The Book of Madness and Cures

by Regina O'Melveny

I lowered my voice and said, “I will go as a man.”

  “Ah. But how will you bear the desert of Barbaria?”

  “You know the desert, then? You are Moorish?”

  “Ah, the señora is curious,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “But let me say that you’ve come to a border between continents, and as at any border, you’ll find that no one here is quite what they seem. The Morisco is a devoted Spaniard. The Jew is now a converso. Even the doctor may be the afflicted, if you take my meaning. But an honest innkeeper is an honest innkeeper.” He clasped his hands and said, “You’ll grow accustomed to the heat and the winds of Barbaria. Learn where the deep wells are, señora. Even the most humble dar has its garden, even the most humble soul.”

  “And what is a dar?” I asked.

  “The dar in Barbaria is the dwelling place, the house with its rooms around a courtyard, as we have even here.” He waved at the small patio within, with its octagonal blue and green tiled fountain, which cast a cool, unsteady light on the pale walls.

  “Truly, I thank you for your help,” I said, turning from him to the submerged shadows of the courtyard, filled with sudden disquiet as I considered the lonely journey ahead.

  That evening, Señor Romanesco knocked at our door and announced, “The fisherman has come to look at your animals. I’ll accompany you to the stable.”

  I nodded. Olmina also joined us.

  I’d decided to keep Fedele and Fiametta, so only the other two were for sale. These would purchase our ship’s passage, so I could still keep a good reserve of ducats.

  When I named my price, the man balked. “I can only buy one of them, then.”

  “Then it is done,” I concluded.

  “Now, just a moment. Let me have a look at them.” He walked around each mule, felt each leg, and tapped the hoofs while they regarded him with mild suspicion, the whites of their eyes widening.

  We haggled back and forth. I quietly drove a firm bargain, while Olmina stood nearby, hands on hips, fastening a good hard look at him that would’ve unnerved me in an instant. We were tougher than the old man had anticipated, and Señor Romanesco stood to one side watching the transaction silently without expression.

  I stroked the mules’ gray faces, their soft sail-shaped ears, which twitched one way, then another, independently of each other. How far they had borne our supplies with resolute labor! I was sad to let them go, but at least they wouldn’t have to travel aboard a ship again.

  In the end, the fisherman purchased both, paying us with silver from a wrinkled, oil-stained leather purse. As he left, I overheard him talking to the departing mules about his catch for the day as he patted their backs, well pleased.

  Before we returned to our room, Señor Romanesco called me aside in the dusk-lit courtyard and said, “I see that you know how to handle a customer, señora. You’re tougher than you appear.” He beamed at me, black eyes flashing. “I wish I could recommend suitable traveling companions for you, but there is no one. However, my brother who lives in Tanger and sells spices in the souk is a shrewd man, a good man who would understand your request.”

  “How will I find him?”

  “Ask for him by name and trade in the morning and you’ll find him. Never go out late in the day. And take a manservant with you. They’re for hire and plentiful at the port landing. Choose an older man—they understand that true profit rests on constancy.”

  “Thank you for your kindness—though I’ve always heard, never trust anyone in a port, and never trust an innkeeper, for that matter.”

  He grinned. “Remember that nothing is what you expect at the edge of the continents.” He handed me a slim sheet of paper folded over and sealed with yellow wax, addressed in Arabic. “Here is a letter of introduction.”

  The night before departure, I asked Olmina a special favor. “Will you cut my hair again?”

  “Of course, signorina.” She drew the knife and comb from her satchel. “There will be no one else to trust, will there?”

  “No one.” I clasped her hand where it rested on my shoulder. Then she gathered my hair tightly, close to the nape of my neck, lifted it, and slashed quickly. She finished with small sewing shears, clipping here and there, stepping around me to check her handiwork.

  The day arrived. Olmina’s ship would set sail just before dawn. The small white houses of Algezer were still stained blue with night behind us when we left the inn. Olmina seemed a shadow in the ashen black garments of a widow, while I wore a brown doublet and breeches, Lorenzo’s clothes, recently refitted to my form by an adept tailor. Olmina had insisted I keep them.

