Tangier by Stewart Angus

Author:Stewart, Angus [Stewart, Angus]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Stewart, Angus - Tangier (1977)
Published: 1977-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

Apparently the Americans had landed two men on the moon. I was prepared to believe this. Meti was not. It was Meti's night to cook dinner. We had agreed on fish. Mackerel was the only fish regularly within his experience. I thought of childhood tales of their eating dead sailors, of Tangier's sewage effluents which the resident knows and the tourist doesn't, but of how as a post-war boy, with dried eggs and bananas and whale steaks, I'd virtually been reared on the stuff.

'Jolly delicious, Meti.' I mopped up oily gravy with bread.

'Cakes?' Meti mumbled, just big eyes above pounding mouthfuls.

'With tea on the terrace. I'll get it,' I said.

And so, sipping Lapsang and nibbling honey and almond stuffed pastry, we sat on the night terrace. Quite terrestrially a large owl flapped silently from the neighbouring building. A yellow mist was rolling in from the bay as it does sometimes with evening, filling the street canyons with wet cotton wool, muffling the traffic sounds, distorting the beam of vehicle headlights. Above, the Plough was sharp as in a planetarium, and the moon huge. I found myself staring at it with a vague concentration which deliberately invited notice.

'It's bad to look at that,' Meti said, stooping over the cakes.

'It's beautiful - bright. Look,' I said,

Med shrugged off a boring phenomenon, but with a casualness not wholly natural. He went indoors to fill his cup with condensed milk: the opaque brew then became in his understanding coffee. When he returned it was with a remaining mackerel, which three fingers picked to extinction with the concentrated fastidiousness of a cat. He wouldn't look at the moon.

'Met,' I began, 'it's very strange, but up there tonight two Men –'

'No!' said Mai, with a violence that showed he'd heard the heresy in town.

I tried again.

This time Meti's 'No!' was fiercer. His mouth arrogantly full of food, he was not so playfully about to chuck the scalding tea-coffee, But I saw also he was frightened. Not the embarrassment of an aunt faced by impropriety, say; or the calculated scepticism of a science that was sure of itself, but a simple, naked fear, Meti was turned in on himself. There was nothing to say. He crouched over his plate eating mackerel fastidiously still, but with a concentration that could only be equated with a dangerous, all-excluding growl.

It is strange,' I said again. And that was the end of man's violation of the moon.

In this context of the unbridgeable, I remember pathetically trying to comfort an American who had known Tangier for about two years. He'd some way been betrayed by his girl, Fatomah.

'Angus, she lied to me.'

'Pete, Moslems have a different idea of "truth" from ourselves - particularly in regard to Christians. It's as it were a floating concept –'

'Angus, I do know! Moslems are different. But what upset me was that when Fatomah lied - lied to me - it was just at Christmas-time.'

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