Tangier

by Angus Stewart

  The vibes were good that night. I received mine from the wrapt intensity of Alssawa musicians and dancers. A man operating a pneumatic drill is similarly liberating. One wants neither overlong,

  9. Meti

  For a long time I concealed the origins of Meti from friends, even from myself. The reason lay in the prosaic, even sinister, circumstances of our meeting, and the quite contrary qualities of the boy.

  Momentarily disillusioned with Tangier, faintly depressed, I'd been investigating the possibility, which looks logical on a map, of taking a, slow boat down the west coast of Africa until I ran out of money or it foundered with the loss of all hands. The slow boat, which ought to exist, didn't. But if I crossed to Spain, approached so-and-so, embarked from Cadiz as deck cargo and produced a quiet bribe. I might reach Monrovia in Liberia for twenty pounds whilst sleeping and eating first-class all the way. I had no reason whatever for visiting Liberia, Getting there sounded corrupt, and doubtless was. Thanks to Meti I shall probably now never know.

  I ate alone in a back-street restaurant. Rain was falling. A neon sign for motor tyres, as so often in Tangier, was rendered ridiculous by dead letters, There remained only a 'd' and 'y'; the Arabic transcript flowing fluorescent pink like some pulsating, plastic intestine, (Years later, in the Place de France, the huge soft drink advertisement one night read: 'Mission Orange. Naturally God.' This unethical proselytising was repaired before I could photograph it.

  'Fuck Tangier, fuck the rain, fuck me for being so stupid as to be here.' I must have mumbled it aloud..

  'Monsieur?' asked the waiter.

  'I wondered whether I might have my bill,' said, unfairly implying he might have understood the request the first time.

  As I turned gloomily homewards a small figure appeared with the speed and shyness of a bat. It wanted a cigarette. The only coherent word was 'garro'. I hate my own addiction to nicotine. Children greedily inhaling was depressing enough even before the cancer link was proven. I walked on, sad. The bat did another quick loop about me. I swung round with a tension and fury out of any proportion to the occasion or the deserts of an urchin.

  'Does your father know you smoke cigarettes!' I asked the small boy grimly.

  The boy and I confronted each other beneath the short-circuited neon. The rain still came down. It should perhaps be made clear, as was apparent to me, that the accosting and request for a cigarette meant only that. The child had spied a 'tourist' and thought he'd try for a smoke. Now his eyebrows shot up in alarm, and my jaw slackened equally involuntarily. I was looking down at a strangely beautiful face, made absurd by shock and astonishment.

  'La!'' he said; then suddenly smiling, 'No - he doesn't.'

  'Come to my house and eat,' I said.

  The astonishment on the small face increased. 'Ouaka - all right,' he said.

  'Follow me,' I suggested, sudden western guilt outweighing courtesy, 'at a distance of fifty metres.' I had to enter the bright foyer of my apartment block . . . there was

  the portera . . . supposing we coincided in the lift with the soured Belgian dentist and his lunatic wife returning from some pied-noir gathering! The little boy wasn't wearing

  clothes: urchin rags in Victorian Whitechapel were robes beside what swaddled him. The boy utterly refused to understand the request. Jesus. Where was the sang-froid of that expensive education? But of course it had been programmed to disintegrate in precisely these circumstances. Then there was the hyper self-consciousness and guilt that accompanies mild depression. I walked with clenched teeth, the grubby little boy insistently beside me, numbed by the dissociation they say shelters the condemned. Only later did I indulge the realization that, by behaving as he did, a true seal of innocence had been set upon the absurdly prosaic meeting. My portera had retired from her glass window into hidden recesses. There were no cynical survivors of colonial rule in the lift.

  Meti splashed in the bath, ate a large meal, and stayed four years.

  By what is perhaps a certain nicety he was so be raised, or simply enabled to grow, by what I saved financially from British taxes upon cigarettes and wine. While he could not be weaned from cigarettes he never, thank religion, touched alcohol.

  With daylight, and before Meti's uncomplicated assumption that he had the right to reside where he chose, my self-consciousness vanished. I closed my mind to the 'nasty' couple of our European neighbours. To be fair even they refrained from much overt objection to Meti's presence in the building while he remained a child. It took them four years to get me arrested; upon the hysterical assumption that the breaking and entering of another flat below must have been committed by the then adolescent Meti as being the only 'native' in the block who was not a subservient maidservant. I told the Tangier police the simple truth. Being obviously Moroccans themselves, and highly intelligent cops as well, they accepted the frame-up for the impertinence it was. My passport was returned within twenty-four hours. Meti was neither seen nor questioned. That was the important thing. Moroccans have different interrogation methods for their own people. Blessedly Meti hadn't done it. His body and my mind were spared. But this brief nightmare was in the future.

