Guillermo Stitch's Blog - Posts Tagged "travel"
Mr & Mrs Stitch Go To Africa
Rabat is placid, as all the guidebooks will tell you, but not when you're trying to park: a small but important detail which they will without exception omit. A street has been recommended to us, where yellow-vested attendants herd wayward cars into implausibly tight spaces for a modest fee, and indeed we are herded, eventually, into just such a space. The advantage, apparently, is access to the old town—the medina—where we are lodging for the night. The downside, though, is the street itself, something of a gauntlet for the delicate European constitution that so happens to be mine, rather sentimentally attached to discernible order and not fond of being yelled at. We see no cars collide, and nobody seems to get run over—miracles both.
The medina attracts the usual crowd: tourists, though fewer here than in the souks of Morocco's more storied cities; street vendors of pastry, juices of pomegranate and prickly pear, phone accessories, steamed snails and fake designer sunglasses; weary women in headscarfs and ankle-length djellabas, moving at their own stately pace, a heaving bag of groceries in each hand; young promenaders, arm in arm in their best gear; and lunatics. It is a member of this latter set who kindly offers, on noting our hesitation in the street, to show us to our guesthouse. In our defence, it doesn't take too much time—though there is a lot of sweaty, pack-laden schlepping involved—for it to to dawn on us that the gentleman has never heard of our guesthouse, and therefore has no idea where it is. As we trek along behind him, up and down the same street we were doing a perfectly decent job ourselves of retreading when he first accosted us, one or two passersby seem to admonish him in familiar tones. A known lunatic, then. We detach ourselves, and find the place unaided, eventually.
Bags down and breaths taken, the need for a sim card takes us into a newer part of town where the streets, if less picturesque that the laneways of the medina, are no less intriguing. As is often the case in hot climates, they are arcaded at street level, and in the shade provided, hawkers have spread their wares on threadbare blankets. The goods on offer are overwhelmingly practical in nature: tissues and usb cables, and more sunglasses. Craning the neck to take in the upper storeys of the tall buildings in this part of town, the place offers sunbaked, soviet visuals—blocky architectures and flaking paintwork, it has the look of an abandoned city the inhabitants have forgotten to abandon. A neglected place, buzzing with life.
I've had the impression before, in Nairobi, in Cairo, but only ever here, in Africa. It is strengthened by the army of young sub-saharans that line the long Avenue Hassan II that divides the modern city from the walls of the medina—more hawkers and another gauntlet. We are on our way back to the guesthouse, one sim card up and having visited the Hassan tower, one of Rabat's historical attractions. The tower itself is incomplete, a mere stump of what it might have been, but it is very handsome and for us represents a satisfying completion: there are only three of these great Almohad towers—the Giralda in Seville, the Koutoubia in Marrakech and the Hassan in Rabat—and now we have laid eyes on them all.
Up on the roof of the guesthouse later, we join the dots. Jutting up from the low Rabat roofscape is the tallest, straightest palm tree we have ever seen. It is nothing like the palms in its vicinity, which it dwarfs, but exactly like one we'd seen just outside the Hassan tower complex. We'd wondered then how they'd managed to install what looked like large lights at the top of so tall a tree, and now, on the rooftop, our gaze shifts judgementally from the impressive tree that sports similar installations, to the ugly telecom tower a little distance behind us. In doing so, the penny drops: the trees are fake, themselves telecom towers. Antennae.
It's the kind of brash innovation one imagines originated in the Arab world—they like that sort of thing, don't they?—but, although not exactly incongruous here, the provenance would distinguish it somewhat from the low higgledy-piggle of the city. Morocco, despite the history, the language, the street signs, the religion, does not assert an Arab identity. This place isn't Arab: it's African.
And you always know it, somehow, though you can't pin it down: something to do with the combination of bustle and neglect, the rarity of reliably straight lines, the patina of peel over paint, the subversion—sometimes inadvertent and sometimes quite deliberate—of those discernible orders some of us place such high value on elsewhere. The inexpressibly complex relationship between pedestrian and traffic. The propensity to claim a random square of pavement and set up a business there. A chicken coop on the rooftop of an apartment block. A chicken flapping around in the luggage compartment of a bus. A chicken, legs tied, carried home upside down, calm and quiet, by a housewife. A lot of it seems to have something to do with chickens.
The use of car horns is incessant—so much so that, from a distance, from this rooftop, it becomes a mellifluous, reassuring murmur by day and by night a liquid lullaby. Interspersed with the regular call to prayer that sounds—either tinnily or booming, according to the quality of the audio set up—from the minarets, and the fact that each and every overheard conversation in this country will convince you that you are witness to the most violent of disagreements, and you will have an idea of the sonic topology of the place.
The scents too. It would be lazy to say the souk smells of spice, though here and there (outside a spice shop, for example) it does. There is also the very particular sweet aroma that wafts from a Moroccan bakery; the heady waft of cheap cosmetics; the before and after smells of raw, butchered meat and its cooked counterpart, sizzling on the hotplate or charring over coals; dust, decaying fruit trampled underfoot, incense and, beneath it all, a constant olfactory reminder of the drain.
All of the senses are newly engaged, deliciously distracted by a panoply of the novel. Touch too, in the contradictory, concrete softness of a tadelakt wall, for example; in the silks—real and otherwise—of innumerable upholstered banquettes; in the terracotta coolness of underfoot ceramics. I love the place and I love it more each time. That I do so in some dreadful, orientalist and culturally insensitive way is probably inevitable, and I suppose the day might come when we won't have to worry about that kind of thing anymore, when we will have ironed all these differences out and no longer even understand such archaic notions as the exotic. I don't particularly look forward to it but I suppose it might come, eventually.
