The Gallery

by John Horne Burns

  Near the American section the provincial French of Fedhala have buried their dead—daughters who died of the whooping cough at eight, old women who came from France for expansion and trade after Maréchal Lyautey’s landing in 1907, wives named Suzanne who didn’t survive childbirth. Little Rouget lies in the same grave with Odette. Over the French graves I remember the marble angels in little niches perpetually green with flowers, crucifixes with marble Christs bent over them. For the French like the sentimental statuary of death just as much as the Irish. And the French of Fedhala bring flowers for the graves of their dear ones. But I remember no flowers on the American graves, clean and bare as the tombs of old misers who died unwept. For who would deck these American graves? The hands that would itch to are on the other side of the Atlantic. They have never seen the still cemetery of Saint Jean de Fedhala. And even if they came, bearing flowers, they’d have to dry their tears long enough to give two American cigarettes as an admission tip to the gardener of the cemetery.

  I remember Fedhala because it had the fairest bathing beach in the Casablanca area, a crescent without popcorn stands or roller coasters. There was only a ring of fresh sand (the recent American blood was not to be seen on it) and a high sea wall that looked toward the sunset. Farther down I remember the docks and cranes that the provincial French charged us for the use of during our landing operations—that is, after the landing was an accomplished fact. I remember that the casino which made Fedhala an African Lido had been a little scarred from the shelling, but we Americans made it first a hospital and then a service club.

  Along the sea I remember villas and copses of palm trees where the rich French shut themselves in and brooded. Then you came to that square white pearl, the Hôtel Miramar, out of which American officers peered at the sea after dark. In 1943 the Miramar had been requisitioned by the Americans, but actually it was in the hands of a combine of French and Ayrabs, who soaked the Americans for cognac and Meknes champagne, and sold our Spam out of the mess cellar to their friends. I remember making friends with the madame and her husband, who were resident in the hotel, representing the proprietors. The husband was a Casablanca corporal who worked in the Shell Building. And Madame used to pace the Miramar sun porches all day long in her high woolen socks, wringing her hands in the Moroccan sunlight:

  —Hélas, mon cher, vous autres américains, vous êtes tous trop riches!

  The other French in Fedhala told me that Madame, born in Lorraine, hadn’t always been a great lady. She’d been a chamber-maid in Fez. One night she’d made Monsieur le Caporale into a bed.

  —Qu’est-ce qui se passe, madame?

  —Rien, rien, mon enfant. C’est seulement ma douleur.

  I remember the center of the beach town of Fedhala. It was a lush and classic park with geometrical walks and squares. There were palms set out like chessmen, begging the eye to go on along the squares to the sea or to the hills back of Casablanca. There were stone benches in the alcoves of this park, where after dark we sometimes chased the Ayrab maidens who did our washing. Their names were Hadouche and Busheltits. And there was also the largest woman in captivity, the French secretary to Fedhala’s doctor. We called her Blockbuster. Each payday there was a ratrace in Fedhala park, a shag lineup coming out of the bushes or under the sea wall in the bathhouses, and Busheltits’ snortings and gigglings:

  —Me professeur de ziggyzag. . . .

  Sometimes we suspected that Busheltits was malade, but nobody could ever prove anything on her. Her Ayrab tendency toward speculation in her prices was offset by the behemoth dignity of Blockbuster, who pranced by daylight through the streets of Fedhala with her parasol and the doctor’s baby in a perambulator. She carried her hundred and ninety pounds with the offishness of a Caucasian among Mahomet’s followers. She insisted on deferential treatment to discriminate her from the Ayrab wenches, who were far more natural and amenable to reason.

  I remember the church in Fedhala, that white half of a tin can lying on its side and stuccoed over with creamy plaster. In the sun it rolled and sparkled, visible from halfway to Casablanca. Its pastor, a white Father, often walked in the courtyard in beard and cassock. They said he had taken to the hills when the Americans landed. And back of his church was the school Relai de la Jeunesse. General Patton had used it for a hospital, but now they read P/W mail there.

