by Paul Bowles
He decided that for the moment he was safe, that no one had seen him jump down, and he began to walk. When he turned the corner of the small street that led to the gate of Moulay Idriss, he realized that he would have done better to go in the other direction. A group of French police stood by the gate ahead of him. He hesitated, started to turn around.
“Eh, toi! Viens ici!” one of them called. Reluctantly he walked toward them. If he had gone the other way, he could have got up through Guerniz, he reflected, but he had come this way. Visions of torture flitted across his mind. They put you between vises and turned the screws until your bones cracked. They covered the floor of your cell with pails full of slippery soap and then smashed bottles on it, then they made you walk back and forth naked, and you kept falling, until you had pieces of glass sticking out of you all around, like the top of a wall. They horsewhipped you, burned you with acids, starved you, made you curse Allah, put strange poisons into you with needles, so that you went crazy and answered whatever questions they asked you. And always they laughed at you, even at the moment when they were beating you. They were laughing now, looking at him, perhaps because it was taking him so long to get to them, for he felt that he was scarcely moving at all. When he got fairly near, the one who had called to him began to speak in a loud voice, but Amar had no idea what he was saying. He stopped walking. The policeman roared: “Viens ici!” That he did understand. He moved ahead once again. The man stepped toward him and grabbed him roughly by the shoulder, talking angrily all the while. Unexpectedly he pushed him against the side of a stall behind him, banging his head on the long iron bolt. His movements were sudden, unforeseeable, violent. Now with one enormous red hand across Amar’s throat he pinned him against the wall, while another man lazily approached and looked at him, smiling. This one also spoke to him. He stuck his hands into Amar’s pockets, felt everywhere in the creases of his clothing—silently Amar gave fervent thanks to Allah for having directed him to leave his folding knife at home—and then struck him once on the cheek with the back of his hand. At this point he walked away, as if he were disgusted, either at the contact with Amar’s flesh or at not having found what he had been looking for. The first man removed his hand from across Amar’s neck, hit him once on the same cheek, exactly as the other had done, and gave him a violent push which sent him sprawling. Amar looked up at him, expecting to see the man’s boot approaching to kick him or stamp on him, but he had turned away, and was sauntering back toward the others. “Allez! Fous le camp!” said one who was leaning against the side of the archway. Amar sat up in the muddy street and looked at them; something about his expression—perhaps its mere intensity—displeased one of the other men, for he called the attention of the man beside him to it, and they both came forward toward him, slowly and menacingly. Now his intuition whispered to him that the safe thing to do was to get up and run as fast as he could, that that was what they wanted to see. But he was determined not to give them that satisfaction. With exaggerated care he picked himself up, and not looking at any of them, took a few steps away from them.
Out of prudence he decided to compromise on a limp. And so, clutching at the door of a shop now and then for support, he made his slow progress down the street, sure that from one second to the next a blow would come from behind. When he finally looked back, at a point beyond the exit into the basket souk, the walls of the passageway had curved sufficiently to hide the men from his view. He stopped limping and went on to a public fountain, where he laboriously washed the mud from the legs of his trousers. There was not much he could do about the seat of them. The sun was strong now; he sat awhile by the fountain letting it dry the large wet patches he had made on the cloth.
Merely sitting still this way, gazing down the empty street, helped to calm the churning he felt inside his chest. He had just seen two Moslems killed, but he had not felt even a stirring of pity for them: they were in the pay of the French, for one thing, and then they had surely committed some unspeakable crime against their own people to have been singled out that way for annihilation. Although he was grateful for having been vouchsafed the spectacle of their death, he wished it might have been slower and more dramatic; they had fallen so quickly and unceremoniously that he felt a little cheated. Under his breath he began to invent a long prayer to Allah, asking Him to see to it that every Frenchman, before he was dragged down to Hell, which was a foregone conclusion in any case, might suffer, at the hands of the Moslems, the most exquisite torture ever devised by man. He prayed that Allah might help them discover new refinements in the matter of causing pain and despair, might show them the way to the imposing of hitherto undreamed-of humiliation, degradation and agony. “And drop by drop their blood will be licked by dogs, and ants and beetles will crawl in and out of their shameful parts, and each day we will cut away one more centimeter from each Frenchman’s entrails. Only they must not die, ya rabi, ya rabi. Never let them die. At each corner of the street let us have one hung up in a little cage, so when the lepers come by they can use them as latrines. And we will make soap of them, but only for washing the sheets of the brothels. And one month before a woman is to give birth we will pull the child out and make a paste of it and mix it with the flesh of pigs and the excrement from the bellies of the Nazarenes’ own dead, and feed their virgins with it.”
It took energy to invent these fantasies; soon he tired of it, and with a final impassioned invocation, to make his impromptu prayer more formal, he rose and started on his way once more. By taking back streets he might be able to get all the way up to Bou Jeloud. The emptiness of the city spurred him on; he wanted to be in the midst of people. Up there, in the large cafés, there was sure to be at least someone.
