The Pillars of Hercules

18 To Morocco on the Ferry Boughaz

This lakelike sea with such a tame coast had so habituated me to sunshine and mediocre weather that it did not occur to me to stick my face into the wind today and fathom its force. Surely the whole point about picturesque landscapes was that they were not dangerous? But if I had simply wetted my finger and held it up I would have known a great deal. As the rain and wind increased, I waited for the Garyounis to take me to Morocco. I saw only that the wind was lifting the flags higher and straighter than normal. A seasoned Mediterranean sailor would have seen more muscle in that wind than I had, sensed something darker and chillier, a turbulence from the Levant, a dolphin-torn and gong-tormented sea. It was the weather we had been having for a week. Mediterranean weather usually came and went. But this did not go.

One day, Mr. Habib said, “The Garyounis was put into dry dock. The Libyans are sending a different ship. It does not take passengers. Therefore, you will have to go some other time.”

I muttered an insincere curse. This was not good weather for the three-day voyage to the far side of Morocco. It was not good for the short voyage to Sicily. There were no other ships to Morocco, and I had vowed not to take any planes. The Marseilles ferry was leaving next week. I decided to make my way by train through Italy to France, where I might find a ferry to Morocco. It was a very long detour, but what was the hurry?

My travels soon became what an exasperated English person would call a bugger’s muddle. Refusing to leave the ground, I traveled from Sicily to Naples again, to Rome; and north by train to Livorno and Pisa. Crossing from Nice to Corsica I had missed this section of coast, which was dramatic, and dignified by rocky cliffs and blasted by the wind. This was one of the loveliest coastlines in the entire Mediterranean. It was another place that I would be happy to return to. I consoled myself by thinking that on the Garyounis I would have missed it — the houses clustered on the great plunging rock cliffs of seaside Cinqueterre, the villas and precipices south of Antignano, the enormous blocks of marble piled at the station of Massa, near Carrara, which had supplied raw material to almost every Italian sculptor.

On the coast, all the way from Chiavari — where I was proud to have relatives — to Portofino and Rapallo and Genoa, the cliffs were too rugged to be vulgarly modernized, too sharply angled to serve as the foundations for condominiums. They had that in common with the cliffs of the Costa Brava in Spain, and the seaside heights of Croatia, and sections of the Turkish coast, and North Cyprus. But wherever the Mediterranean coast was flat it was overbuilt; the low-lying shores had been deemed suitable for hotels and mass tourism, and had been destroyed.

The rarest sight in the Mediterranean was surf, but at Imperia, Porto Maurízio, approaching Ventimiglia, I saw six-foot rollers dumping foam onto the beach. Something unusual was happening in the Mediterranean this week; and still the wind was blowing from the east.

There were six older American couples in the train, bewildered by the weather, burdened by seventeen heavy suitcases. They were from Jackson, Mississippi, and they soon became embroiled with some Spanish students in a fuss about seats. The blustering turned to abuse. It was a blessing that these gentle people were not aware of what was being said to them in Spanish. They were the sort of patient Americans whom I had seen being taken advantage of and overcharged all over the Mediterranean. It did not matter that they said Antibes as though it rhymed with “rib-eyes,” and pressed their faces to the window and chanted “Monny Carla.” After all, no one else here could have pronounced the grand Mississippi name Yoknapatawpha.

“You’re a yella-dog Democrat,” Billy Mounger said to me, concluding — correctly — that I would vote for a yellow dog before I’d vote for a Republican.

I said, “I think I’d vote for a yellow dog before I’d vote for a Democrat, too.”

He laughed at that. He said, “We’re yella-dog Republicans. We’re probably the most right-wing people you probably ever met.”

“Go on, then, shock me, Billy,” I said.

“I’m chairman of the Phil Gramm for President Committee.”

“That is pretty shocking.” Mr. Gramm claimed to be the most conservative candidate of all the Republicans.

“That ain’t the story,” Mounger said. “One of our guys back there is against Phil Gramm. Says to me, ‘I don’t want no oriental damn woman as the First Lady in the White House.’ ”

Mrs. Gramm, born and raised in Hawaii, was of Korean descent.

“You said it, Billy, he’s one of your guys.”

They all got off at Cannes, rhyming it with “pans,” and I stayed aboard, rattled down the track to Marseilles, where I was told there were no ferries to Morocco. I got into my berth and slept until Port-Bou, the frontier, changed trains at dawn, and at Barcelona got another train to Valencia. Twenty-six hours ago I had left Rome.

Gently rocking around the edge of the Mediterranean once again, in the opposite direction, this Spanish train stopped at the town of Tortosa. It was exactly opposite — that is to say, at the far end of the Mediterranean — from the Syrian town of Tartus, where I had been over a month ago. Tartus had once been given the name of Tortosa by the Crusader Knights. We passed Xilxes, which, printed boldly on its station signboard, had the appearance of an obscure Roman numeral. I stayed only long enough at the lovely station at Valencia to buy some oranges and a ticket through the fields of fruit trees, past a small chapellike building lettered Urinario, to Alicante. I would have continued, but I was too late for the Málaga train, so I slept there and went to Málaga the next day.

At Málaga I bought a ticket on the ferry to Melilla, the Spanish enclave in Morocco; then I went out and had dinner of local pickled eels.

“Where are you from in America?” the bartender asked me.

“Boston.”

“The Boston Strangler.” El Estrangulador del Boston.

“That’s me.”

The ferry Ciudad de Badajoz left Málaga at one in the afternoon for Melilla. It was a gray windy day, and only about twenty of us were making the trip. Most of them were Moroccans, the men looking like Smurfs in djellabas, the women like nuns in habits and hoods, traveling with gunnysacks for luggage. A handful of Spaniards had cars or trucks down below. It was a large ferry, five stories from its Plimsoll line to its top deck. I regretted that I had not been able to take one like it from Tunisia, but anyway I would be in Melilla in seven hours.

