«I met Jane Bowles at an American party. I was alone, with a glass in my hand, smoking and under a tree. I asked her why she was alone and she told me that her husband had gone to Algeria to record music. 'Here women only talk about beautiful young men, and men of handsome young men.' I told him one story and then another, and he laughed. I helped her get up because she was very sick. He drank two or three liters of wine a day and smoked four or five packs of cigarettes. He [Paul Bowles] didn't care about her, he treated her like a dishcloth » .
Mohamed Mrabet does not speak with hate but with firmness, without raising his voice, in a soft and French-speaking Spanish. On Wednesday he presented at the Arab House in Madrid an ambitious project of the Cabaret Voltaire publishing house that has started with an unpublished book, The Lemon , and the recovery of Love for a handful of hairs . Thirteen titles in total following one per year. He is 83 years old today.
After that party, Jane told her husband, Paul Bowles, his encounter with that boy, they invited him home, he returned to tell more stories and thus his literary relationship arose . «I started going to see him several times a week, and every time I spent about two hours recording stories. Some were stories heard in cafes; others, dreams; others, inventions he made as he recorded them; and others, in short, things that had really happened to me, ”can be read in Mira and Run. My autobiography told to Paul Bowles (Anagrama) of Mrabet, now unenforceable and that will also be recovered by Cabaret Voltaire, as confirmed by its editor, Miguel Lázaro.
"I was 47 years with them," says Mrabet, then illiterate . During those years he also acted as driver and cook for the Bowles. Mrabet fabulized without stopping before a tape recorder in Dariya , the local Arabic dialect, and then told it in Spanish to Bowles (bilingual), who transcribed it in English. «Checks arrived at up to $ 300, but at first he didn't say anything to his wife. Then she told him to give me something, but I never received a franc . I left pieces of gold and silver from 100, 200 years ago, my paintings in a closet, everything went away. In New York there were exhibitions with the books of my stories. All his books are made with my stories. I tell the truth, I swear to God, for my children and my grandchildren, I was a son of the great whore. I never hurt them, I helped him when he was sick, he shaved him, he took him to bed . Because the Quran says that we must help the Jews, the Buddhists, everyone.
The scene of that was the Tangier of the 50s and 60s, that international city that did not know about passports, where day and night were confused, especially since Paul Bowles was the cover of Life magazine. Everyone had to travel to Tangier, and there Truman Capote, William Burroughs, Tennessee Williams, Barbara Hutton, Mick Jagger ... made a pilgrimage . And Mrabet, among them. First waiter, then one more. He was even invited to spend a few months in the United States, and walked through Iowa and New York. Until he got tired of customs that seemed puritanical, unnatural.
Mrabet's stories are simple, they describe the daily lives of friends, afternoons on the beach, relationships with women, conversations with a kif pipe in his hand. Outstanding Love for a handful of hairs , the first book of the Mrabet / Bowles factory , where witchcraft appears, a complicated married couple, the struggle for life, stevedores, improvised dinners, coffees ... Mrabet was at that time fisherman and professional boxer « I lived a year and eight months in Madrid, in 1955, at 198 Alcalá Street. I was friends with Galiana . I heard an imam in a mosque that the violence was not good according to the Koran and I left it.
Mohamede Mrabet left the family home as a teenager after his father hit him when he learned that he had pushed a French teacher. He came to sleep at the ceiling on the beach, under a fishing boat and that need made virtue. «Tangier is no longer Tangier. Then there were 300,000 people and now three million, friend. Today there is heroin, cocaine, aspirin ».
The stories, he says, are told by a fish he saved by returning it to the sea . "He comes, greets me, talks to me, tells me five or six stories and leaves," he says.
And finally, Mrabet gives the story of The Great Crystal , a story of his: that of a very beautiful young woman with very long hair that was matched with a scissor, until he cut them too much; He climbed on the roof and killed himself. «I never saw a girl with such beauty».
Silence. And applause.
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