The medina attracts the usual crowd: tourists, though fewer here than in the souks of Morocco's more storied cities; street vendors of pastry, juices of pomegranate and prickly pear, phone accessories, steamed snails and fake designer sunglasses; weary women in headscarfs and ankle-length djellabas, moving at their own stately pace, a heaving bag of groceries in each hand; young promenaders, arm in arm in their best gear; and lunatics. It is a member of this latter set who kindly offers, on noting our hesitation in the street, to show us to our guesthouse. In our defence, it doesn't take too much time—though there is a lot of sweaty, pack-laden schlepping involved—for it to to dawn on us that the gentleman has never heard of our guesthouse, and therefore has no idea where it is. As we trek along behind him, up and down the same street we were doing a perfectly decent job ourselves of retreading when he first accosted us, one or two passersby seem to admonish him in familiar tones. A known lunatic, then. We detach ourselves, and find the place unaided, eventually.
Bags down and breaths taken, the need for a sim card takes us into a newer part of town where the streets, if less picturesque that the laneways of the medina, are no less intriguing. As is often the case in hot climates, they are arcaded at street level, and in the shade provided, hawkers have spread their wares on threadbare blankets. The goods on offer are overwhelmingly practical in nature: tissues and usb cables, and more sunglasses. Craning the neck to take in the upper storeys of the tall buildings in this part of town, the place offers sunbaked, soviet visuals—blocky architectures and flaking paintwork, it has the look of an abandoned city the inhabitants have forgotten to abandon. A neglected place, buzzing with life.
I've had the impression before, in Nairobi, in Cairo, but only ever here, in Africa. It is strengthened by the army of young sub-saharans that line the long Avenue Hassan II that divides the modern city from the walls of the medina—more hawkers and another gauntlet. We are on our way back to the guesthouse, one sim card up and having visited the Hassan tower, one of Rabat's historical attractions. The tower itself is incomplete, a mere stump of what it might have been, but it is very handsome and for us represents a satisfying completion: there are only three of these great Almohad towers—the Giralda in Seville, the Koutoubia in Marrakech and the Hassan in Rabat—and now we have laid eyes on them all.
Up on the roof of the guesthouse later, we join the dots. Jutting up from the low Rabat roofscape is the tallest, straightest palm tree we have ever seen. It is nothing like the palms in its vicinity, which it dwarfs, but exactly like one we'd seen just outside the Hassan tower complex. We'd wondered then how they'd managed to install what looked like large lights at the top of so tall a tree, and now, on the rooftop, our gaze shifts judgementally from the impressive tree that sports similar installations, to the ugly telecom tower a little distance behind us. In doing so, the penny drops: the trees are fake, themselves telecom towers. Antennae.
It's the kind of brash innovation one imagines originated in the Arab world—they like that sort of thing, don't they?—but, although not exactly incongruous here, the provenance would distinguish it somewhat from the low higgledy-piggle of the city. Morocco, despite the history, the language, the street signs, the religion, does not assert an Arab identity. This place isn't Arab: it's African.
And you always know it, somehow, though you can't pin it down: something to do with the combination of bustle and neglect, the rarity of reliably straight lines, the patina of peel over paint, the subversion—sometimes inadvertent and sometimes quite deliberate—of those discernible orders some of us place such high value on elsewhere. The inexpressibly complex relationship between pedestrian and traffic. The propensity to claim a random square of pavement and set up a business there. A chicken coop on the rooftop of an apartment block. A chicken flapping around in the luggage compartment of a bus. A chicken, legs tied, carried home upside down, calm and quiet, by a housewife. A lot of it seems to have something to do with chickens.
The use of car horns is incessant—so much so that, from a distance, from this rooftop, it becomes a mellifluous, reassuring murmur by day and by night a liquid lullaby. Interspersed with the regular call to prayer that sounds—either tinnily or booming, according to the quality of the audio set up—from the minarets, and the fact that each and every overheard conversation in this country will convince you that you are witness to the most violent of disagreements, and you will have an idea of the sonic topology of the place.
The scents too. It would be lazy to say the souk smells of spice, though here and there (outside a spice shop, for example) it does. There is also the very particular sweet aroma that wafts from a Moroccan bakery; the heady waft of cheap cosmetics; the before and after smells of raw, butchered meat and its cooked counterpart, sizzling on the hotplate or charring over coals; dust, decaying fruit trampled underfoot, incense and, beneath it all, a constant olfactory reminder of the drain.
All of the senses are newly engaged, deliciously distracted by a panoply of the novel. Touch too, in the contradictory, concrete softness of a tadelakt wall, for example; in the silks—real and otherwise—of innumerable upholstered banquettes; in the terracotta coolness of underfoot ceramics. I love the place and I love it more each time. That I do so in some dreadful, orientalist and culturally insensitive way is probably inevitable, and I suppose the day might come when we won't have to worry about that kind of thing anymore, when we will have ironed all these differences out and no longer even understand such archaic notions as the exotic. I don't particularly look forward to it but I suppose it might come, eventually.
Mr & Mrs Stitch Go To The Library
The library is closed. The factory is open though, so we go there, by way of the shrine. In the courtyard of the shrine, the sick have found some shade for themselves in the arcades that line it. Some of them rest on makeshift mattresses—cardboard, blankets—while others sit on the floor with their backs to the green-tiled wall and look heavy-lidded into the middle distance.
People like us would never be permitted to set foot in the shrine, but the indulgent caretaker lets us poke our heads through the doorway for a peek. It is dim and cool and high ceilinged, and hung with heavy fabrics and the accoutrement of devotion.
We pull our unholy heads back out and head for the factory. On the way there, M shows us through the covered alleyways of the old town, pointing out a few this and thats. We've only known him for ten minutes so he's not exactly doing this out of the goodness of his heart. Later, he'll charge us—but at a rate which makes him feel, if not a friend, then perfectly friendly and a decent sort.
The factory is not what we were expecting, consisting as it does of three deep puddles, some muddy, weary-looking men and an ominous pillar of jet black smoke that rises from the far end of an open yard. A pit there is populated by an old man, a tiny man and a very unhappy looking man. The old and the sad tend furnaces while the little one shuttles their fuel. They are working in heat I am sure I could not stand for two minutes.