  We walked in silence down to the seafront, where one other passenger, a middle-aged man attired in the rich velvet garments of a merchant, stood at the end of a narrow dock. Here we awaited the arrival of the small boat that would take them to the ship.

  As we stood together, I murmured softly, “So at last you are going home, dear Nana,” and I put my arms around her.

  Olmina cupped my sun-darkened face in her hands the way a loving mother would hold the face of a cherished daughter. Her callused hands scratched me and I loved them. The faint blue veins I would commit to memory.

  We held each other. We were bound by the same presence and absence, as if the world were pillared by two women at the gateway between sea and ocean, Europe and Africa, home and la parte incognita. I gave Olmina two leather purses of gold pesetas.

  “Only one, Dottoressa, that is fair. You’ll need the other.” She returned one of the purses to the pocket of my jerkin. She grabbed my shoulder and said in a fierce, low voice, “Won’t you come home with me, then?”

  I shook my head, staring down at the dock planks.

  She picked up her satchel and shuffled toward the small boat and two rowers that had just fastened the lines. The violet sea slapped the pilings. “Good-bye, Olmina, buona fortuna!” I cried. But she didn’t look back. She walked away in her labored manner and descended the gangplank, steadied by the kindly merchant.

  “It must be very difficult to part with your son there,” I heard him say.

  I turned away and felt the land jolt beneath my feet, as if I’d been falling for a very long time and just now struck the earth. Something broke in me, yet I still walked back to our room at the inn, where I bent to the window and wept. I watched the listless ship slowly gather wind, snapping her sails, then round Gibraltar eastward toward the serene city that shimmered in my mind like a place that no longer existed.

  CHAPTER 22

  My Father’s Keeper

  “A man has been asking for you,” Señor Romanesco says. I follow him downstairs, to discover Hamish and his servant. He’s found me!

  He’s dressed all in black in the Spanish fashion. His voice rings fluid and deep as if he were a well mender calling from the bottom of a cistern. “Surely you can’t go on alone? You’ll perish!”

  I stare at him, dumbfounded. Finally the words escape: “I miss you.” He has come so far. I press my hands to his chest. I remember his body, where the bones lift against the skin, the white span of the ribs, the collarbone. “I must go to Taradante. My mind and heart are bent upon this.”

  “Your mind has gone askew. No father would impose such a fate upon his daughter!”

  “It is not imposed. I am my father’s keeper.”

  Hamish parts his lips to reply, when—

  The innkeeper knocked, and I awoke with a start.

  I sat up, looking around the room in desperation. I believed for a moment that Hamish would still be there.

  I left on the Charon at midafternoon, alone, under the glowering sun. The breeze blew steadily, raking the sea into choppy white crests. The mules shuffled and brayed belowdecks, poor beasts. I sat with the medicine chest behind me near a coil of rope on the forecastle of the ship and held on to a wooden rail, not caring whether I took spray. I welcomed the deafening wind of the straits, the creaking of spars and masts, and the dull thuds of sea against prow. The crew let me be. My face ran with salt.


  My eyes were still fixed on Barbaria, as they’d been since we departed, to keep from retching, when I heard a cry from one of the sailors. “Look to starboard, look!” he shouted. “Here come the ladies of Villaderota!”

  Another sailor closer to me whooped like a child. Then I saw them coming from the northwest, hundreds of them flinging open the surface of the sea—glistening arcs of light, some in pairs or singly casting sleeves of spray behind them. I’d never seen such a multitude of dolphins before in my life. Roused from numbness, I stood near the bowsprit, hanging on to one of the shrouds, and called out in surprise as they swam directly toward the ship, their numbers parting around it.

  “I’m going in!” yelled the young sailor who had dubbed them the “ladies” as he tore off his shirt.

  “No, you’re not!” chimed a couple of the crew, grabbing his arms. “We’ll not be coming about to pick up a crazy sailor lovestruck with dolphins!”

  “Maybe the good doctor up there has something to cure you,” called out the captain in jest.

