Tangier (14 page)

'Meti, those particular jeans cost three times as much as your ordinary ones . . .'

'Very modern!' chuckled Juan, the old
portero
. He mostly sat on the pavement step of the apartment block now, gazing into the street. Within a year he was dead of the cancer that had already given a boiled rice pallor to his handsome Spanish face.

Meti was approaching puberty. When Habiba rang the doorbell at eleven o'clock he would get up dutifully from his couch and stumble sleepily to unlock the solid slab of cedar, a steep pyramid distorting the front of his shorts. Opening the door sideways, he'd turn his back on the entering Habiba, make for the terrace, and lie down on his stomach on the rapidly heating tiles. There he'd sleep another hour. Habiba hanging out the washing would step over his prone form. Then, either writing letters, or making my own. breakfast tea to respect Mails modesty, I'd suddenly hear Habiba's near-hysterical shrieks. Meti was awake, could stand without embarrassment, and was attacking Habiba with a water pistol. Standard weapon was a plastic sun-lotion bottle with a slim nozzle: effective fine-jet range six metres. More devastating was the hand-shower at the cod of a rubber tube, detached from the mains pipe. This was used precisely as an elephant's trunk. Tube full of water, lungs bursting from a mighty inhalation, Meti would stalk Habiba with long, flexible proboscis. The game of course was
to corner Habiba within saturation range before he must explosively exhale. Ambiguous screams and laughter would announce that Habiba had been caught, literally in a shower, and one heavy and sudden as a summer storm. Meti would then track down the tortoises, Hamid and Laitifa, and thrust their breakfasts inescapably its their faces: a tomato impaled upon the apertures of their shells, later Hamid, the male, was to become quite tame, setting out determinedly towards one whenever he saw human feet, having connected these with lettuce. This could be disconcerting when one was working or playing barefoot on the terrace. Hamid would announce himself with a bump of his cold nose against one's warm toes.

Reluctantly pulling a tee-shirt over his copper torso and exchanging shorts for jeans, Meti would go down to the shop. Bread, butter, three hundred grammes of that cheese they had yesterday, packet of Tide, large lemonade very cold, kilo oranges. . . . The average list was a day's requirements until shopping for dinner was undertaken, often by myself, at five o'clock when, carrying the battered straw basket that marks the resident, I'd spend an hour over aperitifs with friends on the Boulevard. Meti, blessedly, would be at his daily cinema. The five or six hours since his leisurely waking would have been spent out swimming if I was lucky; amusing himself noisily with toys if I were not.
An assault course was built for the battery-driven caterpillar bulldozer. He would spend hours at a stretch drawing, arm cradled secretively against premature viewing; or else whittling pieces of wood with the timeless concentration of childhood. The suggestion that some formal schooling was useful when one was twelve was rejected. I made no attempt to press the matter. Should the uses of elementary literacy become apparent to him in adolescence be would learn to read and write then. Now was swimming, and drawing and cinema, in quantities and proportions dictated solely by spontaneous whim. The only rule of successive months of brilliant sunshine was that the evening meal was roughly at eight o'clock. If I were out to dinner Meti would either go home, or eat in the Medina and take in a second cinema on supplementary finances. Having spent much of my own childhood and adolescence in cinemas I had no objection to the addiction, while for an illiterate it was a positive instrument of education. A television set was as remote from my means as a refrigerator, and in Tangier less useful, An ingenious derivative of cricket (yes) was played on the terrace with a time-seasoned loaf of French bread (don't play with your food) and a ping-pong ball. Tennis balls were banned after the disappearance of one over the balustrade had been followed by appalling silence before a screaming of car brakes in the street six storeys below, Neither of us was inclined to go in search of that particular ball. Such a boundary forfeited three successive innings. Worse, if Habiba were present, it permitted her to take stand at the wicket, huge in billowing, diaphanous kaftan, and with mighty peasant muscles seemingly trained exclusively to hook furiously to leg.

Meti, for a year or two, understood the philosophy of playing with a straight bat. Rebellion, naturally enough was to come.

