by Paul Bowles
The inside of the greenhouse had grown almost as dark as night. It seemed to him that he felt the damp hot breath of the silent plants at the back of his neck, and he could not bring himself to turn his head, or even to move his eyes in one direction or the other. The thunder crashed and the rain fell against the thousand panes of glass over his head. Soon the water was running through and splattering on the floor somewhere back there in the dark. He pressed his forehead against the cold glass and waited. Perhaps there had been someone in the greenhouse when he came in, hidden behind the plants—a Frenchman with a pistol. Even now he might have it pointed at him, at any moment he might speak, and when Amar turned around or opened the door to escape he would shoot. The great ambition of every Frenchman in Morocco was to kill as many Moslems as possible. But a moment later it occurred to him that it was likely that Allah was protecting him today with His blessing. First there had been his victory over Mohammed, then his adventure with Moulay Ali, which had begun ominously but terminated well, and now his steps had been directed into the park so that he might find shelter from the rain. If he had continued to ride, he would have been caught in the storm. Why should he now lack faith in Allah’s willingness to continue to hold him in His favor at least until the end of the day? “Hamdoul’lah,” he whispered.
And an instant later the rain’s wide voice was still; it merely ceased falling, all at once, and there was nothing but the diminishing sound of its dripping from the trees.
Without looking around even now, he opened the door and ran down the path. It was almost completely dark, but he could distinguish the wheel of the bicycle ahead. He led the vehicle quickly to the outer part of the garden, and continued to the road. Then he hopped on, wet seat and all, and went triumphantly toward the town.
It was a pleasure to ride along the smooth-surfaced streets in the evening. The lights in the shops were doubly bright with their reflections shining from the wet pavements; the sidewalks were crowded with French people and Jews, most of them adolescents, who joked with each other as they met and passed. It was the hour when everyone who was able came out and walked up and down the Boulevard Poeymirau, covering only the few blocks between the Avenue de France and the Café de la Renaissance. At last it was cooler in the street than inside the houses and apartments.
Amar knew he had run up an enormous bill for the rental of his bicycle, for he had added the hours in his head, but still he was loath to give it up; only the fear that the shop might close, so that he would have to pay an extra twelve hours for the night, forced him now to the side street where the Frenchman stood smoking outside the door of his shop. He got down and led the bicycle across the sidewalk. The man looked at him suspiciously, took it from him and without saying anything began to inspect it with great care. Not being able to find any broken or missing parts, he wheeled it inside, and with a piece of chalk on a blackboard calculated the sum that Amar owed him. It was even more than he had expected. In his chagrin at hearing the figure, he forgot how he had arrived at his own estimate, so that he could not discover where the discrepancy lay. It was clear to him that the man was cheating him, but it was worth paying the difference to avoid an argument which could have got him nowhere but the commissariat de police. He was curious to know whether Mohammed had come back with the other bicycle, and, if he had, how he had paid for it, but even had he known how to speak the man’s language, he would have thought it wiser to be silent. He untied his handkerchief, counted out the money and gave it to the man; the latter was watching him with an infuriating sneer which was only partly covered by the cloud of smoke that rose from the cigarette hanging at the corner of his mouth. It was only after he had left the shop and was walking along under the trees that he noticed how fast his heart was beating, and from that fact realized how badly he had wanted to hit the Frenchman. He smiled to himself; he had escaped from that trap, at least. The Ville Nouvelle was a succession of such traps. If you kept out of one you were likely to fall into another. It was not for nothing that the biggest and most imposing building on the Boulevard Poeymirau was the police station, or that outside it there was always a long line of jeeps and radio patrol cars that stretched around the block. That was why it was best not to come here at all. If you minded your own business in the Medina you were reasonably safe, but here, no matter what you did, you could suddenly be informed that it was forbidden, which meant that you disappeared for a month or two, and worked on the roads or in a quarry somewhere during that time. And if this had happened to you once, it was that much easier for it to happen a second time; your dossier always worked against you.
