Travels: Collected Writings, 1950-1993

by Paul Bowles

  NADOR, SEPTEMBER 6

  WE WENT UP to Ismoren as scheduled, at twilight on the following day. The landscape reminded me of central Mexico. The trail from the highway up to the village was a constant slow climb along a wide, tilting plain. The caid was not at home; there had been a misunderstanding and he was in Alhucemas. The villagers invited us into his home, saying that the musicians were ready to play when we wanted to begin. It was a Spanish house with large rooms, dimly lit and sparsely furnished. There were great piles of almonds lying about in the corners; they reached almost up to the ceiling. The dank odor they gave off made the place smell like an abandoned farmhouse. The feeble electricity trembled and wavered. I had Mohammed Larbi test the current because I suspected it of being direct. Unhappily, that was what it proved to be, and I had to announce that in spite of all the preparations it was not going to be possible to record in Ismoren. There was incredulity and then disappointment on all faces. “Stay the night,” they told us, “and tomorrow perhaps the electric force will be better.” I thanked them and said we could not do that, but Mohammed Larbi, exasperated by their ignorance, launched into an expository monologue on electricity. Nobody listened. Men were beginning to bang drums outside on the terrace, and someone who looked like the local schoolteacher was delegated to serve tea. He invited me to preside at the caid’s big desk. When they saw me sitting there, they laughed. An elderly man remarked, “He makes a good caid,” and they all agreed. I opened three packs of cigarettes and passed them around. Everyone was looking longingly at the equipment, wanting very much to see it set up. We had tea, more tea, and still more tea, and finally got off for Alhucemas to a noisy accompaniment of benadir, with two men running ahead of us along the cactus-bordered lanes to show us the way out of the village.

  And so each morning I continued to go down to the government offices to study their detailed wall maps and try to locate the tribes with which I hoped to make contact. The first day I had spotted an official surreptitiously looking up our police records; apparently they were satisfactory. The governor and his aides had begun with a maximum of cordiality; but as the novelty of seeing us wore off, their attitude underwent a metamorphosis. It seemed to them that we were being arbitrary and difficult in our insistence upon certain tribes instead of others, and they had had enough of telephoning and making abortive arrangements. It involved about two hours’ work for them each day. It was the electricity which frustrated us every time; we had been supplied with a transformer but not with a generator, and Einzoren appeared to be the only village in the region with alternating current.

  One night when we went in to have dinner in the comedor of the Hotel España there was a murderous-looking soldier sitting at the table with Mohammed Larbi. We sat down; he was drunk and wanted to deliver a political lecture. He and Mohammed Larbi went out together. At three in the morning there was a great racket in the corridors. Mohammed Larbi was finding the way to his room with the help of various recruits from the street and with the voluble hindrance of the hotel’s night watchman. The next day, which had been set as the day of departure, he was moaning sick. He managed to pack the car for us, and then fell into the back with the luggage, to say no more. The weather had gone on being dramatic and threatening. South of Temsaman the mountains, even in normal weather, look like imaginary sketches of another planet. Under the black sky and with the outrageous lighting effects that poured through unexpected valleys, they were a disquieting sight. Mohammed Larbi moaned occasionally.

  The trail was execrable, but fortunately we did not meet another car all day – at least, not until late afternoon when we had got down into the plain to Laazib Midar, where a real road is suddenly born. My idea was to find some sort of place thereabouts where we could stay when we returned after seeing the Governor at Nador (since we were now in the Province of Nador and had to go all the way to the capital to get permission to work). But, Laazib Midar being only a frontierlike agglomeration of small adobe houses strung along the road, we went on through.

  From the back seat Mohammed Larbi began once more to wail. “Ay, yimma habiba! Ay, what bad luck!” I told him that nobody had forced him to drink whatever he had drunk. “But they did!” he lamented. “That’s just what happened. I was forced.” I laughed unsympathetically. No one can smoke as much kif as Mohammed Larbi does and be able to drink, too. I thought it was time he knew it, inasmuch as he has been smoking regularly since he was eleven and he is now twenty-five.

