Leo Africanus Read online

  Leo

  Africanus

  Leo

  Africanus

  Amin Maalouf

  Translated by Peter Sluglett

  For Andrée

  Copyright © by Amin Maalouf 1986

  Translation copyright © by Peter Sluglett 1988

  First paperback edition published in 1992 by

  New Amsterdam Books

  c/o Ivan R. Dee, Publisher

  1332 North Halsted Street, Chicago 60622

  by arrangement with W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Maalouf, Amin.

  [Léon, l’Africain. English]

  Leo Africanus/Amin Maalouf; translated by Peter Sluglett.

  p. cm

  Translation of: Léon, l’Africain.

  ISBN 978-1-56131-022-7

  1. Leo, Africanus, ca. 1492–ca. 1550—Fiction. 2. Africa—Discovery and exploration—Fiction. I. Title.

  [PQ3979.2.M28L413 1992]

  843—dc20

  91-36145

  CIP

  ISBN 1-56131-022-0 (paper : alk. paper)

  Manufactured in the United States of America.

  Table of Contents

  I THE BOOK OF GRANADA

  The Year of Salma al-Hurra

  The Year of the Amulets

  The Year of Astaghfirullah

  The Year of the Fall

  The Year of Mihrajan

  The Year of the Crossing

  II THE BOOK OF FEZ

  The Year of the Hostelries

  The Year of the Soothsayers

  The Year of the Mourners

  The Year of Harun the Ferret

  The Year of the Inquisitors

  The Year of the Hammam

  The Year of the Raging Lions

  The Year of the Great Recitation

  The Year of the Stratagem

  The Year of the Knotted Blade of Grass

  The Year of the Caravan

  The Year of Timbuktu

  The Year of the Testament

  The Year of the Maristan

  The Year of the Bride

  The Year of Fortune

  The Year of the Two Palaces

  The Year of the Lame Sharif

  The Year of the Storm

  III THE BOOK OF CAIRO

  The Year of the Noble Eye

  The Year of the Circassian

  The Year of the Rebels

  The Year of the Grand Turk

  The Year of Tumanbay

  The Year of the Abduction

  IV THE BOOK OF ROME

  The Year of San Angelo

  The Year of the Heretics

  The Year of the Conversa

  The Year of Adrian

  The Year of Sulaiman

  The Year of Clemency

  The Year of the King of France

  The Year of the Black Bands

  The Year of the Lansquenets

  ‘Yet do not doubt that I am also Leo Africanus the traveller’

  W.B. YEATS

  1865–1939

  I, Hasan the son of Muhammad the weigh-master, I, Jean-Leon de Medici, circumcised at the hand of a barber and baptized at the hand of a pope, I am now called the African, but I am not from Africa, nor from Europe, nor from Arabia. I am also called the Granadan, the Fassi, the Zayyati, but I come from no country, from no city, no tribe. I am the son of the road, my country is the caravan, my life the most unexpected of voyages.

  My wrists have experienced in turn the caresses of silk, the abuses of wool, the gold of princes and the chains of slaves. My fingers have parted a thousand veils, my lips have made a thousand virgins blush, and my eyes have seen cities die and empires perish.

  From my mouth you will hear Arabic, Turkish, Castilian, Berber, Hebrew, Latin and vulgar Italian, because all tongues and all prayers belong to me. But I belong to none of them. I belong only to God and to the earth, and it is to them that I will one day soon return.

  But you will remain after me, my son. And you will carry the memory of me with you. And you will read my books. And this scene will come back to you: your father, dressed in the Neapolitan style, aboard this galley which is conveying him towards the African coast, scribbling to himself, like a merchant working out his accounts at the end of a long journey.

  But is this not in part what I am doing: what have I gained, what have I lost, what shall I say to the supreme Creator? He has granted me forty years of life, which I have spent where my travels have taken me: my wisdom has flourished in Rome, my passion in Cairo, my anguish in Fez, and my innocence still flourishes in Granada.

