Leo Africanus (14 page)

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.

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.