  His words barely reached me, for at that moment I saw a dolphin just below me roll on her side, still shearing through the prow wave, and glance up, her singular eye a black lens that held and then let me go. Nothing came between us until she swiveled back, and I saw the quick clasp and expulsion of her breath from a hole in the top of her body as she swerved off to the right and joined her companions, gleaming like freshly polished pewter as they leapt in and out of the sea, sewing sky to water. A few minutes later they disappeared to the south, and the ocean sealed itself after them.

  So many years had passed since I’d felt that kind of awe. My body shook as I sat back down on the deck, pulling my cape about me like someone who’s been delivered a stunning clout to the head. The deckhands were still bantering among themselves when the captain gave the order to reset the sails. We rounded Cape Malabata, and after a journey of three or four hours the bay lay just ahead, with Tanger in full view, looking like the closed fist of a king, encrusted with dusky sapphires.

  We disembarked, and a turbaned porter with a short white beard, clad in a blue tunic and pantaloons, immediately attached himself to me. Though I bartered with one or two others, he finally won out. His name was Yousef, and while he spoke little Italian, we shared a broken Spanish between us. I liked the lattice of his brown-toothed smile (for he was missing several teeth) and the way he immediately spoke to the mules and calmed them. I also recalled Señor Romanesco’s caution, “Choose an older man.”

  Drawing a large striped blanket about him, Yousef led me to a fonduk within the medina, where the animals were lodged in fine arched stalls on the ground floor, while the visitors, mostly foreign merchants, were lodged above on the first and second floors.

  I was so exhausted I didn’t want to leave my small room, didn’t want to encounter anything strange or exotic. What a peculiar traveler I’d become, a lonely ascetic bereft of my natural curiosity. What if Hamish had truly come along? I couldn’t think of him. My heart was a coffer filled with ghosts.

  Yousef brought me a small plate of goat cheese, figs, almonds, honeyed pastries in the shape of little horns, and a bottle of red wine. When I moved to pay him, he shook his head and gave me to understand that he would return the next day and that I should pay him after I had slept.

  The room contained two rush mats and in the arched sleeping niche a coarse wool mattress. The window was protected by a surprisingly intricate wooden grille of carved vines and leaves. I quickly closed the shutters and withdrew to my sleeping niche, bringing the leather satchel containing the loose leafs of The Book of Diseases and my maps as well as the medicine chest, close to the wall and my body. For a while the conflicting odors of honey and animal urine from the stables below kept me awake, until I wrapped my entire head round with a portion of the blanket.

  The next morning, with the help of Yousef, I sought out Sidi Abdullah Romanesco, the brother of the innkeeper in Algezer. Yousef waved me ahead and followed close behind, touching my left elbow to steer me left, my right to steer me right, as we navigated the way to the quarter of spices. I was grateful. If I’d gone behind him I might have been set upon by those with ill intention. When I’d first mentioned my errand, he shook his head and made the swift gesture of someone picking a pocket.

  As we moved through the dried vine-and reed-covered passageways of the medina, only a few unveiled Berber women balancing jars of water on their heads stared at me sharply. Most of the populace, now under the Spanish crown, had grown accustomed to Europeans and paid them little mind. Perhaps the women sensed I was a woman, even in my manly garb. Maybe even Yousef suspected that I wasn’t the man I seemed, though he went along without question.

  At last we came to the narrow spice souk owned by Sidi Romanesco, off a little courtyard where a large fig tree had fallen over and continued to grow in a different direction, filling the space almost entirely. Passersby simply bent in avoidance of certain branches or perhaps in esteem and walked around it. Sidi, an ample balding man clad in a tan caftan and scuffed leather slippers, stood busy with a customer, an elderly man with a thick goiter. The merchant paused momentarily when he noticed us, directing me to a small red stool on one side of the shop. His opulent ground spices were displayed in conical hills upon flat baskets, in shades of crimson, orange, ocher, umber, green, and black, with various clumps of herbs laid out neatly in baskets to one side.

  I recognized henna, absinthe, cinnamon, pepper, and chunks of amber, but many other spices were unknown to me. Their various sweet, pungent, and hot scents laced the warm air, pleasantly stinging my nostrils. Some of these spices must have been medicinal, I decided, for the old man repeatedly pointed to the swelling at his throat and shook his head as Sidi Romanesco offered various herbs. At last the right plant was agreed upon. The spice merchant wrapped a clump of leaves (sweet cicely?) in a small bit of dried palm leaf and sent the man on his way.

