Tangier

by Angus Stewart

  The hotel (humbler than the one in which Paul and I had stayed) was a farce. It was recommended by friends as commensurate with my finances. I blame the friends not at all; and indeed enjoyed the absurdities. At midnight I allowed myself the luxury of a sleeping pill, and lay in dozing anticipation of the peace and beauty of the south. Dull red bedbugs boldly advancing in neat echelon even in electric light, intestinal rumbling of plumbing as someone ran water in another room, the seatless, paperless lavatories justified drugs.

  Somebody tried a key in the outside of my door. I ignored an easy mistake. Ten minutes later it happened again. I crept over the stained floor tiles and whipped open the door. A lost drunk confused reasonably because the room numbers had been chewed off by termites? No. A scarlet woman looking unapologetic, but hopeful. I assumed a lost guest. Made play with a puzzled comparison of my own key and room number. My acting must have been too good. Five minutes later came the probing key again. 'ma'm'selle,' I said, reopening the door (and the reader is not at liberty to take the ironic escape device literally).

  'Je n'aime que des petits garcons. Adieu.'

  It worked. For just six hours of needed sleep. When I sent out the pimply youth who brought cold coffee in the morning to find a bottle of gin (a necessity for the south) at a proper price, he returned to passionately throw his arms about me. I shoved him good-naturedly away. Perhaps it goes without saying that the bottle of export Beefeater was unsealed, not gin, and wrong price. I didn't buy. This would not happen to the most innocent tourist in Tangier. To be sure a Tanjaoui would get it at around nine dirham wholesale contraband and sell it upwards of twenty-five; but the contents would not be 25 fluid ounces of water and 1 2/3 fluid ounces of gin. The adulteration of even a Christian's drink would shock him.

  Both the scarlet woman and useless youth were hanging about the reception desk when I left. So their function was resident entertainers.

  A friend, Richard Loe, collected and put me in a taxi for Anfa airport and the plane to Agadir, I was in the wrong philosophical mood for long-distance buses, he said. He was right.

  Absurdly perhaps, I stayed at the same hotel on my return from the south, late at night, and after what was my second visit to Tiznit. I knew the hotel's precise location (an essential instruction to Casa's taxi-drivers), there was a cheap restaurant nearby, and I'd bought a bug bombe. The two professional entertainers were again hanging about reception.

  'I won't require visitors: I said loudly. taking my key from the clerk, 'Actually, I only ever . . .' And then the composed effect was spoiled by my stumbling over the French word for the solitary activity which was the early basis of Mr Portnoy's complaint

  Another Casablanca accident was less than triumphantly resolved. It was the more humiliating in that, convinced I was being cheated, I dug my hooves in to be roundly defeated. If only on a technicality, the taxi-driver was right; and I wrong. Domestic flights use the small airport, Anfa near the original village, which is just a few kilometres from the centre of Casa. Royal Air Maroc, winging north for Tangier and Europe, use the international. Noussair, (In fact one can fly Royal Air Inter from Anfa to Tangier. But there was no flight that day; and five minutes longer in Casa would have blown my mind) Arriving for the first time at Anfa from Agadir, I was delighted to find the taxi-fare into, town modest. The driver was pleasant, I named a better hotel for a change; then explained I must catch an early flight next morning, but from the other airport, Noussair. How much would that be, were he to collect me from the hotel? 'The same, of course,' said the driver. There is no Trade Descriptions Act in Morocco. Dead on 7.00 a.m. I was collected and driven to Noussair where, inevitably, the driver demanded a sum in the region of three pounds. Doubtless it was partly guilt at having slept in an expensive hotel that braced my hooves firmly, 'No,' I said.

  For about an hour the driver shadowed me about the weigh-in and coffee stand. I simply flit, I thought confidently. Literally, into the sky. But the driver had been on to the uniformed cop at the entrance to the sanctuary of the departure lounge. He wouldn't let me through. I asked (the Blimp persona surfacing) to see his superior, and was led to a high cop in an office. He couldn't have been less sympathetic or more bored,

  'If you have an accident' (the word he used) 'with a Moroccan,' he said, 'you cannot leave the country. And you can't wait here in my office:

  I protested that I wasn't leaving the country but returning Tangier. That only in Casa had I known Moroccans dishonest. The high cop indicated the door with his head without looking.

