Tangier

by Angus Stewart

  I went south, to Tiznit and beyond. I dared not leave Meti, although he was now nearly fourteen, alone in the flat. The danger was less from his asking in friends or family and having a Belgian riot to cope with than from the similarly explosive potential of butagas. It had killed and maimed too many people. I could vividly imagine Meti's impatience with the bathroom water heater, or his falling asleep while a kettle boiled over and waking to light a cigarette. He was going to stay with his family. At the bus station he surrendered his key and accepted supplementary finances with good grace.

  Three weeks later I unlocked the door less of my flat than of Van Gogh's studio. Meti had been painting with passion, Drawing-books, inks, calligraphic pens and my writing paper more colourfully filled than with the black and white boredom which is typescript, littered the work table. To keep body and soul together the artist had forced the locks of the large suitcase, there found the keys of my manuscript case, and there those of the sinduq, a giant wooden chest. The various containers, including drawers, had yielded foods as disparate as seventeen sterling pound notes, the pair of shoes in which I'd not been travelling (i.e. best and tidy), only formal shirt . . . and so on. Respectfully uneaten were recorder, typewriter, manuscripts and other personal papers. In fact these were neatly in place as the flat on the whole was scrupulously tidy. It was as polite inside job. Pride demanded I find some excuse for Meti's behaviour. I sat down with my feet up and began carefully rationalizing. An Arab who shares one's roof considers half yours his. Some person or hook had told me so. Fair enough. Meti had become too proud to spend three weeks at home when there was an alternative. The idea insulted the psychology of adolescent independence; even of machismo, as he would see it. Yet he had broken the universal tabu upon theft. And the more specific Islamic one with regard to the sovereignty of house and door key. Or had he? Incidentally, how the hell had he acquired a key? Reading suggested one must not say 'I raised you, I loved you. Look what you've done to me!' And react with tears either of self-pity or anger. In terms of economics I/we were only ruined for two weeks. If one forgot my new shoes, shirts. . . . The easiest rationalization was that some nasty big boy must have corrupted my nice little one; said, let's do your Christian while he's out of town. But neither vanity nor mothering instinct would persuade me to think like a schoolmaster.

  Happily Meti gave me only an hour for thought. Letting himself in with his illicit key, he stopped his softly whistled tune rather abruptly when he saw me. He placed the key on the table supporting my feet. And put the kettle on.

  Meti glowered wordlessly while we had tea. 'Cir fhalek – out, please,' said. It was the wounded animal's need to be alone.

  Exile was unlikely to be absolute, An injunction which cannot be enforced is invalid anyway. I knew that when Meti next rang the doorbell I would let him in. The trouble was so did he.

  I walked out to Suani. My hope was that tact might recover my shoes, had they not been sold. On the way I collected the Moghrebi verb 'to steal' which I'd not had occasion to know before. Meti's father was knee-deep in twigs at his oven, I waited until there were no customers in the bakery, then asked his two younger sons to clear out for a moment. I sensed, Sigidhli knew the reason for the visit before I spoke.

  'Your son stole . . . 'I said; and listed some few of the items I could remember the words for.

  He did know. I felt worse for him than about the loss of my shoes.

  'We are poor and can't pay you,' he said.

  This was scarcely the expectation or purpose of my visit. I indicated as much. I said I felt it better that Meti (using his real name) no longer worked for me or lived at my house. That I was sorry.

  The two little boys came back, Sigidhli expressed his vexation by throwing the hot loaves at his younger sons' heads rather than tossing these to them to be stacked on the racks. This seemed unfair, More rationally he might have taken a swipe at me with the wooden paddle.

  Meti reappeared next day. After a sullen lunch the storm broke. It was tearful and terrible and owed nothing to contrition, which I neither wanted nor expected. 'Don't come to Suani, don't talk to my father. I'll kill you, everyone's saying I'm a thief . . . ' I had in fact deliberately told his father, and only in privacy. Meti's desperation was that of an intolerably humiliated human being. Which is not something pretty to watch; or to have instigated, however justified the complaint giving rise to it.

