On spring break, I left my study abroad program in Cordoba, Spain, and headed south by train towards Tangier, Morocco, the birthplace of my father Alberto and the former home of his parents, both of whom had died before I was born. Grandma Sol died from cancer in Tangier when my father was 7. By the time Grandpa Giuseppe died twenty years later, my father had followed him to Rome and New York, only to leave home, become a hippie, and settle in the West.
Armed with a map of the city’s walled medina, a small black ski-boot bag full of clothes, and my tattered brown journal, my plan was to discover as much as I could about the African echoes of my family’s past. At best, I hoped to find a relative of my grandmother’s, her grave, or some other physical sign of her existence. At the very least, I yearned to walk the same street that my family had walked fifty years before. First, I’d have to spend a night in the small port town of Algeciras, which sent daily ferries across the strait of Gibraltar to Tangier.
Preparing for this trip, I failed to recruit any of my fellow study-abroad students, or any Spanish students for that matter, who by then were lounging on the beaches of the Costa del Sol. I sat alone, reviewing my journal for the few clues that my father had dictated to me. Grandma’s full name was Sol Pinto Attanasio, her parents were Albert and Sara Pinto. She had an October birthday (he didn’t know the day), and died in 1960. She gave birth to my father in the Spanish Hospital. Grandpa Giuseppe had worked in the Italian consulate.
The red Andalusian mesas and bluffs whisked past the train window. The dry hills reminded me of my home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Going south, the train approached the 35th degree of northern latitude which transects both Santa Fe and Tangier. Rows of irrigation ditches split valleys, sage green from orchards of olive trees. In Spanish, as well as New Mexican spanglish, ditches are called, acequias, from the Arabic sāqiyah. The Guadalquivir River, which the train line followed, connected Cordoba and the olive growing region to the Atlantic ocean and the Mediterranean sea. Since Roman times, ships have navigated the wide river, sending olive-oil as close as Italy and as far as Trader Joe’s.
Outside the train station in Algeciras, streetlights broke the darkness of the night, illuminating grey apartment blocks. Disoriented in the dark, it took a while to find Hotel Lisboa, where I had booked a room the night before. The sounds of trucks on the highway and the illuminated cranes in the port reminded of other transit cities like El Paso, Juarez, Hong Kong and Shenzhen, where any number of things can happen.
By noon the next day, I stood on the third deck of the ferry with a ham sandwich in my belly and a camera in my hand. As the ferry pulled southward, I stared portside toward the British enclave of Gibraltar, a bare rock of a peninsula on which I never set foot. Behind the boat, up the hill in front of a brick government building, the green and white stripes of the Andalusian flag flopped in a mild wind. The flag depicted a lion-skin clad Hercules with a club over his shoulder, two docile lions at his feet, and two white columns at his back. According to Greek myth, Hercules tore Iberia and North Africa apart leaving his two pillars, the rock of Gibraltar on one side and the Jebel Musa on the other. For the ancients, the “pillars of Hercules” marked the end of the known world.
Sol grew up in Tangier. Spanish was her first language, but she spoke Arabic and French in the street. I think that she taught my father Arabic at home. One of my aunts in Rome told me that when he arrived to Italy after Sol’s death, he carried with him an Arabic exercise book full of elementary scribbles. The aunt who told me this, Lina, married Guiseppe’s brother after meeting him in Tangiers. Lina and family had fled Spain after Franco won the civil war in the 1930s. They were joined by exiles from all over Europe and North America, from refugees of World War II, to disenchanted expats like the literary giants Paul Bowles and Jack Kerouac.
