He was an amazing character, much darker than an Arab, and I suspect his mother of having listened to the blandishments of a Soudanese. He talked a peculiar French rather difficult to follow, with terrific rapidity. All the shopkeepers in the Souks seemed to know him, and he was treated with great deference as he swaggered past, wrapped in his burnous, with his crimson fez on one side, talking of the great artists he had been with, of the six months he spent in Paris, of the expeditions he had organised as guide.
“Comme dessin c’est très joli,” he remarked kindly, on looking at my first hasty pencil sketch in the Souk aux Tapis, “ça donne bien l’impression.”
My heart rather failed me when I heard of the great canvases painted by the French artist. I feared my efforts would be withered in his scorn, but “vous avez vraiment du talent,” he pronounced; and much heartened, I dashed on cobalt and aureolin in a wild effort to reproduce the brilliance of the scene in front of me.
I was painting in the Street of Stuffs. It was a narrow way, sloping down to an entrance to the Souks. A ragged awning was slung from a tumbledown balcony on one side to the roof of a shop on the other. Brilliant handkerchiefs and coloured stuffs hung on either side of the pathway; in the shade of a recess a tailor plied his trade, sitting cross-legged amongst billows of muslin. The sun beat down, slatting the roadway with glowing stripes, a continuous crowd surged up and down, men on their way to the mosque, countrymen staring at the goods proffered for sale, blind beggars tapping their way along and calling “Give, in the name of Allah!” and behind them rose the slender tower of a minaret.
I squeezed in between two shops and painted valiantly, whilst Rached kept the crowd from encroaching on me. He wielded his cane like a scythe from time to time, making a clean swathe amongst the onlookers. And all the time he kept up his lordly air, accepting a chair from one, a cigarette from another, a cup of coffee from a third. He bullied, he cajoled, or he flattered, and always with success. I suspect him of assuring the crowd that I was a person of vast importance. I wondered to myself over his mysterious employment as a waiter, for a large card hung in the office setting forth his prowess as a guide. I gathered from him that if a great artist came along (here a faint underlining of the adjective) he threw up his waitering, engaged a substitute in his place, and turned guide for several months at a time. “Ah yes,” he said, whilst we made our way back to the hotel down a white side street whose walls stood sharp against a blinding sky, “to travel is to live.” He snatched a narcissus from a passing Arab youth and presented it to me with a flourish, leaving the original owner too astonished to protest.
I. M. D.
Le marché aux Tapis.
The Souks. Sfax.
21.2.23.