Maroc

TANGIERS

“What are you doing here?” said the young Moroccan.
The ceiling fan whirred over Barca and Real Madrid
posters . Bottles of Flag Speciale beer
were on the table.
I replied:
“What are you doing here?”
He just looked at the TV, tuned to a gameshow on
Spanish TV.
This seemed to be the answer: don’t know. Just
waiting, like so many others in Tangiers: many
Moroccans smuggled themselves into Europe,
by
dangerous speedboat, others waited, sometimes in vain,
for work visas.
Earlier I had met a small man, round glasses,
who
stopped me in the bazaar.
“Sir, may I show you an excellent restaurant?”
“I have already eaten.”
“Are you interested in souvenirs?”
“I have all my souvenirs, I am leaving tomorrow.”
I let him lead me to a bar. Then I asked him why he
was doing eking out a job as a guide. He told me he
had lost his job as a manager, and that he was living
with his sister. There was no social security. His
dream was to go and work
in Spain. I gave him 10
dirhams.


CASABLANCA

While I would be flying out of Gibraltar, just a short
ferry ride from Tangiers, I had flown into
Casablanca
two weeks earlier..
The film of the same name – whose outdoor scenes look
nothing like the city, it was filmed in a Hollywood
backlot - hinges on a coincidence: two former lovers,
played by Bogart and Bergman, meet by coincidence in
a
bar in Casablanca, a long way from where they had
parted.. It was amusing therefore that I had a
completely coincidental encounter of my own, in a
café, with a London consultant friend I hadn’t seen or
heard from for a year, John. “Of all the gin joints in
all the towns...” I burst out. He was on a business
holiday trip too and travelling alone, so we agreed to
spend the evening together.
Some people bring out
the trickster in you. John was
one. We were going to score with muslim women.
The corniche area was supposed to be the
nightlife
area, but there was just a lot of families licking
icecream, and men in all the bars looking at each
other with long faces and sipping soft drinks. There
was exception: two pretty girls sitting on their own.
We sat down next to them, and I started conversation.
After a while we agreed to each other we were going
places. We went to a nightclub.
“What are you doing here?” my girl said and poked me
in the chest.
“Hey, this is easy,” I said. My girl – John picked –
told me helpfully where a cash point was. She sent
her friend, younger and bustier and pretty
when she
caught her friend’s eye and they did belly dance moves
in their seats to the music together. Why wouldn’t she
go? “Because of the police. If they see me.”
On the way back to their place – a “friend’s
apartment” – in separate taxis, we were indeed stopped
by police. I had to bribe the cop 100 dirhams or he
would throw me into a cell for the night, according to
the taxi driver. I rendezvoused with John and his girl
later outside a
“friend’s apartment” – which we later realised was a
euphemism for brothel – we had both had enough.
There
were more outlays ahead: a door guard, “just
another
100 dirhams” my
girl said. The girls already cadged a
lot of drinks, nightclub entries, mobile phone topups
and cigarette packs off us. John said: “Moroccans are
always into business, always trying to rip you off,”
We decided to call it quits.
In the taxi, John said: if only the girls hadn’t been
prostitutes.
The taxi driver, a student, said: all unaccompanied
women in Morocco after dark are.
He also said that sleeping with a Moroccan woman who
wasn’t your wife could earn you a year in prison

THE MOUNTAINS

I wondered whether it was effect of the Koran, reading
of which was said to be like dipping into a river,
lacking a
narrative of the bible. Moroccan carpet
salesmen. didn’t build up their arguments, but just
repeated certain phrases over and over again.
“Why drink from a river when you
can you drink from a spring.”
“Western Union no problem – take the carpets home, pay
later when you send money. I trust you my friend.”
“I AM NOT INTERESTED.”
He poured me
another tea. When I had left my hotel in
the Todra gorge, half an hour earlier, I was followed
by the hotel owner ten
steps behind, then his mate, Mohammed: I just wanted
go for a walk to the nearby village, but inevitably,
flanked by both of the, we ended up in his private
carpet shop. There followed a ten-minute sales
spiel.

After what I thought was a successful communication of
my non interest, we went for another tea, this time on
the carpet shop terrace, surrounded by a
vista of mountains, red in the setting
sun, in three
directions. I sighed and let my thoughts wander,
until:
“Western Union, no problem.”
Memo to self:
Some people just don’t get the message.

