The Beach

Page taken from my journal, dated 17th July 2010, Essaouira, Morocco

Imagine a beach so desolate it is as though no one ever walked there. Now try to see it as though you were looking from the vast and crumbling walls of an ancient city. It is not the kasbah that I want you to think of, behind the walls; simply know that the walls are there. It is beyond them that I want to look.

In the afternoons I come here, each day climbing out on the rocks when the tide is out and around the corner of the city onto a wide beach. Sometimes there are a few fishermen who sit up under the wall, leaning against it and drinking, throwing the empty bottles onto the rocks where they smash into hundreds of pieces of green glass. If you imagine looking back at the beach from out at sea, the fishermen are high, tucked under the wall in the right hand corner of your vision. The wall is vast, as I have said, and above it rise the ruins of stone buildings, like Zanzibar, or rather, like the ghosts of ruined buildings, for that is how they seem to me from the rocks.

It takes me close to an hour, climbing and clambering and slipping over the rocks before I can go no further and the rocky islands plunge into a ferocious sea, sucking downward and rising again, shooting spray high into the misty golden light of the afternoon. But it isn’t the sea or even the beach that I have come here for, wide and uninterrupted as it is but for piles of broken tiles blown over the seawall. It is the rocks themselves. For what can I say of their shapes? They stretch for some distance out from the beach and along it, not jagged exactly but sculpted, as though they had been carved or chiselled to leave chasms in the surface of the rock. I cannot say why I am so enchanted by their pitted landscape, I can only say that there is something melancholy about them, scarred as they are, as though their surface were the face of a handsome young man who had been severely disfigured by burns leaving skin once smooth and flush clinging to the contours of cheek and nose bones, quite useless and ugly now. The rocks are repellent in that same way, pockled and tortured, nothing to the perfectly picturesque avenues and squares of the ancient town, even the ordered chaos of the crumbling Mellah, poignant because it is so soon to be demolished entirely.

So no-one seems to come here. Except the packs of dogs who sleep in the shade of their shadow during the afternoon when the sun is fierce and the wind picks up and scatters sand into every doorway and pitch of every roof in the city. I am thinking of bones, as I tread the rocks. The bleached collection of bones on my father’s veranda and fireplace in Kenya. I remember that every time I would arrive from England he would show me the newest additions – skulls and jawbones, collarbones and teeth, quite prehistoric in their dimensions. He always insisted on their beauty, the feeling of them as you turn them over in your hands.

At high tide the rocks are submerged by seawater and now, at low tide, the pools glitter with coarse and sharp granules of salt left when the water has evaporated. On the smoother plateaus someone has carved illegible symbols into the surface perhaps untold centuries ago. And I wonder, as I walk inland over the upright crags and sidelong hulks of stone, whether mektoub, it was written, that I would walk here and feel so alone.

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Journal Extract, Essaouira

Taken from a page in my journal, dated 15th July 2010

Routine is something I alternately both reject, on the principle that it eliminates the risk and collision of chance encounter and spontaneous experience, and adhere to almost religiously. And so, for the fifth morning in a row after working until breakfast, we walk through the medinas backstreets running parallel to the busy spinal avenue of Essaouira to Patisserie Driss to buy pastries and then onto the café on the corner of the Place Moulay Hassan where they sell excellent Italian coffee. We take the same table outside; it is always busy, drink coffee and eat the sticky pastries in the sun watching the characters in the square go by while deciding which art gallery or museum to visit that we haven’t already. Some days if we aren’t in the mood for art, we visit the fish market in the old port. With the bastion walls and sinister trawlers, the port of Essaouira is still deliciously medieval. If you walk along the harbour front, men lay out their morning’s catch on upturned crates, the pearly scales glinting in the sun. The colours are quite extraordinary in the hazy light (the light always seems to be hazy here). There are the navy and white faded stripes of the fishermen, the silver fish, pale underbellies, pink crabs, the glittering threads of the nets piled on the ground. There are sardines, gritty with salt and the blood on the rocks, the other side of the crenellated sea wall, where the men are gutting them, stacking eels in piles and hosing them down, sluicing away the innards, red and purple and black and remarkably beautiful when strung over the wet grey rocks.

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Journal Entry, Essaouira

Extract taken from my journal, dated 15th July 2010

So I take up my place at the desk, with coffee, with my ‘grandfather’s pen’. I am reading, simultaneously, a book on the Iran-Iraqi war, travel essays by Edith Wharton published in 1920 and leant to me by Anouck, and a volume of Keats, on which I am beginning to compile notes for my PhD. I feel quite languorous, writing quotes and thoughts and lines of my own verse and knowing that for the immediate years ahead these morning moments and the pages of notes scribbled during these quiet snatched hours will contribute to the most serious and most extended period of literary study and practice that I have ever embarked upon.

In Oxford I was beginning, wearily, to recognize the all too familiar sensation of restlessness that creeps upon me when I have spent too long in one place. I had stopped writing regularly, my thoughts were supine and disjointed and work on my book had dried up again. I had run out of ideas. I was uninspired. I don’t know why I rely so absolutely on the external inspiration of foreign shores, of novelty or at least the ‘feeling’ of exoticism and discovery that seems to create the ‘blank-space’ in my mind needed to start work once more.

