MOSQUÉE
MOSQUA
مسجد
Unable to help myself, I clutch my passport a little tighter, and pick a porthole out which to stare, fixedly. The seas outside the ferry are choppy, a gunmetal blue under a slate-grey sky.
With my passport stamped, Carl and I slip back down to the lower deck, where teal sectional couches and navy armchairs sprawl against the lens-like, concave plastic windows. Save for commenting on the mosque upstairs, we do not talk much; it is easier to pretend to doze, or just stare out the windows at the gloomy weather. When the time comes, we shuffle outside against the blustering winds, to take pictures of the port emerging on the horizon.
My first glimpse of Tangier, and of Africa, is unremarkable. Low mountains are stenciled against a dim late afternoon. It is warm enough to wear t-shirts, but the clammy inscrutability of the clouds roiling on the horizon prompts me to pull a hoodie on. Over the loudspeaker, a woman’s voice is serving up instructions, first in mucous French, then in the barking, sharp coughs of Arabic. Carl listens attentively to the French, nodding at the door to show we should leave. The small group of passengers, half-backpacker, half-robed Moroccans, grip at the railing as we dock. Minutes later, we are clanking down the gangplank, in no danger of looking as though we understand what is happening.
As we try to leave the glassed-in holding tank, a small waiting room for passengers’ safety, we are pulled aside by a dapper-looking senior man in a suit. He is wearing a prominent lanyard and I.D. card under a salt-and-pepper bead, and begins speaking in rapid French. Carl and I, alarmed but docile, let ourselves get steered away from the stream of tourists, straining to hear the man speak.
Suit: “English? Do you speak English? ¿Hablaís castellano? Parlez vous Français?”
Carl: “Je parle...”
Rob: “Sí, castellano está bien...”
The suit gives us a critical eye, and settles on English. The appraising look he gives us, a swift once-over that takes in our daypacks, sandals, and deeply suspicious faces, says a lot about him. It is the efficient sort of look a waitress gives to a table, or a pickpocket gives to your back. Carl leads in French, his mouth a hard, firm line. The man matches him, and continues on in French, locking me out of the debate. Whatever Carl is saying, he seems deeply agitated, and ready to break away. I am uncomfortably aware that the last of the tourists are leaving security, and that the doors are beginning to close.
Suit: “My friends, I just give you information -- if you don’t like it, you don’t have to buy my tour.”
Carl: “I really think we’ll be okay”
Suit: “You see this?” [holds up I.D. card] “it’s my identification card. See? Issued by the government. Right here: it says in French. This is official.”
Carl and I exchange deeply dubious looks, unsure how long we have to talk to this man, before it’s OK to leave. We wave him off three, four, five times, telling him that we know that it’s dangerous, thank you very much, but we’ll be fine. “Before you leave...,” he keeps saying, describing the port’s dangers, its petty thieves, the winding back alleys of the medina where anything (and anyone) can go missing. “Much better,” he says, “to have a Moroccan with you. Protection.” His eyes shuttle between us, looking for some insecurity, some wavering urge to fork over fifty euro (around eighty dollars), if only to be safe; if only to be sure.
Carl and I tell him to back off, and walk quickly through the closing doors. The sun is falling off of its noon, and the wind that stirs trickily off of the port’s waters should not be enough to chill us. Regardless, we feel unnerved, uneasy; the man’s long description of the dangers outside the port’s gates had the uncanny ring of truth. We padlock our bags, hide our passports and wallets, and march past security, into the dusty cacophony of a Tangier afternoon.
We are heading, in a vague way, towards the top of the hill, the casbah, a limestone-white fortress of columns and domes. It seems less like a destination, and more like an agreed upon warplan; as Carl and I climb the narrow, choked streets of the medina, the old town, our faces are creased with constant worry. “Some welcome,” Carl says at one point, as we wait for a two taxis and a motorcycle to untangle a fender bender. I can’t help but agree: the market air is thick with foreign sounds, strange smells, and my mouth is full of the metallic taste of paranoia.
