CHAPTER TEN
A House on Loan
"We wanted something thoroughly and uncompromisingly foreign—foreign from top to bottom—foreign from center to circumference—foreign inside and outside and all around—nothing anywhere about it to dilute its foreign-ness—nothing to remind us of any other people or any other land under the sun. And, lo! In Tangier we have found it. “
More than a century has passed since Mark Twain visited Tangier. He arrived on the steamer Quaker City with 150 New Yorkers for a five-month tour of Europe and the Christian Holy Land. Tangier was a minor anomaly for the Americans, an unscheduled stop on an otherwise Protestant itinerary. It was also Twain's first glimpse of a Muslim city. Few of the ticket holders could have liked it. Twain was mesmerized. The tile floors, Delacroix arches, chairless rooms, biblical dress, and a ruined bridge built by Caesar—"a crowded city of snowy tombs,” he writes—outstripped Twain's definition of the strange. For the next ten pages his more usual bombast trails off, chastened, almost, by the raw and timeless city.
Tangier in 1867 was already the least Moroccan of Morocco's cities. For several centuries the royal court had drawn a protective ring around the town. No sultan ever called there. Tangier was preserved as a diplomatic hive, a sop to Europe, a means of keeping strangers at arm's length. Its tribes were too heterodox, its embassies largely Christian. Royal cartographers sometimes dropped it from their maps. For Europeans, on the other hand, Tangier held promise. Its harbor near Gibraltar offered control of the strait and entry to an interior rich in trade. Twain compared it with Baghdad. For the sultan it was Sodom and Gomorrah. In 1780 he offered it to Spain for a hundred thousand dollars, but the deal failed.
Tangier is a seaside city set on hills. On my first visit here during Ramadan I hadn't taken much notice of its beauties. Today from the back of a cab driving into town the place looked green and pleasant, its streets swept clean for a visit that day by Portugal's President Soares. Phone poles on the parade route streamed with banners. Portraits of the king hung nailed to trees. The heat laid a layer of oppression on the festivities. The checkpoints were wrapped in crepe, but the soldier's faces looked complacent—the faces of men who had seen these things before.
In the heart of town my driver dismissed Soares with a raised finger. Portugal had ruled Tangier off and on for about a century, then passed it on to Britain in 1661, as part of a dowry. Moroccans, and especially Tangawis, had already seen enough of foreigners to inoculate them forever against vain hopes. On the other hand, they liked a good parade. Schoolgirls lined the sidewalks singing anthems. Soares's plane was still an hour away.
The cab crept down avenue Mohammed V, past military cordons and a bandstand, then turned up a little mountain called the Sharf. Rodrigo Rey Rosa's house, where my extra bags were stored, lay up this road.
The driver dropped my luggage at a pair of iron gates. The grounds looked deserted. Rodrigo was still in Paris, working. I found the hidden key and went inside. The house, new, barely lived in, was built on a one-floor plan with six white rooms. An enormous, half-tiled bathroom gave off a faint lime smell of new cement. Because the rooms contained no furniture or carpets, they echoed like a foundry when the door banged. With so few contents, it was easy to set up housekeeping.
A mattress lay on reed mats in a bedroom. In the kitchen I found a one-ring camp stove, sugar and coffee in the larder, two pots, two pans, a bread knife on a board, running water, gas, electric lights. Off the kitchen lay a terrace with a clear view of the strait and a home below. Radio music played between the houses, but a bougainvillea trellis blurred the view. I'd seen laundry hung there to dry on my way in. When I looked again, the line was empty. I did not expect to meet my neighbors on the Sharf.
A double row of orange trees formed a tiny orchard beside the house. Their limbs threw warm shade and bitter fruit. I stretched out beneath them. The grass felt lush and cool, perfumed with citrus. A bumble bee breezed past.
Shreds of parade music woke me, from the bandstand down the road. Uphill the minaret of a mosque poked through the trees. The cabbie had said I would find a shop up there, to buy my groceries. I went inside to wash and change. I was setting out for the store with a woven basket when the call to ’asr prayer came down the hill.
I went inside and put on a djellaba.
The walk took about ten minutes. The one-lane road curved steeply going up, lined with viny walls and overhanging houses. I mounted in spirals. The minaret at the top turned round and round. It was slimmer than those in Marrakesh. Instead of bare, reddish stone, its sides were brightly patterned in Spanish tiles.
A few involutions below the mosque I came to the food shop, a bare bones version of an Andalusian tienda: unpainted shelves behind a wooden counter, milk stacked up in paper tricorns, lengths of white bread end-up in a bin. There were yogurt cups, la Vache Qui Rit for cheese, and a sweating mound of butter near the soft drinks. I bought amounts of all these, a honeycomb chunk, and a kilo of bananas, worked them into the basket, and paid the bill.
