‘When are you leaving?’ Paul Bowles had enquired of Theroux as they sat together, two strangers, smoking joints.
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Everyone is always leaving tomorrow,’ Bowles, who died in the city, had responded.
And now the Tangerines wandered about like neurotic wraiths, back and forth at this nib’s extreme of the Mediterranean, as though their innards had been removed, and there was nothing for it but to wait in cracked shoes or bare feet for the next boat into dock, to beg, and hope, inshallah, God willing, for the city’s next golden age.
As moved as I was by its broken spirit and as much as I would have welcomed a longer stay, I had destinations to reach. I wanted to take a journey back in time. My plan was to hug the Atlantic coast all the way to Essaouira. Essaouira, because it was the farthest outpost of the Phoenician trade route, and, from there, inland penetrating the Atlas Mountains where a unique and special tree grew wild. There, and nowhere else. The ironwood, or argan tree, from what I had discovered was the twin soul of the olive. Still farmed today, its fruits are pressed for their oil in much the same way as olives were pressed back before the Greeks or Romans.
Afterwards, Roman Volubilis and from there, by train, across the border into Algeria.
Four coaches a day departed from Tangier for Casablanca. I took the first. It was due to set off at eleven but was delayed and surprisingly packed. This was not the tourist season yet all the seats were occupied by Arabs and their copious luggage. Before boarding, I gave my last tuppence’ worth of dirhams to an old lady with whiskers on her chin who had not been actively begging but sitting alone on a step, eyes shut, mumbling. When I pressed the coins into her upturned palm, she lifted two fingers to her lips, arms as thin as nails, and blew me a kiss.
Au revoir Tangier. Poverty and sunlight.
I was in Casablanca by evening. Stepping from the diesel-reeking bus, I set my first foot on the soil of Morocco’s largest city. Its population of over three million was growing by the day as desert folk moved north, seeking their fortunes (which invariably did not materialise) and the majority ended up in one of the numerous shantytowns that ring the suburbs. Although Casablanca claims to have the feel of a Mediterranean ‘jewel by the sea’ – albeit a decaying one – it sits on the Atlantic coast. Its cinema heritage, though every frame of the 1942 film Casablanca was shot in Hollywood, created expectation, a romanticism that proved, for me, at least, unfounded.
Anfa was the original seaside settlement. It was rechristened Casablanca by the Portuguese in 1468 when they attacked their southern neighbour and took control. Up to that point it had been a base for Berber pirates who had found themselves a strategically perfect niche from which to harass all shipping passing from the Atlantic through to the Mediterranean. Casablanca blossomed under the Portuguese who ruled until the city was turned to dust by the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755. There, at the surf-beaten water’s edge, it lay in ruins until the end of the eighteenth century when the Moroccan leader Sidi Mohammed III decided to reconstruct it and changed the city’s name to Dar-el-Beida, which also translates as White House. No one I met throughout my journeys in Morocco referred to it as Dar-el-Beida, however. It was affectionately nicknamed Casa, as though it were a friend or an intimate address.
Walking beneath palms and minarets down squalid streets, listening to the muezzin, I searched for a cheap hotel. The French influence was everywhere. With its Mauresque architecture, much of it cluttered around Place Mohammed V, at the heart of Casablanca’s ville nouvelle, with the main post office, la grande poste, as a fine example, it did not feel so very Arabicised. First impressions introduced me to yet another city falling apart at the seams. I searched for a bed and a newspaper, found Le Monde but no mention of the Tangier bombing – it must have been reported, if at all, a day earlier. Next an Internet café, a cramped, dark room at the far end of an alley where the men were courteous – no women, of course – but the computers were dinosaurs. Along the streets, women, voluminous as sacks, slumped against walls, begging. In the Pharmacie de Paris, a bijou of the ville nouvelle’s French colonial decades, the assistant cautioned me against wearing jewellery.
‘Gold will be ripped off you.’
I was seldom so careless and thanked her for her consideration. Returning to my pension, I held the paper bag of purchases close to my breast to protect a gold chain I had forgotten to remove and was thrown off guard when a girl with a small child under her arm approached, begging. I shook my head. She pressed closer while calling to an older woman who appeared from beneath the shadows of a cluster of palms. The girl tossed the infant to the other and grabbed for the chain. I veered in an arc and stepped on fast. She followed for a few steps but then left me be. My own fault, but it shook me up.
