Tangier

by Angus Stewart

  TANGIER

  ANGUS STEWART (1977)

  TANGIER: A WRITER'S NOTEBOOK

  1. Why

  One evening in 1961 I stood on a pavement in downtown Seattle confronting a restaurant sign which said simply, 'Eat'. I resented the injunction. The cocktail party from which I'd just spilled was called 'Mandarin'. And indeed the fierce martinis had flowed from a bone china teapot. A few days later I was on a train rattling down the length of Mexico.

  Crossing that border was a revelation. The food held Europe's honest admixture of dirt. People looked less like polythene and seemed totally unbusy. While no more odd than mandarin martinis, chicken in chocolate sauce was palatable with the chili surreptitiously scrubbed off in a water jug while one's eyes dripped as though massaged with onions. But experiencing the trivia was a man on the run. That he was pursued by himself; and continued to be for many years, did not modify either the momentum or rationale of flight. Search suggests logical progression and competence, At Chihuahua, where they breed and eat the hairless dogs, I was lost. The train stopped. It was air-conditioned. The windows didn't open. On the platform a small girl held her cupped hand out the other side of the double glass. The situation was ridiculous. I was ashamed, lost, but unconsciously being sold.

  Returned to England, I realized being lost meant not knowing who one was. Perhaps a man's sense of physical belonging is of more significance than he easily understands. Animals have territorial instincts. A hedgehog will patrol snuffling and eating within a 200-metre radius all its life. Within this area it will mate several times, and die. I'd been born in South Australia of British parents trapped there by accident of war. It seemed improbable that people on tiny islands 12000 miles from Adelaide should speak English. Arrived in Belfast aged nine, and England a year later. I discovered they did. The parody Englishman who emerged during the next ten years was evolved unconsciously. It wasn't until I kept hedgehogs that I suspected his persona disguised specific failings compared with the higher indigenous animal: territorial confidence, family raising. Two older brothers and two younger sisters were to prove good at both.

  I swung a pair of Woolworth's compasses across an atlas wondering where were the nearest people not like me. This defined as not middle-class, not public school, not Oxbridge and, to complete the externals of flight, not Caucasian either. Two weeks later I was installed in the haouma of Ain Haiani, Tangier, with a camp bed, Primus, saucepan, and a twelve-year-old boy from the jebilet whose fugitive dynamic was positive where mine was negative. The polarization worked well. He had come down from the hills to seek his fortune. I'd left a European city in order not to consider earning an orthodox western living.

  In common with all the haoumats of Tangier, Ain Haiani cannot be called a suburb. It begins where the road ends. There's a green hill where goats graze. Cactus grows sensibly about the village pump so that people lacking roof terraces can spread their washing to dry without its being blown away. Cactus spikes are more equal to the Levanter than clothes-pegs. We didn't have a roof terrace.

  The house was one of a complex of pastel-washed boxes. None resembled another. Each relied architecturally upon the support of its neighbours' walls. Mine was nominally two-storey. It was tiny. The rent was the equivalent of thirty pence a week. Water was fetched by bucket from the pump. The light bulb was wired from the owner's impenetrable mansion next door, but had a switch: I was sovereign within a simple Arab's dower house. The single key weighed half a kilo. Moslem owner and Nesrani tenant met rarely. There proved no awkwardness about being the only Christian save one in the haouma.

  My floors and staircase were beautifully tiled. Ground level consisted of a windowless passage and, behind a flimsy door, a room just large enough to squat in. This was its function. The narrow drain wouldn't accept toilet paper because Moroccans employ the left hand and then wash it I positioned myself over the hole with a box of matches clutched between my teeth. Paper plucked from a wad nailed to the door would then be burnt and the ash washed successfully away with water from the bucket. Upstairs a wedge-shaped room just held my camp bed, a borrowed table and chair, and the mat on which the boy slept. A democratic suggestion that we spend alternate nights on the bed was refused. The only time Niñ, as I called him, could be persuaded to use bed and sleeping-bag was when he had flu. Happily it was of brief duration. The November nights were bitterly cold. There was small comfort wherever one slept until the sun rose and strengthened and one could thaw out on the hillside, or pummel blue flesh at Haiani's Well, from which the haouma of Ain Haiani gets its name.

