A Single Swallow

by Horatio Clare

  My friend’s godfather, one of our teachers, had died. He had been ill with cancer and had fought it, refusing to submit or be daunted by it, right up to the end. A proud South African so naturalised by his work and life to Wales that he actually supported the red shirts when they played the green, he had been in the stadium for the Grand Slam win, and had had, my friend said, a wonderful day. It seemed mad, somehow, but it was absolutely fitting, too. My friend was coming out anyway.

  ‘He would want me to,’ he said. ‘I was talking about it to him the other day and he was excited for us. He told me a great story about Brazzaville.’

  I could hear the shake in my friend’s voice and I fought to keep tears out of mine. His godfather had been my tutor at school; he was wise and dry and loathed pomposity and received wisdom: he did a fine line in pithy truth. But there is a hierarchy to grief, as to love; it seemed, absurdly, not to be right to cry if my friend was not. So we controlled it, and said we would see each other soon.

  And so arrival in the ochre Marrakechi twilight was not a delight, but a mourning march. My bag never felt so heavy. To save money I determined to walk to a place where I had stayed before; because I was tired I took a short-cut. An hour later I was still making an arse of myself pretending not to be lost. A teenager rescued me and was disappointed with the tip. No one, it seemed, did favours for anyone any more. The line from the rai song kept running through my head:

  ‘C’est payant, Monsieur, c’est payant . . .’

  Even after my guide left I was still lost, because he peeled away while still some distance from the square, saying the police would bust him if they saw us together.

  Finding the place, I obtained a room I could not quite afford. I was resolved not to have my friend arrive to find that we were strapped for cash, having already placed a specific and expensive duty-free order with him, and feeling that it would be wrong for him to spend his holiday worrying about my pennies as well as his own. I suppose what was coming took on something of the complexion of a wake. Sometimes the death welled up inside me, but most of the time I buried it in the life of the streets, the skies, and the bars.

  Marrakech was terribly changed. An ugly red tile had entirely colonised the great square, the Jamaa el Fna, like an algae, and spread into the alleys and passageways of the medina. There were neon signs on buildings. There were more of us, with our wallets, and somehow, fewer of them, with their wares, than before. As we thronged the balconies, to watch the famous twilight thickening with the call of the muezzin around the lighting of the lamps, it seemed that we gazed on more of ourselves than perhaps we would wish to see. At rooftop level the change was arresting.

  The rooftops of Marrakech are a world apart. As well as offering air and space and beauty, they are a social and political refuge; traditionally, the roof was woman’s place. Risking gossip, admiration and no doubt the scourge of the self-righteous every time she left the house, a woman was at least free to feel in possession of herself on her husband’s roof. And, as is only fair, they are the best place to be. Because they were woman’s place, it is the height of bad manners to stare onto someone else’s rooftop. However, because the view is a rosy and sandy honeycomb of different heights and colours, shapes and angles, pots and screens, antennae and tables, washing and plants, birds and minarets, and little half-heard, half-glanced-at scenes of domestic life, it is impossible not to peep. So although you may see, you certainly do not look. You may well be glimpsed but essentially you are invisible. You are in miraculous privacy in an effectively public place.

  It was very difficult not to see people, everywhere. At first I was alarmed by it. Just two levels above my own and one roof across I could see the backs, shoulders and occasionally heads of a large mixed group from Europe, Israel and North America, by their accents. On another, about 40 yards away, were some fellow Brits. We are famously easy to spot, at least to other Brits, and for a long time we thought we had a monopoly on the English Season, as they used to call the spring in Marrakech. Now, they said, it was an all-year-round international season. Here and there and here and there, there were more visitors on rooftops.

  ‘We have high season and very high season,’ someone explained, with a weary grin.

  ‘It’s hopeless,’ said someone else. ‘We’ve moved to Fez.’

  Like many of the riads, the one I stood on was owned by a Frenchman. With the introduction of the euro a great many of France’s undeclared francs were said to have poured into Marrakech. Like me, many of the United Kingdom’s journalists and travel writers – no doubt America’s and Europe’s too – hammered out pieces about coming here, staying here, buying here, living here, or at the very least, transporting something of the city’s style, aesthetic, cuisine, art or artefact back home. I have only seen two flight-paths to compare with the congestion on the way into Marrakech Menara: Barcelona and Heathrow.