  But I remember best the Hôtel de France. Madame Jean was the hostess there, of quick step and quicker tongue. She could handle us and she could handle the French sailors off the Richelieu or the Jean Bart when their pompoms got out of hand.

  —Bonsoir, mes petits américains! Pour ce soir je vous offre un magnifique menu-marché noir. Mais vous mangerez! . . . pommes de terre en robe de chambre, un biftek merveilleux . . . et . . . si vous êtes trés mais trés mais trés gentils, il y’aura du homard.

  Madame Jean counted her delicacies on her fingers, screaming them at us with flashing eyes. All day long she worked the black markets of Casa, and every night there was a meal at the Hôtel de France such as we couldn’t get in any army mess. And she’d a little bar in the bowels of the dining room, waited on by a glistening Ayrab who looked like a Negro. In this small room we met all the adherents of La Boule Joyeuse, who bowled their Sundays away on the terrace and drank anise at night, and all the Septiéme Régiment de Tirailleurs Algériens, and the workers in the cork factories. They bummed everything off us, but after the vin rouge and the Grand Marc around 2300 hours we looked at them through a mist of affection:

  —Aprés tout nous sommes de bons Alliés.

  Before Madame Jean threw us out for the evening, she allowed her husband to sing just one song. We thought that he must have worked as a female impersonator in Paris before 1940. He did soubrette songs with gestures that gave me the idea he was singing about things we’d like to try:

  —Il fit ce que je voudrais faire

  Si j’osais faire le soixante-neuf . . .

  Most of all I remember a small Bordeaux sailor who came on certain nights to the Hôtel de France. He never had any money for the vin rouge that he loved. He used to sit at the end of my table, shy and alert till I’d bought him some. He had the huge eyes of a girl with a bedroom look and a mouth such as Frenchmen don’t legally wear. And I’d buy him one drink after another till his pompon began to slip over his ear, and he’d seek out my shoulder till it was time to go back to his batterie. In his cups he used to thunder like Clemenceau:

  —Tu vois, mon cher, c’est trés simple . . . les anglais, les italiens, les allemands, les japonais. . . . C’est plus que simple, la guerre.

  And I remember that he’d clutch my arm and weep as I walked him back to his batterie. He’d be beaten, he said, by his capitaine. I used to watch his shining tears under the stars of Fedhala, and then I knew I was surely in Africa. He wasn’t in Bordeaux and I wasn’t in the States. He’d forget me till next time he wanted some vin rouge, for he spent his Sundays off from the batterie in the arms of an espagnole who was secretary to the Comité de la Libération. She gave him for love what she peddled for her living. But here now in the Moroccan moonlight Jean worked on me to give the impression that he was alone in this world, that I was his only friend:

  —Ah, que tu es sympathique . . . ton nez, tes yeux, ton sourire. . . .

  I remember that this was the first time I’d come upon the European idea of being sympathetic, an idea which doesn’t exist in the American language. It came to mean much to me—sympathique, simpatico—anything, so long as that sympathy existed. I thought it must mean that the emotions and the deepest feelings were involved, even though they were being bought and sold and bartered for in American money and PX rations. It was the beginning of my initiation into the economics of the world, a gradated graph of moonlight and romance on one peak and the struggle to exist on the other. They weren’t intermingled here, as they were in the States. And perhaps the discovery of this cleavage was fatal to me. I remember that I drank more and more and more because I was trapped in the problem
that confronted me. It was this coming to know people who spoke another language, whom the war had already pressed flat. Naturally they preyed on me, though at first I thought I was going to see Life without paying for it. In North Africa I thought I could keep a wall between me and the people. But the monkeys in the cage reach out and grab the spectator who offers them a banana.

  I remember that there’s nothing like a North African hangover. When I was used to Canadian Club and a stop after midnight for a hamburg and milk at the White Tower, the liters of vin rouge and vermouth and cognac that I poured into myself took a toll. In the morning I’d awaken to a nervous and palpitating world in which myself seemed to have died. The night before was remembered like the negative of a photograph; I’d overreached myself in attempting to step into the picture. Ah misery, thy name is Grenache or Moroccan marsala! So I was never free of the vapors till noon. I used to black out on the red and white wines of Morocco. But though I couldn’t remember what I’d done, they told me that my body went right on functioning. I began to realize facets of my personality I hadn’t plumbed on Main Street or in the First Baptist Church.

