‘This man’, he introduced us, ‘is the patron of this restaurant. His father ran it before him. This place has survived everything – this is the true Algiers!’
There was an air of freedom and relish laced into the meaty smelling smoke from the grill. Women swigged bottles of beer, men laughed and flirted; we all seemed to smoke, eat and drink at the same time.
‘In Algiers no one says “go for a swim” but rather “indulge in a swim”, Camus writes. ‘The implications are clear.’
I thought of places where I wanted to live, of Tsumeb, of the valley between Zambia, Mozambique and Malawi, and of Makoua, and I thought of places where I have lived, like London, Palermo, Grenoble and West Wales, and it seemed to me that I could find something of all of them in Algeria, and I did not want to leave. The next morning my visa expired.
The border between Algeria and Morocco is closed, the consequence of an old dispute about Algeria’s support for the people of the western Sahara whose land has been annexed by Morocco. One can only marvel at this mighty handicap to the entire region’s development: Algerian resources and Moroccan connections to Europe and the West would be a formidable combination. The only way to the Straits of Gibraltar, the great crossing point for people and birds, is via air. My flight went to Casablanca. At the airport they returned my binoculars. I will come back, I swore, I will come back by sea, accompanied, when I have found her, by the woman I will marry, and I will give something of my time to Algeria.
CHAPTER 9
Moroccan Tricks
Moroccan Tricks
IT IS LATE March, springtime in the Mediterranean. Fleeing the horrors of the European winter, which this year has been cold and brutal, refugees from the higher latitudes converge on the rim of North Africa. Exhausted by their jobs, drained by the strain of months of rain, darkness and prolonged exposure to newspapers, the travellers, tourists, families, lovers and bargain hunters come in their thousands, heading for the Jerusalem of the Leisure Age, Marrakech, the city under the High Atlas. For the fortunate majority, a swift cheap flight brings relief, and freedom. But for those who are not so lucky, or more curious, or who simply hold their lives and fortunes less dear, there is a notorious stopping point on the way to their year’s first sun: the greatest port of the eastern Atlantic – Casablanca!
‘Where are the swallows?’ I kept being asked, in text messages and emails, during those days in Morocco. Friends and family in Britain were waiting for them, straining to see them, worried about them – and I laughed. I knew exactly where they were. The television forecasts showed rain and snow over Britain, storm systems over western Europe, and a clear break, like a bubble of warmth and fair weather over Spain, the Maghreb and West Africa. The swallows were moving with this bubble, as surely as if guided by an unseen hand. The vanguard were all around me; on the road from the airport to the city I watched them hunting the edges of fields, cutting in and out among tall trees. In rainy weather when there are not many flying insects, the birds sometimes brush trees and bushes to dislodge prey.
I had been to Casablanca before. The first time I arrived, the taxi drivers at the airport refused to take me into town, saying it was too expensive – why not take the bus? But things had changed; now it was all hard bargaining and my driver was moody, unsatisfied at the price we had agreed. Casablanca is the most European of Moroccan cities. The traffic and the pace of life have a European bustle about them. It is as though, so close to the bright lights and bank accounts of Europe, something of Africa’s ease and philosophy have been burned away, as though our wealth acts like a fire, searing away the human in favour of the economic. At the same time, Casablanca is and always has been a trading town, a centre of business and commerce, and it is home, I knew from experience, to the champion hustlers of all Morocco. The second time I came here I ended up financing an impromptu holiday for two girls, one brother, two children and a cook. This time, having come so far, I was confident that I could take care of myself. I was, in fact, overconfident.
Edith Piaf used to stay in the hotel I chose: perhaps I was lavish. Certainly I went out for lunch, without change. The beautiful blue 200 dirham note is a flag with ‘eat me!’ all but written on it. I tried, at a very pleasant little hole in the wall full of students where a charming kebab-seller prepared a delicious kebab and a helpful young man was doing bits and bobs: tearing up paper for napkins, etc. The bill was 15 dirhams (including a drink and all the trimmings); I gave the young man the note and never saw either again.
