by Paul Bowles
We arrived at Tafraout about five in the afternoon, 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 had been left in charge of the premises while the regular guardian was down in Tiznit. He helped with luggage, hung up our clothes, prepared the beds, brought pails of water for washing and bottles of drinking water, and filled the lamps with kerosene. Slept heavily and late. Woke once in 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 (stew) of beef, almonds, grapes, olives and onions. Came back up to the hotel to make coffee 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 came no closer to uncovering an occasion where there might 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, my driver 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 French antibiotic effective in the treatment of intestinal infections. (Indispensable for traveling in the remoter regions of Morocco!)
A bearded Moroccan interne 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 wanted I could speak with the French pharmacist, who in the absence of his chief was in charge of the institution.
The pharmacist, a Monsieur Rousselot, 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.”
We invited him to the hotel for a whiskey. Alcoholic drinks are not on sale in Tafraout, since Moslems cannot drink legally. The only Europeans in the region were the doctor and the pharmacist, and they got by with an occasional bottle of wine or cognac they brought from Tiznit.
The pharmacist brought with him a 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 present visit, 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 in him. “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.
After lunch, as we sat over coffee and brandy, I complimented Monsieur Rousselot on the excellence of his food, told him how grateful we were for his kind invitation, and said I hoped we might see him again on a subsequent visit, since we would be leaving in the morning. Seddiq, the medical student, looked crestfallen.
“Oh, no! You can’t go!” cried Monsieur Rousselot. “I have something much better for you tomorrow.”
I said we had to start moving northward.
“But this is something special. Something I discovered. I’ve never shown it to anyone before.”
“It’s not possible,” I said.
He pleaded. “Tomorrow is Saturday. Leave on Monday morning. We can spend tomorrow night in the palace and have Sunday morning for exploring the oases.”
“Two days!” I cried. But the curiosity he had counted on awakening must have shown through my protestations. Before we left his house I had agreed to go to Tassemit. [Tassemsit is not the real name of the town. The author was taken there contingent upon the understanding that he would not use its true name.] I could scarcely have resisted, after his description of the place. According to him, Tassemsit was a feudal town at the bottom of a narrow canyon, which by virtue of being the seat of an influential religious brotherhood had so far escaped coming under the governmental jurisdiction, and was still functioning in a wholly traditional fashion. Absolute power was nominally in the hands of a nineteen-year-old girl, the present hereditary saint whose palace was inside the walls.
In reality, however, said Monsieur Rousselot, lowering his voice to a whisper, it was the family chauffeur who held the power of life and death over the citizens of Tassemsit. The old Cherif, father of the girl-saint, for many years had run the zaouia where religious pilgrims came to pray and leave offerings. Not long ago he had bought a car to get up to Tafraout now and then, and had hired a young Marrakchi to drive it. The old Cherif’s somewhat younger wife, as wives sometimes do, had found the chauffeur interesting, and “l’inévitable” had happened: the old Cherif had suddenly died and the wife had married the young Marrakchi, who had taken charge of everything: the woman, the holy daughter, the car, the palace and the administration of the shrine and the town around it. “It’s an equivocal situation,” said Monsieur Rousselot with relish. “You’ll see.”
It is early morning the next day. Others still asleep. Big grilled window beside my head. A world of dappled sunlight and shadow on the other side of the wrought-iron filigree, an orchard of fig trees where small birds dart and chirp. Then the mud wall, and beyond, the stony floor of the canyon. A few pools of water in the riverbed. The women are out there, getting water, bringing it back in jugs. Background to all views: the orange side wall of the canyon, perpendicular and high enough to block out the sky from where I sit on the mattress.
We heard more lurid details about the place from Rousselot, Saturday during lunch. When the chauffeur took over in Tassemsit he conceived the idea of providing girls to keep the pilgrims occupied at night, when the zaouia is closed. A great boost to the local economy. A holy city of sin, said Rousselot with enthusiasm. Merely speak to the chauffeur, and you get any woman in town, even if she happens to be married.
He had hardly finished telling us all this when a little fat man came in. Rousselot’s face was a study in chagrin, dropped jaw and all. He rallied then, introduced the little man around as Monsieur Omar, and made him sit down with us for coffee. He was some sort of government employee. When he heard that we were about to leave for Tassemsit, Monsieur Omar said very simply that he would go with us. It was clear enough that he wasn’t wanted, but since nobody said anything to the contrary, he came along, sitting in back with Rousselot and Seddiq, the medical student. The trail was rough in spots on the way up over the peaks just south of Tafraout. Going down the other side it was narrower, but the surface was no worse. Had we met another car, one of us would have had to back up for a half hour.
