The Road to McCarthy (12 page)

Tommy has called their regular taxi driver on the cell phone. After a quarter of an hour he still hasn’t come, and I think I know what’s happened. For seven years I traveled the world making programs with a charming and hilarious Ulsterman blessed with a strong County Down accent that made no concession to people who had learned standard English from Linguaphone
or the BBC World Service. From Moscow to Vanuatu, from China to Marrakesh, I watched as he told anecdotes, explained camera shots and paid compliments to people who couldn’t understand anything he was saying. Then, when he’d finished, one of us would translate. Clearly the same thing is going on here.

Another five minutes pass, and I try and imply as tactfully as possible that the combination of crackly cell phone and difficult accent may mean that the driver has not fully understood. Tommy phones him again, which compounds the confusion. Conor takes over and establishes that the guy must have understood at least a few words, because he is waiting for us at our intended destination.

Ten minutes later he turns up and we get in. Taking care to speak slowly and distinctly, Tommy tells him to take us back to the place he has just driven from. The driver takes us somewhere else. It seems easiest just to get out. We’re saying our goodbyes and trying to work out where we are when the phone that doesn’t work starts ringing. It is Terence, the ex-MacCarthy Mór. The three of us are invited for cocktails tomorrow at five. Conor smiles.

“He says he saw you today, Peter.”

“Where?”

“Having breakfast in Café Portes.”

Bloody hell.

“Why didn’t he come and say hello?”

“He didn’t feel it was socially correct to come and introduce himself there. He says it’s a pity you didn’t buy a paper. That guy’s prices are the cheapest in town.”

This city is starting to spook me. I feel like I’m under constant surveillance. Mind you, Mohammed was probably hiding somewhere in Portes, watching Terence watching me.

I wonder who’s watching Mohammed?

Don’t you hate
those siestas where you wake up at half past nine in the evening and there’s nothing really much to do, except have a little drink
and then go back to sleep again? With such deranged sleep patterns, it’s amazing the Mediterranean nations are as sane as they are. I get up and turn on the TV. BBC Bland International still has pictures but no sound. It’s been like this for days now. There must be so few people watching that nobody’s phoned up to tell them about the fault. Or perhaps they’ve decided to cut the budget and invest the money in a gardening makeover website instead. Over on Eurosport there’s a soccer match with ambient crowd sound—cheering, whistling, catcalling, firecrackers—but no commentary. I try and watch, but it’s an odd experience. The game loses all context, and you have to draw on your own inner resources to give it significance. I discover that I haven’t got any.

It gets even stranger when the soccer is over. I’m still trying to come to terms with the fact that someone I don’t know has beaten someone else I don’t know, or possibly there’s been a draw, in a country I can’t identify, when the tennis comes on. This, too, is commentary-free. All you can hear is the whack of the ball and the grunts of the players, whoever the hell they are. I really haven’t a clue. It’s just two blokes on a red court on a green background in a gym. Is it any good? I don’t know. There’s no one to tell me. Click. CNN is looking at the stories behind the U.S. stock market. Click. A Spanish channel is showing Andalusian agitprop theater performed by men with funny stick-on noses. Click.

Ah! They’ve got the sound back on BBC Bland. There must have been another management reshuffle and a subsequent change in policy while I’ve been channel-hopping. There’s an excellent story about a man from Georgia in the former USSR who is swimming a mile and a half in freezing sea-water with his hands and legs fastened tight with leather straps. “It is a way of bringing pride to Georgia by demonstrating our ancient ways,” says the subtitle beneath a shot of a pervily-bound, hypothermic man. One day he hopes to swim the Dardanelles like this.

The next item is also from Georgia. They’ve obviously decided to get their money’s worth out of the poor bastard they’ve sent there. This one’s about a teenage boy who’s just walked the twenty miles from his village to Tbilisi soccer stadium, bouncing a ball on his head.

“I wanted to make a statement of national self-belief,” says the youth,
bouncing a ball on his head. It just goes to show what young people can achieve if they have the right motivation.

Over on Eurosport quiet tennis has been replaced by commentary-free cycling. I’m beginning to understand the appeal of being an international businessman. As well as all the free shower gel, you’d be able to watch stuff like this all the time.

