Tangier (30 page)

The prescription struck me as logical, if luxurious. Paying the pharmacy was the problem. My bank's being closed was irrelevant. It currently guarded ten pounds which. perhaps as having been the sum of my initial deposit, was in some mysterious Tangier bankers' lore the amount required to keep the account open. Worse, were this fortune touched, new Moroccan legislation now prevented my opening any account whatsoever since technically I was a non-resident. Emergency travellers' cheques I'd mostly eaten. I made for a central pharmacy, mentally knocking some of the luxuries off the prescription. What use was disinfectant liquid soap when one was going to be soaking hands and foot in a murderously strong solution of potassium permanganate? Or four tubes of antibiotic ointment when one could start with two?

'What'll that cost — roughly?' I asked the pharmacist.

'About 150 dirham,'

Fifteen pounds. 'Fine,' I said vaguely as a Rockefeller or Woolworth. 'I'll collect the stuff in about an hour?'

The cost, as I'd suspected, was the intensive course of oral antibiotics, and the ointments. All drugs in Morocco are stamped '
Prix Public Maroc
' and their fixed prices equate closely with those in Britain, had one to buy them privately. So the margin for mild
swindle on my prescription, was in the dissolving of a quarter of a tablet of potassium permanganate in a litre of tap water. This takes half an hour; which was why the pharmacy also needed the time, used by me to collect the money. In fact the particular item, one litre of solution, was only charged for at six dirham: so innocently paying out a profit of well cover 1000 per cent was reasonable forfeit for inattention at school chemistry lessons. The percentage is approximate because while I could calculate the exact value of the lemonade bottle, and next day the price of a litre of solution at the strength prescribed by Lahlou against the '
Prix Public Maroc
' of potassium permanganate tablets, I could not compute the
price of the label telling me not to swallow the stuff or for a litre of tap water drawn in that particular shop. A man becomes angry when cheated. Curiously his anger increases where he discovers the abuse was only made possible as a result of his own stupidity or innocence. Next day I was a little coldly ironical with the French owner-manager of the pharmacy. But not before he had fallen, of his own understandably hesitant volition, into a trap that would have had him selling me potassium permanganate solution at approximately that 1000 per cent plus profit multiplied by forty: say a net profit of 45,000 per cent,

I cashed my penultimate travellers' cheque at Le Claridge, one of the few places on the Boulevard where one could still change money at night. A delicious smell of
sole
normande
didn't bother me. I had no
appetite, and was too concentrated upon trying to countersign the cheque with some semblance of authenticity and on keeping blood off my passport. I collected the medicines and returned home, pausing only at Said's for a half-loaf of bread, and at a less reputable
Soussi
's shop for a bottle of contraband scotch. The day's expenditure had been nearly twenty-five pounds, Or two weeks' money.

The pills were the size of starlings' eggs,. There was no problem about swallowing them six-hourly as I didn't sleep; just in swallowing them. This I did over a saucepan so they could be retrieved if they stuck in the throat and came whizzing out again like ill-mannered ping-pong, balls. Poured into the washing-up bowl, the litre of potassium permanganate barely dampened the palms of my hands. The only saucepan that didn't leak contained soup. By morning the solution had turned from a delicate purple to a muddy brown, visible and satisfactory proof' that it was absorbing the suppuration. But I was also remembering what this miracle chemical was. The cautious of Tangier washed salads in a weak solution. In my Australian childhood my mother had carried the raw crystals on family picnics. Before sophisticated anti-snake-venom serums, any seven-year-old knew you made a neat cruciform incision across the fang punctures with your clasp-knife and stuffed in crystals of potassium of permanganate. Always supposing you had some. And right now I hadn't.

I was back at the pharmacy next morning brandishing my lemonade bottle, politely rinsed. 'I'm going to need a lot of this solution,' I explained, 'About eight litres a day.' To emphasize the point I unthinkingly spread my palms flat for a second upon the polished glass counter. They left perfect prints of pus and blood which I didn't notice. 'And I'm not carrying eight lemonade bottles up and down the Boulevard every morning. Or paying six dirhams a litre. What do you suggest?:

The owner-manager prevaricated for a full ten minutes. The shop was filling, there
were things to attend to in the back-room, the telephone rang giving him time. It was mysterious. I had no idea of the reason for his dilemma., only that he evidently had one., 'If you want a lot I can make for you a good price,' he muttered.

