Tangerine(34)

I let out a small sigh and continued inside.





Seven


Alice


IT’S SO HOT.”

Lucy paused at my words, waiting for me to catch my breath as we made our way to Café Hafa. The day was too thick, the sun too hot—but she had been determined, earlier that morning, that I accompany her to the café. I could feel my face, already red and sticky with sweat.

“I can’t believe you’ve never been,” she said, trying, I suspected, to distract me from the heat, though the comment only sat poorly with me.

I could feel my face grow more crimson still, my breathing ragged.

I placed one foot in front of the other, the sun burning the back of my neck, warming the top of my head, so that I looked with envy at the turban that Lucy had wrapped her own hair underneath that morning. She had traded, it seemed, her usual hat—an awful design made of black straw—for a pale wrap she had no doubt found in one of the shops frequented by expats. Earlier I had stared rather hard at the sight of it, just as we were leaving. It’s the fashion now, she had assured me, though I had continued to watch her with unease. It was not the design itself that had stopped me—but rather, the realization of just how well Lucy blended in with the rest of the expatriates that flooded the streets of Tangier. I had been here for months already, while her feet had barely touched soil for a week, and already it looked as though she was the one who lived here, as though I was only the visitor. It was with embarrassment that I had then reached for my own hat—a rather small white pillbox that fit oddly on top my hair.

“It’s supposed to have breathtaking views,” Lucy said.

I peered at her, curious. “How did you hear about it?”

“Some friends at the bookshop. The Librairie des Colonnes,” she replied.

I nodded, wondering when she had managed to sneak in a visit there as well.

“You sound almost like a local now,” I said, my voice, I knew, tinged with something that made me uneasy.

After that day when she had first told me about Youssef, she had continued to return to the flat late each night, ready to regale me with further tales of her adventures, and I had listened with that same envy, the little knot growing into something large and not so easily managed. Instead I had tried to reshape it, had tried to see Tangier though her eyes, her enthusiasm, similar to John’s, describing a world I could never manage to catch a glimpse of, though all three of us walked upon the same cobblestones. And so when she had demanded, at the end of her first week, that I accompany her, I agreed, anxious to discover what it was that I had been missing, that my eyes refused to see.

“You should come with me next time,” she offered now. “To the bookstore.”

I did not respond.

We walked for a few more minutes in silence until at last we came to stand upon a strange white surface, just a few feet, I could see, from the edge of a cliff. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she ventured, looking over at me. She waited for a reply so that I could feel her, reaching out. It is, of course it is, I wanted to say, but something stopped the words, something stilled me. There were still too many questions and answers obscured by the fog, but which shone, nevertheless, red and bright and warning.

“It’s bluer than anything at home,” I conceded, continuing to stare out at the ocean, working to make my face unreadable.

“These are tombs, just below us,” she continued.

We stood close together, staring at the rectangular formations, at the strange dips and curves and the puddles of water that pocketed the white rock. “Where? Directly below us?”

She nodded. “The tombs are nearly two thousand years old. From when the city was called Tingis.”

“Tingis?” I asked, with a small smile.

“That was the name of the ancient Phoenician city, before Tangier ever existed.” She removed her sunglasses, squinting against the sun. “Tangier has had a lot of different names, apparently. Tingis is only one of them.”

“What were the others?” I asked, feeling my voice become lazy under the heat of the sun.

“There’s Tingis, of course. Tingi, Titgam, Tánger, Tangiers, Tangier—I guess it depends who you ask and how they pronounce it.”

I turned to her. “How do you pronounce it?”

She liked the question, I could see—that it mattered to me what she thought. She seemed to consider for a moment, as if weighing the answer. “I suppose I’ll always say Tangier. But I like the idea of Tingis. Of what it was originally, before it was changed by all the various invaders.”

“There is a sort of romance,” I admitted.

“It’s a country steeped in mythology,” she replied. “Do you know it’s thought that even Ulysses must have passed Tangier during his travels?”

She looked so proud, standing on top of the Phoenician tombs, as if she had made the discovery herself. I tried to picture it—Lucy as some great explorer or conqueror, and I found the idea suited her. Her excitement was so palpable that I could almost feel it, transferring from her body into my own. The heat pulsed around us, the sun pressing down, and yet still, as we moved away from the view, I could sense that we were both reluctant to leave it behind. It was calm here, as if some sort of magic spell divided it from the rest of the city. While down below there was shouting and bartering, the scent of thousands of perspiring bodies pressed up against one another, dirty and unwavering—up here, there was only silence. Only the warm, inviting blue that stretched out and rushed into the currents of the Atlantic, only the smell of the ocean, clean and fresh. I might have imagined it, but I felt as though our feet dragged as we turned away, as we began to close the short distance between us and the café.