The Cool School (44 page)

I know this body as if it were a third party whose skin I put on as a mask to wear through their “Land of Fear” and I do go in a sort of disguise for, like everyone else out here in this blazing desert where a man is a fool to show his face naked by day, I have learned to wrap five or six yards of fine white muslin around my head to protect the mucus of my nose and throat against the hot, dry wind. All you can see of me is my eyes. For once, I look just like everyone else. No need for me to open these eyes. I know what is out there—nothing but the very barest stripped illusion of a world; almost nothing, nothing at all.

Bundled up like a mummy, I huddle here under my great black burnous, a cape as big as a bag for an animal my size, shape and color. It also serves as a portable tent smelling of woodsmoke and lanolin, under which I fumble for the two pencil-thin sections of my
sebsi
, my slim wooden keef-pipe from Morocco, to fit them together. A fine flesh-pink clay pipe head, no bigger than the last joint of my little finger, snuggles up over a well-fitted paper collar shaped wet with spit. I try it like a trumpet; airtight, good. My keef-pouch from Morocco is the skin of a horned viper sewn into a
metoui
and stuffed with great grass. I check with my thumb the tide of fine-chopped green leaf which rolls down its long leather tongue, milking most of the keef back into the pouch. What remains, I coax into the head of my pipe with the beckoning crook of my right forefinger.

A masterpiece matchbox the size of a big postage stamp leaps into the overturned bowl of my left hand, riding light but tight between the ball of my thumb and my third finger. I make all these moves not just out of habit but with a certain conscious cunning through which I ever-so slowly reconstruct myself in the middle of your continuum; inserting myself, as it were, back into this flesh which is the
visible pattern of Me. Yet, I know this whole business is a trap which may well be woven of nothing but words, so I joggle the miniature matchbox I hold in my hand and these masterpiece matches in here chuckle back what always has sounded to me like a word but a word which I cannot quite catch. It could be a rattling Arabic word but my grasp of Arabic is not all that good and no one, not even Hamid, will tell me what the matches say to the box. I hold the box up to my ear as I shake it again, trying to hear what the box stutters back. If I remember correctly, Basilides in his “Game” reduced all the Names proposed by the Gnostics to one single rolling, cacophonic, cyclical word which he thought might well prove to be a Key to the heavens:
Kaulakaulakaulakaulakau . . .”
Can the matches match that?

I love these little matches bought back in Tanja. Each match is a neat twist of brown paper like a stick dipped in wax, with a helmetshaped turquoise-blue head made to strike on the miniature Sahara of sandpaper slapped onto one side of the box. Matchbox is clamped into the claw of left thumb and middle finger. This indifferent caliper proves suddenly sadist as it rams poor matchbox back onto himself, with little-finger of right hand clear up his ass. Little-finger holds him impaled; proffering a drawerful of identical matches to caliper, who solemnly selects one little brother, pinching him tight. Matchbox is closed with a small, scraping sigh against the heel of right hand. Littlefinger withdraws from the rape to help snub poor match against the backslide of his box; striking and exploding his head.

I elbow my way out of this cocoon of felted camel-hair smelling of woodsmoke to thrust forward this pipe, pouch and matches just as we go over a bump and I open my eyes. I am not alone. We are five passengers in here, where we should be only four in the blistering metal cabin of this truck whose red-hot diesel is housed in with us, too. Two seats on either side of it are called First-Class Transportation, while Third-Class is out on the back on top of the cargo of sacks beneath a cracking tarpaulin. In the front seat, Driver, who looks like a chipmunk with the toothache because of the way his sloppy turban hangs under his chin, crouches over the wheel like a real desert rat.
Black Greaser, his number-two man, has been playing a long windy tune on a flute made out of a bicycle-pump and the bump nearly rams the flute down his throat. An anonymous vomiting man, like a doll leaking wet sawdust and slime, flops out the far window carsick while, here right beside me, crammed into my seat with me when we are not up in the air, is Middleman; Stowaway. We rise shoulder to shoulder and I hope he lands back on the diesel and burns.