  I

  The Book of Granada

  The Year of Salma al-Hurra

  894 A.H.

  5 December 1488 – 14 November 1489

  In that year, the sacred month of Ramadan fell in high summer. My father rarely left the house before nightfall, as the people of Granada were short-tempered during the daytime. Quarrels were frequent, and a sombre bearing was regarded as a sign of piety; only a man who was not keeping the fast could smile under the fiery heat of the sun, and only a man who had no concern for the fate of the Muslims could remain cheerful and friendly in a town exhausted from within by civil war and threatened from without by the unbelievers.

  I had just been born, by the unceasing grace of the Most High, in the last days of Sha‘ban, just before the beginning of the sacred month. My mother Salma was excused from fasting while she recovered, and my father Muhammad was dispensed from groaning, even in the hours of heat and hunger, as the birth of a son who would bear his name, and one day bear his arms, is a matter of legitimate rejoicing for every man. Furthermore, I was the first born son, and when he heard himself called ‘Abu’l-Hasan’, my father’s chest swelled imperceptibly; he stroked his moustache and slid his two thumbs slowly down his beard while glancing up at the alcove on the floor above, in which I lay. However, even his overwhelming joy was not as deep and intense as that of my mother Salma, who, in spite of her continuing pain and physical frailty, felt herself born again by my arrival in this world, as my birth transformed her into the first of the women of the household and assured her of my father’s continuing regard in the long years ahead.

  Long afterwards, she confided to me the fears which my appearance had unwittingly assuaged, if not entirely banished. She and my father, cousins betrothed to each other since childhood, had been married for four years before she conceived, and had felt around them as early as the second year the buzzing of defamatory rumours. To the point that Muhammad came home with a beautiful Christian girl, with black braided hair, whom he had bought from a soldier who had captured her in the course of a raid into the country near Murcia. He called her Warda, set her up in a room overlooking the patio, and even talked of sending her to Ismail the Egyptian to teach her the lute, dancing and calligraphy, like any favourite of the sultans.

  ‘I was free, and she was a slave,’ said my mother, ‘so we were not evenly matched. She had all the wiles of seduction at her disposal; she could go out unveiled, sing, dance, pour wine, wink her eyes, and take off her clothes, while I could never, as a wife, abandon my reserve, still less show the slightest interest in your father’s pleasures. He used to call me “My cousin”; he would refer respectfully to me as al-hurra, the free, or al-‘arabiyya, the Arab, and Warda herself showed me all the deference a servant girl owes to her mistress. But at night, she was the mistress.

  ‘One morning,’ went on my mother, her voice still choking with emotion in spite of all the years that had passed, ‘Gaudy Sarah came knocking at our door. Her lips were stained with walnut root, her eyes dripping with kohl, her fingernails steeped in henna, and she was enveloped from head to toe in a riot of ancient crumpled silks which bre
athed sweet-smelling perfumes. She used to come to see me – may God have mercy upon her, wherever she may be! – to sell amulets, bracelets, perfumes made from lemon, ambergris, jasmin and water lilies, and to tell fortunes. She immediately noticed my reddened eyes, and without me having to tell her the cause of my misery, began to read my palm like the crumpled page of an open book.

  ‘Without lifting her eyes, she said these words, which I remember to this day: “For us, the women of Granada, freedom is a deceitful form of bondage, and slavery a subtle form of freedom.” Then, saying no more, she took out a tiny greenish stoppered bottle from her wicker basket. “Tonight, you must pour three drops of this elixir into a glass of orgeat syrup, and offer it to your cousin with your own hand. He will come to you like a butterfly towards the light. Do it again after three nights, and again after seven.”

  ‘When Sarah came back a few weeks later I was already having my morning sicknesses. That day I gave her all the money I had on me, a great handful of square dirhams and maravedis, and I watched her dancing with joy, swaying her hips and tapping her feet loudly on the floor of my chamber, making the coins dance in her hands, the sound of their clinking together mingling with that of the juljul, the little bell which all Jewish women had to carry.’

  It was indeed time that Salma became pregnant, since Providence had ordained that Warda had become pregnant already, though she had taken care to conceal her condition for her own protection. When this came to light, two months later, it became a contest as to which of them would bear a son, or, if both had sons, which would be the first to give birth. Salma was too full of apprehension to sleep, but Warda would have been quite content to give birth to a younger son, or even a daughter, since, according to our Law, the mere act of giving birth would entitle her to the status of a free woman, without having to give up the delicious frivolity which her slave origin permitted.