Outside a puff of cloud ran over the mountain. At the top the street opened on a square. Other roads converged here, too, and a few Moroccans straggled up them, moving in twos and threes toward the mosque. Its door-less arches opened on the plaza. While I waited, two men tied a burro to a hitching post at the entry. I walked with them into the courtyard of the mosque.
I left my basket and sandals at the door and joined a few dozen people in the prayer hall. The floor was covered in reed mats. Ten or twelve women sat on the west wall; a few men were baby-sitting sons. Everyone knelt or sat cross-legged, waiting. Some told beads, some whispered, and then a man stood up and faced in the direction of Mecca. We filed in and straightened our rows. Salat began.
’Asr is one of the unvoiced, daylight prayers. Only the rustle of cloth disturbed the quiet. We performed the first rak'ahs, in unison. After that the pace began to vary, the older men going more slowly while others added extra prayers. At the last salaam, when the heads turn right then left, I looked into the face of a man beside me. On his brow lay the dark, round bruise—a mark of piety—that Moroccans call the raisin, from pressing the forehead often to the ground.
Later we drifted back across the courtyard. I picked up my basket and stepped into the square.
At the house I put my impressions in a notebook. For about twenty years I had been coming to Morocco as a non-Muslim. In that time I naturally assumed that race and culture created unalterable lines of cleavage between peoples. Now the lens I had looked through appeared to be shifting. Perhaps it was even dissolving before my eyes. Two months ago I'd been frightened to enter a mosque here. Tangier had not changed. The change was in me.
I addressed a few postcards home and took a nap. A red towel hung drying on the terrace. A hummingbird buzzed the towel as I dozed off. When a knock hit the door, the sound bounced through the empty house like buckshot. I got up to see what was the matter and found a young woman standing on the porch. Her black hair hung in double braids. She wore a satin blue djellaba. Her name was Sa'ida.
“We live next door,” she said, pointing up the drive. “Rodrigo told us you'd be coming, months ago. Have you seen my husband?”
I had not seen her husband.
“Strange. He was in the orchard. He sent me to find you. We saw your light last night.”
I followed her gaze into the trees. She laughed like a bell, then looked worried.
“You've seen nobody?”
“No.”
“Will you help me find him?”
We set off up the drive. Spears of sunlight slanted through the foliage, and as we walked along she questioned me. Where had I been since April? Was I married? Where was my wife? Did I miss her? Would I ever go home again?
The hill was steep. We walked slowly. She led me into a house through the front door. In the foyer she called out, “Hamza! Hamza!” No one answered. She seemed amused.
She parted a beaded curtain, and we stepped into a sunlit sitting room. The chairs and tables were European, nondescript. The house felt freshly inhabited. Newlyweds, I thought. In a corner off the kitchen door, an upright piano and an organ formed a wedge.
“My husband's,” she said. “He had them shipped from France. Do you play, monsieur?”
I had played as a boy. Not now.
“Not at all, monsieur? Not even a little?”
She stepped into the kitchen, where a maid in skirts was leaning on a mop. Sa'ida introduced me.
Hamza Kropf appeared at my door the next morning with a wicker basket of pears, goat cheese, and bread. We made breakfast in the kitchen, then sat on the counters, talking. Hamza was a lanky, quiet man in his early thirties. He wore a curly beard and spoke Swiss French.
Yesterday's missed meeting went unmentioned. The important thing, he said, was that my arrival in Tangier had coincided with a meeting at his teacher's house.
Hamza was European and a Muslim. He belonged to a local branch of well-known Sufis, the ‘Alawis. His parents had been ‘Alawis, too. The order's principal shrine was in Mostaganem, Algeria, but smaller centers were scattered throughout Morocco. Their regional leader would be a guest of honor at the meeting. Hamza wanted me to come along.
I had heard of the ‘Alawis and their legendary sheikh, Ahmad al-'Alawi. Martin Lings at the University of London had written a book about him, A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century. A French physician, Marcel Carnet, had left an affecting account of the sheikh and their friendship. Al-'Alawi died in 1934, leaving thousands of students here and in Europe and a dozen published works in verse and prose. In his time he had been a celebrated mystic. It surprised me to hear that the order was still vital.
Hamza and I agreed to meet at six o'clock the next day.
After breakfast I walked into town. The city looked prosperous. I passed new residential sections on the outskirts, many more mosques than a decade before, and fewer foreigners. Banners still lined avenue Mohammed V, but the festivities had ended. The crowds were back to normal for a weekday. The sky was cloudless. Overlooking the port at every cross street, views of the strait stretched all the way to Spain. I turned downhill into the market. At a newsstand I stopped to ask directions. I was looking for Yusef Menari's small café.
Yusef and I had been friends twenty years before. He had started out with a shop the size of Mostopha's, then changed hats and become an official guide. These days he ran deluxe bus tours for Pullman all over the country. Like many successful Moroccans, he found that owning his own café provided a respite. I had heard about his success in the travel industry. I hoped he could advise me on getting to Mecca, but no one seemed to have heard of his café. The lanes at the back of the souk turned to culs-de-sac.