Leaving Málaga’s outer harbor, the ferry pitched and began sailing aslant the wind, the shoulder of the easterly hard against its port beam. Seasickness bags were distributed by the crew. The Moroccans used theirs, and some of them could be seen tottering along, bearing these little sacks to the deck where they were jettisoned over the rail. This was a lesson to me. After a year and a half of glaring at the Mediterranean and writing “tame,” “lakelike,” “a vast pond,” “sloshing waves,” “almost featureless,” “wearing a dumb green look of stagnation,” and so forth — heaping abuse on the Mediterranean the way you might insult someone lazily snoring on a sofa — the sea had come alive and was howling in my face, the way someone lazily snoring in a sofa would react if unfairly abused.

It was not a long swell and a distant fetch between waves, but rough irregular waves and a strong wind — a sea that was more confused and noisy than many oceans I had seen. The storm was not an illusion. This large ferry was tossing in it like a chamber pot.

“Windy,” I said to a man at the rail.

The seasick passengers inside had made me feel queasy and had driven me outdoors.

“It is the Levanter,” he said. I had not heard that word spoken before, though I had read it in books about the Mediterranean. It was the weather-changing wind from the east that could blow at gale force. But I had only known sunny or gray or rainy weather; no storms, nothing to interrupt my plans.

“Going to Melilla?”

“I hope so.”

“Why ‘hope’?”

“Because this weather is very bad.”

He looked worried. It had not occurred to me that the wind was anything but a nuisance. How could it be a danger? This was the Mediterranean, after all. Yes, I had read of the severe storms in The Odyssey, but that epic was famous for its hyperbole.

“This is a large ship,” I said.

“Some ships are not large enough for the Levanter,” he said.

To change the subject I said, “Isn’t Melilla a bit like Gibraltar? It is a little piece of Spain in Morocco, the way Gibraltar is a little piece of Britain in Spain.”

“That is true. It is the same. But we still want Gibraltar.”

“Maybe the Moroccans want Melilla.”

“Yes, but so do we. And Gibraltar too.”

He laughed, seeing the contradiction, but refusing to concede.

It was cold on deck, and though there was wind but no rain the deck was wet with spray and spoondrift. The wind had raised the sea and lowered the sky. The visibility was poor. The smack of the waves against the ship was as loud and violent as though the hull were being struck with metal, the sound like the clapper in a cracked bell.

The man’s name was Antonio. He was from Mijas. I told him that I had been to a bullfight in Mijas over a year ago. I had found the whole thing generally disgusting and brutal, but in the hope of eliciting an opinion about bull fever I refrained from telling him my true feelings. Besides, this storm did not create an atmosphere that was conducive to the free flow of ideas.

“Mijas is becoming very famous,” he said. “The young matadors start there, like the ones you saw, and they soon make a reputation.”

“But the most famous matador in Spain is from Colombia, isn’t that so?”

“No. The best one now — the real hero — is Jesulín de Ubrique. Every man and woman loves him — every girl wants to meet him.”

“Ubrique is near here, isn’t it?”

“Down the coast,” Antonio said. He gasped and clutched the rail as a wave crashed against the deck below. He raised his voice. “And another one is the son of the famous El Cordobes, though El Cordobes refuses to say that he is his son.”

“What’s the son’s name?” I shouted over the wind.

“Manuel Diaz el Cordobes, and he is crazy like his father. More crazy! His father used to play with the bull, but this Manuel Diaz puts his face against the bull’s face. He is double crazy!”

“I have a theory that Spanish people prefer football to the corrida.”

“Not true. We love the corrida more.”

“But it’s not a sport.”

“No. It is a spectacle,” Antonio said.

In the course of our little conversation the weather had grown much worse. Spray flew into the windows and salt grains frosted the glass. Sea-water ran across the upper decks, and the lower decks were awash. Now and then you hear about a storm sinking a ferry, because they are not built for storms. But you don’t remember those news items until you are on a ferry, in a serious storm.

“I have lived around here my whole life. I cross to Morocco a lot. I have never seen it this bad,” Antonio said.

“We ought to be there soon.”

“No. It’s many hours away.”

“It’s only a seven-hour trip, and we’ve been sailing for five.”

“Going slowly,” he said.

“Maybe the weather is better in Melilla.”

“With the wind in this direction it will be worse. The Levanter blows against it.”

The fury of the sea, the height of the waves, the screaming wind — they all defied me, author of the words “junk waves,” “mush-burgers,” “slop and plop of the Mediterranean.” It was a maddened sea and this huge ferry was having trouble negotiating it. From the hold came the sound of clanking chains, the creak of cars and trucks, the rolling clatter of steel barrels and the rattle of loose bolts on the steel gangways.

Antonio said, “I am afraid about my car. I think it will crash into another one.”

I stayed on deck. True, it was cold and windy on deck. But it was stifling in the cargo hold. It was nauseating in the lounges. Now and then someone would stagger out to the deck to practice projectile vomiting. I held on, pressed into a corner, tried to read an old fluttering copy of the Guardian I had found in Málaga.

I thought: When we get to Melilla this will just seem like a bad dream.

Soon after, as it was growing dark, the captain made an announcement: “Because of the wind and the poor conditions we are not proceeding to Melilla. We are returning to Málaga.”

The vast squarish bulk of the ferry turned clumsily into the wind, twisting as it went, the sea-spray flying, and then the vessel was in full retreat from the storm.

The phlegmatic Spaniards, used to bad news, took this well. The Muslim Moroccans, contrary to all the teachings of Islam, took the announcement badly and shouted and threw things and argued and slammed the hatchways. Their children cried. The menfolk ranted. The women sulked. They did not want to go back to Spain.

Hours later, in darkness, we were back in Málaga. I was frustrated by the return, but I was also relieved. The captain knew these seas; he would not willingly abandon the voyage if he had confidence in his ship. So he had feared for the ship. The port was closed. All further ferries were canceled.

Antonio gave me a lift to the bus station. He said, “These Levanters usually last three days.”

Perhaps there would be more of it. My response was to go in full retreat myself, back to where I had begun my trip. It was only an hour and a half from Algeciras to Ceuta, the southern Pillar of Hercules. I was disappointed that I had not been able to sail from Tunisia, but it was interesting, was it not, that I had been forced to go all the way back to the Straits of Gibraltar to make my crossing? It had not really spoiled my plans, because — always improvising — I had never had much of a plan.