The nearest bus stop was on the corner opposite the police station. As he waited in line he observed with interest the abnormal activity in front of the main entrance. There was a great amount of coming and going of men both in and out of uniform. What was missing, however, was the usual contingent of Arab youths who were generally to be seen outside the door; these were petty (that is, non-political) informers and errand-runners, procurers of black-market cigarettes and other commodities for the police. He wondered what had happened to them.
When his bus finally came, he stood on its back platform.
The next stop was at the corner of the Avenue de France and the Boulevard du Quatrième Tirailleurs. From here you could see some of the lights of the Medina down in the valley. He watched the people crowding onto the bus: a Berber in a saffron-colored turban who acted as though he had never seen a bus before, a very fat Jewish woman with two small girls, all of them speaking Spanish rather than Arabic (the more presumptuous dwellers of the Mellah conversed in this archaic tongue; it was frowned upon, considered almost seditious, by the Moslems), an Arab woman wearing a haik, in whom Amar thought he discerned a prostitute from the quartier réservé, and several French policemen, two of whom had to hang to the railing outside because there was no possible way for them to squeeze themselves further. He expected the vehicle to continue straight ahead to the Taza road and go down the hill; instead it swung to the left and followed the Boulevard Moulay Youssef. “Ah, khaï, where does this bus go?” he asked of a workman covered with whitewash who was standing pressed against him. “The Mellah,” said the man. “But the last one went to the Mellah,” Amar protested. “This one should be going to Bab Fteuh.” The man turned his head one way and then the other. Amar saw his face briefly in the light of a passing street lamp; he would have said it bore an expression of fright. “Skout,” the workman said in a low voice. “There aren’t any buses going; to Bab Fteuh. Don’t talk.”
CHAPTER 10
Amar hesitated. If what the man said were true, then it was useless to get out and walk back to the corner to wait for the right one. It would be quicker to go on to the Place du Commerce outside the Mellah and catch a bus going to Bou Jeloud than to walk all the way to Bab Fteuh, and besides, the Taza road was outside the walls in the darkness of the country. It was not at all the kind of walk that he relished making: there were far too many trees and streams along the way, places where evil spirits, djenoun and affarit abounded, not to speak of Moslem bandits and French police. It was better to continue this way, even though he had to walk the length of the Medina afterward.
Before the bus roared into the Place du Commerce he realized that something quite extraordinary was going on there. At first it was hard to tell just what: there was a great amount of light, but it was light which was constantly changing and moving, so that the trees and the buildings appeared to be in a state of flux. And the noise was unidentifiable: giant raspings that seemed to be being dropped down into the square from the balconies—mass upon mass of meaningless, buzzing sounds that reverberated between the walls. As the bus moved through the open space that swarmed with people, the sound shifted, and he could hear that there were other focal points of wild racket; each loudspeaker was giving forth different noises, and the mechanisms were such that the noises had long ago ceased to bear any resemblance to what they originally had been intended to sound like. In front of t
he Ciné Apollon a samba might easily have been pieces of scrap iron falling from a great height onto a metal floor. In the corner between the public latrines and the subcommissariat of police, the voice of a young man describing a set of china that could be won in a lottery sounded like an express train crossing a trestle. The young man may have been conscious of this, for now and then he limited his message to the simple, rapid reiteration of the one word tombola. A candy stand whose machine was playing an Egyptian selection might have been a range for machine-gun practice, and a soft-drink bar whose concessionaire had chosen a pile of Salim Hilali records was making a series of sounds that would not have been unusual coming from a particularly brutal abattoir. For this was a fechta, a traveling fair, each of whose booths boasted a separate gramophone and loudspeaker, and some were lucky enough to be furnished with microphone as well. The fair had come from Algeria, where its equipment had been bought second-hand, the purchaser rightly assuming that the uncritical audience of Morocco and the border towns of the Algerian desert, where it was destined to travel, would not hold it against him if paint were chipped and metal rusted and paneling patched. The important thing was to make it as loud and as bright as possible. Both these things had been done; where the lights were concerned, the impresario had managed even more than brightness. He had arranged it so that all the bulbs massed on the façades of the booths and strung through the branches of the trees continually flashed on and off, slowly, regularly, in great groups that worked independently of each other; the studied purpose of this was to induce first vertigo, and then euphoria.