That afternoon I went to see Paul Bowles, taking a cab past the big Kuwaiti mosque, then down a lane past the boarded-up U.S. consulate. His apartment faced this building, across the road.
Years before, as a publisher, I had brought out two small books of Mohammed Mrabet's stories in Bowles's translations. I had liked the work and wanted to do something for Moroccan authors. On my previous trips I had always found Bowles helpful. For me his salon was a mental clearinghouse. I could wash up there after weeks or months of travel and find a bright, genteel man who spoke my language. He had lived here for forty years. He knew the country.
I never knew what to expect when I went to see Paul. You could not telephone ahead. He had no telephone. Today the hall outside his flat was stacked with film equipment. Camera cases lay piled by the stairs. Plugs bristled from outlets. Extension cords ran under the front door.
A technical assistant let me in. Entering the study, he waved a light meter at the windows. I followed him through the door, past a Bolex camera. Paul was seated at a cluttered desk. Another technician stood wrestling with a reflector. To Paul's right sat Claude Thomas.
“Paul's become famous,” she laughed.
“Again?”
Claude had translated several of Bowles's books into French for Gallimard. She nodded. “Now he's doing TV interviews.”
Paul squinted at the camera, looking startled, a birdlike figure caught in a long lens. That year the filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci had turned one of Paul's novels into a movie. Its Hollywood budget had stirred the media.
A makeup man withdrew. The camera rolled, but there were problems with the lighting. Between takes Paul passed me a book he had been saving, Sandstorms, by Peter Theroux. I took the book. I said I would come back later.
The whole apartment seemed given over to capturing literary reflection. Mohammed Mrabet, the Moroccan author, sat on a couch in the living room while a sound man crouched at his feet, adjusting dials.
“School makes a man's mind a zero,” Mrabet was saying. “Books drain the brains of people through their shoes. The Qur'an is the only book I ever read.”
“But you are an author,” the man objected.
“I've published a dozen books,” Mrabet laughed. “What have they brought me? I have three lives. My life with Europeans, in which I feel very Muslim. My life with Moroccans, who treat me like a foreigner. And life by myself, when I dream up stories.”
“What do you want?” the man asked.
“A life with money.”
“Why?”
“It would be something new.”
When the interview stopped, I asked Mrabet the way to Yusef's café. He looked surprised that I knew Yusef. They had played together as children, he said. “Yusef's the one rich man I know who doesn't waste time making all his friends feel like failures. When you're with Yusef, you are with Yusef. He's the same for everybody.”
He drew me a map to the café.
For Europeans and even for Americans, particularly those who endured McCarthyism, Tangier is a fitting place for an artist's laboratory. The markets are clean, the flats are inexpensive, the climate is more agreeable than Europe's, and anything can happen, in three or four languages. For example, you can rent a hotel room for twenty dollars where William Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch. Jean Genet had lived and worked here, too. Francis Bacon. Tennessee Williams. Samuel Beckett.
Near the flat where Djuna Barnes wrote Nightwood, a boy stepped out of the shadow's leading a goat.
“Café Zizwa?”
He pointed to a pair of granite stairs. Beside the door sat a man with a tray of matches.
“Yusef Menari?”
The man motioned behind him.
I stepped up into a long, narrow train car of a room. A wooden bench and tables lined one wall. A handful of men sat quietly sipping coffee. I mentioned Yusef's name to a sad-eyed waiter. He shut down the espresso maker and led me to a doorway strung with beads. He snapped on a light switch, and the square room twinkled. Its walls were studded with hundreds of pink and purple geodes the size of grapefruits. Their crystal centers flickered in the light. A granite shelf circled the room. Painted panels ran up to the ceiling: Day-Glo seascapes, an Arab skyline, a harbor. Lacking windows, the room looked something like a submarine.
Yusef lay on his back on a bench in the corner. I thought he must be asleep, but he was ill. Last week in Fez he had taken a busload of Spaniards to a museum. They had wanted to see how a Muslim performed wudu’. Yusef had found some water in a pool and made the ablutions. The tourists seemed pleased, but the water had had something in it.
“An occupational hazard. How did you find me?”
I showed him Mrabet's map.
“Do you know Mrabet?”
We talked about my stay in Marrakesh.
“Are you keeping a record?” he asked.
“I try.”
“Try harder! And don't think like a child. If you want to know what things mean, ask yourself questions. Even the hadj is pointless without that. You can tell a child, ‘Be good and you'll go to heaven.’ But once he's an adult, he has to think beyond that. Does Paradise have dimensions? Does Allah have a face? Does He have to behave like a man for men to believe in Him?” Yusef sighed. “God is the way things are, but people are lazy. Even religion requires imagination! Instead, you get ventriloquists and dummies, a few men with something to say and the rest repeating it. Be careful! Orthodox minds are the most primitive.”
