Will Self - Psychogeography

Such an emporium was the Tabac Jacquard, and I saw it intoxicate poor James. At my suggestion he bought enough Gitanes to make the trip feel worthwhile. Worthwhile financially — he saved £300 — but worthwhile spatio-temporally as well, because with four thousand cigarettes on board he had in an important way mapped out the course of the next five months. No more late-night pilgrimages to one tobacconist that sells his brand, no more unpleasant fermatas as the white metronomes stop ticking. As he made the calculations with La Divina Nicotina — who appeared to me as a dowdy Frenchwoman of a certain age — a faint flush crept into James’s normally saturnine features.

When we regained the street James had two large carrier bags full of Gitanes and a sloppy grin on his face. He enthused over the gentility, the polish of the woman who he’d dubbed ‘Madame Jacquard’. He fantasised about seducing her away from her husband and settling down in Calais with a little tabac of his own. A week later in London I chanced to look at the receipt for my own modest purchase at the Tabac Jacquard and discovered why it was so called: it’s on the Rue Jacquard. But I haven’t had the heart to ruin James’s fictive relationship with Madame Jacquard. Not yet anyway.

Zooming Moulay had to have been a mistake. Granted, he was taking liberties, but it’s one thing to zoom in your backyard, quite another to zoom cross-culturally. And what a culture to cross: Morocco, with its mystical secret fraternities, its a priori belief in the efficacy of practical magic, and its civilisation founded on successive waves of fanatical puritans emerging from the arid turbulence of the Sahara to stop everyone dancing. No, if you’re going to zoom anyone abroad do it somewhere like Bavaria, or Belgium.

It’s not even as if I didn’t know what I was up against. I’d been in Marrakesh enough times to understand that while for a short stay it’s sufficient to shout ‘Je ne suis pas touriste, j’habite au casa!’ to the legions of young men who descend on you like vultures the second you step outside your hotel, if you’re staying much longer you’re more or less under an obligation to employ a guide. The very least you can do if you’re going to take a cheap holiday in someone else’s misery is alleviate it just a little.

It may have been that Moulay disliked my set-aside scheme for him. I made it clear that I didn’t require his guiding skills at all, but was content to give him a per diem just to keep the other flapping djellabas off my back. That and a little shopping, for majoun (marijuana mixed with dates and honey to make an edible confection), and Spanish Fly (actually dried beetles of the genus Lytta vesicatoria). I thought I was letting him off lightly, but Moulay kept insisting on guiding me through the tortuous passageways of the old town, press-ganging me into this mosque or that tannery. Clearly what I was giving him wasn’t sufficient — he needed to make his kickbacks from other operators.

Eventually I found myself in the ridiculous situation of trying to dodge my own guide. I’d duck out of the hotel, leap in the car, swirl into the Jama Al F’na in a cloud of dust and take up my position in the Cosmos Café, looking out over the sun-beaten square at the snake charmers, the steaming food stalls and the wild Berber men in from the Atlas hawking their wares. But inevitably Moulay would surface at my elbow within seconds of my arrival, as if telepathically informed of my presence. This attribute of his alone should’ve warned me against zooming him.

Ah, Moulay, with his fake Dolce & Gabbana shades and his queasy grin: I thought I knew him then, understood his straightforward rapaciousness, but I was a prize chump. It was the second batch of majoun that decided me. The first was forgivably small, but the second was titchy. I and my companion had necked the lot, crunched all the cantharides, and still felt no more aroused than a couple of pensioners eating potted shrimps at Prestatyn. (Actually, knowing as I do the almost legendary sexual appetites of the Welsh, probably a great deal less aroused.) When I challenged Moulay about this he was much aggrieved: ‘It is too strong for you to eat more majoun, you westerners cannot cope with it. . I am protecting you. .’ Protecting me, my foot. I insisted that we rendezvous at the hotel the following morning; for once I had somewhere I wanted him to guide me.

If he looked shifty and dog-eared in the early morning, I probably looked a good deal worse. I got him into the car, one of those Renault 4s that the Moroccans — out of some misplaced romanticism — insist on referring to as ‘scorpions of the desert’. We drove to a café where I rolled the last of the Sputnik hashish I’d bought in Tangier into a joint the size of a baby’s forearm. Over mint tea I made sure that he smoked as much of it as I, and by the time we left his eyes were two red deltas of blood vessels. Back in the car I told him our destination: ‘I want to go to the old Jewish Quarter.’ ‘Yes, yes,’ he acceded, ‘that’s no problem, I will take you there.’ My foot rammed the accelerator to the floor and we shot away. I drove the scorpion through town as if we were on an extempore leg of the Paris to Dakar Rally, hurling the tip-tilting car this way and that. Moulay clutched the sides of his seat. I fancied I could even sense the mint tea rising in his gorge. He could barely raise a shaky hand to indicate the way.

In the Jewish Quarter I demanded a Jew. ‘Why? Why do you want to speak to these people?’ He was already half-zoomed. ‘Because I’m a Jew myself, Moulay — I want to speak with my people. This city used to have a big Jewish community — I want to know what happened.’ To his credit, Moulay found me a Jew, and a Jewish dentist to boot. The dentist and I sat in his dusty surgery under a diorama of curiously garish posters depicting dental caries. He spoke in Arabic and Moulay interpreted: He was an elderly man. Most of the Jews had left Morocco; they’d gone to Israel like one of his sons, or to the States like one of his other sons. His wife was dead. The seconds ticked away in the wounded mouth of the surgery: the Jews of Marrakesh had been extracted.

Back in the street Moulay seemed fully zoomed, and I left him standing there. We didn’t see him for the last few days we spent in Marrakesh, but I’ve seen him since, oh yes indeed. Whenever I feel uneasy or out of my depth in a foreign country, Moulay is always on hand to offer me his services. He appears in my dreams, his sunglasses opaque, his smile queasy, a relentless reminder of the truth that you should never zoom a Moroccan.

In Iowa the land is flat and the people are fat. Like petrol-driven bowling balls they roll across the plains, occasionally slotting into the groove of a roadway, then rattling to a halt at fast-food joints where they are served with paper cups of 7 Up or Coke the size of oil drums, haystack hamburgers and stooks of fries. In Iowa the land is flat, and divided into a crinkly chessboard of farms. The towns have names derived from just about every other conceivable land — Lisbon, Oxford, Bangor, Lourdes, Fredonia — mixed together with curiously modern coinages — Mechanicsville, Urbandale — so that the state’s identity is an invented palimpsest, worked up out of elsewhere. In Iowa it’s fall, and the tawny stands of brush along the river beds fade to grey, while the yawning maw of the sky cries out for geese to gobble and duck to crunch.

The great American stand-up Steven Wright has a gag: ‘Last year I bought a map of the USA, actual size. This year for my vacation, I folded it.’ I think he was thinking of the Midwest when he came up with this.