine days, and from the first evening Khali began to speak to me about Granada, somewhat in the way my father had done a few years earlier. Perhaps the illness of the one and the despondency of the other had had the same effect, of making them wish to pass on their witness and their wisdom to a younger and somehow less endangered memory, may the Most High preserve my pages from fire and from oblivion! From one night to another I awaited the continuation of his story, whose only interruptions were the howlings of nearby jackals.

On the third day, however, two soldiers came to meet us. They brought a message from a lord whose lands lay to the west of our route. He had heard that the ambassador of the King of Fez was passing this way, and he insisted on meeting him. Khali made enquiries of one of the guides, who told him that the detour would delay us by at least two weeks. He made his excuses to the soldiers, saying that an envoy of the sovereign on a mission could not make visits to noblemen whose lands lay out of his way, all the more since his illness had already delayed him considerably. However, to show in what esteem he held this lord — of whom as he told me later, he had never heard spoken before — he would send his nephew to kiss his hand.

Hence I suddenly found myself entrusted with an embassy when I had not yet reached my seventeenth year. My uncle ordered two horsemen to accompany me, and provided me with several gifts which I was to offer in his name to this friendly nobleman: a pair of stirrups decorated in the Moorish fashion, a magnificent pair of spurs, a pair of silk cords braided with golden thread, one violet, the other azure, a newly-bound book containing the lives of the holy men of Africa and a panegyric poem. The journey lasted four days, and I took advantage of it to write some verses myself in honour of my host.

Having reached the town, which was I believe called Ouarzazate, I was told that the lord was hunting lions in the neighbouring mountains, and that he had given instructions that I should join him there. I kissed his hand and conveyed the greetings of my uncle. He appointed quarters where I could rest until his return. He came back before nightfall and summoned me to his palace. I presented myself, kissed his hand again, and then offered him the presents one by one, which pleased him exceedingly. Then I gave him Khali’s poem, which he had read by a secretary who translated it for him word for word, since he knew little Arabic.

Then it was time for the meal, which I was awaiting impatiently, since my stomach had been empty since morning except for a few dates. We were brought roast and boiled mutton, coated with extremely fine flaky pastry, something like Italian lasagne, but firmer. Then we had couscous, ftat, another mixture of meat and pastry, and several other dishes which I can no longer remember. When we were all amply satisfied I stood up and declaimed my own poem. The lord had several phrases translated, but for the rest of the time he merely watched me, with a tender and protective eye. When I had finished, he retired to bed, because the hunt had fatigued him, but very early the next morning he asked me to breakfast with him, gave me through his secretary a hundred pieces of gold to take to my uncle, and two slaves to attend on him during the journey. He commanded me to tell him that these presents were simply an acknowledgement of his poem, and not an exchange for the gifts which he had presented to him. He also gave me ten pieces of gold for each of the horsemen who accompanied me.

For me, he was keeping a surprise. He began by giving me fifty pieces of gold, but, when I left, the secretary indicated that I should follow him. We went along a corridor until we reached a low door which led us into a small courtyard. In the middle was a horse, fine-looking but small, on which was sitting a beautiful brown rider, her face uncovered.

‘This young slave is the lord’s gift for your poem. She is fourteen, she speaks Arabic well. We call her Hiba.’

He took the bridle and put it in my hand. I took it, my eyes looking up, incredulous. My gift smiled.

Overjoyed to have met so courteous and generous a lord, I returned immediately to Tabalbala, where the caravan awaited me. I told my uncle that I had fulfilled my mission perfectly, and I reported each word and each gesture in detail. I gave him the presents which were intended for him, and the remarks that had accompanied them, and I ended by telling him about my delicious surprise. At this point in my story his face clouded over.

‘Did they really tell you that this slave girl spoke Arabic?’

‘Yes, and I was able to check this on the way back.’

‘I don’t doubt it. But if you were older and wiser you might have heard something else behind the secretary’s words. To offer you this slavegirl was perhaps a way of honouring you, but it may just as well have been a way of insulting you, of showing you the abasement of those who speak your language.’

‘Should I have refused?’

My uncle laughed good-naturedly.

‘I can see that you are going to faint at the mere suggestion that you should have left that girl in the courtyard where you found her.’

‘Then I can keep her?’

My tone was like that of a child hanging on to a toy. Khali shrugged his shoulders and signalled to the camel-drivers to make ready to depart. As I was leaving he called me back:

‘Have you already touched this girl?’

‘No,’ I replied, my eyes lowered. ‘On the way back we slept in the open air, and the guards were close by me.’

There was some malice in his grin.

‘You are not to touch her now either, since before we will sleep under a roof again the month of Ramadan will have begun. As a traveller, you are not required to fast, but you must show your submission to your Creator in other ways. You must cover your slavegirl from head to toe, and forbid her to perfume herself, to use make up, to do her hair, or even to wash.’

I did not protest, for I knew immediately that religious zeal was not the only reason for this counsel. Very often in the caravans there were disputes, attacks of madness and even crimes committed because of the presence of a beautiful servant girl, and my uncle wanted at all costs to avoid any temptation or provocation.

The next part of our journey took us towards the oases of Touat and Ghurara, the points of arrival and departure of the Saharan caravans. It was there that the merchants and other travellers waited to leave together.

Many Jewish traders were settled in these oases, but they had suffered a strange persecution. The very year of the Fall of Granada, which was also the year when the Spanish Jews were expelled, a preacher from Tlemcen came to Fez, and encouraged the population to massacre the Jews of the city. When he came to hear of this, the sovereign ordered this trouble-maker to be expelled; he sought refuge in the oases of Touat and Ghurara, and succeeded in stirring up the inhabitants there against the Jews. They were almost all massacred and their goods looted.

In this region, there are many cultivated fields, but they are dry, since they can only be irrigated by water from wells. The soil is also very poor, and the inhabitants have an unusual way of improving it. When visitors come, they invite them to stay without payment, but they take the manure of their horses, and they explain to the men that they will offend them if they relieve themselves anywhere but in their houses. In consequence, travellers are obliged to hold their noses when they pass anywhere near a cultivated field.

These oases are the last places where it is possible to stock up adequately before crossing the Sahara. The waterholes become further and further apart, and it takes over two weeks to reach the next inhabited place. Furthermore, at the place which is called Taghaza, there is nothing except some mines where salt is extracted. The salt is kept until a caravan comes to buy it in order to sell it at Timbuktu, where it is in constant demand. A camel can carry up to four bars of salt. The miners of Taghaza are dependent on the supplies which they receive from Timbuktu, which is twenty days’ journey away, or from other towns equally far off. It sometimes happens that a caravan, arriving late for some reason, finds that some of these men have starved to death in their huts.

But it is beyond that place that the desert becomes a real inferno. There one sees only the whitened bones of men and camels that have died of thirst, and the only living creatures visible in any number are snakes.

In the most arid part of the desert are two tombs, topped by a stone on which there is an inscription. It says that two men are buried there. One was a rich merchant, tortured by thirst, who bought from the other, a caravaneer, a cup of water for ten thousand pieces of gold. But after having taken a few steps, the seller and the purchaser collapsed together, having died of thirst. God alone dispenses life and benefits!

Even if I were more eloquent, even if my pen were more obedient, I would be incapable of describing the sensation when, after weeks of exhausting journeying, one’s eyes lashed by sandstorms, one’s mouth swollen with tepid salty water, one’s body burning, filthy, racked with a thousand aches, one finally sees the walls of Timbuktu. Indeed, after the desert, all cities are beautiful, all oases seem like the Garden of Eden. But nowhere else did life appear so agreeable to me as in Timbuktu.

We arrived there at sunset, welcomed by a troop of soldiers despatched by the ruler of the city. As it was too late for us to be received at the palace, we were escorted to the quarters which had been reserved for us, each according to his rank. My uncle was accommodated in a house near the mosque; I was given the use of a huge room there overlooking a lively square which gradually began to empty. That evening, after a bath and a light supper, I called Hiba, with Khali’s permission. It must have been ten o’clock at night. Sounds of tumult reached us from the street; a group of young people had gathered, playing music, singing and dancing on the square. I would soon get used to these strollers, who returned throughout my stay there. That night, I was so unaccustomed to the spectacle that I stood watching at the window without moving. Perhaps I was also filled with some trepidation at finding myself for the first time in a room with a woman who belonged to me.

She had made good the ravages of the road, and was as sweet, smiling and unveiled as she had been on the day she had been given to me. She came up to the window and began to watch the dancers like me, her shoulder pressing imperceptibly against my own. The night was cool, even chilly, but my face was burning.

‘Do you want me to dance like them?’

Without waiting for me to reply, she began to dance with her whole body, first slowly, then faster and faster, but without losing her gracefulness; her hands, her hair, her scarves flew around the room, carried by the breeze she created, her hips swaying to the rhythm of the negro music, her bare feet tracing arabesques on the floor. I drew away from the window to let the moonlight flood into the room.

It was only towards one o’clock in the morning, perhaps even later, that the street became silent once more. My dancer lay stretched out on the ground, exhausted and breathless. I pulled the curtain across the window, trying to find courage in the darkness.

Hiba. Even if the land of Africa had only offered me this gift, it would have earned my nostalgia for ever.

In the morning, as she lay asleep, my beloved had the same smile that I had imagined all night, and the same odour of ambergris. Bending over her smooth serene forehead, I covered her with silent tender promises. Noises came once more from the window, the gossiping of the market women, the crunching of straw, the ringing of copper, the cries of animals, and smells wafting on a light fresh wind which gently ruffled the curtain. I treasured everything, blessed everything, Heaven, the desert, the journey, Timbuktu, the lord of Ouarzazate, and even that painful sensation which was shooting discreetly through my body, the fruit of my first journey, eager and clumsy, into the unknown.

She opened her eyes, then closed them immediately, as if fearing to interrupt my reverie. I murmured:

‘We shall never part!’

She smiled doubtfully. I put my lips to hers, my hand slipping along her skin again to rekindle the memories of the night. But someone was already knocking on the door. I replied without opening it. It was a servant sent by my uncle to remind me that we were expected at the palace. I was to be present, in ceremonial dress, at the presentation of the letters of credence.

At the court of Timbuktu the ritual is exact and magnificent. When an ambassador obtains an interview with the master of the city, he must kneel before him, his face brushing against the ground, and then take some earth in his hand which he sprinkles over his head and shoulders. The subjects of the prince must do the same, but only on the first occasion on which they address him; in subsequent interviews the ceremonial becomes much simpler. The palace is not large, but of a very harmonious appearance; it was built nearly two centuries ago by an Andalusian architect known as Ishaq the Granadan.

Although he is the vassal of Askia Muhammad Touré, King of Gao, Mali and many other lands, the master of Timbuktu is an important individual, respected throughout the land of the Blacks. He has at his command three thousand cavalrymen and a vast number of footsoldiers, armed with bows and poisoned arrows. When he moves from one town to another, he rides on a camel, as do the people of his court, accompanied by horses led by the hand by attendants. If he encounters enemies and has to give battle, the prince and his soldiers jump on their horses, while the attendants hobble the camels. When the prince wins a victory, the entire population which has made war upon him is captured and sold, both adults and children. This is why, even in the more modest houses of the city, there are a large number of household slaves, male and female. Some masters use their female slaves to sell various products in the suqs. They can easily be recognized, for they are the only women in Timbuktu not to veil themselves. They control a good part of the retail trade, particularly foodstuffs and everything connected with that, which is a particularly lucrative activity as the inhabitants of the city eat well; cereals and stock can be found in abundance, and the consumption of milk and butter is extensive. The only rarity is salt, and rather than scattering it over food the inhabitants take pieces in their hands and lick them from time to time between mouthfuls.