Initially and for several days following travel I will write, think, conjure nothing. I will be only eyes and ears. Here in Essaouira, there was the silence of the grain market, the scent of burnt coffee at Patisserie Driss, a wide empty square, fishermen mending their silvery nets. These images, scents and sounds seemed to slip past me as though I were walking through water, barely entering my subconscious. Numb, I could enjoy the lack of responsibility that accompanies being a tourist, a bumbling inarticulate foreigner like any other, walking the streets and these deserted stretches of sand before Diabat.

And then, quite abruptly, I am bored. I want more… reality. I want immersion. The thin surface, the veneer isn’t enough. It isn’t enough… the tourist haunts and gawping at the sights everyone else seems to be gawping at, alongside camera-clutching backpackers and people too afraid to walk off the bottom of the map, the small map of a medina, or area of other historical interest listed in their guidebooks as though if they did, they might be lost forever in the sights and sounds, the reek of the fish market, the clamour, the fog of woodsmoke, as though beyond that spectral sheen of sticky, salty night-mist, is oblivion, the edge of the world, a gaping void. It might saturate them, the everyday reality, and it is as though they can only bear to take on the onslaught of the town in short half hour bursts before returning to the safety of their hotels. No, I don’t want to don a Bob Marley t-shirt and join the commune of hippie settlers. But I don’t want to hide behind a djellaba caftan and pretend to be indigenous either.

This is where the apartment comes in. The apartment and the knowledge that the rent can buy not only anonymity and refuge but an authentic sense of living, for the briefest time, in the residential streets of an Islamic town. Because instantly I leave the luxury of the beautifully restored riad hotel with its four posters and air-conditioning units and lug my bag to the top floor of this shabby, bohemian but nevertheless quite charming house, I begin to feel alive again. There is no concierge, no ‘between seven and ten am’ breakfast hours, no air conditioning unit. But there is the breeze, the Alizee wind at night. There are ‘neighbours’, and a grey tomcat who likes yoghurt.

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Mektoub

Page from my journal, dated 13th July 2010, Essaouira

I have always loved living in apartments, sandwiched between the rhythms of other people’s lives. Downstairs this week is a Scottish windsurfer and sometimes in the halls I meet Amina the cleaner, who wears a leopard-print jumpsuit, her hair covered by a black headscarf. And then there is Anouck, the Parisian painter who lives opposite in a converted loft with parquet floors in black and white that remind me of a harlequin costume. Her hands are nearly always covered with paint. She wears gold harem pants and I find her quite mesmerizing; she is ethereal, modern and somehow exotic with milk-pale skin and russet painted lips. When she talks it is impossible not to watch her lips. They are so impossibly precise, an archetype, almost.

When we met I was manhandling a basket of fruit and bread from the market in the doorway of No.44, trying to unlock the front door and to prevent the cat from escaping all at once. We introduced ourselves and shook hands, hers smudged with charcoal, mine stained with black ink. Anouck noticed this and laughed and I indicated the antique gold pen on the chain around my neck. I told her that one day, mid daydream, I decided that hunting for such an object would become a kind of quest from now on, (since searching antique markets and scouring vintage stores is usually more fun if you know you want something specific). I wanted a solid gold pen that was small enough to wear as a pendant and beautiful enough to wear as a piece of jewellery which could be strung on a chain so that whenever I was out somewhere and had lost my pen, or my fountain pen had run out of ink, I would always have one around my neck. That was several years ago and the search took me to many antique jewellers, flea markets and house sales in different towns and while I would often find ‘something’, it was a long time before I found my gold pen. They were rare, particularly slim ones, with a reliable and strong hold for the chain, and I was looking for something special, an intricate design with a small gold italic nib. When I did find it, it was under 10 centimetres in length, engraved with a delicate design along the thin shaft, yet heavy to hold.

While I told her this, Anouck was nodding seriously, turning the pen over in her hands.

- Mektoub, she said, in Arabic.

- What does that mean?

- It means it was written.

There is a postscript to that story, because by far the most thrilling aspect of finding my pen was the discovery of the engraved initials P.L on the encased top. P.L, the initials of my late grandfather, a journalist who had been one of the first editors of the Guardian newspaper in its former days on Fleet Street. He had written quite prolifically until his death, producing hundreds of articles preserved in his scrapbooks, where he had neatly pasted them, chronologically one after the other. One of his most prestigious assignments was to cover the Queen’s visit to Zimbabwe and following this he fell in love with East Africa, where he was stationed for five years during his time in the Royal Air Force. He wrote quite exquisite collections of verse inspired by the landscape that I believe he considered, as I do, his spiritual home, and which he published when he returned to England. That my grandfather was, sixty years earlier, a poet, and that he loved, travelled across and discovered himself deeply affected by East Africa could simply be coincidence or dictated by certain genes passed down to me by blood. But Anouck thinks – no. It was mektoub, it was written, and I kind of like the idea of that.

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