The Boy Who The Set Fire and Other Stories Read online

  MOHAMMED MRABET

  Taped & Translated from the Morgrebi by

  PAUL BOWLES

  Black Sparrow Press

  LOS ANGELES • 1974

  Copyright ©1974 by Paul Bowles. All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Grateful acknowledgment is given to the editors of the following magazines where some of these stories originally appeared:

  Antaeus, Armadillo, Bastard Angel, The Great Society, Mediterranean Review, Omphalos, Rolling Stone, and Transatlantic Review.

  For information address

  BLACK SPARROW PRESS:

  P.O. Box 25603

  Los Angeles, CA, 90025.

  ISBN 0-87685-175-8

  ISBN 0-87685-174-X (pbk.)

  Cover illustration by Mohammed Mrabet

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  Paul Bowles: Translations from the Moghrebi

  By Mary Martin Rountree

  STORIES TOLD BY MOHAMMED MRABET

  Si Mokhtar

  Baraka

  The Saint by Accident

  Abdeslam And Amar

  What Happened in Granada

  The Witch of Bouiba Del Hallouf

  The Dutiful Son

  Bahloul

  The Spring

  The Boy Who Set The Fire

  Mimoun The Fisherman

  Ramadan

  Larbi And His Father

  The Well

  The Hut

  The Woman from New York

  Doctor Safi

  APPENDICES

  Paul Bowles/Mohammed Mrabet:

  Translation, Transformation, and Transcultural Discourse

  By Richard F. Patteson

  Journey Through Morocco [1963]

  By Paul Bowles

  Notes

  PAUL BOWLES was born in 1910 and studied music with composer Aaron Copland before moving to Tangier, Morocco, with his wife, Jane. His first novel, The Sheltering Sky, was a bestseller in the 1950s and was made into a film by Bernardo Bertolucci in 1990. Bowles’s prolific career included many musical compositions, novels, collections of short stories, and books of travel, poetry, and translations.

  MOHAMMED MRABET (born in Tangier, 1936, real name Mohammed ben Chaib el Hajjem) is a Moroccan author artist and storyteller of the Ait Ouriaghel tribe in the Rif region. From 1946 to 1950, Mrabet worked as a caddy at the Royal Tangier Golf Club and thereafter as a fisherman, until 1956, when he met an American couple, Russ and Anne-Marie Reeves, at the Café Central in Tangier's Petit Socco, and remained friends with them for several years. They leased the Hotel Muneria (Tangier Inn) in Tangier and Mrabet worked there as a barman from 1956 to 1959, when he accompanied them to New York, where he stayed with them for several months. Upon his return to Tangier in 1960, he resumed his life as a fisherman and began to paint, (his earliest drawing known to originate in 1959) and met and became friends with Jane Bowles and Paul Bowles, the latter, who, being impressed by his storytelling skills, became the translator of his many prodigious oral tales, which were orated from a distinctive “kiffed” and utterly non-anglicized perspective and published into fourteen different books. Throughout the 1960s until 1992, Mrabet dictated his oral stories, (which Bowles translated into English) and continued work with his paintings. His books have been translated into many languages and in 1991, Philip Taaffe collaborated with Mrabet for the illustrations of his book “Chocolate Creams and Dollars.” Mrabet continues to paint and holds periodic art exhibitions, mostly in Spain and Tangier. He lives in the Souani area of Tangier, with his wife, children and grandchildren.

  INTRODUCTION

  By Mary Martin Rountree

  FROM THE VERY BEGINNING of his residence in Morocco, his country of adoption, Paul Bowles wanted in some way to preserve expressions of the native folk culture. For years he sought, and eventually received, financial assistance from various foundations to carry out an ambitious project of recording Moroccan music. Beneath successive cultural layers superimposed by colonizing powers remained vestiges of ancient art forms that Bowles believed could lead him to the heart of the “hermetic mystery of Morocco.” Among those ancient art forms he placed the inventions, sometimes fabulous, sometimes comic, of the market storyteller, spinning out his tale to a group of listeners for whom the oral tale—even today in this technological age—supplies the chief source of entertainment. It was not until the 1950s, however, after living in Morocco for decades, that Bowles began to record the stories told by some of the young men in his circle of Arab friends.

