A Lot Of Wind...

In Tangier, a body in a blanket: borne through the souk at shoulder height, a brisk pace and accompanied by boisterous call and response. Later, from our room, the sound of women’s chant in some adjacent house and of their ululating – whether in mourning or in celebration of come unconnected event I do not know.

We eat in the courtyard of the women’s charity and amble afterwards around now familiar shops. I buy incense and K lamps, and a wet, grey day opens up into sunshine. They call it the white city but there’s a good deal of clutter in the colour and a good dose of yellow and brown, as if the city were an ageing photo of itself, sunk into a geriatric tint and turned sepia.

It’s good to be back; we’ve been down the coast a little, in Asilah, a resort town with Portuguese and Spanish history and a beautifully maintained medina, although I suppose it could be accused of being a little sanitised – certainly so in comparison with its crumbling counterpart in Tangier. We’ve spent a pleasant couple of days there in what is essentially a typical seaside town but with added Moroccan intrigue.

Sitting outside the old walls with two tall mint teas, for instance, at around eight in the evening, the quintessential seaside promenade; it seemed the whole place was out. A steady trickle of foreign visitors like ourselves, affluent young Moroccan couples in town for a getaway, women dressed in Muslim bling, families with their children – girls hanging on to their mothers’ arms and looking up adoringly while their sullen brothers walked a few steps behind in a sulk or with a little more cheer played leader out in front,fathers walking along looking either proprietorial or like a spare part, depending on how you chose to read their blank expressions.

The town’s popularity with the Spanish has made it cosmopolitan in some respects, and its regular art festivals leave their mark in the form of countless murals, but the locals looked like a conservative bunch – women covered up and men in djellabas or preppy slack and sweater combinations. There was a notice in the reception of our hotel, advising that Muslim couples who wanted to share a room would need to produce a marriage certificate. Another notice in the bathroom castigated the tourist, in comical English, for ruining the towels with their newly acquired henna tattoos, and ended with four words which could have been either an expression of utter contempt or one of undying love: “Your stain is permanent.”

Sitting in the medina’s central square one morning I noticed that workers had congregated to put up some barriers, set out some chairs and assemble a makeshift stage. I wondered out loud what it might be they were preparing for and K took a moment out from her pastry to look up.

“Perhaps it’s a stoning,” she observed, drily.

Her quip was no doubt a result of our shared frustration at the difficulty in getting hold of a beer in this Muslim town. It’s astonishing how important being told you can’t have a beer can make beer seem. We walked the length and breadth of that town looking for one without any luck. Don’t get me wrong – we saw a lot of beer. There are restaurants all along the front that sell it. But they wouldn’t serve it to us, because we weren’t eating there. We learned later that standard practice is to go to one of these places, order a saucer of fish or whatever, and proceed to get hammered.

But how were we to know? Eventually, we found a little shop and got some takeaways to drink in secretive seclusion, back in our room. A tiny little place without signage of any kind on the front or smiles of any kind on the faces if its staff.

“It’s like queueing up for your methadone,” was K’s verdict, and although we had our beer at last, and despite finding Asilah very beautiful, we were beginning to look forward to Tangier, and familiar territory.

Dean’s Bar doesn’t look a bit like Rick’s Café of Casablanca fame, although it may well have been the inspiration for it. The piano is gone and I sit in the windowless back room sipping Tangier’s most reasonably priced brew – you can pay six euros for a small bottle in some places – with K beside me and a couple of middle-aged, dour-looking men at other tables. Out front the bar is busy and there are tapas but no bohemian expats or spies in evidence. That Tangier has vanished with the piano but pilgrimages like this place remain, apparently indelible though I suppose they too will disappear eventually.

In the meantime they draw me here, thrilled to be downing a bottle of Flag inches from a mark on the table that Tennessee Williams might have made, or Francis Bacon, or Ian Fleming. A few feet from where William Burroughs was refused service because Joseph Dean, the probably Egyptian cross-dresser with the fake name, didn’t like the look of him.

