Tangier (18 page)

I glimpsed all corners of the country in the early sixties in a battered sports car, climbing out of the thing for days in cities disparate as Fes, medieval, profoundly Islamic, Unknowable; and Marrakesh., wild, open, migrant city and market-place at once between the south and the modern country, and Morocco and Black Africa. The populace seems to say: 'Yes, you Black Africans have been useful for centuries. Just remember we're Arabs. What can you do with these raw skins? Can you tan? Dye vermilion, ochre? Glaze? What use are dirty sheep fleeces? They have to be turned into colour-fast skeins of wool. Yes, we have salt . . . tempered steel blades? Of course.' I visited also lost Middle Atlas villages like Azrou, the unique, dramatically-sited Kasbahs of the Anti-Atlas, and the giant solitude of the pre-Sahara beyond.

More recently I've travelled by bus. Always, deliberately, I'd avoided Casablanca.

I first went to Casablanca with Paul Bowles who wanted to buy a car. He doesn't drive, and I was to chauffeur him back to Tangier. My only occasion was to get a mouth organ which Meti had requested.

'Aren't you going to
try
it?' asked Paul. We'd eventually found one - made in the People's Republic of China, and so presumably harmonious - in a toyshop.

'Well, no,' I said. Paul is an accomplished musician and composer besides writer.

Meti was sitting with Juan, the
portero
, on the apartment steps when I got back to Tangier at the wheel of the Karmann Ghia. In the lift my arm was unplayfully twisted. Had I got it? Yes, I had. There was no doubt as to the Chinese harmonica's capacity to make noise. A few days later Meti lost - or more probably sold - it, He showed no remorse at its disappearance; I relief.

It may be improper in travel notes to say that the subject country's industrial capital cum centre of commerce stinks. Rabat, the political capital, is completely charming, if somehow sterile, even sterilized. But Casablanca is foul. Its name is the literal Spanish translation of
Dar el-Baida
,
or White House.

The tiny port of Anfa probably pre-dates the seventh-century Arab conquest. In 1830 it was a village of some 600 people. Today Casablanca (known throughout the country simply as 'Casa') is Morocco's largest city, and the population exceeds one and a half million. Three-quarters of Morocco's industry is concentrated in the city. There is one immobile 'sight', and two semi-mobile ones: respectively the French cathedral, Sacre Coeur, a. superb aquarium, and the girls on the beach of the resort at Mohammedia, twelve miles away.

Initially the siting of the original port at Anfa was dictated by the absence of any sand-bar, such as blocks the mouth of the Bou Regreg river at Rabat, Today Casa's port is totally artificial. The dock equipment is sophisticated as any in the world. Only during the month of Ramadan when the day-long fast makes Moroccans light-headed do accidents happen. A nice story (probably apocryphal) occurred when some stevedores sleep-walked into an innocent mountain of grain. They cascaded down the chute, were machine-sewn into sacks, and only rescued when a foreman in the ship's hold noticed unusual movement within the sacks. A morally orientated variant of the story—for sex
also is forbidden during the daylight hours—claims that the dockers in the corn were making love to canteen girls
who, of course, were temporarily redundant owing to the fast. Like a Caesarean birth of Siamese twins a man and a woman was cut from each pregnant grain sack.

Friends who live and work in Casa gently mock my horror of the place. There are fine restaurants. But the city lacks centre; and a pavement café  adjacent to traffic jams and diesel fumes is restless. A few years ago youth and age rode politely put-putting mopeds. Now somebody imports the ear-ripping Yamahas and Suzukis - the new
snobisme
.

The subjective truth is simply that I meet accidents in Casa, And it's subjectively I insist the natives - the
Beidaouna
- are unsympathetic. I've seen an Arabist, a gentle and courteous man fluent in Moghrebi, and with thirty years' knowledge of the country, insulted gratuitously four times in a single day.

A tiny, weedy Moor propositioned me to buggery, with force, in a café  lavatory, yards away from the safety of friends. I don't go on 'adult male homosexuality', while respecting a number of friends who do. Fortunately the scruffy little man (a dock worker, and faintly unbalanced, I was subsequently told) was drunk as well as weedy, The punch-up I won; indeed I was fearful for a moment I'd broken his neck against the rimed enamel of the stinking urinal.