I remembered why I had always liked Yusef and why I had come to see him. “I'll be careful,” I said. I brought up my visa problems. I asked if he knew a good guide.
“The only one worth a guirsh is al-Hadj Nasir.”
He called to the waiter, who called to the match vendor, who called to the boy with the goat across the street. While Nasir was being sent for, Yusef praised him.
Nasir took pilgrims to Mecca every year, arranging every aspect of the journey. Other guides did the same, but Nasir was different. He was honest, for one thing, and he had a younger brother in Mecca who was a mutawwif. The two worked together.
“If I wanted to send my own grandmother on the hadj, I would send her with Nasir. He treats pilgrims like babies,” Yusef said.
The boy came back without the guide. Nasir had gone to Rabat to arrange for visas. He would not return until Monday.
Yusef looked relieved. “I thought he had left for Mecca.”
It was decided that we would meet Nasir on Tuesday. I gave Yusef my address.
“If anything changes, I will send the boy. What about medicine?”
“Medicine?”
“What do you have with you?”
I told him. He looked disappointed.
“It's not enough. You need Cipro for the stomach. You need sulfa and a pill to help you sleep. Don't underestimate Mecca in July. It's a hundred and thirty degrees at noon, and a million people are camping on the street. You're going to need a hotel room, air-conditioned. I will have the pills here on Tuesday.”
He raised himself from the bench. His skin looked pallid. “Be careful what you drink there, too,” he said.
The next day I laid a mat on the terrace and spread out my journals. They were soft, palm-size notebooks containing a patchy record of my months here. They bore no relation to a book. I had always hoped to write about this journey, but Marrakesh had not offered much time. Life in the medina had proved too eventful to permit more than the keeping of a diary.
Tangier was different. Living alone, with no family around me, I found the days quieter and more oblique with the long stretches of free hours required for composition. Tangier was a profoundly Moroccan town, but unlike Marrakesh, it did not look it. Proximity to Europe cast a familiar scrim on everything. Most Tangawis dressed in Western clothes. The modern quarter was larger than the medina. There were even Christian church spires on the hill. The Western scenery often made me squint at the odd effects that lay obscured behind French backdrops.
The first surprise was my meeting with the Sufis.
Hamza met me as arranged, at six o'clock. The sky ran marble pink over the harbor. We drove to an outlying quarter I'd never seen. As the car slipped through the hills, my thoughts were churning. I could hardly believe my luck, to be crossing paths with the ‘Alawis, and yet the final mile made me nervous.
Sufism is the mystical dimension of Islam, a means of seeking divine awareness and love through the subtler aspects of faith and detached abandon. Its goal is concrete but ineffable: to implant within the adept a physical awareness of spiritual existence, rooted in direct experience. The Sufis called this remembering. Of all the Muslim sects and schools, Sufism aims most squarely at an I-Thou relation based on love. I found the proposal attractive but daunting. Its practice was based on the inner meaning of rites I had barely learned. I wondered if I was not going too fast. I described the feeling to Hamza as spiritual ground rush.
He stared out over the car hood and said that a man could not go too fast in certain matters.
“Besides,” he smiled, “Islam is not a rocket. It's more like finding a perfect slice of orange. The question is, Once you see it, what will you do? You can write a book on the beauty of its skin, you can praise its perfection, but that may only make a person shy. When I see the orange, I want to put it in my mouth. The kind of thinking you're doing stalls the process.”
Hamza's face had flushed now; we were on his favorite topic. Sometimes his head shook in midsentence, as if speech could not convey all he had to tell. “I'm a computer programmer,” he said. “I have a good brain. But I don't try to eat with it. I chew with my mouth, tu vois? Of course, the brain would like to do it all. The brain is an incessant volunteer. I admire its versatility, but it wasn't designed to do everything. You can't drink soup with a fork, par exemple. To eat the orange, you need a straight path to it. Passing through the brain is just a detour. “
He brought the car through a lazy curve and pulled up at a large suburban house. The path to the door was lined with rose beds. On a red-brick porch I was introduced to our host, a burly man in his fifties named Hassan. Hassan was the leader of the local ‘Alawi foqra. With my hand in his meaty one he exuded the easy force of a retired wrestler. His striped shirt lay open at the collar. He brought us up into a banquet hall.
The second-story room was large, rectangular, and airy. Low couches lined the walls on all four sides. I counted eighty men seated in groups on low couches, chatting lightly over tea and dates. Some reclined as they conversed, giving the place an air of Plato's Symposium. There were tropical fish tanks built into a pillar and tall china cabinets on one wall. We were shown to a banquette. A boy set a tray of pastries on our table, then poured water from a ewer on our hands.
We were sipping tea when distant chanting came in at the windows. Down the road I heard the tramp of marching feet. This was not another state parade. It was the foqra, advancing like an army up the street.
