A Life Full of Holes Read online

  Driss ben Hamed Charhadi

  (Larbi Layachi)

  A Life Full of Holes

  Foreword by Vijay Seshadri

  A Novel Recorded and Translated by

  Paul Bowles

  Even a life full of holes, a life of nothing but waiting, is better than no life at all

  Charhadi’s commentary on a Moghrebi saying

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Foreword

  Introduction

  1 The Orphan

  2 The Journey to Menarbiyaa

  3 The Shepherd

  4 The Oven

  5 The Whores

  6 Malabata

  7 At Mustapha’s Café

  8 The Wire

  9 The Journey to Tanja

  10 Merkala

  11 Zohra

  12 Znagui

  13 The House of the Nazarenes

  14 Farid’s Sisters

  15 Omar

  16 The Master of the House

  17 Mseud

  About the Authors

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  FOREWORD

  Neglected books, if they’re good enough or, better yet, if they have the qualities of a classic, often possess an unexpected currency and cultural resiliency. Something keeps them alive and fresh along the margins and in the interstices of collective memory. I’ve mentioned A Life Full of Holes many times to friends and acquaintances of mine who read a lot with the idea of introducing them to a discovery, and am almost always surprised and disappointed to hear them say that they know it and like it as much as I do. The reasons these readers know the book, and the reasons they like it, vary. Some are students of Islamic societies or North African societies or postcolonial societies. Some are particularly sympathetic to the annals—short, simple, or otherwise—of the poor. Others are connoisseurs of the work of Paul Bowles or of memoirs and autobiographies. Still others are knowledgeable consumers of oral history, itself an unjustly neglected genre (the oral historian Gerald Albarelli first told me about A Life Full of Holes).

  My friends and I don’t say much about A Life Full of Holes after we uncover our mutual enthusiasm. We usually concur that it is a masterpiece and go on quickly to other subjects. The abruptness is significant, more so than our agreeing that it is a masterpiece. A Life Full of Holes is a masterpiece in the sense that it is original, shapely, riveting, illuminating, and not ephemeral. By calling it a masterpiece and moving on, though, we aren’t concerned with its literary value but, rather, are tacitly admitting that we’re confused about what to make of this peculiar artifact and have been forced to retreat to the safety of an abstract encomium. This confusion extends to a determination of the genre to which A Life Full of Holes belongs. At the beginning of his preface, Paul Bowles says the book is “invented,” and tells us it is the invention of an illiterate Moroccan acquaintance of his in Tangier, Driss ben Hamed Charhadi (the name is also an invention), who asked his help in making a book, help Bowles gave him by taping his dictation and then translating the tapes literally, without adding, altering, or deleting. Bowles then calls the book, in passing, a novel, before subsiding for the bulk of the preface into neutrality about its ontological status, resorting to words such as “story,” “episode,” “text.”

  A Life Full of Holes doesn’t read like a novel; it reads like the truth. Bedrock narrative, laid flush against language, without recourse to devices that create and sustain the illusions of literary perspective—chronological manipulation, character development, mise-en-scène, description, geography, research, introspection—seems to be what we have in our hands. The flatness of the storytelling is extreme, but though the narration has a straightforward orality that earlier Western generations would have called primitive, there are paradoxes which suggest that the author is anything but naïve. As Bowles says, Charhadi is a master storyteller who effortlessly “keeps the thread of his narrative almost equally taut at all points.” He possesses, according to Bowles, solid editorial intelligence. He brings his stories out whole, without hesitation; he either has long rehearsed them or, maybe as likely given the dreamlike quality of the transitions and the lack of emphasis and epiphany in the action, has entered into something resembling a visionary trance. And he is blasé, rather than merely oblivious, about internal inconsistencies. The narrator seems to have had at least two childhoods, time frames piggyback on one another, certain recurring characters—the mother, for example, and the egregious stepfather—are so conveniently static that it is easy to suspect that Charhadi has grown indifferent, because of the pleasure he takes in his storytelling and in the sound of his own voice, to the exigencies of documentary fidelity.

  These elements, though they might or might not be evidence of a hidden narrative self-consciousness, don’t, at least for this reader, weaken the truth force of A Life Full of Holes. Instead, they confirm the well-known proposition that truth really is stranger than fiction and provoke the recognition that memory has its own logic, its own sense of chronological coherence, its own uncanny understanding of the passage of the self through time. Freed of the repressive mechanisms of our supersubtle narrative traditions, how would we tell our stories? In his own writing, Bowles worked with delicate, and often dangerous, material that required infinite circumspection and restraint in its handling. His habits of circumspection and restraint served him well when he found Charhadi. What he has given us, with an interference that is as minimal as possible, seems to be not a story or stories but the narrative plasma from which stories are made.

