Tangier (8 page)

'I think we should stop eating these soggy crisps.' Katie suggested.

'Angus must pour the drink back into the bottle as a symbol of solidarity,' said Hugh who, having tried French and Spanish unsuccessfully on the bemused senior
djibli
, was sensibly admiring the two live hens which had armed with the Moroccans and now lay bound among the bottles.

'I think courtesy will be adequately expressed by our looking at our watches and remarking sympathetically how far the sun still has to fall,' I said. This I did, but not before Katie asked me: 'Isn't your little boy too young to observe Ramadan anyway?'

In the kitchen I explained to her that while at an uncertain thirteen Niñ was not, and though there is no specific age at which one must begin the fast, he had eaten heartily during daylight hours a few days previously. 'I think he's observing it today as much for Dad's benefit as for Allah's,' I said. 'And I imagine he won't ask me for a cigarette the moment the gun booms either.'

Though the English couple and myself were no longer in the flat when the official signal to break abstinence echoed dully through the city that night the hypothesis proved correct. During my return visit to the hills, and with Ramadan ended, the boy would surreptitiously request a cigarette before leaving the hut. Lectures on health hazards sound hollow to a simple Moroccan, never mind coming from a heavy-smoking
Nesrani
. On our overland march to his village Niñ was to make it clear that he was nervous of any witness. Tonight in Tangier, he was scared only of his Dad. In fact I had received muttered instructions that he would not be smoking within minutes of their entering the flat, and had replied with a Moghrebi word and a wry look which, together, expressed: 'You don't say!'

The night was only beginning. Hugh, the girl and I had planned to eat out; then go to the Koutoubia night club. It was the first day of their brief tour of Morocco. I had no idea hose to make
harira
. The soup would be the first thought of my Moroccan guests the minute the earth's rotation permitted, the Governor of Tangier to telephone the artillery battery the order to fire its blank shell. Whether his decision was determined traditionally at the moment when a thread of white cotton became indistinguishable from a thread of black, or by Greenwich and a wristwatch, was clearly only of academic interest to our situation. I gave Niñ the spare door key; and bought the pathetically patient live chickens.

Katie, Hugh and I went out to eat The gun fired in the middle of a drab omelette. Katie poured wine into my glass, playfully nodding sanction. 'Now they'll have found a restaurant with - what's the soup called?'

'
Harira
,'
I said. 'And a bloody sight better and cheaper than this.' It was a measure perhaps of the cannon's power to relax that I spoke in full consciousness of being Hugh and Katie's guest for our meal.

The Koutoubia's floor cum strip show with highly exotic hostesses twining themselves about one's legs and those of bar stools like hungry cats with a passion for non-alcoholic Syrup of menthe priced as tumblers of green chartreuse lived up to its reputation. Sadly, no girl, no dance, no musical number appeared to be Moroccan. 'Where are we?' I asked Hugh. In 1962
I was
still young enough for drink to produce cynicism in me. The Koutoubia Palace does after all fulfil the tourists' legitimate expectation of dramatic girls and music - if imported from countries several thousand miles east of Morocco.' Tangier.' said Hugh, and produced a freshly stamped passport to prove it. 'Less than a hundred yards from your flat,' added Katie. There was nothing drunken in my falling off my barstool: the nearest support was a superbly modelled brown leg under a black net stocking, It was calculated sensual curiosity. 'Beirut,' the girl said in American when I asked her in French where she came from, 'That's a long way from here,' I said. 'Your little boy and his father should be back at the flat,' put in Katie. Perhaps her psychology wasn't deep. But then Ruth Sillitoe (whose is) had adopted similar feminine oblique
ness in respect of Niñ (laughing: 'So that's why you came to Tangier!' Alan healthily gave him a cigar). I smiled at Katie long and kindly.

'Hugh!' I asked.

'Whatss?' said Hugh, who was occupied with a hostess quite as exotic as mine.

'Hugh, isn't there a technical thing called "alcoholic dehydration"?'

'Dunno,' said Hugh.

'Hugh!' said Katie. Not reprovingly. She had elected to encourage us both and spectate.

'Might we have a large jug of iced tap water?' I asked the barman, who moved in the pastel-lit wonderland of a low-wattage rainbow. I'd disentangled my fingers from the black net triangles of stocking, designed surely to lure and catch.

