Points in Time: Tales from Morocco Read online

  TALES FROM MOROCCO

  Paul Bowles

  NEW YORK • 1984

  ©1982 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 review.

  Originally published in the United Kingdom in 1982 by Peter Owen, Limited. First U.S. hardcover edition of this book was published in 1984 by Ecco Press. First Harper Perennial edition published 2006.

  For information address

  HarperCollins Publishers,

  10 East 53rd Street

  New York, NY 10022.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Ecco Press hardcover edition as follows:

  Bowles, Paul Frederic, 1910-1999.

  Points in Time. Reprint. Originally published: London: P. Owen, 1982.

  1. Morocco—History—Fiction. I. Title

  PS3552.0874P6 1984.

  813'.54 83-16571.

  ISBN-10: 0-06-113963-7 (pbk.).

  ISBN-13: 978-0-06-113963-5 (pbk.)

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD:

  Africa Minor [1959]

  By Paul Bowles

  1. واحد

  2. جوج

  3. تلاتة

  4. ربعة

  5. خمسة

  6. سْتة

  7. سْبعة

  8. تْمنية

  9. تْسعود

  10. عْشرة

  11. حْضاش

  AFTERWORD:

  Paul Bowles and Foreign Relations

  By Brian T. Edwards

  Textual Notes and Sources

  Bibliography

  FOREWORD

  Africa Minor [1959]

  By Paul Bowles

  It had taken the truck fourteen hours to get from Kerzaz to Adrar and, except for the lunch stop in the oasis of El Aougherout, the old man had sat the whole time on the floor without moving, his legs tucked up beneath him, the hood of his burnoose pulled up over his turban to protect his face from the fine dust that sifted up through the floor. First-class passage on vehicles of the Compagnie Générale Transsaharienne entitled the voyager to travel in the glassed-in compartment with the driver, and that was where I sat, occasionally turning to look through the smeared panes at the solitary figure sitting sedately in the midst of the tornado of dust behind. At lunch, when I had seen his face with its burning brown eyes and magnificent white beard, it had occurred to me that he looked like a handsome and very serious Santa Claus.

  The dust grew worse during the afternoon, so that by sunset, when we finally pulled into Adrar, even the driver and I were covered. I got out and shook myself, and the little old man clambered out of the back, cascades of dust spilling from his garments. Then he came around to the front of the truck to speak to the driver, who, being a good Moslem, wanted to get a shower and wash himself. Unfortunately he was a city Moslem as well as being a good one, so that he was impatient with the measured cadence of his countryman’s speech and suddenly slammed the door, unaware that the old man’s hand was in the way.

  Calmly the old man opened the door with his other hand. The tip of his middle finger dangled by a bit of skin. He looked at it an instant, then quietly scooped up a handful of that ubiquitous dust, put the two parts of the finger together and poured the dust over it, saying softly, “Thanks be to Allah.” With that, the expression on his face never having changed, he picked up his bundle and staff and walked away. I stood looking after him, full of wonder, and reflecting upon the difference between his behavior and what mine would have been under the same circumstances. To show no outward sign of pain is unusual enough, but to express no resentment against the person who has hurt you seems very strange, and to give thanks to God at such a moment is the strangest touch of all.

  ✿

  Clearly, examples of such stoical behavior are not met every day, or I should not have remembered this one; my experience since then, however, has shown me that it is not untypical, and it has remained with me and become a symbol of that which is admirable in the people of North Africa. “This world we see is unimportant and ephemeral as a dream,” they say. “To take it seriously would be an absurdity. Let us think rather of the heavens that surround us.” And the landscape is conducive to reflections upon the nature of the infinite. In other parts of Africa you are aware of the earth beneath your feet, of the vegetation and the animals; all power seems concentrated in the earth. In North Africa the earth becomes the less important part of the landscape because you find yourself constantly raising your eyes to look at the sky. In the arid landscape the sky is the final arbiter. When you have understood that, not intellectually but emotionally, you have also understood why it is that the great trinity of monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity and Islam—which removed the source of power from the earth itself to the spaces outside the earth—were evolved in desert regions. And of the three, Islam, perhaps because it is the most recently evolved, operates the most directly and with the greatest strength upon the daily actions of those who embrace it.

  For a person born into a culture where religion has long ago become a thing quite separate from daily life, it is a startling experience to find himself suddenly in the midst of a culture where there is a minimum of discrepancy between dogma and natural behavior, and this is one of the great fascinations of being in North Africa. I am not speaking of Egypt, where the old harmony is gone, decayed from within. My own impressions of Egypt before Nasser are those of a great panorama of sun-dried disintegration. In any case, she has had a different history from the rest of Mediterranean Africa; she is ethnically and linguistically distinct and is more a part of the Levant than of the region we ordinarily mean when we speak of North Africa. But in Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco there are still people whose lives proceed according to the ancient pattern of concord between God and man, agreement between theory and practice, identity of word and flesh (or however one prefers to conceive and define that pristine state of existence we intuitively feel we once enjoyed and now have lost).

