In Arabian Nights (16 page)

Now restored to its former glory, the Rif is an Art Deco jewel,
a reminder of the years when the kingdom was a French
Protectorate. I sat on a bench opposite, closed my eyes and let my
mind slip into the past. I could see the high-society limousines
rolling up, mink coats and scarlet lipstick, greased-back hair,
and flashbulbs popping on opening night.

The sound of young voices stirred me back to the present.

Five boys were sitting at the far end of the bench. They were
dressed in weatherworn clothes, all caked in mud. Their leader
said something fast. The others groped through their pockets
and pooled their funds: six marbles, four bottle tops, a painted
twig, a blunt penknife and a few coins. The money was
separated out. Three of the boys started arguing, shouting at one
another. Their argument broke into a scrap. One of the older
boys suddenly turned on the smallest. They fell into the dirt,
punches flying. The leader pulled them apart. He handed all the
coins to the youngest boy, whose shirt had been ripped in
the fight, and sent him off towards the cinema.

The others began playing marbles.

I asked why only one of them was going to the cinema. The
leader glanced up, his sienna eyes catching the light.

'We have the money for only one to see the matinee,
Monsieur,' he said. 'So we send Ahmed. We always send
Ahmed.'

'Why him?'

The leader flicked a marble into the dirt.

'Because Ahmed has the best memory,' he said.

The alchemist dies in pain, and frustration,
While the fool finds treasure in a ruin.

Saadi of Shiraz

SEÑOR BENITO RAISED A FORK OF SAUTÉED SWORDFISH TO HIS
lips and rolled his eyes with shame. We were seated on an
expansive terrace overlooking the strait, taking lunch at a
restaurant known for its fish. The other tables were empty,
almost as if the old collector had booked the entire place so that
we would be left undisturbed.

'The parties were decadent in the extreme,' he said. 'We
would dance through the night, until the sun was high, and we
would bathe in chilled champagne.'

'What brought you to Tangier in the first place?'

Benito sipped his Muscadet.

'A love affair,' he said.

The waiter approached, poured water, then wine, hovered
like a black and white butterfly, flitted away.

'Tangier is a city built on scandal,' he said, when the waiter
was out of earshot. 'Whatever anyone tells you to the contrary is
wrong. Everyone you see from the waiter there to the men selling
crabs down in the port . . . they are all involved.'

'Involved in what?'

'In the scandal, of course.'

I asked about the love affair.

The Italian hunched forward a little, tightening the cream
linen across his back.

'True love can touch the heart once in a lifetime,' he said.
'And it touched mine a long time ago in Milano. I met a young
sailor, tall, fair, perfect in every imaginable way, and in ways that
you would never imagine. He was posted to Tangier. I followed
him. We were like two halves of the same fruit. We spent every
moment together, never apart. We lived in a dream world. But
all dreams must come to an end.'

Señor Benito took a swig of white wine and rinsed it around
his mouth.

'What happened to the sailor?'

'He drowned.'

'Where?'

'Out there near the rocks.'

We both fell silent, ate our fish and strained to think of
happier times. I asked Benito why he had stayed in Morocco. He
thought carefully before answering.

'Because of the life,' he said, 'and because when I walk
through the streets it is as if I am strolling back in time, into the
world of Harun ar-Rachid.'

'The
Arabian Nights
?'

'Yes, those books, but in living form.'

Again, the waiter flitted over, cleared the plates and was gone.

Señor Benito shut his eyes for a moment, breathed in.

'After you have penetrated deep into a labyrinth,' he said, 'it's
hard to leave it, even when at last you know how to find the door.'

'Do you miss Europe?'

The Italian grinned.

'If I do, it's waiting across the strait, just over there.' He waved
a hand to the far end of the terrace. 'But Europe has nothing to
offer me now,' he said. 'It's lost its traditions, its values, its freedom.
Why would I want that when I have this feast for the
senses, this
Arabian Nights
?'

Señor Benito ordered espressos for us both. When they came,
he crushed a sugar cube with the end of a teaspoon and sprinkled
half the powder into his cup. I asked about his interest in
Richard Burton.

He downed the coffee in one gulp.

