Andalus

by Jason Webster

  Lucía’s aunt sat between the two of us, still grasping our hands, the silver crucifix between her breasts quivering as her body trembled very slightly. Salud was using her free hand to clear her eyes, lines of watery black make-up streaming down her cheeks. I stared ahead at the empty walls and the blank shattered people pacing to and fro.

  ‘It was all going very well. They had all the maternity doctors there because there were no other cases to deal with over the weekend. Then – I don’t know, it’s a bit confusing, ¿sabes? Lucía just started bleeding. She haemorrhaged. The baby was very big, or something. I don’t understand. She was three months premature. It was too late for a caesarean – she’d already entered the birth canal. The doctors had to drag her out with forceps in order to save Lucía: they had to open her up to find out where the bleeding was in order to stop it.’

  She took her hand away from mine and pulled a white handkerchief from her sleeve. One of the threads from the lace border caught on her ring as she brought it to her face.

  ‘She bled a lot,’ she continued. ‘They had to give her eight bags of blood. They’re not even sure now if she’ll …’

  Salud and I looked at each other as she hesitated for a second, both wanting to say something to reassure her, to tell her Lucía would be all right. But it felt like tempting fate: Lucía was still too close to death for us to make blandly hopeful comments.

  ‘The baby was without oxygen for a long time. She was only just alive when she was finally born, but … it didn’t take her long to die. The doctors said it was better that way anyway: she would have been a vegetable, and her kidneys didn’t function properly. We just have to pray now for Lucía.’

  ‘Can we see her?’ Salud asked.

  ‘They only allow one visitor a day in intensive care. Her mother’s been staying here, sleeping in the waiting room. The nurses have been very good. No-one’s known a case like this before – not for forty-three years, I heard one doctor say. I think they’ve all been very sad over it.’

  Lucía’s father came out into the hall and walked towards us. Again the smile I had seen a few minutes earlier on his sister’s face. I felt ashamed of barely being able to control my own emotions – it was his granddaughter who had died and his daughter who was now critically ill.

  We spoke a little about the situation, and he repeated much of what Lucía’s aunt had already said. He seemed keen for us not to worry too much, soothing our anguish. It should have been us in that position, I thought, but the tragedy seemed to have brought out a deeply human side in him. In the haze of grief, I even remember us all laughing at some point at some light-hearted comment he made. He was tired, and was just heading off back home for a shower before returning to the hospital to spend another night.

  He put his arm around my shoulders as we walked towards the door.

  ‘Could I ask you a favour?’ he said.

  Back home I dialled a Casablanca number, a strange nervous current running through me as I pressed each button. With a click someone picked up the phone at the other end and there came the hissing sound of a long-distance call.

  ‘Halo?’

  ‘Zine,’ I said. ‘It’s me.’

  CASABLANCA

  ‘That’s where the bomb was,’ the taxi driver said as we jerked from side to side amid the late-night traffic. ‘Hotel Farah.’

  The building was cordoned off, policemen standing at the doorway now that the glass and body parts had been cleaned up, chipboard replacing the windows.

  ‘Looks better like this,’ he grinned.

  It was an ugly, modern hotel, only now it was famous for being the site of the bloodiest of the terrorist bombings that had taken place in the city when suicide squads had struck three days earlier. The war in Iraq had officially come to an end, but the violence continued. Now Morocco was the latest target for blind intolerance and hate.

