‘You are contemptuous of these barbaric laws and traditions. But imagine coming to 13th-century France and deciding that chivalry, old-fashioned and primitive, should be done away with. Like it or not you have destroyed their only ethic, since the one you offer in exchange is to them no more than an aspect of an alien rule they already resent.’
Lieutenant Fromental protested at this: ‘El Glaoui is a true friend of the French.’
‘Because friendship with the French is all that sustains his rule. He has made his decisions and knows he must follow them through. I am not accusing our host of lack of courage, sir! But Moorish chivalry is dying, too, believe me. Were the French to go tomorrow they would leave behind a ruined myth - a bewildered monster. They do not ask for theories of democracy. They should be offered what those theories are based on. And that, I believe, is the Christian religion or something very much like it. In exchange for their freedom you are offering these people a modern philosophy that is at least three hundred years ahead of their needs.’ I think Graf Otto was expressing some of that fashionable paganism which brought Weimar to its knees, but he was of a fine old tolerant South German stock and I later found it very difficult to believe he was guilty of those crimes. He was interested in Kolya’s theories about Wagner, whom he called ‘the great modern genius’. ‘I should like to talk to your Russian prince,’ he said. I told him that it was quite likely he would. Kolya could even now be on his way to Morocco, although Fate might also have taken him into some more remote region of the Muslim world.
‘Wagner is the future,’ declared Count Schmaltz. ‘These gleamingly finished innovations! They turn with such novel precision, like highly-finished movements in some massively complex machine. It is the sublime music for the twentieth century. Strauss and Mahler are mere flounderers, desperately presenting us with novelties and cacophony rather than substance and sublime melody.’
‘The light so bright and the shade so black!’ exclaimed Fromental. ‘Oh, those inspired vulgarities!’ And he laughed admiringly. He had a Frenchman’s traditional suspicion of German seriousness.
‘You are an opponent of imperialism, I take it.’ His attitude towards Count Schmaltz was rather challenging. We all knew that Schmaltz had an East African family whom he planned to visit after he left Marrakech. ‘Would you rather have French influence here, my dear Count, or the kind of barbarism which existed throughout this century before we arrived?’
‘We were not comparing benign foreign imperialism to savage tribalism,’ declared the German. ‘I would agree, the first permits at least a modicum of opposition while feudalism permits none. But those are not the only choices. That is my point.’
‘You think, do you old boy, the weaker Power should be permitted to determine with which strong Power it links its destiny?’ Mr Weeks’s favourite argument held that, given the choice, most countries outside Europe, including America, would prefer to live under the amiable protection of the Union flag. Indeed he had some notion of a Pax Britannica which would dominate the globe by means of gigantic airships, expanding trade, increasing the wealth of all who elected to join his great Commonwealth of Nations. He saw his country’s Empire as the core of a new World Order, making justice and peace available to all. While I had every affection for his optimistic dream I could not see it becoming a reality without invoking the power of Christ, and Mr Weeks, among many other quirks of character, attested to a firm and old-fashioned atheism. Frequently other guests (who visited for a week or two and were often clearly no more than anecdote-hunters who would use their exotic experience as after-dinner topics for the next ten or twenty years) would grow vehement with what they considered Mr Weeks’s socialism, but in fact he called himself a syndicalist and based his particular creed on the work of that droning naturist William Morris, who insisted on working naked in his Oxford carpentry shop in imitation of his hero Blake. Both thought they could build the New Jerusalem upon interminable verse with an artist’s palette and a couple of dovetail joints. Mr Weeks quarrelled only with the PreRaphaelite’s muscular Protestantism, but excused him for it on the grounds of being born too early. I can see the madman now, with his great bottom shining over the limewashed table, those mighty genitals, which made him they said such a Tarzan to his Jane, swinging with manly insouciance above the falling shavings as he tackles another sideboard with his ever-accurate awl! I am no denigrator of Morris as a furniture-maker, nor as a decorator. More than once Mrs Cornelius had said how much she fancied his wallpaper, but it is too expensive, even from Sanderson’s. G. K. Chesterton was another disciple of that hearty Victorian visionary and came to promote his views through a newspaper he founded. I saw nothing wrong with his ideas, any more than with Mr Weeks’s, but they were as flawed by Catholicism as Weeks’s were flawed by apostasy. These days such large men become transvestites. They are never content.