'When I was a child I longed to be an explorer,' he said. 'From
morning to night that was all I thought about. I drew little maps
and plans in notebooks that I made myself. I used to pretend my
sisters were from a dangerous cannibal tribe and I would charge
at them with a home-made sword. My mother said I was the
devil, but my father gave me a picture book about African
explorers. When I was a little older, he presented me with
First
Footsteps in East Africa.
I fell in love.'

'Why didn't you become an explorer?'

The collector stroked his hands over each other.

'All the great exploring had been done,' he said, 'and besides,
I think I am a little too soft inside.' He looked at me gently,
blushing. 'I am a romantic,' he said. 'And when I need a touch of
romance, I slip into Burton's world.'

'Have you read all seventeen volumes of the
Arabian Nights
?'

Benito's eyes widened. 'Of course I have,' he said. 'It was an
education in itself.'

'Do you have a favourite story?'

'They are all my favourites,' he replied. 'But a favourite
passage? It would have to be the "Terminal Essay". Make sure
you read it.'

The call to prayer rang out over the flat white roofs of Tangier,
the muezzin's voice sharp, before blurring into the background.
Señor Benito asked why I prized the
Arabian Nights
so highly. I
told him my father had once owned a copy, that it was the most
exquisite thing I had ever seen, that it smelled of cloves.

'One day a guest arrived at our home,' I said, 'and he left
clutching the volumes to his chest.'

'Did your father sell the books?'

'No, he presented them to the guest, for the man had admired
them.'

Señor Benito raised his grey eyebrows.

'What do the books mean to you?' he asked.

'They are a maze, a labyrinth . . . part of a dream.'

I told him about my fondness of stories, about the baton
passed down through our family, father to son.

'I am searching for the story in my heart,' I said.

Benito stood up in slow motion and led me to the edge of the
terrace. We watched the passenger ferries bridging Europe to
Africa. The Italian collector fastened the buttons of his cream
linen suit with care and pushed up the knot of his tie.

'I think you ought to go and meet Mrabet,' he said.

That evening Rachana telephoned me from Dar Khalifa. Her
voice sounded worn, as if in my absence the house was collapsing
around her. I asked if everything was all right.

'The chalk's come back,' she said. 'There are symbols all over
the front wall. This time they're in red.'

'Did the guardians wash it away?'

My wife took a deep breath. 'They are out there with Zohra,'
she said, 'all of them chatting very fast. They're begging for you
to come back.'

'Is that the only problem?'

Rachana groaned. 'No, there's another thing,' she said.

'The guardians?'

'No: Murad.'

'What about him?'

'He's run away,' she said.

Mohammed Mrabet was a friend and confidant of the American
writer Paul Bowles. They shared a passion for life, a love of
poetry, painting and music, and the same orientation. Together
they were the heart of the Tangier literary scene. Bowles transcribed
and then translated Mrabet's works and found them
publishers in the West. Mrabet gradually became famous and is
regarded as a Moroccan icon, an important literary figure in his
own right. The curious thing is that Mohammed Mrabet never
learned to read or write. He was illiterate, a man who had begun
as a simple fisherman, but whose life was powered by the need
to tell a tale. As an illiterate, he had depended on his ears and his
memory, facets that shaped him in the mould of the great storytellers
of the Moroccan past.

Like just about everyone else I met, I assumed Mrabet was
dead. His name is attached to another time and with the Tangier
salons in which Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Ginsberg
and Burroughs fraternized. So the news he was still alive and living
in a Tangier suburb filled me with great interest.

Señor Benito had given me the name of a small bookshop, Le
Colombe d'Or, and suggested I go and meet a young
Frenchman, Simon-Pierre, who worked there. I telephoned him
in advance. We met in the café next door to the bookshop, the
dense smoke of burning black tobacco heavy in the air. Simon-Pierre
pulled up a chair, ordered a
café noir
and lit a Gitanes. His
face had rugged features but was gentle, his skin flushed with a
touch of pink. He bore a striking resemblance to a painting I had
seen of the explorer Wilfred Thesiger as a young man.

I asked him about Mrabet. He sighed.

'His health is up and down,' he said. 'He smokes too
much.'

'Gauloises?'

'No,
kif
.'

'Is he still working?'

