Travels

by Paul Bowles

  After the lunar brightness of the empty waste land, the oasis seemed dark. The highway went for miles between high mud walls and canebrakes; the black tracery of date palms rose above them, against the brilliant night sky. Suddenly the walls and the oasis came to an end, and ahead, standing in the rubble of the desert, was a big new cinema trimmed with tubes of colored neon, the tin and straw shacks of a bidonville clustering around it like the cottages of a village around the church. In Morocco the very poor live neither in the country nor in the city; they come as far as the outer walls of the town, build these desperate-looking squatters’ colonies out of whatever materials they can find, and there they stay.

  Marrakesh is a city of great distances, flat as a table. When the wind blows, the pink dust of the plain sweeps into the sky, obscuring the sun, and the whole city, painted with a wash made of the pink earth on which it rests, glows red in the cataclysmic light. At night, from a car window, it looks not unlike one of our own Western cities: long miles of street lights stretching in straight lines across the plain. Only by day does one see that most of these lights illumine nothing more than empty reaches of palm garden and desert. Over the years, the outer fringes of the Medina have been made navigable to automobiles and horse-drawn carriages, of which there are still a great many, but it takes a brave man to drive his car into the maze of serpentine alleys full of porters, bicycles, carts, donkeys and ordinary pedestrians. Besides, the only way to see anything in the Medina is to walk. In order to be really present, you must have your feet in the dust, and be aware of the hot, dusty smell of the mud walls beside your face.

  The night we arrived in Marrakesh, Christopher and I went to a café in the heart of the Medina. On the roof, under the stars, they spread matting, blankets and cushions for us, and we sat there drinking mint tea, savoring the cool air that begins to stir above the city after midnight, when the stored heat of the sun is finally dissipated. At a certain moment, out of the silence of the street below, there came a succession of strange, explosive cries. I leaned over the edge and peered down into the dim passageway three floors beneath. Among the few late strollers an impossible, phantom-like figure was dancing. It galloped, it stopped, it made great gravitation-defying leaps into the air as if the earth under its feet were helping. At each leap it yelled. No one paid any attention. As the figure came along below the café, I was able to identify it as a powerfully built young man; he was almost naked. I watched him disappear into the dark. Almost immediately he returned, doing the same inspired dance, occasionally rushing savagely toward other pedestrians, but always stopping himself in time to avoid touching them. He passed back and forth through the alley in this way for a quarter of an hour or so before the qa-houaji climbed the ladder again to the roof where we sat. When he came I said casually, “What’s going on down there?” Although in most places it would have been clear enough that a madman was loose in the streets, in Morocco there are subtle distinctions to be made. Sometimes the person turns out to be merely holy, or indisposed.

  “Ah, poor man,” said the qahaouaji. “He’s a friend of mine. We were in school together. He got high marks and played good soccer.”

  “What happened?”

  “What do you think? A woman, of course.”

  This had not occurred to me. “You mean she worked magic on him?”

  “What else? At first he was like this – “ He let his jaw drop and his mouth hang open; his eyes became fixed and vacant. “Then after a few weeks he tore off his clothes and began to run. And ever since, he runs like that, in the summer and in the winter. The woman was rich. Her husband had died and she wanted Allal. But he’s of a good family and they didn’t like her. So she said in her head: ‘No other woman is going to have him either.’ And she gave him what she gave him.”

  “And his family?”

  “He doesn’t know his family. He lives in the street.”

  “And the woman? What happened to her?”

  He shrugged. “She’s not here any more. She moved somewhere else.” At that moment the cries came up again.

  “But why do they let him run in the street like that? Can’t they do anything for him?”

  “Oh, he never hurts anybody. He’s just playful. He likes to scare people, that’s all.”

  I decided to ask my question. “Is he crazy?”

  “No, just playful.”

  “Ah, yes. I see.”

  At twilight one day we were the tea guests of Moulay Brahim, one of the Moroccans who previously had helped me make contacts with musicians. He lived in a rooming house near the dyers’ souk. The establishment, on the second floor, consisted of a dozen or more cubicles situated around an open central court with a dead fountain in the middle. No women were allowed in the building; it was a place for men who have left home and family behind. Not an object was visible that could even remind one of the existence of traditional Moroccan life.