CHAPTER 14
He went ahead, up the long steep hill through Guerniz with its great high houses on either side of the street. Here there was always the sweet smell of cedar wood and the gurgling of water behind the walls. A goat stood under an arch and looked out at him with its questioning yellow eyes. Through these streets and squares an occasional well-dressed man hurried, on his way to some nearby house for lunch, and looking askance at Amar, with his battered face and muddy European garments. Each time he caught this expression of fastidiousness mixed with fear he smiled to himself: the ones who wore it were not friends of freedom. It was a sure way of telling. They had what they wanted in this world, and they shared no desire with the students and other youths to see the world change. At the same time it was dangerous to try to judge people’s sympathies by their appearance: there were many wealthy men who gave their money and time to the Istiqlal, and by no means all of the poor agreed with, or even understood, the party’s program, although the party made constant bids for the favor of the lower classes.
But he would have staked all he possessed on his conviction that these few men he saw now taking their quick dainty steps along the streets of Guerniz were afraid—afraid of what might happen as a result of the present crisis. France might lose part of her power to protect the system under which they lived and prospered. Then thoughtfully he asked himself how he would feel if his father still owned the land at Kherib Jerad, and the orchard by Bab Khokha, and the three houses in the Keddane, if all of that, as well as the oil press and the mill, had not long since been sold and the money spent. While he was posing this question to his conscience and waiting for a reply to come out, his attention was distracted by the sound of wild cheering from the direction of the Talâa. Where there was a crowd, that was where he wanted to be. Abandoning his decision to use only the back streets, he cut through the nearest alley that led off to his right, and was almost running when he came up against the first bystanders, trying to witness things from a safe distance. He zigzagged ahead until he reached a point where there were so many men packed into the narrow alley that he was unable to push his way further. He could see nothing at all, but he could hear the shouting and singing. Occasionally the men beside him, from whom the procession was likewise hidden, took up a chanted refrain, a
nd filled the small space around them with resonant sound. Not Amar: it would have embarrassed him to open his mouth and shout or sing along with them. It was part of his nature to push his way to the inside and yet at the last moment to remain on the outside. When the time came he always found it difficult to participate; he could only grin and be thrilled by the others. His friends had long ago given up trying to instill in him a sense of teamwork on the soccer field. His principal interest there was in the brilliance of his own plays. Sometimes they would ask him if he thought he were playing alone against both teams. When they complained he would say impatiently: “Khlass! Was that a good pass or wasn’t it? Do you want me to play or don’t you? Just tell me that much and then shut up. Khlass men d’akchi!”
Now he stood here awhile, listening and looking at the men around him. They were ordinary people: small shopkeepers, artisans and their apprentices, all of them carried away by the excitement of the moment. The students marching in the Talâa were carrying portraits of the former Sultan; they were bound to meet the police when they got to Bou Jeloud, if not before, and there would be a fight. But that was what they wanted. They were unarmed, and they knew the French would attack. Each one secretly hoped to become a martyr; it would be almost as glorious as death on the battlefield. Amar wanted to see their faces and admire them, but being shut off from them he could feel only an abstract sympathy which was easily replaced by impatience. Soon he fought his way out of the crowd and returned the way lie had come. It was possible that further up the hill he could double back to the Talâa above the head of the procession and catch it there. But each alley he chose was equally crowded, and he had to keep turning around and continuing upward on the parallel thoroughfare. When he got to Ed Douh he took a way that not everyone knew about, going down a flight of steps, across a public latrine, and out the other side, along a passage so narrow that if two people were to meet each other, one had to stand flat against the wall while the other squeezed through. The sun was very strong now, and the mud had dried almost completely. Down in here the stench was terrible; he hurried along, trying to breathe as seldom as possible until he arrived at the Talâa a little below the house of Si Ahmed Kabbaj. The cortege had not yet arrived, no police were in sight, and people were lined up along the sides of the thoroughfare or dashing excitedly from one side to the other. Amar knew where he wanted to go: it was a café one flight up, above a grocery store, a little way inside the Bou Jeloud gate.
The place was full, everyone was talking very loud, and there was not a single place to sit. Disappointed, he resigned himself to staying in the back room. If something happened outside, he could always run through and watch from one of the windows.
Even in the inner room there was not much choice in the way of places to sit. He found a table in the corner furthest from the main room; two men were already seated there playing dominoes, probably because all the cards and chess sets were in use, but there was space on the bench for another. When the boy came by, Amar ordered half a bread and a salad of tomatoes and turnips.
