فصل 9

THE NIGHTINGALE

Oum-El-Hassen

Oum-El-Hassen was a Moroccan dancing girl gone bad. Not “bad,” you know—impudent and bewitching and unrestricted—but bad: evil, heartless, and inscrutable. She began her public life as a gorgeous cabaret girl and ended it with public humiliation, her once-beautiful face veiled in white. Her story trickled down from her trial in Fez to the tiniest American newspapers, like the San Antonio Light and the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, which reported breathlessly that this famous North African beauty was now the cruelest of them all, but never really stopped to fact-check her story. She was the beauty and the beast, a total enigma, forever doomed to be portrayed through someone else’s eyes.

Oum-El-Hassen, who went professionally by the name Moulay, was born in 1890 in the “white and dazzling” city of Algiers, the coastline capital of Algeria. She grew into an ethereal beauty and a wonderful dancer, and began working as a prostitute at the age of twelve. Before long, she was being lauded as “the most beautiful cabaret girl in Northern Africa.” Though her role in society was an inherently vulnerable one, Moulay was smart about it. She noted those who were in power, and she chased their loyalty. At the turn of the century, Algeria was part of French North Africa, and so Moulay chose to adore the French—especially French soldiers. Later, a journalist would write that there was a “savage friendship [between] French blood and her own,” and Moulay apparently vowed that she would never sleep with a man who wasn’t a member of the French army. Her loyalty to the soldiers was certainly appreciated, but it was also uninvited. A woman can be loyal to an army, but an army is rarely loyal to a woman.

Years later, the French writer Colette would observe bleakly that if Moulay hadn’t been so shrewd, her life would have followed a sad and familiar arc: beautiful prostitute found dead in a ditch. But Moulay was never fated to be one of that “uncertain and miserable number” of young dead girls. She knew violence was inevitable in her line of work, and so she chose the side of the violent.

One Thousand Frenchmen

Young Moulay was a clever businesswoman, and by the time she reached her twenties, she was running a popular brothel in Fez. Here, she entertained French officers and all sorts of important city officials with “gaiety, luxury, young dancers, fine firm Berber women, inscrutable Chleuhs, passive daughters of the South.” (This description was written by a French journalist, and is perhaps representational of how these French officers interacted with Moulay’s dancers: plucking their favorites from an impersonal and dehumanizing lineup.) Though much of Moulay’s private life is a mystery, we do know that she was in love once. For five years, she lived with a French colonel, and at one point she gave birth to a baby girl, whom she sent back to her sister in Algeria. In general, her life was going well. She was wealthy and respected. And things were about to get better.

On March 30, 1912, Sultan Abdelhafid of Morocco signed the Treaty of Fez without really letting the people of Fez know what was going on. This treaty turned Morocco into a French protectorate, and Moroccan nationalists took the signing as a huge betrayal. They stewed in silence for a week or two—days that were “heavy with menace,” according to an eyewitness—and then, on April 17, Moroccan troops rose up against their French commanders and subsequently “spread to the streets of Fez in search of any European they could find.” It was a bloodbath. As the rioters streamed through the streets, Moulay turned her back on her countrymen and hid thirty French officers in her brothel instead. When protestors pounded at her door, expecting to search the place, they were shocked to be greeted by Moulay, who was brandishing a gun. She took a bullet in the hand for her pains, but ended up shooting one of the rebels in retaliation. That day, as the officers quivered in her back rooms, over seven hundred people were slaughtered in the streets—mostly Moroccans.

An ocean away, the histrionic American press reported a more colorful version of the story. They claimed that Moulay disguised the officers as prostitutes: shaving their moustaches, dyeing their skin darker, plastering their faces with makeup, cloaking them in wigs and turbans and silk robes, and handing them fans with which to hide their masculine features. She then arranged them into a seductive tableau, carefully positioning her regular girls in front of the soldiers.

