Tangiers is a crowded dusty warren where the streets are paved with shit. I paid off there. Stay with X who writes Gay pornography for underground publications to finance his work on the endless novel he keeps in a black-grained leather binder hidden in a bohemian apartment of antique and ornate Art Nouveau mirrors. A cypress tree towers twenty feet from the courtyard below, its foliage spills up above his window into the purple glow of sunset and on up into the stratosphere. Its haunted rustling fills his room with the eerie whisper of sepia ghosts. I enjoy his attentions despite his often cruel humour and voyeuristic tendencies. We spend days of sun and hashish-cakes in the shimmering heat-mist of pavement cafes, and twilights wandering through the casbah with Arab youths called Lhabi or Mohammed, their nut-brown skin glistening. But eventually I tire of maleness. Hint to him of a desire for female flesh. He laughs. Makes a series of phone calls.
Poverty is endemic. Prostitution a way of life for a whole section of the population, for both sexes. We cross the city beneath a sky full of blood and dirt in a dreadful sunset -- I, with mixed emotions of undeniable anticipation and slight unease. A rundown peeling dried-mudbrick house in the worst slum area. An unpleasantly greasy fawning man guides us inside, eagerly taking dirhams from X for the favours of what he dubiously claims to be his 'daughter'. He leads us into a half-lit back room. A low dirty bed and a brown-skinned girl, nude but for a fine gold chain around her narrow waist. I can't guess at her age - around twenty?, she has full high breasts and the finest of pubic hair, but no coyness or modesty.
