Tangier

by Angus Stewart

  'Msalkheir — good afternoon,' I said, shaking the hand of Meti's father: mysteriously a well-mannered Nesrani may invoke Allah's guardianship with partings but not greetings. He touched his forefinger to his lips after the handshake; I fairly unself-consciously, let the palm of my hand brush the left side of my chest as I'd learnt to do many years before in the hills. I was back among the djibala, Meti relaxed, even looked proud. Nervously uncertain of custom I'd given his sister only a formal European handshake, it was the first time he'd seen me perform the fuller routine.

  We were not in the family home. Invitation there was to come months later. We stood in Sigidhli's (and I invent the surname) bakery. This was two metres adjacent across the alley. The house itself was not visible, shielded by a stout corrugated-iron gate and a thorn-hedge corral. It was a transposition of a typical jebilet dwelling to Suani, the gate an assertion the family were now metropolitan. They were of the poorest. Dignity had not ken compromised; nor a proper sense of privacy and suspicion. Heaven knew the semi-emancipated daughter was pretty enough. What other women and girls might the household comprise? There was shyness, caution and correctness all round,

  The bakery was a narrow room, perhaps three metres broad and five long. On one wall were slatted shelves with a dozen or so loaves of bread. After laying newspaper on a bench, and bidding me be seated, Sigidhli went back to his oven. It was evident that he must. The bakery process was continuous. It was strictly a service industry. Small children, sometimes women, brought flat circles of dough on boards, individually made in neighbouring homes. These were received by Meti's two little brothers and passed to their father, who stood waist-deep in a well full of twigs, feeding his fire, and slipping the pale cushions of raw dough into the oven with a wooden paddle. Before doing so he impressed his trademark upon each with a wooden mould. The baked, hot loaves were gingerly lifted from the paddle by the little boys and tossed on to the racks to await collection by their various owners. How identification was maintained I can't conceive, Invariably it was, despite the two small brothers, aged about seven and nine, being far more excited and intrigued by my presence than by their work. They wore delightful grins, unable to keep their shy eyes from constantly wandering back to me. It was as if an orang-outang had been mysteriously lent them by a zoo. When eventually they accompanied us up to the road in search of a taxi the pretext seemed good enough for a tip: a practice maintained upon subsequent visits. There were two even younger children present that afternoon: a girl of about four who kept a nervous grip on Meti's trouser leg, and one of about twelve months.

  The gate in the adjacent corral opened and Meti's mother appeared. Formal greetings were repeated. She was a big, handsome, rather weatherbeaten Berber woman, wearing a shawl over her head, and the voluminous red and white striped traditional skirts. Having borne seven children she looked as though a forty-mile overland walk carrying a hundredweight, an average marketing trek for her kind still in the bled, would be no effort. I wondered whether she went foraging for miles around for the sticks which fired the bakery oven. The charge for baking a loaf was eleven francs.

  Now she brought first a taifor, the low wooden table; and then tea equipment. Sigidhli broke off work to play host, while his wife retired to the house.

  Inevitably as we left I wondered whether Meti's residing with myself represented a loss of labour to the family. There had been no hint of resentment, only genuine welcome. Probably they were glad of one less member to feed and clothe. The only time anything was asked of me I was unable to help.

  A year later Sigidhli approached me about the possibility of work in the legendary paradise of Gibraltar. I went, inevitably and in some perplexity, to Bowles. What I must say, he said, might sound callous to us, but a Moroccan would accept logical truth. 'You cannot get work in. Gibraltar,' I explained to Sigidhli. 'You speak no Spanish or English, but the deciding thing is that your teeth are rotten.' I don't think there was misplaced sentimentality in my being glad Sigidhli wouldn't get work in Gibraltar. An ecology had been transposed from the hills to Suani without trauma. Their house, into which I had now been several times invited, was really a two-room shack. But it was spotless; the plastered walls washed pale blue supporting a picture of the king, framed Koranic texts, memorized by their owners rather than legible to them and, also proudly framed, some of my photographs of the children. There was a large brass bed, cushions and matting, a single electric bulb Cooking was done over a mishma of charcoal on the threshold. The corral enclosed a beautiful old fig tree and a private mains water tap. Sigidhli's bakery opposite was a nerve centre to the haouma as important as the shop. The day's cycle was long and busy while remaining intimately social. Men friends would sit in the open doorway and gossip, women come with complicated orders, sometimes lifting a handful of haik across their mouth and nose when they saw me. Sigidhli might earn more money in Gibraltar. But what would happen here? His family ate well and dressed warmly. They lacked nothing meaningful to them. School was free should Meti or the others deign to grace one though there were currently only places for some 60 per cent of Tangier's children. What would become of the little boys' apprenticeship should their father dig sewers for the British army or bury the whisky bottles spilling from the back door of the Rock Hotel! Could it be his bad teeth were for the best? Of course not. But they were fact; as was my own lack of any contact or influence with the employment machinery of Gibraltar. Meti used a toothbrush, most often unthinkingly mine. One was left offering Sigidhli the platitudes that his sons would work abroad if they must; gain increasing share of consumer prosperity. Already Meti's older brother was hell-bent for the Belgian mines. Let him import the record player or harsh, metallic accordion.

