Leo Africanus (13 page)

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.'