Amar got out of the bus, surrendered his ticket to the inspector, and stood still for a moment, letting the chaos soak in. Then, already a little exalted, he moved toward a stand where some youths were pounding a platform with an enormous mallet. At each crash a vertical red bar shot up to what was assumed to be a height corresponding to the force of the blow, and a stout man with black teeth unenthusiastically pushed the bar back down to zero, crying either: “Magnifique!” or “Allez, messieurs! Voyons, on est des enfants?”
Amar wandered on to where a great crowd was gathered around two legionnaires shooting at a long procession of white cardboard ducks that moved jerkily in front of a panorama of palm trees and minarets. This place stood in the crossfire of two equally powerful loudspeakers. He moved ahead to the lottery: holding the microphone, the young man was bellowing: . . bolatombolatombolatombola …” Among the spectators, he recognized a boy from his quarter. They grinned at each other; it was all they could do under the circumstances. Further along, standing on a platform, an ape-like man with a two-day beard, wearing a red satin dress and long dangling earrings, his hands folded behind his head, was making the rudimentary motions of a danse du ventre. Seated on his right, gazing out with empty eyes over the heads of the crowd toward the invisible mountains at the east, was a girl wearing a kepi and a Spahi uniform, listlessly beating a snare drum. On his left stood a middle-aged woman, flashing an entire mouthful of gold teeth at the public as she smiled, crying into her microphone in a voice of iron: “Entrez, messieurs-dames! Le spectacle va commencer!”
The friend also had drifted here, and now stood next to Amar. “Hada el bourdel,” he shouted to him; Amar nodded sagely. The platform had been erected at the entrance of what he supposed must be a very expensive traveling brothel, and presently he was much astonished to see several Jewish women among those buying entrance tickets.
Now he moved ahead, to a kind of shed in front of which three mechanical dolls jiggled on a high pedestal. They were as large as children and wore real clothes. To Amar there was something indefinably obscene in the idea of putting good wool, cotton and leather on these dead, jittering objects; it outraged his sense of decorum. He stood watching their spasmodic movements, feeling a mixture of repugnance and indignation. One figure was playing a violin and opening and shutting a very wide mouth. A second banged together a pair of tin cymbals soundlessly, its senseless head turning from side to side atop its elongated neck. The third swayed back and forth from the hips as it pushed and pulled on a miniature accordion. The shifting light made their hesitant movements more plausible, at the same time removing them wholly from the world of reality and making them somehow believable inhabitants of another world that was all too possible, a pitiless world whose silence would be this crackling inferno of noise, and whose noon and midnight would shine with the same shadowless glare. “Le Musée des Marionettes!” cried an Arab boy at the door. “Dix francs, messieurs! Dix francs, mesdames! Juj d’rial! Juj d’rial! Juj d’riall”
After a prolonged inner debate on the seemliness of his being observed entering such a place, since almost all the people who were going in and coming out were country folk and Berbers, he decided that not too much opprobrium would attach to his buying a ticket and going in. The museum consisted of a U-shaped corridor with a row of glass exhibit-cases along the inner wall. It was brightly lighted, and crowded with Moslem women in various stages of mirthful hysteria. Why they found the exhibits funny to such a degree he could only guess; to him they were only mildly amusing. All of them were crudely caricatured scenes of life among Moslems: a schoolmaster, ruler in hand, presiding over a class of small boys, a fellah plowing, a drunk being ordered out of a bar. (This last he considered a gross insult to his people.) The scenes which delighted the women so much that they could scarcely move away from them were those showing Moslem females. One was a domestic drama, in which the wife sat with a mirror in one hand and a whip in the other; her husband was on his knees scrubbing the floor. Back and forth twitched the woman’s head: she would raise the mirror and gaze into it, and then she would turn to the man and deliver a blow with the whip. At that instant without fail there would be a renewed scream of laughter from the white bundles clustered in front of the glass. The other scene was the interior of a bus, where a man sat next to a woman in a djellaba. Here she would lower one side of her veil, disclosing a hideous face, and replace it just as the man’s head swung around toward her. It was a less complicated game than the other, but being highly improper it evoked equal merriment on the part of the feminine spectators. Amar stood for a while watching, and thought: “This is the way the Nazarenes corrupt our women, by teaching them how whores behave.” He wanted to say it aloud, but the prospect of having so many women turn and stare at him intimidated him, and he strode out into the street with as intense an expression of disgust on his face as he could muster.
