by Anais Nin
De Sidi Hassan Benanai received me under the fine spun-gold colonnades. But he had just begun a forty-day fast and prayer, so he sat in silence, counting his beads, and tea was served in silence, and he continued to pray, occasionally smiling at me, and bowing his head, until I left.
From outside, the houses are uniformly plain, with high walls covered with flowers. One cannot tell when one is entering a luxurious abode. The door may be of beautiful ironwork. There may be two, or four, or six guards at the door. But inside, the walls are all mosaics, or painted, and the stucco worked like lace, the ceilings painted in gold. The pillows are of silk. The Negro women are simply dressed but always beautiful. One does not see the children or the wives.
The white burnous is called a jelabba.
Mystery and labyrinth. Complex streets. Anonymous walls. Secret luxury. Secrecy of these houses without windows on the streets. The windows and door open on the patio. The patio has a fountain and lovely plants. There is a labyrinth design in the arrangement of the gardens. Bushes are placed to form a puzzle so you might get lost. They love the feeling of being lost. It has been interpreted as a desire to reproduce the infinite.
Fez. One always, sooner or later, comes upon a city which is an image of one's inner cities. Fez is an image of my inner self. This may explain my fascination for it. Wearing a veil, full and inexhaustible, labyrinthian, so rich and variable I myself get lost. Passion for mystery, the unknown, and for the infinite, the uncharted.
With my guide I visited the Quartier Réservé. It lay within medieval walls, guarded at each gate by a French soldier. The houses were full of prostitutes. Only the poor Arabs go there because the others have enough wives to satisfy their need of variety. Dark, dramatic, tortuous streets. Bare cellars which have become cafés. Arabs slinking in and out. Negroes. Beggars. Arab music heard now and then. The walls, ceilings covered with shabby rugs and potteries. Thé à la menthe served, or beer. No wine drinking but much drug traffic. Bare, cellarlike rooms. Doors covered by muslin curtains, or beaded curtains. Front room is the bar or café where the men sit and the musicians play. Back room is for the prostitutes. The muslin curtain was parted and I found myself before Fatima, the queen of the prostitutes.
Fatima had a beautiful face, straight patrician nose, enormous black velvet eyes, tawny smooth skin, full but firm, and the usual Arabian attributes of several folds of stomach, several chins. She could only move with difficulty on her enormous legs. She was both queenly and magnificent, opulent, and voluptuous. She was dressed in a wedding costume, a pink chiffon dress embroidered with gold sequins laid over several layers of other chiffon petticoats. Heavy gold belt, bracelets, rings, a gold band across her forehead, enormous dangling gold earrings. Over her glistening black hair she wore a colored silk turban placed on the back of her head exposing the black curls. She had four gold teeth, considered beautiful by Arab women. The coal-black rim around her eyes exaggerated their size, as in Egyptian paintings.
She sat among pillows in a room shaped like many bedrooms in Fez, long and narrow. At each end of the room she had a brass bed, a sign of luxury and success. They are not used as beds, they are only a symbol of wealth. In between the two brass beds lay all the pillows, rugs, and low divans. (In rich homes the floors are tiled but the brass beds are displayed there too.) Fatima not only collected brass beds but also cuckoo clocks from Switzerland. One wall was covered with them, each one telling a different time. The other walls were covered with flowered cretonne. The atmosphere was heavy with perfume, enclosed and voluptuous, the womb itself. A young girl came in with an atomizer and lifting up my skirt gently atomized my underclothes with rose water. She came once more to throw rose petals around my feet. Then she came carrying a tray with glass tea containers, sheathed in copper holders with handles. We sat cross-legged on vast pillows, Fatima in the center. She never made a vulgar gesture. Two blind, crippled musicians were invited in and played monotonously, but with such a beat that my excitement grew as if I had taken wine. Fatima began to prepare tea on the tray. Then she passed around a bottle of rose water and we perfumed our hands. Then she lit a sandalwood brazier and placed it at my feet. I was duly and thoroughly perfumed and the air grew heavier and richer. The Arab soldier lay back on the pillows. The handsome bodyguard in his white burnous, white turban and blue military costume conversed with Fatima, who could not speak French. He translated my compliments on her beauty. She asked him to translate a question about my nail polish. I promised to send her some. While we sat there dreaming between each phrase, there was a fight outside. A young Arab burst in, his face bleeding. "Aii, Aii, Aiii," he cried. Fatima sent her maid to see what could be done for the young Arab. She never lost her composure. The musicians played louder and faster so I would not notice the commotion and my pleasure would not be spoiled. I spent two hours with Fatima, as it is impolite to hurry here. It is a mortal insult to leave too soon or to seem hurried. It offends them deeply. Relationship does not depend so much on conversation or exchange as in the creation of a propitious, dreamy, meditative, contemplative atmosphere, a mood. Finally, when I was ready to leave, my escort made a parting speech.
