Tangier (23 page)

Mina was neither young nor beautiful. She became the most reliable and delightful maid I ever had. She had been a cook at one of Tangier's best French restaurants; and was forever wanting to put on a grand dinner party for me, while I pointed out certain disadvantages about the four bent forks, three widely assorted chairs, and one saucepan that didn't leak. None of these paucities of course prevented a Moroccan meal being prepared and served to suitably sensible friends; and could not deter
Mina. Had she been in office (for 'in service' is inappropriate for what amounted virtually to her Cabinet rank) at the time of the Sudiah affair I've no doubt Mina would have had a marriage arranged and executed within days. Such is the temporal dislocation of fate.

Her services encompassed the prosaic and esoteric with equal efficiency. A shirt button would be sown on unasked from ever ready equipment in her hand-bag; then, one day, she discovered some
kif
pipes in a cupboard. Chuckling with many chins she brought a free sample of
kif
next day.

'Mina, you've not turned police informer?

'
Non
!' A moment's affront gave way to more uncontrolled shuddering of her giant frame.

Pride dictated I boast I was supplied by a very old Moroccan friend, who selected expertly and cut regularly for himself. This led to comparison of samples and the inevitable rising of Mina's pride too, for every Moroccan professes expertise about this commodity. I'd never known a woman concerned either in, or about the subject. Mina's husband continued to cut me small quantities at need.

I consulted Mina about the health of my tortoises. After reeling off some obvious foodstuffs, she announced gravely: 'And of course they like potatoes. But not chips.'

The word 'tragedy' is perhaps only accurately applicable to a death about which are elements of the inevitable, but which leaves the witness, partly because of the time scale involved, convinced it could, and should intelligently have been averted. But the dice were loaded. How fully, the witness realizes too late. With hindsight, even an emotion as trivial as irritation, he subsequently dwells upon his own failure to intervene.

Mina had only been with me a few months when she reported her eight-year-old son's having been hit on the head in
the school playground. The scalp wound was less than an inch long; the stone had been thrown by a boy of fifteen. I thought little of it beyond asking whether he had been attended by a registered doctor. 'Yes,' she said, 'a Spanish one,'

Over the next ten days the child apparently was growing worse. Mina was glum, but there was a fateful acceptance about what little a simple woman could describe of the child's condition. He was feverish: his head was swelling hugely: he was very ill. Was he regularly receiving injections? The question had pathetically to be part played in mime: her French. let alone my Moghrebi, were neither up to what anyway was a helplessly lay question. The answer was: 'Every day.' Presumably my barging in could gain nothing. I didn't ask her whether I should; myself many times.

Two days later Mina did her housework stint for me, regular as ever, 'They,' by which I understood she meant the family, were considering taking the child to hospital in Casablanca. At this point, the impertinence notwithstanding, I think I should have asked to see the situation for myself. Two days later Mina said the child had died, cried a bit, and got on with her work.

The day Mina announced the child had died she brought me .a large bunch of flowers. My flat doesn't run to a vase. She cut the top off a plastic bleach bottle to hold them. '
El-youm
wa er-rhadda
-
today and tomorrow,' she said. It was a philosophy which took no cognizance of yesterday.

The business wasn't ended. The archaic social machinery that went into operation was visibly instrumental in Mina's recovery, a part of mourning,.

The fifteen-year-old-schoolboy who had thrown the stone was of course in jail, she explained. This didn't mean polite juvenile detention. She was going for one and a half million francs compensation before the Tribunal, 'Blood money' - something very like the Anglo-Saxon
wergild
- is virtually automatic expectation, and reward, with this sort of accident. I did the sum, from the 'old franc' terminology rather than Moroccan dirhams Mina used. Where were Moroccans of this class to find £3000 to pay the debt and ransom their fifteen-year-old child from the common, never mind communal, criminal lock-up? I didn't
ask
Mina; but expressed curiosity.

'Oh, they have it!' Mina said, And beneath calculations inconceivable in the circumstances to at lease one westerner, a medieval therapy visibly was working. Mina escalated its efficacy. She was taking the matter right to Rabat and three million (£6000) was now the target.