Many of the citizens are rich, particularly the merchants, who are very numerous at Timbuktu. The prince treats them with respect even if they are not of the country; he has even given two of his daughters in marriage to two foreign merchants because of their wealth. All sorts of things are imported to Timbuktu, particularly European textiles which are sold far more dearly than at Fez. For commercial transactions minted money is not used, but little pieces of gold; smaller payments are made with cowries, shells from Persia or the Indies.

I passed my days wandering round the suqs, visiting the mosques, endeavouring to enter into conversation with anyone knowing a few words of Arabic, and sometimes in my room in the evenings noting down what I had observed, under the admiring gaze of Hiba. Our caravan should have stayed a week at Timbuktu, before making for Gao, the residence of Askia, on the last stage of our journey. But, most likely because of the exigencies of the journey, my uncle fell ill once more. The quartan fever seized him once more on the evening before we were due to depart. Once more I was at his bedside night and day, and I must say that more than once I lost hope that he would be cured. The lord of the city sent his own physician, a very old negro with a white beard around his face, who had read the works of the Orientals as well as those of the Andalusians. He prescribed a strict diet and prepared various concoctions of which I cannot say whether they were effective or simply harmless, since over a period of three weeks my uncle’s state of health exhibited neither permanent improvement nor fatal deterioration.

At the end of the month of Shawwal, although still extremely weak, Khali decided to return to Fez without delay; the summer heat was about to begin, which would prevent us from crossing the Sahara before the following year. When I tried to dissuade him, he explained that he could not stay away for two years on a mission which was supposed to have been accomplished in six months, that he had already spent all the money which he had been allotted as well as his own, and in any case, if the Most High had decided to call him unto Him, he would prefer to die among his own family than in a foreign land.

Was his reasoning sound? I cannot allow myself to judge after so many years. I cannot deny however that the return journey was an ordeal for the whole caravan, because after the seventh day my uncle was unable to keep himself on the back of his camel. We would still have retraced our steps, but he forbade us to do so. Our only recourse was to lay him on a makeshift stretcher, which guards and servants took it in turns to carry. His soul departed from him before we reached Taghaza, and we had to bury him in the burning sand at the side of the road; may God reserve him in His ample gardens a more shady haven!

The Year of the Testament

912 A.H.

24 May 1506 — 12 May 1507

I had left Fez in my uncle’s baggage train, with no other function than to follow him, listen to him and learn as I went behind him; I returned that year in charge of an unaccomplished mission, a caravan adrift and the most beautiful woman who had ever grown up in the Numidian desert.

But the heaviest thing to bear was a letter. On the way from Timbuktu I had seen Khali writing it. He took advantage of the briefest stop to take out his pen and inkwell from his belt and scribble slowly with a hand that his fever made trembling and uncertain. All our companions watched him from a distance, without disturbing him, thinking that he was putting down his impressions of the journey for the benefit of the sultan. After his death I found the letter while looking through his papers, rolled up and enclosed with a golden thread, which started with these words:

In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful, Master of the Day of Judgement, He who sends to men whose lives are drawing to a close signs in their body and in their mind to enable them to learn to know His resplendent face.

It is you, Hasan, my nephew, my son, to whom I address myself, you to whom I leave as an inheritance neither my name nor my small fortune, but only my cares, my mistakes and my vain ambitions.

His first bequest was the caravan.

Its resources are running out, its way home is still long, its commander is dying, and it is towards you that the men will turn, from you that they will expect the most just orders, the wisest opinion, and that you lead them home safe and sound. You must make every sacrifice to ensure that this voyage ends in dignity.

By the time we reached the first oases, I had to replace three sick camels, purchase fresh provisions, pay for the services of two guides who left us at Sijilmassa, give several dirhams to the soldiers to make this stage of the journey agreeable and pacify them until the next one, present several gifts to the notables with whom we stayed, and all this out from a purse that contained only eighteen dinars, all that was left of a sum which my uncle had borrowed from an Andalusian merchant who had come part of the way with us on the journey out. I could also have borrowed some money myself, but because of our hasty departure from Timbuktu no merchant had had the opportunity to come with us, so that I became, with my lack of means, the least poor of travellers. I resolved to sell some of the various presents received by Khali along the way, particularly the two slaves given him by the lord of Ouarzazat, and they fetched about forty dinars. In order to be able to keep Hiba without incurring reproaches or sarcastic remarks, I let the rumour circulate that she had become pregnant by me without my knowing it, but I had to sell her horse, a piece of useless adornment which would only hinder our crossing of the desert.

My uncle presented his second bequest to me by means of a parable from former times. ‘A bedouin woman was asked one day which of her children she loved the most. She replied: “The sick one until he is cured, the smallest one until he grows up, and the traveller until he returns.” ’ I knew that Khali had long been concerned for the future of Fatima, the youngest of his daughters, who had been born in Fez the year before we came, and whose mother, the only wife whom Khali had ever had, had died while bringing her into the world. The child had been brought up by my grandmother, and then after her death by my mother, as my uncle never remarried, probably fearing that a stepmother would not treat his daughters fairly. Aged twelve at the time of her father’s death, Fatima had always seemed sickly, grumpy and entirely unattractive. Khali had never asked me directly to marry her, but I knew that she was intended for me, since it is part of the natural order of things that a cousin should take one of his girl cousins for his own, sometimes the fairest, but often the one who could least easily find another husband.

I therefore resigned myself to doing so, knowing that I would thus fulfil one of my uncle’s dearest wishes, that he should not leave any of his daughters unmarried when he died. For the four eldest ones he had proceeded methodically; the oldest had been assigned the largest room in the house, and her sisters had no other charge but to attend to her, like servants. She was the only one entitled to new clothes, or jewels, until the time came for her to be married. Her place in the best room had then been taken by the next youngest, who took all the honours; the others had followed, except for Fatima, who was still too young and had been reserved for me.

My final bequest concerns you by right, since it is about your mother, who has already lived under my roof for ten years, refusing, like myself, to remarry. She is no longer young, and her only happiness would be if your father were to take her back. I know that he would like to do so, but Muhammad has the failing of taking wrong decisions hastily and correct ones too slowly. I did not tell you before, but, the evening before we left, casting all pride aside, I put the question to him directly. He replied that he had thought about it constantly since the time of our reconciliation. He had even consulted an imam, who explained to him that he could not remarry a woman whom he had divorced, unless she herself had remarried in the meantime. I then suggested that Salma should contract a marriage with one of our friends, who would agree not to consummate it and would repudiate her immediately. I also told him the story of a prince of Andalus, who wanted to take back his former wife and could not bear the idea of seeing her united to another, even in a fictitious fashion. He asked a qadi in his entourage who found a solution for him which was more worthy of a poet than of a doctor of the law. The woman was to go to a beach at night, and lie down naked, letting the waves flow over her body as if giving herself to the embraces of a man. The prince could then take her back without infringing the Law. Our discussion became drowned in laughter.

Far from laughing, I stood there in horror, my hand clenching the letter. Before my fixed gaze ran the faraway memories of myself as a child, with my mother and Sarah, in the shop of the astrologer-bookseller, whose words were ringing in my ears:

Death will come, and then the waves of the sea.

Then the woman will return with her fruit.

On my return to Fez, my parents were married again, and they were all astounded and disappointed that I was not surprised. I forebore to ask them how they had managed to circumvent the interdiction.

Khali’s letter continued:

I also leave my embassy in your hands, although it is not mine to bestow since it belongs to the sovereign who invested me with it. As a result of this mission, I was hoping to be able to approach him, but, by the soil that covers my father’s grave! this was less from a desire to gain favours and riches than to assist my own family. Was it not through my intercession for your sister that I came to know the prince? You must also think of her when you pay court to the monarch. When you go into his presence, give him the gifts that are his due, and then report to him, in measured terms, the fruits of your observations on Timbuktu. Tell him in particular that in the land of the Blacks there are many kingdoms, that they constantly fight one another, but that they do not seek to extend themselves beyond. When you have held his attention and won his esteem, you should speak to him of Mariam, unless she is already free at the time that I am writing these lines.

But she was not free, as Harun told me, when he came to welcome me as the caravan arrived at the gates of the palace. It was there that I had to give back the mounts to the superintendent of camels, hand over the gifts to the captain of the orderlies while waiting for my interview with the monarch. Having discharged these duties I went home on foot, gossiping with Harun, telling him of my uncle’s illness and death, recalling my experiences in Sijilmassa and Timbuktu, without forgetting Hiba, who was following me at a respectful distance carrying my luggage. The Ferret told me the latest news of Fez: Astaghfirullah had died, as well as Hamza the barber, may God lavish His mercy upon them! Ahmad the Lame had gone back to his region south of Marrakesh where he and his brother were leading a group of mujahidin who were fighting against the Portuguese.

At Khali’s house the women were already dressed in black, as the sad news had arrived well in advance of the caravan. Salma was there, delighted at my return, hastening to whisper the news of her remarriage. She still lived in my uncle’s house, so as not to leave my young cousin on her own, but also perhaps to avoid being under the same roof as Warda. Muhammad divided his time between the three houses, those of his two wives and his house in the country, where his crops were flourishing.

I also saw Fatima, whom mourning had made neither less grumpy nor sweeter, and who gave a tearful look in my direction. I turned instinctively to see whether Hiba was behind me. A strange sensation: I found myself repeating my father’s actions, caught between two women, a radiant slavegirl and a cousin in tears.

The next day I left for the palace, where I was given an audience the same day, out of respect for my family’s bereavement. I was not however received in private. The sovereign was accompanied by the captain of the orderlies, the chancellor, the keeper of the royal seal, the master of ceremonies and other courtiers, all far more sumptuously dressed than the monarch himself and who were talking quietly among themselves while I, deeply moved, poured out my carefully prepared sentences. From time to time the sultan pricked up his ears in the direction of some murmur or other, while motioning me to continue with a wave of his hand. Given the immense interest that my account aroused, I cut it as short as possible and then was silent. Several whisperings later the monarch became aware that I had finished, and declared himself impressed by my eloquence, a way of reminding me of my youth. He asked me to convey his condolences to my family, addressed several words on the subject of my uncle, ‘our faithful servant’, and finished by expressing the hope that he would see me on another occasion. The interview was over. However, I lingered where I was, in spite of the frowns of the master of ceremonies.

‘If you would grant me a minute more, I should like to ask you a favour.’

And I began to speak of my sister, as quickly as possible, repeating the word ‘injustice’ two or three times, recalling the promise made to Khali. The monarch looked away; I began to think he was not listening to me. But a single word convinced me otherwise:

‘The leper?’

The chancellor whispered a word in his ear, and then said to me with a little tap on my shoulder:

‘I will deal with it. You will not be disappointed. Do not bother His Majesty with the matter.’

I kissed the monarch’s hand and withdrew. Harun was waiting for me outside the railings.

‘Do you know that you have just committed an offence against the Law of God?’

He had seen immediately that I had been made to look ridiculous, and he was trying to console me in his fashion. I walked faster without saying a word. He continued:

‘I recently heard an eminent shaikh put forward the view that most if not all of the sovereigns of our time increase their revenue by taxes which are forbidden by the Law of God, and that they are all therefore thieves and ungodly men. It follows that anyone who eats at their table, or who accepts the smallest gift, or who establishes family relations with them is an accessory in their thefts and their ungodliness.’

My reply was accompanied by an outburst of anger:

‘That kind of notion has been responsible for starting all the wars which have torn the lands of Islam apart. Moreover, you can rest assured: the sultan did not invite me to his table, gave me no present, and has not offered me his daughter’s hand. Hence I am neither a thief nor an ungodly man, and I am in no danger of finding myself in the fire of Gehenna. But my sister is still with the lepers!’