  I don’t claim that the Moslems of North Africa are a group of mystics, heedless of bodily comfort, interested only in the welfare of the spirit. If you have ever bought so much as an egg from one of them, you have learned that they are quite able to fend for themselves when it comes to money matters. The spoiled strawberries are at the bottom of the basket, the pebbles inextricably mixed with the lentils and the water with the milk, the same as in many other parts of the world, with the difference that if you ask the price of an object in a rural market, they will reply, all in one breath, “Fifty, how much will you give?” I should say that in the realm of beah o chra (selling and buying; note that in their minds selling comes first), they are surpassed only by the Hindus, who are less emotional about it and therefore more successful, and by the Chinese, acknowledged masters of the Oriental branch of the science of commerce.

  In Morocco you go into a bazaar to buy a wallet and somehow find yourself being propelled toward the back room to look at antique brass and rugs. In an instant you are seated with a glass of mint tea in your hand and a platter of pastries in your lap, while smiling gentlemen modeling ancient caftans and marriage robes parade in front of you, the salesman who greeted you at the door having completely vanished. Later on you may once again ask timidly to see the wallets, which you noticed on display near the entrance. Likely as not, you will be told that the man in charge of wallets is at the moment saying his prayers, but that he will soon be back, and in the meantime would you not be pleased to see some magnificent jewelry from the court of Moulay Ismail? Business is business and prayers
are prayers, and both are a part of the day’s work.

  ✿

  When I meet fellow Americans traveling about here in North Africa, I ask them, “What did you expect to find here?” Almost without exception, regardless of the way they express it, the answer, reduced to its simplest terms, is: a sense of mystery. They expect mystery, and they find it, since fortunately it is a quality difficult to extinguish all in a moment. They find it in the patterns of sunlight filtering through the latticework that covers the souks, in the unexpected turnings and tunnels of the narrow streets, in the women whose features still go hidden beneath the litham, in the secretiveness of the architecture, which is such that even if the front door of a house is open it is impossible to see inside. If they listen as well as look, they find it too in the song the lone camel driver sings by his fire before dawn, in the calling of the muezzins at night, when their voices are like bright beams of sound piercing the silence, and, most often, in the dry beat of the darbouka, the hand drum played by the women everywhere, in the great city houses and in the humblest country hut.

  It is a strange sensation, when you are walking alone in a still, dark street late at night, to come upon a pile of cardboard boxes soaked with rain, and, as you pass by it, to find yourself staring into the eyes of a man sitting upright behind it. A thief? A beggar? The night watchman of the quarter? A spy for the secret police?

  You just keep walking, looking at the ground, hearing your footsteps echo between the walls of the deserted street. Into your head comes the idea that you may suddenly hear the sound of a conspiratorial whistle and that something unpleasant may be about to happen. A little farther along you see, deep in the recess of an arcade of shops, another man reclining in a deck chair, asleep. Then you realize that all along the street there are men both sleeping and sitting quietly awake, and that even in the hours of its most intense silence the place is never empty of people.

  ✿

  It is only since the end of 1955 that Morocco has had its independence, but already there is a nucleus of younger Moslems who fraternize freely with the writers and painters (most of whom are American girls and youths) who have wandered into this part of the world and found it to their liking. Together they give very staid, quiet parties which show a curious blend of Eastern and Western etiquette. Usually no Moslem girls are present. Everyone is either stretched out on mattresses or seated on the floor, and kif and hashish are on hand, but half the foreigners content themselves with highballs. A good many paintings are looked at, and there is a lot of uninformed conversation about art and expression and religion. When food is passed around, the Moslems, for all their passionate devotion to European manners, not only adhere to their own custom of using chunks of bread to sop up the oily mruq at the bottom of their plates, but manage to impose the system on the others as well, so that everybody is busy rubbing pieces of bread over his plate. Why not? The food is cooked to be eaten in that fashion, and is less tasty if eaten in any other way.

  Many of the Moslems paint, too; after so many centuries of religious taboo with regard to the making of representational images, abstraction is their natural mode of expression. You can see in their canvases the elaboration of design worked out by the Berbers in their crafts: patterns that show constant avoidance of representation but manage all the same to suggest recognizable things. Naturally, their paintings are a great success with the visiting artists, who carry their admiration to the point of imitation. The beat-generation North Africans are music-mad, but they get their music via radio, phonograph and tape-recorder. They are enthusiastic about the music of their own country, but unlike their fathers, they don’t sing or play it. They are also fond of such exotic items as Congo drumming, the music of India, and particularly the more recent American jazz (Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Cannonball Adderley).