And so, the story goes, when the furious rioters broke down the door, they were first distracted by this alluring scene, and then taken aback by Moulay, who was holding a pistol at eye level and daring them to come closer. She demanded they leave her business alone, and then, in a kinder tone, suggested they come back to enjoy her girls another day, when everyone was a bit calmer. Most of the rioters agreed to this idea, but when one showed signs of recognizing a French officer, Moulay shot the Moroccan through the heart.

Drag or no drag, the French were endlessly grateful to Moulay for services rendered. “She is rich, she is loved, she is adulated,” crowed their newspapers. The officers rewarded her with eleven thousand francs, and people started to murmur that she should be appointed to the prestigious Legion of Honor. Moulay herself was incredibly proud of what she’d done, and later changed the number of officers she’d saved from thirty to sixty. But respectable France couldn’t stomach the idea of bequeathing their highest award to a prostitute who ran a cabaret, and so she was ultimately passed over. The rejection “broke her heart,” reported the San Antonio Light, “because it permitted respectable women to snub her.” That was the thing about Moulay: she wanted to be adored, but she chose people who wouldn’t, or couldn’t, openly love her.

Despite this rebuff, Moulay’s passionate loyalty to the visiting army did not abate, and in 1925 she saved French lives again. A high-ranking Moroccan official was planning to kill a garrison of French soldiers by orchestrating a religious uprising during an annual festival, and Moulay caught wind of the plot. She went straight to a French general to warn him, and the general in turn managed to shut down the revolt. Numerically speaking, she’d just done the French an even bigger favor than she had during the 1912 Fez riots. Later, when she had fallen from her “adulated” position, she liked to remind people that she’d saved the lives of “one thousand Frenchmen.” But for now, she was still famous, beloved by the French army, and queen of the Fez underground. She may have been the madam of a brothel, but she was as respectable and respected as a woman in her position could hope to be.

Then she vanished.

The Body in the Basket

No one really knows why Moulay went deep underground, or what she did there. Maybe she lost a lot of money. Maybe the colonel finally broke her heart. Darker rumors abound: she got mixed up with drug traffickers; she became involved in the “white slavery” trade; she started smoking hashish and sank slowly into the haze of addiction. Eventually, she lost her brothel license and at some point moved out of Fez and relocated to the seedy part of Meknès, a city about fifty miles southwest. She ran her new brothel with the help of a “sordid, fetid” old servant named Mohammed Ben Ali, who quickly became her right-hand man.

This brothel was not the swanky cabaret where Moulay had amused France’s highest-ranking officers with “gaiety, luxury, young dancers.” Instead, her new business was frequented by crueler men who didn’t expect things to be fancy—or even clean. Moulay, for her part, just didn’t seem to care about much anymore.

“The men she receives are demanding, the women she offers them languish,” reported Paris-Soir. Her business was notable for its “grime and beatings” and the “odious practices” of its orgies, and the results showed on the starving, bruised bodies of the girls who worked there. Moulay was paranoid that her girls would secretly beg for help during their “amorous conversations” with patrons, and so she sometimes hid behind a curtain to spy on them.

Perhaps Moulay grew irrationally angry every time she looked at these girls, who were no longer the “fine firm” specimens she’d paraded before the French army years before. These new prostitutes, skinny and damaged, were a visual reminder of her fall from grace. And so she began to abuse them, helped along by Mohammed Ben Ali. The girls were starved and locked up so that they couldn’t escape, and beaten at the slightest provocation. At least seven of them were struck so fiercely and so often they were eventually crippled.

By autumn 1936, Moulay was about forty-six years old. She was no longer supple and young; her looks had “dissolved in the fat of middle age.” Her days of luxury and adulation were far behind her, and her life was filled instead with violence—and one particularly horrible secret.

Children sometimes frolicked in the streets outside Moulay’s brothel, and one day a group of kids stumbled across something that piqued their interest: a heavy basket tied shut with string. They scrambled over each other to open it. Nothing could have prepared them for the contents inside. “Feet, hands, a head and its hair, a torso and young breasts” loomed out of the basket—a sick shadow box, a body in pieces. The broken flesh was surrounded by mint, fennel, and thyme, all stuffed inside the basket to disguise the smell of decay.