  There was nothing for it, Still shadowed by my driver, I changed my last travellers' cheque, and with a gesture both silly and childish thrust him his bundle of notes along the counter as though fearful of contracting plague,

  'The Beidaouna are crooks,' I told Meti unreasonably fifty minutes later. But to Meti Casa was a Valhalla where he had heard there were very many cinemas. Thirty in fact, upon recent count.

  In a country of great, barren expanses, and where telephone communications are often nominal, the Moroccans take the mails very seriously. Consequently a bus's last stop before leaving a town, and first stop before passengers alight in the next, is the post office. In Tiznit this is outside the city walls; and it was beside the low, pink-washed building that I first sensed the excitement of a unique town. I clambered irregularly out of the crowded bus from necessity. A well-meaning ticket clerk in Agadir had awarded me the best seat in the bus; and the best scat was where the mail sacks sat too. All lesser baggage is exiled to the roof, the interior of the bus being otherwise exclusively reserved for humans and live hens. Now, while a postman off-loaded my lumpy, canvas cushions before courteously ushering me back to a suddenly hard seat, I stared at the walls of Tiznit.

  Crenellated, ochre-dusty, on this side of the tiny, oasis town they ran for a quarter of a mile, broken by two unadorned gates. What made them impressive was the optical exaggeration of height and solidity, for they rose from a brutally flat and featureless plain. A lone cyclist made doggedly for the horizon, his machine twitching over sharp stones which were to lacerate the soles of my shoes in the following days, while the dust of his passage hung brown and opaque in the still air. Beyond him, outside the Aglou Gate, corn harvested from the other, irrigated side of the town, lay piled for the threshing. Eight donkeys harnessed abreast drew a baulk of timber in perpetual radius, the animals' hooves and their wooden burden combining to make a threshing machine. Behind them walked a giant Sudanese with a pitchfork. Next day I was to point a telephoto lens tentatively at this process. Simultaneous with the abuse, the pitchfork swung back over the giant's shoulder with that inevitability of movement which defines an Olympic javelin thrower. Calculating the javelin's reach as longer than my lens', and that the picture was anyway idyllic no more, I dropped the camera, fortunately on a neck-strap, and thrust my arms high above my head. It wasn't enough. The Sudanese watched on guard until I'd retreated a quarter of a mile. One could not blame him. It was probably his donkeys. rather than himself, that were threatened by the evil eye. Had they dropped dead he'd have had to haul the telegraph pole, circling like a monster clock hand, himself.

  But beside the bus throbbing at the post office all was peaceful. Everything was so still that the crenellated walls might have been garrisoned by the proverbial dead men. The sky was quartz-iodine white with the heat of afternoon, but the sun caught the clouds of wheat chaff like some explosion of golden midges. I reclaimed my favoured seat, no longer insulated from the thudding Volvo diesel by the Royal Moroccan mails, for the rattle through the gate into the town square. Just how important for Tiznit the arrival of the afternoon bass from Agadir was I discovered later.

  The tarpaulin was peeled from the roof rack. First lowered were a number of stout cinema film boxes. These were trundled of on a hand-cart with an escort of small boys. As my case was handed down a youth addressed me in English. Might he guide me to wherever I was staying? He might indeed, I said. Once in Essaouira, formerly the pirate port of M
ogador. I'd refused similar courtesy in favour of waiting for a taxi, baffling the natives' protests with a knowing smile. Only of course the natives were right. There were no taxis in Essaouira. Shame-faced I'd eventually lugged my heavy case half a mile. Now I set off with the youth, my case thankfully balanced on his bicycle.

  The square, and the small area of souks between it and the city wall, were the only centre of Tiznit's daytime life. Here were the three cafés, two barbers' shops, ill-stocked pharmacy, bicycle shops and a scattering of general stores; above all there were the buses. At one end of it was the substantial military barracks; at the other, nailed simply to a blank wall, a notice which read: 'Union Nationale des Femmes'. Presumably forceful and emancipated women met beneath it. There was little plate glass and no single advertisement hoarding. I began to like Tiznit very much.

