“You may have heard that the sultan dislikes Spaniards for their piracy and the treatment of Moriscos within their borders and is seeking alliance with the English. Of course he ignores his own kidnappings of the Spaniards and the Portuguese!”
“Ha!” interjected Señor Requesne, flinging his hand into the air. “And at the same time he’s gathering handsome sums for their ransoms.”
“So you may well wonder why he welcomes us to his court. One of his poets, al-Fishtali, told me that his master always desires news of distant lands and likes to be fully apprised of both ally and enemy. He is a man of great intellectual curiosity. His court includes mathematicians who are poets, diplomats who are generals, physicians who are astronomers, scholars who—”
“Physicians? I am a doctor myself, collecting notes on diseases and cures as I travel,” I interrupted, immediately regretting that I’d said anything at all.
“Ah.” He paused and scrutinized me for a brief moment, then remarked, “A physician at the court warned me of the most extraordinary disease that plagues foreigners . . .”
He went on to describe an uncanny miasma that afflicts natives of this land and travelers alike, though the latter more gravely. Soon after this intriguing account, I excused myself in order to return to my room so that I might copy it down in full.
Señor Requesne, however, bade me wait a moment and said, “I have something that may interest you, Dottor.”
When he returned, wide-striding like a horseman in a hurry, as if he feared I’d be gone (perhaps he’d already experienced guests eager to escape his garrulous friend), he presented me with a sky map of odd constellations, a map drawn by an elder Fadola woman who’d contracted the fever.
“I don’t recall all the old desert names for the constellations,” he explained. “But the main ones there are Camel’s Eye”—here he snuffed all candles on our outdoor table but one and pointed to the map and then the sky, searching for each pattern above us—“the Yellow Djinn . . . Hoofprints of the Moon.”
For a few moments, even Señor Montcada kept quiet as we observed the close shimmering stars flung across the night sky, far more numerous than I’d ever seen them before.
“This is a wonderful thing,” I exclaimed. “How can I repay you?”
“Hmm, I need a little something for my arthritis. Perhaps you could . . . ?”
“Of course. Where do you suffer?”
He held out his thick hands, swollen at the knuckles.
“Please wait, I’ll be only a short while.”
I walked back to my room, found what was needed in my medicine chest, and then returned with strips of linen wrapped around a small cloth bag of mustard seed powder. “Tomorrow,” I advised Señor Requesne, “make a paste of the powder and spread it on the cloth, then press it to the back of your hand and wrap it round. The heat caused thereby will soothe your aching. Only be careful, don’t leave it on too long or you may suffer blisters. Then wash your hands well of the paste. Do this every day for a week and your hands should improve. Then repeat the treatment every month.”
“Thank you,” said Señor Requesne, bowing slightly.
“If there’s anything else you require, let me know. This is small payment for the map.”
“Oh, you’re not obliged. In truth I was given the map and now it pleases me to give it to you, sir.”
I nodded and then gladly retired to my room.
ZAARAN MIASMA:
An Archaic Fever Carried by Desert Vapors
The victim contracts the fever that originates in the wasteland of the Zaara from the invisible breath of the sands surrounding the oasis in the season of the khamsin, a southeasterly that blows in winter. The inhabitants there say that if one places a hand near the surface of the desert at dusk, one can feel the exhalations of the ancestors. If a person breaks into fever, then the old ones have come to inhabit him. Because water must be drawn daily from the oasis, the villagers are constantly exposed during winter, though very few die. Foreigners are far more susceptible to the contagion. Unwittingly they carry the voices away from their home. The fever has appeared in Lisboa, Valentia, and Tucca, transmitted not only by the afflicted but also by sand transported in large jars to these ports for construction. So the fever is also called the miasma of masons.
An elderly healer of Marruecos by the name of Fatma, who suffered the fever three times in her sixty years of life, warns that since foreigners do not keep their own ancestors well, they become possessed of others’. Empty jars call the river.
