The Stories of Paul Bowles (43 page)

A
T BENI MIDAR
there is a barracks. It has many rows of

small buildings, whitewashed, and everything is in the middle of big rocks, on the side of the mountain behind the town. A quite place when the wind is not blowing. A few Spanish still live in the houses along the road. They run the shops. But now the people in the streets are Moslems, mountain men with goats and sheep, or soldiers from the
cuartel
looking for wine. The Spanish sell wine to men they know. One Jew sells it to almost anybody. But there never is enough wine in the town for everybody who wants it. Beni Midar has only one street, that comes down out of the mountains, curves back and forth like a snake between the houses for a while, and goes on, back into the mountains. Sunday is a bad day, the one free time the soldiers have, when they can walk back and forth all day between the shops and houses. A few Spaniards in black clothes go into the church at the hour when the Rhmara ride their donkeys out of the
souk.
Later the Spaniards come out of the church and go home. Nothing else happens because all the shops are shut. There is nothing the soldiers can buy.

Driss had been stationed for eight months in Beni Midar. Because the cabran in charge of his unit had been a neighbor of his in Tetuan, he was
not unhappy. The cabran had a friend with a motorcycle. Together they went each month to Tetuan. There the cabran always saw Driss’s sister, who made a big bundle of food to send back to the barracks for him. She sent him chickens and cakes, cigarettes and figs, and always many hard-boiled eggs. He shared the eggs with two or three friends, and did not complain about being in Beni Midar.

Not even the brothels were open on Sunday. It was the day when everyone walked from one end of the town to the other, back and forth, many times. Sometimes Driss walked like this with his friends. Usually he took his gun and went down into the valley to hunt for hares. When he came back at twilight he stopped in a small café at the edge of town and had a glass of tea and a few pipes of kif. If it had not been the only café he would never have gone into it. Shameful things happened there. Several times he had seen men from the mountains get up from the mat and do dances that left blood on the floor. These men were Jilala, and no one thought of stopping them, not even Driss. They did not dance because they wanted to dance, and it was this that made him angry and ashamed. It seemed to him that the world should be made in such a way that a man is free to dance or not as he feels. A Jilali can do only what the music tells him to do. When the musicians, who are Jilala too, play the music that has the power, his eyes shut and he falls on the floor. And until the man has shown the proof and drunk his own blood, the musicians do not begin the music that will bring him back to the world. They should do something about it, Driss said to the other soldiers who went with him to the café, and they agreed.

He had talked about it with his cabran in the public garden. The cabran said that when all the children in the land were going to school every day there would be no more
djenoun.
Women would no longer be able to put spells on their husbands. And the Jilala and the Hamatcha and all the others would stop cutting their legs and arms and chests. Driss thought about this for a long time. He was glad to hear that the government knew about these bad things. “But if they know,” he thought, “why don’t they do something now? The day they get every one of the children in school I’ll be lying beside Sidi Ali el Mandri.” He was thinking of the cemetery at Bab Sebta in Tetuan. When he saw the cabran again he said: “If they can do something about it, they ought to do it now.” The cabran did not seem interested. “Yes,” he said.

When Driss got his permission and went home he told his father
what the cabran had said. “You mean the government thinks it can kill all evil spirits?” his father cried.

“That’s right. It can,” said Driss. “It’s going to.”

His father was old and had no confidence in the young men who now ran the government. “It’s impossible,” he said. “They should let them alone. Leave them under their stones. Children have gone to school before, and how many were hurt by
djenoun?
But if the government begins to make trouble for them, you’ll see what will happen. They’ll go after the children first.”

Driss had expected his father to speak this way, but when he heard the words he was ashamed. He did not answer. Some of his friends were without respect for God. They ate during Ramadan and argued with their fathers. He was glad not to be like them. But he felt his father was wrong.

