THE CHESSBOARD WAS SO OLD and battered that you had to guess which squares were white and which were black.
The pieces were worn too, hand-carved from driftwood by my opponent, an old sailor named Abdel-Latif. He was wizened and frail, and had one of those blinding white denture grins that gives nothing away. Especially when he was lining up an attack.
We both opened with our pawns, breaking only to sip our café noir. I felt confident and somehow powerful, certain of early victory. But then, just five moves in, the old seaman’s queen swooped down, and knocked my king on his side. The dentures parted no more than a crack.
‘Checkmate.’
Abdel-Latif tapped a fingernail to the tabletop, indicating that his winnings were due. Like everyone else who frequented the hole in the wall café, in a lane off Tetouan’s souq, I knew the rules.
Once the makeshift capital of Spanish Morocco, the sleepy town of Tetouan, a stone’s throw from Morocco’s Mediterranean coast, is one of café culture, long siestas, and Andalucian charm. It’s a place forgotten by tourists, who make a beeline for Tangier, or the Imperial cities of the Moroccan hinterland. Inexplicably, they have always bypassed Tetouan, a whitewashed treasure trove of history, one that nestles between the Mediterranean and the Rif.
For me, it’s the ultimate de-stress destination. There’s nothing quite so wonderful as wasting long afternoons there. Bathed with Lotus Eater listlessness, I like to amble from café to café playing chess, a rough straw hat shading the blinding summer light. Tetouan is the kind of place that seeps into your bones, gently coaxing you to forget what you imagine to be reality.
But it wasn’t a desire to relax, or even my love of chess, that lured me to Tetouan last week. It was a quest. I wanted to track down the military barracks outside town where Franco had rallied his troops before the Spanish Civil War. I had seen a picture – faded sepia – Franco standing on a mound, haranguing the Guardia Mora, his personal cavalry regiment, the Moroccan bodyguards. They were dressed in fabulous Moorish costumes, capes slung over their backs, turbans crowning their heads, rifles tight across their chests.
It took me no more than an hour to locate the barracks. Abdel-Latif the chess player had whispered the way. He said he could remember as a child seeing the fascist dictator himself parading through the town, his horsemen charging before him like harbingers from Hell. I’d told him about the sepia photograph. His acrylic teeth had grinned.
‘There has been change,’ he said.
And there certainly had. The long barrack buildings were derelict and black with grime, their roofs caved in, the doors torn away. The parade ground was overgrown and forlorn, waist-high with tinder-dry grass, through which wild peacocks roamed.
At the far end of the quadrangle I made out the mound where Franco had stood almost eight decades before. Abdel-Latif was quite right, there had indeed been change.
Later, in the afternoon, dazzled by blinding pink bougainvillea against stark whitewashed walls, I bumped into the chess player again in the Mellah, the old Jewish quarter. He was staggering home, tracing a line through the shade, one that he made twice daily, back and forth from the café in the souq.
‘To know Tetouan, you must know Spain,’ he said slowly, clicking the tip of his cane down on the flagstones, ‘and to know Spain you must know Tetouan.’ I asked if the Andalucian motherland could still be found there. Again, he grinned. ‘You will find it hiding in the details,’ he said.
And Tetouan is all about detail. It’s bewitching and ubiquitous. You see it in the glorious tiled façades of the Hispano-Moorish architecture, and in the wrought iron arabesques, in the contraband from Andalucia that fills the shops, and in the way the young women tie their hair.
What I like best about Tetouan is the small-town feel, the sense that life carries on and no one’s looking, a life conjured by ideal simplicity. There’s none of the hustle and bustle of city life but, instead, a serenity, one that almost touches melancholy.
On a corner, just off the main square, Place Hassan II, a farmer was selling three goats and a sickly-looking lamb. Across from him, I found a boy standing with gleaming chips of painted amethyst cupped in his hands. And, next to him, a cluster of old men. They were touting moist cream cheese and parasols, cigarettes, and Spanish postcards from before the War.
I asked them if tourists ever strayed to their town. Two of the men shook their heads. But the last, a hunched figure in a thick camel-wool jelaba robe, cocked his head towards the square.
I looked round, and spied an Englishman standing there. I knew he was English because he was wearing those dull red trousers that the English wear on their holidays. He had horn-rims, a pallid, almost fearful expression, and a brow streaming with sweat. With nothing else to do, I went over and struck up conversation.
The Englishman said his name was George, explained that he lived in Guildford, and that his wife had got them the deal of a lifetime on a holiday home, bought online. I congratulated him on discovering Tetouan.
He tapped a finger to his nose.
‘Better keep this one to ourselves old boy,’ he said.
I’m not quite sure why, but George seemed unwilling to melt away into the shadows after our brief conversation. I turned towards the souq, and he followed. Down through narrow telescoping lanes, packed with wares – yellow baboush slippers and wool jelabas, golden kaftans and silk brocade, fresh meat, powdered henna, rose water, and savon noir for the hammam. And, like all the truest medinas anywhere, there were underpants and fake Reebok running shoes, wooden spoons, pots and pans, and wooden sieves dyed pink.
With every stride, I could feel George behind me, plodding forward in my footsteps. Just as I wondered how I might slip away, he sponged a giant polka-dot handkerchief over his cherry-red brow, and invited to see the villa he had bought. I accepted, and we drove south for twenty minutes, the slim ribbon of potholed tarmac shaded by olive trees.
The sun was low and the shadows long by the time we arrived. George pointed to an expansive clutch of villas and apartments, all of them whiter than white. He said you could get a villa there for next to nothing. We trooped out of the car and, a minute later, were in his sitting room, his wife was fussing around us. She took out a bottle of Bombay Sapphire and poured three enormous drinks. We clinked glasses. George from Guildford then made me swear a solemn oath not to publicize Tetouan in any way.
‘The last thing we want,’ he said, draining his gin, ‘is this little scrap of paradise going to the dogs!’