Tangier

by Angus Stewart

  All the boys except the godly Omar had the disconcerting habit of locking themselves in my bathroom in pairs for the purpose of mutual masturbation, or other sexual entertainment. My only, anxiety was that the broken bathroom window gave on to the wing of the terrace immediately adjacent to the objectionable Belgians. Squeaks and giggles would have been unfortunate. But the business was altogether too practised or absorbing for squeaks and giggles came there none. Sometimes impatience would have me approach the broken window from the terrace with warning, reticent coughs. The irritating truth was that I was mildly embarrassed; the boys not at all. I would poke my head briefly through the shattered window, register private games, be vaguely noticed myself, then ignored.

  Inevitably this lent dryness of tone to reticence when I said 'Uh . . . look, hurry it up, would you?' before returning to my rickety chair on the other wing of the terrace; or to the bookish Omar.

  And so the twice-weekly lunch hours passed until the banishment of Bachir and those who had behaved recklessly; until Thami and Omar were 'licensed' with the portera only to be beaten up by the Belgians, as recorded. Wretchedly one of the night-whistling exiles had been the blue-eyed Badruddin, healthily extrovert where Omar and myself were introvert, and owner of one of the mast beautifully fluid slow-motion smiles I'd ever known a boy possess. But I'd begun to wonder about that extrovert nature. One night, unobserved. I saw Badruddin cruising for hire outside the Café de Paris, walking embodiment if one wills of the wickedness of Tangier, in French short trousers and equally innocent-looking tee-shirt. I picked him up myself from confused motives of jealousy; putting him in a taxi with cinema money which would keep him off the streets until he was due home.

  Before I left Tangier in midsummer Thami and Omar called on two successive days to say goodbye. Formally 'licensed' though they were with the portera' who was rational in respect of the boys in my presence, she trapped them on the stairs as they departed. Screams of abuse, shouts for her son Manolo echoed up the core of the six-storey building. No wonder the thirty-eight-year-old Manolo appeared repressed and had a nervous twitch. He regarded his mother's ferocity, and indeed this whole affair, with wanly amused helplessness. Calmly Thami's voice was explaining that he and his brother had been visiting Mr Stewart and that she herself had conceded this as their right. It was cool for a twelve-year-old: and the fourteen-year-old Omar would be similarly dignified, though frightened. By the time I had grabbed my keys and raced downstairs the boys had gone; my Janus-faced portera was in her lodge but not answering the bell.

  Perhaps it's unkind to hope the Belgian will be soon expelled the country by history; that natural law may carry the portera to heaven in her carpet-slippers. Because confrontation had become absolute as it was ugly. Prejudices are not easily modified by reason. I had no intention of quitting my flat.

  17. Hiatus again

  That spring of 1974 found me frustrated as a ballerina in moon boots. Steroid ointments prescribed for eczema are designed to stay greasy for six hours. Worse, a constituent chemical stains everything it touches a pretty but indelible yellow. Holding a pen was akin to pillow-fighting on a greased pole and typing like playing a piano with keys that have been anointed with honey. Reading books was out: writers are the only members of the community with a curiosity about the things who are unable to afford them, and so must largely borrow them.

  The answer of course was those moon boots: disposable plastic gloves which enabled me to read, but not to hold a pen or type, They had further disadvantages. Sweat gathered in the floppy fingertips moistening the. skin like a carefully watered flowerbed where a secondary infection could take root; the ointment, while presumably good for the skin, had the curious property of melting the flimsy plastic; and the gloves themselves, usable once only, were of course not available in Tangier. Cotton gloves would answer everything: except the need to hold a pen, and hit typewriter keys. Nevertheless I obtained some - from fifteen hundred miles away. The result was that while remaining about as functional as the ballerina in moon boots I now felt like an out-of-work nigger minstrel as well.

  Why not dictate into a recorder? I can't; and know no one who can. There is a link, invisible yet essential as the drive-shaft of a car, between the physical manipulation of a pets or typewriter and sustained thought. Sentences and paragraphs are organic: they need to be seen and felt to grow in order that they may continue to grow in the direction one requires of them, How the eye, ear and fingertips complement each other I've no idea. But they certainly do for me.

