In Arabian Nights

by Tahir Shah

  Despite his personality flaws, I regard Burton as a champion, a kind of role model. After reading his First Footsteps in East Africa in my teens, I travelled to Africa and lived there for three years. Then I journeyed to the port of Santos, in Brazil, where Burton had been based as a diplomat. After that I went to Iceland, to Trieste and Salt Lake City, each one a destination on the Burtonian map. I took up fencing because it had been his passion, joined London's Athenaeum Club because he had been a member and, when we were first married, I spent all our savings on a secret report in his own hand, detailing the wealth of the Sultan of Zanzibar.

  The taxi rolled down the Corniche, past the port and up the hill, through narrowing streets lined with random life, to the Continental. I knew of the hotel because Richard Burton had stayed there, waiting for his long-suffering wife, Isabel, and while translating the Arabian Nights. A grand, square colossus of a building, it leers out across the strait towards Spain, as it has done for a century and more.

  The hotel was sprinkled with the usual array of tourist kitsch, meek-looking porters and imposing wear and tear. It couldn't have changed much since Burton had arrived in December 1885, laden with trunks filled with papers and books.

  I asked for a single room. A key was slid across the mahogany counter and a finger pointed to the stairs.

  'Fifth floor,' said the clerk.

  'Is there a lift?'

  'Certainly not, Monsieur.'

  There was a sense that only the hardiest of travellers would ever put up at Hotel Continental. The staircase was like a sheer mountain path, the treads between each step extra deep, hinting at the Victorian hardiness that built them. Once at the top, I found my room, little more than an alcove hidden between two others, smothered in blood-orange paint. I turned on the tap to wash my face. The water supply had run dry.

  I retraced my steps down to the reception and dialled the salesman's contact once again. The number was still out of order. The clerk demanded to know whom I was calling.

  'There's a man selling some books,' I said.

  'Books?'

  'Yes, by Richard Burton.'

  'You are an actor, Monsieur?' the clerk enquired.

  'No, not by the actor,' I said. 'There's another Richard Burton. He was a traveller. In fact, he stayed here a long time ago.'

  'Last year?'

  'No, not last year. Before that.'

  'The year before?'

  'No, more than a hundred years ago,' I said.

  The clerk combed his lower teeth through his moustache.

  'How do you hope ever to find him now?' he asked.

  It was one of those inane conversations, the kind that gets trapped in your head, and you find yourself replaying mentally again and again on long-distance bus journeys. I showed the manager the telephone number and the name.

  'Ah, Señor Benito,' he said knowingly. He tapped a hand to the reception's bell.

  A submissive bellboy with large feet appeared.

  'Ibrahim will show you,' he said.

  As I plodded in Ibrahim's oversized footsteps, up the steep slope towards the top of Tangier's medina, I cautioned myself to remember how the Arab world proceeds. In Europe we bluster about, demanding answers to direct questions, whereas in the East a far more circuitous and ancient system is at work, where a little inane conversation can open gilded doors.

  Almost a mile from the Continental, Ibrahim the bellboy froze in his tracks. He turned ninety degrees to the left, to face an ordinary door painted gloss white. He stuck out a hand. I rewarded it appropriately.

  'Señor Benito does not appreciate women,' he said.

  I thanked him for the tip and tapped at the door. A dog growled through the letterbox, and its din mingled with the scent of figs. A firm hand struck the dog and the animal yelped away. Then came the grinding sound of tired old feet approaching slowly, a key turning and rusting hinges pressing back on themselves.

  The smell of figs became all the stronger when the door was fully open. Señor Benito stepped through the frame and out into the sunlight. His movements were made in slow motion, allowing ample time for observation. He was a relic of old Tangier. Dressed head to toe in pressed cream linen, with a fuchsia handkerchief overflowing from his top pocket, his slender form dazzled all who saw it. There was not an ounce of fat. His face and all visible skin were as pale as his suit, almost dove grey. I offered my hand. Señor Benito held the ends of my fingers for a moment and squinted.

