by Annie Hawes
Moustafa having returned to stand over us, beaming benevolently, I took the opportunity to ask him about his Hand of Fatima. Oh, that was nothing – his mother put it there, he said, looking slightly shamefaced. As well he might. I had gathered from our recent Islamic investigations that the purists of the religion, the ones who seem to be gaining the upper hand these days, frown upon all superstition of the Hand-of-Fatima type. They sound depressingly similar to the puritans of Christianity, all plain God-alone worship, no decorations, no frills: going around condemning anything at all entertaining or attractive as sinful, pagan or idolatrous. It was this kind of stuff, in its doom-laden Highland Scots version, which led to the last three generations of my family abandoning organized religion entirely, in favour of the principle of do-as-you-would-be-done-by. A fine principle, too. Entirely adequate to purpose, couldn’t possibly offend a God if there turned out to be one – and allows you to enjoy the pleasant things of life to the full.
Moustafa had never heard of a blue Hand of Fatima, he said. His was done with henna. That was how the old people always did it round here. Henna attracts the good spirits, they say, the kindly djinns, and repels the bad ones that might harm you.
These old people, as it happens, are not wrong. Back in Granada, intrigued by the Spanish Inquisition’s attempts to ban the use of henna, I investigated the matter, to find that not only had henna been used since biblical times – even appearing in the love poetry of the Song of Solomon, with deeply romantic and sensuous connotations – but it was also a powerful antibacterial agent. If we are to count the bugs Candida, Staphylococcus and E. Coli as bad spirits – a good enough description to be going along with – then Moustafa’s mamma was entirely right about the properties of henna. Though not, perhaps, about applying it to doorposts. Still, I hate to imagine the effect on the health of the Spanish nation when both henna and the hammam were banished from the scene. I imagine an Inquisition epidemiologist, had such a personage existed, would have gathered some pretty horrifying statistics.
Moustafa was now telling me that he thought we might find such a thing as a blue Hand of Fatima in Chefchaouen, a town in the foothills of the Rif that was famed for painting everything blue, even its pathways . . . Were we heading that way?
We certainly were: it was the first town we would pass on our way through the Rif, heading along the coast towards Algiers. And I was pleased to hear its mystifying-looking name pronounced aloud: Shef-show-en.
Algeria? Moustafa was not impressed. I should send the Frenchmen off alone to that godless place, he said, and stay here in Morocco. Being English, I would naturally feel more at home in a country with respect for its traditions – and for its Royal Family.
Why had I ever started this conversation? Not only did I suffer from a deep lack of interest in royalty in general, but the Moroccan king in particular did not sound like my cup of tea. His hand-picked interior minister, in charge of the Moroccan equivalent of the PIDE, was nicknamed The Butcher. Several thousand Moroccans had inexplicably gone missing over the last two decades. Need I say more? Also, I badly wanted to get at my breakfast – but how was I supposed to sit stuffing my face in front of a starving man? Not that it seemed to be bothering Gérard and Guy. The croissant-basket was nearly empty already, which made my own situation all the more desperate.
Light-headed with hunger and guilt, I must have burbled something about fasting and Ramadan, because Moustafa was now telling me that it wasn’t so bad when Ramadan fell at this time of the year. The worst was when it came in high summer. Double the heat; double the thirst; and double the hours of daylight to keep to the fast in. People started keeling over in the streets, or fainting at their work.
In high summer? I knew Ramadan moved about, but had imagined it stayed within certain fixed bounds, like, say, Easter. But no. Over thirty-odd years, Moustafa explained, you will have experienced it in every possible season. The lunar months used in the Islamic calendar give a lot less than three hundred and sixty-five days to a year, and don’t correspond to the seasons of the year at all. Ramadan falls roughly ten days earlier each year.
And does everyone really not touch so much as a drop of water, even in such heat? Are people allowed to slip up occasionally?
Only sick people, or women with child, or travellers on the road, answered Moustafa. Or children, of course, who don’t begin joining the fast till puberty. Otherwise, nothing must pass your lips: not while your eye can distinguish a black thread from a white thread in the palm of your hand. That is the word of the Koran.
Really? I was fascinated. Did people actually go around with a pair of threads, checking, then?
