by Annie Hawes
What else does it say? he asks anxiously, handing it back to me. I flick on through it. Nothing, I tell him reassuringly, that would put off a good American parent. All just ancient history. It says that the Spanish have, as Tobias told us, held Melilla since 1497. (A mere five years after the fall of Granada, I note: not content with exiling their Jews and Muslims, Ferdinand and Isabella, by the looks of things, couldn’t resist chasing hotfoot after the other two Peoples of the Book, still living in relative harmony.) Then that Spain used the town as a penal colony for a time, as a sort of Spanish Botany Bay. A perfect place to hold your least desirable prisoners, it says: a fortress city with an unpredictable sea on three sides of it, and to landward, the Berber clans, keen to get their property back, roaming bands of ferocious armed men, just waiting for the chance to cut a few Spanish throats . . .
Yazid laughs heartily at this. It’s the other way round, these days, he says. The ferocious armed men are the Spanish inside the walls of Melilla, not the Berbers beyond. Far from stopping desperate Spaniards getting out, the city spends all its time stopping desperate Africans moving in. Because, once inside, they are into the European Union. And a hard fight Melilla is having of it, too. They’ve put up a ten-foot barrier, right the way round Melillan territory – between his own town and Tobias’ – and have brought in the Spanish army to patrol it day and night. Same goes for Ceuta – we’ll see as we come in to land. Controlling the sea is harder, though. People-smugglers take big money from would-be immigrants to Europe, telling them they’ll be landed on Spanish shores. Then they drop them in the water off Ceuta or Melilla, to swim for it . . .
Europe is putting up the money now to raise the fences to twice the height, Tobias tells us. Word’s already out in the building trade: it could be the first decent job there’s been on this side of the water for years. Obviously they can’t be planning to employ cheap Moroccan labour to build a fence against – well, against themselves! Two solid barriers, five yards apart: surveillance cameras, motion sensors, floodlights. Razor wire on the top for good measure. With a sentry post every half kilometre. Because someone who’s walked right across the Sahara, like a lot of those boys have, isn’t going to balk at a bit of plain barbed wire for long, is he?
Still, who knows, says Tobias, if he will even get a job on the project? He would much rather be in America with his Marla. Do I think he should write her a letter? Should he keep ringing, or will silence make her heart grow fonder? Should he try to get a tourist visa and go over, even if she says she doesn’t want to see him?
I do my best to rise to my new role as expert on feminine psychology, Anglo-Saxon style, but I find it hard to concentrate on Tobias’ love-life. I am too distracted by the thought of that barrier. Good job Salazar didn’t get round to building such a thing between Portugal and Spain! Still, imagine having made it halfway across Africa, hundreds of miles from your home, so close to your goal: only to find that last fence defeating you. A family back home waiting hopefully for news of your success. How could you not try to get over it? Of course you would. You wouldn’t care if you got cut about by razor wire, would you? You’d go in the hours of darkness, try laying your clothes over it to protect yourself, maybe, jump down on the other side, bloody but certain you were in with a chance – only to find yourself trapped and floodlit, stuck in that narrow alley, and the tramp of soldiers’ boots heading your way. It doesn’t bear thinking about.
Tobias isn’t bothered, he says. He wants the work. That’s how life is. He isn’t allowed into the USA. Other people aren’t allowed into Europe. What do you expect?
I don’t know what I expect, but surely we humans can come up with something better than an earth criss-crossed by impassable barriers separating the haves from the have-nots? From a distance, in the abstract, it may be easy to believe in their necessity. But from close up? I, for one, certainly couldn’t look another human being in the eye and give him any good reason why he should have less right than me to travel the world and try his fortune.
Now that the warm morning sun is clearing away the sea mist, the Rock of Gibraltar, rearing high, is just visible again, receding into the deep blue distance. The northern Pillar of Hercules, last outpost of our own continent . . . Or maybe not, these days, when we can just shift bits of one continent to another as the fancy takes us. Which of the high African hills ahead, now looming ever closer, is the Pillar’s southern twin? Does anyone know?
