A Cure for Serpents by Alberto Denti di Pirajno

Author:Alberto Denti di Pirajno [Alberto Denti di Pirajno]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780600826
Publisher: Eland Publishing
Published: 2016-08-14T04:00:00+00:00

In the low tent, which I had to enter almost on my hands and knees, Tahûk was sitting on the ground, wrapped in an outsize garment from which only her head emerged. She smiled at me, displaying a wonderful set of teeth. Their sparkling whiteness contrasted sharply with her dark, full lips which were thickly plastered with a wine-coloured cosmetic.

The smile accentuated her prominent cheekbones and lit up a sea-blue reflection in her enormous, liquid eyes, edged with their darkened lids; the antimony extended the outline of the eyes towards the temples and faded into green where it blended with the ochre colour with which the whole face was covered. What really made this Tuareg woman astonishingly beautiful, however, was her auburn hair which was dressed in curled masses on each side of her head.

The disconcerting colour of the make-up on her Mongoloid features, combined with the mass of gold-copper hair, made her look like a bewitched oriental idol. The girl’s face so fascinated me that I almost failed to notice the odour of her unwashed body.

My visit was not unexpected and Tahûk received me in a natural manner, using the traditional greetings in Arabic and addressing me as ‘my lord’ as she invited me to sit down beside her. She gravely accepted the first present I offered her, which was a mirror. Her hands were beautiful and all her movements full of grace as she held the mirror here and there to catch her reflection. When I produced a bottle of hair lotion, however, she snatched it up with an exclamation of pure joy and held the bottle to her nose, breathing the perfume with eyes half-closed and biting her lip as though she were about to swoon with ecstasy. With a sudden movement she seized and kissed my hand, leaving a wine-coloured stain upon it. She turned back her sleeves to the shoulders and spread the perfumed lotion on her arms, holding them to her nose and murmuring ecstatic words. She passed them under my nose also so that I too might enjoy the scent.

All at once she remembered that this was a doctor’s visit and that I had come to discover her sickness and – possibly – to cure her. She hurriedly put aside the mirror and the bottle and began to tell me how ill she was: she had pain here and pains there and a troublesome cough that split her ribs. She carefully recited what she had obviously been told to say, but when I questioned her she stumbled over her replies and, becoming impatient, insisted that she had pains everywhere.

Under her outer garment she wore a kind of Sudanese ‘gandurra’, a sleeveless garment slit up the sides as far as the hips. She removed this with the rest because, she said, she wished me to hear how bad her lungs were.

Her adolescent body – soft and supple as a cat’s and stained all over with indigo – did not seem to belong to the chrome-yellow face.

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