The Boy Who The Set Fire and Other Stories (26 page)

When the men had finished and had retired from the center, half the women present stood up and began to remove their outer garments. As they moved into the light they created a fine theatrical effect; the beauty of the scene, however, came solely from the variety of color in the splendid robes and the flash of heavy gold adornments. There were no girls at all among them, which is another way of saying that were were all very fat.

A curious phenomenon among female musicians in Morocco: at the beginning of their performance they seldom give much evidence of rhythmic sense. This has to be worked up by the men playing the drums. At the outset they seem distraught, they talk and fidget, smooth their clothing, and seem interested in everything but the business at hand. It took a good deal of insistent drumming to capture the women on this occasion, but after two numbers the men had them completely. From then on the music grew consistently more inspired. “
N’est-ce pas qu’elles sont magnifiques?
”[00] whispered Monsieur Rousselot. I agreed that they were wonderful; at the same time I found it difficult to reconcile what I was seeing with his earlier description of Tassemsit as a holy city of sin. Still, doubtless he knew best.

As the shrill voices and the drumming grew in force and excitement, I became convinced that what was going on was indeed extraordinarily good, something I should have given a good deal to be able to record and listen to later at my leisure. Watching my host idly ruining what might have been a valuable tape was scarcely a pleasure. Throughout their performance the women never stirred from where they stood, limiting their movements to a slight swaying of the body and occasional fantastic outbursts of antiophonal hand-clapping that would have silenced the gypsies of Granada. With all that excess flesh, it was just as well they had no dance steps to execute.

When the final cadence had died away, and while we were applauding, they filed back to the shadows of the arcade and modestly wrapped their great cloths around them, to sit and listen to the
ahouache
’s purely percussive coda. This was vigorous and brief; then a great crash of drums announced the end of the entertainment. We all stood up quickly, in considerable discomfort for having sat so long in the impossible chairs, and went back into the big room.

Five inviting beds had been made up along the mattresses at intervals of perhaps twenty feet. I chose one in a corner by a window and sat down, feeling that I should probably sleep very well. The courtyard emptied in no time, and the servants carried away the chairs, the lanterns and the tape recorder. Monsieur Rousselot stood in the middle of the room, yawning as he took off his shirt. The host was shaking hands with each of us in turn, and wishing us elaborate good-nights. When he came to me, he held out the flat box containing the tape he had just recorded. “A souvenir of Tassemsit,” he said, and he bowed as he handed it to me.

The final irony, I thought. Of course, the spoiled tape has to be given to me, so that I can know in detail just what I failed to get. But my words to him were even more florid than his to me; I told him that it had been an unforgettable occasion, and that I was eternally indebted to him for this undeserved favor, and I wished him a pleasant night. Monsieur Omar was lying in his bed smoking, clad only in his shorts, a delighted and indestructible Humpty Dumpty. He was blowing smoke rings toward the ceiling. I did not feel that the future of Tassemsit was in immediate danger. Our host went out, and the door into the courtyard was shut behind him.

After everyone had gone to sleep, I lay there in the dark, listening to the jackals and considering my bad luck. Yet the original objective of the trip had been attained, a fact I discovered only when I got to the next place that had electricity. When I tried the tape at the hotel in Essaouira, fourteen of its eighteen pieces proved to be flawless. There was no point in wondering why, since logically the thing was impossible; it had to be accepted as a joyful mystery. It is always satisfying to succeed in a quest, even when success is due entirely to outside factors. We bought blankets, trays, rugs and teapots, and set out again for home.

^[
1
]
 Paul Bowles, Preface to
Five Eyes
: Stories by Abdeslam Boulaich. Mohamed Choukri, Larbi Layachi, Mohammed Mrabet, Ahmed Yacoubi (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1979), p. 7.

^[
2
]
 Paul Bowles,
Without Stopping
(New York: Putnam’s, 1972), p. 270.

^[
3
]
 Quoted by Lawrence Stewart,
Paul Bowles: The Illumination of North Africa
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1974), p. 112.

^[
4
]
 
Ibid
., p. 112.

^[
5
]
 Bowles,
Without Stopping
, p. 351.

^[
6
]
 Driss ben Hamed Charhadi,
A Life Full of Holes
, trans. Paul Bowles (New York: Grove Press, 1964), p. 12.

^[
7
]
 
Ibid
., p. 37.

^[
8
]
 
Ibid
., p. 151.

^[
9
]
 
Ibid
., p. 310.

^[
10
]
 Mohammed Mrabet,
Look and Move On
, trans. Paul Bowles (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1976), p. 91.

^[
11
]
 Mohammed Mrabet,
Love with a Few Hairs
, trans. Paul Bowles (New York: Braziller, 1968), pp. 96-97.

^[
12
]
 Stewart,
Paul Bowles
, pp. 113 ff.

^[
13
]
 
Ibid
., p. 113. Stewart quotes Mrabet’s description of his use of kif while composing his narratives:

God gave me a brain that can invent stories. And I feed it with kif. When I drank alcohol I couldn’t tell stories. When I gave up drinking and changed to kif, I began to tell stories again . . . . I smoke a little, shut my eyes, and then I begin to see everything . . . . If I tell one, before I’ve finished telling it I have another in my head. It’s like a chain. Give me twenty or thirty pipes of kif and let me lie under a tree or sit looking at the ocean, or just be in the house, looking at a plant growing in a flowerpot, or at one coal in the fire. Whatever is there opens up and changes while I’m watching it. An empty room can fill up with wonderful things, or terrible things. And the story comes from the things.

^[
14
]
 Mrabet,
Look and Move On
, pp. 90—91.

^[
15
]
 
Ibid
., p. 63.

^[
16
]
 Mohammed Mrabet,
Harmless Poisons, Blameless Sins
, trans. Paul Bowles (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1976).

^[
17
]
 Mohammed Mrabet,
The Beach Café and The Voice
, trans. Paul Bowles (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1980), p. 85.

^[
18
]
 Bowles, Preface to
Five Eyes
, p. 8.

^[
19
]
 Stewart,
Paul Bowles
, p. 113.

^[
20
]
 
Ibid
.

^[
21
]
 Bowles, Preface to
Five Eyes
, p. 8.

^[
1
]
 Bowles first used this label in my presence during an interview conducted on June 8, 1986, but the phrase has since appeared in print.

^[
2
]
 Christopher Columbus claimed to have himself witnessed Boabdil’s surrender seven months before setting sail on his momentous first voyage to the Indies. See
The Journal of Christopher Columbus
, trans. Cecil Jane (New York: Bonanza Books, 1989) 3-4.

^[
3
]
 In addition to his literary immersion in Moroccan culture, Bowles is also responsible for gathering an extensive collection of traditional north African music for the Library of Congress.

^[
4
]
 Bowles has continued to translate occasionally from languages other than Moghrebi—most recently the stories of the Guatemalan writer Rodrigo Rey Rosa.

^[
5
]
 These remarks come from both my meeting with Bowles in June of 1986 and from a letter I received from him dated January 20, 1987.

^[
6
]
 This is another phrase from the letter of January 20, 1987, in which Bowles answered my lingering questions about mutual influence.

^[
7
]
 Mrabet has published ten books to date:
Love with a Few Hairs
(San Francisco:
City Lights
, 1967);
The Lemon
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969);
M’Hashish
(San Francisco: City Lights, 1969);
The Boy Who Set the Fire
(1974; San Francisco: City Lights, 1989);
Look and Move On
(Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1976);
Harmless Poisons
,
Blameless Sins
(Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1976);
The Big Mirror
(Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1977);
The Beach Café & The Voice
(Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1980);
The Chest
(Bolinas, California: Tombouctou Books, 1983); and
Marriage with Papers
(Bolinas, California: Tombouctou Books, 1986). For a general overview of his work, see Mary Martin Rountree’s “Paul Bowles: Translations from the Moghrebi,”
Twentieth Century Literature
32.3/4 (Fall/Winter 1986): 388-401.

^[
8
]
 Those forty-four years of the protectorate were Morocco’s only experience with colonial rule. The kingdom had been independent since its founding in the eighth century.

^[
9
]
 Mrabet has consistently claimed that his visits to the United States (the most recent one, in 1967, with Paul Bowles) made little if any impression on him. Western culture and the money he has earned from his books have, however, brought about certain changes in his daily life over the years. He told me, for example, that he now owns a VCR on which his children watch Dracula movies.