Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories (2 page)

‘Can you get me out of here?’

‘Of course, sir.’

I followed Rachid down a few ancient passageways, liked his gentle company and arranged to meet him after dusk the following night. I would use him to find out the city’s secrets and keep an eye on my back.

Just over twenty-four hours later, walls emerged from the dark night. Rachid emerged from the walls.

‘What would you like to do, sir? Go to a museum or eat something?’

‘Is there a restaurant with music?’

Among the countries of North Africa, Morocco offers the richest, most vibrant and diversified musical tradition and the most articulated contemporary documentation of the many stylistic cultural roots of so-called white African culture. The character of the music heard today in Morocco is a result of the many complex historical vicissitudes of the country, of its ethnic make-up and geographical location.

‘You want belly dancer, sir?’

‘Not really. Do you know Jajouka music, Rachid?’

‘Yes, sir, but there is none here tonight in Fes.’

Jajouka is pagan ritual music that invokes the gods of fecundity, much like the ancient rites of Pan. The Jajouka revere hashish and are known for their 1969 recordings with Rolling Stone Brian Jones.

‘Any other music about hashish?’

‘There is Heddaoua, sir, playing in a restaurant I know.’

The Heddaoua are storytellers of an errant religious sect who normally perform in the squares and market places of small Moroccan towns and villages rather than city restaurants. They recite poems, maxims and proverbs in a strange, allusive and magical language and with a particular style of rhythmic diction. The ultimate scope of their message is an invitation to gives one’s self up to hashish, as a source of freedom and an aid to meditation.

The restaurant was the standard sumptuous
medina
palace. The Heddaoua appeared carrying weird lanterns, crouched on a rug spread out in front of rows of empty bottles and vases of artificial flowers, symbolising a blossomed, magical garden. Live doves rested on the shoulders and heads of the performers. They work in couples, and their form of recitation consists of questions and answers. The recurrent theme is an invitation to smoke. I asked Rachid to translate.

The message was fairly clear, and I was aching for a smoke.

Rachid placed a mixture of kif and hashish in a small clay bowl, which he gently placed at the end of an exquisite cedarwood pipe, handed to me and lit. It was as good as any I’d had for the last twenty years. Perhaps I could squeeze some time for a visit to the hash fields, if only for old times’ sake.

The mellow silence following the departure of the Heddaoua was suddenly punctured by ear-shattering clashes of heavy metal. In walked four males, each wearing a fez with its tassel spinning in time to the rhythm and each pounding enormous iron castanets. Instant frenzy spread through the restaurant. The Gnaoua is a spiritual brotherhood of Sudanese Negroes who, like the Heddaoua, normally perform as musicians and acrobatic dancers in the market places of southern Morocco. They use percussive instruments only. The music is closely related to Mali and Senegalese and is used to exorcise evil spirits. Heads are banged on stone flags, as the musicians eat glass and cut themselves with knives. This was wonderfully mad and made me more determined than ever to revisit the hash plantations.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I
N THIS
KSAR
, where the people have no place to meet but the public square or the earthen benches along the foot of the ramparts on the road to Bechar, here where there is not even a café, I have discovered a kif den. It is in a partially ruined house behind the Mellah, a long hall lighted by a single eye in the ceiling of twisted and smoke-blackened beams. The walls are black, ribbed with lighter colored cracks that look like open wounds. The floor has been made by pounding the earth, but it is soft and dusty. Seldom swept, it is covered with pomegranate rinds and assorted refuse. The place serves as a shelter for Moroccan vagabonds, for nomads, and for every sort of person of dubious intent and questionable appearance. The house seems to belong to no one; as at a disreputable hotel, you spend a few badly advised nights there and go on. It is a natural setting for picturesque and theatrical events, like the antechamber of the room where the crime was committed. In one corner lies a clean red mat, with some cushions from Fez in embroidered leather. On the mat, a large decorated chest which serves as a table. A rosebush with little pale pink blooms, surrounded by a bouquet of garden herbs, all standing in water inside one of those wide earthen jars from the Tell. Further on, a copper kettle on a tripod, two or three teapots, a large basket of dried Indian hemp. The little group of kif smokers requires no other decoration, no other
mise en scène
. They are people who like their pleasure. On a rude perch of palm branches, a captive falcon, tied by one leg.

