Leo Africanus (10 page)

A few days after my father's return, Duke Yahya summoned him to resume his functions as weigh-master, because, he told him, foodstuffs would soon be returning to the markets in abundance, and it was essential to take care that any fraud should be repressed. Initially disgusted by the mere sight of the renegade, my father
ended up by working with him just as he had done with all other police chiefs, not without murmuring curses from time to time when he remembered the hope that this man had once symbolized for the Muslims. The presence of Yahya also had the effect of reassuring the city's notables; while some already knew him well, all began to court him more assiduously than they had done when he was the unfortunate rival of Boabdil.

‘In his anxiety to calm the fears of the vanquished for their fate,' my father recalled, ‘Ferdinand used to make regular visits to Granada to make sure that his men were faithfully carrying out the agreements. Although concerned for his own safety in the first few days, the king soon began to move freely round the city, visiting the market, under close escort of course, and inspecting the old walls. It is true that he avoided staying the night in our city for months, preferring to return to Santa Fé before sunset, but his unease, though perfectly understandable, was not accompanied by any iniquitous or discriminatory measure or any violation of the treaty of surrender. Ferdinand's solicitude, whether sincere or feigned, was such that the Christians who visited Granada used to say to the Muslims: “You are now more dear to the heart of our sovereign than we ourselves have ever been.” Some were even as malevolent as to say that the Moors had bewitched the king to make him stop the Christians taking their property from them.

‘Our sufferings,' sighed Muhammad, ‘were soon going to absolve us and make us recall that even when free we would henceforth be chained fast to our humiliation. However, in the months immediately after the fall of Granada – may God deliver her! – we were spared the worst, because before it was let loose upon us, the law of the conquerors rained down upon the Jews. To her great misfortune, Sarah had been correct.'

In Jumada al-Thania of that year, three months after the fall of Granada, the royal heralds came to the centre of the city, proclaiming, to a roll of drums and in both Arabic and Castilian, an edict of Ferdinand and Isabella decreeing the ‘formal termination of all relations between Christians and Jews, which can only be accomplished by the expulsion of all the Jews from our kingdom'.
Henceforth they would have to choose between baptism and exile. If they chose the latter, they had four months to sell their properties and belongings, but they could take with them neither gold nor silver.

When Sarah came to see us on the day after this proclamation, her face was swollen after a long night of weeping, but from her eyes, now dry, shone that serenity which often accompanies the coming to pass of a long-anticipated drama. She was even able to make fun of the royal edict, reciting the sentences she remembered in a hoarse man's voice:

‘We have been told by the inquisitors and others that commerce between Jews and Christians leads to the most shocking evils. The Jews seek to win back the newly-converted Christians and their children by handing them books of Jewish prayers, by obtaining unleavened bread for them at Easter, by instructing them in the forbidden foods and by persuading them to conform to the Law of Moses. Our Holy Catholic Faith is becoming diminished and debased.'

Twice my mother asked her to keep her voice down, because we were seated in the courtyard that spring morning and she did not want this sarcasm to reach the ears of a spiteful neighbour. Very fortunately, Warda had gone to the market with my father and sister, because I do not know how she would have reacted to hearing the words ‘Holy Catholic Faith' pronounced with such disdain.

As soon as Sarah had finished her imitation my mother asked her the only important question:

‘What have you decided to do? Are you going to choose conversion or exile?'

A feigned smile greeted this question, then a feignedly casual ‘I still have time!' My mother waited several weeks before broaching the subject again, but the reply was the same.

But at the beginning of the summer, when three-quarters of the time allowed to the Jews had expired, Gaudy Sarah herself came to say:

‘I have heard that the Grand Rabbi of all Spain, Abraham Senior, has just had himself baptized with his sons and all his relatives. At first I was appalled, and then I said to myself, “Sarah, widow of Jacob Perdoniel, perfume seller of Granada, are you a better Jew than Rabbi Abraham?” So I have decided to have myself baptized, together with my five children, leaving it to the God of Moses to
judge what is in my heart.'

Sarah's anguish was voluble that day, and my mother looked at her tenderly:

‘I am glad that you are not leaving. I shall also stay in the city, because my cousin has not mentioned exile again.'

However, less than a week later, Sarah had changed her mind. One evening she arrived at our house with three of her children, the youngest hardly bigger than myself.

‘I have come to bid you farewell. I have finally decided to go. There is a caravan leaving for Portugal tomorrow morning; I am going to join it. Yesterday I married my two oldest girls, aged fourteen and thirteen, so that their husbands can look after them, and I sold my house to one of the king's soldiers for the price of four mules.'

Then she added, in an attempt at an excuse:

‘Salma, if I stay, I shall be afraid every day until I die, and every day I shall think of leaving and shall not be able to.'

‘Even if you have been baptized?' my mother was astounded.

In reply, Gaudy Sarah told a story which had been going the rounds of the Jewish quarter of Granada over the last few days, which had finally decided her to choose exile.

‘It is said that a wise man of our community put three pigeons on a window of his house. One was killed and plucked, and he had attached a little label to it which read: “This convert was the last to leave.” The second pigeon, plucked but still alive, had a label saying “This convert left a little earlier,” while the third was still alive and still had feathers, and its label read: “This one was the first to leave.” '

Sarah and her family went away without looking back; it was written that we were soon to join them on the path of exile.

898 A.H.
22 October 1492 – 11 October 1493

Never more, since that year, did I dare pronounce the word Mihrajan in the presence of my father, since its mention would plunge him into the saddest of memories. And my family would never celebrate that feast again.

