Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah Read Online Free

pathos. I fell asleep again, wondering if I had dreamed it.
    In the morning, the receptionist assured me it had not been a dream. ‘It was a wedding,’ he said. ‘They were going to get the bride.’
    I went and sat with a coffee and a
pain au chocolat
at the Café de France, one of the best places from which to observe passing Tangerines. There were some oddities. A boy walked past who had a nose like Federigo da Montefeltro’s in the famous portrait. A respectably dressed woman in her forties, hurrying to an appointment, suddenly stopped to harangue a tree; then, as suddenly, she looked at her watch, muttered something and was off like the White Rabbit. I suppose I was looking for a reincarnation of the untravelled IB; but if he passed by, he was disguised by the shades and Latinate haircut that seemed
de rigueur
for younger Moroccan men. The girls too, even if they dressed less anatomically than for their evening promenade, looked no different from girls on the other side of the Mediterranean . Morocco, however, had not been entirely expunged from the place de France, and morning brought out the older generation – a few men in burnouses, and women on their way to market, wearing the red-and-white striped stuff of the Rif and topped by straw hats bearing a heavy crop of pompoms. But in this overwhelmingly European setting they somehow managed to look alien, as Morris men might on Oxford Street. I spotted some other picturesque characters: a stray from Woodstock in a shocking pink T-shirt, beads and a white beard of the sort that only Victorian clergymen and very ancient hippies can grow; and, on the arm of a dapper Moroccan who had clearly once been handsome, a large and elderly Englishman from within whose carapace of summer-weight tweed an Audenesque head moved slowly, periscopically, as if he were a turtle on a constitutional. It seemed that even the recent past, the Tangier of International Zone days, was all but extinct. What chance had I, then, of finding the Tangier of IB? Wherever it was, it was not here on the place de France. I paid for my breakfast and went to look for the tomb.
    For many Muslims, tomb visiting is something to be done regularly, like changing the oil in a car: it ensures the smooth running of history. History being people rather than artefacts, IB and other travellers headed for tombs in the places they visited as we might head for art galleries. The deceased, for their part, need human contact as much as the living. A Maghribi traveller who settled in Yemen never ceased to dwell guiltily on his family’s tombs lying unvisited back in Morocco, for ‘the dead feel pain if separated from their living relatives’; IB’s contemporary Ibn Khaldun wrote that the dead have sense perception, and that a dead man ‘sees the persons who attend the burial and hears what they say, and he hears the tapping of their shoes when they forsake him’. The idea of burning one’s dead is still considered extraordinary. I have not yet admitted to my Muslim friends that I forked my father’s ashes into a Lincolnshire flowerbed.
    To translate oneself from
ville
to
madinah
, passing through the press of the Grand and Petit Soccos into Tangier proper, is to enter, if not another planet, then at least another continent. The street map I had resembled the biopsy of some many-vesicled organ and was next to useless. Besides, I didn’t know precisely where I was going. I headed upwards. Here, the light was different, diffusing off peeling walls of rose madder and primrose. The smell was different too, and there was an odour of long habitation, of centuries of simmering
tajines
.

    At the top of the climb I reached a gateway. Inside it a dwarf was sitting on the step of a small shop. I asked him where I was. ‘This is Bab al-Asa, the Gate of the Stick. It’s where they used to flog people. Like this!’ he said, springing up and wielding an imaginary birch. When he had exhausted himself, I explained that I was