Amin Maalouf - Leo Africanus

Shouts and commotion awoke us at dawn. Dozens of shouting men, women veiled in black and white, and dazed or squealing children seemed to be taking our galley by storm. We had to cling to our luggage not to be pushed aside or perhaps even thrown overboard. My mother held me to her as the boat began to get further from the shore. Around us, women and old men prayed and wept, their voices barely drowned by the sounds of the sea.

Only my father remained serene on this journey into exile, and Salma could even see a strange smile playing on his lips the whole length of the journey. For, in the very heart of defeat, he had managed to achieve his own tiny field of victory.

I was your age, my son, and I have never seen Granada again. God did not ordain that my destiny should be written completely in a single book, but that it should unfold, wave after wave, to the rhythm of the seas. At each crossing, destiny jettisoned the ballast of one future to endow me with another; on each new shore, it attached to my name the name of a homeland left behind.

Between Almeria and Melilla, in the space of a day and a night, my existence was overturned. But the sea was calm, and the wind mild; it was in the hearts of my family that the storm was swelling.

Hamid the deliverer had performed his duty well, may God pardon him. When the coast of Andalus was no more than a thin streak of remorse behind us, a woman ran towards our corner of the galley, stepping eagerly over both luggage and travellers. Her joyful step was in strange contrast with her appearance; her veils were so sombre and thick that we should have been hard put to recognize her if Mariam had not been in her arms.

The only cries of joy were uttered by my sister and myself. Muhammad and Warda were struck dumb with emotion, as well as by the hundred curious glances which beset them. As for Salma, she held me a little more tightly against her breast. From her restrained breathing and the occasional sighs which escaped her I knew that she was suffering. Her tears were probably flowing beneath the shelter of her veil, and these were not misplaced, as my father’s unbridled passion would soon bring us all to the edge of catastrophe.

Muhammad the weigh-master, at once so serene and so uncontrolled! It so happened that I lost him in my youth, only to find him again in my maturer years, when he was no longer there. And I had to await my first white hairs, my first regrets, before becoming convinced that every man, including my father, had the right to take the wrong road if he believed he was pursuing happiness. From that time I began to cherish his erring ways, just as I hope that you will cherish mine, my son. I wish that you too will sometimes get lost in your turn. And I hope that, like him, you will love to the point of tyranny, and that you will long remain receptive to the noble temptations of life.

900 A.H.

2 October 1494 — 20 September 1495

Before Fez, I had never set foot in a city, never observed the swarming activity of the alleyways, never felt that powerful breath on my face, like the wind from the sea, heavy with cries and smells. Of course, I was born in Granada, the stately capital of the kingdom of Andalus, but it was already late in the century, and I knew it only in its death agonies, emptied of its citizens and its souls, humiliated, faded, and when I left our quarter of al-Baisin it was no longer anything for my family but a vast encampment, hostile and ruined.

Fez was entirely different, and I had the whole of my youth to discover it. I have only hazy memories of our first encounter with the city that year. I came towards it on the back of a mule, a poor sort of conqueror, half-asleep, held up by my father’s firm hand, because all the roads sloped, sometimes so steeply that the animal only moved with a shaky and hesitant step. Every jolt made me sit bolt upright before nodding off again. Suddenly my father’s voice rang out:

‘Hasan, wake up if you want to see your city!’

Coming out of my torpor, I became conscious that our little convoy was already at the foot of a sand-coloured wall, high and massive, bristling with a large number of menacing pointed battlements. A coin pushed into the hand of a gatekeeper caused the door to be opened. We were within the walls.

‘Look around you,’ insisted Muhammad.

All round Fez, as far as the eye could see, were ranges of hills ornamented with countless houses in brick and stone, many of which were decorated with glazed tiles like the houses of Granada.

‘Down there, in that plain crossed by the wadi, is the heart of the city. On the left is the quarter of the Andalusians, founded centuries ago by emigrants from Cordoba; on the right is the quarter of the people of Qairawan, with the mosque and the school of the Qarawiyyin in the middle, that huge building with green tiles, where, if God accepts, you will receive instruction from the ulama .’

I only listened to these learned explanations with half an ear, because it was the sight of the roofs in particular which filled my gaze: on that autumn afternoon, the sun was made milder by thick clouds, and everywhere thousands of people were sitting on the roofs as if on terraces, talking to one another, shouting, drinking, laughing, their voices mingling in a tremendous hubbub. All around them, hanging up and stretched out, was the washing of the rich and the poor billowing in the breeze, like the sails of the same boat.

An exhilarating rumour, a vessel which sails through storm after storm, and which is sometimes wrecked, is that not what a city is? During my adolescence it often happened that I passed whole days gazing at this scene, daydreaming without restraint. The day of my entry to Fez was only a passing rapture. The journey from Melilla had exhausted me, and I was in a hurry to reach Khali’s house. Of course I had no recollection of my uncle, since he had emigrated to Barbary when I was only a year old, nor of my grandmother, who had left with him, the oldest of her sons. But I was sure that their warm welcome would make us forget the horrors of the journey.

Warm it certainly was, for Salma and myself. While she disappeared completely into the all-enveloping veils of her mother, I found myself in the arms of Khali, who looked at me for a long time without saying a word before planting on my forehead the most affectionate of kisses.

‘He loves you as a man loves the son of his sister,’ my mother used to tell me. ‘More than that, since he only has daughters, he considers you his own son.’

He was to prove the truth of this to me on several occasions. But, that day, his solicitude had awful consequences for me.

After having put me down on the ground, Khali turned towards Muhammad.

‘I have been waiting for you for a long time,’ he said in a tone full of reproach, since no one was unaware of the embarrassing idyll which had delayed the weigh-master’s departure.

Nevertheless, the two men embraced each other. Then my uncle turned for the first time towards Warda, who had until then kept herself in the background. His gaze did not alight upon her, but veered off into the distance. He had chosen not to see her. She was not welcome in his house. Even Mariam, adorable, smiling, chubby little girl, did not have the right to the least display of affection.

‘I dreaded this welcome, and this was why I was so unhappy when Warda appeared on the boat,’ my mother explained to me later. ‘I had always put up with Muhammad’s misdemeanours in silence. His behaviour had humiliated me in front of all the neighbourhood, and in the end all Granada made fun of his passions. In spite of that, I always told myself: “Salma, you are his wife and you owe him obedience; one day, when he is weary of fighting, he will return to you!” While waiting I resigned myself to bow my head patiently. My brother, so proud, so haughty, could not do so. He would certainly have forgotten the past if the three of us had arrived alone. But to welcome under his roof the Rumiyya whom all the world accused of having bewitched his brother-in-law would have made him the laughing stock of all the émigrés from Granada, of whom there were not less than six thousand in Fez, all of whom knew and respected him.’