Andalus

by Jason Webster

  Lucía knew the owner of the bar and insisted on ordering for Zine, smiling broadly at him as we made a toast to his finding work.

  ‘Oh my God!’ she screamed as the waiter walked away with our order. ‘It’s got pork in it!’

  Zine burst out laughing. ‘I don’t mind. Really. I can drink wine too. Look.’ And he took another sip from his glass.

  ‘Ay, perdón,’ she said. ‘I just thought … Never mind.’

  ‘My parents didn’t drink alcohol,’ he said, ‘but now it’s common in Morocco. Why not?’

  ‘Didn’t ?’ Lucía asked. I too had noticed his use of the past tense, but felt it rude to ask more.

  ‘They’re both dead,’ he said. ‘My father when I was a child, my mother when I was thirteen.’

  ‘So you’re an orphan,’ Lucía blurted out. ‘I mean … that’s right, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. I lived with my uncle and cousins in Casablanca.’

  He seemed happy to tell this very personal story to the virtual strangers we were, and showed no sign of even considering that he might have had a tough childhood. He was proud, though, and something about his tone of voice gave me the impression that there was more to it – some difficulty with his uncle, perhaps.

  ‘You speak Spanish really well,’ Lucía said.

  ‘I learnt in Tangier,’ he said. ‘You can see Spain from Tangier: of course I had to learn the language.’

  Lucía laughed with him and held out her blue and white packet of L&M cigarettes. He reached out and took one off her, leaning forwards as she flicked her lighter for him. Salud glanced at me with a raised eyebrow from across the table.

  We ate and talked. Salud and Lucía gossiped about actors they both knew from when they’d worked together, while Zine and I half listened in, watching the parade of night people passing to and fro in the street in front of us. A man dressed in a nappy and white boots was jumping up and down, dancing outside the door of the disco opposite.

  ‘How long have you been in Spain?’

  After a brief lull, Lucía started asking Zine more questions. I was surprised that he didn’t mind this, but he talked at length about the years he’d spent in Tangier before coming over, hanging out with other young men looking for a chance to get across the Strait.

  ‘I was lucky: I lived with my aunt. Many of them slept outdoors. We’d do bits of work whenever we could find it, saving the money to cross over to Spain. It’s expensive. My aunt used to complain, though. Said I should stay in Morocco. She thought I’d end up as a rent boy over here, or something.’

  ‘How did you get across?’ Lucía asked. Her smile had been replaced by an expression of deep concern.

  ‘Boat,’ Zine said. ‘They had to push me in because I was scared of the water. Just a little wooden boat with an engine at the back. But I’d been waiting for my chance for years. The farmers organized it. We crossed at night: you have to avoid all the patrols. Few of us had blankets; we were allowed just one bag each.

  ‘It smelt like rotten fish,’ he added with a laugh. ‘I was almost sick.’

  ‘And you got over all right?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Then they took us straight to the farm where Jasie found me.’ And he patted me on the shoulder.

  Lucía’s steady gaze barely wavered.

  ‘You poor thing,’ she said when he had finished telling her about the mafia set-up and our fight to escape. ‘No hay mal que dure cien años, they say – Bad things never last a hundred years.’

  He smiled at her and she giggled. I could tell from Lucía’s eyes that Salud and I were fading from view.

  It seemed inevitable that we would return without Zine to the flat later that night. It was almost six in the morning – in a few hours we were due to take him to Salud’s parents’ house.

  ‘We’re going home,’ I said. ‘You guys staying on?’

  They’d spent the last hour kissing at every opportunity; Salud and I had deliberately gone together to order drinks at the various bars we went to over the course of the night to allow them moments on their own. For couples to show affection in public was common in Spain, but even we were surprised at the sudden bond that had developed between them.

  ‘We’ll come round to pick you up,’ Salud said as he and Lucía walked off in the direction of her flat, bodies pressed close to one another.

  ‘Lucía,’ I said as we turned the corner. ‘She doesn’t hang about.’

  ‘I think they’ll make a lovely couple,’ said Salud.

  ALZIRA

  Vicenta moved around the dark kitchen with a heaviness, burdened by the weight of her ageing body, but also by something else. Sadness, perhaps, at having denied something of herself almost her entire life.