  On the pavements, girls in jeans and revealing tops walked in pairs or with groups of male and female friends under the porticoes of the dusty Art Deco blocks that made up the city centre. A light cool breeze blew in off the Atlantic, the sounds of discos shouting in waves through my open window as salmon-pink street lights flashed overhead. From the port came the smell of fish on the turn, blending with the petrol fumes of the boys in new BMWs and Volkswagens cruising past us as they squeezed down the middle of the street, oblivious to the lines dividing one side from the other. There was little to differentiate this city from a Spanish town, or a city on the French Mediterranean: the buildings, the cars, the clothes, the heat, even the palm trees. It was all very familiar. The distinction came in small things: an extra layer of dust, perhaps; the occasional sight of men in traditional dress; a very slightly darker hue to the skin – but only when viewed as a whole: there were plenty of paler faces among the crowds; the slowness of the driving, not the usual squealing of tyres as the lights turned green; the sight of minarets pushing upwards from the modern city below. Casablanca was what Seville or Malaga might have been like had the Moors never been expelled from Spain. It was vibrant and fun, and now it was organizing itself to express its rejection of the suicide bombings: people sending text messages of solidarity to one another, setting up protest sit-ins, or demonstrations for the following weekend. The Hand of Fatima, which I had seen all over Spain and Portugal on my trip, usually on doors as an ancient Moorish charm to ward off the evil eye, was here being used as a symbol for the anti-terror movement.

  Zine had arranged for us to meet at a Spanish restaurant in the centre. It would be better that way, he said; inviting me to his uncle’s house could prove difficult. Outside, two security guards in black were standing at the door, preventing cars from parking on the stretch in front of the restaurant for fear of car-bombs. I’d already seen the same at a dozen hotels and ‘Western’ venues along the way. How quickly things changed, and how great the effect a small group of people creating fear could have.

  The back wall was covered with a giant screen showing footage from bullfights, with a backing track of Mexican pop music.

  Zine didn’t get up from his table when he saw me, simply waving with a guarded smile. We shook hands as I sat down. Normally we would probably have kissed one another on the cheeks. Time had changed things. I would have travelled earlier to see him but for the strong feeling I got in the weeks after the baby’s death that I would have been unwelcome. He needed to grieve on his own.

  ‘It’s good to see you,’ he said. His voice was heavy.

  He’d let his hair grow again – not quite as long as when I’d first met him on the farm, but the ringlets were beginning to cascade over the tops of his ears again.

  I put my hand on his arm. ‘I’m very sorry about what happened.’

  ‘Of course. It is very sad. But …’ He paused for a second. The waiter came over and we ordered some wine with anchovies in vinegar. A style of food originally taken to Spain by the Moors was now offered as a typically Spanish dish in Morocco.

  We talked a little about my trip over, about how hot it was for me, what I’d seen of the city. Chit-chat just to try to connect once again, but what I wanted to ask, the reason I was there, could not be ignored, blocking everything else from view.

  ‘How’s Lucía?’ he asked.

  I knew they talked often on the phone; he probably knew better than I what she had been going through, but I’d had the chance at least to see her. Only a couple of nights previously she’d broken down at a bar Salud and I had taken her to for dinner. The sight of her once-cheerful face collapsing in sobs on seeing a newborn baby with the family at the next table still played on my mind.

  ‘Sometimes I’m amazed at how well she seems to be getting on, then other times it shows,’ I said. ‘She still looks pale, especially in the evenings, but her parents have been with her most of the time, and she’s already beginning to get back into her theatre life: they’re planning a new show for the end of the summer, as you probably know. I think she’ll be well enough by then. It’s important for her.�
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  For Zine to return to Spain now was out of the question, but at no point talking to either of them over the previous months had I got the impression that Lucía might travel to Morocco to see him yet. I hadn’t asked why, but I had the sense that the relationship was in a state of flux, neither perhaps knowing for sure whether to carry on or finish it: the stress of what they’d been through could either bring them closer together or separate them for good.

  ‘How are you?’ I asked.

  He placed his elbows on the table, holding the weight of his head by the temples, lids drooping slightly over tired eyes.

  ‘I don’t think about it much,’ he said after a pause. ‘It seems hardly true. I start feeling guilty – about how I’m taken up with life here, not thinking about the baby. All I cared about was Lucía. Now I think I should have felt sadder about my daughter.’