The strangers, the wanderers who haunt this retreat, sometimes mix with the kif smokers, notwithstanding the fact that the latter are a very closed little community, into which entry is made difficult. But the smokers themselves are travellers who carry their dreams with them across the countries of Islam, worshippers of the hallucinating smoke. The men who happen to meet here at Kenadsa are among the most highly educated in the land.

Hadj Idriss, a tall thin Filali, deeply sunburned, with a sweet face that lights up from within, is one of these rootless ones without family or specific trade, so common in the Moslem world. For twenty-five years he has been wandering from city to city, working or begging, depending on the situation. He plays the
guinbri
, with its carved wooden neck and its two thick strings fastened to the shell of a tortoise. Hadj Idriss has a deep clear voice, ideal for singing the old Andaluz ballads, so full of tender melancholy. Si Mohammed Behaouri, a Moroccan from Meknes, pale-complexioned and with caressing eyes, is a young poet wandering across Morocco and southern Algeria in search of native legends and literature. To keep alive, he composes and recites verse on the delights and horrors of love. Another is from the Djebel Zerhoun, a doctor and witch doctor, small, dry, muscular, his skin tanned by the Sudanese sun under which he has journeyed for many years following caravans to and fro, from the coast of Senegal to Timbuctoo. All day long he keeps busy, slowly pouring out medicine and thumbing through old Moghrebi books of magic. Chance brought them here to Kenadsa. Soon they will set out again, in different directions and on different trails, moving unconcernedly toward the fulfilment of their separate destinies. But it was community of taste that gathered them together in this smoky refuge, where they pass the slow hours of a life without cares.

At the end of the afternoon, a slanting pink ray of light falls from the eye in the ceiling into the darkness of the room. The kif smokers move in and form groups. Each wears a sprig of sweet basil in his turban. Squatting along the wall on the mat, they smoke their little pipes of baked red earth, filled with Indian hemp and powdered Moroccan tobacco. Hadj Idriss stuffs the bowls and distributes them, after having carefully wiped the mouthpiece on his cheek as a gesture of politeness. When his own pipe is empty, he picks out the little red ball of ash and puts it into his mouth – he does not feel it burning him – then, once his pipe is refilled, he uses the still-red-hot cinder to relight the little fire. For hours at a time he does not once let it go out. He has a keen and penetrating intelligence, softened by being constantly in a state of semi-exaltation; his dreams are nourished on the narcotic smoke.

The seekers of oblivion sing and clap their hands lazily; their dream-voices ring out late into the night, in the dim light of the mica-paned lantern. Then little by little the voices fall, grow muffled, the words are slower. Finally the smokers are quiet, and merely stare at the flowers in ecstasy. They are epicureans, voluptuaries; perhaps they are sages. Even in the darkest purlieu of Morocco’s underworld such men can reach the magic horizon where they are free to build their dream-palaces of delight.