Two hours later, the ferry pulled into the port of Tangier. Above the harbor, and to the right, the tight medina and its medieval walls hugged a slope caked in houses of mud and concrete. To the left, the new city extended behind the medina down the beach, stocked with hotels at every stage of construction: foundations flanked by cranes, iron skeletons clothed with scaffolding, shiny twenty storied buildings with neon signs, and derelict hulks ready for demolition. The Europeans hadn’t made it to the beach yet but dozens of little boys in swim suits teased the surf, running in zigzags, watched by mothers covered from head to toe in black, and fathers wearing suits in the hot sun. Near a sea wall protecting the harbor, small fishing boats with young men working plastic rods lay anchored, bobbing in the seawater. When Kerouac came into the same port with fellow beat William Burroughs in 1957, The high rise hotels didn’t yet exist, and looking up at the hill he saw a uniformly white medina. “Then like seeing sudden slow files of Mohammedan women in white I saw the white roofs of the little port of Tangiers sitting right there in the elbow of the land, on the water,” he wrote, in his loosely autobiographical book, Desolation Angels. Instead of fisherman, the little boats carried pimps that ferryyelled up at his boat in Spanish, offering young male prostitutes.
Once out of the port, I was mobbed by drug dealers and “guides,” walking scumbags who offered me everything from hotels to hash to whores. I hated these hawkers, but it was difficult to pass judgment when a post-Kerouac wave of thrill seekers had come to Tangiers for decades. Like horseflies, they patrolled every inch along the main strip, the Avenue d’Espagne, so numerous and incessant that I couldn’t stop, let alone unfold a map, without being devoured. After twenty minutes of walking with my back to the sea, the hustlers disappeared. Yellow delivery trucks and old Mercedes cabs whipped by me, slowing only for the giant roundabouts that fed into four or five connecting streets. Short wrinkled men dressed in brown and black djellabas sat on café patios drinking tea, with their hoods down. Women walked wearing pink, black, blue or yellow hijabs in and out of electronics stores, butcher shops, and banks.
I stopped at the first landmark that matched up to my cheap map, a bus station marked by a dirt patch and about a hundred young men dressed in tight European tee-shirts carrying plastic bags, duffel bags, backpacks and boxes. I had strayed from the medina, and tried to get there without retracing my steps through the swarm of guides. A few hours and three miles later, I found myself on an undeveloped knoll of dirt and grass. Muslim graves scattered across this hill, that was neither a cemetery nor a park. Could one of these belong to Sol? I doubted it. As a Sephardic—an Iberian or NorthAfrican Jew—her grave probably sat in a Jewish cemetery. Below, the south side of the medina looked inviting, its rock wall opening up at a bab—a large gate—through which donkeys, motorcycles and the occasional rusty Renault passed freely.
The first break in the narrow road was the Petit Soco, the little market, a wide and uneven patch of cobblestone with shops running along the edges. At the café on the uphill side I ordered mint tea, sweetened with more honey than a bee hive. Later, my father told me that he had lived in an apartment above the Petit Soco, from which he watched a weekly donkey market. In Desolation Angels, Kerouac recounts a visit the same square, at the same time that my father lived there. He calles it by the Spanish name, the Zoco Chico.
“We’d just picked us up over desultory coffees in the Zoco Chico with a man in a red fez whom [Burroughs] confidently accused (to me) of causing hepatitis […]. With an old olive can, with a hole in it, another hole for the mouth, we stuffed raw red opium in the well hole and got it lit and inhaled huge blue gobs of opium smoke.”
Across the street, the Pension Mauritania offered me a small single room with a terrace overlooking the Soco for 50 Dirham per night, or about five Euros. A receptionist named Hassan spoke Spanish, which he studied from a worn textbook at the front desk of the hotel. This stocky fellow was my age—22—and after chatting for an hour, I felt that I had at least one friend on the continent. At dusk I crawled back into the street, bought a sandwich stuffed with french-fries, beef sausage, olives, sprouts, carrots and lettuce, and brought it back to my terrace. The temperature was perfect and the city alive. Orange clouds drifted overhead past the waxing moon and I could see a planet shining to the south. Was it Venus?
