P.: Do you know why I like you?
The question silences me.
P.: You have strength and individuality, but you are vulnerable, too.
Me: Vulnerable?
P.: You have suffered, but there is still the small boy in you.
This intimate exchange seals something between us. She has told me something she has kept from her parents. She has seen something in me which I have not denied. But she is wrong. I am those things … but I am not individual … not yet.
10th August 1946, Tangier
I am hobbling around again with my bad back. I have a lump on the right side of my spine. P. arrives for her sitting and immediately sees my problem. She leaves and returns with her little wooden case of bottles of oils. The bedroom is out of bounds. I lie on the floor. She tries to work on me from the side but it is hopeless. She tells me to shut my eyes. I hear her skirt slide down her legs. She lowers herself until she is astride the backs of my thighs. Only her bare legs touch mine on the outside. I can feel the heat of her above me. She kneads the lump in my back with the tips of her fingers while I take root in the ground.
She finishes with me. My whole body has been claimed by the floor. She puts her skirt on and tells me to get to my feet. We stand in front of each other. I have myself under control physically, but mentally I am in disarray. She tells me to walk around. I do this and there is no pain apart from a dull ache in my testicles. She tells me to keep walking. Activity is the secret of the healthy back. I must not sit to paint or draw. She leaves. I smoke some hashish until I feel liquid, like olive oil flowing greenly from room to room.
Ahmed turns up later with a friend. He is mischievous, this boy. I wonder whether C. is putting him up to it as an artistic experiment. Where P. and I are physically so demure, these boys are completely uninhibited. I smoke and they perform for me, their muscular adolescent bodies entwining like rope. They turn their attention to me. The release is explosive and they giggle like children playing around a fountain. Before they leave Ahmed presses a stoned date between my teeth. I lie there with the dreamy sweetness leaching into me, replete and satiated as a slumbering pasha.
11th August 1946, Tangier
It has been reported to me that two of my legionnaires have fought over a lover in a hotel room in town. The fight was long and bloody and the floor of the room was as slippery as a butcher’s. One of my legionnaires is dead, the lover is badly wounded and the other legionnaire is in gaol. I ask the police chief if I can see the lover, thinking that this might be an international incident if she dies; he tells me not to worry as the ‘lover’ is a Riffian boy. He shrugs, arches his eyebrows, opens his hands … es la vida.
I pay a bribe and the legionnaire is released on condition that he leaves the International Zone immediately. I take him to Tetuan and give him some money. On the trip over he tells me he was with the Division Azul in Russia and stayed on with the Legion Espanola de Voluntarios and, after they were disbanded, he joined the SS. He was with the infamous Capt. Miguel Ezguera Sanchez when the Russians stormed Berlin. He shows me a handful of the leading currency at the end — cyanide pellets. He gives me two samples as an odd souvenir and as a novio de la muerte, a bizarre way of thanking me.
1st September 1946, Tangier
R. has taken out a loan and bought two more boats. I have been to Ceuta again and recruited more legionnaires. We train them to run the boats and pay them well for it. They like the work. They still have a weapon in their hands and there is adventure, although, because of our reputation for violence, nobody comes near us. The pirates pick on the small fry. My importance to the business is now paramount because trust is a rare commodity. The strong allegiances between legionnaires means we can rely on them and they will not steal. It releases R. and I from the grind of running the ships. R. is investing in property. We are building and I have to secure the construction sites. R. plays the gold and currency markets with the endless stream of cash that comes in from the smuggling operations. I do not understand these markets and have no inclination to involve myself.
Now that Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth heiress, has taken up residence in the Sidi Hosni Palace, R. tells me that Tangier will be the new Cote d’Azur. He plans to move more heavily into property ‘to build hotels for all the people who will come here to warm their hands on our affluence’. He also tells me that La Rica bought the palace for $100,000 — a quite unimaginable sum for all us Tangerinos to contemplate. The Caudillo, as General Franco is now called, had offered $50,000. He must be sitting in his El Pardo Palace fuming.
3rd September 1946, Tangier
P. comes for another sitting. As soon as I open the door I see daring in her eyes, but also amusement and mockery. It is hot in the middle of the afternoon. We start to work in the usual silence until I lose concentration and she walks around the room looking for anything she hasn’t seen before. She finds a lump of hashish amongst the brushes and pots on the table and sniffs it. She knows what it is but has never tried it. She asks to smoke some. I’ve never seen her with a cigarette even, but I charge the hookah for her. Minutes later she’s complaining that nothing has happened. I tell her to be patient and she releases a small moan as I imagine she would at the first sexual contact. Her eyes have distance in them as if she has retreated into her mind. She licks her lips slowly and sensually. I want to put my own mouth there. I drift and watch the light change in the room. P. says: ‘I think you should draw me as I really am.’ This I’ve been trying to do for weeks. In fast fluid movements she stands up, removes her blouse, lets her skirt fall, unharnesses her brassiere and steps out of her underwear. I am speechless. She stands in front of me, her long dark hair on her naked shoulders, her hands resting on the tops of her thighs, framing the triangle of her pubic hair. She slowly puts her fingertips to her shoulders and moves them down over her breasts to the brown pointed nipples, which harden to her touch. Her fingers trace the outline of her body. We are both so engaged in the sensuality of the moment that I think they are my fingers. ‘This is who I am,’ she says. I grab sticks of charcoal and sheets of paper. My hand flashes over them with bold, fluid movements. I must have drawn her six, seven, eight times in a matter of minutes. As I finish, each drawing slips to the floor. She continues to hold herself, utterly beautiful, and naked, with the supreme confidence of complete womanhood and it is that mysterious essence that I am ‘seeing’ and am able to draw. Then, as occasionally happens with hashish, we are in a different moment. She is pulling her clothes back on. She moves to leave and I stand with the drawings at my feet. She looks down at them and then up at me. ‘Now you know,’ she says. Her lips brush mine with the softness of sable and the coolness of water. The lightning touch of the tip of her tongue on mine stays with me for hours.
20th September 1946
I have returned from Tarragona to find that P. has gone back to Spain with her mother, whose sister has died. The doctor does not know when they will be coming back. I feel both bereft and oddly free. Ahmed
