Tangier

Prologue

Tangier in the rain: it's as if our whole gleaming city is bathed in tears. As the rains lash the streets, the Moroccans pull up the hoods of their djellabas and hurry for shelter beneath the arcades. Men push vegetable carts through deep puddles on Rue de Fez, and in the cafe s of the Socco Chico one sees abandoned lovers hunched over their coffees and the haunted, glazed eyes of the smokers of hashish. Suddenly Tangier seems filled with stricken people. Arrayed at the tables in the Cafe de France are the faces of our dispossessed.

Passing Madame Porte's pastry shop last February, one might have seen the agony of the old architect Leo Fischer through the broad window that looks out on the intersection of Rue Goya and Rue Musa Ben Nusair. He was sitting at the corner table sipping from a cup of tea. Were those tears streaming down his cheeks or an illusion, caused by the raindrops that washed the windows of the shop?

Madame Porte's, in the center of the busy European quarter, was built in the 1940s with a refinement that has well withstood the many vicissitudes that have buffeted our town. Its marble floors and Art Deco moldings make a pleasant contrast with the seediness of the central area. But its elegant architectural details did not interest Fischer that miserable, rainy February day. This man, whose fine leonine presence had come to grace our streets a year or so before, was feeble with illness on the verge of his discharge. One prefers to remember him at his best. Those of us who lived on the Mountain saw him often on our trips back and forth to town. He'd be strolling among the awful shanties of Dradeb, deep in conversation with his assistant, Driss Bennani, talking always of their plan to rehabilitate the Moroccan slum.

Fischer had a magnificent dream. Under contract to the Moroccan government as an advisor on urban renewal, he had lobbied bravely for his vision in the ministries and had even given a series of public lectures in Tangier. "A Visionary Architecture for the Third World" he called them, moving us with his passion to design decent housing for the poor.

"We must give these people sanctuaries," he'd say, shaking his great white mane, rapping on the lectern with his fist, "sanctuaries for living built of the forms they understand. They need the dome and the minaret. Their bricks cry out to make the arch and the fine, sharp edge that reveals the splendor of their sun. . "

Arches and domes, plazas and minarets-this was the stuff of Fischer's dream. But his plan to transform Dradeb into a "new Moroccan village" was lost in the papers that clogged the desks in city hall. The Moroccans wanted a skyline; they wanted to replace the slum with a high-rise development, and nothing Fischer could say would change their minds. Finally he was devastated. As the Moroccans plotted ways to send him home, he walked the muddy alleyways, turned this way and that among the awful shanties, speaking to the still bedazzled Bennani of the plan they both knew was doomed. A routine examination by his friend and a doctor, Mohammed Achar, revealed that his heart had suddenly grown weak. He left Tangier in the rain to join his son in California. A few months later we heard that he was dead.

Poor Fischer. His dream for Tangier is forgotten now. He's remembered for his San Francisco synagogue, the masterpiece of his "brutal period," a monumental hunk of twisted steel and slashing triangles of glass.

Perhaps he could have saved us, but we did not listen to him well enough. That failure — our failure would lead in time to the convulsion that shook apart the sweet limbo in which we lived, shattering our illusion that to live as a European in Tangier was a cheat against all the miseries of the world and a revenge against the inevitability of our deaths.