Tangier

by Angus Stewart

  'Maybe.' said Cohen the agent, 'they didn't repair the catch because they had put the glass in first and were afraid of breaking it?'

  I was back in Tangier.

  Cohen went on to disclaim any responsibility even for repair to the exterior of the building. Yes, I could require this by law, but the flat could now be let for twice what I was paying for it. He would terminate my lease. I knew this would be difficult, for Tangier has rent and eviction control, but did not remind him as much. Whether purely mercenary motives determined a further attempt to evict me later in the summer the reader can best judge. The first row, two years previously, may have had sonic legitimate basis if only because I could not know just how badly the acquaintance to whom I had lent the fiat, or the Moroccan gentleman to whom he subsequently gave the keys, had actually behaved in respect of neighbours. The incident had happened uncomfortably soon after the farce when the Belgians had succeeded in having me questioned by the police on the pretext that Meti might have had something to do with a break and entry upon yet other neo-colonials in the building. These failures had puzzled them. Could it be that nearly twenty years after Morocco's Independence they no longer ruled the country? Tangier is an Alice in Wonderland world and large misconceptions not inconceivable. But in April the personal ambush lay eight weeks in the future.

  The indignant west spoke of 'the fuel crisis'. Moroccans, suffering nearly doubled petrol prices, were philosophical. Though the Arabs had been routed months previously, and a ceasefire now obtained, yet in spirit, and perhaps as a result of their having made only their customary token gesture in the Middle East conflict, Morocco was at war. To plenty of Tanjaouine the increased price of locally produced eggs was somehow helping their brothers behind a ceasefire line thousands of miles away. Fantasy is irrational. Where Islam is the soil, pan-Arabism the compost and propaganda the watering-can delightful flowers grow.

  The rush broom for sweeping butt-ends off my terrace had been pinched, presumably by the portera's maid in my absence.

  'Why' I asked Said, questioning the tripled price of a replacement.

  'The war,' he said sadly.

  Having known Said five years I felt it ill-mannered to conjure the acreage of rushes in the Nile valley, wonder whether the thin sands of Sinai must be patiently swept with brushes to facilitate the advance of tanks. The only response to solemn mystery was to say, 'Ah!'

  Subsidy had held the city bus fares at twenty-five francs to go anywhere. Cheap taxi tariffs were gone for ever. If one telephoned for a cab the driver switched on his meter as he left base in the Grand Socco, rather than when he collected his passenger. It had taken a taxi strike to achieve this right and logical revolution. For me it meant walking, better wind and alerted senses. Mugging in Tangier is a myth promoted by group tour couriers and hotel managers. Having pre-paid all meals in the hotel, souvenir money can then be spent in the hotel's own gift shop; or by the group's being conducted in crocodile to a bazaar — selected by courier, apparently incidentally recommended by hotel management: the two disinterested parties subsequently splitting commission.

  It's with joy that one glimpses breakaways, often families with infants perhaps, eating in a restaurant. And delight must be their reward, The integrity of Tangier's restaurateurs and waiters is high: that of the bazaar and souvenir shopkeepers distinctly less so. The anomaly arises simply because restaurants display priced menus; and the tourist is the bazaar-keeper's sole source of income. A Tanjaoui once said to me: 'God created Christians for us Moslems to live off.' And many are the sales of pouffes, handbags, toy camels at nearly double the identical article imported by London shops. Falling rapidly are the sales of dramatic curved daggers, and thin, machine-pressed brass platters, which tend to have camels on them. Dubious are the giant amber beads, strung often on genuine, but cheap silver chains. It takes a laboratory, rather than any expert eye, to distinguish between amber and plastic technology of today. I was once had myself, even on the rim of the Sahara; which is a sad distance for ingenious mass-produced trivia to have reached.