I was furious and the kebab-seller most distressed. He had no idea who the boy was, he protested. I waited, hunted about a bit, went around the block, stalked the hole in the wall like a tiger creeping up on a lamb . . . It was barely therapy. And there were still the 15 dirhams. I said I would pay tomorrow, after I had caught the bastard, and strangled him. Smiling sadly, the kebab-seller said I could have it on the house.
It would have been a good moment to go down to the port, to kick through the sardine and diesel juice on the quays and admire the crews lounging about in the sun on their wooden fishing smacks. Instead, bloody-minded, I decided to go back to Edith’s, unpeel another note from the dwindling roll, and have the afternoon I had planned: a walk, a drink somewhere, maybe an adventure, who knows, a fish supper: it was Casablanca, after all.
‘Be careful!’ said a voice, as I stepped into the road.
‘What?’
‘I said be careful,’ he said, reasonably, as we crossed together. It was barely a street, more a break between two of the new town’s shaded colonnades. He was a little taller than me, with a handsome nose, eyes like bright wet ink and a slightly threadbare tweed jacket.
‘The road.’
‘Thanks,’ I said witheringly. ‘Like a baby?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Merci bien, but I don’t need help crossing the road.’
‘Excuse me. It’s just that round here they drive very badly. The roads here are very dangerous.’
‘I know. I have been to Casablanca before.’
The first and so far only car chase I have been involved in had begun less than quarter of a mile from where we stood, but though there is a certain flamboyance about Casablanca’s highways, they cannot really compare with anything Nigeria has to offer. Those motorbike rides in Calabar, for example. I must have been crazy.
‘Oh, you have visited before?’
‘Yes, twice.’
We were walking along, chatting easily. He had a kind of rolling gait.
‘I thought you were new,’ he said, giving me a sidelong look.
‘Do you live here then?’
‘I am from here but I do not live here. I am a sailor.’
‘Oh really? What sort of ship?’
‘Cargo.’
‘Wow! A proper ship!’
He shrugged. ‘I am a mechanical engineer – an electrician.’
Mustapha was born in Casablanca. When he was young he made friends with an older man, an engineer, who took him on as an apprentice. He had lived in Holland for a while, on a barge, until his best friend’s wife made a pass at him. Mustapha rejected her, but, scorned and wrathful, she said something to Mustapha’s best friend, who threw Mustapha out.
‘And I did not say anything. Nothing! I thought this is your wife, I am your friend, but you have chosen to believe her. You do not think I am an honourable man, but I am. So I left and did not see him again for many years. Then one day I met him again. He had come back to Morocco. He begged me to forgive him. I said I did. He said he had come home one day to the boat and found his wife in bed with his brother.’
‘Do you still see him?’
‘No, I have not seen him for years. But that is life . . .’
Mustapha’s ship was on a run down the West African coast; the next stop, at the weekend, would be Agadir, where Mustapha would see his wife and children again. We sat in the back of a café, drinking coffee and smoking, waiting for Aziz. The plan was that when Aziz showed up Mustapha would reple
nish his supply of hashish and then if I felt like it I was welcome to go with him to visit his boat. I could not wait. A proper ship in the port of Casablanca and a good conversation – sea stories no less! – and, if I felt like it, a shot of decent Moroccan hash: what pleasures.
We discussed dope. Mustapha had smoked it all his life. He never went anywhere without it, he said.
‘Look,’ he had said, as we swung along the road on the way to the café, withdrawing his right hand from his pocket. Stuck to the tip of his index finger was a tiny blip of dark resin.
It did not look appetising.
‘But don’t you worry about the damage that it can do?’
‘If you smoke it properly it is quite safe,’ he said. ‘You need the very best hashish, and you only smoke two joints a day. One after you have eaten, and one before you go to bed. And Aziz only sells the best. He is a big dealer, but he sells me a little because we are friends. We always meet in Casa. I am lucky to know him . . .’
I was not really very interested; every stoner will tell you his hash is the best, and his dealer is good, and he is lucky to know him, but I was polite. Oh really, jolly good, lucky you . . .