Of course! Look around you later tonight, said Moustafa. Once it begins to get dark, you will see everyone out in the streets, palms outstretched, eyes fixed on those two little cotton threads; just waiting for the moment to come when they can rush indoors and throw themselves on their dinners!
But this, it turned out, was only Moustafa’s little joke. You visitors love le folklore so much, he said. Often it is hard to resist making a little humour! But of course not! In these modern times, it is all done scientifically. Look over the road there, up on the roof: see that siren? That is how we know when the fast is over!
Moustafa went off, guffawing, back to his bar. And I grabbed a croissant.
3
My fellow travellers being men of their word – men who, when they say they will be travelling overland on local transport, really mean it – we had caught the train down to Andalusia, and the ferry from Algeciras at dawn this morning. The boat trip was a most educational experience. The ferry passenger soon discovers that the dark mysteries of distant Africa lie a mere three-quarters of an hour from the familiar Brit-packed beaches of southern Spain. Only nine miles of sea separate the two continents. The last time my world-view took such a battering was when the Berlin Wall came down, the Iron Curtain floated wide, and the fearful Communist bloc turned out to be a place you could, if you lived in Italy, just get into your car and drive to.
Still, though the distance may be short, these are some of the most dangerous and unpredictable seas in the world. The sun-warmed waters of the land-locked Mediterranean stream out here through the narrow Straits of Gibraltar, while the cold might of the massive Atlantic fights its way in: an encounter that unleashes unimaginable powers of wind and current. Turbulent seas, and a turbulent history, too. By the time we had docked on African soil and got through Moroccan passport control, it had become clear to us that the troubled past of this area had segued seamlessly into a troubled present.
Gérard takes a seat in the stern of the ship, pulls out the The Little Cunning One and sets to checking his coordinates. Guy and I get on with checking out the rest of the vessel, making our way through stinging sea spray up to the bows, where the rugged brown cliffs of Morocco are blurring slowly into focus. Here, in a powerful headwind, we make our first African acquaintances of the trip.
Tobias is leaning right out over the handrail, shading his eyes against sun, wind and spray, straining into the distance. He is hoping to catch sight of his home town, Melilla, he shouts: another 140 kilometres eastwards along the Moroccan coastline. Sometimes you can see its headland from the boat. But it is too misty, too early in the day. No sign at all. Just his luck.
Next to Tobias, also gazing out to sea, but in an altogether less fevered manner, is a man with a gentle smile under a bushy moustache, a good twenty years older than him, who introduces himself as Yazid. Yazid, short, dark and a little on the plump side, certainly fits my notion of a Moroccan. But Tobias, with golden brown eyes and a great bush of auburn hair, is a most unlikely-looking North African.
Yazid, he tells us as we withdraw to a slightly less windswept corner, is from Berkane, a short way past Melilla. And although they have only just met, Tobias has kindly offered to save Yazid the tedious bus trip and give him a lift most of the way, getting him home several hours earlier. Yazid seems in a positive fever to see his wife again. He
left Holland yesterday, he tells us, and since then he has rung her three times: from Antwerp, from Marseilles, and just now from Spain. Each phone call is making him more homesick! Tobias is a good man to be so neighbourly, in spite of the troubles that are afflicting him.
No serious afflictions, says Tobias, joining us in the shelter of the cabin wall. A few problems in his love life, that’s all. A bracing sea crossing, some good home cooking at his mamma’s, and he will soon rise above his broken heart. All the more reason, anyway, to help out another lonely man who’s missing his woman.
Tobias does not only look distinctly un-Moroccan, but sounds it, too. I am beginning to suspect from his accent that his mother tongue is not Arabic at all, but Spanish.
Of course! Tobias says. That is because he is, in fact, Spanish. Melilla is a Spanish town, a Spanish enclave on Moroccan shores. The port of Ceuta where we will soon be landing is also a Spanish possession. Both towns have been Spanish since the fifteenth century – officially parts of Spain, and now outposts of the European Union on African shores.
I am startled. How come I’ve never ever heard tell of this African corner of Europe? Or do I mean European corner of Africa? You’d imagine, wouldn’t you, that the supporters of a British Gibraltar, whenever Spain brought up the question of sovereignty over the Rock, would be emphatically pointing the finger at Ceuta and Melilla – at not one, but two Spanish cities still held on Moroccan soil – and making loud remarks about sauce for the goose and sauce for the gander?
