Tangier (17 page)

Amaras
are best visited in the early evening; and at night. The tents, or makeshift shelters, of hundreds of families create as many foci of Moroccan life, otherwise seldom seen. When darkness falls
mishmas
, charcoal cooking stoves, are fanned to a deep red glow, giving off acrid smoke, and lanterns flicker softly inside the diaphanous walls of tents. A child shits unconcernedly among the roots of a
tree and a fat gentleman reclines upon cushions while wives or daughters serve a sequence of dishes. The westerner stalks about, careful not to break an ankle on guy-ropes; drawn one way by the wandering melody of a flute, another by the smell of spiced, roasting meat. I always feel like an urchin at a Dickensian fair: an uneasy mixture of fascination, consciousness or impertinence, and straight, if unwarranted, fright.

A secret of participation is to stand three or four night hours among the tight throng encircling a group of
Aissawa
and let their music and savage bonfire batter all sense of self to extinction. As a change, sip mint tea and watch
Toqtoqa
music being performed in a canebrake café where perhaps two
djibala
have been dancing alternatively for forty-eight hours. Each dance is dedicated at its conclusion to a member of the audience, the barefooted boy dropping to his knees in front of his chosen spectator, who is sitting shoeless on the café matting. Apparent wealth is by no means the prime arbiter of choice, as the poorest Moroccan will hand over his coin irrespective of the whispered blandishments, sometimes dialogue, which are part of the ritual. I'm told by a friend who understands photography that my picture is fuzzy and the dancer very conscious of me because the telephoto, stopped wide for lousy light, was jumping in my hands. What the Londoner didn't know was that I was horribly conscious of the intrusion of the camera. Even five years previously the machine, and possibly operator, would have been smashed.

An important element in Tangier's community and economy are the shopkeepers from Tafraoute, 700 miles south of the city. These men do not come from Taroudant and the Sous river valley, but a man of the Ammeln tribe, who monopolize the trade, is known in Tangier as a
Soussi
.

The
Soussi
are to Tangier's grocery trade what Indians are to its electronics shops or Europeans to its restaurants. They have always principally served Europeans, and their shops are mostly located in the new town, often on the ground floor of apartment blocks. Groceries is really too loose a term. The shops are often tiny as the men themselves, but stock household consumer items from fruit and vegetables through floor-cloths and detergents to clothes-pegs and Chinese marmalade. Some have tobacco and liquor licences. Others go to town upon spontaneous whim with a single example of an electric razor or an armful of old books. Said, proprietor of my own local shop, suddenly became barricaded behind his counter with dozens of boxes of French sanitary towels. But the real proof of a
Soussi
's competence is his lifting a block of butter the size of a cow's head from his refrigerator and slicing off the weight you've asked for to the gramme.

Cash registers are unheard-of. It's difficult to know whether the scrupulously accurate scales, both a simple balance with weights and a finer measure with plate and needle-thin indicator, or the refrigerator, is the mechanical soul of a shop. The
Souassa
are also casual restaurateurs and instant picnic packers. A worker on a building site
or a newspaper boy dividing the day's profits between food and a late-night cinema will drop in for a sandwich made to order, and sometimes a soft drink. The refrigerator hums unceasingly, while a stack of loaves, a giant tin of tuna. and a bowl of stoned olives are permanently at the ready. The bread is of fixed price, but may be weighed two or three times as successive ingredients go into the sandwich, and its price is calculated accordingly,

Having no refrigerator, I exploit the one at the
bacal
,
appearing daily at five-thirty with a thermos flask to be filled with tonic water. Said always behaves as though this ritual moment is the most joyous highlight of his long day. Sometimes his enthusiasm disguises the fact that the boy has put only three bottles of tonic in the refrigerator, where the flask's capacity and my standing order are four. The warm substitute has tactfully to be discovered and rejected. One hot summer, before investing in the thermos I developed a passion for the local lemonade. It is called Super-8; presumably to be one up on 7-Up. Said approved this addiction, not least perhaps because I often forgot to return the bottles, the deposits upon which have a mysterious way of declining when empties are returned in bulk. It was he who accidentally set a precedent; I who insisted upon its being kept up. The Super-8 must be frozen until lemonade icebergs float visibly inside the bottle. Said took proudly to this tricky technology, declaring the result to be '
Super-Ocho-Extra
',
and subsequently simply. '
Extra
'.