I went south, to Tiznit and beyond. I dared not leave Meti, although he was now nearly fourteen, alone in the flat. The danger was less from his asking in friends or family and having a Belgian riot to cope with than from the similarly explosive potential of butagas. It had killed and maimed too many people. I could vividly imagine Meti's impatience with the bathroom water
heater, or his falling asleep while a kettle boiled over and waking to light a cigarette. He was going to stay with his family. At the bus station he surrendered his key and accepted supplementary finances with good grace.

Three weeks later I unlocked the door less of my flat than of Van Gogh's studio. Meti had been painting with passion, Drawing-books, inks, calligraphic pens and my writing paper more colourfully filled than with the black and white boredom which is typescript, littered the work table. To keep body and soul together the artist had forced the locks of the large suitcase, there found the keys of my manuscript case, and there those of the
sinduq
, a giant wooden chest. The various containers, including drawers, had yielded foods as disparate as seventeen sterling pound notes, the pair of shoes in which I'd not been travelling (i.e. best and tidy), only formal shirt . . . and so on. Respectfully uneaten were recorder, typewriter, manuscripts and other personal papers. In fact these were neatly in place as the flat on the whole was scrupulously tidy. It was as polite inside job. Pride demanded I find some excuse for Meti's behaviour. I sat down with my feet up and began carefully rationalizing. An Arab who shares one's roof considers half yours his. Some person or hook had told me so. Fair enough. Meti had become too proud to spend three weeks at home when there was an alternative. The idea insulted the psychology of adolescent independence; even of
machismo
, as he would see it. Yet he had broken the universal tabu upon theft. And the more specific Islamic one with regard to the sovereignty of house and door key. Or had he? Incidentally, how the hell had he acquired a key? Reading suggested one must
not
say 'I raised you, I loved you.
Look
what you've done to me!' And react with tears either of self-pity or anger. In terms of economics I/we were only ruined for two weeks. If one forgot my new shoes, shirts. . . . The easiest rationalization was that some nasty big boy must have corrupted my nice little one; said, let's do your Christian while he's out of town. But neither vanity nor mothering instinct would persuade me to think like a schoolmaster.

Happily Meti gave me only an hour for thought. Letting himself in with his illicit key, he stopped his softly whistled tune rather abruptly when he saw me. He placed the key on the table supporting my feet. And put the kettle on.

Meti glowered wordlessly while we had tea.
'Cir fhalek
– out, please,' said. It was the wounded animal's need to be alone.

Exile was unlikely to be absolute, An injunction which cannot be enforced is invalid anyway. I knew that when Meti next rang the
doorbell I would let him in. The trouble was so did he.

I walked out to Suani. My hope was that tact might recover my shoes, had they not been sold. On the way I collected the Moghrebi verb 'to steal' which I'd not had occasion to know before. Meti's father was knee-deep in twigs at his oven, I waited until there were no customers in the bakery, then asked his two younger sons to clear out for a moment. I sensed, Sigidhli knew the reason for the visit before I spoke.

'Your son stole . . . 'I said; and listed some few of the items I could remember the words for.

He did know. I felt worse for him than about the loss of my shoes.

'We are poor and can't pay you,' he said.

This was scarcely the expectation or purpose of my visit. I indicated as much. I said I felt it better that Meti (using his real name) no longer worked for me or lived at my house. That I was sorry.

The two little boys came back, Sigidhli expressed his vexation by throwing the hot loaves at his younger sons' heads rather than tossing these to them to be stacked on the racks. This seemed unfair, More rationally he might have taken a swipe at me with the wooden paddle.

Meti reappeared next day. After a sullen lunch the storm broke. It was tearful and terrible and owed nothing to contrition, which I neither wanted nor expected. '
Don't
come to Suani,
don't
talk to my father. I'll kill you, everyone's saying I'm a thief . . . ' I had in fact deliberately told his father, and only in privacy. Meti's desperation was that of an intolerably humiliated human being. Which is not something pretty to watch; or to have instigated, however justified the complaint giving rise to it.

A few days later I returned for several months to England.