No, on second thoughts, that might just make both parties look bad. Still, it’s surprising that the Moroccans themselves don’t try to claim their territory back, the way Spain sporadically does over Gibraltar, isn’t it?
According to our new acquaintances, though, there is nothing at all surprising about this. His own king’s government, Yazid says, wouldn’t dream of offending Morocco’s main trading partners – not with the Moroccan economy in such dodgy shape. And nobody, anywhere, ever, says Tobias dramatically, knows of African Spain: neither Ceuta nor Melilla. Except the mainland Spanish, that is, and in their case, Tobias would rather they didn’t. Once upon a time you could be proud to be a Melillan. But not any longer. His city’s main claim to fame was always its great patriotism. It was the base from which General Franco invaded his own country, accompanied by a thousand loyal Moroccan troops, saving Spain from the perils of modern democracy for the next forty years. And, let us not forget, having a seriously negative effect on the Spanish red-tie market.
In his parents’ day, Tobias says, the city’s loyalty to Franco was something to be proud of, but now that the Generalíssimo is dead and his name is mud, Melilla’s association with his exploits does little for its image. A life-size statue still stands down on Melilla’s port, he says, commemorating Franco’s triumph. Nobody takes care of it any more. It is cracked and dirty, lichen-covered, surrounded by weeds, and ignored by the local populace. But still, according to Tobias, other young Spaniards assume that all Melillenses must be some kind of Fascist-supporting reactionaries. He goes over to Andalusia a lot; he has to, he says, to earn a living. He is a builder, a shuttering carpenter. He’s just finished the concrete on one of the myriad British-inspired building sites of Almeria – and he’ll be forced to go back there soon. There’s no work of that ilk to be had in his home town. And he can tell us that you get treated like a dog over there if you’re from African Spain. Like a dog!
Yazid, with a wheezing chuckle, tells us that we should take Tobias’ laments with a large pinch of salt. There are plenty of building jobs much closer to home than Spain. Yazid himself is building a house, he says, in Berkane, with four flats in it, one for each of his children. He is on his way home from his job on the Dutch railways: he has taken his month’s holiday now, bringing his year’s savings with him, especially to get work started on the second floor. He would be happy, he says, clapping Tobias enthusiastically on the back, to offer him a job in Berkane, starting immediately – just a short drive from his home – if he wants one. What about it?
Both men find this suggestion utterly hilarious. Tobias joins his putative employer in hearty laughter.
Work-shy, you see, these Spaniards! says Yazid, once they have got over the private joke, and collapses again into breathless laughter.
Perplexed, we await enlightenment.
No Spaniard, Yazid explains between chuckles, would ever dream of working on a Moroccan building site. And no Moroccan would consider employing a Spaniard – not even an African Spaniard. Their towns may be only a few miles apart, but wages in Berkane are less than a third of European ones. Tobias, born with the right to work in Europe, would be mad to take a Moroccan job. Why do we think Yazid leaves his wife and family to go all the way to Holland? Far from employing rich Spaniards, he says, he will be taking on fellow Moroccans from down in the poverty-stricken south, where people are glad to get any sort of a job. They are hard workers too, he says, not like our lazy Spanish friend; and Yazid needs to get a move on – his oldest son will be getting married next year, and the ground floor, where Yazid’s own wife and the younger children are living, still isn’t properly finished. Though at least he has, at long last, managed to get that telephone put in.
Yazid, we gather, is almost as keen to see his new phone as he is to see his wife. He can’t wait, he says. A real telephone, all his, sitting there in his own home. The first house phone his family has ever had, and already it has improved his life beyond all measure! He will be ringing his wife again as soon as we dock in Ceuta!
Yazid has been working abroad, he tells us, since the year he got married, twenty-five years ago. And he reckons that, over all that time, he has spent less than three years altogether in his family’s company. Still, looking on the bright side, he says, they certainly haven’t got bored with one another! It was hard enough to keep in touch at all. When he first left Morocco there were hardly any phones in the country, and no postal service worth mentioning, either. Migrants like him would pay professional runners from their home towns to carry letters for them – and then, of course, the wife had to pay someone to read them out to her, and to write down her answer. No chance of mentioning anything private or intimate. The first phones were a lot better, but still, there Yazid would be, queueing with his workmates at some phone box – in Germany first, then in Holland – hoping against hope to get through to another in Morocco, where his wife would be waiting. Nine times out of ten something would go wrong. And then when it didn’t, it cost a fortune! For a while, when audio cassettes first came out, Yazid and Naima used those instead of the phones. You could chat, relaxed, for a whole hour, for the price of the cassette and the postage stamp. And say openly what you meant. Even whisper sweet nothings, if you wanted to! But this wonderful system was soon spoilt – by jealousy and greed.