  There had been an increase of housebreaking. The police ascribed the most successful incidents to a professional gang from Casablanca. Two acquaintances of mine had been burgled: a woman, unknown to me, had been struck, her bag snatched as she entered her block of flats; and another had been brutally attacked within her home, and was in hospital, Two homosexuals, flamboyant in jewellery rather than demeanour, had had chains snatched from neck and wrists at knife-point, and also their watches, at night on the Avenue d'Espagne. All these victims were Europeans or Americans. Covering three months, this net total of incidents hardly amounted to a crime wave. The city police had been reinforced again with soldiers, armed only with metre-long truncheons, who wandered about in pairs. This was as much to impress locals with the strength of central government at to inhibit petty crime. But when minor royalty arrived (which happened on Good Friday) rifles were issued to the men who stood casually in doorways up the length of the Boulevard. Some claim the automatics of the regular police are not loaded. Certainly they could not be quickly fired; their butts, just discernible in their white holsters, reveal the weapons as protectively wrapped in heavy polythene. It is, incidentally, impossible to get the simplest street directions from a Tangier policeman. On the other hand courtesy necessitates that he direct the inquirer somewhere. Moroccans and Europeans alike are accorded a snappy salute: upon the criteria of visible wealth or physical bearing. I collected one emerging from a cinema and momentarily imagining myself Monty. The police are dangerous when they have a down on a particular taxi driver, suddenly whistling him to stop. An innocent, I once commenced a journey correctly in the rear seat and ended it, in the middle of the Place de France, beside my driver.

  Meanwhile the city was gearing itself for its high tourist season: prime, often sole source of income for small traders, registered guides, hotel staff, the beach bars. On the beach itself gear-change was literal and audible. Caterpillar bulldozers were busy levelling, each operator holding idiosyncratic views about how the section he was responsible for should look. When the Levanter blew a fine haze of sand across the two-foot wall protecting the promenade which fronts the beach bars, simpler technology took over. Some few score of workmen in tattered djellabas and straw hats shovelled the encroaching sand into trucks. One of these had a leaking tailboard. While noticing this, the particular gang was quite unperturbed. It was as though the top of a stout-waisted hourglass were being filled while its lower globe leaked. (Time and motion study would be incomprehensible to Moroccans,) My favourite beach bar was being repainted. But this year the proprietor had elected to employ a responsible professional rather than his random choice of small boy. There was more paint upon the changing cabins, café tables and chairs as intended, than indelibly splashed on the ground; nor indeed did patrons stick to their chairs as a result of over-enthusiasm in its application,

  In the town, café and bar prices had leapt 15, 20, even 50 per cent. A glass of chemical beer (similar to the French: untouched by hops) had always cost 20 per cent less in Rabat than in Tangier. Now Tangier was edging towards the status and prices of Cannes. The part of one that thinks (in conflict with that which has to live) wondered, why not? Beaches and weather are better than on the Riviera, the town more interesting than Monte Carlo, if with smaller motor cars, and presumably less cash in the Casino. Risen too were the most anomalous of Tangier's prices those of spirits in bars. I doubt if there's a single bar or restaurant which doesn't avail itself of the contraband spirits and liqueurs entering Tangier Via Ceuta: they simply refill the expensive government-sealed bottle on the bar shelf from a contraband one, As bottles of contraband spirits cost less than half the price of legitimately imported ones, and less than one-third of those taxed in Britain, it seems a pity that Tangier's bar prices are higher than those in London's West End. Of course this isn't the whole story. Tangier's bars are tiny, turnover small, and presumably their proprietors must maintain the pretence that they've
paid duty on their spirits. The prices even astonish sailors, the last people to bother about booze costs with perhaps only six hours' shore leave, ' 'Effing 'ell!' a rating off a slinky frigate in the harbour said as he paid for a large scotch. 'If they think this is Biarritz or Acapulco where are the actionable girls!' I told him. He felt their discovery too intricate, as indeed it is. I explained where wine could be bought at twenty pence a litre, but surreptitious consumption on a street corner isn't the point of an evening ashore.

  The early troubles of 'Moroccanization' were showing themselves, In effect the policy, due to be complete by midsummer, stated that 30 per cent of businesses must be Moroccan owned or controlled. That such a law should only be enacted nineteen years after the ending of colonial rule was not so extraordinary, because organizations as different as French big business and the CIA helped keep an absolute monarch on his throne, a monied caste in control. On the other hand there had been no tumbling into mayhem in those years since Independence. Morocco retains all the evils, but also human community advantages of a medieval kingdom. The maldistribution of national wealth is odious; but bloodshed, until the rising among the Berbers in the deep south over the last two years, has remained small,

  One suspects Moroccanization was brought in as a sop. Rural land was given to the peasantry. French vintners, citrus fruit farmers became at least 50 per cent dispossessed. Many left the country; their European planter psychology being unable or unwilling to adapt. The sop did not impress intellectuals and students. They wanted, and want, a republic.

