Tangier

by William Bayer

  Yes, somehow she had come to understand the city, had grasped its needs and mood, and now she understood him too, he felt, and the role that he should play. That was what was so marvelous about her—her mysterious grasp of things—and why her presence, no matter how quiet, had always been so good.

  He looked up, saw that she was watching him.

  "Hamid, I need you too." She smiled and very gently nodded her head.

  He knew then what she was going to say, and he wanted to say it first. He took her hand. "What do you think, Kalinka—a traditional Moroccan wedding, with lots of dancing and beating drums all night?"

  They made love.

  Later, falling asleep, wrapped in her arms, he felt serene at last. His tensions unwound, and with them his old conception of Tangier. He began to dream his way through the city's labyrinth, seeking a way out of its trap, its maze. He wanted to soar about the town, look down upon it, understand it as a place where he could act, no longer as a mere observer but as a player in the struggle he knew must come.

  Martin Townes Leaves Tangier

  Early one afternoon in late October the American writer Martin Townes arranged his packed suitcases near the entrance to his villa and climbed up to his roof. Here he sat for hours in the glass-walled studio he'd constructed years before, looking down upon the city which he would leave before the sun was due to set. Tangier shimmered as it always had, but there was a different aura about it. Armed men with close-cropped hair, dark desert men with cruel eyes, were patrolling everywhere in pairs.

  Townes had sold his villa. Many others had done the same. Rich Moroccans from the south, Casablanca and Rabat, were taking advantage of the Europeans' fear and buying up the Mountain for a song. Townes didn't envy them, these wealthy Arabs, these new lords of the hill. He knew that when the next rampage took place they'd be the object of Dradeb's wrath.

  Townes, like most of the European community, had used Tangier as a shelter from the storm. Often, sitting in his tower, looking across the city at the rising sun, he'd felt that he was cheating his way out of a fair share of the world's misery and pain. But now everything was changed. The refuge had collapsed. The city had been revealed, and now he felt shaken out of voyeurism and ennui.

  Yet even though he was leaving Tangier, Martin Townes knew he would never escape the city's spell. He'd decided to write a novel about Tangier and some things he'd imagined there, and though he knew there would be those who would say his characters and scenes were based on real people and events, this would not be true. Everything in his novel, he'd decided, would take place only in his mind. He would attempt nothing more than to chronicle the fantasy which he dreamed while staring down upon Tangier that final afternoon.

  SPECIAL AUTHOR’S EDITION SUPPLEMENT

  TANGIER: Q&A WITH WILLIAM BAYER:

  Q. You lived in Tangier?

  A. Yes, from 1972-1977. Great years! Paula Wolfert and I decided to go there, rent a house for a year, work on our respective writing projects (my novel, Visions Of Isabelle, based on the life of Isabelle Eberhardt, and Paula’s cookbook Couscous & Other Good Food From Morocco) then move on to some other equally exotic and inexpensive Mediterranean locale. But because we liked living there and Tangier real estate was undervalued, we started to look around for a good property and ended up buying a house on what they call “La Nouvelle Montagne” overlooking the city and the Rif Mountains beyond. So we ended up staying six years.

  Q. Was the expatriate colony there as decadent as depicted in the novel?

  A. It was. And, from what I hear, although the cast of characters has changed, there is still considerable decadence in the expat crowd, though at a far lower level of intensity.

  Q. Did you know Paul Bowles?

  A. We knew him well, visited him regularly, entertained him many times at our house. He was quite the gentleman, always well-dressed, always polite, not the hippy character a lot of people imagine. But I think it’s safe to say that he was mildly stoned most every afternoon.

  Q. Did he read Tangier?

  A. It was published after Paula and I left the city so I was never able to discuss it with him, but I was pleased to hear that he did read it and thought quite highly of it too. In fact, his only objection, from what I was told, was that he felt my fictional characters were too close to the original models.

