Incidents

In Morocco, not long ago . . .

The Bartender, in a station restaurant, came out to pick a red geranium and put it in a glass of water, between the coffee machine and the sink full of dirty cups and saucers.

In the square in front of the Socco, his blue shirttails flying, an emblem of Disorder, a furious boy (which in this country means a boy with all the features of madness) gesticulates and rails at a European (Go home! ). Then vanishes. A few seconds later, the sound of chanting indicates the approach of a funeral; the procession appears. Among the bearers (in relays) of the coffin, the same boy, temporarily subdued.

Heard the King's Cousin, who is very dark, pass himself off as an American Negro (pretending not to know Arabic).

Tonsorial persecution: Rafaelito claims his father cut his hair off while he was asleep. Other boys say that the police crop them whenever they can catch them in the street: rebellion and repression on the level of the boys' black hair.

Two elderly American women seize the elbows of a tall blind man even older than themselves and walk him across the street between them. But what he wanted, this Oedipus, was money: money, money, not assistance.

A delicate, almost gentle, boy, his hands already a little coarse, suddenly makes the triggerlike gesture that reveals the young punk: flicking the ash off his cigarette with the back of a fingernail.

Abder asks for a clean towel, which, out of a religious fear of contamination, must be kept here beside the bed, to purify himself afterward of love.

A venerable hadji with a neatly trimmed short gray beard and carefully manicured hands, artistically draped in a snow-white djellaba of extremely fine cloth, drinking a glass of milk.

Yet this: a stain, a faint smear of something, maybe pigeon shit, on his immaculate hood.

A European woman, no longer young, heavily made up, filthy, preposterously swathed in whatever sways and frays, hair in braids, fringes on cloak, bag, and skirts, passes through the Socco. This Pendulous Wonder (I am told by a boy who doesn't bat an eye) is a "Soviet witch."

The child I find in the corridor was sleeping in an old cardboard box, his head sticking out as though cut off.

Near the Socco, a European couple has set up shop, selling fast food for hippies. A sign says: Hygiene is our specialty . And the woman empties her ashtray in the street—which is not British .

A young girl is punished in public by her mother, a peasant woman. The daughter screams. The mother is calm, persistent; she has seized the girl's hair as if it were a swatch of cloth and proceeds to deliver a series of regular blows to her head. A circle forms instantly. The masseur's judgment: the mother is right.—Why?—The girl is a whore (as a matter of fact, he knows nothing about her).

The child—he can't be more than five—in shorts, and a hat: knocks on a door—spits—adjusts his crotch.

An old blind beggar with a white beard, wearing a djellaba: magisterial, impassive, classical, theatrical, Sophoclean, while the face of the adolescent boy who begs for him assumes the whole expressive burden that such a situation allows: agonized features contorted by a glowering pout display suffering, poverty, injustice, doom: Look! look! the child's face says, look at this man who can no longer see.

The little girls illicitly peddling mint, lemon (Virgil). The vile plainclothes cop looks very tough; he abuses them, brutalizes them, but lets them run away.

Delicious fantasy: a certain Mohammed with soft hands, who works in the textile factory, insists that the Jews' mosque is dark on Saturdays; he points it out to me: it is the church of the Spanish Capuchins; the Jews, he says, use it (it has been lent to them) for their services.

An adolescent black, in a wretched raincoat and a bright blue sombrero, and a hippie girl, barefoot on the filthy side-

walk, pass in front of the natives of the Café Central: the boy has picked up a girl but publicly sacrifices to an insane Westernism.

The Iberia official does not smile. She has a peremptory voice, heavy (but dry) makeup, very long bloodred nails—these nails shuffle the long tickets, folding them with a practiced and authoritative gesture . . .

A pot for mint tea, made of hammered metal without a plastic stopper, bought with the help of the middleweight boxing champion of Morocco.

Since I had the foresight to inform the King's Cousin I would be quite useless to him, he reassures me: I could advise him about investing the millions he plans to make from his gin distillery.

Abdessalam, a boarder at Tétouan, seems to have come to Tangiers this morning (our meeting entirely accidental) to buy an antirheumatism salve and a whistling stopper for his kettle.

A young black, crème-de-menthe shirt, almond-green pants, orange socks, and apparently very soft red shoes.

Watching a bearded man dancing, the King's Cousin informs me that this is a philosopher. In order to be a philosopher, he says, four things are necessary: (1) to have a certificate in Arabic; (2) to travel a great deal; (3) to have contacts with other philosophers; (4) to be remote from reality, for example at the seaside.