M introduces us to the foreman, A, who proceeds to give us the grand tour—from puddle to pit and, briefly, into a side shed where he half buries himself in the ground in order to spin a similarly half-buried turntable. It seems a very odd arrangement to me until he explains it's so the artists, as he calls them, can stay cool as they work.
Although the closed library was our first port of call this morning, and the shrine expected, the existence of this factory was known to us long before either, and is our reason for coming here. Ever since we crossed the Strait of Gibraltar, and for all the time we've spent driving a thousand kilometres south via the capital, Rabat, frenetic Marrakech, that city of chancers, the Atlas mountains and their otherworldly valleys and gorges, and the string of oases that thread along the Draa valley, our minds have been on this place. But we're not here to seek a cure at the shrine or to borrow a book from the library. We're here to buy a fruit bowl.
The green of Tamegroute pottery is a very particular and very deep green, the complex kind of colour a looker can fall into a little, find themselves mesmerised by, momentarily—forgetful of where they are or what they were thinking about before they looked. We've seen examples all over northern Morocco, on many occasions, and have been curious enough to ask and learn about its origin, but this is the first time we've made it here, to the mighty Draa valley, with its sprawling date palmeries and eroding kasbahs, and the dusty little desert town of Tamegroute.
We buy a wide green bowl and, because it's finer than the mottled examples we've liked elsewhere, we buy one of those too. The place is a cooperative and we get fixed prices which we assume are at the higher end but within the bounds of reason. Afterwards, M has some disappointing news. The library is still closed, and will remain so for some hours. Pleased with our purchase, but determined not to miss out on the books, I tell him we'll try again in the morning.
In the morning, the library is closed. We go to the shop instead—the shop being the shop M ushers us into for some tea while we wait for the library to open. It's the kind of development that, were we in Marrakech, that city of predators, we would never go along with—to accept tea there is to acquiesce to being bullied and held hostage until some hasty purchase seems the only way to effect a getaway. Here though, M and the shopkeeper seem so lackadaisical we just go with the flow.They offer us tea, they make us tea, we drink the tea. Some antique knives and jewellery are briefly discussed but, on my declaring we won't be buying any of them, they are put away and not again mentioned, the conversation—a little stilted due to language issues—becoming pleasantly non-transactional.
Eventually though, and with the best will in the world, it dries up. The twenty minutes M had told us we'd be waiting become forty, then an hour. African time. We resolve to leave it again, hoping that when we pass this way for the third and final time, two days from now, we'll have better luck. An apologetic M walks us back to our car but, before we can get into it, triumphantly declares the key to the library has arrived. Following his extended index finger, I see that it has done so in a Renault Twingo. The library is open.
Crossing a little square and stepping through an arched wooden doorway into the mosque complex, we pass through a shaded courtyard, greeting a couple of women who sit together there, and wait by the locked library door for the driver of the Twingo to come with the key. When he does, he is a well-dressed, well-groomed, professional looking young man and, upon being introduced to us as R, he let's us in. It's a one room affair and like its attendant is well kept and fairly new. Handsome and functional, it is lined with glass-fronted shelves on three walls and lit brightly from the high windows of the forth. Much of the remaining space is taken up by a large table for study. At waist height all along the shelves are slender glass cabinets, and in them some select books are displayed. It's important to protect them, I suppose, because although the current building is young, the library is anything but.
The first book R draws our attention to, a koran, is just a little larger than a pocket paperback and a thousand years old. Next to it, hadith, not much more recent. For a little while we make our way, the three of us, around the room, R quietly telling us at each point what we're looking at. More copies of the koran, more religious works, astronomy, histories, grammatical works and Pythagoras—none of books are especially ornate, tending instead toward the workmanlike, though the calligraphy is of course lovely and some diagrams exquisite.
I won't bother you with the particulars of the library's founder, with its history and function—you can look it up for yourself if it interests you. Suffice it to say that when, after not all that many minutes, our visit comes to an end, I am entranced. To the extent that, despite our obsession with green pottery and the presence of a holy man's mausoleum, it is this place, these books, that will linger in my memory the most—at least until a few days later when, in an out of the way market in one of those oases of the Draa valley that few tourists will see, we are made an offer on a Tamegroute bowl and realise that the prices we have paid in the cooperative here are indeed at the higher end, and bear very little relation to reason.
People like us would never be permitted to set foot in the shrine, but the indulgent caretaker lets us poke our heads through the doorway for a peek. It is dim and cool and high ceilinged, and hung with heavy fabrics and the accoutrement of devotion.
We pull our unholy heads back out and head for the factory. On the way there, M shows us through the covered alleyways of the old town, pointing out a few this and thats. We've only known him for ten minutes so he's not exactly doing this out of the goodness of his heart. Later, he'll charge us—but at a rate which makes him feel, if not a friend, then perfectly friendly and a decent sort.
The factory is not what we were expecting, consisting as it does of three deep puddles, some muddy, weary-looking men and an ominous pillar of jet black smoke that rises from the far end of an open yard. A pit there is populated by an old man, a tiny man and a very unhappy looking man. The old and the sad tend furnaces while the little one shuttles their fuel. They are working in heat I am sure I could not stand for two minutes.
M introduces us to the foreman, A, who proceeds to give us the grand tour—from puddle to pit and, briefly, into a side shed where he half buries himself in the ground in order to spin a similarly half-buried turntable. It seems a very odd arrangement to me until he explains it's so the artists, as he calls them, can stay cool as they work.
Although the closed library was our first port of call this morning, and the shrine expected, the existence of this factory was known to us long before either, and is our reason for coming here. Ever since we crossed the Strait of Gibraltar, and for all the time we've spent driving a thousand kilometres south via the capital, Rabat, frenetic Marrakech, that city of chancers, the Atlas mountains and their otherworldly valleys and gorges, and the string of oases that thread along the Draa valley, our minds have been on this place. But we're not here to seek a cure at the shrine or to borrow a book from the library. We're here to buy a fruit bowl.