Perversely, although Tangier is a much better bet for a beer than Asilah, we come unstuck when we try to combine a drink with something to eat. Our usual place in the medina is closed and obvious alternatives are either too expensive or too far away. It’s late and kitchens here close early, and a fraught half hour of debate culminates in the bustle of the Socco Grande with me screaming blue murder at a taxi driver, and getting back out of his moving car, and giving up on the idea of wine with dinner, and heading a couple of streets south for a fish restaurant I have heard about where we take a seat and try to calm down and are served the best John Dory I’ve ever eaten, entertained by the jocular owner till we find ourselves in a good mood again, in spite of our sobriety.

Strolling afterwards, the door to Dean’s is just a little too dark to be inviting. I suggest another pilgrimage: the Tanger Inn, where the likes of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg took a drink, and which in subsequent years became a knocking shop frequented by middle aged men with a taste for Moroccan boys. They’ve gone now too but the bar remains a stop for the literary tourist in this wonderfully seedy city. Knowing I haven’t the faintest idea how to get there, K is sceptical.

“It’s a bit late,” she says, and she’s right. I would like to tick it off my list, though.

“Ok, but next time we go to the gay brothel, yes?”

“Yes, alright darling.”

In the morning, torrential rain. We’re lucky and avoid the worst of it, making our way downhill through the medina and to the port between two heavy downpours. The large windows of the domed port building frame Tangier. From here it is indeed a white city, from the heights of the kasbah on our right through the cascading old town and right along the corniche which crescents the bay to our left. They are building a marina here that will almost certainly transform the city, such is its scale. A new chapter, but I hope those marks of old Tangier, those traces, are not completely erased. The ferry pulls out and the water is jade green beneath a gun metal sky, smeared with rain showers out on the Strait.

The feathery touch of the late sun against worn sandstone blocks, almost physical, like a warm breath.

In a plazuela to the side of the Iglesia San Dionisio, overlooked by a virgen in ceramics, K’s glass of water casting a long shadow and splitting the light into a colour spectrum on the arm of her chair.

The wrought iron doorway of the meson, swung open, and the waitress’ white shirt that catches the sun as she stands there.

To the left of the door, a window covered in iron lattice and behind that, glass panes framed by dark wood.

All of it set into the heavy blocks and all of it softy brilliant in the slanted sun, dappled in the shadows of the orange trees as the last light shines like time itself, animating everything.

Our table, which I thought messy at first and almost avoided till I saw that the others were the same, in fact strewn with fragile white stamen, fallen from the orange blossom overhead. The air sweet and heady with its perfume.

Hello again, Jerez.

The little plazuela is three-sided, opening up onto the larger Plaza de la Asunción with its weather-beaten but wonderful old cabildo – the 16th century town hall that functions as a library and museum today. There are a few people around this late Saturday afternoon but, as always in Jerez, it is quiet and uncrowded – the city is dappled with its own population the same way our table is with spots of sunlight.

We are a little blissed-out, having spent the afternoon in the warm waters, and hot waters, and cold waters, of a hammam: low-lit luxury, dim spaces and illuminated, perfumed pools. Obligatory Arab music and Moroccan lamps. Mint tea. I’m usually reluctant but, also usually, enjoy myself. K is made for it. There must be some oriental blood in her somewhere – the moment she sets foot in a hammam she looks like she’s come home. She saunters, she lolls, she lounges and floats, a look on her face like she’s about to break a prince’s heart, or order someone’s head on a stick whilst helping herself to a complimentary pastry.

She’s lovely, in the water.

I, on the other hand, come into my own in the bar. It’s a little early – as I sit in the square and look up at a stork on one of the rooftops that seems impossibly still until I realise it’s a fake – to launch an attack on the city’s tabancos, but pretty soon that’s exactly what we’ll do. A meandering series of olorosos, amontillados and palo cortados in the barrel rooms of the city, ending with a hazy few in San Pablo, K sitting at a table and watching my back as I stand at the bar and tuck into some tapas, under the impression that she’s gone to the bathroom and oblivious to her presence behind me. When she finally calls my name and asks what I think I’m doing, I bring the leftovers to her. It’s that end of the evening.