W
HAT DOES ONE
experience? What does one see? Marvellous things, is it not so? Wonderful sights? Is it very beautiful? Such are the usual questions which, with a curiosity mingled with fear, those ignorant of hashish address to its adepts. It is, as it were, the childish impatience to know, resembling that of those people never quitted their firesides when they meet a man who returns from distant and unknown countries. They imagine hashish drunkenness to themselves as a prodigious vast theatre of sleight of hand and of juggling, where all is miraculous, all unforeseen. That is a prejudice, a complete mistake. And since for the ordinary run of readers and of questioners the word ‘hashish’ connotes the idea of a strange and topsy-turvy world, the expectation of prodigious dreams (it would be better to say hallucinations, which are, by the way, less frequent than people suppose), I will at once remark upon the important difference which separates the effects of hashish from the phenomena of dream. In dream, that adventurous voyage which we undertake every night, there is something positively miraculous. It is a miracle whose punctual occurrence has blunted its mystery. The dreams of man are of two classes. Some, full of his ordinary life, of his preoccupations, of his desires, of his vices, combine themselves in a manner more or less bizarre with the objects which he has met in his day’s work, which have carelessly fixed themselves upon the vast canvas of his memory. That is the natural dream; it is the man himself. But the other kind of dream, the dream absurd and unforeseen, without meaning or connection with the character, the life and the passions of the sleeper: this dream, which I shall call hieroglyphic, evidently represents the supernatural side of life, and it is exactly because it is absurd that the ancients believed it to be divine. As it is inexplicable by natural causes, they attributed to it a cause external to man, and even to-day, leaving out of account oneiromancers and the fooleries of a philosophical school which sees in dreams of this type sometimes a reproach, sometimes a warning; in short, a symbolic and moral picture begotten in the spirit itself of the sleeper. It is a dictionary which one must study; a language of which sages may obtain the key.

In the intoxication of hashish there is nothing like this. We shall not go outside the class of natural dream. The drunkenness, throughout its duration, it is true, will be nothing but an immense dream, thanks to the intensity of its colours and the rapidity of its conceptions. But it will always keep the idiosyncrasy of the individual. The man has desired to dream; the dream will govern the man. But this dream will be truly the son of its father. The idle man has taxed his ingenuity to introduce artificially the supernatural into his life and into his thought; but, after all, and despite the accidental energy of his experiences, he is nothing but the same man magnified, the same number raised to a very high power. He is brought into subjection, but, unhappily for him, it is not by himself which is already dominant. ‘He would be an angel; he becomes a beast.’ Momentarily very powerful, if, indeed, one can give the name of power of what is merely excessive sensibility without the control which might moderate or make use of it.

Let it be well understood then, by worldly and ignorant folk, curious of acquaintance with exceptional joys, that they will find in hashish nothing miraculous, absolutely nothing, but the natural in a superabundant degree. The brain and the organism upon which hashish operates will only give their ordinary and individual phenomena, magnified, it is true, both in quantity and quality, but always faithful to their origin. Man cannot escape the fatality of his moral and physical temperament. Hashish will be, indeed, for the impressions and familiar thoughts of the man, a mirror which magnifies, yet no more than a mirror.

Here is the drug before your eyes: a little green sweetmeat, about as big as a nut, with a strange smell; so strange that it arouses a certain revulsion, and inclinations to nausea – as, indeed, any fine and even agreeable scent, exalted to its maximum strength and (so to say) density, would do.

Allow me to remark in passing that this proposition can be inverted, and that the most disgusting and revolting perfume would become perhaps a pleasure to inhale if it were reduced to its minimum quantity and intensity.

There! There is happiness; heaven in a teaspoon: happiness, with all its intoxication, all its folly, all its childishness. You can swallow it without fear; it is not fatal; it will in nowise injure your physical organs. Perhaps (later on) too frequent an employment of the sorcery will diminish the strength of your will; perhaps you will be less a man than you are today; but retribution is so far off, and the nature of the eventual disaster so difficult to define! What is it that you risk? A little nervous fatigue tomorrow – no more. Do you not every day risk greater punishment for less reward? Very good then; you have, even, to make it act more quickly and vigorously, imbibed your dose of
extrait gras
in a cup of black coffee. You have taken care to have the stomach empty, postponing dinner till nine or ten o’clock, to give full liberty of action to the poison. At the very most you will take a little soup in an hour’s time. You are now sufficiently provisioned for a long and strange journey; the steamer has whistled, the sails are trimmed; and you have this curious advantage over ordinary travellers that you have no idea where you are going. You have made your choice; here’s to luck.