13 Tangier: A Fever Refusing to Cool

THE EYES OF THE STREET

There’s no better city for a hangover: the wind, the light and the sea draw it out like a pimple being roughly squeezed. Some of the doormen guarding apartment blocks are already in position. They’re the eyes of the street, yet they don’t even see you. Once you’ve been in this city long enough, the sense of being watched fades. You’re invisible, no longer the Other to a stranger, instead a regular passer-by, someone who’ll be there tomorrow and the day after – or not at all. It doesn’t matter. The doormen go back inside. Or maybe they weren’t there in the first place, perhaps it was all in my imagination, just like the night I just had. Like the man with the watch of gold, belly dancing to the keyboard player’s tune.

FRIENDS OF THE NIGHT

My friends of the night have disappeared. I stroll down to the beach, across the boulevard populated by dozens who will never have a hangover. Now that I have one though, I move to their rhythm, becoming one with them, they are sober, I am the worse for wear.
In a few hours’ time the first bars will open their doors again. But the coffee houses (this city has more coffee houses than cats) have already opened theirs, offering coffee, pancakes and a place to sit. The place to sit is the most important; people are always invited to enjoy their coffee or tea somewhere public. The café is a clubhouse, a meeting place, a business unit. This is where deals are done, where cars are sold, apartments are offered, crossings to Europe arranged. A café is the embodiment of commercial activity but without the facade. I drink in the buzz.

GRAND SOCCO

Whiling away the time until evening isn’t difficult. Everything is clear: the grimy neoclassical jumble of facades on the Avenu d’Eespagne, the peeling remnants of past glory, and the faux-stately former casino with its pointed European roof and the steep street leading up to the Grand Socco square and its covered markets beyond. All can be seen in a single sweeping glance, unhindered by the stubborn sun shining into your eyes from the south that gradually drifts out to sea in the north. The sun paints by numbers. All around the oval, Grand Socco’s shutters are being pulled up. No one wants to die in their sleep. The morning is made of rubber, not plastic.
A group of men with broomsticks tackle a cornered rat. It’s not something they enjoy, the rat’s despair is a reflection of their own. People kill reluctantly.
The rat’s weaving and dodging frustrates them, though, and they lash out more angrily. I cross the Grand Socco towards Iberia, a European-style bourgeois quarter built by Europeans with apart-ment blocks with brick exteriors, common in the city but rare elsewhere in Morocco. I want to go to Iberia to feel my calves: the road leading up to it is steep.
Passing the Christian graveyard with its weathered tomb stones with the names of honourable European citizens, dignitaries, representatives of their nations, of military men, their Prussian names evoking wheat fields and marshes, I go down Avenue Sidi Bou Arraqia. No one bothers anyone else. I slip into the graveyard to take a piss, the only place where I wouldn’t trip over cats. Continuing up the steep road, I reach Iberia, once an entirely European enclave with windows and balconies, opulent villas behind high walls, bougainvillea and palm trees. Cocktail parties, mistresses and French baguettes fresh from the oven. The building is right in front of me. I’ve been here before.

PAUL BOWLES

In 1998 I went to Tangier to meet Paul Bowles, the American author who wrote The Sheltering Sky (1949). Legend had it that he would receive his fans. Visiting Tangier as a kind of literary safari, Bowles as an old leopard.
Bowles was brought to my attention by Dutch theatre maker Wilfried de Jong, whom I’d met when I was a trainee at Radio Rijnmond, where he worked. Between reports of frozen water pipes and stalled trams, we talked about the literary place of despair called Tangier. I loved the stories De Jong told me, describing a Moroccan city so very different from the one I knew, a place permeated by a raw, urban synthesis of Moroccan and Western influences, where writers worked and discovered that dead-end streets can offer liberation. He had crossed over to Tangier from Tarifa, but hadn’t been allowed in. They’d said he didn’t have a visa, but that was just an excuse. He went back empty-handed and never returned. In some ways, though, I feel that, by having been refused access, he’d seen more of Tangier than I had, having spent days, weeks and months among the Tanjawis, the reserved citizens of that place. Tangier works better in the imagination, just as some poems are better read than recited aloud.