The landscape became constantly more dramatic. For two hours the trail followed a valley that cut deeper and deeper into the rock walls as it went downward. Sometimes we drove along the bed of the stream for a half mile or so. At the date-palm level we came across small oases, cool and green, that filled the canyon floor from cliff to cliff. The lower we went, the higher the mountain walls above, and the sunlight seemed to be coming from farther away. When I was a child I used to imagine Persephone going along a similar road each year on her way down to Hades. A little like ha
ving found a back way out of the world. No house, no car, no human being all afternoon. Later, after we’d been driving in shadow a good while, the canyon widened, and there on a promontory above a bend in the dry riverbed, was Tassemsit, compact, orange-gold like the naked rock of the countryside around it, still in the sunlight. A small rich oasis just below it to the south. The zaouia with its mosque and other buildings seemed to occupy a large part of the town’s space. A big, tall minaret in northern style, well-preserved. We stopped and got out. Complete silence throughout the valley.
Monsieur Rousselot had seemed pensive and nervous all during the afternoon. He got me aside on some pretext, and we walked down the trail a way, he talking urgently the whole time. It worried him very much that Monsieur Omar should be with us: he felt that his presence represented a very real danger to the status quo of the place. “One false move, and the story of Tassemsit can be finished forever,” he said. “C’est très délicat. Above all, not a word about what I told you. Any of it.” I said he could count on me.
It came to me as we walked back up toward the car that there was probably another reason, besides the fact that he wanted to keep the place as his private playground, why Monsieur Rousselot was worried. A Frenchman’s job in Morocco, if he works for the government, is never too secure in any case; it is easy to find a pretext which will dispose of him and replace him with a Moroccan. At Monsieur Rousselot’s insistence we waited another half hour; then we drove down a side trail to the right, to within two hundred feet of the town gate. A mist of sweet-smelling woodsmoke hung over the canyon. Several tall black men in white cotton robes appeared at the top of the rocks above us, came down to the car, and recognized Monsieur Rousselot. Smiling, they led us through a short alley into the palace itself, small, primitive and elegant. The big room where they left us was a conscious synthesis of luxury and wild fantasy: with its irresponsible color juxtapositions it was like something Matisse would have produced had he been asked to design a Moorish salon.
“This is our room,” said Monsieur Rousselot. “Here we are going to eat and sleep, the five of us.” While we were unpacking, our host came in and sat down in our midst for a while. He was pleasant-mannered, quick-witted; he spoke a little French. A man in his late twenties, born in the country, I should say, but used to living in the city. At one point I became aware of the conversation he was having with Monsieur Rousselot, who had taken a seat beside him on the mattress. It concerned the possibility of an ahouache, to be sung and danced by citizens of Tassemsit later in the evening. Afterward, when the host had left, Monsieur Rousselot announced that not only would we have the entertainment, but that a certain number of women would take part in it. “Very unusual,” he commented, looking owlishly at Monsieur Omar. Monsieur Omar grinned. “We are fortunate,” he said; he was from Casablanca and might as well have been visiting Bali for all he knew about local customs. “You understand, of course,” Monsieur Rousellot went on to say to me with some embarrassment, “This ahouache will have to be paid for.”
“Of course,” I said.
“If you can give me three thousand francs, I should be glad to contribute two.”
I protested that we should be delighted to pay the whole amount, but he wouldn’t consider it.
Through the windows, from the silence in the canyon outside, came the thin sound of the meuzzin’s voice calling from the mosque, and as we listened, two light bulbs near the ceiling began to glow feebly. “It’s not possible!” I cried. “Electricity here?”
“Tiens,” murmured Monsieur Rousselot. “He’s got his generator going at last.”
A tall servant came in and announced that the Cherifa was expecting us on the floor above. We filed out under the arcade and up a long flight of stairs. There at the top, on an open terrace, surrounded by roaring pressure lamps, sat our host with two women.
We were presented to the mother first. She would have been considered elegant anywhere in the world, with her handsome head, her regal white garments and her massive gold jewelry. The daughter, present titular ruler of Tassemsit, was something else; it was difficult to believe that the two had anything in common, or even that they inhabited the same town. The girl wore a pleated woolen skirt and a yellow sweater. She had had her front teeth capped with gold, and noisily snapped her chewing gum from time to time as she chatted with us. Presently our host rose and conducted us back down the stairs into our room, where servants had begun to arrive with trays and small tables.