Soon the police were knocking on Moulay’s door, demanding an explanation. Moulay received them, haughty and dismissive. Yes, she said, the dead girl was Cherifa, one of her former “boarders”—a euphemism if there ever was one—but she had no idea how Cherifa had ended up in the basket. She then reminded the police that she’d saved the lives of a thousand Frenchman, in case anyone had forgotten to keep track.

Mohammed Ben Ali wasn’t so cool under pressure, and as soon as the police turned to him, he began to babble about revenge and beatings and strangulation. But Moulay silenced him immediately. “Mohammed is a fool,” she said. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

The skeptical police investigated Moulay’s house anyway. They discovered weapons in Mohammed Ben Ali’s room and a couple of suspicious bloodstains. As they continued to search, they heard strange noises coming from behind one of the walls—a faint scratching, and then a mewling that sounded a lot like a cat.

Moulay told them that it was indeed a cat. She’d been having repairs done on one of the walls, she said, and the feral animal was accidentally plastered up in the process. The police made as if to knock down the walls, and Moulay calmly dissuaded them, saying that she’d already hired a professional to come and free the cat. He would be able to do a cleaner job, she cooed. She was so convincing that the police were about to leave, when from behind the wall, they heard the voice of a child: “Help! There are four of us here and we are dying.” Colette Attends the Trial

Word of the sensational crime spread quickly across the city, and Moulay became a celebrity once again. This time, it was an unpleasant fame. Hustlers began selling jewels to the morbidly curious, swearing that they were “snatched from the throat” of Moulay herself. In anticipation of drama, gory details, and general human tragedy, the French papers sent their best journalists to Fez to cover the trial.

The celebrated French writer Colette showed up in Morocco less interested in the back-and-forth legalities of the trial and more interested in knowing the unknowable Oum-El-Hassen. In the courtroom, Colette sat very near to Moulay—so close she could have touched her—and eyed the now forty-eight-year-old woman like a hawk. Moulay was dressed entirely in spotless white robes. She held a white handkerchief over her mouth, so that the only visible parts of her face were her curved nose and her “very dark green-brown eyes, lavishly treated with blue kohl.” But when she lifted away the handkerchief to speak, all traces of elegance were lost: she was missing teeth, and her mouth was “flat, ungracious, made for gossiping, invective and—perhaps—cruelty.” There was a horrific spread of evidence at the front of the courtroom: a little shrine of household items allegedly used to kill and dismember poor Cherifa. There was the infamous basket that held Cherifa’s hacked-up body, a pot in which Cherifa was supposed to have been boiled, a knife, a revolver, a garrote, and a “pestle for grinding scalps rather than almonds.” Saddest of all were the pink and white pieces of cotton that had been wrapped around the mutilated limbs. There was no sign of blood on any of this fabric because, according to Mohammed Ben Ali, Cherifa had been too thin to bleed.

The murder of this dancing girl appeared to be merely a synecdoche for Moulay’s “chamber of horrors” as a whole. Everybody was pretty certain that Moulay had killed again and again during her time in Meknès. After all, only about half of her “boarders” were accounted for. The prosecutor, M. Julin, announced, “Of 14 girls known to have been inmates of this house in a year, three have disappeared, four are dead, and seven have been tortured so badly that they will be invalids for life. Once a girl entered this haunt she was never seen again outside.” Another of the dead girls was finally identified: her name was Aicha, and she was a dancer at Moulay’s house of horrors long before Cherifa arrived, but “lost her health and looks under the abuse until she was no longer of interest to the guests.” With no use for Aicha anymore, Moulay allegedly murdered her with a loaf of bread stuffed full of strychnine.

Aicha and Cherifa were, at the very least, named in the press, but Moulay’s other victims were fated to remain nameless forever. Her business was a place of utter darkness, a fetid drain where the poorest and youngest beauties of society seemed to catch, spin, and disappear. The details of the other two deaths—as well as those three missing girls—never surfaced, and no one came forward to mourn them.

