The Boy Who The Set Fire and Other Stories Read online

  Pleased with his efforts as a novelist, Mrabet produced two books the following year: The Lemon (1969) and M’Hashish (1969). The Lemon, reminiscent of Charhadi’s A Life Full of Holes, is the story of a young boy of twelve who is cast out into the streets by his father, who believes that the family has been shamed by the boy’s rebellious behavior at the French school he attends. The spunky hero Abdeslam has his own sense of pride and refuses, no matter how sordid and difficult his existence, to humble himself to his father.

  The Lemon, in its own way, is an initiation story, a study of one boy’s passage from innocence to experience. But Abdeslam is certainly no Huckleberry Finn, and the growth the outcast Muslim youth experiences leaves him decidedly in the violence and brutality of the slums. Like Charhadi’s autobiography, much of The Lemon concerns itself with Abdeslam’s efforts to earn enough money for food and a place to sleep. Eventually, Abdeslam is befriended by a large, burly dockworker named Bachir, who carouses drunkenly with prostitutes as well as young boys. Abdeslam finds work in a café but continues to live in Bachir’s squalid quarters. One of Bachir’s prostitutes becomes fond of the little boy, bringing him toys and ultimately initiating him sexually. Mrabet depicts with great skill the complexity of the feelings of Abdeslam and the prostitute as the woman becomes both mother and mistress to him.

  As Abdeslam enters ever more deeply into the brutality of the street world, he learns to smoke hashish and feels superior to Bachir, who prefers alcohol. As a Muslim who has learned how to read the Koran, Abdeslam associates alcohol with weakness, and though only a small boy, he stakes his personal pride on resisting the advances of the drunken Bachir, who, in front of his friends, repeatedly threatens to take Abdeslam to bed. Like sex, the streets, and hashish, the cinema plays a part in Abdeslam’s loss of the innocence of childhood. At the movies he visits with his prostitute friend, he is at first sickened, then excited, by the crime and violence he sees. After a particularly brutal film he realizes that violence can compensate for his size in his uneven struggle with Bachir. Thus, one evening when Bachir kisses him in front of his drinking cronies and later tries to take him to bed, Abdeslam slashes him with razor blades embedded in a lemon. Thereafter, Abdeslam is know on the streets as “The Lemon.”

  Mrabet’s second novel, though depressing, is an astonishing book mainly because of his ability to create memorable, thoroughly believable characters. The clumsy, coarse dockworker Bachir, the tender, complicated prostitute Aouicha, and the proud, feisty little hero, beautiful to look at but turned by circumstance into a lethal animal—these three make The Lemon more than a casual narrative spun into a tape recorder. Mrabet handles dialogue with extraordinary skill as he builds his characters and plot to an awesome climax. Although the boy Abdeslam may wish to escape to the fairyland of stories such as “Haroun er Rachid,” which he reads over and over again, he is wise enough to recognize the realities to which he has been condemned when his father closed the family door behind him.

  M’Hashish, which appeared in the same year as The Lemon, disappoints the expectations raised by Mrabet’s first two publications. As the title of this thin volume indicates, all of the stories concern cannabis smokers. The title translates as “under the influence of hashish” or “behashished.” Lawrence Stewart in his book on Bowles discusses at length Bowles’s growing interest in cannabis at the time he began to work extensively with translations from the Moghrebi tapes.[12] According to Stewart, Bowles’s storytellers always dictated while “behashished”: “Indeed at no time would one of these young storytellers attempt to narrate a tale until he had smoked kif [the local hashish] and allowed its power to affect his consciousness.”[13]

  Bowles himself, having experimented with the hashish paste or jam known as “majoun,” began to smoke kif at this time, although Mrabet noted that Jane Bowles approved neither of her husband’s smoking nor of his working with translations instead of his own fiction.[14] In any event, kif, as subject or influence, fails to bring forth stories of quality in this particular volume by Mrabet. Some of the stories aim to be humorous, but the humor is mainly scatological or bawdy and the tone adolescent. In “The Doctor from Chemel,” for example, a bum who has done nothing but drift and smoke kif, cures a khalifa of his rectal abscess by first feeding him majoun, then sodomizing him to burst the abscess. The grateful khalifa gives him much money and the reputation of being a remarkable healer.