  The relevance of this digression is twofold. The hands first became raw in Tangier, were not very effectively stabilized in England, only to blow up far worse again in Tangier, And without a pen I’m like a man without a penis: in low-profile depression, either over-confident and aggressive with friends, or avoiding any except the closest altogether. The syndrome is true of any man's accustomed work, which is the misery of unemployment or retirement.

  A medical friend visited me over Easter. It was fortuitous. Alister Brass had not been in Tangier for twelve years; is the contemporary who had discovered the thirty-pence a week Ain Haiani house, and bought champagne at Dean’s on the binge night with Francis Bacon. The hands had suddenly developed sacs of pus about the fingertips and on the palms. 'Stop using the steroid ointments,' he said and bound the worse hand up (highly competently considering he had not practised medicine for years and had become a tycoon with a drug company in California). Besides dulling the pain, bandaging was a social necessity in a hand-shaking country. How for instance introduce my friend to a Moroccan café proprietor in a remote village when all I could do myself was clench my fists and bob my head at the man? It was interesting, incidentally, that Moroccans and Europeans alike almost automatically associated hand damage with butagas explosion. Rather inaccurately the bottled gas is said to cook more hands, and sometimes whole children, than food.

  An oral antibiotic Alister prescribed, but also donated from his personal travelling kit, quietened the general infection in the blood: but only for a few days. Meanwhile Alister had departed and, following his advice, I consulted a mutual friend, a retired colonial doctor living on the Mountain. I feel guilty when ill. Whether this derives from my mother, one sister, and another sister's husband being doctors, I don't know. Painful about this consultation was my being invited to present my trivial complaint at the bedside of the doctor's wife, who was really ill. I had known and loved her sweet nature for thirteen years. He explained apologetically that his prescription was not available in Morocco, and he didn't think there was any of the stuff at the moment in Gibraltar,

  My next visit was to the Tulloch Memorial Hospital, run by Dr St John, one of the few truly saintly Englishmen in Tangier, who has been there over thirty years. His reputation with Moroccans is enormous, The law against proselytizing means that a gospel or commentary is only slipped into the pockets of Christians. I was hurt this didn't happen to me; perhaps I was instantly felt beyond redemption. The hospital caters for the poor, and mostly Moroccans. Hailing a cab as I arrived were a bouncy hippie couple. The fact that St John would have, for instance, prescribed a free course of the expensive anti-fungoid antibiotic Griseofulvin rather than hair-shaving had their affliction been ringworm would be unremarkable were Tangier not a stronghold of British reactionaries. Nine years previously, when I was in a protracted phase of depression of which the symptoms were twenty-four-hour mental, terror and bodily near-paralysis. the kind and simple girl who was then my wife called in an elderly physician at my request. I must make up my mind, be explained gently at the bedside, whether I wanted 'a short happy life or a long useful one'. The depressed are scarcely happy, My definition of 'usefulness' was probably not his.

  Now the physical consultation with St John lasted thirty seconds. 'Nasty,' he said, prescribed gentian violet and boric ointment free from the dispensary; then gave me a quick appraisal, adding, 'Five dirham?'

  I walked home enormously cheered and hopeful. Alas, the boric clean
ed the pus sacs when they burst; then more erupted.

  Twice more I visited the outpatient clinic. There was no boredom in queuing. Apart from city buses and bus stops it was the only place to stare at near-transparently veiled beauties for any length of time. By 1974 young girls tended only to he veiled if married and subject to a husband's jealousy. The modern litham is often token anyway, revealing through its near-opacity somehow more than it conceals: line and delicacy of jaw, tip of nose-moulding. And how elegant the litham compared with the Middle Eastern yashmak, like a primitive chloroform mask, or half a miniature rugger ball since it's sometimes made of leather. So I sat gawking at the pretty girls, with fists clenched to prevent pus dripping on the floor.

