Tangier (4 page)

But before leaving the astronauts' photograph one inevitably thinks of the most profound and lasting invasion ever to sweep Morocco, as indeed all North Africa; the Arabs, and the all-pervading Islamic religion they brought with them.

The indigenous people of Morocco, the Berbers, had basically a nomadic culture. No one knows quite how they derived, though most probably and logically they are descended from the Phoenicians. Their language, Shleugh, has no written form except in the dialect of the Saharan Tuareg. They are a strangely beautiful people, often very fair, sometimes blue-eyed, with finely modelled features distinguished frequently by curiously sweet, heart-shaped faces. The fact belies their warrior potential, as the savage tragedy of the Rif Wars with Spain at the beginning of our own century proved. Their faith was sometimes Christian but withal largely animalistic.

The explosion of Islam, with its genesis inland of the western seaboard of the Arabian peninsula was a revolution. Its dynamism, and the speed with which the Arabs conquered and spread their faith, were extraordinary. Within twenty years of the death of he Prophet Mohammed the Arabs were in Tangier, ousting its Byzantine ruler, Count Julian, in sae A.D. 682. By A.D. 707 a further wave, led by Mussa ben Noussair (today commemorated by a rather seedy street in the city), had subjugated all Morocco. But the most astonishing thing about Islam is its absolute tenacity. Tangier, after all, is just eighteen miles from Catholic Spain; other North African cities only some hundreds from Rome. Yet a monolithic faith, the vast majority of whose followers are almost totally ignorant of its precepts in all save what one can best compare with a binding, almost tribal instinct, has remained untouched by Christianity for some twelve hundred years. Islam successfully resists conversion. But such observations as an outsider may tentatively advance about a faith, the very strength of which one sometimes suspects resides in its obscurity, belong to a later chapter.

The
Mons
Calpe
docked at Tangier in the brief, southern twilight. Swallows banked, screaming, about a
low huddle of sheds. The entire width, though not depth of the city, can be seen from the port.

On the left is the green knoll of the Charf hill, a modulation unnaturally neat, clustered with villas and trees, and surmounted by its mosque. Immediately in front, the white arc of the modern town overlaps the south-westerly horn of the famous bay, with its beach measuring almost two miles. On the right is the old town, crowned by its fortified Kasbah, veined with alleys and built densely as only the Arabs know how. Its houses are clean shades of pastel: white, yellow, and washed blue. and seem to spill over one another, threatening dusty collapse into the sea. They look like an untidy pile of children's bricks that have been left a long time in the sun.

Behind the new town are wings of
haoumats
, village-suburbs: Ain Haiani, Casa Barata, Emsallah, Suani, Beni Makada, Dradeb; all splendidly ill-disciplined, but with their streets fastidiously swept. Backing these again, is the Mountain. The Mountain is not a mountain at all, but a hill, tree-laden, and divided into rambling estates, with often preposterous villas, owned largely by Europeans. Although the hill is one, it is designated either New Mountain or Old Mountain according as to whether one takes, or lives upon, the left-hand road or the right. Despite the presence on the New Mountain of both the king's and the provincial governor's palaces, the Old Mountain is held to be superior, at least by those who live there. Its villas have a fine view of the Atlantic and the Spanish coastline.

The centre of the new town is best described as a crippled cartwheel, Its hub is the Place de France. The least damaged spoke is the quarter-mile of the Boulevard Pasteur, which becomes the Boulevard Mohammed V. and runs parallel with the sea. It's here at about eight o'clock, assuming particular elegance on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, that one performs the nightly ritual of the
paseo
: that slow and curious circulation inherited from the Spanish and designed for the purpose of greeting one's friends, and studying strangers, who of course are studying you. The lazier, more affluent, or earlier coming, select a pavement café and let the world revolve about them, Both the numerous cafés' clientèle, and what might be termed their several magnetic fields, either conscious or unconscious. vary considerably,

The other buckled cartwheel spokes centred on the Place de France head, respectively, to further areas of the new town, downhill sharply to the Avenue d'Espagne, the seafront running parallel with the Boulevard, and also downhill to the Grand Socco.
*

*
All Tangier's place and street names have their Arabic, French and Spanish forms. On the whole, I stick to the French.