I drift off to sleep and become embroiled in confused dreams of Mohammed Mrabet, the MacCarthy Mór. He is an eerie composite of two people I have never met, and speaks with an impenetrable accent. I try to dream a commentary by way of explanation, but none is available.

When I leave the hotel
at two the next day, Mohammed is lurking in the street waiting for me. He looks particularly shifty today. Perhaps this is to be the big sting.

“So, Peter, we go to meet Mohammed Mrabet?”

I’ve been expecting a last-minute change of plan, but it looks like he’s going to persist with this literary fantasy until I call his bluff. As we’re getting into a taxi, a Moroccan businessman in suit and tie clocks the situation—naïve half-wit tourist heading off to the boonies with ruthless cut-throat vagrant—and gestures to me.
“No!”
he mouths, shaking his head.
“Don’t!”
As we drive off, he repeats the signal. He’ll be a key witness when they do the reconstruction on
Crimewatch Morocco
.

Mohammed says something I don’t understand to the driver, while I try and think happy thoughts and suppress the visions of kidnap and mutilation that are springing up uninvited from the depths. We head out of the center of town, down streets I’ve never seen, where the traditional buildings give way to nondescript modern flats. Mohammed is grinning and reassuring me that everything is okay, but it isn’t easy to relax. No one knows where I am, and Tommy reckons they’re after my kidneys. It would be a pity to end up minus vital internal organs just hours before I’m meant to be meeting the ex-MacCarthy Mór.

I know I shouldn’t be here, but the possibility of meeting the renegade storyteller is too unlikely to pass by. But does my Mohammed really know
him? Is Mrabet even alive? Or is this the equivalent of me pouncing on some unsuspecting Japanese tourist in Stratford-upon-Avon and telling him I’m taking him to meet William Shakespeare?

“Mohammed Mrabet has very nice house. Nice area,” says Mohammed, as we get out at a noisy traffic circle in a dusty concrete suburb. On the pavement nearby, three men are busily creating antiques out of coffee tables that were made earlier in the day. We turn off the main drag and trudge up a pot-holed hill. Ahead of us a young man stands leaning against a wall, where the street forks. Is he a lookout? An accomplice? A policeman who will hold me down and hide the drugs up my arse before dragging me off to that prison where your friends have to bring in water if you want to have a wash? We walk past, he ignores us, and we stop outside a nondescript block of low-rise housing. Mohammed knocks on the door. I’m half hoping there’ll be no reply. A shutter upstairs moves, but I’m too late to see who it was. “You see him?” No, I didn’t. Is this all part of the plan?

The door is opened by a sick-looking man with a winning smile. He’s in his sixties and is smaller than I’d expected after reading those raucous accounts of him beating people up. That’s if it’s really him, of course. He gives a painful-sounding cough, and I notice that his sallow skin has a distinctly yellow tinge.

Yellow.

That’s a sign of iffy kidneys, isn’t it?

I call him by his name and ask in French if it’s okay to meet, and he says it is. He takes us upstairs to a space with no windows or natural light, a kind of room within a room where we sit on low cushions in a large alcove. The TV and gas heater are both on. There’s a low table spread with pens and colored inks and other art materials and lots of biscuits, and an overpowering smell of hashish, as if dozens of art students have spent many years in here watching daytime TV. He makes tea as the other Mohammed looks on, grinning as if to say, “See, I told you we were friends.” There’s an easy feeling between the two of them that makes it clear he’s been telling the truth. We sit down on the cushions to talk. I’m trying to reconcile the lurid account I read this morning of Mrabet breaking up a homosexual orgy with a
broken vodka glass, with the frail and gentle old man who’s sitting before me.

He carefully fills a long, dark, wooden pipe with hashish, fires it up and tells me how he was put in prison when he was fourteen after finding a stolen safe and filling his trousers with money from it. He’d served seven months of a twelve-year sentence when they found the real robbers and released him. At any rate, I think that’s the story. He delivers it first in Arabic, then again in French, then refills the pipe and starts telling me about Paul Bowles and the society of the free port in the years before Moroccan independence. He gets very excited.

