Virtual Tangier: Paul Bowles

VIRTUAL TANGIER: Visions of the City

c. 1958 Paul Bowles: excerpts from "The Worlds of Tangier"

Beginning with the first day and continuing through all the years I have spent in Tangier, I have loved the white city that sits astride its hills, looking out across the Strait of Gibraltar to the mountains of Andalucia.

... This city has changed to such an extent since I first settled here in 1931 that if my strongest memories from that period were not inextricably connected with its climate and weather, I should no longer recognize it as the same place.

The air and the wind are really about all that is left. Tangier's strange warm air with the pockets of coolness in it even under the searing sun! One day the air is crystalline, so that the mountains of Spain stand out as is they were across the street; the next day it is like a luminous gas, so that even the freighters in the harbor below are made equivocal by its white glare. And the wind is present-- ech chergi -- the impossible levante that rushes in from the Mediterranean between the Pillars of Hercules with the force of a gale, and can keep blowing day after day without respite. These things are still here.

… There was a certain ramshackle unity in the architectural style twenty years ago, now there is none. The place is frankly hideous. It is like a piece of jewelry whose setting far outshines its stone. The blue sky, the blue sea and the blue mountains are still here, but the town, not blue now save for the houses of a few recalcitrant Moors, no longer complements their combined charm. Instead, like most things of today, it lies in unlovely defiance of the laws of nature and beauty... Its topography, more than anything else, I think, saves it.

The city is built along the crests and down the flanks of a series of small hills that stand between the sea on one side and a low slightly undulating plain on the other, with high mountains beyond. There are few level stretches in town; at the end of each street there is almost always a natural view, so that the eye automatically skims over that which is near at hand to dwell on a vignette of harbor with ships, or mountain ranges, or sea with distant coastline.

Then, the intensity of the sky, even when cloudy, is such that the lighting of these vistas is dramatic, often breathtaking, so that wherever one happens to be, the buildings serve only as an unnoticed frame for the natural beauty beyond. You don't look at the city, you look out of it.

The back streets of the Medina, crooked, sometimes leading through short tunnels beneath the houses, sometimes up long flights of stairs, lend themselves to solitary speculative walks. With nothing more dangerous than pedestrians and an occasional burro to worry about, bumping into, you can devote part of your mind to coming to grips with your ideas. Since I returned here in 1947 I have spent a good many hours wandering through these passageways (incidentally learning to distinguish the thoroughfares from the impasses) busily trying to determine the relationship between Tangier and myself. If you don't know why you like a thing, it is usually worth your while to find out.

I have not discovered very much, but at least I am now convinced that Tangier is a place where the past and the present exist simultaneously in proportionate degree, where a very much alive today is given an added depth of reality by the presence of an equally alive yesterday. In Europe, it seems to me, the past is largely fictitious; to be aware of it one must have previous knowledge of it. In Tangier the past is a physical reality as perceptible as the sunlight.

... I think it appeals particularly to those with a strong residue of infantilism in their character. There is an element of make-believe in the native life as seen from without (which is the only viewpoint from which we can ever see it, no matter how many years we may remain). It is a toy cosmos, whose costumed inhabitants are playing an eternal game of buying and selling… when you huddle or recline inside the miniature rooms of the homes you are immediately back in early childhood, playing house, an illusion which is not dispelled by the tiny tables and tea glasses, the gaudy cushions and the lack of other furniture. The beggars come by and sing outside the door, each one with his own little song, and the forgotten but suddenly familiar sensation of being far inside is complete.

… Such reactions, I have been told, are those of a person who refuses to grow up. If that is so, it is all right with me, to whom being child-like implies having retained the full use of the imagination. For imagination is essential for the enjoyment of a place like Tangier, where the details that meet the eye are not what they seem, but so many points of reference for a whole secret system of overlapping but wholly divergent worlds in the complex life of the city.

... A town, like a person, almost ceases to have face once you know it intimately, and visual modifications are skin-deep; the character is determined largely by its inhabitants, and a good deal of time is required to change their attitudes and behavior. Tangier can still be a fascinating place for the outsider who has the time and inclination to get acquainted with the people. The foreigner who live here on a long-term basis will still find most of the elements which endeared the pace to him in the old days, because he knows where to look for them. Tangier is still a small town in the sense that you literally cannot walk along a principal street without meeting a dozen of your friends with whom you must stop and chat…

... Certainly it is agreeable now and then to spend an evening reclining peaceably among piles of cushions in effortless talk with people who are completely natural but infinitely polite. And when the end of the evening comes, and they have fully convinced you that the occasion has been even more enjoyable for them than for you and you have pronounced the necessary formulas of farewell, it is delightful, too, to step out into the silent moonlit street

and a moment later look from a Casbah gateway down upon the thousands of white cubes which are the houses of the Medina, hearing only the waves as they break on the beach and perhaps the sleepy antiphonal crowing of two roosters on neighboring rooftops.

If I ask myself occasionally whether I may not be a trifle out of my mind to have chosen to spend so many years in this crazy city, at such moments that I am reassured -- easily able to convince myself that if it were 1931 once more, and I possessed the gift of accurately foretelling the future, I should very likely take Miss Stein's good advice and make my first journey to Tangier all over again.

Sources: 1. "The Worlds of Tangier", Holiday magazine (1958)

2. "Letter from Tangier", The Nation magazine (1954)

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