Travels: Collected Writings, 1950-1993 Read online

  “I want to talk into it once in a while,” he said. When he turned the volume up the machine howled, of course, and there was laughter from the spectators, who until then had been very quiet, just standing and watching. The host had another chair brought, and he sat down in it, holding the microphone in his hand – a position not likely to produce much better results than the first one. Christopher caught my eye and shook his head sadly. More chairs were provided from out of the darkness, and someone arrived bringing a pressure-lantern, which was set inside the musicians’ circle. That was where the fire ought to have been, but there was not enough space in the courtyard to put it there.

  The performers, all Negroes, wore loose white tunics, and each carried a poignard in a silver scabbard at his waist. Their drums were the regulation bendir - a skin stretched over a wooden hoop about a foot and a half in diameter. This simple instrument is capable of great sonorous variety, depending on the kind of blow and the exact spot on the membrane struck by the fingertips or palm. The men of South Morocco do not stand still when they play the drums; they dance, but the purpose of their choreography is to facilitate the production of rhythm. No matter how involved or frenzied the body movements of the players (who also sing in chorus and as soloists), the dancing is subordinate to the sound. It is very difficult to hear the music if one is watching the performance; I often keep my eyes shut during an entire number. The particular interest of the Anti-Atlas ahouache is that drummers divide themselves into complementary groups, each of which provides only certain regularly recurring notes in the complex total of the rhythmical pattern.

  The men began to play; the tempo was exaggeratedly slow. As they increased it imperceptibly, the subtle syncopations became more apparent. A man brandishing a gannega, a smaller drum with a higher pitch and an almost metallic sonority, moved into the center of the circle and started an electrifying counter-rhythmic solo. His virtuoso drumbeats showered out over the continuing basic design like machine-gun fire. There was no singing in this prelude. The drummers, shuffling their feet, began to lope forward as they played, and the circle’s counterclockwise movement gathered momentum. The laughter and comments from our side of the courtyard ceased, and even the master of the palace, sitting there with his microphone in his hand, surrendered to the general hypnosis the drummers were striving to create.

  When the opening number was over, there was a noisy rearranging of chairs. These were straight-backed and completely uncomfortable, no matter how one sat in them, and it seemed clear that no one ever used them save when Europeans were present. Few chairs are as comfortable as the Moroccan mtarrba with its piles of cushions.

  “Art Blakey’d enjoy this,” said Christopher. “There’s a lot of material here for him.”

  Our host leaned sideways, holding the microphone in front of his mouth, and said, “Comment?” Then he held it closer to Christopher for his reply.

  “I was talking about a great Negro drummer in America.”

  He shifted it again. “Ah, yes. The Negroes are always the strongest.”

  Out in the open part of the courtyard, groups of three or four men were going across into the far corner to tune their drums over the fire. Almost at once they began again to perform; a long, querulous vocal solo was the prelude. One might have thought it was coming from the silence of the town, from somewhere outside the palace, it was so thin and distant in sound. This was the leader, creating his effect by standing in the darkness under the arches, with his face turned to the wall, as far away as he could get from the other performers. Between each strophe of his chant there was a long, profound silence. I became more aware of the night outside, and of the superb remoteness of the town between the invisible canyon walls, whose only connection with the world was the unlikely trail we had rattled down a few hours earlier. There was nothing to listen for in the spaces between the plaintive cries, but every- one listened just the same. Finally, the chorus answered the faraway soloist, and a new rhythm got under way. This time the circle remained stationary, and the men danced into and out of the center in pairs and groups, facing one another.

  About halfway through the piece there was whispering and commotion in the darkness by the entrance door. It was the women arriving en masse. By the time the number was finished, sixty or seventy of them had crowded into the courtyard. During the intermission they squeezed through the ranks of standing men and seated themselves on the floor, around the center -bundles without form or face, wrapped in great dark lengths of cloth. Still, one could hear their jewelry clinking. One of them on my left suddenly rearranged her outer covering, revealing a magnificent turquoise robe embroidered in gold; then swiftly she became a sack of laundry once more. Several set pieces by the men followed, during which the women kept up a constant whispering among themselves; they watched politely, but it was evident that their minds were on the performance they themselves were about to give.

