Dancing Bare - 31. Flawed Companions

We had little in common, Duff and I. I made friends easily; Duff frightened them away. I chattered constantly, giving my opinion on everything. To get an opinion out of Duff required Dominican Inquisitors. I kept fit through useful activity; Duff swore by 5BX, the Canadian Air-Force fitness programme. He was strongly muscled but narrow of body and face as well as outlook. In his swimming togs, he looked tough but not attractive. Eyes too close together, lips pursed, frowning, humourless, pinched, grudging, no apparent interest in sex, other people or places.

I recall him in the south of Spain demanding in a truculent drawl of a young boy who wanted to practice his English, “What’re y’ staples?” When the poor kid didn't understand, Duff growled exactly the same question again and again, only louder each time. As I too had no idea what he was on about, I asked him. Staples, it transpired, is Canadian for the most common foods.

Spain was still hopeless for hitching so we caught buses and trains. Arriving towards evening in Seville, I had to wait for my rucksack to be unloaded. When I looked around, Duff had disappeared. Imagining he’d had an accident I wasted two days searching at embassies, hotels, everywhere. When I saw him in a café, I raced across mightily relieved. He just shrugged, indifferent to my concern, and offered no explanation. I assumed I'd annoyed him by chattering too much on the bus from Lisbon, and promised myself to improve.

In Algeciras two days later, he missed the ferry to Tangiers. In preparation for his arrival I took a room at the same hotel as last time behind Socco Chico, and met the next ferry. But he’d met three other, equally unattractive and sour Canadians on board and decided to stay with them at a rental house in the modern part of the city. No thanks for my efforts, apology, or explanation. I guessed I'd again annoyed him, but had no idea how, and he didn't care enough to enlighten me. Mightily relieved to be once more alone, I set off for Fez, the most perfectly preserved medieval Arab city in the world, and also the most attractive.

Surrounded by a magnificent wall, Fez is a labyrinth of narrow alleys lined with tiny shops open to the street selling everything from fruit to herbs, leather to silver – the trader sitting on a shelf behind his wares. Laden donkeys and their drivers squeezed past djellaba-clad pedestrians. Magnificently decorated arches offered vistas through to grand ‘squares’ jammed with traders, merchants, noise, colour, and life. The river gushes through barred arches in the ancient encircling walls, watering very old trees in parks and gardens. Secret courtyards can be glimpsed through tiny grills. At the lowest point is an ancient tannery where, in execrable stench, near-naked, slim, brown young men up to their thighs in round stone vats full of steaming coloured dyes, knead with their feet the beautiful, soft Moroccan leather.

If a load was too small for a donkey or the street too narrow, porters hoisted heavy bundles on their backs. One such, a handsome young man who called himself Texas because of an infatuation with the Wild West, took up with me, said I could stay at his place, and became my guide for three days. After traipsing the hot, scented alleys, wandering around the old fort and cemetery, watching eagles in the surrounding hills, we sweated in Turkish baths and exercised in a cellar gymnasium with other scantily clad young men lifting weights, wrestling and drinking sweet mint tea. Everywhere in Morocco, it seemed, on roadsides, construction sites, in shops and houses, mint tea would be bubbling aromatically in blue, exotic shaped enamel teapots on tiny primus stoves.

Texas lived in three rooms in an ancient courtyard house near the centre of the city. His grandfather, a lean sixty-year-old with cheekbones you could slit your wrists on, spoke excellent English although his smile was a trifle disconcerting – exposing a full set of stainless steel dentures. Over scalding mint tea, I learned that he and Kiril [Texas’s real name] were Persians. Not Arabs, not Muslim. When the rest of the family had been murdered by the Shah these two had fled to Fez. He doted on Kiril but worried that one day one of the foreigners he ‘entertained’ to supplement his meagre income as a porter, would either bring disease or take him away. The grandfather too had taken wealthy lovers as a young man… but… he shrugged acceptance of fate.

So! It wasn’t my magnetic charm that had attracted Kiril. I was expected to pay for what I’d once been paid for! Too late to find somewhere else to sleep – and I didn't want to.

Kiril led me through a beaded curtain to his bedroom and undressed. Naked, he was as smooth and lithe as an eel. Powerful shoulders, narrow hips, strongly muscled legs, and bubble bum. He sprawled cheekily over the bed and grinned; very professional. Taught me a few tricks and it was fun – except for the fear of disease. He looked clean, but you can never be a hundred percent sure. As always, I withheld a large part of me, unwilling to reveal the yearning for my other half who was out there somewhere. I had to keep searching.

Grandfather brought in breakfast bowls of warm milk and pastries dripping with apricot jam, Kiril planned the day, and I relaxed for the first time in what seemed like years. Three days and nights cost about the same as I earned in two hours as an escort. Too cheap by far, so I trebled it.