  As for my father, he was so overjoyed at having been vouchsafed this double proof of his virility that he never had the slightest inkling of the bizarre competition taking place under his roof. Just before sunset one evening, when the condition of both his wives had become sufficiently advanced to be plainly visible, he commanded them both to accompany him to the threshold of the hostelry where he used to meet his friends, near the Flag Gate. They walked hand in hand several paces behind him, shrinking in shame, my mother in particular, from the inquisitive scrutiny of the men and the sniggering of the old gossips of our quarter, the most garrulous and most idle in the entire suburb of al-Baisin, who were watching them from the upper rooms of their houses, hidden behind curtains which parted as they walked past. Having shown them off sufficiently, and having no doubt himself felt the force of these glances, my father pretended to have forgotten something and took the same road back home, as darkness was beginning to obscure the countless dangers of the alleys of al-Baisin, some muddy and slippery in the spring rain, others paved but even more dangerous, as each gaping flagstone could turn into a fatal trap for the mothers-to-be.

  Exhausted and disorientated, almost at breaking point, Salma and Warda, for once united, collapsed on to the same bed, the servant’s bed, since al-hurra was unable to struggle up the stairs to her own. My father went back to the hostelry, quite unaware that he could have caused the loss of both his future children at the same time, hurrying, no doubt, according to my mother, to bask in his friends’ admiration and in expectation of their good wishes for the birth of two fine sons, and to challenge our neighbour Hamza the barber to a game of chess.

  When they heard the key turned in the lock, the two women burst out into in a fit of spontaneous laughter and it was a long time before they recovered their composure. Recalling the incident fifteen years later, my mother blushed at such childishness, drawing my attention somewhat shamefacedly to the fact that while Warda was barely sixteen, she herself was already twenty-one. After this a certain bond developed which softened the rivalry between them, so that when Gaudy Sarah paid Salma her monthly visit the next day, she asked the servant girl to come and have her stomach palpated by the pedlar-clairvoyant, who also doubled, when necessary, as midwife, masseuse, hairdresser and plucker of unwanted hair; she could also tell stories to her countless customers, shut up in their harems, of the thousand and one scandals of the city and the kingdom. Sarah swore to my mother that she had become exceedingly ugly, which made her very happy, since this was an unmistakable sign that she was carrying a boy, and complimented Warda pityingly on the exquisite freshness of her complexion.

  Salma was so sure of the accuracy of this diagnosis that she was unable to refrain from telling Muhammad about it that very evening. She also felt she could bring up another rather more embarrassing notion of Sarah’s, namely that a man should not come near either of his wives during pregnancy for fear of damaging the foetus or causing a premature birth. Even though obscured by circumlocutions and interspersed with long hesitations, the message was sufficiently direct to cause my father to flare up like a dry stick and launch into a stream of barely intelligible invective in which the words ‘rubbish’, ‘old witches’, ‘she-devil’ kept being repeated like the blows of a pestle in the hollow of a mortar, as well as a number of other generally uncomplimentary remarks about medicine, Jews and women’s brains. Salma thought that he would have beaten her if she had not been pregnant, but also told herself that in that case the argument would of course not have taken place. To console herself, she concluded wisely to herself that the advantages of motherhood outweighed these passing inconveniences.

  As a kind of punishment Muhammad strictly forbade her to receive ‘that poisonous Sirah’ in his house, hissing her name with the characteristic Granada accent which he was to retain all his life, which made him call my mother Silma, his concubine Wirda, the door ‘bib’ instead of ‘bab’, his town Ghirnata and the sultan’s palace ‘the Alhimra’. He remained in an extremely bad temper for several days, but with equal measures of prudence and vexation kept away from both his wives’ bedrooms until after their confinements.