The
bacals
of the
Souassa
are open from about six in the morning until eleven at night every day of the week. They are run dynastically, by a pair of brothers, a succession of cousins, or a son following his father. Said currently runs his
bacal
with a locally hired boy. The proprietors work their sixteen-hour day for perhaps twenty or thirty years, living in Tangier with extreme frugality, often sleeping beneath their counters, or in the store-room backing the shop. Proverbially they return each year to Tafraoute, and more particularly to the Ammeln valley for an annual holiday, marriage or family affairs, and ultimately to retire as persons of considerable consequence. They are Berbers. The geographical isolation of the Ammeln valley, lying in the Anti-Atlas, makes it as fast a stronghold of 'pure Berber' people as any in the country. The area is fertile, rich with almonds, olives and palms, and magnificently beautiful in its landscape of escarpment and strange pinnacles of rose, and dun-coloured rock. Its inhabitants find it unthinkable to leave for ever. The
Souassa
evolve workable dual personalities between their humble drudgery in Tangier and the quiet grandeur with which they live at home. Their dignity and charm remains constant. Said flying to Agadir in his best white
djellaba
is only an externally changed man.

Charm is equalled by trading acumen. The fortunes of the smaller shopkeepers are built upon hundreds of thousands of minuscule transactions with very cost-conscious customers, a tiny plastic bag of sea salt, a knot of esparto grass for scouring pans, one hundred grammes of sugar, three cigarettes, boiled sweets sold individually, a bunch of mint. The staples are fruit, vegetables, bread, cheese, butter, soft drinks, sugar and detergent. So are they of course in most societies. But there are times when it's useful to buy a packet of Tide the size of a box of Swan Vestas, or a single egg, without feeling self-conscious. The killings are made with imported products like Mr Heinz' lazy  varieties or Messrs Cadbury's colour photograph packaged biscuits. Killings are made too with contraband spirits; and among gullible short-stay Christians, whose killing doesn't count.

Sometimes a
Soussi
in Tangier makes the big time. This is the Case with Brahim, proprietor of La Fine Bouche, delicatessen extraordinary, six languages spoken, deliveries of complex orders virtually guaranteed motor-delivered within the hour, particularly to expatriate Christians. This is the ultimate extension of a
Soussi's
traditional service. Brahim has been able to extend his accumulated wealth and influence into all manner of businesses. Unfortunately for him, a nice man and smooth as the movies, Tangier has no equivalent of an elected mayor. A time was (before mine) when apparently one could ask simply for 'a bottle of the one-dollar scotch, please'; and get a different curiosity each time. Brahim revolutionized the trade by introducing a - well, clever - Moroccan lady assistant who could sum a casual customer at a glance and compute prices accordingly. The prices had an unnerving way of changing from hour to hour. His shop has now become a serve-yourself supermarket.

Besides being the grocer, a
Soussi
shopkeeper may be confidant, social counsellor and arbiter, guardian of door keys as more reliable than many concierges, and baby-sitter. You take your baby to him. He differs from his counterpart in Europe, the disappearing 'corner' or village shopkeeper, in an extraordinary respect. He does not gossip. This, I think, is because as a tribesman from nearly a thousand miles away, he is a natural buffer both between Moroccans, collectively his own people, and between Moroccans and the Europeans, whom historically it became his genius to exploit or serve. Southern Morocco is composed of entire villages dedicated to one specific trade. The
Souassa
are unique in that they have evolved a specific trade away from home, and right across the modern country. A
Soussi
doesn't merely look suddenly remote and sad when confronted by argument or contention in his shop; he
is
remote and sad. For just reasons one never hears him cursed. He is accepted as a wise and canny man. My widowed Spanish
portera
(and later the grim relation who replaced her) is as at home with Said as with her own people. The neurotic wife of the nee-
colon
Belgian dentist, while treating Said crisply as is only proper behaviour towards an
indigène
,
is not averse to leaving her pallid baby niece in his care while she and her husband go to the cinema. That they are at the cinema, or a Saint-Saens concert at the French lycée, is in no doubt: they leave precise information for a potential caller pinned to the door of their flat.

