A Single Swallow (32 page)

I know this story because a famous Spanish story-teller told it to me; his name is Juan Goytisolo and he lives in Marrakech. (There is a better version of it in his book
The Garden of Secrets.
) He said you can now also hear it in the square, and he is very pleased about this, because it means that an ancient Berber tale, told by one to another, has become a written story in his hands, and has been published for the readers of the world. And since then, no doubt because his telling improved it, somehow it has become an oral story again, and is now told in the square, where stories have been told since the beginning of who knows when.

Have you ever heard a stork sing? Nor have I. Have you seen one dance? Lucky you! But have you ever seen her fly? The wings are set far back; they are broad and strong. A beak halfway between a stiletto and a cutlass leads the way. And her long body and her legs are all held in perfect balance by that white neck, the absurdity that makes sense of it all. When a stork flies it is not that she is using the air to lift her, as so many birds do; it is more that she is using her weight and balance to stop herself being drawn up, and on up, and away.

I lazed about on the roof, watching the falcons, writing up Algeria in my diary, and took siestas in the dark cool of my room in the afternoon. The engagement with the authorities who ran the riad had been swift, bullish and conclusive. For this extraordinary luxury, including wonderful breakfasts and occasional access to the internet, I was paying a fair price. The half-blind, half-paid woman in the kitchen/laundry below me became my friend, and taught me the Berber for swallow:
tififeliste
!

Unlike many birds, swallows call on the wing, on their perches, when alarmed, when mobbing, when courting, when mating, and to one another in passing; perhaps it is another reason we mind about them: they are as talkative as us, and their conversation is as varied. They have a different call for all these occasions. Sometimes, it seems, they just chatter for the pleasure of it. The Berber name,
tififeliste
, is exactly as they sound, when in that sort of chatty mood. Tififeliste, ti-fi-fi-lisss-ti!

Painstakingly, my friend wrote out a vocabulary list, with four keys to pronunciation, and tested me on it, her good eye shining hawkishly, whenever our paths crossed. It was much more fun being a language student than playing my usual role: guiltily tipping guest. I looked for swallows diligently but they were nowhere to be seen. Instead, the world above us belonged almost exclusively to swifts.

Devil birds; flying cross-bows; devourers of wind-borne spiders which sleep on the wing and land only to breed, they are born to the air, to flight. Why do swift-lovers love swifts so? They will give you a dozen reasons. Why do we who love them all divide into swift people and swallow lovers? John Ayto's
Dictionary of Word Origins
gives a clue:

The seventeenth century: the age of civil war, revolution, Shakespeare, Milton, the King James Bible and the Copernican shift, when telescopes and astronomy put the sun at the centre of the then known universe, and moved the English and their God slightly to one side. The century of the English language itself: then it was that those of our ancestors who decided that all those swallows were not swallows at all, pointed up at the bands of screaming, keening faster-fliers, and said ‘These are swifts!'

In English, at least, swallows are the establishment: swifts are the revolution.

I saw ‘our' swifts coming north, and they were magnificent. Compared to the more sedentary species the European swift is a mighty thing. Transcontinental swifts, they should be called, they are like ocean-going airliners, suited in a dark soft brown. Not for them the long, long battle to the furthest south. Swifts fly as though they could go to the ends of the earth, but they have decided where that is: Congo. Its particular storms, its weather systems, its permanently alternating high rain season and low rain season, its vast profusion of creatures, flying, floating and crawling, its morning mists, its afternoon silences, its wild crying darkness, this is the wintering-ground of the swift.

Above the rooftops of Marrakech, however, it was not these birds that beguiled me, but their smaller, stubbier, white-rumped cousins, Little Swifts. The trick is to focus on one bird. To do this you need to be lying down, so that your binoculars, pointed skywards, will not shake. Then pick your Little Swift. To be able to follow one for as much as a minute feels like a real achievement. What at first looks like a batty swarm of dozens and dozens resolves itself into a series of aerial chases. One Little Swift, if not being pursued itself, will almost always be pursuing another.