  “But it was at the barracks, and there were eight soldiers, and they said if I didn’t drink I must be a woman. Is that b’d drah or not?”

  “It’s very sad,” I said, and he was quiet.

  It was black night and raining quietly when we got into Nador. After driving up and down the muddy streets we stopped at a grocery store to ask about a hotel. A Spaniard in the doorway said there was no hotel and that we should go on to Melilla. That was completely out of the question, since Melilla, although in Morocco, has been Spanish for the past four hundred and fifty years, and still is; even if Christopher and Mohammed Larbi had been in possession of Spanish visas, which they were not, we could never have got the equipment across the border. I said we had to stay in Nador no matter what. The Spaniard said: “Try Paco Gonzalez at the gasoline pump. He might put you up. He’s a European, at least.”

  A small Moroccan boy who was listening shouted: “Hotel Mokhtar is good!” The word “hotel” interested me, and we set out in search of it. Less than an hour later we came across it; it was over a Moslem café. Above the door someone had printed in crooked letters: h. mokhtar. The place reminds me somewhat of the Turkish baths that used to exist in the Casbah of Algiers thirty years ago. It is run by a bevy of inquisitive Riffian women; I know there are a great many of them, but I haven’t yet been able to distinguish one from the others. After assigning us three uniformly melancholy rooms, they all came, one at a time, to examine our luggage and equipment; then apparently they held a conference, after which they put a “kitchen” at our disposal. This room was strewn with garbage, but it had two grids where charcoal fires could be built if you had charcoal. It also had a sink which was stopped up and full, I should guess, of last year’s dishwater. We threw the garbage out the window onto the flowers in the patio, (there was nowhere else to put it) and installed ourselves. By now we are used to inhaling the stench of the latrines at each breath, but that first night it bothered us considerably. I flung my window open and discovered that the air outside was worse. The interior odor was of ancient urine, but the breeze that entered through the window brought a heavy scent of fresh human excrement. Just how that could be was unascertainable for the moment. However, I shut the window and lighted several bathi sticks, and then we settled down to prepare some food.

  The next morning when I looked out into the sunlight I understood. The Hotel Mokhtar is built at the edge of town; for about five hundred yards beyond it the earth is crisscrossed by trenches three feet deep. These are the town’s lavatories; at any moment during the day you can see a dozen or more men, women and children squatting in the trenches. Until 1955 Nador was just another poor Moroccan village with a few Spaniards in it; suddenly it was made the capital of a newly designated province. The Spanish still have several thousand troops stationed here to “protect” Melilla – which Rabat more or less openly claims and will undoubtedly sooner or later recover. And so, naturally enough, the Moroccans have that many thousand soldiers, plus several thousand more, quartered here in order to protect Nador.

  There are many more people here than there should be. Water has to be got in pails and oil tins from pumps in the street; food is at a premium and all commodities are scarce. Dust hangs over the town and refuse surrounds it, except on the east, where the shallow waters of the Mar Chica lap against the mud, disturbing the dead fish that unaccountably float there in large numbers. The Mar Chica is a useless inland sea with an average depth of about six feet – just enough to drown a man. At the horizon, glistening and white, is the sandba
r where the Mediterranean begins, and toward which one gazes wistfully, imagining the clean-smelling breeze that must sometimes blow out there. Nador is a prison. The presence of a wide, palm-and-flower-planted boulevard leading down the half-mile from the administration building to the dead shore of the Mar Chica only makes the place more revolting. At the lower end of the thoroughfare is a monstrous edifice built to look like a huge juke box, and supported by piles that raise it above the water. This is the town’s principal restaurant, where we eat each noon. The paseo is lined with sidewalk cafés and concrete benches. When the benches are full of the hundreds of desperate-looking Spanish and Moroccan soldiers who roam the streets, the only place for new arrivals to sit is in the chairs put out under the palms by the café-keepers. They sit there, but they stare down the boulevard and order nothing. At night it’s a little less depressing because the thoroughfare is not at all well lighted and the intense shab-biness doesn’t show. Besides, after dark the two military populations are shut into their respective barracks.

