The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society (19 page)

The trick it seemed was to get to the consulate early. So we took the bus to Tangier, stayed the night in a cheap hotel in the Medina, and got up as the first glimmer of dawn was spreading across the skyline. I checked my watch as we rounded the corner to the consulate building. It was 5.30 am – and thirty people were already settled into a line ahead of us.

A notice on the wall announced that the visa section would open at 9.30 am and close at noon. By the time nine o’clock came the queue stretched round the corner and
down the road – maybe three hundred people or more. All of them were clutching various documents that they hoped might give them an edge; letters of recommendation,
longexpired
visas belonging to other members of their families, photocopied bank statements, and the exorbitantly priced passports that the Moroccan government allows people to buy but which gain them entry only to two countries, Mauritania and Algeria. What you need to travel on a wider scale is a visa – a simple piece of paper that is denied to almost all who apply.

The window from which this precious document was to be issued was mounted low in the wall so that applicants were forced to adopt a humiliating half-crouching
position
to talk to the official on the other side. As 9.00 am moved towards 9.30, most of those waiting slipped off in relays for coffee, so the queue was constantly waxing and waning. Then 9.30 came and went and a murmur of impatience rippled through the crowd. At 9.45, the hatch opened and the business of the day commenced. It took a long time to deal with each applicant, often accompanied by shouting and impassioned gesticulation; and, to cut a long story short, by the time twelve o’clock came, and we had been queuing for six hours, there were still thirty people ahead of us. We hadn’t moved forward one single place. Mourad and Aziz kept disappearing to count the numbers, but it was clear that there wasn´t any possibility of being seen.

There were a number of policemen keeping order of a sort, and finally Mourad had a word with one of them. ‘Of course you’re still in the same place,’ he said, looking at Mourad as if he were some sort of half-wit. ‘You have to pay if you want to be attended to.’

So the three of us left the line and shouldered our way into the tumultous gaggle that now surrounded the nearest hatch. It was soon obvious who the policeman taking the money was. Mourad spoke to him directly and I slipped him the suggested amount: two hundred dirhams – £16. Immediately we were ushered through the crowd; not to the service window, but to a small door beside it where I alone was told to enter and take a seat.

The man at the desk cut short his half-hearted
attendance
to the poor man crouching on the other side of the hatch and turned towards me. ‘Yes?’ he demanded gruffly in Spanish. ‘What do you want?’ I could tell that two hundred dirhams wasn’t going to buy us much time so I hurriedly explained that I was standing as a sponsor for my two friends who wished to visit me at my home in Spain. Of course the thing was as transparent as can be; nobody could doubt that as soon as Mourad and Aziz entered Spain then they´d be off and into the vastness of Europe, where they would most likely stay.

‘I see,’ he said. ‘Your friends must return to their home town and there procure the following documents.’ And he proceeded to enumerate a whole heap of improbable papers. A Certificate of Absence of Criminality from the police, a Leave of Absence signed by their employer, a Social Security bond – the list went on and on,
covering
documents that possibly did not exist and, if they did, were entirely beyond my friends’ grasp. For a start, neither Mourad nor Aziz had an employer to sign them off. ‘There will be no problem,’ the official assured me. ‘Once your friends have assembled all these documents, they just bring them to me and I will authorise their visas. Okay?’

That ‘Okay’ had a finality to it: we had wasted our two hundred dirhams. Mourad and Aziz immediately
recognised
the brush-off and were crestfallen, but there seemed no use hanging around and insisting. We walked slowly along the edge of the port, talking of possible stratagems. I remembered once, while queuing on the quayside for a boat to Algeciras, noticing a dishevelled looking youth covered in axle grease and engine oil dodging between the cars on the quayside. As I watched, and beneath the very noses of the Port Police, he crawled underneath a truck and started exploring for handholds and footholds. The police ignored him until the truck was due to move onto the ship; then they ordered him out. He came out and they gave him a half-hearted cuffing. He lurched about, slack-jawed, like a drunk, intoxicated by his desperation and by the constant dashing of his hopes – and then crept beneath the next truck. I hoped that Mourad and Aziz would never be driven to such extremes, though it was easy to see how
obsessive
the need to travel can become when it is so flatly and unjustly denied.

As we were talking, a couple of youths approached us. They were deep black and so shabbily dressed that they stood out. There was a haunted look in their eyes and they addressed me hesitantly in very shaky English. They had travelled, they told me, all the way from Liberia, where a civil war was raging. Their families had been slaughtered and they could not return for fear of their lives. They were utterly destitute. They believed that, if they could just get to Europe, they could find work and start to rebuild their lives, with enough to eat and freedom from terror. I was the only European in the crowd, so they had sought me out. Surely I could help them?

 I could do nothing. They walked off slowly, not
knowing
where to go or what to do. I can still recall the faces of those poor boys – neither of them would have been as much as twenty years old – wandering aimlessly among the lorries; the fear in those youthful eyes, the momentary light of hope, and the disappointment. I hate to think what became of them.

Mourad and Aziz stopped with me at the pier. We bade each other a fond farewell, swore vows of undying
friendship
and swapped all manner of addresses. Then I
shouldered
my baggage and walked apprehensively towards customs.