  There was Naïma, So we named the beautiful young rabbit Meti brought home one night. Instant slaughter and our supper, was my first squeamish thought. But apparently Naïma was to be a pet. At least Meti dismantled those already rotten flower-boxes on the terrace to build her a hutch, An incidental result was that while I was in England winter downpours washed loose soil to block the terrace drains. The twenty-two metre semi-circular swimming pool to which our terrace was unknowingly converted could, so a visiting architectural student subsequently assured me, have collapsed more than the facade of the six-storey building. Those alive would have remained responsible. Neither Meti nor myself was in residence or we should have realized the danger.

  Naïma's disappearance is a joke to this day. I'm confident she was raised for the Sigidhli family pot. Sensible enough. Meti's story remains unchallengeably different. He took her to the cinema. For convenience he placed her on the vacant seat beside him. An old countryman came in, vision unadjusted to the darkened auditorium, sat, and . . .

  'Meti, do you remember we once had - ' I have only to begin, affecting great effort of memory, for him to come out of a gloomy period, smile, and tell me to shut up. He's not going to change his story. I'm never going to accept it with other than overt scepticism.

  There was the magnet. It was a fist-sized chunk of pig-iron, But so powerful it could almost pull the cheap metal chair at my work table from beneath me. This was altogether more serious.

  'Meti, it's difficult to explain but . . .' It wasn't difficult. It was impossible. The exercise might be tried by anyone as adept at Moghrebi and elementary science as I am. How to rationalize the prohibition that the thing must be kept yards away from my precious Sony recorder, never mind some years' gleaning of Moroccan music and assorted sounds! I knew Meti was sensibly curious and peasant enough to sneak up on the recorder in my absence with the pig-iron. At what distance would the Sony explode? Die? Vanish? I stole Meti's magnet, threw it away, and guiltily gave him an extra slab of pocket money. Neither of us commented upon the disappearance of a particularly malign djinn. The powers of bad djnoun are never precisely explained or dwelt upon,

  To Meti these spirits, evil or benign, were very real. Like Islam, they were a forbidden topic; no subject for threat or jest. In my deepest voice I r
ecorded at 3¾ ips the hopeful injunction: 'Med - Meti - sleep . . .' Then surreptitiously switched on the tape at 1 7/8 ips. The slow, incredibly low-pitched hypnotic growl froze him. Then Meti was not amused: until his quick mind grasped a demonstration of the magic. When I returned from dining out with friends it was no childish fear of the dark that invariably had him fully dressed and awake on any bed, where the lamp was brighter than beside his own mtarrba. Every light in the flat blazed and the curtains were tightly drawn.

  A chit arrived from the Post Office saying there was a parcel to collect. Gear for Meti. It was wrong in a country needing revenue, but I decided to lie. We had a little over one pound a day at the time. The tax assessed as one opens a parcel is arbitrary: extortionate or token depending upon the mood of the clerk. Books are duty-free. It was a girl who handed the box to me. 'H'md'allah! - thank God!' I said. Then In French: 'I desperately hope it's clothes for the child'. I knew it was. Unwrapping, I explained the predicament We were staying at the X Hotel. All that was known was that our son's suitcase hadn't been stolen by French, or Germans let alone Moroccans but, most shameful, by English - my own people! The boy was confined to his bedroom in a bathing slip. The management wouldn't let him into the dining room to eat like that. We loved Morocco. Wanted to travel. But in a bathing slip . . .! She smiled without loss of bureaucratic authority. 'There is no duty, monsieur.' I could have kissed her. But one doesn't do that lightly to Moslem girls, even across a two-metre Post Office counter. Outside the building was a little girl dressed as a nurse collecting for the Red Crescent - Islam's Red Cross, logically enough. I put three dirham in her tin. 'Allah ikennek!' I said: Allah was singularly going with me too.

  What contraband riches! Messrs Courtaulds' 'Courtelle' (plastic, as I think of it) school pullover, mutated from Arab oil or felled forests, living beyond its two-year guarantee, if horrid-feeling once Moroccan washed. Indestructible nylon socks. Smooth needlecord jeans. Natural-fibre shorts were hitting, £3.20 a pair, and longs about £7. It was, a John Lewis assistant later explained to the mothering part of me, 'because the Japanese are buying all the wool clip'. Plus, I thought, revolution of the domestic washing machine resulting in the current English schoolboy's bruised plastic trousers, which look like tired carbon paper. About the flat Meti continued to wear the new cut silvery flannel shorts, perfect complement to his firm gold body. The drab island and my overdraft were fifteen hundred miles away.

