(Casablanca)
I REMEMBER THE SMELL OF THE AIR IN CASA, A POTION OF RED clay and the dung of camels. That was the way the Ayrabs stank too.
A Liberty ship in convoy brought me to Casa from Camp Patrick Henry, Virginia. In the nineteen days of crossing the Atlantic, I remember that something happened to me inside. I didn’t know what adjustment to make for where I was going, but I think I died as an American. I’d climbed the gangplank with some of that feeling of adventure with which all soldiers go overseas. All the pacifist propaganda of the twenties and thirties couldn’t quite smother that dramatic mood of well-here-we-go-again-off-to-the-wars.
I remember the endless foul nights below deck, with the hatches battened, and the clunk of the depth charges, and the merchant marine eating like kings and sneering at us and our Spam-twice-a-day. We GI’s were like pigs in the hold, bunks five-high to the block, latrines swilling and overflowing, and vomit or crap games on the tarpaulin-sheathed floor where we huddled. The sergeant was on the bottom tier, one inch off the floor, with his nose jutting into the rear end of the joe sleeping above him. The pfc was on the top, trying to sleep with his face against a ventilator. And everywhere a litter of barracks bags and M-1’s, with every man making up deficiencies in his equipment at the expense of his neighbors. It was the first time I’d seen American soldiers stealing from one another. There were three hundred of us in that hold, looking down one another’s windpipes. We lived off one another like lice. I’d believed that Americans liked to give one another elbow room, except in subways.
I remember the enforced calisthenics on the deck of the Liberty ship, the drill with the Mae Wests, the walking guard on deck lest Neptune should arise from the waves and goose the ship with his trident, the crap game that ran night and day throughout the voyage, the listening to the ship’s guns spit out practice tracers. There were nurses and Red Cross girls and State Department secretaries on the boat deck, which was off limits to us. They took sun baths and dallied with the officers and screeched when the depth charges detonated. If a starboard wind blew it my way, I heard their laughter, stylized like a sound track for bobby-soxers.
I remember the harbor of Casa at 0700 hours. At first when I saw the cranes and the berths, I thought it was all a joke, and that we were really still at Hampton Roads. It took all day to disembark us replacements because the cargo security officer couldn’t find a case of Coca-Cola and was worried about his date with a Casablancaise that evening. He had the one-up-on-you wisdom of one who’s already been overseas, and he peddled his wisdom to us gratis:
—I tell ya, French gals can teach the American ones a trick or two.
We got two days’ supply of C-rations, and we carried our M-1’s and A-bags onto the soil of North Africa. The smell I’d sniffed out in the channel was now strong, like the tart sweatiness under the wing of a dying chicken. And the Ayrabs stood around our two-and-a-half-ton truck. They were wearing GI mattress covers. They held out their hands, smiling as cagily as poor relations. They had white teeth and red fezzes. We tried to buy some of those Ayrab chapeaux.
I remember the Place de France and the Boulevard de la Gare and the billboards of Publi-Maroc. There was a secret yellow bell tower I’d seen as photomontage for Humphrey Bogart. And the long cool Hôtel de Ville in the Place Lyautey, near palm trees, fountains, and an MP motor pool. However they might deal with the Ayrabs, the French had hit on a colonial architecture that seemed to grow naturally out of the pink soil of Morocco. There were stained stucco walls around the two Medinas, all of which were off limits to us.
Why is it called Casablanca? Because for all the smell there’s a ghostly linen brilliance about the buildings clustered on their terraced levels. This White City is best seen at noon or sunset. I knew that I couldn’t be anyplace else but in Africa. There’s something festering here, something hermetically sealed. With the exception of the indigenous Ayrabs, all Caucasians here seem to be corpse intruders, animated by a squeaking desire to be somewhere else. The restlessness of Casablanca is of the damned. It’s a place where all the tortures of the twentieth century meet and snicker at one another, like Ayrab women under their veils marketing in the Suk.
—What I mean to say is, I’m going to start chasing some of this French stuff tonight.
—And I’m plenty pissed off at Miss Lucy Stout, who taught third-year French at Coolidge High. Ya need more than a bongswahr in this town.
—J’aime le jambon quand il est bon.