  Major Frank Mellor, the other English resident of Ain Haiani, had been in Tangier for nearly thirty years. Now Frank regularly invited me to breakfast with him, when three eggs would be boiled so I might take one back to Niñ who was concocting his own peculiar coffee, thick with condensed milk, Otherwise Niñ and I subsisted as natives.

  He had learnt survival young, particularly where and how to buy food with minute sums of money. We took bread sparely spread with tinned fish in the shop to the rocky shore at Merkala and cooked a simple touajen stew, at night. Sometimes he'd be drawn back to the lights of the town, and particularly the Petit Socco, where he'd spent the first six months of his independent life. The boredom of the roadless hills which this ambitious infant had fled for Tangier's beach and cinemas I wasn't to experience for a year, when I visited his home.

  Tentatively I began to explore the two towns: the Medina, with its life little changed over centuries; and the European city, for the most part less than fifty years old. Both were suffering a slump. Morocco had become independent five years previously, and months later the International Zone which, principally through currency dealing, had made Tangier one of the richest cities in the world for all except its indigenous inhabitants, had ended with the abrogation of the Statute of Tangier on 29 October 1956. In 1961 the tourist boom was ten years in the future.

  I put on a white shirt, gratuitously thumped and wrung clean by laughing Moroccan women at the well, and nervously visited three very different writers to whom I'd been given introductions by friends in London. Otherwise, excepting a wild visit from an old friend, Alister Brass, and with its lights, restaurants and a nearly forgotten world for me; and a more dignified one from John Lehmann, who could barely stand upright in the house and wisely declined Niñ's coffee, Ain Haiani, the boy, Frank, his servant Mustafa whose sons were roughly of an age with Niñ and daughters either sufficiently young or inured to Christians as to be allowed shyly to communicate with them, were my life for four months, I knew nothing of Tangier. But the accident was enough. An odd, backdoor introduction. A. shy youth in limbo was hooked. Inevitably this had happened in low key.

  In the fourth month I ran out of money; but was back within two. Rain collapsed the house in my absence. Niñ had guarded the key among the ruins calmly as the boy on the burning deck. We removed to the furnished penthouse suite on top of Tangier's prestigious Lottery Building, the highest eyrie in the New Town, at an inclusive rent of eight pounds a month. Briefly I had rented a damp basement boxroom. Supplied was a chewed convict's blanket with black arrows stamped on it. There were to be fifteen other residences, including a room lent me by Niñ who had acquired a Medina house by the age of seventeen on the proceeds of supplying English language, sympathy and hemp to hippies while sleeping with their girls, and nine years before the hazardous establishing of my own,

  The thirteen years' exposure to Tangier were not continuous, but each of them found me there for from four to nine months. In England I taught, married, unmarried, worked in London, settled in Berkshire, wrote. The mechanics of addiction were simple. Whenever I could raise an air fare plus I left for Morocco. When the money ran out, or I hungered guiltily for closer association with my own people, I came back. T
wo phrases were to haunt these thirteen years: less elusively than the maddening half-remembered melody, because fixed, concrete. A violence of happiness. The loneliness is obscene.

  Dichotomy. Wind strokes the downs' corn like gold corduroy brushed the wrong way. On the Ridgeway autumn stubble burning has begun. Bonfires light the night skyline. We're expecting no Armada, as far inland as one can be in England from the sea. Pockets of smoke ambush the twisting road to Lambourn: racehorse village so dedicated to four-leg transport that four-wheel vehicles, and incidental mechanical accessories, double-park casually as equine mounts in a cowboy town.

