Leo Africanus (16 page)

Several lips followed the prayers, while others seemed set in a dreamy pout, amused at times, while still others chattered incessantly. In the men's reception room, only Khali was weeping. I can see him still, as if he was taking shape before my eyes. I can see myself too, sitting on the floor, not happy, certainly, but not particularly sad either, my dry and carefree eyes roaming avidly around the
company. From Boabdil, who had become immensely fat, to the shaikh, whom exile and the years had rendered skeletal and angular. His turban appeared more immense than ever, out of all proportion. Every time he became silent the raucous screams of the women mourners rang out, their faces damp with sweat, their hair dishevelled, their faces scratched until the blood came, while in a corner of the courtyard the male mourners dressed in women's clothes, clean-shaven and made up, were feverishly shaking their square tambourines. To make them keep quiet, Astaghfirullah began to chant again, more loudly, more off key, with greater fervour. From time to time a street poet would get up and recite in a triumphal tone an elegy which had already been used for a hundred other departed souls. Outside, there was the clanging of cooking pots; the women of the neighbourhood were bringing in food, since nothing is cooked in a house where someone has died.

Death is a celebration. A spectacle.

My father did not arrive until midday, explaining rather confusedly that he had just learned of the sad news. Everyone eyed him curiously, thinking themselves obliged to greet him coldly or even to ignore him. I felt mortified; I would have wished that he had not been there, that he were not my father. Ashamed of my thoughts, I went towards him, leant my head against his shoulder and stood there without moving. But while he slowly caressed the nape of my neck I began to remember, I do not know why, the astrologer-bookseller and his prediction.

So the death had taken place. Without really admitting it to myself, I was somewhat relieved that the victim had been neither my mother nor my father. Salma told me later that she was afraid that it would be me. That which she could not voice, even in the very depths of her heart, only old Astaghfirullah dared to put into words, in the form of a parable.

Raising himself up to pronounce an elegy for the departed, he addressed himself first to my uncle:

‘The story is told that one of the caliphs of long ago had lost his mother, whom he cherished as you used to cherish your mother, and he began to weep without restraint. A wise man came up to him. “Prince of the Believers,” he said, “you should give thanks to the Most High, since he has favoured your mother by making you weep over her mortal remains instead of humiliating her by making her weep over yours.” We must thank God when death follows the
natural order of things, and trust in His Wisdom when, alas, it is otherwise.'

He began to intone a prayer, which the company murmured in time with him. Then without any transition he picked up the thread of his discourse:

‘Too often, at funerals, I hear men and women believers cursing death. But death is a gift from the Most High, and one cannot curse that which comes from Him. Does the word “gift” seem incongruous to you? It is nevertheless the absolute truth. If death was not inevitable, man would have wasted his whole life attempting to avoid it. He would have risked nothing, attempted nothing, undertaken nothing, invented nothing, built nothing. Life would have been a perpetual convalescence. Yes my brothers, let us thank God for having made us this gift of death, so that life is to have meaning; of night, that day is to have meaning; silence, that speech is to have meaning; illness, that health is to have meaning; war, that peace is to have meaning. Let us give thanks to Him for having given us weariness and pain, so that rest and joy are to have meaning. Let us give thanks to Him, Whose wisdom is infinite.'

The assembly gave thanks in unison:
‘Al-hamd ul-illah, al-hamd ul-illah!
' I noticed that at least one man had remained silent; his lips cracked, his hands clenched together; it was Khali.

‘I was afraid,' he told me later. ‘I thought to myself: “If only he can restrain himself!” Unfortunately I knew Astaghfirullah too well to nurture the least illusion in that direction.'

In fact, the sense of the allocution was beginning to change:

‘If God had offered me death as a gift, if He had called me to Him instead of letting me live through the agony of my city, would He have been cruel towards me? If God had spared me to see with my own eyes Granada falling into captivity and the believers into dishonour, would He have been cruel towards me?'

The shaikh raised his voice sharply, startling the company:

‘Am I the only one present to think that death is worth more than dishonour? Am I the only one to cry out: “O God, if I have failed in my duty towards the Community of the Believers, crush me with Your powerful hand, sweep me away from the surface of the earth like some baleful vermin. O God, judge me even today, for my conscience is too heavy to bear. You have entrusted me with the fairest of Your cities, You have put in my hands the life and honour of the Muslims; will You not summon me to render my accounts?” '

Khali was bathed in sweat, as were all those seated near Boabdil. The latter was deathly pale, like a turmeric stalk. It might have been said that his royal blood had abandoned him so as not to share in his shame. If, acting on the advice of some counsellor, he had come to re-establish his links with his former subjects, in order to be in a position to ask them to contribute to the expenses of his court, the enterprise was ending in utter disaster. Another one. His eyes roamed desperately towards the way out, while his heavy body appeared to have collapsed.

