Tangier (24 page)

There are girls, youths, and a very few small boys, who tour Europeans' homes, or are kept. My anecdotes concentrate upon the last group as more overtly unique to the town; while Moroccan mistresses, one might say, are more overmastering than Moroccan masters. Or so I idly supposed, Again one doesn't speculate about a friend's manservant; and if he's wise he doesn't ask you to lunch with his mistress. In fact one friend did just this, The imitation was dated 'Vat 69'. Dr Dennis Little, a lovable. often extrovert man, who suffered from clinical depression, and knew mania, died a few years later. He would not have wanted this tiny memorial anonymous. Four of his mistresses were present. I had a delicious lunch and free sex, but learnt very little new about Moroccans.

A European naturalist asked me to look after the small boy with whom he'd fallen in love for
two weeks while he was away in the Atlas. (X, now several years dead, was never to let this unhappy deviation appear overtly in his beautiful, and vastly popular books: and so anonymity must be respected by me.) The flat I'd temporarily taken had a British Consulate official as one neighbour; the Moroccan equivalent of a High Court judge as the other. I said fine. Mustafa was thirteen, pre-pubertal, muscled solid gold from six hours' daily swimming, not particularly pretty. His bounce and exuberance were alarming. He was bothered that I wouldn't make love to him.

'What do you do,' I asked him, 'if a client won't pay up, or gets nasty?'

Mustafa assumed a look of hatred, whipped off his clothes, threw them in my face, walked out of the door and sat down stark naked on the landing, strategically near the stairs. He grinned at me broadly. The strategic position happened to be leaning against the Moroccan judge's door. Mustafa couldn't read the nameplate: presumably would have been more delighted if he could.

'I understand,' I said. 'Come back.'

Mustafa remained sitting, grinning, shaking his head. 'I dig,' I said. 'You use . . .' But I didn't know the Moghrebi Arabic for 'embarrassment blackmail'. Mustafa's French
wasn't even up to 'You embarrass the bloke.' Patently the situation was designed to frustrate philosophical discussion anyway. I closed the door. Mustafa rang the bell within two seconds, dived into his bed, and was asleep within ninety.

I began to understand his appeal for a lover of wild animals.

Mustafa discovered a game. The flat was single room, plus kitchen and bath. When I was reading there would come a knock on the outside of the curtained windows. Mustafa. When I was in the bath, the knock would come on the outside of the frosted window. The game would have amused me too, but the flat was on the third floor, without balcony, and there was
a forty-foot drop to solid concrete. I realized that the higher wild animals are more difficult to look after than the lower.

'That's the brand of whisky X drinks,' Mustafa said, naming his proper keeper. And he emptied the bottle down the lavatory. I suggested to Mustafa that to destroy anything I kept in my house with which to entertain friends was bad manners. Instantly the Arab was fully in him, understanding. I refrained from mentioning the cost of a bottle of Teacher's in Tangier: or drawing moral analogy from its name. It was I who was learning.

Mustafa attacked me playfully with an aerosol fly-spray. 'That's toxic,' I protested. 'It doesn't kill humans,' Mustafa said. 'Look, there are pictures only of mosquitoes and beetles on the tin.'

Over and over Mustafa thumped out his full name, patronymic, and address on my typewriter, neglecting only to add 'the world, the universe,' as an English boy might have done. One could better understand his wanting to define who he was. I was alarmed when he played piano chords on the keys of the machine. He was puzzled, then intrigued, when the metal hammers jumped up to jam in an inky bunch.

'What's it for?' Mustafa asked.

'My work.'

'
This
?'
He was playing autumn tree with the leaves of the third draft of a novel. 'How much is it worth?' A standard, sensible Moroccan question about any physical object. 'About five hundred pounds if I'm lucky; nothing if I'm not.'

Mustafa stacked up the quarto sheets neatly as I would, but not for neurotic reasons: I gave up trying to adjust a comma: had to pretend to be doing something. 'You mean
this
costs five hundred pounds?'

'No. D'you know anyone who sells
Le
Petit Marocain?'

'Ahmed sells newspapers.'

'Well, they make several copies of this the same way.'

'How many?'

'Three thousand.'

'How much money each ?

'Two pounds,'

'Two pounds for a newspaper! That means you get
six thousand pounds
for this?'

