The Boy Who The Set Fire and Other Stories (2 page)

Once free from prison, Ahmed sleeps on the floor of a café at night and looks for work during the day. The café is frequented mainly by thieves and pickpockets, whom the young boy begs to teach him how to steal. As the days pass, and he finds no job, his will to work gradually gives way to apathy: “I stayed there in the café. I was thinking, and talking with them [the thieves], and each day I spent less time looking for work. And finally I stayed the whole time in the café, and did not look for work any more.”
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When Ahmed does find work again, it is as houseboy for a couple of French homosexuals who are taken with his good looks. For a few months Ahmed flourishes in a job which gives him some sense of pride in himself and his work. He enjoys being in charge of the housekeeping duties, and, for once, he has good food and plenty of it. But Ahmed’s orderly world falls apart when the relationship between the French couple breaks up because of the younger Frenchman’s infatuation with an Arab youth. The remainder of the “novel” follows Ahmed’s dogged attempt to maintain a measure of decency and order in his work as the Frenchman, more and more besotted by his young lovers, sinks further into poverty and degradation. The final episodes approach the implacable realism of Zola or Balzac in their focus on a weak individual slowly being destroyed by his sexual obsession. The book ends with Ahmed once again assessing the bleakness of his life:

I was thinking: Look at all the work I did for that Nazarene! And when it ended, he cursed me and threw me out. But that’s all right. The stork has to wait a long time for locusts to come. Then he eats.
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Ahmed’s ability to wait, to approach the threshold of hope without actually giving in to hoping, makes him an appealing figure. Charhadi’s autobiography succeeds largely because his is an honest, unpretentious voice. The story he has to tell brings the Western reader remarkably close to the social realities of North Africa, and Bowles must have sensed the importance of recording the life story of an illiterate Moroccan youth.

The humiliation and pain, both physical and emotional, of Charhadi’s
Life Full of Holes
are echoed in several of the other translations, for Bowles’s narrators, without exception, belong to the poorer class of Moroccan society. The success of Larbi Layachi’s work with Bowles attracted another young Moroccan street youth, Mohammed Mrabet, who has taped eight volumes and has contributed stories to the collection entitled
Five Eyes.
In his autobiography
Look and Move On
, published in 1976, Mrabet recounts the beginning of his collaboration with Bowles. He had met Jane and Paul Bowles on several occasions and one day visited their apartment in Tangier, where Bowles showed him a copy of
A Life Full of Holes
with Larbi’s picture on the cover. “I began to laugh,” Mrabet says, “when I saw it, because I knew Larbi could not write. How can that be Larbi’s book? He can’t even sign his name.” Bowles then showed him Larbi’s tapes and explained how he translated from the tapes. When Mrabet is assured that Larbi made enough money from the book to get married, Mrabet decides that he too has stories to tell:

I began to go see him [Bowles] several times a week, and each time I spent two hours or so recording stories. Finally I had a good collection of them. Some were tales I had heard in the cafés, some were dreams, some were inventions I made as I was recording, and some were about things that had actually happened to me.
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The first of these stories dramatizes a curious kind of modern Arabic love affair in a novel entitled
Love with a Few Hairs
, published in 1968 and later produced by the BBC. Mrabet tells a highly engrossing story of love addiction, magic potions, and witches’ spells that further complicate an already complicated situation in which the handsome young protagonist Mohammed is the primary love interest not only of his wife but of his homosexual lover, Mr. David, who runs a hotel in Tangier.

At age seventeen Mohammed has already spent five relatively contented years with Mr. David when he falls in love with his beautiful young neighbor Mina. After it is clear that Mina does not reciprocate his passion, Mohammed visits a local witch, who gives him a love powder concocted of a variety of items, including a few of Mina’s hairs. The powder works its magic only too well and soon Mina is imprudently in love with Mohammed. Much against her family’s wishes, Mina marries Mohammed, who manages to placate Mr. David enough to extract from him considerable sums of money to pay for the bride and wedding festivities. After a few months of exhilarating happiness, very convincingly portrayed by Mrabet, the marriage turns sour when Mohammed’s meddling mother-in-law, suspicious that her daughter is under a spell, consults a fortune-teller, who casts snails in the dust and determines that Mina is indeed the victim of a “false” love induced by magic.