  Other stories are merely trivial, such as “Two Friends and the Rain,” which is a short piece about two smoking friends who live together and once when high discuss the difference between rain and water during a storm. Only “Allah’s Words,” the story of one man’s conversion to kif smoking, can make any claims to being genuinely comic. Allah’s words come from the tape recorder of a very religious man who records the Koran and blasts it out over his neighborhood. At first his neighbors like it, but the noise becomes a nuisance, and they think the old man is crazy. The family is so ashamed that the son with a friend takes the tape and re-records it backwards. Meanwhile, the old man has met a kif smoker in a café and brings him home to reform him by playing the Koran tape for him. The frog-like words make no sense, but the kif smoker, sensing the trick played on the old man by the son, insists that he understands the garble and offers the old man a sebsi pipe of kif to relax. The old man smokes until he, too, thinks that he understands the garble. After this experience, he spends his time smoking in cafés and gives the tape recorder to his son.

  Mrabet’s next publication, The Boy Who Set the Fire and Other Stories (1975), is an odd assortment of very short tales without any dominating theme unifying the collection. Noteworthy in this volume, however, is the heavy incidence of violence and casual bloodshed. Only a few of these seventeen stories contain humorous touches; most incorporate the sinister horror of dreams and hallucinations, while others are largely autobiographical and of marginal interest. Witchcraft, omens, evil spells again figure importantly. There are tales of vengeance, such as the title story, in which a boy finds out that his mother poisoned his father in order to marry the father’s best friend. The boy takes revenge by setting fire to the house and burning both his mother and her husband alive. Two of the more memorable stories in this group focus on what one might call the “generation gap.” “Larbi and His Father” and “The Hut” center the action around insolent, kif-smoking youth contemptuous of the attitudes and values of the older generation. These chilling stories describe the callous cruelty of the young people toward their fathers.

  By and large, The Boy Who Set the Fire does not measure up to Mrabet’s achievements in his first two books. Unfortunately, his autobiography, Look and Move On (1976), proves even more disappointing. Like his hero in Love with a Few Hairs Mrabet seems to know how to extract the best (monetarily) from both the expatriate colony in Tangier and his own native culture. The book makes the point that Mrabet is genuinely pleased with himself—with his good looks, his sexual prowess, and so forth—but it takes a great deal of searching to find anything to admire about the man or his life as he recounts it.

  The autobiography skips over Mrabet’s childhood and his adolescent experiences in the streets of Tangier. Instead, he begins with his sexual relationship with an American couple who pick him up at a café in Tangier and then take him on his first trip to the United States, where his primary object seems to be to accumulate a tidy sum of money and dozens of suitcases of clothes. His experience with a woman, Joanne, whom he meets at a swimming pool in the Midwest, fairly accurately summarizes the nature of his relationships: “I was never bored. It was just the kind of life I enjoyed. Joanne had a great deal of money to spend. The day before I was to take the plane, we went to the bank together, and she gave me some money.”[15] Mrabet meets Jane and Paul Bowles, marries, has two children who die shortly after birth, but he does not settle down to any introspective awareness of any of these experiences. The pace of the book is restless and shallow: “Look and Move On” proves to be more than just a title.
r />   However, Harmless Poisons, Blameless Sins, a thoroughly delightful collection of tales, published also in 1976, pushes the mediocre autobiography exactly where it ought to be: very much in the background of Mrabet’s total production. The protagonist in these tales is Hadidan Aharam, who, as Paul Bowles explains in his translator’s note, “is the traditional rustic oaf who, in spite of his simplicity and sometimes precisely because of it, manages to impose his will upon those who have criticized and ridiculed him.”[16] Hadidan Aharam is the archetypal rogue figure of picaresque fiction. His exploits in cunning and deception recall the coneycatching tales of the Elizabethan writer Robert Greene. While some of the stories in Harmless Poisons, Blameless Sins are Mrabet’s versions of tales still extant among Moroccan country people, others, according to Bowles, are original inventions, and they are all refreshingly successful. Raunchy, bawdy humor abounds, for Hadidan Aharam is an earthy, shrewd peasant who is not about to miss out on any available pleasure, especially if it means making a cuckold of a more powerful, well-situated rival. Some of the stories have knocked around in oral literature of various cultures, notably the tall tale of American humor. In “The Hens” Hadidan Aharam feeds his market hens soft bread, gives them plenty of water to drink, then blows their intestines full of air to plump them up for the unsuspecting shopper. This and other stories find their counterparts in, for example, the tall tales of Mark Twain or William Faulkner.

