A short story written before 1981.
SYNOPSIS
Set in Tangier, Morocco during the summer.
Part I
Madame La Sorcière, a woman of considerable age and sexual prowess as well as supernatural powers, resides at the Grand Hotel des Souhks.
Known for her escapades with young, handsome hotel employees, Madame La Sorcière desires Ahmed, the evening barman.
Late one evening, the Narrator follows Madame and a young man to Madame’s room. After a few minutes he overhears her protestations over the man’s inhibited approach to sexual positions. She administers an aphrodisiac of camel dung to him, and soon after the Narrator hears a wild ruckus coming from the suite. The next morning, the Nar-rator dines on the patio below Madame’s suite win-dow. He witnesses a crow fly out of the suite, and he does not see the young man for several days.
When the young man resurfaces at the hotel, he sporadically makes winglike gestures with his arms.
Princess Fatima sits next to Madame at El Bar.
She challenges Madame’s assertion that Ahmed has no body hair and charges that Madame has not been intimate with him. Madame summons the four-piece orchestra to her table. As they play a seductive melody, she unzips the caftan she is wearing, exposing herself below the waist to Ahmed. Madame’s powerful stare transfixes Ahmed. Feeling as though she is losing the argu-ment, Princess Fatima counters Madame’s actions by loudly asking her age; however, Madame is not distracted by the question. She simply answers that
she was born on a day when the sun rose. Princess Fatima is perturbed by the coolness of Madame’s avoidance of the question. Madame baits the princess further by questioning her social status.
Enraged by this slight, the princess states that she is second in the line of succession to the throne of the country of Kughwana. Madame retorts that she has never heard of such a place.
Madame positions her chair to expose her vagina to Princess Fatima, who is stunned by its beauty. She does not believe it is real, but Madame suggests they retire to the bathroom so that the princess may investigate its authenticity. The two women agree to end their argument, though as enemies, and agree to avoid any future contact.
Before Princess Fatima exits, she asks Madame the exact date of her birth, and Madame repeats her previous answer. Again, Madame questions the importance of Princess Fatima’s country. Insulted and furious, Princess Fatima instructs Madame to take a closer look at the gold jewelry adorning her body. Madame deems the ornaments nothing more than brass or copper. Madame coolly purrs and dis-engages from the tiresome Princess Fatima. Dis-gusted by Madame’s actions, Princess Fatima quickly rises from her table, overturning a carafe of chilled wine on her two guard-eunuchs. One eunuch yelps with pain, as his castration is recent. Madame goes to this eunuch, wipes his tears, and propositions him with a night in her suite. He questions her choosing him, but she assures him that she can still give him pleasure.
Part II
One night in July of the same summer, Lady Abh-fendierocker docks her yacht at the port in Tangier.
Banned from most ports in the Mediterranean because of previous lascivious behavior with a high-ranking official, Lady Abhfendierocker is accompa-nied by a set of notorious jewel thieves who have paid for their passage with a fake emerald and sex-ual favors. During their passage from Nice, one of the thieves suffered a moment of impotence, which made Lady Abhfendierocker suspicious of the emer-ald. Upon appraisal in a port, she learns the emerald is not real. She forces the thieves to board a slowly deflating raft in the middle of the ocean in an act of 114 “It Happened the Day the Sun Rose”
revenge. The thieves, however, manage to survive, make their way to shore, and room with Madame at the Grand Hotel des Soukhs.
Ahmed proposes to spend a night with Madame.
Madame however rejects him because she knows he is only interested in garnering a passport to Argentina. Ahmed becomes angry, cursing Madame as she exits the bar. In response to this humiliation, Ahmed phones the front desk and alerts them to the jewel thieves in Madame’s suite. Ahmed’s blun-der results in his own dismissal from the hotel.
Now unemployed, Ahmed submits to being seduced by a wealthy older man, Lord Buggersmythe, who has courted him for many months. Lord Bug-gersmythe arranges a trust fund for Ahmed from the earnings of his five-star restaurant. This fund will forever be available to Ahmed on the condition that Ahmed never strays for a single night from their bed.
Ahmed happily agrees to this condition.
One evening nearly one month later, Madame enters the restaurant of Lord Buggersmythe. She requests that Ahmed serve her. Ahmed apprehen-sively acquiesces. Madame coos with delight when she sees him. She congratulates him for his new occupation as Lord Buggersmythe’s kept boy.