  Late this morning we went to the governor’s office; he was in Meknès with the Sultan, but his voluble katib had stayed behind, and it was he who took charge of us. “Let’s see. You want the Beni Bouifrour tribe. You will have them tomorrow without fail. Go now to Segangan.”

  That sounded too easy. He saw my hesitation. “You can still catch the khalifa before he goes out for his aperitif. Wait. I shall telephone him. He will wait.” And when I looked dubious, “By my order he will wait. Go.”

  To get us out of the way, I thought. When we come back, this one will be gone, and I’ll lose the whole day. Maybe two days. My doubt must have made itself even more noticeable, for he became dramatic. “I am telephoning. Now. Look. My hand is on the telephone. As soon as you go out that door I shall speak with the khalifa. You can go with the certainty that I shall keep my word.” I understood that the longer I listened to him go on in this vein, the less I was going to believe anything that he said. There seemed to be nothing to do but start out for Segangan immediately.

  But the katib had telephoned, after all, and the khalifa of Segangan, once we found the military headquarters where he had his office, proved to be pleasant and unreserved. He closed his office and walked with us into the street. As we strolled under the acacias he said, “We have many charming gardens here in Segangan.” (He pronounced it Az-rheung-ng’n, in the Riffian fashion.) “It only remains for you to choose the garden of your preference for the recording.”

  “Haven’t you a room somewhere?” I suggested. “It would be quieter, and besides, I need to plug my equipment into the electric current.”

  “Gardens are better than rooms,” he said. “And we have our own electrician who will do whatever you ask him.”

  We examined bowers and arbors and fountains and nooks. I explained that I did not care where we did it, if outside noises were kept at a minimum, and that bearing this in mind, it seemed that indoors would perhaps be preferable.

  “Not at all!” cried the khalifa. “I shall have all traffic deflected during the recording.”

  “But then the people of the town will know something is going on, and they’ll come to find out what it is, and there will be more noise than ever!”

  “No, no,” he said reassuringly. “Foot traffic will not be allowed to circulate.”

  It was clear that any such measures would call attention to us straightway, because they never would be fully enforced. But his excessive proposals were a part of his desire to appear friendly, and so I ceased objecting, and resolved to speak to the katib about it when I got back here to Nador. We found a place in which to record, a remote corner of one of the parks, as shady as a thicket and quiet save for the crowing of roosters in the distance. The session was arranged for tomorrow morning. Back here in Nador I went to find the katib, but he had left his office for the day; we shall be at the mercy of the well-meaning khalifa.

  SEPTEMBER 7

  MY ANXIETY was unnecessary. When we got to Segangan this morning, we were taken to a completely different garden, quite outside the town. The khalifa‘s electrician had already installed the cable, and everything went with beautiful smoothness.

  Among the Berbers, not only in the Rif, but much further south in the Grand Atlas, the professional troubadour still exists; the social category allotted him is not exactly that of an accepted member of the community, but neither is he a pariah. As an entertainer he is respected; as an itinerant worker he is naturally open to some suspicion. The Riffians are fond of drawing an analogy between the imdyazen (as the minstrels are called both here and in the Atlas) and the gitanos of Spain -only, as they point out, the imdyazen live in houses like other people, and not in camps outside the towns like the gypsies. If you ask them why that is, they will usually reply: “Because they are of the same blood as we.” In Segangan I had my first encounter with the imdyazen. Their chikh looked like a well-chosen extra in a pirate film – an enormous, rough, good-natured man with a bandana around his head instead of a turban. He, at last, had a zamar with him. Even Mohammed Larbi had never seen one before. We examined it at some length and photographed it from various angles. It consists of two separate reed pipes wired together, each with its own mouthpiece and perforations; fitted to the end of each reed is a large bull’s horn. The instrument can be played with or without the horns, which are easily detached.