He has risen up in the air without losing his cross-legged Sufi saint pose, as if to show me he knows how to levitate. I shoot up my own dusty eyebrows at him as much as to say:
So can I!
because he glares at my pipe with all the baleful ferocity of a carnivorous bird. He feels I pollute him with my keef-smoke—too bad! We both drop back into my seat. I paid First-Class Transportation for these broken springs; no need to share them with him. Yesterday, or the day before, or one of those days back along our trail, he suddenly jumped up from behind a bare dune in the middle of nowhere, flagging us down. I had spotted him up there ahead of us and was just saying to myself: “Is that a man or a bush?” when he started up, skipping and waving his arms. Driver changed gear without daring to stop in the sand from which this little old stick of a man hopped up quick as a bird when Black Greaser threw open the door, grandly waving him into my seat with me. He is a Hadj, just back from the pilgrimage to Mecca; a new little saint. Black Greaser let his whole ugly face fall apart in a welcoming grin: “No baggage, Father?”

The little old man twitched aside the yards of gray-green muslin piled on top of his head and swathing his bearded face: “No baggage. This is the way I came and—
Inch’ Allah
!—this is the way I shall return.”

I push back the window of opalescent glass frosted by the blasting of sand, to thrust the whole length of my slender pipe out like a periscope into the bouncing air of the dazzling desert through which we churn night and day no faster than a funeral. When I lean out the window, the light out there hits me like a blow. Shading my eyes, I look down into the granular shallows of flowing sand on whose
current we ride until I am dizzy and sick. Everything visibly crawls; even the cloth of my sleeve when I look at it close. I glance up and out with my eyes clenched against the all but intolerable brightness of the blazing desert where the mirage sizzles across the horizon like a sweep of glittering marshes, thickly grown with tall rushes whipped by the wind. Air ignites and flames up around the truck like the billowing breath of a blast furnace searing my lungs. The water should lie not more than a half hour’s distance away—or so you might think. Hour after hour, day after day, we bore on through the sands without reaching those marshes.

All this ululating emptiness aches in my ears like the echo of a shell. Now and again, I swear I can hear the lowing and bellowing of invisible herds of longhorn cattle but, of course, there are none. When I listen even further down into myself, I contact something else which shakes my whole intimate contact with Me. When I try to tune out the constant moaning roar of the wind, my whole being vibrates to a sound down below the threshold of hearing. My sinuses, antrums, the cords of my throat and the cavities of my chest, the very hollows of my bones hum in a register too low for my ear but, for no known reason, I tremble, I quake. This, so they tell me, is the voice of Ghoul and Ghoul is the Djinn of the Desert, Keeper of the Land of Fear. Grains of sand in their incalculable billions ofbillions are grinding, grinding together, rolling and sliding abrasively in dunes as big as New York and as high, vibrating this ocean of air through which we paddle like sick fish on their flight from some distant dynamite blast. At that, a very American thought suddenly strikes me: they do have an atomic center out here in the Sahara. Could this air be radioactive, perhaps? Or, is that just the black breath of Ghoul?

F
AR
AWAY
back up north in the green hills of Morocco, which I call home since I began to merge almost against my will into this scene with Hamid my Moroccan mock-guru, everyone around the keef cafés is always talking and singing of the Sahara but not one man in ten knows where it begins or ends or how to get into this desert. “It
lies down that way, many days marching,” they say, swinging their long slim keef-pipes around vaguely south. Yet, every last man sitting there on a straw mat on the floor feels he owns the whole sweep of the Sahara desert, personally, inside his own Muslim head. Let some paleface tourist appear on the scene and they will all proclaim themselves competent “guides,” if you please; when not one of them can read even a map. In my forlorn American way, I thought to teach Hamid the lay of the land and, to this end, I pulled my poor self together to make an expedition up out of the damp grotto in which Hamid and I were living in the native quarter of Tanja, in the impasse of a narrow alley in a section of the Medina below even the tight-packed little pedestrian square of cafés called the Socco Chico; in other words, lost.