  He stuck a toothpick in one end of a whitened anchovy on the plate then folded it, spiked it again at the other end and placed it in his mouth. In the semi-darkness of the restaurant it seemed his posture had changed since Spain – a roundness in the shoulders, his head jutting forwards slightly.

  ‘For a while I just wanted to get away. People always asking. Now they don’t – you just get on with things. But now you’re here and … This is the first time I’ve spoken about it for weeks. It makes me sad.’

  On the giant screen the programme had changed to a live Spanish football match being shown on local TV – Valencia were losing at home to Real Madrid. A bald, brown-skinned man with sticking-out front teeth had taken off his shirt after scoring and was running with his arms stretched out, pretending to glide like a bird.

  ‘But how long ago was it?’ Zine went on. ‘Two months? Seems like much, much longer. For a while there were all kinds of things I thought would be closed off to me once the baby came, even though I’m here and she’s – she was – there. Then you start thinking: I can go back and enjoy all those things again. But you don’t really feel like it, you don’t want to.’

  I poured him some more wine and he lit a cigarette.

  ‘It was a beautiful experience – the pregnancy, I remember that. Lucía says we could try again. But …’

  ‘Do you want to?’ He shrugged.

  ‘Have you spoken to her recently?’ I asked.

  ‘We call each other.’

  ‘Would it frighten you, going through it all again?’

  ‘It wouldn’t be the same.’

  The rest of the food came and we ate in silence. I ordered another bottle of wine. The intensity he had always had was still there, but some of the electricity that had seemed to flow constantly around him had dulled slightly. It was difficult to tell, though: perhaps my perception was obscured by the darkness, the noise, my own expectation that the experience must have changed him in some deep way. I’d been moved by it myself, visiting Lucía in hospital, then following her progress as she mended herself and started getting back into work. But sometimes people just carried on the same.

  ‘I want you to take something back to Lucía for me,’ he said as we finished eating. Putting his hand into a jacket pocket, he pulled out an object wrapped in brown tissue paper. ‘Here, I’ll show you.’

  He pulled the layers off and placed a little crafted ball of brass in my hand, its surface marked by tiny dents. At the top there was a little star-shaped button. From the feel of it, it was hollow, but it felt good in my hand: warm; something you wanted to handle and caress, perhaps absent-mindedly while thinking or talking to someone.

  ‘It’s an orange,’ he said without further explanation.

  I wrapped it again and put it carefully in my bag, puzzled, but with something of an idea of its meaning: an orange, an ancient Arabic symbol of love, the union of two souls. I would take it to Lucía as soon as I got back.

  ‘I’m working with my uncle now,’ he said. I knew this from our phone conversations. Before he’d given the impression he’d been running away from precisely this: his uncle’s little import and export business, and the hostility of his competitive elder cousins. A family where he felt a stranger: a reminder of the loss of his own parents.

  ‘How does it suit you?’ I asked.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘bad things never last a hundred years.’

  An ironic glint lit up his eyes for a second. It was the phrase Lucía had used the night they met in Valencia. We both sniggered, almost cautiously at first, but slowly building up until eventually we were both laughing out loud, the tension between us easing and slipping away like dead skin. I was pleased for him. Something, at least, was going right.

  ‘You old bastard,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ he asked with a smile.

  ‘All that effort to find you a bloody job on a farm.’

  ‘So? You were going that way anyway, no?’

  ‘Yes, but I’d planned on going alone.’

  ‘How can you travel around Moorish Spain without a Moor?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘It was fate. Otherwise you wouldn’t have found all those jewels you kept talking about. You needed me to help you see.’

  *

  We left the restaurant and caught a red ‘small-taxi’ to the Corniche, with its hotels, nightclubs and low white villas: a cross between Los Angeles and the hilltop Moorish villages of Andalusia we’d been driving around only six months before. Satellite dishes the size of bathtubs sat on every roof, like inert sunbathers trying to catch burning rays, while in the distance the gigantic modern mosque of Hassan II perched on the sea’s edge, the most westerly point of Islam. Its minaret was a thick square tower over two hundred metres high, the younger and larger brother of the Almohad minarets of the Kutubiyya in Marrakesh and La Giralda in Seville. The old lighthouse to its left whipped out beams of light above our heads, catching the milky haze blowing in off the ocean, while waves rippled onto the beach like cream. After the recent bombings, going dancing and drinking here felt something like a political statement.

