Tangier by Josh Shoemake

Author:Josh Shoemake
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-06-24T16:00:00+00:00

11

Hotel Rembrandt – Villa Muniria

The Hotel Rembrandt is back up the Boulevard in the angle formed by two smaller side streets. Rue Ibn Zoubair on your right will take you winding down to the Town Beach, and Rue Jabha Watania on your left stays up at the level of the Boulevard for a while, leading past little restaurants and tapas bars. About 100 metres down this road, a filthy alley appears to your right, descending sharply towards the beach. It is the sort of dank, littered passage that screams danger, which is exactly why we’re going to turn down it. This, Rue Magellan, is the most storied literary street in Tangier.

You will see the sign for the Tangier Inn, long a favourite bar for a wide assortment of residents. Under new management for the past few years, the average age of its patrons has dropped to about 20, and inside you will have to contend with flashing lights and pounding music, but for decades it was run by Peter Tuckwell and John Sutcliffe, who sold copies of his novel, The Unknown Pilgrim (1981), from behind the bar. Not yet convinced of Rue Magellan’s literary pedigree? Well, Mohamed Mrabet was a voluble bartender at the Tangier Inn back in 1965. And then there is the hotel connected to the bar, the Muniria, which in the 1950s was the principal Beat hotel in the world (the Hotel Ibn Battuta could once be found directly across the alleyway).

Francis Bacon spent the summer of 1954 here, painting and tutoring the young Ahmed Yacoubi as a favour to Paul Bowles (at least when he wasn’t up off the Boulevard gambling). William Burroughs moved here the next year – room 9 on the ground floor (the numbers have since changed), where the dirt billowed in from the garden. He paid $15 a month. Accompanying him from Dutch Tony’s was David Woolman, now a friend. Also accompanying him was the old habit, as Naked Lunch describes:

I had not taken a bath in a year or changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of terminal addiction. I never cleaned or dusted the room. Empty ampule boxes and garbage piled up to the ceiling. Light and water had been long since turned off for non-payment. I did absolutely nothing. I could look at the end of my shoe for eight hours.

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