No. Nobody does. It’s been a thousand years and more since anybody knew the answer to that question, says Tobias. Some say it is Jebel Musa, over to the west there, on Moroccan soil. But most people prefer Monte Hacho for the role, that hill straight ahead, above Ceuta – the one with the Byzantine fortress sitting on it.
I suppose it makes sense, in the tangled history of this part of the world, that the southern Pillar should have a Spanish name, and the northern Pillar an Arabic one. Just for balance. Because Yazid tells us that the real name of Gibraltar is Jebel Tariq – Tariq’s hill. Our word is just a corruption of the original Arabic.
More intriguing than the etymology, though, was the back story. Who was Tariq? What was he up to on this hill? Why did the place get named after him? Simple. The year was 710 AD, and Tariq, a Berber leader recently converted to Islam, was assembling his forces there. He was about to launch that Islamic invasion of Iberia: the one that stopped half way up France and never did make it to my tomato patch. Strange that Franco the Spaniard should launch his invasion from the Maghreb, while Tariq the Maghrebi launches his from Spain. Does this reflect the level of welcome they were expecting to meet? As invasions of Spain go, General Franco’s bitterly fought one, bringing about the deaths of millions of his fellow Spaniards, followed by a stultifying regime no longer than his own life span, was certainly a terrible failure compared to Tariq’s. Franco’s statue is, it seems, already rotting in Melilla a mere sixty years on, and in Spain itself there is hardly a memorial to him left standing. But the words Jebel Tariq will have been perfectly comprehensible to the local Spanish populace for the next seven hundred years, and Tariq’s name is still going strong well over a millennium later – even if, admittedly, somewhat garbled up by us infidels.
Fettah, short for Abdelfettah, we come across – fall over, rather – when we go indoors out of the wind. He is perched on top of a colossal zip-up bag – those rectangular white-plastic plaid ones you find in street markets all over the world – and we have to clamber over three equally enormous bags, all full to bursting, to take a seat with Guy, to whom he is chatting animatedly inside this luggage barricade.
Guy introduces us. Abdelfettah, who looks about eighteen and has the most amazingly thick, curly eyelashes, is on his way home to Morocco, to Tetuan. He has been working in the greenhouses – or the plastic tunnels, rather – of the Spanish agro-industry. The Maghrebi contribution to Spain’s horticulture still continues, it seems, albeit in modern guise. And this stuff in the bags is all the shopping he is taking home to the family.
Much shopping! says Abdelfettah, patting it happily.
It certainly is much shopping. And, Guy tells us, he has to get it all through customs by himself, no trolleys, no help, nothing!
But why? How on earth can he carry all that by himself ?
It is necessary, says Fettah. All must go on my back! Guy passes on the explanation. The residents of Tetuan have a special dispensation on visits to the next-door Spanish territory – they pay no Moroccan import tax on any goods they can manage to carry, without help, on their backs (or any other part of their body, come to that) from the Spanish side of the border. The idea being that criminal gangs will have no incentive to go in for large-scale organized smuggling if local Moroccans can just nip over to Ceuta – to Europe, as it were – and bring back their own cheaper shopping. No scope for profiteering. Sounds a good plan, although, by the look of things, also likely to lead, in the longer term, to plenty of bad Tetuan back problems.
We could just carry one each for him, couldn’t
we, says Gérard, evidently thinking along the same lines as me. We’ve got hardly any luggage ourselves.
But no, we couldn’t, because we’re not residents of Tetuan, are we? If we got stopped we’d be made to pay the tax on it all! It won’t be too hard, though, Abdelfettah tells us. There is always a big crowd of willing would-be porters waiting just beyond the Ceuta border. There is no work in his town, and no end of big, strong men keen to earn themselves a few dirhams by taking over a traveller’s burden.
Tobias now offers us, too, a lift for the first leg of our journey. There’s still plenty of room in the back seat. And he’d be glad of some more help with the petrol. He could drop us off at Tetuan – or a couple of hours further on, if we like, in Chefchaouen. Unless we’d like to come and visit Melilla, maybe? No, of course not . . .
