Authors: Frederic Raphael
Perhaps her technique was bad, but there was no separating the dancer from the dance. Her young repertoire was instinct with proud resentment. Her heels spurned the red tiles as she jumped forward, skirt raised, rapping the rhythm with her heels, claps, cries. Suddenly she would stop; hands writhing in the silence, eyes frowning at them, dark and love-ready, flicking across the audience now, available for a moment and then, oh no; then secret, guarding the flame within. She bent back over the floor, red lips, white teeth, face knit yet reposed; beauty.
Then she was moving her hands again, arms so slowly moving, as she watched and watched them. Up again, shaking her shoulders, eyes narrowed and suspicious; more clapping, sharper, demanding. The cries of the onlookers more earnest now, the dancer’s hair tumbled over her nose, dark eyes, knit brows, red lips, heels rapping and rapping; head flung back, virgin eyes dark with knowing innocence; then the hair flung forward again: climax, stillness, applause. The god spent, all that was left was a shy girl who nodded to the company and went to sit down.
A girl of twelve, with broad flat feet and the wide-apart hazel eyes of a Velázquez princess, came in and danced, brows drawn in concentration, breastless chest arched, hair long and lank and brushed back. A young boy danced with her, almost a dwarf. The angular, haughty postures of his puny body, the slanting contempt in his little eyes left you uncomfortable at how perfectly he mimicked the big man he would never be. He beckoned to Linda and the little American girl seemed possessed; she writhed like a Bacchante, her eyes caught fire, legs twitched, hands straining to clap in a kind of sexual paroxysm.
An old man with a long nose, sad small eyes in a pale face, quavered some flamenco; he was said to be the most inspired of the singers, but his voice was past its best; when the singers are young, their voices are suitable, but they lack the wisdom. You can never hear a perfect flamenco singer.
I ended the account in my notebook with: ‘When the girl danced again, briefly, it was more calculated. You wanted to give her your heart, but she wanted only pesetas.’
A
FTER A FEW days, the Oppenheims were ready to drive on to the next architectural landmark. They urged me to come with them, but each time I went down the hill to the Banco Central, I was greeted by a head-shaking clerk: there was still no sign of my money. I was not entirely sorry to be alone again. Herb and Judy had made things easy, for which I was grateful, but I had been drawn out of the anonymity with which I now resumed spying on the world. What I overheard seemed truer than anything said to me directly. A Welshman staying at the
pensión
with his teenage son snatched at the
moscas
that blackened the buffet tablecloth at breakfast. ‘Nothing like Spanish flies, boy,’ he said. I noted the leer. Why would a man say that, like that, to his son?
I went back to the Alhambra and, on the advice of Russell (he seemed more cogent because I did not like him), bought a five-day ticket that included the bonus of a visit to the gardens by moonlight. I took my Oxford Complete Shakespeare. The fountains were all dead. It was shadowy and cold. I read a few sonnets by what I could cadge of the moon’s own borrowed light and then went back to my narrow bed.
In the morning, I went again to the Banco Central and gave them my name ‘Raphael, Frederic’. There was still nothing. I went to the Capilla Real and
tried to enjoy the unSpanish precision of the Dutch paintings that happened to hang there. I bought and pretended to enjoy Washington Irving’s
Tales of the Alhambra
. In the Court of the Lions, I overheard a guide explain that the Moorish recipe for covering the ceilings with that pendent plasterwork included white of egg, which rendered it proof against the weather. When the Christian conquerors tried to repeat it, in order to efface the original mouldings, with their Koranic citations, the added plaster fell off.
Among the tourists, I saw the couple who owned the hotel Mon Repos in Juan-les-Pins, where my parents stayed. I smiled and said, ‘
Bonjour
.’ They were not responsive. One afternoon, an Englishman whom Herb had befriended came in search of a fourth for bridge. His name was Murdoch; he was staying at the Hotel Washington Irving. When I told him that Linda and her parents had left, he said that they would have been wise to give her ‘a good hiding’. He had been at Cambridge and had served as a supply officer in the Far East. The Chindits kept asking for things he couldn’t provide. When the next war broke out he knew exactly what he was going to do: ‘I shall polish up my Morse and become a wireless officer on a small ship.’ The bridge game was not of a high standard. We did not play for money, but I happened to win every rubber. Murdoch and his friends looked at me as if my name might be Sandheim.
I trekked again to the Banco Central and was greeted again by a shake of the head. ‘
Nada
.’ I could not believe that St John’s College had let me down. It occurred to me to say, ‘
Por favor, mire sobre effe. Frederic
.’ The money was there. They had, unsurprisingly, taken Raphael to be my first name. After two weeks, unlike the last Moorish sultan, I left Granada without a sigh.
