what I had a whole lot more of than money, left my address and went away.
Most of Tangier, south and east of the darse and its warehouses, is fronted by a fine, white, wide curving beach. Because the beach is in the bay and protected in large part by the breakwater it hasn’t much to offer in the way of surf. But it’s a fine place to paddle around, sun yourself and watch the coming-out parties. In Morocco, which was then and still is now to an extent a French protectorate (read Tangier for Morocco here, since they should have been and were in time integrated), at least half of the women you see in the street are Moslem. They dress universally in a long enveloping blue-gray hooded haik, with a litham, face-veil, concealing the lower part of the face; everything hidden from view but the eyes and the upper part of the nose. They remind you of a Pullman sleeper after the berths have been made up for the night, all curtains except for the eyes peering at you through the slits. The color of the curtains doesn’t vary much, although the quality of the material going into them may, and you can sometimes guess something, not much, about the wearer’s social status by her shoes if you catch a glimpse of them under the draperies. But walking toward one of those animated duffle-bags on the street you can’t tell from thirty feet out if she’s one of the Sultan’s wives out for a stroll or a poule who will pitch at you as you pass with, ” ‘Allo, bébé. Feefty dirhams, eh?”
Guessing the quality of the goods beneath the draperies is even more difficult, although provocative in its way. When one of the bundles came down to the beach to swim or sun itself, as happened with fair frequency, it drew the attention of all eyes as soon as it stepped on the sand. The litham always came off first, and was carefully furled. Next, the hood of the haik would be thrown back, so you could have a look at the face. Then, as the world watched and waited with bated breath, the duffle-bag would bend over, grab the bottom hem of itself and lift the curtain on the final act. It was something of a striptease, something like the unveiling of a monument. What usually emerged from under the yardgoods, on the beach that is, was not much. Moroccan women tend toward dumpiness and spread, a combination without eye-appeal even when wrapped in the French bikinis many of them wore when they got down that far. Besides, when you have cased the whole Cote d’Azur on the half-shell during the summer season, you are inclined to be a bit choosy about what you elect to look at. I was saving my eyesight for something worth the effort.
When it came, it was well worth the wait. The French say, Il faut de toutes sortes pour faire un monde, and that’s what populated the laissez-vivre monde of Tangier back in the good old bad days; toutes sortes. Rich men, poor men, beggarmen, thieves and, naturally, a fair population of swindlers. I was still an apprentice, and on my uppers besides, but there were pros working in and out of Tangier who could have sold the White House to the President of the United
States for cash. You had to keep your guard up at all times, even on your uppers, because you never knew how or when you were going to be roped.
One morning I was sitting on the beach feeling depressed and downtrodden because I was almost out of money and faced the dreary prospect of going to work if I wanted to continue eating. At the same time I felt pleased with myself because of a newspaper squib I had seen that morning reporting the arrest, in Antibes, of a gang of escrocs headed by one Albert Bernard, ancien agent de police. As he had said, the greedier you get, the dumber it makes you. While I was congratulating myself on my own superior intelligence for having pulled out before it was too late, Boda rose on my horizon. For the time being I lost all interest in other things.
She was wearing a kind of loose beach-robe when I first saw her. I think the cops must
Most of Tangier, south and east of the darse and its warehouses, is fronted by a fine, white, wide curving beach. Because the beach is in the bay and protected in large part by the breakwater it hasn’t much to offer in the way of surf. But it’s a fine place to paddle around, sun yourself and watch the coming-out parties. In Morocco, which was then and still is now to an extent a French protectorate (read Tangier for Morocco here, since they should have been and were in time integrated), at least half of the women you see in the street are Moslem. They dress universally in a long enveloping blue-gray hooded haik, with a litham, face-veil, concealing the lower part of the face; everything hidden from view but the eyes and the upper part of the nose. They remind you of a Pullman sleeper after the berths have been made up for the night, all curtains except for the eyes peering at you through the slits. The color of the curtains doesn’t vary much, although the quality of the material going into them may, and you can sometimes guess something, not much, about the wearer’s social status by her shoes if you catch a glimpse of them under the draperies. But walking toward one of those animated duffle-bags on the street you can’t tell from thirty feet out if she’s one of the Sultan’s wives out for a stroll or a poule who will pitch at you as you pass with, ” ‘Allo, bébé. Feefty dirhams, eh?”
Guessing the quality of the goods beneath the draperies is even more difficult, although provocative in its way. When one of the bundles came down to the beach to swim or sun itself, as happened with fair frequency, it drew the attention of all eyes as soon as it stepped on the sand. The litham always came off first, and was carefully furled. Next, the hood of the haik would be thrown back, so you could have a look at the face. Then, as the world watched and waited with bated breath, the duffle-bag would bend over, grab the bottom hem of itself and lift the curtain on the final act. It was something of a striptease, something like the unveiling of a monument. What usually emerged from under the yardgoods, on the beach that is, was not much. Moroccan women tend toward dumpiness and spread, a combination without eye-appeal even when wrapped in the French bikinis many of them wore when they got down that far. Besides, when you have cased the whole Cote d’Azur on the half-shell during the summer season, you are inclined to be a bit choosy about what you elect to look at. I was saving my eyesight for something worth the effort.
When it came, it was well worth the wait. The French say, Il faut de toutes sortes pour faire un monde, and that’s what populated the laissez-vivre monde of Tangier back in the good old bad days; toutes sortes. Rich men, poor men, beggarmen, thieves and, naturally, a fair population of swindlers. I was still an apprentice, and on my uppers besides, but there were pros working in and out of Tangier who could have sold the White House to the President of the United
States for cash. You had to keep your guard up at all times, even on your uppers, because you never knew how or when you were going to be roped.
One morning I was sitting on the beach feeling depressed and downtrodden because I was almost out of money and faced the dreary prospect of going to work if I wanted to continue eating. At the same time I felt pleased with myself because of a newspaper squib I had seen that morning reporting the arrest, in Antibes, of a gang of escrocs headed by one Albert Bernard, ancien agent de police. As he had said, the greedier you get, the dumber it makes you. While I was congratulating myself on my own superior intelligence for having pulled out before it was too late, Boda rose on my horizon. For the time being I lost all interest in other things.
She was wearing a kind of loose beach-robe when I first saw her. I think the cops must
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