The Boy Who The Set Fire and Other Stories (25 page)

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 having 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 courtyard 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.

The men began to play; the tempo was exaggeratedly slow. As they increased it imperceptibly, the subtle syncopations became more apparent. A man brandishing a
gannega
, a smaller drum with a higher pitch and an almost metallic sonority, moved into the center of the circle and started an electrifying counter-rhythmic solo. His virtuoso drumbeats showered out over the continuing basic design like machine-gun fire. There was no singing in this prelude. The drummers, shuffling their feet, began to lope forward as they played, and the circle’s counter-clockwise movement gathered momentum. The laughter and comments from our side of the courtyard ceased, and even the master of the palace, sitting there with his microphone in his hand, surrendered to the general hypnosis the drummers were striving to create.

When the opening number was over, there was a noisy rearranging of chairs. These were straight-backed and completely uncomfortable, no matter how one sat in them, and it seemed clear that nobody ever used them save when Europeans were present. Few chairs are as comfortable as the Moroccan
m’tarrba
with its piles of cushions.

Out in the open part of the courtyard groups of three or four men were crossing to the far corner to tune their drums over the fire. Soon they began again to perform; a long, querulous vocal solo was the prelude. One might have thought it was coming from somewhere outside the palace, from the silence of the town, it was so thin and distant in sound. This was the leader, creating his effect by standing in the darkness under the arches, with his face turned to the wall, as far away as he could get from the other performers. Between each strophe of his chant there was a long, profound silence. I became more aware of the night outside, and of the superb remoteness of the town between the invisible canyon walls, whose only connection with the world was the unlikely trail we’d rattled down a few hours earlier. There was nothing to listen for in the spaces between the plaintive cries, but everyone listened just the same. Finally, the chorus answered the far-away soloist, and a new rhythm got under way. This time the circle remained stationary, and the men danced into and out of the center in pairs and groups, facing one another.

About halfway through the piece there was whispering and commotion in the darkness by the entrance door. It was the women arriving
en masse
. By the time the number was finished, sixty or seventy of them had crowded into the courtyard. During the intermission they squeezed through the ranks of standing men and seated themselves on the floor around the center, bundles without form or face, wrapped in great dark lengths of cloth. Still, one could hear their jewelry clinking. One of them on my left suddenly rearranged her outer covering, revealing a magnificent turquoise robe embroidered in gold; then swiftly she became a sack of laundry once more.

Several set pieces by the men followed, during which the women kept up a constant whispering; it was evident that their minds were on the performance they were about to give.