The Stories of Paul Bowles

by Paul Bowles

  A Chaambi from Ouargla happened to be with the other Chaamba when the raid took place. He was one of those who had been willing to give Medagan wheat on credit. When he had finished telling the others that part of the story, the men determined to go in pursuit of the Tuareg. A few days later sixty men set out on fast mehara.

  When Medagan and his sons arrived back to their hiding place they suspected that they might be followed, but they were fairly confident that the Chaamba would not venture into the maze of gorges and narrow passageways which characterize the terrain. Nevertheless, before lying down to sleep that night, Medagan prayed for a dream that could guide his behavior in the event the Chaamba did manage to catch up with them. In the morning when he awoke and realized with dismay that he had had no dream whatever, or none that he could recall, he conferred with his sons. They read this as an unfavorable omen, and agreed that if they were forced into battle they would seek anaya, throwing themselves upon the mercy of the Chaamba once again, this time definitively. Then Medagan sent off his youngest son, who was no more than a child, with some camels they had captured earlier, to sell them in El Golea. Since the group had just returned from there, this act would seem to indicate that Medagan foresaw the possibility of serious trouble, and hoped to save this son at least. In this he was successful, for the boy reached El Golea with the camels, unharmed.

  The Chaamba meanwhile found the group with ease, and heard Medagan call out to them that Allah had advised him to seek anaya. Seeing that the Tuareg in truth were not even attempting to defend themselves, the Chaamba settled the matter by sending their black slaves against them. This ruled out the possibility of anaya, since a slave is powerless to grant it. The blacks cut the throat of each man, thus ending the saga of Medagan and his sons.

  This took place in 1863, just as the French were making strenuous efforts to extend their hegemony southward into the desert. It marked the beginning of a twenty-year period of excessive lawlessness throughout the Sahara. Bandit groups sprang up on all sides to sweep down on oases, plunder passing caravans, and massacre voyagers. Some of this activity was legitimate retaliation for French incursions, but the greater part was simple outlawry, due no doubt to the breakdown in moral conventions attendant upon the prolonged infidel presence.

  A small group of the Mekhadema tribe having been attacked and murdered in the same region of the Tademait where Medagan had met his death, the popular imagination around Ouargla was quick to attribute the raid to Medagan and his sons, who were declared to be wreaking vengeance from beyond the grave in return for having been denied the possibility of anaya by the Chaamba. Thereafter, as the raids proliferated, each new razzia was attributed to the ghosts of the Medaganat, and the word fast came to be a Saharan synonym for outlaw. Every petty thief, agitator, pillager, renegade or highwayman was labeled a Medagani. Only the empty shell of the word remained, its original and secondary meanings both having been lost in the general confusion that existed in the region. The assaults became organized and took on a more openly political character. Now it was the Chaamba themselves en masse who decided to be outlaws, and who in 1871 adopted the name of Medaganat as their official designation.

  In 1876 they boasted of killing the three French priests, Fathers Paulmier, Menoret, and Boujard. The French press reacted with hysteria: the situation in the Sahara was utterly intolerable. Meanwhile the attacks increased in number and violence. The Medaganat conducted raids along the Tunisian border, in Libya, in Morocco, and throughout the Algerian desert. It was only several years later, in 1883, when they were careless enough to attack a group of Reguibat, that they finally met with an enemy able to destroy them.

  At the very beginning of the battle a good many of the Medaganat, sensing likely defeat, defected outright to the Reguibat. The others, once it became clear that they could not win, then tried like their original namesakes to obtain anaya. But the women of the Reguibat, who were with them in the camp, repeatedly warned their menfolk not to grant it. Thus the Reguibat were obliged to chop the Medaganat into pieces with their swords to prevent them from touching the folds of their capes. The women furthermore insisted that even those who had surrendered at the outset be slaughtered. This was a grave infraction of desert law, but to oblige them the men cut a few dozen throats, and finally the women were quiet.