Harun’s face clouded over.

‘Will you go and see her soon?’

‘I am waiting for a reply from the chancellor. I would rather see her after that, as I may perhaps have some good news for her.’

In the weeks that followed I went back to some of the courses at the madrasa Bu Inania. I was asked to talk about my travels to my fellow students, and in particular to describe to them some of the mosques which I had seen in the land of the Blacks, as well as the saints’ tombs which I had visited. Since I had taken copious notes, I was able to speak for two whole hours, and the professor was delighted. He invited me to his house and encouraged me to write down my observations, as Ibn Batuta and other famous travellers had done before me. I promise to do so one day, if God allows me.

The professor also asked me if I was seeking work, because his brother, who was director of the maristan of the city, wanted to employ a young student as secretary, at a salary of three dinars a month. I accepted eagerly, as I had always been interested in the work of hospitals and hospices. It was agreed that I would start work in the autumn.

I let two months pass before returning to the palace, since I did not wish to give the chancellor the impression I was rushing him. He seemed extremely friendly, told me that he had been awaiting me for weeks, offered me some syrup, spoke tearfully of my departed uncle and then told me in an almost triumphant tone that he had managed to arrange that my sister would be examined again by four officially designated women.

‘You will understand, young man, that our sultan, however powerful he is, cannot bring anyone back into the city who is suspected of being infected with this dreadful disease. If your sister is declared healthy and unmarked, a letter from the sovereign will have her removed from the quarter within a day.’

This solution seemed reasonable, and I decided to convey it to Mariam, in the most confident manner to give her new hope. Harun asked if he could accompany me. I said ‘yes’ immediately, not without some surprise.

Mariam claimed to be happy to see me return in good health after such a long journey, but she seemed even further away than at our last meeting, and deathly pale. I looked hard at her.

‘And how do you feel?’

‘Much better than most of my neighbours.’

‘I had hoped that you would be free when I came back.’

‘I had too much to do here.’

The bitter sarcasm which had so exasperated me two years earlier was even more pronounced.

‘Do you remember my oath?’

‘If you keep to it, if you do not marry, I shall have neither children nor nephews.’

Harun was standing behind me, looking now at the stream, now at the guard. He had only given my sister a timid and furtive greeting, and was giving the impression of not paying attention to what we were saying. Suddenly he cleared his throat noisily and looked straight into Mariam’s eyes:

‘If you react in this way, if you let yourself give way to discouragement, you will come out of here insane, and rescuing you will be pointless. Your brother has come to bring you good news, the result of his efforts at the palace.’

At his words she calmed herself immediately and listened to me without a trace of mockery or sarcasm.

‘When shall I be examined?’

‘Very soon. Be always ready.’

‘I am still healthy. They will not find the smallest mark.’

‘I have no doubt. All will be well!’

As we were leaving that accursed place, I looked at Harun beseechingly:

‘Do you think she will ever leave?’

Instead of replying, he walked on, gazing at the ground with a pensive air for several minutes. Suddenly, he stood still, pressed his hands to his face and then spread them out, his eyes still closed.

‘Hasan, I have made my decision. I want Mariam to be my wife, the mother of my children.’

The Year of the Maristan

913 A.H.

13 May 1507 — 1 May 1508

In the hospice of Fez there are six nurses, a maintenance man, twelve attendants, two cooks, five refuse collectors, a porter, a gardener, a director, an assistant and three secretaries, all decently paid, as well as a large number of sick people. But, as God is my witness, there is not a single doctor. When a sick person arrives, he is put into a room, with someone to look after him, but without receiving any treatment at all, until he either dies or is cured.

None of the sick there is from Fez itself, since the people of Fez prefer to take care of themselves at home. The only people from the city in the hospice are madmen, for whom several rooms are set aside. Their feet are always kept in chains, for fear that they might otherwise do some damage. Their ward is at the end of a corridor whose walls are strengthened with thick joists, and only the more experienced attendants dare to go near them. The one who gives them their meals is armed with a stout stick, and if he sees that one of them is excited, he gives him a good beating which either calms him down or knocks him out.

When I began working at the maristan I was warned very strongly about these unfortunates. I was supposed never to speak to them, or even to show that I acknowledged their presence. However, some of them made me feel very sorry for them, especially one old man, who was thin and half bald, who passed his time in prayer and chanting, and used to embrace his children tenderly when they came to see him.

One evening I had stayed late at my office to recopy the pages of a register over which I had unintentionally spilt a cup of syrup. As I was leaving I cast my eyes in this man’s direction. He was weeping, leaning on his elbows at the narrow window of his room. When he saw me he hid his eyes. I took a step towards him. He began to tell me, quite calmly, that he was a God-fearing businessman who had been confined to the hospital because a jealous rival had denounced him, and that his family were unable to free him because his enemy was powerful and well received at the palace.

His story could not fail to move me. I came closer to him, murmuring some words of comfort and promising to make enquiries of the director the very next morning. When I was quite close to him he suddenly leapt at me, grabbed hold of my clothes with one hand and smeared dirt on my face with the other, shrieking with demented laughter. The attendants who rushed to my aid reproached me vigorously for my folly.

Very fortunately the hammam near the maristan was still open for men at that hour. I spent an hour there scrubbing my face and my body, and then went to Harun’s house. I was still extremely perturbed.

‘It has taken a madman to make me understand at last!’

My words were jerky and confused.

‘I understand why all our efforts end in failure, and why the chancellor has such a suave voice and such an affected smile when he receives me, and why he always makes promises he does not keep.’

My friend remained impassive. I took another breath.

‘There are thousands of people in this city interceding on behalf of a relative who they claim is innocent but who is often a savage murderer, or who they claim is sane but who is often just like the madman who deceived me, or who they claim is cured of leprosy when he is almost eaten away by the disease. How is it possible to distinguish between them?’

I was waiting for the Ferret to contradict me, as he usually did. But he did not. He remained silent, deep in thought, his brow furrowed, and his reply was also a question.

‘What you say is true. What should we do next?’

His reaction was strange. When Mariam was merely the sister of his friend he did not hesitate to take initiatives, regardless of my misgivings, appealing to Astaghfirullah, for instance, and deliberately causing a scandal. Now he seemed less sure of himself, although he was now the one of us most directly concerned about the fate of the fair prisoner. Indeed, after having intimated to me that he intended to marry my sister, Harun had not wasted any time. He had sought out my father since his return from the countryside in order to pay him a visit, wearing his Friday clothes, and ask him formally for Mariam’s hand in marriage. In other circumstances Muhammad the weigh-master would have considered that a porter with no other fortune than the good name of his guild would have been a very poor match. But Mariam was already in her nineteenth year, an age at which of all the women of Fez only a few slaves or prostitutes would not yet have celebrated their marriages. Harun was an unhoped-for saviour, and were it not for the loss of dignity it might entail, my father would have kissed the hands of this heroic fiancé. Several days later the marriage contract was drawn up by two lawyers; it stipulated that the bride’s father was to hand over one hundred dinars to his future son-in-law. The very next day Warda went to bring the news to Mariam, who started to hope again and smile once more for the first time since her confinement.

But it was Harun who lost all his jollity, cheerfulness and sparkle, from one day to the next. His face always wore a worried look. That evening I finally understood the thoughts which were running through my friend’s head. He insisted on having my opinion.

‘But even so we can’t leave Mariam with the lepers for ever! Since all our efforts have been to no avail, what do you think we should do next?’

I had no idea, and this made me reply even more angrily:

‘Every time I think of her, the victim of blackguardly injustice for four years, I want to seize the Zarwali by the throat and strangle him, as well as his accomplice the shaikh of the lepers.’

I suited the action to my words. Harun seemed not the slightest impressed:

‘Your stone is too big!’

I did not understand. He repeated with a tone of impatience:

‘I tell you that your stone is too big, far too big. When I am in the street with the other porters I often see people shouting, insulting each other and attracting a crowd around themselves. Sometimes one of them picks up a stone. If it is the size of a plum or a pear, someone must hold his hand back, because he risks giving his adversary a bloody wound. But, on the other hand, if he takes hold of a stone the size of a water-melon you can go away in peace, because he has no intention of throwing it; he just wants to feel a weight in his bare hands. Threatening to strangle the Zarwali and the shaikh of the lepers is a stone the size of a minaret, and if I was in the street I should go off shrugging my shoulders.’

Without seeming to notice that I was blushing with embarrassment, Harun continued, spacing out his words as if passing each one of them through a filter:

‘There must be a way of helping Mariam to escape without risking her recapture and without her family being worried. Of course she will not be able to live in Fez for several years at least, and since I intend to marry her, I must run away with her.’

I had know him long enough over the years to realize that a plan was bubbling away in his head and that he would not unfold it to me prematurely. However, I was unable to understand what motivated him to act in this way. In the name of our friendship I had to speak to him about it.

‘How can you forsake your city, your family, your guild of your own free will, to go and live in exile, like a criminal, fleeing from one mountain to another for fear of being clapped in irons, all this for a girl to whom you’ve only ever once said a word in your life?’

The Ferret put the palm of his right hand on the top of my head, as he used to do when we were younger before telling me a secret.

‘There is something which I could not tell you before, and even today I want you to swear that you will not be offended by it.’

I swore, fearing the worst, some sort of dishonour for my family. We were sitting on the ground in the patio of his house. The Ferret was leaning his back against the little stone fountain in which the water was not running that day.

‘Do you remember the time that I went secretly into the women’s hammam?’

Seven or eight years had gone by, I think, but I still remembered the merest wink, the slightest heartbeat. I assented with a smile.

‘Then you will also remember that at the time, in spite of your pestering, I had obstinately refused to tell you what I had seen. I went in, draped in a veil, with a scarf tied round my head. I had wooden sandals on my feet and I was wrapped in a towel. I was eleven years old then, and there was no hair on my body to betray my sex. I walked around inside until I came across Warda and Mariam. Mariam’s eyes met mine, and I knew immediately that she had recognized me. She had often seen us together, so she could not be mistaken. I was paralysed, waiting to hear a scream, to be roughly handled, and have blows rained upon me. But your sister did not cry out. She took up her towel, nimbly wrapped it round her body, while a conspiratorial smile formed on her lips. Then, on some pretext or other, she led her mother into another room. I hastened to leave, still not quite able to believe that I was safe. That day, I regretted that Mariam was not my sister; it was only three years later that I rejoiced that I was only the friend of her brother, and could dream of her as a man dreams of a woman. It was then that misfortunes began to rain down upon the head of the girl with the silent eyes.’

Until that point the Ferret’s face was radiant with happiness, but it darkened at the last sentence. Before it lit up once more.

‘Even if the whole world had betrayed her, the memory of the hammam would have prevented me from abandoning her. Today, she is my wife, I shall save her as she saved me, and we shall make verdant the land that makes us welcome.’

Harun came round to see me again a week later to say farewell. His entire luggage consisted of two woollen purses, the larger one containing the gold of the dowry, the other his modest savings.

‘The smaller one is for the guard of the quarter, so that he will close his eyes while Mariam escapes; the other is for us, enough to live on for more than a year, with the protection of the Most High.’

They would go to the Rif, hoping to stay for some time in the mountains of the Bani Walid, the most valiant and most generous men in the kingdom. They were also very rich, since although their lands were fertile, they refused to pay a single dirham in taxes. Anyone unjustly banished from Fez knew that he could always find refuge and hospitality among them, even that some of his expenses would be defrayed, and that if his enemies sought to pursue him, the inhabitants of the mountain would attack them.

I held Harun tightly to me, but he quickly tore himself away, eager to discover what Destiny had in store for him.