  At the moment, writing about any part of Africa is a little like trying to draw a picture of a roller coaster in motion. You can say: It was thus and so, or, it is becoming this or that, but you risk making a misstatement if you say categorically that anything is, because likely as not you will open tomorrow’s newspaper to discover that it has changed. On the whole the new governments of Tunisia and Morocco wish to further tourism in their respective countries; they are learning that the average tourist is more interested in native dancing than in the new bus terminal, that he is more willing to spend money in the Casbah than to inspect new housing projects. For a while, after the demise of the violently unpopular Pasha of Marrakech, Thami el Glaoui, the great public square of Marrakech, the Djemaa el Fna, was used solely as a parking lot. Anyone will tell you that the biggest single attraction for tourists in all North Africa was the Djemaa el Fna in Marrakech. It was hard to find a moment of the day or night when tourists could not be found prowling around among its acrobats, singers, storytellers, snake charmers, dancers and medicine men. Without it Marrakech became just another Moroccan city. And so the Djemaa el Fna was reinstated, and now goes on more or less as before.

  ✿

  North Africa is inhabited, like Malaya and Pakistan, by Moslems who are not Arabs. The Encyclopaedia Britannica’s estimate of the percentage of Arab stock in the population of Morocco dates from two decades ago, but there has been no influx of Arabs since, so we can accept its figure of ten percent as being still valid. The remaining ninety percent of the people are Berbers, who anthropologically have nothing to do with the Arabs. They are not of Semitic origin, and were right where they are now long before the Arab conquerors ever suspected their existence.

  Even after thirteen hundred years, the Berbers’ conception of how to observe the Moslem religion is by no means identical with that of the descendants of the men who brought it to them. And the city Moslems complain that they do not observe the fast of Ramadan properly, they neither veil nor segregate their women and, most objectionable of all, they have a passion for forming cults dedicated to the worship of local saints. In this their religious practices show a serious deviation from orthodoxy, inasmuch as during the moussems, the gigantic pilgrimages which are held periodically at the many shrines where these holy men are buried, men and women can be seen dancing together, working themselves into a prolonged frenzy. This is the height of immorality, the young puritans tell you. But it is not the extent, they add, of the Berbers’ reprehensible behavior at these manifestations. Self-torture, the inducing of trances, ordeal by fire and the sword, and the eating of broken glass and scorpions are also not unusual on such occasions.

  The traveler who has been present at one of these indescribable gatherings will never forget it, although if he dislikes the sight of blood and physical suffering he may try hard to put it out of his mind. To me these spectacles are filled with great beauty, because their obvious purpose is to prove the power of the spirit over the flesh. The sight of ten or twenty thousand people actively declaring their faith, demonstrating en masse the power of that faith, can scarcely be anything but inspiring. You lie in the fire, I gash my legs and arms with a knife, he pounds a sharpened bone into his thigh with a rock—then, together, covered with ashes and blood, we sing and dance in joyous praise of the saint and the god who make it possible for us to triumph over pain, and by extension, over death itself. For the participants exhaustion and ecstasy are inseparable.

  This saint-worship, based on vestiges of an earlier religion, has long been frowned upon by the devout urban Moslems; as early as the mid-thirties restrictions were placed on its practice. For a time, public manifestations of it were effectively suppressed. There were several reasons why the educated Moslems objected to the brotherhoods. During the periods of the protectorates in Tunisia and Morocco, the colonial administrations did not hesitate to use them for their own political ends, to ensure more complete domination. Also, it has always been felt that visitors who happened to witness the members of a cult in action were given an unfortunate impression of cultural backwardness. Most important was the fact that the rituals were unorthodox and thus unacceptable to true Moslems. If you mentio
ned such cults as the Derqaoua, the Aissaoua, the Haddaoua, the Hamatcha, the Jilala or the Guennaoua to a city man, he cried, “They’re all criminals! They should be put in jail!” without stopping to reflect that it would be difficult to incarcerate more than half the population of any country. I think one reason why the city folk are so violent in their denunciation of the cults is that most of them are only one generation removed from them themselves; knowing the official attitude toward such things, they feel a certain guilt at being even that much involved with them. Having been born into a family of adepts is not a circumstance which anyone can quickly forget. Each brotherhood has its own songs and drum rhythms, immediately recognizable as such by persons both within and outside the group. In early childhood rhythmical patterns and sequences of tones become a part of an adept’s subconscious, and in later life it is not difficult to attain the trance state when one hears them again.

  ✿

  A variation on this phenomenon is the story of Farid. Not long ago he called by to see me. I made tea, and since there was a fire in the fireplace,

  I took some embers out and put them into a brazier. Over them I sprinkled some mska, a translucent yellow resin which makes a sweet, clean-smelling smoke. Moroccans appreciate pleasant odors; Farid is no exception. A little later, before the embers had cooled off, I added some djaoui, a compound resinous substance of uncertain ingredients.

  Farid jumped up. “What have you put into the mijmah?” he cried.

  As soon as I had pronounced the word djaoui, he ran into the next room and slammed the door. “Let air into the room!” he shouted. “I can’t smell djaoui! It’s very bad for me!”

  When all trace of the scent released by the djaoui was gone from the room, I opened the door and Farid came back in, still looking fearful.

  “What’s the matter with you?” I asked him. “What makes you think a little djaoui could hurt you? I’ve smelled it a hundred times and it’s never done me any harm.”