I've never engaged a young and pretty maid. Being a part-time employer, rather than a bachelor, has proved the limiting factor: but also the young are increasingly reluctant to work for Christians. When I did employ a young girl, upon first acquiring my own flat, she was neither pretty nor remotely tolerable as a servant, as recorded earlier. Since that experience I've opted for the staid and middle-aged, usually making contact through the charming, French-speaking maid of my pleasanter French neighbours; and have never been let down.
In the numerous flats I had inhabited for short periods prior to getting my own, a maid was usually already engaged. These ranged from faithful family retainers with prerogatives like coffee and croissants to the meanly-paid slaves appointed by the owners of quick turnover tourist accommodation. Extraordinarily these last were never cynical, which was remarkable in view of the oddity of some of the even weekly-changing clients with whom they had to cope. They would whine for little extras, sometimes attempt the straight swindle, but rarely steal. Their jobs were too precious and the European landlords ruthlessly unsentimental. A favourite trick was the butagas switch. The cylinders, Tangier's principal energy source, hold 13 kg of liquid gas, and cost £1.50 to exchange when empty. All the Souassas' baccals keep a stock; and a cylinder will last many months. In one notorious apartment block particularly, the tourist arriving for a fortnight would invariably find an empty cylinder in both kitchen and bathroom and be faced with an immediate expense of three pounds. Even then he was likely to be supplied with cylinders with only a few hours' gas in them, for the shop of course was in on the racket. The wise resident orders direct from one of the producing companies. Their delivery services are perhaps the only thing in Tangier which function with flawless precision and punctuality.
A curiosity of the freelance 'fatimahs' is their rigid hierarchy. A young and bossy one will often have a veritable great-grandmother, wrinkled and doubled, to do the really dirty work. Lowliest of all is the woman hired by a portera to clean her apartment block's foyer, landings and stairs. The area of marble and shiny tiles to be washed daily is considerable in a six-storey building. Alarming to the western eye is that a Moroccan woman never kneels to wash floors but bends double from the waist, legs straight and parted, both hands grasping the cloth and making pendulum motions. I can perform the exercise for almost seven seconds, covering three nine-inch tiles. How the often enormously stout women deal with acres while smiling and chattering I can't conceive. It is the hallway woman who initially cleans my flat when I've been away for any length of time. For organizing the operation the portera charges me six dirham, of which the worker, I fortuitously discovered, got one and a half. I took to giving her a small biannual tip after my own maid had dropped a piece of lemon peel on the landing and the lunatic Belgian woman below had had the nerve to ring my bell and point hysterically at what le petit (by whom she meant Meti) had done.
Perhaps it's time to explain why I uncharitably define this neighbour as lunatic. There had been, and continued numerous manifestations of mild hysteria. But the prize incident occurred early in my tenancy. She rang my bell after midnight wearing a scanty nightgown. I assumed she was proposing adultery. Heaven knew enough marital rows were evidenced beneath my floors. But no. Had any Moroccans passed through my flat? she demanded. My threshold gives an unbroken view into the salon. I indicated le petit fast asleep on his mtarrba and said certainly not. It transpired that she had been reclining in the bath when human feet materialized on the skylight above it. Obviously I had imported an intruder and lowered him on to her roof from my terrace to persecute her in this unseemly way. Her husband now appeared behind her, He literally carried a wrought-iron poker. I could produce no weapon, but the obliging Blimp act easily. It seemed a good opportunity to achieve détente through the heroic gesture. The grizzled Belgian had a key which unlocked the door from the landing to the roof. Together we looked for the phantom among the television aerials. The search proved vain. 'My wife,' grumbled the dentist, 'is a little - nervous.' I remained silent.
The number of maids that I've had in my own flat owes nothing to disatisfaction of either party but everything to my employing only part-time and being away for months at a stretch. By accepting the recommendation of the saner French family's maid I've invariably had an honest and reliable woman, but one with a modicum of the French language as well. The majority of maids, as with all Tangier's simpler classes of adult generation, speak only Spanish.