  But no one who loves birds will ever be unhappy for long in Marrakech. Its rooftops are a wonderful world in which to birdwatch. Not only are you engaged in one of the most sunny, lofty versions of the great human pastime – part worship, part contemplation – that is ornithology, it also is perfectly possible to do it flat on your back on a sun-lounger with a glass of mint tea to hand.

  Between the walls of the Bahia palace and the ramparts above the Bab Rehmat cemetery two falcons were in residence. They had a couple of royal palms to perch in, the Andalusian gardens of the Bahia at their feet and miles of tombs and walls to hunt over. They made a lot of noise, at certain times of the day – Kek-kek-kekekekeK! – at other times they were silent; soaring in soft ellipses over the roofs. Below, among and sometimes beside them were the swifts. ‘Our’ swifts (European Swifts), Pallid Swifts and most of all, Little Swifts, in wheeling crowds of hundreds. For three days, all I really did was worship swifts. But over to the north-east of me, above the Qadi Ayad mosque and the Bab Ailen, were storks, White Storks, and it is easy to be bewitched by them.

  A Berber story says they are simply men and women who have taken the form of birds in order to see the world. There is a variation about a woman called Ayasha who left her children to go to Europe, to work at whatever she could for whatever she could get, to make money for her family back in Marrakech. (As is sometimes the way, she was able to obtain the work permits and provide the bank statements her husband simply could not raise.) He missed her so much, and stared at the storks on the royal palace so long, that he became one, too. He took to the air, crossed the great plain, the wide sea and the vast swamp, and followed a mighty French river all the way to the house where she was living. He crashed into her garden, exhausted. And there she was. And there was a Frenchman, and there were children she had had with him. Ayasha took care of the stork, and the more she looked after him, the more she was reminded of Marrakech and the more she missed her husband, and the more the Frenchman loathed the bird. But he was a good-hearted man, or he cared for Ayasha more than anything, because for love of her he allowed the stork to do exactly as it wished in his house. One day, the stork flew back to Marrakech and resumed the shape of the husband. Returning to his house, he found a great pile of letters that he had watched Ayasha writing, telling him how much she missed him. Not long after that, Ayasha returned, with many presents from the north, and everyone was delighted to see her, her husband most of all. He forgave her adultery: indeed, he never had cause to mention it.

  I know this story because a famous Spanish story-teller told it to me; his name is Juan Goytisolo and he lives in Marrakech. (There is a better version of it in his book The Garden of Secrets.) He said you can now also hear it in the square, and he is very pleased about this, because it means that an ancient Berber tale, told by one to another, has become a written story in his hands, and has been published for the readers of the world. And since then, no doubt because his telling improved it, somehow it has become an oral story again, and is now told in the square, where stories have been told since the beginning of who knows when.

  Have you e
ver heard a stork sing? Nor have I. Have you seen one dance? Lucky you! But have you ever seen her fly? The wings are set far back; they are broad and strong. A beak halfway between a stiletto and a cutlass leads the way. And her long body and her legs are all held in perfect balance by that white neck, the absurdity that makes sense of it all. When a stork flies it is not that she is using the air to lift her, as so many birds do; it is more that she is using her weight and balance to stop herself being drawn up, and on up, and away.

  I lazed about on the roof, watching the falcons, writing up Algeria in my diary, and took siestas in the dark cool of my room in the afternoon. The engagement with the authorities who ran the riad had been swift, bullish and conclusive. For this extraordinary luxury, including wonderful breakfasts and occasional access to the internet, I was paying a fair price. The half-blind, half-paid woman in the kitchen/laundry below me became my friend, and taught me the Berber for swallow: tififeliste!

  Unlike many birds, swallows call on the wing, on their perches, when alarmed, when mobbing, when courting, when mating, and to one another in passing; perhaps it is another reason we mind about them: they are as talkative as us, and their conversation is as varied. They have a different call for all these occasions. Sometimes, it seems, they just chatter for the pleasure of it. The Berber name, tififeliste, is exactly as they sound, when in that sort of chatty mood. Tififeliste, ti-fi-fi-lisss-ti!