Mustafa was looking at the typescript as if it were some dangerous modern western invention. Which is what the novel form is.

'How much money does Ahmed get hawking news-papers?'

'Ten per cent on Christian ones, three on Moroccan ones,' Mustafa said instantly.

'That's about what I get. Go and have a bath.'

Mustafa went off: thoughtful as always; obedient for once. 'But Ahmed doesn't write the newspapers,' he said sleepily from bed,

'I know,' I said. 'Perhaps one day he will.'

A colleague of Mustafa's turned up at a flat I'd temporarily rented from a woman novelist who had gone abroad. It must have been a straight bit of shadowing. At twelve Abdulkader drank, was said to be an alcoholic. (He wasn't: he was simply discovering a new drug like masturbation; and was out of the phase, in the same profession, with a different pride, by the time he was fifteen.) I kissed him because I wanted to, because he was beautiful and knew more about the exercise than I, who also have aberrant phases; if innocent spontaneity can be called that. He had probably timed his arrival to coincide with a Christian's dinner hour. The mistake was giving him a glass of watered wine, showing him the spare room, and forgetting about him. At midnight it's reasonable to forget one's uninvited guests. The woman novelist was not an alcoholic either. She did have one of the most dramatically stocked drinks cupboards I've ever seen.

About 2.00 a.m. I went to the kitchen to cut myself a sandwich. No bread-knife, I knocked politely on Abdulkader's door. Locked. Furious now, less because it's impossible to cut stale French bread without a sharp knife than because of the blind absurdity of a prostitute's defending himself against rape, let alone against me, with a bread-knife, I knocked more firmly. Disgruntled mumblings from the other side of the door. I realize now that the knock must have had the tenor of my parents' on my locked door when I was hiding from school. Happily no such poignant memory consciously hit me.

'Abdulkader,' I lied, 'I'm going downstairs to see the porter who has a spare key to this room.' I opened and shut the apartment door; tiptoed back. Abdulkader had opened up.

'I only want the bread-knife,' I explained, sitting on the boy's bed. It was surrendered, wordlessly. Then I noticed strange lumps under the blanket.

Unsealed and sampled were
a
dozen bottles, including some tricky to replace — like green chartreuse and Fernet-Branca. 'You idiot child,' I said in English, more to myself than to him.

Pathetically, the only bottle Abdulkader stole was the one that would fit in his jeans' pocket unobtrusively. Heaven knows what he made of neat Angostura bitters. I didn't entertain Abdulkader again until I had my own flat, bare by design as much as from necessity. On that occasion my miniature Sony transistor radio disappeared. It was sheer magic because, on Abdulkader's departure. I had given him a polite, exploratory hug. Two days later he brought it back. 'How?' I asked him. It could scarcely have been concealed between sock and sole where such children sensibly keep money against mugging. The answer was a stout rubber-band about the lower calf.

Norodin (aforementioned) was of a different calibre, aided probably by his being 'lower middle-class'. At seven he was trotting about with an elderly Englishman, and I didn't believe what I was told; at ten he spoke four languages; at twelve some lover sent him to secondary modern school for one term in London (where his English developed a lisp); at thirteen he became my secretary for three months before he got bored with me, and his dynamism and mysteriously acquired passport carried him through the occupations of uniformed pageboy in white gloves at one of Gibraltar's grander hotels to cabin boy on a luxury yacht. Norodin wasn't beautiful. Competent he was. Probably he knew more about the thirty or so Christians he worked for personally during the first fourteen years of his life than they knew about themselves.

As secretary he was
invaluable. He could unconsciously allay the suspicions about me of my neo-
colon
European neighbours, not simply in their own languages but in their thought processes. Norodin, also, had a yapping little dog on a leash. He could politely control my then dubious maid, Hasnah; summon and bargain with a locksmith. unblock drains with his own hands, and return a manuscript to a friend with the safety and concern with which I post my own letters.

Norodin's English lisp made him 'sec-wetary'. But there was little wet about Norodin. He had a tiresome precocity.

'Norodin, you stupid little boy!'

'U'm not a little boy.'

'
Big
boy, then.'

'U'm not a big boy.'

'Just what are you?'

'U'm lovely boy,' said Norodin comfortably.