  A few days later I returned for several months to England.

  On a wet winter night I took some practical gift to the Sigidhli home, An ulterior motive was to discover whether Meti was where he should be. A Moroccan had cheeringly told me that Meti had become the leader of a teenage gang in Suani, styling himself 'The Lion'. This sounded unlikely. A diminutive old man, huddled and cowled, opened the corral gate and I asked for Sigidhli the baker. When he came we talked some minutes before I lit a match for cigarettes. Holding this for the dwarf in the djellaba I saw the flame flicker across the silently laughing eyes and lips of Meti.

  Meti reasonably invited himself to lunch many times over the next two summers. The visits were unannounced; time for a sequence being heralded for him by the first springtime washing hung on my terrace. Rinse socks that had been in England and a Meti call would happen within a week. I gave him lump sums for gear when I could.

  Poverty made him look like an undersize Ché Guevara follower: the near knee-length officer's jacket with turned up cuffs was proof against rain rather than proof of machismo. That grew in his face and bearing where it belongs.

  'Get him on the game, for God's sake!' said a homosexual acquaintance whose call once coincided with one of Meti's. There was no point in explaining that wasn't Meti's scene This particular tourist's psychology needed deeply to believe that all adolescent Moroccan males were sexually available to Christians through the wallet.

  If Meti's poverty depressed me its Visible manifestations allied with perpetual adolescent machismo scowl terrified the neo-colonial Belgians. And with new jeans and shirt and my own lightweight jacket shortened at the sleeves the machismo glower not unnaturally remained. Whether Meti should have modified glower for such insensibles as he might meet in lift or upon landing when visiting I personally doubt. The glower incidentally was rendered the more threatening by being worn beneath exactly the innocent floppy model cotton hat in which Leslie Hartley must first have wondered about shrimps and anemones. Where Meti found it I can't conceive; though I'd seen a Napoleon officer's cockade in uses as a duster in a peasant's house in the pre-Sahara. Whichever way it was, an uninvited lunchtime visit of Meti's first exploded the Belgian couple. And had me briefly arrested.

  But before this there were the nicer moments of the cheese sandwich and mint tea. One occasion I'm unlikely to forget. Meti had become someone from whose visits one could not politely excuse oneself. He was also too tough to physically throw out. He arrived as I was struggling with a tie in order to lunch with rather formal friends on the Mountain. I wasn't leaving Meti alone in the flat; and he was staying where he was. Each knew as much. It didn't need to be stated. I gave Meti a glass of cold orange from the thermos and took mine. with gin added, to the terrace. I also handed him a precious copy of Playboy, lent me by a friend in order to read an article in it. Wandering back into the flat hoping that Meti might have finished looking at the pictures and be about to depart. I noticed he was sitting strangely still with the colour-spread lady across his knees. Carefully not looking at my watch, I took another drink back to the terrace. Meti appeared and handed me the open magazine with sultry triumph. It was liberally splashed. 'Marvellous,' I said. There seemed no other possible remark. Besides this practical demonstration of the efficacy of Playboy's nudes there seemed to me to be something sadder. Meti's attitude could be read as saying, 'Fuck you!' to the western world and the girls he couldn't have. But Niñ had passed through this, into married life with an English girl, and that western world, for whatever the western world is worth. Any hopes of depressing thoughts being banished b
y a good lunch disappeared when Meti maintained his refusal to leave and we had a fight tasting some hours. It was not the last.

  I explained to the friend who had lent me Playboy how the colour-spread had become glued together. Fortunately he was amused.

  The crisis came about in this way. As I'd been endeavouring for some months to persuade Meti only to come to lunch when invited. and also to obstruct his entry physically when he visited at tiresome moments, there was a certain irony about the adventure.

