This Is Also Tangier

You come from the other side?" a young man later asks me, in the bar in Tangier.

________

On the flight from Lisbon to Morocco, I try to see where Europe ends and Africa begins. The coast must be somewhere below me, but it's lost in the diffusion of clouds. I stare at the cabin wall opposite, where strange shapes, long trapezoids, morph; they're projected from the late sun blazing to the south. I want to say "African sun," but that rings false, like something said in the nineteenth century.

The iconic Tangier arrival is, of course, by boat, but these days a flight is less expensive. I bargained away seeing the continent loom from a ferry navigating between the two pillars of Hercules. The first step taken from the boat to land would have felt somehow more decisive. New rules would have applied. I would have felt it in my feet.

But up here in the air all I see, at first, is an indistinct, pale band. Then a pronounced beach, an estuary, a perimeter fence. The airplane turns, we plunge into shadow, the light disappears, then, lower, dimly, the hills are articulated, variegated in patches, and winter green. There is surprise when the view fully opens. I do not see an organic maze of a city, but an illuminated geometry, interlocking polygons of suburban housing estates, precise and planned.

I feel a twinge of disappointment. Perhaps the scruffy port, with its would-be guides and jostling taxi drivers fighting for my tender, would've been more reassuring than this arrivals hall. It is arid, spotless, tiled with perfect squares, and I wait less than a minute for my stamp.

I should be walking from the port up to the Medina. There should be details out of a novel by Paul Bowles, a storm, a palm pounding a wall in the wind. I should reach a hotel without electricity, with just a lonely candle in the window. I should be on my knees in the darkened hallway, searching for where I've dropped the key.

Burial

In Bowles's Let It Come Down, a sixteen-year-old girl turns to look across the straits to Europe from Tangier. She shudders: "That is where they kill people." The novel was set in the shadow of both the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. Europe must have seemed a savage land. Now, it is the sea, below the Medina, that buries those fleeing to Europe. A graveyard lies between the two continents.

The Window

From the airport, I am in the capsule of an old Mercedes—with torn cloth walls, a silent driver—and the vehicle threatens to go dead at any time, depositing me in some suburb, aimless with my bag, looking for something I do not expect. Then the taxi picks up speed and rounds the coast of the central city. It's past dusk. I see the Medina illuminated, white. We chug up the old alleys; men are rapping on the car windows. I find the hotel easily, just across from the Grande Mosquée. In my room, the shower drain emits a sickly sweet smell. But the space is tidy, with white walls and ironed sheets, a purple embroidered coverlet, an industrially produced kilim rug, and bronze lamp. I go out to explore immediately, into the maze. Everything is closer than I expected: the Petit Socco where the Beat poets picked up their rent boys, and then the Grand Socco almost around the corner. I had wanted to get lost here. I shouldn't have studied the map. I should have left my smartphone in the room.

The Grand Socco is busy with night hawkers, dusty carts, lottery ticket sellers. The bar of the Cinema Rif bursts with Moroccan hipsters, men who spill into the square. The ritual evening stroll, a poorly-lit paseo, is more tawdry than on the other side of the Mediterranean. There are more shadows. I criss-cross through side streets.

Soon I find myself wandering down a very dark road along a construction site...