The Book of Madness and Cures (36 page)

Hassan brought a tray with fragrant honey-mint tea, set it upon a small brass table, and served me first, pouring the tea into a small thick glass from the dented brass pot. He smiled at me as if we were sharing a joke, and the fresh transparency of his good nature startled me. I thought,
Things may change for the better,
a possibility that hadn’t entered my heart for a while. Then he served Sidi Romanesco and also poured a glass each for Yousef and himself, the two of them settling cross-legged upon the edge of the woven straw mat to partake of their tea. We sipped it slowly in a silence that seemed courtesy rather than the uneasiness of strangers. I didn’t have to explain myself further to the spice merchant. This small respect shone like a coin in my day. Customers who approached understood that they must patiently wait. Sidi Romanesco was taking his tea.

Before leaving, I requested a bit of costly cinnamon from the spice merchant, who, when I drew my purse from my breeches to pay, waved my money away from him as if he were brushing away flies. He wrapped the slivers of bark neatly in palm leaf and gave me the packet. Then he took Yousef aside and spoke to him about our arrangements.

Later that very afternoon he sent the boy to bring word that I might change lodgings to the more commodious fonduk of the mathematicians. And so we transferred my simple effects to a room that possessed a balcony with keyhole-shaped arches opening onto the sea.

The next day, Sidi Romanesco’s boy delivered a fine blue caftan, a headscarf, a sand-yellow djellaba, and red leather slippers, for which I was very grateful. These clothes turned out to be the most comfortable I’d ever worn. With consistent generosity, the spice merchant again refused to accept reimbursement (though I’d dispatched a small purse of silver along with Yousef to the souk). Later I sent a note of thanks (translated by one of the scribes in the passageways), not wishing to press payment and offend him.

I would spend the next two days in the cool shadows of my room, reading and writing as I waited for the departure of the caravan. Yousef explained that the traders had already arrived at the outskirts of Tanger but the camels needed to rest before setting out once more for Marruecos and Taradante and then traveling on to Segelmesse, following the salt route.

That first evening I met my Catalonian companions, two middle-aged gentlemen. Antonio Montcada was a thin man, fair as a Hollanter, with large blue eyes and straw-colored hair. Martin Requesne was a swarthy loose-limbed man with amber eyes and curly black hair flecked with gray. They invited me to a light supper of
succussu
and capon in the courtyard, and I accepted reluctantly, uneasy with my guise as a man.

I needn’t have worried. For soon Señor Montcada (his tongue loosened by wine) began talking nonstop, regaling us with an account of his previous journey to al-Badi, the palace of Sultan al-Mansour, as well as the general state of affairs in the known world. He paid little attention to me, other than as a handy ear for his tales.

“You may have heard that the sultan dislikes Spaniards for their piracy and the treatment of Moriscos within their borders and is seeking alliance with the English. Of course he ignores his own kidnappings of the Spaniards and the Portuguese!”

“Ha!” interjected Señor Requesne, flinging his hand into the air. “And at the same time he’s gathering handsome sums for their ransoms.”

“So you may well wonder why he welcomes us to his court. One of his poets, al-Fishtali, told me that his master always desires news of distant lands and likes to be fully apprised of both ally and enemy. He is a man of great intellectual curiosity. His court includes mathematicians who are poets, diplomats who are generals, physicians who are astronomers, scholars who—”

“Physicians? I am a doctor myself, collecting notes on diseases and cures as I travel,” I interrupted, immediately regretting that I’d said anything at all.

“Ah.” He paused and scrutinized me for a brief moment, then remarked, “A physician at the court warned me of the most extraordinary disease that plagues foreigners…”

He went on to describe an uncanny miasma that afflicts natives of this land and travelers alike, though the latter more gravely. Soon after this intriguing account, I excused myself in order to return to my room so that I might copy it down in full.

Señor Requesne, however, bade me wait a moment and said, “I have something that may interest you, Dottor.”

When he returned, wide-striding like a horseman in a hurry, as if he feared I’d be gone (perhaps he’d already experienced guests eager to escape his garrulous friend), he presented me with a sky map of odd constellations, a map drawn by an elder Fadola woman who’d contracted the fever.

“I don’t recall all the old desert names for the constellations,” he explained. “But the main ones there are Camel’s Eye”—here he snuffed all candles on our outdoor table but one and pointed to the map and then the sky, searching for each pattern above us—“the Yellow Djinn…Hoofprints of the Moon.”

For a few moments, even Señor Montcada kept quiet as we observed the close shimmering stars flung across the night sky, far more numerous than I’d ever seen them before.

“This is a wonderful thing,” I exclaimed. “How can I repay you?”

“Hmm, I need a little something for my arthritis. Perhaps you could…?”

“Of course. Where do you suffer?”

He held out his thick hands, swollen at the knuckles.

“Please wait, I’ll be only a short while.”

I walked back to my room, found what was needed in my medicine chest, and then returned with strips of linen wrapped around a small cloth bag of mustard seed powder. “Tomorrow,” I advised Señor Requesne, “make a paste of the powder and spread it on the cloth, then press it to the back of your hand and wrap it round. The heat caused thereby will soothe your aching. Only be careful, don’t leave it on too long or you may suffer blisters. Then wash your hands well of the paste. Do this every day for a week and your hands should improve. Then repeat the treatment every month.”

“Thank you,” said Señor Requesne, bowing slightly.

“If there’s anything else you require, let me know. This is small payment for the map.”

“Oh, you’re not obliged. In truth I was given the map and now it pleases me to give it to you, sir.”

I nodded and then gladly retired to my room.