The green of Tamegroute pottery is a very particular and very deep green, the complex kind of colour a looker can fall into a little, find themselves mesmerised by, momentarily—forgetful of where they are or what they were thinking about before they looked. We've seen examples all over northern Morocco, on many occasions, and have been curious enough to ask and learn about its origin, but this is the first time we've made it here, to the mighty Draa valley, with its sprawling date palmeries and eroding kasbahs, and the dusty little desert town of Tamegroute.
We buy a wide green bowl and, because it's finer than the mottled examples we've liked elsewhere, we buy one of those too. The place is a cooperative and we get fixed prices which we assume are at the higher end but within the bounds of reason. Afterwards, M has some disappointing news. The library is still closed, and will remain so for some hours. Pleased with our purchase, but determined not to miss out on the books, I tell him we'll try again in the morning.
In the morning, the library is closed. We go to the shop instead—the shop being the shop M ushers us into for some tea while we wait for the library to open. It's the kind of development that, were we in Marrakech, that city of predators, we would never go along with—to accept tea there is to acquiesce to being bullied and held hostage until some hasty purchase seems the only way to effect a getaway. Here though, M and the shopkeeper seem so lackadaisical we just go with the flow.They offer us tea, they make us tea, we drink the tea. Some antique knives and jewellery are briefly discussed but, on my declaring we won't be buying any of them, they are put away and not again mentioned, the conversation—a little stilted due to language issues—becoming pleasantly non-transactional.
Eventually though, and with the best will in the world, it dries up. The twenty minutes M had told us we'd be waiting become forty, then an hour. African time. We resolve to leave it again, hoping that when we pass this way for the third and final time, two days from now, we'll have better luck. An apologetic M walks us back to our car but, before we can get into it, triumphantly declares the key to the library has arrived. Following his extended index finger, I see that it has done so in a Renault Twingo. The library is open.
Crossing a little square and stepping through an arched wooden doorway into the mosque complex, we pass through a shaded courtyard, greeting a couple of women who sit together there, and wait by the locked library door for the driver of the Twingo to come with the key. When he does, he is a well-dressed, well-groomed, professional looking young man and, upon being introduced to us as R, he let's us in. It's a one room affair and like its attendant is well kept and fairly new. Handsome and functional, it is lined with glass-fronted shelves on three walls and lit brightly from the high windows of the forth. Much of the remaining space is taken up by a large table for study. At waist height all along the shelves are slender glass cabinets, and in them some select books are displayed. It's important to protect them, I suppose, because although the current building is young, the library is anything but.
The first book R draws our attention to, a koran, is just a little larger than a pocket paperback and a thousand years old. Next to it, hadith, not much more recent. For a little while we make our way, the three of us, around the room, R quietly telling us at each point what we're looking at. More copies of the koran, more religious works, astronomy, histories, grammatical works and Pythagoras—none of books are especially ornate, tending instead toward the workmanlike, though the calligraphy is of course lovely and some diagrams exquisite.
I won't bother you with the particulars of the library's founder, with its history and function—you can look it up for yourself if it interests you. Suffice it to say that when, after not all that many minutes, our visit comes to an end, I am entranced. To the extent that, despite our obsession with green pottery and the presence of a holy man's mausoleum, it is this place, these books, that will linger in my memory the most—at least until a few days later when, in an out of the way market in one of those oases of the Draa valley that few tourists will see, we are made an offer on a Tamegroute bowl and realise that the prices we have paid in the cooperative here are indeed at the higher end, and bear very little relation to reason.
Mr & Mrs Stitch Go To Dinner
A traveller’s choice of restaurant can reveal a lot about them. Take Rick’s Cafe in Casablanca, for example — a work of fiction in brazen brick and mortar. Aficionados of the classic film will know the authentic Rick’s existed only fleetingly, as a film set in Burbank, California. Life doesn’t merely imitate art though — sometimes it plagiarises, and here in Morocco’s commercial capital some bright spark, as recently as 2004, designed and opened this place to cash in, I would imagine, on decades of disappointed tourists asking for directions to a bar that did not (yet) exist.
They did a pretty good job, as any visitor to the website can see. It’s all there — the arches, the leafy palms, the central patio, the balconies and the laconic piano player. The proprietors cannot be accused of trying to fool anybody, Wikipedia making no secret of the establishment’s provenance. Still, it’s inevitable that many of the foreigners who fill it up each night with their iphones and selfie sticks will labour, awestruck, under the impression that they find themselves in the real thing.
Who can blame them? Some people just go on holiday — they don’t need to research every square inch of the place they’re going or plan every minute of what they’ll do there. They just go. They weave in and out of fact and fiction, blissfully unaware of the distinction. They have a good time. Perhaps, even, it is better that way.
What kind of person though, I have to ask myself, would — knowing of the sleight of hand involved here, perfectly aware of the deception — willingly cast themselves as the stooge in this cognitive heist, make such a patsy of themselves in this culinary crime story, this trompe l’oeil of a painted tart, this farcical affront to fact, this lie?
For starters, we share a very decent caprese and afterwards I go for the t-bone while Mrs Stitch has some pasta alfredo. We’re on the balcony and it’s nice to see her so beautifully lit — it’s been a rainy day in Casablanca and after a good drenching, we’ve spent much of the afternoon beneath the halogen bulbs of our hotel room, semi-naked and swigging wine from the bottle. With that and the very nice atmospherics of Rick’s, I must admit I’m feeling a little bit Bogart, even if Mrs Stitch, or anyone who’s ever met me for that matter, would tell you I’m not so much the leading man — more one of life’s Peter Lorre’s.