The honking of horns. Puddles of soiled, soapy water bubbled in the damaged gutters. Crossing the wide boulevards was a life-and-death experience. The traffic was demented, but the view across to the ocean from the flat roof of my boarding house almost redeemed the tired, bedraggled state of this business capital. The central place of worship, Hassan II Mosque, was imposing, impressive, its proportions formidable. Only Mecca is larger, but this one boasts the tallest minaret in the world. Its glass floor reveals the crashing ocean waves beneath it, but I was not impelled to visit. I had grown tired of churches, mosques, symbols of religion. Religion and the Mediterranean: now there’s a subject.
The world famous piano bar owned by ‘Rick’, Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, was a figment, but a café bearing that name, situated in a restored mansion house built within the walls of the medina close to the Place du Jardin Public, had been opened, but neither Bogey nor Miss Bergman ever set foot in this gin joint. It was a recent addition to the city; an enterprise belonging to an American who had worked in the US Embassy in Morocco and after 9/11 retired herself out of politics, deciding instead to kick-start a little tourism and interest into this washed-up, surf-sad town. I tried to find it, toyed with the idea of an aperitif in the piano bar, limbering fingers on keys before a few chords of ‘As Time Goes By’, but when I learned the pianist was Issam (pronounced I-Sam), I suspected it might be a disappointment. Instead, I passed my one evening in Casa within the medina, surprisingly deserted, before accidentally landing up down at the eerily dark dockside. A sickle moon cast little light. Aside from the echoes of distant hammering, the busiest port in Morocco had shut up shop.
My bus the following morning was due to depart at 6.45. At the rather smart coach station I was informed that no seats were available to Essaouira for three days.
‘Tomorrow begins the holidays’, I learned.
I had to think back. I could barely remember what month I was in. March. I could not afford to wait around for three days. I was advised to take the train to Marrakesh, which departed at seven, and from there continue by bus. This involved leaving the coast, which was disappointing. Still, I hurried outside and grabbed a ‘petit taxi’, a small red car, and begged the Casa Voyageurs train station. Give him his due, the driver, wheels skidding round every corner at breakneck speed, made it. To my astonishment, the station was bedlam. Not queues, but cattle stalls. Arabs were pushing, shoving, waving their arms, smoking, shouting. The customary phlegmatism was out the window. I glanced at the black hands on the station clock. Eleven minutes to. I had no hope of reaching a booth before seven, let alone the quay. I shuffled within the crush of bodies while wiry men in black leather jackets passed cash from outstretched arm to outstretched arm, begging another for the purchase of his tickets. Every locale in Morocco was being called, in Arabic and French. Four minutes to go and I had given up when someone leaned forward and asked me my destination. The tall, hooded gentleman took my cash, cried out ‘Marrakesh!’ over the heads of scarved, fierce women, and handed it to a clerk. Like the parting of the seas, folk moved aside and I stepped forward.
‘Take this, pay the difference on the train’ I was advised. I thanked everybody heartily, all were smiling, nodding and the
n straight back to their scrum.
The train was in. It was thirty seconds after seven. Someone yelled, directed me to a carriage. A matchstick octogenarian hauled up my pack and settled me into a first-class compartment where a composed and very chic Arab woman in jeans and European clothes, without headgear, sat with her coltish and equally pretty daughter watching a film on a laptop.
‘Bonjour,’ she said as I threw myself, puffing, into a window seat. This was my first introduction to the pleasures of travelling in Morocco by train – the French built most of the roads and laid the railway lines. For a dollar or two extra I could always upgrade and I had some of the most enlivening conversations, met interesting travellers, without exception all Moroccans. Pulling out of Casa, we passed one of the infamous shantytowns, home to rural migrants, a bidonville of the most miserable sort with corrugated roofs, lacking facilities including fixed electricity and plumbing but where most habitations displayed a satellite dish.
‘Tomorrow is the Prophet’s birthday and there will be celebrations everywhere,’ the elegant woman smiled as though to explain the discomforts I had just experienced. ‘It is like your Christmas. Everyone is on the move, visiting loved ones. It coincides with the finish of the school term and a week of holidays.’
