Tangier (27 page)

The Spanish exodus drained colour from the city. Fewer were the stout women munching cream cakes in Forte's, the men who seemed to assume inches when nattily suited for the
paseo
(though their shoes looked too tight and small), the handsome youths whose natural swagger rubbed off on to their Moroccan contemporaries, the overdressed small children. Italians and French were leaving too, though not my objectionable Belgian. As a dentist he fell within the professions, with doctors and teachers who were exempt from Moroccanization. However, rumour had it that European schools were
to become more democratic: take a higher ratio of indigenous children. That outraged him. His threshold of tolerance to anything Moroccan was not high.

Living myself with no gadgets except Sony recorders and a Leica (which like
Rolls-Royces tend not to break down) I had no need of skilled technicians. When a Moroccan ribbon for my typewriter dried out in three days I typed without ink. It was a bit like writing with snow on snow. Puzzled correspondents received carbon copies.

People with malfunctioning televisions were at wits' end. The Englishman who understood electronics was leaving, himself despairing, a victim of Moroccanization, Before the crisis much of his business consisted of trying to repair television sets disembowelled, from curiosity as much as frustration, with tools like kitchen scissors and heavy sugar-hammers. He must have felt like a surgeon hopefully presented with a victim of Jack the Ripper by a simpleton. This is not to mock Moroccans. The idea that happiness devolves more readily upon a non-technical people, once a romantic myth, becomes more tenable every day.

The poignancy of so many Europeans departing struck me in the second when the eyes of two infants met. I was sitting at a Boulevard café. Led by parents there passed each other in opposite directions a Moroccan aged three or four wearing the kaftan and cap that is ritual for circumcision and a slightly older Spanish girl in her first communion dress. They summed each other's respective gear up with friendly nonchalance. After centuries' warring the two races had evolved a symbiotic relationship, based on mutual respect for culture and creed. Now it was ending.

Another Middle East war had caused further exodus of Moroccan Jews. Here the loss was to the higher professions as much as skilled trades. Dignified gentlemen with beards, black suits and hats, were suddenly an infrequent sight.

Cohen, controlling agent of my apartment block and much other property, was scarcely rabbinical. Like the majority of Tangier's Jews he was of indigenous birth, a Moroccan subject. When we first met I had asked him whether he were Spanish. 'I am a Moroccan but not a Mussulman,' he said, His inability to say simply, 'I am Jewish,' was depressing besides insulting. But evasion proved to be the core of the man's character. Apart from greed, an asset perhaps in the job, it was his only weakness. If I disliked Cohen it was because I had several times witnessed his obsequiousness towards tenants and screaming of abuse at Moroccan workmen. Understandably a labourer tried to kill me on the occasion I called at Cohen's home, presumably mistaking my visit for social intercourse between fellow capitalist conspirators. It was net that way at
all. Meanwhile I had spent years privately thinking of Cohen as Sam in the hope that auto-suggestion might produce
entente
if not affection. The exercise was successful. I came to pity Sam, his office life, the joyless mathematics of extortion, a frame grossly overweight from food and physical inertia, his digestive mints efficacious as a teaspoonful of rainwater in the bath of Mr Haig, the lurking coronary. Sam had a good mind. Sparring with it left me relaxed. The worst crises were unreal. I enjoy farce. Sam did not. In five years I never saw him smile. Asked whether there were human beings to whom the idea of a joke was an alien conception I should previously have said it impossible. Sam taught me otherwise. His ethos was disadvantageous to him. He supposed that agility of mind comes from self-confidence. It need not. Further, I suspect he equated self-confidence with cash. Sam's desire to evict me was tempered by caution, and the struggle was visible in his eyes. I did nothing to encourage dark uncertainties but nothing to discourage them either. Patently I was mad. Then had I lawyers, mysterious influence in Rabat? Was I a person who would bring the case before Tangier's Rents Tribunal just for kicks? And distribute a few thousand pounds in bribes? Sam didn't know; I did. My connections with government were easily delineated. I had just engaged a new maid whose daughter was married to a chauffeur of a sister of the king. At the time of the worst crisis I had £50 in Morocco and £132 in the outside world. It seemed unreasonable to surrender my lease so that Sam could require 100 per cent more monthly of a new tenant, If I
gave my furniture to my maid would its value cover the cost of removal? In a town of cheap labour and hand-carts I thought so. No, the happy confidence baffling Sam was that of a
kamikaze
pilot. And sometimes I felt like one who had taken off, changed his mind, and then remembers that the aircraft has no landing gear and is anyway a flying bomb, Very well, I would bomb Sam and anyone else who attacked - with incredulity, irony, even outright mockery.