A PLACE OF ROMANCE

De Jong and I talked about Tangier and Bowles, who’d been sent to Tangier by Gertrude Stein in the 1930s. She’d been convinced that he would meet his destiny here. Bowles went to Tangier, then returned with his lesbian wife, Jane Bowles, in the 1950s and stayed on, even after her death in 1973.
De Jong dreamt of going to Tangier to visit Bowles. While I thought of Tangier merely as a port in northern Morocco, De Jong imagined it as a place of romance, a place to which artists and writers flocked, drawn by the destructive energy arising from contact with an alien culture, the Orient as a means to spark the flames. In Tangier, they encountered the je ne sais quoi of Moroccan culture. What they didn’t know was that, thanks to its location, history and political circumstances, Moroccans considered it an alien city, un-Moroccan in many ways. This is what attracted me to Tangier: the city as an outsider, misunderstood by anyone laying claim to her, a little aggressive. Anyone loved for the wrong reasons, develops a strong aversion to the Other. The Other is whomever considers you different, yet no-one sees you as you really are. The anti-Other, that’s we ourselves.

BEAT GENERATION

Bowles never strove to make Tangier a literary hub. Why would he? By the time he settled there, the city was already in decline. When it returned to Moroccan rule, there was an exodus of its Western citizens, leaving Bowles on his own in his Tangier after death of his wife.
It just happened, just as Tangier doesn’t try to be loved. It leaves her cold. Not that she does so deliberately, she was born this way.
Bowles didn’t move. In pictures, he is often seen sitting or lying stock-still. He must have been amused seeing visitors come and go, to then quickly retreat back into his self-imposed isolation, his eyes reflecting the light of a man stranded at the terminus.
The Beat Generation found an authentic, primitive, demon-possessed world in the Orient – more a product of the imagination than harsh reality – where they could rid themselves of their Western neuroses. But Bowles felt they came for the wrong reasons, those long-haired good-for-nothings.
Bowles didn’t understand them, the Ginsbergs and Kerouacs of the modern world. He didn’t share their individualism. Throughout his life, Bowles fought against egotism in literature.
This is the man I went to see as a twenty-one-year old. The city was bathed in summer light when I arrived; the taxi driver who picked me up from the station ripped me off. The hostel on Petit Socco – a dry square with only the names on old signage recalling the profits from alcohol once generated here – was infested with cockroaches, which are either very small or very big in Morocco, but it’s the small ones that I detest most. The toilet was broken.
After I’d made some enquiries, I arrived in a European-looking neighbourhood, at a modernist apartment block in the middle of a deserted stretch of land. Was this where Mr Bowles lived?
The young doorman told me that Mr Bowles would be back later that afternoon. The way he said it, though, suggested he himself didn’t expect his statement to pan out. When I returned, Mr. Bowles’s driver opened the door of the apartment, and told us we would have been welcome any other day. Mr Bowles was ill. I left, and Mr Bowles died later that year.
His death coincided with that of Hassan II, the King of Morocco from 1961 until his death in 1999, and the fact that they died so close to each other must have been fate. The city that Hassan II despised and never visited, was the one Bowles chose as the only city where he could live as a serious writer.
Their deaths heralded the end of Tangier’s isolation. A wind of change was blowing through the city, the first trip of the newly crowned Crown Prince Mohammed, who later became King Mohammed VI, was to Tangier, a symbolic gesture, casting the past aside like an old rag. She had been accepted.

