The Road to McCarthy (8 page)

“You want to rent a house?”

The cheery voice comes from somewhere to my right and I spin round instinctively, even though I already have a lovely hotel room. Why the hell would I need a house?

“I know German man. He has perfect house for bar restaurant but he needs business partner. Or maybe he will rent house to you if I ask him.”

This is so absurd, so outlandish, such a parody of what I knew was bound to happen that I give a big smile. He smiles back, and that’s it. It’s all over. Five minutes, day one, and he has me. He is my guide, and I am his creature. He knows it. I know it. There’s no escaping now.

“I see you leave hotel.”

He’s been watching me! He’s seen me coming out! Targeted me, followed me. I should be outraged, but I’m not. What nerve, I’m thinking, what bottle.

“You must be very careful, my friend. In Tangier are many bad people will try to be your guide. You must not go with them. If you like I will show you.”

He’s very good at this.

“What is your name, my friend?”

It’s important I don’t tell him anything about myself, especially my name.

“Peter.”

Damn. Why did I do that?

“My name is Mohammed.”

He’s about thirty, with liquid doe-brown eyes, and looks like he’s been sleeping rough since Ramadan two years ago. I, on the other hand, have been munching croissants in a fancy hotel. The moral high ground is definitely his.

“Come with me. I show you casbah.”

I tell him I don’t want to go to the casbah, I must find somewhere else first. Suddenly, he’s all ears. Where? Where do I have to find? Which street? What people? Why? When? Who? How? Let me help! He’s moving round and round on the spot in an agitated manner, anxious for any snippet of information so he can pick up the scent and head off in pursuit. I’ll have to be careful here. I don’t want to play all my cards at once. Information is power. It might be better to keep him at arm’s length. Don’t get too familiar. Don’t tell him the name of the street.

“I’m looking for Rue des Postes.”

I can’t believe I said that. I really didn’t mean to. There’ll be no getting rid of him now. He’ll know all my business if I’m not careful. I’ll just have to make sure he clears off once he’s helped me find the street. There’s absolutely no need for him to know which house I’m going to, or whom I’m meeting.

“I am looking for two Irish men.”

“Irish? What is Irish?”

“Irish. You know, from Ireland. They are staying in a guest house. Pension? Small hotel? In Rue des Postes. Do you know it?”

I’m feeling foolish for giving so much away, but I don’t seem to be able to help it. It’s as if some kind of truth drug has been administered. I’ve only known him about a minute and a half, yet already Mohammed seems to have some kind of psychological hold over me, as if he knows what I’m thinking. Perhaps I’m not even saying these things out loud. Maybe he’s just reading my mind. It’s possible. He could be part Vulcan. Morocco’s exactly the sort of place aliens would make for. I haven’t been here long, but already it seems to have far more that would be of interest to intergalactic life forms than Roswell, say, or Wiltshire. It certainly seems to encourage extravagant thought processes.

“Rue des Postes,” he says. “Yes. I know this place.”

But he’s pausing. He looks unsure. He doesn’t know, does he? He’s just trying to humor me. He doesn’t bloody know!

“Where is it, Peter?”

See, told you.
He’s
asking
me
where it is. But I don’t know. That’s the whole point! That’s why I’m asking him. So why am I saying, “I think it must be quite near the port.”

His face lights up and he starts walking on the spot again.

“The port? This is good. Come. Come. This way.”

We plunge off down a side street, Mohammed leading the way. It’s too late to try and explain that this is just guesswork and that the person who may or may not be the head of the MacCarthy clan, and therefore a potential contender for the throne of Ireland if it should ever come up for grabs, though at the moment it has to be said that doesn’t seem likely—that this person had only mentioned in passing that it was no problem to meet me at the port, “because it’s not far at all.” He was probably just being polite, and anyway now that I’m here I can see that nowhere in Tangier is actually that far from the port. This nonexistent street could be virtually anywhere. No matter though. We’re off, and if not exactly running, walking very briskly. We pass the gloriously dilapidated Spanish-looking Théâtre Cervantes. Below us the bay gleams in the sunshine and I’m thinking it must be wonderful to live in a city where the water is always visible from the center like this. And then two men walk past, one in a fez, one in a little gold embroidered hat, and I stop thinking about the water and start thinking how lucky these guys are to come from a place where you can wear headgear like this without any sense of irony or fear of looking ridiculous. I don’t seem to be able to stick with any thought for very long at the moment. Perhaps my powers of concentration aren’t what they used to be.

