Travels

by Paul Bowles

  We got into the center of Ayudhaya a little after three o’clock. It was hot and noisy; the bhikkus had no idea of where to look for a restaurant, and the idea of asking did not appeal to them. The five of us walked aimlessly. I had come to the conclusion that neither Prasert nor Vichai understood spoken English, and I addressed myself earnestly to Yamyong. “We’ve got to eat.” He stared at me with severity. “We are searching,” he told me.

  Eventually we found a Chinese restaurant on a corner of the principal street. There was a table full of boisterous Thais drinking mekong (categorized as whiskey, but with the taste of cheap rum) and another table occupied by an entire Chinese family. These people were doing some serious eating, their faces buried in their rice bowls. It cheered me to see them: I was faint, and had half expected to be told that there was no hot food available.

  The large menu in English which was brought us must have been typed several decades ago and wiped with a damp rag once a week ever since. Under the heading specialities were some dishes that caught my eye, and as I went through the list I began to laugh. Then I read it aloud to Brooks.

  “Fried Sharks Fins and Bean Sprout

  Chicken Chins Stuffed with Shrimp

  Fried Rice Birds

  Shrimps Balls and Green Marrow

  Pigs Lights with Pickles

  Braked Rice Bird in Port Wine

  Fish Head and Bean Curd”

  Although it was natural for our friends not to join in the laughter, I felt that their silence was not merely failure to respond; it was heavy, positive.

  A moment later three Pepsi-Cola bottles were brought and placed on the table. “What are you going to have?” Brooks asked Yamyong.

  “Nothing, thank you,” he said lightly. “This will be enough for us today.”

  “But this is terrible! You mean no one is going to eat anything?”

  “You and Mr. Bowles will eat your food,” said Yamyong. (He might as well have said “fodder.”) Then he, Prasert, and Vichai stood up, and carrying their Pepsi-Cola bottles with them, went to sit at a table on the other side of the room. Now and then Yamyong smiled sternly across at us.

  “I wish they’d stop watching us,” Brooks said under his breath.

  “They were the ones who kept putting it off,” I reminded him. But I did feel guilty, and I was annoyed at finding myself placed in the position of the self-indulgent unbeliever. It was almost as bad as eating in front of Moslems during Ramadan.

  We finished our meal and set out immediately, following Yamyong’s decision to visit a certain temple he wanted to see. The taxi drive led us through a region of thorny scrub. Here and there, in the shade of spreading flat-topped trees, were great round pits, full of dark water and crowded with buffaloes; only their wet snouts and horns were visible. Brooks was already crying: “Buffaloes! Hundreds of them!” He asked the taxi driver to stop so that he could photograph the animals.

  “You will have buffaloes at the temple,” said Yamyong. He was right; there was a muddy pit filled with them only a few hundred feet from the building. Brooks went and took his pictures while the bhikkus paid their routine visit to the shrine. I wandered into a courtyard where there was a long row of stone Buddhas. It is the custom of temple-goers to plaster little squares of gold leaf onto the religious statues in the wats. When thousands of them have been stuck onto the same surface, tiny scraps of the gold come unstuck. Then they tremble in the breeze, and the figure shimmers with a small, vibrant life of its own. I stood in the courtyard watching this quivering along the arms and torsos of the Buddhas, and I was reminded of the motion of the bo tree’s leaves. When I mentioned it to Yamyong in the taxi, I think he failed to understand, for he replied: “The bo tree is a very great tree for Buddhists.”

  Brooks sat beside me on the bus going back to Bangkok. We spoke only now and then. After so many hours of resisting the heat, it was relaxing to sit and feel the relatively cool air that blew in from the rice fields. The driver of the bus was not a believer in cause and effect. He passed trucks with oncoming traffic in full view. I felt better with my eyes shut, and I might even have dozed off, had there not been in the back of the bus a man, obviously not in control, who was intent on making as much noise as possible. He began to shout, scream, and howl almost as soon as we had left Ayudhaya, and he did this consistently throughout the journey. Brooks and I laughed about it, conjecturing whether he were crazy or only drunk. The aisle was too crowded for me to be able to see him from where I sat. Occasionally I glanced at the other passengers. It was as though they were entirely unaware of the commotion behind them. As we drew closer to the city, the screams became louder and almost constant.

  “God, why don’t they throw him off?” Brooks was beginning to be annoyed.

  “They don’t even hear him,” I said bitterly. People who can tolerate noise inspire me with envy and rage. Finally I leaned over and said to Yamyong: “That poor man back there! It’s incredible!”

  “Yes,” he said over his shoulder. “He’s very busy.” This set me thinking what a civilized and tolerant people they were, and I marveled at the sophistication of the word “busy” to describe what was going on in the back of the bus.

  Finally we were in a taxi driving across Bangkok. I would be dropped at my hotel and Brooks would take the three bhikkus on to their wat. In my head I was still hearing the heartrending cries. What had the repeated word patterns meant?

