The Boy Who The Set Fire and Other Stories (24 page)

When we had finally persuaded him that it was time for us to leave, he reluctantly rose from the radio and took us out into the streets to the apothecary market, where I had expressed a desire to go. It is the place you visit if you want the ingredients for making black magic. There were six stalls in a row, all bristling with the dried parts of birds, reptiles and mammals. We wandered slowly, by examining the horns, quills, hair, eggs, bones, feathers, feet and bills that were strung on wires in the doorways.

I was put in mind of the unfortunate Allal and the rich widow, and I described Allal to Moulay Brahim. He knew him; everybody in Marrakech knew him, he declared, adding as he pointed to the rows of glass containers in front of us: “You can get everything for that sort of business here. But you’ve got to know how to blend them. That takes an expert.” He raised his eyebrows significantly and approached the nearest merchant to mutter a few words to him. A packet containing tiny seeds was brought out. Moulay Brahim examined them at some length, and bought fifty grams. “What is it?” I asked him.” But he was enjoying his brief role as mystery man, and merely rattled the seeds in their paper, saying: “Something very special, very special.”

We left Marrakech at noon, driving straight up to Ouirgane, in a valley about three thousand feet above the plain. Brilliant day. Sky like a blue enamel bowl overhead. Lunch outside in the sun at Le Sanglier Qui Fume, our table midway between a chained eagle and a chained monkey, both of which watched us distrustfully while we ate. Below, hidden, somewhere nearby, the little river roared over its rocks. The Grand Atlas sun fiery, Monsieur gave us drooping old straw sombreros to wear during our meal. A tame stork, very proprietary, strutted around, poking its beak into everything. It was wary, however, of the monkey, which had a long bamboo pole in its hand and patiently tried to trip it up each time it came past. Everything excellent: hors d’ouvre, frogs’ legs and chicken paprika. Madame is Hungarian, said she lives in the hope that people coming through Ouirgane will prove to speak her language, “. . . or at least know Budapest,” she added. Obviously disappointed in us. On up to the pass at Tiz’n Test and over the top. The valley of the Souss thick with a mist that looked like smoke. Only the long sloping rim of the Anti-Atlas showed in the sky to the south, fifty miles across. Below, a gulf of vapor. Got into Taroudant at seven. The heat was still everywhere inside the walls. While I was unpacking, a procession of Guennaoua shuffled by in the street. (The Guennaoua are a Sudanese religious cult whose members practice medico-psychic therapy.) Tried to get out through a door in the patio, but it was padlocked. I peeked through a crack and saw them going past slowly, carrying candle lanterns. The pounding of the drums shook the air.

After Taroudant—Tiznit, Tanout, Tirmi, Tiffermit. We cross great hot dust-colored valleys among the naked mountains, dotted with leafless argan trees as gray as puffs of smoke. Sometimes a dry stream twists among the boulders at the bottom of a valley, and there is a peppering of locust-ravaged date palms whose branches look like the ribs of a broken umbrella. Or hanging to the flank of a mountain a thousand feet below the road is a terraced village, visible only as an abstract design of flat roofs, some of the color of the earth of which they are built, and some bright yellow with the corn that is spread out to dry in the sun.

The argan trees are everywhere, thousands of them, squat and thorny, anchored to the rocks that lie in their dubious shade. They flourish where nothing else can live, not even weeds or cacti. Their scaly bark looks like crocodile hide and feels like iron. Where the argan grows the goats have a good life. The trunk is short and the branches begin only a few feet from the ground. This suits the goats perfectly; they climb from branch to branch eating both the leaves and the greasy, bitter, olivelike fruit. Subsequently their excrement is collected, and the argan pits in it are pressed to make a thick cooking oil.

Tafraout is rough country—the Bad Lands of South Dakota on a grand scale, with Death Valley in the background. The mountains are vast humps of solid granite, their sides strewn with gigantic boulders; at sunset the black line of their crests is deckle-edged in silhouette against the flaming sky. Seen from a height, the troughs between the humps are like long gray lakes, the only places in the landscape where there is at least a covering of what might pass for loose earth. Above the level surface of this detritus in the valleys rise smooth expanses of solid rock.

