‘As God disposes him to conduct himself!’
The ambiguity of this formulation was evidently not lost on the Jewess. She put her hand on my mother’s arm. Glancing at me at the same time out of the corners of their eyes, they took a step aside and spoke to each other in low tones, so that I could hear only occasional snatches of the conversation. The words ‘Rumiyya’ and ‘sorcery’, perhaps also ‘drug’ kept appearing on Salma’s lips; the Jewess was attentive and reassuring.
The two women agreed to meet again in the same place two days later to go the rounds of the soothsayers. I knew about it that day because my mother had decided that I should accompany her. Perhaps she did not want to leave me with Warda; perhaps she judged it more fitting, in the eyes of my father and the neighbours, to take a child with her, as living proof of the honesty of her comings and goings. At all events, for a seven-year-old boy it was an experience as wonderful as it was unexpected, and, I must admit, sometimes agonizing as well.
Our first visit was to a clairvoyant named Umm Bassar. It was said that the sultan of Fez would consult her at each new moon, and that she had put a spell upon an amir who had threatened him, striking him blind. In spite of her renown, she lived in a house as modest as our own, situated in the perfume suq, at the end of a narrow arcaded gallery. We had only to push past a hanging to make our way inside. A black maidservant made us sit down in a small chamber before leading us down a dark corridor to a room which was only a little larger. Umm Bassar was seated on an enormous green cushion, her hair covered with a scarf of the same colour, fringed with golden threads. Behind her back was a tapestry with a picture of the twenty-eight tabernacles of the moon; in front of her was a low table on which there was a glazed earthenware vessel.
My mother sat opposite the clairvoyant and explained her business to her in a low voice. Sarah and I stayed behind, standing up. Umm Bassar poured some water into the vessel, added a drop of oil, and then blew on it three times. She recited several incomprehensible formulae, and then thrust her face towards the vessel, saying, in a cavernous voice:
‘The jinns are there; some come by land, others by sea.’
Suddenly she turned towards me and beckoned me:
‘Come closer!’
Suspicious, I did not move.
‘Come, don’t be frightened.’
My mother gave me a reassuring look. I came up to the table timidly.
‘Lean over the table!’
The sight was, I swear, astonishing enough. The dancing reflections of the droplets of oil on the polished surface of the amphora gave the impression of ceaseless movement. Looking at it for several seconds, and allowing one’s imagination free rein, one could make out all manner of beings and objects.
‘Did you see the jinns moving about?’
Of course I said ‘Yes’.
I would have said yes whatever the question had been, but my mother was all ears. For the objective she had in mind, and for the price she was paying, she did not want to be disappointed. At Umm Bassar’s command I returned to my place. The clairvoyant remained for several minutes without moving.
‘We must wait until the jinns become calmer; they are too troubled,’ she explained in a confident voice.
There was a long period of silence, and then she began to talk to her jinns. She murmured questions to them and then leant over the vessel to observe the gestures they made with their hands and eyes.
‘Your cousin will return to you after three periods of time,’ she declared, without specifying whether it would be three days, three weeks, three months, or three years.
My mother took out a gold piece and left, pensive and bewildered. On the way back she asked me not to tell anyone about the visit, not even my father, for fear of seeing the jinns climbing on top of me in my sleep.
A week later we met Gaudy Sarah again on the square close to our house. This time our visit led us to an imposing residence situated not far from the sultan’s palace. We were received in an immense lofty room, with a ceiling painted azure and gold. There were several women there, all fat and unveiled, who seemed not at all pleased to see me. They talked about me for several minutes, and then one of them got up heavily, took me by the hand and led me to a far corner of the room, promising to bring me some toys. I did not see a single one, but I had no time to be bored, because after a few minutes Salma and Sarah came back to fetch me.
I must say immediately that I had to wait several years before I learned the truth about what happened that day; I only remember my mother and Gaudy Sarah grumbling incessantly as they left, but also that between outbursts of anger they joked with each other and laughed out loud. I also remember having heard mention, in the salon, of al-Amira, the princess.
She was a strange person. The widow of one of the sultan’s cousins, deeply versed in all the occult sciences, she had founded a peculiar circle, formed only of women, some chosen for their gifts of clairvoyance, others for their beauty. People with great experience of life call these women sahasat, because they are accustomed to use one another, and I know no more appropriate term to express it. When a woman comes to see them, they make her believe that they have friendly relations with certain demons, whom they divide into several species: red demons, white demons, black demons. They themselves alter their voices to make it seem as if the demons are speaking through their mouths, as I have set forth in my Description of Africa. These demons often order their fair visitors, if they are of comely appearance, to take off all their clothes and to exchange loving kisses with themselves, meaning, of course, with the princess and her acolytes. If the woman is prepared to go along with this game, whether out of stupidity or inclination, she is invited to become a member of the sisterhood, and a sumptuous banquet is organized in her honour, at which all the women dance together to a negro orchestra.
It was at the age of sixteen or seventeen that I learned the story of the princess and the demons. It was only then that I guessed what it was that had made my mother and Sarah take flight so quickly.
In spite of this misadventure, Salma had no wish to interrupt her quest. But for her next visit she showed greater circumspection in her choice of soothsayer. Hence, some weeks later, the three of us found ourselves at the house of a highly respected man of the city, an astrologer and bookseller who kept a shop near the Great Mosque of the Qarawiyyin. He received us on the first floor, in a room which was furnished only with books along the walls and a mat on the floor. He was at pains to point out as soon as we arrived that he was neither a magician nor an alchemist, and that he sought only to decipher the signs sent by God to His creatures. In support of his words he cited these verses from the Qur’an:
There are signs on earth for those whose faith is solid.
There are signs in yourselves, do you not see them?
There are also good things in Heaven which are destined for you.
And also those by which you are threatened.
Having thus reassured us of his faith and his honesty, he asked us to withdraw to the far corner of the room, rolled up the mat and traced several concentric circles on the floor with a piece of chalk. He drew a cross in the first one, and indicated the four cardinal points on the extremities of the cross, writing the names of the four elements on the inside. He then divided the second circle into four quadrants, and each quadrant into seven parts, making twenty-eight altogether, in which he wrote the twenty-eight letters of the Arabic alphabet. In the other circles he put the seven plants, the twelve months of the Latin year and various other signs. This procedure, known as zairaja, is long and complicated, and I would not have remembered the slightest detail if I had not seen it done three times in front of me. I only regret that I did not learn to do it myself, for of all the occult sciences it is the only one where the results are not open to discussion, even in the eyes of certain ulama.