  When the men had finished and had retired from the center, half the women present stood up and set about removing their outer garments. As they moved into the light they created a fine theatrical effect; the beauty of the scene, however, came solely from the variety of color in the splendid robes and the flash of heavy gold adornments. There were no girls at all among them – which is another way of saying that they were all very fat. A curious phenomenon among female musicians in Morocco is that at the beginning of their performance they seldom give much evidence of rhythmic sense. This has to be worked up by the men playing the drums. At the outset they seem distraught, they talk and fidget, smooth their clothing, and seem interested in everything but the business at hand. It took a good deal of insistent drumming to capture the women on this occasion, but after two numbers the men had them completely. From then on the music grew consistently more inspired. “N’est-ce pas qu’elles sont magnifiques?” whispered Monsieur Rousselot. I agreed that they were wonderful; at the same time I found it difficult to reconcile what I was seeing with his earlier description of Tassemsit as a holy city of sin. Still, doubtless he knew best.

  As the shrill voices and the drumming grew in force and excitement, I became convinced that what was going on was indeed extraordinarily good, something I would have given a good deal to be able to record and listen to later at my leisure. Watching my host in the act of idly ruining what might have been a valuable tape was scarcely a pleasure. Throughout their performance, the women never stirred from where they stood, limiting their movements to a slight swaying of the body and occasional fantastic outbursts of antiphonal hand-clapping that would have silenced the Gypsies of Granada. With all that excess flesh, it was just as well they had no dance steps to execute. When the final cadence had died away, and while we applauded, they filed back to the shadows of the arcade and modestly wrapped their great cloths around them, to sit and listen to the ahouache’s purely percussive coda. This was vigorous and brief; then a great crash of drums announced the end of the entertainment. We all stood up quickly, in considerable discomfort for having sat so long in the impossible chairs, and went back into the big room.

  Five inviting beds had been made up along the mattresses at intervals of perhaps twenty feet. I chose one in a corner by a window and sat down, feeling that I should probably sleep very well. The courtyard emptied in no time, and the servants carried away the chairs, the lantern and the tape-recorder. Monsieur Rousselot stood in the middle of the room, yawning as he took off his shirt. The host was shaking hands with each one of us in turn and wishing us elaborate good-nights. When he came to me, he held out the flat box containing the tape he had just recorded. “A souvenir of Tassemsit,” he said, and he bowed as he handed it to me.

  The final irony, I thought. Of course, the spoiled tape has to be given to me, so that I can know in detail just what I failed to get. But my words to him were even more florid than his to me; I told him that it had been an unforgettable occasion, and that I was eternally indebted to him for this undeserved favor, and I wished him a pleasant night. Monsieur Omar was lying in his
bed smoking, clad only in his shorts, a delighted and indestructible Humpty Dumpty. He was blowing smoke rings toward the ceiling. I did not feel that the future of Tassemsit was in immediate danger. Our host went out, and the door into the courtyard was shut behind him.

  After everyone had gone to sleep, I lay there in the dark, listening to the jackals and considering my bad luck. Yet the original objective of the trip had been attained, a fact I discovered only when I got to the next place that had electricity. When I tried the tape in the hotel at Essaouira, fourteen out of its eighteen pieces proved to be flawless. There was no point in wondering why, since logically the thing was impossible; it had to be accepted as a joyful mystery. It is always satisfying to succeed in a quest, even when success is due entirely to outside factors. We bought blankets, trays, rugs and teapots, and set out again for the north.

  Tangier

  Gentlemen’s Quarterly, October 1963

  THE LEAST CONFUSING introduction to Tangier would be to make a low, leisurely flight, preferably by helicopter, over the very tip of northwestern Morocco. The jagged southern coast of the Strait of Gibraltar ends suddenly at Cape Malabata and becomes a wide white semicircle of sand, the shore of the Bay of Tangier. The European quarter, most of it build since World War II, includes the beach and covers more space than all the various native quarters put together. The Medina, a chaos of whitewashed cubes, begins at the port’s edge and climbs up a steep hill to the walls of the Casbah, the fort built on the conveniently flat top of the hill. York Castle is at the northeast corner; it is astonishing to think that there is a tunnel leading from its dungeons all the way down to the port. Beyond the Casbah is the Marshan, a continuation of the tableland overlooking the Strait’s cliffs. Here are big, Spanish-style villas, built at the turn of the century. The high trees that shaded them have been cut down, as they have in many parts of the city, to the fury of the British and Americans. (The average Moroccan thinks of a tree as potential firewood, nothing more.) And everywhere, in the interstices of open country between the various European settlements, are the thousands of permanently unfinished box-like houses that represent the new architecture of Morocco! No more blank walls pierced by one grilled peephole – instead, large European-style windows with glass in them, through which the women can watch the world outside without fear of being beaten by their husbands for having shown a momentary interest in the life of the street. This excrescence of haphazard constructions is beginning to grow up even along the base of the heavily forested hill behind the city, known simply as “The Mountain,” a territory which has long been a bastion of foreign (largely British) property owners. The thick vegetation up here isolates each estate and gives it a degree of privacy no longer easy to come by in most places. High cliffs drop off into the widening Strait of Gibraltar; to the south and east there is a vast panorama of rolling countryside, with the foothills of the Rif Mountains in the background. Ahead is the open Atlantic.