The locusts have fed well here too. Tafraout could never subsist on its dates. But the bourgeois Berbers who live here learned long ago that organized commerce could provide greater security than either the pastoral or the agricultural life. They created a virtual monopoly on grocery and hardware stores all over Morocco. Taking his male children with him, a man goes to a city in the north where he has a shop (or several shops) and remains there for two or three years at a stretch, living usually in conditions of extreme discomfort, sleeping on the floor behind the counter.

Being industrious, thrifty and invariably successful, he is open to a good deal of adverse criticism from those of his compatriots who despise his frugal manner of living and deride his custom of leaving boys of eight in charge of his shops. But the children run the establishments quite as well as their elders: they know the price of every object and are equally difficult to deal with in the national pastime of persuading the seller to lower his asking price. The boys merely refuse to talk; often they do not even look at the customer. They quote the price, and if it is accepted, hand over the article and return the change. It is a very serious matter to be in charge of a store, and the boys behave accordingly.

As you come up from Tiznit over the pass, the first Tafraout settlements on the trail occur at the neck of a narrow valley; built among, underneath and on top of the great fallen lumps of granite, the fortress-houses dominate the countryside. It is hard to reconcile the architectural sophistication of these pink and white castles with the unassuming aspect of their owners back in the north, just as it is difficult to believe that the splendid women, shrouded in black and carrying copper amphoras or calfskin-covered baskets on their shoulders, can be these inconspicuous little men’s wives and sisters. But then, no one would expect a tribe of shopkeepers to have originated in the fastnesses of this savage landscape.

We arrived at Tafraout about five in the afternoon, after having a puncture ten miles up the trail. Hotel completely empty, save for a handful of ragged children and one old gentleman in a djellaba who had been left in charge of the premises while the regular guardian was down in Tiznit. He helped with luggage, hung up our clothes, prepared the beds, brought pails of water for washing and bottles of drinking water, and filled the lamps with kerosene. Slept heavily and late. Woke once in night to hear a great chorus of howling and barking below in the village. Lunch better than dinner last night, but everything was drowned in an inch of hot oil. Tajine (stew) of beef, almonds, grapes, olives and onions. Came back up to the hotel to make coffee on the terrace afterward. The old man who received us last night was sitting in a corner, buried under his djellaba. He saw we were looking at magazines, got up and came over. Soon he said timidly: “Is that an American book you are reading?” I said it was. He pointed to a color photograph and asked: “And are the mountains in America really all green like that?” I told him many of them were. He stood a while studying the picture. Then he said bitterly: “It’s not pretty here. The locusts eat the trees and all the rest of the plants. Here we’re poor.”

During the next few days I discovered how unrealistic my recording project had been. We visited at least two dozen villages in the region, and came no closer to uncovering an occasion where there might be music. The previous year even the government had needed thirty-six hours’ notice for sending its directives via a network of caids and messengers up into the heights, before the musicians had put in their appearance in Tafraout. When Friday morning arrived, my driver said to me at breakfast: “What do you think? Do we leave tomorrow for Essaouira?” I said I supposed there was nothing else to do. Then I suggested we go down to the hospital to see if they had any Rovamycine, a French antibiotic effective in the treatment of intestinal infections. (Indispensable for traveling in the remoter regions of Morocco!)

A bearded Moroccan interne stood under a pepper tree in the hospital’s patio, a syringe in his hand; he said the doctor had gone to Agadir for the weekend, but that if I wanted I could speak with the French pharmacist, who in the absence of his chief was in charge of the institution.

The pharmacist, a Monsieur Rousselot, arrived rubbing his eyes. He had been working all night, he told us. There was no Rovamycine. “It’s an expensive drug. They don’t supply us with that sort of thing here.”

We invited him to the hotel for a whiskey. Alcoholic drinks are not on sale in Tafraout, since Moslems cannot drink legally. The only Europeans in the region were the doctor and the pharmacist, and they got by with an occasional bottle of wine or cognac they brought from Tiznit.

The pharmacist brought with him a Moroccan medical student who had just arrived from Rabat the day before; he thought Tafraout the strangest place he had ever seen. We sat on the terrace in the scalding sun and watched the crows flying in a slowly revolving circle high above the valley.