Habiba was built like a Russian shot-putter. Rather than disturb me at my work table when washing the floor she would simply lift the chair in which I was sitting and deposit me gently a few feet away. That this critically altered the juxtaposition between myself and the blank paper at which I was staring was sensibly not her concern. She could wring out a double-bed sheet, having pounded it in cold water and detergent in the bath, as easily as I might a handkerchief, She was the cricketer whose hooking the ping-pong ball to leg with the seasoned loaf of French bread neither varied nor failed; and she mothered Meti and myself with genuine affection. If the reader suspects I discovered in my maids the ideal nanny (ideal because the charge, myself, theoretically was boss) this often occurred to me too.
Naïma sometimes brought two pretty teenage daughters. One had an ankle-length kaftan; the other, extraordinarily a flouncy miniskirt. The anomaly was explained when I discovered the kaftan concealed a leg-iron. But, as can happen, my infatuation wavered equally between both. Perhaps this is why Islam permits four wives. Naïma, alas, was strictly temporary. Inexplicably the portera disapproved of her. I think she suspected Naïma of trying to arrange marriage between one of her tenants and a Moroccan. Horror! Looking back, I realize this was what Naïma was trying to do. About the conflict between chaperonage and mother's lengthy disappearances to the baccal to buy an unnecessary packet of Tide while daughters remained huge-eyed, French murmuring, and all mine, was a calculation cautious, beautifully un-western and, to use a difficult word only once, exotic. Poor woman. How could she know that a Christian apparently able to read and with a suit in the wardrobe was living on about £600 a year And while I fantasized and wavered Naïma and her visionary daughters were gone, Or did I perhaps leave town? That I don't clearly remember is the measure of any impact on me. The portera's relief was clear. Her satisfied sigh was visible.
To this account of maidservants (as of infatuation) belongs a pathetic story. It is of a girl who worked for a stranger — and I don't doubt another man would have been more enterprising than I. I behaved about as boldly as a fifteen-year-old. Perhaps this was because Sudiah could not have been older, and may well have been younger, than that herself.
In Said's shop one morning was a very beautiful girl. I goggled. Emboldened, I craned my neck sideways, peering round the headscarf from profile to full face. Swallowed. When young Berber girls are good-looking they are very good-looking indeed. I suspect one has to have carved in pale boxwood to understand the fineness, fragility of feature. Besides the headscarf, she was wearing a gauzy kaftan and green plastic sandals. The palms of her hands were dyed orange with henna. Such beauties are usually only glimpsed at the twice-weekly markets, or in the hills. But here was the daughter of a maidservant in the neighbouring apartment block. Her purchases suggested as much. What Berber smokes Dunhills? The girl herself was as likely to smoke as be a whore.
'Good morning, Sir Angus!' cried Said (with the anomaly earlier explained). Numbly I asked for my half loaf of French bread and 200 grammes of cheese.
That evening I caught Said alone, just before he closed shop.
'Eh . . . what is the name of that girl who was in here this morning?'
Said affected vagueness. I pressed him, with disinterest ill-geared to the awe he couldn't have missed when the girl was in the shop.
'Sudiah.' he said,
I'd never heard the pretty name (which is her real one) before. It fed the flame in my skull like an injection of liquid oxygen.
Three days I brooded. A tryst. But how? What, or who, the
go-between? The quadrilingual, distinctly worldly-wise child Norodin proved out of town. Expatriate advisers would groan - or, worse, laugh, A letter! Politely requesting that Sudiah and her mother take tea with me. This cautious device clashed with standing counsel: 'Never write to Moroccans: from any written word they'll prove you've bequeathed them your house and every penny in your pocket.' To hell with such cynics, But the letter was never written. Could it be that where morale-disintegrating infatuation (as opposed to simpler bodily satisfaction, though heaven knew even that took years to come by) was concerned I was still the schoolboy who discovered that by putting sellotape over the postage stamp the Valentine arrived at that secret schoolgirl with its town of origin unfranked! I knew damn well it was. And the knowledge made for brooding. From my terrace, on the Boulevard, I watched the sex objects of a fairly liberal town parade as invitingly as tin robots. Worse, of course, they were unmistakably soiled flesh.
