Leo Africanus (2 page)

Salma was so sure of the accuracy of this diagnosis that she was unable to refrain from telling Muhammad about it that very evening. She also felt she could bring up another rather more embarrassing notion of Sarah's, namely that a man should not come near either of his wives during pregnancy for fear of damaging the foetus or causing a premature birth. Even though obscured by circumlocutions and interspersed with long hesitations, the message was sufficiently direct to cause my father to flare up like a dry stick and launch into a stream of barely intelligible invective in which the words ‘rubbish', ‘old witches', ‘she-devil' kept being repeated like the blows of a pestle in the hollow of a mortar, as well as a number of other generally uncomplimentary remarks about medicine, Jews and women's brains. Salma thought that he would have beaten her if she had not been pregnant, but also told herself that in that case the argument would of course not have taken place. To console herself, she concluded wisely to herself that the advantages of motherhood
outweighed these passing inconveniences.

As a kind of punishment Muhammad strictly forbade her to receive ‘that poisonous Sirah' in his house, hissing her name with the characteristic Granada accent which he was to retain all his life, which made him call my mother Silma, his concubine Wirda, the door ‘
bib
' instead of ‘
bab
', his town Ghirnata and the sultan's palace ‘the Alhimra'. He remained in an extremely bad temper for several days, but with equal measures of prudence and vexation kept away from both his wives' bedrooms until after their confinements.

These took place within two days of each other. Warda was the first to feel the contractions, which then became less frequent in the evening and only became more intense at dawn; it was only then that she began to cry out loudly enough to be heard. My father ran to our neighbour Hamza, beat on his door and begged him to tell his mother, a worthy old lady of extreme piety and great skill, that the confinement was imminent. She appeared a few minutes later, wrapped in a white veil, carrying a broad-brimmed bowl, a towel and a piece of soap. She was said to have a lucky hand, and to have brought more boys into the world than girls.

My sister Mariam was born around noon; my father hardly looked at her. He had eyes only for Salma, who swore to him ‘
I
shall not disappoint you!' But she was not so sure, in spite of Sarah's infallible prescriptions and her repeated promises. She had to endure two further interminable days of anguish and suffering before her dearest wish was granted, to hear her cousin address her as Umm al-Hasan, the mother of Hasan.

On the seventh day after I was born my father called Hamza the barber to circumcise me, and invited all his friends to a banquet. Because of my mother's and Warda's condition, my two grandmothers and their servants took charge of the preparation of the meal. My mother did not take part in the ceremony, but she confessed to me that she slipped quietly out of her bedroom to see the guests and hear what they had to say. Her emotion was so great on that day that the most minute details became engraved upon her memory.

Gathered in the courtyard, around the carved white marble fountain, whose water refreshed the atmosphere with the noise of its splashing and with the thousands of droplets which it scattered, the guests ate with appetites made particularly healthy because it was the
beginning of Ramadan, which meant that they were breaking their fast at the same time as celebrating my entry into the community of the believers. According to my mother, who had to be content with the left-overs the following day, the meal was a feast fit for a king. The main dish was
maruziya
, lamb prepared with honey, coriander, starch, almonds, and pears, and walnuts, as the season was just beginning. There was also green
tafaya
, goat's meat mixed with a bouquet of fresh coriander, and white
tafaya
, made with dried coriander. Not to mention the chickens, the young pigeons, and the larks, in garlic and cheese sauce, the baked hare, coated with saffron and vinegar, and dozens of other dishes which my mother so often enumerated, recalling the last great feast which took place in her house before the fury of Heaven rained down upon her and her own. Listening to her as a child, I always waited impatiently for her to reach the
mujabbanat
, hot pies made of soft white cheese, dusted with cinnamon and dripping with honey, cakes made of dates or almond paste, and pastries filled with pine kernels and nuts, and perfumed with rose water.

At this feast, my mother swore piously, the guests drank only orgeat syrup. She forbore to add that if no wine was poured, it was only out of respect for the holy month. In Andalus, the circumcision ceremony was always the excuse for celebrations whose original religious purpose was often entirely forgotten. The most sumptuous of all these occasions was still remembered in our day, the feast organized by the Amir Dhu'l-Nun of Toledo to celebrate the circumcision of his grandson, a feast which all the world sought to imitate but never managed to do. Wine and liqueur flowed like water, while hundreds of beautiful slave girls danced to the orchestra of Dany the Jew.

But at my circumcision too, my mother declared, there were also musicians and poets. She even remembered the verses which were recited in my father's honour:

By this circumcision your son's light glows more brilliant,
As the light of the candle increases when the wick is trimmed.

Recited and sung in every key by the barber himself, this couplet by an early poet of Saragossa marked the end of the meal and the beginning of the ceremony itself. My father went up on to the terrace to snatch me in his arms, while the guests gathered in silence around
the barber and his assistant, a young beardless boy. Hamza made a sign to his assistant, who began to go round the courtyard, lantern in hand, stopping in front of each guest. A small present had to be offered to the barber, and according to custom everyone pressed the coins he gave on to the face of the boy, who announced the donor's name in a high voice and thanked him before passing on to his neighbour. When the money had all been collected, the barber asked for two powerful lamps, unsheathed his knife, recited some appropriate Qur'anic verses and leant towards me. My mother always said that the cry which I let out rang out over the whole quarter like a sign of precocious valour, and then, while I continued to scream with the whole of my tiny body, as if I had seen all the evils that were to come pass before my eyes, the celebrations began again with the sound of the lute, the flute, the rebeck and the tambourine until the
suhur
, the meal just before sunrise in Ramadan.

