‘Jump up and down!’
As she remained dumbstruck with fear, he went up to Muhammad and held the point of his dagger to his neck. In mortal fear, the concubine shook herself and gesticulated like a contorted puppet, but without leaving the ground. Not fully comprehending the seriousness of the situation, I let out a loud laugh which my father silenced with a frown. The thief shouted:
‘Jump higher!’
Warda threw herself into the air as best she could, and a light tinkling of coins could be heard.
‘Give all that to me!’
Putting her hand under her dress, she drew out a small purse which she sent rolling on the ground with a disdainful gesture. The bandit picked it up without taking offence, and turned towards my mother:
‘Your turn now.’
At that moment, the call to prayer rang out from a distant village. My father glanced up at the sun standing high in the heavens, and deftly pulled his prayer rug from the side of his mount, spreading it out on the sand, and then, falling to his knees, his face turned towards Mecca, began to recite his midday prayer in a loud voice. This was all done in the twinkling of an eye and in such a matter-of-fact manner that the bandits did not know how to react. While they were exchanging glances with one another, as if by a miracle a thick cloud of dust appeared in the road less than a mile in front of us. The bandits just had time to mount their horses before making off in the opposite direction. We were saved, and my mother did not have to do their bidding.
‘If I had had to do that, it would not have been a jingling that would have been heard but a regular fusillade, because your father had made me carry hundreds of dinars, sewn up in ten fat purses, which I had attached all over me, convinced that no man would ever dare to search so far.’
When the providential arrivals on the scene caught up with us, we saw that they formed a detachment of soldiers. Muhammad hastened to describe to them in detail the stratagem to which we had fallen victims. Precisely for such reasons, their commander explained with a smile on his lips, he and his men had been ordered to patrol this road, which had become overrun with brigands since the Andalusians began to disembark by the boatload at Melilla. Generally, he said in the mildest of tones, the travellers would have their throats cut and the muleteer would get his animals back as well as the share of the booty which would have been left for him. According to the officer, many of the people of Granada travelling to Fez or Tlemcen had met with similar misfortunes, although those making for Tunis, Tetouan, Sale or the Mitidja of Algiers had not been bothered.
‘Go back to the harbour,’ he advised us, ‘and wait. When a merchant caravan forms up, leave with it. It will certainly be guarded, and you will be safe.’
When my mother asked whether she had any chance of retrieving her precious casket, he replied, like any wise man, with a verse from the Qur’an:
‘It may be that you detest something, but that it shows benefit to you; it may be that you rejoice over something and it brings harm to you; because God knows, and you, you do not know.’
Before continuing:
‘The mules which the bandits were forced to leave with you will be much more use to you than the jewels; they will carry you and your baggage, and they will not attract thieves.’
We followed this man’s advice to the letter, and it was thus that we arrived at our destination at the end of ten days, exhausted but safe. To find that our relatives refused us hospitality.
It was thus essential to find a roof under which we could shelter, which was not easy as the Andalusian emigrants, arriving in wave after wave in Fez, had taken over all the houses available. When Boabdil had landed, three years beforehand, he had been accompanied, it was said, by seven hundred people, who now had their own quarter where life was still lived in the style of the Alhambra, pride apart. Normally, the newcomers would put up for a while in the houses of their closest relatives, which we would certainly have done without Warda. As things were, there was no question of spending a single night in Khali’s house, where my father considered, with justice, that he had been held up to ridicule.
There remained the hostelries, the funduqs. There were not less than two hundred of them at Fez, most of them very clean, each with fountains and latrines with swiftly running water flowing through them, taking the sewage towards the river in a thousand canals. Some had more than a hundred and twenty spacious rooms, all giving on to corridors. The rooms were let out completely empty, without even a bed, the landlord only providing his customers with a covering and a mat to sleep on, leaving them to buy their own food, which would be cooked for them. Many made the best of such places, however, because the hostelries were not only for the accommodation of travellers but also provided dwelling places for certain widowers of Fez, who had neither family nor sufficient money to pay for a house and servants, who sometimes lodged together in the same room to share the rent and the daily tasks, and also to keep each other company in their misery. We had to set up house ourselves in this way for several days, the time it took to find more suitable accommodation.
It was not, however, the proximity of these unfortunates that upset my father, but the presence of a very different group of people. Having visited Fez in his youth, he still remembered the reputation of certain hostelries, which was so disgusting that no honest man would cross their thresholds or address a word to their proprietors, because they were inhabited by those men who were called al-hiwa. As I have written in my Description of Africa, the manuscript of which remains at Rome, these were men who habitually dressed as women, with make up and adornments, who shaved their beards, spoke only in high voices and spent their days spinning wool. The people of Fez only saw them at funerals, because it was customary to hire them alongside the female mourners to heighten the sadness. It must be said that each of them had his own male concubine with whom he carried on like a wife with her husband. May the Most High guide us from the paths of error!
Far more dangerous were the outlaws who frequented these same hostelries. Murderers, brigands, smugglers, procurers, those engaged in every vice felt themselves secure there, as if they were in a territory outside the kingdom, freely organizing the sale of wine, kif-smoking sessions and prostitution, combining together to perpetuate their misdeeds. I wondered for a long time why the police at Fez, always so ready to punish the greed of a shopkeeper or the hunger of a man stealing bread, never went into these places to grab hold of the criminals and put an end to activities which were as displeasing to God as to men. It did not take many years for me to discover the reason: every time the sultan’s army left on campaign, the innkeepers were made to supply all the staff necessary to cook for the soldiers, without being paid. In exchange for this contribution to the war effort, the sovereign left them to their own devices. It seems that in all wars order is the natural accomplice of disorder.
To be sure not to find ourselves in one of these infamous places, we had to find a hostelry near the Qarawiyyin mosque, where rich travelling merchants used to stay. Although the price of rooms there was more expensive than elsewhere, these establishments were never empty; whole caravans of customers would take them over at a time. The evening of our arrival we had the very good fortune to find a lodging in a hostelry run by an emigrant from Granada. He sent one of his slaves to the Smoke Market to buy us some small fried fish, meat fritters, olives and bunches of grapes. He also put a pitcher of fresh water on our doorstep for the night.