‘I am a liberal Muslim, but I love women in hijab. It gets me so excited.’
I pulled a book from my pocket. Although he lived in Essex, he was an optician in Rabat and returned twice a month to keep ‘an eye on his concerns’. Was this a feeble joke? His expression was deadly serious. In his district there was a great deal of drug-trafficking. This morning he had delivered a car to a ‘relative’ in Gibraltar. Yak-yak, non-stop, as though on speed or exceptionally nervous. I noticed then that he was travelling without luggage and I became convinced that secreted somewhere about his person were illicit substances, contraband of one sort or another, and he was latching on to me, a mature Caucasian female, to offset any customs suspicion. I crossed to get my passport stamped and then headed to the loo where I stayed till boarding was announced.
A kerfuffle on the quay. A ferry had just docked from Africa, passengers were disembarking. Uniformed immigration officers greeted them, inspecting their papers before they set foot on Spanish soil. Several were pulled out of line, pushed aside. Shouting began. These men were indocumentados, illegal immigrants, to be returned to Africa. A pathetic party of strays they were: wrinkled and soiled as trodden leaves, sour-faced yet vulnerable.
I made my way to the upper deck, passing by a small, cloistered cubicle encircled with unpolished shoes. Within, a handful of Arabs prostrate at prayer. On the deck, I watched Algeciras disappear into the hazy distance; the sea opening out southwards. North to the right, the Rock. Who would ever have imagined that the strategic position of this limestone protuberance would achieve such significance? Suddenly from behind me, his voice.
‘Gibraltar’s name in Arabic, Jabal Tariq, means Mount Tariq. Islam is woven deep into the Spanish culture, which is why they hate us.’
I sighed. It was a fact that Gibraltar’s title had been chosen to honour Tariq ibn Ziyad, Moorish, Muslim conqueror of the Spanish peninsula in AD 711, but I had no desire to engage in history or any conversation with this particular passenger. Ignoring him, I returned to the fuggy interior lounge observing as I went that Mr Morocco-from-Essex was now in possession of a Vuitton briefcase.
I spotted one harassed American couple feeding three snivelling baby blond boys. Otherwise Arabs, most of whom were asleep: flat out in the prayer room or leaning over themselves on chairs, hugged, folded as though cramped or sick. Arabs in skullcaps, Arabs in socks, slippers, looking worn out, hands over eyes, fingers up noses, travelling with immense quantities of luggage stuffed into plastic tartan bags. I had been told that the prejudice against them in Spain was untenable. Judging by their demeanours, I could believe it. I found a seat close to the salt-sprayed window. Moments later, he was hovering close by me.
‘Morocco is on red alert,’ he warned. ‘There have been bombings in Algiers, military targets. You shouldn’t be travelling alone, you’re not safe.’
He must have read my disbelief.
‘I have friends high up,’ he insisted. ‘Friends in the police, security. Where are you staying tonight?’
I threw on my backpack, gave him a withering look and paid some insignificant sum to climb stairs to the ‘Business Lounge’, empty save for one solitary passenger, Daphne, a sad-eyed English divorcee who reminded me of an unkempt bloodhound. Living in Andalucía for thirty years, she had bought and was renovating a tumbledown riad – a traditional North African townhouse with interior courtyard – in Tangier. I asked if she had heard news of bombings. She nodded. A boy had been killed near the kasbah. It was very surprising, shocking.
‘The country is on red alert.’
‘But I thought the bombings were in Algiers?’
She knew nothing about Algeria. A small Arab boy had been blown up the day before with his bicycle. She was acquainted with his family and intended to pay them a visit.
‘Are you afraid?’ I asked her.
She shrugged. ‘What’s the point? Life goes on. Why are you travelling alone?’
From Daphne I heard again of the ironwood tree, popularly known as the argan, growing uniquely in central Morocco.
She offered another possible explanation for the origin of tapas, one that nobody had proposed in Spain, but after two months in the country and encounters with so many varying cultures did not seem too far-fetched. In Sanskrit, she said, tapas meant heat or austerity. She suggested that those rationed portions, described as raciones or demi-raciones on Spanish menus, might have grown up out of the philosophy of lack of excess, eating with due measure, particularly during the climatically hot months. Indian, Sanskrit. Hinduism. While watching the gypsies dancing in Jerez, I was distinctly aware of influences from India, Asia, gestures that at moments were reminiscent of places as distant as Indonesia. The melting pot, the tapestry of the Mediterranean.