  Meti was djibli, born in the country. His father was a baker. The large family, all of whom I was to come to know, lived in the Tangier haouma of Suani, where they had moved in from the hills when Meti was about eight, Until this age he had never seen a motor car, spending his days herding a few precious goats from sunrise to sunset. A brief attendance at a village Koranic school endlessly repeating scriptures with a switch liberally applied to the palms of the hands to sustain attention had decided him firmly against education. Together with his parents, brothers and sisters, he was totally illiterate.

  Like most of the northern Berbers Meti had fair skin, but features one could imagine as modelled by a being with an obsession for proportion and symmetry. Bath soap couldn't spoil the softness of his hair. Shampoo was a luxury the household didn't afford: besides Meti had never heard of it. His brown eyes were large. All eyes can look both hard and soft. Meti's possessed an additional expression, It was less that they lost focus than that they seemed to be looking at something strange and serious very far away. Nobody knows from whom the Barbers, the indigenous pre-Roman, never mind pre-Arab Conquest peoples of North Africa descend. To me Meti's were Phoenician eyes. His teeth had a regularity no dentist would dare reproduce in plastic; and the smile which unveiled them finally proved that the obsessive creator, be he a mindless string of DNA molecules, somehow understood both poetry and drama and was reminding one of as much a hundred times a day. When he grew up Meti's good looks were to have heads turning in the streets. Now, as a little boy, his face was hypnotically over that disputable line which divides beauty from prettiness. I loved him.

  In common with most Tangier boys Meti spent six or seven summer hours a day swimming and playing on the giant crescent beach, His body was beautifully proportioned as his face; muscular, antique gold and tough as truncheon rubber. With his bathing trunks off his bum, hips and genitals were pallid as putty. Of his own volition he only swam at the eastern end of the bay, known as the omed because a stream flows into the sea; nearly a mile from the stretch with the beach bars, tourists and Europeans. This was good. I was jealous, concerned and possessive as any mother with an only child. I need not have worried. Meti disapproved of homosexuality.

  The immediate problem was to get him something, anything, to wear. Salvageable only were his milky plastic sandals, I had experience of cheap Moroccan clothes through once having had to buy myself a pair of trousers. Now I showed him the seam sewing of some English ones and explained he must try in the shop to pull the stitching apart before buying, I myself would get a couple of tee-shirts from a European shop. Meti returned with a pair of cotton long trousers. Evidently he had been wise. They refused to fall apart. I sent him back at once to get a second, identical pair. Identical they were; only the tailor had neglected tai add the fly-buttons or to cut the buttonholes. Patiently Meti went
back to have the garment finished. Within two days what had been undetectable instant obsolescence was at work. After two weeks both pairs of trousers were falling apart. This was how Moroccans made clothes for their own people. It was criminal and depressing. From the bacal I telephoned resident friends with small boys of their own and asked where in Tangier I could buy strong jeans. 'Gibraltar' was the uncompromising reply. As my finances stood they might equally have said London or Paris.

  Enquiry of educated Moroccans produced better results, Then a well-meaning friend airmailed two pairs of grey school shorts and a couple of pullovers from Harrods. The tax I paid at the Post Office, where one must collect and open incoming parcels, was staggering.. But then so was the price and elegance of the clothes. To my relief Meti elected to consider the majority of this gear as pyjamas: my relief because the complex of snake belt, real flannel shorts and wool pullovers (at a modest £5.80 each - more than I'd ever paid for a sweater) would have raised every English eyebrow in Tangier. Writers become impervious to wry comment. Upon an uncomprehending child the focus would have been unfair. Probably the blessed Meti sensed the incongruity himself. And so he came regularly to sleep in the most snooty and expensive sort of preparatory schoolboys' Sunday best, usually just shorts. I didn't disguise private amusement. What would Matron have said? Or Mother? One suspects Mr Buckeridge's Master Jennings would have felt similar shock, defining illicit approval. Wool by both Arab and Berber is taken seriously as silver or silk. Meti's chest expanded four and a half inches with pride in the pullovers. He was intrigued by the shorts' nylon zips.