“… latombolatombo …” cried the young man of the lottery. Now he held an alarm clock in his hand, now a great, fat doll dressed in pink satin, whose eyes, Amar noted with interest, opened and shut when she was bent forward or backward. “Like a cow’s eyes,” he thought, and he wondered what made them work, even as he was conscious of hating the idea that he should be interested at all in such childish nonsense. They would forbid things like this, he was certain, when the Moslems took power. By what right did the French assume that such absurdities would amuse the Moroccans? The fact that they were amused by them was beside the point; they would have to change. He could imagine the French coming here from the Ville Nouvelle, not to look at the exhibits, but to be entertained by watching the Moslems look at them. Is it my fault, Mohammed Lalami had said, if the people of Morocco are donkeys? There he was right.
He found himself being pushed from behind toward the long counter where the prizes were displayed. There were sets of shining aluminum cooking utensils, tablecloths and mantillas draped over the counter, umbrellas hanging by their crooks, fountain pens arranged by the score in designs on sheets of painted cardboard, table lamps with red bulbs in them, flashing on and off, along with all the other lights, and even a small radio, which the young man now and then announced would be given as a special prize to anyone who picked the winning number three times in succession. This detail was lost on Amar, who was thinking that it would be a wonderful thing for a man to have his own radio right in the room with him. So far he had seen them only in cafés. “For thirt
y francs,” the young man was crying, “you can have this magnificent apparatus.” That much Amar did understand, and at the risk of being laughed at by the onlookers (for one never knew quite what was happening in the world of the Nazarenes) he worked his way ahead to the edge of the counter and held out thirty francs. Of course, it was wrong; he saw that immediately in the expression on the young man’s face. “Only one number at a time!” he shouted to the crowd, as though they all had made the same mistake. “Only ten francs!” He took one coin from Amar’s hand. “Messieurs-dames! This time it will be Monte Carlo! Players will choose their own numbers! Only five players! One more?” Someone at the far end of the counter raised his hand; a girl working at that end took his coin. “Les numéros?” The players called their choices.
The only number Amar was certain of pronouncing correctly was dix. He said the word clearly; the young man seemed satisfied, turned and spun the disk that was affixed to the wall, moving the microphone so that it picked up the clicking sound made by the metal flange as it hit the large pins that marked the numbers. The clicking slowed down, the wheel stopped, and Amar saw with more terror than satisfaction that the indicator was without a doubt directly over a thin yellow slice of the disk which bore the number ten. “Numéro dix!” shouted the young man without emotion. The girl at the other end reached out nonchalantly and took up a strange-looking object which she tossed to the announcer. The Christians and Jews, and doubtless some of the Moslems watching, recognized it as a rag doll which was meant to be a comic representation of a French sailor. It had a pot-belly and a hideous painted face, but its uniform and headgear had been made with an eye to detail. The young man held it up so everyone could admire it; then he handed it to Amar.