‘If you like you can buy some too.’
‘Oh, you’re very kind, but I don’t think I will. Perhaps you will let me try a little of yours . . .?’
‘Of course! It is up to you.’
We talked about the shipping business. Mustapha’s ship was a dry bulk carrier. I was very interested in the trade routes – cereals coming over the Atlantic from North America, being unloaded at various ports down towards the Gulf of Guinea, and being reloaded with . . .
Aziz appeared. Slightly overweight, with a yellow-olive skin, glasses and better clothes than Mustapha’s, he was sweating slightly, having hurried. Who would be a dealer? Poor fellow, really. It had obviously made him good money, but what a life. Always hurrying to a rendezvous. Being so careful with your phone. Having to make instant decisions about who to trust, and how far you could trust the trusted not to betray a confidence to someone who might talk carelessly; knowing that half the demands on your time and who knows how much of your friendships are based on desire for what you peddle, regardless of anything you are.
We were rapid and scrupulous in putting each other at ease. We shook hands. Aziz, laughing slightly shamefacedly, apologised for his breathlessness. I offered him a drink, he gratefully accepted a mint tea, and he told me as much as he could about his life. He worked from his car. He never used a phone. He only dealt to a small circle of people he knew very well, and he did not get involved in this sort of thing, small deals, because it was not worth it. But then he and Mustapha went back a long way. The two old friends were very pleased to see each other, and I leaned out of their conversation, politely, as they worked out their exchange.
‘How much do you want?’ Aziz asked, after a minute.
‘Oh, nothing. Don’t worry about me. Thank you, though! It’s a kind offer . . .’
‘The thing is,’ Mustapha said, reluctantly, ‘I am going to buy 800 dirhams’ worth. It is pollen, the very best there is, and it really is expensive, but Aziz gives me a very good deal. Do you want 400 dirhams?’
‘No, really, you are very kind, but that’s too much.’
I was curious. Pollen. I had heard about it, I thought. Such a lovely word. And what would the effect be? A sort of hashish equivalent of Bollinger, I imagined.
‘A little, 100 dirhams would be great – but I don’t want to carry a lot with me.’
The package passed from Aziz to Mustapha very quickly. It was about the size of a box of cigarettes, but more bulked out, wrapped tight in brown sticky tape.
‘May I see?’
We were sitting at the back of the café and no one was paying us any attention, except the waiter, and Aziz was keeping an eye on him. We had all done this before. The package was in my hands without anyone suspecting anything.
It was soft, under pressure, then hard. I sniffed it, but the wrapping was extremely tight. I gave it back to Mustapha.
‘The thing is,’ Mustapha said, and I could see it pained him, ‘Aziz . . .’
‘I can’t divide this any smaller,’ said Aziz, surreptitiously checking the time on his phone.
‘If you took half . . .’
‘OK,’ I said, trying not to sound weary, ‘I’ll take half.’
We worked it out very quickly after that.
It was not complicated. There was a guy who owed Mustapha money. We had to go and get it off him. Luckily I had some euros: Mustapha could get a very good exchange rate on them. If I paid the whole 800 dirhams now, and let Mustapha change some euros for me, Aziz could be on his way, Mustapha could give me the 400 dirhams, and, thanks to the exchange rate, we would both make a little extra on the euros, reducing the price we paid for the pollen. We headed off as quickly as possible, swinging by my hotel to pick up the euros, and some more dirhams (I had only come out with 400) and nipped into another café to do the exchange. Mustapha wrote down his name, Mustapha Lotfi, and the quay number of the ship – I was welcome to come with him now, of course, but I was quite happy to go down later. I was tired, the afternoon was hot, and it was time for a Casablanca siesta; best taken, I thought, on my bed, under my open shutters, admiring the blue picture postcard shadow thrown by a tall palm onto the honey-yellow wall opposite, with a nice – indeed, superlative – spliff, and ruminations on Edith Piaf. Aziz, sweetly, gave me a token of appreciation.