'Cowards.' Katie said to her escorts.

'There's probably a charge for being thrown out higher than for entry,' I suggested.

'Yes, there is,' Hugh said when we'd drunk several glasses of water each. 'After alcohol, say six pints of beer, the system demands innocuous fluids because - '

'Angus, may Hugh invite the girls back to your flat?' whispered Katie.

'By all means,' I said. One is expected to behave oddly during Ramadan. If the boy's father in his rustic
djellaba
,
staff
in hand and with muddy
sappat
on his feet, harmonized with myself and the simplicity of the flat, these startlingly expensive girls must, as it were, clash with more than the decor. I was suddenly sober. Happily the suggestion proved impracticable. Dejection touched Katie's face. It disappeared in exchange for a kiss.

We returned home: to that penthouse suite of a decaying six-storey building in which I was the sole inhabitant. It was true that Tangier's Lottery occupied, as it still does, the ground floor; and perhaps someone slept behind the imposing glass and wrought-iron doors, which were not my entrance. It was also true that ten years previously the ground site price of around £130 a square metre was the most expensive in the world, more than for a square metre of central Manhattan. The anomaly of the five empty storeys which separated that early flat from the Lottery, and my exclusive tenancy of one of the city's most prestigious buildings at two pounds a week in 1961, well demonstrates the economic slump into which Tangier declined between the ceding of the International Zone on 29 October 1956, some eight months after Morocco's Independence on 2 March 1956, and the tourist boom getting into its stride in the early seventies. Meanwhile this central building, and other similar ones, unlike Philip Larkin's prognostication for less secular but no less grandiose edifices in England, was not 'let . . . rent-free to rain and sheep'. More seriously, empty apartments were then seldom let at all to Moroccans. The rooftop pad seas let to me: a passing puff of wind. On the other hand the
bidonvilles
,
shanty towns of Moroccans attracted by Tangier's fantastic boom, had disappeared by the time of my first arrival in 1961.

Now Katie, Hugh and I took the alarming lift to the top of the empty building. Paul Bowles, the Sillitoes and other thinking people, preferred the stairs. The lift, the electrics of which had burned out at the first floor, was particularly unpredictable, Its cable was said to be knotted, string. If the
car
jammed between storeys three and four at 1.00 a.m. there was no danger. Its open cage construction admitted air. On the other hand the alarm bell was not connected, and Lorenzo the concierge was often away for a week. I also explained the hazard of power cuts to my guests.

'We risk it,' Katie decided.

'At least there are no graffiti,' said Hugh.

I told them, they would not find obscenities on walls anywhere in Morocco. This wasn't zealous erasure. It would simply not occur to a Moroccan to express himself pathetically. Very rarely Tangier boasts a political slogan. Even these tend towards poetry and enigma: 'The sons of the land languish in prison while the brigands inhabit the palaces'. Most often the
Tanjaouine
keep their political thoughts in, their heads. A Moroccan writer friend comforts himself with the mysterious phrase: 'The
lions have departed; only the dogs remain'. The metaphor can apply equally to king and government or to Christians of whom my friend disapproves. It always makes me uneasy because Morocco's last literal lion was shot outside Tangier by a dogged Englishman.

'Hush!' Katie  exclaimed dramatically as I inserted my door key. 'I hear snoring within!'

The flat, which was subsequently taken over by the writer William Burroughs, was peculiar in other respects besides its lack of curtains and the curious green continents of fungus growing on the walls. (Before painting the walls over Bill discovered a list of telephone numbers I'd pencilled on them, traced these as one can from Tangier's continental-type directory, and brooded upon their lack of common denominator, I sincerely hope this exercise didn't contribute towards the development of 'cut-up technique'.) Access to the bathroom and kitchen could be gained only through the single bedroom. The
salon
, for no other word expresses the dignity of the tiled, split-level room surrounded an area of French doors and cracked plate glass too vast even to consider curtaining, contained a leather sofa and two matching club armchairs. At eight pounds a month the eyrie was a melancholy paradise after my Ain Haiani house had literally collapsed, incidentally necessitating that Niñ and myself spent a week in an hotel of assignation, because he had no papers, and I wasn't abandoning him among the rubble. It was not ideal for simultaneously entertaining Moroccans and Europeans during Ramadan.