  'Bonjour,' he said.

  'I have come about the Arabian Nights.'

  'Please come inside.'

  Moving in slow motion, I followed the lines of cream linen through the doorway, past a miniature sharp-toothed dog, into a rambling villa, painted in off-white inside and out. The building was less of a house and more like a temple, dedicated to flamboyant indulgence and to phallic art. Every inch of space was adorned with paintings, sketches, and sculptures, each one a study on manhood.

  The elderly Italian led the way into the salon, a well-proportioned room adorned with phalluses great and small. There were phalluses torn from Greek marbles, phalluses portrayed in oils, sketched in charcoal, and on an elaborate mantelpiece was a phallus crafted from wire mesh and parrot feathers.

  'We spoke on the telephone,' I said when we were seated in the salon. It was a sentence designed to break the silence and to cure my unease at the phallic decor.

  Señor Benito smoothed a crease from his cream linen shirt. He sauntered over towards the window, which was filled with the winter blur of Gibraltar in the distance, and he turned.

  'I have a nice bottle of port,' he said, 'a Sandeman 'sixty-three.'

  He rolled back the northern hemisphere of an ornamental globe, revealing a concealed drinks cabinet. His ashen fingers fished out the bottle and poured two glasses.

  Benito touched the port to his lips.

  'Thank God for the Iberian Peninsula,' he said softly.

  'Could I see the books?'

  The old Italian jerked his chin towards a built-in set of shelves at the far end of the room.

  'Help yourself,' he said.

  I scanned the bookcase. There must have been five hundred books, half on phallic interests in every language of the world; the other half dedicated to works of African exploration. At ankle level, I found the set of ten volumes, the black cloth spines bejewelled in gold, Alf Layla wa Layla, 'A Thousand Nights and a Night'.

  'Go on, take them out,' said the Italian.

  I leaned forward and pulled out the books on either side. Then, I carefully pushed my fingers behind the set and urged them out one by one. The bindings were exquisite, the condition near perfect. I opened the first book. It began with the name of the Indian city Benares, the date in Roman numerals, MDCCCLXXXV, 1885. After that, the words 'Printed by the Kamashastra Society for Private Subscribers Only'.

  'Two thousand copies were printed,' said Benito, topping up our glasses. 'After the first ten volumes, Burton published six more, The Supplements.'

  'They were really printed in London, in Stoke Newington,' I said.

  The Italian put a hand to his heart.

  'The censorship police,' he said dimly. 'They have hounded good men before and since.'

  'I don't understand how Abdul Hafiz the salesman found you.'

  Benito meandered over to the bookcase, stroking a hand over an oversized Roman phallus as he went. He only stopped when he was standing a foot away from me, his face three inches from mine.

  'The Network,' he said.

  I stepped back and he stepped forward, like a tango partner following the lead. I was pinned to the bookcase.

  'Are you a salesman as well, then?'

  Benito blinked. 'A collector,' he said. 'And as such I am connected to the Network.'

  'What is the Network?'

  'A group of people who link other people together,' he said. 'A man with a want and another with a need.'

  'Where is it, the Network?'

  The Italian turned his palms upwards an
d stuck his arms out to the side.

  'It's all around us,' he said.

  'But your need . . . to sell such a fine set of books as these?'

  Benito glanced down at his white canvas shoes.

  'It's a need inspired by a certain standard of living,' he said. 'Ask any collector and he will tell you.'

  'Tell me what?'

  'Tell you that there's no point having all this if you can't afford a nice glass of port from time to time.'

  After an hour of conversation I plucked up courage to enquire the price of the books. I sensed Benito had lived in Tangier since the old days, when Paul Bowles's salon attracted the great writers of the Beat generation. As an adoptive Moroccan, he knew the protocol. Unlike in the West, where the price is the first thing you demand, in the East a transaction is far more subtle. You first establish that you want to buy an object. You inspect it and only then do you ask how much it might be.

  The Italian didn't say the price at first.

  He strolled back to the window, through two millennia of phallic art, and took a good hard look at the rain.