  In his preface to Five Eyes, a collection of stories by five different tellers, Bowles describes the beginnings of what would become for him an extremely important part of his literary activity:

  I had first admired Ahmed Yacoubi’s [a painter and close friend whose work Bowles encouraged] stories as long ago as 1947, but it was not until 1952 that the idea occurred to me that I might be instrumental in preserving at least a few of them . . . . One day as Yacoubi began to speak, I seized a notebook and rapidly scribbled the English translation of a story . . . across its pages.[1]

  Although the young men were by no means traditional or professional storytellers, Bowles became increasingly convinced of the value of their tales as a repository of cultural memories, and with the purchase of a tape recorder in the mid-Fifties, he set about in earnest his work as a translator.

  As early as the 1930s Bowles had encountered the challenges of translation so that he had in some measure already developed the skills he would need in this work. Fluent in French, Spanish, and Moghrebi (the Arabic dialect of Morocco), Bowles has numerous translations to his credit, particularly after he joined the board of editors of View. In his autobiography, Without Stopping (1972), he speaks of the work involved in his best-known translation, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos, and of how the problem of finding precisely the right title for the play came to him from a sign in the New York subway: No Exit.[2]

  Both the number of Moghrebi translations he has published and the fact that Bowles has been steadily engaged in this activity since the mid-Fifties testify to the value Bowles sees in them. Thus far, he has edited and translated ten volumes of various kinds of narrative—short stories, novels, autobiographies, fables—the last one The Beach Café and the Voice by Mohammed Mrabet appearing in 1980. Although the narratives themselves spread over a wide range of tone, character, and plot, the Moroccan narrators all have in common the fact that they are illiterate. Bowles apparently believes that the illiteracy of his storytellers contributes to the power of their stories. He says:

  I’m inclined to believe that illiteracy is a prerequisite. The readers and writers I’ve tested have lost the necessary immediacy of contact with the material. They seem less in touch with both their memory and their imagination than the illiterates.[3]

  Accordingly, the first Moroccan narrator to record extensively with Bowles was a watchman named Layachi Larbi, who uses the pseudonym Driss ben Hamed Charhadi. After Bowles had successfully translated and published a few of Charhadi’s anecdotes, Charhadi, elated by the money he made and eager to continue this odd kind of “work,” began to record almost daily with Bowles. The result is an entirely autobiographical account of Charhadi’s hardships in growing to adulthood. Although Lawrence Stewart refers to A Life Full of Holes as the first Moghrebi novel[4], Bowles states that an editor at Grove Press, quite arbitrarily, “had the idea of presenting the volume as a novel rather than
nonfiction, so that it would be eligible for a prize offered each year by an international group of publishers . . . .”[5] While A Life Full of Holes failed to win the prize, it was translated into several languages and earned Charhadi an encouraging sum of money.

  A Life Full of Holes, though simple and totally uncomplicated structurally, is nonetheless quite long and compelling in its detail, an altogether astonishing feat of sustained storytelling. Bowles accurately singles out Charhadi’s gifts in his introduction to A Life Full of Holes: “The good storyteller keeps the thread of his narrative almost equally taut at all points. This Charhadi accomplished, apparently without effort. He never hesitated; he never varied the intensity of his eloquence.”[6]

  The title of Charhadi’s autobiography comes from his own commentary on a Moghrebi saying—“Even a life full of holes, a life of nothing but waiting, is better than no life at all”—and this saying aptly describes the life of suffering, of enduring, of waiting for something better, if only a little better, that Charhadi’s tale unfolds. The story begins when the young protagonist Ahmed is eight years old. His mother marries a soldier, and the harsh, oppressive stepfather figures importantly throughout the boy’s life and is a heavy presence in the narratives of some of Bowles’s other storytellers as well.