Mrabet then describes the various means used by a witch to “disenchant” Mina, to break the bondage of her passion. The reader learns a great deal not only about the costs of these sorcerers’ services but also about the sometimes hilarious ways in which spells are cast or broken. Mina’s spell, for instance, is broken as she straddles a brazier smoking with the witch’s concoction: there is a loud explosion and she is “cured.” All the while, however, Mohammed remains hopelessly in love with his wife, unable to counteract the machinations of his mother-in-law, unable to sway Mina despite the profusion of gifts he lavishes upon her, thanks to his services to Mr. David, who remains a sometimes irritable but faithful supporter during Mohammed’s troubles.

Mrabet’s probing of the conflicting desires that paralyze Mohammed and account for his inability to leave Mina make the novel an absorbing psychological study. Even after Mohammed again tries a witch’s cure to rid him of his love, he remains attached to Mina, who is increasingly unwilling to give up the material rewards of being Mohammed’s wife. Eventually, it is time and the faithful Mr. David that cure him of his love addiction. With his lover’s help he buys himself out of the marriage. Years later on a bus, he happens upon a dirty, ragged country woman with three small children and realizes she is his former wife and one of the children his own son. He gives the child some money, says good-bye to Mina, then goes his way, congratulating himself on his good life with Mr. David and his ability to enjoy women now without becoming attached to them as he had with Mina.

Besides being an intensive look at the psychology of obsessive love and marriage,
Love with a Few Hairs
offers in its protagonist Mohammed an example of a young Moroccan stranded between two cultures: his native Islamic traditions and values and the European manners of Mr. David’s expatriate world. Though Mohammed moves freely in both worlds, he has considerable scorn for each of them. Mr. David and his friends remain “Nazarenes,” the Moroccan’s term of contempt for Christians or Europeans. The Nazarenes, though usually rich and powerful, are innocents, easy dupes of the more subtle, crafty Muslims. Mohammed, for example, invites Mr. David and his friends to his bride’s wedding celebration, a ceremony strictly reserved for Muslim women, on the condition that each bring a bridal gift. When they arrive at the bride’s home, they are quickly placed behind a curtain, where they can actually see none of the ceremony, but they go away happy with their piece of local color, and the bride’s family is likewise happy with the gifts they leave behind. Mr. David’s hotel and friends mean alcohol and dissipation to Mohammed’s family; yet they are content with his relationship with the Englishman because he brings useful gifts, which the family promptly sells after each of his visits. On the other hand, Mohammed believes that he is “elevating” Mina by marrying her and offering her a standard of living above the primitiveness of the typical Moroccan lower class. In one of his many drunken rages against Mina, Mohammed berates her ungrateful attitude: “What are you, anyway? You’re just a Djiblia. Your father with his djellaba and his pants a kilometer wide, and the turban down over his ears like somebody in the cinema. I’ve made you into something civilized.”
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Pleased with his efforts as a novelist, Mrabet produced two books the following year:
The Lemon
(1969) and
M’Hashish
(1969).
The Lemon
, reminiscent of Charhadi’s
A Life Full of Holes
, is the story of a young boy of twelve who is cast out into the streets by his father, who believes that the family has been shamed by the boy’s rebellious behavior at the French school he attends. The spunky hero Abdeslam has his own sense of pride and refuses, no matter how sordid and difficult his existence, to humble himself to his father.

The Lemon
, in its own way, is an initiation story, a study of one boy’s passage from innocence to experience. But Abdeslam is certainly no Huckleberry Finn, and the growth the outcast Muslim youth experiences leaves him decidedly in the violence and brutality of the slums. Like Charhadi’s autobiography, much of
The Lemon
concerns itself with Abdeslam’s efforts to earn enough money for food and a place to sleep. Eventually, Abdeslam is befriended by a large, burly dockworker named Bachir, who carouses drunkenly with prostitutes as well as young boys. Abdeslam finds work in a café but continues to live in Bachir’s squalid quarters. One of Bachir’s prostitutes becomes fond of the little boy, bringing him toys and ultimately initiating him sexually. Mrabet depicts with great skill the complexity of the feelings of Abdeslam and the prostitute as the woman becomes both mother and mistress to him.

