‘Let me out,’ shouted the devil, struggling inside the cask.
‘Ha, ha! – we shall never let you out again,’ replied the women.
‘Bitches!… Camels!… Harlots!’
‘You blasted oak!… You one-haired monster!’
‘My daughters, let me out and I will do you good.’
‘How can you do us good, father of Evil?’
‘I will teach you witchcraft; I will give you the secret which will make the spirits that cause disease obey you.’
The women agreed and the devil kept his promise.
However – in the case of Sitta Mamuna the devil’s tricks had had no effect. The unfortunate girl had inhaled all kinds of aromatic herbs, swallowed all manner of nauseating concoctions, covered herself with every conceivable magic pomade, slept under a mountain of amulets. The one who ‘sits on the shoulder’ had remained firmly in the saddle.
Sitta Mamuna never came up to the terrace; she lived shut up in herself, often falling into convulsions which left her prostrate and exhausted. For days at a time she might seem to be normal, but even then she remained in her room, laughed immoderately, wept without cause, and was full of feverish vivacity.
Should we go and see her?
The room was dark. Amid hisses and explosions there was the sound of someone pumping a pressure lamp, which with a sudden bang produced a blinding light. The only piece of furniture in the room was a coffer heavily ornamented in brass.
At my feet a completely naked girl was stretched out on a mat. On seeing me she sat up, crossed her legs and made me a sign to sit down opposite her, for all the world as though she were closely covered and veiled, as every God-fearing Mohammedan woman should be.
Behind me were the old aunt and a servant. The lamp had been placed on the floor between me and Sitta Mamuna so that grotesque shadows danced on the walls and ceiling. The girl was very young, but not beautiful. She had high cheekbones and a wide forehead; her thick, pouting lips were those of a spoilt child; her breasts were high and firm and her skin of a whiteness that seemed artificial in the phosphorescent light of the petrol lamp. She took my hand and laid it against her cheek, and as she dragged herself along on the mat towards me I was assailed with the scent they call dongria, a kind of incense to which is attributed therapeutic powers. The aunt made an effort to pull her away from me, angry at such shamelessness, but the girl turned on her and bit her arm. The room was filled with the cries of the old woman and the shrieks of the servant, and Sitta Mamuna took refuge in a corner where she immediately had a fit of classical hysterical convulsions. Rolling and twisting herself jerkily, she suddenly fastened head and heels to the ground and arched her body into a bridge. She remained in this acrobatic position for a few moments, her eyes closed, the abdomen rising and falling to her heavy, hurried breathing. Then she relaxed and her breathing became more regular. She opened her eyes and gave me a tired smile.
When I had completed my examination she bent towards me and, as though continuing an interrupted conversation, asked me if I knew that Aishah was a bitch. I explained that I did not know Aishah and that, therefore, I could not say to which zoological family she belonged. The girl replied that Aishah was a prostitute, a bembaka, like all Ghadamese women. She was speaking, it seemed, of Hajj et-Talatin’s first wife. It appeared that the Ghadamese woman hated Sitta Mamuna, who was a Tuareg of noble race and could therefore have nothing in common with a vulgar bembaka like Aishah.
In order to change the conversation, I asked news of Hajj et-Talatin, as though I had not seen him for some time. At the mention of his name she became suddenly uncontrollably hilarious. With her hands she described his pot-bellied outline and laughed uproariously. Did I know the great fat thing? Was he a friend of mine?
The aunt endeavoured to restrain this outburst, so unbecoming in a young wife. But the bite was very recent and when Sitta Mamuna jumped to her feet she backed away, shielding herself with the body of the servant.
The girl now began to parade up and down the room, swaying her hips, striking suggestive attitudes and gesticulating in an affected manner. She was obviously imitating someone, and the pantomime was evidently meant to be offensive for the old woman covered her face with her hands and the servant turned to the wall in order not to see.
We again sat down on the mat. The girl took my arm under hers and leaned her head on my shoulder. She was in confidential mood. Did I know that she was a Tuareg princess? I replied that she was not alone, since the Moroccan wife of Hajj et-Talatin was a Berber princess.
