The South

The South

Alan Hancock 2025

2 020 words

When she woke, always before me, always at first light as slanting sunlight brought the touch of the day's heat in through the gaps in the wooden shutters, through the muezzin's long call to prayer as the swallows went swooping and screaming past the window down the long canyon of Rue Descartes, past Hamid the bed maker opening the steel doors of his workshop, in the first light in the still of the early morning she made tea. I would half wake and hear her in the kitchen. The metal sound of a lid taken off a tin, the shudder of faulty plumbing, the pop of the gas jets as she lit the stove, then the tinkle of spoon on glass. She made tea: Jasmine, Earl Grey, Hibiscus, Mint, Lemon and Mango, tea scented with tropical perfumes and fragrant with exotic scents.

 Then she would come back to bed, shaping her body into whatever shape my body made, offering me half awake, half a-dream, her warm tea-stained kisses to kiss me back to life, and to love. How could I ever forget such mornings. She was my Cleopatra, my North African Queen, my gypsy lover with the ancient gold at her throat and wrist. And in my bed she whispered to me the words of some woman's spell in her own desert language, holding me with words that had no translation, or ever could.

I always told her she used too much sugar and she laughed and said everybody in Morocco has sugar. You are English. One day, I told her, we’ll go away from here. We’ll go somewhere we can be together, all the time. Paris, or London, or Rome. I’ll take you somewhere we won’t need to hide away.

She gave me a long look. And who will get me a passport, who will talk to my father? Then she tapped a slender finger to the side of her brow. You have too many stories, up here. You tell yourself too many stories. When I reminded her that Sheherazade told stories for a thousand and one nights, told her husband stories that saved her very life, she just smiled. Ah, but Sheherazade was far from home, and she had a broken heart.

With my Latifa the nights were sugared with scented tea and with her presence. I was adrift in my happiness, the two of us sailing my tiny apartment through the darkness high above the streets as they swirled and seethed. Here was my golden treasure at the end of a voyage along the shipwreck Barbary coast of all this strange hard land. Here was our world within a world, our castaway cave that glowed by candle flame while all around the city surged. 

This was my citadel and I wanted nothing more, just to live here and wait for a step in the hall, for a knock on my door. So I would wait each night for this dark eyed and scented woman, who blossomed like opium in my veins and in my heart through every waiting moment of day and night. Each morning I went to do my work, to teach English to my English classes. I shopped at the market in the Place Roi Hassan. I marked student papers on the novels of Thomas Hardy. I paid my bills. It was all an interlude in the sweet stories we made in my little flat.

But everything was changing, fast. Alarms and warnings rang through the world outside, and I paid them no heed. A storm was gathering in a place that had once been the Persian Empire, a storm that would bring a wind, like a Harmattan from the desert to sweep through every corner of our world. The people listened to the voices of the BBC World Service, who told us of Persia and the great Emperor Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, deposed. We heard of a revolution, led by a fierce man whose religion burned inside him, whose words were like flames.

Once again the fire of Islam was spreading across the lands of Araby, bringing fear to their kings and presidents. Police with their guns patrolled the city all night. They looked at us closely as they checked our papers, unsmiling. Dissidents, holy men, and protesters were taken from the streets and into jail. One by one our students began disappearing and were spoken of in hushed voices by family and friends. The great fortress prison at Kenitra filled with anyone who dared support the new voice of Islam, and there were many who did. This was a defiant people. There was news of war, rumour of the new jihad. I wasn’t listening; I was lost in my love.

Then one night Latifa came late, very late, her face dark with worry. Her brother had been arrested. No-one knew where he might be, and now the police were looking for his cousin and friends. What he had done wasn’t clear, and didn’t really matter. He was gone, and now she too would go. She mentioned the name of a village where her mother and father lived. She held me for a moment and kissed me. “T’inquiète pas,” she whispered, don’t worry. Then she left.

She left for a place too small to appear on any map, too far and lost for letters or a voice on the phone. And I knew I could not follow. My little flat and the fleeting life I had made myself here on the edge of Africa became, quite simply and completely, empty. I waited. My time stood still. Empty, empty space waited in the kitchen and in every teacup, in the clock, in my eyes, and in my cool chaste bed.