Simon-Pierre looked across the room, out towards the street.

'He's painting,' he said.

An hour later we were sitting in Mrabet's modest apartment
at the far end of Tangier. The walls were hung with abstract art,
conjured in many colours from the deepest reaches of the icon's
mind. Half of the main salon was given over to a kind of
platform, on which the work was done. There were paints
everywhere – gouache and watercolours, pigments packed in
bottles and cubes the size of dice. The brushes were scattered
about, some ready for use, others clogged with dry paint. On the
other side of the room, a long thin table ran along the wall. It was
heaped with papers and photographs, with children's toys and
boxes, with broken candles and bottles of ink.

There were no windows, but the room was not dark. The lack
of ventilation trapped the smoke from Mrabet's pipe, causing all
visitors to be overcome by mild delirium. Mrabet himself was
perched at the narrow end of the platform, his back pressed
against the wall, knees tucked up under his chin. The long
angular shaft of the pipe ran from between his bare toes up to his
lips. From time to time he poked the end in his mouth and
sucked.

On the far wall was pinned a large black-and-white photograph
of the storyteller as a young man. He was naked to the
waist, standing half-profile on the beach, his chest and shoulders
a mass of muscle, his mouth roaring with self-confidence. My
eyes left the picture and panned through the room, down to
where Mrabet was sitting, the pipe's fire crackling between his
feet. Time had been harsh. The great idol of Tangier had lost his
physique and his faculties were dimmed by decades of
kif
. He
sat, crouched, contemplating. I said I was an admirer of his
stories and of the tradition of oral folklore, that my grandfather
had lived and then died in Tangier.

Mrabet asked his name. I told him. He closed his eyes in an
extended blink.

'I remember him,' he said. 'Ikbal the Afghan. He lived on . . .'

'On rue de la Plage,' I said.

'Yes, I remember. He had brought a bodyguard from
Afghanistan. He had a huge white turban and a very old gun.
He never moved from the door. Not even when it was pouring
with rain.' The storyteller blinked again, swallowed hard and
opened his mouth just a crack. 'We were friends,' he said in a
sombre voice. 'It's because we were both from the mountains. He
was from the Hindu Kush, the roof of the world, and I come
from the Rif.'

I asked Mrabet about stories.

'In the Rif, stories are the blood that runs through our veins,'
he said: 'they are the air we breathe, the food we eat.'

He paused to draw at the pipe.

'Why did you leave the mountains for the sea?'

The old storyteller stared at his toes.

'To swim with the fish,' he said.

Simon-Pierre coaxed him to tell me a story, to perform. We sat
in awkward silence, Mrabet gazing at his feet. I felt like a
devotee waiting at his guru's deathbed, a little excited and a little
ashamed. I was desperate for a few words of wisdom, or a clue
how to proceed. The storyteller filled the pipe again, lit it and
took a long contemplative drag. He coughed and spewed a
mouthful of blood on to his painting rag. Like a tired old lion in
a circus ring, he was content just to sit motionless. He was quite
rightly ready to endure punishment rather than perform one last
time.

I explained I was following the Berber tradition, searching for
the story inside me, in my heart. Mrabet peered up. He put the
pipe on the floor. I noticed his eyes for the first time. We looked
at each other, pupils locking on. I thought I saw a sparkle in
there, a touch of magic. The old storyteller sat up tall. He
touched a thumb to his own chest.

'It's in there waiting,' he said.

'What is?'

'Your story.'

'Waiting for what?'

Mrabet closed his eyes.

'It's waiting for you to close your eyes and wake up.'

The next evening I arrived back at the Caliph's House. As usual,
Rachana had a long report, detailing the trials and tribulations
that had occurred in my absence.

'The chalk came again in the night,' she said. 'It's green now,
wilder than before, scrawled the entire length of the outside
wall. Zohra cut her hand this morning and claims it's because the
house is bleeding.'

'What about Murad?'

'I told you, he's run off.'

'To Marrakech?'

'No one knows.' She sighed deeply. 'And Osman. His wife has
left him for another man.'

'Poor Osman,' I said, remembering his wife, who was
regarded by all as the prettiest woman in the
bidonville
.
Zohra never stopped ranting on jealously about her fine
looks.