On a wet winter night I took some practical gift to the Sigidhli home, An ulterior motive was to discover whether Meti was where he should be. A Moroccan had cheeringly told me that Meti had become the leader of a teenage gang in Suani, styling himself 'The Lion'. This sounded unlikely. A diminutive old man, huddled and cowled, opened the corral gate and I asked for Sigidhli the baker. When he came we talked some minutes before I lit a match for cigarettes. Holding this for the dwarf in the djellaba I saw the flame flicker across the
silently laughing eyes and lips of Meti.

Meti reasonably invited himself to lunch many times over the next two summers. The visits were unannounced; time for a sequence being heralded for him by the first
springtime washing hung on my terrace. Rinse socks that had been in England and a Meti call would happen within a week. I gave him lump sums for gear when I could.

Poverty made him look like an undersize Ché Guevara follower: the near knee-length officer's jacket with turned up cuffs was proof against rain rather than proof of
machismo
. That grew in his face and bearing where it belongs.

'Get him on the game, for God's sake!' said a homosexual acquaintance whose call once coincided with one of Meti's. There was no point in explaining that wasn't Meti's scene This particular tourist's psychology needed deeply to believe that all adolescent Moroccan males were sexually available to Christians through the wallet.

If Meti's poverty depressed me its Visible manifestations allied with perpetual adolescent
machismo
scowl terrified the neo-colonial Belgians. And with new jeans and shirt and my own lightweight jacket shortened at the sleeves the
machismo
glower not unnaturally remained. Whether Meti should have modified glower for such insensibles as he might meet in lift or upon landing when visiting I personally doubt. The glower incidentally was rendered the more threatening by being worn beneath exactly the innocent floppy model cotton hat in which Leslie Hartley must first have wondered about shrimps and anemones. Where Meti found it I can't conceive; though I'd seen a Napoleon officer's cockade in uses as a duster in a peasant's house in the pre-Sahara. Whichever way it was, an uninvited lunchtime visit of Meti's first exploded the Belgian couple. And had me briefly arrested.

But before this there were the nicer moments of the cheese sandwich and mint tea. One occasion I'm unlikely to forget. Meti had become someone from whose visits one could not politely excuse oneself. He was also too tough to physically throw out. He arrived as I was struggling with a tie in order to lunch with rather formal friends on the Mountain. I wasn't leaving Meti alone in the flat; and he was staying where he was. Each knew as much. It didn't need to be stated. I gave Meti a glass of cold orange from the thermos and took mine. with gin added, to the terrace. I also handed him a precious copy of
Playboy
, lent me by a friend in order to read an article in it. Wandering back into the flat hoping that Meti might have finished looking at the pictures and be about to depart. I noticed he was sitting strangely still with the colour-spread lady across his knees. Carefully not looking at my watch, I took another drink back to the terrace. Meti appeared and handed me the open magazine with sultry triumph. It was liberally splashed. 'Marvellous,' I said. There seemed no other possible remark. Besides this practical demonstration of the efficacy of
Playboy
's nudes there seemed to me to be something sadder. Meti's attitude could be read as saying, 'Fuck you!' to the western world and the girls he couldn't have. But Niñ had passed through this, into married life with an English girl, and that western world, for whatever the western world is worth. Any hopes of depressing thoughts being banished by a good lunch disappeared when Meti maintained his refusal to leave and we had a fight tasting some hours. It was not the last.

I explained to the friend who had lent me
Playboy
how
the colour-spread had become glued together. Fortunately he was amused.

The crisis came about in this way. As I'd been endeavouring for some months to persuade Meti only to come to lunch when invited. and also to obstruct his entry physically when he visited at tiresome moments, there was a certain irony about the adventure.

I was some two hours' back from a brief trip south. The bell rang. There was the graceless Belgian, who at once began bawling at me hysterically; and beside him a. differently graceless Meti, the sullen Ché Guevara follower. There had been a robbery, the Belgian screamed. What did I mean by inviting such obviously criminal riffraff into the building! It didn't seem the moment to suggest to the dentist that it was illogical for him to have suffered Meti the sunny child for years and now be condemning the difficult adolescent upon the evidence of a sulky frown. I would have glowered permanently at that Belgian too had I not learnt he were better handled by being politely ignored. Now I stared at him with bland astonishment.