  In this instance it is clear that neither anaya nor istikhara produced what was desired of it, and yet the results were by no means the same as they would have been had neither been practiced. To a Moslem, the failure of Medagan’s attempt at istikhara is implicit in the facts. One may pray, but if one is not in a state of grace the prayer fails to get through. Once Medagan had betrayed his protectors, he was not in a condition which permitted contact with the Deity. And having construed his dreamless night as an instruction to seek anaya, by going out and requesting it immediately, without making even a gesture of self-defense, he doubtless helped to bring about his own defeat. To the Chaamba this behavior could only have seemed a proof of cowardice; the sending of slaves to despatch the bandits thus gave a flavor of contempt to their refusal. Apparently, Medagan and his sons were beyond the radius of normal functioning with regard to both istikhara and anaya. Many of the Chaamba Medaganat, however, would have been saved by anaya if the Reguibat had not happened to have their women along.

  Thus there was no istikhara, no anaya, Medagan was not a Medagani, and the Medaganat had never heard of Medagan.

  (1976)

  Things Gone and Things Still Here

  TANGIER—if I were to move into the house at Ain Chqaf I should go to great expense to have the workmen install a fountain in the center of the courtyard. The water would fall into a marble basin and run out along marble troughs into a ditch. Running water, they say, rests the soul before the hour of prayer. On occasion, perhaps too much. An example: the familiar story of Hadj Allal, who came to grief through no fault of his own.

  “As if he had stepped on a mine,” explained one divinity student. “Only the mine was invisible and made no sound when it exploded. No one knew anything about it. He was there looking into the stream. Then he came into the mosque. For all of us he had been out there perhaps five minutes. But in the place where he had fallen two years had gone by. He tried to explain it to us. We took him home and told his wife to put him to bed and cover him up.”

  There is the tale of the fqih who taught in a local mosque some two centuries ago. No trace of his passage through life would remain now had it not been for an inexplicable psychic misadventure: the man must have stumbled upon one of those rare fissures in time—an open fault, as it were, in the surface of time—and fallen in.

  Another fqih, this one in Hajra den Nahal, is said to have slipped between two instants and fallen into a deep well of time. The accident occurred while he was washing in the stream outside the mosque. As he squatted by the running water two tolba passed by on their way into the mosque to pray. They were having a conversation. Later the fqih stated that he had heard only one phrase: “in the twinkling of an eye.” That seems to have been the signal. Everything around him stopped existing and he was in darkness.

  In all versions the entry into this bubble in time is decisive for the protagonist. The two false years, according to the Nahali’s story, were spent by him in India in a state of invisibility. During that time he did nothing but observe a famous goldsmith at work. When he was cast out of the time trap and returned to the stream by the mosque, he had brought with him all the Indian master’s secrets, knowledge which he immediately put to use by becoming a goldsmith himself. His fame as a master artisan spread throughout Islam, so that the Indian goldsmith, on hearing of it, could not rest until he had visited Morocco and seen the designs himself. Unwisely, he traveled with his wife. The dénouement and meaning of the story for those who tell it is the Nahali’s double victory. Not only did the Indian see all his own designs improved upon by the Moroccan, but he also lost his wife to him.

  Another unfortunate fqih passed his sojourn in the ti
me bubble as a woman, but returned to the world with greater wisdom.

  A BRILLIANT ACCOUNT could be written of the saga of the Haddaoua and their destruction. The patron saint sat smoking kif in a nargilah all day every day, it is said; even seven or eight years ago adepts could still be found smoking beside the ruined tomb. The brotherhood has been painstakingly eradicated by the authorities. Sometimes you see a lone man walking along the road wearing the dusty rags and wild hairdo of a Haddaoui, but since the cult no longer exists (and, perhaps more importantly, has no headquarters) such a man no longer deserves the respect which being a member of a brotherhood would give him, and so for most citizens he slips into the category of ordinary madman.