The next day I woke up late. Hassan wasn’t at the front desk, but he popped out of a backroom carrying a prayer rug.
“Praying?” I said.
“Yes,” he replied, with a smile.
“You pray every day?”
“Of course, I am a Muslim.”
“How about Friday mass? You go to that?”
“No, I can’t, I have work, so I pray here.” Then, he asked me questions. I explained that I was from New Mexico and normally studied in Vermont, but now studied in Spain. We chatted about his mother, with whom he lived on the northern edge of the medina. Two of his friends came to visit him at work. Like most Moroccan youth, they spoke French and Arabic, but not Spanish. The first one, a man with glasses and styled black hair, didn’t speak. The other, a woman with deep brown eyes and a Playboy logo t-shirt, had just come from class at the local University. She spoke so fast in Arabic that I wondered if even Hassan could understand her. She asked why I had come to Tangier, and Hassan was happy, and perhaps even proud, to translate. When I told these three Muslims that my grandmother was Sephardic, an Arab Jew, they delighted at my Moroccan connection. After his friends left, Hassan offered to take me out.
“Tomorrow you come to my house and my mother will prepare you dinner. Then I show you the medina,” he said. I agreed
At 7 am, I walked through the medina. In the back of my mind, it was a scouting mission to erase my unease at walking the city in the dark with Hassan. On the northern side of the median, near where Hassan said his mother lived, the wall opened up to a panoramic view of the port and the sea. Across the straight, a thick strip of black and grey marked Spain. Each year thousands of migrants from Morocco and sub-Saharan Africa crossed to Spain. Hassan had friends in Madrid, who wrote on his Facebook page and sent gifts by mail. The modern Fascists across Europe called Muslim immigration an invasion, a reenactment of the Islamic conquests when armies of Arabs and Bedouins crossed to Spain to conquer the weak Visigoth kingdom in 711 B.C.E. In Madrid, I’d met plenty of migrants. And if they were invaders, they were armed with mops, brooms, and cloaked in the social invisibility of nightshifts and strange accents. In my imagination, those migrants traced the reverse path of Sephardic refugees who fled from of the Spanish inquisition to Morocco.
On the map, the old Italian Consulate looked close. A short walk down the edge of the Kasbah, up Rue Assad Ibn al Farrat, a busy public hospital sat on one side of the street. Guards in dull tan uniforms blew silver whistles directing human and vehicular traffic through the green metal gates. Moroccans went in and out. Some waited on crutches, while others exited wearing head bandages or carrying plastic bags marked “Rx.”
The old Italian Consulate lay on the other side of the street unmarked and abandoned, with a high iron gate and the grotesque remains of a call box. I peered through the bars, across a large abandoned parkway, toward the two-story white building on the other side. Before Morocco’s independence and the consulate’s move to Rabat, it had been the residence of the Italian ambassador, and the office of the consulate staff. As I looked at the slate roof, the two large horseshoe arches on the second floor, and the French doors at the entrance on the ground floor, I saw a black-and-white version of my young 1950s grandfather, in his starched navy uniform carrying a briefcase, with important business to attend to. My grandfather worked there as the military attaché to the ambassador. A communications chief, he did intelligence work. My father once told me that he spied on the Russians in a US-led surveillance effort, spending weeks on fishing boats in the Aegean.
On the other side of the medina in the new city, I found a large white synagogue. I waited in the empty entry chamber while men prayed in Hebrew in the next room. The first person I saw, a solitary white man with a blue yarmulke, didn’t speak English or Spanish. He sent out his nephew, a pale skinny teenager with thick glasses. It was obvious from their whiteness that these were European, Ashkenazi Jews, and that I might not be as welcome as I had hoped.
“Hi, I am… doing genealogical research on my Jewish grandmother from here, do you know of any Sephardic cemeteries or cemetery records?” I said, stumbling on each factual detail.
“I am sorry, but it is Passover, and we are very busy,” said the boy, with a face that wondered if I even knew what Passover was.
