The Boy Who The Set Fire and Other Stories

by Paul Bowles

  Miller, Christopher L. “Theories of Africans: The Question of Literary Anthropology.” Critical Inquiry 13.1 (1986): 120-39.

  Mrabet, Mohammed. The Big Mirror. Trans. Paul Bowles, Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1977.

  ——The Boy Who Set the Fire and Other Stories. Trans. Paul Bowles. San Francisco: City Lights, 1989.

  ——The Lemon. Trans. Paul Bowles. New York: McGraw Hill, 1969.

  ——Look and Move On. Trans. Paul Bowles. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1976.

  Naipaul, V.S. Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey. New York: Vintage, 1982.

  Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.

  Todorov, Tzvetan. The Conquest of America. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Harper & Row, 1984.

  JOURNEY THROUGH MOROCCO

  [1963]

  By Paul Bowles

  WHENEVER I LEAVE TANGIER to go south, my home takes on the look of a place struck by disaster. The night before I set out on this trip the usual disorder prevailed. There were crates of canned foodstuffs and bundles of blankets and pillows in the living room. The portable butane-gas stove and boxes of recording tape covered the road maps.

  I said good-by to my servants, who had induced me to write down the things they hoped I would buy for them while I was down there. Fatima wanted a white woolen blanket at least eight meters long, and Mina a silver-plated circular tray with three detachable legs. Following tradition, they had scrupulously insisted that these things were to be paid for out of their wages after I returned, and I had agreed, although each of us was aware that such deductions would never be made. Moroccan etiquette demands that when the master of the house goes on a journey he bring back souvenirs for everyone. The farther he goes and the longer he stays, the more substantial these gifts are expected to be.

  In this country departure is often a predawn activity. After the half hour of early-morning prayer calling is finished and the muezzins have extinguished the lights at the tops of the minarets, there is still about an hour of dark left. The choir of roosters trails on in the air above the rooftops of the city until daybreak. It is a good moment to leave, just as the sky is growing white in the east and objects are black and sharp against it. By the time the sun was up, we were far out in the country, rolling along at a speed determined only by the curves and the occasional livestock in the road. The empty highway, visible far ahead, measured off the miles of open, mountainous countryside, and along the way no billboards came between us and the land.

  During the past year I had traveled some 25,000 miles around Morocco, recording music for the Library of Congress. The tapes that interested me most were the ones I had recorded in Tafraout, a region in the western Anti-Atlas. Since I had managed to get only six selections there, I wanted to go back there now and try to find some more. By my inland itinerary there was a distance of 855 miles to be covered between Tangier and Tafraout, and the roads would be fairly good all the way. The direct route to Marrakech via Rabat traverses flat terrain and has a certain amount of traffic. The unfrequented interior route we used, which leads through the western foothills of the Rif Mountains and over the Middle Atlas, takes an extra day but is beautiful at every point.

  Beyond Xauen [Chaouen] we followed for a while the River Loukkos, here a clear swift stream at the bottom of a narrow valley. We stopped for lunch, my driver and I, spread a rug under an old olive tree and ate, listening to the water skipping over the stones beside us. The hills rose steeply on both sides of the river. Not a person or a dwelling in sight. We started out again.

  A half hour farther, we rounded a corner and came upon a man lying face down on the paved surface of the road, his djellaba covering his head. Immediately I thought: “He’s dead.” We stopped, got out, prodded him a bit, and he sat up, rubbing his eyes, mumbling, annoyed at being awakened. He explained that the smooth road was a better place to sleep than the stony ground beside it. When we objected that he might easily be killed, he replied with the fine peasant logic that no one had killed him yet. Nevertheless, he got up and walked a few yards off the highway, where he slumped down again all in one motion, wrapped the hood of his djellaba around his head, and went back into the comfortable world of sleep.

  The next day was hotter. We climbed along the slowly rising ramp of the Middle Atlas, the great range that lies between the Rif and the Grand Atlas, a gray, glistening landscape. The shiny leaves of the scrub live-oaks, and even the exposed bedrock beneath, reflected the hot light of the overhead sun. Farther along, on the southern slope of the mountains, we passed the mangled body of a large ape that had not got out of the road fast enough—an unusual sight here, since these animals generally stay far from the highways.

  All afternoon we had been speeding down the gradually descending valley between the Middle Atlas and the Grand Atlas. The sun went down ahead of us and the moon rose behind us. We drank coffee from the vacuum bottle and hoped we would get into Marrakech in time to find some food. The new Moroccan regime has brought early closing hours to a land where heretofore night was merely a continuation of day.

  After the lunar brightness of the empty wasteland, the oasis was 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 squatters’ colony 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 these desparate-looking bidonvilles out of whatever materials they can find, and there they stay.

  Marrakech 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 Western cities: long miles of street lights stretching in straight lines across the plain. Only by day you 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 buggies, 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 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 Marrakech, we 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.

  Abruptly out of the silence of the street below, there came a succession of strange, explosive cries. I leaned over the edge and peered into the dim passageway three floors beneath. Among the few late strollers an impossible, phantomlike 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 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 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 qahaouaji, having made the tea, 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 gahaouaji. “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. 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? 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 put 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 native musicians. He lived in a rooming house near the dyers’ quarters. 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 Sekou Touré of Guinea said to Nkrumah of Ghana about Nasser of Egypt. 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 in 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 passed pipes of 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 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.

  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 Marrakech 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.”

  We left Marrakech at noon, driving straight up to Ouirgane, in a valley about three thousand feet above the plain. Brilliant day. Sky like a blue enamel bowl overhead. 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 during our meal. 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’ouvre, 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 Tiz’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. (The Guennaoua are a Sudanese religious cult whose members practice medico-psychic therapy.) Tried to get out through a door in 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. We cross 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 of 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 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 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, olivelike fruit. Subsequently their excrement is collected, and the argan p
its 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 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 created 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, sleeping on the floor behind the counter.

  Being industrious, thrifty and invariably successful, he is open to a good deal of adverse criticism from those of his compatriots who despise his frugal manner of living and deride his custom of leaving 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 difficult 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 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 fastnesses of this savage landscape.