  Hundreds of Spanish had left the country over the last nine months. The result was a paucity of technicians: plumbers, electricians, garage mechanics. My portera had not emigrated. Might she do so when her son, a plumber aspired to his own business? Probably the economic advantages of a free flat precluded the possibility. She would die with her carpet slippers on, endeavouring to protect her building from my guests.

  The Spanish exodus drained colour from the city. Fewer were the stout women munching cream cakes in Forte's, the men who seemed to assume inches when nattily suited for the paseo (though their shoes looked too tight and small), the handsome youths whose natural swagger rubbed off on to their Moroccan contemporaries, the overdressed small children. Italians and French were leaving too, though not my objectionable Belgian. As a dentist he fell within the professions, with doctors and teachers who were exempt from Moroccanization. However, rumour had it that European schools were to become more democratic: take a higher ratio of indigenous children. That outraged him. His threshold of tolerance to anything Moroccan was not high.

  Living myself with no gadgets except Sony recorders and a Leica (which like

  Rolls-Royces tend not to break down) I had no need of skilled technicians. When a Moroccan ribbon for my typewriter dried out in three days I typed without ink. It was a bit like writing with snow on snow. Puzzled correspondents received carbon copies.

  People with malfunctioning televisions were at wits' end. The Englishman who understood electronics was leaving, himself despairing, a victim of Moroccanization, Before the crisis much of his business consisted of trying to repair television sets disembowelled, from curiosity as much as frustration, with tools like kitchen scissors and heavy sugar-hammers. He must have felt like a surgeon hopefully presented with a victim of Jack the Ripper by a simpleton. This is not to mock Moroccans. The idea that happiness devolves more readily upon a non-technical people, once a romantic myth, becomes more tenable every day.

  The poignancy of so many Europeans departing struck me in the second when the eyes of two infants met. I was sitting at a Boulevard café. Led by parents there passed each other in opposite directions a Moroccan aged three or four wearing the kaftan and cap that is ritual for circumcision and a slightly older Spanish girl in her first communion dress. They summed each other's respective gear up with friendly nonchalance. After centuries' warring the two races had evolved a symbiotic relationship, based on mutual respect for culture and creed. Now it was ending.

  Another Middle East war had caused further exodus of Moroccan Jews. Here the loss was to the higher professions as much as skilled trades. Dignified gentlemen with beards, black suits and hats, were suddenly an infrequent sight.

  Cohen, controlling agent of my apartment block and much other property, was scarcely rabbinical. Like the majority of Tangier's Jews he was of indigenous birth, a Moroccan subject. When we first met I had asked him whether he were Spanish. 'I am a Moroccan but not a Mussulman,' he said, His inability to say simply, 'I am Jewish,' was depressing besides insulting. But evasion proved to be the core of the man's character. Apart from greed, an asset perhaps in the job, it was his only weakness. If I disliked Cohen it was because I had several times witnessed his obsequiousness towards tenants and screaming of abuse at Moroccan workmen. Understandably a labourer tried to kill me on the occasion I called at Cohen's home, presumably mistaking my visit for social intercourse between fellow capitalist conspirators. It was net that way at all. Meanwhile I had spent years privately thinking of Cohen as Sam in the hope that auto-suggestion might produce entente if not affection. The exercise was successful. I came to pity Sam, his office life, the joyless mathematics of extortion, a frame grossly overweight from food and physical inertia, his digestive mints efficacious as a teaspoonful of rainwater in the bath of Mr Haig, the lurking coronary. Sam had a good mind. Sparring with it left me relaxed. The worst crises were unreal. I enjoy farce. Sam did not. In five years I never saw him smile. Asked whether there were human beings to whom the idea of a joke was an alien conception I should previously have said it impossible. Sam taught me otherwise. His ethos was disadvantageous to him. He supposed that agility of mind comes from self-confidence. It need not. Further, I suspect he equated self-confidence with cash. Sam's desire to evict me was tempered by caution, and the struggle was visible in his eyes. I did nothing to encourage dark uncertainties but nothing to discourage them either. Patently I was mad. Then had I lawyers, mysterious influence in Rabat? Was I a person who would bring the case before Tangier's Rents Tribunal just for kicks? And distribute a few thousand pounds in bribes? Sam didn't know; I did. My connections with government were easily delineated. I had just engaged a new maid whose daughter was married to a chauffeur of a sister of the king. At the time of the worst crisis I had £50 in Morocco and £132 in the outside world. It seemed unreasonable to surrender my lease so that Sam could require 100 per cent more monthly of a new tenant, If I gave my furniture to my maid would its value cover the cost of removal? In a town of cheap labour and hand-carts I thought so. No, the happy confidence baffling Sam was that of a kamikaze pilot. And sometimes I felt like one who had taken off, changed his mind, and then remembers that the aircraft has no landing gear and is anyway a flying bomb, Very well, I would bomb Sam and anyone else who attacked - with incredulity, irony, even outright mockery.