While Daphne and I were tossing back and forth a potpourri of ideas, thoughts on Indian music, cultures, past travel experiences, she turned her wrinkled face towards the sea.
‘Look,’ she remarked without a flicker of emotion. ‘Dolphins.’
It was a calm, end-of-afternoon crossing. Lights were dancing on the water. As we left Gibraltar behind us, a pod of dolphins was swimming alongside the boat, fooling around in the slipstream, deep in the Strait.
The Pillars of Hercules are the pair of rocks that form the gateway to the twenty-kilometre-wide Strait of Gibraltar, Estrecho de Gibraltar. The more northerly pillar is Gibraltar itself while the second lies to the south on a tip of Africa that has been retained by Spain, Mount Hacho in Spanish Ceuta. According to mythology, Hercules was commanded to perform twelve labours. Labour number ten involved crossing the Atlas Mountains in North Africa to reach an outlying island beyond the Mediterranean, where he was to steal a herd of red cattle from a triple-bodied monster, Geryon, nephew of the Gorgon Medusa. Our hero, Hercules, son of mighty Zeus, wielding his club of olive wood, decided that instead of hiking over he would simply rip the mountain apart. Smashing with his olive club, tossing rocks here and there, he split apart the range that had barricaded the Mediterranean Sea from the Atlantic Ocean, thus creating a passage through, the Strait of Gibraltar. On either side of this newly opened access stood a towering mass. This became known as the twin Pillars of Hercules.
‘Dolphins, see them?’
I nodded. The Phoenicians, as far as we know, were the first Mediterranean sailors to pass through the Pillars out into the Atlantic Ocean, the ‘further beyond’. They hunted these mammals and called them ‘sea-horses’.
‘I killed a nahiru, which these people call “sea-horse”, in the midst of the sea.’ So wrote one of the Assyrian kings in 1100 BC when he was on a mission to Phoenicia to collect cedar wood and pay a visit to the city-peoples living along the coastal shores of Byblos and Sidon. It was they who took the king out on that fishing trip.
1100 BC, the foundation of Cádiz.
A felicitous sighting, I was thinking.
Pink clouds hung above the mountains as we approached the African shoreline. Morocco, named by the Arabs, Al-Maghreb al-Aqsa, ‘The Farthest Land of the Setting Sun’.
Morocco sits at the extremity of the world of Islam and at the western edge of the southern Mediterranean. In spite of the news of exploding bombs, I felt excited to be returning to the Maghreb, to the splendours of the desert, cubed white houses, mountains and oases but, as a woman alone, I was bound to face the prejudices of Islam.
I made a swift exit from the boat, haring along the jetty, dreading the arrival of the Essex-Moroccan and was almost on African soil when a young man came hurtling after me, ‘Madame! Madame!’ I did not spare him a glance, taking him to be a hustler until he drew up by my side, panting, waving two fifty-euro notes.
‘You dropped these,’ he said with a smile, ‘when you pulled out your passport.’
Everywhere had posted warnings against Tangier rip-offs. I accepted the cash gratefully, pleasantly surprised.
Out into the portside evening with its stench of diesel, gutted fish and congealing blood and the chaos of North Africa, bird
s cawing, flapping from flat rooftop to rooftop. Filthy lorries huffing pollution, screeching brakes, queuing to board for Spain. As far as I could recall this was the first time I had ever crossed continents by foot. Taxi touts begging business, but I had no idea where I was going. Nothing booked. Tomorrow Casablanca, towards the argan forests, so a simple overnight hostel. Gaggles of small pubescent boys, black unkempt hair, eyes dark as mine shafts, were hurrying after me. I was their Pied Piper. They wanted dirhams, cigarettes and in return were offering sex or to carry my backpack.
‘Hotel, Madame?’
‘Cigarette?’
‘One dirham, please!’
‘Buy boy?’
‘I have nothing. Rien du tout,’ I shrugged and they grinned, mimicking my shrug.