LE COEUR

It’s 2am in Tangier. Larbi and I walk down to the last café at the end of the street. So far, we’ve been to three bars, cabarets and clubs, but it’s all the same to Larbi, he makes friends wherever he goes. The doors of bars and cabarets are half open to offer a glimpse of the spectacle and draw in anyone interested, which shouldn’t be necessary, as most bars run on regulars. Other visitors are considered extra. We are extra.
The street slopes down, and it’s my fourth bar tonight. The previous drinking house we were in was called Le Coeur de Tanger, not a bar but a cabaret where the audience is entertained by a singer and a keyboard player, and where you can dance. Posers enjoy giving the dancers money, after which their name is put into a song. The song is sung, and the money shared. At the end of the night, the owner and the singer divide the spoils, the singer gets a fraction, the café owner the rest.
Larbi rang a friend at Le Coeur, begging him to come. He wanted to introduce me to him, as he might be useful to me, Larbi said. Waiting for his drinking buddy – Larbi makes everyone his drinking buddy, for here drinking is a profession that you can’t practice on your own – we had another one. And another one. There was Flag Special, Casablanca and Stork. The last is the cheapest, it used to be brewed in Fes, back when the water was good.
Le Coeur de Tanger is a nightclub/café/restaurant above the Gran Café de Paris, the famous café on Boulevard Pasteur, opposite the French consulate. Tangier at night is Le Coeur, a traditional nightclub with a rare balcony, run by singing, round-bosomed sheikhas whipping up a mix of locals and foreign nationals. A plump, dolled-up girl next to us threw us sultry glances, then melted when Larbi struck up a conversation with her.
Meanwhile, I thought back to the beginning of the evening, several hours earlier.

RUBY

I’d met Larbi at Ruby’s, an old café frequented by artists, writers and women, who feel comfortable there. The man at the bar was called Abdelkader. Larbi called my name, and the barman looked over his shoulder, smiled when he learned that I was the other Abdelkader. A bearded, middle-aged man, the eternally single type, got on stage and wriggled in behind the keyboard. High above the tables, he began to play American songs from the 1980s. Larbi introduced me to a few people, while Abdelkader covered the bar in spicy and savoury tapas. To stop the café from filling up with freeloaders, he’d put up the prices of tapas. Simon, a writer and the manager at Librairie des Colonnes, told me that, not so long ago, Ruby’s had been the haunt of a man who called himself the King of Ireland. I don’t know what happened to him. Knowledge is a theory here; the truth lies at the bottom of the sea. Those who can dive well can become very rich.
Ports tend to have lots of bars, and that is certainly true for Tangier, despite government attempts to cut them back. Every once in a while, licences need to be extended, which takes time and money, and sometimes cafés need to be closed as a result. The owner of Number One, for instance, had to shut his café for more than a year, due to some disagreement about the extension of his licence. But now his café is open again.

BAR MAR CHICA, BAR TONY, DEAN’S BAR

Several illustrious cafés have been closed down for good, though. Bar Mar Chica and Bar Tony, haunt of homosexuals, transvestites and paedophiles, will never open again. Madame Porte became a coffee house, but despite its central location and pleasant look, visitor numbers were low. Last year, it became a McDonalds. Melancholy filling in the gaps.
Dean’s Bar, in the street leading up to Hotel Villa de France, popular in the 1960s with a motley crew of artists, bon vivants and sex tourists, also closed down, and will remain so. A senior clergyman of the Anglican church had a spiritual revelation and was seen in the bars and brothels around the Petit Socco from then on. Tangier, city where boarding school boys were allowed to be devils.

WILLIAM S. BURROUGH

What attracted the Beat Generation to Tangier can be summed up as follows: everything that’s good and sinful was cheap and plentiful in Tangier. Tangier was the most Catholic city of the Mediterranean, and sin and confession lay side by side. But that doesn’t mean that Tangier was willing to just give it all away. William S. Burroughs had a hard time finding the sex he was looking for; boys and young men were avoiding him like the plague, initially. And he found the drugs disappointing too, Tangier’s high was no more than a rumour. But eventually he got what he wanted, writing his Naked Lunch (1959) at the Hotel Munira in the company of drugs, boys and despair. In Tangier, lunch is both the most important and cheapest meal of the day.
Larbi’s drinking buddy arrived and they knocked back a few beers. We exchanged phone numbers and during our short conversation, we discussed the quality of the fish, the best way to get a building permit and why being drunk is a higher state of being. They said beautiful things about all three subjects, but telling you what they told me would lead to another book. The night is compact, impenetrable, everlasting, while the day is clear, exhausting and temporary. Night, choose me as your companion. Then we left Le Coeur de Tanger.

