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