The Year of the Bride

914 A.H.

2 May 1508 — 20 April 1509

In that year the first of my marriages was celebrated, desired by my uncle as he lay dying as well as by my mother, anxious to separate me from Hiba, who always had the most tender of my caresses although she had given me neither son nor daughter in three years of love. So, as custom demanded, I had to place my foot solemnly upon the foot of Fatima, my cousin, at the moment when she entered the bridal chamber, while a woman of the neighbourhood waited at the door for the linen stained with blood, which she would then brandish, laughing and triumphant, under the noses of the guests, proof of the virginity of the bride and the virility of the husband, the sign that the festivities could begin.

The ritual seemed to last for ever. Since early morning, dressmakers, hairdressers and depilators, including the irreplaceable Sarah, had been bustling around Fatima, painting her cheeks red, her hands and her feet black, with one pretty triangular design between her eyebrows and another beneath her lower lip, elongated like the leaf of an olive tree. Made up in this fashion she was seated on a platform, so that all could admire her, while those who had dressed and prepared her were given a meal. Since the end of the afternoon, friends and relations had gathered outside Khali’s house. Finally the bride departed, more troubled than troubling, almost stumbling in her dress at each step, and then got into a kind of octagonal wooden coffer covered with silks and brocades which four young porters, friends of Harun, lifted on their shoulders. The procession then set off, preceded by flutes, trumpets and tambourines as well as a great number of burning torches brandished by the employees of the maristan and my old friends from the college. The latter walked along at my side in front of the coffer on which the bride was sitting, while behind her were the husbands of her four sisters.

We had first paraded noisily through the suqs — the shops were already shut and the streets were emptying — before halting in front of the Great Mosque, where a few friends had sprinkled us with rose water. At this stage my oldest brother-in-law, who was taking my uncle’s place for the ceremony, had whispered to me that the time had come for me to leave. I had embraced him before running off towards my father’s house where a room had been decorated for the night. It was there that I had to wait.

The procession caught up with me an hour later. Fatima had been entrusted to my mother, and it was she who led her by the hand to the threshold of the room, where, before leaving us, Salma reminded me with a wink what I was supposed to do first of all if I wished immediately to assert my authority as a man. So I stepped heavily on the foot of my wife, which was admittedly protected by her wooden shoe, and then the door closed. Outside there were shouts and laughter, some quite close by, as well as the clattering of saucepans, as the first marriage feast should be prepared while the marriage was being consummated.

Draped in red and gold, Fatima stood before me, deathly pale in spite of the make up, without moving, petrified, suffocating, doing her best to smile, her eyes so pitiful that I drew her towards me with a spontaneous movement, which was less of an embrace than an attempt to reassure her. She buried her head against my breast and burst into tears. I shook her to keep her quiet, fearing that she could be heard. She collapsed against me, gradually choking back her tears, but her body was trembling, and she sank slowly to the ground. Soon she was no more than a bundle of sticks awkwardly held up by my arms.

My friends had warned me that on the wedding night many girls did their utmost to appear more ignorant, surprised or alarmed than they really were, but no one had ever mentioned fainting. Moreover, I had often heard it said at the maristan that widows or women who had long been deserted suffered from fainting fits which some people put down to hysteria, but never girls of fifteen, and never in the arms of their husbands. I shook Fatima and tried to help her up again; her head fell back, her eyes closed, her lips half open. I began to tremble in my turn, less, I must confess, from concern for my cousin than out of the fear of the ridicule which would cling to me indelibly until the end of my days, if I were suddenly to open the door and shout: ‘Help! The bride has fainted!’

I had no other recourse than to carry my cousin to the bed, lay her on her back, take off her shoes, and slacken the scarf tied under her chin. She looked as if she had merely fallen asleep, and her breathing, which had previously been spasmodic, became regular. I sat down beside her, thinking up ways to extricate myself from the situation. I could cut my finger with a pin, and smear the linen with blood, and forget about the marriage night until the next day. But did I know how to soak the white material in the way it ought to be done, without the woman at the door, who had witnessed countless deflorations, discovering the trick? I cast desperate, beseeching, woeful glances at Fatima. Her glowing red hair was spread out on the bolster. I passed my hand over her hair, seizing a clump in my hand, then let go with a sigh, before slapping her cheeks, faster and faster, harder and harder. A smile hovered on her lips, but she did not emerge from her slumber. I shook her shoulder, vigorously, until she began to toss about. She seemed not to be aware of it; the smile did not even leave her face.

Exhausted, I lay down, stretched out, my fingers brushing against the candlestick. For a brief moment I thought of snuffing it out, and going to sleep as well, come what may. But, a minute later, a scratching at the door, impatient, fortuitous, or perhaps merely imagined, recalled me to my duties. The noises outside suddenly seemed more urgent, more insistent. I did not know how long I had already spent in this nightmarish room. I put my hand to Fatima again, feeling for her heartbeats, and shut my eyes. A faint smell of ambergris brought back the negro music of Timbuktu to my ears. Hiba was before me in the moonlight; her dance ended, her arms opened, her skin sleek and smooth. And perfumed with the ambergris of the sea. My lips trembled at the b of her name, my arms repeated the same embraces, my body found once more the same distractions, the same landmarks, the same hiding places.

Fatima became a woman in her absence. I opened the door, the woman from next door seized the precious linen and began her ululations, the guests bustled about, the music began to rise, and the ground began to vibrate beneath the feet of the dancers. It was not long before someone came to call me to come quickly and join in the feast. I had to; I had all the time in the world to see my wife, since, according to tradition, I should not leave the house for seven days.

When I awoke, my bride was standing in the courtyard, leaning against the fountain, nonchalantly watching my mother, crouching on the ground two paces away from her, who was busily polishing an immense copper dish in preparation for the second feast of the wedding, which would take place that evening, to which, according to the custom, only women were invited, and at which only servant girls sang and danced. Salma was speaking in a low voice, with a worried air. When I came nearer, she stopped speaking abruptly and began to shine the dish a little more energetically. Then Fatima turned round and saw me. She was smiling blissfully, as if we had spent the most marvellous of nights of love together. Her feet were bare, she was wearing the same dress as the previous day, slightly crumpled, with the same make up, a little less obvious. I made an obviously disenchanted face before going to sit in the salon next to my father, who embraced me proudly and called in a loud voice for a basket of fruit. My mother brought it to us, and as she put it down said quietly into my ear in a reproachful tone:

‘Be patient with the poor girl!’

In the evening I made a brief appearance at the women’s feast, a chance to see the outline of Hiba, of whom I was to be deprived for a week more. As I left, Fatima followed me to the bedroom, no doubt at my mother’s prompting. She took my hand and covered it with kisses.

‘I displeased you last night.’

Without answering, I lay down on the left-hand side of the bed and closed my eyes. She leant over me and said in a hesitant, stammering voice that was barely audible:

‘Don’t you want to visit my little sister?’

I jumped up, incredulous. Hiba had indeed mentioned this expression to me in a mocking voice, used by certain women of this country to refer to the intimate parts of their bodies. But how could I have expected to hear it from the mouth of Fatima, who, as recently as the previous day, had fainted at the mere sight of the marriage chamber? I turned towards her. Her two hands were flat against her face.

‘Who has taught you to say that to me?’

She was ashamed, frightened, weeping. I reassured her with a prolonged laugh and held her against me. She was forgiven.

The week ended with a final banquet, for which I received from my four brothers-in-law the gift of four whole sheep as well as earthenware vessels full of sweets. The next day, I left the house at last, and headed straight to the suq to perform the last act of the endless marriage ceremony; to buy some fish and give them to my mother, so that she should throw them at the feet of the bride, wishing her health and fertility.

Before the end of that year, Fatima was pregnant, and I immediately found it necessary to find some better-paid work than my job at the maristan. The daughter of a bookseller, my mother encouraged me to launch out into business, which displeased me not at all because of my taste for travelling. She accompanied her advice with a prediction which made me smile at the time:

‘Many men discover the whole world while seeking only to make their fortune. But as for you, my son, you will stumble on your treasure as you seek to discover the world.’

The Year of Fortune

915 A.H.

21 April 1509 — 9 April 1510

Fatima bore me a daughter in the last days of the summer; I called her Sarwat, Fortune, for that year saw the beginning of my prosperity. If the latter was short-lived, I could not complain, as it was taken away from me just as it had been given to me, by the sovereign will of the Most High; my only contributions were my ignorance, my arrogance and my passion for adventure.

Before committing myself to a career in business I paid a visit to Master Thomasso de Marino, the old Genoese whom I had got to know on the way to Timbuktu, and who, of all the foreign merchants living in Fez, was the most respected for his wisdom and straightforwardness. I wanted to ask his advice, and perhaps work with him for a while, or go with him on some journey. Although bedridden, he received me with great friendliness, recalling with me the memory of my uncle as well as more agreeable recollections of our caravan.

The reason for my visit sunk him into deep thought. His eyes seemed to be sizing me up, moving from my green felt hat to my carefully trimmed beard, and then to my embroidered jacket, with its wide and imposing sleeves; his white eyebrows seemed like scales, weighing for and against. Then, after having apparently put aside his hesitations, he made me an unexpected offer:

‘Heaven has sent you to me, my noble friend, because I have just received from Italy and Spain two large orders for black burnouses, one of a thousand items and the other of eight hundred, for delivery at the beginning of autumn. As you know, the most appreciated burnouses in Europe come from Tafza, where I would go to look for them myself if I were in better health.’

He explained the transaction to me: I would receive two thousand dinars, one thousand eight hundred to buy the stock, at one dinar per burnous at the wholesale price, the remainder for my expenses and my trouble. If I managed to get a better price from the suppliers, my share would be greater; if I had to buy more dearly, I would be obliged to pay out of my own pocket.

Without really knowing whether I had made a good bargain or a bad one, I accepted eagerly. He gave me the money in gold pieces, lent me a horse, two servants and nine mules for the journey and counselled speediness and prudence.

In order not to leave with the pack animals empty, I had collected all the money that I could lay my hands on, my own savings, those of my mother, and a part of Khali’s bequest to Fatima, which amounted to a total of four hundred dinars. With this I bought four hundred of the most ordinary sabres, of exactly the same sort as the Fassis were wont to sell to the inhabitants of Tafza. However, when I proudly told my father of my bulky acquisition on my return from the suq, he almost tore his robes from consternation and despair:

‘You will need at least a year to get rid of so many sabres in a little town! And when people know that you are in a hurry to return, they will buy them off you at the lowest possible price.’

His words made sense, but it was too late to withdraw, since I had gone round all the artisans to collect my consignment together, which I had paid for in cash in full. I had to resign myself to coming back the loser from my first business journey, telling myself that no one could learn a profession without bruising either his hands or his purse.

The evening of my departure my mother, panic-stricken, came to tell me the rumours she had heard in the hammam. Serious incidents were taking place at Tafza; there was talk of an expedition led by the army of Fez to re-establish order there. But instead of discouraging me, her words kindled my curiosity, so much so that I left the next day before sunrise, without even having tried to find out about it. Ten days later I arrived at my destination without incident, only to find the place seething with unrest.