I took the bus to Algeciras and caught the morning ferry to Tangier. The enclave was still governed by an international consortium. Bourgeois timidity led me, past a red British pillar box by the harbour gate, to the Hotel Bristol in the European quarter. After lunch, I walked up to the casbah. A Moroccan boy, perhaps twelve years old, in a faded brown shirt and dirty trousers
led me up a cobbled alley faced with blank walls to a cruciform café. Dark-stained doors opened onto three tiled rooms with black tables, few chairs. A man lay unconscious on a stone bench against the wall. Another Arab sat beside him, in a fez and brown
djellaba
(collar and tie underneath), a small violin upright on his knee. He sawed at it with no effort at tunefulness.
In a corner, by the unglassed window, a boy was smoking a long bamboo pipe with a tiny clay bowl. In the room across from us, unshaded electric light shone on Arabs sitting or reclining as they smoked pipes similar to the boy’s. On the sawdusty ground in front of the bar, several glasses lay on their sides. The elderly landlord, in a soiled suit and yellow apron across pyjama-like trousers, brought me a tall glass of black coffee, another of tea for my companion, who told me that he did not work; he smoked
kif
all day to dispel the blues.
The boy informed me that marijuana in its dried state was pale green. You had to pull away the diamond-shaped leaves and remove the tiny yellow seeds. The stalks and seeds were too strong to smoke. The leaves had to be chopped finely, like parsley, and left to dry. The boy filled a new pipe and handed it to me. The bluish smoke tasted mild, not at all like Player’s No 3. When I had finished my bowlful, the boy indicated that I should blow down the cob. The dottle popped out onto the floor. The violinist looked alarmed when I was offered a second instalment: I should be careful, he said. The other Arab and the boy laughed. They smoked all day and look at them. The unconscious Arab rolled off his narrow bench and thumped on the floor, without waking.
The boy walked me back to the Hotel Bristol. He promised to come back at eight o’clock that night and take me on a tour of the brothels. He knew all the best places where the girls were clean and would do whatever I liked. Or did I prefer boys, like so many of the Europeans in Tangier? I suppose that I gave him some money, but I was already too sleepy to remember. I went upstairs in a leaden haze and fell on the bed. I woke at eight o’clock
the following morning, after a dreamless fifteen-hour sleep. I never did go to the brothels. I arranged to leave my big suitcase at the Bristol before I caught the train to Fez.
Two manifest Jews shared my compartment, alongside a heavily built European, in horn-rimmed glasses, reading André Maurois’
Ariel
in Spanish. The older Jew was tall and wore a brown suit, baggy but expensive, with broad lapels, and a floppy brown hat. When it was removed, there was a black skull cap underneath. He had a full black beard, pale skin, harsh hair brushed back from his shiny forehead. His nose was rounded and fleshy, lips full and soft, the lower one drooping, a dip in the centre. His mouth was always ajar. Perhaps he was adenoidal. He spoke in a very British accent, with the odd middle-European consonant. He wore brown shoes with black socks. His hands were broad and white, like Dover soles.
His companion was a francophone Moroccan, olive-faced, smallish eyes, nose curved to a dark upper lip, profile almost semi-circular. He too wore a
yarmulke
and scanned a Hebrew book from time to time. The brown-suited man quizzed him, with explicit loudness, about the conduct of Zionist affairs in north Africa. He seemed to be a sort of Lawrence of Morocco. His only commendatory remark, not infrequently uttered, was, ‘He’s a very
clever
boy.’ Something possessed me to ask him whether, by any chance, he knew the Test match score. He seemed quite shocked. He had something of the obsessive humourlessness of the character played by Joseph Wiseman (in a similar hat) in
Viva Zapata!
When he opened his very big brown suitcase, with reinforced corners, to get some apples, I saw that the contents had all been compressed into tight cylinders. He might have been toting a range of pork-free sausage rolls.
My guide in Fez was an Arab who had been a sergeant pilot in the RAF. I could call him Ahmed. He wore a plum-coloured fez with a tassel and a fawn linen robe. The Hôtel de la Paix was in the modern European quarter. Between it and the old city was the Sultan’s summer palace; it had been
turned into a barracks for French native forces. Mohammed V had been sent into exile for demanding independence for his kingdom. The riots that followed, and their repression, had ruined the tourist trade. We passed a Bren-carrier that had tipped into a ditch. A French officer was supervising its removal under the eyes of a carefully expressionless crowd of Berbers and local Arabs.
The Berber camp was under the battlements of the old city: dark tents, a brown and white dog, women carrying children tucked under their bosoms; seated men, in white robes, made a large double circle around a story-teller. Ahmed promised that the stories came from the
Thousand and One Nights
, but a good raconteur, like a Homeric rhapsode, added his own flourishes. The ancient world was coming to life in front of me, too late.
The French supervised the
souks
where workshops and stores were combined in tiny alcoves. There were pools of dirty water and a yellow reek of urine. Beggars squatted in the dust; rich men straddled their mules on turreted saddles. The side streets were so narrow that we had to sidle between the bulge of the white walls, as if the houses had overeaten. Tight cedar doors gave off a faintly scorched odour. The lintels were no more than five feet above the dusty ground. They had slim brass hands for knockers, pendent fingers, for luck.