The hotel (humbler than the one in which Paul and I had stayed) was a farce. It was recommended by friends as commensurate with my finances. I blame the friends not at all; and indeed enjoyed the absurdities. At midnight I allowed myself the luxury of a sleeping pill, and lay in dozing anticipation of the peace and beauty of the south. Dull red bedbugs boldly advancing in neat echelon even in electric light, intestinal rumbling of plumbing as someone ran water in another room, the seatless, paperless lavatories justified drugs.

Somebody tried a key in the outside of my door. I ignored an easy mistake. Ten minutes later it happened again. I crept over the stained floor tiles and whipped open the door. A lost drunk confused reasonably because the room numbers had been chewed off by termites? No. A scarlet woman looking unapologetic, but hopeful. I assumed a lost guest. Made play with a puzzled comparison of my own key and room number. My acting must have been too good. Five minutes later came the probing key again. '
ma'm'selle,'
I said, reopening the door (and the reader is not at liberty to take the ironic escape device literally).

'
Je n'aime que des petits garcons. Adieu
.'

It worked. For just six hours of needed sleep. When I sent out the pimply youth who brought cold coffee in the morning to find a bottle of gin (a necessity for the south) at a proper price, he returned to passionately throw his arms about me. I shoved him good-naturedly away. Perhaps it goes without saying that the bottle of export Beefeater was unsealed, not gin, and wrong price. I didn't buy. This would not happen to the most innocent tourist in Tangier. To be sure a
Tanjaoui
would get it at around nine dirham wholesale contraband and sell it upwards of twenty-five; but the contents would not be 25 fluid ounces of water and 1 2/3 fluid ounces of gin. The adulteration of even a Christian's drink would shock him.

Both the scarlet woman and useless youth were hanging about the reception desk when I left. So their function was resident entertainers.

A friend, Richard Loe, collected and put me in a taxi for Anfa airport and the plane to Agadir, I was in the wrong philosophical mood for long-distance buses, he said. He was right.

Absurdly perhaps, I stayed at the same hotel on my return from the south, late at night, and after what was my second visit to Tiznit. I knew the hotel's precise location (an essential instruction to Casa's taxi-drivers), there was a cheap restaurant nearby, and I'd bought a bug
bombe
. The two professional entertainers were again hanging about reception.

'I won't require visitors: I said loudly. taking my key from the clerk, 'Actually, I only ever . . .' And then the composed effect was spoiled by my stumbling over the French word for the solitary activity which was the early basis of Mr Portnoy's complaint

Another Casablanca accident was less than triumphantly resolved. It was the more humiliating in that, convinced I was being cheated, I dug my hooves in to be roundly defeated. If
only on a technicality, the taxi-driver was right; and I wrong. Domestic flights use the small airport, Anfa near the original village, which is just a few kilometres from the centre of Casa. Royal Air Maroc, winging north for Tangier and Europe, use the international. Noussair, (In fact one can fly Royal Air Inter from Anfa to Tangier. But there was no flight that day; and five minutes longer in Casa would have blown my mind) Arriving for the first time at Anfa from Agadir, I was delighted to find the taxi-fare into, town modest. The driver was pleasant, I named a better hotel for a change; then explained I must catch an early flight next morning, but from
the other airport
,
Noussair
. How much would that be, were he to collect me from the hotel? 'The same, of course,' said the driver. There is no Trade Descriptions Act in Morocco. Dead on 7.00 a.m. I was collected and driven to Noussair where, inevitably, the driver demanded a sum in the region of three pounds. Doubtless it was partly guilt at having slept in an expensive hotel that braced my hooves firmly, 'No,' I said.

For about an hour the driver shadowed me about the weigh-in and coffee stand. I simply flit, I thought confidently. Literally, into the sky. But the driver had been on to the uniformed cop at the entrance to the sanctuary of the departure lounge. He wouldn't let me through. I asked (the Blimp
persona
surfacing) to see his superior, and was led to a high cop in an office. He couldn't have been less sympathetic or more bored,

'If you have an accident' (the word he used) 'with a Moroccan,' he said, 'you cannot leave the country. And you can't wait here in my office:

I protested that I wasn't leaving the country but returning Tangier. That only in Casa had I known Moroccans dishonest. The high cop indicated the door with his head without looking.