When she left I hardly noticed the lengthening shadows as the sun slid away into winter and all the twilight came to live in my little flat. Bit by bit the outside slipped into our world as her spell faded, and then was gone. The room looked suddenly old. It was full of junk, not treasure. There was furniture made of old boards, foam rubber and rugs. There were cracked walls covered with cheap Berber blankets, poorly woven. No rubies or diamonds any more, just dirty glass, the magic lost and fled.

She had gone, and one day I awoke and knew that she would not come back. I knew that I too would have to leave. On a day of cold blue sky in January my contract ended. The director wanted to know if I would consider renewing it for another year. When I said no he asked if I would be going home. I pictured a suburb with its bleached empty acres and neat cars in their driveways, the silent houses and shopping centre stunned in the heat. Home.

*                     *                     *         

Buses left from the square outside the gates of the old town, from the Bab ar Rouah, Gate of the Winds, and these winds blew me away and into another country. I became a nomad again, so that those I met could never have guessed that I had once been a king with his queen in a palace of velvet and gold. The buses were full of women with henna painted hands, women without shape or even a hint of it in their shapeless black and brown jelabas. Each had many children of whom those packed into seats near mine gazed at me for hours on end in quiet fascination.

The old men sat at the back and smoked their kiff pipes. They sang together as the old diesel ground its way past wheat fields and the brown earth with its villages of stone and mud. The women clapped out the beat and they shared tangerines with me and I gave the children brightly coloured sweets. The road took us all into the mountains and into the desert and out of this world and into a new one where the future might surprise us with its face.

I changed buses in Souk el Arba, a place made entirely of cinder blocks and bare earth hammered flat by Mercedes and Renault trucks. I ate tajine and Danone yoghourt in Beni Mellal, slept under a fig tree amid the fires of the kebab sellers in the sleepless bus park at the edge of town. I looked up and saw moonlight on the snow of the high Atlas and next morning I bought a woolen scarf in the souk. The old woman who sold it me had more gold than teeth in her mouth and she smiled the golden smile of an angel then held my hand a long time when I turned to go. God be with you, God be with you my child, she said. It was a blessing so pure I was blessed and redeemed.

As I walked out her scarf and her blessing both warmed me, and I knew that no cold such as I had felt in my heart would touch me ever again. Those days I always paid over the odds and it brought me joy to see such smiles on the faces. The children followed me every step I took and I was completely alone in all the turning brown world of Africa. I never once doubted that this was the way and that God was with me and always would be.

I went south and east, deeper into the empty places, on a road they said was made for Roman chariots when the desert was green with its trees. I drank only coffee and mineral water - Sidi Oulmes, bottled locally and some said of doubtful origin but preferable to whatever might come unwanted and unknown in the public supply of these places. I waited for a sign. I navigated by my stars and I knew a sign would come.

I came to the last village at the end of a worn-out road and asked for the way to the small place with the name she had spoken. And yes, the people said, it was too lost and small for any map, and very close. And yes, Mohammed the café owner has a place where sometimes travelers stay, though it had no bed or chair.

All night the generator hummed its song and the jackals cried out from the hills as I slept on a mat in a bare earth room. I slept deep and long, and happy.

In the morning I woke at first light to find the window ledge at my head crowded with swallows, whose soft twittering had woken me. I went outside into the cool air and sat with my back to a mud brick wall, and I watched the swallows fly in. And so Spring came to meet me, as the first rays of sun touched all the wide land and warmed every pebble and rock and hillside and warmed me too with its touching. And with this touch it made assurance that all was well and all would be well in this one place.

Mohammed the café owner, hooded and thick robed against the dawn wind, hurrying a little in his pointed leather slippers as he heard from the mosque the call to the faithful, brought me a glass of mint tea. A drink so sugared I could not stop smiling, then felt the tears close by.

As he turned to go I asked him the question I’d feared to ask before. Did he know a Latifa, a young woman who had come back from the city? He looked at me for a long time, as if he wanted to know who I was. “Oui, m’sieur. Elle sait que tu es là.” She knew, of course.

Here at a moment beyond all travel and waiting, with the sun in my eyes and in my heart and with the sure knowledge that love was always lost and always found, here in the heart of the desert at the heart of all things, as the world turned to bring me the day and everything it might hold, I drank tea.

End.