  I was some two hours' back from a brief trip south. The bell rang. There was the graceless Belgian, who at once began bawling at me hysterically; and beside him a. differently graceless Meti, the sullen Ché Guevara follower. There had been a robbery, the Belgian screamed. What did I mean by inviting such obviously criminal riffraff into the building! It didn't seem the moment to suggest to the dentist that it was illogical for him to have suffered Meti the sunny child for years and now be condemning the difficult adolescent upon the evidence of a sulky frown. I would have glowered permanently at that Belgian too had I not learnt he were better handled by being politely ignored. Now I stared at him with bland astonishment.

  Meti came in. And for once left again almost instantly, sensing that this time his skin (and perhaps literally) was at stake.

  Just what is all this about? I was asking the Belgian couple in their hallway seconds later. Other neo-colonials on the third floor had had their flat broken into. It was known to have been a Moroccan. Naturally, I accompanied the Belgian downstairs to see his friends. We had time to discuss the mystery for only minutes when the lift disgorged a very large and tough-looking plainclothes cop who announced that he and I were going up to my flat. Is this you? he asked, jabbing at the card on my door. Yes. Passport please. Certainly. I'll keep this. And he was gone with my passport requesting that I turn up at the area station near Porte's and ask for him at two o'clock.

  When I did so (having put on a collar and tie for self-confidence: I was unused to this sort of thing) I was told the gentleman was at lunch and I must return at five o'clock. The time I filled usefully collecting advice. There were practical details. Spare cigarettes in case I was required to spend the night in an unfamiliar place; a couple of ten-dirham notes in my socks against the possibility of having to buy food. I discovered the Christian name of the current Consul-General. It occurred to me that to be able to ask: 'Might I phone Bernie — I mean the Consul!' could prove useful gamesmanship in an Alice in Wonderland world.

  The cop who interviewed me, not the one who'd collected my passport, wasn't nice. He also shouted.

  'This morning a boy came to your flat!'

  'Yes.'

  'Who is this boy!'

  'I've no idea.'

  'We want to speak with this boy!'

  'If I see him again, I'll ask him to drop in.'

  'No! You will bring the boy here. Until you do we will keep your passport!'

  This was unfunny. It was also impracticable. I couldn't see Meti being willingly led to police questioning. I could all too easily see myself identifying him if they beat me up. The uncomfortable dilemma produced an uncanny physical calm and mental clarity. A miracle intervened. Or it may have been psychological interview technique. My questioner was called away. I was ushered to a different cop in another office; who promptly handed me my passport. I must report to the main police station.

  'When!'

  'Now, of course.'

  At the main station a principal in tinted glasses questioned me while two subordinates dealt with other business,. smoking, and occasionally offering comment. It all seemed rather elaborate as the neo-colonials had claimed only the theft of a watch, seemed uncertain of that and there had been no visible damage to their door. I couldn't have done it, I explained. emphatically not trying to be funny, but transmuting genuine concern into puzzlement, endeavouring to lead their attention into blind alleys. Surely they could check the signature in southern hotel registers against that in my passport? This I'd surrendered again.

  We know you didn't do it.'

  'Then what is all this about?'

  'Just tell us the name of the boy who carne to the flat?'

  'I don't know it.'

  'Where does he live?

  'But that's easy. Delegate an officer and a car and I'll take you there. More simply, show me a map.' Absurdly they had none. The address was tricky to describe. I explained, truthfully enough, that that morning a Morocco-bound book had been delivered by boy unknown from Tangier's only bookbinder, a personal friend. 'I doubt he's a criminal,' I said. In fact there was no straighter or nicer craftsman struggling for survival in the city, and they would know it. 'He's a good man.'

  There was muttered discussion.

  'This is not a bad man,' said one of the subordinates, unexpectedly airing English.

  'I know no bad Moroccans,' I returned equally carefully, The sarcasm of inflexion was there before I could stop it. Of course I couldn't win. And in the end didn't. Blessedly the 'betrayal' of Meti proved of no relevance to the case. He was neither sought nor questioned. I wasn't to know this as my passport was locked up for the night and I was requested to report back at 9.00 a.m., but also to try and remember who my visitor had been. 'Please think,' they said kindly.