She looked into my face and gripped my arm. Did I know Zayida the Berber too? But I must not say she was a princess because she was not, even though her skin was softer than silk. She caressed her lip with the tips of her fingers, closed her eyes and bent her head back in ecstasy.
I stood up, but the patient threw her arms round my knees. Would I not stay with her?
I promised to return later in the night when her husband would be sleeping, and the wives too.
‘They do not sleep,’ she said as she bade me farewell, ‘they are bitches.’
With a sigh of relief the aunt opened the door of the room and piloted me back across the labyrinth of corridors, ramparts, antechambers, stairs and steps, down again into the courtyard which was now in darkness.
The darkness, in fact, permitted a frankness which would have been impossible if we had been able to see each other.
‘You will give me a cure, tebīb?’
Certainly. I had very effective remedies for women tormented by the ‘spirit that sits on the shoulder’ – but I must know all the facts.
The old woman was not without imagination. Yes, perhaps Mamuna had wept when they brought her to the house of her husband, or perhaps she had lost a sandal during the marriage ceremony; or perhaps the evil spirit had jumped on her shoulder at the moment when her husband removed her veil.
I agreed that, of course, all kinds of incidents of that nature might cause no end of trouble – but that the physician must know all. How many times a week did Hajj et-Talatin visit Sitta Mamuna?
The breathing of the lady aunt became more audible in the darkness. I must know that Hajj et-Talatin was the most important merchant in Ghadames and his trade with all the countries of the world kept him busy night and day.
I admitted that Hajj et-Talatin was certainly a man of many activities.
The old woman grasped at my words and talked rapidly and at length of Hajj et-Talatin’s many occupations, insisting on the respect he enjoyed.
But this highly respected merchant was also a virile and full-blooded man – and yet he did not approach his women? Was that not strange, signora?
Her breath was now coming rapidly and she mumbled confused phrases. I caught a garbled citation from the Koran about it being a sin to suspect one’s fellows, and to the effect that every man was free to do as he thought best so long as he did not offend against the law, and even the law admitted that every caravan might have its ‘wife’.
This hint was sufficient for me. The signora was quite right, I said: Ghadames was full of caravan ‘wives’. When Sitta Mamuna was parading up and down the room was she not perhaps imitating a caravan ‘wife’, a zâmel? These young men did, in fact, sway their hips and gesticulate in the same affected manner. Hajj et-Talatin then, having three pretty, fresh young wives, preferred the company of a zâmel? And yet with these strange tastes he had married three wives? O Allah, Lord of the universe, what playthings you make of the sons of Adam!
And the wives? Why did Aishah detest Mamuna? Were they jealous? Jealous of whom?
The old aunt hinted that I wished to know too much: only God was all-wise, she said.
Was it not true that after her marriage Sitta Mamuna waited on the terrace with the other wives for the attentions of an evasive husband? While they waited had there not sprung up between Sitta Mamuna and Zayida, the Berber with the skin softer than silk, one of those morbid attachments which are engendered among women deprived o
f men? But Zayida was already Aishah’s property, was she not? And so the spirit that sits on the shoulder had leapt upon the young wife. Was this not the cause, signora?
I lit a match in order to look into her face. The old lady shook her head in protest: she had no desire to stir up such muddy pools. In any case, what purpose did it serve? God knew all. She became almost angry. If I was a physician I should be able to prescribe the right medicine. Had I the medicine, or had I not? The other matters were beside the point.
It was only a brief moment of irritation, however, and when at the door of the house I whispered in her ear the name of the medicine which would cure Sitta Mamuna, she turned and placed her head on her arm against the doorpost so that I should not see her smile.
Chapter Four
THE VEILED PEOPLE
ALTHOUGH the Tuareg people are the traditional protectors of Ghadames their proper territory is the vast desert region lying to the south. Here, in south-west Tripolitania, live the tribes belonging to the great Azdjer family, whose sovereign in those days was Bubaker ag Legoui. He had his residence in the Ghat oasis and in 1929 I took the opportunity while I was at Ghadames of paying him a visit.