As Abdeslam enters ever more deeply into the brutality of the street world, he learns to smoke hashish and feels superior to Bachir, who prefers alcohol. As a Muslim who has learned how to read the Koran, Abdeslam associates alcohol with weakness, and though only a small boy, he stakes his personal pride on resisting the advances of the drunken Bachir, who, in front of his friends, repeatedly threatens to take Abdeslam to bed. Like sex, the streets, and hashish, the cinema plays a part in Abdeslam’s loss of the innocence of childhood. At the movies he visits with his prostitute friend, he is at first sickened, then excited, by the crime and violence he sees. After a particularly brutal film he realizes that violence can compensate for his size in his uneven struggle with Bachir. Thus, one evening when Bachir kisses him in front of his drinking cronies and later tries to take him to bed, Abdeslam slashes him with razor blades embedded in a lemon. Thereafter, Abdeslam is know on the streets as “The Lemon.”

Mrabet’s second novel, though depressing, is an astonishing book mainly because of his ability to create memorable, thoroughly believable characters. The clumsy, coarse dockworker Bachir, the tender, complicated prostitute Aouicha, and the proud, feisty little hero, beautiful to look at but turned by circumstance into a lethal animal—these three make
The Lemon
more than a casual narrative spun into a tape recorder. Mrabet handles dialogue with extraordinary skill as he builds his characters and plot to an awesome climax. Although the boy Abdeslam may wish to escape to the fairyland of stories such as “Haroun er Rachid,” which he reads over and over again, he is wise enough to recognize the realities to which he has been condemned when his father closed the family door behind him.

M’Hashish
, which appeared in the same year as
The Lemon
, disappoints the expectations raised by Mrabet’s first two publications. As the title of this thin volume indicates, all of the stories concern cannabis smokers. The title translates as “under the influence of hashish” or “behashished.” Lawrence Stewart in his book on Bowles discusses at length Bowles’s growing interest in cannabis at the time he began to work extensively with translations from the Moghrebi tapes.
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According to Stewart, Bowles’s storytellers always dictated while “behashished”: “Indeed at no time would one of these young storytellers attempt to narrate a tale until he had smoked kif [the local hashish] and allowed its power to affect his consciousness.”
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Bowles himself, having experimented with the hashish paste or jam known as “majoun,” began to smoke kif at this time, although Mrabet noted that Jane Bowles approved neither of her husband’s smoking nor of his working with translations instead of his own fiction.
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In any event, kif, as subject or influence, fails to bring forth stories of quality in this particular volume by Mrabet. Some of the stories aim to be humorous, but the humor is mainly scatological or bawdy and the tone adolescent. In “The Doctor from Chemel,” for example, a bum who has done nothing but drift and smoke kif, cures a khalifa of his rectal abscess by first feeding him majoun, then sodomizing him to burst the abscess. The grateful khalifa gives him much money and the reputation of being a remarkable healer.

Other stories are merely trivial, such as “Two Friends and the Rain,” which is a short piece about two smoking friends who live together and once when high discuss the difference between rain and water during a storm. Only “Allah’s Words,” the story of one man’s conversion to kif smoking, can make any claims to being genuinely comic. Allah’s words come from the tape recorder of a very religious man who records the Koran and blasts it out over his neighborhood. At first his neighbors like it, but the noise becomes a nuisance, and they think the old man is crazy. The family is so ashamed that the son with a friend takes the tape and re-records it backwards. Meanwhile, the old man has met a kif smoker in a café and brings him home to reform him by playing the Koran tape for him. The frog-like words make no sense, but the kif smoker, sensing the trick played on the old man by the son, insists that he understands the garble and offers the old man a sebsi pipe of kif to relax. The old man smokes until he, too, thinks that he understands the garble. After this experience, he spends his time smoking in cafés and gives the tape recorder to his son.