A young black who looks as though he were powdered with white, in a Day-Glo parka.

At the Socco, in July, the terrace is full of people. A group of hippies takes a table, one couple among them; the husband is a plump blond fellow wearing nothing under his overalls; the wife is in a long Wagnerian nightgown; she holds the hand of a tiny limp white girl whom she encourages to shit on the sidewalk, between the legs of her companions who do not react.

Vain attempt to find a blue djellaba. Siri's comment: there are no blue sheep.

Mustafa is in love with his cap. He won't take it off to make love.

In the patio of the Hotel Minzah, a rather haggard woman in a long red dress gives me a sharp look and asks for "les cabinets."

A demonstration of phonological pertinence: a young vendor in the bazaar (with an appealing glance):

tu/ti (you/yuh: non-pertinent) veux tapis/taper (want a rug/want to fuck: pertinent)?

Aliwa (a good name to repeat over and over) likes immaculate white trousers (late in the season), but the toilets being what they are, there is always a stain on these milk-white garments.

On the beach at Tangiers (families, fags, boys), some old workmen, like very slow, very ancient insects, rake the sand.

Selam, a veteran from Tangiers, bursts out laughing because he has met three Italians who were of no use to him: "They thought I was feminine!"

An old peasant in a brown djellaba (the deep color of rags) carries over his shoulder a huge braid of old-rose Spanish onions.

"Papa," a charming and crazy old Englishman, in sympathy gives up his lunch during Ramadan (in sympathy for the circumcised little boys).

At nine in the morning, a fierce young fellow walks through the Socco, a live sheep over his shoulders, hooves tied in front (a pastoral and biblical attitude). A little girl passes, caressing a hen in her arms.

Through the hotel window, on the rather deserted promenade (it is still early on Sunday morning: in the distance, boys are going to the beach to play ball), I see a sheep and a little fantailed dog; the sheep follows right on the dog's heels; finally he tries to mount him.

From the train he has just left at a deserted station (Asilah), I watched him run down the road, alone in the rain, hugging the empty cigar box he had asked me to give him "to keep his papers in."

In a street of Salé, someone says there's going to be a police raid, everyone in rags makes a getaway. A boy of fourteen is sitting there, a tray of old pastry in his lap. A huge military policeman heads straight for him, knees him in the belly, and snatches the tray, without stopping or turning around, without a word (the police will certainly eat the pastry). The boy's face is contorted, but he manages not to cry; he hesitates, then vanishes. —The presence of two friends embarrasses me and keeps me from giving him two thousand francs.

A Racinian opening: with a gentle willingness: "You see me? Do you want to touch me?"

A good-looking young man, well dressed in a gray suit and wearing a gold bracelet, his hands delicate and clean, smoking a pack of red Olympics, drinking tea, speaking quite intensely (some sort of official? the kind that checks the dossiers?), drools a tiny thread of saliva onto his knee; his companion points this out to him.

He energetically cleans the bidet with the little washroom broom. When I remark on this: "Only for the bidet!"

At a concert (German, of course), two young Arabs talking very seriously in the lobby (realizing they are being watched and therefore, in European fashion, not looking back); one, in a corduroy jacket, with a pipe in his mouth.

In a restaurant in Rabat, four men from the country—among sauces, salads, meats, and three-button suits—drink sugared milk and slowly chew bread torn off a huge loaf.

A certain Ahmed, near the station, wears a sky-blue sweater with a fine orange stain on the front.

A crowd, actually a mob, in the distance placards, banners, police whistles. A strike, a political demonstration? No, a pathetic initiation ceremony of the Mohammedia School of Engineering: a girl in a miniskirt on a truck, French songs, edifying slogans: "We Know We Have Work to Do," "Freshmen Today, Engineers Tomorrow."

Farid, encountered at Jour et Nuit, curses out a beggar who first asks me for a cigarette, then, having gotten it, for money "so I can eat." This gradual scheme of exploitation

(though banal enough) seems to outrage Farid: "That's how he thanks you for having given him something!" Then, a minute later, as I leave him, giving him my whole pack of cigarettes, which he pockets without a word of thanks, I hear him asking me for five thousand francs "so I can eat." When I burst out laughing, he alleges the difference (here everyone asserts himself as different, because he conceives himself not as a person but as a need).