  Casual bloodshed occurs in numerous stories in this collection, Hadidan Aharam being characterized as essentially amoral. Annoyed at being awakened by the four o’clock ijer from a neighboring mosque, Hadidan Aharam takes an ax and hacks off the head of a muezzin and dumps it down a well. And in “The Rhoula” he chops up the bodies of a witch’s seven beautiful daughters, piles the meat up into a great mound, then maims and mutilates the old witch before killing her. For this service he is praised and rewarded by the local cheikh. Although Mrabet dwells upon the acts of violence with more than a little relish, Hadidan Aharam remains a sympathetic rogue of legendary proportions.

  Violence, characteristic of all of Mrabet’s narratives, dominates his imagination in The Big Mirror (1976). Another odd love story, The Big Mirror is a sustained nightmare, a dark hallucination. The hero Ali marries a young girl of extraordinary beauty and prepares for her a house which features a ballroom with an immense, floor-to-ceiling mirror. The young bride spends her time captivated by her own image in the mirror. Even the birth of a child fails to break her enthrallment to the big mirror. After she slits the baby’s throat before the mirror one night, she sees a wicked reflection there which suggests to her other murders. As she gazes into the mirror each night, she is transformed into a bird, flies out the window, and slits the throat of other victims, returning just before dawn. Finally, she stands before the mirror and slashes herself into a mass of mutilated flesh. With her death Ali himself assembles seven old crones who, he believes, are the evil spirits that destroyed his beautiful wife. In the ballroom he slits their throats, drains their bodies, then disposes of them in the country. In his kif dreams he marries a girl in white who can come to him only in his sleep. With its emphasis on color—red and white—and its somber tone, The Big Mirror is akin to the kind of horror story some of Edgar Allan Poe’s narrators have to tell. Its timeless, abstract qualities suggest the hallucinatory drug-induced imagination. While the slow movement helps to create a languorous dream effect, the tale would fare better as a short story.

  Mrabet’s last recorded work with Bowles was published in 1980. The Beach Café and The Voice are two long short stories very different in nature. The Beach Café has a contemporary, realistic setting while The Voice is another tale of magic spells and omens. Both tales are extremely slight, even tedious, especially The Beach Café, which rambles along pointlessly about a truculent old café owner who says nasty, grudging things about a young man from the city who patronizes the café when he comes out to swim at the beach. The young man perversely brings the old man gifts from the city—kif, mint tea—taking a kind of pleasure in “doing good” for someone who returns these favors by speaking ill of him. The Voice demonstrates once again Mrabet’s fondness for the supernatural. The hero of this story hears a voice which incites him to acts of increasing destruction, for which the boy is rewarded. When he begins to resist the demands of the voice, a beautiful young girl appears. As their friendship grows, the boy learns that the girl has been sent by the voice to poison him. Together they devise a scheme of enticing the voice down the chimney and destroying it. The success of their scheme is worth quoting in full:

  He turned swiftly and tipped the cauldron [into which the voice has fallen coming down the chimney]. The boiling water poured over the floor in the doorway, making a cloud of steam that filled the air. When he could see the floor, something small and red lay there. He jumped down and went to examine it. It was a small lump of flesh about the size of a hen’s liver.

