The Book of Madness and Cures

CHAPTER 22





My Father’s Keeper

“A man has been asking for you,” Señor Romanesco says. I follow him downstairs, to discover Hamish and his servant. He’s found me!

He’s dressed all in black in the Spanish fashion. His voice rings fluid and deep as if he were a well mender calling from the bottom of a cistern. “Surely you can’t go on alone? You’ll perish!”

I stare at him, dumbfounded. Finally the words escape: “I miss you.” He has come so far. I press my hands to his chest. I remember his body, where the bones lift against the skin, the white span of the ribs, the collarbone. “I must go to Taradante. My mind and heart are bent upon this.”

“Your mind has gone askew. No father would impose such a fate upon his daughter!”

“It is not imposed. I am my father’s keeper.”

Hamish parts his lips to reply, when—

The innkeeper knocked, and I awoke with a start.

I sat up, looking around the room in desperation. I believed for a moment that Hamish would still be there.



I left on the Charon at midafternoon, alone, under the glowering sun. The breeze blew steadily, raking the sea into choppy white crests. The mules shuffled and brayed belowdecks, poor beasts. I sat with the medicine chest behind me near a coil of rope on the forecastle of the ship and held on to a wooden rail, not caring whether I took spray. I welcomed the deafening wind of the straits, the creaking of spars and masts, and the dull thuds of sea against prow. The crew let me be. My face ran with salt.

My eyes were still fixed on Barbaria, as they’d been since we departed, to keep from retching, when I heard a cry from one of the sailors. “Look to starboard, look!” he shouted. “Here come the ladies of Villaderota!”

Another sailor closer to me whooped like a child. Then I saw them coming from the northwest, hundreds of them flinging open the surface of the sea—glistening arcs of light, some in pairs or singly casting sleeves of spray behind them. I’d never seen such a multitude of dolphins before in my life. Roused from numbness, I stood near the bowsprit, hanging on to one of the shrouds, and called out in surprise as they swam directly toward the ship, their numbers parting around it.

“I’m going in!” yelled the young sailor who had dubbed them the “ladies” as he tore off his shirt.

“No, you’re not!” chimed a couple of the crew, grabbing his arms. “We’ll not be coming about to pick up a crazy sailor love-struck with dolphins!”

“Maybe the good doctor up there has something to cure you,” called out the captain in jest.

His words barely reached me, for at that moment I saw a dolphin just below me roll on her side, still shearing through the prow wave, and glance up, her singular eye a black lens that held and then let me go. Nothing came between us until she swiveled back, and I saw the quick clasp and expulsion of her breath from a hole in the top of her body as she swerved off to the right and joined her companions, gleaming like freshly polished pewter as they leapt in and out of the sea, sewing sky to water. A few minutes later they disappeared to the south, and the ocean sealed itself after them.

So many years had passed since I’d felt that kind of awe. My body shook as I sat back down on the deck, pulling my cape about me like someone who’s been delivered a stunning clout to the head. The deckhands were still bantering among themselves when the captain gave the order to reset the sails. We rounded Cape Malabata, and after a journey of three or four hours the bay lay just ahead, with Tanger in full view, looking like the closed fist of a king, encrusted with dusky sapphires.



We disembarked, and a turbaned porter with a short white beard, clad in a blue tunic and pantaloons, immediately attached himself to me. Though I bartered with one or two others, he finally won out. His name was Yousef, and while he spoke little Italian, we shared a broken Spanish between us. I liked the lattice of his brown-toothed smile (for he was missing several teeth) and the way he immediately spoke to the mules and calmed them. I also recalled Señor Romanesco’s caution, “Choose an older man.”

Drawing a large striped blanket about him, Yousef led me to a fonduk within the medina, where the animals were lodged in fine arched stalls on the ground floor, while the visitors, mostly foreign merchants, were lodged above on the first and second floors.

I was so exhausted I didn’t want to leave my small room, didn’t want to encounter anything strange or exotic. What a peculiar traveler I’d become, a lonely ascetic bereft of my natural curiosity. What if Hamish had truly come along? I couldn’t think of him. My heart was a coffer filled with ghosts.