The Tuaregs suffer from a complex which the psychoanalysts call hypertrophy of the ego: they are sincerely convinced that they are superior to all other races. They are ‘the veiled family’ and, according to them, the noblest line on earth, their warriors the bravest under heaven, and their women alone able to ‘illuminate the night with a smile’.
Throughout North Africa, from the Sahara to the Niger, there are fewer than 200,000 of them and of these I have treated not more than thirty, but my limited experience has convinced me that when the veiled family disappears from the earth, decimated by disease or absorbed by other populations, it will be the end of a fascinating people whose singular characteristics place them in a unique category of mankind.
They are divided into noble and vassal tribes – the ihaggaren and the imghad. The vassals are richer than their masters because they own livestock, work the land, supply the caravans with camels and run the economy of the territory. The feudal lords, on the other hand, live a life of ease. When the opportunity occurs they carry out a raid, but mainly they live on their subjects and spend their time composing songs in honour of the beautiful women of their clan. From their appearance, these nobles might be beggars: they are dressed in cotton rags, their feet thrust into worn-out sandals. In spite of this, however, they are as ceremonious and pompous as a sultan on his throne and as proud as a Spanish hidalgo. When a dirty, louse-infested ihaggaren, with his face veiled and his hand on his sword-hilt, asks a passing stranger for an object to which he has taken a fancy, and insists like an importunate beggar, disregarding refusal or rebuff, he manages to maintain such a superb air of superiority that one begins to understand why the imghad are almost grateful to their noble lords for allowing them the honour of supporting them.
These aristocrats are wonderful fighters, and the history of the Tuareg people abounds with episodes of heroism, of chivalry and of generous folly worthy of Charlemagne’s court or of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table.
The warrior of the Azdjer Tuaregs who, on a hill and surrounded by enemies, ordered his servants to retreat to safety and remained fighting alone until he was riddled with bullets because, as servants, they might be permitted to flee, whereas he, as a patrician, could not turn his back on an adversary, was blood brother to that Roland who, at Roncesvalles, overpowered by the Moors and with the icy hand of death already gripping his heart, refused to retreat by so much as a step.
The infiltration of the European powers into Africa and the consolidation of their rule brought these heroic deeds to an end and the decadence of the patricians then set in. Up to relatively recent times, however, it was still their function to defend the tribe’s pasturage, to raid other people’s livestock, to sack the camps of their enemies, to extort tribute, to impose tolls, and to protect their vassal tribes from oppression by the nobles of other Tuareg tribes. With the passing of the system whereby armed barons defended the rights of their vassals, the patricians’ raison d’être also disappeared, leaving only pretensions for which there was no longer any justification. The result has been that the feudal lord, incapable of any other activity, is today a mendicant living on charity.
The patricians, belonging to a class which produces only warriors, are completely ignorant of anything but warfare. Very few of them speak Arabic and hardly any are able to write tifinar, the strange Tuareg characters which may be written from right to left or from left to right, from the top down or from the bottom up. Only very rarely does a patrician hold any public office, except that of king of the confederation, or tribal chief.
These deficiencies and limitations are both the cause and the effect of the supremacy of the women in Tuareg society. The Tuareg woman can read and write tifinar; she generally speaks Arabic, and quite frequently writes it. She has a passionate love of poetry; she preserves and hands on the family traditions; she plays the rebaza, a four-stringed mandolin, and the lute, called the umzad.
The matriarchal system of the ancient Berber communities from which the Tuaregs are descended still continues among the ‘veiled people’. They say that ‘the womb gives its colour to the new-born child’ and that, therefore, the child belongs to the caste of the mother and not to that of the father.
As a result of their social predominance the women control not only the tribe’s economy but also its property. And, although there may be other countries in which women have the upper hand (either openly or by guile) there certainly is none where they enjoy a greater sexual freedom.