One must know the language of stars to appease them. That is why, according to Fatma, one must learn the sky map as protection, for the names themselves are amulets.
The day before departure, while exploring the city with Yousef as vigilant companion, I came upon the Church of Santa Barbara, patroness of gunsmiths and artillerymen, the saint governing explosions of all sorts, whose name is also evoked against thunderstorms.
Yousef waited outside as I entered to pray, something I hadn’t done in a long while. When I stepped inside, my eyes momentarily eclipsed by a cool darkness, I gradually took in a strange row of apparitions. Noble Spanish patriarchs, patrons of the church (I assumed, for I’d seen this once before in Sicilia), were hung after death along the walls beneath archways on either side of the nave, or, to speak precisely, they were mummified and dressed in their favored clothing—hose and shoes, gusseted slit pants, shirts and waistcoats, jackets and broad hats. They dangled from the white church walls so that each supplicant had to run a gauntlet of death grimaces and finery. I couldn’t decide whether arrogance or irony was the greater sin here. Some of the patriarchs hung by hooks piercing their lace collars, others by ropes around their necks, which gave them the appearance of being eternally garroted. Some were held by crudely sculpted arms that emerged from the walls behind.
A comely young nun approached from the transept, her eyes fixed upon the floor, though I still greeted her and asked, “What is this display, these arms constantly holding up the dead?”
She answered so quietly I could barely hear her. “The daughters, granddaughters, and great-granddaughters commissioned the arms for their beloved kin.”
“And is this not overly prideful?” I ventured.
The nun looked away anxiously toward the altar, as if she awaited a priest, and whispered, “And let the fathers fall?”
“No,” I remarked, “but why not use coffins?”
“Ah,” she said, nodding, “but there is a lesson here, good sir, for all those who pass. Humility and filial devotion.” Still she gazed at the floor, and only then I remembered my appearance. A nun most certainly must never speak to a man alone. Yet she went on, “We must pity those who have no arms to hold them. Those poor devils have no daughters, and eventually they’ll crumble in the sand. Do you not have a daughter, sir?”
“No, I don’t,” I said, barely restraining a dry laugh.
“May you be fortunate, then, in the future to beget one.” She scurried away, her robes rustling, hushing.
“Ah yes, may I be fortunate.”
Later in my sea-lit room, certain words came to me. Forgive the fathers. The daughters. I fear for my own father. Help me, Santa Barbara, to find him. Or help me to give him up.
CHAPTER 23
We Are Housed by the Past
The caravan departed in the blue hour before the hot sun climbed the horizon. It would take five days to reach Taradante. Yousef fitted my mule Fedele as a pack animal, then straddled the other mule, while I engaged a camel for the journey. We rode at the end of the caravan, since camels don’t suffer mules easily in front of them (they don’t suffer humans well upon them either, to be honest), with one heedful camel driver at some distance behind us.
The two Catalonian gentlemen rode ahead of us, having employed three camels just to carry the tomes of their library. Other travelers included Berber traders and a blue-veiled Arab woman of some distinction flanked by two men with scimitars.
We proceeded wi
th a lot of commotion at the outset, the camels snorting, belching, and grunting like dyspeptic old men, while the three drivers shouted brisk commands up and down the line. The camels’ rope bridles and harnesses shook with indigo tassels, as if they still carried bits of night and sleep with them, rendering them cantankerous in the transition. But as soon as the city disappeared behind us, all animals and humans alike settled into an undulant rhythm.
Sitting high on the camel’s hump in a saddle that was no more than folded blankets with a forked wood pommel, I lurched and dropped and lurched. There were no stirrups. I had never ridden anything so uncomfortable in my life, but I hoped, with patience, to learn to fall in with the motion. At least the nausea I’d felt off and on for weeks after leaving the northern lands had passed.