No harm in my enjoying the illusion for a little while, and it doesn’t hurt that just as I tuck in to my steak, piped music is replaced by the pianist proper with a rendition of As Time Goes By. Apparently he trots it out several times a night. We discover that the good show they put on here extends to the quality of the food on the plate — to the extent that I can tell you, quite unequivocally, that it’s the third most adorable meal we’ve had this week.
First and second place go to Vague Bleu, a tiny restaurant in the seaside resort of Essaouira, run by two women whose names I did not have the manners to ask for. You’ll have to look them up and it probably won’t take you long — in short order these entrepreneurs have vaulted their hole-in-the-wall venture to the top of the usual online listings and review sites. Having eaten there on our first evening in the town, there was never any doubt as to where we’d go the following night.
The miniscule space accommodates ten people at a time, and it only manages that by lining them up side by side on slender benches along the two short walls. Food is served on half-width tables and everybody eats looking at each other. It’s convivial — you will be getting to know your fellow diners. The limited menu choices are market driven but always includes pasta and often ray, or skate wing, with capers. I have that on the second night and a generous plate of small, splayed sardines on the first. Mrs Stitch tries their spaghetti and some gratinated aubergines. It’s my new favourite place. Cooked to order, the food takes its time but, when we’re not in conversation with fellow diners, the snippet of narrow Essaouira alley visible though the open door entertains.
The one thing these two restaurants have in common is that they depart from the usual tagine-and-couscous affair towards which the tourist here tends to gravitate. Now, I love a tagine, but we do try to get away from these places at least half of the time we spend here, and probably more. As well as a certain level of repetition in the menus, they tend to go for a particular ambiance — tiled walls and draped fabrics, fake silk cushions on implausibly low seating, piped oud music and all that thousand-and-one-nights jazz. You never see a Moroccan in them. Mind you, we don’t bump into any in Rick’s or Vague Bleu either. Where are they?
This is a country that, though lavish in its approach to hospitality, keeps its secrets. It can’t be pure coincidence that a movie like Casablanca, steeped as it is in mystery and intrigue — not to mention deception — was set here. Both the movie and the modern venue are the products of American imagination, but that doesn’t stop them revealing something about this country that blinks so coquettishly from behind any number of veils. The film’s provenance is hardly less chimeric than the bar’s — despite the title, it may be set in Tangier.
Certainly, that city’s wartime milieu — spies, racketeers, dissolute expatriates and inebriate artists — would seem more likely a model for the classic movie. According to some, Tangier was avoided as a title because it sounded too much like Algiers, a hit released a few years previously. The city can also lay claim to not one, but several inspirations for Rick’s. The watering hole attached to the Cinema Vox, for example, was said to be a haven for spies and the international criminal set of the time. Dean’s Bar on the Rue d’Amerique du Sud is reportedly now closed, but until very recently a cold beer could still be obtained there. They all drank at Dean’s: the rich, famous and thoroughly disreputable.
With its doors shut, one of the last remaining artefacts of Tangier’s International Zone years has disappeared. The modern city is more interested in presenting a very different image. There is a new marina, phase one of a massive luxury waterside development. Each time we visit, the place seems to have smartened itself up a bit, deepened its denial of the recent past. Dean’s Bar was opened in 1937 by Joseph Dean, a pseudonym for a British intelligence operative. Or a cross-dressing Egyptian — it depends who you ask. It’s a plausible inspiration for Rick’s, though that too depends on who you ask. Unless of course you happen to have asked the husband-and-wife team who wrote the original play upon which the movie was based — they were always clear that their inspiration was a bar near Marseilles, on the south coast of Vichy France.
On the movie, the bar and the country, clear answers are rarely forthcoming, and if your questions are anything along the lines of What is the real Morocco?, What is it all about? or As I eat and sleep my way around this country, where are the Moroccans? — then best address them elsewhere. Don’t ask me.
They did a pretty good job, as any visitor to the website can see. It’s all there — the arches, the leafy palms, the central patio, the balconies and the laconic piano player. The proprietors cannot be accused of trying to fool anybody, Wikipedia making no secret of the establishment’s provenance. Still, it’s inevitable that many of the foreigners who fill it up each night with their iphones and selfie sticks will labour, awestruck, under the impression that they find themselves in the real thing.
Who can blame them? Some people just go on holiday — they don’t need to research every square inch of the place they’re going or plan every minute of what they’ll do there. They just go. They weave in and out of fact and fiction, blissfully unaware of the distinction. They have a good time. Perhaps, even, it is better that way.
What kind of person though, I have to ask myself, would — knowing of the sleight of hand involved here, perfectly aware of the deception — willingly cast themselves as the stooge in this cognitive heist, make such a patsy of themselves in this culinary crime story, this trompe l’oeil of a painted tart, this farcical affront to fact, this lie?
For starters, we share a very decent caprese and afterwards I go for the t-bone while Mrs Stitch has some pasta alfredo. We’re on the balcony and it’s nice to see her so beautifully lit — it’s been a rainy day in Casablanca and after a good drenching, we’ve spent much of the afternoon beneath the halogen bulbs of our hotel room, semi-naked and swigging wine from the bottle. With that and the very nice atmospherics of Rick’s, I must admit I’m feeling a little bit Bogart, even if Mrs Stitch, or anyone who’s ever met me for that matter, would tell you I’m not so much the leading man — more one of life’s Peter Lorre’s.
No harm in my enjoying the illusion for a little while, and it doesn’t hurt that just as I tuck in to my steak, piped music is replaced by the pianist proper with a rendition of As Time Goes By. Apparently he trots it out several times a night. We discover that the good show they put on here extends to the quality of the food on the plate — to the extent that I can tell you, quite unequivocally, that it’s the third most adorable meal we’ve had this week.
First and second place go to Vague Bleu, a tiny restaurant in the seaside resort of Essaouira, run by two women whose names I did not have the manners to ask for. You’ll have to look them up and it probably won’t take you long — in short order these entrepreneurs have vaulted their hole-in-the-wall venture to the top of the usual online listings and review sites. Having eaten there on our first evening in the town, there was never any doubt as to where we’d go the following night.