  'I've lived in this house since before you were born,' he said. 'Tangier is sleeping now. But back then it was wide awake. It raged with life, with vitality, like a circus of the bizarre.' He put out a hand and weighed his words. 'I heard from the Network that a young man, a writer, was searching for one thing in life,' he said. 'When asked to write it down on a piece of paper, he wrote its name. Imagine how I felt . . . for that object you dream of is sitting in my own home, gathering dust.'

  Benito mumbled a price, a quarter of the market rate. I thanked him and wrote out a cheque. He stepped slowly across the room to a fine bureau with cabriole legs, opened one of the miniature drawers, removed a scrap of crumpled paper, shuffled back over and passed it to me. Written on it in my hand were the words 'Richard Burton's Arabian Nights, Benares edition, 1885'.

  The Italian collector looked out at the rain.

  'Perhaps we could have lunch tomorrow,' he said in a whisper. 'I know a nice little place for fish.'

  Opening the curtains next morning at the Continental, I was dazzled by a flood of canary-yellow light. I held a hand to my brow and spied the ferries straddling the Strait. Tangier is a hybrid of Europe, Africa and the Arab world. It is a city of such charm and sophistication that the people who reside there sometimes forget their astonishing good fortune.

  Eager to explore, I descended the steep steps and found the desk clerk eating his breakfast on the counter. He grunted a greeting, leaned down to open a cabinet below and pulled out a pair of scratched sunglasses.

  'We keep these for special guests,' he said with loathing.

  I thanked him, bolstered at the thought of extra privilege, and ambled out to the street. For thirty minutes I roved up and down and up again until, after endless twists, turns and dead ends, I came to the Grand Socco, Tangier's great square.

  Poised at the edge of the old medina, the Grand Socco is a cross-section of East and West. There are market stalls erupting with produce, cafés packed with gritty no-nonsense men, fountains, benches and a great mosque. There is a gate, too, leading into the shadowed passages of the medina.

  Burton had passed through it into the square during the winter of 1885. He had come to seek fresh air, while working on his epic translation. Part of the reason for his visit to Morocco was to scout the country out. It had long been his dream to become the British ambassador and the signs were good that his appointment was imminent. With twenty-five years of experience in the Consular Service, Burton had never been promoted, despite regarding the Prime Minister himself as a personal friend. He put his stalled diplomatic career down to a report he had written four decades earlier, while in the employ of Sir Charles Napier, on a Karachi male brothel touting a wide range of eunuchs and young boys.

  The first volume of Arabian Nights had appeared with much media attention in the second week of September, three months before Burton docked at Tangier. Each month or two another volume was completed, then printed, and mailed directly to subscribers. The early reviews had been mostly encouraging and no subscribers had demanded their money back. Despite the good reception, Burton must have been seething from an article in the well-respected Edinburgh Review. Its correspondent Harry Reeve had written: 'Probably no European has ever gathered such an appalling collection of degrading customs and statistics of vice. It is a work which no decent gentleman will long permit to stand upon his shelves . . . Galland is for the nursery, Lane for the study, and Burton for the sewers.'

  Tangier's damp winter climate had brought on Burton's gout. He didn't much appreciate the town, so it was perhaps just as well that he was passed over for the position of ambassador. He wrote to John Payne, a fellow translator of the Arabian Nights: 'Tangier is beastly, but not bad for work'. His description of the Grand Socco is recorded in the tenth volume. He said that the coffee-houses were all closed after a murder had occurred in one of them. The usual clientele had been forced to drink their refreshments and take their kif out on the street, despite the miserable conditions.

  It was there he found a storyteller plying his trade. Characteristically harsh in his judgement, Burton was scathing of the square, just as he was of the town in which it was found. He wrote: 'It is a foul slope; now slippery with viscous mud, then powdery with fetid dust, dotted with graves and decaying tombs, unclean booths, gargottes and tattered tents, and frequented by women, mere bundles of unclean rags . . .'

