He took out a slip of scarlet paper and handed it to Uncle Mafìo, who unfolded it and read aloud:
“‘Bless, O God, sanctify this paper that it may frustrate the work of the Devil. He who upon his person carries this paper writ with Holy Word shall be free from the visitation of Satan.’”
“There is a ready market for such daubs, among men going into battle,” the Prince said drily. “Men of both sides, since Satan is the adversary of Muslims as well as Christians. The priests will also, for a price—for an English groat or an Arabian dinar—treat a wound with holy water. Any man’s wound, and no matter if it is the gash of a sword or a sore of the venereal pox. The latter is the more frequent.”
“Be glad you will soon get out of Acre,” sighed the Princess. “Would that we could.”
Uncle Mafìo thanked them for our audience, and he and I took our leave. He told me he was going back to the khane, for he wished to learn more about the availability of the mumum ointment. I set out merely to wander about the city, in hope of hearing some Farsi words and memorizing them, as Prince Edward had recommended. As it happened, I learned some that the Prince might not have approved of.
I fell in with three native boys of about my own age, whose names were Ibrahim, Daud and Naser. They did not have much grasp of French, but we managed to communicate—boys always will—in this case with gestures and facial expressions. We roamed together through the streets, and I would point to this or that object and speak the name by which I knew it, in French or Venetian, and then ask, “Farsi?” and they would tell me its name in that language, sometimes having to consult among themselves as to what that name was. Thus I learned that a merchant or a trader or a vendor is called a khaja, and all young boys are ashbal or “lion cubs,” and all young girls are zaharat or “little flowers,” and a pistachio nut is a fistuk, and a camel is a shutur, and so on: Farsi words that would be useful anywhere in my Eastern journeying. It was later that I learned the others.
We passed a shop where an Arab khaja offered writing materials for sale, including fine parchments and even finer vellums, and also papers of various qualities, from the flimsy Indian rice-made to the Khorasan flax-made to the expensive Moorish kind called cloth parchment because it is so smooth and elegant. I chose what I could afford, a medium grade but sturdy, and had the khaja cut it into small pieces that I could easily carry or pack. I also bought some rubric chalks to write with when I had no time to prepare pen and ink. And I began then to set down my first lexicon of unfamiliar words. Later, I would begin to make note of the names of places I passed through and people I met, and then incidents which occurred, and in time my papers came to constitute a log of all my travels and adventures.
It was by then past midday, and I was bareheaded in the hot sun, and I began to perspire. The boys noticed and, giggling, suggested by gesture that I was warm because of my comical clothing. They seemed to find particularly funny the fact that my spindly legs were exposed to public view but tightly enclosed in my Venetian hose. So I indicated that I found equally risible their baggy and voluminous robes, and suggested that they must be more uncomfortably warm than I was. They argued back that theirs was the only practical dress for that climate. Finally, to test our arguments, we went into a secluded alley cul-de-sac and Daud and I exchanged clothes.
Naturally, when we stripped down to the skin, another disparity between Christian and Muslim became evident, and there was much mutual examination and many exclamations in our different languages. I had not known before exactly what mutilation was involved in circumcision, and they had never before seen a male over the age of thirteen with his fava still wearing its capèla. We all minutely scrutinized the difference between me and Daud—how his fava, because it was always exposed, was dry and shiny and almost scaly, and stuck with bits of lint and fluff; while mine, enclosable or exposable at my whim, was more pliant and velvety to the touch, even when, because of all the attention it was getting, my organ rose erect and firm.
The three Arab boys made excited remarks which seemed to mean “Let us try this new thing,” and that made no sense to me. So the naked Daud sought to demonstrate, reaching behind him to take my candelòto in his hand, then directing it toward his scrawny backside which, bending over, he wiggled at me, meanwhile saying in a seductive voice, “Kus! Baghlah! Kus!” Ibrahim and Naser laughed at that and made poking gestures with their middle fingers and shouted, “Ghunj! Ghunj!” I still comprehended nothing of the words or byplay, but I resented Daud’s taking liberties with my person. I loosed his hand and shoved it away, then hurried to cover myself by getting into the clothes he had doffed. The boys all shrugged good-naturedly at my Christian prudery, and Daud put on my clothes.
The nether garment of an Arab is, like the hose of a Venetian, a forked pair of leg-envelopers. They go from the waist, where they tie with a cord, down to the ankles, where they are snug, but in between they are vastly capacious instead of tight. The boys told me that the Farsi word for that garment is pai-jamah, but the best they could do by way of a French translation was troussés. The Arab upper garment is a long-sleeved shirt, not much different from ours except in its loose and blousy fit. And over that goes an aba, a sort of light surcoat with slits for the arms to go through, and the rest of it hanging loose around the body, almost to the ground. The Arab shoes are like ours, except that they are made to fit any foot, being of considerable length, the unoccupied portion of which curls up and backward over the foot. On the head goes a kaffiyah, a square of cloth large enough to hang well below the shoulders at the sides and back, and it is held on with a cord loosely bound around the head.
To my surprise, I did feel cooler in that ensemble. I wore it for some while before Daud and I exchanged again, and I continued to feel cooler than in my Venetian garb. The many layers of the clothing, instead of being stifling to the skin as I would have expected, seem somehow to entrap what cool air there is and to be a barrier against the sun’s warming it. The clothes, being loose, are quite comfortable and not constrictive.
Because those clothes are so loose, and so easily made looser yet, I could not understand why the Arab boys—and all Arab males of every age—urinate as they do. They squat when they make water, in the same way women do. And furthermore they do it just anywhere, as blandly regardless of the people passing as those passersby are of them. When I expressed curiosity and distaste, the boys wanted to know how a Christian makes water. I indicated that we do it standing up, and preferably invisible inside a licet closet. They made me understand that such a vertical position is called unclean by their holy book, the Quran—and further, that an Arab dislikes to go inside a privy, or mustarah, except when he has to do the more substantial evacuation of his bowels, because privies are dangerous places. On learning that, I expressed still more curiosity, so the boys explained. Muslims, like Christians, believe in devils and demons that emanate from the underworld—beings called jinn and afarit—and those beings can most easily climb up from the underworld by way of the pit dug under a mustarah. It sounded reasonable. For a long time afterward, I could not crouch comfortably over a licet hole for dread of feeling the clutch of talons from underneath.
The street clothes of an Arab man may be ugly to our eyes, but they are less so than the street clothes of an Arab woman. And hers are uglier because they are so unfemininely indistinguishable from his. She wears identically voluminous troussés and shirt and aba, but instead of a kaffiyah headcloth she wears a chador, or veil, which hangs from the crown of her head almost to her feet, before and behind and all around her. Some women wear a black chador thin enough so that they can see dimly through it without being seen themselves; others wear a heavier chador with a narrow slit opening in front of their eyes. Swathed in all those layers of clothes and veil, a woman’s form is only a sort of walking heap. Indeed, unless she is walking, a non-Arab can hardly tell which is her front and which her back.