There is a considerable similarity between working for a Moroccan Pasha and a Hollywood Mogul. Both have a tendency to keep you waiting for hours, sometimes months. Both are inclined to change their minds rather more often than they change their undershirts and always find it surprising that you should fail to anticipate their every momentary whim (which usually involved dismantling anything which has already been created). Your master also provides a rich but erratic flow of money, which makes it impossible for you to make long-term plans and puts you permanently at his disposal. He wishes you to socialise with him, to become his confidant when, at three in the morning, he has become bored with his latest sexual conquest. On other occasions you can expect him to pass you by without even recognising you. You are no more than a shadow-player in his complicated vanities. Like one of his women or boys, you are merely something to pass the time with. And yet, while you remain in his favour, you are invested by him with considerable power of your own. Much of his authority becomes yours even though to him you are no more nor less useful and worthy of affection than a good gun-dog. My latest patron was, I had to admit, somewhat more tolerant than most tyrants of human weakness, and so weary was I of my ordeal I grew very swiftly to welcome the opulence, to rest at last under the patronage of the Pasha. I came to take as natural the power and the immediate security of my position at the Pasha’s court, just as I had come to take Hollywood for granted. Indeed I might have been in Hollywood when I awoke in the morning to stand on my balcony and look through tall palms, across Moorish roofs and battlements, past the towers of the muezzin to the mountains. Why should I not give up a few months of my life to this wonderful venture? I had no great reason to rush back to America. I drank sherbet. I read books. What else could I do?
A few days after I had arrived I again buttonholed Mr Mix. This time I put my hand over his lens and humorously warned him that I should do this every time I saw him unless he came to my room at Le Transatlantique that evening. He agreed with the quick, unthinking air of a boy not used to following his own desires. ‘I’ll be there. Now let me go, Max.’ But he was reluctant, disturbed. He seemed fatigued, almost maniacally distracted. For the first day or two I had been given quarters in the Pasha’s palace, one of several small buildings adjacent to the courtyard housing honoured guests or high-ranking officials. All were built of the same salmon-coloured piste, with green tiled roofs, and their windows looking only inward, like every traditionally built house in the part of Marrakech they were beginning to call ‘the Medina’, meaning ‘Old City’. The new French administrators and merchants raised themselves fine mansions beyond the walls. Some of these, save for their distinctive colours, could have graced any provincial street from Brussels to Barcelona. Whatever its benefits, imperialism also has a knack for banality.
I was now staying as the Pasha’s guest at the only reasonable hotel in Marrakech, Le Transatlantique, in honour, I think, of the Americans who had begun to find the new colony safe at last for a daring fling at the mysterious East. Americans will go anywhere so long as it has familiar toilet facilities. The first action of any nation wishing to attract US dollars is
to order its porcelain from Thomas Crapper and Sons, the great originals. Thus Britain, too, benefits from her new master’s psychology. ‘Without the Americans,’ says the plumber in the pub (they call him ‘Flash’ Gordon), ‘the British toilet industry would be down the drain.’ He has no other range of metaphor. ‘Once the Japanese dribble in, it’ll pull the plug on Staffordshire,’ he predicts. His politics are crass. He once said that people like me were blocking the sewer of history. If so, it’s because history can’t afford to call you out, I told him. These plumbers are all the same. They are famous throughout the world. Mention frustration to a Berliner and he will speak of plumbers, mention extortionate bills and the Bombay brahmin will cry ‘plumber’. In Cairo the plumber is a term applied to any bloodsucker or blackmailer while in Sydney to ‘sink a plumber’ means to get your own back. Muscovites, even today, cite the plumber as the example of the vulgar nouveaux riches now rubbing shoulders in the same apartment blocks with academics and engineers! ‘And you have the nerve,’ I cry to Gordon, ‘to accuse me of exploitation!’ The plumbing at Le Transatlantique near the Mammounia Gardens left something to be desired (although it was of the European rather than the Turkish type) since the water frequently had to be turned off for mysterious reasons. However, I was able to take regular showers and use Western soap and this, just then, was luxury enough. Even the most thoroughly hospitable desert peoples tend to be parsimonious around water - unless they are of that type which delights in spectacular waste. Mrs Cornelius had a cleaning job with an Arab once. Everywhere in the house there was a tap, she said, it was running full-blast. He loved the sound of it above all other music, he said, and it was costing him nothing!
