The Pilgrimage: A Story

by DRISS CHRAÏBI

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To MY astonishment, the driver of the bus from Casablanca to Fez told me that his name was Julius Caesar. He explained himself:

“Why not? Just because I’m an Arab do I have to have a prefabricated name like Ali bin Couscous?”

I smiled. He displayed his identify card.

“See. Look at that.”

It was true. Last name: Caesar. First name: Julius. Son of Mohammed bin Mohammed. Presumed born in 1912, in the village of Aglagal, Taskemt tribe, Marrakech, Morocco. Occupation: Chauffeur. Nationality: Citizen of the U.S.A. “How did you arrange that?”

“The commander of the region, of course.” He laughed. “One of those old-guard colonials we need more of. He sees Morocco as a land of mystery and adventure and I was able to take care of a little private matter for him.”

I was staring at him.

“And you,” he asked. V What’s your name?” “Driss Ferdi.”

“Haj Fatmi’s son?”

“Haj Fatmi Ferdi’s son.”

“Enfer!”

He spat on the windshield and gestured toward my mother, who was invisible except for her eyes and the tips of her fingers.

“What have we? Sister, wife, or grandmother?” “My mother.”

DRISS CHRAIBI was born in Mazagan, Morocco, but has lived in France for the last ten years so that his work reflects in certain ways the French attitude toward the Arab. Our selection is from his novel Le passé simple. Dr. HELEN RIVLIN,a research fellow at Harvard’s Middle Eastern Studies Center, is a specialist on nineteenth-century Egypt.

He said “cufer!” again, then went up to a pair of pensive Chleuhs, Herber tribesmen, and slapped them on the back encouragingly. They climbed onto the roof and found places between a row of barrels and a canoe. My mother and I then occupied their seats. Julius Caesar stepped over a pile of chickens with their legs tied together and turned back to appraise his passengers.

“Coreligionists, listen! Perhaps among you there are cowards, pregnant women, cardiac cases, or individuals subject to vomiting and diarrhea. Let them get off immediately and consign their persons to a French company like the C.T.M. or Valéna who will guarantee their safe delivery by a stamped document . . . Well?”

No one moved.

“Perfect!” concluded Julius Caesar. “Let no more be said and let’s get this Chevrolet roaring like Old Man Adam. Because . . .” he shoved his cap in place, ”... either I get this pile of nuts and bolts cracking or she’ll kill us all!”

He seized the steering wheel. “Ready?”

“Ready!” yelled the mechanic.

He slammed the door and the bus jerked forward in a cloud of smoke. My mother murmured through her veil but I couldn’t make out what saint she was commending her soul to. She closed her eyes and did not open them again.

Julius Caesar drove well. In the first hundred yards, he grazed a sidewalk, broke up a procession of Franciscan monks, and squashed a Pekingese dog. Slumped down in the driver’s seat, he held the wheel disdainfully between his thumb and his index finger, as he would a cigarette. Now and then he turned around to grin at me. He enjoyed a citizenship that allowed him to brush aside all traditions, shackles, and subterfuge. The road ran dizzily beneath him, like a river in full flood.

Julius Caesar accelerated, swerved, honked. Buildings, eucalyptus, roadway fled past and out of sight in the wink of an eye. The Berber facing me was reading a newspaper. The bus swayed and rattled. My mother was feeling for my hand. I relinquished it to her. She held it in her thin hands like a little bird — a presence, an aid. As a young girl she had been cloistered. As a wife, my father, our Lord and Master, had locked her up at home. At first. Then he had gotten her pregnant seven times, in very rapid succession. The result was that, with no servant and continually pregnant or nursing, she no longer saw any significance in an open door. Her last trip dated from her wedding day.

Beneath her white haik she was festively dressed: a salmon-colored caftan, a badia of woven silk and silver thread, a heavy girdle of gold, and a dozen bracelets on each wrist. She was going to Fez.

In Fez she would strike her head against the gravestone of her late father the Marabout. The Lord and Master had expressed a desire that she do this. A few moments before morning prayer.

