Travels: Collected Writings, 1950-1993

  With this phenomenon in mind, many of those who planned to attend the Hutton ball have been concerned lest the police protection provided for prospective guests might prove insufficient, and lest “hoodlums” thus manage to molest them before they ever arrived at the house. But the police don’t have the opportunity to earn this much extra money every night, so they are being very conscientious. This includes smiling now and then at the foreigners distastefully picking their way down the none-too-clean passageways. The address given in the invitation is erroneous: Derb Sidi Hosni is not in the Casbah, but well outside it, below the ramparts.

  When we get down to Sidi Hosni, there is a crowd of Moroccans standing along the railing by the saint’s tomb, watching what goes on below in front of the entrance to the house. We pass through a further cordon of police, have our names checked by a row of men at the door, and go in. Immediately we are presented to our hostess, who stands in a doorway at the top of a short flight of stairs. Beyond here, inside, are some two hundred guests amusing themselves, but the house is so designed that there are surprisingly few people in any one spot. This impression is confirmed when we begin to wander through the rooms. Some are completely empty; others have ten or fifteen people in them. There is a certain amount of movement en masse; groups of guests speaking Italian or French hurry by, in search of other groups. On a partially uncovered terrace overlooking a dark, well-lit patio there are thirty or forty people sitting at tables eating. Waiters rush in all directions.

  We are greeted by a Spanish friend who has just got off the plane from Madrid. He has been up there seeing Sam Spiegel, for whom he has written a filmscript. I want to talk about the script, but Emilio is more interested in showing us a piece of red velvet which hangs on the wall of an inner room, and which is insured for a million dollars, so we go to look at that. When we get there I understand the detail about the insurance, for the cloth, originally the property of a certain maharajah, is decorated with a border about a foot wide which is embroidered with large pearls, rubies and emeralds. I examine it closely and announce that the center of one of the designs, a particularly large emerald, is missing. Jane, who has sat down at the base of the cloth among some pillows also sewn with pearls and sapphires, jumps up nervously and says: “Let’s sit somewhere else.” I have already recognized members of Tangier’s secret police mingling with the guests.

  Strains of Djibli music are coming from a nearby room. We go in that direction. On our way we meet an old Tangier resident who stops us and remarks: “It’s a fine house, isn’t it?” We agree. “It’s the last of the great Moroccan houses. There’ll never be another.” (Every square inch of plaster in the house is hand-incized with lacelike arabesques.) “The plaster work alone,” explains the old gentleman, “took a gang of workmen more than ten years to do. I used to come and watch them work. The old maalem was from Fez. He’s dead now, of course. They all are. Have you noticed the angle of the incisions? It changes gradually according to the height. Below eye-level they slant one way. At eye-level they’re horizontal. At ten feet they slant a little the other way. Up there,” he pointed to the top of the wall twenty-five feet above us, “the slant is very much accentuated. Nobody knows how to do it now.” I say that is interesting, and that I had not known it. “Oh, yes,” he says. “Otherwise you don’t get the same illusion of depth all the way up. It’s a beautiful house.” Again we agree, and go into the room from which the native music is coming.

  Jane Bowles (right) at a Tangier ball, with the Comtesse de Faille and Jay Haselwood, owner of the Parade Bar, an ‘international Tangier’ landmark

  Among the mountains of cushions on the floor recline a dozen or so Moroccans in turbans and bdeyas. They are playing hand drums, tambourines, lutes and guinbris. There are two youths dressed in the traditional costume of Djibli boy-dancers (always semi-disguised as girls) doing somewhat prim belly-dances. In a corner of this room is an old Moroccan servant in scarlet ser-rouelles, squatting on the floor beside a large American flag built of flowers. The stripes are alternate rows of jasmine and hibiscus. The square for the stars, in the darkest part of the corner, is of some blue flower I’m not able to identify. The old man is afraid someone is going to step on the flag, which someone tells me is his creation. He has bordered the whole thing with candles, but they are not yet lighted. An English lady comes by and says: “The Ameddican flag. How sweet!” The old man looks up at her distrustfully

