The Pillars of Hercules

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.