I said nothing, Cash compensation for the accidental manslaughter of my child was beyond my comprehension, project imaginatively as I might. But then, perhaps, where I'd certainly have bust up, Mina remained working, tough and humane.

The family of the jailed fifteen-year-old called to console, apologize. 'We didn't ask them in,' Mina said. But she was troubled, recovering.

Petitioning the capital I'd supposed an imaginative and understandable fantasy aiding the process of mourning. But Mina, and presumably husband, did go to Rabat. I tried to envisage the scene, doing my own washing for ten days, brusquely refusing a neighbour maid's offer of assistance. I was, and remain, unhappy lest intervention at the right time on my part could have saved the life of a little boy I'd never met.

Mina returned from Rabat. The fifteen-year-old was out of jail. Mina was offhand about settlement terms. Probably this had to do with the Koran's injunction that it is invidious to press claims for compensation too far. And so detail was withheld from a Nesrani.

Today's profession is freelance. It is also discreet. This comes about I think because, while Moroccans themselves enjoy, and get, every conceivable form of extramarital sex, it is had manners to let anyone see you getting, or about to get, it. Homosexuality is accepted probably rather more because the Arabs have practised it for centuries, and because a Moslem girl, as financial asset, must be virgin at marriage, than because some dear old queen told Katharine Whitehorn for a colour supplement that Tangier's local name is 'Queersville-on-Sea'.

Women solicit lone European males in a most practical way: a light slap, it couldn't be called a grope, on the balls in passing. This is accompanied by a sideways flick of big eyes above the veil, and a scarcely audible, friendly hiss. It happens mostly at the lower, dark end of the Boulevard, and streets off it; but also in the brightly lit, slow moving current of summer humanity, the
paseo
inherited from the Spanish. Younger, unveiled girls use only their eyes. For obvious reasons they avoid darker streets. In July 1973 a girl of about fourteen said 'Hallo' to me quietly in broad daylight. I'm told, and can believe, this was happening that summer for the first time since Independence in 1956: that it was quite an invasion, probably from Casablanca.

Youths cruise, relying on eyes and wits like the girls; but there similarity ends. A youth will never slap a prospect in the balls; a girl will never loiter. Small boys (there are probably less than a dozen visible professionals) ape their elders, relying on their own private grapevine for information about clients. A youth or a boy may pass and repass the Café de Paris at the height of the
paseo
five
times in as many minutes. He will be equating the level of coffee in a regular client's cup against the possibility of a rival's better timing, If he is leaning against the only tree on that corner it is because he is annoyed with a regular client and demonstrating the fact with guts. The client may neither know nor care that his lover can be arrested and beaten up by his own people. The boy's pride will remain intact; his body repair itself, after a few days.

I must emphasize that the above refers to a very small, tough corps, specializing in the westerner taking two weeks' annual holiday in Tangier for one purpose only. The child who cleans your shoes is not a whore. He may accept muddled cuddling and kissing from an awed student or frustrated preparatory schoolmaster, run a hippie household with thoughtful economy, receive a Deutschmark cheque for life from an immature businessman with mature bank balance who's fallen in love with his eyes or grubby fingernails. He won't do a blow job, or be buggered; but will be home to mum and dad an hour after nightfall, with profits fat or nil, to much discussion about the oddities of Christians - foreigners.

Among the Moroccans themselves the picture is different. When girls can't be found or afforded, boys are used, sometimes very young. This isn't as horrific as it sounds. The children have been trained by and for the indigenous people, or individuals. Their anal sphincters have adapted; persons penetrating them are usually considerate, often
loving.

These are the hard corps the tourist sees (or goes with); on the Boulevard, in the Petit Socco, leaning against that tree in the Place de France. The equivalent (slightly older) girls have similarly moved to the richer market for the season. As has been said, they lack the arrogance to loiter. The very young girls are invisible. Paradoxically the only way of meeting one would be through a similarly hard corps' little boy, who would deny the existence of any such person, misunderstand, and probably spit on you.