  There are bars here and there. Since neither of us drinks, we don’t stop at them. In one room there is an almost invisible balcony halfway up the wall; from behind its moucharabia comes the sound of a piano playing a Mozart sonata. I try to find a spot from where I can see the performer, and finally get a glimpse of a man in tails sitting up there. One of the belly-dancers slithers into the room and circulates briefly among the guests, doing a neck and shoulder dance, but he has lost touch with headquarters; the Nazarene music disturbs him, and he hurries back to his own music. Jane suddenly sees someone from Rabat from whom she wants some political information; she ditches me and goes off with him. I stray out onto a small terrace and look at the view. The fog has lifted and the moon is bright over the city. It is a fine night, after all, if perhaps a little cool for ladies in décolleté attire. A White Russian woman comes up to me and tells me that more than thirty people have had to be turned away from the door. Some had invitations with them which they had ingenuously bought from Moroccans who are presumed to have stolen them, (they have been fetching up to 20,000 francs each during the past few days) and some had no invitations at all. An American woman, the wife of a local banker, arrived fully bedecked, and on being refused admission became hysterical. As the police hurried her away, she screamed; “You’ll hear from me about this!” “Fantastic,” I say to the Russian woman, and then I decide to go and eat something.

  The food all looks extremely rich. I notice several huge lobsters waiting to be dissected. I sit with a Britisher and his wife who apparently know me, although I’m not able to identify them. Suddenly the woman stares at her arm incredulously and cries to her husband: “It’s gone!” The man registers dismay, says: “Which one?” “The platinum grapes,” she says, rising and looking helplessly around her. “Do excuse us,” says the husband, and they leave the table and disappear.

  Soon Jane comes along with some friends. “Did you find out what you wanted to know?” I ask her. “Yes,” she replies; she is obviously in good humor. We climb a long stairway and come out onto a broad terrace where at least a hundred people are standing; it is here that everyone is concentrated. Another flight of stairs leads us to the top terrace. Here a big dance floor has been built. Moroccans in slave costumes are sprinkling wax over it, taking care to make little designs of the powder as they work. A pavilion has been constructed to house the orchestra, which is playing Latin-American dance music. The combined façades of fifteen or twenty native houses just above and facing the Hutton house have been freshly whitewashed and their woodwork painted, and the whole mass is brilliantly floodlighted. There are Moroccans in all the windows and along the edges of the roofs, watching the show. But if the party is entertainment for them, the floodlighting of their dwellings makes it clear that these are meant to be a dramatic backdrop for the party, and indeed nothing in the house itself strikes me as being nearly so theatrical in effect as this unexpected view of the quarter of Amrah with its unmoving rows of shrouded women, merely sitting and looking. On the other side of the terrace, the native houses go down steeply toward the harbor, their flat white roofs making a kind of stairway in the moonlight. And now, as I examine the nearby roofs and my eyes grow used to the relative darkness of the night, I see that we are surrounded by staring Moroccans on all sides. Some are rolled in blankets, lying on mats, some are leaning out the tiny windows, some are just sitting cross-legged on their terraces under the moon. They don’t seem to be talking to one another, and it is obvious that in order to miss nothing they are going to stay where they are until the party is over. I ment
ion to Jane, the English lady who lost her bracelet. “It’s all right,” she says. “Each guest is insured for a million francs.” While I am trying to understand the reason for this arbitrary figure, she says she is cold, and so we go back down into the house.

