Still Life with Oranges, Jars,
and Boxes of Sweets, c. 1760-65
(Oil on canvas, 48.3 x 35.2 cm)
BY Luis Meléndez
Kimbell Art Museum

He had a round, happy face, and had joined the army, he said, because he couldn’t find any another job. He had been driven here by the colonel, who opened the large metal gate and showed him around the garden with its fruit trees and rows of vegetables. There was a little house at the bottom of the garden where he could live, the colonel said.

Now he tended the colonel’s fruit trees, watered the colonel’s vegetables daily with a pipe and a system of canals that he organised with a mattock. Even the colonel’s banana trees looked as if they might produce a crop of small bananas this year. The colonel was pleased, he said, and the colonel’s wife came each week to collect her stock of aubergines, peppers, tomatoes. In winter she would sell most of the crop of oranges and clementines for a profit.

He didn’t mind living out here away from the city, he didn’t even miss life at the barracks or his fellow soldiers. He didn’t mind gardening either. It was okay. He had learned a lot. It was a lot better than being in the war down in the Sahara, he said.

It is Friday, sunset. Each muezzin is chanting Allah el-Akbar from his minaret. Many have loudspeakers or electrical systems to augment the sound. Not many have the beautiful voices of the Egyptian chanting the same thing simultaneously on TV. Later there will be a film, followed by an orchestra playing Andalou music. In between, if parliament is in session, viewers may be treated to an hour of unscheduled political speeches.

There are no flat surfaces in this part of the Rif: steep mountains climb all around, up to 4,500 feet, black or yellow and red fleisches and schists with, miraculously, every six yards or so, a fig tree clinging for dear life. These are small hardy fig trees, and just before the harvest is ready in the valleys, the dried figs come into their own. When there is nothing left to eat, both men and animals live on dried figs from last year. Some of the figs have fermented by this time, and both animals and men are slightly drunk and argumentative. Down in the valley, people say that the people up here are crazy.

A butcher had a very beautiful daughter. One day the king passed the butcher’s house and caught a glimpse of the daughter. Later that day a car from the palace was seen in the vicinity, and the girl was never seen again.

“She is in the harim at the palace,” people say.

“Do you know what Morocco means in Saudi Arabia?” he asked, with a bitter smile. “The rich buy plane tickets so they can come here and find a woman for a few days, drink and dance and be merry. Then they go home as chaste as you like. And the poor? They just gaze at the Moroccan embassy over there in Saudi, with longing.”