  Yesterday the effusive khalifa promised me two zamars, and even this morning he let me go on believing, for the first half-hour or so, that a second player would be forthcoming. But when I began to seem anxious about his arrival and made inquiries among some of the officials, meaningful glances were exchanged, and the language abruptly shifted from Moghrebi into Tarifcht. I realized then that I was being boorish; one does not bring a lie out into the open. For some personal reason the chikh did not want another zamar, and that was that. He was an expert on his instrument, and he played it in every conceivable manner: standing, seated, while dancing, with horns, without, in company with drums and vocal chorus, and as a solo. He insisted on playing it even when I asked him not to. Within two hours my principal problem was to make him stop playing it, because its sound covered that of the other instruments to such an extent that there was a danger of monotony in sonorous effect. I finally seated him ten or twelve yards away from the other musicians. He went on playing, his cheeks puffed out like balloons, sitting all alone under an orange tree, happily unaware that his music was not being recorded.

  One very good reason why I wanted to cut out the zamar was the presence among the players of an admirable musician named Boujemaa ben Mimoun, one of the few North African instrumentalists I have seen who had an understanding of the concept of personal expression in interpretation. His instrument was the qsbah, the long reed flute with the low register, common in the Sahara of southern Algeria but not generally used in most parts of Morocco. I had been trying to get a qsbah solo ever since I had found a group of Rhmara musicians in Tetuan. The Rhmara had agreed to do it, but their technique was indifferent and their sound was not at all what I had hoped for. Again I tried at Einzoren, and got good results musically, but once more not in the deep octave, which because of the demands it makes on breath control is the most difficult register to manage.

  When I drew ben Mimoun aside and asked him if he would be willing to play a solo, he was perplexed. He wanted to please me, but as he said, “How is anybody going to know what the qsbah is saying all by itself, unless there is somebody to sing the words?” The chikh saw us conferring together and came over to investigate. When he heard my request, he immediately proclaimed that the thing was impossible. Ben Mimoun hastily agreed with him. I continued to record, but clandestinely carried my problem to the caid of the village from which the imdyazen had been recruited. He was sitting, smoking kif with some other notables in a small pergola nearby. He seemed to think that a qsbah could play alone if it were really necessary. I assured him that it was, that the American government wished it. After a certain length of time
spent in discussion, during which Mohammed Larbi passed out large quantities of kif to everyone, the experiment was made. The chikh saved face by insisting that two versions of each number be made – one for qsbah solo and one with sung text. I was delighted with the results. The solos are among the very best things in the collection. One called “Reh dial Beni Bouhiya” is particularly beautiful. In a landscape of immensity and desolation it is a moving thing to come upon a lone camel driver, sitting beside his fire at night while the camels sleep, and listen for a long time to the querulous, hesitant cadences of the qsbah. The music, more than any other I know, most completely expresses the essence of solitude. “Reh dial Beni Bouhiya” is a perfect example of the genre. Ben Mimoun looked unhappy while he played, because there was a tension in the air caused by general disapproval of my procedure. Everyone sat quietly, however, until he had finished.

  After that they went back to ensemble playing and dancing. The kif had sharpened not only their sense of rhythm but their appetites as well, and I could see that we had come to the end of the session. As the drummers frantically leapt about, nearly tripping over the microphone cable, a tall man in a fat turban approached the microphone and began to shout directly into it. “It’s a dedication,” explained the caid. First there was praise of the Sultan, Mohammed Khamiss, as well as of his two sons, Prince Moulay Hassan and Prince Moulay Abdallah. After that came our friend the Governor of Alhucemas Province (because in the 1958 Riffian war of dissidence he found a solution which pleased nearly everybody), and finally, with the highest enthusiasm, came a glorification of the Algerian fighters who are being slaughtered by the French next door, may Allah help them. (Drums and shouting, and the bull’s horns pointing toward the sky, spouting wild sound.) We drank far too much tea and got back here to Nador too late to eat in the juke box restaurant on stilts, so we opened some baked beans and ate them in the filth and squalor of my room.