Tangier

by Angus Stewart

  If one averts one's mind from the horror (and this is no place for comparison with western 'sack emptying' techniques by napalm and chemical defoliants, a process that is both impersonal and gathers no taxes) a harka must have been a tremendous spectacle. The camp followers of such expeditions, encompassing prostitutes, saddlers, musicians, cooks, armourers, blacksmiths, canny magical potion 1/4,ndors, medicine men, mad marabouts and dancing boys, could outnumber the military. I could imagine these gathered on the plain about Tiznit, since surely Moulay Hassan would reserve the sanctuary for his own elite. There would be literally thousands of cooking fires in the dusk, an endless procession of women bearing water through the palm groves from the spring of Lalla Tiznit, roasting smells, mint tea smells, kif smells, wandering flute music. and lanterns, diaphanous in the makeshift tents of rags sewn together. The ten courses of a formal diffa, music of Aissawa or Gnawa groups, politely organized sex would be happening in and about the mosaic patios of the town's houses. Besides Islam, a common denominator of the two groups would be instant mobility. Neither Arab nor Berber values anything which cannot he transported. The beautiful house, tiled court, fountain and fig tree remain. The master's bed (sometimes bed mates) and cooking utensils go with him.

  Tiznit was to be the starting point of a counter harka; one against the ruling Sultan. On 31 March 1912 El Hafid signed the notorious Treaty of Fes, giving France a mandate to 'protect' Morocco, represent it abroad, and pacify the bled es-siba. The entire French population of Fes, though numbering only some seventy people, was massacred in protest. Hafid resigned, humiliated; and a younger brother, Moulay Yussef, was installed as puppet Sultan.

  Dissidents in the south found a leader in the Berber, El-Hiba, son of a popular marabout. He proclaimed himself Sultan in Tiznit, raised a harka and cannily marched on Marrakesh where the French had not yet arrived in any force. While negotiations went on between El-Hiba and the Glaoui brothers, the French did arrive: and with them artillery, mortars and machine-guns. Armed only with flintlock rifles, their long barrels chased with silver and stocks inlaid with mother-of-pearl, El-Hiba's tribal army was massacred outside the city walls. His march was to be the last true harka. From now on the subjugating columns were led by Christians, colonizing French and Spanish, amply equipped and competent with the machines of modem war.

  In Tiznit I was able to indulge a hobby of playing at silversmith. My skill is not great. But then Berber jewellery is relatively simple, and after a week's apprenticeship I was improving. The silversmiths' souk is in an enclosed courtyard containing some dozen tiny workshops. Driss introduced me to a sympathetic smith, and I spent my first two days watching him from dawn till dusk. When I protested that I must be getting in the way, Rachid's reaction was to send out for more mint tea, and ask me to hold something. Usually this was one end of a doubled length of silver wire. The other end he screwed into a simple drill, which might have been from a child's carpentry set, with the bit removed. He then turned the handle, and the result was finely-twisted silver wire, basis of much filigree work, and also the skeleton of some types of ring The particular job at the moment was the manufacture of enamelled rings for local ladies, About the periphery of a flat, petal-shaped plate, the wire was soldered to form seven symmetrical divisions, also of petal shape. With the silver wire once more, a cone was formed in the centre of the ring, composed of four tiny triangles. The plate, like some Lilliputian formal garden without colour, was then soldered to the band. This was also flat metal, but decorated with less tightly coiled silver wire, like an extended spring. The object was intricate, browned from the soldering torch, and exceedingly drab. Rachid now went to work with the brilliant enamels, melted from sticks like sealing wax. One by one the symmetrical beds of the miniature garden were filled with blue, green, and honey. A fascination of these last two colours is that the enamel on the silver scabbard of a dagger bought in Marrakesh in 1917, and dating from the 1850s, matches them exactly. I bought Rachid's ring the moment it was cool enough to hold, Its cost was twenty-three pence.

  The previous year an American girlfriend had bought an antique silver ring in Marrakesh. I asked Rachid whether there was any possibility of finding one in Tiznit. The next day he opened a twist of newspaper and spilled a dozen at my feet. Not one was phony, and I'd seen nothing but trash in the town's few tourist bazaars. Why I didn't buy the lot I can't now think. Partly it was a Fantasy that a dozen tribesmen must have been murdered in the night to obtain them, but more an obscure sense that to buy indiscriminately rings that didn't fit my own fingers would be an abuse of my relationship with this craftsman. I bought four. Three are simple, engraved with cabbalistic patterns, wafer-thin at the edges through wear. The Fourth was a problem. Presumably once the property of a very pudgy finger, cut into its top in crude Roman capitals were the initials TA. Besides being incongruous with its finely graven band, I have no affiliations whatsoever with the sometime Territorial Army; the terrestrial arts perhaps.