The miniscule space accommodates ten people at a time, and it only manages that by lining them up side by side on slender benches along the two short walls. Food is served on half-width tables and everybody eats looking at each other. It’s convivial — you will be getting to know your fellow diners. The limited menu choices are market driven but always includes pasta and often ray, or skate wing, with capers. I have that on the second night and a generous plate of small, splayed sardines on the first. Mrs Stitch tries their spaghetti and some gratinated aubergines. It’s my new favourite place. Cooked to order, the food takes its time but, when we’re not in conversation with fellow diners, the snippet of narrow Essaouira alley visible though the open door entertains.
The one thing these two restaurants have in common is that they depart from the usual tagine-and-couscous affair towards which the tourist here tends to gravitate. Now, I love a tagine, but we do try to get away from these places at least half of the time we spend here, and probably more. As well as a certain level of repetition in the menus, they tend to go for a particular ambiance — tiled walls and draped fabrics, fake silk cushions on implausibly low seating, piped oud music and all that thousand-and-one-nights jazz. You never see a Moroccan in them. Mind you, we don’t bump into any in Rick’s or Vague Bleu either. Where are they?
This is a country that, though lavish in its approach to hospitality, keeps its secrets. It can’t be pure coincidence that a movie like Casablanca, steeped as it is in mystery and intrigue — not to mention deception — was set here. Both the movie and the modern venue are the products of American imagination, but that doesn’t stop them revealing something about this country that blinks so coquettishly from behind any number of veils. The film’s provenance is hardly less chimeric than the bar’s — despite the title, it may be set in Tangier.
Certainly, that city’s wartime milieu — spies, racketeers, dissolute expatriates and inebriate artists — would seem more likely a model for the classic movie. According to some, Tangier was avoided as a title because it sounded too much like Algiers, a hit released a few years previously. The city can also lay claim to not one, but several inspirations for Rick’s. The watering hole attached to the Cinema Vox, for example, was said to be a haven for spies and the international criminal set of the time. Dean’s Bar on the Rue d’Amerique du Sud is reportedly now closed, but until very recently a cold beer could still be obtained there. They all drank at Dean’s: the rich, famous and thoroughly disreputable.
With its doors shut, one of the last remaining artefacts of Tangier’s International Zone years has disappeared. The modern city is more interested in presenting a very different image. There is a new marina, phase one of a massive luxury waterside development. Each time we visit, the place seems to have smartened itself up a bit, deepened its denial of the recent past. Dean’s Bar was opened in 1937 by Joseph Dean, a pseudonym for a British intelligence operative. Or a cross-dressing Egyptian — it depends who you ask. It’s a plausible inspiration for Rick’s, though that too depends on who you ask. Unless of course you happen to have asked the husband-and-wife team who wrote the original play upon which the movie was based — they were always clear that their inspiration was a bar near Marseilles, on the south coast of Vichy France.
On the movie, the bar and the country, clear answers are rarely forthcoming, and if your questions are anything along the lines of What is the real Morocco?, What is it all about? or As I eat and sleep my way around this country, where are the Moroccans? — then best address them elsewhere. Don’t ask me.
Mr & Mrs Stitch Go To The Shop
They are setting up for the evening on the Paseo de los Tristes — unstacked chairs clack in the gathering gloom and chains rasp, unfastened to free the fixtures: tables and menu stands, lamps, terrace heaters and the assorted paraphernalia of hostelry. The stallholders of a little knickknack mercadillo are packing up to vacate the space for drinkers and diners. We’ve come down the Cuesta del Chapiz from our place in Sacromonte — where a peep through the door of one of the flamenco clubs revealed a scene (two dancers in full polka dot regalia, one sporting an abanico and the other a jet black moustache) that looked very much like the mediterranean 1973 of my imagination — with our hands in our pockets, except where the slippery cobbles threaten to unfoot us and we need them to counterweight our wobbles. It isn’t usually this cold at this time of year.
On the Paseo, we can’t see the Sierra Nevada. The distant mountains are obscured by the steep wooded slope of the narrow valley’s far side and, at the top of it, the municipally illuminated ramparts of the Alhambra. From here, the Generalife, the Comares tower, and the balconies of the Nasrid palaces peer down their haughty noses at us. We didn’t prebook in time.
It occurs to me as we stroll that, in the ten years that we have been coming to Granada, I have never heard the Darro rush. I lean over the wall to look and the little river, usually a mere trickle, is loud and lively. I suppose that, despite the crisp weather, there must be a melt in progress somewhere up there in the sierra that wear, we have noted earlier, a thicker cap of snow than we’ve seen before. On the smoothly paved flat of the paseo, my hands return to the warmth of my pockets. They’ll burn some gas on these terraces tonight.
Where the terraces come to an end, the way narrows and becomes the Carrera del Darro that, cleaving to the river, winds its way down and into the city centre. It is often billed as one of Europe’s most beautiful half miles, overlooked by the Alhambra and lined with magnificent churches and palaces. At this time of day, with early diners out and late shoppers yet to go home, it’s a nightmare of audio narrated tour groups, snaking Segway gangs and a perilous tangle of selfie sticks. With our own noses held haughty, we float through the roiling human sea, mercifully carried along by the benevolent forces of Hypocrisy and Delusion, thereby relieved of the need to acknowledge that we are part of it.
I swear there are more people here with each passing year. A lot more. Is that, I wonder, because we first came here at the height of the financial crisis? Or simply because there are more people now? More people doing this, doing that, going here and there. Making noise. Demanding their piece of the pie. Taking space, and selfies.