I think it was at Casablanca that the bottom dropped out of my personality. Americans profess to a neatness of soul because their country is Protestant, spacious, and leery of abstracts. Now I’m an American uprooted. I’m in a foreign land where I must use a ration card, where there’s no relation between the money in circulation and the goods to buy with it. This was the only way I could explain to myself the looks I got from the French and the Ayrabs. That housewife who protested she was born in Lyon was thinking about the difference between my lunch and hers. That foxy old Ayrab selling leather wallets knew I was almost as rich as the Caïd. That splayfooted garçon who brought me Bière la Cigogne, tasting like straw soup, wondered whether he might have sniped at me in Fedhala on November 8, 1942. For the first time I saw the cancer of the world outside of the United States, where we put nice sterile bandages over any open sores, and signs of Men Working by sewers.
I remember that a truck carried us to a staging area outside Casa. Around this camp was barbed wire to keep us and the Ayrabs on our respective sides. But such arrangements never work, because of the x factor of human curiosity.
—Yas, ya’re repple-depple boys now. Ya’ll get to know these sandy tents so well. Beds made of planks and chicken wire. Ten percent pass quota. Rushes to the pro station. Details we dream up just to keepya out of mischief. . . . And don’t ya dare try to write ya mom about ya sorrows. That’s what the army has censorship for. . . . The slip of a lip may sink a ship, but the slip of ya pen may upset the Congress of the United States.
I remember the Old Man of our repple-depple. He was a major. Once he’d been a lieutenant colonel. We heard that at Salerno he got the idea of marching his battalion in parade formation up the beach. The battalion didn’t exist any more, and neither did his lieutenant-colonelcy. So now he toughened up infantry replacements. He used to walk all over camp waving his stock and wearing his campaign ribbons. He loved to make inspections. He always wore leggins. Sometimes he carried a bull’s pizzle to beat the Ayrabs with. And at all hours his voice came over his personal public-address system, through the whirling sand and the flapping lonely tents:
—Men, I know what war is . . . you don’t . . . yet. . . .
Evenings he might be seen at the Automobile Club in Casa with a French WAC officer built like Danielle Darieux. But he had trouble with the parachutists in our repple-depple. They’d shoot holes in their tents when they couldn’t get out on pass. Then our major would drive through the areas in a jeep, with a tommy gun pointed out of his sound truck.
At midnight the parachutists would take off under the barbed wire for Casa, for at reveille everybody answered to everybody else’s name. In repple-depples the noncoms were only acting, with brassards pinned sheepishly to their arms. Even our first sergeants were only casuals themselves—privates. So they couldn’t chew us out too much because we’d get them later at the Bar Montmartre or at the Select or at Pepita’s, and we’d fix them up with Marie the Pig, who was malade.
I remember that at Casablanca it dawned on me that maybe I’d come overseas to die. Thus I was put for the first time in my life against a wall which I couldn’t explain away by the logic of Main Street or the Weltanschauung of Samuel Goldwyn. I’d read of the sickness of Europe and shrugged my shoulders—Oh those furreners. It didn’t occur to me that they were members of the human race. Only Americans were.
And I remember finding myself potentially expendable according to the Rules of Land Warfare, trapped in a war which (I said) was none of my making. So I began to think of my Life with the tenderness of a great artist. I clasped myself fondly to myself. I retreated into my own private world with the scream of a spinster when she sees a mouse. And I remember that I saw the preciousness of the gift of my Life, a crystal of green lymph, fragile and ephemeral. That’s all I am, but how no-accounting everything else is, in juxtaposition to the idea of Me! What does anything else matter? The world ceases to exist when I go out of it, and I have no one’s assurance but my own for the reality of anything. Those who were machine-gunned in 1918—it’s the same as though they had never been.
I remember that I began to think these things in Casablanca, though I didn’t utter them. Therefore in a sense I went mad. Those who brood on death in wartime find that every pattern of life shrivels up. Decency becomes simply a window-shade game to fool the neighbors, honor a tremolo stop on a Hammond organ, and courage simply your last hypocrisy with yourself—a keeping up with the Joneses, even in a foxhole.
Oh my sweet Life, my lovely Life, my youth—all destined for a bullet. . . . Perhaps it were better if my mother hadn’t borne me. I wondered whether my father really wanted children, or was feeling sorry for himself after a rough day at the office.
I remember in Casa going to the Gare on MP duty from the repple-depple to see that some of our joes got loaded on the forty-by-eights—forty hommes and eight chevaux. They were going to Oran, then to Algiers, then to Italy. We’d heard that General Patton had GI’s walking about in the Algiers summer in OD’s and neckties. Even the French could tell what was cooking.
—Forty American men in a boxcar, like cattle. Wish I had my camera. The American people ought to know about this. Wish I could write my congressman.
—They look like the French Foreign Legion.