The first to attack was Sam himself. He was quiet, embarrassed, even brave. After five years he found the courage to express the unmentionable, He called unexpectedly. The
portera
, like a grim little wardress, stood beside him. He and I spoke English, As preamble he said that that month's rent had not been paid (a lie). Pleasantly I reminded him that the rent had been paid monthly, in advance, by banker's order for five years, He agreed the sudden error was odd. I offered him a chair, He had been sitting all day. So I expressed the question as to what he had really come about with tilt of head, over-courteous attention.

'Mr Stewart, people are complaining again about your - visitors.'

'Oh! Drunks! I know none.'

'Sir, please, you are too . . . too' (genuinely searching for English word, touching own skull) 'too intelligent not to know what I mean.'

'Oh?'

'These - boys.
Little
boys.' That's taken Sam guts to utter. My admiration mustn't show. 'The
portera
is tired of fighting them.' (He means shooing away contemporaries of two schoolboys I'm currently entertaining for English-Moghrebi conversation from the foyer downstairs: 'shooing' can be straight terrorization, as I discover later.)

'I would have supposed the job of a
portera
was to keep unwanted people out of her building.'

'Mr Stewart, but for you she would have no job!' (This is a linguistic slip: he means 'unnecessary work'.)

'I understand.'

'So, Mr Stewart, I am telling you now' (Sam is genuinely sad) 'either you stop these boys coming to your flat, or I ask my lawyers to terminate your contract. And I am telling the
portera
that if these boys come again she must call the police.'

This Is not funny.

'Cohen. two middle-class Moroccan brothers come to my flat with the knowledge, consent and
thanks of their father for English lessons. If you wish, I'll have photostats of their identity cards complete with first name, patronymic, surname, photograph and serial number on your desk and in the
portera
's lodge within twenty-four hours.'

Sam would back down in bad fiction. He doesn't. Nor do I.

'Mr Stewart' (genuinely sadder) 'I am telling you -

'I will introduce these people to the
portera
so she will know who is legitimate and who not.'

Exit Sam and
portera
.
Are
they bluffing? Europeans don't want properly nationalistic cops around. That goes for the
portera
,
who would lose face. Sam may be greedy, but I can't believe him evil: i.e. prepared to 'frame' me in an effort to terminate my lease.

What are the facts?

Three schoolfriends of the brothers Thami and Omar have visited me; on one occasion, after a family funeral, a cousin. The boys come in self regulating social groups for coffee and conversation. They use the stairs, rather than lift, are hyper-correct. do not indulge in horseplay on the landings of the building, never mind vandalize it in any way. But they are Moroccans: young, and incidentally very pretty. The hysterical Belgian and his wife below can only rationalize any interest in them by fantasizing sexual orgies, The Sane French couple appear to concede a man's right to entertain whom he wills
in his own home, and continue courteous and delightful. Being childless, I have almost invariably had a boy friend in Morocco. I like them. Meti was socially acceptable because he worked for me. The upper-class status of Thami and Omar suggested the roles be reversed: it is mutually agreed that I work for them. The problem is insisting they don't bring their friends, cousins or younger brother. This I find socially offensive and well-nigh impossible to enforce. But is this not my house, they wonder? Surely the Belgians have their own house downstairs? I can (and do) explain that the Belgians suppose I am taking them all to bed with me. 'How,' they ask, 'does that affect the sovereignty of a man's house?'

A few days later the Belgian dentist demonstrates how to handle unwanted children, But in the meantime I've 'registered' Thami with the
portera
,
taking him down to the foyer.

'Do you speak Spanish?' she asks him,

'No,' says Thami in French. This is his only European language, Spanish hers. Now she must converse with him in Arabic as he intended. 'Do you visit the Englishman for lessons?' she asks him, scribbling on an imaginary textbook: she herself can neither read nor write any language.

'Yes.' says Thami.