The conversation around the café, although it never touched on the situation of the day, was louder and more animated than it would have been normally. A sizable group of men stood at each window that gave on the street, merely waiting. When Amar’s food came, he murmured “Bismil’lah” and ate it ravenously, sopping up the almost liquid salad with small pieces of bread. Then he sat awhile quietly, prey to a growing impatience; it spread from his chest upward and downward, so that he drummed with his fingers on the bench and the table, and jiggled his feet. The domino players looked up from their game now and then, and stared at him, saying nothing. Even if they had spoken he would not have minded. The day was important and glorious; he felt that much with a conviction which increased every moment. Whether it presaged joy or misery was unimportant; it was different from all other days, and by virtue of that fact alone, it deserved to be lived differently.
Then suddenly he made an important decision: to leave here and have tea at the Café Berkane, which was just outside the walls, beyond the bus stop. Benani had warned him to stay inside the walls today, but after all, Benani was not his father. He called the boy, complained about the food, refused to pay, then did pay, joked awhile with the proprietor, and left smiling. It was excessively hot in the open square, and there was still no sign of the demonstration. Slowly he walked up to the big gate and passed under its main arch, out into the world of motors and exhaust fumes. He had never seen so many policemen; they were lined up all around the outer square, against the walls, along the waiting room for the buses, in front of the Pharmacie de la Victoire, and as far up the road as he could see—many more than there had been the year the Sultan had come on a visit. This was very fine, and he was delighted that he had taken the courageous step of coming outside the Medina. They were all enemies, of course—he did not lose sight of that fact—but they looked admirably impressive in their uniforms, massed this way around the periphery of the square, and they had various models of guns with them which he had not seen before. It was decidedly worth seeing.
The Café Berkane, a fairly new establishment, had made use of a long, narrow strip of land between the ramparts of the Casbah Bou Jeloud and one of the branches of the river. The entrance to the building was reached by going across a small wooden footbridge, but there were generally tables on the outer side of the stream as well, scattered here and there under the delicate vertical fronds of the pepper trees. Today, however, the tables had not been put out, and the space usually given over to them was empty save for a few policemen who had been stationed there out of the glare, glad to be even in the thin, powdery shade that was half sunlight. Amar expected them to stop him as he approached the little bridge and perhaps search him again, or forbid him to enter, as if he were crossing a frontier, but they seemed not even to notice him.
The interior here, in contrast to the place he had just left, was almost deserted, and the few clients who occupied tables, if they spoke at all, conversed quietly, almost in whispers. This was most unusual; Amar quickly decided it was because they realized that they were outside the walls, and consequently felt less sure of themselves with regard to what this strange day might bring forth. Then, of course, there was the fact that those who sat near the windows and door had a clear and sobering view of the policemen standing out there in the sun. There were several rooms in the Café Berkane, all but one of which had windows on the front, directly over the water; if you spat or dropped a cigarette butt out, it landed in the river and was rapidly rushed downstream. The other room, a small afterthought tacked on to the back of the building, had an entirely different atmosphere: instead of facing north it faced south and east, and its view consisted of a section of the massive rampart walls and a square basin of still water—nothing more. The water in the pool was not deep—perhaps a meter—nor was it stagnant, since it was connected with the stream by a channel which went under the café. The owner had meant to plant bamboo and iris around its edge and to have water lilies floating on its surface; it had seemed such an excellent idea at the time he had built the café that he had been willing to spend the money for the cement to make the basin. Once he had opened the establishment, however, he had forgotten his original intention, and now the edges of the pool were ragged with masses of dying weeds, encouraged by the proximity of water but weighted down with the constantly descending dust from the nearby square. The small back room was the one Amar preferred, because it was the quietest, and the still water seemed to him more desirable and rare than the moving stream: in Fez rushing water was no novelty.
He knew just which table he wanted. It was behind the door, beside the window, all by itself. Often when he was not working he had come here and sat an entire afternoon, lulled by the din and music from the other rooms into a stage of vague ecstasy, while he contemplated the small sheet of water outside the window. It was that happy frame of mind into which his people could project themselves so easily—the mere absence of immediate unplea
sant preoccupation could start it off, and a landscape which included the sea, a river, a fountain, or anything that occupied the eye without engaging the mind, was of use in sustaining it. It was the world behind the world, where reflection precludes the necessity for action, and the calm which all things seek in death appears briefly in the guise of contentment, the spirit at last persuaded that the still waters of perfection are reachable. The details of market life and the personal financial considerations that shoot like rockets across the dark heavens of this inner cosmos serve merely to give it scale and to emphasize its vastness, in no wise troubling its supreme tranquillity.
He passed through the first two rooms of the café, and into the small back one, where he was relieved to see that the table he wanted was unoccupied. In fact, there was no one in the room at all, which made him decide that he would stay only long enough to drink one tea, and then move to a more populous spot in another room. This was a small ceremony that he was inventing, for his feeling about the day demanded the observance of some sort of ritual. When he paid for the tea, he would change the twenty-rial piece he had found that morning in the street. It would be a most acceptable way in the eye of Allah, he thought, to use the money.