  Painstakingly, my friend wrote out a vocabulary list, with four keys to pronunciation, and tested me on it, her good eye shining hawkishly, whenever our paths crossed. It was much more fun being a language student than playing my usual role: guiltily tipping guest. I looked for swallows diligently but they were nowhere to be seen. Instead, the world above us belonged almost exclusively to swifts.

  Devil birds; flying cross-bows; devourers of wind-borne spiders which sleep on the wing and land only to breed, they are born to the air, to flight. Why do swift-lovers love swifts so? They will give you a dozen reasons. Why do we who love them all divide into swift people and swallow lovers? John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins gives a clue:

  Swift [OE] The etymological meaning of swift appears to be ‘moving along a course’; speed is a secondary development. It goes back ultimately to the pre-historic Germanic base *‘swei – swing, bend’, which also produced English sweep, swivel and the long-defunct swive, ‘copulate with’. Its use as a name for the fast-flying swallow-like bird dates from the 17th century.

  The seventeenth century: the age of civil war, revolution, Shakespeare, Milton, the King James Bible and the Copernican shift, when telescopes and astronomy put the sun at the centre of the then known universe, and moved the English and their God slightly to one side. The century of the English language itself: then it was that those of our ancestors who decided that all those swallows were not swallows at all, pointed up at the bands of screaming, keening faster-fliers, and said ‘These are swifts!’

  In English, at least, swallows are the establishment: swifts are the revolution.

  I saw ‘our’ swifts coming north, and they were magnificent. Compared to the more sedentary species the European swift is a mighty thing. Transcontinental swifts, they should be called, they are like ocean-going airliners, suited in a dark soft brown. Not for them the long, long battle to the furthest south. Swifts fly as though they could go to the ends of the earth, but they have decided where that is: Congo. Its particular storms, its weather systems, its permanently alternating high rain season and low rain season, its vast profusion of creatures, flying, floating and crawling, its morning mists, its afternoon silences, its wild crying darkness, this is the wintering-ground of the swift.

  Above the rooftops of Marrakech, however, it was not these birds that beguiled me, but their smaller, stubbier, white-rumped cousins, Little Swifts. The trick is to focus on one bird. To do this you need to be lying down, so that your binoculars, pointed skywards, will not shake. Then pick your Little Swift. To be able to follow one for as much as a minute feels like a real achievement. What at first looks like a batty swarm of dozens and dozens resolves itself into a series of aerial chases. One Little Swift, if not being pursued itself, will almost always be pursuing another.

  Locked on to the tail of the swift in front, our hero twists, ducks, dives, slides, skids, arcs and arches, clinging to the track of the hunted. At some point one will either tire or change its mind. If the fleeing swift puts enough space between itself and the chaser, often another bird will drop into the space between them and pick up the chase where the first left off; sometimes the chaser peels away and latches onto another, and pursues it.

  A lot of swifty squeaking and screaming accompanies all this activity, and it may have all been in deadly earnest, a mating competition etc., but it looked like tremendous fun. Best of all was seeing them practise their acrobatics. The first few times I saw it I could not fathom it. The binoculars would be left staring helplessly at vaguely unfocused dots: where an instant ago there had been a Little Swift would now be a blank blue space.

  In slow motion, then: our Little Swift is hurtling along in relatively level flight. Suddenly it half-closes one wing, folding it in, while half-opening the other; the shoulder moving forward. At the same time, it throws itself sideways and down. It looks remarkably as though the bird has flipped up a hood, pulling the half-open wing over its head. In a split second it drops 50 feet straight down: gone! What a trick. If you can do that your pursuer will almost certainly over-shoot you, and it would not be at all surprising if you did not turn a few heads in the rest of the crowd. Some of them could do it perfectly; others kept practising.

