After having finished his drawing, the astrologer asked my mother what she was seeking. He took the letters of her question one by one, translated them into numerical values, and after a very complicated calculation, found the natural element to which the letter corresponded. After an hour’s scribbling, his reply came in the form of a verse:
Death will come, and then the waves of the sea,
Then the woman and her fruit will return.
My mother was so upset that her words choked, and the man tried to calm her:
‘If one seeks to know the future, one must expect sometimes to encounter death. Is death not at the end of every destiny?’
Salma found the strength to reply, trembling, almost beseeching him:
‘At the end, probably, but here it appears at the very beginning of the prediction.’
The man’s only reply was to turn his eyes and his palms towards heaven. No more words passed his lips, and when my mother attempted to pay him he refused with a gesture which brooked no argument.
The fourth visit was to be Salma’s undoing. This time it was to one of those people known as mu‘azzimin, famous for their ability to cast out demons. My grandmother, may God take pity upon her! had praised this man exceedingly; according to her, he had solved a thousand problems far more complicated than our own. In fact, he was so sought after that we had to wait two hours in his antechamber while he dealt with six other clients.
As soon as Salma explained her situation to him a condescending smile came over his face, and he swore that within seven days her problem would be forgotten.
‘Your cousin has a tiny demon in his head which must be cast out. If he were here I would cure him immediately. But I shall pass to you the power to exorcize him yourself. I will teach you a spell which you should recite over his head while he sleeps tonight, tomorrow and the next night; I will also give you this phial of perfume. You must pour out a drop when you pronounce the spell.’
The first evening, my father slept in Salma’s room, and she had no difficulty in reciting the words and pouring out a drop of the elixir. On the second evening, however, there came to pass what any intelligent being might have foreseen. Muhammad was with Warda, and my mother slipped trembling into their bedroom. She was about to pour out the liquid when the concubine let out a piercing cry, at which my father awoke, and with an instinctive movement seized his frail aggressor by the ankle. Salma fell sobbing to the ground.
Seeing the phial in her hand, Muhammad accused his wife of sorcery, of madness, and of attempting to poison him. Without waiting for dawn he at once cried out to her three times in succession: ‘Anti taliqa, anti taliqa, anti taliqa’, declaring thus that she was henceforth free of him and divorced.
The Year of the Mourners
902 A.H.
9 September 1496 — 29 August 1497
That year, Boabdil himself came to our house for the condolence ceremonies. I should say to Khali’s house, because I went to live with him after my father had repudiated Salma. The deposed sultan entered the room, followed by a chamberlain, a secretary, and six guards dressed in the style of the Alhambra. He murmured various appropriate words to my uncle, who shook his hand for a long time before giving him his high divan, the only one in the house. His retainers remained standing.
My grandmother had died in the night, and the Granadans resident in Fez had begun to gather since the morning. Boabdil had arrived unannounced, well before the midday prayer. None of those present had a particularly high opinion of him, but his titles, however hollow, continued to make a certain impression upon his former subjects. Furthermore, the occasion was not a suitable one either for recriminations or for the settlement of accounts. Except, that is, for Astaghfirullah, who came into the room shortly after the sultan, but did not favour him even with a glance. He sat down on the first empty cushion, and began to recite aloud in his rasping voice the Qur’anic verses appropriate to the occasion.
Several lips followed the prayers, while others seemed set in a dreamy pout, amused at times, while still others chattered incessantly. In the men’s reception room, only Khali was weeping. I can see him still, as if he was taking shape before my eyes. I can see myself too, sitting on the floor, not happy, certainly, but not particularly sad either, my dry and carefree eyes roaming avidly around the company. From Boabdil, who had become immensely fat, to the shaikh, whom exile and the years had rendered skeletal and angular. His turban appeared more immense than ever, out of all proportion. Every time he became silent the raucous screams of the women mourners rang out, their faces damp with sweat, their hair dishevelled, their faces scratched until the blood came, while in a corner of the courtyard the male mourners dressed in women’s clothes, clean-shaven and made up, were feverishly shaking their square tambourines. To make them keep quiet, Astaghfirullah began to chant again, more loudly, more off key, with greater fervour. From time to time a street poet would get up and recite in a triumphal tone an elegy which had already been used for a hundred other departed souls. Outside, there was the clanging of cooking pots; the women of the neighbourhood were bringing in food, since nothing is cooked in a house where someone has died.
Death is a celebration. A spectacle.
My father did not arrive until midday, explaining rather confusedly that he had just learned of the sad news. Everyone eyed him curiously, thinking themselves obliged to greet him coldly or even to ignore him. I felt mortified; I would have wished that he had not been there, that he were not my father. Ashamed of my thoughts, I went towards him, leant my head against his shoulder and stood there without moving. But while he slowly caressed the nape of my neck I began to remember, I do not know why, the astrologer-bookseller and his prediction.
So the death had taken place. Without really admitting it to myself, I was somewhat relieved that the victim had been neither my mother nor my father. Salma told me later that she was afraid that it would be me. That which she could not voice, even in the very depths of her heart, only old Astaghfirullah dared to put into words, in the form of a parable.
Raising himself up to pronounce an elegy for the departed, he addressed himself first to my uncle:
‘The story is told that one of the caliphs of long ago had lost his mother, whom he cherished as you used to cherish your mother, and he began to weep without restraint. A wise man came up to him. “Prince of the Believers,” he said, “you should give thanks to the Most High, since he has favoured your mother by making you weep over her mortal remains instead of humiliating her by making her weep over yours.” We must thank God when death follows the natural order of things, and trust in His Wisdom when, alas, it is otherwise.’
He began to intone a prayer, which the company murmured in time with him. Then without any transition he picked up the thread of his discourse:
‘Too often, at funerals, I hear men and women believers cursing death. But death is a gift from the Most High, and one cannot curse that which comes from Him. Does the word “gift” seem incongruous to you? It is nevertheless the absolute truth. If death was not inevitable, man would have wasted his whole life attempting to avoid it. He would have risked nothing, attempted nothing, undertaken nothing, invented nothing, built nothing. Life would have been a perpetual convalescence. Yes my brothers, let us thank God for having made us this gift of death, so that life is to have meaning; of night, that day is to have meaning; silence, that speech is to have meaning; illness, that health is to have meaning; war, that peace is to have meaning. Let us give thanks to Him for having given us weariness and pain, so that rest and joy are to have meaning. Let us give thanks to Him, Whose wisdom is infinite.’