He has a few bits of business to see to on the way, he says, but it will still save us three or four hours of bus – and a change at Tetuan. We’ll get to see a few places off the beaten track, too.
What does he mean, bits of business? asks Gérard as soon as Tobias is out of earshot. Doesn’t he seem a rather fishy character altogether? And much too friendly?
He certainly does if, like Gérard, you’ve had your nose stuck in The Little Cunning One for half the boat trip. Gérard shows us the ‘dangers’ box on the next page of the Melilla entry, with a map of the town standing right at the head of the poverty-stricken and isolated hills of the Rif. The traveller should trust nobody here: carry nothing for anyone, and accept no lifts. This is the country’s main cannabis-growing area. That’s what it says. And Gérard is now certain that Tobias must have some ulterior motive for wanting us along. Luckily for our chances of a lift, though, he can’t quite think what this motive could be.
Surely, says Guy, even if Tobias did import hashish into Spain, as well as working on building sites – a combination that doesn’t strike Guy as too likely – Gérard can’t seriously imagine that he would be bringing it the wrong way across the Mediterranean, back into Morocco? Or that he would be so hard up he needed to ask for a share of the petrol?
Gérard, somewhat shamefacedly, agrees to give his fears – and his book – a rest.
We’ve almost arrived now, and Ceuta looks beautiful from a mile out, sitting on its ancient fortified walls, the steep hills above it crowned with their ruined fortress and dappled with the fresh green of spring, a tiny jewel of a Mediterranean town set at the blue sea’s edge. The flyer we were given with our ticket tells us that this is a harbour so safe and so well placed that it has been fought over since the dawn of seafaring history. It lists the one-time masters of the town: Phoenicians and Romans, Arabs and Visigoths, Portuguese and Spanish – everybody who was anybody has had a finger in this pie. A Hollywood extravaganza with a cast of thousands – millennial battling over these narrow straits: Roman legions and Visigoth raiders, Moorish armies and crusading Normans, Barbary pirates and traders of the Levant, Elizabethan privateers and Spanish galleons, and then, all the fleets of the colonial powers, competing for the spoils of Empire . . . Finally, behind the warfarers and the moneybags, come the unsung ordinary inhabitants of both sides of the water, following the tides of history, scraping a living for themselves and their families as best they can, shifting back and forth from one continent to the other – these days, likely as not, as human contraband in flimsy fishing boats and tiny inflatables.
Once we’ve pulled into shore amid the clang and crash of landing gear, Tobias drives us out of the dark bowels of the ship and into the blinding sunshine of a new and indeterminate land. The continent: Africa. The country: Spain. There are signs everywhere for churros and café con leche, for hamburguesas and bocadillos. Another mile or so of Spanish territory, and we meet Ceuta’s ten-foot anti-African barriers, as advertised: a few yards further on are the somewhat lower wire fences of Morocco. Assembled on the tarmac between the two, a large crowd of people – Tetuan residents, presumably, though we can’t see Abdelfettah here yet – are passing massive quantities of bags and boxes over to waiting helpers. Our queue inches forward towards passport control, and here comes Abdelfettah at last, a bag hanging from either elbow, a third clutched to his belly, and the last perched precariously on one shoulder. There are so many other heavily laden people around him that he hardly stands out from the crowd at all. We wave to him, but he doesn’t see us. Not that he’s in any position to wave back if he did. And he is soon thoroughly upstaged by a family who, bizarrely, are contriving to lift a full-size fridge right over the fence.
Sitting comfortably in Tobias’ big, white, squashy saloon with its Spanish number plates, we roll on to join the passport queue. Our side of the border is moving pretty quick. There are only a few cars in front of us. But look at the size of the queue on foot, coming the other way! Several hundred not-very-hopefuls are being held back behind barbed-wire barriers bristling with armed men. The no-man’s-land this side of the border is thronged with people standing and sitting about, not a few of them sub-Saharan Africans as predicted by Tobias, waiting in patient – or do I mean tragic? – poses that suggest they’ve been here for hours, if not days. None of them looks remotely prosperous. Not a few of them look positively ragged.