Despite the voluble orchestra, Ahmed faintly hears crows cawing from under Madame’s chair. Madame’s dinner date whispers that Madame is afflicted by crows, five of which have entered her person. The man explains that Madame has an extra orifice, much like the pouch of a kangaroo. Madame inter-rupts to say that the crows are pecking away at her abdomen because their sedation has worn off. She is able to release them, but not without a type of magic practiced with camel manure and the bottle of elixir in her purse.
Ahmed tells her that he cannot bring camel manure to her table. Furthermore, there are no camels for miles and miles. Madame replies that she only needs a tiny amount of manure, and pro-duces a small box for Ahmed to gather it in. She begs him to hurry before her screams blow the roof off the building.
The chef presents a platter of manure to Madame within minutes. She immediately recognizes the manure to be human, not camel. Angered and insulted, Madame hurls the manure at the chef and
Ahmed. Chaos breaks out in the restaurant, and five crows begin to circle overhead. Pleased that the crows are released in spite of the lack of ingredients for the elixir, she thanks Ahmed. Madame invites him to share a bottle of champagne in celebration.
He hesitantly walks to her and is transformed into the sixth crow circling the ceiling.
Time passes. In the moonlight of Lord Bug-gersmythe’s bedroom, a 12-year-old Balinese boy and a physician tend to the dying old man. Lord Buggersmythe calls out to Ahmed, the crow. He accuses Ahmed of escaping his cage when he sleeps. Lord Buggersmythe wishes he could have sex with Ahmed. The cries of women and men and the barking of dogs throughout Tangier interrupt this sentimental moment. Miraculously, Ahmed’s human body is reinstated. Madame appears in the room and throws a brilliant gem at Ahmed’s feet.
Another gem is discarded at the threshold of the room. She calls out her suite number and disap-pears. Lord Buggersmythe dies.
The moral of the story is, “truth is all that we know of right in this world, and therefore its absence is all that we know of wrong. In other words, it is not good, it is God.”
COMMENTARY
Williams investigates the power of feminine sexual-ity in this story. He pushes the boundaries that he created in such archetypal women as Maggie the Cat Pollitt (CAT ON AHOTTINROOF), Blanche DuBois (A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE), and Miss Valerie Coynte (“MISSCOYNTE OFGREENE”). Like Blanche who “avoids adult sexual relationships but actively seeks affairs with adolescents” (McGlinn, 513), Madame La Sorcière seeks sexual encounters with considerably younger men, but her actions, com-bined with supernatural powers, literally transform her conquests if they do not satisfy her sexual appetite.
Wielding their sexuality as weapons to conquer their male counterparts and manipulate situations, Williams’s overtly sexual female characters “seem to have been conceived by their creator, if not as representatives of a sort of salvation, then at least as attractive earth goddesses whose salvation is their own sexuality” (Jones, 211). Madame’s power
“It Happened the Day the Sun Rose” 115
is her beautiful vagina. Men and women alike are enamored of it. Williams presses the boundaries of feminine sexuality to involve the physical organ, and what was merely (yet powerfully) the essence of feminine sexuality in past characters such as Blanche and Maggie is now physically manifest.
Madame La Sorcière’s earthiness is exemplified when she states that she was “born the day the sun rose,” revealing a wraithlike and ancient soul.
In the short story “Miss Coynte of Greene,”
Williams portrays another earthy woman who is sexually liberated and profoundly concentrated on sexual fulfillment. Miss Coynte is also a character who is centrifugal to the cycle of life. Her daughter, Michele Moon, carries on the sexual liberation in her affair with twin lovers. Michele Moon and Miss Coynte are also unconventional as they publicly cel-ebrate their African-American lovers in a racially segregated setting. Their fearless love, desire, and wants supersede any human-based laws or social, religious, or political mores.
Ahmed the barman does not escape Madame’s wrath, as his invitation to have sex is not sincere desire but rather a means to garner a passport. The all-knowing Madame is aware of Ahmed’s deceit.
His downfall is that he underestimates her psychic powers. Ahmed also attempts to trick Madame into believing that he has delivered the required camel dung for her case of crows. His punishment for this misdeed is that he, too, becomes a crow.
And while Ahmed does not succumb to Madame’s seduction, he suffers the same punishment because he rejects her sexually. In this instance, Madame’s sexual power is an inescapable trap.