Yousef brought me a small plate of goat cheese, figs, almonds, honeyed pastries in the shape of little horns, and a bottle of red wine. When I moved to pay him, he shook his head and gave me to understand that he would return the next day and that I should pay him after I had slept.

The room contained two rush mats and in the arched sleeping niche a coarse wool mattress. The window was protected by a surprisingly intricate wooden grille of carved vines and leaves. I quickly closed the shutters and withdrew to my sleeping niche, bringing the leather satchel containing the loose leafs of The Book of Diseases and my maps as well as the medicine chest, close to the wall and my body. For a while the conflicting odors of honey and animal urine from the stables below kept me awake, until I wrapped my entire head round with a portion of the blanket.



The next morning, with the help of Yousef, I sought out Sidi Abdullah Romanesco, the brother of the innkeeper in Algezer. Yousef waved me ahead and followed close behind, touching my left elbow to steer me left, my right to steer me right, as we navigated the way to the quarter of spices. I was grateful. If I’d gone behind him I might have been set upon by those with ill intention. When I’d first mentioned my errand, he shook his head and made the swift gesture of someone picking a pocket.

As we moved through the dried vine- and reed-covered passageways of the medina, only a few unveiled Berber women balancing jars of water on their heads stared at me sharply. Most of the populace, now under the Spanish crown, had grown accustomed to Europeans and paid them little mind. Perhaps the women sensed I was a woman, even in my manly garb. Maybe even Yousef suspected that I wasn’t the man I seemed, though he went along without question.

At last we came to the narrow spice souk owned by Sidi Romanesco, off a little courtyard where a large fig tree had fallen over and continued to grow in a different direction, filling the space almost entirely. Passersby simply bent in avoidance of certain branches or perhaps in esteem and walked around it. Sidi, an ample balding man clad in a tan caftan and scuffed leather slippers, stood busy with a customer, an elderly man with a thick goiter. The merchant paused momentarily when he noticed us, directing me to a small red stool on one side of the shop. His opulent ground spices were displayed in conical hills upon flat baskets, in shades of crimson, orange, ocher, umber, green, and black, with various clumps of herbs laid out neatly in baskets to one side.

I recognized henna, absinthe, cinnamon, pepper, and chunks of amber, but many other spices were unknown to me. Their various sweet, pungent, and hot scents laced the warm air, pleasantly stinging my nostrils. Some of these spices must have been medicinal, I decided, for the old man repeatedly pointed to the swelling at his throat and shook his head as Sidi Romanesco offered various herbs. At last the right plant was agreed upon. The spice merchant wrapped a clump of leaves (sweet cicely?) in a small bit of dried palm leaf and sent the man on his way.

“And what is your wish, signor?” he asked me in Italian, correctly assessing my Venetian dress, though it didn’t differ that much from the style of Andaluzian men.

I handed him my letter of introduction from the innkeeper.

After reading it, he glanced at me cautiously and asked, “But why is an Italian doctor dressed as a commoner?”

“I believed it would provide safer passage,” I replied.

He stared at me in disbelief. “We must get you some Maroccan clothes now, especially if you’re traveling into the south, where there can be much danger.”

Then he was silent, examining the letter, as if weighing the information there. At last he called out toward the back of the surprisingly deep shop. A nimble young boy appeared.

“Bring us some tea, Hassan, and hurry up, we have guests!”

The boy scurried behind a thin blue curtain.

“So”—I addressed the spice merchant—“may I ask, what did you give the man with the swelling?”

“Ah, sweet myrrh to use as a compress,” he replied diffidently, seating himself upon a stool behind the spices, rubbing his large paunch with one hand. He folded the letter up and tucked it into a pocket in his robe. Then he said, “There are two mathematicians, I believe, or geometers from Barçalona, staying at my friend’s fonduk, traveling to the court of Ahmad al-Mansour in Marruecos. They would be proper companions.”

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.