Tangier

by William Bayer

  TANGIER PLAYERS: Fever over at TP has gone up another ten degrees. Larry Luscombe, the club's founder and president, has told this column he won't resign. "Not under any circumstances," he said, and we take him at his word. If worse comes to worst, and the AMERICAN power play does succeed, Larry has promised he'll start another group.

  DIPLOMATICALLY SPEAKING: The Foster Knowles’ out the other night at Heidi's Bar, along with the Willard Manchesters and the Ashton Codds. The young Knowles’ are becoming quite popular, we hear. A number of our older fellow Tangerenes have joined their early morning jogging group.

  BY THE WAY, speaking of Heidi's, we wonder how they liked the food. We were poisoned there, ourselves, last week, by some over-pungent ratatouille!

  DIPLOMATICALLY TOO: The Dan Lakes have been seen socially with Peter Zvegintzov. Just shows that détente works, even in Tangier.

  BITS AND PIECES: Tessa and David Hawkins back from Dublin, where they bought an Irish jumper. This brother and sister horseback riding act, which has won every prize in Tangier, will be heading down to Rabat soon to take on the Royal Equitation Team.

  ON THE LITERARY FRONT: Kranker, Klein, and Doyle back from Marrakech, where the three literary lions held forth at the Glaçière. The fourth member of the old quartet, Martin Townes, has been in deep seclusion for a month. We don't know what he's cooking up, but there are rumors that CERTAIN TANGIER PERSONALITIES may find themselves in his forthcoming book.

  PEOPLE COMING: Pierre St. Carlton will be at "Capulet" by June 15. Our dapper Indonesian friend Jimmy Sohario is also expected soon. Dolores Faye spent the spring in Nepal and will come here after a stopover in Jaipur. No word yet on Henderson Perry, but his yacht has been spotted off Iran. When he gets here the real parties will start, and the talk won't be about the price of aubergines either.

  FINALLY this from the Beaumonts (younger generation): a valuable pre-Colombian objet is missing from Villa Chapultepec. Would whoever took the thing, INADVERTENTLY, OF COURSE, please leave it with the gatekeeper? We promise not to report his name.

  Robin pulled the last page out of his typewriter, sat back and gasped. He'd written the entire column in ten minutes, without stopping to choose his words. He lit up a pipe of kif and inhaled. Then he read the column through.

  Poetry it wasn't. He folded the pages neatly, sealed them in an envelope, and threw himself down on his bed. His dream of making his name with serious verse had fled him years before, and now he didn't care anymore—life in Tangier was much too gay. There were still too many marvelous characters to meet, too many fine young bodies to screw. Hustler. Police informer. Dope dealer. Gossip. Robin, the redheaded weasel with the barbed tongue. He was all of these things, and had found himself a town that matched his seedy vision of his soul.

  A little before noon he gathered himself up, walked out of the medina to the offices of the Dépêche de Tanger. He left his column under the door; he had no wish to see his Moroccan editor or hear a lecture on the dangers of submitting material late. Besides, he wasn't owed any money—he'd borrowed a month's salary in advance.

  An hour later he was at the base of the Mountain, having walked across the city and through the valley of Dradeb. The Jew's River was marshy, full of debris. Women, washing clothes there, had spread sheets on the banks to dry. As he hiked by La Colombe, he saw Peter Zvegintzov closing up for lunch. The Russian was wrestling with his iron grill, but Robin didn't stop to help. Zvegintzov was like a tailor, he thought, with a little bedroom tucked away behind his shop. There he sat, glasses glinting, worrying over his accounts.

  At Villa Chapultepec he rang the bell, then waited before the iron gate. Finally a servant opened up and led him through the house. It was a rambling old Moorish palace where the younger Beaumonts, all in their twenties, sat about wasting time. Their parents were in Paris fighting off litigations that had followed the collapse of the family's bank.

  Robin was led down long, damp corridors and finally into a great salon. Here he was greeted by Hervé Beaumont, a dark, brooding young man of twenty-five. His two younger sisters, Guyslene and Florence, came up too, and Robin slipped them a kilo of kif. Hervé handed him some soiled banknotes, and Florence grasped his hand.

  "Oh, Robin," she said, kissing both his cheeks, "you're just in time to see our film."