One of the metalworkers took a disc of brass, like a cymbal, and laid it across a vice and took up a small chisel and a light hammer. Looking about him as he did so, he tapped the wedge and tooled the surface of the metal with a pattern of leaves in an intricate flow of curving lines. One false stroke and it would be ruined. He subdued his material with a kind of humble contempt for the admiring stranger who watched him.
The salesmen all told me how lucky I was: things were going cheap; they needed money badly. Ahmed did not quite convince me that he was arguing my case when we were bargaining. He leaned up and kissed a seller’s forehead rather too quickly. I bought a silver bracelet for Beetle, but backed
away from thin teapots, coffee pots, coasters, gongs, chandeliers and incense burners gaudy with green and white and blue and red enamel.
Behind the old Arab market, with its blackened cedar arcades, now a police station, a single fat gendarme leaned, in blue shirtsleeves, over the first-floor balcony. Below him, ironworkers made grilles for windows. The forges were black as funerals. Squashed against the back wall squatted a boy clutching and pumping the double bellows with both hands so that, like alternate lungs, they breathed first one, then the other, on the hidden fire. The tip of its tongue darted, like the pulse of an insatiable passion, quick and thrusting at the bolts of iron pressed up to it by the smith’s tongs. When the arm of iron was red, he drew it out and beat on it before its heat could run away. He hammered it into curlicues, flexing it with no more than the hint of effort you might apply to bend a sheaf of spaghetti in boiling water. Behind him, the dark child, feet packed away in a curve of dark toes and pink soles, pumped and pumped as though priming his own heart.
After the bridal dresses, with their cinctures of gold twine braided on linen and the grooms’ white-belted costumes, we came to the dyers’ quarter. Pots of colour lay like fractured rainbows on the roadway. Vats of natural dye bubbled under corrugated iron hoods, cadging colour from boiling flowers and leaves. Women drowned fresh bolts of white in the vats and prodded them to stay down, like memories dumped into oblivion. Between the old and the new town – literally middle men – came the Jews in their black cowls. Their houses resembled those in Toledo: open wooden balconies on the first floor; tall windows below, where the Arab houses were closed and secret. The Jews were detached, aloof and vulnerable.
The sunset, when it came, blushed quickly, a tissue filter pinking the distracted clouds. At five-thirty the light was lit on the principal minaret of the main mosque. Crowds hurried to pray in one of the 134 mosques in the city, some grand and elegant, others like the dark box near where ironworkers filled the brazen air with their hammering. Donkey carts with lanterns
bobbing fore and aft clopped along; an Arab sideways on a donkey, kicking its neck with his heel in rhythm with its agreeable movement. The muezzins’ cries rose as the sun crumbled into ash. The sky glowed hollowly in its husky wake. Night had fallen.
I went by train across the desert to Meknès. In the new town, where I found a clean hotel, the
colons
behaved as if they were in France: they sat in the sidewalk cafés and shook hands with each other on meeting and parting. The buildings were white and sheer and impersonal. The road curved up into the old town and dwindled into pot-holes and cracked concrete channels. I came to an Arab café, flies and more flies, blackness inside; soiled wooden benches and old card tables; the Arabs’ clothes were crusted with sweat. There were donkeys’ hoofprints in the crusted dung below the high triple gateway to the medina. Inside, there was a broad rectangular square, domed like a shallow breast, where the native buses left for Moulay Idriss, the sacred town that Europeans had to leave by nightfall.
In the modern, French quarter, I found my way to La Comédie Humaine, a
librairie
run by a Russian émigrée who told me that her name was Princess Kubowsky. She wrote novels and memoirs, published by Plon, under the pseudonym Jacques Croiset. She had won the
Prix de Paris
for her 1949 novel
Europe et Valérius
. She said she was delighted to meet an Englishman. She had escaped to London in 1941 and had a wonderful time as a journalist. She met Cyril Connolly. A short, thick woman in a black suit, she looked like leftover puff pastry in a black pie dish. She had a flat thick nose, pudgy cheeks, a large, loose mouth, blue eyes, chin depending from a big jaw. Her husband, a Pole, was in Brussels, trying for a job with some international agency. He always told her that she talked too much and was too inquisitive for the British taste. She did not ask me why I was in Morocco nor what I had done or planned to do. She did, however, warn me, urgently, against making a joke about a French
légionnaire
’s képi. I could not easily imagine feeling the temptation.
She had put her life’s savings, 4 million francs (roughly £4,000), into buying the shop, four years earlier. Now, in the midst of a war without a shot, since there were no tourists, she was broke. Local French residents used La Comédie Humaine as a social centre (always shaking hands with everyone present, both on arriving and on leaving), but they bought few books, it seemed. One of the women had a twelve- or thirteen-year-old daughter of whom a
colon
remarked, with a shaping gesture, ‘
Elle a déjà sa
petite poitrine
.’