Michael Pearce - A dead man in Tangier

‘And, of course, if you are a Moroccan, it’s worse. My mother will be shocked and hurt at what I’ve done. She will say that I’ve put her to shame — that everyone will say she’s not brought me up properly. She will think I’ve let her down.’

‘Oh, come on! My impression was that everyone in the crowd agreed with you.’

But Chantale was not convinced.

‘She will feel that even if Madame Poiret was in the wrong, I still ought not to have struck her. She will think it lowering on my part. A lapse of standards. You have to behave properly even to people who don’t behave properly to you. It’s a question of — well, I suppose it’s like noblesse oblige. If you’re part of the caida, you’re like noblesse. That’s the way I ought to think and behave and if I don’t, she will feel she has failed.’

‘But, look-’

Chantale shook her head.

‘You don’t know what it means to my mother. She has struggled to bring me up. And most of the time on her own. And part of that is being true to the way a well-bred Moroccan should behave. The Moroccan bit is important. She doesn’t want me to lose touch with — well, the Moroccan side of me. And now look what I’ve done!’

She looked at him tragically with her large, tear-stained eyes and Seymour found his knees turning to jelly.

‘Put it down to the French side of you!’ he said, in an attempt to lighten things.

She shook her head again.

‘She wouldn’t like that either. She also wants me to be true to my father. And to that side, the French side, as well. She has rather an idealized picture of that, too. He always had such beautiful manners. I mean, to everyone, high or low, the meanest beggar. He always treated them with respect. You could feel it when he spoke to anyone. It was a bit like the caida. Or that’s how she would understand it. So she would feel I’ve let her down on that, too.’

He could see that it was very important to her and that an attempt to jolly her would be wrong.

‘You’re caught between both sides, I see that,’ he said. ‘And perhaps between unrealistic expectations on both sides?’

She shook her head fiercely.

‘No!’ she said. ‘Don’t say that! She is right. I must be true to both sides of me. The best of both sides. That was what my father would have wanted. My mother knows that. And she has tried to bring me up to be like that. Only, sometimes — sometimes it’s not easy.’

‘I think you’re terrific,’ said Seymour. ‘And I think it’s a terrific ideal. And I’m not surprised if you can’t always live up to it.’

He heard a door close somewhere nearby in the house behind the counter and wondered if someone was coming.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘why don’t I take you out to dinner? Or would that be another Western breach of caida?’

She sat back, as if slightly shocked.

Then she smiled.

‘No decent Moroccan girl would allow herself to be seen out at night alone with a man. Even in a restaurant. However-’ she pretended to consider — ‘a French one would, I suppose. Think of me, for the purposes of this evening, as French. I will ask my mother to cover the desk.’

She suggested a place near the Kasbah and a little later they were making their way through some of the streets he’d passed through earlier. Then they had struck him as seedy. Now, however, the darkness concealed the grime and dilapidation and the moonlight picked out things he’d not previously noticed; carved doorways, ornamental arches, delicate columns.

They went through one of the arches into a small patio with a fountain and trees. One of the trees must have been an orange tree for they suddenly walked into a heavy waft of orange blossom. A spiral staircase wound up out of the patio and they found themselves on an upper balcony on which men were sitting on leather cushions around low tables.

They chose a table at one end of the balcony, from which they could look down on to the patio. The evening was heavily warm but the fountain freshened the air. A waiter brought small bowls of olives and nuts and little plates of salted cakes.

Chantale hesitated.

‘They do serve alcohol,’ she said, ‘but perhaps that had better wait until the meat.’

Instead, they drank fruit juice, freshly made and deliciously cool.

‘It’s what most Moroccans stick to,’ she said. ‘But the French — and a lot of French come here — can’t get through a whole evening without wine.’

‘This is a Moroccan evening, is it?’ he said.

‘Do you mind?’

‘Not at all. I find it…’ He searched for the word and found that only the French one would do. ‘… sympathique.’

She seemed pleased.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That is the right thing to feel.’

Everything was relaxed, soft, gentle. The voices were low and courteous. There was no loud laughter as there probably would have been in England. The people smiled and touched each other affectionately, intimate but without any sexual connotations, simply enjoying the social contact. This was Arab, he thought, at its best.

Yes, sympathique was the word. But it was an odd one to use after the way he had been spending his time. It wasn’t his preoccupation with Bossu but everywhere he had had the sense of strain, of tension barely contained. It had been there on the street that first night when he had intervened on behalf of Mustapha, there in the pig-sticking and in the presence of the soldiers, everywhere. There, too, in people’s conversations: in the conversation with Sadiq and Mr Bahnini, and with the Resident-General and Mr Suleiman, with Juliette and with Monique, running all the time like an undercurrent.

He said this to Chantale and she nodded.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘ that is Morocco, too.’

She was the only woman on the balcony. He wondered if that, too, was Morocco.

It didn’t seem to bother Chantale. But was there a hint of defiance in her assurance? A deliberate, un-Moroccan assertiveness? He wouldn’t put it past her. But if there was, it co-existed with the lack of assertiveness that he had found before in Arab women. Or was that just a question of manners, something shared with the men, a quintessential difference from Western culture?

Later, they went up another flight of stairs to another balcony, where again people were sitting at low tables and where the ripple of the fountain was even more gentle, but where they had the compensation of being more exposed to the moon so that the whole balcony was bathed in its soft light.

Some of the people up there were clearly French, and there were women among them. So far as he could see there was no sense of strain.

Waiters brought silver bowls, towels and kettles of cold water so that they could rinse their hands before eating. That, said Chantale, was absolutely required because the food was eaten with the fingers only and also because the polite thing to do was pluck out tasty morsels from the dish in front of you and offer them to your neighbour.

She reached out a hand, took up some couscous, moulded it with her fingers into a little ball and placed it on Seymour’s plate.

‘ Bismillah,’ she said. ‘That means: In the name of God. But it is not just religious, it is part of the caida. It makes the food more than just food. Not exactly holy, but special.’

Later when the main dish came, a kind of pastrilla, with layers of different meats underneath a crust of delicious flaky pastry, he reached into the dish, took out some pigeon, and put it on her plate.

‘ Bismillah,’ he said.

Sitting at the receptionist’s desk when they returned to the hotel was a middle-aged Moroccan lady.

‘My mother,’ said Chantale.

She smiled at Seymour and there was something in her smile that reminded him of her daughter. She was still a beautiful woman but the face was thin and drawn, as if it had seen harsh times, and the large, dark eyes were wary. They appraised Seymour in much the same way, he thought, as his own mother’s eyes appraised any woman he brought home for the evening. He thought he would say this to Chantale later. It might comfort her.