  A Life Full of Holes features jailbreaks, visits to prostitutes, episodes of criminal behavior, moments of startling existential absurdity. It gives us constant glimpses of colonized and decolonizing geographies, which are so much the source of our current crises. It can teach us as well as anything I know about what it actually means to be poor in the Third World. It offers as convincing a representation as I’ve encountered of the stupendous, transcendent fatalism at the heart of Islam. All this relevance is dwarfed, though, by the redemptive act of narration itself, which is the deepest value that A Life Full of Holes has to offer. Charhadi seems to have been waiting all his life to put things down, and he recognized his opportunity when it came for the miracle that it was and seized it. The word for book in Arabic is kitab, and it has a numinousness and magic that derives in Islamic societies from the presence and power of the Book, the Qur’an, which is not an account of God but comprises His actual words, dictated by His emissary to the Prophet. Illiterate and dependent though he was, Charhadi, a writer of a piece with his civilization, knew what a serious thing a book is. He wanted to make one, and he did.

  VIJAY SESHADRI

  INTRODUCTION

  The man who invented this book, and along with it the name of Driss ben Hamed Charhadi, is a singularly quiet and ungregarious North African Moslem. His forebears are from a remote mountainous region where, however, Moghrebi Arabic rather than a Berber tongue is spoken. He is totally illiterate. His speech in Moghrebi is clear and correct. Like a peasant’s, it is studded with rustic locutions and proverbs. The fact that translating and compiling the novel was a comparatively simple process is due mainly to the sureness with which he proceeds in telling a story. He knows beforehand just what he is going to say, and he says it succinctly and eloquently.

  The book came to exist in a roundabout fashion. Charhadi used to call by to see me from time to time, usually in the evening on his way home from the cinema. On one of these occasions he had been to see an Egyptian “historical” film. People in this part of the world are prone to confuse the intent of feature films with that of newsreels. Was it possible, Charhadi wanted to know, that the entire city of Cairo had
been destroyed without his having heard about it on the radio? When I told him how fictional films are made and what they are meant to be, he was particularly struck by the fact that it is not forbidden to “lie.” I said that no one thought of film-making in those terms. “And books, like the books you write,” he pursued. “They are all lies, too?”

  “They’re stories, like the Thousand and One Nights. You don’t call them lies, do you?”

  “No, because they’re true. They happened long ago when the world was different from the way it is now, that’s all.”

  I did not argue the point. Instead, I asked him: “And how about the stories the men from the country sometimes tell in the market place? Are they true, too?”

  “Ah, but they’re only stories. Everybody knows they’re just for fun.”

  “That’s like my books. And that’s like the films. Everybody knows they’re only stories.”

  “And it’s not forbidden,” he said half to himself. “But then anybody would have the right to make a book! I could, or my mother could. Anybody!”

  “That’s right. Anybody can, if he has a story to tell and knows how to tell it.”

  “And he doesn’t have to send it to the government for permission?”

  “Not in my country,” I told him.

  A few days later he telephoned me. “May I see you tonight? It’s about something important.”

  We set the time, and he arrived. He did not come at once to the point of his visit. Presently he said: “I’ve been thinking. I want to make a book, with the help of Allah. You could put it into your language and give it to the book factory in your country. Would that be allowed?”

  “I told you anything’s allowed. But making a book is a lot of work. It would take a long time.”

  “I see. And you haven’t enough time.”

  “I would have, if it were really good,” I said. “The only way to know is to tell some of the story. Come tomorrow night and we’ll try it.”

  The next night when he came, he said: “I thought about it last night before I went to sleep, and I know everything I want to say.”

  He sat down on the m’tarrba beside the fireplace. I put the microphone in front of him and started a tape-recorder. After a long time he began to speak.

  Immediately I knew that whatever the story might turn out to be, his manner of telling it left nothing to be desired. It was as if he had memorized the entire text and rehearsed the speaking of it for weeks; there was no indication that it was being improvised. About an hour later I had “The Wire” complete on tape.

  “That’s not the beginning,” he said. “I thought I’d tell that first, and see if you liked it.”

  “What do you think about it?” I countered.

  “I think it’s a good story, but maybe no one else will.”

  “It sounds very fine in Moghrebi,” I said. “But I can’t tell you anything until I’ve changed it into English.”

  When I had the first half-dozen pages translated, I told him that I thought we should do some more.

  “Hamdoul’lah,” he said. “Thank God.”

  Perhaps two months later I had finished putting “The Wire” into English. At the outset I had seen that the translation should be a literal one, in order to preserve as much as possible of the style. Nothing needed to be added, deleted, or altered.

  During this period Charhadi came several times a week, while we went over the spoken text word by word. The apocryphal material disclosed by this examination had its own philological and ethnographical interest, and would have filled a book by itself. One day when we had nearly completed the translation of “The Wire,” he asked me to play the tape back to him from the beginning. Halfway through, he called out: “Please stop the machine! Here I want to tell something more, if it’s all right.” What he inserted was not a supplementary incident; it was a sequence which would give the piece a sense of the passage of time. With the intuitive certainty of the master storyteller, he placed it precisely where it made the desired effect. In the course of dictating the book he made only a half-dozen such additions to his original text.