THE DESERT

There is a certain age when many men buy a boat and go
to sea. The desert is a kind of sea. In the last town
in Morocco
, where the highway ended, and where there
was an old sign somewhere that said it was 52 days to
Timbuctoo, I hired Ibrahim and his Mercedes
240.
The desert poured past, the light as blinding as
darkness, the sand as white as snowfield. Stones and
gravel, gravel and sand, sand and stones.
Heat distorts perception, perhaps it was one
hour or many.
It was early evening now, and dunes – huge dunes,
could be seen for miles away,
I was glad to see trees: when the ground is flat, the
sky sinks. Trees raise the sky by being big yet there
is so much further to go. It was an oasis – there were
some berber mud houses. We parked and ate
some dates
off the trees.

We began to climb, at the top of the dune, we saw a
quilt of dunes, set in relief by the sun, stretching
to the horizon. Then the stars came out, billions of
them. The stars were like green chandeliers….I
switch on the shortwave radio. Above me is a wonderful
sense of cool, listening to the rise and fall of
interference, the rolling of the huge roaring breakers
of space…..
I sent a text message to Brussels. There is no reply.

HOTEL

Back in the hotel in Rissani, after a week in the
desert,
I look at the mirror. My face is haggard, worn
down
by the sun, eroded like the mountains that turned
into rocks, the rocks that turned into sand. Life is
like jumping off a skyscraper, and this summer I have
passed the halfway point
Who is she? Imagine Anne Frank grown up on a good
diet. Elongated limbs, once an ugly duckling but now
statuesque. She used to smile like Anne Frank on the
cover, total devotion, and flap her fingers on my
naked chest whenever she wanted to say something or
was worried. Or, when she was sad, she would dangle
her handbag slowly like a pendulum. When she looked at
things there was this
intention: you could read it. I
am going to look. And then she turned her head and
looked. “I am very clumsy,” she would say. But also
very strong:
with a friend she carried a table four
flights up to
her flat off the Grand Place, very elegant and large.
And she was never ill.
Later she was very cute when she was angry. She had an
IQ of 160, had just started working for the European
Commission, and was 26. She had dumped me shortly
before starting her new job.

MARRAKECH

The Red city, in what is known as the square of the
dead, Djmaa El Fnaa. There are berbers, Gnawa
music, monkeys, fire, dentists. I go to a fortune
teller. He is summoned by a
salesman of alternative
medicines, who speaks French.
“How much will he charge?”
“150 dirhams.”
“Sure?”
“Yes.”
And we sit down next to buckets and boxes of
traditional herbal medicines laid out on a large
carpet in the square, lit by kerosene lamps, smokes is
rising from the food stalls, lit up in a ghostly way
by
their kerosene laps, and there is the sound of
drummers and snake charmers. The fortune teller gives
me six sticks inscribed with Arabic script which I
have to wrap strips of cloth. I let the strip hang
from the stick, grab the two ends, bring them together
and wrap them in unison around the stick. Six times,
and he puts it between a
large notebook in his lap,
writes furiously in Arabic as if a prescription – he
is neat, balding, looks like a Swiss accountant, quite
fair skinned, but for his jellabiyah, leans forward
several times, as if a stomach ache, making several
guttural sounds, opens the notebook and asks me
to
ynravel the strips. This I do: three strips of cloth
come off the stick completely – I wonder how this is
so
When this happens, the herb seller, who acts as our
translator, says: bad news. This means problem. The
fortune teller reads the messages on the unfortunate
sticks and tell me my fortune: I am a dreamer, have
missed lots of opportunities in life. I give a lot to
my friends and lovers without expecting
anything
back.These people are afraid of me though because I
represent a threat, and don’t return the attention. .
They think I am going to kill them. Ania is a
good
person, but to be back together with her, I must not
contact her, he will write a spiritual letter. I must
bury it under my pillow and within five days she would
contact me.
“Let her come to you,” he said. Then he
asks 1,500 dirhams. .
“Oh dear,” I say.
We haggle it down to the original
figure, a tenth of this, but the fortune teller will
not write the letter.
“That is a shame,” says the salesman, grinning
embarrassedly. “I really wanted to see for myself
it worked too.”

I did my story, on medical caravans.
Basically three days in a taxi.
Back in England, she never called. I consoled
myself
that the letter wouldn’t have made any difference;
that it was pure superstition.
I continued
waiting, like the Moroccans in Tangier, hoping,
waiting
– waiting for the exit visa