  She led him around to greet the other guests—all people he knew. They were sprawled on sofas yards apart, and he had the impression of an inanimate group. There was Patrick Wax, who raised his little pony whip in salute, Inigo in a white suede vest worn over a black shirt, the Hawkins' in riding clothes, Madame de Hoag with Jean Tassigny, and Martin Townes.

  Townes was perched on a huge white Marrakech hassock, his blue-tinted glasses cocked warily on his nose. Robin sat next to him—though he didn't know the writer well he liked his looks and saw a plate of hors d'oeuvres nearby. The Beaumonts and Inigo were smoking kif. Wax was sipping champagne, the Hawkins' were drinking vodka, Claude de Hoag a pastis, and Townes a bottle of beer.

  "You know," Robin said, "it's amazing to find you all here. I just finished writing my column, and there's not one of you I didn't name."

  "You write nasty stuff, lad," said Wax, hissing through his teeth. "But I love it anyway."

  "What did you say about us, Robin?" Hervé passed Florence his pipe.

  Robin brought a finger to his lips. "They're sealed," he said. "Anyway, you can read it yourselves Saturday morning. Nothing juicy, I assure you, though I mentioned your missing statuette. Oh, yes—I did take a few swipes at the conversation at Barclay's Tuesday night."

  "Good for you," said Wax. "He's got it coming to him, the bloody snob. So grand he is, and so awfully dull. I'd love to know who wrote that note."

  "You're a prime suspect," Robin said.

  Wax laughed. "Unfortunately I don't go to his dreadful little church. They're all such phonies there, and the Vicar's liturgy stinks. But I'll be there Sunday—to hear the sermon, though not, I assure you, to pray." He brought down his little whip hard on the arm of the couch. The smokers were too stoned to turn, and the Hawkins so drunk they didn't hear.

  "I doubt," said Townes, fixing Robin with a stare, "that you could have said very much about me. We rarely see each other, and everyone knows I don't go out."

  "That's just what I wrote. I suggested you were up to something. Scribbling something nasty in that windowed tower of yours."

  "You speculated, then?"

  "If you want to put it that way."

  Townes looked at him closely, then turned back to his beer. Robin lit his own pipe and watched Hervé set the projector up.

  "Listen, everybody," said Florence. "We're going to show the film. It's just a home movie—nothing dirty. Move your chairs around. We'll project it on the wall."

  "Guyslene will do the commentary," said Hervé.

  "No," said Guyslene. "Florence."

  "I think Florence might do better," said Patrick Wax. "She's a little less badly stoned."

  "All right. Now someone draw the curtains." When no one did, Florence drew them herself.

  A minute later the film was on, a flickering study, Robin thought, of a family in decline. Florence's voice-over was full of giggles and breathy gasps.

  "See—there's Hervé in his Maserati! Just like James Bond! And there he is leaving the hospital. After his heroin detoxification in Suisse."

  A cut then from Hervé walking out the hospital door to shots of Mexican women dressed in black sitting on mules.

  "This is Acapulco, I think. We had Christmas there last year."

  Florence was seen jumping topless into a pool, while a pair of panting Afghans eyed her from the side.

  "You're fatter now," said Claude de Hoag.

  "Hmmm. Maybe. There's papa leaving court! See all the photographers. And the mob!"

  "The stockholders put them up to that," said Hervé . Robin watched a pan of angry faces—people who'd lost their savings in the Beaumont bank.

  "Look! Here we are skiing. That'
s Jamie Townsend, Guyslene's fiancé last year."

  The images went on, shakier and more blurred. There were scenes of the Beaumonts sitting around smoking hash, and barely legible footage of a Djillala party they'd organized the previous summer on the beach at Cap Spartel. They all looked young and rich, and vulnerable too, beneath their smiles. There was a sense of doom in the background—people playing while their fortunes turned unseen. Gone now were the Maserati, the Christmas vacations in Acapulco, the ski chalet in Klosters. Robin had heard that the elder Beaumonts were living on credit in a commercial rightbank hotel, and that their legal fees had mounted to more than a million francs.

  Once, when the film broke and Hervé worked to splice it up, Martin Townes wandered out of the salon. Robin thought he'd gone to the toilet, but after a while, when he didn't return, Robin excused himself and went out to look. He found Townes, finally, sitting in the garden stretched out on a wicker chaise lounge.

  "Couldn't stand it, huh?" Robin asked.

  "I got the idea pretty quick."