  One of these was the short episode in “The Shepherd,” where the narrator insists on spending the night at the tomb of Sidi Bou Hajja in order to see if the “bull with horns” will appear. When he had appended this bit and listened to the playback, he decided that it was not interesting, and was for leaving it out. This was our only occasion for disagreement. I wanted to include it because, although it was incidental to the story, the passage was a clear illustration of the persistence of pre-Islamic belief: the appearance of the ancient god in a spot whose initial sanctity has been affirmed by the usurping faith. (During rural celebrations the bull is still decorated with flowers and ribbons and medals, and led through the streets to be sacrificed.) I explained to him the reason why I thought the passage ought to be included, knowing in advance that he would disapprove any suggestion to the effect that his ancestors had been something else before embracing Islam. We let the subject drop, he having agreed, if not wholeheartedly, to allow the episode to be incorporated into the text.

  The good storyteller keeps the thread of his narrative almost equally taut at all points. This Charhadi accomplished, apparently without effort. He never hesitated; he never varied the intensity of his eloquence. When, now and then, I stubbornly insisted, for the sake of experimentation, that he give me his personal opinion of the behaviour of one of his protagonists, he held back. Probably because he had fashioned them with actual acquaintances in mind, he was loath to pass moral judgment upon his characters. From time to time he would recount a section before we taped it. On such occasions my reactions may have influenced him in his decision to include or excise certain details, but I made no suggestions one way or the other. Apart from the exceptions mentioned and the few passages whose intelligibility depended upon some elaboration, the procedure followed was that once the material was on tape, it was considered to be final and inalterable.

  PAUL BOWLES

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE ORPHAN

  When I was eight years old my mother married a soldier. We lived in Tettaouen. One day my mother’s husband came home and told her: We’ve got to go to Tanja. They’re moving the barracks there, so we have to move too.

  All right, she said. If we have to go to Tanja, let’s go.

  Get everything ready. When the truck comes to the house, we’ll put it all in and go.

  Ouakha, she said. She packed everything, clothes and mattresses and cushions, and at noon a truck came. They put the things in. Then we got into the truck too, and they drove us away. We went to Tanja and took a house in Dradeb.

  We had been living there three or four months. One day I went out of the house by myself. I did not know the houses or the people in the quarter. I went out and started to walk along, and I kept walking, walking, until I was far away, up on the Boulevard. And night came and I began to cry. A man said to me: What’s the matter?

  I don’t know where my mother is and I don’t know where my house is.

  He said: Come with me. I’ll take you home. He took me to the comisaría. A policeman was sitting in a chair in the doorway. He asked me: Where do you live?

  I told him: In Tettaouen.

  Poor boy, he said. Come on. He gave me a mat and told me: Sit down there. Are you hungry?

  Yes, I said. Then he brought a little food and a piece of bread.

  Have you finished? Give me the bowl. I gave it to him and he took it away. Then he said: Come here. Take off those old trousers. Take them off. Don’t be afraid. So I took them off. Come here, he told me. Sit down on my lap. He was unfastening his trousers. Don’t be afraid, he kept saying. Then I thought I saw a snake in his hand, and I jumped down and ran out of the room. He ran after me, but another man caught me.

  What’s the matter? Where are your clothes?

  In the room, I said. The first policeman came running. Grab him! He’s lost. Give him to me.

  He put me in anoth
er room and brought me my trousers. Get in here. Stop crying. I didn’t do anything to you, did I?

  No.

  And don’t say anything to anybody.

  I won’t.

  He shut the door and left me there, and I slept. In the morning a Spanish man came. The policeman told him: Somebody brought the boy here last night. He’s from Tettaouen. He’s lost.

  Where do you live? he asked me.

  In Tettaouen, I told him.

  Come on, he said. And he took me to Tettaouen.

  The police looked everywhere in Tettaouen for my mother, and they could not find her. And they said: This boy has no family. We’ll put him into the Fondaq en Nedjar.

  They put me into the Fondaq en Nedjar, where they send children and women too, who have no families. In the fondaq they said to me: Boy, where do you live? I told them: Here in Tettaouen. And they too looked and looked for my house, and found nothing, nothing.

  And I stayed there. They gave me clothes and shoes and everything I needed. We ate every day and had blankets to sleep under. And I was still small and not yet circumcised. They saw that and said: You’ll have to be circumcised. I was afraid, and I said: No! When I find my mother I’ll do it.

  They called the pacha. He came and said: That boy must be circumcised now. Two men took hold of me and handed me to the women who lived there. They killed two rams and then they circumcised me. I stayed with the women there until I was well. Some of them gave me candy, and some gave me money, but I did not know what money was. When I was well I went back to live with the others. I was learning to read. From one day to the next I was beginning to know something.