The coast was stormy all the way to Algeciras. This time Torremolinos was wild and windblown, and so was Torreblanca, the sea gray and the heavy surf smashing thick suds onto the deserted beach. I was heading back to where I had begun, and the signs went from Spanish, to bilingual, to English as we traveled south. Then it was Liquor Shop, Property Brokers, Video Rental, Hairdresser, Music Cafe, Insurance Broker, Real English Breakfast, the Sun on the newspaper racks, Iron Monger’s Shop, Legal Advice.

This was the sort of coast that had inspired the witty last line in Harry Ritchie’s book about the Costa del Sol, Here We Go. Looking up from the deranged coast of hooligans and package tourists, and seeing the sunset on the mountains, the author reflects, “Spain. It looked a beautiful country. Someday, I thought, I really must go there.”

To Fuengirola again—Everything for Your Pets, Real British Pub—and then on to Marbella via trailer parks and the hills of white condos, beside the white raging Mediterranean, reminding every frail dwelling on shore that this old sea, the actual water that had been described on the first page of the Bible, was not to be underestimated, and nature was greater than anything man-made. Good-bye to your beach umbrellas and your ridiculous signs and your awnings and your gimcrack fences; good-bye to your condos and your haciendas; good-bye to the very shoreline of fragile soil. Nature was also the Sunderer of Delights and the Destroyer of Dreams.

The storm gave the sea a symmetry I had never seen in it before, the order of sets advancing on the shore from the horizon. These waves pounded the beaches and the promenades, and scoured the dark sand, and dragged trash away.

Seventeen months after leaving Algeciras in sunshine, on the road to Morocco the long way, I arrived back, in a high wind. There is something about a seaside town on a stormy night. This was not any old wind, this was the Levanter, and the official weather station in the port of Algeciras clocked its gusts at ninety-three miles per hour (150 kilometers per hour). On the Beaufort scale seventy-two miles per hour is the strongest wind for which there is a designation. It is a hurricane, number 12. Most of the time the Levanter was blowing in the 50s and 60s — gale force, occasionally rising to storm force, number 11. This was the third day of the storm. The hurricane gusts had knocked over light poles and put Algeciras in darkness.

The wind was news. Like Málaga and Melilla, the port of Algeciras had shut down. So had Tangier. So had Ceuta. This entire end of the Mediterranean was closed. In Algeciras, traffic had accumulated at the ferry landing. People were sleeping in the lobbies of the terminal, they picnicked beside their cars. There were few vacant rooms to be had at the hotels, and this normally quiet town was full of people, waiting for the ferries to leave.

Just down the coast at Tarifa the loose sand and gravel had blown off the beach, leaving a hard smooth packed-down surface. One of the proverbs relating to the violent Levanter wind was that of the Portuguese sailors: “When the Levanter blows, the stones move” (Quando con Levante chiove, las pedras muove). Along the coast road plastic bags were plastered against the sheep fences; billboards had blown down, so had some trees and power lines. In the narrow backstreets of Algeciras obscure objects rose up and smacked me in the face. The palms on the promenade were noisy, their fronds smashing. Large metal signs were knocked from buildings and clattered into the street.

The other thing about constant wind, which is one of the worst forms of bad weather, is that it can drive you mental. It is more deranging than rain, a greater nuisance than snow; it is invisible, it pushes, it pulls, it snatches your clothes, it twists your head, and finally your mind. That night and the next day passed. The wind did not cease. It seemed odd to go to sleep hearing the wind blowing hard, and to wake up with it still blowing. On my second day in Algeciras it seemed to be blowing harder.

“I’ve been to Morocco twenty-three times,” a bird-watcher named Gullick told me. “That’s forty-six crossings. Only one of them was canceled — New Year’s Eve, out of Tangier.”

Gullick was conducting a birding expedition to Morocco. His Range Rover was hung up on the quay, his passengers were becoming agitated.

“We’re all birders,” the only woman in the group told me.

Her name was Debbie Shearwater.

“That’s an amazing coincidence, for a bird-watcher to have a bird’s name.”

“I changed it, from Millichap, for personal reasons,” she said. “But also I hated having to spell Millichap all the time.”

“Everyone spells Shearwater right, then?”

She laughed. “No! They call me Clearwater, Stillwater, Sharewater—”

“That flag’s not flapping as strong as it was yesterday,” one of the other bird-watchers said, looking up at the flag on the Boughaz (“The Straits”).

But it was, it was whipping hard.

“Where I come from,” Debbie Shearwater said, “a wind like this would be news. It would be on the front page.”

Later that day, Gullick proudly passed around an item from El Pais about the Levanter. The facts were that the port had been closed for two and half days. The gusts had been clocked at 150 kilometers per hour. There were fifteen-foot waves in the gong-tormented Straits. Some fishing boats had been lost. The other news concerned the large number of people waiting in Algeciras — travelers, truckers, Moroccans, Spaniards. These travelers milled in the town like displaced people, unable to move on.

One hotel in Algeciras was fairly empty — it was the best one, located at the edge of town, the Hotel Reina Cristina. I was staying near the ferry landing, so that I could watch the progress of the ships as well as the storm, but one day I walked out to the Reina Cristina to kill time. This hotel had a pool, and gardens, and was surrounded by trees, and was more like a villa in the country than a hotel in this port town. On the lobby wall were the bronzed signatures of some of the hotel’s more illustrious guests: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, July 20, 1937; Cole Porter, 1956; Lord Halifax; Estes Kefauver, 1957; Alfonso XIII; Orson Welles.

W. B. Yeats spent the winter of 1927–28 at the Reina Cristina. He had gone to Spain to recover from a bad cold. While nursing his cold, Yeats wrote a poem, “At Algeciras — A Meditation upon Death,” which begins with a pretty portrait of the straits:

The heron-billed pale cattle-birds

That feed on some foul parasite

Of the Moroccan flocks and herds

Cross the narrow Straits to light

In the rich midnight of the garden trees

Till the dawn break upon those mingled seas.

Back in town my more optimistic bird-watcher was saying again, “I don’t think that flag is flapping as hard as it was this morning.”