The Hot Tea Dance

Neither Colette nor the French reporter Paul Boué—on location for Paris-Soir and calling in his reporting by phone—provided a detailed narrative of the night Cherifa died. (We do, however, have a date: November 21, 1936.) Somehow, though, a dramatic retelling of that fateful night wended its way into the American press. The account is more interesting for its speculative detail than for its accuracy—the American journalist seems to be trying to cram every exotic cliché he can into the story—and so it ends up telling us more about the Western press’s opinion of Moulay than about Moulay herself. This is both intriguing and torturous. We want to know what happened, but instead, we get a flattened, exoticized, eroticized story of a girl who dances like a trapped princess and a woman with the cruelty and heartlessness of a witch.

Cherifa was a such a talented dancer, the story goes, that she was often forced to perform an elaborate ritual for clients called the Hot Tea Dance, which was invented by Moulay herself. During this performance, Cherifa was stripped naked, and Moulay placed a tray loaded with cups of boiling mint tea on the girl’s head. Thus burdened, Cherifa was required to dance and perform acrobatic tricks without scalding herself. She managed to complete the routine about once every four times, but she was usually burned.

One evening, Moulay was entertaining some particularly important guest who was high on hashish and feeling exceptionally cruel. The tense spectacle of the Hot Tea Dance wasn’t doing it for him that night, so he topped it off with a little entertainment of his own invention: sticking pins into Cherifa’s naked back, heating them with a cigarette lighter, and watching her squirm.

Cherifa snapped. As the man busied himself with one of the pins, she spun around and, with an acrobat’s strength, punched him right in the stomach. When he crumpled, she kicked him so hard in the chin that she almost broke his neck. Before she could finish him off, Moulay and Mohammed sprang on the rebellious girl—and that was the beginning of the end.

Though this story may well be fictionalized, it alludes to a surprising number of truths hidden between the accounts of mint tea and sinuous nude dancing. We know that Cherifa was brutalized, starved, and forced to sleep with horrible men. We know that Moulay was a wicked mastermind who used her creativity and intellect to please her clients. The tea tray and the cigarette lighter add color, but they’re not the real point of the story. What’s important here is that Moulay, once again, aligned herself with the victimizer, not the victim.

Speaking of reportage, though: what of the Moroccan press? Where are the accounts written in Arabic about Cherifa’s murder, about Moulay’s ghastly brothel? As a matter of fact, there was almost no large-scale Arabic-language Moroccan press extant in Moulay’s day. Since Morocco was a French protectorate, there were French papers published in Morocco, but those mainly targeted, well, the French. Attempts by nationalists to run Arabic-language papers were frequently squelched by French colonial authorities in order to ensure that the idea of protectorate as ideal state wasn’t challenged. So what we know of Moulay, we know in French or English. Colette’s account (written in French) is the best we have, but even though her reportage is at times quite empathetic, and though she takes the devastating effects of colonialism into account, she is not Moulay’s countrywoman. What we’re left with is an imperfect portrait of a strange, cruel woman who never did manage to break free from the tentacles of the country she loved—or pretended to love, or was forced to love—not even in print.

In the courtroom, Mohammed Ben Ali—who had tried to admit everything to the police earlier—was more than willing to keep talking. He even stood at the front of the room and acted out the murder for the benefit of his disgusted and fascinated audience. According to Ben Ali, once he and Moulay grew tired of kicking and beating Cherifa, they each picked up one end of a garrote and wrapped it around the girl’s neck. Slowly, patiently, they pulled the cord in opposite directions. Later, the two dismembered her, “boiled the remains for twenty-four hours to make them unrecognizable,” and then packed her away in the basket full of herbs. But they were remarkably careless with the body: not only did they fail at rendering the remains “unrecognizable,” but they barely bothered to hide the basket. Cherifa’s broken body could no longer bring in money, and so it meant nothing to them.