  Moulay Brahim is militantly of his epoch; his life is almost wholly abstract. He spends his hours in an attitude of prostration on his mattress, his head touching a large short-wave radio. He knows what time it is in Jakarta, just where the Nigerian representative to the United Nations is at this moment, and what Sékou Touré said to Nkrumah about Nasser. The radio is never silent save for a useless five minutes now and then while he waits impatiently for a program in Cairo or Damascus or Baghdad to begin. He follows the moves of the cold war like an onlooker at a chess match, making searing comments on what he considers the blunders of both sides. Only the neutralist powers have his sympathy. We sat in the dusk around the dimly illumined radio and listened to it hiss and crackle. Moulay Brahim dispensed kif silently, intent on the panel of the instrument, weighing each gradation of static with the expression of a connoisseur certain of his ground. Fifteen minutes might go by without a trace of any sort of program coming out – only the unvarying noise of interference. His face did not change; he knows how to wait. At any moment he may hear something more, something identifiable. Then he can relax for a bit, while the tea-concession man from across the courtyard brings in the big tray, sets up the glasses and rolls the mint between his hands before stuffing it into the pot. But soon it is not enough for Moulay Brahim to know that he is in touch with the BBC service to the Middle East, and he begins once again the painful search for the unfindable.

  Inhabitants of the other rooms came in and squatted, but it was difficult to engage them in anything more than desultory conversation. They had learned from experience that in Moulay Brahim’s room it was better to be quiet. At one point, when a particularly confused noise had for some time been issuing from the loudspeaker, I rashly suggested that he adjust the dial. “No, no!” he cried. “This is what I want. I’ve got five stations here now. Sometimes others come in. It’s a place where they all like to get together and talk at once. Like in a café.” For a young and deracinated Moroccan like Moulay Brahim, radio is primarily neither a form of entertainment nor a medium of information. It is a sort of metaphysical umbilical cord – a whole manner of existence, an essential adjunct to feeling that he is in contact with life.

  Musicians in Essaouira, southern Morocco, on the recording trip Bowles made for his Library of Congress project (PB)

  When we had finally persuaded him that it was time for us to leave, he reluctantly rose from the radio and took us out into the streets to the apothecary market, where I had expressed a desire to go. It is the place you visit if you want the ingredients for making black magic. There were six stalls in a row, all bristling with the dried parts of birds, reptiles and mammals. We wandered slowly by, examining the horns, quills, hair, eggs, bones, feathers, feet and bills that were strung on wires in the doorways. I was put in mind of the unfortunate Allal and the rich widow, and I described Allal to Moulay Brahim. He knew him; everybody in Marrakesh knew him, he declared, adding as he pointed to the rows of glass containers in front of us, “You can get everything for that sort of business here. But you’ve got to know how to blend them. That takes an expert
.” He raised his eyebrows significantly, and approached the nearest merchant to mutter a few words to him. A packet containing tiny seeds was brought out. Moulay Brahim examined them at some length, and bought fifty grams. “What is it?” I asked him. But he was enjoying his brief role as mystery man, and merely rattled the seeds in their paper, saying, “Something very special, very special.”

  TAROUDANT, OCTOBER 6, 1961

  Brilliant day. Sky like a blue enamel bowl overhead. Left Marrakesh at noon, driving straight up to Ouirgane, in a valley only about three thousand feet above the plain. Lunch outside in the sun at Le Sanglier Qui Fume. Our table midway between a chained eagle and a chained monkey, both of which watched us distrustfully while we ate. Below, hidden, somewhere nearby, the little river roared over its rocks. The Grand Atlas sun fiery Monsieur gave us drooping old straw sombreros to wear while we ate. A tame stork, very proprietary, strutted around, poking its beak into everything. It was wary, however, of the monkey, which had a long bamboo pole in its hand and patiently tried to trip it up each time it came past. Everything excellent: hors d’oeuvre, frogs’ legs and chicken paprika. Madame is Hungarian, said she lives in the hope that people coming through Ouirgane will prove to speak her language, “Or at least know Budapest,” she added. Obviously disappointed in us. On up to the pass at Tizi n’Test and over the top. The valley of the Souss thick with a mist that looked like smoke. Only the long sloping rim of the Anti-Atlas showed in the sky to the south, fifty miles across. Below, a gulf of vapor. Got into Taroudant at seven. The heat was still everywhere inside the walls. While I was unpacking, a procession of Guennaoua shuffled by in the street. Tried to get out through a door into the patio, but it was padlocked. I peeked through a crack and saw them going past slowly, carrying candle lanterns. The pounding of the drums shook the air.