  She breathed sharply and shallowly through her nose, opening her mouth once in a while as though gasping for air. Her heart was frail, yet it sometimes seemed you could almost hear its faint little tickety-tick beating underneath the layers of heavy clothes.

  ‘My husband doesn’t like this, but I’m making it because you’re here,’ she said, rubbing sweet smoked paprika with her thick fingers into roasted almonds she had just pulled from the oven. ‘You need very fine salt, otherwise the crystals stick in one place.’

  It was one of my favourites – a simple local dish. One of just half a dozen or more she was preparing for lunch that afternoon: fried anchovies, stuffed peppers, roast aubergines with garlic and olive oil, and sheep’s milk cheese laced with quince jam.

  Sitting on a stool in a corner as she worked – she would never let me help – I drew the sweat off my temples, hoping that a breeze might make it through the tiny window and cool us down.

  ‘¡Abuela!’ One of the children ran into the kitchen. ‘When will lunch be ready?’

  ‘Soon. Here, take this through carefully to your grandfather.’ And she handed the boy a glass of beer to carry down the corridor. Maybe this would soften the old man up before I presented him with a Moroccan looking for work. ‘I’m not a racist,’ he had often declared over Sunday lunches. ‘We are all personas.’ Yet bringing him face to face with a moro would put his statement to the test. Salud had often been ticked off as a child when she took him at face value and in the spirit of brotherly love had brought Gypsy friends home from school. Now she was with Zine at the bar round the corner, waiting for my signal to come round with our surprise guest.

  There was a crackling, spitting sound as Salud’s mother placed the flour-dipped anchovies into the hot fat, a seafood smell spreading through the kitchen.

  For a brief moment I was back in my flat in Alexandria. That smell was so familiar. Every Friday, without fail, my Coptic neighbour, Iskandar the chemist, who lived in the flat downstairs, would start cooking fish at dawn, the scent lifting up through my bedroom window as Khalid, my landlord, and his enormous family arrived promptly at half past seven to pick me up for a day on his private beach.

  ‘Yallah, ya Jasie,’ his delightful seven-year-old son would shout up to my window from the street. Why all Arabs had a problem pronouncing my name I had never worked out.

  ‘Let’s go!’ I could quite happily sleep through the dawn call to prayer, but something about that kid’s voice went straight to the wake-up nerve in my brain, no matter what efforts I’d gone to the night before to anaesthetize it. Almost breaking my ankles as I tripped up in the corridor putting my trousers on at top speed, I would appear in the doorway one minute and thirty seconds later, barely conscious and stinking of fish and booze on the holiest day in the Islamic week, having to squeeze onto the back seat of their tiny car with a child on each knee. Great for my Arabic, I kept telling myself. Kids are fantastic for learning foreign languages, even if you do want to throttle them to death. But Khalid was the chief of the local prison. If he invited me to his private beach, I had to go. You didn’t argue with a guy who pushed people out of windows for a living.

  Here in Vicenta’s kitchen, the food could easily sit alongside dishes from North Africa or the Middle East. She had ne
ver read cookbooks: her recipes and techniques had been passed down orally from mother to daughter over centuries. As I watched her prepare meatballs in tomato sauce, the links seemed all the more evident: their Spanish name, albóndigas, was a memory of the original Arabic word, al-banadiq; the pan she was cooking them in, a cazuela, came from the word qas’a, meaning ‘bowl’. Four, perhaps five hundred years previously, an Arabic voice was speaking; a neighbour passing on a recipe to her Christian friend using the mixed Spanish-Arabic patois of the time. Or, during the Inquisition, a Morisco mother was speaking a half-forgotten language to her Christianized daughter, who could understand, but not speak, this strange and illegal tongue of her ancestors’ fast-disappearing culture.

  Salud’s father was smoking his pipe in the living room when I walked in, trying amid the chaos of playing, screaming children to concentrate on a TV documentary about the mating habits of Amazonian tapirs. His neat round head seemed too small for the broad shoulders on which it sat, and his gigantic arms, moulded by decades of hard physical work in the fields, looked as if they belonged to a different body altogether – the closest match they could find at the time in the local arm-transplant hospital. The ability of the man to instil fear in his own children – Salud sometimes told me of the beatings he’d given her and her sister – had waned with age, and now his growlings at his grandchildren as they fell over him in their hide-and-seek games went mostly unheard.