I had not yet entered the town gate when the people congregated around me, some shouting at me aggressively, others questioning me insistently. I tried to keep calm; no, I had not seen the troops from Fez coming in this direction; yes, I had heard rumours, but I had not paid any attention to them. While I was vainly endeavouring to force my way through the crowd, a tall man appeared, dressed like a prince. The crowd parted in silence to let him through. He greeted me with an elegant movement of his head and introduced himself as the elected chief of the town. He explained to me that Tafza had existed hitherto as a republic, governed by a council of notables, not under the protection of any sultan, nor any nomadic tribe, paying neither taxes nor ransoms, maintaining its prosperity by the sale of woollen burnouses, which were valued the world over. But ever since a bloody conflict had broken out between two rival clans, a succession of deadly fights and gang battles had taken place, to such an extent that in order to stop the slaughter the council had decided to ban the members of the clan which had started the fighting from the town. In order to take vengeance, those who had been expelled appealed to the sovereign of Fez, promising that they would hand over the town to him. Hence the townspeople feared an imminent attack. I thanked this man for his explanation, stated my name and the reason for my visit, repeated to him the little that I had already heard about the incidents of Tafza, adding that I did not intend to linger there, only long enough to sell my sabres, purchase my burnouses and go back again.

The notable asked me to forgive his countrymen’s apprehension and ordered the crowd to let me through, explaining in Berber that I was neither a spy nor a messenger from Fez, but a simple Andalusian merchant working on behalf of the Genoese. I was then able to enter the city and make for the hostelry. However, before I could get there, I saw two richly dressed men in my way, talking loudly to each other while watching me closely. When I drew level with them, they were both talking at once; each begged me to do them the honour of staying in his house, promising also to take charge of my servants and my animals. As I did not wish to offend either of them, I refused both invitations, thanking them for their hospitality, and went to the hostelry, which was fairly uncomfortable in comparison with those of Fez, but I did not complain, since I had known no other roof than the starry vault for several nights.

I had barely settled in when the biggest fortunes in the town began to parade through my room. A rich businessman suggested I should barter my four hundred sabres for eight hundred burnouses. I was going to accept, when another merchant bounced up to my ear and quietly suggested a thousand. Having no experience, it took me some time to understand the reason for all this concern: at the approach of the hostile army the inhabitants thought only of getting rid of all their stock, to protect it from the pillage which would certainly follow the capture of the town. In addition, the arms which I was carrying could not have arrived at a more opportune moment, since the whole population was preparing to face the attackers. So I could dictate my own conditions; in exchange for my sabres I therefore required one thousand eight hundred burnouses, not one less; after some discussion, one of the merchants, a Jew, eventually accepted. So, the very day of my arrival I already had all the stock requested by Master de Marino in my possession without having spent any of the money which he had entrusted to me.

Having no more to sell, I made ready to leave the next day. But, like a lover in the middle of the night, fortune had made up her mind not to let go of me. Once more the great merchants of Tafza came to seek me out, some suggesting indigo or musk, others slaves, leather or cordovan, everything sold at a tenth of its proper price. I had to find forty mules to carry everything. The figures skipped about in my head; from my very first deal I was rich.

On my third day of business the criers announced the arrival of the army of Fez. It consisted of two thousand light cavalry, five hundred crossbowmen, and two hundred mounted pistoleers. Seeing them arrive, the terrified inhabitants decided to treat with them. And, since I was the only Fassi in the town, I was begged to act as intermediary, which, I must say, seemed most amusing. From our first meeting, the officer commanding the royal army took a liking to me. He was an educated and cultivated man, assigned, however, to carry out the most frightful task: to hand over the town and its notables to the vengeance of the opposing clan. I tried to dissuade him.

‘Those who have been banished are traitors. Today, they have handed over the town to the sultan; tomorrow they will give it to his enemies. It is far better to negotiate with brave men who know the price of devotion, sacrifice and fidelity.’

I could see in his eyes that he was convinced by my reasoning, but his orders were clear: to gain possession of the town, to punish those who had borne arms against the sultan and hand over authority to the head of the exiled clan, with a garrison to assist him. However, there was one argument which he could not set aside:

‘How much does the sultan hope to gain in exchange for his protection?’

‘The exiled clan has promised twenty thousand dinars a year.’

I made a little calculation in my head.

‘There are thirty notables on the town council, and a further twelve rich Jewish merchants. If each one of them were to pay two thousand dinars, that would make eighty-four thousand —’

The officer interrupted me:

‘The annual income of the whole kingdom barely comes to three hundred thousand dinars. How do you imagine that a little town like this one could collect such a sum?’

‘There are undreamed-of riches in this country, but the people hide them and do not seek to make them bear fruit; they fear being stripped of them by the rulers. Why do you think the Jews of this country are accused of being miserly? Because the least expenditure, the slightest ostentation, puts their fortune and their lives in danger. For the same reason so many of our cities are dying and the kingdom is becoming impoverished.’

As the sovereign’s representative the man I was speaking to could not let me speak in this way in his presence. He asked me to come to the point:

‘If you promise the notables of Tafza that their lives will be spared and the customs of the city respected, I will persuade them to hand over that amount.’

Having obtained the officer’s word, I went to see the notables and informed them of the agreement. Seeing them hesitate, I told them that a letter had just arrived from Fez bearing the sultan’s seal, demanding the immediate execution of all the leading figures in the town. They began to wail and to lament, but, as I have recounted in my Description of Africa, within two days the eighty-four thousand dinars were deposited at the officer’s feet. I had never seen such a huge quantity of gold, and I learned afterwards from the mouth of the sultan himself that neither he nor his father had ever possessed such a sum in their treasuries.

When I left Tafza, I received valuable presents from the notables, happy to have saved their lives and their town, as well as a sum of money from the officer, who promised to tell the monarch about the role I had played in this strange business. He also gave me a detachment of twelve soldiers who accompanied my caravan back to Fez.

Before even going home, I went to see Master de Marino. I gave him the consignment he had ordered, and returned him his servants, his horse and his mules. I also gave him presents worth two hundred dinars and told him my adventure without omitting a single detail, showing him all the goods I had amassed for myself; he said it was worth fifteen thousand dinars at least.

‘It has taken me thirty years to collect such a sum,’ he said to me without the slightest trace of jealousy or envy.

I had the feeling that the whole world belonged to me, that I needed nothing and no one, that henceforth fortune would obey me implicitly. I was no longer walking, I was flying. As I took my leave of the Genoese, he shook my hand for a long time, leaning forwards slightly; I stood up straight, my head high, my nose raised. The old man held my hand firmly in his, longer than usual, then, without straightening himself up, looked into my eyes:

‘Fortune has smiled upon you, my young friend, and I am as happy for you as if you were my own son. But be on your guard, as riches and power are the enemies of sound judgement. When you see a field of corn, do you not see that some ears are straight and others bent? It is because the straight ones are empty! So keep that humility which has led you towards me, and which has thence opened to you, by the will of the Most High, the paths to fortune.’

In that year took place the most effective attack ever launched against the Maghrib by the Castilians. Two of the main coastal cities were taken, Oran during the month of Muharram and Bougie in Ramadan. Tripoli in Barbary would fall in the following year.

None of these three cities has been recaptured since by the Muslims.

The Year of the Two Palaces

916 A.H.

10 April 1510 — 30 March 1511

I have made a rose flower upon your cheeks,

I have made a smile open out upon your lips.

Do not push me away, for our Law is clear:

Every man has the right to pick

What he himself has planted.

I had from that time a court poet, fond of my wine and of my servant girls, greedy for my gold, ready to sing the praises of my visitors and above all of myself, at each feast, each time a caravan returned, sometimes even simply at meal times, when friends, relations, attentive employees, busy merchants, passing ulama, and masons engaged in the construction of my palace were gathered around me.

Since my journey to Tafza my fortune had multiplied, my agents were travelling all over Africa, from Badis to Sijilmassa, from Tlemcen to Marrakesh, laden with dates, indigo, henna, oil and textiles; I took part myself only in the larger caravans. The rest of the time I ran my business from my diwan, and used to supervise, a cane in my hand, the construction of my new residence, on a hill not far from my uncle’s house, where I had settled as master after the birth of my daughter, but which day by day seemed more confined, more modest, more unworthy of my fortune. I waited impatiently for the day when I would be able to live in my palace, my superb incomparable palace which I dreamed about and talked about incessantly, and for whose construction I had employed the best artisans, charged with the task of carrying out to perfection each of my costly desires: ceilings of carved wood, arches covered with mosaics, fountains in black marble, without thinking of the expense. When, sometimes, a figure caused me to hesitate, my poet was there to pronounce the words: ‘At the age of twenty, wisdom is not to be wise.’ Of course he was carving these words with my gold.

The day when the building work began was one of the most magnificent in my life. At dusk, surrounded by a horde of courtiers, I went to deposit some precious talismans and some child’s hair, cut carefully from my daughter’s head, at the four corners of the new building; I had suddenly become very susceptible to magic and superstitions, and I was the first to be amazed at this. This is probably the fate of rich and powerful men: aware that their wealth owes less to their merits than to luck, they begin to court the latter like a mistress and venerate it like an idol.

Throughout the night, Khali’s house resounded to the sound of an Andalusian orchestra, and trembled under the muffled steps of the dancers, all slavegirls, two of whom had been bought specially for the occasion. I forbade Hiba to dance, because since Timbuktu I could never bring myself to allow her to display her intoxicating charms in front of others. I made her sit close to me, on the softest of cushions, and put my arm around her; Fatima retired early to her room, as was fitting.

I was happy to see Hiba happy and carefree for the first time for months; she felt humiliated by the birth of my daughter, and one night, going into her room, I came upon her wiping away a tear with the end of her scarf; when I ran my fingers through her hair, stealthily caressing her ear, she pushed me away with a gentle but firm hand, murmuring in a sorrowful voice which was unfamiliar to me:

‘In my country, when a woman is sterile, she does not wait until her husband repudiates her or abandons her. She goes away, hides herself, and makes herself forgotten.’

I tried to adopt a playful tone, the way she normally spoke herself:

‘How do you know that you won’t give me a fine boy next Ramadan?’

She did not smile.

‘Even before I came to puberty, the soothsayer of my tribe said that I should never become pregnant. I had not believed it, but I have been with you for five years, and you have had a child by another.’

Not knowing what else to say, I drew her close to me; she freed herself, her face twisted with pain.

‘Would you agree to set me free?’

‘To me you are my beloved, not my slave. But I don’t want you to stop belonging to me.’

I put my hands tightly around her wrists as if they were claws to draw her palms to my lips, one after the other.

‘Have you forgotten our night at Timbuktu, have you forgotten all our nights together, and our promises never to leave one another?’

A cool breeze swept in through the open window, blowing out the candle in the bronze holder. It was dark and gloomy, and I could no longer see Hiba’s eyes. Her voice came to me from afar, shuddering, like some plaintive cry from the desert.

‘Often, lovers hold each other by the hand and dream together of happiness to come. But as long as they live their happiness will never be greater than at that moment when their hands were clasped together and their dreams melted into one.’

Eventually she opened her arms to me that night; out of weariness, duty, remembrance, I do not know. But since then a light veil of sadness had never left her eyes.

So I was happy to see her laugh again and clap her hands in time to the music of the Andalusian orchestra. In the middle of the meal my poet stood up to declaim, from memory, verses he had composed in my honour. From the first couplet, my palace was already the Alhambra and its gardens those of Eden.

‘May you enter there, on the blessed day of its completion, your heir seated upon your shoulders!’

A shiver from Hiba ran through my arm which was around her. She sighed in my ear:

‘God, how I should like to give him to you, that heir!’

As if he had heard her, the poet looked towards her with compassion as well as desire, and interrupting the flow of his verse, improvised two lines, uttered in a singing voice:

Love is thirst at the edge of a well

Love is flower and not fruit.

With a spontaneous movement I picked up my purse and threw it towards him; it must have contained more than fifty dinars. But the smile which radiated from Hiba’s face had no price. I spent the whole night gathering its fruit.

Six months after this banquet, I had a visit from an officer of the royal guard; the sultan wished me to see him that very day, just after the siesta. I put on suitable clothes and left for the palace, intrigued, but not without a slight pricking of unease.