Locked on to the tail of the swift in front, our hero twists, ducks, dives, slides, skids, arcs and arches, clinging to the track of the hunted. At some point one will either tire or change its mind. If the fleeing swift puts enough space between itself and the chaser, often another bird will drop into the space between them and pick up the chase where the first left off; sometimes the chaser peels away and latches onto another, and pursues it.

A lot of swifty squeaking and screaming accompanies all this activity, and it may have all been in deadly earnest, a mating competition etc., but it looked like tremendous fun. Best of all was seeing them practise their acrobatics. The first few times I saw it I could not fathom it. The binoculars would be left staring helplessly at vaguely unfocused dots: where an instant ago there had been a Little Swift would now be a blank blue space.

In slow motion, then: our Little Swift is hurtling along in relatively level flight. Suddenly it half-closes one wing, folding it in, while half-opening the other; the shoulder moving forward. At the same time, it throws itself sideways and down. It looks remarkably as though the bird has flipped up a hood, pulling the half-open wing over its head. In a split second it drops 50 feet straight down: gone! What a trick. If you can do that your pursuer will almost certainly over-shoot you, and it would not be at all surprising if you did not turn a few heads in the rest of the crowd. Some of them could do it perfectly; others kept practising.

The two days passed quietly while I wished they would hurry up. I ought to have gone out to the Menara Gardens in the evening, or found the sewage works, or at least taken a good long walk around the edge of town, but instead I lay on the roof, and took long, dark sleeps, and soup in the square, and excused myself on the grounds that staying in is the only way of saving money. I thought about what a wonderful way-point Marrakech must be to all migrating birds. All you have to do is survive the desert and the mountains, and in the instant you break over the edge of the precipices, through that lethal wall of winter, there it would be. A bright bowl of smell and noise and colour. All those people and all their waste; what a fug of flies they would put up. How busy, limited and impoverished a species we must seem to birds.

On the evening of the second day a group of swallows burst over the rooftops. They came in fast and low from the south, heading north-east. They skimmed the roofs, barely jinking, at top speed: I had never seen them flying so quickly and directly, with such urgency. I wondered what could be wrong: what drove them? I scanned around with the binoculars and saw, in the quarter of the sky from which they had come, a bird larger than all the rest; the size of a falcon but with something of the speed and profile of a giant swift. It slung down out of the sky in a long, fast glide, a shallow stoop, in fact, and suddenly I realised what it was: the cheetah of the skies – a hobby. Down it came,
swift, swift and unmoving, like a missile on a programmed flight path, heading for the great minaret of the Kotubia. And then there was a flicker in its wings, open then shut, very fast, and with a twist it rocketed down at a steep angle, striking, and there came from below the rooftops, just out of sight, an explosion of panicked birds, and it vanished.

It was exhilarating and deeply sinister, like watching a sweep of the reaper's scythe.

‘Wow!' I cried. ‘Hobby!' and scanned the sky for him again. He was gone. ‘A drink is called for . . .' I resolved.

There are two places to buy inexpensive beer in the Medina, which is the old town in the heart of Marrakech. The first is a hole in the wall in the Jewish quarter: down an unlit alley, in a midnight-dark patch where the buildings meet above you there is a hatch, where a hand will pass you the cheapest can of Spéciale Flag in town. The second is the Hotel Tazi.

The lobby, with its sickly yellow light and single other-worldly Christmas decoration high in one corner is a sort of human aquarium. That evening twenty nationalities perched on its tatty furniture and waved desperately at one waiter in an unlikely white tuxedo whose best defence against overwork was to appear to be somewhat confused. Excited Spanish teenagers, German trekkers, loud Italian couples, local bad boys on acid and a host of hawking or touting or drunk Moroccans played musical chairs without music. A man at the reception desk bet me €50 he could guess where I was from, chose Canada, and promised to pay next time. In the dining room, which reeked of cat urine, there had been a buffet supper: all that remained now was a huge, crisped fish head lolling over the side of its dish, its burnt eyes blind to the dirty tables where its flesh was still scattered, its teeth set in a grin. Next door, in the bar, a rank of silently surly Moroccan men watched a football game. The bar itself was deserted but for the harried coming and going of the white-jacketed waiter and a single Englishman from Middlesex who worked with computers,
and had brought himself on holiday. It was a pleasure to hear my own language again.