But not everyone was in the mood for the celebration. My maternal uncle, Abu Marwan, whom I always called Khali, then a member of the staff of the secretariat at the Alhambra, arrived late at the feast with a sad and downcast countenance. An enquiring circle formed around him, and my mother pricked up her ears. One sentence drifted across to her, which plunged her back for several long minutes into a nightmare which she believed she had forgotten for ever.

‘We have not had a single year of happiness since the Great Parade!'

‘That accursed Parade!' My mother was instantly overcome with nausea, just as in the first few weeks of her pregnancy. In her confused mind she saw herself once again a little girl of ten with bare feet, sitting in the mud in the middle of a deserted alley through which she had passed a hundred times but which she did not recognize any more, lifting the hem of her crumpled, wet and mud-flecked red dress, to cover her tearful face. ‘I was the prettiest and most fussed over child in the whole quarter of al-Baisin, and your grandmother – may God forgive her – had sewn two identical charms on to my clothes, one on the outside, and the other hidden, to defeat the evil eye. But that day, nothing could be done.'

‘The sultan of the day, Abu'l-Hasan ‘Ali, had decided to hold pompous military parades, day after day and week after week, to show the world the extent of his power – but only God is powerful and He does not love the arrogant! The sultan had had stands built on the red hill of the Alhambra, near the Treason Gate, and every morning he and his retinue received visitors and dealt with affairs of state there, while innumerable detachments of troops from all corners of the kingdom, from Ronda to Basta and from Malaga to Almeria, marched past interminably, saluting the sultan and wishing him good health and long life. The inhabitants of Granada and the neighbouring villages both old and young, used to foregather on the slopes of Sabiqa at the foot of the Alhambra near the cemetery, from which they could see this continuous ceremonial taking place above them. Street sellers set themselves up nearby, selling slippers, or merguès, doughnuts or orange blossom syrup.'

On the tenth day of the Parade, as the Islamic year 882 was ending, the New Year celebrations, which were always unostentatious, passed almost unnoticed amid the hectic tide of these continuous festivities. These were going to continue through Muharram, the first month of the year, and my mother, who used to go along to Sabiqa every day with her brothers and cousins, noticed that the number of spectators was constantly increasing, and that there were always many new faces. Drunkards thronged the streets, thefts were commonplace, and fights broke out between gangs of youths beating each other with cudgels until the blood flowed. One man was killed and several wounded, which led the
muhtasib
, the provost of the merchants, to call the police.

It was at this point that the sultan finally decided to put an end to the festivities, evidently fearing further outbreaks of rioting and violence. Accordingly, he decreed that the last day of the Parade should be 22 Muharram 883, which fell on 25 April of the Christian year 1478, but he added that the final celebrations should be even more sumptuous than those of the preceding weeks. That day, on Sabiqa, the women of the popular quarters, both veiled and unveiled, were mingling with men of all classes. The children of the town, including my mother, had been out in their new clothes since the early morning, many of them clutching several copper coins with which they bought the famous dried figs of Malaga. Attracted by the swelling crowds, jugglers, conjurers, entertainers, tightrope walkers, acrobats, monkey-keepers, beggars, genuine and fake blind
men could be found throughout the entire Sabiqa quarter, and, as it was spring, the peasants were walking their stallions, taking fees for letting them mate with the mares that were brought to them.

‘All morning,' my mother remembered, ‘we had cheered and clapped our hands watching games of “tabla”, during which one Zenata rider after another tried to hit the wooden target with staves which they threw standing up on the backs of their horses at a gallop. We could not see who was most successful, but the clamour which reached us from the hill, from the very place known as al-Tabla, gave an unerring indication of winners and losers.

‘Suddenly a black cloud appeared above our heads. It came so quickly that we had the impression that the light of the sun had been extinguished like a lamp blown out by a jinn. It was night at midday, and without the sultan ordering it, the game ceased, because everyone felt the weight of the heavens on his shoulders.

‘There was a flash, a sheet of lightning, another flash, a muffled rumbling, and then torrents of rain poured down upon us. I was a little less scared knowing that it was a storm rather than some grim curse, and like the other thousands congregating on Sabiqa, I looked for somewhere to shelter. My older brother took me by the hand, which reassured me but also forced me to run along a road which was already turning to mud. Suddenly, several paces in front of us, a number of children and old people fell down, and seeing that they were being trampled underfoot, the crowd panicked. It was still very dark, and shouts of fear were punctuated with cries of pain. I too lost my footing, and I let go my brother's hand and found myself trying to catch hold of the hem of one soaked dress after another without getting any purchase on any of them. The water was already up to my knees, and I was certainly yelling more loudly than the others.

‘I fell down and picked myself up again about five or six times without being trampled on, until I found that the crowd had thinned out around me and was also moving more slowly, because the road was going uphill and the waves rushing down it were becoming larger. I did not recognize either people or places, and ceased to look for my brothers and my cousins. I threw myself down under a porch and fell asleep, from exhaustion as much as despair.

‘I woke up an hour or two later; it was less dark, but it was still pouring with rain, and a deafening rumble assaulted my ears from all sides, causing the flagstone on which I was sitting to tremble. I had run down that alleyway countless times, but to see it deserted and
divided by a torrent of water made me unable to work out where I was. I shivered from the cold, my clothes were soaked, I had lost my sandals in my flight, an icy stream of water ran down from my hair, pouring into my eyes which were burning with tears. I shivered again, and a fit of coughing seized my chest, when a woman's voice called out to me: “Up here, girl!” Searching all around with my eyes, I caught sight of a striped scarf and a hand waving from an arched window very high above me.