  Now there are a few more guests in the room with the Moroccan musicians, and the air is full of kif smoke. They are all puffing on their sebsis at the moment, stretched out among the cushions in attitudes of extreme comfort. Someone is singing as if to himself, and someone is beating a drum in a desultory fashion. Soon the old man begins to light the candles around his flag of flowers, and the dancing boys rise, tighten their sashes, straighten their turbans, and once again go into their ancient routines. It is apparent that they have been smoking a good deal; their expressions and gestures are more obsessive. The state of trance is not distant. The music is better, too, particular in its rhythm. One dancer moves like a sleep-walker afflicted with chorea in the direction of a divan where two American couples, a European lady, and her Moroccan lover are sitting. When he arrives opposite the Moroccan, he makes the customary obeisance before him and rises to his feet with his arms outstretched. The Moroccan hands his glass to the woman beside him and gets to his feet, and the two begin a long, serious mutual belly-dance facing each other, exactly as if they were in a tent-café at an amara in the mountains. No one pays them much attention. The other dancer singles out the son of a British peer and invites him to dance, which he does, but he seems to think it is amusing, and he does not know the steps. As far as I can make out, he is doing an exhibition rumba. After a long five minutes he stops, executes a mock bow to the boy, and leaves the room. The Moroccan guest, one of the very few Moslems present in a capacity other than that of servant (apart from the secret police) continues to dance until the end of the piece, and then takes a thousand-franc note from his pockets, runs his tongue over it, and plasters it against the youth’s forehead. The next dance finds the boy still wearing the money.

  It seems that some Gypsies have been imported from Granada for our pleasure. Everyone is on his way to a large patio where they are about to perform. We go in that direction, find it impossible to get into the patio because there are so many people already installed there, and decided to go to the upper terrace and look down. On our way up we meet our hostess coming down. “Come and see the Gypsies,” she says. “There’s no room,” I tell her. “We’re really going to try and see them from above.” She shrugs. “Really? I was told to go down.” She continues on her way and we on ours. Once on the terrace we kneel on cushions and look down. I see the motionless Moslems up there on their roofs, and I wonder if they are able to see the fandango going on in the patio. On a remote and less brightly lighted part of the terrace a few people are lying on the pillows that cover the floor, talking and looking up at the moon. The dancers are directly below us, but they are not always visible. They are extremely professional, and so is the guitarist, – all of them very precise, as flamenco performers must be. On the western side of our terrace there is a throne of brocades, feathers and spears; it is a nook where the hostess can receive her particular friends during the party. I have not seen her use it, but a photo in the London Daily Mail of two days later will show her there, surrounded by intimates, some time shortly before dawn.

  It is after three o’clock and we are sleepy. We are worried, too, that we will have to walk all the way down through the Medina to the Zoco Chico in order to get a cab, since there is no way for any vehicle to get anywhere near the house, nor is there a parade de taxis in the neighborhood. No one else is leaving so early, but with the help of a guest who knows someone in the police, we are finally presented to a taxi-driver standing in the crowd on the street above, and he takes us up to the Place de la Casbah where his cab is waiting. When I get home I am not sleepy any more, so I decide to record the muezzins calling the fjer. At this time of year the pre-dawn call to prayer lasts roughly from four fifteen to four forty-five. A little past five I get into bed and listen to the playback. I have recorded the fjer from my window innumerable times before; each night it is a different arrangement of many voices chanting from many minarets, always against a rich background of cockcrow, dogbark and assbray. But tonight there are faint strains of Nazarene music floating from time to time across the auditory landscape: it is the dance orchestra atop the Hutton house, a good mile and a half to the east. I go to sleep. The next day I hear that by nine o’clock in the morning the ball was definitely over.

  (On August 27th, two days before the party, the Moroccan authorities closed down both the local newspapers published for the foreign colony of Tangier: the daily Dépéche Marocaine and the weekly Tangier Gazette, the oldest paper in Morocco. The suppression of the English-language paper, which has been appearing since 1883, caused consternation, because it was preceded by a savage campaign in the Moroccan press; the editor, an American, was denounced as a stooge for the foreign colony in general, a group consisting, it alleged, of “thieves and smugglers” who should be deported. The violence of the attack shocked a good many people. It’s not unlikely that more substantial shocks than this are in store for Tangier’s foreign residents in the not-too-distant future. The question is how spectacular can the disparity between the very well-fed and the nearly starving segments of the population be, without the danger of incidents tending to reduce that disparity?)

