…“Or vedi com' io mi dilacco!/vedi come storpiato è Mäometto!/Dinanzi a me sen va piangendo Alì,/fesso nel volto dal mento al ciuffetto./ E tutti li altri che tu vedi qui,/seminator di scandalo e di scisma/fuor vivi, e però son fessi così”.
-Canto XXVIII
“Buaron, Rebecca, proprietress of Misurata brothel, 78-87; Ghazala, prostitute, 159-60; Gmera, prostitute, 88; Khadija, prostitute, 83,86; Mabrouka, prostitute, 87; Mahadia, prostitute, 83,85; Massauda, prostitute, 153-57; Mne, prostitute, 82,84,87; Prostitution, Moslem attitude to, 19; Salma, prostitute, 83; Yasmina, prostitute, 87…”
-Index to A Cure for Serpents, Alberto Denti Di Pirajno, memoir of an Italian colonial doctor in Libya and Eritrea, and later the Governor of Tripoli
If Dante placed a disemboweled Muhammad and a cloven Ali in the 8th Circle of Hell for fomenting schism among monotheists, the Duke of Pirajno would rather have lain there next to Gmera, Ghazala, or Mabrouka “The Lucky”.
Once in Libya I was being driven from Tripoli to Fezzan by two randy young men assigned to show me the country. We drove past a desert hospital in Mizda (according to the Duke, called by the Arabs the blad el asrar, the land of mysteries) and they wanted to pull over to see the “Ukraniyaat”, the “famously beautiful” (according to Libyan male folklore) Ukrainian nurses whose medical team was headed by the “voluptuous blonde” (in the words of a diplomatic cable from the US ambassador to Libya, released by Wikileaks) Galyna Kolotnytska, said to be Qaddafi’s mistress-cum-bodyguard.
I was told that I must read Pirajno’s memoir by a lady I’d met in Andes, New York, and was glad to have been given the tip, for after reading it I learned we had covered much the same territory- Mizda, Nalut, Ghadames, Massawa, Harar, etc. I remember once being told in Asmara at the breakfast table by a skinny Frenchman that because I was ”robuste” I had not gotten sick the night before, as had he and our other companions, from drinking bad alcohol at the hotel bar.
I did not need Dottore Denti’s well practiced medical knowledge of a body’s ills, chills, and other North African indispositions, which he cured most happily in Libyan brothels and Eritrean boudoirs and wrote about in the most exquisite detail, to know that being robuste is not enough for one to avoid a fever in Asmara or Tripoli. It also takes a bit of luck. Mabrouk!