  ‘And your hunt for Musa’s treasure?’ Zine asked with a smile. ‘You’ve found it all now? The secret jewels?’ Despite his grief, he still remembered the point of my journey, how all of this began.

  ‘I think there’s more to be discovered,’ I said. ‘But it may be increasingly hard to find.’

  There was something of a ghostly presence to Al-Andalus, I’d realized: a spirit which had entered Spain with the Moors and which perhaps had never left, disguising itself to remain safe from harm when the world had turned against it. It was easy to imagine that some kind of spell, as in the legend, had been cast over it as a form of protection. To say I had finally discovered its secrets felt almost irreverent, like claiming to have found the Philosopher’s Stone. Moorish Spain may have functioned as some kind of alchemist’s crucible on one level, yet as I had seen from the people I’d met on my journey, it could mean different things depending on who you were. My friend Pedro and Camilo had studied Arabic together, yet had come away with contrasting ideas about the Arab legacy; and neither of them would have much in common with Muhammad the convert in Granada. Perhaps only the prince came truly close to living in ‘Moorish Spain’: for him it was less about ideas and theories and more something he experienced every day.

  The secret legacy of Al-Andalus – Musa’s treasure – seemed to be disguised and half forgotten, yet it was a symbol of hope that something of another time had survived – a time when Muslims, Jews and Christians had shared the same ‘spiritual space’, in Burckhardt’s phrase. Difficult to perceive, perhaps, but a channel, a current still present nonetheless: something to tap into, like an underground river beneath a desert. Dig around and you might find traces of it. In some places, I suspected, it came close to the surface of its own accord. Ignored and unrecognized, however, my fear was that it might be gradually running dry, perhaps disappearing for good.

  In going out and looking for Musa’s treasure, I’d made a more personal discovery as well, though: a deeper understanding of Spain, perhaps, which, altho
ugh it could never remove the fact that I was a foreigner there, at least made the country less foreign to me. Concepts such as ‘home’, I was beginning to think, were perhaps less important than I’d imagined: Spain had once been home to Moors and Jews, yet they had been forced to convert or leave. Homes could be unstable places, and putting too much emphasis on finding one was probably a mistake. Things changed. One minute you might be settling down, a baby on the way, the next it was all gone.

  Tankers were lining up on the horizon to enter Casablanca port, like little bunches of glow-worms in the night. Despite the darkness and thick salty air, you sensed the openness and vastness of the ocean at your side here: inviting and forbidding; a barrier and a gateway to other worlds.

  Zine put his arm through mine as we walked along the pavement, past palm trees and pretty girls charged with sexual energy, black tresses flowing down their backs like velvet. It was so different from what I remembered of Egypt, where more and more women covered their hair in veils, arranging them in such a way that their golden earrings just poked out from underneath the wrapping. There I’d sensed a constant unease and anger: about the first war in the Gulf, about the Palestinians, about the West, about the overbearing power of the ruling party and the danger of extremists. Pseudo-Islamic conformity was imposed through fear. Here it still felt a world away from all of that, despite the bombing. Fundamentalists, with their bland uniform of square beard, short hair and humourless expressions, were far less in evidence. Nor did Moroccan men walk around with fake bruises on their foreheads from praying, like many Egyptians did as a kind of badge of holiness. You had to pinch yourself to remember the violence of just a few days before. There was so much joy of life here, something I’d always found and admired among the Spanish. And of course the city still had a Spanish name. For a moment it was hard to tell if the place felt like an Arab version of Spain, or if Spain were a European version of Morocco. Although, of course, once upon a time there hadn’t been such a distinction.