The sovereign welcomed me with a torrent of courtesies, and his familiars imitated him, fawning and grimacing. He recalled my first visit on my return from Timbuktu, and my mediation at Tafza, which had brought into his treasury in that year more gold than did all the city of Fez. After having sung the praises of my uncle, my ancestors, and of Granada, he began to extol my prosperity, my eloquence and my brilliance to his companions, as well as my vast knowledge, acquired in the most prestigious schools in Fez.

‘Didn’t you know Ahmad the Lame at the madrasa?’

‘Indeed, my lord.’

‘I have been told that you were one of his best friends, the only one he would listen to with respect and attention.’

I immediately understood the reason for the summons and the unexpected praise. Ahmad was beginning to assume some importance, and many young students at Fez and Marrakesh had left their homes to take up arms at his side in the struggle against the slow invasion by the Portuguese which was threatening the whole Atlantic coast. The Lame One was travelling up and down the country with his supporters, sharply criticizing the Sultan of Fez, who was becoming worried by this and wished to parley with the dangerous rebel. Using me as mediator.

I decided to take advantage of the occasion to settle some old accounts which were close to my heart.

‘Sharif Ahmad often came to my house, when we were at college. He proved himself a real brother to me when my sister was imprisoned in the lepers’ quarter, may God efface remembrance of it from my memory and from hers!’

The sovereign cleared his throat to hide his embarrassment.

‘What became of that unfortunate woman?’

‘A worthy young man, a porter, took her hand in marriage, and then took refuge somewhere with her, without daring to give us any news of them, as if they were criminals.’

‘Do you want a safe-conduct for them? A pardon? My secretary will prepare one.’

‘Your goodness has no limits! May God grant you long life!’

I had to utter these hallowed formulae, but I was determined not to let go. I leaned towards the monarch’s ear.

‘My friend Sharif Ahmad was deeply concerned at the unjust fate suffered by my sister, victim of the hateful vengeance of the Zarwali.’

‘I have been told of the role played by that man.’

I was greatly surprised to know that the sovereign had been told of these matters in detail; I forebore from asking him why he had done nothing at the time, since I wanted to keep him on my side. Thus I continued, still in a low voice:

‘In Ahmad’s eyes, the Zarwali had become the example of the depravity, which, he said, is corrupting the morals of the people of Fez. I have even heard that he had mentioned this man frequently in his harangues. May God guide him along the way of Truth,’ I added cautiously, not wishing to seem to share the Lame One’s opinions.

The sultan thought to himself and hesitated. Then, without saying anything, he adjusted his turban and sat up straight on his throne.

‘I want you to go to see Ahmad.’

I inclined my head to show I was listening. He continued:

‘You must try and calm him down, to rekindle in him more cordial feelings towards me, our dynasty, and the city of Fez, may God protect her from the unbelievers and the ambitious! I am ready to help this young Sharif, with money and arms, in his struggle against the Portuguese invaders, but I need peace on my flanks if I am to engage in my turn in the fight to defend my kingdom, which is now greatly weakened. Tangier has fallen to the Portuguese, as well as Arzila and Ceuta; Larache, Rabat, Chella and Salé are threatened, Anfa is destroyed and its inhabitants have fled. In the north the Spaniards are occupying the coastal towns one by one.’

He pulled me towards him and lowered his voice. His courtiers drew back, although pricking up their ears imperceptibly.

‘In a few months I am going to send my army against Tangier and Arzila once more, in the hope that this time the Most High will send me victory. I would like to have the Sharif as an ally in this undertaking, and rather than raising the provinces against the Muslim kings, I would like him to attack the Portuguese at the same time as me, because both of us are warriors in the holy war. Can I entrust you with this mission?’

‘I shall do my best, for nothing is dearer to me than the unity of the Muslims. As soon as you give me the command, I shall leave for the Sous to meet Ahmad, and I shall do everything to make him more amenable.’

The sovereign tapped me on the shoulder to show his satisfaction, and asked the captain of the orderlies and the chancellor, the keeper of the royal seal, to approach him.

‘You will send a messenger this very evening to the house of the Zarwali. You will order him to leave our city for at least two years. Tell him that he should go on the pilgrimage, and then return for some time to the village of his birth.’

All the courtiers were listening avidly. In a few hours the rumour was going the rounds of the city, from mouth to mouth. No one would dare to greet the exile, no one would dare to visit him, and it was not long before grass began to grow on the road to his house. I was savouring my just vengeance, little knowing that it would bring down additional unhappiness upon my family.

When I took leave of the sultan, he asked me to return the next day, as he wished to consult me about the financial affairs of the kingdom. Henceforth I was with him every day, attending his audiences, even receiving certain petitions myself, which did not fail to arouse the jealousy of the other dignitaries. But I was quite indifferent to this, because I intended to leave for the Sous in the spring, and when I returned to busy myself with my caravans, and above all with my palace, which was growing large and more beautiful in my head, but which was making little progress on the ground, because the last months of that year had been rainy and cold, and the building site of my dreams was no more than a lake of mud.

The Year of the Lame Sharif

917 A.H.

31 March 1511 — 18 March 1512

That year, according to plan, the Sultan of Fez and the Lame Sharif each launched separate attacks against the Portuguese, the former seeking to recapture Tangier, the latter trying to relieve Agadir. Both were repulsed, with heavy losses, no trace of which can be found in the poems composed in their honour.

I had arranged to be present at the time of these days of fighting, making myself record my impressions in writing each evening. Re-reading them in Rome several years later, I was astonished to see that I had not devoted a single line to the progress of the battles. The only thing to capture my attention was the behaviour of the princes and their courtiers in face of the defeat, behaviour which did not fail to surprise me, although my attendance at court had relieved me of a number of illusions. I will cite a brief extract from my notes by way of illustration.

Written this day, the penultimate day of the month of Rabi‘ al-Awwal 917, corresponding to Wednesday 26 June of the Christian year 1511.

The corpses of the three hundred martyrs fallen before Tangier were brought back to the camp. To flee this sight, which caused my heart to crumble, I went to the sovereign’s tent, where I found him conferring with the keeper of the royal seal. On seeing me, the monarch beckoned me to come nearer. ‘Listen,’ he said to me, ‘to what our chancellor thinks about what has happened today!’ The latter explained for my benefit: ‘I was saying to our master that what has just come to pass is not such a bad thing, because we have shown the Muslims our ardour for the holy war without making the Portuguese feel bruised enough to take vengeance.’ I nodded my head as if in agreement, before asking: ‘And is it true that the dead are counted in hundreds?’ Sensing some recalcitrance or irony, the chancellor said no more, but the sovereign himself took over: ‘There were only a small number of cavalrymen among the dead. The others were only infantrymen, beggars, louts, good for nothings, of whom hundreds of thousands exist in my kingdom, far more than I could ever arm!’ His tone wavered between heedlessness and joviality. I took my leave on some pretext or other and left the tent. Outside, by the light of a torch, some soldiers were gathered around a corpse which had just been brought in. Seeing me come out of the tent, an old soldier with a reddish beard came up to me: ‘Tell the sultan not to weep for those who have died, for their reward is guaranteed on the Day of Judgement.’ His tears flowed, his voice choked abruptly. ‘My eldest son has just died, and I myself am ready to follow him to Paradise when my master commands it!’ He took hold of my sleeves, his hands, clenched with despair, telling a story very different from the one on his lips. A guard came to warn the soldier not to bother the sultan’s adviser. The old man slipped moaning away. I returned to my tent.

I had to leave for the Sous several days later, to meet Ahmad again. I had already met him at the beginning of the year to bring him the sultan’s message of peace. This time, the master of Fez wanted to inform the Lame One that the Portuguese had suffered more losses than ourselves, and that the sovereign was safe and sound, by the grace of the Most High. When I rejoined him, the Lame One had just besieged Agadir, and his men were bubbling over with enthusiasm. Many were students, from all corners of the Maghrib, who longed for martyrdom as they would have languished for a mysterious lover.

After three days the battle was still raging, and spirits had become inflamed with the intoxication of blood, vengeance and sacrifice. Suddenly, to the amazement of everyone, Ahmad ordered that the siege should be lifted. A young man from Oran who criticized the order to retreat in a loud voice was beheaded immediately. When I showed my surprise at seeing the Lame One so easily discouraged, so quick to abandon his undertaking, he shrugged his shoulders:

‘If you want to mix yourself up in politics, and negotiate with princes, you will have to learn to scorn the appearance of things.’

His nervous laugh reminded me of our long conversations in the madrasa. As we were alone under a field tent, I questioned him directly. He took some time to explain to me:

‘The inhabitants of this region want to get rid of the Portuguese who are occupying Agadir and overrunning the plain around it, making it impossible to work in the fields. Since the master of Fez is far away, and the master of Marrakesh never leaves his palace except for his weekly hunting expedition, they have chosen to send for me. They have collected enough money to enable me to equip five hundred cavalrymen and several thousand infantrymen. It was then my duty to launch an attack against Agadir, but I had no desire to take possession of it, as I would have lost half my troops in the battle, and, even worse, I would have been obliged to station the rest of my army here for years to defend the town against the continual assaults of the Portuguese. I have better things to do today. I must mobilize and reunify the whole of the Maghrib, by subterfuge or by my sword, for the struggle against the invader.’

I clenched my fists as hard as I could, telling myself that I should make no reply; but as I was still in my twenties I could not control myself.

‘So,’ I said, spacing out my words as if I was only trying to understand, ‘you want to fight against the Portuguese, but you are not going to throw your troops against them; you need these men who have answered your call for the holy war for your conquest of Fez, Meknes and Marrakesh!’

Without stopping at my sarcasm Ahmad took me by the shoulders:

‘By God, Hasan, you don’t seem to realize what is happening! The whole Maghrib is in uproar. Dynasties will disappear, provinces will be sacked, cities razed to the ground. Observe me, gaze upon me, touch my arms, my turban, because tomorrow you will no longer be able to stare at me nor brush your fingers against my face. In this province, it is I who cut off men’s heads, it is my name that makes the peasants and the people of the cities tremble. Soon, this whole country will bend the knee as I pass, and one day you will tell your sons that the Lame Sharif was your friend, that he came to your house, and that he was worried about the fate of your sister. As for me, I shall remember nothing of it.’

Both of us were trembling, he with impatient rage, me with fear. I felt myself threatened, because, since I had known him before the days of his glory, I was in some sense his property, as beloved, scorned, and loathed as my old patched white coat had been for me on the day that I encountered fortune.

Thus I decided that the time had come to go away from this man, since I could no longer ever speak to him as one equal to another, since I would henceforth have to shed my self-esteem in his antechamber.

Towards the end of the year an event took place whose details I only came to know much later, but which was to have a serious effect on the lives of my family. I shall tell the story as I have been able to reconstruct it, without omitting any detail and leaving it to the care of the Most High to trace the line separating crime and just punishment.

The Zarwali had left on the pilgrimage to Mecca as he had been ordered, and was then going in the direction of the area where he was born, the Bani Zarwal mountains in the Rif, where he was to spend his two years of banishment. He did not return to the province where he had carried out so many exactions in the past without some apprehension, but he had made contact with the principal clan chiefs, distributed some purses, and had seen to it that he was accompanied on the journey by some forty armed guards and by a cousin of the ruler of Fez, an alcoholic and fairly impoverished prince whom he had invited to live with him for a while, hoping in this way to give the mountain people the impression that he was still well in at court.