  Rachid had never worked with gold, but expressed his willingness to try. Unfortunately there was no gold in Tiznit. A colleague collected a few grammes from Agadir. Melting the stuff was the problem, for silver is worked cold. However we overcame the difficulty. Molten brilliance was poured from a tiny crucible over the top of the ring, to be planed into the three facets of a bridge, rather as one ices a cake with a spatula.

  In a mare lowly silversmiths' workshop, not in the souk at all, I went solo. Breaking step at a doorway, I was invited in. While the three youths ate a supper of harita and bread I went to work with the confidence of a master. The object produced (and this is shamelessly childish for it reproduced the flat, rag-doll-type face-lift my chewed miniature teddy bear received thirty years ago) I explained to my hosts as a djinn - a benign one. This was accepted because I mysteriously knew exactly what I wanted. I cut a flat two-inch square plate of cheap metal, soldered on coils of the ubiquitous silver wire, hollow so as hopefully to receive enamel, for eyes and nose, a broad grin of more thickly coiled wire, and loops of the same gauge for ears. It remained only to bore two holes, purchase a silver chain at a good price, and disappear into the night.

  'You've come to enamel the eyes of your djinn!'' Rachid laughed when I visited the souk proper a mile away next morning. 'Yes,' I said embarrassed. It was a small town. So the master craftsman carried on unconcerned while I dropped molten azure into the eyes of my djinn and honey into its ears. The net result was disastrous. No self-respecting hippie would have worn it about his neck. I gave it to my mother, who had re-faced the original bear.

  One night Driss, who had met me at the bus station invited me to his home for cakes and mint tea. Like all older Arab houses it presented only a blank wall and heavy door to the alley. The door gave immediately on to another blank wall, maintaining privacy for the seconds during which it was ever open. A right-angle took us into a typically furnished room, long, narrow, with mtarrbas, low couches against the walls, and a haitai, or wall tapestry some five feet high, backing them. Unfortunately the haitai, once multi-coloured silks, sometimes felts embroidered with gold and silver wire, was tube-train moquette, and the couches covered with transparent plastic sheets, like the seats of a neurotic car owner. It would have been as improper to question anything, wish to see the rest of the house, the patio (if one existed), as to have wondered about the female who now passed the tea equipment and brass salver of cakes to my host from behind a curtain.

  'Supposing,' I began whimsically, and less from lust than because small talk was thinning. 'Supposing I were a rich merchant travelling from Goulimine to Taroudant. That I had to break my journey in Tiznit. What would I do after dinner?'

  'Sleep?' suggested Driss, as though we were solving a crossword puzzle.

  'Y-es,' I said. Mint tea glasses get terribly hot. I'd already burnt the tips of my fingers.

  'I mean - for entertainment.' Driss spoke Idiomatic English, was nineteen and presumably virile. 'There is the cinema,' he said,

  I reached fo
r a gazelle's-horn pastry, correctly with the first fingers of my right hand. 'I'm thinking of sex and of live women.'

  Driss permitted himself the mirage of a smile, 'We threw out brothels with the French.' he said.

  I ate my phallic pastry, stuffed with ground almonds and honey, thoughtfully.

  The Fassi insisted I be his guest at the cinema. It would be ignoble to think that only with the hotel's sole resident thus accounted for could he lock up and indulge his passion for the eight-hour show.

  Not idly is Tiznit's cinema reputed unique. Three full-length features are shown in succession, Better, the breaks for reel change had only this year been obviated by the purchase of a second projector. Night-time centre of the town, the cinema takes its function very seriously. There is no nonsense about the big colour spectacle playing to a dwindling house for a month. Together with its equally lengthy features it is screened just once. The patrons arrive with eager precision at five o'clock and tumble out bemused into the starlight at one in the morning. I never discovered how, if at all, the pretty girls emptied their bladders. I relieved myself by standing against a wall outside: but the greater relief was of headache, and in talking to an old man who ran a soft drink stall by the light of an oil lamp.