“What are they singing?”
“A poem of Sheikh al-'Alawi's,” Hamza whispered.
The feet stamped up the walk between the rose beds, entered Hassan's house, and marched upstairs. The stone steps boomed and echoed. Two men pinned back the double doors, and a stream of white-robed adepts swept through the entry. Half or more were in their early twenties, sixty men caught up in a joyful noise, arms swinging, faces gleaming as they passed us, forming ranks at the center of the sala, dropping to the carpet in neat rows.
Deportment in the banquet hall was formal. The students faced a wall of couches lined with elders. Robed and grave, the mentors sat straight backed, hands folded on their laps like a benchload of mandarins. The burly Hassan had slipped into a djellaba. Squeezed beside him, appearing somewhat lost, sat a round, lightly balding red-haired man of forty in a three-piece business suit. Because of his dress and height, about five feet two, I did not pick him out as the guest of honor.
The foqra began to sing to him selected trios and duets from the diwan of Sheikh al-'Alawi. There were no instruments, no drums. The mood was sweet, like a serenade. A chorus added refrains between the stanzas.
The blows of love play tricks on men
And destroy them stage by stage.
I asked: am I acceptable'?
The elders said, Make yourself empty.
I know what you mean,
I replied
But consider my state
And show me some compassion,
Sadness is only the start
Of the weight I carry.
The short strophes ran together into fifteen-minute blocks, each song in its own hypnotic scale. Now and then one of the elders read from the Qur'an. Occasionally the red-haired man made a comment.
The choir had great reserves. The hall was crowded. As the singing continued, a light steam filmed the windows. The room grew warm. My couch ran perpendicular to the foqra in their rows. One student, jammed in near me on the floor, by leaning back could rest his spine against my kneecaps. Behind him sat another in his teens. When that one sang, his right foot brushed my toes.
The recital reached a high point with a different sort of piece. It consisted of variations on one word repeated up and down a lilting scale. The word was Allah. It started out simply enough—I sang along—voices rising in the heated air until bit by bit the middle il’s dropped from the word like the body of an airplane and the song changed into aspirated breathing: Ah—UH! Ah—UH! At the back of the room a voice cried Allah, and the beat redoubled, the wings took off, the entire hall sucking in drafts of air at the solar plexus, which were held a moment, then shunted out in light explosions. Multiplied a hundred times, the sound was stunning. My eyes began to dart.
By this time the man whose foot brushed mine was leaning slightly forward. He rocked up and back, keeping time to the music. At first I thought nothing of it. Gradually, as the beat increased, the man seemed to lose control, until his rocking developed aspects of a seizure. I assumed the elders would come to his aid in any real emergency, but when his whole frame stiffened, I began to wonder. I could see that the music had induced a kind of ecstasy, but why in only this particular student? I hadn't planned to be so near the action. When his forehead unexpectedly became pinned to my left foot, I nearly panicked. By now he was foaming lightly on my sock while his legs swept open and shut like a pair of scissors. No one moved to change the situation. I sang to keep my courage up. Near the end of the song he lay stretched out, rolling from side to side; then his body went rigid. A sigh like a wisp of steam escaped his lips.
A moment later two companions came behind him, hoisted his body onto their backs, and lumbered away with it. The chanting continued. It had never stopped.
* * *
A softer psalm closed out the evening. When it was done, tablecloths appeared, and a meal of several courses was served: rounds of pigeon pie two feet across followed by bread, steamed vegetables, and joints of mutton.
Moroccans do not converse much while they eat. By the time I felt able to bring up the fainting student, the room was calm. Hamza whispered answers to my questions. The event, while new to me, was not very praiseworthy. These things happened often, Hamza said, especially among the younger students. He compared the man to a soldier who after a long day's march had come to a river without a bridge and gone on marching right down into the water. Hamza's tone implied that had he been paying attention, the man might have quenched his thirst at the water's edge, not become swamped in it. In other orders trance states were sought out. I had seen them among the Genowa. I had seen them at Baptist revivals, too: the swooning limbs of a choir member followed by rigor ecstasis, the gaze on a face that a minute before had looked human.
The river, which seemed like unconsciousness to me, is described by some who step into it as purgation. In Morocco, among less sophisticated orders (the Hamadsha, the Jilala), the trance is linked to the actions of local saints. In the south the saint “rides” you. In the north he “visits.” A Jilali once described it to me this way: “You leave your body as though you were leaving a house. But you leave the door open. And while you are out, the saint comes in and cleans it. Then the saint leaves and leads you back through to the door.” People compared the results to walking on air.
Two men stopped me, going down the stairway. One, named Moulay, asked how I'd liked the singing. The last song, he said, was quite special. Had I noticed the way it reduced God's name to breathing? “You see,” he said, “some men reach God by repeating his name. We get there by forgetting it.” Other than that I'd seen nothing special this evening. “You must come to Algeria. There you will see something special.”