  Think I did. And take quietly rational advice. It is not a mass paranoid fantasy that police files are kept on all foreigners resident, or semi-resident in Tangier. The chances were the police had facts, as opposed to neo-colonial hysteria, filed about my simple life. The consensus of very different friends' advice was; 'Tell them the truth. They'll know about you anyway.'

  At 9.00 a.m. I was punctually back at the glass and concrete structure which is the central police station. My interviewer proved to be an inspector I had supposed a junior the previous evening,

  'Have you thought?' he asked as we entered his office, This presumably was euphemism for, 'Are you ready to talk?'

  'Why, yes.' I said,

  Inspector X studied my passport like a bone he either might or might not give to a dog. Then pushed it politely across the desk and looked at me expectantly.

  My unpopularity with my Belgian neighbours had begun, I explained, when I had lent my flat to an acquaintance who had behaved oddly, not least in giving my keys to a hippie who subsequently changed the locks preparatory to indefinite residence. While this didn't bother me the hippie gentleman had been a Moroccan of carefully wild and revolutionary appearance. To exacerbate matters the Belgian living below me was of a generation and temperament that apparently had not taken cognizance of the fact that Morocco had become independent in 1956. His wife was clinically an hysteric, The net result was an unfortunate mentality which corporately regarded Moroccans as inconsequential yet dangerous indigènes, and an Englishman who associated with Moroccans as deeply suspect. I was bored with the bloody Belgians.

  The boy who had visited my flat yesterday, and had caused the Belgians to react so impertinently, had been with me for several years, whenever I was in Tangier. He had ceased sleeping at my flat about a year previously, when he had pinched some stuff from myself. Since he was only a child I had taken him by the ear to his father, who was a friend of mine,

  'What is this boy's name?' asked X.

  I told him.

  'How old is he now?'

  'Nearly fifteen. The family are djibala. His mother doesn't know his exact age,'

  At this juncture a slim and efficient-looking gentleman in a light blue suit came into the office, I was introduced to Tangier's Chief of Police; and we shook hands, He looked enquiringly at the inspector, who shook his head. When the Chief left, X said, 'This boy was not the thief. We are looking for a Moroccan in his thirties, well-dressed like you.'

  And there the interview effectively ended.

  'If there's anything further I can do to help . . . ' I began, disguising relief with vague courtesy.

  'Next time you're im England perhaps you'd bring me a woollen tie like yours,' said N.

  We disc
ussed ties, about which I know nothing and could not care less, for several minutes. I never fulfilled this typically Moroccan request. If this was unwise another omission was more so. X wondered whether I had ever met the owner, as opposed to Cohen, the agent of my apartment building. Stupidly I didn't write the name down. A Classical Arabic letter manufactured in Oxford or London might have brought peace to my troubled flat. But the failure of the Belgian's clumsy attempt to frame me was sufficient in itself to keep him out of my hair for some time.

  As postscript to an ugly episode I ran into the huge plainclothes cop who had so mysteriously appeared to confiscate my passport within minutes of Meti's departure. It was a few days later and he was lurking outside the Post Office looking particularly grim. Had they found their man I asked pointedly if pleasantly. He had no idea, he said. 'The case belongs to a lower department.' This had not been my impression. As indicative of the tiny scale of Tangier I was subsequently many times to see all the higher [malice- with the exception of the Chief on the Boulevard, or find myself drinking coffee beside one at the Café de France, where they congregate. I'm told it's bad etiquette to recognize them; and so don't.

  Meti still shares my bread and cheese lunch at no notice, He lives at home in the haouma of Suani and has a job which, while paying piteously, affords him a new dignity. Cheeringly he holds all Christians, including myself, in ironic regard. Depressingly, and in common with the majority of prospectless Tangier's illiterate youth, he sees authority, government. law, even his whole country about which he knows virtually nothing, with simple, savage bitterness, modified only occasionally by Islamic pride. It would be comfortable to suppose the syndrome the unchannelled aggression of male adolescence. But it subsists identically in many adults Perhaps the travel brochures are defining this sense or repression when they say that 'In Tangier East exotically meets West.'