Her eyes were closed and her chest held rigid, and I knew that my mother was uneasy. This bus was transporting her swiftly toward the city of her people which she had left very long ago. And very long ago she had resigned herself not to cry any more and not to beg that just once before her death she he permitted to return there — as if to Mecca, the dream of a half-billion believers. She was far away from the square, white house of concrete where we lived — and Julius Caesar’s foot was pressed down on the gas pedal.

Joy? She was probably overcome with joy. This air was different air, these other passengers — behind her, in front of her, beside her really existed, and how many houses had sprung from the soil since her last trip! And the sounds of life, the shivers of excitement, the new people. She closed her eyes. The right hand of the Lord and Master would suddenly reach out and all this would disappear.

Julius Caesar was a demon and the bus was an infernal machine. But she would welcome an accident. The Koran was clear on this point: “Whoever shall perish during the course of a pilgrimage shall automatically be admitted into the kingdom of heaven.”

Suddenly, Julius Caesar slammed on the brakes. We were in front of the Customs barricade. The sergeant who opened the barrier was half asleep. An interpreter helped him. The first wore a service pistol slung from his shoulder and the other a small leather pouch. Behind them was a tight group of Arab soldiers, armed with submachine guns, men like those the Lord and Master employed on his lands to do the work of draft animals.

I lowered the safety-glass window and filled my lungs with the hot, dry air. The choral of cicadas deafened me. I leaned my head out and saw a jeep, two motorcycles left one on top of the other with the engines running, and a sentry box topped with the tricolor flag.

“How many chickens?” asked the interpreter.

“Twenty,” said Julius Caesar.

He had taken off his cap and was dusting it off on the steering wheel. His eyes were crafty, with a touch of unrest, and a reserve of menace.

“Too many,” said the interpreter reproachfully. “Many too many. Tax or arrangement ?”

“We’ll see.”

“Good. How many passengers?”

“Sixty. Forty-two seated, the rest standing, besides the two Chleuhs up there . . . And me.”

“Too many,” repeated the other. “Many too many. Tax or arrangement?”

“We’ll see,” said Julius Caesar.

“Good. And the barrels?”

He rubbed his hands together. Gently. Methodically. One fine day he had received his diploma. Later they had named him interpreter at the Customs House. He had his place in the sun.

“Seven,” replied Julius Caesar.

“And what do they contain?”

“Gunpowder.”

The interpreter started.

“For the nationalists from Sebou,” Julius Caesar calmly added. And he gave his identity card to the sergeant. The latter examined it. Nothing in this Godforsaken place could affect him any more.

“Pass,” he said.

Julius Caesar put on his cap, let in the clutch, and shifted through the gears. He was humming the Marseillaise. The Route Imperiale opened before him. He hadn’t been born a lord, he had become one. He made fun of laws, Arab soldiers, rifles, He accelerated. Once he had been a jackal among other jackals, hunting rotten flesh. He had become a wolf — it was as simple as that. A wolf in the middle of a fat flock of sheep. How much was morality worth?

A white halo encircled the sun. The asphalt shone like a mirror; it was bordered by enormous mulberry trees and merciless immobile expanses of russet barley fields — not a house, not a fence. I looked away from Julius Caesar and began scrutinizing my vis-à-vis, who was still reading his newspaper. He was young with steady eyes, and his lips were moving. There was something odd: unless he was a fakir working a miracle he could not possibly be reading that paper.

I said to him, “Tell me, brother, is any of the news good?”

He glanced at me, uttered a little cough, and turned his attention back to the paper, moving his lips all the faster.

“It’s like every day, brother,” he replied. “You don’t read, do you?”

“No,” said I prudently.

“That’s a pity.”

I had listened to him very politely and then stood up. After all, he could read his paper. Julius Caesar smiled at me in the rear-view mirror. I grasped his shoulder affectionately.

“Look here. If the son of Haj Fatmi Ferdi needed you some day, would you be willing to help him?”

“Sure!” he said. “You’ll find me at the Bousbir every other evening.”

And, although the highway was empty, he sounded a long blast on the horn.

Returning to my seat, I excused myself to the Berber and turned his newspaper to the normal position. He was reading it upside down. He made a ball of it and solemnly stuffed it into his pocket.

Translated by Henry Carlisle