Gypsies, Germans, Moroccans, Africans, sailors, families, small children, motorcyclists, dogs, truck drivers, bus passengers — everyone was waiting. Some were drunk. Many slept in their vehicles. Backpackers lay on the floor of the terminal in their sleeping bags. And people were still arriving by car in Algeciras to take the ferry to Tangier or Ceuta.

It was just over an hour to Ceuta, about two hours to Tangier. But now three days had passed without any ferries. And still the wind blew. I took the bus to Tarifa, to kill time. It was a pleasant little town buffeted by wind. Spray blew from one side of the harbor to the other, drenching the bronze statue erected to “Men of the Sea.”

The wind gave me a headache that would not go away. It made me irritable. It woke me in the middle of the night and made me listen to it damaging the town and scraping at the window. During the day it made me feel grubby. It hurt my eyes. It exhausted me.

Algeciras was such a small town and I was there such a long time that I kept seeing the same people. I got to know some of them. The ceramic seller with the terra-cotta piggy banks, the many Moroccans selling leather jackets. The dwarf selling lottery tickets. The scores of agencies selling ferry tickets; the fruit sellers and market butchers and fishmongers. Some born-again Christians who had once been hippies ran a cafe that offered Bible study with its sandwiches; I got to know them. The Indian watch salesman who had lived in Spain for ten years, “and no Spanish person ever said to me, ‘You fucking Indian,’ like they did to me in London — or four or five men come up to me in the tube train and say things. Spanish are good people”—I met him, too.

And there was Juana. She stood on the sidewalk near Bar El Vino. She was twenty, or perhaps younger. But a serious drug habit made her look much older — haggard, red-eyed, wild-haired. The wind tore at her hair and snatched at her skirt as she clutched her jacket and searched passersby with her pockmarked and pleading face. She was cold and impatient, and sometimes plainly desperate.

“Señor — hola!”

Most of them hurried past. She was harmless, but there was something dangerous and witchlike about her appearing from the shadows beside Bar El Vino in this wind.

Juana became a familiar face, and so I usually said hello to her.

This friendliness encouraged her. “Fucky-fucky?”

“No, thank you.”

“Three thousand.” That was twenty-five dollars.

“No, thank you.”

“Anything you want to do, I will do.”

“No, thank you.”

“The money includes the room at the hotel!”

“No, thank you.”

“It is cheap!”

And following me down the street, bucking the wind, she would be summoned back by a big growly-voiced woman, calling out, “Juana!”

It was too windy for me to read. I couldn’t think in this wind. Listening to music was out of the question, and so was conversation. After dinner I watched TV in the neighborhood bar, and it seemed as though I had begun to live the life of a lower-middle-class resident of Algeciras. Crocodile Dundee was on one night, dubbed in Spanish. We watched that. We watched wrestling and football. One night there was a bullfight. A matador mounted on a horse wounded a bull, then rode back and forth poking the bleeding animal with a pikestaff. The bull turned and gored the horse, then flipped the horse and rider and trampled them. The matador lay motionless, next to the crumpled horse, until the bull was distracted and run through with a sword. It was possible that this ten-minute corrida produced the death of the bull, the horse and the matador.

We watched cartoons. That was what I had been reduced to by five days of Levanter wind: a middle-aged mental case sitting on a wobbly chair in the filthy Foreign Legion Bar, watching Tom and Jerry cartoons.

The Levanter was as strong on the sixth day as it had been on the first day. But there was nothing new about this. In 1854, in a book called The Mediterranean, Rear Admiral William Henry Smyth wrote, “The hardest gale of the neighborhood is the Solano or Levanter of the Gibraltar pilots … That the winds in the Straits of Gibraltar blow either from the east points or west points of the horizon (technically termed down or up) in general has been immemorially remarked; and the conformation of its coasts on both sides renders the reason palpable. Of these winds, the east is the most violent, being often the cause of much inconvenience in the bay, from its gusty flaws and eddies, besides its always being found raw and disagreeable on shore: hence Señor Ayala, Historian of Gibraltar, terms the east wind ‘The Tyrant of the Straits’ and the west their ‘Liberator.’ ”

The morning of my sixth day sickly yellow-gray clouds with shafts of dawn appeared over Gibraltar. Though from La Linea the Rock had the appearance of the Matterhorn, and from the heights of Algeciras Gibraltar seemed like a fortress, glimpsed from the port here the complicated rock looked like a mutt snuffling on a hearth rug.

“I think that flag’s starting to droop a bit,” the bird-watcher said.

He was wrong again, but that afternoon the wind did abate, and by evening it had slackened enough for the port authority to give the order to start loading the ferries. After that, everything happened quickly. The whole port came awake, people began running to their cars, gathering their children and dogs. The truckers started their engines. And Algeciras, which had been scoured by wind for six days, just slumped and lost its look of defiance. The storm was over. The town was as limp as its flag and it reassumed its guidebook description: “An ugly town of very slight interest.”

After all this, the ferry trip was an anticlimax; from Algeciras to Ceuta, the southern Pillar of Hercules, took just one hour. The pillar stood at right angles to Gibraltar. Hardly more than a hill, it was said to be Gibraltar’s “rival in antiquity if not in splendor.” Neither photogenic nor remarkable, it was upstaged by its geraniums, another two-star relic that made me reflect again that what matters is the journey, not the arrival.

That glimpse of the other Pillar of Hercules should have meant the end of my grand tour. But I had waited so long to get to Morocco I decided to stay in Tangier. Besides, David Herbert had just died, at the age of eighty-six. “End of an era,” the obituaries said, writing of his frivolity: “He became the toast of Tangerine society. In that ‘oriental Cheltenham’ (as Beaton called it) he was often to be found arranging flowers for one of Barbara Hutton’s rooftop parties in the casbah.” I had been urged to look him up. “He’s awful — you’ll love him.” He was colorful, he wore a wig, his sister was lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mum, he had known everyone who lived in or had ever visited the place, and every pasha and pederast in Sodom-sur-Mer.

David Herbert’s father was Lord Herbert, elder son of the fifteenth earl of Pembroke and twelfth Earl of Montgomery — he was also bankrupt. The old man had inherited Wilton, “perhaps the most beautiful house in England.” As second son, David Herbert had no title, though to irritate his brother he called himself Lord Herbert. He was known as the “Uncrowned Queen of Tangier.”