I went into an Indian's boutique and bought a silk head. scarf, 'Please,' I said stiffly, handing the wrapped gift to Said my shopkeeper. 'would you give this to Sudiah.' And there the story ends. Straight reportage has its anti-climaxes. Whether a sense of outraged propriety caused the diplomatic Soussi to give the gift to his own womenfolk or whether Sudiah in fact received it I don't know. I glimpsed her only once more. She was not wearing my scarf. If I see Sudiah again I shall march her to her father and offer such bride price as I can raise on my camera and watch without preliminary nonsense. Only, would I?
Mina was neither young nor beautiful. She became the most reliable and delightful maid I ever had. She had been a cook at one of Tangier's best French restaurants; and was forever wanting to put on a grand dinner party for me, while I pointed out certain disadvantages about the four bent forks, three widely assorted chairs, and one saucepan that didn't leak. None of these paucities of course prevented a Moroccan meal being prepared and served to suitably sensible friends; and could not deter Mina. Had she been in office (for 'in service' is inappropriate for what amounted virtually to her Cabinet rank) at the time of the Sudiah affair I've no doubt Mina would have had a marriage arranged and executed within days. Such is the temporal dislocation of fate.
Her services encompassed the prosaic and esoteric with equal efficiency. A shirt button would be sown on unasked from ever ready equipment in her hand-bag; then, one day, she discovered some kif pipes in a cupboard. Chuckling with many chins she brought a free sample of kif next day.
'Mina, you've not turned police informer?
'Non!' A moment's affront gave way to more uncontrolled shuddering of her giant frame.
Pride dictated I boast I was supplied by a very old Moroccan friend, who selected expertly and cut regularly for himself. This led to comparison of samples and the inevitable rising of Mina's pride too, for every Moroccan professes expertise about this commodity. I'd never known a woman concerned either in, or about the subject. Mina's husband continued to cut me small quantities at need.
I consulted Mina about the health of my tortoises. After reeling off some obvious foodstuffs, she announced gravely: 'And of course they like potatoes. But not chips.'
The word 'tragedy' is perhaps only accurately applicable to a death about which are elements of the inevitable, but which leaves the witness, partly because of the time scale involved, convinced it could, and should intelligently have been averted. But the dice were loaded. How fully, the witness realizes too late. With hindsight, even an emotion as trivial as irritation, he subsequently dwells upon his own failure to intervene.
Mina had only been with me a few months when she reported her eight-year-old son's having been hit on the head in the school playground. The scalp wound was less than an inch long; the stone had been thrown by a boy of fifteen. I thought little of it beyond asking whether he had been attended by a registered doctor. 'Yes,' she said, 'a Spanish one,'
Over the next ten days the child apparently was growing worse. Mina was glum, but there was a fateful acceptance about what little a simple woman could describe of the child's condition. He was feverish: his head was swelling hugely: he was very ill. Was he regularly receiving injections? The question had pathetically to be part played in mime: her French. let alone my Moghrebi, were neither up to what anyway was a helplessly lay question. The answer was: 'Every day.' Presumably my barging in could gain nothing. I didn't ask her whether I should; myself many times.
Two days later Mina did her housework stint for me, regular as ever, 'They,' by which I understood she meant the family, were considering taking the child to hospital in Casablanca. At this point, the impertinence notwithstanding, I think I should have asked to see the situation for myself. Two days later Mina said the child had died, cried a bit, and got on with her work.
The day Mina announced the child had died she brought me .a large bunch of flowers. My flat doesn't run to a vase. She cut the top off a plastic bleach bottle to hold them. 'El-youm wa er-rhadda - today and tomorrow,' she said. It was a philosophy which took no cognizance of yesterday.
The business wasn't ended. The archaic social machinery that went into operation was visibly instrumental in Mina's recovery, a part of mourning,.
The fifteen-year-old-schoolboy who had thrown the stone was of course in jail, she explained. This didn't mean polite juvenile detention. She was going for one and a half million francs compensation before the Tribunal, 'Blood money' - something very like the Anglo-Saxon wergild - is virtually automatic expectation, and reward, with this sort of accident. I did the sum, from the 'old franc' terminology rather than Moroccan dirhams Mina used. Where were Moroccans of this class to find £3000 to pay the debt and ransom their fifteen-year-old child from the common, never mind communal, criminal lock-up? I didn't ask Mina; but expressed curiosity.