  After Taroudant – Tiznit, Tanout, Tirmi, Tiffermit. Great hot dust-colored valleys among the naked mountains, dotted with leafless argan trees as gray as puffs of smoke. Sometimes a dry stream twists among the boulders at the bottom of a valley, and there is a peppering of locust-ravaged date palms whose branches look like the ribs of a broken umbrella. Or hanging to the flank of a mountain a thousand feet below the road is a terraced village, visible only as an abstract design of flat roofs, some the color of the earth of which they are built, and some bright yellow with the corn that is spread out to dry in the sun.

  The argan trees are everywhere, thousands of them, squat and thorny, anchored to the rocks that lie beneath in their dubious shade. They flourish where nothing else can live, not even weeds or cacti. Their scaly bark looks like crocodile hide and feels like iron. Where the argan grows the goats have a good life. The trunk is short and the branches begin to proliferate only a few feet from the ground. This suits the goats perfectly; they climb from branch to branch eating both the leaves and the greasy, bitter, olive-like fruit. Subsequently their excrement is collected, and the argan pits in it are pressed to make a thick cooking oil.

  Tafraout is rough country – the Bad Lands of South Dakota on a grand scale, with Death Valley in the background. The mountains are vast humps of solid granite, their sides strewn with gigantic boulders; at sunset the black line of their crests is deckle-edged in silhouette against the flaming sky. Seen from a height, the troughs between the humps are like long gray lakes, the only places in the landscape where there is at least a covering of what might pass for loose earth. Above the level surface of this detritus in the valleys rise the smooth expanses of solid rock.

  The locusts have fed well here, too. Tafraout could never subsist on its dates. But the bourgeois Berbers who live here learned long ago that organized commerce could provide greater security than either the pastoral or the agricultural life. They inaugurated a successful campaign to create a virtual monopoly on grocery and hardware stores all over Morocco. Taking his male children with him, a man goes to a city in the north where he has a shop, or several shops, and remains there for two or three years at a stretch, living usually in conditions of extreme discomfort on the floor behind the counter. Being industrious, thrifty and invariably successful, he is naturally open to a good deal of adverse criticism from those of his compatriots who are less so, and who despise his frugal manner of living and deride his custom of leaving small boys of eight in charge of his shops. But the children run the establishments quite as well as their elders; they know the price of every object and are equally diffi- cult to deal with in the national pastime of persuading the seller to lower his asking price. The boys merely refuse to talk; often they do not even look at the customer. They quote the price, and if it is accepted, hand over the article and return the change. It is a very serious matter to be in charge of a store, and the boys behave accordingly.

  As you come up from Tiznit over the pass, the first Tafraout settlements on the trail occur at the neck of a narrow valley; built in among, underneath, and on top of the great fallen lumps of granite, the fortress-houses dominate the countryside. It is hard to reconcile the architectural sophistication of these pink and white castles with the unassuming aspect of their owners back in the north, just as it is difficult to believe that the splendid women, shrouded in black and carrying copper amphoras or calfskin-covered baskets on their shoulders, can be these inconspicuous little men’s wives and sisters. But then, no one would expect a tribe of shopkeepers to have originated in the fortresses of this savage landscape.