I usher Thami into the lift, thanking the
portera
without trace of irony. I explain Thami has in older brother who also has permission to visit my list, who is equally
muy
correcto
. She gives her fond little grandmother smile, which is genuinely charming. Whether this, or its obverse, the Belsen wardress, is the real woman I shall never know, The wardress
persona
comes into being when she's frightened for her job. This polite little boy is no threat whatever.

Three days later I am expecting Thami, on my terrace, kitchen window open to hear the doorbell. I only semi-consciously register the sound of a scuffle on the landings: all the neighbours have dogs. A moment later some instinct prompts me to look over the terrace balustrade. Thami is in the street, shrugging with despair. When I get downstairs, he explains the 'bad' Belgian had hit him and driven him out.

We ride up in the lift, and I ring the Belgian's doorbell. Simultaneously I rap shortly, but so sharply the knuckle is bruised and swollen for two months, caution perhaps against acting instantly upon anger. The Belgian peers round his door, he is pale and frightened only for a few seconds. I could understand why. Five years previously when I'd sacked poor Hasnah, my useless maid, with abuse, but certainly nor violence, she'd been back within minutes with a cop,

Thami stood beside me. 'I am told,' I said now, using the French
impersonal coldly, that you've just struck one of my pupils:

Too late I realized that my savage rap, the Belgian's momentary shock of fear, must have its inevitable reaction. The assault was more Latin than Belgian. His wife joined him in screaming, gesticulating abuse, Meanwhile, incredibly, he was endeavouring, to take swipes at Thami, the blows becoming potentially more lethal as his hysterical injunctions to the child to clear out of the building had no effect whatsoever. He continued to stand behind my, shoulder, not even wide-eyed, but puzzled clearly by the idiocy of Christians. I would have run.

None of the Belgian's blows struck home. I gently pushed his hands away. He registered incredulity; then hatred. There was that hiatus in which two human beings, or lower animals of the same species for that matter, confront one another upon the brink of physical violence only to think better of it. In this case flashpoint was reached and defused within seconds. I had not been in the situation since was a child, It is statistically odd that I should find myself in it again, more protractedly, later that night.

The Belgians' phone was immediately within their hall. Hysterically, the woman was trying to use it. The word 'police' was now being freely used in the stream of abuse, presumably to panic Thami or myself as chargeable with attacking the Belgians. This, I thought in the expressive American phrase. is where the shit hits the fan: But any snap decision casually to ask Thami to leave was blessedly postponed: the Belgian slammed their door.

Thami and I got into the lift. Did he want coffee, or would he rather go home? 'Coffee.' he said. In my flat, he raised the question whether the Belgians were really calling the police, and why. I told him I didn't know. It was then he said his older brother, Omar, had been similarly assaulted, this time by the wife, a few days previously. I told him what I believed to be the human truth about these particular people. They were an exception, a childless couple, the woman mentally unwell, the man soured, burnt-out. They belonged to a generation which believed that the only Moroccans who should come into the building, not just the one flat in eighteen which was theirs, were maidservants. This I had explained before. Thami departed to reiterate the position to Omar; and with the request to continue impressing upon any other relation or friend that they must not visit me. I hadn't the guts to utter the untruth, more effective friends assured me, that I didn't want to know them and wouldn't let them in.

The police didn't come. Almost certainly they had not been called. I half wished they had. Bitterness at the Belgians had set my mind in a very cold and calculating frame indeed. I wrote a brief letter at once to the man, Its burden was simple to grasp. He had now twice made vicious physical assault upon the young sons of a Moroccan friend of mine. I very much hoped, for his sake, that the children did not tell their father about the incident. There was nothing clumsy in my not mentioning the Belgian's wife. Of my using 'father' rather than 'parents' in respect of the boys. A Moroccan would not mention women in this sort of circumstance. I wrote in English in the hope that the sad dentist must either have a temporizing colleague translate the letter; or at worst spend a sleepless night -with a dictionary. The fact that I had never met the father of Thami and Omar struck me as irrelevant. This was war, instigated by the Belgian by physical attack upon children with no rational reason whatsoever. He and his wife had bluffed me unintelligently by pretending to call the police. I would bluff them - with more thought. My ace was the man's incredible stupidity in striking two Moroccan. children in any, never mind the obtaining, political climate.. He would realize this without being told. Should he not, the translating colleague or some friend might advise caution. I added to my note only that I was protesting that night to Cohen.