In Arabian Nights (17 page)

I strolled into the garden, where I found Osman stooped over
a rake, his head hung so low that I couldn't see his neck. His
private life was none of my business, for in Morocco family
matters are kept well behind sealed doors. I put a hand on his
shoulder blade and wished him well.

'She has brought shame on us,' he said.

I tried to mumble something supportive.

Osman looked upwards until our eyes were level. He blinked
and a single tear rolled from the corner of his eye, down his
cheek to his chin.

'I still love her,' he said.

Everyone in the
bidonville
had the same question: where was
Murad and why had he gone? I ferreted out Marwan at his shack
on the north side of the shantytown, hoping he could shed light on
the storyteller's disappearance. He was helping his wife hang
out the washing. As soon as he saw me he dropped into the mud
the damp shirt he was holding, embarrassed to be seen doing
women's work. His wife slapped the back of his head for being so
clumsy. Then, when she saw me, she spun round in a frenzy,
furling a scarf over her hair, making flustered preparations for the
guest.

Marwan ushered me into the lean-to and then corralled me
into the most comfortable chair. His son was sent to buy a two-litre
bottle of Coca-Cola, the ultimate indulgence. I apologized
for arriving without notice and expressed my concern about
Murad.

The carpenter's face froze.

'Is there something wrong?' I asked.

Marwan put a hand to his mouth.

'He left,' he said.

'Where's he gone?'

'Back to Marrakech.'

'Why?'

'He . . .'

'Yes?'

'He . . .'

'Yes, Marwan, what is it?'

'He's gone back to Marrakech and . . .'

'And?'

'And taken Osman's wife with him.'

Burton used the
Arabian Nights
as a kind of repository of
oddities, scraps of information and obscure lines of thought. He
was getting on in age when the books appeared and you get the
feeling that he was keen to lay down the gems of a lifetime's
scholarship before it was too late. The vast scope and length of
the collection – which runs to over six and a half thousand pages
– allowed him to embed all sorts of annotations.

The text itself is peppered with hundreds, perhaps thousands,
of footnotes. Understanding them in their entirety calls for a
working knowledge of Latin, Greek, German, French and
classical Arabic. They cover an edifying spectrum of material
and frequently border on the sacrilegious, the illegal, or, more
usually, the obscene.

The more pedestrian notes address areas such as breeds of
Arab horse, camels' names, door hinges, carrier pigeons and
cannibal tribes. A great number of others stray into territory that
would have been regarded with outright horror by those
harbouring gentle Victorian sensibilities. They dote in dazzling
detail on matters such as syphilis, incest, penile size and dismemberment,
flatulence, menstrual discharges and hymeneal
blood, castration, eunuchs, aphrodisiacs and bestiality. Indeed, a
long note on that subject explains a safe and foolproof method of
enjoying 'congress' with a female crocodile.

The footnotes provide entertaining relief from Burton's
tremendously old-fashioned use of English, which was even
regarded as outmoded at the time.

His masterpiece of even greater irrelevance is the 'Terminal
Essay'. Running to almost two hundred and fifty pages, the essay
has very little to do with the stories in
A Thousand and One
Nights
. Agreed, it begins with a reflection on the origin of the
stories and their introduction into Europe. There is, too, a study
of the 'matter and the manner of the Nights', as well as an
academic commentary on the use of poetry in the collection. But
the nucleus of the 'Terminal Essay' is an extraordinary
dissertation on what Burton describes as 'Pederasty'. We would
call it homosexuality.

At a time when anthropology was in its infancy and moral
decency was at the fore, the essay developed and made public
Burton's own theory on homosexual practice throughout what
he called the 'Sotadic Zone'. He considered that pederasty was
motivated by geography and climate rather than by race or
genetic configuration. The zone in which Burton had isolated
homosexual tendencies as 'endemic' encompassed the Americas,
north Africa and southern Europe, the Holy Land, Central Asia
and much of the Far East. Over many pages, he relayed aspects
of the history, literary association, sociology, spread, and the
pleasure derived from homosexual activity.