  TAFRAOUT, OCTOBER 9

  Arrived yesterday about five, after having a puncture ten miles up the trail. Hotel completely empty, save for a handful of ragged children and one old gentleman in a djellaba who has been left in charge of the premises while the regular guardian is down in Tiznit. He helped with luggage, hung up our clothes, prepared the beds, brought pails of washing water and bottles of drinking water, and filled the lamps with kerosene. Slept heavily and late for the first time since Meknés. Woke once in the night to hear a great chorus of howling and barking below in the village. Lunch better than dinner last night, but everything was drowned in an inch of hot oil. Tajine of beef, almonds, grapes, olives and onions. Came back up to the hotel to make Nescafé on the terrace afterward. The old man who received us last night was sitting in a corner, buried under his djellaba. He saw we were looking at magazines, got up and came over. Soon he said timidly, “Is that an American book you are reading?” I said it was. He pointed to a color photograph and asked, “And are the mountains in America really all green like that?” I told him many of them were. He stood a while studying the picture. Then he said bitterly, “It’s not pretty here. The locusts eat the trees and all the rest of the plants. Here we’re poor.”

  During the next few days I discovered how unrealistic my recording project had been. We visited at least two dozen villages in the region, and made no progress toward uncovering an occasion where there might prove to be music. The previous year even the government had needed thirty-six hours’ notice for sending its directives via a network of caids and messengers up into the heights before the musicians had put in their appearance in Tafraout. When Friday morning arrived, Christopher said to me at breakfast, “What do you think? Do we leave tomorrow for Essaouira?” I said I supposed there was nothing else to do. Then I suggested we go down to the hospital to see if they had any Rovamycine.

  A bearded Moroccan intern stood under a pepper tree in the hospital’s patio, a syringe in his hand; he said the doctor had gone to Agadir for the weekend, but that if I wished I could speak with the French pharmacist, who in the absence of his chief was in charge of the institution.

  The pharmacist arrived rubbing his eyes. He had been working all night, he told us. There was no Rovamycine. “It’s an expensive drug. They don’t supply us with that sort of thing here.”

  Christopher invited him to come up to the hotel for a whiskey. “Avec plaisir,” he said. Alcoholic drinks are not on sale in Tafraout, since Moslems cannot drink legally. The only two Europeans in the region were the doctor and the pharmacist, and they got by with the
occasional bottle of wine or cognac they brought up from Tiznit.

  The pharmacist had with him a young Moroccan medical student who had just arrived from Rabat the day before; he thought Tafraout the strangest place he had ever seen. We sat on the terrace in the scalding sun and watched the crows flying in a slowly revolving circle high above the valley. I was disappointed in my sojourn this time, I told Monsieur Rousselot, because I hadn’t got into the life of the people and because there was no edible food. The second reason touched the Frenchman. “I shall do my best to fill these unfortunate lacunae,” he said. “First let us go to my house for lunch. I have a good chef.”

  The house behind the hospital was comfortable. There were several servants. Walls were lined with books, particularly art books, for like many French men of medicine, Monsieur Rousselot loved painting, and had a hankering to try his hand at it himself one day.

  During lunch he announced, “I have a little excursion in mind for this afternoon. Have you ever drunk mahia?” I said I had, many years ago, with Jewish friends in Fez. “Ah!” he exclaimed happily. “Then you are acquainted with its virtues. You will have an opportunity to drink mahia again later this afternoon.” I smiled politely, having already determined that when the moment arrived I should decline the offer. I am not fond of eau de vie, even when it is made of figs, as it is in Fez. In the Anti-Atlas they use dates, said Monsieur Rousselot; this didn’t seem an improvement.

  After coffee and cognac, we started out down the Tiznit trail. Some thirty miles to the south, in a parched lower valley, we came to a poor-looking village called Tahala, which, besides its Moslem population, contains a Jewish colony of considerable size. The air was breathless as we got out of the car in front of the primitive little mosque. Five or six Moslem elders sat on the dusty rocks in the shade, talking quietly. “The Israelites add to their modest revenue by selling us the ambrosia they distill,” explained Monsieur Rousselot. Seddiq, the medical student, now expressed himself on the subject for the first time. “It’s terrible!” he said with feeling. “Bien sûr,” agreed Monsieur Rousselot, “but you’ll drink it.”