Said so nearly resembles a hobbit that I sometimes crane my neck over his counter in an attempt to see whether there is fur on his feet. A strange euphoria overtakes him. usually late at night while the boy sweeps out the shop and draws the rattling grilles across the windows. There is nothing about England he doesn't want to know, with prices his principal curiosity. It is difficult explaining these in terms of the comparative economies of a small industrial island and an agricultural country like Morocco. He is puzzled that lemons cost twelve times as much in England; a refrigerator a third of what one does in Tangier. Happily he has ceased to give me embarrassing handfuls of sweets.
This was an oddity of my first months in the flat. Like many dumb Englishmen I prefer to speak French with non-Frenchmen. We get along splendidly.

Said had one proud line of English which he would utter gleefully: 'Hallo, mister! How are you today?' I explained that, unlike
monsieur
and
señor
,
mister couldn't stand alone. One could say 'Mister Angus' — he found my surname unpronounceable — or one could say 'sir'. The point bothered Said profoundly. But sleep was to resolve it. Next morning I was greeted with a joyful cry: 'Hallo, Sir Angus! How are you today?'

Alas, before evening when I could take up an even more difficult linguistic point, Sir Angus was to be roundly humbled.

'Funny thing," remarked a visiting friend, who had a smattering of Arabic. "I just bought a packet of cigarettes in, your
bacal
and the
Soussi
asked me in grave confidence whether you'd ever been to school?'

'He must have asked "university" not "school",' I said coldly. The words are similar.

'No,' My visitor was triumphant, 'We were speaking French anyway. He thinks you can never have been to school because of your lousy Spanish!'

There was the year Said rashly entrusted his shop to an ambitious nephew.

'No
croissants
,' Meti announced. He had gone down to the shop swathed in the appropriated silk dressing-gown one of my sisters had made me, looking like an expensive Japanese doll.

'But they keep them for us without fail.'

'The police are there,' said Meti.

I sat up, awake,

'They've piled all the alcohol, cigarettes and chocolate on the pavement.' Meti said 'alcohol' with satisfied triumph; 'cigarettes and chocolate' regretfully.

Meti spent the morning craned over the terrace balustrade giving a running commentary. I stayed in bed with the sheet over my head wondering how to get rid of empty contraband gin bottles without government seals. They could scarcely be flushed down the lavatory.

'At least get dressed,' I begged the excited child.

'No,' said Meti.

My fears were unfounded. There was no ring on the doorbell. The scrupulous
Souassa
shopkeepers are loyal to their customers.

The importation of spirits is a state monopoly. Yet contraband, coming through the Spanish port of Ceuta, is more or less condoned as subsidizing the economy of the north. Much of the smuggled liquor and cigarettes find retail outlets in the shops of the
Souassa
.
The raid meant no more than that somewhere, or to someone. Said's nephew had skimped on the pay-off. Perhaps the drama was only, a bartering manoeuvre: the
bacal
's tobacco licence was withdrawn for two weeks. Whichever way, with the return of Said, the shop ceased even to stock the indigenous wines. My irritated Belgian neighbours had to send their maids all of two blocks to collect these from elsewhere. Said's nephew has not been entrusted with the shop since. Multi-lingual sons are at school in Tafraoute.

'Tangier is not Morocco.' One's heard the remark many times; made it often. A moment comes when the system screams to get out of a small town; be rid of familiar faces, wander where nobody knows one.

The country is fantastically rich in scenery: but also humanly primitive and elemental in a way that has become unfashionable to admire. Morocco is an extraordinarily complex garden. The explanation is geographical: the bastion of
the High Atlas, permanently snow-capped, more staggeringly beautiful than the Alps because of both the clarity of the air and the contrasts of its either side. The mountain range protectively cradles an
agricultural country from the Sahara, from phosphates, oil, foci of international strife. The Atlantic seaboard is thousands of square miles of citrus fruits, wild flowers, corn, watered by rivers gracious as any in France. 'Morocco is a cold country with a hot sun,' Marshal Lyautey said. A practical soldier, he neglected to add it has cedar forests finer than the proverb of Lebanon, waterfalls dramatic as Canada, streams secretively soft as the Cotswolds' Evenlode, a waking spring, and autumn delicate as Corot.