  These took place within two days of each other. Warda was the first to feel the contractions, which then became less frequent in the evening and only became more intense at dawn; it was only then that she began to cry out loudly enough to be heard. My father ran to our neighbour Hamza, beat on his door and begged him to tell his mother, a worthy old lady of extreme piety and great skill, that the confinement was imminent. She appeared a few minutes later, wrapped in a white veil, carrying a broad-brimmed bowl, a towel and a piece of soap. She was said to have a lucky hand, and to have brought more boys into the world than girls.

  My sister Mariam was born around noon; my father hardly looked at her. He had eyes only for Salma, who swore to him ‘I shall not disappoint you!’ But she was not so sure, in spite of Sarah’s infallible prescriptions and her repeated promises. She had to endure two further interminable days of anguish and suffering before her dearest wish was granted, to hear her cousin address her as Umm al-Hasan, the mother of Hasan.

  On the seventh day after I was born my father called Hamza the barber to circumcise me, and invited all his friends to a banquet. Because of my mother’s and Warda’s condition, my two grandmothers and their servants took charge of the preparation of the meal. My mother did not take part in the ceremony, but she confessed to me that she slipped quietly out of her bedroom to see the guests and hear what they had to say. Her emotion was so great on that day that the most minute details became engraved upon her memory.

  Gathered in the courtyard, around the carved white marble fountain, whose water refreshed the atmosphere with the noise of its splashing and with the thousands of droplets which it scattered, the guests ate with appetites made particularly healthy because it was the beginning of Ramadan, which meant that they were breaking their fast at the same time as celebrating my entry into the community of the believers. According to my mother, who had to be content with the left-overs the following day, the meal was a feast fit for a king. The main dish was maruziya,
lamb prepared with honey, coriander, starch, almonds, and pears, and walnuts, as the season was just beginning. There was also green tafaya, goat’s meat mixed with a bouquet of fresh coriander, and white tafaya, made with dried coriander. Not to mention the chickens, the young pigeons, and the larks, in garlic and cheese sauce, the baked hare, coated with saffron and vinegar, and dozens of other dishes which my mother so often enumerated, recalling the last great feast which took place in her house before the fury of Heaven rained down upon her and her own. Listening to her as a child, I always waited impatiently for her to reach the mujabbanat, hot pies made of soft white cheese, dusted with cinnamon and dripping with honey, cakes made of dates or almond paste, and pastries filled with pine kernels and nuts, and perfumed with rose water.

  At this feast, my mother swore piously, the guests drank only orgeat syrup. She forbore to add that if no wine was poured, it was only out of respect for the holy month. In Andalus, the circumcision ceremony was always the excuse for celebrations whose original religious purpose was often entirely forgotten. The most sumptuous of all these occasions was still remembered in our day, the feast organized by the Amir Dhu’l-Nun of Toledo to celebrate the circumcision of his grandson, a feast which all the world sought to imitate but never managed to do. Wine and liqueur flowed like water, while hundreds of beautiful slave girls danced to the orchestra of Dany the Jew.

  But at my circumcision too, my mother declared, there were also musicians and poets. She even remembered the verses which were recited in my father’s honour:

  By this circumcision your son’s light glows more brilliant,

  As the light of the candle increases when the wick is trimmed.

  Recited and sung in every key by the barber himself, this couplet by an early poet of Saragossa marked the end of the meal and the beginning of the ceremony itself. My father went up on to the terrace to snatch me in his arms, while the guests gathered in silence around the barber and his assistant, a young beardless boy. Hamza made a sign to his assistant, who began to go round the courtyard, lantern in hand, stopping in front of each guest. A small present had to be offered to the barber, and according to custom everyone pressed the coins he gave on to the face of the boy, who announced the donor’s name in a high voice and thanked him before passing on to his neighbour. When the money had all been collected, the barber asked for two powerful lamps, unsheathed his knife, recited some appropriate Qur’anic verses and leant towards me. My mother always said that the cry which I let out rang out over the whole quarter like a sign of precocious valour, and then, while I continued to scream with the whole of my tiny body, as if I had seen all the evils that were to come pass before my eyes, the celebrations began again with the sound of the lute, the flute, the rebeck and the tambourine until the suhur, the meal just before sunrise in Ramadan.