“Maybe come back next week,” he said motioning subtly towards the door.
Back in the medina, I figured I might as well do some shopping. Peddlers of handicrafts and factory-made trinkets dominated the alleyways, while producers and vendors lined the wider streets. Compared to the guides on the beach, they were incredibly respectful. One young man who sold me a leather belt after a friendly round of haggling put it this way: “Those guys on the beach, they make us look bad. They lie, they cheat, and then no one wants to buy anything.”
That evening, I met Hassan at the Mauritania and we walked up the hill to his mother’s house on the northern side of the medina. A gateway in the ancient wall opened to a view of the strait, the same one I had seen that morning, but dotted with lights along the coast of Spain. Hassan’s house, whose entrance also faced the strait, was the size of a school bus cut in half and stacked on top of itself. The walls, roof, and ceiling were all painted purple over smooth yet uneven plaster. The first floor was a kitchen, a dining room and an entryway separated by walls, but not doors. Hassan’s mother greeted us with a white gap-toothed grin. She was chubby, wrinkled, dark-skinned, and wore a black smock with a black-and-rose-patterned hijab. I didn’t ask about Hassan’s father. Together we ate oily fried fish, a yellow dish of garbanzo beans, and unleavened flatbread. After dinner, Hassan and I walked the medina, discussing Islamic saints in between greeting the neighbors. At the local cyber café, we got on Facebook together. He showed me pictures of his past girlfriends. Hassan was a pious ladies man, who wouldn’t dare sleep with his sweethearts before marriage, but flirted with every girl we passed on the street.
The next day I found the Spanish Hospital where my father was born. I couldn’t go in, but I loitered around the entrance and took a photo for my father. Then, I bummed around the beach, eventually running into some teenagers doing parkour, which is a type of street gymnastics, like skateboarding without the skateboard. They did handstands on pillars and executed spectacular jumps over the stairs. I juggled rocks for them, which sent them into a frenzy of Facebook name sharing. They spoke English, and wanted to know everything about America, the land of motocross and Vin Diesel.
Back with Hassan at the Mauritania, I thought back to a conversation with my father about looking for people with my grandmother’s maiden name, “Pinto.” “There are too many, like probably sixty families” he had told me. I asked Hassan for a phone book. Considering how little I had found in the past few days, I thought it might be worth a try. We scanned the equivalent of the White Pages, and found Pinto. There was only one. I dialed and a woman answered. I spoke in Spanish, figuring that if they only spoke Arabic we already had a deal breaker for meeting.
“Hello, I’m looking for Señor Pinto, is he available?” I said.
“No, he’s out of town, on business,” she said. I explained that my grandmother was a Pinto, and that my father was born in Tangier.
“So, are you folks… Sephardic?”
“Yes, yes we are.” She told me to call back later, when her husband had returned and explained that yes, most of the Sephardic had immigrated to Israel. I tried back a few times but never got Mr. Pinto on the phone. He existed though, and his wife existed, and that was enough for me.
On my last day I checked out of the Mauritania and said goodbye to Hassan. I slung my bag over my shoulder and made my way towards the American Consulate Museum at the western entrance of the medina. As with the Italian Consulate, diplomatic functions had moved to the new capital in Rabat. Still, the Americans kept it up, because it was the first American-owned building outside the US. On my way out, I asked one of the guards if he knew of a Sephardic cemetery.
“Yes, right down the alley, just outside the walls,” he said.
Outside, I circled the cemetery, which spanned a couple of blocks and was enclosed on all sides by a nine-foot whitewashed wall. A green hut with signs in Arabic and Hebrew marked the entrance, locked by a chain. With a few more days on my hands, I might have found out the visiting hours or conned my way in, but I had to leave.