  In the eyes of the government, the Haddaoua were not a religious sect at all, but an organized group of brigands to be finished off with bullets. Apart from their uncanny powers over goats, which made it possible for them to arrange the wholesale theft of these animals all over northern Morocco, and their use of magic spells as a threat in order to extort money from the rural populace, there would seem to be no valid reason for their persecution and extermination. Perhaps it was the fact that they built a fortress and kept a good many women shut into the cellars. They claimed that the women had come of their own volition and asked to be taken in as adepts. Whether or not that was the case, once the women had been present at the rituals they were not permitted to leave the premises, but were locked into the basement where they performed domestic duties.*

  The Haddaoua placed great stress on food. Each meal was a banquet. This emphasis on eating may have been the result of the vast quantities of cannabis the men ingested each day, but the meals themselves were made possible by the easy availability of edible livestock. A Haddaoui could go out alone into the countryside and return in a few days with hundreds of goats following him in single-file formation. This alone was enough to strike fear to the hearts of the peasants. No one appears to know exactly how they imposed their will on the animals, but all agree that it was a special art which took time and patience to learn. When you consider that the men learned the technique by lying down among the animals and conversing with them at night during their sleep, it does not seem so improbable. The Haddaoui lying in the Marrakech dust forty years ago “became” a goat while I watched, and there in front of me was a man’s body with a goat inside it, as if the goat had been able to assume the visible form of a man, while at the same time it remained unmistakably a goat. Whatever it was that they stumbled upon in the way of esoteric knowledge, their misuse of it was their undoing.

  FOR PEOPLE LIVING in the country today the djinn is an accepted, if dreaded, concomitant of daily life. The world of djenoun is too close for comfort. Among the Moroccans it is not a question of summoning them to aid you, but simply of avoiding them. Their habitat is only a few feet below ours, and is an exact duplication of the landscape above-ground. Each tree, rock and house has its identical counterpart beneath the earth’s surface. The only difference is that there the sky is made of earth instead of air, and so it is totally dark. But since the lower world is a faithful reproduction of the upper world, it follows that the djenoun are perfectly equipped for life down there, and actually prefer it to our world. The trouble occurs when they emerge and take on human or animal form, for they are our traditional enemies, an alien tribe always on the lookout for an opportunity to infiltrate our ranks, and they do this merely by establishing contact with us.

  Once a djinn has revealed himself to you your life changes. You can suspect his influence or presence whenever things have not gone as they should have, whenever there is a suspect or inexplicable element in a situation, whenever, in short, you are confronted with anything you don’t understand. This is your warning; you begin to look for the djinn, and sooner or later you come across it and recognize it, no matter in what form you find it. What counts is your behavior and method of dealing with it at that point. Losing out in your struggle with a djinn can involve you in years of harassment or illness; it can also be fatal.

  Above all you must guard against becoming emotionally involved with a djinn or a djinniya. There are many instances of miscegenation, but these are usually not discovered until after one partner has killed the other. “I watched her for months and I noticed that she never ate anything with salt in it. That was how I knew she was not a woman.”

  The open points along the frontier between the two worlds can conceivably occur anywhere, but exist generally in caves and under water, particularly under running water. If your itinerary involves crossing a stream, best have something made of steel (or at least iron) handy. City people often say there are no djenoun, not any more, or in any case not in the city. In the country, where life is the same as before and where there are not many automobiles and other things containing iron, they admit that djenoun probably still exist. But they add that the automobiles will eventually drive them all away, for they can’t stand the proximity of iron and steel. Then it will be only in the distant mountains and the desert where you will need to worry about them.

  Notwithstanding the rationalizations, djenoun continue to raise havoc now and then in the very center of the city by coming suddenly out of sink drains and attacking housewives. With this in mind, many women will not allow any hot water to fall into the sink, which means they must wash the dishes in cold water for fear of burning the possible inhabitant of the pipe. Djenoun have been known to be extremely vindictive in such cases, and commonly retaliate by causing paralysis in the offender.