  Vladimir (a shubunkin) died in his outdoor pool, victim probably of crop-spraying. Jasona (a hedgehog) plunged into the same pool and drowned. Her 'suicide', since hedgehogs swim perfectly and enter water without first prospecting feasibility of egress only when desperately ill, had most likely engorged slugs which had equally innocently fed on marrows without first washing them under a tap. Jasona left three unweaned offspring, small as miniature cacti. They could be dropper-fed diluted milk and glucose. But the antibodies present in the mother's milk have not been synthesized. They died on the hoof: maggots eating into their live bellies opportunely as hyenas preying on abandoned African young. Bubé (a wild kitten electing to ally with man) was run over. It was an achievement, living 200 metres from a road. He got his Jewish pet-name because

  his siblings had been humanely gassed by the RSPCA (without my knowledge) and because a Jewish American girlfriend in Tangier calls me this, with affectionate irony. Jasona's cousins patrol the night, clawing the bark of gale-felled branches for insects, nuzzling beneath chestnut leaves shrunken and yellowing like wicket-keeping gloves in a forgotten pavilion, making quick sprints for fieldmice; a race equal in time but unequal in speed. Both species hibernate at the same season. But a hedgehog can clock 4½ mph; the mouse only 4. Bubé was replaced by a queen kitten from a cat sanctuary. Almost immediately she lost half an eye to a wild tom. She looked like a Tangier cat. Surgery saved her sight. The squint can be read as cynicism. I interpret her expression as wisdom. On the theory that cats only mature after producing she was given her head, rather left her uterus. Besides, she had to recover her nerve, Bubin and Bubina I kept. The now neutered trio form a family exclusive and mutually admiring as Bloomsbury. Internecine cattiness is gamesome and sporadic. Of Hamid and Laitifa (my Moroccan tortoises) there is little to say in Berkshire. They are depressed. Whether depression in England is preferable to being turned into a phony musical instrument for tourists in Tangier is difficult to assess objectively. Like the bear Pooh reptiles have very little brain.

  Animism. The quite primitive conviction that a tree, for instance, is sacred. It may be the home of benign djnoun. Corresponding evil spirits may be angered by its felling. For all the solidarity of Islam, a politico-religious identity younger but more cohesive than Christianity, the Berbers, aboriginal pre-Arab Conquest people of Morocco, remain animistic. I identified with them unthinkingly. They are not sentimental about cats; rather kick and starve them. But then the creatures can carry rabies. Tortoises are crop ravagers live; their shells economic commodities, the flesh dragged out living with a piece of hooked wire. 'He's happier now than he was.' I was told by a Tanjaoui. 'Look! He can make music for ever.' And the Moroccan plucked the strings for which the empty shell formed a sounding box Human finger and toenail parings are more precious negatively. They must be seen to reach the sewers. Their acquisition by a stranger renders the original owner liable to anything from magically induced infatuation and disastrous marriage to undetectable murder.

  Tangier proved rich in people. They follow all the professions counted on fruit stones, excluding neither the poor man nor merchant chief. Besides the Moroccans, many of whose women are fragile of facial bone structure and among the most beautiful in the world, there are colonies of French, Spanish, Italians, Indians, Jews, British and Americans all subsisting within a heterogeneous city no larger than the average English market town. There is even a choice of seas. The crescent bay, above only a third of which the New Town is built in parallel arc, is the Mediterranean in temperament and tide: technically it is the Strait of Gibraltar. Peer from a secretive window high in the Kasbah and one's unambiguously looking at the Atlantic. The shore is straight, the sea unpredictable, its deserted sands and changing face of the water a different colour.

  Geographically the promontory of Tangier is a corner. Offshore two seas meet turbulently or harmoniously. There are months of brilliant sunshine and soft, starlit nights; the Levanter, notorious for its ability to produce odd mental states; yellow sea mists; rain which hits the pavement and bounces a metre; southern twilights, the sky like salmon scales a moment before the quick darkness. But historically, ethnically, religiously and politically Tangier is a junction or crossroads too. The church bells are properly discreet, even sited so as not to occlude the calls of muezzins from minarets. One might see a white-robed Sudanese; a blue-eyed Berber girl in traditional striped skirts and straw hat; a Spanish schoolboy; an Italian nun; a hippie family with barefoot, cross-blooded infants; a rabbi; tourists in crocodile; a congenital syphilitic without a nose; this or that painter, writer, filmstar; a lottery ticket seller blinded by trachoma; an Anglican priest; a refrigerator on a handcart; junior Italian naval officers with little ceremonial daggers, and RN ratings giving them a sceptical glance; a performing monkey; an acrobat; a town policeman with white-holstered automatic; a beach guard (with brown one plus solar tepee); a pair of King Hassan's most loyal troops: simple peasants in khaki djellabas, metre-long truncheons (which can rapidly be supplemented with rifles) suspended from their belts; an Indian girl wearing a sari and Hindu caste-mark; a Moslem funeral processing with pedestrian dignity to the wandering, transcendental music of flutes. . . .