If he’d asked, I would have settled down with him for life. But I had no security. No job. He wouldn’t have understood, anyway. He expected to marry and have children when too old for clients. The notion of being exclusively gay or straight was foreign to him and all the other boys. Sexuality for them, as with most animals, is fluid. Only in western democracies are we forced to choose one thing or the other, and it’s for that reason that Muslim rulers say they have no homosexuals. What they mean is they have no exclusive gays living like heterosexual couples.

Fez was where Sebastian retreated with a lover in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. I didn't envy him his drug addiction, but I did envy him the chance to live in such an ancient romantic city. Life, I decided in a moment of poetic incompetence, is like wandering through a storm of leaves – we grab at a few as they flutter past, but millions escape us. We have no idea where or how other people we meet end up, or what their life is like. We touch only a few, scarcely knowing them. Barely knowing ourselves.

Having bid farewell to Kiril, I was standing outside the walls of the old city surrounded by busy traffic and uninspiring modern buildings wondering which road lead to Algeria, when a pleasant young man asked if I needed help. I explained, he took me by the hand to a taxi, gave the driver instructions, paid him, shook my hand and stood watching as I was whisked off to the edge of the city. Such kindness and generosity was not unusual in my experience. Europeans had warned me to be wary of knife-wielding mad Arabs, in the same way as the English soldier in Gibraltar had warned me against Spaniards. But not once in all my time in North Africa and the Middle East did I feel in danger. Too often I felt embarrassed by their genuine hospitality.

Ahmed, a cheerful young Algerian returning from unsuccessful job hunting in France, decided to travel with me. I thought I travelled lightly, but he was carrying nothing except his guitar so I felt ridiculously over-burdened with a small rucksack. We hitched easily together across the border into Algeria, arriving in Oran at dusk, where he introduced me to Arab ‘doss houses’. For a few pennies we had a scrupulously clean mattress in a vast room filled with single men. No one would steal, he assured me, Muslims treated guests with respect. We left our gear beside our mattresses and wandered down to the port, me foolishly worried about an outbreak of plague, having recently read Camus’ La Peste. The town was more attractive than I'd expected—being, like all modern towns in colonised countries, architecturally similar to the cities of their conquerors rather than reflecting the culture of the natives. Before long Ahmed was chatting up a pair of pale Swedish businessmen, who, imagining I was also an Arab, invited us back to their hotel, shouted us a meal, and after an athletic romp in their room handed us twenty American dollars each.

The road to Algiers, the capital, passed fertile fields of vineyards and other crops, and could have been anywhere in the world, except for the simple poverty of the buildings. It was difficult to imagine families living in such primitive abodes as those peasants, but today it is clear that the only hope we have of keeping global temperatures to a survival level, is for everyone on the planet to live as simply. But of course that's not going to happen. It was somewhere along this road that I had my first view of fundamentalist Muslim women draped from top to toe in white sheets with only a tiny gap left for one eye. When they became aware of our approach even that tiny hole was closed, and they stood still, solid white ghosts gleaming in the sun until we’d passed.

Ahmed was a cheerful companion during the hours we stood and waited, or walked, what a contrast with Duff. I was sorry when we arrived at the turn off to his family house and shook hands in farewell—his house was too small for guests, and so… I assured him I was impatient to get to the centre of the city.

Algerian men were so friendly that even in the central business district of Algiers, where public transport had not been properly restored after the war, pedestrians had only to put out a hand and passing cars would stop and offer a lift. The friendliness, honesty, hospitality and generosity of North African Arabs amazes me still. It was only a few years since Algeria had thrown off France’s cruel colonial yoke and their pride was palpable. Anger was reserved for Israel and countries that supported it.

When they realised I wasn’t a local, drivers would ask to see my passport before admitting me to their car or truck. If I'd been an American I'd have been spat on and left by the roadside. The USA was blamed not only for Israel, but also for water hyacinths clogging Nile cataracts, and every other disaster, war, coup, and atrocity in the Middle East, and especially Viet Nam. At the time I thought it paranoid, but now realise it was basically the truth.

Hours after leaving Algiers, my ride dropped me about ten kilometres from Constantine, probably the most spectacularly situated city I've ever visited. It straddles a very deep and narrow, rocky gorge, spanned by a delicate looking bridge precariously anchored on each side of the hundred-metre-high vertical cliffs. Young men from the Algerian Resistance, “Sons of the Revolution”, attached themselves to me as I trudged into the city. I was a novelty; very few travellers visited this centre of Algerian resistance so soon after their war of independence. They insisted I stay for a few days with them in their headquarters where, in the evenings they recited poetry, we listened to music, and talked deep into the night about revolution, the meaning and value of life, and the nature of humanity. My schoolboy French was of limited use, but it’s amazing how much you can pick up through body language and intonation, and how much empathy and appreciation can be conveyed with smiles and nods.

I gained the impression as I travelled across North Africa and through the Middle East that Arabs, at least the ones I met, are wider educated, culturally more involved, more philosophically inclined, and more politically aware than the young people I knew from New Zealand and other British Commonwealth countries. They also had fewer inhibitions about expressing their feelings, singing, dancing, and reciting poetry, and took obvious pleasure in physically embracing and touching their friends in ways that would have them labelled queer at home. It was not sexual; it was simply the natural behaviour of males not emotionally castrated by Christian social bigotry. They never seemed to question either their masculinity or their right to hold opinions about life and everything else.

One evening rather late, someone asked my opinion of Israel. I knew virtually nothing about the place except that every Arab I'd encountered hated it, while Australian friends I’d met at a camp had spent six months there in a kibbutz and raved about the wonderful experience. I didn't know the land had been stolen, the Palestinians evicted, tens of thousands murdered, and great misery caused. How could I? I never read newspapers and it had never been mentioned in history at school. So I shrugged and said, “je m'en fiche.” [I don’t care about it.]

The point of a knife pricked my throat. Quickly apologising for my imperfect French, I said I meant Israel should be wiped off the face of the earth! The knife was withdrawn and friendship resumed. Had they checked my rucksack they might have slit my throat – it contained a duplicate passport stamped ‘Valid Only for Israel’, so I could visit and not have it recorded in my regular passport, making subsequent entry to Muslim countries impossible. I hadn’t felt threatened by the young warrior; it was a wonderfully theatrical gesture I'd love to have made myself. They had all killed people, but not for nothing.

They taught me to write my name and a few numbers and words in Arabic, and I praised them for freeing themselves from their colonial overlords. All were devout believers, very excitable, with apparently inexhaustible energy. When I'm with people I seem to have no control over my energy output. It’s full bore till I suddenly run out of gas and fall asleep. The energy of these young revolutionaries outlasted mine by megajoules and, despite the affection I felt, I was pleased to bid farewell.

Eighteen months later I gave a public lecture in Paris about my time in Algeria, in which I praised the Algerians for their kindness, hospitality, honesty and enthusiasm in the rebuilding of their country. Afterwards, ex-colonials in the audience who'd been forced to leave, argued angrily with me. Algerians were lazy, uncouth, untrustworthy, dirty, heathens. I should be ashamed of myself for telling such lies.

Tunisia was a relief. No revolutionary fervour, merely a gentle acceptance of the good and bad things in life. Tunis was, like Algiers, a replica of Paris, not very interesting. I headed south. One sweltering afternoon after being left in the middle of nowhere, I walked in increasing disbelief along the dead flat, dusty road towards what looked like a giant drum. Slowly it grew and grew becoming even larger than I had guessed. Finally I was greeted by a ragged gang of youths who took me by the hand inside this vast stone arena to watch them playing soccer. I’d arrived at the best preserved Roman amphitheatre in the world—el Djem. I was the only foreigner there, the kids laughed at my astonishment, and the scene was so bizarre it stuck with me and was the inspiration for the architecture of “Oasis” in my novel Mortaumal. It was declared a World Heritage site in 1979, so is now a bustling tourist attraction. I was fortunate to have missed that.

In Sfax, an impeccably uniformed young soldier took me by the hand and led me through the vast and ancient walled city to a café in cool gardens where we sipped coffee, holding hands across the table and sniffing small bunches of daphne flowers attached to a stick; behaviour that attracted no attention – all the young men were doing it. Afterwards I wandered down to the port, bustling with large ships and dotted with romantic looking dhows.

To my chagrin, Duff arrived at the Sfax Youth Hostel while I was arranging with Bruno and Adolph, a Swiss couple I'd just met, to spend a week on the islands of Kerkenna. He looked harassed and ill-tempered, having endured a dreadful trip from Tangiers, being forced to take crowded buses because “…the fucking Arabs were so fucking unfriendly.”

Before I could warn him, Bruno invited Duff to join us on the island.

Once on the islands – mere date-palm-speckled sandbars about twenty kilometres off shore - Duff succumbed to dysentery so returned to Sfax and flush toilets at the youth hostel, leaving us to enjoy paradise. The locals, with whom our communication was reduced to gestures, entertained us in the evening with palm wine, a brew guaranteed to take the lining off your stomach. They declared themselves honoured that we had chosen to sleep on their beach. It was more likely they were checking us out in case we were thieves.

A young lad of about twelve took it upon himself to arrive with water, fresh eggs, and fruit every morning, refusing payment! I took his address and promised to send him stamps. When we left, leaving our camping site cleaner than when we arrived, it was only with great reluctance that these extremely poor islanders accepted payment for their hospitality.