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Tangier
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Strai ght of Gi b ral tar
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wich in my belly and a camera in hand. As the ferry pulled southward, I stared portside toward the British enclave of Gibraltar, a bare rock of a peninsula on which I never set foot. Behind the boat, up the hill in front of a brick government building, the green and white stripes of the Andalusian flag flopped in a mild wind. The flag depicted a lion-skin clad Hercules with a club over his shoulder, two docile lions at his feet, and two white columns at his back. According to Greek myth, Hercules tore Iberia and North Africa apart leaving his two pillars, the rock of Gibraltar on one side and the Jebel Musa on the other. For the ancients, the pillars of Hercules marked the end of the known world. Sol grew up in Tangier. Spanish was her first language, but she spoke Arabic and French in the street. I think that she taught my father Arabic at home. One of my aunts in Rome told me that when he arrived in Italy after Sol’s death, he carried an Arabic grammar book full of elementary scribbles. The aunt who told me this, Lina, married Guiseppe’s brother after meeting him in Tangier. Lina’s family—joined by many other post World War II refugees— had fled Spain during the civil war of the 1930s and headed to Morocco.
A t l a n t i c O c e a n
Ceuta
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5
Gibraltar
e a n M e r a n d i t e r
10
S e a
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A post-Kerouac wave of thrill seekers had come to Tangier for decades, looking for exactly what the guides were selling.
Two hours later, the ferry pulled into the port of Tangier. Above the harbor, and to the right, the tight medina and its medieval walls hugged a slope caked in houses of mud and concrete. To the left, the new city extended behind the medina down the beach, stocked with hotels at every stage of construction: foundations flanked by cranes, iron skeletons clothed with scaffolding, shiny twenty storied buildings with neon signs, and derelict hulks ready for demolition. The Europeans hadn’t made it to the beach yet but dozens of little boys in swim suits teased the surf, running in zigzags, watched by mothers covered from head to toe in black, and fathers wearing suits in the hot sun. Near a sea wall protecting the harbor, small fishing boats with young men working plastic rods lay anchored, bobbing in the seawater. Once out of the port, I was mobbed by drug dealers and “guides,” walking scumbags who offered me everything from hotels to hash to whores. I hated the attention from the hawkers, but it was difficult to pass judgment. A post-Kerouac wave of thrill seekers had come to Tangier for decades, looking for exactly what the guides were selling. Like horseflies, they patrolled every inch along the main strip, the Avenue d’Espagne, so numerous and incessant that I couldn’t stop, let alone unfold a map, without being devoured. After twenty minutes of walking with my back to the sea, the hustlers disappeared. Yellow delivery trucks and old Mercedes cabs whipped by, slowing only for the giant roundabouts that fed into four or five connecting streets. Short wrinkled men dressed in brown and black djellabas sat on café patios drinking tea with their hoods down. Women walked wearing pink, black, blue or yellow hijabs in and out of electronics stores, butcher shops, and banks. Dust swirled as cars and trikes passed around fifty-foot wide Parisian roundabouts. I stopped at the first landmark that matched up to my cheap map, a bus station marked by a dirt patch and about a hundred young men dressed in tight European t-shirts carrying plastic bags, duffel bags, backpacks and boxes. I had strayed from the medina,
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gated the wide river, sending olive-oil as close as Italy and as far as Trader Joe’s. Outside the train station in Algeciras, streetlights broke the darkness of the night, illuminating grey apartment blocks. Disoriented in the dark, it took a while to find Hotel Lisboa, where I had booked a room the night before. The sounds of trucks on the highway and the illuminated cranes in the port reminded of other transit cities like El Paso, Juarez, Hong Kong and Shenzhen, where any number of things could happen. By noon the next day, I stood on the third deck of the ferry with a ham sand-
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n spring break, I left my study abroad program in Córdoba, Spain, and headed south by train towards Tangier, Morocco, the birthplace of my father Alberto and the former home of his parents, both of whom had died before I was born. Grandma Sol died from cancer in Tangier when my father was seven. By the time Grandpa Giuseppe died twenty years later, my father had followed him all the way to New York, only to leave home, become a hippie, and settle in the West. Armed with a map of the city’s walled medina, a small black ski-boot bag of clothes, and my tattered brown journal, my plan was to discover as much as I could about the African echoes of my family’s past. At best, I hoped to find a relative of my grandmother’s, her grave, or some other physical sign of her existence. At the very least, I yearned to walk the same street that my family had walked fifty years before. First, I’d have to spend a night in the small port town of Algeciras, which sent daily ferries across the strait of Gibraltar to Tangier. Preparing for the trip, I failed to recruit any of my fellow study-abroad students, or any Spanish students for that matter, who by then were lounging on the beaches of the Costa del Sol. I sat alone, reviewing my journal for the few clues that my father had told me. Grandma’s full name was Sol Pinto Attanasio, her parents were Albert and Sara Pinto. She had an October birthday (he didn’t know the day), and died in 1960. She gave birth to my father in Tangier’s Spanish Hospital. Grandpa Giuseppe had worked in the Italian consulate. The red Andalusian mesas and bluffs whisked past the train window. The dry hills reminded me of my home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Going south, the train approached the 35th degree of northern latitude which transects both Santa Fe and Tangier. Rows of irrigation ditches split valleys of the Andalusian Plain. Olive orchards paved the red hills with rows of sage green. In Spanish, ditches are called acequias, from the Arabic sāqiyah. The Guadalquivir River, which the train line followed, connected Spain’s olive-growing region to the Mediterranean Sea. Since Roman times, ships have navi-
Miles
and tried to get there without retracing my steps through the swarm of guides. A few hours and three miles later, I found myself on an undeveloped knoll of dirt and grass. Muslim graves scattered across this hill. Could one of these belong to Sol? I doubted it. As a Sephardic—an Iberian or North African Jew—her grave probably sat in a Jewish cemetery. Below, the south side of the medina looked inviting, its rock wall opening up at a bab—a large gate—through which donkeys, motorcycles and the occasional rusty Renault passed freely. The first break in the narrow road was the Petit Soco, the little market, a wide and uneven patch of cobblestone with shops running along the edges. At the café on the uphill side I ordered mint tea, sweetened with more honey than a bee hive. Later, my father told me that he had lived in an apartment above the Petit Soco, from which he watched a weekly donkey market. In Desolation Angels, Kerouac recounts a visit the same square, at the same time that my father lived there. He called it by the Spanish name, the Zoco Chico. “We’d just picked us up over desultory coffees in the Zoco Chico with a man in a red fez whom [Burroughs] confidently accused (to me) of causing hepatitis […]. With an old olive can, with a hole in it, another hole for the mouth, we stuffed raw red opium in the well hole and got it lit and inhaled huge blue gobs of opium smoke.” 15 19