“The Proper Fashion”

There were plenty of witnesses against Moulay, but the most pitiful ones were the emaciated children who had been pulled from behind her wall. In court, people were astounded by their thinness, their raw animal terror—one of the girls burst out screaming when she saw Moulay in the courtroom—but what nobody expected was that these children, who had seen it all happen through a crack in the plaster, had nothing to say. They had been so starved and abused that they hardly had the capacity to form memories, much less recall and process them on command. “They barely murmur, wail quietly, prostrated,” Colette wrote. When asked why they didn’t try to run away, they responded, “We didn’t think about it,” or, “Impossible, we were too weak.” Colette rather callously saw them as “graceful cattle, but cattle whose impenetrable crushing stupidity is utterly loathsome.” You get the sense, reading over the trial, that these children were something like blank slates, wiped bare by months of torture. When they were rescued, the heaviest of them weighed no more than seventy pounds. “Victim? Certainly,” wrote Colette of the only boy, a thirteen-year-old named Driss, who tottered and gasped at the witness stand. “But a victim without memory; he has forgotten the dungeon, the lice, the itching, the hunger, the torture.” Moulay was visibly disdainful of these child witnesses, her old employees. Watching her, Colette noted that Moulay had no sense of guilt about the way she’d treated them. For Moulay, abuse was simply a natural part of the world she knew. It was the way one ran a brothel. “What words or images can we use to make Oum-El-Hassen understand what we mean by cruelty, and how could the accused murderer and torturer communicate to us her conviction that she is innocent?” asked Colette. Moulay seemed to believe that prostitutes should know their place in public, and she was appalled by the trembling and wailing of her former boarders. “Let them entrust this shrieking girl to Oum-El-Hassen and they’ll see how to educate them in the proper fashion,” wrote Colette, speculating about Moulay’s thought process. “A touch of torture, starvation, some shutting away.” Moulay’s actions imply that she cared desperately about following the rules—and not just any rules, but the French rules. She informed on the uprising, as dutiful as a telltale child. She eavesdropped on her girls to make sure they followed her instructions, which were simple: pleasure the clients and don’t try to escape. But her reliance on the rules was a doomed one, for the game she was playing was rigged. The scholar Marnia Lazreg writes that “the colonial view of prostitution was marked not only by a deliberate neglect of the ways in which colonialism contributes to a flourishing, if not encouraging, of this activity, but also by a constant desire to define prostitution as a sign of deficient moral standards among native people.” French soldiers may have paid her rent for a while, but they would never truly claim her as one of their own. She was too contaminated.

Was Moulay so careful about rules because she genuinely bought into this system of colonialism? Or was her loyalty given coldly and calculatingly—you know, betting on the side of the victor? It seems she chose the side of the French as a careful gamble: she would be good to them now, and they would be good to her later. But what a gamble to make, counting on the loyalty of a colonizing nation.

For her entire life, Moulay’s position was marked by abuse from above and below. She was colonized; she was colonizer. In 1933, a few years after Moulay warned her Frenchmen about the religious uprising, one journalist lamented over the state of the average Moroccan woman, who was “stuck in a medieval routine” and could “neither read nor write, stays imprisoned in her house.” Contrast this with Moulay, who was not the imprisoned woman, but the jail keeper herself. She was liberated from the home, but bought—too fully—into another system of oppression. Though she avoided being one of that “uncertain and miserable number” of dead girls, she contributed to the miserable number. In these economies of flesh, where everyone is feeding off everyone else, a dreadful question starts to emerge: is a life of comparative freedom (Moulay) only able to be purchased with the life of another (Cherifa)? The violence begins to feel inevitable, even mathematical—a horrible equation of power.

In court, a few folks testified about Moulay’s character—or rather, her properness, which was her real defense. If she was a proper woman and ran a proper house, how could she be criticized? Proper women can’t be executed, can they? But the searing disappointment of the trial, for Moulay, was the fact that none of her beloved officers showed up to defend her. Several of them were summoned, but not one of her clients or lovers appeared in court to explain how valuable she was to them, and how good. It was quite possibly the great betrayal of her life, and when she realized it, she wept into her white silk handkerchief.