LOOKING FOR MONEY

We’re having our last drink at the last café at the end of the street that slopes down. The people there are completely wasted, anyone who goes in, can’t go back out. The only direction is deeper into drunkenness. The hangover isn’t on its way, it’s already there, as if everyone and everything is living out of step. In slow motion. Without an audience. Alone.
The singer sings out of tune; a boy gets up, performs a pirouette and falls back onto the sofa. The guard is keeping a close eye on him. A woman in traditional dress pushes up the jumper of the man with whom she’s standing at the bar and kisses his enormous belly. The man stares ahead, in a drunken haze. Everyone in this drinking den appears to have lost their senses. Unrestrained befuddlement reigns. I’m trying to figure out what makes these drunkards different from the ones I saw in other bars. I’m thinking that they aren’t very bright, that they’re folks without regular jobs, people incapable of doing basic sums in daily life, who can barely read and write. Vulnerable, simple people lifting bottles to their lips, just like me.
All cafés and bars are frequented by prostitutes. If you want, they’ll approach you, but if you don’t, they’ll leave you alone. I could spend an entire night at the bar without being bothered by any. People are looking for money, they’re not interested in bodies. Anyone who goes into a bar displaying his prosperity is quickly fleeced. Here everything is about money. For some customers, spending money is a release, a means to relax and escape the rigid system. Men who find it difficult to talk, let the singer speak for them, and she will sing their praises in return for bank notes. Drunken men find it hard to hold back. There are stories about drug barons spending an entire year’s takings on a single night. Money means nothing to these people.

SHEIKHA

The cabarets are run by sheikhas, professional singers operating in the twilight zone of entertainment, sentimental songs and sensual clapping. They can sing for hours in a mix of Moroccan Arabic, the local dialect, magic words, incantations and classical Arabic. Being stout, their takchitas – long, elegant Moroccan night dresses – appear to be bursting at the seams, and there is so much kohl around their eyes that you could be looking at two burning coals. When they stop singing, their keyboard players take over, and anyone who has money to spend, shares his wealth with the sheikha.

RACHIDA MADANI

Rachida Madani is a poet from Tangier, although she is invisible in the city. I’ve never seen her, but there are videos of her on YouTube in which she reads her poetry. She writes in French, her language of choice. French is her literary mother tongue, like a writer can have more than one mother and more than one mother tongue. She has written about Scheherazade, the storyteller of One Thousand and One Nights, who seduced the vengeful king with her stories and persuaded him to give her one night’s stay of execution a thousand and one times. At the end she marries the king and becomes pregnant with his child. This is what we call a happy ending. The fairy tales of One Thousand and One Nights are not about a thousand nights, though, they’re about a single night in which everything changes, which changes everything. To the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges, the single night was a symbol of infinity. This author was a collector of signs of infinity, including the Aleph, hidden under the stairs, in which the entire universe revealed itself.
To Madani, Scheherazade is a woman, a mistress, a body. Scheherazade represents loneli-ness, and the story of One Thousand and One Nights, a tale for disfigured women.

I rescue myself from the city
and I go where the water goes.
With what weight of tears borne
in their chests
have how many women come
to refill your basin
sea of vanquished women?
Carry my skiff as far as you can,
Ocean,
for once you will be carrying something
besides flotsam.
Carry my skiff
my body is beautiful
my desire great
it bursts forth from you, skiff
escaped from what waters . . .
I is free
and I flow onto its banks,
I is free
wave already and fire already
I is free
and I swallow up your reefs
ocean of suicides.