  "Disgusted?"

  "Not really. These people are fascinating, in a macabre sort of way."

  "Why do you think?"

  "Their emptiness, their superficiality. In some strange way that film shows them as they are."

  "It'll be over for them soon, you know. This house is on the market. Not that anyone in his right mind would want to buy it, of course."

  "I'm a great admirer of your column," said Townes, looking suddenly into Robin's eyes.

  "Well, thank you very much. I wouldn't have thought you'd like it much."

  "Actually I do. Gossip is what the novel is all about. Men and women, society, news. But there's something special about your work that's attracted me a long time. You don't write particularly well, and most of it's crap, but still, beneath it, there's a voice. A distinct one, I think."

  Robin was caught off guard. He knew his column was "crap," but he wasn't particularly happy to be told so to his face. "Oh?" he said. "Please tell me more. Just what is this voice you hear?"

  "It's the voice of a young man weary with life, and also fascinated by his own despair. He loathes what he does, and revels in it at the same time. The Robin Scott that emerges from a year or so of reading 'About Tangier' is a soul who's found grandeur wallowing in the abyss. He leads a perfectly pointless life, but somehow, despite that, he achieves a kind of sainthood in the end."

  "Like Jean Genet?"

  "No. Genet is a thief. Robin Scott is not a criminal, except perhaps in a broader sense. But certainly he's an existential character living on the edge, striding through Tangier's filth with an angelic smile on his face. People say terrible things about you, Robin. They say you inform for the police."

  "That's rubbish, of course."

  "Of course. Anyway, the point is that people apprehend you as a diabolical character. You're sinister in their eyes, and they can't reconcile that with all the fun you seem to have. There must be envy in it too. Everyone, at times, wishes he could embrace immorality."

  "So, I'm an immoralist. What else do people say?"

  "Oh, the usual things. Faggot. Pimp. Heroin racketeer. What is this business about putting young boys in woolen shorts?"

  Robin blushed. "It's something I've wanted to do."

  "Tell me about it."

  "I'd rather not."

  "Come on, Robin. It's all the same to me. Besides, I've read your poems."

  "You have? How on earth did you find them?"

  "Doyle showed me some things, in a little magazine."

  "What did you think?"

  "There were some lines. I remember a pair: 'His face is the triangle of a Berber horse / He has the burning eyes of Moroccan dice.' Something like that. Anyway, what comes through is the voice of a man who has a passion to confess."

  "Perhaps I do, but my woolen shorts fetish is something I don't talk about anymore."

  Townes shrugged. "As you like, Robin. But please tell me the story about your being nearly castrated last year. I've heard several versions, but not the true saga from the authoritative source."

  "Ah! That was something! I was asleep in my room, my grubby little hole as everyone calls it, when this Moroccan boy I know—not a boy, exactly; he's over twenty—stole in and got into my bed. I didn't lock the door in those days, though I sure as hell do now. Anyway, he snuggled down next to me, and I was quite happy about that until I suddenly felt this rather sharp, cold piece of steel just beneath my balls. Christ, he had a knife down there. He told me not to move or he'd cut the damn things off. Then it began, his tirade, two hours in broken English, French, and then Arabic—so fast I couldn't make much of it out. It was all about Vietnam and U.S. imperialism, and when I protested that I was Canadian he brought the blade up a little tighter and told me to shut my trap. He went on and on then, pouring out his poor, young, angry heart, and I lay there terrified, afraid to say a word, wondering if I was going to be unmanned to expiate America's sins. Finally he grew tired, pulled the knife away, and gave my cock (totally retracted by then) a few smart fondles, which did not bring it back to life. He snitched my wallet, my coins, my watch, even my wretched stamps, and stole back out into the dark. I lay there the rest of the night shaking with fear, and in the morning, when I'd more or less recovered my senses, I thought about going to the police. Anyway, I thought better of it, decided the whole business was a crude but important experience, and so I kept quiet until, a few days later, I ran into him again."

  "How was that?"

  "He was simply sitting, sweet as you please, at a front table in the Café de Paris. I went up to him, we shook hands, then I sat down and we began to talk. He wasn't wearing my watch, and he said nothing about what he'd done. We chatted about this and that, and he was absolutely normal—as I'd thought he was before. We had such a good time we went out to a couscous joint and continued chatting there. Then, afterward, we shook hands, and he went back to his place and I returned to mine. Why didn't I ask him about it? Or at least ask him to return my things? I don't know. It was very odd, and he was so correct, so charming, that I wondered if I'd dreamed the whole thing up. But there was this thin red line where he'd pressed the blade beneath my balls, and I knew I hadn't done that to myself. Later I told a few people—it was such an extraordinary experience, perhaps the most terrifying and extraordinary of my life."