“Maybe it is near here.”

He asks a man selling grilled fish, but he looks hostile and shakes his head, so we thread through the traffic to cross the narrow street and end up at one of the archways leading into the medina.

“You like to see casbah?”

No, I don’t want to see the bloody casbah, I want to see the MacCarthy
Bleedin’ Mór, Prince of feckin’ Desmond, and to be perfectly frank it’s looking less likely by the minute. On an impulse I pause in the middle of the street and ask a policeman or soldier or traffic warden or bus conductor, a man in a uniform anyway, but he shakes his head too, then takes a couple of assertive strides, blows a whistle and points at a lad on a moped. I’m hot and bothered now with all this charging about, and also conscious that I’m the only Western face on the street. We’ve wandered into a part of town with no carpet shops or MasterCard stickers. They clearly don’t cater to tourists round here, unless they’re tourists looking for hardware or electrical fittings or coffins who are prepared to pay cash.

After a few minutes I’ve had enough and decide to hail a taxi. Mohammed pushes past me and gets in first and the driver nods at the mention of the street name. Back up the hill we go, away from the port, obviously, past my hotel, naturally, past the spot where I met Mohammed a little while ago, inevitably, and then we pull over at a crossroads. We’re 100 yards from where we started, in the opposite direction from the way we walked. I pay the driver, who smiles and waves as he drives off. The street signs are all in Arabic.

“So which street is it?” “It is one of these.”

“But there are four streets here, Mohammed. Which one?” “Yes. One of these. Or very close to here. We find it now, Peter. Come.” And the whole thing happens again. This way. That way. Past orange stalls and fish stalls and a cybercafé, misdirected by two people who clearly haven’t heard of it but don’t want to disappoint us, until a man in a fabric shop sends us back to where we first got out of the taxi, and I notice a sign on the wall that I hadn’t seen before. And it’s in French. Perhaps someone stuck it up as we walked away from the taxi. rue des postes, it says. I point it out to Mohammed, who’s looking the other way.

“Yes,” he says. “Ah, yes. Des Postes. I am good guide, yes?”

In the cybercafé we ask if they know of a pension run by an Irish lady, which they don’t, or if they’ve seen two Irish men in here, which they haven’t. A man washing a car on the street also knows nothing. I feel like a secret policeman trying to find the Resistance among a patriotic and tightlipped
population. On the off-chance that I’ve remembered the number on the scrap of paper correctly we approach number twelve, a detached Spanish-style villa with colorful tile work, and ring the bell. After a couple of minutes a Moroccan woman in a veil comes to the door, denies all knowledge of pensions, Irishmen and anything else we want to know, and sends us packing. Mohammed shrugs and smiles.

“You like to drink mint tea? In Morocco, everyone drink mint tea.”

We go to a café, where I order mint tea and he orders Coke. Not to worry, he says, soon I will find my friends. In the meantime would I like to see the casbah? Would I like to visit the beach? Perhaps we go out of town, see the caves of Hercules? And all the time I’m feeling like a fool for letting him insinuate himself so easily, yet guilty for coming from an affluent country so that to him I’m impossibly wealthy, even though to me I’m not. And now he’s asking can I help him? After all, he found the street for me, he knew it was near here but he is poor, hasn’t showered for many days, needs fingernails cutting, needs scissors. Well, what can you say? Of course I’ll help. I give him twenty dirhams. He laughs disdainfully and asks for more. I give him another five. He winces, shrugs, smiles.

“I meet you tomorrow at ten, Peter, same place, by the cannons on Boulevard Pasteur?”

I disappear into the cushioned lounges and exquisite tiled courtyards of the hotel, knowing that the becloaked pantalooned flunky will bar Mohammed’s way if he should try to follow. Part of me feels bad for letting him attach himself and fleece me in this way, while the other part feels guilty for not giving the poor guy much more money.

One thing is certain though.

At ten tomorrow morning I’ll be as far from Boulevard Pasteur as I can get.

Later in the afternoon
, after a short hallucinatory nap, I try and get to the bottom of the mystery of the Rue des Postes. I’ve decided to confront the concierge with the fact that it does exist, because I’ve just been there. He is charming and personable, while sticking firmly to the alternative
reality that there is no such place. It stands to reason therefore that the alleged pension I am seeking cannot exist either. The clear implication is that I am either mistaken or mad. I can take my pick.