Abdellatif—a voluptuous boy—peremptorily justifies the Baghdad hangings. The guilt of the accused is obvious, since the trial went so fast: the case was clear. Contradiction between the brutality of this nonsense and the fresh warmth of his body, the availability of his hands, which I continue, somewhat dazed, to hold and to caress while he pours out his vengeful catechism.

Visit from an unknown boy, sent by his friend: "What do you want? Why are you here?"—"It's nature!" (Another boy, on another occasion: "It's love!")

Chella park: a tall youth with straight hair, dressed all in white, ankle boots under the white jeans, accompanied by his two veiled sisters, stares hard at me and spits: rejection or contingency?

Hard to bring back from Paris a "souvenir" for this boy who had asked me for one: What sort of pleasant trifle can you give someone who is totally indigent? A lighter?—to light what cigarettes? I opt for a coded, in other words, excessively useless, souvenir: a brass Eiffel Tower.

A Frenchman, a derelict of the Protectorate (hardware store), aphasic (rifle butt in the face, he stammers painfully), but ataxic as well, slowly digging up two wicks for my butane lamp, suddenly finds a loud, clear voice to scream at his dog (which has done nothing but be there), twice over: Damn bitch!

Driss A. doesn't know that sperm is called sperm—he calls it shit: "Watch out, the shit's going to come now": nothing more traumatizing.

Another boy, Slaui (Mohammed Gymnastique), says dryly and precisely: ejaculate : "Watch out, I'm going to ejaculate."

Going downstairs, I hand Mustafa (charming, smiling, ardent, honest) my sandals to carry, while I get out my key ("Here, hold this"). Later I realize he has kept them (suppression of the loan).

At the bank: a blind beggar staggers in, his cane fumbling around doors, counters, tellers' windows. A customer gives him a coin. The teller: "Don't do that, you'll get them in the habit."

At Jour et Nuit, a shoeshine boy: splendid eyes and smile, diligent. His name is Driuish (little dervish). Leaving, already some distance away, he gives me a friendly wave.

Lahucine, at the house. He is sitting opposite me, inert, placid, all morning. Never have hands been in such repose: only a painter could show it. In his presence, I am excessively active: constantly doing something, continually changing whatever it is I do: writing, reading a newspaper, sharpening a pencil, putting on another record, etc.

Mulay, the building super, lets me know with an imperious gesture that while I am away his young wife Aisha, to safeguard the apartment against "thieves," will sleep on the floor, here in the doorway, on the matting near the couch (tiny piece of matting, the size of a bathmat on the tiles).

The young pied-noir , a reconstructed petit bourgeois, wears his sweater draped over his shoulders, the sleeves knotted in front; he drops his car keys on the café table; his accent is harsh and quick, as though abruptly twisted off.

Two law students:

One, Abdellatif (French law), Westernized, two years in Switzerland (apparently), elegant (blue pullover, expensive beige corduroy suit), refined accent, a liar (says he's in second year, which I know to be false), gives me the Boredom routine (getting out of this country) and asks this question: What do you think of Pompidou?"

The other, Najib, encountered the next day in the same place, thus replacing the first boy, a student of Arab law, naturally elegant but poorly dressed (white T-shirt, heavy brown corduroys, worn shoes with buckles), with warm eyes, cool delicate hands, not dramatizing his boredom, says his vocation is to become a minister . He asks me to explain whether ministers, changing posts, are specialized, specifically trained or not (no critical intention).

The Trésorerie générale, a fortress-bank in the French style, is continuously surrounded by a horde of cripples, hopping around like sparrows on a lump of dung: one legless fellow, apparently the bicycle guard, bears down vehemently on a wretched client . . .

Amid the group's rather lascivious horseplay, one of the lycée boys brings up the latest theme assignment: "Compare the pedagogy of Rabelais with that of Montaigne."

According to his schoolmates, H. is "very sensual" (a phrase made all the more disturbing by the dryness of the pied-noir accent): in my mind, it becomes H.'s name: Very Sensual. Yet the nickname's meaning is easy enough to guess: H. lets himself be fucked.

"I'm afraid I'm falling in love with you. It's a problem. What should I do?"

"Give me your address."

While little Mohammed recites the verses he has just composed (unless they're by Sully Prudhomme), I keep thinking how lucky it is that I've met him, since I'll ask him to go buy me a couple of pounds of tomatoes at the neighborhood grocery.