Mr Mix came to see me at my suite on the top floor of Le Transatlantique. From my balcony it was possible to look out into the warmth of the summer night, at the natural geometry of palmeries and distant mountains beneath the diamond stars and the golden moon. My valet having gone to bed, I opened the door for Mix myself. My whole suite was furnished in that opulent Moorish style found elsewhere only in restaurants, with a profusion of slippery leather and wood saddles no self-respecting camel would allow on her back and upon which no rider could keep a seat. Mr Mix stepped in and closed the mirrored door behind him. He was wearing his big bush hat and khaki tropical kit. He removed his hat and accepted the sherbet I offered him (I had yet to redevelop my taste for alcohol and only drank it for social reasons). He asked immediately if I had any ‘snow’ and I said I had a little. I could spare him a sniff or two. He was grateful and became immediately human. He apologised. ‘I’ve had to give you the ice, Max. The Pasha doesn’t like his boys having conflicting loyalties. But now you’re on the team I guess it’s okay. I’ll tell you this fast, Max, I’m in a jam and I want to get out of here. I’m in hock to the Pasha and I’m working off my debt to him.’
Now I understood immediately and was overcome with sympathy. ‘Mr Mix! You are buying yourself back! So you were, after all, captured by slavers!’
He seemed embarrassed. ‘Not exactly, Max.’ He leaned forward in his leather settee, found purchase and steadied himself as he lowered his nose to the straw and the straw to the little ribbon of cocaine I had laid out for him.
‘It’s a long story,’ he said. ‘But after I jumped ship at Casablanca I had this idea of riding the train up as far as here and then seeing what happened.’
‘You were not captured by gypsies?’
‘Those guys. They’re bums. They tried to rob me. No, I bought a ticket and boarded a train, first class, all my stuff in the luggage wagon. A compartment to myself once I got the idea I had to slip the right number of francs to the right people. Only it went to Rabat. I awoke still looking out at the Atlantic Ocean! Then, before I could get off, it went to Fez. Well, on the train to Fez I met an Algerian entertainment promoter. He fixed it for local acts to entertain the tourists, that kind of thing, but he also ran a couple of burlesque theatres in Tangier. He was planning to open two more in Casablanca and another one in Marrakech.’
‘He offered you the chance you’d always wanted to act,’ I said. ‘How could you refuse? What was it - some sort of coon number? Your dancing skills alone - ‘
He lifted a tired hand which begged me not to interrupt. ‘We came to a deal. It seemed good to me since it would give me control of the Marrakech theatre. I’d begun to figure out that Africa wasn’t going to be a whole lot different to America. Nobody welcomed me as a long-lost brother. They just wanted to know why I’d been fool enough to leave and how much dough I’d brought with me. Mainly it was like Valentino said when he got back to the States - “In the world, I was a hero, in Italy, I was just another wop.” Here, I’m just another nigger - and in Tangier that means about what it means in Tennessee. So I’m cheated blind by my business partner who is about to get hold of my stock in the company and I decide to get the hell out of there and come to Marrakech myself where I’d heard the boss was almost a nigger and it was possible for a gentleman of colour to get along better than in the North. So I finally got there, overland, making a little money as I went. By the time I arrived three months ago I had enough to open The Ciné Palace in what used to be an old slaughterhouse off Djema al Fna’a near the Katoubia Mosque. It was all remodelled. Believe me, Max, it’s the ritziest little theatre outside Casablanca. We opened in June and business boomed. I’m not kidding you, Max, we had to have big buck Berber hillmen to keep those boys out. I’ve seen the alternatives. Believe me, Ace Among Aces beats snake-charmers and the two-thousandth re-telling of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. These boys’ll pay good money to see a movie. Any movie! It doesn’t matter a damn what the moulas say, they go anyway. All I had to do was square a couple of the big religious guys and make sure we scheduled the programmes between prayers. That’s five shows a day, morning till night, seven days a week, and every one packed. The same guys came back show after show. These people don’t believe they’ve got the best out of a story unless they’ve heard it told a hundred times. They never got tired of the programmes!’
It had begun to dawn on me that the reason for my reception as we entered the city, indeed the alacrity with which the Pasha put his aeroplane scheme to me, all had something to do with Mr Mix’s business venture. But why was my old compañero now forced to work off a debt to the Pasha?
Jerusalem Commands - [Between the Wars 03] Page 57