  Any schoolboy today can pass electricity through resistant wiring in a vacuum to re-discover the electric light bulb. It was by accident, and independent of tutors, that Meti stumbled upon 'tie and dye' jeans. The Moroccans have a passion for chlorine bleach. At sixty francs a litre it whitens underclothes, smartens sheets and helps clean the bath. One night, unthinking, Meti slopped some into the bidet and chucked in his jeans. Presumably he'd noticed either Habiba or myself leaving whites to soak in this way. Sure enough, incompletely submersed, the jeans produced an extraordinary aspect in the morning. Bone-white continents emerged, nascent, driving away the blue denim sea. Delightedly Meti hung his jeans on the line where the sun would dry them within an hour. His impatience to wear the garment, however, warred with scientific curiosity over whether with neat bleach he could modify the peninsulas and bays arbitrarily created overnight. Man, the interfering animal, eventually achieved a big white M for Meti on the left buttock and a fierce face on the right.

  'Meti, those particular jeans cost three times as much as your ordinary ones . . .'

  'Very modern!' chuckled Juan, the old portero. He mostly sat on the pavement step of the apartment block now, gazing into the street. Within a year he was dead of the cancer that had already given a boiled rice pallor to his handsome Spanish face.

  Meti was approaching puberty. When Habiba rang the doorbell at eleven o'clock he would get up dutifully from his couch and stumble sleepily to unlock the solid slab of cedar, a steep pyramid distorting the front of his shorts. Opening the door sideways, he'd turn his back on the entering Habiba, make for the terrace, and lie down on his stomach on the rapidly heating tiles. There he'd sleep another hour. Habiba hanging out the washing would step over his prone form. Then, either writing letters, or making my own. breakfast tea to respect Mails modesty, I'd suddenly hear Habiba's near-hysterical shrieks. Meti was awake, could stand without embarrassment, and was attacking Habiba with a water pistol. Standard weapon was a plastic sun-lotion bottle with a slim nozzle: effective fine-jet range six metres. More devastating was the hand-shower at the cod of a rubber tube, detached from the mains pipe. This was used precisely as an elephant's trunk. Tube full of water, lungs bursting from a mighty inhalation, Meti would stalk Habiba with long, flexible proboscis. The game of course was to corner Habiba within saturation range before he must explosively exhale. Ambiguous screams and laughter would announce that Habiba had been caught, literally in a shower, and one heavy and sudden as a summer storm. Meti would then track down the tortoises, Hamid and Laitifa, and thrust their breakfasts inescapably its their faces: a tomato impaled upon the apertures of their shells, later Hamid, the male, was to become quite tame, setting out determinedly towards one whenever he saw human feet, having connected these with lettuce. This could be disconcerting when one was working or playing barefoot on the terrace. Hamid would announce himself with a bump of his cold nose against one's warm toes.

  Reluctantly pulling a tee-shirt over his copper torso and exchanging shorts for jeans, Meti would go down to the shop. Bread, butter, three hundred grammes of that cheese they had yesterday, packet of Tide, large lemonade very cold, kilo oranges. . . . The average list was a day's requirements until shopping for dinner was undertaken, often by myself, at five o'clock when, carrying the battered straw basket that marks the resident, I'd spend an hour over aperitifs with friends on the Boulevard. Meti, blessedly, would be at his daily cinema. The five or six hours since his leisurely waking would have been spent out swimming if I was lucky; amusing himself noisily with toys if I were not.

  An assault course was built for the battery-driven caterpillar bulldozer. He would spend hours at a stretch drawing, arm cradled secretively against premature viewing; or else whittling pieces of wood with the timeless concentration of childhood. The suggestion that some formal schooling was useful when one was twelve was rejected. I made no attempt to press the matter. Should the uses of elementary literacy become apparent to him in adolescence be would learn to read and write then. Now was swimming, and drawing and cinema, in quantities and proportions dictated solely by spontaneous whim. The only rule of successive months of brilliant sunshine was that the evening meal was roughly at eight o'clock. If I were out to dinner Meti would either go home, or eat in the Medina and take in a second cinema on supplementary finances. Having spent much of my own childhood and adolescence in cinemas I had no objection to the addiction, while for an illiterate it was a positive instrument of education. A television set was as remote from my means as a refrigerator, and in Tangier less useful, An ingenious derivative of cricket (yes) was played on the terrace with a time-seasoned loaf of French bread (don't play with your food) and a ping-pong ball. Tennis balls were banned after the disappearance of one over the balustrade had been followed by appalling silence before a screaming of car brakes in the street six storeys below, Neither of us was inclined to go in search of that particular ball. Such a boundary forfeited three successive innings. Worse, if Habiba were present, it permitted her to take stand at the wicket, huge in billowing, diaphanous kaftan, and with mighty peasant muscles seemingly trained exclusively to hook furiously to leg.

  Meti, for a year or two, understood the philosophy of playing with a straight bat. Rebellion, naturally enough was to come.