  Driss proved to be a student in Rabat, visiting his home town for the summer vacation. As an ambassador of Tiznit he appeared everywhere known and respected. The way to the hotel followed the inside of the city wall. A lowering sun bisected the rough road into purple shadow and glaring gold, the division so precise that with artful walking one could tan just one side of one's nose, This curious phenomenon said a lot for the architects and builders of the ramparts. The contrasts of light and shade spelt disaster for catching candid photographs of people.

  Sheet steel gates closed the hotel patio from the narrow alley we'd now entered. Driss knocked with the flat of his hand. A rumble like distant thunder was followed by the opening of a wicket. The porter who appeared was to become more than a good friend, but philosopher, confidant, even letter-writer when inevitably, if totally inappropriately, I fell in love. But at this moment the porter was simply a squat, bald, instantly friendly man with a deep chuckle. Within hours I was to discover he was also chef, chambermaid, gardener, laundryman, handyman, waiter, housepainter, builder, Classical Arabic scholar, nanny and private tutor to the French patron's younger children. On this, and subsequent visits of mine, he became el-Fassi – the man of Fes.

  Marcel, the French proprietor, proved equally friendly. Twenty years before he had married a Moroccan, and he himself, and all his family were naturally bilingual,

  Driss departed with a promise to show me around next day. 'But,' he insisted, 'there is absolutely nothing to see or do in Tiznit.' 'That's why I came,' I said. It seemed the wrong moment to explain that wandering dead-end alleys, alone, and with wide eyes, was the tonic for which I'd fled the hectic little world of Tangier. 'There is the cinema.' said the Fassi, loyally it proved, for the patron owned it. 'Bien entendu!' Marcel added now.

  The hotel was charming. Built about an open patio, two sides were shaded cloister, one plain wall, and the fourth the two-storey residence with kitchen, lounge and dining-room on the ground floor; and half a dozen bedrooms on the first. It was modern, dead simple, tiled, colour-washed and sparkling clean from the ministrations of the indefatigable Fassi. When it proved empty of guests into the bargain I decided to stay two weeks. At the beginning of my third a young English couple arrived in a car. I gratefully accepted a lift to Goulimine and its Saturday camel market; then hitched and bought truck lifts to Tantan and the Mauritanian border beyond, entertaining fantasies of carrying on to Timbuktu, Unfortunately it was July, my pockets were empty, and a Saharan crossing was probably impracticable for a penniless Christian whose shoes were falling apart simply through walking around Tiznit. Instead I contented myself with buying a castle. It has crenellated battlements, no windows, a four-inch thick wooden door, and cost nineteen pounds. As even close friends are highly sceptical about this property, suspecting its very existence to be fantasy, I won't write about it here except to say that it is let, free, to a herdsman, and to his sons in perpetuity, upon the simple condition that when the owner arrives they, their womenfolk, hens and the goat, must move from the best bedroom to the second best. The following year the owner arrived with a sleeping-bag to test the thesis. The key to the castle gate, a sacred object in Moroccan law, and this one a foot long and weighing a kilo, was promptly given to me. Gravely I handed it back because its pocketing would have pulled my trousers down. The laird stayed three days, All arrangements worked perfectly. During that time everything I had ever worried about in my life became irrelevant, which of course was, and is, my castle's raison d'être. The only sadness was that the eighteen-year-old daughter, about whom deference to custom inhibited designs, had gone to work in an earthquake-proof hotel in Agadir. So much for what Morocco is pleased to call 'the Miami of Africa'. Did I know the hotel X? my tenants asked anxiously. I explained I knew only the airport, the bus station, the best kebab stall, and a craftsman who worked in wood, This last was difficult. Why? they wanted to know. One of the sons spoke French, and translated. In fact I'd tendered for, and commissioned a hinged cedar board to unfold across my knees in table-less cafés, or when sitting with my back against a wall or a fig tree. Its function was to provide a writing surface. When I returned to the craftsman to collect my simple board he'd been apologetic. Sensibly puzzled by the idea that anyone should want to lay paper upon a flat board and scribble, he had made modifications. The dimensions, the hinge were precisely as specified. But what he handed me was inlaid with seven different woods, mother-of-pearl and a modest quantity of ivory. The veneered surface smelled deliciously of bees-wax. Within the ornate periphery the severe, geometric pattern was somehow familiar, 'You can – you can also – play chess on it.' the wood-worker said.