The Grand Socco, once tree-lined and festive, is now a shabby disappointment, terminus of the town buses, and nerve centre for Tangier's telephonable taxis. It is simply a large metalled square surrounded by vendors' stalls and tiny restaurants, with discouraged municipal flowerbeds, standing at the entrance to the Medina's most landward gate. Cars may plunge through this gate down the Rue d'Italie into the bowl of the Medina, and up the steep hill to the Kasbah. But, with the exception of
two further motor routes at the opposing perimeters, motor vehicles of all kinds are forbidden in the Medina, and cycles must be walked. While uniquely pleasing to western, urban man, the prohibition does not make the Medina a restful place. Hand-carts and donkeys are there in abundance. At peak times the human press is like a
lumber jam in a Canadian river, But you can't really understand Moroccans until you have been in one of their crowds, preferably at a moment of festivity, when they are vociferous as well as massed.

The porters arriving on board the
Mons Calpe
were less frightening than their nineteenth-century forebears. I chose one who looked crafty because it's your porter who gets you through Customs. I had little to hide, but should have hated to pay duty on three pounds of tea, or have anyone peer at the obscure data which, for want of a better term, I call my manuscripts. The one formality that was really a nuisance had been waived or simply forgotten, which is a peculiarity of Moroccan laws. For years one was required to declare currency on a form: the theory being that one produced the form, all neatly stamped by reputable banks to prove that one had exchanged legally, upon leaving the country. To 'lose' it was too bland a lie for me. To exchange ten pounds while presumably having spent four months with friends made of one a measly guest. But I was also conscience-stricken at exchanging against the interests of an underdeveloped country. Eventually I asked a well-known English novelist, who is a communist, how he had exchanged when in Morocco. 'Christ, illegally of course!' he said. And computing myself some hundreds of times poorer I was often to exchange illegally myself. Such is the
childish logic of deceit. But there was no form to fill in. In the crush of the Customs shed my sly-looking porter was bawling to an officer that I was a tourist. '
Touriste
,' I added gravely myself, and the chalk squealed disinterestedly over my bags. I noticed that the officer respectfully avoided the purple arabesque to which I had myself subjected my typewriter. Packets of Knorr soups and other beat sustenances, I noticed, were being systematically dug from the sacks of my
djellaba
'd
Caucasian friends, who had blared their radio and been censured on the ferry. I hoped they wouldn't be charged duty. The world discriminates ruthlessly upon appearance,

But another test was to come. A taxi must be found; and the driver persuaded to put his meter on. There is only one occasion when the taxi-drivers of Tangier may try to cheat you: on the drive from port or airport. My porter found a cab, and I installed myself. I give my address and try to think quickly. My mind is totally blank on suitably oblique remarks. 'What month do you think Sidi Hassan [the king] will visit us this year?' Too familiar. 'Is the clock in the Pace de France mended yet?' It won't have been. And subsequently I discover them finally to have taken it away. The town's focal point became for a couple of years an abstract of sheet tin. Currently it is a pond, about the periphery of which some hundreds of jets alternately dribble and squirt high in powerful arcs. The local explanation of these mechanics is obvious. Massed relays of small boys organized radially upon their backs beneath the fountain urinate in competition at the command. 'Ah,' I say aloud, 'We're coming up to the Spanish cathedral. You've chosen much the best road.' For the taxi has just motored up the street where the blacksmiths are congregated, with furnaces glowing in the night, clanging hammers, and sooty little boys wielding oxyacetylene torches on the pavement. A Spanish grunt from my driver. But number one trick is avoided: a tour of the town. Taxi-driver trick two may yet be played, The British are known to be embarrassed by scenes, and the knowledge is exploited. The trick is worked thus. Your meter reads perhaps two dirhams. Relieved that it's been on, and the sum as reasonable as Tangier taxi fares
are, you off-load your luggage and hand the driver two dirham fifty through the window. '
Señor
!'
You turn back politely. On the driver's outstretched hand are the fifty-franc piece you gave him, and two Spanish ten-peseta pieces, of identical rise but lesser value than dirhams. The driver is suggesting you gave
him them by mistake. React quietly (for Moroccans love scenes) with the single word '
Imah
!', uttered with gentle irony. It means 'Mummy!' However absurdly, it is exactly right for this occasion, as for countless others. The mother is strangely more present in the minds of Moroccans than Momma (allegedly) is in the minds of mature American males. '
Imah
!' is one or the most desperate invocations of human succour a Moroccan can make. Conversely, the ultimate insult is to threaten defecation upon another's mother. The trick was not played, and I arrived at my destination.