  The first to attack was Sam himself. He was quiet, embarrassed, even brave. After five years he found the courage to express the unmentionable, He called unexpectedly. The portera, like a grim little wardress, stood beside him. He and I spoke English, As preamble he said that that month's rent had not been paid (a lie). Pleasantly I reminded him that the rent had been paid monthly, in advance, by banker's order for five years, He agreed the sudden error was odd. I offered him a chair, He had been sitting all day. So I expressed the question as to what he had really come about with tilt of head, over-courteous attention.

  'Mr Stewart, people are complaining again about your - visitors.'

  'Oh! Drunks! I know none.'

  'Sir, please, you are too . . . too' (genuinely searching for English word, touching own skull) 'too intelligent not to know what I mean.'

  'Oh?'

  'These - boys. Little boys.' That's taken Sam guts to utter. My admiration mustn't show. 'The portera is tired of fighting them.' (He means shooing away contemporaries of two schoolboys I'm currently entertaining for English-Moghrebi conversation from the foyer downstairs: 'shoo
ing' can be straight terrorization, as I discover later.)

  'I would have supposed the job of a portera was to keep unwanted people out of her building.'

  'Mr Stewart, but for you she would have no job!' (This is a linguistic slip: he means 'unnecessary work'.)

  'I understand.'

  'So, Mr Stewart, I am telling you now' (Sam is genuinely sad) 'either you stop these boys coming to your flat, or I ask my lawyers to terminate your contract. And I am telling the portera that if these boys come again she must call the police.'

  This Is not funny.

  'Cohen. two middle-class Moroccan brothers come to my flat with the knowledge, consent and thanks of their father for English lessons. If you wish, I'll have photostats of their identity cards complete with first name, patronymic, surname, photograph and serial number on your desk and in the portera's lodge within twenty-four hours.'

  Sam would back down in bad fiction. He doesn't. Nor do I.

  'Mr Stewart' (genuinely sadder) 'I am telling you -

  'I will introduce these people to the portera so she will know who is legitimate and who not.'

  Exit Sam and portera. Are they bluffing? Europeans don't want properly nationalistic cops around. That goes for the portera, who would lose face. Sam may be greedy, but I can't believe him evil: i.e. prepared to 'frame' me in an effort to terminate my lease.

  What are the facts?

  Three schoolfriends of the brothers Thami and Omar have visited me; on one occasion, after a family funeral, a cousin. The boys come in self regulating social groups for coffee and conversation. They use the stairs, rather than lift, are hyper-correct. do not indulge in horseplay on the landings of the building, never mind vandalize it in any way. But they are Moroccans: young, and incidentally very pretty. The hysterical Belgian and his wife below can only rationalize any interest in them by fantasizing sexual orgies, The Sane French couple appear to concede a man's right to entertain whom he wills in his own home, and continue courteous and delightful. Being childless, I have almost invariably had a boy friend in Morocco. I like them. Meti was socially acceptable because he worked for me. The upper-class status of Thami and Omar suggested the roles be reversed: it is mutually agreed that I work for them. The problem is insisting they don't bring their friends, cousins or younger brother. This I find socially offensive and well-nigh impossible to enforce. But is this not my house, they wonder? Surely the Belgians have their own house downstairs? I can (and do) explain that the Belgians suppose I am taking them all to bed with me. 'How,' they ask, 'does that affect the sovereignty of a man's house?'