  Tangier seems to call forth a different reaction from each observer. Over the years, a great deal of disparate material about the place has been written – for, neutral and against – labeling it everything from a paradise to a hellhole, so that by now practically everybody knows that the little Moslem city at the northwest corner of Africa is not exactly like other cities, that it is a place of unlikely people and unexpected occurrences. It also seems that Tangier has become a kind of legend. I was not aware of this until three or four years ago, and I am still uncertain as to what the legend is and where it came from. When a man from N.B.C paid me a visit earlier this year, I put the question to him. “It’s the name,” he murmured. “Timbuctoo, Tangier, Samarkand ... You know.” I nodded assent, but I was not clear as to why Tangier was being listed along with the other two admittedly legendary names. It goes without saying that I like living here, or else I should not still be doing so after these many years. At the same time, I can only speculate as to the reasons for the legend.

  There is no visible civilized elegance of the sort found in European resorts; nor, on the other hand, has any effort been made to conserve the town’s original “exotic” flavor, with the result that the latter has been largely lost. (The Chamber of Commerce of Biskra in Algeria, for instance, used to hire a bevy of local girls to spend their days carrying empty water jars on their shoulders up and down the streets so the tourists would have proper subjects for their snapshots.) To the uninitiated, the greater part of Tangier looks like either slum or suburb. In the Medina and the Casbah there are no streets. The alleys are narrow, often piled with garbage, and most of the houses have no water. Yet outside the walls, where there are streets and traffic, one has the recurring impression that one is on the outskirts of a larger city whose center is not far away. But the city never appears.

  Certainly there is no great architecture in Tangier. Apart from the old Treasury in the Casbah and the tiny Sultan’s Palace behind it, there is not an edifice worth inspecting. It is true that for visual charm the town does not have to depend on its buildings. It has its own special light and is fortunate topographical situation; the two combined go a long way to making an essentially ugly city into a reasonably attractive one. Painters arriving here for the first time always remark on the power and quality of the light. Not being a painter myself, I am unable to isolate and analyze its characteristics; I only know that it enhances whatever it illuminates, above all at a distance. And since Tangier ranges up and down over a series of hills, in such a way that at the end of every street there is a view of open countryside, sea or distant mountains, the eye naturally seeks out the bright vignette ahead of it, and remains relatively unaware of the building beside it.

  There is the climate: the perfect summers that continue into November, the winters which, if often tempestuous, are still far better than those of Europe. There are the miles of magnificent beaches both on the Atlantic and on the Strait. These are assets, obviously, but they are scarcely sufficient to explain the city’s renown. I suspect the legend of being nothing more than a residue of the lurid publicity Tangier was accorded in its international days. What most people expect to find is neither the place I knew when I first came thirty-two years ago, nor yet the one which actually exists today. They are looking for the boom city of fifteen years back, with its easy life and its crowd of free spenders; they also hope vaguely to unearth signs of the natural concomitants of such a phenomenon: organized vice and crime. The era is long since past; visible reminders of it are few.

  The town is still the confused, heterogeneous and polyglot little center, but it will never again look as it used to. During even the years that I have known it, there have been three distinct phases in its succession of metamorphoses: the colonial era, the boom period and the not-so-rosy days being lived through at present, now that the city has lost its international status and has been integrated into the body of independent Morocco.