I rode from Ceuta to Tangier with a pair of terrified tourists, a husband and wife, in a busload of Moroccans. “I’m a surgeon and my wife is an attorney,” the man said, with uncalled-for pomposity. They were from Minneapolis.

“Both those professions will come in handy here,” I said.

It was raining very hard when we entered the city, and at the Avenue d’Espagne, where it met the Rue de la Plage, the pelting drops turned the puddles mirroring the bright piled-up Medina into its own glittering reflection.

Almost at once I was set upon by four men.

“Big welcome, my friend—”

“Listen, I not a guide. I want to practice my English—”

“I am student. I show you what you want—”

“I take you to hotel—”

They followed, haranguing me, and it was hard to shake them off; but I walked resolutely in the rain as though I knew where I was going, and they dropped by the wayside. Farther on I was accosted by beggars, but the street grew steeper — Tangier is spread across several hills — and soon there was no one except the Moroccan men and women, Smurfs and nuns, their pointed hoods up against the rain and cold. I passed the Medina. Medina in Arabic means the city, and is usually the walled city in any Arab settlement; Casbah means citadel. The most convenient definition is: A medina is a walled city with many gates, both exits and entrances; a Casbah, being a fortress, has only two, an entrance and an exit.

I was headed for the Hotel El Muniria, the hotel in which William Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch, and where Jack Kerouac and others had stayed. On the way, as I stepped out of the rain into a lighted doorway to read my map, a man appeared and asked me what I was looking for. When I told him he said, “This is a hotel.” He showed me a room. It was pleasant enough and cost fifteen dollars (140 dihran), and besides my feet were wet and I really did not want to go any farther.

From the beginning of my trip I had hoped to drop in on Paul Bowles, who was as important to the cultural life of Tangier as Naguib Mahfouz was in Cairo. David Herbert had been no more than a colorful character, but Bowles had written novels that I had admired—The Sheltering Sky, and Let It Come Down and The Spider’s House. Many of his short stories I regarded as brilliant. Some of the strangest and best writers of the twentieth century had come to Tangier; Bowles had known them all, Bowles represented the city. He had known Gertrude Stein and William Burroughs and Gore Vidal and Kerouac and all the rest; he was a writer and a composer. He had translated books from Spanish and Maghrebi Arabic. Most of the world had visited. Everyone had left. Bowles remained, apparently still writing. In a world of jet travel and simple transitions, he refused to budge. He seemed to me the last exile.

“Mister Bowles is very ill,” a Moroccan told me.

It was not surprising. Bowles was in his mid-eighties. The weather was terrible — first the six-day Levanter, and now this rain. It was cold enough for me to be wearing a jacket and a sweater. I needed the radiator in my hotel room. But I dreaded Bowles’s illness too, his being sick. I did not want to pester a sick man, and it also seemed to me that any illness in this damp cold city could have serious consequences. Besides, I had no introduction to him. I did not know where he lived.

This Moroccan, Mohammed, who claimed to know Bowles, said, “He has no telephone.”

Would he deliver a letter for me? He said yes. I wrote a note, telling him that I was in Tangier, and asking him whether he was well enough to have a visitor. I handed it over to Mohammed for delivery.

“We meet tomorrow at three o’clock,” Mohammed said. “I will tell you the answer.”

The rain continued to crackle all night on the cobblestones, blackening the narrow streets of the Kasbah, and emptying the Medina of pedestrians or else forcing them to shelter in doorways, and giving the city an air of mystery: in the rain Tangier was gleaming and unreadable. In such bad weather all Moroccans pulled their hood up over their head and it looked like a city of monks.

I could understand why certain foreigners might gravitate to Tangier. It was full of appealing paradoxes. The greatest was that it seemed so lawless and yet was so safe. It was also superficially exotic but not at all distant (I could see solid, hardworking Spain from the top floor of my hotel). Tangier had an air of the sinister and the illicit, yet it was actually rather sedate. Except for the touts, the local people were tolerant towards strangers, not to say utterly indifferent. Almost everything was inexpensive, and significantly, everything was available — not just the smuggled comforts of Europe but the more rarefied pleasures of this in-between place, that was neither Africa nor Europe.

If you decided to stay in Tangier there were other people just like you, writing books, composing music, chasing local boys or foreign girls. The city was visually interesting but undemanding. I realized that as I waited for a response from Paul Bowles. It was an easy city to kill time in. Its religion was relaxed and its history was anecdotal. The rough real Morocco was behind it, beyond the Rif Mountains. A foreigner might have to be careful there. But everyone belonged in Tangier. “Cosmopolitan, frowsy, familiar Tangier,” Edith Wharton wrote in her travel book In Morocco (1925), “that every tourist has visited for the last forty years.”

From 1923 until 1956 Tangier had been officially an International Zone, run by the local representatives of nine countries, including the USA. But even its absorption into Morocco at independence in 1956 did not change Tangerine attitudes nor its louche culture. In addition to the Casbah and the drugs, and the catamites that hung around the cafes, Tangier had the lovely Anglican cathedral of St. Andrews and the Grand Mosque. It seemed to me not Moroccan but Mediterranean — a place that had closer links to the other cities on the Mediterranean than it did to its own country. The great Mediterranean cities had much in common, Alexandria and Venice, Marseilles and Tunis, and even smaller places like Cagliari and Palma and Split. Their spirit was mongrel and Mediterranean.

I met Mohammed at the Hotel El-Minzah, one of the landmarks of Tangiers, an elegant place but untypical in being rather expensive.

“Mr. Paul Bowles is ill,” he said.

“You told me that yesterday. Is he sicker now?”

“Perhaps,” Mohammed said.

“Did you deliver my letter?”

“Yes.”

“No answer?”

“You can ask Mr. Paul Bowles.”

“And how will I do that?”

“You can meet him.”

The problem was finding him. And it was odd that everyone knew him and yet no one could say exactly where he lived. Even odder was the fact that he had been living in the same apartment block for almost forty years. He did not get out much. He had sought exile in Tangier; he had also sought exile in his apartment. Mohammed knew the name of the building in which Bowles lived, and the street, but no one seemed to recognize these names. My taxi driver had to ask directions. The street had been renamed — it was no longer Imam Kastellani. The building had no number. It was about a mile from the center of Tangier, in what counted as a suburb. And it was not much of a building — four nondescript stories, you entered by the back, and the ground floor was occupied by two shops.