It was after midnight. The city, so crowded during the day that I could hardly move in it, was silent and empty. The night watchman sleeps on the doorsteps. There are gates between different quarters. Six gates had to be opened for us with enormous keys. You are not allowed to circulate at night except by special permission and with a pass which the soldier showed to each watchman.
The frogs were croaking in the garden pools behind the walls, the crickets were announcing tomorrow's heat. The smell of roses won the battle of smells. A window was suddenly opened above me, an old woman stuck her head out and threw out a big rat she had just caught, with many curses. It fell at my feet.
Fez is a drug. It enmeshes you. The life of the senses, of poetry (even the poor Arabs who visit a prostitute will find a woman dressed in a wedding dress like a virgin), of illusion and dream. It made me passionate, just to sit there on pillows, with music, the birds, the fountains, the infinite beauty of the mosaic designs, the teakettle singing, the many copper trays shining, the twelve bottles of rose perfume and the sandalwood smoking in the brazier, and the cuckoo clocks chiming in disunion, as they pleased.
The layers of the city of Fez are like the layers and secrecies of the inner life. One needs a guide.
I loved the racial nobility of the Arabs, the pride, the love of sweets instead of alcohol, the gentleness, the peace, the hospitality, the reserve, pride, love of turquoise and coral colors, dignity of bearing, their silences. I love the way the men embrace in the street, proudly and nobly. I love the expression in their eyes, brooding, or fiery, but deep.
The river under the bridge was foul. Men held hands while talking on the street. A dead Arab was carried on a stretcher, covered with narrow white bandages like an Egyptian mummy. Over his feet they had thrown a red rug. Silence and quietism. Contemplation and chanting. Music. Tea served on copper trays with a samovar kettle. Glasses have colored tops. On another tray a big silver box with big rough pieces of rock sugar. Trays with perfume bottles. Trays with almond cakes covered by a silk handkerchief or copper painted lids.
I met the Arab women walking to their baths. They went there always in groups, and carrying a change of clothes in a basket over their heads. They walked veiled and laughing, showing only their eyes and the hennaed tips of their hands holding their veils. Their full white skirts and heavily embroidered belts made them heavy and full-looking, like the pillows they liked to sit on. It was heavy flesh moving in white robes, nourished on sweets and inertia, on passive watches behind grilled windows. This was one of their few moments of liberty, one of the few times they appeared in the street. They walked in groups with their servants, children, and bundles of fresh clothes, laughing and talking, and dragging their feet in embroidered mules.
I followed them. When they entered at the mosaic-covered building near the mosque, I entered with them.
The first room was very large and square, all of stone, with stone benches, and rugs on the floor. Here the women laid down their bundles and began undressing. This was a long ceremony, for they wore so many skirts, and several blouses, and belts which looked like bandages, so much white muslin, linen, cotton to unroll, unfold, and fold again on the bench. Then there were bracelets to take off, earrings, anklets, and then the long black hair to unwind from the ribbons tressed into the hair. So much white cotton fallen on the floor, a field of white petals, leaves, lace, shed by the full-fleshed women, and as I looked at them I felt they could never be really naked, that all this they wore must cling to them forever, grow with their bodies. I was already undressed and waiting, standing, as I would not sit naked on the stone bench. They were waiting for the children to be undressed by the African maids, waiting for the maids to get undressed.