The four of us drive on, straight up to the sentry-post where a banner proclaims PASAPORTE EUROPA. I am suddenly seized by a powerful feeling that, in solidarity with the other Undesirable Aliens of this world, I should refuse to cross this border. Turn back and just go home.
Silly idea. What good would that do anyone?
Tobias hands our documents through the car window to the men in uniforms. A quick glance, and we’re waved on out of Spain and into Morocco. Easy as pie.
4
In Tetuan, Tobias points us towards the medina. There are plenty of cafés in the square up there, he says. He’ll be back by the time we’ve finished breakfast. Yazid, of course, is staying in the car: he urgently needs to find a phone booth.
An hour later, we’re still in Moustafa’s bar, and there’s still no sign of either of them.
You see! says Gérard, whose worst fears are now confirmed. Of course Tobias was up to something! He was just using us as cover while he got whatever-it-was through customs! Come to think of it, maybe he and Yazid were in it together? We’ve only got their word for it that they didn’t know one another already, after all . . .
Guy rolls his eyes meaningfully. I can see he’s about to make some cutting remark about guidebook-induced paranoia.
Well, I say soothingly, it’s no skin off our nose, is it? The Rif buses leave from here – we had to come to Tetuan anyway.
The boys decide to have one more coffee, just in case this is the last outpost of civilization we meet for some months. If Tobias hasn’t turned up by then, we’ll go and find the bus station. While they go to the bar, I nip back out under the shutter and into the street. The sunlight is blinding now, and it’s starting to get ridiculously hot. I can’t waste the chance to get a glimpse of a proper old-style Moorish town for the first time since Granada. Or as proper as it gets on the last day of Ramadan, anyway, if Moustafa is to be believed: with all the local inhabitants either in a temper or fainting away.
I cross the square, squeeze through the archway, now crowded with shoppers – plenty of them dressed European-style, too: the market traders must be a more traditionally minded bunch – and push my way along the alley. A few yards up, the lady with the hennaed heels has spread her wares on the cloth of her bundle and is sitting cross-legged beside it, along with several dozen other purveyors of vegetables, narrowing the already-narrow street even more. My first impression is of total chaos. So many people, so much hubbub, so much stuff, none of it ordered in any way I recognize. From all sides, a cacophony of Arabic music from tinny radios; somebody banging on a tambourine as he calls out his wares; the chat of busy shoppers; the braying of an invisible donkey. Where people have stopped to examine the goods, or to barter loudly over their price, the flow of bodies is dammed up completely: we shove pas
t in single file. I’m caught up in the crowd now, no choice but to move at their speed, which gives me plenty of time, alas, to examine a busy butchers’ street full of skinned sheeps’ heads and dangling offal. Can the medina always be this frantic? Maybe it’s worse during Ramadan: if you can’t eat, you can at least shop? The winding alleys really do look just like the Albaycín. Whitewashed buildings, terracotta-tiled roofs, curving wrought-iron grilles protecting the windows. The rule here seems to be just one trade per street. I pass through an alley of spice-sellers now, warm perfumes strong in the air: baskets of nutmegs and of cinnamon sticks, whole sacks of cumin and of coriander, yellow turmeric and red chilli powder, a little wooden shovel in each for measuring out . . . now on to dried fruits and nuts, dates beautifully stacked and gleaming, figs strung on loops of palm-frond, a display that must take hours to do each morning; off the main drag is a tiny piazza with a bunch of old men sitting on worn stone steps, chanting what must be verses of the Koran. I try not to stare at two women covered from head to toe in haiks, only their eyes showing; now a gaggle of teenagers, chatting animatedly in Arabic, bursts out of a side opening: all in blue jeans, the girls with slinky jersey tops and lashings of make-up. Only one of them has her hair modestly covered up in the khimar scarf; the others have it blonde-streaked, curled and primped. Two worlds crushed up together in a three-foot alley.