  The film I did watch right through was extraordinary, Its dialogue was Arabic, format uncertain colour, and place of manufacture presumably Cairo. Polonius would have been hard put to describe it. Indeed was it 'pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral.' Particularly it was 'scene indivisible' and 'poem unlimited' too. The cast comprised a butch lady with a long whip, who had a harem of scarcely pubescent schoolgirls uniformly dressed in the outdated type of English gymslip. Nowhere was the film obscene. It was decidedly kinky for an hour and forty minutes. For all I know it may have been a brilliant satire on Moslem womanhood, The Fassi beside me vibrated with laughter and slapped my arm blue. The children of Tiznit stared at the screen in wide-eyed awe. I began to understand the true importance of the afternoon bus from Agadir, the privileged unloading of the film cans from its roof, the status of the cinema manager's minion as he wheeled the escorted hand-cart to the theatre.

  I took refuge with my back against a palm tree staring at the stars, giant, preternaturally bright as though in a planetarium. The Fassi I'd insisted see the show through. I'd no immediate wish to return to the hotel.

  A youth materialized beside me. Without preamble, in an upstage English whisper he announced: 'I am a Jew of Tiznit.'

  The statement was splendidly dramatic: rather as though a huge Germanic matron were to seize one in Regent Street and boom, 'I am Brunhild!' or a rheumy don on the Oxford milk train pathetically claim, 'We are Lear, Monarch of this Kingdom!'

  I stood up and shook his hand. He wanted to know about the Jews of England, particularly. London. Did I speak to them? Was it distasteful to me that he should be speaking to me now? He kept looking nervously about the deserted square, rather like my cat, Bubé, when she's afraid some wild tom may dash from ambush and dispute her food. Lamely I explained that one of my brothers was married to a Jewish girl, and that my three nieces were the prettiest, but also cleverest, little girls in Hampstead. We talked on for an hour beneath the palm trees.

  My favourite night-time distraction was to walk out through the Aglou Gate after dinner and simply make for the horizon.. The starlight threw every pebble into sharp relief. The air was deliciously cool. Behind me, with the exception of the cinema, and one other place I was to discover fortuitously, the town was locked, silent, apparently deserted. Perhaps five miles away, a dusty orange ball would resolve itself into the headlamps of a lorry. Arbitrarily it might leave the track and make for the Bab Aglou. Most often the cab would be crammed with people, and I'd ride the running-board back into town.

  One such lift was particularly exhilarating. As I clung to the door and rear-view mirror, the driver slowed of necessity to pass through the narrow gate. But then he accelerated, clanking along the only really navigable road; the one that circles immediately within the city walls. The sense of speed and peril was heightened in this narrow canyon. Where could we be going so furiously? The answer proved to be Tiznit's only bar. Judging by the caution with which it was entered, the lorry having been parked, I suspect it was illicit. Only the two European hotels officially serve liquor. A very few bottles of beer worked wonders for the driver and his mate. I was invited into the former's home for a delicious tajine of fish, followed by the inevitable mint tea. Disastrously it had been one of those nights when the Fassi had supplemented my dinner with fried eggs. There was nothing for it but to extend stomach capacity by willpower.

  In Tiznit I was arrested. The offence was loitering with intent. Through harebrained, rebellious idiocy. But the episode, must be told sequentially, or lose pathos.

  Driss, the English-speaking youth, and I had paused on our bicycles outside the Aglou Gate. There was the inevitable rubbish tip. The giant Sudanese still circled behind his tight donkeys, threshing the corn. I was without my camera.

  Suddenly there was a clatter of hooves beneath the arched vaulting of the gateway. In a cloud of dust, barefoot and bareback, there emerged it radiantly beautiful boy. The donkey he rode with incredible splendour. Pure Tuareg? gasped my irrational mind. Or perhaps a ten-year-old girl's dream after loud, fireside readings from an expurgated Arabian Nights. It was love at first sight. How pretend otherwise? But, a recording animal, the limit of my ambition was neatly to decapitate this apparition with Leica lenses.

  We swapped bicycle for donkey. Disgruntled, even a little sceptical I thought, Driss rode off on his bicycle with expressions of politeness.