—Are your canteens full, men?
—The Ayrabs sell vin rouge all along the route.
—And buy the shirt offn your back.
—This is an outrage to American manhood.
—Americans are dying in Italy right now. The American people know that, don’t they?
—Yes, but do they care as long as we preserve their standard of living for a few more years? D’ya think they give one healthy you-know-what when they get up in the morning?
—See the chaplain. . . .
O my Life, my green ignorant dreaming Life! I said so long to them as the forty-by-eights left the Gare at Casa.
And when I remembered that soon it would be my turn to go to Oran, I didn’t go back to the repple-depple, even though my pass said I should. We kept on our MP brassards, and bigtimed it through Casablanca in our leggins. The bars didn’t open till 1700 hours. So we went to the Vox Theater, which the Red Cross was operating, and saw a movie in technicolor. It was all about the glory of the Army Air Forces, those same ones who at the repple-depple bitched about the calisthenics and the sleeping on chicken wire.
I remember waiting for it to get dark in Casa because as an American I’d all sorts of ideas about the Romance of Evening. I wanted a girl, but it was the American code to pick them up in twos, with your buddy. From high school on I’d doubledated. Going steady and gettin a little lovin weren’t private affairs, because they were done in parked cars. I couldn’t understand how a French sailor, and cold sober too, could walk up to a girl by herself, talk to her, and take her arm. No sense of shame at all. French love and all that. I thought that love, till you got married, was a business of foursomes. Otherwise it seemed something rather sneaky. You were expected to kid back and forth at some bathing beach or roller-drome. Eventually you reached over somewhat sheepishly and the foursome broke up into two twosomes.
—Nossir, nothin in the world like American wimmin. Maybe a little independent, but then ya can’t spend all ya time in bed.
—I never did understand those Lysol ads and all that talk about keepin yaself dainty.
—I knew a Polish beast once. She loved it.
—French girls do things that no decent American woman would.
—A chaplain once explained to me the difference between love and lust. But I can’t remember exactly what he told me.
—All I know is, boy, when you’re in love, everything you do together seems beautiful. . . .
Those Casablancaises—it wasn’t hard to get myself invited to their homes if I came armed with half my PX rations. Maman always claimed she wasn’t born in North Africa, but of course France after June, 1940, wasn’t fit to live in. Her girls went to the cinéma and to bicycle club and to dancing school. They loved to be taught American songs by rote. That was one way to kill an afternoon. They liked to be called Jackie.
But I remember that the surer bets were in the bars. There the widows of French officers sipped crème de menthe. Not a one that didn’t claim mon mari had been killed in Tunisie; not a one whose rank had ever been lower than commandant.
—Je suis seule ce soir avec mes rêves. . . .
I remember how the fetid fragrance of Casablanca let up in the evenings. The oleanders came out with the bats. There was a hum and clatter from the New and Old Medinas. Little Ayrabs ceased their operating and promoting. The sound of donkeys wheezing and snorting and stalling died with their clopclopping in the streets. Then I knew that I was far, far from the States, and that nothing I had brought with me of my own personal universe would make Casa anything other than Casablanca, a hinterland of secrecy, where German submarine captains came ashore in civvies and drank by my elbow in bars.
I remember that I first knew loneliness in Casablanca, the loneliness that engenders quietism. I was stripped of distractions and competitions since I no longer was a citizen of my own hermetical country, with ideas on progress, better homes, and sanitation. These thoughts often assailed me on the benches in the Parc Lyautey after sunset. My loneliness was that of a drunken old man sitting in a grotto and looking out on an icy sea at world’s end. Then, sinking away under a weight of time, I’d be constrained to draw down the head of her on the bench beside me. I’d kiss her in an attempt to focus all my longing and my uneasiness.
—Demain sans doute il fera beau, et après-demain, et la semaine prochaine.
—L’ombre s’enfuit. . . .
Through her hair I counted the spines of barbed wire in the enclosure of the tank park. There the French kept old tanks lined up for a surprise review by General de Gaulle.
Along with the barren names of Cazes and Mogador and Mazagan I remember birdlike ones, Henriette and Marie and Suzanne and a chorus of others who rode their bicycles by me on Saturday afternoons and made me teach them to jitterbug. They were almost like pretty boys, those Casablancaises. They had the pinched brilliance of old paupers’ garments, lovingly mended and darned.
—Darling, they said, il faut gémir quand nous faisons l’amour. Et la prochaine fois je te prie de m’apporter un peu de chewing gum.
I remember Casa. . . .