I adjusted my shades and smoked one last pipe for the road before I stepped cautiously out into the mainstream of mankind in the swarming alley as narrow as a corridor that is our street. At first, the entire Medina of Tanja feels like one mysteriously rambling mansion packed full of maniacs but, eventually, what looks like a terrifying trap to a tripper gets to feel like your very own house. I cut into the traffic and kept my head down as I whipped around corners with my eyes glued to the ground; so as not to be noticed, I hoped. I slid through alleys so wide I could touch the walls on both sides with my elbows and I had to flatten myself into doorways to let heavily-laden donkeys and porters push past. The whole point of this game, best known to Old Tanja Hands, is to get from one side of the Socco Chico to the other without crossing it; invisible to all traders and touts. My own cunning route, first shown me by Hamid of course, is a turnoff between the old
Hotel Satan
and
Casa Delerium,
once a whorehouse in better days. This way, you can bypass not only the Socco Chico but also steep Siaghine Street running up out of it; lined as it is with neon-lit bazaars, swarming with tourists and tramps.

I meant to drop by the American Library on my way up to the Boulevard in the New Town of Tanja but, when I caught sight of myself in a mirror in a shop window, I thought: Uh-uh, better not! I
managed to make myself look a little more human before I got to the Café de Paris on the Place de France. I drew up in front of a raggedy man who sells raggedy books in the street. On an earlier trip, I had spotted his stock of old dog-eared French guidebooks and road maps of North Africa, put out by Michelin, the makers of tires. As I bent over his wares, I picked up on the fact that I was getting scanned from behind their newspapers by the whole row of white American and British operatives seated, as always, out on the terrace of the Café de Paris. They had their telepathic finders out feeling all over me as I bought, for one dirham, a map which is now out of print. I scuttled back down to the Socco and called Hamid out of his cavernous keef café to drag him home for a bout of instruction in the map.

#151 Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia
(1
centimeter for 20 kilometers or 1/2,000,000).
On this map, one handspan to the right along the Mediterranean shore lies Woran. With your thumb on Woran, your little-finger lands on Algut. If you pivot due south from that white city on the cliffs, your thumb will fall on Ghardaïa, the mysterious desert capital of the Dissident Mozabites. All that can take at least three or four days of travel from the bright blue Straits of Gibraltar, along the lush coastal valleys, over green hills and mountains so high they are covered with snow. On the far side of these are plains marked in brown to denote almost no annual rainfall at all and they must be crossed before you get to even the fringe of the bright golden Sahara. The trouble with this map is that it has two big insets of Woran and Algut, shown in some detail at a scale of 1/500,000, and these effectively obscure the desert trails to the south.

I trundled myself back up to the Boulevard again next day, or was it next week? Anyway, one fine day when I could tear myself away from the great smells of Hamid’s cooking and manage to part the curtain of keef which hung over our door, I fell out into the street and worked my way back to the Boulevard bookstall, where I bought, unobserved, an old guide to Algeria and the Michelin map #152—a great prize. This pretty, pictorial map was printed to illustrate the glorious exploit of General Leclerc, who marched a Free French army
from Dakar all the way north to Tunis across the Sahara by way of Lake Chad. Not even the Romans could have brought off such a feat but Hamid shows little interest in anything done by the French or the Roumis, in general. Being Black, I am not a real Roumi to Hamid. On the other hand, Hamid looks down on all Blacks as the natural slaves of the Arabs; even though his own hair is curly enough to give him trouble finding a barber, back in the States. Hamid shuts me up when I tell him I am Black. “You’re not Black, you’re American!
Safi!
Enough!”

Hamid suddenly became fascinated by the form he began to see in my map. He pointed out that the Great Desert is in the shape of a camel stretching its neck right across Africa, from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. He laughed like a lunatic to see that the western butt-end of his camel was dropping its Mauretanian crud on the Black Senegalese—“Charcoal Charlies,” Hamid calls them, having picked up the term in the port. The head of Hamid’s camel drinks its fill in the sweet waters of the Nile. The eye of the camel, naturally enough, is that fabled city of Masr, where the Arab movies are made and all the radios ring out over streets paved with gold. Us poor Nazarenes call the place Cairo, for short. Suddenly, somewhere down on the lower middle belly of Hamid’s camel, about four knuckles north of Kano in northern Nigeria, I dowsed out a big carbuncle. With no more warning than that, my whole heart rushed out to this place which was pictured as an outcropping of extinct ash-blue volcanoes jutting up out of the bright yellow sands. I noted that the whole area was called the Hoggar and it seemed to boast only one constantly inhabited place, whose name I made out to be Tam. I was truly surprised to hear myself calmly boasting to Hamid, as if I were A
MERICAN
E
XPRESS
: “I’ll be in this place, here, this time next year.”