Girls cost from five dirham to fifty; boys from one to ten; youths from ten to thirty. The actual sum depends less upon supply and demand than upon vendor-client relationship. Rape is extremely rare, regarded with deep opprobrium. The nature of Arab building is like a cluster of beehives; where the bees are whispering women. Again family relationships are close and indissoluble. A girl may well have six tough brothers, not to mention a father and uncles; while murdering a man who's provenly raped your sister will sensibly put you in jail for a week. It's wiser to go. with whores while wooing the loved one with, simultaneously, western 'sophistication', Semitic charm, and magical potions bought secretly from the very best benign witch.

All love-making is discreet. There is honour among prostitutes. I've never known one who would describe precisely what they did with a client. Similarly, and at the other end of the scale, it would be ten times more unthinkable to ask a married Moslem how he performed with his wife (or four wives) than it would be to ask an equivalent western friend.

In 1971 on four successive afternoons, them arrived at my flat: two different pairs of girls, a group of three youths, two Spanish youths, yet two more girls. All were pleasant, untough, polite. The first pair of girls I invited in to tea. The second I asked, 'Who sent you?' On the third day I was asking 'Who is sending you?' The answer: 'A man in the Medina.' Whether this was in fact organized probing, or some friend's practical joke, I don't know. I confess I took none to bed; thinking more about retaining my typewriter and tape recorder, and the work I was doing with the former when the doorbell rang,

X's all-male brothel, specializing in technically crude voyeurism (holes in walls) recently moved to new quarters. The stories about it are legion and legend. I don't propose to rehearse a single one; and must confess to never having visited either premises. I always meant to, but the time, suitably orientated friend, and nerve never coincided. In his heyday X could, at an hour's notice, provide clients with anything from a giant Sudanese Negro to a blond Spanish twelve-year-old with blue eyes and a foreskin. The charge until 1970 was ten dirham to the prostitute and ten to the establishment. Subsequently it was twenty to each. For all I know X may now be dead from boredom. Some say he no longer operates.

In 1971 I did get into a regular Moorish brothel. The guide was the former servant of a deceased nobleman; and I'd known both men eight years. Reasonably the Moroccan wanted ten dirham down. The girls were not paraded, were not naked, were not pathetic, and the youngest was at least sixteen. Four of the seven playfully sipping my glass of not very good mint tea were fantastically beautiful. My remaining flaccid had obviously nothing to do with there only being thirty dirham in my pocket: a lot, probably, with the irreconcilables of visual impact, thought, and unfamiliarity with professionals. Soft kisses over immaculate teeth, deep ones between the twenty minutes it takes to consume even some of a scalding glass of mint tea were worth the five dirham for which the
Madame
quietly asked. It would be tricky to spend fifty pence so delightfully in my market town.

Tangier today is a sexually innocent, well-run city. The orthodox tourist will be offered model leather camels and phony musical instruments but not sex. At least it will not be thrust at him. Moslem Morocco is in many aspects proud and prim as Catholic Spain sixteen miles away. It hungers for the money of mass tourism with better cause. A tourist's wife and daughters' legs will be looked at and commented upon. But they would be in most parts of  southern Europe; and this is perhaps why wife and daughters have suggested a holiday in Tangier anyway. A girl has less chance of being dragged into a dark alley and de-flowered than in Cheltenham or Stockholm. Unless that's what she's come for. Or why she's left Cheltenham or Stockholm.

If that sounds cynical, I'll put it personally. A waif (Niñ, in fact, who shared my Ain Haiani house when he was twelve) went through five very pretty and consenting Caucasian girls (about a month each) when he was seventeen, in the simple Medina house he'd been able to rent on the tiny profits gained from kindness to hippies; married a rather plain English girl from love and lust when he was nineteen; and removed to North America to run his family on a job paying enough for them to live with the dignity they deserve.

The middle Tangier period of this odyssey I was able to observe because he had lent me a room in his house where I could smoke and read away from traffic sounds. I was also offered his European mistresses, as part of the process of their being successively cast off, and his little Moroccan boyservant, whom I exploited to discover phonetic transliterations of nursery words like: 'cow, mountains, goats, eggs'. At seventeen Niñ was running his household (including me when present) with a quiet courtesy and concern one might describe as feudal. It was modem Arab-Berber.