  "And you never went to the police?"

  "No."

  "Did you ever see your things again?"

  Robin shook his head. "Lost. Completely lost. A few weeks later I bought myself a cheap Japanese watch."

  "Was this boy a political type?"

  "No. That's the point. None of his political talk made any sense. I think he was just filled with rage—the rage they all have against us every now and then—and he simply expressed it in this strange dual way, the knife (which is pure Moroccan) and this crazy rhetoric he'd heard and half understood from Europeans he'd met around the Socco."

  "Fascinating! I'd like to meet him if that's possible."

  "You know him already, I think."

  "I do?"

  "Sure. He's around Inigo all the time now. The queens all call him Pumpkin Pie."

  Townes nodded and the two of them fell into silence. A few minutes later the others drifted out. They assembled on the lawn furniture, drinks and pipes in hand, while a servant passed bowls of olives and dates, and the conversation, which was intermittent, lapsed slowly with the afternoon.

  "Soon," said Wax, "the summer will come, and we'll not be able to bear the heat."

  "Parties," said Florence. "Parties. Parties. I wish it were summer now."

  No further talk about the movie they'd seen, but it had induced a feeling of malaise. The Beaumonts sensed this too and sat curled, brooding with their pipes. After a while Hervé got up to take a long walk along the cliffs above the sea.

  At four o'clock Townes and Inigo excused themselves—they both, they said, had to return to work. Townes looked at him warmly as they shook
hands. Robin decided to seek him out and talk to him again. As they left he was filled with the feeling that they were serious people and he was not. He had no doubt they were much more talented than himself—Inigo was probably a genius and Townes' books were good—but talent wasn't the point so much as waste: he knew that if he still had something to say he wasn't bothering to say it anymore.

  He stayed until everyone had left—Wax off to Madame Porte's for his daily tranche of pâté de foie gras, the Hawkins' for their afternoon ride, Claude de Hoag and Jean Tassigny to the Emsallah Tennis Club, where their matches were said to be a disguised erotic dance. Finally, when the Beaumonts had become impossibly uncommunicative, Robin decided it was time to leave himself. There was nothing to say to them anymore, not even any gossip to pick up. So he loaded his pockets from the bowls of food and made his way, against the sunset, down the Mountain to Tangier.

  Eleven o'clock. He was sitting in the Centrale surveying the scene. The small-time hustlers, the ones who sold fake watches and third-rate hash, had long since disappeared. Now the big-time dudes were out, and a hard core of Anglo-American queers inspected the meat rack as it passed.

  Darryl Kranker was sitting with a boy whom Robin had once known well. He was a dancer now—a teenage beauty who put on makeup, danced with a tray of candles on his head, and made passes at men sitting in the nightclubs on Avenue d'Espagne. Robin had known him when the boy was thirteen years old. He was the last of the ones he'd dressed in woolen shorts.

  He had no idea where he'd acquired that obsession: perhaps at his Canadian boarding school, a strict, cold, damp, unhappy place. Somehow the image had infected his brain—sunlight glittering off shorts of the purest wool, worn by prepubescent boys whose leg hairs still were fair. He'd never been able to shake it off, and when he'd moved to Tangier he'd brought the dream to life. One winter he'd grubbed his way to London on a cheap charter out of Gib and bought a dozen pairs. These he'd put on his favorite boys—made them wear them when they were in his room. When he was alone he kept them tucked in the closet, to be brought out when he needed inspiration for his work. The habit was so odd he spent much time trying to analyze it—more, in fact, than he spent composing verse. In the end he gave up the boys—there'd been too many close calls with Hamid. The Inspector, he knew, would not hesitate to throw him out; despite their friendship it was the one vice he despised. And soon after that he got rid of the shorts too, sold them in the flea market for a few measly francs. He'd hoped that some Moroccan mother might buy them for her son, and then, at least, he'd have the pleasure of seeing them catch the sunlight around Tangier. It was a gamble that didn't pay off: he never saw the shorts again.