While we’ve been talking a man with an air of elegantly crumpled Frenchness has been sitting in a chair in the lobby. He’s got a small cell phone in his hand and is gazing at it fixedly as people do all over the world these days, as if in an act of worship. As I turn from the desk he catches my eye and smiles.

“Monsieur, there is something you should know.”

He explains that most streets have now been renamed in Arabic, though a few still have their old French names; and to complicate matters further some have two entirely different names, one in each language, that do not translate as each other. What a fantastic system. It’s as if, say, Oxford Street were also called the Meadow Where a Thousand Petals Bloom, only in another language with an entirely different alphabet. Many locals are oblivious to the French names, which is why nobody had heard of Rue des Postes. Shameful ignorance of such crucial local information is one of the joys of traveling alone. Like near-castration by Barbary ape, it’s the kind of meaningful interaction with local culture that makes it worth getting out of bed in the morning.

I do what I can to find the elusive Irishmen. I try and look for T. MacCarthy in the telephone book, but the hotel switchboard and the international phone-fax bureau at the top of the street both tell me that Tangier doesn’t have a telephone book. I’ve been here less than a day, but already this seems plausible. I walk to the tourist office to make enquiries, but it has a broken window and is closed, or possibly abandoned. I’m not sure what else to do. Perhaps I should try and start acting like a private detective. I put on a jacket and sit at the hotel bar looking as mysterious as I can manage. In the film I would slip the barman a bank note and he would give me the information. In real life, however, he ignores me.

Early in the evening I head down towards the medina in the most purposeful and preoccupied manner I can manage, and this time nobody bothers me. I stride briskly through the street traders in Grand Socco, their alarm clocks and belts and handbags laid out on the ground, and take a seat
outside a café. All around me there is shouting and laughter, hustlers selling crêpes and Islamic CDs and underwear, women carrying carpets and boxes of oranges. Half the people in the city are frantically busy doing things, while the other half are sitting at cafés watching them. Men keep coming into the café to greet and hug other men, join them for a quick mint tea, then move on. I feel as if I’m at the theater, separate from the action that’s unfolding before me. The actors all know precisely how the play fits together and understand the significance of everything, while I can only sit and observe the spectacle.

As I get up to leave, marveling at the exotic and impenetrable foreign-ness of it all, I notice that the café has filled up with rows of men staring impassively at a TV in the corner. Curious as to what is exerting such a powerful spell over them—the king perhaps, or a spiritual or military leader—I poke my head round the door. They are all watching an old episode of
Cheers
. The mood is serious, almost somber. Perhaps they’ve just heard that Coach is dead and have been overwhelmed by the hollow emptiness of life.

On the way back to the hotel I stop at a bakery and buy some kind of custardy-creamy-filled croissanty-type affair which I smuggle past the room service police and eat in my room for dinner. It’s rather strange. I can’t work out whether its savory lemony-cheesy flavor is intentional, or whether it’s just a sweet one that’s gone rancid in the heat. Never mind. The role of tension and uncertainty in gastronomy is frequently underrated, particularly late at night. I pour a decent-size tumbler of Soberano to chase the ambiguous pastry, and turn on the TV.

Hotels all over the world now have CNN the way they used to have trouser presses and Gideon Bibles. I’m hoping for a global political update, but instead I get the result of the University of Wisconsin football match, proving once again that CNN has no equal when it comes to providing world news from all over the United States. Over on BBC Bland International there’s some pleasure to be had from wondering whether the anchor or the viewer will lose the will to live first. This is a pale shadow of the BBC as we have known it, like turning up to see Manchester United and getting a schoolboy team instead. I’m halfway through the brandy now and getting
angry, unable to understand why they’re spending license payers’ money on hotel guests who have twenty other channels to watch, when they could be spending it on proper terrestrial TV programs about decking and water features instead. This is terrible. I’d rather watch a still photograph of the hotel lobby. Luckily they’re showing one on Channel 3. After a while it gets a bit predictable, like watching a repeat of a program you already saw repeated not long ago, so I drain my glass and settle for an early night. Wisconsin beat Notre Dame, by the way. Massacre, by the sound of it.