I was disappointed in my present visit, I told Monsieur Rousselot, because I hadn’t got into the life of the people and because there was no edible food. The second reason touched the Frenchman in him. “I shall do my best to fill these unfortunate lacunae,” he said. “First let us go to my house for lunch. I have a good chef.”

The house behind the hospital was comfortable. There were several servants. Walls were lined with books, particularly art books, for like many French men of medicine, Monsieur Rousselot loved painting, and had a hankering to try his hand at it himself one day.

After lunch, as we sat over coffee and brandy, I complimented Monsieur Rousselot on the excellence of his food, told him how grateful we were for his kind invitation, and said I hoped we might see him again on a subsequent visit, since we would be leaving in the morning. Seddiq, the medical student, looked crestfallen.

“Oh, no! You can’t go!” cried Monsieur Rousselot. “I have something much better for you tomorrow.”

I said we had to start moving northward.

“But this is something special. Something I discovered. I’ve never shown it to anyone before.”

“It’s not possible,” I said.

He pleaded. “Tomorrow is Saturday. Leave on Monday morning. We can spend tomorrow night in the palace and have Sunday morning for exploring the oases.”

“Two days!” I cried. But the curiosity he had counted on awakening must have shown through my protestations. Before we left his house I had agreed to go to Tassemit. [Tassemsit is not the real name of the town. The author was taken there contingent upon the understanding that he would not use its true name.] I could scarcely have resisted, after his description of the place. According to him, Tassemsit was a feudal town at the bottom of a narrow canyon, which by virtue of being the seat of an influential religious brotherhood had so far escaped coming under the governmental jurisdiction, and was still functioning in a wholly traditional fashion. Absolute power was nominally in the hands of a nineteen-year-old girl, the present hereditary saint whose palace was inside the walls.

In reality, however, said Monsieur Rousselot, lowering his voice to a whisper, it was the family chauffeur who held the power of life and death over the citizens of Tassemsit. The old Cherif, father of the girl-saint, for many years had run the
zaouia
where religious pilgrims came to pray and leave offerings. Not long ago he had bought a car to get up to Tafraout now and then, and had hired a young Marrakchi to drive it. The old Cherif’s somewhat younger wife, as wives sometimes do, had found the chauffeur interesting, and “
l’inévitable
” had happened: the old Cherif had suddenly died and the wife had married the young Marrakchi, who had taken charge of everything: the woman, the holy daughter, the car, the palace and the administration of the shrine and the town around it. “It’s an equivocal situation,” said Monsieur Rousselot with relish. “You’ll see.”

It is early morning the next day. Others still asleep. Big grilled window beside my head. A world of dappled sunlight and shadow on the other side of the wrought-iron filigree, an orchard of fig trees where small birds dart and chirp. Then the mud wall, and beyond, the stony floor of the canyon. A few pools of water in the riverbed. The women are out there, getting water, bringing it back in jugs. Background to all views: the orange side wall of the canyon, perpendicular and high enough to block out the sky from where I sit on the mattress.

We heard more lurid details about the place from Rousselot, Saturday during lunch. When the chauffeur took over in Tassemsit he conceived the idea of providing girls to keep the pilgrims occupied at night, when the
zaouia
is closed. A great boost to the local economy. A holy city of sin, said Rousselot with enthusiasm. Merely speak to the chauffeur, and you get any woman in town, even if she happens to be married.

He had hardly finished telling us all this when a little fat man came in. Rousselot’s face was a study in chagrin, dropped jaw and all. He rallied then, introduced the little man around as Monsieur Omar, and made him sit down with us for coffee. He was some sort of government employee. When he heard that we were about to leave for Tassemsit, Monsieur Omar said very simply that he would go with us. It was clear enough that he wasn’t wanted, but since nobody said anything to the contrary, he came along, sitting in back with Rousselot and Seddiq, the medical student. The trail was rough in spots on the way up over the peaks just south of Tafraout. Going down the other side it was narrower, but the surface was no worse. Had we met another car, one of us would have had to back up for a half hour.