‘Oh yeah,' he said quietly. ‘It's been an amazing life. Taken me some amazing places. I was in Russia in the 1990s. I remember being taken to a shed in the Urals, just a big empty room and in the middle of it this thing in a big box of wire and wood which was a complete mock-up, which was faking thousands of computers it was talking to somewhere into thinking it was an IBM mainframe! A whole pirated mainframe! Amazing really . . .'

I bought a drink and took it through to the lobby, hoping for a spot from which to observe the proceedings. There was only one seat free, that I could see, just to my right; I hesitated fractionally before taking it because I was suddenly aware that in the ring of occupied places around it, dead opposite it, in fact, was a tall and very beautiful woman. As I sat down someone said, ‘Well done!'

She and her friend were in the middle of a comical cross-fire with an aggressively drunk young Marrakechi wearing green. The drunk Marrakechi wanted to talk to the beautiful girl. The beautiful girl did not much want to talk to him, but even more than this, the beautiful girl's no-nonsense friend wanted the Marrakechi to get lost, and told him so, at which he accused her of racism. Switching rapidly from English to French and back again I waded in, determined to take the bile out of the row. It was unexpectedly, unreasonably difficult.

‘What for you come to fucking Morocco if you don't like fucking Moroccan peoples?' the Marrakechi demanded.

‘Listen,' I said in French, ‘it's not that, of course they like Moroccan people, you just haven't understood – leave it, it's not that they don't like you, and they haven't insulted . . .'

‘Tell you what, mate,' cut in the no-nonsense friend, who spoke with a dust-dry London accent which reminded me powerfully of Danny, Withnail's drug dealer, fixing the Marrakechi with a stare, ‘why don't you just fuck off, yeah?'

‘What is it you do?' I had asked the beautiful girl, but in the ensuing explosion from the Marrakechi her reply was lost.

‘Sorry – what?'

‘I teach communication and peace studies,' she said, and burst into a peal of laughter so mischievous it was almost dirty.

‘You are joking.'

‘No!'

She asked what I was doing and I explained and asked what on earth she was doing in the Hotel Tazi and she said she was on holiday and had been here before with her estranged husband and her six-, nearly seven-year-old son; she said that it always delighted her. Her soft voice had an accent I could not place.

‘Where are you from?'

‘Rochdale.'

‘Where's that?'

‘Lancashire.'

I almost said ‘Where's that?' but something happened in my head and so instead with my heart leaping I said, ‘My God, I'm completely in love with you and it's really obvious, isn't it?'

She laughed and said, ‘Yes!'

(Afterwards she said she had thought I had said, ‘Would you like another beer from the bar?')

Her name was Rebecca, and her friend was Rosie. The Marrakechi having pushed Rosie to a certain point, Rosie asked the hotel management to throw him out. This the management agreed to do, but then the Marrakechi wailed in supplication, and begged Rosie to ask the hotel management to let him off, which she did, and they did, and I bought him a beer, and we all finished friends, and two of our lives, at least, were changed.

Enchantment may seem to come like that, like a lightning strike, but of course it does not, normally, no more than lightning comes from a clear blue sky. For years I said I was a romantic, by which I meant that I believed in the powers of life, beauty and art to bring miracles out of everyday existence. By being available for joy, by living in hope and expectation of wonders, I trusted that wonders would come. And so they did. However, I was also – and no doubt am – a man as greedy,
venal, lustful, wayward as a man can be, and in the name of this ‘romantic' calling I had happily pursued whatever or whoever took my fancy, for years. When it went wrong, when a relationship broke down, I would tell myself that it was because I had not found my soul-mate, and that I must just be patient, and hope. While following swallows it was impossible not to compare their endeavours with mine. What drove their journey, in the end, if not the desire to find a mate, and raise young? What drove mine? It has been said that the business of artistic production is a biological activity akin to the peacock spreading its tail. Was that my motive? Was the pursuit of the birds a pretext for a continuation of my search for the ‘romantic' ideal over a vastly expanded territory?