One hot summer Sunday when the sky was very blue Driss lay in bed late. The men who slept in his room at the barracks had gone out. He listened to the radio. “It would be good down in the valley on a day like this,” he thought. He saw himself swimming in one of the big pools, and he thought of the hot sun on his back afterward. He got up and unlocked the cupboard to look for his gun. Even before he took it out he said,
“Yab latif!”
because he remembered that he had only one cartridge left, and it was Sunday. He slammed the cupboard door shut and got back into bed. The radio began to give the news. He sat up, spat as far out as he could from the bed, and turned it off. In the silence he heard many birds singing in the
safsaf
tree outside the window. He scratched his head. Then he got up and dressed. In the courtyard he saw Mehdi going toward the stairs. Mehdi was on his way to do sentry duty in the box outside the main gate.

“
Khaï!
Does four rials sound good to you?”

Mehdi looked at him. “Is this number sixty, three, fifty-one?” This was the name of an Egyptian song that came over the radio nearly every day. The song ended with the word nothing. Nothing, nothing, sung over and over again.

Why not? As they walked along together, Driss moved closer, so that his thigh rubbed against Mehdi’s.

“The price is ten,
khoya.
”

“With all its cartridges?”

“You want me to open it up and show you here?” Mehdi’s voice was angry. The words came out of the side of his mouth.

Driss said nothing. They came to the top of the stairs. Mehdi was walking fast. “You’ll have to have it back here by seven,” he said. “Do you want it?”

In his head Driss saw the long day in the empty town. “Yes,” he said. “Stay there.” He hurried back to the room, unlocked his cupboard, and took out his gun. From the shelf he pulled down his pipe, his kif, and a loaf of bread. He put his head outside the door. There was no one in the courtyard but Mehdi sitting on the wall at the other end. Then with the old gun in his hands he ran all the way to Mehdi. Mehdi took it and went down the stairs, leaving his own gun lying on the wall. Driss took up the gun, waited a moment, and followed him. When he went past the sentry box he heard Mehdi’s voice say softly: “I need the ten at seven,
khoya.
”

Driss grunted. He knew how dark it was in there. No officer ever stuck his head inside the door on Sundays. Ten rials, he thought, and he’s running no risk. He looked around at the goats among the rocks. The sun was hot, but the air smelled sweet, and he was happy to be walking down the side of the mountain. He pulled the visor of his cap further down over his eyes and began to whistle. Soon he came out in front of the town, below it on the other side of the valley. He could see the people on the benches in the park at the top of the cliff, small but clear and black. They were Spaniards and they were waiting for the bell of their church to begin to ring.

He got to the highest pool about the time the sun was overhead. When he lay on the rocks afterward eating his bread, the sun burned him. No animals will move before three, he thought. He put his trousers on and crawled into the shade of the oleander bushes to sleep. When he awoke the air was cooler. He smoked all the kif he had, and went walking through the valley. Sometimes he sang. He found no hares, and so he put small stones on the tops of the rocks and fired at them. Then he climbed back up the other side of the valley and followed the highway into the town.

He came to the café and went in. The musicians were playing and singing. The tea drinkers clapped their hands with the music. A soldier cried: “Driss! Sit down!” He sat with his friends and smoked some of
their kif. Then he bought four rials’ worth from the cutter who sat on the platform with the musicians, and went on smoking. “Nothing was moving in the valley today,” he told them. “It was dead down there.”

A man with a yellow turban on his head who sat nearby closed his eyes and fell against the man next to him. The others around him moved to a further part of the mat. The man toppled over and lay on the floor.

“Another one?” cried Driss. “They should stay in Djebel Habib. I can’t look at him.”

The man took a long time to get to his feet. His arms and legs had been captured by the drums, but his body was fighting, and he groaned. Driss tried to pay no attention to him. He smoked his pipe and looked at his friends, pretending that no Jilali was in front of him. When the man pulled out his knife he could not pretend any longer. He watched the blood running into the man’s eyes. It made a blank red curtain over each hole. The man opened his eyes wider, as if he wanted to see through the blood. The drums were loud.