There was nothing for it, Still shadowed by my driver, I changed my last travellers' cheque, and with a gesture both silly and childish thrust him his bundle of notes along the counter as though fearful of contracting plague,

'The
Beidaouna
are crooks,' I told Meti unreasonably fifty minutes later. But to Meti Casa was a Valhalla where he had heard there were very many cinemas. Thirty in fact, upon recent count.

In a country of great, barren expanses, and where telephone communications are often nominal, the Moroccans take the mails very seriously. Consequently a bus's last stop before leaving a town, and first stop before passengers alight in the next, is the post office. In Tiznit this is outside the city walls; and it was beside the low, pink-washed building that I first sensed the excitement of a unique town. I clambered irregularly out of the crowded bus from necessity. A well-meaning ticket clerk in Agadir had awarded me the best seat in the bus; and the best scat was where the mail sacks sat too. All lesser baggage is exiled to the roof, the interior of the bus being otherwise exclusively reserved for humans and live hens. Now, while a postman off-loaded my lumpy, canvas cushions before courteously ushering me back to a suddenly hard seat, I stared at the walls of Tiznit.

Crenellated, ochre-dusty, on this side of the tiny, oasis town they ran for a quarter of a mile, broken by two unadorned gates. What made them impressive was the optical exaggeration of height and solidity, for they rose from a brutally flat and featureless plain. A lone cyclist made doggedly for the horizon, his machine twitching over sharp stones which were to lacerate the soles of my shoes in the following days, while the dust of his passage hung brown and opaque in the still air. Beyond him, outside the Aglou Gate, corn harvested from the other, irrigated side of the town, lay piled for the threshing. Eight donkeys harnessed abreast drew a
baulk of timber in perpetual radius, the animals' hooves and their wooden burden combining to make a threshing machine. Behind them walked a giant Sudanese with a pitchfork. Next day I was to point a
telephoto lens tentatively at this process. Simultaneous with the abuse, the pitchfork swung back over the giant's shoulder with that inevitability of movement which defines an Olympic javelin thrower. Calculating the javelin's reach as longer than my lens', and that the picture was anyway idyllic no more, I dropped the camera, fortunately on a neck-strap, and thrust my arms high above my head. It wasn't enough. The Sudanese watched on guard until I'd retreated a quarter of a mile. One could not blame him. It was probably his donkeys. rather than himself, that were threatened by the evil eye. Had they dropped dead he'd have had to haul the telegraph pole, circling like a monster clock hand, himself.

But beside the bus throbbing at the post office all was peaceful. Everything was so still that the crenellated walls might have been garrisoned by the proverbial dead men. The sky was quartz-iodine white with the heat of afternoon, but the sun caught the clouds of wheat chaff like some explosion of golden midges. I reclaimed my favoured seat, no longer insulated from the thudding Volvo diesel by the Royal Moroccan mails, for the rattle through the gate into the town square. Just how important for Tiznit the arrival of the afternoon bass from Agadir was I discovered later.

The tarpaulin was peeled from the roof rack. First lowered were a number of stout cinema film boxes. These were trundled of on a hand-cart with an escort of small boys. As
my case was handed down a youth addressed me in English. Might he guide me to wherever I was staying? He might indeed, I said. Once in Essaouira, formerly the pirate port of Mogador. I'd refused similar courtesy in favour of waiting for a taxi, baffling the natives' protests with a knowing smile. Only of course the natives were right. There were no taxis in Essaouira. Shame-faced I'd eventually lugged my heavy case half a mile. Now I set off with the youth, my case thankfully balanced on his bicycle.

The square, and the small area of
souks
between it and the city wall, were the only centre of Tiznit's daytime life. Here were the three cafés, two barbers' shops, ill-stocked pharmacy, bicycle shops and a scattering of general stores; above all there were the buses. At one end of it was the substantial military barracks; at the other, nailed simply to a blank wall, a notice which read: '
Union
Nationale des Femmes
'. Presumably forceful and emancipated women met beneath it. There was little plate glass and no single advertisement hoarding. I began to like Tiznit very much.

Driss proved to be a student in Rabat, visiting his home town for the summer vacation. As an ambassador of Tiznit he appeared everywhere known and respected. The way to the hotel followed the inside of the city wall. A lowering sun bisected the rough road into purple shadow and glaring gold, the division so precise that with artful walking one could tan just one side of one's nose, This curious phenomenon said a lot for the architects and builders of the ramparts. The contrasts of light and shade spelt disaster for catching candid photographs of people.