A second mother entered, thickset, with daughter in tow. She wore full Islamic apparel, save for the face veil. Her daughter, though, wore Western clothes but was less elegant than her counterpart. The second mother was reading an Arabicised Hello! magazine. We females fell into conversation, nattering convivially. I fielded the usual questions about my purpose of journeying alone, but this time we were all unaccompanied women. They expressed no disapproval and I noted that I was the only one wearing a wedding ring. Were they both divorced? I did not ask. As to the bombing in Tangier? The women exchanged glances.
‘These events are all too frequent, alas.’
It had been reported, but no one as far as they were aware had claimed responsibility. They were fascinated to learn of my olive quest and both confirmed that the regions near Meknès and Fès produced excellent olives, as did Sraghna, near Marrakesh.
‘And the argan?’
‘Ah, the Moroccan olive tree! But their forests are disappearing.’
The vegetation was changing as we moved away from the coast towards the centre of the country. A heat haze rose from the earth. It was still early, of course, though I had been up for hours. I sighted the first olive groves on the outskirts of Settat. Beyond, we rode through parched towns with blank red sand where shallow hills were punctuated with groves. I felt the approach of the desert. Curious, when I had been preparing for the ocean.
On an official Moroccan website I had read ‘the olive’s history in Morocco can be traced to Greeks who colonised Sicily’. It suggested that these Greeks had also delivered the olive to mainland Italy, and eventually, as trade routes opened up, had brought the tree west. After came the Romans who were responsible for planting huge groves in North Africa. ‘By the tenth century, cultivated oleasters covered the islands of the Mediterranean and ringed the shores of southern Europe and northern Africa. The olive is one of Morocco’s most fabled crops and has recently re-emerged as one of its most important.’
Again, so many differing hypotheses. Mine was that the Phoenicians were here first, followed by their descendants, the Carthaginians, the Greeks later, and, after the destruction of Carthage, the Romans who, as ever, made major business out of the oil, but I had still to discover where the Phoenicians had left their mark. If the Phoenicians had known of the argan tree would argan oil have become a staple of the Mediterranean diet? Would the argan be the plant encircling the basin? Or had the Phoenicians attempted to cultivate it and found that it was limited, that it would not root elsewhere? After the sterility of the Spanish olive business, I was excited at the prospect of discovering the earliest traditions of argan farming.
I was gazing upon an old earth with a complexion that shifted, sagged, dried up and sometimes flooded. An earth in constant change, wearing its experiences of time. Beyond the window I was looking at ridged land with soft stones, men in robes on bicycles, on donkeys. Shepherds, boys in torn-off trousers or old men in the hooded djellabahs. Sheep, a few, red sand and occasional eucalypts. I had not expected to hit Berber Africa quite so soon. Dry land and then a river with greenery, rushes and small groves of olives and palms. The ladies explained that these views from the window, these desert-like scenes, were unnatural and had been caused by lack of rain.
‘When there is rain, this is a wheat-farming district, but today, très peu, precious little, for farmers to live off.’
I was amazed. I saw no signs of farming. It was desert.
And as for the beasts, their grazing had almost entirely disappeared. It was developing into a serious crisis.
‘When were the last rains?’
The women frowned, calculating. ‘Three years ago.’
Such excitement expressed by the more conventional of the two Muslim women as we approached the outskirts of the immortal city and passed by palm groves, les palmerais.
‘So green!’ she cried with joy, like a child seeing snow for the first time.
Men with liquid-black expressions, rags over their heads, several with crutches upright at their sides, leaned or squatted against mud-baked walls.
Pressing my nose against the glass, I regretted that I was only passing through Marrakesh.
