Amin Maalouf - Leo Africanus

Before continuing:

‘The mules which the bandits were forced to leave with you will be much more use to you than the jewels; they will carry you and your baggage, and they will not attract thieves.’

We followed this man’s advice to the letter, and it was thus that we arrived at our destination at the end of ten days, exhausted but safe. To find that our relatives refused us hospitality.

It was thus essential to find a roof under which we could shelter, which was not easy as the Andalusian emigrants, arriving in wave after wave in Fez, had taken over all the houses available. When Boabdil had landed, three years beforehand, he had been accompanied, it was said, by seven hundred people, who now had their own quarter where life was still lived in the style of the Alhambra, pride apart. Normally, the newcomers would put up for a while in the houses of their closest relatives, which we would certainly have done without Warda. As things were, there was no question of spending a single night in Khali’s house, where my father considered, with justice, that he had been held up to ridicule.

There remained the hostelries, the funduqs . There were not less than two hundred of them at Fez, most of them very clean, each with fountains and latrines with swiftly running water flowing through them, taking the sewage towards the river in a thousand canals. Some had more than a hundred and twenty spacious rooms, all giving on to corridors. The rooms were let out completely empty, without even a bed, the landlord only providing his customers with a covering and a mat to sleep on, leaving them to buy their own food, which would be cooked for them. Many made the best of such places, however, because the hostelries were not only for the accommodation of travellers but also provided dwelling places for certain widowers of Fez, who had neither family nor sufficient money to pay for a house and servants, who sometimes lodged together in the same room to share the rent and the daily tasks, and also to keep each other company in their misery. We had to set up house ourselves in this way for several days, the time it took to find more suitable accommodation.

It was not, however, the proximity of these unfortunates that upset my father, but the presence of a very different group of people. Having visited Fez in his youth, he still remembered the reputation of certain hostelries, which was so disgusting that no honest man would cross their thresholds or address a word to their proprietors, because they were inhabited by those men who were called al-hiwa . As I have written in my Description of Africa , the manuscript of which remains at Rome, these were men who habitually dressed as women, with make up and adornments, who shaved their beards, spoke only in high voices and spent their days spinning wool. The people of Fez only saw them at funerals, because it was customary to hire them alongside the female mourners to heighten the sadness. It must be said that each of them had his own male concubine with whom he carried on like a wife with her husband. May the Most High guide us from the paths of error!

Far more dangerous were the outlaws who frequented these same hostelries. Murderers, brigands, smugglers, procurers, those engaged in every vice felt themselves secure there, as if they were in a territory outside the kingdom, freely organizing the sale of wine, kif-smoking sessions and prostitution, combining together to perpetuate their misdeeds. I wondered for a long time why the police at Fez, always so ready to punish the greed of a shopkeeper or the hunger of a man stealing bread, never went into these places to grab hold of the criminals and put an end to activities which were as displeasing to God as to men. It did not take many years for me to discover the reason: every time the sultan’s army left on campaign, the innkeepers were made to supply all the staff necessary to cook for the soldiers, without being paid. In exchange for this contribution to the war effort, the sovereign left them to their own devices. It seems that in all wars order is the natural accomplice of disorder.

To be sure not to find ourselves in one of these infamous places, we had to find a hostelry near the Qarawiyyin mosque, where rich travelling merchants used to stay. Although the price of rooms there was more expensive than elsewhere, these establishments were never empty; whole caravans of customers would take them over at a time. The evening of our arrival we had the very good fortune to find a lodging in a hostelry run by an emigrant from Granada. He sent one of his slaves to the Smoke Market to buy us some small fried fish, meat fritters, olives and bunches of grapes. He also put a pitcher of fresh water on our doorstep for the night.

Instead of staying there a few days, we passed six weeks in this inn, until the landlord himself found us a narrow house at the bottom of a cul-de-sac not far from the flower market. It was half the size of our house in Granada, and the entrance door was low and somewhat sordid, the more so as one could not get inside without wading through a muddy puddle. When he suggested it to us he explained that it had been lived in by an Andalusian merchant who had decided to move to Constantinople in order to develop his business. But the reality was quite different, as our neighbours hastened to inform us: our predecessor, constantly confined to his bed, unable to carry on his business, and not having known a single day’s happiness during the three years he had spent in Fez, had simply gone back to Granada. Two of his children had died of the plague and his eldest son had contracted a shameful disease known as ‘the spots’. When we arrived, the whole of Fez was living in fear of this disease; it spread so quickly that no man seemed able to escape it. At first those who were afflicted by it were isolated in special houses, like lepers, but their number soon became so great that they had to be brought back to the bosom of their families. The whole town became an enormous infected area, and no medicine proved effective against it.

Hardly less deadly than the disease itself was the rumour that surrounded it. The people of the city whispered that it had never been seen among them until the arrival of the Andalusians. The latter in their turn defended themselves by claiming that ‘the spots’ had been spread, without any doubt, by the Jews and their women; they in their turn accused the Castilians, the Portuguese, sometimes even the Genoese or Venetian sailors. In Italy, this same scourge is called ‘the French evil’.

That year, I think in the springtime, my father began to talk to me about Granada. He was to do so frequently in the future, keeping me at his side for hours, not always looking at me, not always knowing whether I was listening, or whether I understood, or whether I knew the people or the places. He used to sit cross-legged, his face lit up, his voice softened, his tiredness and his anger abated. For several minutes, or several hours, he became a story-teller. He was no longer at Fez, no longer within these walls that breathed plague and mould. He travelled back in his memory and only came back from it with regret.

Salma watched him with compassion, with worry, and sometimes with fear. She considered that his moods were not brought on by homesickness nor the difficulties of his life in exile. For her, my father had ceased to be himself since the day that Warda had left, and the return of the concubine had settled nothing. Those absent eyes, that self-conscious voice, that attraction towards the land of the Rumis, these obsessions which made him act against all common sense all led her to suppose that Muhammad had been put under a spell. She determined to rid him of it, even if she had to consult all the soothsayers of Fez one by one.