  —Ooooo, what you did lasnight! Ya walked right up to her an said voolayvoo cooshay aveck mwah? Ya’re a bad baaad boy, and I hope ya tell ya mother in ya next V-mail.

  —The human body is a wonderful thing. You walked around just as if you were walking in your sleep, took off your shoes, and put yourself to bed. You answered all our questions, just like you’d been hypnotized. I said to myself: That’s my boy, and I’m proud of him. . . .

  I remember how the dawn begins in Fedhala: the murmur of the sea drops like chained wolves. (Why is the sea louder and more insistent in the night?) And out of the heavy uterine dark a violet light begins to swirl like a soft turbine. The color mottles into gold, the sea dies still more, and something seems to swish through the air like yellow torpedoes. There’s a reveille braying from all the Fedhala donkeys, as if, fearful of the sunrise and the workaday world ahead of them with its blows and kicks, they tore off a last chunk of donkey love. When the sun is up, the Medina opens its walls and out stream the Ayrabs who work in the cord and sardine factories. It’s a stretched-out file of a thousand persons walking in the streets and on both sidewalks. They converse together like turkeys gobbling. They play tricks on each other. They use the French telephone poles with considerable liquid spite. The Ayrab men wear battered caps and jackets that perhaps they took off the beach on 8 November 1942. Others have mattress covers and cotton breeches. But they don’t look like a background of extras for Marlene Dietrich in technicolor. The faces of some of the men are as hawklike and refined and supercilious as a ballet dancer’s; they have a feminine walk and a way of holding themselves aloof from the others. Some of the women have mashed noses and wide-set eyes like Nubians. A few show blue slits above their noses where the facepiece meets the veil. But there are a few Ayrab girls of sharp hurt beauty, flowers manured in a rich and poignant soil. These too walk apart from the others like the beautiful slight men. The handsome ones of the Ayrabs link hands as though from some lore inside the Medina they had learned of an aristocracy of body and face given to few in their generation. The calling out and the horseplay are always from the uglier and coarser Ayrabs, as though to distract attention from their own thinking. The Ayrabs of delicacy and wistfulness commune only with themselves or their likes and walk with downcast eyes, aware of their spell. For they’ve sucked up out of filth and squalor the wisdom of the Suk —that to be born is the greatest misfortune that can befall anyone. Ayrab beauties make their whole life a lament that all but escapes us Americans. The handsome Ayrab men and women never beg; and when I catch their eyes I know that they feel a mistake has been made in their caste: it is I who should be begging from them.

  The procession passes from the Medina to the cork factories with a swiftness as though the Ayrabs had a secret determination to get off the streets before the Americans and the French are abroad. I note Busheltits and Hadouche in the streaming files. They smile at me, thinking themselves already set apart from their own people by the favors they’ve conferred on the Americans. And last in the parade is Oombah and his wife, locked to him with an invisible manacle. For he has married well in the Medina because of his profits on vin rouge to the Americans. He’s wearing his encrusted Omar Khayyam slippers and a turban such as Rudolph Valentino introduced to the movies when Ayrabs were romantic. The clucking of the Ayrabs and their spoiled smell fade as they pass to the sardine and cork factories or to the brick kilns of Fedhala. They’ve gone beyond the huge windows of the Brasserie du Parc. Oombah goes in and starts setting the tables. But first he locks Mrs. Oombah in the ladies’ latrine, where she will sit and cry all day long till he takes her out in the evening.

  I remember the varieties of breakfasting around Fedhala. I had almost never to eat in my own mess, where the KP was done by Ayrabs, and later by Italian P/W. Sometimes I was invited by a French family with whose daughter we took turns in shacking, depending on the results of last night’s crap game. The breakfast was frugal and accompanied by French provincial homilies and imprecations against the times. Madame watched every sip of coffee I took, as though the guillotine were too good for the world’s men. Better fare was provided by Martin the Spanish barber, who’d escaped (by various versions of his own) through Tangier and Gibraltar. He’d make coffee on a hot plate he’d begged of me, and I’d sit on his bed while he cut dark bread and moaned of his little daughter and the Falangists:

  —En el fondo del mar

  Naciò una perla . . .