Amal seems enchanted by his own name: he tells it to me right away, fatuously providing the translation ("My name is Hope," he says), delighted whenever the word appears in a song.

Mohammed (of course), a policeman's son, wants (later on, when he's through with the lycée ), to be a police inspector: that's his vocation. Moreover (he says): he likes football (right guard), pinball, and girls.

Though the shop window is crammed with the latest kinds of electronic equipment, the two salesmen whom I ask for a cassette player can't sell me one. The younger man doesn't know how to operate the machine he shows me: a whole series of buttons pressed with absurd results: lid flying open, batteries reversed, painful noises, and no music. The other man, the boss, busy with something or other, sulky, shows no interest and immediately decides that it's the machine that is defective. All of which is not much encouragement to buy a machine for eighty thousand francs.

Mohammed L., encountered one morning around ten, is still half-asleep; he just got up, he says, because last night he composed some verses for a play he's writing—"no characters, no plot," etc.—and stayed up very late. Another Mohammed, the little one, told me he wrote poetry "to keep from being bored." In this country poetry allows you to go to bed too late .

Amidou, second-year student, future gym teacher, encountered one Sunday morning in the dust of the flea mar-

ket, poor and good-natured, his raincoat too short, his big shoes coming apart, his fine Moroccan eyes, his kinky hair, has to "reflect" for tomorrow on "Molière's notion of comedy."

Amidou: I prefer spelling my name without an h , since:

Doux comme l'amidon (smooth as paste)

Inflammable comme l'amadou (inflammable as tinder).

I enjoy Amidou's vocabulary: dream and burst for get an erection and have an orgasm. Burst is vegetal, scattering, disseminating, not moralistic, narcissistic, closed off.

Ramadan: the moon will soon be up. We have to wait another half hour to make love: "I'm starting to dream." "Is that allowed?" "I don't know."

A., leaving the other day after having "dreamed," came in his underwear once he was out in the street; but he couldn't wash himself off, as his religion prescribes, because his boarding school grants only one shower every eight days, etc. (resentment transferred to the State).

Sitting on the balcony, they wait for the tiny red lamp to be lit on the tip of the minaret, marking the end of the fast.

Every afternoon of Ramadan, around five (this is November), the Restaurant de la Libération, in the medina, seen from the street, is transformed into a hospice with long rows of tables where the men line up to eat their soup; the sole waiter on duty runs back and forth, like a lay brother.

Naciri knows French well; to prove it, he studs his discourse with foreign phrases: "Ils sont sortis ce soir, because Ramadan ."

The "head bookkeeper" (a boy with an attractive face) pronounces solemnly: "Civilization is when you know your rights and are conscious of your duties." After which, like the rest of us, he bursts out laughing.

This Friday evening, when Ramadan ends, there is still no smoking, because when we walk off the street into a Jewish house, the Sabbath is beginning.

French professors discussing a doctoral candidate: what teaching skills has he shown? Confusion, embarrassment. Suddenly, to the great relief of all, someone exclaims: his agrégation lecture!

Tonsorials: my shoeshine boy, bending over my feet, reveals the huge bald spot on the back of his skull, while behind him, on the sidewalk, a boy in rags obsessively rakes his close-cropped dusty hair with a toy comb.

Relation between his very delicate, carefully groomed hands (he had just washed them) and the way in which he showed them, played with them, incorporated them, as he talked, into the pied-noir 's gesture repertory. Relation between the extreme delicacy of his expensive black socks and his way of stretching his legs.

A clumsy, half-mad shoeshine boy always hurls himself on me, insistently offering: "Me, shine, Chinese" (the adjective of perfection).

The same day:

on the one hand, the petit bourgeois student stupidly showing off for the others in order to "stick the prof," who contradicts me with a statement so ridiculous that nothing remains in it but the message of ill will;

on the other, Mustafa, called Musta: hair cropped, fine almond-shaped eyes, an almost Roman head except for the sweetness of his expression; born in Fez, he is eighteen and too poor to continue his studies; looking for work in Rabat,

he has taken a job with a carpenter at Akkari; he earns thirty-five hundred francs a week. His father does nothing, his mother works in a textile factory. He lives with one of his sisters. A being devoid of any hostility.

A determined little Frenchwoman, whose puny lover is carrying huge suitcases, answers the ticket collector ("You've got quite a load there"): "They're such thieves, these porters, but they don't take us in for a moment." Good-natured laughter of the ticket taker, though he is as annoyed as the porters.

