‘What for you come to fucking Morocco if you don’t like fucking Moroccan peoples?’ the Marrakechi demanded.
‘Listen,’ I said in French, ‘it’s not that, of course they like Moroccan people, you just haven’t understood – leave it, it’s not that they don’t like you, and they haven’t insulted . . .’
‘Tell you what, mate,’ cut in the no-nonsense friend, who spoke with a dust-dry London accent which reminded me powerfully of Danny, Withnail’s drug dealer, fixing the Marrakechi with a stare, ‘why don’t you just fuck off, yeah?’
‘What is it you do?’ I had asked the beautiful girl, but in the ensuing explosion from the Marrakechi her reply was lost.
‘Sorry – what?’
‘I teach communication and peace studies,’ she said, and burst into a peal of laughter so mischievous it was almost dirty.
‘You are joking.’
‘No!’
She asked what I was doing and I explained and asked what on earth she was doing in the Hotel Tazi and she said she was on holiday and had been here before with her estranged husband and her six-, nearly seven-year-old son; she said that it always delighted her. Her soft voice had an accent I could not place.
‘Where are you from?’
‘Rochdale.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Lancashire.’
I almost said ‘Where’s that?’ but something happened in my head and so instead with my heart leaping I said, ‘My God, I’m completely in love with you and it’s really obvious, isn’t it?’
She laughed and said, ‘Yes!’
(Afterwards she said she had thought I had said, ‘Would you like another beer from the bar?’)
Her name was Rebecca, and her friend was Rosie. The Marrakechi having pushed Rosie to a certain point, Rosie asked the hotel management to throw him out. This the management agreed to do, but then the Marrakechi wailed in supplication, and begged Rosie to ask the hotel management to let him off, which she did, and they did, and I bought him a beer, and we all finished friends, and two of our lives, at least, were changed.
Enchantment may seem to come like that, like a lightning strike, but of course it does not, normally, no more than lightning comes from a clear blue sky. For years I said I was a romantic, by which I meant that I believed in the powers of life, beauty and art to bring miracles out of everyday existence. By being available for joy, by living in hope and expectation of wonders, I trusted that wonders would come. And so they did. However, I was also – and no doubt am – a man as greedy, venal, lustful, wayward as a man can be, and in the name of this ‘romantic’ calling I had happily pursued whatever or whoever took my fancy, for years. When it went wrong, when a relationship broke down, I would tell myself that it was because I had not found my soul-mate, and that I must just be patient, and hope. While following swallows it was impossible not to compare their endeavours with mine. What drove their journey, in the end, if not the desire to find a mate, and raise young? What drove mine? It has been said that the business of artistic production is a biological activity akin to the peacock spreading its tail. Was that my motive? Was the pursuit of the birds a pretext for a continuation of my search for the ‘romantic’ ideal over a vastly expanded territory?
Perhaps. Or perhaps I had outgrown a younger self, or perhaps the journey had wrought some fundamental change in me, or perhaps I had inadvertently been worshipping at an ancient shrine which retained some elemental power: whatever it was, it hit me now like a house falling down. There she was. The one. I have never been so certain of anything. Naturally, part of me thought I must be mad.
Two days later I drove west with my friend from Wales. Rebecca had gone to Casablanca: she would join us tomorrow. I was at the wheel of a rented wreck we had christened the Petit Voleur, a pre-scratched Ford, elegant as a bread-bin, battered as a skip, hired from no reputable firm, which pulled viciously to the right, with a slaughtered gearbox, which carried Casablanca plates and screamed ‘Stop me!’ to every policeman.
Beside me was Norddine, an acquaintance of Rebecca’s, a young Marrakechi, a walker, a musician and mountain guide, with a sitar between his knees; in the back were Rosie and my friend from Wales. In the boot, a pile of treasures belonging to the Two Princesses, les Deux Princesses, Rochdale girls of Pakistani descent, who were travelling with Rebecca. With their Punjabi, their great beauty and iron-hard bargaining, they brought first hope then despair to every trader whose wares attracted them. They bargained like pirates. We were carrying their haul from the souk, and now following the westering sun as it sank, casting straw-gold light over the ochre lands which led, in the end, to the sea.