Norodin banked so much cash with me during his three months' daily attendance that I could have lived off the interest, Like a good banker, I didn't ask where the money came from; I knew. The day arrived when he announced  he must realize his assets because: 'U'm going to Fes with my mum.' I'd eaten the cash and had a hectic hour exchanging emergency travellers' cheques at black-market rate. Norodin got his dirham, and was genuinely puzzled to receive their hazardously acquired interest. The nice thing was that he actually did go to Fes with 'my mum'. At that date the coiled, coloured wax candles he brought back as a gift could be
obtained nowhere else in the kingdom. I was invited to choose two from a dozen. Where the other ten, rest
or have burnt I don't know.

Norodin banked something else with me. For three months a tin of airgun slugs stood on my work table: I think because the weapon belonged to his brother, these slugs to him. At each weekend the tin was lighter. I was never presented with the threatened 'pie of small birds' (probably sparrows). So courtesy required I need only guard instruments of the pies' manufacture; not consume one of the pies.

Norodin understood the conception of a book, read the simpler lurid paperbacks, and had a little French girlfriend whom he felt up at the cinema. He said he had long been bothered by a mystery of cinema. I explained I had little inside experience of the medium. But Norodin's curiosity was simple and specific. 'Why.' he asked, 'are mens always going to bed with girls but never with boys like me?'

He made his final appearance with Driss, a beautiful, pale Berber child with whom I understood he was touring, the homes of a number of single gentlemen, mostly expatriate. Besides his mysterious income, Norodin had a handsome album of stamps in which the various denominations of Britain, America and Germany were most prominently represented. The function of Driss, who had huge green eyes and an expression like a fine kitten caught watchful in lamplight, was unequivocally resolved.

'Put Driss in the book,' Norodin instructed about his protégé. 'But don't say
he slips with mens.'

'The plural word is "men'', Norodin,'

I chucked them both out, into the clean winter sunshine. The Charf hill was bright, rounded, its cypresses living green, not funereal. Over the city bats were replacing the swallows, as they do any evening, in an ecological balance others know more about than I. The date was 1969.

It rained in Tangier. I lay on the sluicing terrace on my stomach mumbling inanities at my tortoises. Meti was at the cinema: wide-eyed beneath the weight of a Spanish-dubbed Indian film industry spectacular. He would understand neither the weak, streak-lightning Arabic subtitles, nor the Spanish dub. He'd be sharp as flailing cutlasses on the visual story line. I was thinking about residents and visitors.

I have friends in Tangier. Expatriate friendships can have depth and a peculiar psychological strength. Sown upon alien soil, blown there by winds as complex and of as different origin as the natural currents of air that course the globe, people achieve delicately balanced relationships, mutual accommodations. Unfortunately these can prove as unstable, and explosive as any actual meteorological phenomenon. Yet man has intelligence natural forces lack. He can take evasive action. I've always avoided local thunderstorms; or, when forced to witness them, have done so dispassionately at a dry remove. So do the half-dozen persons with whom I most closely marry. There are others who enjoy the hail; whose happiness, even existence, depends less upon remarking than chasing and licking to extinction each tiny globule of ice. These thirsting tongues of expatriate Tangier I watched for a year; then rejected totally.

John Lehmann had given me an introduction to Paul and Janie Bowles, Joe McCrindle of the
Transatlantic Review
one to Alan and Ruth Sillitoe. Lehmann, and independently the literary agent, Michael Sissons, provided recommendations to Rupert Croft-Cooke. I lurked for months in the waterless Ain Haiani house before daring drop notes on such eminences. What if they should call? And what an idiotically shy youth I was in 1961. John Lehmann I asked to the Ain Haiani house when he was visiting Tangier, and he came.

I called first upon Paul and Janie. That was the beginning of a long friendship.

For Croft-Cooke I climbed into a callow youth's twenty-eight-inch-waist scruffy tropical suit, and murderously expensive taxi. (Later he was to say: 'I thought he was rather a
dirty
young man.' At twenty-five I was dirty in neither sense.) Dutifully I'd read Rupert's delightful
Tangerine House.
The book describes the building of his then residence, but also the construction and stocking of his wooden drinks cupboard: the word cannot have been 'cocktail bar'. Either way, It lauded the heaven of Tangier, and the Vast selection of wines he stocked.