We make noises of polite enquiry. Jealousy and greed?
Yes. It’s a terrible thing, says Yazid, how his own countrymen, the ones who were lucky enough to get a good start in life, to be able to stay at home in their own town – people with school qualifications and a decent career in the Post Office, for example – can be full of hatred and envy for migrants like himself. They’re disgusted that a man like him, an unskilled ignoramus, can earn good European wages, afford to build a nice new home for himself and his family, a place to retire to and live happily ever after, snug among his grandchildren. They sit in their nice, clean offices, he says, muttering to one another about ignorant country bumpkins getting above themselves. The Post Office officials started demanding bribes when migrants’ wives came to collect their letters or packages. Nothing too obvious; they would insist on selling them lottery tickets, stuff like that, to cover the bare-faced blackmail. If the woman didn’t buy one, she would be told she had no mail that day, and go home empty-handed.
But look – all that is behind him! He has his own wonderful telephone in the house! He’s had a lock put on it, of course, so his wife and children can’t bankrupt him while he’s away, and n
ow he will always have peace of mind: no more anxieties about staying in touch. Best of all, he confides, is the way he can ring his wife randomly, at any time of the day or night. That way, he doesn’t have to worry, the way he used to, about what she, or his daughter, might be getting lured into with no man in the house to watch over them . . .
Poor wife! She can’t even use the phone herself, then. I wonder how glad she is to have it in the house?
Gérard and his guidebook now arrive at our side, Gérard having absorbed enough information from it, he tells Guy with a wicked look, to make sense of what he’s looking at. While Gérard gets on, at last, with admiring the misty-morning view of the shores of Africa, where the vague outline of a small white coastal town set against lush green vegetation is starting to be visible, I check out the book to discover that there is much more to Melilla’s bad name on the Spanish mainland than Tobias has let on. The only industry in Tobias’ city these days, I read, apart from a small fishing fleet, is smuggling. Melilla is Mediterranean Morocco’s main depot for contraband. Hashish goes north to Europe, along with would-be asylum-seekers or migrant workers, while electrical goods, avoiding heavy Moroccan taxes, come south.
Tobias is horrified to hear that all this is written down in black and white. He snatches the book from me, only to be defeated by the complexities of written French. But would the same stuff be written in an English version?
I imagine so, I say.
So the whole world can read that stuff, he says. The whole world!
Why? I ask. Is it not true?
But that is not the problem. Tobias fears, he explains, that the ill fame of his town may have spread as far as the United States of America. Tobias, unlike the contented Yazid, seems a very angry man. He is only on this boat, he says, and obliged to go home to Melilla, because he has just been jilted by his fiancée – an American, from Texas. Tobias, who has now realized that I am English, appears to feel that, since I share not only a sex but also a language with this girl, I should be ready to take my share of responsibility for her actions. He was supposed to join her in the States next month, he tells me accusingly. Her parents had even stood guarantor for his visa, though they’d never met him. Tobias spent almost a whole month’s wages on the ticket, and pulled out of the next job he had lined up, too. But last week, all of a sudden, Marla rang him from the States, a different person, cold as ice, to say that it had all been a mistake: now she was back home, she’d realized theirs had been nothing but a holiday romance. The wedding was off, the visa guarantee withdrawn, and his bright future on the gold-paved streets of America snatched away, leaving him adrift on the Mediterranean, minus last month’s money, and on his way home to Mamma. He was just a human tourist attraction, he says bitterly, a handy Latin lover with a set of free Spanish lessons thrown in. Though now he has begun to wonder whether maybe her parents got to her – could they be racists who, once they’d worked out where Melilla was, thought he was actually an African African? But then – if everyone in the whole world can read this insulting description of his home town, maybe that was what did for him?