Among these people, the sexual function is woman’s chief attribute. The family, the tribe, are built around the woman’s femininity, which is understood as being exclusively an instrument for the exercise of love – but not a passive instrument, for the Tuareg woman is not a chattel or an object of conquest: on the contrary, she has the uncontested right to choose her men. It may be extremely mortifying for the male sex, but I am obliged to admit that, in so far as their women are concerned, the function of these proud Tuareg warriors is more or less that of the male bee in the hive.
In a Tuareg community, a woman becomes independent when, on reaching puberty, she is excluded from religious practices. In fact, this period is called ba-n’amuk, the suspension of prayer. With the first menstrual blood she is considered impure, and is therefore not permitted to pray, but the occasion is celebrated by the family and clan as her coming-of-age. For the first time she sits as a woman outside her tent. She is dressed in a fine new blouse dyed with a shiny, greasy indigo preparation, and covered with ornaments of metal, silver and ivory, much too heavy for her childish form; her face is plastered with yellow ochre and her eyes disfigured with make-up, and she sits like a freshly varnished doll between her father and mother, surrounded by relatives and friends of the family. It is the ceremony which consecrates her as a woman: from that day she can paint her face, play the lute in public, frequent the ‘courts of love’ and proclaim herself in a state of asri. While she is in the state of asri, the Tuareg woman takes as many lovers as she likes. She receives them in her tent, or invites them to the ‘court of love’ where the girls play the umzad, surrounded by warriors who kiss their hands, improvise poems in honour of their beauty and beg forgiveness for a too audacious compliment by lightly brushing the foot of the offended goddess with their lips. When the madrigals have ceased, when the moon is veiled, the couples disappear behind the patches of lentiscus, behind the rocks, into the stony river beds, into the tents.
These dissolute and cavalier customs may be the legacy of a cynical, amoral and decadent civilisation, but other Tuareg traditions and habits form a striking contrast to such subtle refinements.
The Tuareg – man or woman – goes through life without washing. For the ritual ablutions, sand is used. To invite a Tuareg to wash is to invite a curse upon him since he is touched by water only when the
washer of the dead takes over his corpse. Their magnificent bodies, therefore, acquire a patina which is a combination of decades of filth and indigo dye from their cotton garments. The dye runs into their skin so that a naked Tuareg looks as if he had been daubed with blue varnish.
The women grease their hair abundantly with rancid butter, and as the hair is never washed the superimposed strata of fetid grease are a happy hunting ground for lice. In addition, they wash their garments with a root which produces a generous lather but gives off an absolutely pestilential odour. Finally, the noble Tuareg woman chews tobacco and is extremely skilful in launching mouthfuls of yellowish saliva over immense distances.
Perhaps it was on account of these strident contrasts, this extraordinary mixture of magnificence and poverty, of pride and grovelling, of beauty and filth, that the Tuaregs were also referred to by the Arabs as ‘the mad people’.
* * *
I had for some time been in correspondence with the great chief of this strange and contradictory people, Bubaker ag Legoui of Ghat, and every so often he sent a message to me by one of his sons – either his legitimate son for whom he seemed to have little fondness, or his bastard son who was the apple of his eye.
In order to reach Ghadames, the small band which accompanied the chief’s son, whichever it might be, had to cross country dominated by the rebels, and to avoid trouble they were often obliged to make long detours off the beaten tracks. On one occasion they had to fight their way through for a whole night. They arrived in the morning, exhausted with thirst, with one of their number hunched up on a camel, his belly slit open and his intestines held in by a scarf. After I had sewn him up he recovered quickly and returned some days later to his tribe in the highest of spirits.
But almost any evening one of the sons of Bubaker, tall, lean, and wrapped around like all Tuaregs with three or four long garments, might appear on the terrace of the fort. He would murmur his name and, to prove his identity, come close to me, place his face a hand’s breadth from mine, and for an instant raise his veil so that I might recognise him.
A Cure for Serpents Page 13