An old woman was waiting for us, a completely shriveled old woman with only one eye. Her breasts were two long empty gourds hanging almost to the middle of her stomach. She wore a sackcloth around her waist. She gave me a little approving tap on the shoulder and smiled. She pointed to my finger nails and talked but I could not understand, and I smiled.
She opened the door to the steam room, another very large square room all of grey stone. But here there were no benches. All the women were sitting on the floor. The old woman filled pails of water from one of the fountains and occasionally poured one over their heads, after they had finished soaping themselves. The steam filled the room. The women sat on the floor, took their children between their knees and scrubbed them. Then the old woman threw a pail of water over them. This water flowed all around us, and it was dirty. We sat in rivulets of soapy, dirty water. The women did not hurry. They used the soap, then a piece of pumice stone, and then they began to use depilatories with great care and concentration. All of them were enormous. The flesh billowed, curved, folded in tremendous heavy waves. They seemed to be sitting on pillows of flesh of all colors, from the pale Northern Arab skin to the African. I was amazed that they could lift such heavy arms to comb their long hair. I had come to look at them, because the beauty of their faces was legendary, and proved not at all exaggerated. They had absolutely beautiful faces, enormous, jeweled eyes, straight noble noses with wide spaces between the eyes, full and voluptuous mouths, flawless skins, and always a royal bearing. The faces had a quality of statuary rather than painting, because the lines were so pure and clear. I sat in admiration of their faces, and then I noticed that they looked at me. They sat in groups, looking at me and smiling. They mimicked that I should wash my hair and face. I could not explain that I was hurrying through the ritual because I did not like sitting in the darkening waters. They offered me the pumice stone after using it thoroughly all over their ponderous bodies. I tried it but it scratched my face. The Arab women's skin was tougher. The women chatted in circles while washing themselves and their children. I could not bring myself to wash my face with the soap they all used for their feet and armpits. They laughed at what they must have thought was a European woman who did not know the rules of cleanliness.
They wanted me also to pull out superfluous eyebrows, hair under the arms, and to shave my pubic hair. I finally slipped away to the next room where pails of cooler water were thrown over me.
I wanted to see the Arab women clothed again, concealed in yards of white cotton. Such beautiful heads had risen out of these mountains of flesh, heads of incredible perfection, dazzling eyes heavily fringed, sensual features. Sometimes moss-green eyes in dark sienna skins, sometimes coal-black eyes in pale moonlit skins, and always the long heavy black hair, the undulating tresses. But these heads rose from formless masses of flesh, heaving like plants in the sea, swelling, swaying, falling, the breasts like sea anemones, floating, the stomachs of perpetually pregnant women, the legs like pillows, the backs like cushions, the hips with furrows like a mattress.
They were all watching me, with friendly nodding of their heads, commenting on my figure. By counting on their fingers they asked was I adolescent? I had no fat on me. I must be a girl. They came around me and we compared skin colors. They seemed amazed by my waist. They could enclose it in their two hands. They wanted to wash my hair. They soaped my face with tenderness. They touched me and talked with volubility. The old woman came with two pails and threw them over me. I was ready to leave, but the Arab women transmitted messages of all kinds with their eyes, smiles, talk. The old woman led me to the third room, which was cooler, and threw cold water over me, and then led me back to the dressing room.
On the way back, landing at Cádiz, I saw the same meager palm trees I had carefully observed when I was eleven years old, on my way to America. I saw the cathedral I had described minutely in my child-diary. I saw the city in which women did not go out very much, the city, I said, where I would never live because I liked independence.
When I landed in Cádiz I found the palm trees, the cathedral, but not the child I was. The last vestiges of my past were lost in the ancient city of Fez, which was built so much like my own life, with its tortuous streets, its silences, secrecies, its labyrinths and its covered faces. In the city of Fez I became aware that the little demon which had devoured me for twenty years, the little demon of depression which I had fought for twenty years, had ceased eating me. I was at peace, walking through the streets of Fez, absorbed in a world outside of myself, a past which was not my past, by sickness one could touch and name, leprosy and syphilis.