A small girl playing in the foyer told me in French, “The American Bowles is upstairs in number twenty — the fourth floor.”

I went up and rang the bell and waited. I rang it four times, standing in the semidarkness of the hallway. Except for the jangling of the bell, there was no other sound inside. The afternoon was cold and damp, the building smelled gloomily of stewed meat. I thought: If I am spared, if I attain the age of eighty-five, I do not want to live in a place like this. Give me sunshine.

“One time I visited Bowles and when I entered his apartment he was being thrown into the air by an Arab,” my friend Ted Morgan had told me.

Historian and biographer (Maugham, Churchill and FDR, as well as William Burroughs), Morgan had lived in Tangier in his previous incarnation as Sanche de Gramont. His descriptions of Tangier in his Burroughs biography, Literary Outlaw, had rekindled my desire to visit the city, which he regarded as lurid but fun. But what was this about Bowles being thrown into the air?

“The Arab was muscular and had a very serious expression, and he was bouncing Bowles the way you might throw a baby in the air to make it laugh. That was what struck me. Bowles was giggling madly as he went up and down.”

But there was no answer from Bowles’s apartment. I turned to buzz the elevator when the door of number twenty opened and a dark and rather tough-looking Moroccan in a black leather jacket stood facing me.

“Yes?”

I said, “I would like to see Mr. Bowles.”

The Arab stared at me. Why had it taken so long for him to answer the door?

I said, “I want to ask him if he received my letter.”

It seemed a lame excuse, but the man nodded. “Wait here. I will ask him.”

He had left the door ajar, so I could see into the shadowy apartment, to a room with cushions and low chairs, a sort of Moroccan parlor, with shelves but not many books. There was a small kitchen to the right, a stove with a blackened kettle on it; but it was cold — nothing cooking. I nudged the door with my foot, and as I did so the Arab returned.

“You can go in,” he said. He was abrupt, neither polite nor rude. And he was strong. I could just imagine this Arab as the man in Ted Morgan’s story, tossing the distinguished writer in the air and making him giggle. The Arab vanished, leaving me to find my own way.

The parlor was dark — I could not read the titles of the few books on the shelves. Another small room beyond it was darker still, but its shadows were an effect of the brightness in the last room, where Paul Bowles lay in a brown bathrobe, on a low pallet against one wall, propped up, like a monk in a cell.

My first impression of the room was that it was very warm and very cluttered. The heat came from a hissing blowtorch attached to a gas bottle, a primitive heater shooting a bluey-orange flame at Bowles from a few feet away. The litter of small objects included notebooks and pens, as well as medicine bottles and pills, and tissues. There was an odor of camphor and eucalyptus in the air that gave it the atmosphere of a sickroom.

“Come in, come in,” Bowles said. “Yes, I know your books. Take that chair.”

He had a genteel American voice, rather soft, with one of those patrician East Coast accents that is both New York and New England — but in fact placeless, more a prep school than a regional accent.

“I’m not well at the moment. I had a blocked artery in my leg. The doctor operated immediately, and I think it worked. But here I am. I can’t walk. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to.”

Yet, apart from lying there on his pallet, he did not look ill and he certainly did not seem elderly. His face was almost boyish, his hair was white but there was a lot of it — he had the look of a parson or a schoolmaster. What he had just said was precise. He spoke carefully, sometimes ironically, and was responsive. His hearing was excellent, his mind was sharp. Only his posture — supine — and his thinness, indicated that he might be ill. Otherwise he looked like someone whom I had disturbed in his nap, which was possibly the case.

Everything he might need was within reach. He was surrounded by books and papers and medicine, by a teapot and spoons and matches; and the wall facing him was divided into shelves and cubbyholes, in which there were stacks of sweaters and scarves and manuscripts. Some of the manuscripts were typed, and others were musical scores.

On the low table near where Bowles lay there was a large metronome, and bottles of capsules and tubes of ointment, and cassette tapes and a tin of Nesquik and cough drops and a partly eaten candy bar and a crumpled letter from the William Morris Agency and another note folded and jammed into an envelope scribbled, Paul Bowles, Tanger, Maroc, a vague address but it had obviously found him, as I had, with little more information than that.

That metronome reminded me of something Bowles said in a letter to Henry Miller. The letter is in his collection In Touch, and it relates to his choosing to live in Tangier. “I agree with you about doing things slowly,” he wrote. “Now that I think of it, it’s one of the reasons why I’m still here. One can set one’s life metronome at the speed that seems convenient for living. In the States the constant reminder that time is passing, that one must be quick, removes all the savor of being in the midst of living.”

Blackout curtains covered the window. That impressed me. You would not know in this small back room whether it was night or day, nor what country you were in.

“I am very sorry to disturb you,” I said. “It was kind of you to see me. I won’t stay long.”

He had blue piercing eyes. His thin hands were folded over his brown robe, and some papers lay on his lap. The blowtorch hissed and fizzed.

“I’m glad you came,” he said.

“But I can see you’re working. I know I’m interrupting.”

“I wish I could get up,” Bowles said. “I’m doing a translation — Roderigo Rey Rosa, a Guatemalan. And I have some work to do on a piece of music. What brings you to Tangier?”

“I’ve been traveling in the Mediterranean, trying to make some sense of it. Going to places I’ve never been before,” I said. “But you’ve been here since — when?”

“I first came here in 1931,” Bowles said, tugging his robe closer to his throat. “I was planning to go to Villefranche. Gertrude Stein said, ‘Go to Tangier.’ I didn’t know Tangier from Algiers. She had been here. She was very interested in a local painter.”

Gertrude Stein — hadn’t she also sent Sir Francis Rose and Dorothy Carrington to Corsica? And Robert Graves to Mallorca? And Hemingway to Spain? My impression of her now was of a big bossy lesbian, queening it in her salon in Paris, directing literary traffic, sending writers to unlikely destinations in the Mediterranean.

