The Boy Who The Set Fire and Other Stories (23 page)

The tension between this side and the other, between “here” and “there,” animates nearly all of Mrabet’s tales, and his work owes its very existence to his ability to travel within the territory marked by those imagined (but nonetheless real) places. The result is these Moroccan stories in these English words, a transcultural discourse suffused with a sense of alterity. Underlying Mrabet’s thematic explorations of that pervasive otherness are two kinds of doubleness which influence the direction and focus of his artistic vision: the understanding (deriving in this case from the artist’s own culture) that language and truth can never be synonymous; and the paradox that Mrabet’s texts, as texts, exist only in the language of another culture. If their manifestation as translated texts distances them from the truth of their telling, that “truth” must itself be seen as the imperfect replication of some reality beyond articulation. But both teller and translator, in their sorties and sojourns past the borders of the familiar, continue to pursue this elusive goal, going out into “a strange place” and, like Baraka, bringing things back—transmitted, translated, transcribed, transformed.

Ajami, Fouad. “The Battle of Algiers.”
The New Republic 9
and 16 July 1990: 12-13.

Bowles, Paul.
Collected Stories 1939-1976
. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1981.

——“The Art of Fiction LXVII,” with Jeffrey Bailey.
Paris Review
81 (1981): 63-98.

——Interview with Oliver Evans.
Mediterranean Review
1.2 (1971): 3-15.

——“Notes on the Work of the Translator.”
Five Eyes
. Trans. Paul Bowles. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1979. 7-8.

——
The Sheltering Sky
. New York: Vintage, 1990.

Certeau, Michel de.
Heterologies: Discourse on the Other
. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Geertz, Clifford.
Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia
. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.

Hollander, John. “Versions, Interpretations, Performances.”
On Translation
. Ed. Reuben Brower. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959. 205-31.

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.

W
henever
I
leave
T
angier
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.