  I had not been able to give an acceptable answer to Yamyong in his bewilderment about the significance of the necktie, but perhaps he could satisfy my curiosity here.

  “That man in the back of the bus, you know?”

  Yamyong nodded. “He was working very hard, poor fellow. Sunday is a bad day.”

  I disregarded the nonsense. “What was he saying?”

  “Oh, he was saying: ‘Go into second gear,’ or ‘We are coming to a bridge,’ or ‘Be careful, people in the road.’ Whatever he saw.”

  Since neither Brooks nor I appeared to have understood, he went on. “All the buses must have a driver’s assistant. He watches the road and tells the driver how to drive. It is hard work because he must shout loud enough for the driver to hear him.”

  “But why doesn’t he sit up in the front with the driver?”

  “No, no. There must be one in the front and one in the back That way two men are responsible for the bus.”

  It was an unconvincing explanation for the grueling sounds we had heard, but to show him that I believed him I said: “Aha! I see.”

  The taxi drew up in front of the hotel and I got out. When I said good bye to Yamyong, he replied, I think with a shade of aggrievement: “Good bye. You have left your lotus pods on the bus.”

  Fez: Behind the Walls

  Journal 1984; Barry Brukoff ‘Morocco’, 1991

  IF YOU CAME down out of the mountains from Ouezzane, you saw it far below – a whitish-gray spot ringed with green, which from that distance was unrecognizable as a city; it might have been a quarry or a simple discoloration in the plain. As you swung around the curves on your way down the flank of Djebel Zalagh, the perspective remained the same, but the spot broadened constantly and a definite line separating the gray part from the green became visible: it was the wall surrounding the Medina. Within were the tens of thousands of cube-shaped structures, their pattern varied here and there by the thin prism of a minaret reaching above them. Outside the line were the fruit orchards and olive groves that brought the country to the very foot of the wall, enclosing the city within a solid frame of verdure, so that from this vantage point it was like a white bouquet tightly encased in leaves. In the past two decades the city has burst through its confines at several points and grown new additions outside the ramparts. But from above it looks much the same.

  To call Fez one of the great cities of the world might seem to some a generous gesture. It is not commercially or industrially important; it is no longer a cultural or political center; it does not even have the most impressive examples of its own
architectural style (which are not to be found in Morocco at all, but in Spain). Unlike other cities which enjoyed their period of greatness in remote times, and which are judged worthy of more or less attention according to the number of historical vestiges they contain, Fez does not have to rely upon its ancient structures for its claim to importance. Its interest lies not so much in relics of the past as in the life of the people there; that life is the past, still alive and functioning. It would be difficult to find another city anywhere in which the everyday vicissitudes of medieval urban life can be studied in such detail. How much longer this will remain true depends upon how quickly the Moroccans can implement their plans to industrialize the nation, since the economy of Fez is based primarily on the market for its hand-made goods. Here is a city of more than half a million people who spend their time at such occupations as hammering and chasing brass and copper, tanning and tooling leather, carding, spinning and weaving wool, and all the other slow processes whereby the raw materials of the land are transformed into artifacts. (These objects, originally designed for the Moroccan market, are now made with the tourist trade in mind, and there is a corresponding deterioration in their workmanship.)

  The visitor senses something in Fez which he describes as a feeling of mystery; that is as good a way as any of describing the impression the city makes. There is no doubt that to the person with a little imagination that impression is very strong: the city seems inexhaustible, incredibly complex, and vaguely menacing. It is possible that the visitor will also find it beautiful, although this is by no means certain. Fez is not a city that everyone can like. Many travelers have a negative reaction to its dark twisting alleys, teeming with people and animals. Anyone subject to claustrophobia may well find it only a nightmarish welter of tunnels, dead-end passageways and windowless walls. To grasp the fascination of the place one has to be the sort of person who enjoys losing himself in a crowd and being pushed along by it, not caring where to or for how long. He must be able to attain relaxation in the idea of being helpless in the midst of that crowd, he must know how to find pleasure in the outlandish, and see beauty where it is most unlikely to appear.

  One of the city’s chief attractions (for the visitor) is also one of its major annoyances (for the inhabitants): its ancient wall. In some places people have done what was formerly unthinkable; they have built houses outside the ramparts. These miles of walls, without which Fez could not have existed, are beginning to stifle the city. There are not many gates, and to get out it is necessary often to make long detours. With the passage of time the wall seems destined to be reduced to a few vestiges of itself. New gateways will be cut through from the crowded interior to the open spaces outside. Eventually whatever is left of the wall will be lost in the new structures made inevitable by the fast-growing population and the unfolding of the city’s economy. For the moment, however, the wall provides a precise demarcation between outside and inside. Automobiles can go through certain gates, but nowhere is it possible for them to continue very far. The ingenuous motorist who imagines that because he has got in, he is going to be able to go on, is in for a sad surprise. The street, narrow from the beginning, is suddenly allowing the walls to touch the car on both sides, and he has got to go back where he came from, but in reverse.