“I came with Aaron Copland,” Bowles said. “He hated it. There is often drumming at night here — you must have heard it. Aaron couldn’t sleep. He used to hear these drums and say, ‘The natives are on the warpath.’ He was very worried. He went away, but I stayed.”

“But you must have traveled a great deal. I love your Mexican stories, especially ‘Pastor Dow at Tacaté.’ Pastor Dow and his wind-up phonograph, playing jazz so that the Indians will stay and listen to his sermon.”

“I was in Mexico from ’36 until — when was Pearl Harbor?”—I reminded him—“Yes, until 1941,” he said. And he smiled. “My favorite part of ‘Pastor Dow’ is the little girl with the small alligator dressed up as a doll.”

“Have you done any traveling lately?”

“I went to Madrid last June to hear a performance of my music.”

“What about the United States — do you have a hometown?”

“New York is my hometown, if New York can be called a hometown,” Bowles said. “But I haven’t been back to America for twenty-seven years. I’m not afraid of flying. It’s just that it’s a lot of trouble — all the delays and waiting. And you can only bring one suitcase. I liked traveling in the great days, by ship, when I could bring half a dozen trunks — two of them might be filled with books. Now that is impossible.”

“How long has this been home for you?”

“I moved to this apartment in 1957, if that’s what you mean.”

“I meant Tangier.”

“Years,” Bowles said. “I had a house in Sri Lanka for a while. But I like it here. I like Islamic countries. It’s very corrupt here, but not as corrupt as some of these Central American countries.”

“Has it changed you, living here so long?”

“Living here, among Muslims, I suppose I’ve become more patient and fatalistic,” Bowles said. “You have no control over things, so what can you do? Muslims live their faith, they are seldom hypocrites. But hypocrisy is part of Christianity.”

“What is it about Tangier that attracts so many foreigners?”

He shrugged. The question did not provoke him. He had perhaps heard it ten thousand times. He said, “They don’t stay. The Beats came here twice, first in ’57, and then in ’61. Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg.”

“And William Burroughs?” I said, prompting him.

“Burroughs was here,” Bowles said. “For a long time he didn’t know where he was. Then he was writing Naked Lunch. He’d finish a sheet of foolscap and drop it on the floor. Allen gathered them and put them in order.”

It was well known that Bowles kept his distance from the Beats. These people were simply passing through. But Bowles was a respectable exile — superficially, at least. He was married, for one thing. Jane Bowles was another famous figure of Tangier. Her novel Two Serious Ladies was one of the strangest books I had ever read; accomplished, but odd. They kept an alligator as a pet. They had no children. Jane was frankly lesbian and towards the end of her life had been confined to a wheelchair. Daniel Farson wrote in his biography of Francis Bacon, “She drank; he preferred drugs like majoun. She called herself, with self-lacerating cruelty, ‘Crippie the Kike dyke.’ ” Bacon said Jane “died in a madhouse in Málaga, it must have been the worst thing in the world. Looked after by nuns, can you imagine anything more horrible?”

“Sex, for Bowles, appears to have been an embarrassment rather than a relief or a consummation of more delicate feelings,” the poet Iain Finlayson was quoted as saying in Farson’s book. “His fondness for young men can perhaps be better viewed as somewhat pedagogic and paternal.”

But that was obviously the past — and probably the distant past. He seemed to me a man who masked all his feelings; he had a glittering eye, but a cold gaze. He seemed at once preoccupied, knowledgeable, worldly, remote, detached, vain, skeptical, eccentric, self-sufficient, indestructible, egomaniacal, and hospitable to praise. He was like almost every other writer I had known in my life.

Talking about the Beats, Bowles mentioned Allen Ginsberg. “Ginsberg is a rabbi manqué,” he said. “He looks like a professor of chemistry. I read Howl. I didn’t love it. I read Kaddish, his next, and liked it more.”

“What about Naked Lunch?”

“Burroughs had a sense of humor,” Bowles said. “No jokes in the others.”

“What do you read for pleasure?”

“Recently I reread Victory. It is very sinister when those three men show up. And Passage to India. I reread that. I didn’t like it as much as the first time.”

“You said a moment ago that you had a place in Sri Lanka,” I said.

“It was an island,” Bowles said. “I loved it. I happened to be visiting the Duke of Pembroke at Wilton—”

“David Herbert’s father,” I said.

“Yes, and I met Sybil Colfax. I told them I wanted to go somewhere warm. They suggested Ceylon. It was an awful trip on a Polish ship. I went to Colombo and then down to Galle and then on to this island. It was small, not more than an acre, but covered with wonderful plants that a Frenchman had brought from all over the world. When the island was put up for sale I wired my bank and bought it.”

And now in this small hot room, with the shades drawn, he was on another island. No living space could have been smaller than this back room where he obviously lived and worked; he ate here, he wrote here, he slept here. His books, his music, his medicine. His world had shrunk to these walls. But that was merely the way it seemed. It was another illusion. His world was within his mind, and his imagination was vast.

I said I ought to be going. He said, “You’re welcome to stay,” and opened a flat tobacco can and took out a hand-rolled cigarette and offered me one.

“Go on. It’s a kif cigarette,” he said. Kif was marijuana, majoun was hashish jam. He added, “I always have my tea at four. And look, it’s almost five-thirty.”

We puffed away, Bowles and I, and now I recognized one of the odors in the room that earlier I had not been able to put a name to. We smoked in silence for a while, and then my scalp tightened and a glow came on in my brain and behind my eyes.

“I take it for health effect,” Bowles said. “They should legalize it, of course.”

“Of course,” I said. “I was going to bring you a bottle of wine.”

“I don’t drink. Next time bring me chocolates.”

We kept puffing, companionably, saying nothing. Then I saw what Bowles’s real strength was: he was stubborn. People came and went. Bowles stayed. People started and abandoned their symphonies and novels. Bowles finished his own. People got sick and neglected their work. Bowles took to his bed and kept working. His life was a masterpiece of non-attachment, of a stubborn refusal to become involved in anyone else’s passions. I could just imagine his blue eyes narrowing and his thin lips saying, I’m not moving.