  Which would be unremarkable had I not identified one of each during ninety minutes' immobility on an outdoor café chair. Lacking was a motor car. They're not allowed in the Petit Socco unless they belong to the police, and even they respect the limitations of a square the area of which is less than a third of a football pitch. At that afternoon hour another sight unfamiliar to an Englishman was also missing: the steel-helmeted file of seven crack troops with sub-machine guns tends only to stalk the town after dark. The government likes Moroccans to know they are around. 'Third World' is a loose term with many connotations.

  Sometimes I've changed names, and also made transposition of precise circumstance. The motive has been to respect privacy while neither sacrificing fact nor distorting point.

  The best moment in time to begin narrative seemed to be 1969: a little past midway in my experience of Tangier; but also when I had £300 and no responsibilities except the perennials: loyalty to friends and the compulsion of exorcism. I returned to the magnetic town, hoping to establish a pad of my own.

  2. Return

  Above Heathrow the sky was colourless with a pale yellow paring of cloud, like the twist of lemon peel in a martini. The image wasn't fortuitous. We British, seize our duty-free concessions with eagerness. It's almost conditioned reflex. Encumbered with cut-price poisons, a holiday has really begun. Most of my fellow passengers clasped elegantly boxed bottles, and cartons of cigarettes like silver bullion bars. I did too. A quick stride through the boarding gate. When it comes to aeroplane window seats I'm a child, I look up at the single yellow cloud again.

  'Evening News, sir? Or Standard.' The question carries an assumption. The hostess smiles. 'They're quite free!' But I don't want the London papers. This window that's going to lift into the sky is magical and I want simply to stare through it. Just now its revelation is fascinating. On our wing something curiously domestic is happening. A mechanic leans over an opened flap on one of the engine cowls. He draws out an oil dipstick, studies it, wipes it on a rag, lowers it tentatively again. The cycle is repeated three more times. He might be an anxious car owner on a suburban Sunday.

  'You can unfasten your belt now, sir.' The stewardess, faintly amus
ed. 'Would you like a drink before dinner?' I shake my head vaguely and do as I'm told. Below is the Isle of Wight in clear evening sunlight. There are cliffs felted green like a billiard table. Shallows in the Channel are the palest lettuce-leaf. We're crossing Newport, flying almost due south. Suddenly there are the Needles, standing bony like the eroded vertebrae of a stranded whale.

  I'm returning to Tangier via Gibraltar and the ferry which crosses the eighth-mile strait that divides Europe from Africa, rather than flying direct in to the browned airstrip of Boukhalf. Spain's blockade of the Rock makes this way cheapest. I've never counted the chickens on the Rock of Gibraltar; though the apes Churchill signed on to the wartime garrison payroll are said to be carefully numbered still — as is customary with members of Her Majesty's Forces. There is certainly no cow, As a consequence it's reasonable to assume that beneath our floorboards are crates of eggs, and fresh milk measured in pints rather than litres.

  My neighbour's name is Murli. He's an Indian Gibraltarian shopkeeper. I know his name and profession because he once sold me a pair of five-shilling cuff-links. I'm wearing them, as they're the only ones I possess. Murli is looking very much the significant businessman he undoubtedly is. He sells everything from silks to refrigerators; but also has relations in Tangier. The Indians are scrupulously honest once a bargain has been struck. One could confidently have given fifty pounds to an Indian in Gibraltar and collected Moroccan dirham from a colleague in Tangier at advantageous rate. But this black market no longer exists.

  We settle on to the Madrid runway in darkness. The May night is strangely cool, delicious. The stewardess lets me stand in the open doorway, but not descend the steps. 'How long do we stop'.' I ask. Just ten minutes.' And for just ten minutes I inhale Madrid air. Not even a private helicopter could make it to the Prado.