As we rode away from the boundaries of Tanger, we passed the tanners, their goat hides soaking in stone vats of crushed sumac bark, giving off a pungent stench. Next to them, some of the softened hides rested in red cochineal dye, looking like the flayed skins of unnamed martyrs. From these bloodred baths came the beautiful maroquin leather covers of many of our books at home. I hadn’t fully considered it before, but I would never touch those books again without the knowledge of what underlay the art of their bindings.
As we rode across the stark desert plain, with the Atlas Mountains beyond, Cousin Lavinia’s words returned to me from a long-ago letter in which she described painting San Paolo the Hermit. I begin with burnt sienna and lead white but avoid pure white as a ground. It’s too harsh and unforgiving. Even the desert can’t be this absolute in its absence of color. But she’d never seen the Mauritanian earth, its vacant glare nearly stripping one of sight. I could barely look out through the blue-black gauze of my wrapped headscarf, a woven net like the grid of a drawing screen plotting the landscape, the foreshortening, the vanishing point.
By midmorning the faint smoldering curves that marked the wadis snaking out of the mountains were barely distinguishable. Far behind us I observed another caravan dimly, with all the travelers wearing light blue robes. Sweat stung my eyes. The inescapable heat emptied me. There was no perspective, all things were equal: foreground, background, the line of camels, mules, men, and women leveled by the impartial sun, a confounding demon . . .
It was like the devil in the wall at the Benedictine chapel in Subiaco that I had visited as a child.
My father and I had met a hunched priest with strings of yellow-gray hair like rigging dangling around his face. “There are two walls here,” he warned us, and he pointed his forefinger toward the small crumbling hole in the wall left of the nave. I stepped back, frightened, as he lowered his voice to a whisper. “You must not look there!”
My father directed a question to the priest about the painting of the raven in a niche on the opposite wall. As they walked away, their backs turned to me, I crept up to the hole and peered in. The gap was dark, but gradually I could make out a twisted profile. Then a hand like a rooster’s spur seized me from behind and I leapt back.
“See, see,” hissed the priest, as he released my shoulder. “The devil lives between the walls. He is trapped there forever. But don’t worry, he won’t harm you as long as you don’t let him out.”
The old monk grinned and my father gave a dry laugh like a cough. The painted devil I’d glimpsed between the walls, between the old plain church and the new embellished one, was a leering demon with sharp nails and lurid eyes. It sat crushed between a history forgotten and one reinvented. The whole chapel nested inside the hewn cave of its older form, the way we are housed by the past when we think we are creating something new.
We stopped at a small mudhole to rest until the intense heat of midday passed. As my camel slowly folded his front legs to sit upon the ground, I thought surely I’d plunge forward. All around me the sounds of beasts eagerly lapping water, travelers conversing in parched tongues, and palm fronds crackling in the wind flattened to a dull pitch. Yousef urged me to drink and I did.
As I rested against a palm trunk in a narrow strip of shade, the camel drivers suddenly began waving their arms, yelling, and drawing the animals closer together. Yousef pulled the mules close and quickly wrapped their muzzles with shreds of torn scarf, no small task, as they jerked their heads away from him. Señor Montcada shouted, “The red sharki is coming. Cover up!”
“What’s the red sharki?”
“A hot southeasterly that will scour your skin.”
“How long does it last?”
But he didn’t hear me, for he’d turned and rushed back to his companion, both of them kneeling against one of the camels that bore their books. A thin red haze began to sift through the palm fronds, and then farther out I saw it, a rolling wall of sand that broke across the desert, scuffling and roaring down upon us.
Taut with fear, I squeezed my eyes shut and crouched against the musky camel, whose stink I almost welcomed, for the world returned to three dimensions through scent. As the sand pelted us and I struggled to breathe through my dark scarf in the shifting body of the desert, something stirred within.
I felt it jump—oh!—like a small fish in my belly.
It jumped again! My body had given me signs for months. The nausea, the cease of my cycles, which I’d read as grief, the heaviness I had blamed on my indulgence in sweets—these were all something more. A child swam in my womb.