At the bottom, on the Plaza Nueva, further evidence: outside Los Diamantes, a famous fish place, there is a substantial queue. Now, I love Los Diamantes, but fried fish is fried fish. The queue is a triumph of marketing: I can only conclude that the shivering people feel they must go to this legendary bar while in Granada. We’re down here sniffing for food too but even so, we walk on, probably almost concealing our disdain. It isn’t as if it’s the real Los Diamantes. The original is blocks away, on Navas. It’s tiny and, frankly, ugly, and on our first visit to Granada was one of a kind. These days though, the legendary freiduria trades as Grupo Los Diamantes and has several premises throughout the city.
I have been prevented by two more cosmic forces — Pretension and Snobbery — from using any of the new outlets. I will only countenance the original. Sadly, because of the victim-of-own-success impossibility of getting in there, not to mention its strip-lit, aluminium-tabled failure to live up to Mrs Stitch’s aesthetic standards, I haven’t set foot in the place for seven or eight years. To gaze upon its open doorway during that time has been, for me, to know a little something about heartbreak — a wall of backs barring my entry and Mrs Stitch tugging at my sleeve.
A little further on from Plaza Nueva, despite our not having tickets and being down here in the city, we get our Alhambra fix. The old Moorish fortification boasts an embarrassment of exquisite spaces — babbling fountains in perfectly proportioned courtyards, elaborately carved palaces and intricately adorned halls with their exalted cupolas — but among the most uplifting of them is actually down here on Reyes Católicos: in the form of the gift shop, an upscale riot of zellige porn and moorish garniture.
We come every time, to look at the same things — pottery, prints, cookbooks and stationery, histories of the city, its castle, its culture — plus whatever is new. For me, it’s usually the books, while Mrs Stitch has for a number of years now been fixated on ceramic pomegranates. As is always the case, we find things we suddenly, desperately want and as is also always the case, we leave them where they are — knowing full well we’ll be back the next day to get them, having pretended to sleep on it.
This year’s buy for me, the following morning, is a paperback edition of Amin Maalouf’s Leo the African. Mrs Stitch is clothes shopping, an activity for which I have neither the moral fortitude nor, as Mrs Stitch has pointed out, the necessary focus, so the timing of the purchase is an expedience — I have some waiting to do and I will do it on leafy Bib Rambla, with the book and a morning beer. I settle down to read an account of Hasan al-Wazzan, who would become Leo, and the 1489 of the author’s imagination: the story of a violent flood that raced down the Darro valley, as seen by an old woman and a child from a high window there, and their own heartbreak as they watch it sweep away homes and lives in the city below.
Even in last night’s ebullient form, the little river would have struggled to sweep away a shopping trolley. Its present condition would be, I imagine, as inconceivable to the woman and the little girl as the flood is now, until it occurs to me that the inundation of tourists would be — from that high window — more or less exactly analogous, sweeping away the quieter city we first came to know a decade ago. At any rate, they were to have their hearts broken again just a few years later, when the christian reconquista washed jew and muslim from the peninsula in a great migratory wave that deposited them, stranded and starting again, in the Maghreb, Italy, and the Levant, reinventing Granada so that the city they knew is now vestigial — it lies beneath, behind and between the fixtures of the city I see, remnants worn smooth by the currents of time.
It’s too early for lunch when we meet up again and we wander through the realejo district in vain, watching waiters unstack chairs and unchain tables but unable to get in anywhere. We end up walking the gauntlet of an awakening but still closed Navas, resolved to make our way towards Calle Elvira where, by the time we get there, something might be open. As we near the end of Navas, however, Mrs Stitch — most uncharacteristically — suggests we might stand a chance, being so early, of getting into Los Diamantes. I snort my derision at her naivety, but say nothing. A few moments later, we stand before the fabled fish bar. It’s thirty-three minutes past noon, which means the place has been open for three minutes and, true to form, is already almost full.
The operative word in that sentence, however, is almost. In a minor miracle that might as well be the parting of a sea, I drift through a gap — an honest-to-goodness gap — in the wall of backs, finding myself in the temple’s inner sanctum and then, in a further miracle that isn’t at all minor, at the hallowed bar itself, an indulgent Mrs Stitch rolling her eyes at my side and a portly bartender, who I am tempted to describe as cherubic, smiling beatifically at me, awaiting my instructions. Is that a halo? I’ll concede it might just be a trick of the overhead fluorescent lights. Scalp tingling, all senses heightened, I order a couple of beers.
In the brilliant, purifying light, I look around — at the menu board, the kitchen hatch, the three aluminium tables. Not a single thing has changed in all of those lost years. The place, which in my mind had been washed away, covered over by the encrustations of time, of tourists, of new branches, endures in its original state. The first. The best. My Los Diamantes, the one that is holy to me, persists.
That the divine is eternal and the eternal divine is not, perhaps, a revelation one would expect to experience chewing slack-jawed on a mouthful of battered anchovies, but I’ll take it where I can get it. Securing a curt nod of permission from Mrs Stitch, I order us another couple of beers. These ones come with squid. With a mouthful of that distending my grin, I continue to take it all in and to repeat this new, revealed truth to myself. That which is sacred is never lost — it is still here, and has been all along.
On the Paseo, we can’t see the Sierra Nevada. The distant mountains are obscured by the steep wooded slope of the narrow valley’s far side and, at the top of it, the municipally illuminated ramparts of the Alhambra. From here, the Generalife, the Comares tower, and the balconies of the Nasrid palaces peer down their haughty noses at us. We didn’t prebook in time.
It occurs to me as we stroll that, in the ten years that we have been coming to Granada, I have never heard the Darro rush. I lean over the wall to look and the little river, usually a mere trickle, is loud and lively. I suppose that, despite the crisp weather, there must be a melt in progress somewhere up there in the sierra that wear, we have noted earlier, a thicker cap of snow than we’ve seen before. On the smoothly paved flat of the paseo, my hands return to the warmth of my pockets. They’ll burn some gas on these terraces tonight.