  “And what is your wish, signor?” he asked me in Italian, correctly assessing my Venetian dress, though it didn’t differ that much from the style of Andaluzian men.

  I handed him my letter of introduction from the innkeeper.

  After reading it, he glanced at me cautiously and asked, “But why is an Italian doctor dressed as a commoner?”

  “I believed it would provide safer passage,” I replied.

  He stared at me in disbelief. “We must get you some Maroccan clothes now, especially if you’re traveling into the south, where there can be much danger.”

  Then he was silent, examining the letter, as if weighing the information there. At last he called out toward the back of the surprisingly deep shop. A nimble young boy appeared.

  “Bring us some tea, Hassan, and hurry up, we have guests!”

  The boy scurried behind a thin blue curtain.

  “So”—I addressed the spice merchant—“may I ask, what did you give the man with the swelling?”

  “Ah, sweet myrrh to use as a compress,” he replied diffidently, seating himself upon a stool behind the spices, rubbing his large paunch with one hand. He folded the letter up and tucked it into a pocket in his robe. Then he said, “There are two mathematicians, I believe, or geometers from Barçalona, staying at my friend’s fonduk, traveling to the court of Ahmad al-Mansour in Marruecos. They would be proper companions.”

  Hassan brought a tray with fragrant honey-mint tea, set it upon a small brass table, and served me first, pouring the tea into a small thick glass from the dented brass pot. He smiled at me as if we were sharing a joke, and the fresh transparency of his good nature startled me. I thought, Things may change for the better, a possibility that hadn’t entered my heart for a while. Then he served Sidi Romanesco and also poured a glass each for Yousef and himself, the two of them settling cross-legged upon the edge of the woven straw mat to partake of their tea. We sipped it slowly in a silence that seemed courtesy rather than the uneasiness of strangers. I didn’t have to explain myself further to the spice merchant. This small
respect shone like a coin in my day. Customers who approached understood that they must patiently wait. Sidi Romanesco was taking his tea.

  Before leaving, I requested a bit of costly cinnamon from the spice merchant, who, when I drew my purse from my breeches to pay, waved my money away from him as if he were brushing away flies. He wrapped the slivers of bark neatly in palm leaf and gave me the packet. Then he took Yousef aside and spoke to him about our arrangements.

  Later that very afternoon he sent the boy to bring word that I might change lodgings to the more commodious fonduk of the mathematicians. And so we transferred my simple effects to a room that possessed a balcony with keyhole-shaped arches opening onto the sea.

  The next day, Sidi Romanesco’s boy delivered a fine blue caftan, a headscarf, a sand-yellow djellaba, and red leather slippers, for which I was very grateful. These clothes turned out to be the most comfortable I’d ever worn. With consistent generosity, the spice merchant again refused to accept reimbursement (though I’d dispatched a small purse of silver along with Yousef to the souk). Later I sent a note of thanks (translated by one of the scribes in the passageways), not wishing to press payment and offend him.

  I would spend the next two days in the cool shadows of my room, reading and writing as I waited for the departure of the caravan. Yousef explained that the traders had already arrived at the outskirts of Tanger but the camels needed to rest before setting out once more for Marruecos and Taradante and then traveling on to Segelmesse, following the salt route.

  That first evening I met my Catalonian companions, two middle-aged gentlemen. Antonio Montcada was a thin man, fair as a Hollanter, with large blue eyes and straw-colored hair. Martin Requesne was a swarthy loose-limbed man with amber eyes and curly black hair flecked with gray. They invited me to a light supper of succussu and capon in the courtyard, and I accepted reluctantly, uneasy with my guise as a man.

  I needn’t have worried. For soon Señor Montcada (his tongue loosened by wine) began talking nonstop, regaling us with an account of his previous journey to al-Badi, the palace of Sultan al-Mansour, as well as the general state of affairs in the known world. He paid little attention to me, other than as a handy ear for his tales.