Young compatriots—with girls to show off for—pretending to speak English with an exaggerated French accent (a way of concealing the fact, without losing face, that they will never have a good accent).

Medina: at six in the evening, in the street studded with peddlers, one sad fellow offers a single chopping board on the edge of the sidewalk.

Behind me, on the plane, an old French lady, chatting with the woman beside her, is doing needlepoint: a grayish piece of buckram with old-fashioned bouquets drawn on it. Later, not getting off at the intermediate stop, she continues

her work during the landing and the takeoff, absolutely static amid the plane's movements: imperturbable figure.

Two conductors, off duty, sitting at the bar; the younger one hands a cup of coffee to the older man, who refuses with a smile. Later, I realize that the older man is only an assistant, he has only one star on his cap, the younger man has three.

In the train, there are around me: (1) a woman traveling alone, she has a Teutonic accent (Alsatian, Swiss?), wears a ponytail with a scarf knotted around it; she tries to make contact with me, accepts a lunch tray when I do, orders nothing to drink then wants selzer water, ice, etc.; she is reading Rif, Terre de légendes ; (2) a black Moroccan woman, pustular; she wears a wine-colored caftan and high-button shoes and holds a kinky-haired baby in her arms; (3) a modest piednoir woman doing some kind of complicated crochet stitch; (4) two lesbians playing cards; (5) a young Moroccan, barefoot.

Group taxi: a "député" from Tétouan (an architect, he has built a whole street in Madrid, which has made him a multimillionaire) directs through the dark and the rain our old taxi driver (gray workshirt and yellow skullcap), who sees nothing, by loud, abrupt, metallic interjections, the way

you drive an old carriage horse, moreover a perfectly docile one.

Azrou Workers' Cooperative: a flock of little girls huddled together like birds and cheeping over huge carpets hung in front of them: a mixture of aviary and classroom; from this to the Sadean seraglio.

At Ito, looking out over a huge, noble landscape, one of us jokingly gives a picture of a naked woman (from some Playboy or other) to young Moha, who sells semiprecious stones: smiles, reserve, seriousness, remoteness on the boy's part: he is the one who masters a scene initially intended to ridicule him; the other boy's hysteria remains here, on the distaff side .

Abdelkader, a boy with shining eyes and an imperious smile, endowed with an absolute friendliness, manifesting in all its glory, beyond any form of culture, the very essence of charity : no other word for it (Tinerhir).

Two hippie hitchhikers. Ideology : one of them talks to me about the "stream of consciousness." Economy : going to Marrakesh to buy Indian shirts, which they will sell at very high prices in Holland. Ritual : as soon as they are in

the back of the car, they roll cigarettes and deliberately, mechanically plunge into absence (from which they awake as soon as they are offered a coffee).

But also: at Settat, I picked up a hitchhiker twelve years old; he carries a huge plastic bag filled with oranges, tangerines, and a package wrapped in filthy waxed paper; docile, serious, reserved, he sets none of this down, keeping it on his knees, in the hollow of his djellaba. His name is Abdellatif. Out in open country, without a village in sight, he tells me to stop and points to the plain: that's where he's going. He kisses my hand and gives me two dirhams (probably the bus fare, which he had got ready and was holding in his fist).

Savoir-vivre in Marrakesh: fleeting conversation from open carriage to bicycle: cigarette given, rendezvous made, the bicycle turns the corner and vanishes.

In the Rue Samarine, I was walking against the current of this human stream. I had the feeling (nothing erotic about it) that each one had a zob (Arab argot for penis) and that all these zobs , as I passed them, were lined up like a mass-produced object rhythmically stamped out by a mold. In this stream, but dressed in the same rough cloth, in the same colors, the same rags, from time to time, a zob missing.

Marrakesh souk: wild roses in the piles of mint.

The little Marrakesh schoolteacher: "I'll do whatever you want," he says, effusively, his eyes filled with kindness and complicity. Which means: I'll fuck you , and that's all.

A black man, entirely swathed and hooded in his white djellaba, thereby becomes so black that I take his face for a woman's litham .

On the road between Marrakesh and Beni-Mellal: a poor boy, Abdelkahaim, speaking no French, carries a round, rustic basket. I give him a lift for a few hundred yards. No sooner in the car than he takes a teapot out of his basket and hands me a glass of hot tea (how can it be hot?); then he gets out, vanishes at the roadside.