At the port, I searched for a ferry ticket. Of the five or so ferry companies, none of them were offering tickets for 40 Euros or less, the price I paid coming from Spain. Frustrated with this, I tried to find the passport stamping office, to at least get that out of the way. A jittery hustler intercepted me, shoving a customs form in my face and demanding he help me complete it. Perhaps because of the innocence of the scam—he wasn’t selling me hash or trying to be my guide for the weekend—I caved easily. As I finished the form, the hustler tried to lure in a man walking away from a white van.
“No, Uncle, I don’t need your help, fuck,” he said in Spanish with a thick Zaragozan accent. Massive brown dreadlocks sprouted out of his orange headband. He wore loose-fitting pants and a hand-made Moroccan shirt; unbuttoned, showing is tanned skin and muscular frame.
“You crossing, Uncle? You bought a ferry ticket?” he asked me, calling me uncle, the Spanish equivalent of “dude.”
“No, not yet.”
“Well, I’ve got a van and another person, and I’m trying to bargain a deal”
“You can bargain the ferry tickets?”
“One can bargain anything here, Uncle.”
“Ya, sounds great,” I said. The Spaniard, whose name was Sergio, led me to the white van, a hollowed-out bread delivery truck from Zaragoza. Inside, a little blonde Czech girl named Petra sat on the giant mattress built into the back part of the van. She had ridden up with Sergio from Marrakesh after traveling with her boyfriend for three months. The boyfriend wanted to hike in the Atlas Mountains, but she needed to go back for a job interview. Tie-dye tapestries hung from the walls and a set of black speakers took up half the floor, pumping out airy techno music. Forty minutes later, after I had learned the Czech word for beer and friend (pivo, kamradka), Sergio came back.
“Twenty-eight Euros per person and eighty five for the van,” he said. “Now we have to get gas, cheap Moroccan gas.” We closed up the van, and he turned around, driving out of the port. At the nearest gas station, Sergio bargained the gas down from 13 Dirhams per liter to 11. Back at the port, we lined up with the other cars. Sergio manned the wheel, trying to hustle up the line, chatting up the customs officers. In the back, the Czech girl waited.
“Mattress is not showing,” she said in her broken English.
“What?”
“Mattress is secret,” she said. I peered to the front of the van and out at the customs officer with his smart black hat, brown uniform and silver badge.
“What is it? What is under the mattress?” I whispered urgently. The van lurched forward, and we pulled onto the boat, associating me even more with the possibly drug-dealing hippies. What would happen at the Spanish customs office on the other side of the Strait of Gibraltar? Was I sitting on bricks of Moroccan hash?
“Look,” said the Petra. I slowly pulled back the mattress sheet, revealing layer upon layer of brightly colored textiles. I laughed. Sergio finished with the customs people, rolled up the windows, and looked back at me with his victorious grin.
“I don’t like to pay the tariff,” he said. “I take these to the stores in Spain and make myself enough money, maybe come back to Morocco for three months after.”
We crossed the border and drove towards Marbella, where I would meet my distant relatives, the former Spanish exiles. I thought of my dad, who was Sergio’s age when he left my grandfather’s house in New York and became a hippie in the West. I scanned through the pictures that I had taken for him: the Italian Consulate, the Spanish Hospital, the Soco Chico, the rock of Gibraltar. Maybe I could invoke some nostalgic memories from him. In the back of the van, the music poured out of the speakers. Large jugs of olive oil sat on the floor, next to cartons of fresh vegetables and stacks of Moroccan bread. Small town Moroccan olive presses didn’t completely separate the meat from the oil. Pieces of olive meat drifted around the bottles, giving the oil had a tinge of kalmata taste. Sergio and Petra extolled to me the virtues of a raw food diet. They were on their way to a raw food hippie gathering in southern Spain and I was welcome to join them. Tomatoes, celery and bell peppers tasted good raw. I tore off a strip from a pizza sized piece of Moroccan bread, soaked it in olive oil, and savored the taste of the olive-flesh silt.