Reading it in today's liberal climate, one's eyes widen and you
can only wonder the effect it had on puritanical Victorian
society. It is no surprise that Burton did everything in his power
to avoid the long arm of the censorship police.

The section is awash with the peculiar. Towards the end of the
essay, Burton notes: 'A favourite Persian punishment for
strangers caught in the harem is to strip and throw them and
expose them to the embraces of the grooms and slaves. I once
asked Shirazi how penetration was possible if the patient resisted
with all the force of the sphincter muscle: he smiled and said,
"Ah, we Persians know a trick to get over that; we apply a
sharpened tent-peg to the crupper-bone (os coccygis) and knock
till he opens."'

To deflect the censor's attention, Burton frequently broke into
Old English, French, Latin or Greek when describing the sensitive
or the indescribable. Another touch, found throughout his
collection, is the use of idiomatic language. It tends to hinder
easy comprehension, but adds to the general poetry. Burtonian
language includes phrases such as 'his prickle stood at point', 'a
stiff-standing tool', 'wee of waist and heavy of hip', 'he abated
her maidenhead' and 'thrust boldly in vitals with lion-like
stroke'!

Some of the material was so explicit that it is no great wonder
the 'Terminal Essay' was excised from any edition but the first. It fell to
Lady Burton to edit a version of her husband's work fit for the parlour as
well as the nursery. But you get the feeling Burton himself didn't give a
damn for that, or for the moral limitations of his time. Pushing even his
own absent boundaries of acceptability, Burton's pièce de résistence
must surely be this: 'The Jesuits brought home from Manila a tailed man whose
movable prolongation of the os coccygis measured 7 to 10 inches: he had placed
himself between two women, enjoying one naturally while the other used his
tail as a penis succedaneus.'

At Café Mabrook, Dr Mehdi was sitting at a different table from
where he was usually to be found, on account of a drip leaking
from a pipe on the floor above. The thumbless waiter Abdul
Latif was extremely agitated and was throttling a plumber in a
back room, albeit with great difficulty. The surgeon seemed
uneasy at the change in position and kept scratching his back, as
if the new seat had brought on an allergy.

When he saw me slope through the door, he stood up.

'I have been here an hour waiting for you,' he cried.

I said I had been in Tangier, that I had met Mohammed
Mrabet.

'Is he still alive?' Dr Mehdi asked in disbelief.

'Barely,' I said. 'He's smoking rather a lot of
kif
.'

'What did he tell you?'

'That if I want to find the story in my heart I must close my
eyes and then wake up.'

The doctor touched a fingertip to my knee.

'You must listen to me,' he said. There was urgency in his
voice.

'OK, I'm listening.'

'We are friends,' he said.

'Yes.'

'Then, as a friend I must ask a favour of you.'

I picked up my glass of coffee and pretended to sip it. In the
West one might enquire what the favour was before agreeing to
carry it out. But in the East a sense of honour is attached to the
asking of a favour. Demanding to know the nature of the favour
before accepting it would call into question the trust on which
the friendship is built.

The doctor touched my knee again, emphasizing the grave
importance of the duty being asked.

'My family have encountered a problem,' he said.

I nodded. 'What kind of problem?'

'A delicate one.'

I nodded again. 'How can I help?'

'I need you to take a message to my nephew Ibrahim.'

'I would be happy to,' I said.

'Very good.'

'What's the message?'

'You are to tell him that Hasif Mehdi of Casablanca has asked
you to bring some rock salt. I have written him a letter,' he said,
pulling out an envelope.

'What's the salt for?'

'It's special to our family, from a particular place,' he said. 'We
must use it at weddings for good luck, for purifying the wedding
garden. It's a tradition for us. My granddaughter has just become
engaged and so we will need some soon. But this time there's no
one to go and get some. Without it there can be no marriage.' Dr
Mehdi widened his eyes. 'Do you see the problem?' he said.

