The truth is I can’t see it. Not on this first run in Morocco. Tangier. Not in the old city, the medina, it’s called, or the Casbah, or citadel, forever changed by a single song by the Clash, “Rock the Casbah,” and now Moroccan houses, really just two bedrooms, a kitchen and a sitting area (what more do you need?) are bought up, walls knocked down, and become home to the third wave of jet setters, at Manhattan prices. Nine hundred and more streets, some the narrowest of passageways but cars and small trucks can bring goods up through the tourist row, the dark rattan chairs of the Café Central that nods to Rick’s Café Americain, and another time, because M and I are here in the morning before the European ferries arrive, and can imagine how foreign the glamour of the likes of a Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman would be in Tangier 2010. Yet Tangier still bears the imprint of its artists and socialites, famously Barbara Hutton, the Poor Little Rich Girl, the Woolworth heiress who died thirty years ago, and in the cobbles, embedded, are
small diamonds that led pre-guide book tourists, before the packaged vacation, to the homes of Henri Matisse, his Morocco period, places as if they await their Casbah occupants still: the artist Diego Velazquez, and, of course, William Burroughs and Paul Bowles, scoring bags of hashish, and in these days, if only, a decent Cote du Rhone.
But I can’t see Spain. Not from the Tangier waterfront, a showcase promenade finished only a few years ago at the behest of the king. The day before M and I could see it from the hillside tea garden, Café Haffa, in the Djemma el Mokra suburb, were M pointed out the Cadiz beaches where we’d been in June. In Zahara de los Atunes on the southern Atlantic coast, I ran along the beaches for miles, a month after the Pittsburgh Marathon, a prevacation land where the wind never let up and bulls and cows strolled along the dunes and near-empty sandy expanses. Here, I ran from Zahara to Barbate and back, a good fifteen miles, and when I was within sight of our beach house, a man up the dunes stood and saluted me, mockingly, I think, but in context it isn’t entirely clear. “Ole!” he said, bowing as a matador would before a bull. “Ole!”
In Tangier the women walk multiple-abreast, and some you can see their faces, enough to feel the sun on this chilly morning in October, but definitely no knees, and Wal-Mart sneakers, long cloaks that sweep the ground, what comes as a bit of a surprise because this is not the ancient religious center, Fes, or some mountain-ridge village but Tangier, what Havana was at one time, the playground for the rich, famous and well-born, but now a place of backpackers and Times frugal travelers, sipping Moroccan mint tea in the rattan chairs of the Café Central, the faded glory of the Continental Hotel, just inside the medina walls, where the ghost-birds of the sea make their way in predawn before the first wail of the muezzin, the call of the Muslim prayer leader, and I wonder as I run the waterfront here, so new and yet so old, the waterfront, not the women, and occasionally I spy a young couple out for a pre-breakfast stroll, but mostly it’s women in black shrouds, totally covered, some, with only their eyes peering out, why it is that no one has done a dissertation on the link between Islamofascism and sleep deprivation because no way in hell can you sleep through the deafening sound of the morning call to prayer in Tangier’s Casbah.
The pristine ocean waterway ends in a slum. The sidewalk crumbles to ankle-breaking holes and ahead, as I run, I see small gatherings of locals. Clutches of bike riders, a man pulling a wooden cart with medieval-looking wheels, and too many idle teens, even at this hour, 9 a.m., I got to wonder, although they could be on their way to school. I don’t explore further because there’s little time; we’re on our way to pick up our rental car for a drive to Fes. Where the medina, according to the requisite guide, is the oldest, the biggest and the best in the world, the best because it is still for all intents and purposes unchanged in its customs; its 9,000-plus streets so narrow and fragile that motorized vehicles of any kind aren’t found; rather donkeys laden with hundreds of pounds of goods vie for space with locals and wobbly-legged visitors, at times forcing near-misses with newcomers, why it struck me as I’d later tell our guide, Hussaine, that for him to grow up in the medina as he said he did, he must have for simple survival adapted by having a second set of eyes grow in the back of his head. I said this to him with his back to me, and M said he broke out in a smile that eerily mirrored mine. See, I told M later, he does have eyes in the back of his head.
I’m legging it home, back to the Continental. Where Degas once stayed. When I started this run, I made a mistake, veered down what I thought was the Tangier waterfront road, but was really the king’s commercial wharf, where the drugs are smuggled because only in closed borders like the one that stretches between Mexico and the United States do drug lords reign. Here, the constant whisper of hashish mingles in the air like the final strains of the muezzin. I’m only a few feet from the gate, when the wharf workers arise as one and more than one begins screaming at me in German. I don’t know why German; I’m wearing my Canada 2000 cap, but German it is. I’m guessing the curse words sound best in German, and rather than proceed on for a closer look at this new fangled global port I think better of it and turn around and indeed find the waterfront road and my first sign this morning of Western life: A woman walking alone, covered head to toe in a burka, and wearing a black cloth cap that says “IMUS.”
A political message: advocating peace between the imams and the US? Or a Don Imus fan? God only knows.
Next: Running for Your Life: Question period
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