  IF YOU GO TO the outskirts of any town, to where the fields begin and sheep are grazing, and dig in the earth under certain trees, you will come upon a knife. If you dig somewhere a few yards away from there, you may find another. There are many of them, all of the folding sort, and each one is clasped shut on a scrap of paper. Even though you open every knife you find, each time releasing a man from the spell of some accursed woman, still you are not going to spend all your time doing good turns for a whole group of men you have never known and never will meet. There would be no reason in the first place to go and dig for knives unless you suspect that a woman has shut a knife on you. Then, depending on who you think it might have been and where she would be most likely to go in order to bury it, you get busy and start to dig.

  Sometimes you come upon other men digging, and when they see you they look ashamed and pretend to be looking for some change they have dropped. Often they stand up, shrug, and walk away. But if you go some distance and wait, they come back and start again to dig. Where is the justice in a world in which a woman with a simple folding knife can make so much trouble for a man?

  “Twice I’ve found folded knives deep in the water at the bottom of the cliffs along the strait. The women who do this are even worse than the ones who bury them in the ground. They are willing to walk all the way to the cliffs so they can ruin the lives of the men they hate. There is not much chance of these knives being found and opened. And even if the paper where the curse was written has dissolved in the water, the man can have no sort of life again until the blade is opened. It’s the shutting of the blade on the curse that keeps a man from being able to get hard. If I ever come across a woman burying a knife, she’ll never get back home.”

  (1976)

  * * *

  * This is the legend. A recent examination of the place, however, proved to me that there are no cellars beneath any of the structures in the sanctuary.

  Midnight Mass

  HE ARRIVED IN Tangier at noon and went straight to the house. In the rain the outer courtyard was uninviting. Several dead banana plants had fallen over and been left to rot on the tile floor. Even as old Amina, seeing him from the kitchen doorway, waddled out into the rain to greet him, he was aware of the piles of empty crates, and of the frame of an ancient garden swing looming behind her.

  At lunch he tasted his childhood in Amina’s soup. The recipe had not changed; pumpkin and cumin still predominated. All at once he was aware of a cold wind blowing through the room. He ca
lled to Amina: the big window in the kitchen was broken. He reminded her that money had been sent to have it repaired. But the wind had come and blown it in again, she said, and this time they had simply left it that way. He told her to shut the door to the kitchen. When she had done it he could not see that it made any difference.

  He went through the rooms. The place was only a shell of the house he remembered. Most of the furniture was gone, and there were no rugs or curtains. When he discovered that all six of the fireplaces belched smoke, he had his first doubts about the usefulness of the house as a place to spend the Christmas holidays—at least, that year. It was the only bequest his mother had made him, and she had been reluctant even about that. “You don’t want the house in Tangier. You’ll never use it.” “But I love it,” he had objected. “I grew up in it, after all.” Once she had agreed to leave it to him, she had proceeded to strip it of everything of value. A rug went to one friend, a highboy to another, a chest to someone else, so that by the time she died, the house must have been in more or less its present state. Several times during the eight years since her death his wife had urged him to go and “take stock” of the house, but since her interest was based on the possibility of selling it, a thing he intended never to do, he had taken no action.

  The house was in even worse condition than he had expected it to be. Ingenuously, he had assumed that because he paid their wages promptly each month, the servants would make an attempt to keep it in order. He hoped for some hot water to get the chimney soot off his hands, but Mohammed told him that the water heater had not functioned since the year before Madame had died. The man she called in to repair it had said it would have to be replaced by a new system, so she had used cold water after that. As he dried his hands on a flimsy linen guest-towel (she had given away all the bathtowels) he thought grimly: She could let old Madame Schreiber go off with a rug worth several thousand pounds, but she couldn’t afford to bathe in hot water.