  Martin had rimmed mad eyes, and his hands always shook except when they held a razor. But the best Fedhala breakfast was to be bought in the Brasserie du Parc, where the flies spiraled over the fruit and the wine bottles. I remember that I used to buy a long black loaf cut in two and stuffed with spicy granulated pork. With this I would drink white wine so cold and bitter (the Brasserie) had a frigidaire) that I stumbled out from my breakfast more than a little crocked and with a churning in my belly as though the pork and flies were wrestling on the mat of my stomach. Then I’d go back to bed, for often I’d stayed up rolling them all night long. My eyes would be stinging from the sun and the wine, for Fedhala at 0900 hours has the hard brilliance of a Spanish landscape at noon. Or maybe I’d go out to the Fedhala golf course over a rustic bridge. Sometimes I could buy American beer there and bat the breeze with a corporal from Texas who’d been a pro and didn’t want to be anything else. He had his special racket because colonels and brigadier generals would come out from Cazes airport and from Casa to take putting lessons. This corporal therefore had that liberal immunity about him, a large looseness of spirit found in great gamblers and in the bodyguards of presidents. Sometimes he’d let me use a colonel’s clubs for a few holes of the course. And I would correct his French and look at him over my cold beer with a geewhiz delight. So far from America, from Saratoga, from Balmoral, and here was golf and that air of controlled opulence that hangs like cigar smoke around bunkers and country clubs.

  I remember the long afternoons by the beach wall of Fedhala. Was that the Atlantic Ocean? Yes, and three thousand miles on the other side was Virginia. Along the sea wall the French had gun emplacements and barbed-wire entanglements. And the sailors were always oiling these pieces as though they weren’t quite satisfied with the way they’d functioned on 8 November 1942. These were the sailors who came to Madame Jean’s bar in the Hôtel de France. By daylight they looked seamy in their pompoms and dungarees, outside the dull glow of Picardan wine and the moth-eaten gentility of the salle à manger. Tonight they and I would meet on a different plane, and we would fly to one another like estranged lovers.

  The Fedhala beach season begins at noon. The provost marshal of Casablanca fined us for going in swimming without a lifeguard, without our dogtags, or at other than stated hours. I lie in the sand and watch the rich French and Spanish families come out like lizards from their cabañas. They are as eager to offer me hospitality as t
hey were gracious to the German Armistice Commission caught in their pajamas at the Villa Miramar. The wives in their sleek bathing suits are all studied and wise, their daughters are all fifteen and studying with the nuns of Casa. The Spanish wives of the cork magnates are especially luscious and cordial. One of them loves one of us, and he uses her love for her benedictine and her fruitcakes. She looks like Dolores Del Rio. He hasn’t told her that he’s married and has a kid. After all, that was back in Charleston. She waits for him on evenings when her husband is away in Rabat, leaves her patio gate open for him, and sits hushed and cool in her silken wrapper. She’s an accomplished mistress, he tells me. But he enjoyed even more seducing her daughter, to whom he taught the secrets that her mother taught him, and which are not dispensed at the convent school in Casablanca. At midnight sometimes (he says) mother and daughter sit up with him while he chews chicken and swills Chablis. Mother and daughter look at one another slyly, conspirators with one another against Papa. They don’t know that they are against one another. He takes all that they give. After all, he’s on vacation from Charleston, South Carolina. They are foreigners, aren’t they; and who conquered this desert oasis of Fedhala?

  I remember the afternoons on the beach at Fedhala in French Morocco. It wasn’t crowded like Coney Island. It seemed the seascape of a dream, where bronzed French and Spanish and American bodies cut into the water and splashed and laughed and called out to one another. There was the jingle of dogtags on our chests or mothers warning their children in French to beware of the undertow. . . .

  THIRD PORTRAIT