  ‘Stop throwing those beer mats.’ An aunt or uncle was more likely to be imposing discipline these days. Still, he went to his fruit fields every day, despite being in semi-retirement. And if his mood looked as if it was swinging to dangerous levels of grumpiness, you could always get him talking about the finer points of orange harvesting. When I had dared to suggest that oranges and most citrus fruits had in fact been introduced to Spain by the Moors, the familiar slightly dazed look that most Spaniards assume when presented with this kind of stuff came over his face. In many ways, though, his whole livelihood depended on the Moorish legacy: the Romans had laid foundations for the great market garden that circled Valencia, but the Arabs had brought the necessary irrigation know-how to convert it into one of the most fertile plains in Europe. Clues lay in the vocabulary farmers used: an irrigation channel was known as an acequia (or séquia in Valenciano – the local language), which came from the Arabic al-saqiya. The fruits and vegetables themselves had Middle Eastern names: orange – naranja in Spanish – came from the Persian naranj; artichokes, or alcachofas, came from the Arabic al-kharshuf; spinach, or espinacas, from isbinaj; aubergine, or berenjena, from bidinjan. The list was long. The running of the irrigation system was still overseen today by a local court set up during the reign of Abd al-Rahman II in the ninth century. During the Moorish period it had met inside the mosque itself, but now the Tribunal de las Aguas held its sessions outside the Gothic cathedral, standing on the site of the former Islamic temple. Its Moorish origins were still evident from the time the court sat – every Thursday at midday, the traditional day for meetings in an Islamic context, Thursday being the last day of the working week. The bailiff of the court was known as el alguacil, a title derived from the Arabic al-wazir, or minister.

  ‘Young people today don’t know the meaning of hard work.’ Salud’s father turned away from the television as his programme finished. Looking at the size of his forearms I wasn’t about to argue with him. He was a constant reminder of our soft-living age.

  ‘This year’s been terrible – all over Europe. Never known a year like it. Rains everywhere. I know ‘cause I’ve seen it on the telly. It’s a window on the world, that thing.’

  ‘Bad crop?’

  ‘There was a freak hail storm the other day – damaged everything. It’s only good for juice now.’

  This had the potential to throw out our plans, the hope being that as we moved into the harvest period he would appreciate an extra pair of hands in his orchards. But with things not looking good the chances of getting Zine a job seemed to be diminishing. I decided to broach the subject straight away.

  ‘All right,’ he said when I told him my friend was waiting in a bar with Salud. ‘Is he English?’ I shook my head. ‘Oh, well. Show him in. As long as he’s not Moroccan. They never lift a finger.’

  Two and a half hours later we were back in the car, bellies full but no work for Zine. My efforts to pretend he was Algerian hadn’t really paid off and Salud’s father had simply sat back in front of the TV after lunch and ignored him. But then I wasn’t sure if it was a general dislike of moros on his part or simply that he didn’t have enough work to offer. In the past, when the Moriscos were still working on the land after the Reconquest, the Christian landowner’s saying was Quien tiene moro tiene oro – something like ‘Moors are worth their weight in gold’. The new Christian arrivals from the north had relied on them for their agricultural nous, at least until their final expulsion. Nowadays the stereotype was of North Africans being lazy and untrustworthy.

  ‘He’s hardly got any orchards left now – he’s sold most of them off,’ Salud said as we left. ‘I don’t think he can afford to pay anyone to work for him.’

  I was sure she was right, but we were still facing the problem of what to do with Zine. I couldn’t leave Valencia to continue with my trip until we’d got him settled in some way.

  ‘You can drop me off at Lucía’s place,’ Zine said as we reached the city centre, leaning between us from the back seat like a cockerel, head jerking excitedly in small sideways movements. ‘She’s dining Moroccan tonight. Ha, ha.’

  Still, he’d landed on his feet in one sense.

  MORISCOS

  It was Michaelmas the day we left – the clearest day of the year – driving south on the old Játiva road towards Alicante. The rains of the previous week had cleaned the air and the mountains that ringed the city on three sides like a crescent moon rippled a welcoming purple-green, sharp edges against the blue-white sky. The area was at its best like this, and the unrestricted light bathed the blighting megastores and warehouses that cut deep into the orange orchards with a softening haze. It augured well, I thought. Recommencing my journey on such a day could only be a good thing.

  Zine sat beside me smoking a packet of L&M cigarettes and reading about Iraq in the newspaper. Lucía had failed to show up that morning to see us off; from his silence it seemed the separation had been more difficult than he’d expected. But he still needed work, and despite trying everything we could – even asking around the Arab bars – we’d been unable to find him anything in Valencia. The problem was, as always, his lack of paperwork.

  ‘There’s always Tío Sergio,’ Salud had said. ‘He has Moroccans working for him.’

  Like his elder brother, Salud’s uncle was also a farmer, but had moved away from Valencia twenty years before down to the village of Niebla in Andalusia, near the south-western border with Portugal. It was one of the centres of agricultural work for North Africans, great fruit fields the size of cities filling the gaps between the few, underpopulated villages in the area. After hesitating for a day, we gave Uncle Sergio a ring. Cash in hand, of course. No, he didn’t have any paperwork.

  From the expression on Salud’s face as she spoke to him, I could tell he was reluctant to agree. You didn’t give a job to someone you’d never met before just based on a phone call, especially someone who could land you in jail. But the fact was he did need people, and Salud was his favourite niece.

  ‘Tráelo y veremo,’ he said. ‘Bring him and we’ll see. No prometo na.’

  And so now, three weeks since he’d saved me from the mafia farmers, Zine was back in the passenger seat of my car once more, homeless, jobless and ‘illegal’, but a useful person to have around if the car played up again. I had planned to travel through Andalusia and the south in my search for Musa’s treasure anyway, I reminded myself. Besides, putting him on a train or a bus would have been risky, as he was more likely to be picked up by the police that way in an ID check. Yet we still had to be caref
ul: Spanish friends of mine had been asked for their papers just because they had darkish skin and wore old clothes. It was clearly safer for him to come with me.

  There was a complication, though: Uncle Sergio could only take him on in another fortnight’s time, but I needed to set off now: two of the people I wanted to meet along my way would be unavailable if I left it any longer. Which meant the two of us stuck together travelling for some time.

  At first I’d felt a reluctance about bringing him along: travelling alone meant greater flexibility, not having to worry about someone else’s moods. And this was a very personal trip, too, in many ways – a journey to discover more of Spain and to see, perhaps once and for all, if it really was a country I could feel at home in. But reluctance melted into a feeling of inevitability.

  ‘At least you’ll have a Moor with you in your search for Moorish Spain,’ Salud said.

  Zine had already given me a couple of insights into Spanish life that I might otherwise have missed. I was just worried about the authorities getting hold of him before I’d made good my promise.

  Something of his character had become apparent in his relationship with Lucía. I had never known her so happy as in that brief time they were together. Although she had had a string of boyfriends, something about Zine seemed to rub off on her, producing a fullness of being and sense of peace that all her friends had remarked on. The occasional voice might have warned her against a relationship with a moro, but in the eyes of anyone who knew her well the arrival of Zine had been a life-affirming experience for her.

  ‘Gracias,’ she’d whispered to me one night as we stepped out of a bar together just a fraction before Salud and Zine behind us. And she’d held my hand tightly – no need to explain anything.

  The effect of the relationship on Zine was harder to tell, as I’d barely known him before the two of them had hooked up. I’d been amazed at the speed with which it had happened, but it was obvious they had bonded quite powerfully. My original impressions of him were confirmed and reinforced, if anything, by the joy I saw in Lucía; he was upbeat, dynamic and clearly ready to jump at opportunities, although I never had the impression at any stage that he was simply cruising for a meal ticket. He’d rarely been at the flat with us after the first week and had handed me back my old clothes when Lucía had bought him some new ones. I’d told him not to bother, but he insisted.