  For a week I was to stalk Hassan about the crumbling mud town. Mann's Aschenbach in Venice trailed Tadzio no more awed, hooked, tremulous; no less innocently. My camera was in an opaque plastic bag, I succeeded in cajoling Haman against a wall in an empty alley. Click. Click. Click, Try portraiting a god with complicated machinery in the noonday blaze of the pre-Sahara in July! One must think, bracket exposure, judge plane and angle minutely, be more sensitive to texture and tone than the finest photo-electric meter. More! But Hassan slid off shyly. After all, a photograph is a single click, not thirty-six.

  And Hassan produced a go-between, chaperon, Pandarus - perhaps he was all three: a thoroughly nasty little boy with a skin disease and permanent flow of mucus from his nose, green as spinach soup.

  A date was fixed to walk to cool fig groves (no less) a mile outside the city wall. The dappling of light and shade? Water? Even figs! Borrowing confidence from Gide now, Hassan was to carry not a travelling-rug to tuck about the old man's knees, but my camera bag, weighing seven pounds. It would look proper to eyes on the battlements as we wended out across the pitiless, stony plain.

  And Hassan didn't show.

  I drank a litre of wine at dinner, smoked kif with some old men at the Aglou Gate; then irk a strange state between sulking fury and indomitable euphoria proceeded, knowingly, to the outrageous. Not only did I present myself uninvited at the door of an Arab's house, but did so after dark.

  'Shkqut?' a woman's voice inquired sharply front a high window.

  'Ana, er-Rhoumi - I, the Christian,' I said gravely.

  'Hassan is at the cinema.' came the reply.

  Well, it was indeed a small town. And I must be the only Nesrani. I'd never been near this house before. Single-eyed spying had discovered its whereabouts. I murmured thanks.

  It was midnight. The moon was huge. Soft dust in the alley still held warmth from the day. A cat fight broke out somewhere. In my pocket was a naboula of the best kif from Ketama in the Rif, but also my patent sebsi (which converts rapidly into an innocent briar). I decided to sit down. I'd reproach Hassan gently from the sand as he came home from the triple feature, eight-hour movie show.

  The ambush-tryst was not to be. Whoever called the police, it can have been neither Hassan's mother, nor anyone who had overheard our conversation. I was aware
of a large American car drawing up at the entrance of the alley. The police in Tiznit prefer to conserve their petrol and tyres, and simply commandeer one of the town's three taxis at need. Two figures came unhurriedly towards me. The one in uniform held a flashlight on my face. The plainclothes gentleman asked politely for my passport. Kif, which can sway the smoker either to mild paranoia or to great calm and composure, was flowing benignly. I got to my feet and produced a visiting card.

  'This is not a passport,' said the plainclothes cop reasonably.

  'That's at the hotel,' I said.

  The man motioned with his head towards the commandeered taxi.

  At the police station was a rather formidable gentleman in a neat suit behind a big desk. The gist of my interrogation was simple. Why was I sprawled leisurely in the dust of a dark alley in Tiznit at one o'clock in the morning?

  A stoned state, in even a mildly experienced occasional smoker, can be disguised without difficulty. It also gives insights on literal truth, which now seemed perfectly plausible to me. I had laid ambush for the most beautiful person in Tiznit because he had jilted me. My heart ached; and I was seeking its solace by means of direct action, however idiotic.

  Some inner prompting suggested this explanation might be misconstrued.

  A few days previously I'd had long conversations with a shoemaker, whose shop was near the point of my arrest. 'I was looking for a man who is making me shoes,' I said. 'He is a Tunisian.' Half lost, but uncaring, I had sat down to enjoy the deliciously cool night air.

  They bought it. But what a small town!

  'Why were you looking for my father last night?' the sort of the shoemaker asked next day in the town square.

  The police drove me back to the hotel, where my passport was checked, and the proprietor, still dressed perhaps as a result of his ownership of the cinema, assured them that I was 'quiet' and 'respectable'.

  Three days later came the army dissidents' raid on the king's beach palace at Skhirat. A column of loyal army lorries came roaring across the plain into Tiznit trailing a dust cloud a mile long. Meanwhile I'd found myself in a VIP deckchair, guest of my police interrogator, at the municipal water sports marking the Festival of Youth and King Hassan's forty-second birthday, more politely than in the current assassination attempt on the Atlantic coast. A curious competition was to release live ducks into the pool. The winner was the small boy who first caught one usually with a cautious breaststroke approach, of which the last few yards were swum underwater. SM Hassan II's dramatically beautiful subject Hassan did not compete in any events. It was finals day, after many heats.