A very poor hitchhiker moving from town to town looking for work (very nice eyes) tells me a grim story of a group taxi (we're driving through a sort of woods) whose driver was murdered by four passengers disguised as women. "But those jitney drivers never have much money." "It doesn't matter: a thief's a thief."

"Monsieur, remember, you should never give a lift to a Moroccan you don't know," says this Moroccan to whom I'm giving a lift and whom I don't know.

A girl begging: "My father's dead. It's to buy a notebook," etc. (The nasty part of mendicancy is the tedium of the stereotypes.)

On the road between Agadir and Tamri, a person in some sort of uniform: civilian, filthy, ragged, but an official's cap and a revolver holster: he is a forest ranger. He likes detective stories, because "he too, in a way, is a kind of detective (keeps an eye on the thefts of wood); he occasionally finds himself confronting similar problems," etc.

The Moroccan student, with slightly buck teeth and a little beard, has a Catholic scholarship from Lille, because there was a white father in his Upper Atlas village. He is reading (or not reading) Les Fleurs du mal .

Front legs tied and folded, forced to kneel as though in abasement, a camel makes terrible efforts to get up. Another,

crouching on the ground, immobilized, bleeding from the mouth, exhibited as though in the stocks, a circle of spectators standing around it (including tourists, one potbellied and pink, in tight shorts, camera slung over one shoulder), the camel meanwhile shrieking horribly, kicking with all its might . His master, a small black man, beats him, picks up a handful of sand and throws it in his eyes.

Gérard, whose father is French and whose mother is a native woman, wants to show me the way to the Gazelle d'Or; he sprawls in the car in order to reveal his charms; then, as a rare delicacy, a final, irresistible argument: "You know, my thing, it's not cut!"

Three young Chleuhs, on the cliff, ask for a French lesson. "How do you say . . .?" Answering them, I realize that the sexual organ preserves a consonantal paradigm: cul/con/queue . The three young fellows, instant philologists, are amazed.

A boy sitting on a low wall, at the side of the road, which he ignores—sitting there as though for eternity, sitting there in order to be sitting, without equivocation :

"Seated peaceably, doing nothing,

Spring comes and the grass grows of its own accord."

A certain Jean, a young professor—of what?—leans over my book: "I could never get that guy (Proust) through my head; but I feel it'll happen one of these days." His friend Pierre, dumbfounded, disdainful, and dry (indifferent to the answer): "Are you taking notes?"

Azemur: bought a tin tureen from a young and toothless vendor who offers to meet me "in his garçonnière ."

Happiness at Mehiula: the huge kitchen, at night, the storm outside, the simmering harrira , the big butane lamps, the whole ballet of little visits, the warmth, the djellaba, and reading Lacan! (Lacan defeated by this trivial comfort.)

The marabout guardian is a toothless old woman who initiates the village boys for fifty francs apiece.

(The tomb is near a mud cube marked with the number 61—this is the room where the dead are washed; the grave is open: some mats on the ground, cloths hung as gifts on the green-painted wooden coffin under a faded photo of the former sultan, a pair of sandals abandoned on a mat.)

M., sick, huddled in a corner on a mat, concealed his bare and burning feet under his brown djellaba.

A big, toothless lout of a fellow, his tone convinced and passionate, whispers about the most ordinary brand of cigarettes: "Marquise: for me, it's as good as kif!"

Little I. brings me flowers, a real country bouquet: a few heads of geranium, a spray of red briar roses, two roses, four sprigs of jasmine. He has had this impulse after the great pleasure I have given him: typing his name several different ways on a piece of paper that I presented him (flowers in exchange for writing).

Having given one of them an aspirin, now they all have headaches and I become a dispensary.

A group of boys chipped in to pay for a whore; one bicycled thirty kilometers to find her in A., and to bring back something to drink; then each took his turn.

This country: where even Boy Scouts can be reprehensible. I give three of them a lift to town: rather shabby, long hair uncombed, caps of all kinds—and yet a flag, badges, Scout salute, phraseology ("Scouts are everyone's brother"). Bare-legged, the "master" sported an erection, while the others were singing sad Scout songs (story of an orphan).

Over the door, in the cement, the mason Ahmed Midace has engraved these words in clumsy letters: CUISINE PAR FORCE. The father didn't want this extra kitchen, the mother did.

Two naked boys have slowly crossed the wadi, their clothes in bundles on their heads.

The peace of a djellaba (from behind) on a donkey, the sign regularly repeated in the countryside.

(1969)