  The Route to Tassemsit

  Holiday, February 1963; Their Heads Are Green, 1963

  WHENEVER I LEAVE Tangier to go south, my home takes on the look of a place where serious disaster has just struck. The night before I set out on this particular trip the usual disorder prevailed. There were crates of canned foodstuffs and bundles of blankets and pillows in the living room. The recording equipment was scattered over an unnecessarily large area, so that coils of extra cable hid the portable butane-gas stove and boxes of tape covered the road maps. The servants had induced me to write down the specifications of the things they hoped I would remember to buy for them while I was away. Fatima wanted a white woolen blanket at least eight meters long, and Mina a silver-plated circular tray with three detachable legs. Following tradition, they had scrupulously insisted that these things were to be paid for out of their wages after I returned, and I had agreed, although each of us was aware that such deductions would never be made. Moroccan etiquette demands that when the master of the house goes on a journey he bring back souvenirs for everyone. The farther he goes and the longer he stays, the more substantial these gifts are expected to be.

  In this country, departure is often a pre-dawn activity. After the half-hour of early morning prayer-calling is finished and the muezzins have extinguished the lights at the tops of the minarets, there is still about an hour of dark left. The choir of roosters trails on in the air above the rooftops of the city until daybreak. It is a good moment to leave, just as the sky is growing white in the east and objects are black and sharp against it. By the time the sun was up Christopher and I were far out in the country, rolling along at a speed determined only by the curves and the occasional livestock in the road. The empty highway, visible far ahead, measured off the miles of grandiose countryside, and along the way no billboards came between us and the land.

  During the last six months of 1959 I traveled some twenty-five thousand miles around Morocco, recording music for the Library of Congress on a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. The quality of the material was uniformly splendid; nevertheless, one always has preferences. After a great deal of listening, the tapes which interested me most were the ones I had recorded in Tafraout, a region in the western Anti-Atlas. Since I had managed to get only six selections there, I wanted now to go back and try to find some more, although this time it would have to be without the assistance of the Moroccan government. By my inland itinerary there was a distance of 1,370 kilometers (855 miles) to be covered between Tangier and Tafraout, and the roads would be fairly good all the way. The direct route to Marrakesh via Rabat runs over flat terrain and has a certai
n amount of traffic along it. The unfrequented interior route we used, which leads through the western foothills of the Rif Mountains and over the Middle Atlas, takes an extra day, but is beautiful at every point.

  Beyond Xauen we followed the River Loukos for a while, here a clear, swift stream at the bottom of a narrow valley. Christopher, who was driving, suggested that it was time for lunch. We stopped, spread a rug under an old olive tree and ate, listening to the sound of the water skipping over the stones beside us. The hills rose steeply on both sides of the river; there was not a person or a dwelling in sight. We started out again. A half-hour further on, we rounded a corner and came upon a man lying face down on the paved surface of the road, his djel-laba covering his head. Immediately I thought: he’s dead. We stopped, got out, prodded him a bit, and he sat up, rubbing his eyes, mumbling, annoyed at being awakened. He explained that the clean, smooth road was a better place to sleep than the stony ground beside it. When we objected that he might easily be killed, he replied with fine peasant logic that no one had killed him yet. Nevertheless, he got up and walked a few yards off the highway, where he slumped down again all in one motion, wrapped the hood of his djellaba around his head, and went back into the comfortable world of sleep.

  The next day was hotter. We climbed up along the slowly rising ramp of the Middle Atlas, a gray, glistening landscape. The shiny leaves of the scrub live oaks, and even the exposed bedrock beneath, reflected the hot light of the overhead sun. Further along, on the southern slope of the mountains, we passed the mangled body of a large ape that had not got out of the road fast enough – an unusual sight here, since the monkeys generally stay far from the highways.