'Oh, they have it!' Mina said, And beneath calculations inconceivable in the circumstances to at lease one westerner, a medieval therapy visibly was working. Mina escalated its efficacy. She was taking the matter right to Rabat and three million (£6000) was now the target.
I said nothing, Cash compensation for the accidental manslaughter of my child was beyond my comprehension, project imaginatively as I might. But then, perhaps, where I'd certainly have bust up, Mina remained working, tough and humane.
The family of the jailed fifteen-year-old called to console, apologize. 'We didn't ask them in,' Mina said. But she was troubled, recovering.
Petitioning the capital I'd supposed an imaginative and understandable fantasy aiding the process of mourning. But Mina, and presumably husband, did go to Rabat. I tried to envisage the scene, doing my own washing for ten days, brusquely refusing a neighbour maid's offer of assistance. I was, and remain, unhappy lest intervention at the right time on my part could have saved the life of a little boy I'd never met.
Mina returned from Rabat. The fifteen-year-old was out of jail. Mina was offhand about settlement terms. Probably this had to do with the Koran's injunction that it is invidious to press claims for compensation too far. And so detail was withheld from a Nesrani.
14. Prostitution
Today's profession is freelance. It is also discreet. This comes about I think because, while Moroccans themselves enjoy, and get, every conceivable form of extramarital sex, it is had manners to let anyone see you getting, or about to get, it. Homosexuality is accepted probably rather more because the Arabs have practised it for centuries, and because a Moslem girl, as financial asset, must be virgin at marriage, than because some dear old queen told Katharine Whitehorn for a colour supplement that Tangier's local name is 'Queersville-on-Sea'.
Women solicit lone European males in a most practical way: a light slap, it couldn't be called a grope, on the balls in passing. This is accompanied by a sideways flick of big eyes above the veil, and a scarcely audible, friendly hiss. It happens mostly at the lower, dark end of the Boulevard, and streets off it; but also in the brightly lit, slow moving current of summer humanity, the paseo inherited from the Spanish. Younger, unveiled girls use only their ey
es. For obvious reasons they avoid darker streets. In July 1973 a girl of about fourteen said 'Hallo' to me quietly in broad daylight. I'm told, and can believe, this was happening that summer for the first time since Independence in 1956: that it was quite an invasion, probably from Casablanca.
Youths cruise, relying on eyes and wits like the girls; but there similarity ends. A youth will never slap a prospect in the balls; a girl will never loiter. Small boys (there are probably less than a dozen visible professionals) ape their elders, relying on their own private grapevine for information about clients. A youth or a boy may pass and repass the Café de Paris at the height of the paseo five times in as many minutes. He will be equating the level of coffee in a regular client's cup against the possibility of a rival's better timing, If he is leaning against the only tree on that corner it is because he is annoyed with a regular client and demonstrating the fact with guts. The client may neither know nor care that his lover can be arrested and beaten up by his own people. The boy's pride will remain intact; his body repair itself, after a few days.
I must emphasize that the above refers to a very small, tough corps, specializing in the westerner taking two weeks' annual holiday in Tangier for one purpose only. The child who cleans your shoes is not a whore. He may accept muddled cuddling and kissing from an awed student or frustrated preparatory schoolmaster, run a hippie household with thoughtful economy, receive a Deutschmark cheque for life from an immature businessman with mature bank balance who's fallen in love with his eyes or grubby fingernails. He won't do a blow job, or be buggered; but will be home to mum and dad an hour after nightfall, with profits fat or nil, to much discussion about the oddities of Christians - foreigners.
Among the Moroccans themselves the picture is different. When girls can't be found or afforded, boys are used, sometimes very young. This isn't as horrific as it sounds. The children have been trained by and for the indigenous people, or individuals. Their anal sphincters have adapted; persons penetrating them are usually considerate, often loving.
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