  Q. Were they?

  A. Some were, some were totally made up. The Peter Zvegintsov character, for instance: there was a Russian guy who ran a little shop that catered to the foreign colony. Some folks thought he might be a Russian agent. I took his nationality and situation and made up an elaborate back-story that had nothing to do with him. If I were writing the book today, I’d probably turn him into a Hungarian who ran an upholstery shop. Of course none of this would matter if I’d set out to write a roman a clef...and there’s certainly a long and mostly honorable tradition for that. But that wasn’t my intention. I wanted to write a serious expatriate novel, and so in cases where my characters are too close to their models I have to agree with Paul that that’s probably a flaw.

  Q. I’d imagine some of the folks on whom the characters were based were pretty annoyed?

  A. Some were. I heard there were several dinner parties at which people heatedly discussed my book. They felt I’d betrayed them. The model for the Peter Barclay character even composed a letter to me in which he accused me of betrayal: “We invited you into our homes, and this is how you repay us!” That sort of thing. I believe his friends persuaded him not to send it. But you see, we weren’t really very close to those people, and, anyway, fiction writers use what they know and observe. As Truman Capote put it in another context: “They knew I was a writer. What did they expect I was doing with them all those years?” In fact, the decadent expat crowd could never quite figure us out. We weren’t gay, we didn’t smoke kif, we arrived with two young kids and led a normal family life, working hard all day on our writing and going to bed fairly early. Many of them, on the other hand, mostly lounged around and gossiped, were obsessed with the interior decoration of their villas and their pursuit of Moroccan boys and/or each other, and in the evening entertained at dinner parties at which they exchanged what they thought were brilliant ripostes. So far as I was concerned, their ridiculous and sometimes mean antics made for excellent literary fuel. My main character, Moroccan police inspector Hamid Ouazzani, studies them much the way I did.

  Q. You’re known as a crime novelist. Do you consider Tangier a crime novel?

  A. Not in the sense that it starts with a body on the floor. But the main character is a police detective whose job is to mind the foreign colony. And there are crimes in the book, including a murder, and numerous crimes of betrayal as well. As Hamid interacts with the expats, he arrives at a point of considerable fascination and disgust...which is pretty much where I ended up, and why Paula and I decided to leave. There was another reason too: I began to see that my fictional Tangier was more interesting to me than the actual city.

  Q. How did Moroccans react to your novel?

  A. Very few had an opportunity tp read it because it was immediately banned. Back then the Moroccan government was big on banning books. There was a joke that they banned a book about chess because it contained a chapter on surrounding and capturing the king. One of my characters mentions this.

  Q. Hamid seems a complex character.

  A. He was the first detective character I ever wrote, and writing about him got me interested in writing crime fiction. He’s the first of three foreign detective main characters I’ve worked with. The other two are the Israeli detective David Bar-Lev in Pattern Crimes and the Argentine detective, Marta Abecasis in City Of Knives. I now refer to these three books as my “foreign detectives series.”

  Q. Any regrets about this book?

  A. Aside from Bowles’ objection that I based too many characters on real people, I wish I had made Hamid more sympathetic toward the gay community. Actually he is sympathetic. His brother is gay, and near the end he exp
lains his feelings about all this to Robin (who, of course, is gay) and his deep sympathy comes through. What bothers him throughout is what he thinks of as the plundering of young Moroccan boys by European gays. Still there were times when, rereading the book, I found him a bit harsh.

  Q. Any other regrets?

  A. I think that in the Picnic chapter I over-satirized the old-guard gay community of Tangier. I had a lot of fun writing that chapter, and, indeed, it’s made up of bits and pieces I heard and/or observed. But if I were writing that scene today I’d probably cut back on the characters’ many cruelties because, nasty as many of those guys were, particularly in the way they spoke of Moroccans, some of them could also be quite kind at times. Looking back, I understand that their brittle meanness can be attributed to their quite legitimate feelings of oppression. I think that’s something I could have explored better among the secondary characters, as I did with Robin.