For children unable to laugh.
A tale crashing in the glass garden
after centuries of patrol
centuries of silence
in Shehriyar’s palace.
It was the sobbing tale of a shattered woman
the bloody tale of a head severed
on the way to revolt…
And without a tear, in the glass garden,
the blackest owl
took its turn to stand guard.¹

1. Rachida Madani, ‘The Second Tale’, in Tales of a Severed Head, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012, XI and XV.

AHMED YACOUBI

The high is from the mountains of the Rif. Although there are many bars and cabarets where alcohol is served, it will never exceed the amount of kif consumed. In my street, there’s a tea house which is largely populated by users of the sibsi, a small wooden or metal pipe used for smoking grains of kif. Men in long djellabas carry their pipes as though they are precious.
I spotted the fish monger at the main market whom I usually buy from take a quick drag during work. I haven’t seen him for a while, but the authorities don’t take action against smoking kif. Paul Bowles describes the consumption of majnoun, a sweet, sticky cake with kif as its main ingredient. In the Alchemist’s Cookbook (1972) his good friend, the artist Ahmed Yacoubi, provides a recipe for a savoury pie.

PAIN-NU

Though my friends don’t like spending time at Au:Pain-Nu, I do. They think you can’t go to a bar-cabaret named after Larbi Choukri’s famous novel. Now part of a hotel, it was just an ordinary café in Choukri’s time. When I go there, I’m taken to a table where I remain the rest of the night, listening to a singer filling the small place with sentimental songs. The keyboard that accompanies her is louder than anything else. The reason why I like going there has to do with my first visit, when everything seemed right: the music, the atmosphere, the people. I had taken a friend, who’d been amazed by everything she saw.
And a friend from Tangier had told me about a bar-cabaret for homosexuals, which I decided to visit. The café is in a street where there used to be a lot of nightclubs. Apart from the café, all the other establishments are now closed, their facades roughly painted over. Perhaps this café is simply waiting for better times to come. There’s no hurry to change.
It’s the last café I’ll visit this evening. It doesn’t look like anything special, and if the men are homosexual, they’re very discreet. The singer on duty sits at the bar, but when she sees us – I’ve taken a woman friend – she and the keyboard player begin to make music. We order a drink and listen to their sentimental song. The way she sings it is not very passionate, but I like that, there’s none of the drama, fuss and false exuberance that we’ve encountered for the rest of the evening. She’s just a singer singing a sad song the best she can, about a man she never had.

PEOPLE COME AND GO

I try to limit my visits to cafés. Not out of fear of becoming a pub crawler who has no time for the more serious things in life, but because going to bars is quite demanding. I remember everything that happened for days on end, a fever refusing to cool. When I visit Tangier, I restrict my bar visits to two or three per week. I have no need to go every night. But for most customers, the reverse is true; the bar is part of their identities, and they’re out there every night. I see them sitting at round tables, ruling their social lives like pashas and gorging on snacks, drinks and conversation with ironclad self-discipline. People come and go, slapping each other on the backs, happy to put in a good word for each other. They are members of an exclusive club demanding a strong constitution.

THERE IS NO BETTER CITY TO HAVE A HANGOVER

Tangier, city of ghost bars. I just pass them by, bricked-up doors, weathered signs, draped in the veils of the past, thin and ragged with age. I’m walking parallel to Boulevard Pasteur. Aimlessly. Aimlessness is a form of surrender here, never having to arrive anywhere. Well hidden, on the corner of a steep street, is Hotel Munira where Burroughs wrote his Naked Lunch. It’s an ugly place. He picked up boys in a number of bars, some of them half brothels. Homosexual artists whose lust was restricted by the harsh anti-gay laws of Western countries found a permissive El Dorado here. It became part of the myth, it became the myth itself. The Tanjawis don’t want to know. As far as they are concerned, that part of history is a thing of the past, an amoral past. Before this was paradise, it was hell. So things can only get better, but that doesn’t mean the ambiguity in the streets has gone. Men and women of different sexual orientations still find their way to the bride of the north. But you must really feel like Tangier, because Tangier doesn’t feel like you. Not yesterday, not today and not tomorrow. There’s no better city to have a hangover in than Tangier.