I felt no fear. I strode to the first square. As I crossed, an arm settled on my shoulder and I almost jumped out of my skin. I swung about and the stranger veered off in another direction. I did feel fear. I had left Europe behind. Spanish, French, languages I could converse in; gone was the imposing face of Catholicism, which I was not comfortable with but I had been educated in so I understood its thinking. Now I was in North Africa where Islam was the dominant mindset. Frequently, too, poverty, decay and corruption were to be found. I sat outside a bar, requested a glass of mineral water and looked about me. The street was dusty and disorganised, a few weeds growing up through broken, displaced paving stones. A policeman was blowing a whistle and directing traffic. No one was paying him any heed. Behind him was his harnessed horse with blond mane, grazing on a bit of scrub alongside a rubbish tip and a man beneath a tree, torn trousers round his knees, defecating. Samuel Pepys described Tangier as the ‘excrescence of the earth’.
I hiked up towards the kasbah to find myself a place to sleep, to the medina, the old walled town, glimpsing the esteemed Hotel Continental, still remarkably intact. It had opened in 1888. Alfred, one of Queen Victoria’s sons, was its first guest. Hustle and shove. Shops crammed with second-rate items I could not imagine anyone desiring, Arabic music wailing from numerous nearby cafés, dirty-faced boys offering themselves as guides to the Sultan’s Palace. The women were in hijab. Kids were selling stuff off the streets and at the scent of police thrust everything into ragged Berber blankets and skedaddled. The inability to stroll about after dark as a woman alone. In-your-face salesmanship. Eventually, I found a room for a price that I could afford in the nouvelle ville, the new town; a faded Art Deco signature of a once glorious past. I enquired, while checking in, about the bombings.
‘There have been no bombings. Elsewhere, yes, not here,’ the receptionist lied while staring into the face of a computer.
Tangier, straddling the tip of Africa between sea and mountains, built on low hills, and capped by the bluest of skies. Every great seafaring nation of the Mediterranean had dropped anchor here, and it became one of the most cosmopolitan and renowned port cities of the twentieth century. Administrated by both Spain and France, Tangier was designated an International Zone in 1923. In her 1920 travel book In Morocco, the New York heiress and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edith Wharton described Tangier as a ‘pale-blue town piled up with brown walls’ where the signs above the shops were displayed in English, French and Spanish and cab-stands were to be found in every square. It gained a legendary, not to say romanticised, James Bond-type reputation as a haven for spies, crooks and traders of one sort or another, bank traders and free money market traders. It attracted the high players in all manner of lowlife activities. Even today a tax-free status is offered to foreign companies which base their businesses here, I learned from Daphne. During the forties and fifties it had become la Ville de Plaisir, the City of Pleasure. Somerset Maugham, Cecil Beaton, William Burroughs, Truman Capote and a host of literati were regulars to these crooked Arab streets. Even the comic-strip heroine Modesty Blaise kept a house on a hill overlooking the city! Jack Kerouac hung out here. Paul Bowles, the American writer, one of the city’s most renowned internationals and the longest literary resident of them all, used to pass Errol Flynn as he sat drinking coffee in the Petit Socco, while attempting to hide behind the pages of a newspaper from the staring eyes of girls. It was a city of contraband, of international espionage, of millionairesses and homosexuality – sex between males was legal in Tangier back then and it became known as one of the most glamorous and openly gay resorts in the world.
But that was the twentieth century. What I was passing through now was a city in tatters, gasping for breath, staving off the death rattle. I had a bite in the hotel’s dreary dining room and fell on to the bed exhausted, too tired to venture back out into the chaotic streets. There I lay, mobile phone in hand, staring at circles of damp and mould on the ceiling, highlighted by the flashing neon colours of night in the marketplaces and back alleys, beyond my fifth-floor windows. How triste this tangerine city of sated desires, and I was wondering who, if anybody, would take responsibility for the bombings. During my late-night call to Michel, he suggested that I might consider returning home.
