Amin Maalouf - Leo Africanus

I carried these counsels to Warda. She obtained the appropriate items and when my father returned to town a few days later she went with him to the edge of the quarter. A watchman called Mariam, who came to see them. She looked disoriented, overwhelmed, haggard, with bloodshot eyes in her pallid face. A stream separated her from her parents, but they could speak to her, promise her a speedy deliverance and give her their advice. They gave the things they wanted taken to her to the watchman, slipping a few dirhams into his hand.

I was waiting for them in front of the door of the house when they returned. My father made as if not to see me. I knelt on the ground and took his hand, pressing it to my lips. After several long seconds he took it away, passed it over my face, and then patted my neck. I got up and threw myself into his arms.

‘Make us something to eat,’ he said to Warda in a broken voice. ‘We need to discuss the matter.’

She hastened to do so.

Neither he nor I said very much. At that point, the important thing was to be together, man to man for the first time, seated on the same mat, dipping our hands in the same fashion into the same dish of couscous. Mariam’s engagement had torn us apart; her ordeal hastened our reconciliation. It would also reunite Muhammad with my mother’s family.

That evening, Khali came to my father’s house, whose threshold he had not crossed since our arrival at Fez ten years earlier. Warda treated him as an honoured guest, offered him orgeat syrup and placed an enormous basket full of grapes, apricots, pears and plums in front of him. In return, he gave her kindly smiles and words of comfort. Then she withdrew behind a door to let us discuss the matter together.

The rest of the year was entirely taken up with endless undertakings and interminable secret meetings. Sometimes, people outside the family would join us, contributing their advice, and sharing our disappointments. They were mostly Granadans, but there were also two of my friends. One was Harun, of course, who was soon going to make my problem his own, to the point of taking it away from me altogether. The other was called Ahmad. At the college he was called the Lame One. Calling him to mind, I cannot prevent my pen from ceasing its tortuous scratchings, and to stop for a moment thoughtful and perplexed. As far away as Tunis, Cairo, Mecca, even Naples, I have heard men speak of the Lame One, and I always wonder whether this old friend of mine will leave any traces on the pages of history, or whether he will pass across the memory of men as a bold swimmer crosses the Nile, without affecting its flow or its floods. However my duty as chronicler is to forget my resentment and to recount, as faithfully as I can, what I have known of Ahmad since the day that year when he came into the classroom for the first time, greeted by the laughter and sarcastic remarks of the other students. The young Fassis are merciless towards outsiders, especially when they seem to have come straight from the province where they were born, and particularly if they have some physical infirmity.

The Lame One had let his eyes wander round the room, as if taking note of every smile, every grin, and then came to sit down next to me, whether because it was the nearest place for him to sit or because he had seen that I was looking at him differently. He shook me vigorously by the hand, but his words were not a simple greeting:

‘Like me, you are a foreigner in this accursed city.’

His tone was not questioning, his voice not low. I looked round with embarrassment. He started again:

‘Don’t be afraid of the Fassis, they are too crammed with knowledge to retain a drop of courage.’

He was almost shouting. I felt that I was becoming involved unwillingly in a dispute that had nothing to do with me. I tried to extricate myself, saying light-heartedly:

‘How can you say that, if you are coming to seek knowledge in one of the madrasas of Fez?’

He gave me a condescending smile.

‘I do not seek knowledge, because it weighs the hands down more certainly than a chain. Have you ever seen a doctor of the Law command an army, or found a kingdom?’

While he was talking, the professor came into the room, his gait dignified, his silhouette imposing. As a mark of respect, the whole class stood up.

‘How do you expect a man to fight with that thing wobbling on his head?’

I was already regretting that Ahmad had come and sat next to me. I looked at him in horror.

‘Lower your voice, I beg you, the master will hear.’

He gave me a fatherly slap on the back.

‘Don’t be so timid! When you were a child, didn’t you speak out the truth that the oldest ones kept secret? Well, you were right then. You must find the time of innocence in yourself again, because that was also the time of courage.’

As if to illustrate what he had just said, he got up, limped towards the professor’s raised chair and addressed him without respect, in a manner which silenced the slightest noise in the room:

‘My name is Ahmad, son of Sharif Sa‘di, descendant of the House of the Prophet, on whom be prayers and peace! If you see me limp, it is because I was wounded last year fighting the Portuguese when they invaded the territories of the Sous.’

I don’t know if he was more closely related to the Messenger of God than I am; as far as his deformity was concerned, he had been lame since birth, as I was to learn later from one of his friends. Two lies, then, but they intimidated everyone present, including the professor.

Ahmad went back to his seat, his head high. From his first day at the college, he became the most respected and admired of all the students. He always went about surrounded by a host of devoted fellow students, who laughed at his jokes, trembled at his rages, and shared all his enmities.

And these were very tenacious. One day, one of our teachers, a Fassi from an old family, had dared to cast doubt on the ancestry to which the Lame One laid claim. This opinion could not be disregarded lightly, since this professor was the most famous in the college, and had recently obtained the honour of giving the weekly sermon in the Great Mosque. At the time, Ahmad did not reply, and simply smiled enigmatically at the students’ questioning looks. The following Friday, the whole class took itself off to hear the preacher. He had hardly uttered the first words when the Lame One was seized with an interminable fit of coughing. Gradually, other coughers took over, and after a minute or so thousands of throats were being noisily cleared in unison, a strange infection which lasted to the end of the sermon, to the extent that the faithful went back to their homes without having understood so much as a word. Henceforth the professor took care not to speak of Ahmad, nor of his noble but doubtful ancestry.

I myself never followed in the Lame One’s wake, and he certainly respected me for it. We only saw each other alone, sometimes at my house and sometimes at his quarters in the madrasa itself, where there were rooms reserved for students whose families did not live in Fez; his people lived on the edges of the kingdom of Marrakesh.

I must say that even when we were alone together, some of his attitudes repelled me, bothered me, even sometimes frightened me. But he could also appear generous and faithful, and that was how he seemed to me that year, attentive in my periods of dejection, always finding the right tone to get me back on my feet again.

I greatly needed his company, and that of Harun, even if they both seemed unable to save Mariam. Only my uncle seemed in a position to take the necessary steps. He met lawyers, amirs of the army, the dignitaries of the kingdom; some were reassuring, others embarrassed, still others promised a solution before the next feast. We only let go of one hopeful possibility to cling on to another, equally in vain.