In order to reach the Bani Zarwal, the caravan had to go through the territory of the Bani Walid. There, on a rocky route between two shepherd villages, the silhouette of an old woman was waiting, a dirty black mass, out of which all that emerged was a palm opened carelessly for the generosity of passers-by. When the Zarwali drew near, riding a horse with a harness, followed by a slave holding an immense umbrella over him, the beggar woman took a step towards him and began to mumble some pious entreaties in a voice that was barely audible. A guard called to her to go away, but his master made him be silent. He needed to re-establish his reputation in the land he had robbed. He took several pieces of gold from his purse and held them out in a conspicuous manner waiting for the old woman to cup her hands to receive them. In a second, the beggar woman gripped the Zarwali by the wrist and pulled him violently. He fell from his horse, with only his right foot staying in the stirrup, so that his body was upside down, his turban brushing the ground, and the point of a dagger at his neck.

‘Tell your men not to move!’ cried the sham beggar woman in a male voice.

The Zarwali complied.

‘Order them to go off as far as the next village!’

A few minutes later only an impatient horse, two motionless men and a curved dagger remained on the mountain road. Slowly, very slowly, they began to move. The highwayman helped the Zarwali to his feet, and then led him, on foot, far off the road, between the rocks like a beast dragging his prey in his jaw, and then disappeared with him. It was only then that the aggressor revealed himself to his trembling victim.

Harun the Ferret had lived for three years in the mountain of the Bani Walid, who protected him as if he was one of their own. Was it only the desire for vengeance which prompted him to act like a bandit, or the fear of seeing his enemy established in the neighbourhood, once more hounding himself, Mariam and the two boys she had already given him? In any case, his method was that of an avenger.

Harun dragged his victim towards the house. Seeing them arrive, my sister was more terrified than the Zarwali; her husband had told her nothing of his plan, nor of the arrival of her former fiancé in the Rif. Besides, she herself had never seen the old man and could not understand what was happening.

‘Leave the children here and follow me,’ ordered Harun.

He went into the bedroom with his prisoner. Having rejoined them, Mariam pulled back the woollen hanging which was used to close the room.

‘Look at this woman, Zarwali!’

Hearing this name, my sister let out an oath. The old man felt the blade of the dagger pressing against his jaw. He flinched imperceptibly, without opening his mouth.

‘Undress, Mariam!’

She looked at the Ferret, her eyes unbelieving, horrified. He shouted again:

‘It is I, Harun, your husband, who order you to undress! Obey!’

The poor girl uncovered her cheeks and her lips, and then her hair, with clumsy and halting movements. The Zarwali closed his eyes and visibly lowered his head. If he were to see the naked body of this woman, he knew what fate would await him.

‘Stand up and open your eyes!’

Harun’s order was accompanied by an abrupt movement of the dagger. The Zarwali straightened up, but kept his eyes hermetically sealed.

‘Look!’ commanded Harun, while Mariam was undoing her clothes with one hand and wiping her tears with the other.

Her dress fell to the ground.

‘Look at that body! Do you see any trace of leprosy? Go and examine her more closely!’

Harun began to shake the Zarwali, pushing him towards Mariam, then pulling him back, before pushing him violently again and then letting go of him. The old man collapsed at the feet of my sister, who cried out.

‘That’s enough, Harun, I implore you!’

She looked with a mixture of fear and compassion at the evil wreck of a man stretched out at her feet. The Zarwali’s eyes were half open, but he no longer moved. Harun went up to him suspiciously, felt his pulse, touched his eyelids, and then stood up, unperturbed.

‘This man deserved to die like a dog at the feet of the most innocent of his victims.’

Before nightfall, Harun had buried the Zarwali under a fig tree, without removing his clothes, his shoes or his jewels.

The Year of the Storm

918 A.H.

19 March 1512 — 8 March 1513

That year, my wife Fatima died in childbirth. For three days I wept more intensely for her death than I had ever loved her in life. The child, a boy, did not live.

A little before the condolence ceremonies of the fortieth day I was summoned urgently to the palace. The sultan had just come back from his latest summer campaign against the Portuguese, and although he had indeed suffered only reverses, I could not understand the impassive faces which greeted me as soon as I had stepped through the main entrance.

The monarch himself showed me no sign of hostility, but his welcome lacked warmth and his voice was sententious.

‘Two years ago you asked for a pardon for your brother-in-law Harun the porter. We granted it. But instead of mending his ways, instead of showing his gratitude, this man never returned to Fez, preferring to live beyond the law in the Rif, waiting for the chance to avenge himself on the old Zarwali.’

‘But there is no proof, Majesty, that Harun was the assailant. The mountains are full of highway robb—’

The chancellor interrupted me, his tone louder than that of the sovereign.

‘The Zarwali’s corpse has just been found. He was buried near a house where your sister and her husband used to live. The soldiers recognized the victim; his jewels had not been taken. Is that the crime of an ordinary highwayman?’

I must say that since the first news of the disappearance of the Zarwali, which had reached Fez four months earlier, although I did not know the slightest compromising detail, the possibility of Harun taking vengeance had crossed my mind. I knew that the Ferret was capable of pursuing his hatreds to the end, and I was not unaware that he had chosen to live in that part of the Rif. Thus it was not easy for me to declare his innocence. However I had to defend him because, coming from me, the least hesitation would have condemned him.

‘His Majesty has too keen a sense of justice to agree to condemn a man without him being able to plead his own case. Particularly when it concerns a respected member of the porters’ guild.’

The sultan seemed irritated:

‘It does not concern your brother-in-law any more, but you, Hasan. It was you who asked for the Zarwali to be banished, it was at your insistence that he was ordered to go into exile in his village, and it was while going there that he was attacked and assassinated. You bear a heavy responsibility.’

While he was speaking, my eyes clouded over, as though they were already resigned to the darkness of a dungeon. I saw my fortune confiscated, my property scattered, my family humiliated, my Hiba sold on some slave market. My legs began to give way, and sweat overcame me, the cold sweat of helplessness. I forced myself to speak, with difficulty, miserably.

‘What am I accused of?’

The chancellor broke in once more, made aggressive by my too evident fear:

‘Of complicity, Granadan! Of having left a criminal at liberty, of having sent his victim to his death, of having held the royal pardon up to ridicule and of having abused the benevolence of Our Master.’

I tried to rally myself:

‘How could I have guessed the moment that the Zarwali would return from his pilgrimage, or the route he would take? As for Harun, I have lost sight of him for more than four years, and I have not even been able to communicate to him the pardon which has been conferred upon him.’

In fact I had sent message after message to the Ferret, but in his obstinacy he had not bothered to reply. However, my defence did not leave the sovereign unmoved, and he adopted a more friendly tone:

‘You are certainly not guilty of anything, Hasan, but appearances indict you. And justice lies in appearances, at least in this world, at least in the eyes of the multitude. At the same time, I cannot forget that in the past, when I have entrusted you with various missions, you have served me faithfully.’

He was silent. In his mind a debate was in progress which I forbore to interrupt, since I felt him slipping towards clemency. The chancellor leaned towards him, evidently seeking to influence him, but the monarch silenced him abruptly, before decreeing:

‘You will not suffer the fate of the murderer, Hasan, but that of the victim. Like the Zarwali, you are condemned to banishment. For two whole years, you will not present yourself any more at this palace, you will not live any more at Fez, nor in any other of the provinces which belong to me. After the twentieth day of the month of Rajab, anyone who sees you within the boundaries of the kingdom will bring you here in chains.’

In spite of the harshness of these last words, I had to make an effort not to make my relief too evident. I had escaped ruin and the dungeon, and a long journey for two years did not frighten me in the least. In addition I was allowed a month to put my affairs in order.

My departure from Fez was flamboyant. I decided to go into exile with my head high, dressed in brocade, not at night but right in the middle of the day, passing through the swarming alleys, followed by an imposing caravan: two hundred camels, loaded with all sorts of merchandise, as well as twenty thousand dinars, a treasure protected by some fifty armed guards, dressed and paid for out of my own pocket, in order to discourage the bandits who roamed the roads. I stopped three times: in front of the madrasa Bu Inania, in the courtyard of the Mosque of the Andalusians, and then in the street of the Potters, near the ramparts, to shower the passers-by with pieces of gold, reaping praise and ovations in return.

I was taking risks by organizing such a show. Some spiteful words whispered into the ear of the chancellor, then into the ear of the monarch, and I could have been arrested, accused of having mocked the royal punishment which had struck me. However I had to run this risk, not only to flatter my self-esteem, but also for my father, my mother, my daughter, for all my family, so that they should not live in disgrace through the period of my banishment.

Of course, I also left them the wherewithal to live safe from need for years, nourished, with servants, and always dressed in new clothes.

When I was two miles from Fez, on the road to Sefrou, sure that all danger had now passed, I went up to Hiba, perched on her mount in a palanquin covered with silk.

‘In the memory of the people of Fez there has never been such a proud retreat,’ I called out contentedly.

She seemed worried.

‘One should not defy the decrees of Destiny. One should not make light of adversity.’

I shrugged my shoulders, not at all impressed.

‘Did I not swear that I would take you back to your tribe? You will be there in a month’s time. Unless you wish to accompany me to Timbuktu, then to Egypt.’

Her only reply was an enigmatic and anguished ‘Insha’ allah’.

Four days later we were going through the pass of the Crows, in weather appreciably colder than I had expected in the month of October. When we had to stop for the night, the guards set up the encampment in a little depression between two hills, hoping in this way to shelter from the freezing winds of the Atlas. They made the tents into a rough circle, with mine rising up in the middle, a real palace of cloth, its sides decorated with artistically calligraphed verses from the Qur’an.

It was there that I was to sleep with Hiba. I awaited this moment with anything but displeasure, but when dusk fell my fair companion obstinately refused to sleep in the tent, without any obvious reason, but with an expression of such fear that I gave up arguing. She had found the entrance to a cave half a mile from the camp. There she would sleep, and nowhere else.

To spend the night in a cave in the Atlas mountains, in the company of hyenas, lions, leopards, perhaps even those huge dragons that were said to be found in such numbers in the neighbourhood, and so poisonous that if a human body came into contact with them it would crumble like clay? It was impossible to instil such fears into Hiba. Only my marvellous tent could terrify her on that cold autumn night.

I had to give in. Overcoming my own misgivings, I let myself be led towards the cave, in spite of the entreaties of the guards and their irreverent winks. Seeing Hiba absurdly weighed down with a large pile of woollen blankets, a lantern, a goatskin full of earners milk and a long bunch of dates made me feel that my respectability was somewhat in jeopardy.

Our shelter turned out to be cramped, more of a hollow in the rock than a real gallery, which reassured me, since I could easily touch the bottom and thus assure myself that no creature was in residence. Apart from my indomitable Hiba, who was behaving more and more strangely, piling up stones to make the entrance smaller, carefully clearing the earth away, wrapping up the goatskin and the dates in wool to protect them from frost, while I, idly mocking, continued to shower her with sarcasm and reproaches, without succeeding either in cheering her up or in irritating her, still less in diverting her from her feverish antlike bustling.

Eventually I became silent. Not from weariness, but because of the wind. From one moment to another it began to blow so strongly that it became deafening. It was accompanied by a thick swirling snowstorm which threatened to surge in spurts into our hideout. Not in the least perturbed, Hiba now surveyed her defence and survival system with an expert eye.

Wonderful Hiba! It was not this occasion that caused me to begin loving her. But she had never been anything else for me than the jewel of my harem, a brilliant, capricious jewel, who knew how to remain elusive from one embrace to the other. However, during the storm in the Atlas a different woman emerged. My only home was in her eyes, her lips, her hands.