'Wouldn't it be simpler for me to buy the crystals, tablets or whatever?' I asked in genuine innocence. He became more preoccupied. So here somewhere was the crux of his embarrassment. 'I mean, I do have tap water.' I made a crazy Gallic gesture of suffering and despair. The true Gaul would have walked out with a flourish to another pharmacy. I still didn't realize that this must have been what the man was playing for. Eventually he brought out a tube of the tablets. Clearly they were dangerous because he was extremely reluctant even to let me hold the tube to read the dilution instructions on it. He himself looked in physical pain. His problem was being a European. A Moroccan sensibly wouldn't have given a
damn about any possible reaction to the revelation to come.

This was simply that the twenty-tablet tube of potassium permanganate was stamped with the Moroccan public price of one dirham fifty: or, at the solution prescribed by Dr Lahlou, I would get 200 litres for fifteen pence; as opposed to the single litre the pharmacist had sold me the previous night for sixty pence. Also it saved me the logistics of transporting two hundred lemonade bottles to my flat. The relief of this last fact was so great that I made no comment about price, but simply asked whether it was just the same stuff as prescribed and dissolved for me.

'Well, not
quite
,'
he explained. 'Because you see when the chemical is compressed into tablets, it is less pure.' There was no reason for preventing his saving face, so I said, 'Ah!'

It was odd that my tube of twenty tablets proved to contain nineteen and three-quarters; a quarter tablet was the amount needed to provide the solution supplied the previous night.

Within a week I was recovered. I could hold a pen and do other practical things. The oral antibiotics killed the general infection, the potassium permanganate dissolved only to masochistic strength dried up the suppuration, and the steroid cum antibiotic ointments had begun healing the cleaned lesions, at least temporarily. I could reappear unself-consciously in public and handle objects without pain.

During the preceding seven weeks the jokes had ranged from the vulgar and silly to the sophisticated: because that is the spectrum of Euro-American Tangier. My maid said, '
Choueiya, choueiya
!' invoking the healing properties of time. An English beachcomber whose unvarying attire over three months was a stained and carefully ancient cowboy hat and the butterfly bright and flimsy bottom component of a female bikini was
wont to call gaily in beach bars, 'How are the syphilitic hands?' Such people tend to be both intelligent and sensitive, and he was no exception. So the game ended when I wondered pointedly whether jokes about VD, even where not the complaint, weren't rather 'Eh – Old hat?' At the other end of the spectrum, and more realistic as it was amusing, an American girlfriend told me over a polite family tea of the violinist who got eczema on the fingertips of his left hand whenever he tamped down on the A-string. Ruin. Unacceptable only (as boring and without scientific foundation) were those who inevitably had a friend who had 'caught just the same thing in Tangier'. He or she tended to have been carried on a stretcher to an ambulance at Heathrow and be still residing in the London Hospital for Tropical Diseases. Simple eczema is endogenous, arising from unknown cause within the body; and can neither be 'caught' nor transmitted.

On the whole it seemed wisest to associate with unsensational Euro-American friends; so hide in the flat with Moroccans, who are philosophically armoured against, and consequently more careless of, illness and pain. Or to hole-up alone, which an animal does.

Airborne, one is instantly in another world. Through the plane's window I looked perplexedly down on my terrace, briefly revealed, rather as though a telephone, wrong number, were interrupting coition.

Hamid and Latifa, Moroccan tortoises, died within a month of each other during their second English hibernation, the winter of 1974-5, while I was making a typescript of these notes. They lie buried the prescribed Moslem depth beneath Christian soil.

The small part of my mind which is rational knew it was time to leave Tangier. But would one? Indecision rests uneasily balanced on a question impersonally expressed.