It was an old-fashioned Moroccan dinner, beginning with soap, towels and a big ewer of hot water. When everyone had washed and dried himself, an earthenware dish at least a foot and a half across was brought in and set in our midst. It held a mountain of couscous surrounded by a sea of sauce. We ate in the traditional manner, using our fingers, a process which demands a certain minimum of technique. The sauce was bubbling hot, and the tiny grains of semolina (since the cook knew his business) did not adhere to each other. Some of the food we extracted from the mound in front of us got to our mouths, but a good deal of it did not. I decided to temporize a bit until someone had uncovered some of the meat buried in the center of the mass, and when my opportunity came I seized a small piece of lamb which was still too hot to touch with comfort, but which I managed nevertheless to eat.
“I see that even the rudiments of local etiquette remain unknown to you,” remarked Monsieur Rousselot to me in a voice which carried overtones of triumph rather than the friendly concern it might have expressed.
“Have I committed an infraction?” I asked.
“Of the gravest,” he said solemnly. “You ate a piece of meat. One is constrained to try some of every other element in the dish first, and even then one may not try the meat until one’s host has offered one a piece of it with his own fingers.”
I said this was the first time I had eaten in a home of the region. Seddiq, the medical student, observed that in Rabat such behavior as Monsieur described would be considered absurd. But Monsieur Rousselot was determined to be an old Moroccan hand. “Quelle decadence!” he snorted. “The younger generation knows nothing.” A few minutes later he upset a full glass of tea on the rug. “In Rabat we don’t do that either,” murmured Seddiq.
Shortly after tea had been served for the third time, the electricity began to fail, and eventually it died. There was a pause in the talking. From where he sat, the head of the house shouted an order. Five white-dustered black men brought in candle lanterns; they were still placing them in strategic positions around the room when the lights came on again, brighter than before. The lanterns were quickly blown out. Candles are shameful. Twenty minutes later, in the midst of a lion story (stories about lions are inevitable whenever city people gather in the country in South Morocco, although according to reliable sources the beasts have been extinct in the region for several generations), the current failed again, abruptly. In the silence of sudden darkness we heard a jackal yapping: the high sharp sound came from the direction of the riverbed.
“Very near,” I remarked, partly to seem unaware of the host’s probably embarrassment at having us witness the failure of his power system.
“Yes, isn’t it?” He seemed to want to talk. “I have recorded them many times. Not one jackal—whole packs of them.”
“You recorded them? You have a tape recorder here?”
“From Marrakech. It doesn’t work very well. At least, not always.”
Monsieur Rousselot had been busy scrabbling around his portion of the rug; now he suddenly lit a match and put it to the candle of the lantern near him. Then he went the length of the big room, lighting the others. As the patterns painted on the high ceiling became visible again, there was the sound of hand drums approaching from the town.
“The entertainers are coming,” said our host.
Monsieur Rousselot steped out into the courtyard. There was the increasing sound of voices; servants had appeared and were moving about beyond the doorway in the gloom. By the time we all went to look out, the courty
ard had some fifty or sixty men in it, with more arriving. Someone was building a fire over in a corner under the far arcade. A drum banged now and then as its owner tested the membrane. Again the electricity came on. The master of the palace smiled at Monsieur Rousselot, disappeared, and returned almost immediately with a servant who carried a tape recorder. It was a small model. He set it on a chair outside the doorway, and had difficulty connecting it because none of the wall plugs appeared to work. Eventually he found a live one. By that time more than a hundred men were massed under the arches around the open center of the courtyard, and in the middle were thirty or more musicians standing in a circle. The host had propped the microphone against the machine. “Why not hang it on the wall?” I suggested.
“I want to talk into it once in a while,” he said. When he turned the volume up, the machine howled, of course, and there was laughter from the spectators, who until then had been very quiet. The host had another chair brought, and he sat down in it, holding the microphone in his hand. More chairs were provided from out of the darkness, and someone arrived bringing a pressure lantern, which was set inside the musicians’ circle. The traditional fire for heating the drums should have been inside the circle, but there was not enough space in the courtyard to put it there.
The performers, all Negroes, wore loose white tunics, and each carried a poignard in a silver scabbard at his waist. Their drums were the regulation bendir, a skin stretched over a wooden hoop about a foot and a half in diameter. This simple instrument is capable of great sonorous variety, depending on the kind of blow and the exact spot on the membrane struck by the fingertips or palm. The men of South Morocco do not stand still when they play the drums; they dance, but the purpose of their choreography is to facilitate the production of rhythm. No matter how involved or frenzied the body movements of the players (who also sing in chorus and as soloists) the dancing is subordinate to the sound. It is very difficult to hear the music if one is watching the performance; I often keep my eyes shut during an entire number. The particular interest of the Anti-Atlas ahouache is that the drummers divide themselves into complementary groups, each of which provides only certain regularly recurring notes in the complex total of the rhythmical pattern.