  Colonial Tangier consisted of the Medina, with its winding alleys, its mosques and its thousands of cube-shaped houses. Outside the walls was a leisurely, unassuming European town that straggled upward over the several hills. There were horse-drawn carriages to ride in; the streets were shaded by high eucalyptus trees and protected from the ubiquitous wind by jungles of canebrake. The good life was cheap if you were a European. It did not occur to many people to wonder how the Moroccans got along; the common belief was that they could live on nothing. They did almost that, and managed never to project an image of poverty.

  With the boom, Tangier ceased being a sleepy port somewhere in North Africa. Empty reaches of sand became city blocks of office buildings; olive groves suddenly grew hotels and apartment houses. Streets were indefinitely extended, across distant wheat fields and through inaccessible meadows where shepherds sat playing their flutes while they watched the flocks. Wealthy Europeans, intent on becoming more wealthy, declared themselves residents of the International Zone and built impressive homes on choice parcels of land commanding vistas of forest, mountain and sea. (No taxes, no restrictions, n
o labor unions. Madame wants twenty servants? Why not?) The shops were crammed with products from all over the world, often at prices below those of the country of origin. These were the good days; everyone knew they were, and made the most of them while they lasted. Parties were elaborate: you hired a whole village to come and amuse your guests for a half-hour of music, dancing, snake-charming and acrobatics. The end came on March 30, 1952, in the form of riots sparked by French-Spanish rivalry in the Zone. Tangier was dead long before the French precipitated the war by kidnapping the Sultan and carrying him off to Corsica. It is noteworthy that throughout the entire course of the war for independence it was the only city in Morocco without a program of systematic terrorism, and this in spite of the fact that many of the political leaders wanted by the French had sought refuge there; not one death due to political violence was reported.

  Tangier’s present, more prosaic state is that of a minor Moroccan city; when it was stripped of its privileges it was at the same time largely emptied of its European population. (They are beginning to come back, however.) Banks have been turned into bazaars and barbershops, the stock exchange has become the headquarters of the municipal lottery, the tiny offices from which dubious import-export transactions were conducted have had beds put into them and are being rented out by the week or day (and often, I might add, by the hour); and there is a whole new generation for whose members the wearing of exclusively European clothes serves as reassuring proof that they are a part of the civilized world.

  Living in Tangier, however, has still meant being witness to an array of strange episodes in the lives of a whole series of bizarre characters. Nowhere have I seen such a concentration of eccentrics. You have been invited to Sir Malcolm’s for dinner. When the meal is over, and the cook comes to carry out the coffee cups, Sir Malcolm mutters to her in Arabic: “Bring in the girls.” She returns at the head of a procession of seven teenage maids in mountain garb, with their hair hanging loose down their backs. “Get the drums!” shouts Sir Malcolm, and they obligingly fetch a collection of large and small African drums covered with zebra hide. “Got ‘em in Zanzibar one winter,” he explains. Then, after a certain amount of chin-chucking and cheek-pinching, he adopts a more serious mien, and brings out a long black horsewhip, which he holds at his side while the girls begin to work up a rhythm on the skins. The drumming has a startling effect on Sir Malcolm: his nostrils dilate and he shouts exhortations. Then he commences a flourishing of the whip above their heads, making it crack in sharp explosions. They scream, but one feels that they are not really afraid, even when Sir Malcolm advances upon them and seizes one of them by the hair. He drags her to her feet in an effort to make her dance, but she covers her face with her hands and merely stands there. Sir Malcolm goes into English. “Dance, damn you!” he cries, striking her lightly with the handle of the whip. After a few listless wriggles, she pretends to trip and fall, landing in the midst of the drummers. A kind of circus ensues, in which the drums are sent rolling across the room as all seven girls pile on top of one another, shrieking, pulling whatever tresses are within reach, pinching whatever flesh is at hand. For a moment the guests are concerned: someone is bound to be hurt. But Sir Malcolm rushes in with his whip, not hesitating to use it as he pries them apart and shoves them one by one through the doorway where the cook is waiting to lock them into their quarters. When they are all gone, he tosses the whip on the floor and turns back to his guests, panting and red-faced. “Sorry,” he says. “Wild little things.” (But no one feels that the evening has been a failure.) “Take a bit of training. Of course they never stay more than two weeks, and that makes it difficult. They go back to the hills and spread the word. Sometimes one of them will come back after a while. Most of them are new.” (Sir Malcolm is gone now; I wonder what country he has found to live in, now that such shenanigans are no longer practicable.)