Characters such as Madame La Sorcière are most often found in Williams’s fiction rather than his dramatic works. Jürgen C. Wolter writes in his essay, “Tennessee Williams’s Fiction,” “Since fiction allows space for undramatic reflections and digres-sions and since the breaking of taboos can be much more radical in a text that is written for the private closet of the individual reader than in a script for the ‘public theatre,’ a story can be a more sponta-neous reaction.” This is also evident in Williams’s treatment of gay issues and themes. His short sto-ries and fiction detail and celebrate gay characters and situations, and in no way has he shied away
from this topic, which was generally considered taboo during his lifetime. Williams provides a sub-plot in this story that involves a relationship between Ahmed and Lord Buggersmythe, who becomes Ahmed’s savior after he is fired from the hotel. Even after Ahmed has been turned into a crow, Lord Buggersmythe desires him.
Tennessee Williams visited Tangier in the sum-mer of 1973. This visit is chronicled in the book Tennessee Williams in Tangier, by Muhammad Shukri.
Williams was struggling to write THE RED DEVIL
BATTERYSIGN. According to Gavin Lambert, in his introduction to the book, Williams was very restless and having terrible luck in his travels that summer.
What proved, however, to be an unplanned success was the relationship between Shukri and Williams:
two men who seemed to have very little in com-mon. During their chance encounters in cafes, on the streets, or at PAULBOWLES’s apartment, Shukri became very interested in Williams as a writer.
Williams was very pleased with the book, calling it
“gently humorous and discreet with a reticent sym-pathy implicit” (Shukri, Epilogue), and Williams was relieved and surprised that he was chronicled in such a positive light after years of suffering a waning public image.
PUBLICATION HISTORY
“It Happened the Day the Sun Rose” was published in It Happened the Day the Sun Rose and Other Sto-ries by Sylvester & Orphanos in 1981.
CHARACTERS
Ahmed A handsome young Moroccan barman who works at the Grand Hotel des Souhks.
Ahmed’s life changes when he encounters Madame La Sorcière, a woman with supernatural powers and a robust sexual appetite. Ahmed coolly keeps his distance from her. When Ahmed proposes to spend a night with Madame La Sorcière in hopes of securing an Argentine passport from her, she rejects him. When Ahmed tries to trick Madame La Sorcière a second time, she turns him into a crow. Ahmed is restored in the final moments of the story when Madame La Sorcière returns and turns him back into a man. She also reinstates the invitation to her suite.
116 “It Happened the Day the Sun Rose”
Lady Abhfendierocker A wealthy woman who docks her yacht in Tangier. She is accompanied by a gang of notorious jewel thieves who have paid her for their passage with a fake emerald. When Lady Abhfendierocker has the emerald appraised at the port and learns that it is counterfeit, she forces the thieves to board a slowly deflating raft in the mid-dle of the ocean in an act of revenge.
Lord Buggersmythe An aging wealthy bachelor who, smitten by Ahmed, supports him financially on the condition that Ahmed never stray a single night from their bed. Lord Buggersmythe desires Ahmed even after he is turned into a crow.
Madame La Sorcière A wealthy and powerful woman who lives at the Grand Hotel des Souhks in Tangier, Morocco. Endowed with supernatural powers and psychic intelligence, Madame La Sor-cière has an insatiable sexual appetite. She is also in the habit of turning her young lovers into crows if they do not meet her expectations. Equipped with an extra pouchlike orifice around her stomach, she carries these crows inside her, calming them with a magic elixir when they become restless. Madame La Sorcière fancies Ahmed, the barman at the hotel, but when he attempts to trick her, she turns him into a crow. She does return after some time and reinstates his human form, rewards him with two precious gems, and leaves an open invitation to tryst in her suite.
Princess Fatima Madame La Sorcière’s rival, Princess Fatima is second in succession to the throne of Kughwana. Madame La Sorcière ques-tions the importance of her country, insulting Princess Fatima and causing her to retire to her room with her eunuch-guards, but not before she tries to embarrass Madame LaSorcière by asking her age. Madame La Sorcière ripostes by displaying her youthful and extraordinary vagina for Princess Fatima to envy.
FURTHER READING
Jones, Robert Emmet. “Tennessee Williams’s Early Heroines.” Modern Drama 2 (1959): 211–219.
McGlinn, Jeanne M. “Tennessee Williams’s Women:
Illusion and Reality, Sexuality and Love.” In Ten-nessee Williams: A Tribute, edited by Jac Tharpe.
Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1977.
Shukri, Muhammad. (Mohamed Choukri). Tennessee Williams in Tangier. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Cadmus Editions, 1979.
Wolter, Jürgen C. “Tennessee Williams’s Fiction.” In Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and Perfor-mance by Philip C. Kolin. Westport, Conn.: Green-wood Press, 1998, pp. 220–228.