  Now, that Tiznit hotel was to provide a more polite solitude. I settled to an easy routine: early breakfast, no lunch, simple dinner. When I looked hungry the fassi would slip in a dish of fried eggs between his rather standard soup and more delicious pigeon with almonds, tajine of lamb, or giant sole from Aglou, some twelve kilometres away on the coast. I'd envisaged Aglou as a miniature Essaouira. In fact there is nothing there at all except a concrete restaurant with bathing facilities and a number of koubbiyet, or marabouts' tombs, springing like white puff-balls from the rocky soil.

  As the helpful youth had promised, the sights of Tiznit could be 'done' in a morning. It was the atmosphere of the remote town busy with leatherworkers and silversmiths, soporific with old men and goats, rattling with the current children's toy (a tin can through the axis of which ran a length of stiff wire by which it was propelled), the blistering vacuum of midday, and the cool, starlit nights that were compelling. I hired a bicycle.

  Some five kilometres of wall enclosed the town's 9000 inhabitants and the simple baked-mud mosque of Idaou Kfa. The minaret bristles with ingenious drains, precaution against torrential rainstorms blowing in from the Atlantic. Today there was only blinding sunlight, the whisper of subterranean water, and the depressed, even craven, look palm trees assume in totally still air. Despite the heat there was no discomfort. Even twelve kilometres from the Atlantic the pre-Saharan atmosphere is so dry that perspiration has no chance to form. Better, it is invigorating. I've never breathed pure oxygen beneath a battery of infra-red lamps, but the effect must be similar. We bumped away on our bicycles.

  In itself this was an experience for me, Not having ridden one for fifteen years, it required concentration akin to flying a light plane at hedge height. Downhill was particularly exciting. I seem to remember that, on my bike, the chromium levers beneath the hand grips applied brakes. On this machine they didn't. Uphill would suddenly have me working a futile treadmill. The chain had fallen off. In Driss the conflict between educated appraisal of mechanical failure, embarrassment over the discourtesy of the hire shop, and a suspicion that perhaps God had not intended I tour Tiznit on such a contrivance, was Instructive. At the end of the morning our fingers were black with oil. Braking was easy. I simply thrust and braced my legs forward like a show jumper refusing a fence. Of course horses take off from soft surfaces and their hooves are shod with steel. The Tiznit ground is sharp stones and my moccasins humble leather. Thus began the destruction of my shoes.

  Tiznit is best viewed from half a mi
le outside the walls. The die-straight battlements, the towered gates, the desert plain, the horizon of which one can imagine a visible segment of the globe's curvature. The ochre mud bastion convinces the eye of Tiznit's heroic centuries. Mind confirms the message, for what besides enormous antiquity presents such monochrome monotony? In fact Tiznit was founded six years after the first practical application of colour photography (probably Louis Ducos du Hauron's 1877 View of Angoulême).

  In 1882 Moulay Hassan wanted two things in the Sous: cash, and tougher control of the Berbers. Both ends were best met by the creation of a fortified base; and Tiznit was built as strategically commanding the road to the sea port of Ifni, and the entrance to the Draa valley.

  The harka - literally the 'burning' - was a Moroccan peculiarity dating back to the Idrissid dynasty in the eighth century. Politely, its function was tax-gathering. But in the bred es-siba - uncontrolled lands - this could only be accomplished by bloody subjugation. The nucleus of such expeditions comprised the Sultan himself, his harem, ministers, personal guard regiments, cavalry and artillery, and a mighty host of lesser, but loyal soldiery. The composition of the majority changed constantly as the fire raged upon its way. Tribe X would lend strictly temporary allegiance to the Sultan for the convenience of decimating their personal enemy tribe Y. In this way tribe X might also save some fraction of their crops and livestock. Tribe Y, if they were lucky, would be left with a few old women and very young children. The result was self-evident; no trouble from the Ys for at least a generation, Razing of crops and livestock had a similar motive. The dissidents would be too preoccupied with starvation to wield flintlocks; or, as the saying went, 'An empty sack cannot stand up.'