Comfort zones

It is good to leave your comfort zone; that is what someone told me when I said that having vowed never to go on a group trip again, I had signed up for a ten-day holiday along the Atlantic coast of Morocco. I had never wanted to go to Morocco before and am still not sure why I wanted to now. Perhaps it was the words “Atlantic Coast”, which reminded me of holidays in the West of Ireland: empty beaches, huge waves and the exhilarating feeling that the next bit of land was America. I have a collection of pieces of coral in a Wills Handy Cut Flake tobacco tin my grandfather gave me; it came from a so-called coral beach, not real coral I understand now, but I can still feel how painful it was to walk on in bare feet. Belmullet and Achill Island: these were wonderful places, wild and beautiful, now officially part of the “Wild Atlantic Way”, and probably a lot busier than when we were there. Sadly the Atlantic coast of Morocco, at least what I saw of it, was not wild at all, and very difficult to get at. One hotel advertised a beach, which turned out to be down a steep flight of concrete steps and behind a fence, too unattractive even to take a photo.

            The first problem was which travel books to read; everyone recommended Paul Bowles. I didn’t like him when I first read him, so I tried again and found him just as clichéed and pretentious as before. The film of The Sheltering Sky was slightly better than the book, thanks to the photography, and scenes of Tangier, where my trip was to begin. I read a book by someone doing up a house in Casablanca who was having trouble finding the right tiles, and I looked for Mohamed Choukri’s classic book Le pain nu (1980), translated into French by Tahar Ben Jelloun, then decided it would be good to buy a copy in the country itself. But just as I had been mistaken about the wild Atlantic coast, so it seemed that I was also deluded about travel literature about Morocco. Tangier sounded so romantic – the Beats, the expatriates – but their books were not inspiring. William Burroughs lived in Tangier for a time and wrote Naked Lunch there; I am never going to read that again. I didn’t know it at the time but the café in Tangier where we had lunch was where Burroughs used to buy drugs and find male prostitutes. This was not mentioned by the guide, but he did take us to a café, once patronised by rock groups, where a few kif smokers from central casting sat around in semi-darkness, considerately leaving the verandah for the tourists.

            I finally found a copy of Le pain nu, at a kiosk in Rabat; it is a pirated one, copied from the Seuil edition, with the bottom edges of the pages cut off. It is a powerful story, partly set in Tangier, which starts with the killing of the narrator’s brother by their father, but you wouldn’t call it travel literature. The real surprise didn’t come until I was home again, complaining about my Moroccan reading, and somebody mentioned Elias Canetti on Marrakesh. Long ago I read that Canetti had an affair with Iris Murdoch, during which he treated her very badly. This must have been in one of John Bayley’s books about her, and it is obviously not a good reason not to read him, or even actively to avoid him, but the result was that I had never read anything by him.

            Canetti’s book is a collection of short pieces, The Voices of Marrakesh: A Record of a Visit (1967). The English edition dates from 1978 and is now available as a Penguin Modern Classic. It makes up for all those other books on Morocco, all the non-existing ones that nobody was inspired to write; it is one of the best books of travel impressions that I have ever read. I spent two and a half days in Marrakesh, mostly trudging around behind a group of strangers, and how I envy Canetti, who was there for several weeks and was able to wander around alone. I saw some of the things and places he describes, and when I read him it is as if my eyes were closed when I was there, as if I had only been told that I saw them.

            He writes about camels (very upsetting), beggars, the souk, bargaining, everything, in a way that makes you see it differently. I am glad I read this book after my trip; otherwise I might have seen it all through Canetti’s eyes. As it is I know I didn’t see enough, but there is one chapter, “The Silent House and the Empty Rooftops”, which describes something that I did see as he did, very briefly. In a museum in Marrakesh I went up to the roof terrace; there was another staircase so I went up that too, and found myself alone, looking over the flat roofs of the city, in complete silence. I was no longer part of a group, was far from the unnerving bustle and people selling things in the alleys, looking out over a flat landscape in the sky. As Canetti writes, “You feel you could walk all over the city up there.” The Atlas Mountains were just visible in the distance, there were the tops of palm trees, the odd tower, the terrace was full of pink trumpet vine; it was all at eye level, it was the perfect view. So that was why I wanted to go to Morocco.