The second man had the same first name as mine. His face looked familiar. Moulay said this was because I'd been staring all night at a portrait of the man's brother. The photograph hung above the elders’ couch, between Hassan and the red-haired man: a young-looking face, considering his station, the acting sheikh, I was told, of the tariqa, the inheritor of Sheikh al-'Alawi's chair.
The man said, “I'm leaving for Mostaganem this evening. Would you like to come with me?”
Algeria lay a two-day drive to the east over rugged mountains. I said I might manage a visit after the hadj. He produced a pen and wrote down an address and a phone number. “Go to the consulate and get a visa. You can take a bus to the border at Oran. Just tell them you're a tourist and get into the first cab. You don't really need an address. All the cabbies know the way.”
As the red-headed man approached, I turned to Moulay.
“And your guest tonight?” I asked. “What is his function?”
“Sa'id is a Sufi, just like us. But he's also le responsable des responsables. He travels all over Morocco bringing order to the centers. That's his job.”
Sa'id stood at my elbow now. His forehead reached my shoulder. He asked if we were discussing politics.
I said, “I don't think so.”
“Good. It's a waste of time. In Algeria we have too much of that. The Socialists fill the streets one day; the Muslims march the next. Then it's the Democrats! They wear out their shoes, and none of it puts bread in the poor man's pocket. Sufis have a different politic. The body and the soul arc not the same. The soul has no border, no douane.”
“How many ‘Alawis are there?”
The order had a good following, he said. Thirty thousand or so, here and in Europe. Of course, they were in the minority, he added. The motor of the world was always like that. Artists, thinkers, Sufis were always the few. The majority made nothing real happen. It was the other 10 percent that drove the world.
I had mentioned to Hamza the book I was thinking of writing. He brought it up now.
“A book, about what?” Sa'id looked doubtful.
“The hadj.”
“Ah, well, thank God! I thought you were writing a textbook on Islam. Impossible subject! Where does one find it? Islam is a word with fifty different meanings. And it's all mixed up with politics these days. You have one Islam in Pakistan and another in Saudi Arabia. You have Saddam Hussein and his cannon for God. The Kuwaitis who worship oil. The Iranians begging God to destroy them both. Where is Islam?”
“Don't ask the Americans,” I said. “Most Americans don't know Islam from a tomato.”
“Maybe your book will help change that.”
“Most of my people believe the TV,” I said.
He nodded. “The Muslims have not fared well on your television.”
“No one has fared well,” I said. “The average American student can't find Georgia on a map.”
Sa'ida chuckled. “Be sure you have a map when you get to Algeria. Mostaganem is a very small city.”
We shook hands. I went downstairs.
During the next few days I organized my notebooks every morning, laundered clothes, and dried them in the sun. After lunch I napped or read. In the afternoon I climbed to the hilltop grocer's, or strolled into town for provisions. I saw Paul every other day. I dined several times with Hamza and Sa'ida. Nights, I listened to the BBC.
The Sharf was otherworldly with quiet. Downhill, traffic throbbed in a golden haze, and freighters blasted bass notes in the harbor. At night there were foghorns. Some evenings I strolled around the kasbah walls. The town was divided, like Marrakesh, between a New Town and an old quarter. In Tangier everyone seemed to live in both places simultaneously. That was part of its genius as a city—to offer life's essentials on two planes. As the town was split, so were the people I knew here. Paul Bowles had not been home in thirty years. Mrabet led three lives. Rodrigo wrote of his homeland, Guatemala, as hauntingly as if it were the moon. In Tangier, if anywhere, exile lent enchantment to the view.
* * *
When I played a tape of ‘Alawi songs for Paul, he squinted at the sound and finally nodded. “It's the real thing,” he confirmed. “But what does that mean?”
In the 1950s Paul had collected indigenous music here, for the Library of Congress. As a writer his attraction to Morocco seemed rooted in the irrational vitality of its people. Of their music and dance he had written:
How much we could learn from them about man's relationship to the cosmos, about his conscious connection to the soul. Instead of which we talk about raising their standard of living! Where we could learn why, we try to teach them our all-important how, so that they may become as rootless and futile and materialistic as we are.
Certainly this applied to the ‘Alawi music, but the Genowa's ritual choreography interested him more. “Did you happen to see them in Marrakesh?” he asked.
He drew back a cabinet door and exposed several shelves of the music on cassettes. “You never can get enough of it,” he said.
“Are there Genowa in Tangier?” I wondered.
“Of course.”
Driving through town with Mrabet the next day, I saw them. We had turned onto rue Mexique, a perfectly European-looking side street, and were coming downhill to an intersection when three men dressed in cream-colored robes and saffron skullcaps crossed the road. Mrabet slowed to let them pass. One bore a drum on his shoulder, covered with sequins.
I asked Mrabet about the ‘Alawis in Tangier.