The bags of seed, gathered with such care and with present and future hopes riding upon them, suddenly made me profoundly nervous. Although I knew I was doing nothing illegal – as Carl had explained, there were no seed-exporting regulations in place between Morocco and Europe – there was guilt written all over me. I oozed paranoia and was already preparing for my arrest and trial. I was sure I wouldn’t get a fair hearing. The system in Morocco was such that officials in public employ –
policemen
, customs officials, administrative officers – were not paid well enough even to feed and clothe their families. Corruption was thus a necessary way of life. There seemed a strong likelihood that, carrying all the broom seeds, I might find myself thrown in jail, and would be obliged to buy my way out. I could probably afford the bribe, but even so it would be very disagreeable and inconvenient to find myself in the slammer, or indeed to risk the fruit of our recent labours.

At the customs control, I trembled and blushed,
stammered
when spoken to, looked nervously to left and right
and cast the odd distracted glance behind me in case I was being followed. The three uniformed customs officers stared at me knowingly as I approached the inspection… but did nothing; not even a poke in my bag. A short walk up the gangway and I was on my way back home to Spain.

Carl was thrilled by our haul, and listened with interest to my plans of starting a seed-collecting partnership with Mourad. This was precisely the sort of operation he wanted to support and, although Ana had some reservations about covering the entire expanse of northwest Europe in Cytisus
battandieri
, she too thought it right to shift the project to a local enterprise.

With the omens all in place, I entered into an erratic correspondence with Mourad. As neither of us had easy access to a phone, we wrote letters, which introduced a rather formal note to our relationship, Mourad using an elaborate literary English. It also showed us both up as appallingly inept entrepreneurs. One thing we agreed on, however, was that we would meet the following summer in Azrou and collect some seeds.

In the event we didn’t, because the winter before that Mourad took it into his head to smuggle himself into Europe. As proof that the worst-laid plans just occasionally work, he had hunkered down under the seat of his cousin Naïma’s van, covered himself in rugs and the sprawling legs of her children, and sailed serenely through customs. He’d done it. He’d reached Europe, the promised land. And his first thought, touchingly, was to visit me at El Valero, and take up my offers of hospitality. But, by some mischievous
twist of fate, he chose the one month that year that I was away, shearing in Sweden.

Ana was at home and recounted the brief visit as soon as I got back. Apparently Mourad had persuaded his cousin, who was on her way back to her home in France, to make a detour to our farm. Finding it almost impossible to work out the right road to our valley, they accosted the first foreigner they met in the street for directions. Luckily this was Sam Graves, a kind and gracious British expat who knew us very well, being the father of the agent who had originally sold us the farm. He was also the son of Robert Graves, which, had Mourad known, might have led to much literary discussion.

But the talk, it seems, was all about how to reach our farm: not an easy thing to explain. Poor Sam tried every means to get across the complicated directions, but to no avail, and in his typically generous manner ended up
taxiing
Mourad, his cousin and her husband, and their four children, along our rutted mountain track, even fording the river to the farm. At last they rounded our final bend and parked just below the stables. Mourad and his group emerged from the car and looked slowly round at the few traditional buildings and ramshackle outhouses that comprise our home. Nobody said a word, but each wore a slightly puzzled frown. The farm, as Mourad explained to me later, reminded them all of one thing: Morocco.

Still, the party made their way up towards the house and were greeted by Ana on the way. She had never met Mourad before and he stepped quickly towards her through the dust, anxious to effect the introduction, and to discover where I was. The news was a blow. It hadn’t occurred to him that I might be away. Ana invited him to stay until I
returned, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Not only would it have been a gross breach of etiquette to stay with Ana on her own, but I think he was also worried about incriminating her with the police.

By the time I came back, Mourad had disappeared from his cousin’s home in Lyon and embarked on what sounded very much like a grand tour of Europe. It was typical of Mourad that he refused to limit himself to working behind the scenes in a restaurant kitchen or sweatshop, making discreet forays around the city under cover of night. Instead, as soon as he earned a bit of cash he embarked on the sort of travels that only the most avid literary tourist might contemplate: hopping trains and buses and popping into bookshops en route to read up on each new city’s attractions in a guidebook. Following up contacts he’d been given by friends in Azrou, and trusting that his outrageous luck would continue, he sallied over the border from France to Italy and on to Switzerland, where he had a hankering to see the Alps. Eventually it was in Switzerland, in the shadow of the mountains, that his luck faltered. He was caught dawdling near the border in broad daylight, thrown into jail for a fortnight and deported. ‘Ah, but Chris,’ he told me, his eyes dancing at the memory, ‘I would do it all again.’

Later on, I had my own reason for delay. Chloë was born the following year, so I tried to pare down foreign trips to a minimum and find work closer to home. Carl came up trumps with a large order for the extravagantly blossomed
Retama monospermum
which thrives on the Costa de la Luz, and some euphorbias, which grow even closer to home, on the hillside high at the head of the Trevélez River. But, even with local shearing jobs thrown in, it was tough trying to
make ends meet, and when autumn came I was left with no choice but to head for Sweden again for a month’s
shearing
. I remembered once asking a friend of Mourad – one of the lucky ones with a visa in his passport – how he could bring himself to leave his young family for a year at a time to work on construction sites in Germany. He shrugged: ‘But I’m Moroccan. For us there is not a choice.’ And yet my own short stints seemed hard enough to bear.