Where the terraces come to an end, the way narrows and becomes the Carrera del Darro that, cleaving to the river, winds its way down and into the city centre. It is often billed as one of Europe’s most beautiful half miles, overlooked by the Alhambra and lined with magnificent churches and palaces. At this time of day, with early diners out and late shoppers yet to go home, it’s a nightmare of audio narrated tour groups, snaking Segway gangs and a perilous tangle of selfie sticks. With our own noses held haughty, we float through the roiling human sea, mercifully carried along by the benevolent forces of Hypocrisy and Delusion, thereby relieved of the need to acknowledge that we are part of it.
I swear there are more people here with each passing year. A lot more. Is that, I wonder, because we first came here at the height of the financial crisis? Or simply because there are more people now? More people doing this, doing that, going here and there. Making noise. Demanding their piece of the pie. Taking space, and selfies.
At the bottom, on the Plaza Nueva, further evidence: outside Los Diamantes, a famous fish place, there is a substantial queue. Now, I love Los Diamantes, but fried fish is fried fish. The queue is a triumph of marketing: I can only conclude that the shivering people feel they must go to this legendary bar while in Granada. We’re down here sniffing for food too but even so, we walk on, probably almost concealing our disdain. It isn’t as if it’s the real Los Diamantes. The original is blocks away, on Navas. It’s tiny and, frankly, ugly, and on our first visit to Granada was one of a kind. These days though, the legendary freiduria trades as Grupo Los Diamantes and has several premises throughout the city.
I have been prevented by two more cosmic forces — Pretension and Snobbery — from using any of the new outlets. I will only countenance the original. Sadly, because of the victim-of-own-success impossibility of getting in there, not to mention its strip-lit, aluminium-tabled failure to live up to Mrs Stitch’s aesthetic standards, I haven’t set foot in the place for seven or eight years. To gaze upon its open doorway during that time has been, for me, to know a little something about heartbreak — a wall of backs barring my entry and Mrs Stitch tugging at my sleeve.
A little further on from Plaza Nueva, despite our not having tickets and being down here in the city, we get our Alhambra fix. The old Moorish fortification boasts an embarrassment of exquisite spaces — babbling fountains in perfectly proportioned courtyards, elaborately carved palaces and intricately adorned halls with their exalted cupolas — but among the most uplifting of them is actually down here on Reyes Católicos: in the form of the gift shop, an upscale riot of zellige porn and moorish garniture.
We come every time, to look at the same things — pottery, prints, cookbooks and stationery, histories of the city, its castle, its culture — plus whatever is new. For me, it’s usually the books, while Mrs Stitch has for a number of years now been fixated on ceramic pomegranates. As is always the case, we find things we suddenly, desperately want and as is also always the case, we leave them where they are — knowing full well we’ll be back the next day to get them, having pretended to sleep on it.
This year’s buy for me, the following morning, is a paperback edition of Amin Maalouf’s Leo the African. Mrs Stitch is clothes shopping, an activity for which I have neither the moral fortitude nor, as Mrs Stitch has pointed out, the necessary focus, so the timing of the purchase is an expedience — I have some waiting to do and I will do it on leafy Bib Rambla, with the book and a morning beer. I settle down to read an account of Hasan al-Wazzan, who would become Leo, and the 1489 of the author’s imagination: the story of a violent flood that raced down the Darro valley, as seen by an old woman and a child from a high window there, and their own heartbreak as they watch it sweep away homes and lives in the city below.
Even in last night’s ebullient form, the little river would have struggled to sweep away a shopping trolley. Its present condition would be, I imagine, as inconceivable to the woman and the little girl as the flood is now, until it occurs to me that the inundation of tourists would be — from that high window — more or less exactly analogous, sweeping away the quieter city we first came to know a decade ago. At any rate, they were to have their hearts broken again just a few years later, when the christian reconquista washed jew and muslim from the peninsula in a great migratory wave that deposited them, stranded and starting again, in the Maghreb, Italy, and the Levant, reinventing Granada so that the city they knew is now vestigial — it lies beneath, behind and between the fixtures of the city I see, remnants worn smooth by the currents of time.
It’s too early for lunch when we meet up again and we wander through the realejo district in vain, watching waiters unstack chairs and unchain tables but unable to get in anywhere. We end up walking the gauntlet of an awakening but still closed Navas, resolved to make our way towards Calle Elvira where, by the time we get there, something might be open. As we near the end of Navas, however, Mrs Stitch — most uncharacteristically — suggests we might stand a chance, being so early, of getting into Los Diamantes. I snort my derision at her naivety, but say nothing. A few moments later, we stand before the fabled fish bar. It’s thirty-three minutes past noon, which means the place has been open for three minutes and, true to form, is already almost full.
The operative word in that sentence, however, is almost. In a minor miracle that might as well be the parting of a sea, I drift through a gap — an honest-to-goodness gap — in the wall of backs, finding myself in the temple’s inner sanctum and then, in a further miracle that isn’t at all minor, at the hallowed bar itself, an indulgent Mrs Stitch rolling her eyes at my side and a portly bartender, who I am tempted to describe as cherubic, smiling beatifically at me, awaiting my instructions. Is that a halo? I’ll concede it might just be a trick of the overhead fluorescent lights. Scalp tingling, all senses heightened, I order a couple of beers.
In the brilliant, purifying light, I look around — at the menu board, the kitchen hatch, the three aluminium tables. Not a single thing has changed in all of those lost years. The place, which in my mind had been washed away, covered over by the encrustations of time, of tourists, of new branches, endures in its original state. The first. The best. My Los Diamantes, the one that is holy to me, persists.
That the divine is eternal and the eternal divine is not, perhaps, a revelation one would expect to experience chewing slack-jawed on a mouthful of battered anchovies, but I’ll take it where I can get it. Securing a curt nod of permission from Mrs Stitch, I order us another couple of beers. These ones come with squid. With a mouthful of that distending my grin, I continue to take it all in and to repeat this new, revealed truth to myself. That which is sacred is never lost — it is still here, and has been all along.