Another almighty scrum awaited me to secure a place on the bus to Essaouira, but in Marrakesh I was introduced to the system of the grand taxi. The inner cities were serviced by the small cars, les petits taxis, but the big taxis, usually sturdy old Mercs, were the intercity alternatives to coach or train. I would have continued on to the coast by train but the route had no railway and, yet again, the coaches were full. It was a question of grouping up with five other passengers and sharing the price of an intercity ride. A quartet of backpackers hassled me to join up with them, but I hung out for the bus. I had a hunch that I could swing a cancellation, which I did. The last seat. It placed me on the aisle alongside Douglas, a downbeat, unemployed bachelor from the outskirts of Manchester who returned to England at regular intervals to collect his dole cheque and then ‘pissed off again’, usually to southern Spain, where his ‘auntie had a condo’ on the Costa del Somewhere, to live as ‘cheap as chips’ until the next cheque arrived. He moaned from start to finish and I was obliged to pull out my notebook and bury myself in scribbling. Even so, he leaned over my pages, mumbling, ‘I wanted to be a writer once. You’re not saying summat about me, are yer?’
I hoped he would sleep so that I could stare across him out of the window. The agriculture directly out of Marrakesh appeared bountiful with olives both young and more mature. Some were thriving while others were drought-burned and desiccated. We travelled through a swathe of Sahel; a duned wasteland with occasional trees. Mud-baked walls enclosed the occasional properties or tiny settlements, nourwals, where goats fed off clumps of scrub. We were held up by a troupe of donkeys on the road, but arrived more or less on schedule. I gently extricated myself from lonely Douglas who was keen for company and suggested a night at the youth hostel together. I wished him well and set off merrily along the windy street, whorls of rising sand pricking at my skin, in search of a bed. I loved Essaouira from the moment I stepped off the bus into its blustery blue-and-white heart. Its romanticism, its utter remoteness. Its white minarets, its red-brown fortress, on the ramparts of which in 1948 Orson Welles had strode in windswept robes, shooting the opening sequence of his award-winning film Othello. From Francis Drake to Jimi Hendrix, the visitor lists had been eclectic.
For those earliest of incomers, the Phoenicians, Essaouira, or Migdal as they knew it, provided their farthest outpost. It was the margin, the extreme limit for those long-distance merchants who were interacting, staking claims, transporting knowledge everywhere round the Mediterranean. This was foreign. Here, where the Atlantic rollers beat at the rocks and the wind
ripped the guts out of their boats. Archaeological research shows that Essaouira was occupied as far back as prehistoric times. So who greeted those easterners when they dropped anchor? The bay in front of the harbour is almost closed off from the open sea by the large island of Mogador, making it a relatively protected zone against those fierce Atlantic gales and a natural choice for those sailors who landed first on that island before setting up a mainland base during the seventh century BC. What must it have looked like? What must it have felt like to reach this distance, this ‘far beyond’? But what did they trade here? Examples of Phoenician red pottery dating from the seventh century BC have been unearthed but no painted ostrich eggs, oil lamps or jars used for the transportation of wine and olive oil. All of these commodities have been found at their other North African sites. Might they have attempted to engage these natives in olive cultivation, the purchase of its oil, and were refused because the locals had their argan trees?
It was a long way to come to go shell-seeking even given that the dye from the murex brought them fabulous returns. Migdal was visited again in the fifth century BC by their descendants, fleets of Carthaginians led by their navigational hero, Hanno. A trading centre was established and, later, a purple-dye factory to process the murex and purpura shells found in the rocks along this coastline. The dye was shipped to Rome for the imperial togas.
I found myself a bed in a two-storey house on the seafront overlooking the waves, five minutes from the old city. An Arabic proverb: he who travels much learns more than he who lives long. I felt in the running for such knowledge! It was early evening. I had been on the road since before dawn. Such a circuitous route here from Casa, but I was happy. How must this windy outlet have seemed to those first voyagers so far from their eastern shores? Did they find nothing but rocks, islands and surf? I dropped my bags in my room with view and small table by the window, and set off. The beachfront was a generous golden arc of sand with gulls flying low in the evening light. The wind was still up. There were monkey puzzle trees lining the esplanade, and, in that respect, it reminded me, with its surfers and vegetation, of Manly Beach, Sydney, Australia. The Moroccan equivalent of the Spanish paseo seemed to be under way for the seafront was crowded. Mothers, accompanied by young daughters in scarves and long dresses, strolled arm in arm. The tourists – and there were more here than I had encountered anywhere so far on this voyage – bore the surfer’s look: faces forged by the sea’s salt and by excess. Also dropouts, ex-hippies and druggies.
The Olive Tree (The Olive Series Book 2) Page 19