I walked with the Arabs, sang and prayed with them to a god who ordained acceptance. With the Arabs I crouched in stillness. Streets without issues, such as the streets of my desires. Forget the issue and lie under the mud-colored walls, listen to the copper being beaten, watch the dyers dipping their silks in orange buckets. Through the streets of my own labyrinth, I walked in peace at last, with an acceptance of myself, of my strength, of my weakness. The blunders I made lay like garbage in the doorsteps and nourished the flies. The places I did not reach were forgotten because the Arab on his donkey, or on his mule, or on his naked feet, walked forever between the walls of Fez. The failures were the inscriptions on the walls half effaced, and those books eaten by the mice, the childhood was rotting away in the museums, the crazy men were tied in chains and I walked free because I let the ashes fall, the old flesh die, I let death efface, I let the inscriptions crumble, I let the cypresses watch the tombs. I did not fight for completeness, against the fragments devoured by the past or today's detritus under my feet. What the river did not carry away nourished the flies. I could go with the Arabs to the cemetery with colored rugs and bird cages for a little feast of talk, so little did death matter, or disease, or tomorrow. Night watchman sleeping on the stone steps, or mud, in soiled burnous, I too can sleep anywhere. There were in Fez, as in my life, streets which led nowhere, impasses which remained a mystery. There must also be walls. The tips of minarets can only rise as high because of the walls.
It was in Cádiz that I lay down in a hotel room and fell into a dolorous, obsessional reverie, a continuous secret melody of jealousy, fear, doubt, and it was in Cádiz that I stood up and broke the evil curse, as if by a magical act of will, I broke the net, the evil curse of obsession. I learned how to break it. It was symbolized by my going into the street. From that day on, suffering became intermittent, subject to interruptions, distractions, not a perpetual condition. I was able to distract myself. I could live for hours without the malady of doubt. There were silences in my head, periods of peace and enjoyment. I could abandon myself completely to the pleasure of multiple relationships, to the beauty of the day, to the joys of the day. It was as if the cancer in me had ceased gnawing me. The cancer of introspection.
It seemed to have happened suddenly, like a miracle, but it was the result of years of struggle, of analysis, of passionate living. Introspection is a devouring monster. You have to feed it with much material, much experience many people, many places, many loves, many creations, and then it ceases feeding on you.
&nbs
p; From that moment on, what I experienced were emotional dramas which passed like storms, and left peace behind them.
[May, 1936]
Louveciennes. But I am living outside. First there was Fez outside, the sun, the sea, and the city which was shaped like the brain, a city externally like the cities of the soul, and then there was Paris outside, and I on the streets. And then there was House of Incest arriving in huge bundles from the printer's, there were letters to be written, turquoise paste for the eyelids to be sent to Fatima. There is Henry passing through an air pocket, as he calls it. Lost, dispersed, disconnected.
Then there was coughing all night to the choking point, loss of weight. The little French doctor saying it was chronic bronchitis. After a few weeks, someone mentioned a German refugee doctor recently arrived from Germany. I went to a modest apartment, and as soon as I entered the room I felt in the presence of an unusual personality. He was Dr. Max Jacobson (who later became so famous in New York). He had dark, piercing, brilliant eyes. He took one glance at me and said: "Toi, ma fille, you have whooping cough. I'll fix you up in a minute." And with one injection he restored me to sleep and health.
He was so vital, so keen, so alert, mentally and physically. It was as if he were making diagnosis while flying. He never sat down, or listened. It was as if he did not want the patient's talk, list of details, to obstruct his intuition which worked swiftly, like an arrow. He was handsome, with curly dark hair, a healthy rosy face, and always ready to laugh. He did not listen, but watched with such intensity and then pounced upon the symptoms. From that moment on I had a blind faith in him (which was never to change). We became friends. He came to dinner with his wife.
