Leo Africanus Read Free

just as in the first few weeks of her pregnancy. In her confused mind she saw herself once again a little girl of ten with bare feet, sitting in the mud in the middle of a deserted alley through which she had passed a hundred times but which she did not recognize any more, lifting the hem of her crumpled, wet and mud-flecked red dress, to cover her tearful face. ‘I was the prettiest and most fussed over child in the whole quarter of al-Baisin, and your grandmother – may God forgive her – had sewn two identical charms on to my clothes, one on the outside, and the other hidden, to defeat the evil eye. But that day, nothing could be done.’

    â€˜The sultan of the day, Abu’l-Hasan ‘Ali, had decided to hold pompous military parades, day after day and week after week, to show the world the extent of his power – but only God is powerful and He does not love the arrogant! The sultan had had stands built on the red hill of the Alhambra, near the Treason Gate, and every morning he and his retinue received visitors and dealt with affairs of state there, while innumerable detachments of troops from all corners of the kingdom, from Ronda to Basta and from Malaga to Almeria, marched past interminably, saluting the sultan and wishing him good health and long life. The inhabitants of Granada and the neighbouring villages both old and young, used to foregather on the slopes of Sabiqa at the foot of the Alhambra near the cemetery, from which they could see this continuous ceremonial taking place above them. Street sellers set themselves up nearby, selling slippers, or merguès, doughnuts or orange blossom syrup.’
    On the tenth day of the Parade, as the Islamic year 882 was ending, the New Year celebrations, which were always unostentatious, passed almost unnoticed amid the hectic tide of these continuous festivities. These were going to continue through Muharram, the first month of the year, and my mother, who used to go along to Sabiqa every day with her brothers and cousins, noticed that the number of spectators was constantly increasing, and that there were always many new faces. Drunkards thronged the streets, thefts were commonplace, and fights broke out between gangs of youths beating each other with cudgels until the blood flowed. One man was killed and several wounded, which led the
muhtasib
, the provost of the merchants, to call the police.
    It was at this point that the sultan finally decided to put an end to the festivities, evidently fearing further outbreaks of rioting and violence. Accordingly, he decreed that the last day of the Parade should be 22 Muharram 883, which fell on 25 April of the Christian year 1478, but he added that the final celebrations should be even more sumptuous than those of the preceding weeks. That day, on Sabiqa, the women of the popular quarters, both veiled and unveiled, were mingling with men of all classes. The children of the town, including my mother, had been out in their new clothes since the early morning, many of them clutching several copper coins with which they bought the famous dried figs of Malaga. Attracted by the swelling crowds, jugglers, conjurers, entertainers, tightrope walkers, acrobats, monkey-keepers, beggars, genuine and fake blindmen could be found throughout the entire Sabiqa quarter, and, as it was spring, the peasants were walking their stallions, taking fees for letting them mate with the mares that were brought to them.
    â€˜All morning,’ my mother remembered, ‘we had cheered and clapped our hands watching games of “tabla”, during which one Zenata rider after another tried to hit the wooden target with staves which they threw standing up on the backs of their horses at a gallop. We could not see who was most successful, but the clamour which reached us from the hill, from the very place known as al-Tabla, gave an unerring indication of winners and losers.
    â€˜Suddenly a black cloud appeared above our heads.