White Silks

Moulay was skewered in the press throughout the trial. Everyone focused on the cruel corrosion of her looks, emphasizing that she used to be beautiful and talented and popular but that now she was evil both inside and out: the “once-glamorous” courtesan gone really, really bad. People even linked the loss of her looks to the increase in her cruelty. “After she lost her beauty she opened a house of prostitution,” ran the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, a bit smugly.

The most compelling insight into Moulay’s interiority comes from Colette’s cold but beautifully written reportage—and even though Colette sat next to the murderess for hours, watching the intricate play of emotions in her eyes, it’s still only speculation. In her coverage of the case, Colette puts forth a sort of theory of Moulay’s cruelty, saying that Moulay considered brutality to be a rite of passage for young, beautiful women who put themselves in the way of men. “What we call cruelty was the ordinary, bloody, and joyous currency of her life from infancy: the blows, the cord tying the slender limbs, the harsh male embrace, the passion she had for following . . . our first French contingents,” wrote Colette. “All that kills, wounds, withers was her first lot as an adventurous girl.” Moulay’s world taught her that women were “creatures who strictly speaking have no value,” and she internalized this message and passed it on to her boarders. “Where could she have learned that punishment exercised on women . . . has any limits?” Colette wondered. What she learned of violence, she probably learned from the French contingents, who were marching through her streets and paying her to spend the night with her North African girls.

Her devotion to the French was finally rewarded, however: she escaped the guillotine and was only sentenced to fifteen years in prison. (Mohammed got away with ten years.) Once her story reached the United States, it ballooned to mythical proportions: the number of victims attributed to her hovered around one hundred, and at least one paper ran a piece claiming that she had been guillotined. The same article reported that, at her execution, her beloved colonel was “seen to dabble his eyes.” The misinformation about Moulay only contributed to the sense of enigma and exoticism that hovered around her. Even Colette couldn’t help comparing the trial to something out of the Thousand and One Nights. To this day, Morocco still appears sinuous and strange in the Western imagination; descriptions of Fez have hardly changed since Colette wandered, a wide-eyed product of her colonizing motherland, through its streets. (In 2007, the New York Times described Fez with breathless amazement, writing that the city’s “shrouded figures and forgotten passages can seem impossible to decipher—yet tinged with a deep enchantment.”) When Western sources retold Moulay’s story, the details about smoky hashish, supple dancing girls, and scalding mint tea all fit nicely into the perennially popular fetish of the exotic woman, playing out against the backdrop of a very strong, very manly, very European army. At the end of the day, what was Moulay to the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern but a “shrouded figure” from a fairy tale?

But the true mystery of Moulay isn’t her exoticism. It’s her motives, which will always be closed to us. Who did she kill to please? Her clients? Her own dark urges? The French? And why? We can only guess at the forces that made her so willing to take a bullet in the hand for the officers of an invading army. We don’t know what happened between Moulay and her love, the colonel. We can speculate that she felt broken, abandoned, and haunted by the memories of her glory days, when she was beautiful and when all the soldiers wanted her. But all we can really rely on is the image of her in the courtroom, surrounded by her own instruments of torture, weeping into her white silks.

So Moulay went to prison, and the world wondered why she didn’t get the death penalty. Some suspected that she knew more than she was letting on—perhaps she was privy to some “political dynamite”?—or that she still had friends in high places who would have retaliated if the French executed her. But no one reached down from on high to hand Moulay a pardon, so off to jail she went, and she was never heard from again, at least not in “proper” society.

Perhaps her colonel finally appeared to her, tore down the walls of her prison, and stole her away into the warm night air. But if not, Moulay stumbled out of her cell at the end of her sentence and vanished, a second time, into the underbelly of the world that raised and destroyed her.