BOOK REVIEW : Death Comes to Rest Weary Mind : SILENT DAY IN TANGIER<i> by Tahar ben Jelloun Translated from French by David Lobdell</i> A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book Harcourt Brace Jovanovich $16.95, 112 pages

To be dead is to be cut off from the pleasures, pains, objects, emotions, people, projects and despairs offered by life. Tahar ben Jelloun, a Moroccan poet and novelist, depicts the fraying of these things--before the final severance--in the mind of a dying 80-year-old.

In dying, the conspicuous features, nose and chin, become sharper and more prominent. Pride, malice and a pitiless wit are the conspicuous energies of Ben Jelloun’s retired merchant-tailor in his cold bedroom in Tangier at the end of winter.

His ruminations and memories, voiced now in the first person and now in the third, are a prose poem of isolation and decay. Yet sparks of tenderness flicker through. They are ghosts; not quite gone, he is more nearly a dead man haunted by life than a live man haunted by the dead.

The events of his life are meager. Sons of a merchant in the graceful but stagnant city of Fez, he and his brother moved to Tangier, hoping to prosper from the city’s status as an international enclave and free port. Business--they manufactured fine-quality djellabas--dropped off when Tangier was incorporated into Morocco.

For years, the old man has been living, retired, with his wife; a pious and attentive but distant woman whom he makes a practice of despising. His two sons, both successful, visit rarely; and when they do, it is their mother to whom they prefer to talk.

Ben Jelloun’s initial images are of place and weather, outdoors and indoors. “Tangier,” he writes, “a seaport in the perpetual grip of the wind, a city in which indolence and ingratitude reign supreme.” It is an old man scolding; an old man tormented by the ceaseless East wind that penetrates the rattly windows and crushes his bronchial chest.

He is tormented by the moldy patches on the wall, the deep crack on the low ceiling, the leaky plumbing, the dilapidated objects all around him. They are the signs of his own irreversible dilapidation. Death comes to us through the dying and distance of the world around us.

Everything is far from him. The servant scrubs the floor beside him, singing tunelessly, as if he weren’t there. His wife looks in as if--so he imagines--to measure the progress of his decay. He rages, demands, calls for hotter tea, and he is attended. But the proud man who ordered is now kept in order.

His boredom is as draining as the incessant wind. He listens to the rain “no longer knowing what to do with himself in this narrow bed that his body has transformed into a kind of trap which will open one day to send him plunging into the wet black earth.”

He is desperate for company. He makes a list of his friends who are dead: Moulay Ali, the passionate gambler; Tourizi, the world-class seducer; Bachir, whose religious fanaticism amused them all; Abbas, whose malicious gossip was a high art. Larbi, the amateur actor, is still alive, but he is visiting his daughter in Casablanca. The old man reviles the daughter to himself; why couldn’t she marry and thus make it unnecessary for her father to visit her?

There are the women he knew; in particular, Lola, the Spanish 16-year-old he seduced when he was young and charming. But more powerful than such nostalgias are the hatreds; particularly for a mysterious enemy whom he took into his business and who, in some unexplained fashion, betrayed him.

Or perhaps not. The old man’s angers--he is also angry at his sons and many others--run very deep. They come from his bafflement at the distance people keep from him. Bit by bit, we see what has made the distance.

It is his imperiousness and unfettered tongue. His wit is his pride and his art. He loves people, he insists. When he has visitors, he sees that every light in the house is turned on. He loves them for an audience. He thinks his malice is the most hospitable of entertainment. Why, then, is the theater empty?

Ben Jelloun has made a telling, subtle and occasionally puzzling portrait. Not all the wanderings of the bitter old mind are clear; but then all dying, like all life, is at least one part mystery.

And the bleakness lifts entrancingly at the end. In the past, the old man had imagined Heaven as a field full of pretty women in short skirts on bicycles. Now the wind shifts to the north. It is suddenly warm. He is out walking. A beautiful woman pedals up and hands him her bicycle.

“With agility, the girl seats herself on the bar between the saddle and the handlebars. I lower my head to her left shoulder. Her hair blows gently in my face as we roll through a field flooded with light and mirrors.”

His venomous tongue is at rest. It is death. Heaven is ribald and comic.

Next: Judith Freeman reviews “Glad Rags” by MacDonald Harris (Story Line Press).