  Q. You mentioned moving to Tangier to work on a novel based on the life of Isabelle Eberhardt. How did that lead to your writing Tangier?

  A. While writing the final chapters of Visions Of Isabelle, I got the idea for Tangier. I remember outlining it on Christmas morning. I’d always admired Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet, and thought Tangier would make an excellent setting where a set of interesting expatriates could interact. But I knew I needed someone or something to pull these different conflict stories together. That Christmas morning it came to me: a detective assigned to keep his eye on the foreign colony. Once I had that I knew I could write the novel. The Alexandria Quartet was definitely a model in terms of the interweaving of politics, sex and expatriate life in an exotic foreign locale.

  Q. Hamid gets personally involved with the Europeans on account of his girlfriend, Kalinka.

  A. Yes, she’s the link, a half-Vietnamese half-Russian woman with a mysterious past. The tension between Hamid and Peter Zvegintsov is all on account of Kalinka. Hamid, longing to understand her, uncovers her past, which helps her to understand herself. And she helps him find a new role for himself as well. In a sense you could say that the core story of Tangier is their love story.

  Q. I understand that Tangier has recently been published in France. What’s been the reaction?

  A. The French reviews have been excellent. My hope is that the French edition will find its way back to Morocco where French is still the favored language of Moroccan fiction readers.

  Q. You mentioned that the Peter Barclay character was based on a real person.

  A. Yes, a Brit, now deceased, who was quite absurd and nasty, and who ruled the expatriate social scene. He actually had himself listed as a “Lord” in the Tangier telephone directory though he was not one. That was an amusing aspect of Tangier: people would go there and reinvent themselves, often adding a title in the process. Barbara Hutton (whom I never met, though I used to play tennis with her nurse) famously insisted that people address her as “Princess.” Apparently she’d been married briefly to some sort of Laotian prince. There was also a fellow who received people in his house from a papier-mâché throne, wearing a bejeweled cruficix he claimed to have received from his former lover, the prelate of Hungary. I used him as the model for a minor character, Patrick Wax. But all the principals such as Hamid and Robin were totally fictitious.

  Q. Did you model a character on Paul Bowles?

  A. No. I liked him too much.

  Q. What about the rather mysterious minor character, Martin Townes – what can you tell us about him?

  A. Martin Townes is the voice that occasionally intrudes into the story, referring to the foreign colony as “we” and to Tangier as “our town.” In effect, he’s the teller of the tale.

  Q. So are you Martin Townes?”

  A. In fictional guise, yes.

  Q. Aside from disguising the character models, are there any other changes you’d make in the book?

  A. I’m very fond of Tangier. It was important in my development as a fiction writer. But if I were to write the novel today, I’d give it a more driving narrative line and thus make it into more of a thriller. There’d be a crime that Hamid would have to solve, the resolution of which would keep the reader involved. The large cast of expatriate characters could then by introduced in connection with his detective work. I also think I’d have fewer instances in which the characters ask themselves questions. Rereading the text I found a great many “whys” posed by characters to themselves. It works for Hamid, who has a questing sort of mind, and it reflects the influence of French existentialism on my writing. That kind of rigorous existential self-questioning now strikes me as a bit overdone. Still, rereading the book I feel very good about it. There’ve been a number of novels set in Tangier, including one by Paul Bowles. And of course there’ve been many expatriate novels, probably the most famous of which is Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. I certainly don’t put Tangier in that category, but I do feel (immodestly, of course) that as an expatriate novel set in the 1970s, Tangier stands up very well.

  Q. Have you been back since you pulled up stakes there?

  A. Not since I returned to close on the sale of the house. Paula did go back a few years later, and wrote about that visit in a prize-winning article in Saveur Magazine. She found the experience quite disillusioning. The city had grown much larger and had changed in many ways. I have no desire to return, preferring to remember it as it was and as I depicted it in Tangier, a white cubistic labyrinth of a city, a marvelous stage set for romantic affairs and mysterious interactions and goings-on.