  St John eventually said he didn't know what the infection was, apologized for being unable to help, and asked how soon I was returning to England. He suggested injected penicillin, but seemed doubtful about its efficacy. While I equated this against drug cost plus fee of the practitioner I should have to have daily administer the stuff, the decision solved itself. The local infection was perverse enough. At any given moment perhaps two fingers out of ten were usable: only these tended to be the thumb of the left hand and little finger of the right, which can open a fly zip if one's not concerned to do it up again, and left me frothing at the mouth turning Tangier's notoriously stiff latchkeys. It was merciful not to have been arrested on both or either counts. Now the hands blew up totally overnight and swollen glands beneath my armpits caused my elbows to stick out idiotically like a penguin. Gin was the handiest painkiller. Screw caps can be removed with the knees. I had some for breakfast, lighting cigarettes from an emergency candle and swearing at the miserable inch-long wax match, rigid as a grass blade, which had burnt my lips as I struck it to light the candle.

  Said in his shop was only too delighted to spin his telephone dial while I hid my hands in my pockets. Since the introduction of direct dialling to Casablanca and even Paris, phones borrowed, or rather charged for at 100 per cent profit on local calls are understandably watched intensively, claimed out of order, or personally dialled by their owner. It would he sentimental to suggest Said's normally allowing me to dial my own calls arose from friendship. Almost unconsciously, he could count the number of units which make a local call, just as his twelve-year-old assistant could mentally compute the mounting cost of bread loaf, butter, tuna from giant can and olives from trees, as a sandwich was progressively built upon the sensitive scales for a workman whitewashing a nearby building.

  Gavin Lambert struck me as the most trustworthy resident with a telephone, sufficiently organized as to be at his desk at ten o'clock in the morning. It had never occurred to me to keep a doctor's telephone number written down. Gavin recommended a Moroccan physician and an Italian lady GP. I opted for the woman in the hope of receiving motherly love and the more rational bill of a European. The instincts of panic were vindicated. Her initial assumption that my appointment was social, the young Moroccan couple in the waiting-room and the design of an examination table dominating the surgery suggested the delightful lady's principal line was gynaecology. And she refused any fee whatever for her consultation. What she did do was get me an appointment with a dermatologist within half an hour, and sensibly warn that if he couldn't effect improvement within a week I should get on an aeroplane because 'Morocco is a terrible place for skins'.

  The contrast between the Italian lady's waiting-room with its faded family photographs, antimacassars and elderly retainers, and the space-age movie-set complete with sensuous and artificially bright, no, cocky, European secretary, with which the Moroccan dermatologist had surrounded himself, was one of those mind-bending delights that epitomize the essence of Tangier. What the simple Moroccans uneasily poised on their uniform shiny white single-moulding plastic chairs geometrically disposed across the pastel wall-to-wall carpeting thought I do not know. Skin afflictions are, or can be, closely related to mental states. It may be the waiting-room alone produced some spontaneous cures. On this first visit I was denied glimpse of the waiting-room; though whether as a minor emergency or as someone who after the correct ethics of private medicine could be charged more than a pauper did not emerge. Either way, this was just at well. My mind was only minimally bent by immediate exposure to the surgery itself. Physical pain helped.

  But before reaching this Valhalla the taxi had delivered me to a car breaker's yard. I told the driver I didn't think this could be right. He found the correct address and got a 100 per cent tip, less from sentimental gratitude than because my coins were glued together with blood and I couldn't decently ask him to prise them apart.

  It may have been fantasy, but I had the impression that the pretty secretary wanted to date the well-mannered Englishman who kept his hands in his pockets. The fact that half an hour later she literally chased me out of the building had nothing to do with sex. I had innocently supposed that one more or less professional man who leaves his card with another and has a second appointment within forty-eight hours can be trusted to honour his bill even if he has to sell his watch. (Which I damn nearly had to do.)

  Dr Lahlou proved to be one of the most charming Moroccans I'd ever met. His name was embroidered in pale blue on his white coat. The silently moving sandals matched the coat; and his socks the embroidery. The secret of his intellectual gifts and four languages was huge behind his desk upon the wall: a giant photographic panorama of Granada. He was, in short, a Moroccan of immemorial lineage from Andalucia; one of the proverbial romantics who keep a large, rusted doorkey to a house in Granada which no longer exists. I discovered as much on my third visit. Even I can say, 'Ah, Andalucia!' in Arabic with unaffected nostalgia; which, pretending to have noticed the beautiful photograph for the first time, I did. Lahlou's eyes melted. But not, reasonably enough, the grandeur of his bills.