In the morning, through the thin walls of our hostal, we hear a guest clear his throat. For ninety minutes. I say clear his throat – it sounds more like the suicide attempt of a man who, finding nothing sharp to hand and not being in possession of a viable quantity of narcotics, has embarked on a spirited attempt to cough himself to death. It soon becomes clear, to us at least, that he’s made a poor choice and will not succeed, but say what you like about this guy – he’s no quitter.

I say cough, but the word does no justice to the violence of the noise that cracks into our room like the thong of a phlegm-soaked whip. I feel as though I and the lower reaches of this man’s oesophagus are really getting to know each other. Although a light hangover keeps us horizontal for a little while, in the end it’s too much and we dress quickly, heading out for a tostada on the Arenal.

On the square the morning light is just as soft and the shadows just as long as they were the previous afternoon by the church, but the air is fresher and the shadows cooler. There is the lulling rush of the huge fountain, a deep blue sky that heralds the first summery day of the year, the palm trees perky, the orange trees well-groomed and the odd stroller dapper in Franco-era Sunday best: sharply creased slacks, handkerchiefs that peep out of blazer pockets, waxed hair, shiny shoes and the like.

Pigeons on the black iron lamps.

After breakfast we walk down to the Sunday market, held each week below the ramparts of the Alcazar, where we always come across something noteworthy. This time it’s pottery – amidst all the broken dolls, old vinyl, antique furniture and general tat, we come across a gypsy woman selling incense and little nazareno-shaped burners. I buy a packet of charcoal from her too and she adds it all up incorrectly, overcharging us by fifty cent. It’s an honest error – she’s done it all out loud and simply made a mistake, but we don’t point it out to her, either because we’re slow to notice or because she looks like she could snap me in two, absent-mindedly.

On the other side of the Moorish fortifications – it’s too early in the year for the intervening avenue of jacarandas to burst with their blue blossom – is an art market, usually attended by a jerezano artist we like and who has a very distinctive, child-like style. For a pauper who lives in a rental with limited wall space, I buy too many pictures, but I can’t help myself this morning; I want to take some of all this beauty away with me. I choose an uncharacteristically conventional sketch of the city of Cádiz and almost certainly pay less than it’s worth.

It might seem contrary to eschew the style that attracted us to him in the first place, and equally so to take a picture of Cádiz home from a visit to Jerez, but then that’s what we love so much about the place – we’ve made it our own each time we’ve come, done our own thing. The bodegas, the horses, the feria – those things are emblematic of a city that is too rich to be defined by them. The real attraction here is more difficult to pin down. Tiene algo más. Tiene alma. I find myself resorting to contradictions in an effort to describe what draws us here – soporific but stimulating, shabby but elegant, full of music and boom-voiced cantadores, but quiet.

Dusty and dry but soaked in wine, and always cleansing.

Until the Arabs came, this was the end of the world. Everything to the west was monsters and mystery; everything to the south was sultry, secretive and uncivilised. To the Syrians and their Berber hordes it became a new frontier, and a potential route to the domination of Europe, but until that moment, for the people they were about to conquer, it was the edge of the known. For some it still is of course – Europeans are in plentiful supply who would willingly go no further.

Sitting on a bus and looking at the back of someone’s head can be a bracing business; we never see the back of our own heads and it’s probably just as well – this evening’s guy has hair cropped short with salt and pepper flecks and a line of imperfections along the rim of his ear (spots or old wounds of some sort) that he continually rubs and picks at. He has a way of sneezing that makes me wince even though he’s doing it in the opposite direction: a series of near silent convulsions after which he checks his hands, his jacket and the window for mucous. My hand’s been resting on the miserly ledge at the bottom of my window and just behind his seat; I pull it back a little and breath as shallowly as I can, impatient to get off and suddenly conscious that a blemish at the back of my own ear may be disgusting someone at this very moment, grey hairs involuntarily counted, greasy collar disapproved of.

But it isn’t a journey I would willingly cut short. For one thing, it’s the way home and I’d like to get there. For another, the daily drive gives me time to look and think. I’ve written about the circuits I take on foot around Tarifa and how they have become externalised thought processes for me. This is the wheeled version – the spectacular bus ride from home to work and work to home which I’ve taken so many times now it has to be hard-wired in me – a permanent impression, retinal and synaptic, that formats my thought.