‘This is a present for you, you understand,’ he said. A corner of delicious-smelling hash, light butter-gold with a darker crust.
‘Thank you, Aziz! That’s really, really kind. Would you like another coffee?’
‘No, thank you, I really must go – I am late.’
‘Of course. And how would I find you, if I am ever in Casa again? Phone?’
‘Ah, I do not give out my phone – the police,’ he said, pointing to the sky.
‘Ah, yes. Sorry . . .’
‘Through Mustapha,’ he said.
‘Through me,’ Mustapha confirmed.
It would be easier, we decided, if Mustapha came to my hotel at seven. There was no hurry. I had the pollen, after all. We parted in a flurry as Casablanca’s siesta hour began to melt into a threshing, gilded coil of rush-hour traffic. There was a bus pulling into a stop, a little taxi trying to get out of the stream of vehicles to pick up Aziz; I was going one way and Mustapha another. It was a job just to shake hands properly and not be run over.
‘Look,’ he said suddenly, quietly.
I looked. There was his finger again, with the tiny blip of hash on the end of it.
‘That’s class, eh?’
I was not sure when the dream began to fade, but now I see it again. I see myself hurrying back to the hotel, trying not to hurry. And not opening the package, because it would not be right: Mustapha ought to do the division. And starting to smile, and being filled with comical dread at the same time. And being tossed and tumbled in a wild double current: calm certainty in half my brain; rampaging incredulity in the other half. And then knowing, almost in the instant the door to my room shut behind me, knowing absolutely, and howling. The expletives would not form properly because my smile kept getting in the way. The fury would not ignite fully, because I could not – it was more physical than mental – bring myself to count right up to the number of dirhams and euros, converted into pounds, that I had spent and lent. Every time I came close to the total something would snap and I would find myself trying to force a fist into my mouth.
And then there was the package. I could decide it was pollen, break in and smoke a bit, just to prove it. I could wait for Mustapha. He would not come at seven, but of course I would wait for him anyway, on general principle.
‘But it’s beautiful!’ I kept crying out. ‘They were just – beautiful! Con artists? Con maestros.’
In the end I unwrapped a few turns of brown sticky tape, sniffed it and sneezed: snuff.
That was
not quite the end of Casablanca. My bag now contained an additional £300 worth of snuff, and very little money. Thanks to Mustapha and Aziz, I entered my room an idiot, but I left it resolved to become a Berber. In the mighty market that is Morocco, there is no higher compliment a Moroccan can pay your bargaining skills than to call you a Berber. I still went out that night (as far as the disco in the basement of the hotel) but I drank beer from a corner shop, and the next day I took the bottles back and claimed a couple of dirhams for the recycling. I then walked to the railway station, Casa Voyageurs, via the kebab-seller, who sweetly accepted the 15 dirhams in a way that made it clear I could have another kebab any time. At the station I thought hard about how much I actually needed an omelette before the train arrived. My spirits soared, when it did, for I was going to Marrakech, on a lovely hot spring afternoon. There were swallows again, and, apart from the money, I was all set for my week off. A friend from Wales was coming out to meet me, and we planned to travel together, down into the desert, to greet the main force of the migrating swallows as they came north.
I watched the compass needle spin as we left Casablanca, heading south. There were swallows over the train and I tried to work out which way they were going. Some were indeed heading north-east, as I hoped and calculated they would be, streaking towards the Straits of Gibraltar, but others appeared to be flying aimlessly around the outskirts of town.
It is a beautiful train journey, but still I was a little impatient with it, because I longed to get there, to Marrakech, the town which named the country, and which keeps a part of the heart of everyone who visits her.
Just as we were coming in, and I could finally see the great mountains in their snow, I called my friend to tell him that I was nearly there, and that his reception was assured. He is a teacher like most British teachers, who works too hard for too little. This was to be his Easter holiday and he was looking forward to it tremendously, as I was. At last! Someone to really share it all. He answered the phone and gently gave me dreadful news.
A Single Swallow Page 23