  A Life Full of Holes is a painstaking depiction of a young Moroccan boy’s growth to manhood in a world of miserable poverty and deprivation, of cunning, violence, and treachery. During a journey, fraught with every conceivable difficulty, Ahmed’s mother turns to him at one point and says, “Ah, you see how hard life is!”[7] Generally speaking, this is the theme of the book, which is the story of stoic endurance of a life written by Allah. Charhadi describes the drudgery of the menial jobs Ahmed passes through in his struggle to earn enough to feed himself. From being a shepherd to work on a farm where he has a number of chores such as spreading cow dung to dry for winter fuel, he moves to the city where he gets a job as a “terrah,” a baker’s errand boy who fetches loaves of bread from houses to be baked at the oven, then returns them. For this he receives a piece of bread from each freshly baked loaf. At night he sleeps near the ovens. During this time Ahmed has the first of several jail experiences, this one occasioned by his cutting down trees to sell to “Nazarenes” (Christians) for Christmas. Charhadi’s account of his jail experiences are among the more remarkable episodes in the book. He re-creates the petty tyranny of sadistic guards, the intrigue and shabby power plays among the inmates, the tedium and hardship of their living conditions. The way in which the French authorities in the judicial system pit Moslem against Moslem adds yet another dimension to Ahmed’s sense of hopelessness. Never, however, does he indulge in self-pity. Though he rages against injustice around him, he accepts his fate patiently as a passage of time to be endured.

  Once free from prison, Ahmed sleeps on the floor of a café at night and looks for work during the day. The café is frequented mainly by thieves and pickpockets, whom the young boy begs to teach him how to steal. As the days pass, and he finds no job, his will to work gradually gives way to apathy: “I stayed there in the café. I was thinking, and talking with them [the thieves], and each day I spent less time looking for work. And finally I stayed the whole time in the café, and did not look for work any more.”[8]

  When Ahmed does find work again, it is as houseboy for a couple of French homosexuals who are taken with his good looks. For a few months Ahmed flourishes in a job which gives him some sense of pride in himself and his work. He enjoys being in charge of the housekeeping duties, and, for once, he has good food and plenty of it. But Ahmed’s orderly world falls apart when the relationship between the French couple breaks up because of the younger Frenchman’s infatuation with an Arab youth. The remainder of the “novel” follows Ahmed’s dogged attempt to maintain a measure of decency and order in his work as the Frenchman, more and more besotted by his young lovers, sinks further into poverty and degradation. The final episodes approach the implacable realism of Zola or Balzac in their focus on a weak individual slowly being destroyed by his sexual obsession. The book ends with Ahmed once again assessing the bleakness of his life:

  I was thinking: Look at all the work I did for that Nazarene! And when it ended, he cursed me and threw me out. But that’s all right. The stork has to wait a long time for locusts to come. Then he eats.[9]

  Ahmed’s ability to wait, to approach the threshold of hope without actually giving in to hoping, makes him an appealing figure. Charhadi’s autobiography succeeds largely because his is an honest, unpretentious voice. The story he has to tell brings the Western reader remarkably close to the social realities of North Africa, and Bowles must have sensed the importance of recording the life story of an illiterate Moroccan youth.

  The humiliation and pain, both physical and emotional, of Charhadi’s Life Full of Holes are echoed in several of the other translations, for Bowles’s narrators, without exception, belong to the poorer class of Moroccan society. The success of Larbi Layachi’s work with Bowles attracted another young Moroccan street youth, Mohammed Mrabet, who has taped eight volumes and has contributed stories to the collection entitled Five Eyes. In his autobiography Look and Move On, published in 1976, Mrabet recounts the beginning of his collaboration with Bowles. He had met Jane and Paul Bowles on several occasions and one day visited their apartment in Tangier, where Bowles showed him a copy of A Life Full of Holes with Larbi’s picture on the cover. “I began to laugh,” Mrabet says, “when I saw it, because I knew Larbi could not write. How can that be Larbi’s book? He can’t even sign his name.” Bowles then showed him Larbi’s tapes and explained how he translated from the tapes. When Mrabet is assured that Larbi made enough money from the book to get married, Mrabet decides that he too has stories to tell:

  I began to go see him [Bowles] several times a week, and each time I spent two hours or so recording stories. Finally I had a good collection of them. Some were tales I had heard in the cafés, some were dreams, some were inventions I made as I was recording, and some were about things that had actually happened to me.[10]

  The first of these stories dramatizes a curious kind of modern Arabic love affair in a novel entitled Love with a Few Hairs, published in 1968 and later produced by the BBC. Mrabet tells a highly engrossing story of love addiction, magic potions, and witches’ spells that further complicate an already complicated situation in which the handsome young protagonist Mohammed is the primary love interest not only of his wife but of his homosexual lover, Mr. David, who runs a hotel in Tangier.