We were pulled over by two unsmiling officers of the Gendarmerie Royale, grey-uniformed police. They asked for a demonstration of the brake lights, almost as though they knew they were not working. I was outraged, having hired the car only hours before. They summoned me to their vehicle.
‘The lights do not work. You must pay . . .’
‘Yes! I will!’
‘What?’
‘I am more than happy to pay. I am absolutely furious – it’s incredibly dangerous not to have working brake lights.’
The officers were entirely wrong-footed by this. They began to smile.
‘How much is it?’
‘Where are you from?’
‘Wales . . .’
They nodded, and continued to smile.
‘How much is it?’
‘How much do you have?’
‘Well that is the problem. I spent it all hiring the car and paying for the petrol – I need to go to a cash point in Essaouira . . . I can’t believe the bastard who rented me this car!’
By now they were laughing with something like delight and shaking their heads that anyone could be so gulled.
‘So how much do you have?’
‘Fifteen dirhams!’
They took it as the most enormous joke, accepted the fifteen dirhams, still shaking their heads, and let us go. It was as though something was on our side.
Perhaps something was on our side, that weekend. We made the crest of the cliff above Essaouira just as the sun sank into the freezing Atlantic and the sea turned spray-white and blue. Essaouira’s winds bit us and we hurried into town, and huddled over coffee, and Norddine found us an apartment. Essaouira is defended by its winds. An ancient trading post, white-walled and ramparted by the Portuguese, it has a harbour, guarded by the Isles of Mogador, and a beach which stretches as far as you can see down to a castle slowly being eaten by waves. Were it not for its winds Essaouira would have been bought up long ago and Norddine’s find, a flat in the centre of town, with a balcony over the street, within earshot of the sea and a roof with a view of everything would have been owned by some distant millionaire and entirely unaffordable to us.
The next day we ran on the beach, throwing ourselves into the wind, and sitting on it, and my friend and I re-enacted the jinking runs of the Welsh winger, Shane Williams, who had scored for us the winning tries of the championship. We watched a man kite-surfing in the ferocious wind and my friend noticed that of the six camels available for hire on the beach, two at least were so camp that they had to be gay. And that night we feasted, when les Deux Princesses and Rebecca arrived, and we drank beer and whisky and argued about abstract things for pure pleasure, and told stories, and bargained for my hat.
‘There are only five beautiful girls in Rochdale,’ they said, laughing, ‘and you’ve got three of us here!’
Norddine, my friend and I felt appropriately blessed. My friend told the story of 2001, Space Odyssey and I felt I was watching it. Between stories we haggled for fun; we worked out the bride price of one of les Deux Princesses: a girl, by common consent, extraordinarily pretty.
‘A BMW X5 with tinted windows and a full tank of gas,’ she conceded.
Then Norddine told the story of an adventure in the High Atlas.
‘I went for a walk for three years: I walked the mountains and beyond the mounta
ins. I saw many things, I met many people, I learned many things in that time. One day I was walking in the mountains with my friend and my dogs. I have a bow – do you know archery? – a proper bow. You should see it. Anyway, we were far away from everywhere, somewhere very remote and very high up, and in these mountains there are apes. Normally my dogs are very good, they do what I tell them, but that day they chased some apes – I called them but they didn’t listen and they chased. So, we carried on going, and the dogs came back eventually. Then my friend said – look, up there, apes. And there were some apes high above us. The dogs barked at them and then there were more, on the left side, and more, on the right. We stopped, and turned around, and there were apes behind us. We were in a bowl in the hills, like a bull ring, and there were apes all around us now, hundreds of them, and they closed in. And my dogs, you should have seen them, they started to tremble, shaking all over, and pressing against my legs, and still the apes came closer, and they were barking and growling and banging on the ground. My friend said, “Hey, we’ve got to get out of here – they want to kill these dogs!” And the dogs knew it. They were shaking so much and whimpering, you know what, they pissed themselves in fear. My friend said, “Fuck this! Come on – if we don’t give them the dogs they’re going to kill us too!” But you know what, I had seen the leader of the apes. He was a little way back, and a little high up, and he was big, a big pale blonde ape. And I thought no, you’re not going to kill my dogs, so I took an arrow and I shot near the closest ape, but they still kept coming so I took some more arrows and I shot a few apes, each time getting closer to the leader. And when he saw this, something changed, and the apes stopped advancing, and a way opened behind us, and they let us all go . . .’