Was it out of pity, or exhaustion or simply by chance, that Astaghfirullah suddenly decided to interrupt his accusations and to resume his prayers? My uncle regarded this, he said, as an intervention from Heaven. The moment that the shaikh pronounced the words ‘I bear witness that there is no other God but God, and that Muhammad is the Messenger of God', Khali seized the opportunity literally to jump out of his place and to give the signal for the departure of the cortège to the cemetery. The women accompanied the shroud to the threshold of the gate, waving white handkerchiefs as a symbol of desolation and farewell. Boabdil slipped away through a side door. Henceforth the Granadans of Fez could die in peace; the flabby silhouette of the fallen sultan would appear no more to plague their final journey.

The condolence ceremonies continued for another six days. What better remedy is there than exhaustion for the pain caused by the death of a loved one? The first visitors would come at dawn, the last would leave after nightfall. After the third evening, the relatives had no more tears, and sometimes forgot themselves sufficiently to smile or to laugh, which those present did not fail to criticize. The only ones to behave properly were the hired mourners, who sought to increase their pay by intensifying their wailing. Forty days after the decease, the condolences resumed once more in the same fashion, for three further days.

These weeks of mourning gave opportunities for my father and my uncle to exchange various conciliatory words. It was not yet a reunion, far from it, and my mother took care not to cross the path of the man who had repudiated her. But, from the vantage point of
my eight years, I believed I could discern a glimmer of hope on the horizon.

Among other matters, my father and my uncle had discussed my future. They had agreed that it was time for me to start school. Other children went to school later, but it seemed that I was already showing signs of precocious intelligence, and it was pointless to leave me at home all day in the company of women. I might grow soft, and my virility might suffer. They each came to me in turn to explain this, and one morning they both solemnly accompanied me to the local mosque.

The teacher, a young turbaned shaikh with a beard which was almost blond, asked me to recite the
Fatiha
, the first
sura
of the Book. I did this without a mistake, without the slightest hesitation. He appeared satisfied with this:

‘His elocution is good and his memory is precise. He will not need more than four or five years to memorize the Qur'an.'

I was not a little proud, since I knew that many pupils took six years, even seven. After having learned the Qur'an by heart, I would be able to enter the college, where the various sciences were taught.

‘I will also instruct him in the principles of orthography, grammar and calligraphy,' the teacher explained.

When asked what payment he required, he took a step backwards:

‘My only payment comes from the Most High.'

However, he added that each parent gave what he could to the school on the various feast days, with a more substantial gift at the end of the final year, after the Great Recitation.

Promising myself to memorize the hundred and fourteen
suras
as soon as possible I began to attend the shaikh's classes assiduously five days a week. There were no fewer than eighty boys in my class, aged between seven and fourteen. Each pupil came to school in whatever clothes he pleased, but no one would have thought of coming to school dressed in sumptuous garments, silk, or embroidery, except on special occasions. In any case, the sons of princes and of the grandees of the kingdom did not go to the mosque schools. They received the instruction of a shaikh in their own homes. But with that exception, the boys who attended the school came from a variety of backgrounds: sons of qadis, notaries, officers, royal and municipal functionaries, shopkeepers and artisans, even some sons of slaves sent by their masters.

The room was large, and arranged in tiers. The bigger boys sat at
the back, the smaller ones in front, each with a little board on which he would write the day's verses, taken down at the master's dictation. The latter often had a rod in his hand, which he would not hesitate to use if one of us swore or made some serious mistake. But none of the pupils held it against him, and he himself never harboured a grudge from one day to the next.

On the day of my arrival at the school, I found a seat in the third row, I believe. Close enough to see and hear the teacher, but far enough away to protect myself from his questions and his inevitable outbursts of anger. Next to me sat the most mischievous of all the children of the quarter, Harun, known as the Ferret. He was my age, with a very brown complexion, with clothes that were worn and patched but always clean. After the first scuffle we became inseparable friends, bound together in life and death. No one who saw him would fail to ask him for news of me, and no one would see me without being astonished that he was not with me. At his side, I was to explore both Fez and my own adolescence. I felt an outsider; he knew the city was his, created for him, only for his eyes, for his limbs, for his heart. And he offered to share it with me.

It is true that he belonged, by birth, to the most generous of companies.

903 A.H.
30 August 1497 – 18 August 1498

It was in that year that Melilla fell into the hands of the Castilians. A fleet had been sent to attack it, but found it deserted, abandoned by its inhabitants, who had fled into the neighbouring hills, taking their possessions with them. The Christians seized the city and began to fortify it. God knows if they will leave it one day!

At Fez, the refugees from Granada became afraid. They had the sensation that the enemy was at their heels, that he would pursue them to the very heart of the lands of Islam, even to the ends of the earth.

My family's worries increased, but I was still only slightly affected, absorbed in my studies and in my budding friendships.

When Harun came to my house for the first time, still very shy, and when I introduced him to my uncle, mentioning the guild to which his family belonged, Khali took my friend's hands, more slender than his, but already more roughened, in his own, and pronounced these words, which made me smile at the time:

‘If the fair Scheherazade had known them, she would have devoted a long night to telling their story; she would have added jinns, flying carpets and magic lanterns, and before dawn, by some miraculous means, she would have changed their chief into a caliph, their hovels into palaces, and their penitential garb into ceremonial robes.'