  At age seventeen Mohammed has already spent five relatively contented years with Mr. David when he falls in love with his beautiful young neighbor Mina. After it is clear that Mina does not reciprocate his passion, Mohammed visits a local witch, who gives him a love powder concocted of a variety of items, including a few of Mina’s hairs. The powder works its magic only too well and soon Mina is imprudently in love with Mohammed. Much against her family’s wishes, Mina marries Mohammed, who manages to placate Mr. David enough to extract from him considerable sums of money to pay for the bride and wedding festivities. After a few months of exhilarating happiness, very convincingly portrayed by Mrabet, the marriage turns sour when Mohammed’s meddling mother-in-law, suspicious that her daughter is under a spell, consults a fortune-teller, who casts snails in the dust and determines that Mina is indeed the victim of a “false” love induced by magic.

  Mrabet then describes the various means used by a witch to “disenchant” Mina, to break the bondage of her passion. The reader learns a great deal not only about the costs of these sorcerers’ services but also about the sometimes hilarious ways in which spells are cast or broken. Mina’s spell, for instance, is broken as she straddles a brazier smoking with the witch’s concoction: there is a loud explosion and she is “cured.” All the while, however, Mohammed remains hopelessly in love with his wife, unable to counteract the machinations of his mother-in-law, unable to sway Mina despite the profusion of gifts he lavishes upo
n her, thanks to his services to Mr. David, who remains a sometimes irritable but faithful supporter during Mohammed’s troubles.

  Mrabet’s probing of the conflicting desires that paralyze Mohammed and account for his inability to leave Mina make the novel an absorbing psychological study. Even after Mohammed again tries a witch’s cure to rid him of his love, he remains attached to Mina, who is increasingly unwilling to give up the material rewards of being Mohammed’s wife. Eventually, it is time and the faithful Mr. David that cure him of his love addiction. With his lover’s help he buys himself out of the marriage. Years later on a bus, he happens upon a dirty, ragged country woman with three small children and realizes she is his former wife and one of the children his own son. He gives the child some money, says good-bye to Mina, then goes his way, congratulating himself on his good life with Mr. David and his ability to enjoy women now without becoming attached to them as he had with Mina.

  Besides being an intensive look at the psychology of obsessive love and marriage, Love with a Few Hairs offers in its protagonist Mohammed an example of a young Moroccan stranded between two cultures: his native Islamic traditions and values and the European manners of Mr. David’s expatriate world. Though Mohammed moves freely in both worlds, he has considerable scorn for each of them. Mr. David and his friends remain “Nazarenes,” the Moroccan’s term of contempt for Christians or Europeans. The Nazarenes, though usually rich and powerful, are innocents, easy dupes of the more subtle, crafty Muslims. Mohammed, for example, invites Mr. David and his friends to his bride’s wedding celebration, a ceremony strictly reserved for Muslim women, on the condition that each bring a bridal gift. When they arrive at the bride’s home, they are quickly placed behind a curtain, where they can actually see none of the ceremony, but they go away happy with their piece of local color, and the bride’s family is likewise happy with the gifts they leave behind. Mr. David’s hotel and friends mean alcohol and dissipation to Mohammed’s family; yet they are content with his relationship with the Englishman because he brings useful gifts, which the family promptly sells after each of his visits. On the other hand, Mohammed believes that he is “elevating” Mina by marrying her and offering her a standard of living above the primitiveness of the typical Moroccan lower class. In one of his many drunken rages against Mina, Mohammed berates her ungrateful attitude: “What are you, anyway? You’re just a Djiblia. Your father with his djellaba and his pants a kilometer wide, and the turban down over his ears like somebody in the cinema. I’ve made you into something civilized.”[11]