The two sleeping lumps disposed on sofa and armchairs were indistinguishable, for each was completely covered by a blanket. This fascinated me. Two years previously I'd been teaching the diametric extreme Of Arabs: expensive babies in England variously headed for Rugby and Gordonstoun whose addresses had been simply surname, Kuwait. They'd covered their heads, completely in sleep to the irritation of preparatory school matrons. Was it loneliness? Or defence against bad
djnoun
, evil spirits, which might well be more prevalent in a Christian environment? I'd wondered then; and wondered now.

But so far so good. I showed Katie to the bedroom. Hugh and I settled down in sleeping bags on the floor of the
salon
. It was about 2.00 a.m. Almost immediately Hugh fell asleep. Katie was presumably sleeping soundly in the bedroom. The excitement of the night club and oddity of the present situation combined to keep me awake. A match flared followed by the smell of burning
kif
,
a drug I'd not myself indulged in at this date, and which the boy didn't smoke either. There was no longer any doubt as to which lump was who. Smoking as well as eating and drinking is proscribed during the daylight hours of Ramadan. My senior Moroccan guest was, as it were smoking grass while the moon shone. But then he stood up with a grunt. I turned on my torch. Happily I recognized the Moghrebi word for 'piss'. But was my guest's request euphemism for a shit? Between ourselves and the lavatory were two warped, creaking doors - and a sleeping Katie. On the other hand nothing stood between us and the terrace except a well-oiled french window - and a host's conscience. Nor did the dilemma end there, Should the countryman in fact want to defecate, a subsequent absolute requirement would be water with which to wash his left hand. Katie must then be woken anyway, my Moroccan guest having been insulted unnecessarily. I gambled on the man's word. Idiotically repeating the word 'Piss?' I guided him apologetically to the terrace, gave him the torch, and slunk in to my sleeping bag. Within moments he was back beneath his blanket, comfortably snoring.

But now to the fragmented memories of the night club and my sense of being a scarcely adequate host was added the image, at once absurd as it struck me as pathetic, of the
djibli
squatting. as he would do to urinate, on a terrace on top of Tangier's Lottery Building lit up by the alternating red and green neon sign announcing the adjacent Tanger Hotel; a sign which for all its Arabic translation neither he nor his son
could read. 3.00 a.m. is said to be the nadir of a man's morale. At 3.00 a.m. my guest hawked noisily and got up from the sofa again, Deliberately I closed my eyes a moment. The concentration resulted in my having rapidly to turn my head from the probing torch; I was grinning too broadly for propriety. Equally involuntarily the grin shrank to a frown. The
djibala
were unlikely to get, or volunteer for, prostate operations. I got up and switched on the light: a ceiling-hung Spanish chandelier, an enormous weight of cut glass whirls produced brilliant illumination although only one of its ten bulbs was in commission.

My guest commenced to shake the blanket-hidden form of his son none too gently. I watched, intrigued. Moroccans changing, or endeavouring to change worlds, and Niñ was to go far, have a genius for sleep, additional even to the physiological languor accompanying puberty. Or so it had always appeared to a sentimental insomniac. Niñ had slept many fifteen-hour stretches, immovable. Now he was
awake arid up with alacrity.

'Angus -food,' he explained in the bastardized Moghrebi we used. 'Father and me.'

I was beyond incredulity. 3.15 a.m.! Then I remembered Ramadan. They must eat again before sunrise. Though I didn't know it at the time, having yet to make the trek, father had a bus journey followed by an eighteen-mile overland walk before him. I knocked on Katie's door. She woke to instant life and understanding as an SRN can. The road to kitchen and bathroom was open. And so two emergency trained
Nsara
and one natural insomniac sat sipping thick English tea in my
salon
while a chicken was slain and a
tajine
rapidly and unfamiliarly cooked by two Moroccan males before the critical rising of the sun.

It could not have been a more authentic introduction to Morocco for Hugh and Katie.

My curiosity about hemp is its precipitating instant, controlled psychosis. The gut is gently busied and flushed by syrup of figs. Hemp does the same for the mind. Popular fear of cannabis is probably as justified as recent recommendation of thalidomide. Only cannabis has been tranquillizing for thousands of years without physically deforming the briefest generation or mentally torturing the children's parents. Again modern tranquillizers are like chastity belts. They perform a function while inhibiting a more complex need. A natural cycle is rendered inert and repressed as surely as soda in a siphon.