And what a format. Although the N340 from Algeciras to Tarifa begins by winding close to the Mediterranean coast – the Rock of Gibraltar and its African counterpart, Jebel Musa, in full view – the country here is distinctly Atlantic.  “Looks like Wicklow” is a running and presumably, for K, rather tiresome joke of mine. I say it whenever we lay eyes on some wild wonder. I said it in the Cares Gorge and, believe me, the Cares Gorge looks nothing like Wicklow. We’ve never visited the Grand Canyon but I’m pretty sure that if we did, I would turn to her and observe that it looked like Wicklow.

This place really does look like Wicklow though. Not even the high summer of southern Spain can bleach the green out of it. We never see the parched browns and charred, near black burn of Extremadura to the north or more easterly parts of Andalucia. It is wet and verdant and, particularly as the road rises through the village of Pelayo, misty. The continent tapers to an end in a series of streams and rivulets and the valleys they have carved out like ripples on the earth, tectonic folds in a ruffled green sheet.

At this time of year in particular the Wicklow comparison is apt – the slopes above and below the road are ablaze with swathes of the same yellow flowering gorse that lines the country roads of that county. It looks like some benevolent bushfire sweeping across the hills and valleys. Like coast roads everywhere, this one curves and dips, as does the land around it – up to the wind turbines that turn on the ridge and down to the wild shore, a good distance away from the elevated highway.

On the other side of the gleaming water the craggier outcrops and mountains of Morocco, almost black save for the wrinkles of Jebel Musa, which blush in the soft light of the setting sun. Cargo ships like bootless skates as they slip and slide along the Strait; some of them will turn left when they hit the open water, some right. The little old fincas that predate the road they can be seen from, snug in their long occupied spots like crumbs that have rolled and come to a stop where the fabric folds. The horned red cattle on the hillsides and the odd meadow speckled with snowy white wild flowers. The well-maintained little tracks that curl and thread their way on the seaward side, connecting the compounds and homesteads like draped ribbons.

As if I needed further reminder of my origins, the weather the following day, on my way back in the opposite direction is thoroughly Gaelic – which is to say mixed, and wet. Every fifty metres, in every direction, the light changes. I can see rain falling from nearby clouds in vertical shafts of dirty grey, curtains of water under a veiled sun. The clouds above me are a study in difference – difference in colour, in altitude, in shape and in speed.

The yellow gorse, the spots of rain and light, the windy bluster – a study in similarity, and in evoking the place where I started out in life, it underlines the circuitous route by which I have ended up here. As the road nears Tarifa in the evening, it gently descends and reveals the open Atlantic, the sun pinkening above it and the vast water gleaming. I have likened the view here (of two seas and two continents) before to a page in the atlas and, if I say so myself, it’s a good analogy. Quite apart from any journeys I may have undertaken, this little town at the end of the world has been on its own: gateway of the Arab empire, the key to Spain, Muslim outpost, Christian stronghold, backwater, fishing village, kitesurf resort. It has come a long way.

At the entrance to the town the bus passes a down-at-heel barrio of drab, shabby apartment blocks that have just this week been partial transformed. The first three blocks now sport spectacularly ornate artwork on their sidewalls. The four story spaces are filled with ornate Arab calligraphy and portraits of Muslim women. Cranes were brought in to assist the artists to complete their work. It is shocking and delightful, especially in such a hard-up neighbourhood, and was funded by something called the Foundation of the Three Cultures which is based in Cordoba and is dedicated to Spain’s Christian, Jewish and Muslim past.

Even now, more than thirteen hundred years since Tarif Ibn Malik landed here with his advance party, the culture he brought with him has the vitality left in it to contribute to the town’s culture. To the community. To brighten up a neighbourhood. Tarifa has indeed come a long way, but the ties remain. And so do mine. Life isn’t made of departures, or arrivals. It’s made of the ways that wind and turn (and twist and surprise) between them. And there is no point in subscribing to “always look ahead” or “stay true to your roots” simplifications – the traffic flows both ways.