Driss got up and paid the
qahouaji
for his tea. He said good-by to the others and went out. The sun would soon go below the top of the mountains. Its light made him want to shut his eyes, because he had a lot of kif in his head. He walked through the town to the higher end and turned into a lane that led up into another valley. In this place there was no one. Cactuses grew high on each side of the lane, and the spiders had built a world of webs between their thorns. Because he walked fast, the kif began to boil in his head. Soon he was very hungry, but all the fruit had been picked from the cactuses along the lane. He came to a small farmhouse with a thatched roof. Behind it on the empty mountainside there were more cactuses still pink with hundreds of
hindiyats.
A dog in a shed beside the house began to bark. There was no sign of people. He stood still for a while and listened to the dog. Then he walked toward the cactus patch. He was sure no one was in the house. Many years ago his sister had shown him how to pick
hindiyats
without letting the needles get into the flesh of his hands. He laid his gun on the ground behind a low stone wall and began to gather the fruit. As he picked he saw in his head the two blind red holes of the Jilali’s eyes, and under his breath he cursed all Jilala. When he had a great pile of fruit on the ground he sat down and began to eat, throwing the peels over his shoulder. As he ate he grew hungrier, and so he picked more. The picture he had in his head of the man’s face shiny with blood slowly faded. He thought only of the
hindiyats
he was eating. It was almost dark there on the mountainside. He looked at his watch and jumped up, because he remembered that Mehdi had to have his gun at seven o’clock. In the dim light he could not see the gun anywhere. He searched behind the wall, where he thought he had laid it, but he saw only stones and bushes.

“It’s gone,
Allah istir,
” he said. His heart pounded. He ran back to the lane and stood there a while. The dog barked without stopping.

It was dark before he reached the gate of the barracks. Another man was in the sentry box. The cabran was waiting for him in the room. The old gun Driss’s father had given him lay on his bed.

“Do you know where Mehdi is?” the cabran asked him.

“No,” said Driss.

“He’s in the dark house, the son of a whore. And do you know why?”

Driss sat down on the bed. The cabran is my friend, he was thinking. “It’s gone,” he said, and told him how he had laid the gun on the ground, and a dog had been barking, and no one had come by, and still it had disappeared. “Maybe the dog was a
djinn,
” he said when he had finished. He did not really believe the dog had anything to do with it, but he could not think of anything else to say then.

The cabran looked at him a long time and said nothing. He shook his head. “I thought you had some brains,” he said at last. Then his face grew very angry, and he pulled Driss out into the courtyard and told a soldier to lock him up.

At ten o’clock that night he went to see Driss. He found him smoking his
sebsi
in the dark. The cell was full of kif smoke. “Garbage!” cried the cabran, and he took the pipe and the kif away from him. “Tell the truth,” he said to Driss. “You sold the gun, didn’t you?”

“On my mother’s head, it’s just as I told you! There was only the dog.”

The cabran could not make him say anything different. He slammed the door and went to the café in the town to have a glass of tea. He sat listening to the music, and he began to smoke the kif he had taken from Driss. If Driss was telling the truth, then it was only the kif in Driss’s head that had made him lose the gun, and in that case there was a chance that it could be found.

The cabran had not smoked in a long time. As the kif filled his head he began to be hungry, and he remembered the times when he had been a boy smoking kif with his friends. Always they had gone to look for
hindi
yats
afterward, because they tasted better than anything else and cost nothing. They always knew where there were some growing. “A
kouffa
full of good
hindiyats,
” he thought. He shut his eyes and went on thinking.

The next morning early the cabran went out and stood on a high rock behind the barracks, looking carefully all around the valley and the bare mountainside. Not far away he saw a lane with cactuses along it, and farther up there was a whole forest of cactus. “There,” he said to himself.

He walked among the rocks until he came to the lane, and he followed the lane to the farmhouse. The dog began to bark. A woman came to the doorway and looked at him. He paid no attention to her, but went straight to the high cactuses on the hillside behind the house. There were many
hindiyats
still to be eaten, but the cabran did not eat any of them. He had no kif in his head and he was thinking only of the gun. Beside a stone wall there was a big pile of
hindiya
peelings. Someone had eaten a great many. Then he saw the sun shining on part of the gun’s barrel under the peelings. “Hah!” he shouted, and he seized the gun and wiped it all over with his handkerchief. On his way back to the barracks he felt so happy that he decided to play a joke on Driss.