It all happened on the ninth day of the holy month of Ramadan, or rather, I should say, on St John's Day, the twenty-fourth of June, since Mihrajan was celebrated not in accordance with the Muslim year but following the Christian calendar. The day marks the summer solstice, which punctuates the cycle of the sun, and thus has no place in our lunar year. At Granada, and, by the way, at Fez, we followed both calendars at once. If one works the land, if one needs to know when to graft the apple trees, cut the sugar cane or round up hands for the harvest, only the solar months make sense; at the approach of Mihrajan, for instance, it was known that it was time to pick the late-flowering roses, which some women wear at their breast. On the other hand, when leaving on a journey, it is not the solar cycle which is consulted, but the lunar one; is the moon full or new, waxing or waning, because it is thus that the stages of a caravan are calculated.

This said, I should not be faithful to the truth if I did not add that the Christian calendar was not used only for agricultural purposes, but that it also provided numerous occasions for feasting, of which my compatriots never deprived themselves. It was not sufficient to celebrate the birth of the Prophet, al-Mawlud, with great poetry competitions in public places and the distribution of food to the
needy; the birth of the Messiah was also celebrated, with special dishes prepared from wheat, beans, chick-peas and vegetables. And if the first day of the Islamic year, Ras al-Sana, was marked particularly by the presentation of formal congratulations and good wishes at the Alhambra, the first day of the Christian year was the occasion for celebrations which children would wait for impatiently; they would sport masks, and would go and knock at rich people's houses, singing rounds, which would win them several handfuls of dried fruit, less as a reward than as a way of stopping the racket; again, Nawruz, the Persian New Year, was welcomed with pomp; the day before, countless marriages were performed, since, it was said, the season was propitious for fertility, and on the day itself, toys made out of baked clay or glazed pottery were sold on every corner, shaped like horses or giraffes, in spite of the Islamic interdiction. There were of course also the major Muslim festivals: ‘al-Adha, the most important of the '
ids
, for which many of the people of Granada would ruin themselves to sacrifice a sheep or to buy new clothes; the Breaking of the Fast at the end of Ramadan, when even the poorest could not feast with fewer than ten different dishes; al-Ashura, when the dead were remembered, but also the occasion on which expensive presents were exchanged. To all these festivals should be added Easter, al-Asir, the beginning of autumn, and above all the famous Mihrajan.

On the latter occasion it was customary to light great fires of straw; people used to say with a smile that as this was the shortest night of the year, there was no point in sleeping. In addition it was useless to seek any rest at all, as bands of youths roamed through the city until morning, singing at the tops of their voices. They also had the dreadful habit of drenching all the streets with water, which made them slippery for the next three days.

That year, these hooligans were joined by hundreds of Castilian soldiers, who had since early in the morning been frequenting the numerous taverns which had been opened since the fall of the city, before wandering out into the various suburbs. So my father had not the slightest desire to take part in the rejoicing. But my tears, and those of my sister, and the pleadings of Warda and my mother persuaded him to take us for a stroll, ‘without leaving al-Baisin', he insisted. So he waited for sunset, since it was the month of the Fast, quickly swallowed down a well-deserved bowl of lentil soup – how unbearable Ramadan is when the days are so long – and then took us
to the Flag Gate, where temporary stalls had been set up by vendors of sponge doughnuts, dried figs and apricot sorbets, made with snow brought on the backs of mules from the heights of Mount Cholair.

Fate had given us an appointment in the street of the Old Castle Wall. My father was walking in front, holding Mariam in one hand and me in the other, exchanging a word or two with each neighbour that he passed; my mother was a couple of steps behind, closely followed by Warda, when suddenly Warda cried ‘Juan!' and stood stock still. On our right, a young moustachioed soldier stopped in turn, with a little drunken hiccup, trying with some difficulty to identify the veiled woman who had addressed him thus. My father immediately sensed the danger, and leaped towards his concubine, seized her urgently by the elbow, and said in a low voice:

‘Let's go home, Warda! In the name of Jesus the Messiah, let's go home!'

His tone was imploring, because the said Juan was accompanied by four other soldiers, all visibly drunk and armed, like him, with imposing halberds; all the other passers-by had drawn aside, in order to watch the drama without being involved in it. Warda explained with a cry:

‘It's my brother!'

Then she advanced towards the young man, who was still dumbfounded:

‘Juan, I am Esmeralda, your sister!'

With these words she pulled her right hand from Muhammad's clenched fist and deftly raised her veil. The soldier stepped forward, held her for several moments by the shoulders, and held her closely to him. My father turned pale and began to tremble. He realized that he was about to lose Warda, and even more serious, that he would be humiliated in front of the whole quarter, his virility impugned.

As for me, I did not understand anything of the drama unfolding before my childish eyes. I can only remember clearly the moment when the soldier grabbed hold of me. He had just said to Warda that she should accompany him and return to their village, which he called Alcantarilla. She suddenly began to hesitate. Although she had expressed her spontaneous delight at finding her brother again after five years in captivity, she was not sure that she wanted to leave my father's house to go back to her own family, burdened with a daughter which a Moor had fathered upon her. She would certainly no longer find a husband. She had not been unhappy in the house of
Muhammad the weigh-master, who had fed her, clothed her, and not left her on her own more than two nights on end. And then, after having lived in a city like Granada, even in times of desolation, the prospect of returning to bury herself in a little village near Murcia was not enticing. It could be imagined that such thoughts were running through her head when her brother shook her impatiently: