by Tahir Shah
Señor Benito shut his eyes for a moment, breathed in.
'After you have penetrated deep into a labyrinth,' he said, 'it's hard to leave it, even when at last you know how to find the door.'
'Do you miss Europe?'
The Italian grinned.
'If I do, it's waiting across the strait, just over there.' He waved a hand to the far end of the terrace. 'But Europe has nothing to offer me now,' he said. 'It's lost its traditions, its values, its freedom. Why would I want that when I have this feast for the senses, this Arabian Nights?'
Señor Benito ordered espressos for us both. When they came, he crushed a sugar cube with the end of a teaspoon and sprinkled half the powder into his cup. I asked about his interest in Richard Burton.
He downed the coffee in one gulp.
'When I was a child I longed to be an explorer,' he said. 'From morning to night that was all I thought about. I drew little maps and plans in notebooks that I made myself. I used to pretend my sisters were from a dangerous cannibal tribe and I would charge at them with a home-made sword. My mother said I was the devil, but my father gave me a picture book about African explorers. When I was a little older, he presented me with First Footsteps in East Africa. I fell in love.'
'Why didn't you become an explorer?'
The collector stroked his hands over each other.
'All the great exploring had been done,' he said, 'and besides, I think I am a little too soft inside.' He looked at me gently, blushing. 'I am a romantic,' he said. 'And when I need a touch of romance, I slip into Burton's world.'
'Have you read all seventeen volumes of the Arabian Nights?'
Benito's eyes widened. 'Of course I have,' he said. 'It was an education in itself.'
'Do you have a favourite story?'
'They are all my favourites,' he replied. 'But a favourite passage? It would have to be the "Terminal Essay". Make sure you read it.'
The call to prayer rang out over the flat white roofs of Tangier, the muezzin's voice sharp, before blurring into the background. Señor Benito asked why I prized the Arabian Nights so highly. I told him my father had once owned a copy, that it was the most exquisite thing I had ever seen, that it smelled of cloves.
'One day a guest arrived at our home,' I said, 'and he left clutching the volumes to his chest.'
'Did your father sell the books?'
'No, he presented them to the guest, for the man had admired them.'
Señor Benito raised his grey eyebrows.
'What do the books mean to you?' he asked.
'They are a maze, a labyrinth . . . part of a dream.'
I told him about my fondness of stories, about the baton passed down through our family, father to son.
'I am searching for the story in my heart,' I said.
Benito stood up in slow motion and led me to the edge of the terrace. We watched the passenger ferries bridging Europe to Africa. The Italian collector fastened the buttons of his cream linen suit with care and pushed up the knot of his tie.
'I think you ought to go and meet Mrabet,' he said.
That evening Rachana telephoned me from Dar Khalifa. Her voice sounded worn, as if in my absence the house was collapsing around her. I asked if everything was all right.
'The chalk's come back,' she said. 'There are symbols all over the front wall. This time they're in red.'
'Did the guardians wash it away?'
My wife took a deep breath. 'They are out there with Zohra,' she said, 'all of them chatting very fast. They're begging for you to come back.'
'Is that the only problem?'
Rachana groaned. 'No, there's another thing,' she said.
'The guardians?'
'No: Murad.'
'What about him?'
'He's run away,' she said.
Mohammed Mrabet was a friend and confidant of the American writer Paul Bowles. They shared a passion for life, a love of poetry, painting and music, and the same orientation. Together they were the heart of the Tangier literary scene. Bowles transcribed and then translated Mrabet's works and found them publishers in the West. Mrabet gradually became famous and is regarded as a Moroccan icon, an important literary figure in his own right. The curious thing is that Mohammed Mrabet never learned to read or write. He was illiterate, a man who had begun as a simple fisherman, but whose life was powered by the need to tell a tale. As an illiterate, he had depended on his ears and his memory, facets that shaped him in the mould of the great storytellers of the Moroccan past.
Like just about everyone else I met, I assumed Mrabet was dead. His name is attached to another time and with the Tangier salons in which Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Ginsberg and Burroughs fraternized. So the news he was still alive and living in a Tangier suburb filled me with great interest.
Señor Benito had given me the name of a small bookshop, Le Colombe d'Or, and suggested I go and meet a young Frenchman, Simon-Pierre, who worked there. I telephoned him in advance. We met in the café next door to the bookshop, the dense smoke of burning black tobacco heavy in the air. Simon-Pierre pulled up a chair, ordered a café noir and lit a Gitanes. His face had rugged features but was gentle, his skin flushed with a touch of pink. He bore a striking resemblance to a painting I had seen of the explorer Wilfred Thesiger as a young man.
I asked him about Mrabet. He sighed.
'His health is up and down,' he said. 'He smokes too much.'
'Gauloises?'
'No, kif.'
'Is he still working?'
Simon-Pierre looked across the room, out towards the street.
'He's painting,' he said.
An hour later we were sitting in Mrabet's modest apartment at the far end of Tangier. The walls were hung with abstract art, conjured in many colours from the deepest reaches of the icon's mind. Half of the main salon was given over to a kind of platform, on which the work was done. There were paints everywhere – gouache and watercolours, pigments packed in bottles and cubes the size of dice. The brushes were scattered about, some ready for use, others clogged with dry paint. On the other side of the room, a long thin table ran along the wall. It was heaped with papers and photographs, with children's toys and boxes, with broken candles and bottles of ink.
There were no windows, but the room was not dark. The lack of ventilation trapped the smoke from Mrabet's pipe, causing all visitors to be overcome by mild delirium. Mrabet himself was perched at the narrow end of the platform, his back pressed against the wall, knees tucked up under his chin. The long angular shaft of the pipe ran from between his bare toes up to his lips. From time to time he poked the end in his mouth and sucked.
On the far wall was pinned a large black-and-white photograph of the storyteller as a young man. He was naked to the waist, standing half-profile on the beach, his chest and shoulders a mass of muscle, his mouth roaring with self-confidence. My eyes left the picture and panned through the room, down to where Mrabet was sitting, the pipe's fire crackling between his feet. Time had been harsh. The great idol of Tangier had lost his physique and his faculties were dimmed by decades of kif. He sat, crouched, contemplating. I said I was an admirer of his stories and of the tradition of oral folklore, that my grandfather had lived and then died in Tangier.
Mrabet asked his name. I told him. He closed his eyes in an extended blink.
'I remember him,' he said. 'Ikbal the Afghan. He lived on . . .'
'On rue de la Plage,' I said.
'Yes, I remember. He had brought a bodyguard from Afghanistan. He had a huge white turban and a very old gun. He never moved from the door. Not even when it was pouring with rain.' The storyteller blinked again, swallowed hard and opened his mouth just a crack. 'We were friends,' he said in a sombre voice. 'It's because we were both from the mountains. He was from the Hindu Kush, the roof of the world, and I come from the Rif.'
I asked Mrabet about stories.
'In the Rif, stories are the blood that runs through our veins,' he said: 'they are the air we breathe, the
food we eat.'
He paused to draw at the pipe.
'Why did you leave the mountains for the sea?'
The old storyteller stared at his toes.
'To swim with the fish,' he said.
Simon-Pierre coaxed him to tell me a story, to perform. We sat in awkward silence, Mrabet gazing at his feet. I felt like a devotee waiting at his guru's deathbed, a little excited and a little ashamed. I was desperate for a few words of wisdom, or a clue how to proceed. The storyteller filled the pipe again, lit it and took a long contemplative drag. He coughed and spewed a mouthful of blood on to his painting rag. Like a tired old lion in a circus ring, he was content just to sit motionless. He was quite rightly ready to endure punishment rather than perform one last time.
I explained I was following the Berber tradition, searching for the story inside me, in my heart. Mrabet peered up. He put the pipe on the floor. I noticed his eyes for the first time. We looked at each other, pupils locking on. I thought I saw a sparkle in there, a touch of magic. The old storyteller sat up tall. He touched a thumb to his own chest.
'It's in there waiting,' he said.
'What is?'
'Your story.'
'Waiting for what?'
Mrabet closed his eyes.
'It's waiting for you to close your eyes and wake up.'
The next evening I arrived back at the Caliph's House. As usual, Rachana had a long report, detailing the trials and tribulations that had occurred in my absence.
'The chalk came again in the night,' she said. 'It's green now, wilder than before, scrawled the entire length of the outside wall. Zohra cut her hand this morning and claims it's because the house is bleeding.'
'What about Murad?'
'I told you, he's run off.'
'To Marrakech?'
'No one knows.' She sighed deeply. 'And Osman. His wife has left him for another man.'
'Poor Osman,' I said, remembering his wife, who was regarded by all as the prettiest woman in the bidonville. Zohra never stopped ranting on jealously about her fine looks.
I strolled into the garden, where I found Osman stooped over a rake, his head hung so low that I couldn't see his neck. His private life was none of my business, for in Morocco family matters are kept well behind sealed doors. I put a hand on his shoulder blade and wished him well.
'She has brought shame on us,' he said.
I tried to mumble something supportive.
Osman looked upwards until our eyes were level. He blinked and a single tear rolled from the corner of his eye, down his cheek to his chin.
'I still love her,' he said.
Everyone in the bidonville had the same question: where was Murad and why had he gone? I ferreted out Marwan at his shack on the north side of the shantytown, hoping he could shed light on the storyteller's disappearance. He was helping his wife hang out the washing. As soon as he saw me he dropped into the mud the damp shirt he was holding, embarrassed to be seen doing women's work. His wife slapped the back of his head for being so clumsy. Then, when she saw me, she spun round in a frenzy, furling a scarf over her hair, making flustered preparations for the guest.
Marwan ushered me into the lean-to and then corralled me into the most comfortable chair. His son was sent to buy a two-litre bottle of Coca-Cola, the ultimate indulgence. I apologized for arriving without notice and expressed my concern about Murad.
The carpenter's face froze.
'Is there something wrong?' I asked.
Marwan put a hand to his mouth.
'He left,' he said.
'Where's he gone?'
'Back to Marrakech.'
'Why?'
'He . . .'
'Yes?'
'He . . .'
'Yes, Marwan, what is it?'
'He's gone back to Marrakech and . . .'
'And?'
'And taken Osman's wife with him.'
Burton used the Arabian Nights as a kind of repository of oddities, scraps of information and obscure lines of thought. He was getting on in age when the books appeared and you get the feeling that he was keen to lay down the gems of a lifetime's scholarship before it was too late. The vast scope and length of the collection – which runs to over six and a half thousand pages – allowed him to embed all sorts of annotations.
The text itself is peppered with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of footnotes. Understanding them in their entirety calls for a working knowledge of Latin, Greek, German, French and classical Arabic. They cover an edifying spectrum of material and frequently border on the sacrilegious, the illegal, or, more usually, the obscene.
The more pedestrian notes address areas such as breeds of Arab horse, camels' names, door hinges, carrier pigeons and cannibal tribes. A great number of others stray into territory that would have been regarded with outright horror by those harbouring gentle Victorian sensibilities. They dote in dazzling detail on matters such as syphilis, incest, penile size and dismemberment, flatulence, menstrual discharges and hymeneal blood, castration, eunuchs, aphrodisiacs and bestiality. Indeed, a long note on that subject explains a safe and foolproof method of enjoying 'congress' with a female crocodile.
The footnotes provide entertaining relief from Burton's tremendously old-fashioned use of English, which was even regarded as outmoded at the time.
His masterpiece of even greater irrelevance is the 'Terminal Essay'. Running to almost two hundred and fifty pages, the essay has very little to do with the stories in A Thousand and One Nights. Agreed, it begins with a reflection on the origin of the stories and their introduction into Europe. There is, too, a study of the 'matter and the manner of the Nights', as well as an academic commentary on the use of poetry in the collection. But the nucleus of the 'Terminal Essay' is an extraordinary dissertation on what Burton describes as 'Pederasty'. We would call it homosexuality.
At a time when anthropology was in its infancy and moral decency was at the fore, the essay developed and made public Burton's own theory on homosexual practice throughout what he called the 'Sotadic Zone'. He considered that pederasty was motivated by geography and climate rather than by race or genetic configuration. The zone in which Burton had isolated homosexual tendencies as 'endemic' encompassed the Americas, north Africa and southern Europe, the Holy Land, Central Asia and much of the Far East. Over many pages, he relayed aspects of the history, literary association, sociology, spread, and the pleasure derived from homosexual activity.
Reading it in today's liberal climate, one's eyes widen and you can only wonder the effect it had on puritanical Victorian society. It is no surprise that Burton did everything in his power to avoid the long arm of the censorship police.
The section is awash with the peculiar. Towards the end of the essay, Burton notes: 'A favourite Persian punishment for strangers caught in the harem is to strip and throw them and expose them to the embraces of the grooms and slaves. I once asked Shirazi how penetration was possible if the patient resisted with all the force of the sphincter muscle: he smiled and said, "Ah, we Persians know a trick to get over that; we apply a sharpened tent-peg to the crupper-bone (os coccygis) and knock till he opens."'
To deflect the censor's attention, Burton frequently broke into Old English, French, Latin or Greek when describing the sensitive or the indescribable. Another touch, found throughout his collection, is the use of idiomatic language. It tends to hinder easy comprehension, but adds to the general poetry. Burtonian language includes phrases such as 'his prickle stood at point', 'a stiff-standing tool', 'wee of waist and heavy of hip', 'he abated her maidenhead' and 'thrust boldly in vitals with lion-like stroke'!
Some of the material was so explicit that it is no great wonder the 'Terminal Essay' was excised from any edition but the first. It fell to Lady Burton to edit a version of her husband's work fit for the parlour as well as the nursery. But you get the feeling Burton himself didn't give a damn for that, or for the moral limitations of his time. Pushing even his own absent boundaries of acceptability, Burton's pièc
e de résistence must surely be this: 'The Jesuits brought home from Manila a tailed man whose movable prolongation of the os coccygis measured 7 to 10 inches: he had placed himself between two women, enjoying one naturally while the other used his tail as a penis succedaneus.'
At Café Mabrook, Dr Mehdi was sitting at a different table from where he was usually to be found, on account of a drip leaking from a pipe on the floor above. The thumbless waiter Abdul Latif was extremely agitated and was throttling a plumber in a back room, albeit with great difficulty. The surgeon seemed uneasy at the change in position and kept scratching his back, as if the new seat had brought on an allergy.
When he saw me slope through the door, he stood up.
'I have been here an hour waiting for you,' he cried.
I said I had been in Tangier, that I had met Mohammed Mrabet.
'Is he still alive?' Dr Mehdi asked in disbelief.
'Barely,' I said. 'He's smoking rather a lot of kif.'
'What did he tell you?'
'That if I want to find the story in my heart I must close my eyes and then wake up.'
The doctor touched a fingertip to my knee.
'You must listen to me,' he said. There was urgency in his voice.
'OK, I'm listening.'
'We are friends,' he said.
'Yes.'
'Then, as a friend I must ask a favour of you.'
I picked up my glass of coffee and pretended to sip it. In the West one might enquire what the favour was before agreeing to carry it out. But in the East a sense of honour is attached to the asking of a favour. Demanding to know the nature of the favour before accepting it would call into question the trust on which the friendship is built.
The doctor touched my knee again, emphasizing the grave importance of the duty being asked.
'My family have encountered a problem,' he said.
I nodded. 'What kind of problem?'
'A delicate one.'
I nodded again. 'How can I help?'
'I need you to take a message to my nephew Ibrahim.'
'I would be happy to,' I said.
