Tangier (13 page)

More weeks elapsed before Meti spontaneously suggested we visit his home. It was after lunch. A taxi took us on the ten-minute trip to Suani. The interlocking
haoumats
(suburbs is simply the wrong word) that lie behind the town of Tangier are completely charming. There are shallow stream beds, groves of eucalyptus, undulating green common where sheep and goats graze beside patches of baked earth. But it is really the sense of space, the neat, irregular geometry of Arab houses, supported by one another, no two ever alike, and built along alleys that ascend or descend and are never straight for more than a few metres, which gives these areas beauty as much as fascination. To the northern industrial mind poverty conveys an image of squalor, garbage, darkness, the nightmare clutter and murky printing inks of Doré. Human dignity has been abandoned. The struggle is too great; effort no longer worthwhile. In Tangier's outlying areas, where by no means everyone is poor, the houses are colour-washed white, a marvellous pale chalky blue, sometimes soft pink. Their doors, often the only ground-floor aperture of structures seldom more than three storeys high, are particularly proud; polished wood and brass, sheet steel decorated with wrought iron. Upstairs windows have louvred wooden shutters, sometimes iron grilles. Most often the front door gives on to an angled recess, baffle against unwanted eyes during the few seconds it is open. Invariably staircases and floors are scrubbed coloured tiles. More than any Englishman's, every Moroccan's home is his castle. Life in the fastidiously clean alleys is one of irrepressible gaiety for the young, dignity for the old, and for everyone of a tempo, quick or languorous, arising from and adjusting as naturally to the present moment, be it the mood of a group or an individual. The atmosphere confuses a westerner. He begins to suspect he's lost something. it's like the elusive conviction of intention overlooked, left undone. But what? Paradoxically perhaps it's the absence of just such anxiety mechanisms in those about him which he envies. Yet it's too easy, or he has become too complex, to define his sense of deprivation as the loss of simplicity. These Moroccans seemed maddeningly possessed by the dictum of Candide's Pangloss, as fact rather than irony, that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. They don't say so. The conviction's too obvious to be remarked upon. Could it be as they insist: that a divine being does go with them; less enthusiastically with us?

'
Msalkheir
— good afternoon,' I said, shaking the hand of Meti's father: mysteriously a well-mannered
Nesrani
may invoke Allah's guardianship with partings but not greetings. He touched his forefinger to his lips after the handshake; I fairly unself-consciously, let the palm of my hand brush the left side of my chest as I'd learnt to do many years before in the hills. I was back among the
djibala
, Meti relaxed, even looked proud. Nervously uncertain of custom I'd given his sister only a formal European handshake, it was the first time he'd seen me perform the fuller routine.

We were not in the family home. Invitation there was to come months later. We stood in Sigidhli's (and I invent the surname) bakery. This was two metres
adjacent across the alley. The house itself was not visible, shielded by a stout corrugated-iron gate and a thorn-hedge corral. It was a transposition of a typical
jebilet
dwelling to Suani, the
gate an assertion the family were now metropolitan. They were of the poorest. Dignity had not ken compromised; nor a proper sense of privacy and suspicion. Heaven knew the semi-emancipated daughter was pretty enough. What other women and girls might the household comprise? There was shyness, caution and correctness all round,

The bakery was a narrow room, perhaps three metres broad and five long. On one wall were slatted shelves with a dozen or so loaves of bread. After laying newspaper on a bench, and bidding me be seated, Sigidhli went back to his oven. It was evident that he must. The bakery process was continuous. It was strictly a service industry. Small children, sometimes women, brought flat circles of dough on boards, individually made in neighbouring homes. These were received by Meti's two little brothers and passed to their father, who stood waist-deep in a well full of twigs, feeding his fire, and slipping the pale cushions of raw dough into the oven with a wooden paddle. Before doing so he impressed his trademark upon each with a wooden mould. The baked, hot loaves were gingerly lifted from the paddle by the little boys and tossed on to the racks to await collection by their various owners. How identification
was maintained I can't conceive, Invariably it was, despite the two small brothers, aged about seven and nine, being far more excited and intrigued by my presence than by their work. They wore delightful grins, unable to keep their shy eyes from constantly wandering back to me. It was as if an orang-outang had been mysteriously lent them by a zoo. When eventually they
accompanied us up to the road in search of a taxi the pretext seemed good enough for a tip: a practice maintained upon subsequent visits. There were two even younger children present that afternoon: a girl of about four who kept a nervous grip on Meti's trouser leg, and one of about twelve months.