  Of the storyteller, he was a little more approving: 'he speaks slowly with emphasis, varying the diction with breaks of animation, abundant action and the most comical grimace: he advances, retires and wheels about, illustrating every point with pantomime; and his features, voice and gestures are so expressive that even Europeans who cannot understand a word of Arabic divine the meaning of his tale. The audience stands breathless and motionless surprising strangers by the ingeniousness and freshness of feeling under their hard and savage exterior.'

  Alas, there were no storytellers in evidence any longer. I scanned the square, taking in the detail, wondering how the atmosphere had changed in the century and more since Burton had stood there. One significant alteration was the fabulous Cinema Rif.

  Now restored to its former glory, the Rif is an Art Deco jewel, a reminder of the years when the kingdom was a French Protectorate. I sat on a bench opposite, closed my eyes and let my mind slip into the past. I could see the high-society limousines rolling up, mink coats and scarlet lipstick, greased-back hair, and flashbulbs popping on opening night.

  The sound of young voices stirred me back to the present.

  Five boys were sitting at the far end of the bench. They were dressed in weatherworn clothes, all caked in mud. Their leader said something fast. The others groped through their pockets and pooled their funds: six marbles, four bottle tops, a painted twig, a blunt penknife and a few coins. The money was separated out. Three of the boys started arguing, shouting at one another. Their argument broke into a scrap. One of the older boys suddenly turned on the smallest. They fell into the dirt, punches flying. The leader pulled them apart. He handed all the coins to the youngest boy, whose shirt had been ripped in the fight, and sent him off towards the cinema.

  The others began playing marbles.

  I asked why only one of them was going to the cinema. The leader glanced up, his sienna eyes catching the light.

  'We have the money for only one to see the matinee, Monsieur,' he said. 'So we send Ahmed. We always send Ahmed.'

  'Why him?'

  The leader flicked a marble into the dirt.

  'Because Ahmed has the best memory,' he said.

  ELEVEN

  The alchemist dies in pain, and frustration, While the fool finds treasure in a ruin.

  Saadi of Shiraz

  SEÑOR BENITO RAISED A FORK OF SAUTÉED SWORDFISH TO HIS lips and rolled his eyes with shame. We were seated on an expansive terrace overlooking the strait, taking lunch at a restaurant known for its fish.
The other tables were empty, almost as if the old collector had booked the entire place so that we would be left undisturbed.

  'The parties were decadent in the extreme,' he said. 'We would dance through the night, until the sun was high, and we would bathe in chilled champagne.'

  'What brought you to Tangier in the first place?'

  Benito sipped his Muscadet.

  'A love affair,' he said.

  The waiter approached, poured water, then wine, hovered like a black and white butterfly, flitted away.

  'Tangier is a city built on scandal,' he said, when the waiter was out of earshot. 'Whatever anyone tells you to the contrary is wrong. Everyone you see from the waiter there to the men selling crabs down in the port . . . they are all involved.'

  'Involved in what?'

  'In the scandal, of course.'

  I asked about the love affair.

  The Italian hunched forward a little, tightening the cream linen across his back.

  'True love can touch the heart once in a lifetime,' he said. 'And it touched mine a long time ago in Milano. I met a young sailor, tall, fair, perfect in every imaginable way, and in ways that you would never imagine. He was posted to Tangier. I followed him. We were like two halves of the same fruit. We spent every moment together, never apart. We lived in a dream world. But all dreams must come to an end.'

  Señor Benito took a swig of white wine and rinsed it around his mouth.

  'What happened to the sailor?'

  'He drowned.'

  'Where?'

  'Out there near the rocks.'

  We both fell silent, ate our fish and strained to think of happier times. I asked Benito why he had stayed in Morocco. He thought carefully before answering.

  'Because of the life,' he said, 'and because when I walk through the streets it is as if I am strolling back in time, into the world of Harun ar-Rachid.'

  'The Arabian Nights?'

  'Yes, those books, but in living form.'

  Again, the waiter flitted over, cleared the plates and was gone.