  Give me the powder it brought you! cried Mseud, and Tania handed him a small box. He stared at the mass of flesh on the floor. It was twitching feebly, like a fish stranded on the sand. Opening the box, he poured the powder over it. The edges of the flesh reached up and curled around the powder, enfolding it. Then, while they watched, the thing turned black. All that remained was a cinder.[17]

  The evil voice destroyed, the young couple, of course, marry. Mrabet’s imagination seems particularly drawn to this combination of the grisly supernatural and young love.

  Mohammed Mrabet is clearly Bowles’s favorite storyteller. Mrabet “has no thesis to propound,” writes Bowles, “no grievances to air . . . . He is a showman; his principal interest is in his own performance as virtuoso story-teller.”[18] But in the collection Five Eyes, the writer who gave Bowles the most trouble as a translator stands out as the most gifted of all the storytellers. Mohammed Choukri can be called a writer because he is the only one of the five who is literate, the only one who did not tape-record his tales. Choukri’s stories in Five Eyes were originally written in Classical Arabic, then orally translated into Moghrebi, Spanish, or French for Bowles. The four stories Choukri contributes to this volume are stylistically highly evocative, sophisticated pieces that reveal the author’s wide reading in contemporary literature, particularly French. Unlike the other storytellers, Choukri is much more interested in revealing the consciousness of his characters than in constructing a plot. His sketches are therefore remarkable for their introspection and study of states of consciousness. Mainly, however, it is Choukri’s suggestive prose style and his perceptions that emphasize his talent.

  Taken as a whole, Bowles’s translations from the Moghrebi represent an enormous labor. The accumulation of volumes over the years shows the extent to which he was willing to divert his creative energies from his own work. If, as Mohammed Mrabet suggests, Jane Bowles did indeed resent her husband’s working as a translator at the expense of his fiction, she would surely have been alarmed by his absorption in the Moghrebi translations after her death in 1973. Although Paul Bowles in his autobiography speaks of the translations in a curiously offhand way that obscures one’s impression of how committed he was to them, he has confided to Lawrence Stewart that the translations have had an important influence on the style of his own work, “so much so that people get them all mixed up.”[19] And even a casual reading of Bowles’s later stories will confirm this striking kinship: “Some think that the translations are actually my own inventions,” writes Bowles, “and others think the stories I invented are really folk tales.”[20]

  Despite the disconcerting range in quality of the translations, they all share a cultural environment. “They spring,” Bowles writes in the Preface to Five Eyes, “from a common fund of cultural memories; the unmistakable flavor of Moroccan life pervades them all.”[21] Except for Choukri’s stories, it is irrelevant to look beyond the conventions of oral literature passed down from generation to generation for literary antecedents of the translations. While Western genre definitions have dramatica
lly influenced Moroccan writers educated in French schools and more conversant with European than with Arabic literature, Bowles’s storytellers, being illiterate, are imaginatively closer to the Thousand and One Nights. This is precisely the heritage, distant though it may be, that Bowles meant to preserve in recording and translating the stories of these young Moroccans.

  SI MOKHTAR

  A VERY OLD RIFFIAN who lived in Boubana had four sons. Before he died he divided his land equally among them. The three younger men thought only of selling their share, but Si Mokhtar, the eldest, loved the place where he lived, and did not want to see it change. And so he bought his brothers’ shares from them, and went on living in his father’s house.

  The orchard had all the hundreds of pear trees that his father had planted during his long lifetime in Boubana, and there were six deep wells on the land. In the garden Si Mokhtar grew the vegetables he needed for himself and many more. What he did not need he sold. Behind the house there was a clearing that always had been there, because nothing would grow there, and beyond that he had built a fence out of high canes and covered it with vines. The fence hid a patch of kif and a patch of tobacco. Between the two he had left a small place where he could sit.