The gate in the adjacent corral opened and Meti's mother appeared. Formal greetings were repeated. She was a big, handsome, rather weatherbeaten Berber woman, wearing a shawl over her head, and the voluminous red and white striped traditional skirts. Having borne seven children she looked as though a forty-mile overland walk carrying a hundredweight, an average marketing trek for her kind still in the
bled
,
would be no effort. I wondered whether she went foraging for miles around for the sticks which fired the bakery oven. The charge for baking a loaf was eleven francs.

Now she brought first a
taifor
, the low wooden table; and then tea equipment. Sigidhli broke off work to play host, while his wife retired to the house.

Inevitably as we left I wondered whether Meti's residing with myself represented a loss of labour to the family. There had been no hint of resentment, only genuine welcome. Probably they were glad of one less member to feed and clothe. The only time anything was asked of me I was unable to help.

A year later Sigidhli approached me about the possibility of work in the legendary paradise of Gibraltar. I went, inevitably and in some perplexity, to Bowles. What I must say, he said, might sound callous to us, but a Moroccan would accept logical truth. 'You cannot get work in. Gibraltar,' I explained to Sigidhli. 'You speak no Spanish or English, but the deciding thing is that your teeth
are rotten.' I don't think there was misplaced sentimentality in my being glad Sigidhli wouldn't get work in Gibraltar. An ecology had been transposed from the hills to Suani without trauma. Their house, into which I had now been
several times invited, was really a two-room shack. But it was spotless; the plastered walls washed pale blue supporting a picture of the king, framed Koranic texts, memorized by their owners rather than legible to them and, also proudly framed, some of my photographs of the children. There was a large brass bed, cushions and matting, a single electric bulb Cooking was done over a
mishma
of charcoal on the threshold. The corral enclosed a beautiful old fig tree and a private mains water tap. Sigidhli's bakery opposite was a nerve centre to the
haouma
as important as the shop. The day's cycle was long and busy while remaining intimately social. Men friends would sit in the open doorway and gossip, women come with complicated orders, sometimes lifting a handful of
haik
across their mouth and nose when they saw me. Sigidhli might earn more money in Gibraltar. But what would happen here? His family ate well and dressed warmly. They lacked nothing meaningful to them. School was free should Meti or the others deign to grace one though there were currently only places for some 60 per cent of Tangier's children. What would become of the little boys' apprenticeship should their father dig sewers for the British army or bury the whisky bottles spilling from the back door of the Rock Hotel! Could it be his bad teeth were for the best? Of course not. But they were fact; as was my own lack of any contact or influence with the employment machinery of Gibraltar. Meti used a toothbrush, most often unthinkingly mine. One was left offering Sigidhli the platitudes that his sons would work abroad if they must; gain increasing share of consumer prosperity. Already Meti's older brother was hell-bent for the Belgian mines. Let him import the record player or harsh, metallic accordion.

There was Naïma, So we named the beautiful young rabbit Meti brought home one night. Instant slaughter and our supper, was my first squeamish thought. But apparently Naïma was to be a pet. At least Meti dismantled those already rotten flower-boxes on the terrace to build her a hutch, An incidental result was that while I was in England winter downpours washed loose soil to block the terrace drains. The twenty-two metre semi-circular swimming pool to which our terrace was
unknowingly converted could, so a visiting architectural student subsequently assured me, have collapsed more than the facade of the six-storey building. Those alive would have remained responsible. Neither Meti nor myself was in residence or we should have realized the danger.

Naïma's disappearance is a joke to this day. I'm confident she was raised for the Sigidhli family pot. Sensible enough. Meti's story remains unchallengeably different. He took her to the cinema. For convenience he placed her on the vacant seat beside him. An old countryman came in, vision unadjusted to the darkened auditorium, sat, and . . .

'Meti, do you remember we once had - ' I have only to begin, affecting great effort of memory, for him to come out of a gloomy period, smile, and tell me to shut up. He's not going to change his story. I'm never going to accept it with other than overt scepticism.

There was the magnet. It was a fist-sized chunk of pig-iron, But so powerful it could almost pull the cheap metal chair at my work table from beneath me. This was altogether more serious.