My host, as I'd learned a few data earlier, was away. Henry was one of those invaluable American human exports, A Harvard graduate, holding a high-powered job with a United Nations agency in Paris, he had taken a year's leave and come to Tangier with his wife and young children to work on a novel. He was earnest, and intensely interested in everything about him. The previous summer I had formed a great affection for the family, abetted by that particular devotion of the bachelor for anyone who invites him to meals. Henry's departure was a loss to a city not rich in young intellectuals. Among the foreign community, the British are poorly represented by young; the Americans, with the nuclei of the American School of Tangier, and the astonishing number of consular staff the US appoints to countries thought of as 'third world' or 'uncommitted', fare better,

After being received by Henry's wife I went out almost immediately to call on Paul Bowies, before joining her again later at the Parade bar. I arrived just before the downstairs door was locked. The
assas
, or night watchman, of Paul's apartment block, is someone in Tangier totally without my control, Although I've visited Paul countless times at night over the years, and have lived in the block myself, the
assas
affects absolutely not to recognize me or produce his key until I have first produced a coin. This is upsetting to dignity'. I have no objection to tipping (and in Tangier one learns the art with cunning), but to the sequential nature of this particular man's extortion, Charon, Paul calls him. Tonight I'd evaded what has long been known between us as the 'Bowles Tax'.

Paul was unchanged: a matchstick man made of mercury, as I think of him; infinitely courteous, With him was the Riffian, Mohammed Mrabet, whose novels and stories he has translated through the oral medium of tapes. I discovered that the flat I had hoped to have reserved had been taken. The confusion was my own fault. I'd been delayed in England longer than intended, Three weeks later I blessed the muddle that prevented my taking what was a small unfurnished flat near my old
haouma
of Ain Haiani. I'd found an ideal place its the centre of town. It was an exhausting, and often curious, sequence of negotiations which achieved this. But I was determined to long-term rent my own place at last. Meanwhile, my temporary hostess was packing up with her small children to return to America. Most of my first week was devoted to helping her. One small incident backed my resolution that I couldn't afford a telephone. Henry's wife was determined to have hers on for a remaining month, for which the rental had already been paid: as not infrequently happens with Tangier's telephones it had quietly died. I accompanied her to the office of the telephone people run, like the British system, by the Post Office, There was a '
No funciona
'
notice on the lift, the clock had stopped, and the impressive steps leading to the offices were in process of demolition, so that entry to the post office itself was rather like negotiating a Himalayan ridge. Not wishing to indict an important service casually, I went back a week later. The steps had been repaired, perhaps as necessary encouragement to business. But both lift and clock remained resolutely dead as my hostess's telephone. A few days later she left for New York and I moved into an hotel,

In the rush of these days I sat one afternoon on the Kasbah patio beside York Castle, named after Charles II's brother but initially built by the Portuguese, thinking, about the twenty-two-year British occupation of the city. Our arrival in 1661 was unique. An expansionist power only really beginning to discover empire, we'd not seized but been given it. Yet by 1684 the venture had been abandoned, garrison and colonists evacuated (to receive a curious personal welcome by Charles on their arrival in England), and the famous mole, one of the distinctive engineering feats of the age, dynamited out of existence.

The factors accounting for the political failure were the political situation at home, the bankruptcy of the English Treasury after the Dutch war, and the local situation in Tangier itself. For a start the English expedition under Lord Peterburgh found that not only had the Portuguese artisans and craftsmen left the city, but they had taken with them the doors, windows and even floors of the more habitable dwellings. Then Tangier was virtually under constant siege by the Berber. Abd Allal Ghailan, who wanted the city for himself; and the prerequisite of colonial trading, good relations with the natives, was never more than poorly established. The attempt was not helped by successive changes of governor, some twelve in the twenty-two-year period, excluding a number of acting ones.