I have always been ashamed to say ‘I love you’, but my heart has never been ashamed to love. And I loved Hiba, by Almighty God, dispenser of storms and calm, and I called her ‘My treasure’, without knowing that henceforth she was all that I possessed, and I called her ‘My life’, which was only right, since it was by her intervention that God enabled me to escape death.

The wind howled for two days and two nights, and the snow piled up, very soon blocking the entrance to the cave and keeping us prisoner.

On the third day, some shepherds came to unblock the opening, not to save us, but to shelter in the cave while eating their meal. They did not seem at all pleased to see us, and it did not take long for me to discover the terrible reason for this. Taken by surprise in the storm, guards and camels had perished, swallowed up in the ice. As I came nearer I could see that the goods had fallen victim to marauders, and the bodies to vultures. The encampment of my caravan was nothing but desolation and ruin. I had the presence of mind not to show myself concerned either at the death of the men I had engaged or at the loss of my fortune. I had actually grasped at the first glance that the shepherds were no strangers to looting. Perhaps they had even finished off the wounded. A word from Hiba or myself could have brought us the same fate. Suppressing my rancour, I assumed an air of extreme detachment and said:

‘Such is the judgement of the Most High!’

And, since my listeners had approved this dictum, I carried on:

‘Could we partake of your hospitality while waiting to resume our journey?’

I was well aware of the strange morals of these nomads. They would kill a believer without a moment’s hesitation to seize a purse or a riding animal, but an appeal to their generosity was sufficient to transform them into considerate and attentive hosts. A proverb says that they always have a dagger in their hands, ‘either to slit your throat, or to slit the throat of a sheep in your honour’.

‘Two gold dinars and five silver dirhams! I have counted them over and over again, weighed them and shaken them. That’s all that is left of my huge fortune, all I have left to cross the Sahara as far as the land of the Nile and to begin my life again!’

Hiba met my repeated lamentations with an inscrutable smile, mischievous, mocking and gentle at the same time, which only stirred up my anger.

‘Two gold dinars and five silver dirhams!’ I cried again. ‘And not even an animal to ride, and no clothes to wear except for these which the journey has made filthy!’

‘And what about me, don’t I belong to you? I’m certainly worth fifty pieces of gold, perhaps more.’

The wink which accompanied this remark emptied it of the slightest trace of servility, as well as the landscape in front of us which Hiba was indicating with a lordly air, a field of indigo plants on the banks of the river Dara, at the entrance to the village where she was born.

Some urchins were already running towards us, and then it was the turn of the chief of the tribe, black-skinned, with fine features, his face surrounded with a white beard, who recognized my companion immediately in spite of ten years’ absence, and hugged her to him. He spoke to me in Arabic, saying that he was honoured to offer me the hospitality of his humble dwelling.

Hiba introduced him as her paternal uncle; as for me, I was her master, which was certainly true but of no significance in the circumstances. Was I not alone, impoverished, and surrounded by her people? I was about to say that as far as I was concerned she was no longer a slave, when she silenced me with a frown. Resigning myself to saying nothing further, I found myself taking part, with as much surprise as delight, in the most extraordinary scene.

I had gone with Hiba and her uncle into her uncle’s house, and we were sitting in a long low room on a woollen carpet, around which about twenty people were assembled, the elders of the tribe, their expressions showing no rejoicing at the reunion they were supposed to celebrate.

Hiba began to speak. She described me as an important notable of Fez, well acquainted with the Law and with literature, described the circumstances in which she had been given to me by the lord of Ouarzazate, and gave a graphic and moving account of the snowstorm which had brought about my ruin, finishing with these words:

‘Rather than selling me to some passing merchant, this man undertook to bring me back to my village. I have sworn to him that he will not regret it.’

With an outrageous impudence, she called out to one of the elders:

‘You, Abdullah, how much are you ready to pay to buy me back?’

‘Your worth is beyond my means,’ he answered in confusion. ‘But I can contribute ten dinars.’

She cast her eyes around the company, looking for her next victim:

‘And what about you, Ahmad?’

The one called Ahmad rebuked Abdullah disdainfully before declaring:

‘Thirty dinars, to cleanse the honour of the tribe.’

And she continued to go around the room in this fashion, cleverly making use of jealousies and quarrels between families and clans in order to obtain a larger contribution each time. The figures were adding up in my head. My two wretched dinars became twelve, forty-two, ninety-two… The last person to be appealed to was Hiba’s uncle, who, as chief of the tribe, had to vindicate his rank by going higher than the most generous of his subjects.

‘Two hundred dinars!’ he called out proudly to the assembled company.

I could not believe my eyes, but in the evening, as I was lying down in the room where the chief had invited me to spend the night, Hiba came to see me with the entire amount, more than one thousand eight hundred dinars:

‘By the God which has made you so beautiful, Hiba, explain it to me! What on earth is this game? How can the people of this village have so much money? And furthermore, why should they give it to me?’

‘To buy me back!’

‘You know very well that they could obtain your freedom without handing over the smallest copper coin.’

‘To make amends as well.’

When I continued to show the most utter incomprehension, she finally condescended to explain:

‘For generations, my tribe were nomads on the west of the Sahara, until the time when my grandfather, enticed by the prospect of profit, began to cultivate indigo and sell it. Hence this village earns far more money than it needs to spend, and there is more gold buried in the ground under each little hut than in the finest residence in Fez. But, in choosing the sedentary life, my relatives lost all their warrior virtues. One day, when I was just coming to maturity…’

She sat down beside me, leaning her head back, before continuing:

‘A large number of us, young and old, men and women, had gone to make a pilgrimage to the tomb of a wali about a day’s journey from here. Suddenly, some riders from the guard of the lord of Ouarzazate swooped down upon us. There were four of them, while there were about fifty of us, including more than twenty men bearing arms. But none of my companions thought of using them. All of them ran away without exception, giving each of the four horsemen the opportunity to carry off the girl of his choice. During the strange ceremony in which you have just taken part, the elders of the tribe have done no more than pay their debt, atoning for the shame of themselves and their sons.’

She rested her head on my shoulder:

‘You can take this money without shame or remorse. No other man deserves it as much as my beloved master.’

So saying, she had brought her lips close to mine. If my heart was thumping, my eyes glanced uneasily towards the thin curtain which separated us from the adjoining room where her uncle was.

Without the slightest embarrassment Hiba undid her dress; offering her carved ebony body to my gaze and my caresses, she whispered:

‘Until now, you have taken me as a slave. Today, take me as a free woman! For one last time.’

When I left Hiba, I had only one object in view: to find some memory of her in Timbuktu, perhaps even to find some trace of her in that room which witnessed our first kiss. The building was still there. Although it belonged to the ruler of the city who kept it for important visitors, a dinar served to open its doors for me. So that on the evening of my arrival I was leaning out of the same window, inhaling the air from outside to recapture the ambergris which had once perfumed it, waiting for the rhythms of the negro orchestra, which I was certain would soon be resounding in the street. Then I would turn round to face the middle of the room, where I would see the shadow of my Hiba dancing once again. A strong gust of wind lifted the curtain which began to flutter and whirl round gracefully.

Outside, the sound of running feet and cries drifted closer. The orchestra of my memories, perhaps? But why was it making such a noise? My bewilderment was alas short-lived; the market place suddenly became alive as if it was broad daylight, invaded by a crazed and motley crowd which filled the heavens with its cries. How could I not be overwhelmed with fear? I called down from my window to an old man who was running more slowly than the others. He stopped and uttered a few breathless words in the language of the country. Seeing that I had not understood him at all, he ran off again, making a sign that I should follow him. I was still hesitating to do so when I saw the first glows of the blaze in the sky. Making sure that my gold was securely about me I jumped out of the window and ran.

I spent at least three hours wandering in this fashion, submitting to the moods of the panic-stricken crowd, picking up news of the disaster more from gestures than from words. More than half Timbuktu had burnt down, and it seemed that nothing could stop the fire, fanned by the wind, from spreading across the countless thatched huts, each dangerously close to the other. I had to get away as quickly as possible from this gigantic inferno.

I had heard the previous evening that a caravan of merchants of diverse origins had collected outside the city, ready to leave at dawn. I caught up with it. The forty of us travellers spent the whole night standing up on a hillock, fascinated by the sight of the fire and by the fearful clamour that rose from the flames, in which we could faintly discern the terrible screams of people burning to death.

I shall never recall Timbuktu without that image of hell coming back to me. When we were about to leave, a cloud of mourning veiled its face, and its body was racked with endless crackling. My most treasured memory was consumed in flames.

When our geographers of old spoke of the land of the Blacks, they only mentioned Ghana and the oases of the Libyan desert. Then came the conquerors with veiled faces, the preachers, the merchants. And I myself, who am only the last of the travellers, know the names of sixty black kingdoms, fifteen of which I crossed one after the other that year, from the Niger to the Nile. Some have never appeared in any book, but I would not be telling the truth if I would claim to have discovered them myself, since I only followed the ordinary route of the caravans which left from Jenne, Mali, Walata or Timbuktu for Cairo.

It took us no more than twelve days, following the course of the Niger, to reach the town of Gao. It had no defensive wall, but no enemy dared to go near it, so great was the renown of its sovereign, Askia Muhammad, the most powerful man in all the land of the Blacks. The merchants in the caravan were delighted to stop there. They explained that the citizens of Gao had so much gold that the most mediocre cloth from Europe or from Barbary could be sold there for fifteen or twenty times its value. On the other hand, meat, bread, rice and marrows were available in such quantities that one could purchase them extremely cheaply.

The next stages of the journey took us across several kingdoms, among which I will mention those of Wangara, Zagzag and Kano, as well as Bornu, which was far more important than the others, but where we did not linger. In fact, as we entered the capital city, we met another group of foreign merchants who hastened to tell us of their misfortunes, as I have reported in my Description of Africa. The king of this country had some extremely strange habits. He took such pleasure in displaying his wealth that all the harnesses of his horses were made of gold, as well as all the dishes in his palace. The leashes of his dogs were all made of fine gold, I have confirmed it with my own eyes! Having been attracted by so much luxuriousness, and, to their misfortune, having confused generosity and ostentation, these merchants had come from Fez, Sous, Genoa and Naples, with finely chased swords encrusted with jewels, tapestries, thoroughbreds and all kinds of precious goods.

‘The king seemed delighted,’ one of these unfortunates told me. ‘He took everything immediately without even discussing the price. We were overjoyed. Since then, we have waited to be paid. We have now been at Bornu for more than a year, and every day we go to the palace to complain. We are answered with promises, and when we insist we are answered with threats.’

That was not the behaviour of the sovereign whom we visited next, the master of Gaoga. I was in his palace paying my respects to him when an Egyptian merchant from the town of Damietta came and presented the king with a fine horse, a Turkish sabre, a coat of mail, a blunderbuss, several mirrors, some coral beads and some chased knives, worth altogether some fifty dinars. The sovereign accepted this gift politely, but in return he gave the man five slaves, five camels, about a hundred huge elephants’ tusks, and, as if all this were not enough, he added the equivalent of five hundred gold dinars in the money of his country.

After leaving this generous prince, we came to the kingdom of Nubia, where the great city of Dongola is situated, standing on the bank of the Nile. I was considering hiring a boat to take me to Cairo, but I was told that the river was not navigable at this point, and that I should follow the river bank as far as Aswan.

The very day of my arrival in that town, a sailor offered to take me on his jarm. He was already taking a large quantity of grain and livestock in this flat-bottomed vessel, but he could still manage to clear a very comfortable place for me.

Before going on board I lay down on my stomach on the bank and plunged my face deeply into the waters of the Nile. As I stood up, I was suddenly certain that after the tempest which had destroyed my fortune a new life was awaiting me in this land of Egypt, a life of passion, danger and honour.

I hastened to seize hold of it.