The young people who move around us in shoals are comfortably Westernized; some even have track jackets, though none could be mistaken for European. Each adolescent has one thing slightly off: a bald head, or bright yellow clogs, or the thin barrel of a cigarillo, wagging from between gap-toothed smiles. The women are nowhere, or in every corner; it is hard to catch a lady’s eye, or even frame them in a glance. The burquas melt before men in tall black robes and small crowns, before ruddy-faced Frenchmen in safari khaki, before wolf packs of ten-year-old boys, who are playing with their lighters. It is utterly foreign, and disarming; half-storybook, half-nightmare, all-too-real for us, at times, to handle.
Our alley breaks out upon a square, an open plaza of palm trees and benches. With a wary eye about us, I fish my camera out of its locker, and take picture after picture. “I do have one mission,” I say to Carl, reminding him of my quest for spices. He nods, and we roll over to one of the spice vendors, a wooden stall under a sagging canvas canopy. The smell coming off of the tabletop is incredible, an assault on your nose: sharp balsam, spicy cumin and curry, riotously green olive oil, and there, in the center, in a mountain of burnt-scarlet, the paprika my mom asked for.
The man who owns the stall has a long, grey face, capped by another of those mini-tambourine hats. He speaks twenty languages, or maybe fifty, but all of them poorly, as though he no longer remembers which is his own. Our debate over the paprika is stewed in French, Arabic, English, and Spanish; Carl handles most of the actual details. The final price is three dirhams, the Moroccan currency. The lowest note we have is a 100-dirham bill; as we offer it to him, he throws up his hands, and issues pidgin-demands to Carl to get change. And so on.
We have retreated to a café in another back-alley. Somewhat shamefacedly, we order in English, uncomfortably aware that we have chosen these seats for the soothing island of pale faces around us. I try to order an omelette and coffee; a tuxedoed Arab whirls our plates back to us, bearing two Cokes and some sort of egg-wrapped sandwich. The frosty glass of the Coke bottle is unreadable, written in Arabic and French -- when the waiter is not watching, I slip it into my backpack for home. If I am going to remember Tangier, I want that bottle to anchor my memories. I want the Coke logo in Arabic, a talisman of the commercial, the quixotic, and utterly indecipherable feel of Tangier.
“Why is no one else eating?” Carl asks, his eyes scanning the long barrel of the alleyway. It’s true: every restaurant is empty, save for the palefaces at this café. “It’s Ramadan,” I hear myself say, almost unsure of its truth, until I hear myself say it. It is Ramadan, and these people have been fasting all day; these people are hungry; these people are waiting for dark to fall; these people are waiting to feed.
“It’s still not legal to take pictures,” Carl says, for the third time, as we sit on the concrete deck outside the dock building. I look around cursorily, and go back to building a panorama with my camera. Carl’s voice raises in pitch, almost imperceptibly. “There were signs all along the walk back! Non...” and he finishes in French, a phrase that probably means “picture-takers will be slain, and fed to syphilitic she-camels” (or something). I shrug, mostly because I don’t speak French, but also because I have zero faith in Moroccan rule-of-law. Not long after, we watch three young Moroccan kids sneak over to the fence below us, and jump into the loading dock area behind our ferry. “Shrug,” the new Moroccan in me wants to say.
We are outside because the guards refuse to let us inside; inexplicably, they have barred the doors against the coming night with potted plants and iron bars. As the bars rattle into place, I marshal enough Spanish to tell them that we have tickets, that we’re American, that we paid already, and can we please wait inside? They shake their heads curtly, and gesture firmly to the concrete ledge that hangs over a parking lot, and the port gates. We obey; there is no alternative.
A bitter wind whips off the casbah, carrying the sounds of the call-to-prayer. Ululation, the sound of weary wonder, and of stern warning, fills the sunset air. The mosques are the tallest shadows against the enflamed sky; the sun sets behind the casbah summit. On the port wall, over the sea, a tinker is walking, balanced delicately with a long pole. On one side, the medina, and the chaotic law of a black market. And on the other: a stable of glass and steel, of Americans and Europeans baying desperately at the falling night in this strange land. The tinker turns toward us slowly, silhouetted against the flames of Tangier. Our eyes do not meet.
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