“They have a school in Emsellah,” he said. “I've never been in it.” My interest in the ‘Alawis seemed to exasperate him. “If you're going to be a Muslim,” he said, “stick with Allah. Go to the mosque and don't listen to anybody.”
Mrabet was always advising me to be careful. His passport had once been rescinded on account of his stories, and the government had changed his legal name. He had published a dozen books in Bowles's translations and earned himself a following abroad, but at home he was circumspect. He had a wife and children. He advised me to watch out.
* * *
That night three dogs slipped under the gate into the courtyard and set up a chorus baying at the moon. My roof lay level with the driveway. As their howls reached a peak, the dogs skittered down the drive onto the rooftop. I chased them off, returned to bed, and tuned in the BBC.
News Desk was doing another piece on the Iraqi supergun.
That spring, the story ran, an order from Baghdad had been placed with a foundry in Britain, for fifty-four lengths of hollow steel pipe. Each piece of pipe was 132 feet long. Officially they were for an oil plant in Basra. The forty-inch bores were finely rifled, however. Fitted together, they seemed to form the barrel of a cannon large enough to lob shells into neighboring Israel. Because this represented a weapon five times larger than NATO's biggest gun, British authorities had seized the shipment.
This was the “cannon for God” that Sa'id had mentioned. Although its existence could not be confirmed, the rumor cast a cloud on the Middle East that summer. Saddam Hussein was a bellicose neighbor, for Arabs and Iranians as well as for Israelis. He commanded the world's fourth-largest army.
When Tuesday morning rolled around, I walked into town for my meeting at Yusef's. Down in the harbor sunlight mottled the skins of two white freighters. I wondered whether they were pilgrim ships. In 1867 Mark Twain had written that
hundreds of Moors come to Tangier every year and embark for Mecca. They go part of the way in English steamers, and the ten or twelve dollars they pay for passage is about all the trip costs. They take with them a quantity of food, and when the commissary department fails they “skirmish.”
I had always preferred ships to airplanes. I made a note to ask Yusef's guide about it.
Passing the post office, I dropped in to telephone Khalil. The call went through the first time—a miracle by Marrakeshi standards. Khalil gave me instructions and the numbers of several connecting flights from here to Saudi Arabia. More important, to my relief, I would be able to acquire a hadj visa in Tangier. It was not imperative to go to Washington. “You'll meet a man at the airport,” he said.
“Which airport?”
“The hadj airport, at Jidda.”
“What's the man's name?”
“I'm not sure yet. He will find you.”
Khalil sounded rushed. A Muslim high school in Washington had telephoned, he said, asking for a graduation anthem. “They want it this week,” he sighed. “And it has to be in English.”
I'd had some experience with the English ballad.
“It ought to rhyme,” he said shyly.
“I'll wire it to you.”
I walked toward Yusef's, thinking about the anthem and the airplanes.
On a stone-benched pavilion overlooking the port at the top of the road I stopped to examine more closely the freighters in the harbor. From here I could see they were aging steel-hulled vessels streaked with oxides. Joseph Conrad had written of ships like these—"old as the hills, lean like a greyhound, eaten up with rust.” The white shapes I'd taken for pilgrims on deck were only painted barrels of petroleum. I could make out their flags now. The ships were British.
Yusef sat on the café steps, conversing with the match vendor. His health looked improved. He wore a puckish grin.
“I have something for you.”
We went inside and sat down in the submarine room. On a bench lay a carton stamped with a green crescent. It contained bottled medicines. Yusef opened the carton, raised each bottle to the light, and read out the dosage. There were painkillers, sulfa, antibiotics, and a water purifier. I thanked him. The pills were a present. The prices on all the labels had been rubbed out.
Yusef dispatched the goat boy to find Nasir. Meanwhile the sad-eyed waiter brought us tea. Today Yusef warned me again not to think simply.
“You hear people talk about heaven,” he began. “They say it's a place.” (He pointed to the doorway.) “They think it's over there somewhere. They live that way and they die that way, insistent. ‘Heaven's a garden. Hell is a furnace. Allah has a throne.’ “
He looked at me slyly.
“Does he have a face, too, do you think?”
This suggestion would make any Muslim recoil. Polytheism, totem worship, comparing Allah to anything are anathema in Islam. Even the male pronoun is just a convenience.
No vision can grasp Him.
He encompasses every view.
He is unfathomable,
Entirely aware.
I answered no.
“Of course not. And yet the Qur'an says,
Don't dismiss those men
Who call on him morning and evening,
Seeking his face.
“Somebody once asked Omar Khayyám the question, What would a man who looked into God's face see? Omar answered that he would see every face he knew, every place he had ever been, the face of the earth, the moon, and the face of heaven. Like looking into the sky at night, the stars, and the night behind them. God's face would be bigger than that,” Yusef said.