I lifted the shutter and let the pastel brilliance of a new day flood in. A disc of sun rising mandarin, suffusing primrose-yellow wings across the water beyond Tangier’s crescent bay. Who would have guessed from that distance at the stench and hustle ashore? Beyond satellite dishes and washing hung across the flat roofs, the dawn promised harmony and tranquillity, a flamingo in flight. I was up and out of the hotel a little after seven, determined to continue. Reception agreed to store my pack for a few hours and I drifted at leisure through early morning streets being cleaned, much as the streets of Paris are washed each morning. Here the process was achieved by moustached men with raggy towels on their heads working with straw brooms and metal buckets. Down the plunging lanes of the ville nouvelle where several of the façades had been whitewashed, like the Spanish pueblos blancos, rendered attractive for foreigners. At least they had not been pulled down and replaced by concrete. I stopped at a pâtisserie that might have been designed for a musical so extravagant was its marble decor, so charming the girls who weighed and served the sticky delights, while in the background beneath an ornate chandelier a swathed Muslim woman on hands and knees scrubbed the pristine floor.
In 1912 Matisse visited Tangier and again the following winter. He called the city ‘a painter’s paradise’. I walked to St Andrew’s Anglican Church, perhaps his most famous Tangier canvas, and tried to find other images reflecting his work, but the sights had changed. Paul Bowles, who moved here in 1947 at the suggestion of Gertrude Stein (neatly described by Paul Theroux as a big lesbian directing artistic traffic), and lived here until his death aged eighty-eight in 1999, wrote at the end of the fities:
‘There must be few places in the world which have altered to such an extent in the past quarter of a century.’ He had arrived as a young man, artistically uncertain, and had found his life and voice as a writer within this French North African community.
Tangier came into being in the fifth century BC as a port for the Carthaginians (why not the Phoenicians earlier, when they founded Cádiz?). They called it Tingis. The ground on which they built their trading post was surely named after the Berber goddess Tinjis. Even today, the port remains a sacred site for Berbers. Morocco during those pre-Christian eras had been densely forested and inhabited by elephants, tigers, lions. After the fall of Carthage, the Roman galleons arrived and Tingis was taken and served as a far-flung Roman colony and entrepôt.
Morocco has changed hands many times over the centuries but proudly claims to be the only country in North Africa not to have suffered Turkish domination, keeping its own native rulers until the nineteenth century. This fact has had a particular effect on the country. Although it extends further west than anywhere in mainland Europe and its coastline is more Atlantic than Mediterranean, the character of Morocco is infused with orientalism, an exoticism rare in the modern Islamic world. Its last dominating influences were the French and Spanish whose colonisation lasted a mere forty-four years, the shortest in Nor
th Africa. The country gained its independence in 1956 and today is ruled by King Mohammed VI who is both the military leader and religious despot.
‘In Tangier the past is a physical reality as perceptible as the sunlight.’
This might have been true when Paul Bowles wrote these words in 1958 but it was less apparent today. Because I had time to spare I returned to the port, the city’s raison d’être. I wanted to see it in daylight. I walked the esplanade where washing lines had been erected on the grubby beach and hung with damp, sandy clothes. Scooters and lorries were parked there, too. Families were living rough, gaping craters on the beaches promised construction that might or might not happen, men swept the streets with brushes and, as they swept, the dust and sand blew in. Serious-faced gents in fezzes and brown djellabahs watched the world from the sidewalks. The backdrop: layers of crumbling colonialism, inhabited high-rises with many broken windows not fit to be condemned, street-side cafés with up-to-the-minute aluminium Italian chairs where men with dark glasses, iron-grey hair and moustaches sipped soft drinks, mint tea or endless tiny cups of coffee and smoked pack after pack of cigarettes. Nobody seemed to have a purpose, endlessly wheeling barrows and hand carts to and fro for no particular reason – hawking for customers to fill them, perhaps? Others, wheeling fruit boxes. Ragged limestone rocks on which stood Art Deco buildings in a state of decay, as though the entire city was about to tumble from the hillsides into the sea. Dozens of idle cranes pierced the skyline, all construction at a standstill. A city of myriad levels, hills, heart-stopping views of sea and mountains (‘You don’t look at the city, you look out from it,’ Bowles wrote), vertical keyboards of stairways leading to passages, hidden doorways, illicit mysteries, to dead ends. Down near the port a man in a beige woolly Noddy cap was on his knees planting geranium shoots at a non-existent roundabout – and that seemed to sum up modern-day Tangier for me; a place where the inhabitants were gracious and gentle, but with nothing to do, no longer cosmopolitan but comatose, as though the sap had been sucked out of them. Everybody had passed through, traded, pimped, spied, buggered, bartered, sung its praises and sailed off.
The Olive Tree (The Olive Series Book 2) Page 18