  There is a good deal of frustration involved in the process of enjoying Fez. The blank wall is its symbol, but it is this very secretiveness which gives the city its quality. The Fassi feels intuitively that everything should be hidden: the practice of his religion, his personal possessions (including his womenfolk) and above all his thoughts. If anyone besides him knows what he really thinks, he is already compromised, at a disadvantage, since his mind functions largely in terms of strategy. Moroccans in general are not an “oriental” people, but the bourgeois of Fez are.

  I HAVE NOTICED that the inhabitants have a minimal interest in what exists immediately outside the limits of their city. The dozen miles or so of high ramparts have consistently shut out not only the Berber’s unwelcome person, but also his incompat- ible African culture. Some years ago I was working on a project for the Rockefeller Foundation, recording folk and art music throughout the country. This had to be done in collaboration with the Moroccan government. Inevitably, I came to Fez and presented my credentials to the katib of the governor. “Folk music!” he snorted. “I detest folk music! It is precisely this sort of thing that we are doing our best to stamp out.”

  Nevertheless, since he was a Moroccan and I was a foreigner in his country, he also felt it incumbent upon him to give me some sort of assistance, so that eventually I found myself talking with a group of young musicians who played chaabiya or popular urban music. One of them politely asked me in which city I had so far made most of my recordings. I said that the great majority of them had been made not in any city, but in the country. My answer seemed to bewilder him. “In the country? But there is no music in the country.”

  I said that my experience had been that there was music practically everywhere in Morocco. He smiled. “Oh, you mean the Berbers! I’ve never heard any of their music.”

  “Surely you must have,” I said. “You can hear it only a short distance from here, up that way, down that way – (I pointed) around Tahala or Rhafaii, for instance.”

  He smiled again, this time at my ignorance. “Nobody ever goes to such places,” he said categorically. Aware of that, I still feigned innocence. “Why not?” I demanded.

  “Because there’s nothing there. The people are like savages.”

  The Fassi is a metropolitan, bourgeois in his habits and isolationist in his attitude; he also has the reputation of being a hard man to beat in a business deal, which makes him not entirely popular with his compatriots. There is no doubt that he has an element of arrogance in his character. Aware that his city was the cultural hub of all North Africa, he has been content to let others come to him in order to learn. Civilization ended at the gates of the Medina; outside was the wilderness.

  From its earliest days the growth of the city has followed a particular pattern which might have been expected to destroy it rather than to play a part in its development. The place seems to carry the element of dissension within its very foundations. It has been a schizophrenic city from the outset, when, early in the ninth century, Idriss II founded the two communities which formed its original nucleus. Each time its two parts have been unified, a rival town has sprung into existence next door, an entity which in its turn had to be subdued and ultimately amalgamated. And, from without, the place has been besieged, flooded, pillaged, burned and bombarded so often that it seems incredible there should be anything at all left of it, much less the architecturally homogeneous mass that it is. Through the centuries, the reigning dynasties have been obliged to wage war against its inhabitants in order to make them recognize their sovereignty. Being prepared for a siege is so much a part of the pattern of life that some middle- and upper-class citizens are inclined to keep a large supply of staple foods in their houses, “just in case.”

  The conditions responsible for this display of mass anxiety have not changed basically in the eleven hundred years since the founding of the city. One could use Fez as an object lesson to illustrate the play of forces in the city-versus-country struggle that operates throughout Morocco and determines much of its character. Fez was built at a natural crossroads, the spot where the route from the Sahara to the Mediterranean coast intersects the east-west passage between Algeria and the Atlantic. To impose an economic stranglehold on the newly conquered land it was imperative that the Arabs control these principal arteries of transit. Automatically, Fez became the strategic center, the command of which was a sine qua non for the administration of the entire region. Within the walls there grew up a prosperous commercial city with an imported Semitic culture, while directly outside in the surrounding hills, in full view of the town, lived the infinitely less evolved Berbers, upon whose precarious good will the urban dwellers’ peace of mind largely depended. The pagan Berber
s accepted the new monotheistic religion of Islam, but clashes between two such dissimilar groups were inevitable.

  Despite the government’s efforts to create a more homogenous population, the friction still persists.

  THE STREET GOES down and down, always unpaved, nearly always partially hidden from the sky. Sometimes it is so narrow as to permit only one-way foot traffic; here the beasts of burden scrape their flanks on each side as they squeeze through, and you have to back up or step quickly into a doorway while they pass, the drivers intoning: “Balak, balak, balak ...” Here is the bitter earth odor of new pottery, here the rank smell of hides being tanned, or the stench of a butcher’s stall where the meat, black with flies, ripens in a shaft of dusty sunlight that points like an accusing finger down through the meshes of the latticework. In dark recesses like grottoes are mosaic fountains where women and girls scream invective as they fill their pails and the dust under their feet turns to mud. Then you are walking under an elaborately carved portal hung with ancient bronze lanterns, and you smell the feline scent of fig-trees. A cascade of water rumbles nearby, but it is behind a wall and you never catch a glimpse of it.