The mathematicians left us on the fourth day to pursue their calculations in Marruecos. On the fifth day we mounted stark ridges through scant juniper and pine forests. At dusk we approached a walled village, all squares and rectangles and pointed arches, assembled at the base of brick-red mountains. The cool night air returned to me what the heat of day had drained. The pleasing geometry of human dwellings set against the disorders of the desert secured me once more in the world.
At last we had reached Taradante.
After Yousef made a few inquiries of the gatekeepers, we found lodging with the only person who offered beds to foreigners, a middle-aged woman of indigo skin by the name of Malina. Tall, lean, and wrapped in colorful robes and a blue half veil (covering only the lower part of her face), she ushered us into her cool courtyard. The veil, embroidered with small red triangles and dangling tiny silver coins, jangled lightly and glittered as she moved, drawing attention to the gleam of her good eye. The other resembled a dried fig embedded with an opaque marble. She provided me a plain room across the courtyard, separated from her own by a thin stick fence to keep the goats in. It was one of several rooms in the square cluster of red mud rooms and a granary tower that formed her dwelling.
Malina gave Yousef a smaller room to one side of the courtyard, beneath a single great date palm that shaded the animal stalls. Three goats lay in the straw, watching us pensively as they slowly chewed. She also pointed out a slightly larger stall where we could keep our mules. Luckily she spoke some Italian. I wondered, though I didn’t ask, about her kin, who must once have occupied these rooms—whether they died in a plague or war or were lost one by one. For it seemed strange that a woman would live alone in such a compound. There were no other guests.
The next morning I took Malina aside and explained, “I am in need of a woman’s garments, for I am only a man by the clothing I put on to travel in safety.” I didn’t mention that those clothes were growing more uncomfortable around my belly day by day.
“Mmm,” she murmured, and she stared at me. “I noticed your face was beardless and oddly smooth, but then I’m not always sure how to judge foreigners.” Then she smiled as she stroked my cheek. “Don’t worry. I have ample clothing for you.”
I put away my man’s garb and adopted the loose linen and wool robes of the Susa women. Malina kindly offered me these second-hand garments from among her own and gladly accepted payment.
Yousef was not alarmed. “I knew, Dottoressa, I knew,” he informed me quietly, nodding and looking down at his rough feet as he squatted in the courtyard, cleaning a bridle, the first morning I stepped to the well as a woman. “By your s
cent of salt and sweet. No man, not even a youth, has the smell of a woman.”
“But you acted kindly to shield me . . . Weren’t you worried about the trouble I’d cause?”
“You pay me well, Dottoressa. There will be no trouble while I serve you.” The old man spoke in a plain tone and continued brushing the bridle clean.
“Thank you, then.” I sat at the edge of the well, a round mud wall surrounding a cistern, capped by a chipped clay jug to prevent evaporation. Nearby, a simple pail tied to a coil of rope could be used to draw water.
“God, who speaks in the beehive, has many riddles, and why shouldn’t we be one of them?” added Yousef, still considering my changing guise.
Malina, who’d probably overheard our conversation, peered at me from her window. Then she entered the courtyard and handed me a small sheathed blade. “Keep this in your belt for the future,” she instructed me. “For though Yousef bears respect, others may not. And you must take the room next to mine.” She directed Yousef to move my things.
My new room, which opened onto the courtyard, was larger and possessed a narrow window and a crude wooden bed frame with a neatly folded pile of hendira blankets, woolens that women wove in pomegranate red, saffron yellow, and night blue, which could be worn as garments or used for sleeping.
A faded wine-red carpet patterned with flocks of triangular birds lay upon the packed earthen floor. In the darkest corner of the room a large cobalt-glazed jar of water with a snug ceramic lid stood like a watchful young child. When I filled my brass cup and drank, I tasted ancient minerals as if the water had passed through the veins of mountains, like those celebrated waters in Umbria, which I still remembered from former journeys with my father.
The Book of Madness and Cures Page 27