  Meti didn't know how old he was; nor, when I was eventually invited to meet them, did his parents, he was one of seven children. Photographs shown to friends both medical and lay gave the consensus that he was aged eleven. His fascination with simple western toys could make him appear younger; a self-sufficiency and sharp intelligence, older. For hours he would absorbedly trail a Dinky toy lorry about the terrace, loading it with cargoes of sand or spent matches. Later there was a fire engine from Spain with extendable ladder taller than its owner ('Is this for a Moroccan?' asked the Customs: 'For my child,' I half-lied); and an electric bulldozer from England, exciting as a tank while not a war toy. When It came to essentials like food shopping or getting back the full deposit upon bottles Meti was as wise and tough an asset as a graduate of the Harvard Business School. I never discovered how to buy a couple of chicken legs for our nightly tajine at two dirham, and left the secret to his pride.

  'It must be Mehedi,' said Paul. 'There is no such name as Meti.' He insisted as much several times.

  'It's a pet name,' I explained patiently.

  But at least Paul now made no attempts to instil paranoia into me as he had done in respect of Niñ, the similarly juvenile companion whom I had had many years previously. Meti Paul even spontaneously invited on a car trip to the Caves of Hercules. Indeed it was Paul (could there have been irony?) who suggested I should take on a companion for Meti. This must have been semi-consciously in my mind during an imbecile incident at the southern oasis of Tiznit. All my other friends of whichever of four or five sexes were to accept Meti completely.

  'May I tip him?' asked Paul, who had dropped in one evening. He had forgotten to buy cornflakes for his customary 3.00 a.m. breakfast. As his own shop would be closed when he got home, I'd sent Meti down to our bacal.

  'By all means,' I said: fifty francs was never unwelcome in our household. Meti politely refused.

  'He is a good boy,' confided Said, the Soussi shopkeeper, in one or his rare personal statements. I knew it. Meti was the sort of child who did the washing-up and scrubbed down the kitchen unasked when one's back was turned. Certainly it was only on the four days a week when we were without Habiba, But for anyone who knows Moroccan males it was miraculous and moving. To complete the domestic idyll came the occasional waking question: 'Tea - Hangus? Coffee?' Usually I woke at 10.30; Meti nearer midday. It was my interior clock which tended to wake first on Fridays.

  'Meti – el-jumaa.' Hot tea with a hundred grammes of sugar, and Meti went off to the mosque.

  The days found an easy rhythm. The problem was getting Meti out of the tiny flat when I wanted to work. In a society where all trades are carried on in booths open to the street, where the jeweller intricately tools gold among a workshopful of chattering women and the clothier stitches daylong while gossiping with his friends, the conception of privacy is alien, incomprehensibly suspect. I am unable to write with a little boy manoeuvring an electric bulldozer about the floor or, worse, playing pendulum with a nail on the end of a string just touching the tiles with the clack of a metronome. Blessed was the giant semi-circular terrace. But Meti seemed most content to play where I was.

  'Isn't it time you went swimming?"

  'Only if you come,'

  And so a scratch picnic was packed, Meti went out to find a petit taxi, climbed beside the driver, and collected myself, who would be waiting on the downstairs doorstep of the apartment block. We would drive out to the solitude or Merkala. Here a coast road had once been built to facilitate quarrying stone for the modern harbour. The landowner had sensibly decreed that the road be demolished once the quarrying was complete. Now there were only red rocks, jagged or smoothly eroded, and the changing face of the Atlantic, pale green, kingfisher blue, brilliant in the sunshine beneath a gigantic sky. Half a mile's walk and there was no one except perhaps an old man fishing off the rocks or a child leading a single sheep along the difficult path. Meti dived and swam for hours at a time. I sat, back against favourite rock, body torpid, mind aimlessly wandering, which is something I both can and need to do for long periods. One day a solitary peasant passed in a battered djellaba and bade me good day. He had a staff in one hand; in the other a Penguin edition of Stephen Potter's Lifemaniship. Merkala is a dream place. But this was no dream. The chances against the djibli's being able to read. his own language were 82 per cent. Against his being a student of an esoteric English humour. . . . Another day two small boys pinched our hideously expensive sun lotion. The incident would be trivial were it not unusual in that courteous place, and but for my private memory of Meti, with a hundred-metre handicap, giving chase. He was out of the water top speed, a lithe gold figure leaping with incredible agility from rock to rock, diminishing, visible

  for nearly a mile before he rounded a headland. He never caught the little crooks. The image is one of those every man keeps in varying context against mental darkness.