I accepted the request for a favour willingly and felt my
friendship with the doctor strengthen as a result. But I didn't
quite understand why he didn't go and fetch the salt himself.

'Do you promise you will do it, as one friend to another?'

I promised.

'Is your nephew living in Casablanca?' I asked.

'No, not in Casa.'

'In Rabat?'

'No, not there either.'

I paused and looked into the surgeon's rock-steady eyes.

'He lives in the south,' he said.

'Where exactly?'

'In the Sahara.'

The length of the
Arabian Nights
has always been a matter of
contention. Even though the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
compilers and translators expanded the collection many times, it
has never comprised much more than five hundred stories
(Burton's translation has four hundred and sixty-eight tales). But
then, the title of the collection refers to the length of nights
rather than to the number of stories recounted. In its original
form, the treasury of tales may have been far longer, but it's very
unlikely. I expect this is due partly to the limit of oral recitations.

A storyteller would surely find his audience satisfied with a
few hundred tales at most, and those spread over weeks or even
months. The endless repetition and frequent summaries suggest
a time when the tales were recounted verbally, a time when the
audience would need refreshing on what events had come
before.

Before the collection was arranged in a more rigid written
structure, oral recitation must have allowed extreme fluidity. It
is a point that modern academics sometimes find baffling: how a
large body of work, an encyclopedia in itself, could be so free
from boundaries. Tales would have come and gone depending
on the storyteller, the geographic setting, fashion and the
audience waiting to be entertained.

A Thousand and One Nights
in its written form allowed the
work engine of Victorian scholarship to outdo itself. As with
other triumphs, like Hastings'
Encyclopaedia of Religion and
Ethics
and, of course,
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, the translations –
and especially Burton's translation – pulled out all the stops.
Although his edition copied liberally from earlier versions –
particularly that of his colleague John Payne – it was its own
entity and, in many ways, is the most expansive.

For more than a century, scholars and laymen have railed against
Burton at every available opportunity. They have attacked his prejudice, his
snobbery and his loathing for the establishment. It's a fact that Burton was
no saint. But his translation of the
Arabian Nights
is a work of titanic
achievement. It is so because the translator was a polymath, a man versed
in literature and history, expert in multiple sciences, languages and skills.
His translation drew upon a lifetime of knowledge to create a magnum opus
that has rarely, if ever, been equalled.

The week after my arrival back from Tangier, I remembered my
promise to the cobbler, the promise that I would take the
Arabian
Nights
to show him. I had spent days and nights reading the
volumes, absorbed by the sheer peculiarity and detail of the footnotes.
The morning I went to meet the cobbler, I had read over
breakfast a first-hand account of a eunuch's dismemberment.

It was the kind of passage that causes tears to well in any
man's eyes.

There-upon she called out to the slave women and bade them
bind my feet with cords and then said to them, 'Take seat on
him!' They did her bidding, upon which she arose and fetched a
pan of copper and hung it over the brazier and poured into it oil
of sesame, in which she fried cheese. Then she came up to me
and, unfastening my bag-trousers, tied a cord round my testicles
and, giving it to two of her women, bade them hawl at it. They
did so, and I swooned away and was for excess of pain in a world
other than this. Then she came with a razor of steel and cut off
my member masculine, so that I remained like a woman: after
which she seared the wound with burning oil and rubbed it with
a powder, and I the while unconscious. Now when I came to
myself, the blood had stopped; so she bade the slave-girls unbind
me and made me drink a cup of wine.

The cobbler was standing outside the shop, as if waiting for
someone or something to arrive. We greeted and he kissed my
knuckles. I asked what he was waiting for. The old man jerked
off his navy-blue hat and held it to his heart.

'I spend my life in that shop,' he said. 'It's full of dirt and
noise. Sometimes I feel that I am going mad in there.'

'But it's noisy and polluted out here on the street,' I said. 'The
traffic's terrible.'

Noureddine the cobbler grinned and put his hand on my
shoulder.