  Dr Lahtou's desk was of stainless steel, fine woods and black glass. Pens, and some highly ingenious western toys, perhaps for entertaining children, were spread across it with precision. Learned books uniformly bound in leather were behind glass against one wall. Dominating the desk in a slip-case was a two-volume edition of somebody's textbook of dermatology. Blackwell's Scientific published. This would have been unremarkable had the books' spines faced the doctor's chair not the patient's. It soon became evident why. I ascribe the diagnostic method to Lahlou's courtesy. He came sprightly round the desk and discovered a colour photograph of diseased hands. At his invitation we began to skim the English text of the aetiology aloud in unison. Every now and then he would make a little bounce of delight and say, 'Ah !' At such moments I fell respectfully silent. The truth was I was uneasy, even jealous, because the photographed hands were clean as Rachmaninov's compared with my own. Certainly they bore no resemblance to mine before the general infection, which presumably was accounting for the volcanic craters and the glandular swelling, had set in. But I knew enough to know I knew nothing; and concentrated instead upon how genuinely comforting this unpretty picture-book must be to Moroccan patients, particularly those who could not read English.

  Lahlou next studied the single toe similarly affected, and gave another little jump of delight. He had a beautifully self-illuminating magnifier the size of a standard-lamp. I wanted to peep, but decided better not.

  Lahlou diagnosed a fungus of unknown aetiology, said he could cure it in three months, but would first tackle the general infection. There was nothing to worry about. I breathed a sigh of relief. This changed its character as his seven point prescription began to build on to a second sheet of quarto, taking over fifteen minutes to construct.

  I made a further appointment, thanked Lahlou; and was chased by the glamorous girl with the consultation bill, discreetly calling, 'M'sieur, s'il vous plait? M'sieur . . .?

  Happily for honour it was a modest four pounds, which was exactly what I had in my pocket apart from the sticky small change. Round the corner I found courage to look at the prescription, having asked the first Moroccan I saw to light me a cigarette.


  The prescription struck me as logical, if luxurious. Paying the pharmacy was the problem. My bank's being closed was irrelevant. It currently guarded ten pounds which. perhaps as having been the sum of my initial deposit, was in some mysterious Tangier bankers' lore the amount required to keep the account open. Worse, were this fortune touched, new Moroccan legislation now prevented my opening any account whatsoever since technically I was a non-resident. Emergency travellers' cheques I'd mostly eaten. I made for a central pharmacy, mentally knocking some of the luxuries off the prescription. What use was disinfectant liquid soap when one was going to be soaking hands and foot in a murderously strong solution of potassium permanganate? Or four tubes of antibiotic ointment when one could start with two?

  'What'll that cost — roughly?' I asked the pharmacist.

  'About 150 dirham,'

  Fifteen pounds. 'Fine,' I said vaguely as a Rockefeller or Woolworth. 'I'll collect the stuff in about an hour?'

  The cost, as I'd suspected, was the intensive course of oral antibiotics, and the ointments. All drugs in Morocco are stamped 'Prix Public Maroc' and their fixed prices equate closely with those in Britain, had one to buy them privately. So the margin for mild swindle on my prescription, was in the dissolving of a quarter of a tablet of potassium permanganate in a litre of tap water. This takes half an hour; which was why the pharmacy also needed the time, used by me to collect the money. In fact the particular item, one litre of solution, was only charged for at six dirham: so innocently paying out a profit of well cover 1000 per cent was reasonable forfeit for inattention at school chemistry lessons. The percentage is approximate because while I could calculate the exact value of the lemonade bottle, and next day the price of a litre of solution at the strength prescribed by Lahlou against the 'Prix Public Maroc' of potassium permanganate tablets, I could not compute the price of the label telling me not to swallow the stuff or for a litre of tap water drawn in that particular shop. A man becomes angry when cheated. Curiously his anger increases where he discovers the abuse was only made possible as a result of his own stupidity or innocence. Next day I was a little coldly ironical with the French owner-manager of the pharmacy. But not before he had fallen, of his own understandably hesitant volition, into a trap that would have had him selling me potassium permanganate solution at approximately that 1000 per cent plus profit multiplied by forty: say a net profit of 45,000 per cent,