Bowles said, “People come every day. There are film and TV people. The équipe take over. Some Germans stayed for eleven days and dropped food and sandwiches everywhere. Some people want me to sign their books. The ones with the most chutzpah say to me, ‘Since we were in Tangier we didn’t want to leave until we saw what you looked like.’ ”

“I suppose because you keep to yourself, people seek you out.”

But another reason that people sought him out was that he had no telephone.

“I work all the time,” Bowles said. “Malraux said to me, ‘Never let yourself become a public monument. If you do, people will piss on you.’ ”

“That’s good.”

Bowles leaned over, snatched at the blackout curtains, missed, and then gathered his bathrobe again.

“Is it dark?”

“It must be — it’s after seven,” I said. “I ought to be going.”

“I don’t know whether I’ll go anywhere with this leg,” he said, staring at his thin shanks under the blanket. He looked up at me. “We’ll meet again, Inshallah. Are you staying in Tangier?”

“I might leave tomorrow.”

He took a puff on his kif cigarette and kept the smoke in his lungs.

“Everyone is always leaving tomorrow.”

Darkness had fallen. I had to grope my way out of Bowles’s apartment, and I stumbled down the stairs — the elevator was not working. But I was elated. I had met Bowles, he had been friendly and he seemed to typify a place that had been something of a riddle to me.

Pleased with myself for this pleasant encounter, I kept walking, down Bowles’s road, that had once been called Imam Kastellani, up to the main road and past the Spanish consulate, and into town, about a twenty-minute walk. I needed to find a quiet place to write everything down, the whole conversation. I entered a bar, The Negresco, and ordered a glass of beer and began writing.

“You’re a writer,” the bartender said. His name was Hassan. He asked to see the page, and smiled at my handwriting. “Do you know Mohammed Choukri? He is a writer. He is over there.”

I was introduced to a small smiling man with a big mustache. He was slightly drunk, but he was alert and voluble. His books, he said, had been translated by Bowles. His best-known novel was For Bread Alone. But he had published other books, in Arabic and French. One was a diaristic account of his meetings with Jean Genet.

“Genet preferred me to Bowles,” Choukri said, a twinkle in his eye, as though defying me to guess the reason. He was small, fine-featured, smoking heavily, in his late fifties or early sixties. He wore a tweed jacket and a tie and seemed almost professorial.

“Why?”

“Because I am marginal,” Choukri said. “Bowles is from a great family. He has money. He has position. But I am a Berber, from a little village, Nador. Until I was twenty I was illiterate.” He licked his thumb and pretended to stamp a document with it. “I had thirteen brothers and sisters. Nine of them died of poverty — tuberculosis and other diseases.”

“How long have you known Bowles?”

“Twenty-one years,” Choukri said. “He is a miser. In twenty-one years he has not bought me even one cup of coffee.”

You’re not difficult; you’re simply mean, a friend of Bowles once said to him. Bowles reflected: I’ve thought about it for some years, and have decided he was probably right. The meanness however is not personal; it’s just New England parsimony, and I’ve never questioned its correctness.

“Do you think he’s happy here?”

“You can’t ask that question now,” Choukri said. “You should have asked him that thirty years ago.”

We stood at the bar, drinking beer. The beer slopped on my little notebook. I had been interrupted writing about Bowles. Now there was more — this sudden encounter with one of Bowles’s oldest friends in Morocco. It was dreamlike, too. All those names: Gertrude Stein, Aaron Copland, the Duke of Pembroke, William Burroughs, Jean Genet — familiar and intrusive and unreal in this smoky Tangerine bar, another unlikely interlude in the hello-good-bye of travel.

“He is a nihilist,” Choukri said.

That seemed to sum him up, the man who had once owned an island and visited Wilton Manor; who now stubbornly lived in one room, warmed by a blowtorch.

“Did Tangier do that to him?”

“Tangier is a mysterious city,” Choukri said. “When you solve the mystery it is time to leave.”

I could not have imagined a better exit line to serve my departure — from Tangier, from Morocco, from the Mediterranean. But the line vanished from my mind the next morning as I boarded the ferry Boughaz for the trip across the Straits.

I was thinking of how there was an aspect of Mediterranean travel that was like museum-going, the shuffling, the squinting, the echoes, the dust, the dubious treasures. You were supposed to be reverential. But even in the greatest museums I had been distracted, and found myself gazing out of museum windows at traffic or trees, or at other museum-goers; places like that were always the haunt of lovers on rainy Sundays. Instead of pictures, I often looked at the guards, the men or women in chairs at the entrances to rooms, the way they stifled yawns, their watchful eyes, their badges. No museum guard ever resembles a museum-goer, and my Mediterranean was like that.

Herculean was a word I kept wanting to use but never did. The only Herculean part of my trip was every night having to describe how I had spent the day, without leaving anything out; turning all my actions into words. It was like a labor in a myth or an old story. I could not sleep until the work was done. Mediterranean travel for me — for many people — was sometimes ancestor worship and sometimes its opposite. This was unlike any other trip I had taken, because although the journey was over, the experience wasn’t. Travel was so often a cure; I was cured of China and Peru, by going; I was cured of Fiji and Sri Lanka. Cured of Kenya and Pakistan. Cured of England, after many years. But my trip had not cured me of the Mediterranean, and I knew I would go back, the way you went back to a museum, to look — at pictures or out the window — and think; back to some Mediterranean places I saw, and more that I missed.

The mooring lines of the Boughaz were hauled aboard just as dawn broke. I thought of what Bowles had said. Don’t become a monument or people will piss on you. There was no danger of my becoming a monument, but Gibraltar was another story. Perhaps that explained why I had been so flippant when I had seen it the first time, and maybe so many monuments explained the mood of my Mediterranean travel, or some of it.

The darkness in the sky dissolved, as though rinsed in light. Into that eastern sky leaked yellow-orange, pinking to paleness, a whole illuminated day ahead, looming behind the Rock to the northeast, grander at this distance, and then the pair of pillars big and small on the facing shores. The sea was calm, and glittered under limitless sky — it was going to be a wonderful morning, the sort of restful brilliance you get, the sky exhausted of clouds, after days of storms. The light grew brighter, revealing the day, and it just got better, as this rosy dawn became a sunset in reverse.