Mario Reading - The Nostradamus prophecies

Eventually, Sabir allowed himself to slide backwards down the wall of the caravan until he ended up with his rump on the floor and his legs stretched out beneath the bed. Nobody noticed him. He began to breathe more freely again. Then the cramp hit him.

Grasping his left thigh with both hands, he squeezed for all he was worth, writhing away from the bed, his teeth locked together in a rictus of pain. He wanted to yell, but didn’t dare to disrupt proceedings any further than he already had.

Like a plastic match unravelling, he turned first on to his front, one leg stretched out behind him and then scissored over on to his side when the cramp came back.

He was beyond caring what anybody else thought of him by this time and began to drag himself, like a slug, towards the door, beyond which the ever-watchful Sergeant Spola no doubt awaited him.

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disrupt proceedings like that. Only I got the cramp.’

Yola sat down beside him and began rubbing at his leg. Sabir was by now so far indoctrinated by gypsy custom that he looked guiltily around in case any of her women friends might see her and be outraged at her polluting – or being polluted by (he still didn’t quite understand which) – a gadje.

‘It’s all right. The curandero is very happy. You took away much of Alexi’s pain.’

‘ I took away Alexi’s pain? You’ve got to be joking.’

‘Yes. Under the curandero ’s hands it transferred itself to you. You must feel very close to Alexi. I had thought that it would transfer to me.’

Sabir was still in far too much pain to even consider laughing. ‘How long does this transfer last?’

‘Oh, a few minutes only. You are a…’ Yola hesitated.

‘No. Don’t tell me. A conduit?’

‘What is that?’

‘Something which leads to something else.’

She nodded. ‘Yes. You are a conduit. Unless the pain finds somewhere else to go, it will stay with Alexi. That was why I came to help. But the pain would not necessarily find me. It might find another target, that could not deal with it. Then it would return, much stronger and Alexi might die. The curandero is very pleased with you.’

‘That’s big of him.’

‘No. Don’t laugh, Damo. The curandero is a wise man. He is my teacher. But he says you, too, could be a curandero. A shaman. You have the capacity inside you. You only lack the will.’

‘And any understanding of what the heck he’s talking about.’

Yola smiled. She was beginning to understand Sabir’s gadje diffi dence by this time and to attribute less importance to it than heretofore. ‘When he’s finished with Alexi he wants to give you something.’

‘Give me something?’

‘Yes. I have explained to him about the eye-man and he is very worried for us both. He picked up the evil on me that the eye-man left and he has cleaned me free of it.’

‘What? Like he was cleaning Alexi?’

‘Yes. The Spanish call it una limpia – a cleansing. We don’t really have a word for it, as no gypsy can be cleaned of their ability to pollute. But evil that another has planted on us may be taken off.’

‘And the eye-man planted evil on you?’

‘No. But his own evil was so strong that his connection to me – the relationship he forged with me when I was standing on the stool, waiting to be hanged – this was enough to pollute me.’

Sabir shook his head in disbelief.

‘Listen, Damo. The eye-man read a story to me at that time. A story of a woman being tortured by the Inquisition. This was a terrible thing to hear. The evil of this story settled on me like dust. I could feel it sifting through the bag covering my head and settling about my shoulders. I could feel it eating into my soul and blanketing it with darkness. If I had died straight after hearing this story, as the eye-man intended, my lacha would have been tarnished and my soul would have been sick before God.’

‘Yola, how can someone else do such a thing to you? Your soul is your own.’

‘Oh, no, Damo. No. No one owns their own soul. It is a gift. A part of God. And we take it back to Him when we die and offer it to Him as our sacrifice. Then we are judged on the strength of it. That is why the curandero needed to clean me. God works through him, without the curandero knowing how or why it is done, or why he has been chosen – just as God worked through the prophet Nostradamus, who was chosen to see things that other men could not. The same thing happened with your cramp. God chose you to take Alexi’s pain away. He will be well now. You’ve no need to worry anymore.’

Sabir watched Yola walk away from him and back towards the caravan.

One day he’d understand all this, surely? One day he’d re-attain the simplicity that he’d lost as a child – the simplicity that these people he loved appeared to have held on to in the face of every last obstruction that life cared to put in their way.

The curandero still travelled by horse-drawn caravan. He had found himself a pitch at a riding stables about two kilometres out of town, on the right bank of the Etang des Launes. His horse presented an unnatural slash of brown amidst the predominant white of the gardien ponies in the corral.

As Sabir approached, the curandero pointed to the ground outside his front steps. Yola was already squatting there, an expectant expression on her face.

Sabir gave a vehement shake of the head, one eye still fixed on Sergeant Spola who was lurking near his car at the roadside. ‘I’m not squatting anywhere. Believe me. I’ve never had cramp like that before. And I don’t want it again.’

The curandero hesitated, smiling, as if he didn’t quite understand Sabir’s use of the vernacular. Then he disappeared inside the caravan.

‘He understands French, doesn’t he?’ Sabir whispered.

‘He speaks Sinto, Calo, Spanish and Romani-Cib. French is his fifth language.’ Yola looked embarrassed, as if the mere subject of how much the curandero might or might not be able to understand was subtly out of order.

‘What’s his name?’

‘You never use his name. People just call him curandero. When he became a shaman, he lost his name, his family and all that connected him to the tribe.’

‘But I thought you said he was the cousin of your father?’

‘He is the cousin of my father. He was that before he became a shaman. And my father is dead. So he is still the cousin of my father. They called him Alfego, back then. Alfego Zenavir. Now he is simply curandero.’

Sabir was saved from further bewilderment when the curandero re-emerged, brandishing a stool. ‘Sit. Sit here. No cramp. Ha ha!’

‘Yes. No cramp. Cramp a bad thing.’ Sabir looked uncertainly at the stool.

‘Bad thing? No. A good thing. You take pain from Alexi. Very good. Cramp not hurt you. You a young man. Soon gone.’

‘Soon gone. Yes.’ Sabir didn’t sound convinced. He backed on to the stool, stretching his leg carefully out ahead of him like a gout victim.

‘You married already?’

Sabir glanced at Yola, unsure what the curandero was getting at. But Yola was doing her usual trick of concentrating intensely on the curandero and pointedly refusing to notice any strategies Sabir might care to use to gain her attention.

‘No. Not married. No.’

‘Good. Good. This is good. A shaman should never marry.’

‘But I’m not a shaman.’

‘Not yet. Not yet. Ho ho.’

Sabir was beginning to wonder whether the curandero might not in fact be short of a few marbles – but the stern expression on Yola’s face was enough to disabuse him of that notion.

After a short pause for prayer, the curandero felt inside his shirt and drew out a necklet, which he placed around Yola’s neck. He touched her once with his finger, along the parting of her hair. Sabir realised that he was speaking to her in Sinto.