Zaaran Miasma:

An Archaic Fever Carried by Desert Vapors

The victim contracts the fever that originates in the wasteland of the Zaara from the invisible breath of the sands surrounding the oasis in the season of the khamsin, a southeasterly that blows in winter. The inhabitants there say that if one places a hand near the surface of the desert at dusk, one can feel the exhalations of the ancestors. If a person breaks into fever, then the old ones have come to inhabit him. Because water must be drawn daily from the oasis, the villagers are constantly exposed during winter, though very few die. Foreigners are far more susceptible to the contagion. Unwittingly they carry the voices away from their home. The fever has appeared in Lisboa, Valentia, and Tucca, transmitted not only by the afflicted but also by sand transported in large jars to these ports for construction. So the fever is also called the miasma of masons.

An elderly healer of Marruecos by the name of Fatma, who suffered the fever three times in her sixty years of life, warns that since foreigners do not keep their own ancestors well, they become possessed of others’. Empty jars call the river.

One must know the language of stars to appease them. That is why, according to Fatma, one must learn the sky map as protection, for the names themselves are amulets.

The day before departure, while exploring the city with Yousef as vigilant companion, I came upon the Church of Santa Barbara, patroness of gunsmiths and artillerymen, the saint governing explosions of all sorts, whose name is also evoked against thunderstorms.

Yousef waited outside as I entered to pray, something I hadn’t done in a long while. When I stepped inside, my eyes momentarily eclipsed by a cool darkness, I gradually took in a strange row of apparitions. Noble Spanish patriarchs, patrons of the church (I assumed, for I’d seen this once before in Sicilia), were hung after death along the walls beneath archways on either side of the nave, or, to speak precisely, they were mummified and dressed in their favored clothing—hose and shoes, gusseted slit pants, shirts and waistcoats, jackets and broad hats. They dangled from the white church walls so that each supplicant had to run a gauntlet of death grimaces and finery. I couldn’t decide whether arrogance or irony was the greater sin here. Some of the patriarchs hung by hooks piercing their lace collars, others by ropes around their necks, which gave them the appearance of being eternally garroted. Some were held by crudely sculpted arms that emerged from the walls behind.

A comely young nun approached from the transept, her eyes fixed upon the floor, though I still greeted her and asked, “What is this display, these arms constantly holding up the dead?”

She answered so quietly I could barely hear her. “The daughters, granddaughters, and great-granddaughters commissioned the arms for their beloved kin.”

“And is this not overly prideful?” I ventured.

The nun looked away anxiously toward the altar, as if she awaited a priest, and whispered, “And let the fathers fall?”

“No,” I remarked, “but why not use coffins?”

“Ah,” she said, nodding, “but there is a lesson here, good sir, for all those who pass. Humility and filial devotion.” Still she gazed at the floor, and only then I remembered my appearance. A nun most certainly must never speak to a man alone. Yet she went on, “We must pity those who have no arms to hold them. Those poor devils have no daughters, and eventually they’ll crumble in the sand. Do you not have a daughter, sir?”

“No, I don’t,” I said, barely restraining a dry laugh.

“May you be fortunate, then, in the future to beget one.” She scurried away, her robes rustling, hushing.

“Ah yes, may I be fortunate.”

Later in my sea-lit room, certain words came to me.
Forgive the fathers. The daughters. I fear for my own father. Help me, Santa Barbara, to find him. Or help me to give him up.

CHAPTER 23

We Are Housed by the Past

The caravan departed
in the blue hour before the hot sun climbed the horizon. It would take five days to reach Taradante. Yousef fitted my mule Fedele as a pack animal, then straddled the other mule, while I engaged a camel for the journey. We rode at the end of the caravan, since camels don’t suffer mules easily in front of them (they don’t suffer humans well upon them either, to be honest), with one heedful camel driver at some distance behind us.

The two Catalonian gentlemen rode ahead of us, having employed three camels just to carry the tomes of their library. Other travelers included Berber traders and a blue-veiled Arab woman of some distinction flanked by two men with scimitars.

We proceeded with a lot of commotion at the outset, the camels snorting, belching, and grunting like dyspeptic old men, while the three drivers shouted brisk commands up and down the line. The camels’ rope bridles and harnesses shook with indigo tassels, as if they still carried bits of night and sleep with them, rendering them cantankerous in the transition. But as soon as the city disappeared behind us, all animals and humans alike settled into an undulant rhythm.

Sitting high on the camel’s hump in a saddle that was no more than folded blankets with a forked wood pommel, I lurched and dropped and lurched. There were no stirrups. I had never ridden anything so uncomfortable in my life, but I hoped, with patience, to learn to fall in with the motion. At least the nausea I’d felt off and on for weeks after leaving the northern lands had passed.

As we rode away from the boundaries of Tanger, we passed the tanners, their goat hides soaking in stone vats of crushed sumac bark, giving off a pungent stench. Next to them, some of the softened hides rested in red cochineal dye, looking like the flayed skins of unnamed martyrs. From these bloodred baths came the beautiful maroquin leather covers of many of our books at home. I hadn’t fully considered it before, but I would never touch those books again without the knowledge of what underlay the art of their bindings.

As we rode across the stark desert plain, with the Atlas Mountains beyond, Cousin Lavinia’s words returned to me from a long-ago letter in which she described painting San Paolo the Hermit.
I begin with burnt sienna and lead white but avoid pure white as a ground. It’s too harsh and unforgiving. Even the desert can’t be this absolute in its absence of color.
But she’d never seen the Mauritanian earth, its vacant glare nearly stripping one of sight. I could barely look out through the blue-black gauze of my wrapped headscarf, a woven net like the grid of a drawing screen plotting the landscape, the foreshortening, the vanishing point.