  The two days passed quietly while I wished they would hurry up. I ought to have gone out to the Menara Gardens in the evening, or found the sewage works, or at least taken a good long walk around the edge of town, but instead I lay on the roof, and took long, dark sleeps, and soup in the square, and excused myself on the grounds that staying in is the only way of saving money. I thought about what a wonderful way-point Marrakech must be to all migrating birds. All you have to do is survive the desert and the mountains, and in the instant you break over the edge of the precipices, through that lethal wall of winter, there it would be. A bright bowl of smell and noise and colour. All those people and all their waste; what a fug of flies they would put up. How busy, limited and impoverished a species we must seem to birds.

  On the evening of the second day a group of swallows burst over the rooftops. They came in fast and low from the south, heading north-east. They skimmed the roofs, barely jinking, at top speed: I had never seen them flying so quickly and directly, with such urgency. I wondered what could be wrong: what drove them? I scanned around with the binoculars and saw, in the quarter of the sky from which they had come, a bird larger than all the rest; the size of a falcon but with something of the speed and profile of a giant swift. It slung down out of the sky in a long, fast glide, a shallow stoop, in fact, and suddenly I realised what it was: the cheetah of the skies – a hobby. Down it came, swift, swift and unmoving, like a missile on a programmed flight path, heading for the great minaret of the Kotubia. And then there was a flicker in its wings, open then shut, very fast, and with a twist it rocketed down at a steep angle, striking, and there came from below the rooftops, just out of sight, an explosion of panicked birds, and it vanished.

  It was exhilarating and deeply sinister, like watching a sweep of the reaper’s scythe.

  ‘Wow!’ I cried. ‘Hobby!’ and scanned the sky for him again. He was gone. ‘A drink is called for . . .’ I resolved.

  There are two places to buy inexpensive beer in the Medina, which is the old town in the heart of Marrakech. The first is a hole in the wall in the Jewish quarter: down an unlit alley, in a midnight-dark patch where the buildings meet above you there is a hatch, where a hand will pass you the cheapest can of Spéciale Flag in town. The second is the Hotel Tazi.

  The lobby, with its sickly yellow light and single other-worldly Christmas decoration high in one
corner is a sort of human aquarium. That evening twenty nationalities perched on its tatty furniture and waved desperately at one waiter in an unlikely white tuxedo whose best defence against overwork was to appear to be somewhat confused. Excited Spanish teenagers, German trekkers, loud Italian couples, local bad boys on acid and a host of hawking or touting or drunk Moroccans played musical chairs without music. A man at the reception desk bet me €50 he could guess where I was from, chose Canada, and promised to pay next time. In the dining room, which reeked of cat urine, there had been a buffet supper: all that remained now was a huge, crisped fish head lolling over the side of its dish, its burnt eyes blind to the dirty tables where its flesh was still scattered, its teeth set in a grin. Next door, in the bar, a rank of silently surly Moroccan men watched a football game. The bar itself was deserted but for the harried coming and going of the white-jacketed waiter and a single Englishman from Middlesex who worked with computers, and had brought himself on holiday. It was a pleasure to hear my own language again.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s been an amazing life. Taken me some amazing places. I was in Russia in the 1990s. I remember being taken to a shed in the Urals, just a big empty room and in the middle of it this thing in a big box of wire and wood which was a complete mock-up, which was faking thousands of computers it was talking to somewhere into thinking it was an IBM mainframe! A whole pirated mainframe! Amazing really . . .’

  I bought a drink and took it through to the lobby, hoping for a spot from which to observe the proceedings. There was only one seat free, that I could see, just to my right; I hesitated fractionally before taking it because I was suddenly aware that in the ring of occupied places around it, dead opposite it, in fact, was a tall and very beautiful woman. As I sat down someone said, ‘Well done!’

  She and her friend were in the middle of a comical cross-fire with an aggressively drunk young Marrakechi wearing green. The drunk Marrakechi wanted to talk to the beautiful girl. The beautiful girl did not much want to talk to him, but even more than this, the beautiful girl’s no-nonsense friend wanted the Marrakechi to get lost, and told him so, at which he accused her of racism. Switching rapidly from English to French and back again I waded in, determined to take the bile out of the row. It was unexpectedly, unreasonably difficult.