“Oui, internationale
, whoaaah! Woooh!
C’était…. une salade niçoise. Tu comprends? Très …. mixte.”
He says that Elia Kazan offered him a part in a movie but wanted him naked, frolicking with a girl. He wouldn’t do it.

“Everyone see Mohammed Mrabet—like that?
Non, non, non!
Tennessee Williams, he tells me I should do it. Plenty money. But money does not matter. For naked?
Non
.”

He explains that his stories come from an oral tradition, and mix his life and his dreams with older legends and spontaneous improvisation. He says he can neither read nor write. He asks if I am a writer, then tells me he needs a new
collaborateur
—
“pour traduire”
—as he has more stories to tell the world. He reels off a list of a dozen or more countries in which he’s published, but says that the royalties don’t bring in much money. In a moment of shame, I realize that I’m waiting for him to try and hit on me for cash, but it doesn’t happen. He’s very dignified and by now, surely, extremely stoned. He shows me the intricate pen-and-ink Islamo-psychedelic pictures he’s been working on, and it’s clear I can buy one if I want. They’re not really to my taste though, and I can’t bring myself to get one as a literary souvenir, a little piece of him to take back. But my mind’s buzzing at the thought of a possible collaboration with this near-legendary figure, the man who was the link between the ancient tradition of North African storytelling and the cranked-up world of the beats. He’s probably been stuck indoors smoking himself to a standstill for years. He must meet hardly any outsiders. This could be a real opportunity! I could rediscover the renegade genius of Moroccan
letters. It’s an international event! Look—he’s even giving me his home telephone number. I am his solitary connection with the outside world. I’ll phone the publishers from the hotel.

I thank him for his time and I’m just getting up to leave when there is a knock at the door. He looks at his watch and pulls a face. “French journalists.” What? He shrugs. “I have to live.” He comes to the door to let us out and let the next lot in, but there’s been a mix-up and it’s not French journalists—it’s a Spanish TV producer and his assistant instead. The French journalists are due in an hour. I feel my collaboration with the reclusive genius hurtling away into the rapidly receding distance.

Outside we flag a taxi and head back into town before a film crew from the BBC can arrive and join the party. Mohammed is clearly elated, and who can blame him? He has delivered. He worked out that I wasn’t interested in sightseeing or entering into a partnership with a German restaurant owner. He reckoned I needed a literary encounter, so he’s laid one on. As we get out of the taxi and I’m paying the driver, Mohammed goes for the hard sell.

“Give me three hundred dirham please, Peter. For blanket. Very cold at night where I live. No furniture. No blanket. These clothes I wear, Australian boy gave them to me. You have clothes you can give? Please, Peter, give me one shirt, one trouser.”

I give him the three hundred but decide to hang on to my clothes for the time being. But he’s still not happy and I’m not feeling proud. He senses this and becomes increasingly blunt.

“Peter, you rich. I am poor. You give me more money now. For nothing. Just give me. Five hundred. Please.”

I say I’ll see him again before I leave. Well, obviously I will. I’ll have no choice.

It’s just before five
as the taxi pulls up outside a pink-walled villa glowing warm in the evening sunshine on a hillside on the outskirts of the city. I have it on good authority—well, Conor and Tommy told me—that two neighboring houses are owned by the king and the princess. Of Morocco, not Munster.

A gate in the wall opens and Terence MacCarthy comes out to greet us. He’s a large, rotund man in his forties, smiling and jolly, wearing a well-pressed V-neck woollie over a collar and tie, fixed with what looks like a diamond tie pin. To my practiced eye, it’s clear at a glance that this man is either a brilliant and wrongly deposed Irish clan chief, who has spent his life laboring tirelessly on behalf of his people, or else a deluded and cynical impostor, who has exploited the office of chief for his own aggrandizement. The problem is, I’ve no idea which.

Nor do I have any intention of subjecting him to a ferocious interrogation regarding his bona fides. I realized early in life that I’d make a hopeless magistrate or immigration official because if someone seems likeable, and most people do, then I believe everything they tell me. I am, however, keen to have a few drinks with him and see what turns up. If the Spanish Inquisition or Joe Stalin or Senator Joe McCarthy had abandoned their rigidly methodical approaches in favor of cocktails and a few nibbles, they might have achieved a lot more than they did.