I did not disbelieve this but there was something strange about it, supplementary to it, as if Norddine’s story was a parable.
My head span with the mysteries and tricks of Morocco. The way an ashtray is just two pieces of clay which fit together – click! – smothering smoke. The way a key may be turned in a lock, round and round, snick, snick, snick – uselessly, until it is turned by someone who knows how to use it. Then the door opens. The way they have with a credit card and a pencil, shading the waxy paper foil the way a child traces a penny. The way signatures are smeared, blurred, made meaningless. The endless maze of SIM cards, changed phones, changed numbers – as if half of society has evolved in deliberate, willed obscurity, hiding its doings from the police state. The way a card reader can be fixed so that it takes twice, three times, four times the amount you keyed in, in seconds, humming like a saw.
‘My brother installs satellite dishes,’ someone said. ‘He has a satellite decoder. You can scroll through satellite feeds like tuning a television!’
‘Do you see things?’
‘You see amazing things . . .’
In the market place Bush and Bin Laden chase each other around a toy train track, grinning, never catching up.
‘He’s dead you know,’ says someone, seriously. ‘He was ill – he died two years ago.’
Norddine teaches me a password: Azamir. Azamir! you say, and doors open, miraculously. It is the Berber for Berber. You soon realise that Morocco is a nation containing a nation, the Berber people and culture follow the Atlas right across North Africa, from the Atlantic to Algiers. If you could speak their language you could move across borders, through unknown worlds, like a ghost.
‘Ha! The Welsh are the Berbers of Britain!’ I declare. ‘We are hill farmers too! Azamir!’
The house was like a lantern of winds that night; the gulls laughed and cackled and cried like spirits in the luminous moonlight – houaa! houaa! – and just before daybreak the muezzin called, loud and as if forlorn – Allah-u-akbar – Allahuuuakbar!
We went down to the port and the dockyard where fishing boats are still built. We were given a tour of the yard; they showed us the different woods that go into each boat: teak, and, in the crucial joint at the point of the keel, the piece that holds the whole boat together, iroko, from the plundered forests. We lolled on the dock and told sea stories. The wind had stopped, as if by some sorcery, the blue swells of the sea seemed to check themselves and the air was as still as held breath. After lunch I bargained for a silver ring for Rebecca and a strange cross for my friend, who is a mariner: a Berber compass, for finding your way in the desert.
Another of my teeth blew up. It went without any pain: there was just a crack in my head, from the upper left side of my jaw, and bits of molar fell out, leaving a good-sized hole. I rushed for my dental kit, but there seemed no call for it. I left part of myself in Essaouira.
In the evening I took scraps up to the roof for our two nesting gulls; it seems many Essaouira residents do this, as if making offerings to djinns. We went to a bar overlooking the ramparts where ancient Portuguese cannons still point out to sea, and drank, and danced. A strange, shifty boy talked to me about Essaouira. Did I know it was all run by a Jew? No, I said, I did not.
‘I used to be banned from here, but they let me in now, because I have changed,’ he said. Then he asked me for money. He did not seem to need it but I felt – in the flood of love and hope that embraced me, with these new friends, and my greatest friend, and this laughing, beautiful woman whom I felt I had always been looking for – as though I had no need of money either, and I gave him a note. My friend did not understand it.
‘But why would you do something like that? I don’t understand.’
He was offended by the waste.
‘Because if he wants something so badly it doesn’t hurt me to give it.’
It was not the first thing I had given away, but it was the beginning of a flood of giving, a kind of divesting, which came on me and would not stop. As we were leaving the bar’s manager caught me hiding money under the ashtray.
‘But why?’ he asked.
‘Because I used to collect ashtrays, once, in a club.’
‘Would you like a job here?’
‘Yes!’
‘What can you do?’
‘I’m a barman.’
‘OK,’ he said, after a short pause. ‘Come back one day.’