The boy came back with a message then. “Nasir is very busy,” Yusef sighed. “He's taking three hundred pilgrims to Mecca this summer. He's rented a building; he's leased two airplanes. The boy brings you Nasir's apologies. You are not the only hadji having problems. He was called down to Rabat, early today.”
The boy handed Yusef a yellow slip of paper.
“It's the address of Nasir's brother in Mecca,” he said. “Nasir wants you to have it.”
I put the slip into my passport. I had wanted to talk to Nasir about ships.
Yusef sighed. “These days, eighty percent of the pilgrims go by airplane. A ship takes forever. People have jobs to get back to, people have families. They have no time, and so the ships are few. The last one left Tangier a week ago.”
When the boy was gone, I mentioned my phone call to Washington.
“It's your choice,” Yusef said. “Nasir returns on Saturday. He invites you to lunch with him.”
That night the dogs wakened me again, roughhousing on the roof. I chased them off and threw back the shutters. A half-moon hung by its tips over the mountain. I switched on a lamp, boiled water for tea, and worked at Khalil's anthem for an hour. The song went smoothly. As I finished, the call to prayer came down the hill.
An extra verse distinguishes the predawn call from the four that follow it. The additional words are Assalatu kairum minanaum: “Prayer is better than sleep.” I showered and dressed and stepped through the gates, up the hillside. The cobbles grew wet as I climbed. The moon slipped down.
In the mosque on the hill I performed the fajr prayer with a dozen men and two schoolboys. It was 4:30 A.M. Half-asleep, I had left the house in a plain white shirt and slacks. The light inside the mosque was poor. We formed a single row facing the niche and were busy straightening our line when I happened to notice that everyone else had a robe on. No one except myself looked remotely Western. Suddenly I felt very wide awake.
The bowing began. We performed salat, sat back for a while, then stood and crossed the yard. By the fountain two elders stopped to greet me. If they wondered where I was from, they did not ask.
In one sense nothing unusual had happened. We had performed a fajr prayer. I'd attended a lot of them with Mostopha at Ben Yusef, but this was different. Today I had come on my own in Western clothes to a mosque in a city close to Europe. Cultural lines were firmly drawn here; the laws of survival discouraged crossing them. I had not intended to test these waters. I had only forgotten to hide inside a djellaba. Waiting to start the salat, I prepared for the worst: rage, expulsion. Instead, a few old men had glanced my way and seen another man starting his morning.
Si Mallek had said to forget myself. Yusef had warned against thinking like a baby. Hamza counseled me not to think at all. Before I reached the house, I had made my decision. I would take the most immediate route to Mecca. I would not wait five more days for al-Hadj Nasir. I was going to set myself in motion. I wouldn't hire a guide to do it for me.
I drew up a list of errands. When the stores began to open, I walked to town.
I began at the Minzah, Tangier's best hotel. Although prey now to tour buses and a floor show, its lobby still retained the charm of a former palace. The reception desk boasted a fax machine. I tipped the desk man, handed him my song, and watched him feed it through the rollers.
Next I went to the Saudi Arabian consulate. It was only a small bureau, two flights up, behind a door with a crossed-swords seal. A man took my passport. He suggested I come back in three hours.
Paul Bowles lived a few blocks away. I went up to his flat to report my plan and return the book he had lent me. I had read quite a bit of it. Peter Theroux's Sandstorms was a lively account in English of his apprenticeship as a journalist in the Middle East. The author was light on his feet, unimpressed by sham, and engaging about individual Arabs. He spoke Arabic; he read Arabic fiction. These last two factors alone distinguished his book from many others. When I handed it back to Paul, he noticed my page marker.
“If you haven't finished reading it, take it with you.”
“I'd better not,” I said.
“Not the sort of thing a pilgrim should be reading,” Paul surmised. “Still, you have a day or two. Keep it. You can leave it at Rodrigo's.”
I took back the book with the same mixed emotions Theroux himself expresses about the genre:
I tended to read these books with mounting resentment, because they could not help but be glib, and yet who could do a better job? Saudi Arabia in particular was a poser. A travel writer could record his thoughts about the high walls, empty streets, and pitiless heat. He would meet almost no one, certainly no Saudi, who would confide in him. Describing the difference between this alien culture and our own would be easy, but what was the point? Making people understand other people would have been to stress similarities, to see them from the inside.
Sandstorms wouldn't be much help where I was going.
Paul said, “Send me a letter if you think of it. I've never received one from Mecca.”
“Insha’ Allah,” I said. “Assuming I'm let in.”
“Oh, I shouldn't worry. People call it the House of Friendship, don't they?”
“What?”
“The Ka'ba. The House of Friendship.”
I wasn't thinking about the Ka'ba then. I was thinking about the customs booth at Jidda. Paul sat back and lit a cigarette. I surveyed the room: the mantelpiece with its African figures, the huge rhododendron on the terrace. I'd been coming here for twenty years, I reflected, and in all that time I had never heard Paul tell anyone not to worry.
It made me nervous.