  When we went to the town beach it was to the eastern end, the oued. While the whole crescent stretch of sand is public there is nevertheless an ingenious form of segregation. Adjacent to the beach bars one may not set foot on the sand in summer while wearing anything more than a bathing costume. If one does a uniformed beach guard with khaki solar tepee, brown holstered automatic and truncheon to distinguish him from the more exalted police whose armoury is white, furiously blows a whistle. As a consequence one must pay to use a changing cabin and the poorer people congregate at the oued where the regulation doesn't apply. The authorities rationalize a tiresome rule as precaution against theft of clothes left on the beach. One suspects it's as much to keep simpler Moroccans with no intention of undressing and indulging in the frivolity of swimming, from scrubbing down babies and mules too near the precious tourist facilities.

  'Whose are these clothes?' asked the beach guard as I sat dressed, reading on the sand in the permitted place.

  'My friend's.'

  'Fine.' said the guard, accepting a cigarette.

  Long hours on busy beaches have little appeal for me. Meti was porpoising, out of sight in the shimmering sea. Through some resolution of his own he was never to bring friends to the flat. Away to my left the hundred-yard breadth of bone-yellow sand curved nearly a mile to the harbour with the green and yellow Malaga ferry, Ibn Batuta, named after the fourteenth-century geographer born in Tangier, gracefully sliding into its berth. Above her the Kasbah was piled in its pastel hues. Nearer, but still
far away, were the beach bars, the carefully cultured bodies, fashionable bathing suits, brightly segmented beach parasols and a pile of pontoon pedal-boats. Behind these ran the single track railway line, the colonial stucco or modern glass and concrete of the hotels along the Avenue d'Espagne, backed up the shallow rise of some two hundred metres, by the white angularity of the new town. I grew tired of waiting for Meti, picked up his clothes and walked home. A grapevine would tell him what had happened. One can do little in Tangier unseen either by someone who knows, or knows of one

  Two hours later, unresentful. a shoeless figure in a bathing slip rang the doorbell. I wished suddenly the Belgian would appear to disapprove of the logical.

  One afternoon Meti brought an attractive seventeen-year-old girl wearing a modern light grey djellaba and scarcely opaque black litham which she dropped from the bridge of her nose about her throat revealing a friendly smile. Meti's sister had work as a maid in an hotel: hence the relative opulence of her clothes. I made tea. Clearly I was being inspected and would be reported upon. Meti had refused to spend a single night at home since his arrival six weeks previously. Visits he had made. This was my first encounter with a member of his family.

  More weeks elapsed before Meti spontaneously suggested we visit his home. It was after lunch. A taxi took us on the ten-minute trip to Suani. The interlocking haoumats (suburbs is simply the wrong word) that lie behind the town of Tangier are completely charming. There are shallow stream beds, groves of eucalyptus, undulating green common where sheep and goats graze beside patches of baked earth. But it is really the sense of space, the neat, irregular geometry of Arab houses, supported by one another, no two ever alike, and built along alleys that ascend or descend and are never straight for more than a few metres, which gives these areas beauty as much as fascination. To the northern industrial mind poverty conveys an image of squalor, garbage, darkness, the nightmare clutter and murky printing inks of Doré. Human dignity has been abandoned. The struggle is too great; effort no longer worthwhile. In Tangier's outlying areas, where by no means everyone is poor, the houses are colour-washed white, a marvellous pale chalky blue, sometimes soft pink. Their doors, often the only ground-floor aperture of structures seldom more than three storeys high, are particularly proud; polished wood and brass, sheet steel decorated with wrought iron. Upstairs windows have louvred wooden shutters, sometimes iron grilles. Most often the front door gives on to an angled recess, baffle against unwanted eyes during the few seconds it is open. Invariably staircases and floors are scrubbed coloured tiles. More than any Englishman's, every Moroccan's home is his castle. Life in the fastidiously clean alleys is one of irrepressible gaiety for the young, dignity for the old, and for everyone of a tempo, quick or languorous, arising from and adjusting as naturally to the present moment, be it the mood of a group or an individual. The atmosphere confuses a westerner. He begins to suspect he's lost something. it's like the elusive conviction of intention overlooked, left undone. But what? Paradoxically perhaps it's the absence of just such anxiety mechanisms in those about him which he envies. Yet it's too easy, or he has become too complex, to define his sense of deprivation as the loss of simplicity. These Moroccans seemed maddeningly possessed by the dictum of Candide's Pangloss, as fact rather than irony, that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. They don't say so. The conviction's too obvious to be remarked upon. Could it be as they insist: that a divine being does go with them; less enthusiastically with us?