Norddine and I prepared a feast as if we were catering for a wedding. Later we went up to the roof and sat with the guardian of the house. I had a piece of green glass which I had picked up on the beach.
‘What is this?’ asked the guardian, turning it over in his palm.
‘I found it on the beach.’
‘Yes, but what is it?’
He ran his fingers across its edges; some rounded and sea-smoothed, some still sharper than razors. Its shape reminded me of a country on a map.
‘It’s . . . Algeria!’ I cried.
He laughed. ‘This,’ he said, turning it over again and then dismissively tossing it on the table, ‘this? This is life . . .’
In the morning my friend and I bade farewell to Norddine – I gave him my precious head-torch – and to Rosie, les Deux Princesses and Rebecca. The girls were going back to Rochdale and London – half-term was ending for them – and we were going to do a great circle, south, first, to look for swallows coming in from the desert, then north again, to Tangier, the Straits and Spain. We pointed the Petit Voleur at the Anti Atlas and drove.
We did not travel well together. I was over-excited. My friend became very quiet. Perhaps I had been on the road too long to share it reasonably. We were together but it was as though we saw different worlds. I have nothing but strange memories and questions from those days. I am only half-sure of the memories: perhaps my friend could confirm them but he will not; it will be years before we reminisce about Morocco, if we ever do.
Did we really go down to that strange beach, in pewter sea-light, and help the men push their fishing boat through sand like a crust of clay, and swim, and imagine we might live there? What was the name of the boy with dreadlocks whom we ate with in Agadir at the fish market, where we drank surreptitiously with the off-duty policeman? Where were those orange groves wher
e we stopped to do nothing, and all the birds singing? Why did we buy carpets in Taroudannt? Where I gave away my hat, my beautiful, treasured, road-battered hat, to the old bald man on the bicycle. And then we met Brahim, a guide, a trader, a clever and warm but somewhat mysterious man, and read that cutting he gave us, too, written by an American – was it really from the New York Times? Did the writer not say that through Brahim he had received a warning about a terrorist attack on America? Why did Brahim show us that? What was he trying to say? Did he think we were messengers?
I split my head open, playing hopscotch on black and white tiles, and my friend bandaged it. Was I concussed, in the following days? Would that explain the strangeness?
Brahim took us on a tour, a long, wonderful drive through the Middle Atlas, past the king’s gold mines, all the way down to the desert. We stopped in the darkness, in the sand, to meet Ahmed, a man of infinite gentleness, and two camels. We rode, perched on our camels, south-east, through the dark dunes. And what were those shapes that shadowed us? Jackals? Djinns? Mujahadeen?
We counted meteorites that night, as we talked and argued and cried, under a sky that seemed to burn and pulse with stars like flecks of fire. I went out, later, while my friend slept, with my camel, which refused to carry me to the top of the dune. I saw the moonrise over Algeria, just after dawn, huge and perfectly round, like a ghost, like the sun’s dead twin.
Out there, beyond the encampment, there was no way to judge distance, height or depth. With nothing to fasten on, the eye assigns uncertain values to the landscape – that is far, this is near, everything in between is a speculation. There are tracks on some of the dunes – fennec foxes, gerbils – their marks the only tiny traces of life between the sand and the high, bare sky. Under our cloudscapes, we of the north live in a narrow strip which allows us to scale the earth according to our own proportions. A man is so high, a tree is higher, then a building, then a hill. But in the desert there is no such relativity; here you are confronted by space the eye cannot measure and the mind cannot calculate. To climb to the top of a mountain in Britain is to be exalted, as the land spreads below you for your contemplation. But to gain a vantage point in the desert is to be confronted with the daunting exaltation of untamed space, to be further diminished. Your sense of self shimmers at the sight of the dune sea. The tenets with which you armour yourself against existence seem vain illusions against the desert’s beauty and indifference: you are a tiny, tiny, temporary thing, fragile and vulnerable as a bird. To stand in the dunes, a speck on the sand, is perhaps something like finding yourself in the water, mid-ocean, beyond the sight of ships and shores. To find my way back, not trusting my tracks in the sand, I left one shoe, then another, as markers on top of high dunes.
A Single Swallow Page 25