'Meti, it's difficult to explain but . . .' It wasn't difficult. It was impossible. The exercise might be tried by anyone as adept at Moghrebi and elementary science as I am. How to rationalize the prohibition that the thing must be kept yards away from my precious Sony recorder, never mind some years' gleaning of Moroccan music and assorted sounds! I knew Meti was sensibly curious and peasant enough to sneak up on the recorder
in my absence with the pig-iron. At what distance would the Sony explode? Die? Vanish? I stole Meti's magnet, threw it away, and guiltily gave him an extra slab of pocket money. Neither of us commented upon the disappearance of a particularly malign
djinn
. The powers of bad
djnoun
are never precisely explained or dwelt upon,

To Meti these spirits, evil or
benign, were very real. Like Islam, they were a forbidden topic; no subject for threat or jest. In my deepest voice I recorded at 3¾  ips the hopeful injunction: 'Med - Meti - sleep . . .' Then surreptitiously switched on the tape at 1 7/8  ips. The slow, incredibly low-pitched hypnotic growl froze him. Then Meti was
not amused: until his quick mind grasped a demonstration of the magic. When I returned from dining out with friends it was no childish fear of the dark that invariably had him fully dressed and awake on any bed, where the lamp was brighter than beside his own
mtarrba
.
Every light in the flat blazed and the curtains were tightly drawn.

A chit arrived from the Post Office saying there was a parcel to collect. Gear for Meti. It was wrong in a country needing revenue, but I decided to lie. We had a little over one pound a day at the time. The tax assessed as one opens a parcel is arbitrary: extortionate or token depending upon the mood of the clerk. Books are duty-free. It was a girl who handed the box to me.
'
H'md'allah! -
thank God!' I said. Then In French: 'I desperately hope it's clothes for the child'. I knew it was. Unwrapping, I explained the predicament We were staying at the X Hotel. All that was known was that our son's suitcase hadn't been stolen by French, or Germans let alone Moroccans but, most shameful, by
English
-
my own people! The boy was confined to his bedroom in a bathing slip. The management wouldn't let him into the dining room to eat like that. We loved Morocco. Wanted to travel. But in a bathing slip . . .! She smiled without loss of bureaucratic authority. 'There is no duty,
monsieur
.'
I
could have kissed her. But one doesn't do that lightly to Moslem girls, even across a two-metre Post Office counter. Outside the building was a little girl dressed as a nurse collecting for the Red Crescent - Islam's Red Cross, logically enough. I put three dirham in her tin. '
Allah ikennek
!' I said: Allah was singularly going with me too.

What contraband riches! Messrs Courtaulds' 'Courtelle' (plastic, as I think of it) school pullover, mutated from Arab oil or felled forests, living beyond its two-year guarantee, if horrid-feeling once Moroccan washed. Indestructible nylon socks. Smooth needlecord jeans. Natural-fibre shorts were hitting, £3.20 a pair, and longs about £7. It was, a John Lewis assistant later explained to the
mothering part of me, 'because the Japanese are buying all the wool clip'. Plus, I thought, revolution of the domestic washing machine resulting in the current English schoolboy's bruised plastic trousers, which look like tired carbon paper. About the flat Meti continued to wear the new cut silvery flannel shorts, perfect complement to his firm gold body. The drab island and my overdraft were fifteen hundred miles away.

Any schoolboy today can pass electricity through resistant wiring in a vacuum to re-discover the electric light bulb. It was by accident, and independent of tutors, that Meti stumbled upon 'tie and dye' jeans. The Moroccans have a passion for chlorine bleach. At sixty francs a litre it whitens underclothes, smartens sheets and helps clean the bath. One night, unthinking, Meti slopped some into the bidet and chucked in his jeans. Presumably he'd noticed either Habiba or myself leaving whites to soak in this way. Sure enough, incompletely submersed, the jeans produced an extraordinary aspect in the morning. Bone-white continents emerged, nascent, driving away the blue denim sea. Delightedly Meti hung his jeans on the line where the sun would dry them within an hour. His impatience to wear the garment, however, warred with scientific curiosity over whether with neat bleach he could modify the peninsulas and bays arbitrarily created overnight. Man, the interfering animal, eventually achieved a big white M for Meti on the left buttock and a fierce face on the right.