Book 1:6 - Tangiers2

A Meeting of Minds

Cafe Hafa today - a very different clientele

Café Hafa. I was in a chaotic mental state, one minute happy to be free, the next gripped by a torture of guilt and pain – how could I have left my baby with a violent brute? Would he hurt her too? The idea was driving me to madness. Tom sensed my neediness, reassured me, and gave me focus again. We enjoyed a simple fruit and yoghurt breakfast on our magical patio, lying back in the early sun on the cushions looking out over the Straits. It was Heaven. I really didn’t want to leave, but he convinced me and took me back to the Cliff Cafe Hafa where he’d arranged for me to meet Ute and Sven, the cool Swedish couple he’d been with the day before at the 1,001 Nights cafe.  It was a meeting of minds and we instantly all jelled. I felt we were all family. They were a very spiritual couple with feral knowing eyes.     Part of a Majorca-based band they had been touring and had been in California for the Monterey Pop Festival and Haight Ashbury for the Summer of Love.  I had just been in London for the British version of the ascent of Flower Power.

We had much to share:  beautiful feelings, the crazy behavior, the decadence, the inspiring music, radical ideas, and the hope inherent in it all. What was happening in our generation then was a complete lift-off from anything so far experienced. I wondered what it all meant – would it survive or be quashed by a fascist swing back to the conservative values of the past. I felt at last I was among people I could identify with; people who were concerned with the directions belief systems and lifeways were driving our human culture. People who thought in global, world, planet concepts and tried to make it all a better experience by living the truth they saw was a better way. I told them of the Conference of Dialectics and the inspiring ideas that had been shared there by speakers now viewed as legends of 60’s thinking and they told me of Esalen and the human potential and Earth planet-focused workshops they’d enjoyed there. We were all into Allan Watts and the emergence of yoga, meditation and other Eastern spiritual happening as the so-called Age of Aquarius manifested. 

For Tom all this was the confirmation of his convictions.  This was the New Age and he was its prophet, the traveling messenger with the Word. He was nearly jumping out of his skin with eyes on fire, hands expressive, arms whirling, as he dominated the conversation with his inspired rave: Brothers and sisters of the Way. We are All One. Consumerism is a sickness. Capitalism is destroying us. End wars. Embrace the Truth. And all the inspiring and crazy talk he’d rolled into a well-practiced (as I later found out) spiel that resonated in so many minds at that time, disillusioned seekers of a better way looking to heal a world gone wrong.. It was so easy to say Yes, Yes, to so much of what he was spouting. Something had to change and we were going to change it. We would spread the word as we traveled. People were listening. Something was happening Mr Brown! This miracle of life we all shared was not going to be lived in mindless drudgery, squandering resources, supporting the rich, feeding wars. We would bring peace and love, sharing and caring, equal rights for all regardless of race, creed, status, sex. There would be no violence, greed, pain in our Beautiful Rainbow Utopia. Ah yes, Tom had a Dream. Maybe he was mad but, if so, he wasn’t alone. It was a psychosis shared by many then and it felt good to me. The question was: how would this Islamic culture react to Brother Toma,  now morphed into Abdullah, Servant of the Prophet,  preaching to them?

We had so much to talk about and as Tom pointed out, little time, as we hadn’t explored Tangiers and our plan was to leave for Marrakesh next day. But we all felt we wanted to spend the rest of today together so we could relax and share on deeper levels. Despite my inner chaos, I had hoped to see something of Tangiers away from the Kasbah, but these beautiful people had captured me and I hadn’t felt such a rapport with anyone since London.

It was coming up to lunch time. Macrobiotics was our instant common link, unheard of in these local restaurants.  So they invited us to their rooms nearby, not far from the riad where we were staying, to prepare a feast for four, food prepared to our own liking. Whole, fresh and mostly raw.

I instantly loved their apartment. Similar to ours, but theirs was on a year’s lease so it was much more lived-in and personalised. Part of a riad set in the ramparts on the high point of the Kasbah that rise from the harbor port cliffs, quite close to the café. We entered via in a nondescript old door in a row of doorways set in a long wall. From street level stone steps led down through a low cave-like passageway that seemed to fall off the cliff as I could see water beyond. But then we went right and through another arched door and down again into a breath-taking long room with several levels and alcoves – white walls with ornate zellij mosaic tile features in niches & alcoves, Berber floor carpets and silk shawls draped over the long divan along one wall.  Filigree brass pendant lanterns suspended from ceiling chains.  A pile of silky cushions.  Polished brass and silver trays, a hookah.  A  mezzanine bedroom above behind a low carved wooden balustrade through which I could see several beds - floor mattresses with opulent covers and all hung with nets and curtains. 

Very similar to Ute & Sven's mezzanine bedroom

A basic tiny kitchen up 3 steps overlooked the room. Along the opposite wall bright light streamed in from several filigreed windows that framed blue of sky and water beyond.  I walked to a door where wafting cream silk curtains moved in gentle airs and filtered the late morning glare of sun reflecting off the Straits beyond. Outside was a miniscule cantilevered balcony suspended above a vertigo-inducing drop down the old stone walls to rocks and the port way below.  What a view!

 Sven explained that they were in a band based in Deya, Majorca.  Their music more New Age experimental than mainstream, a fusion of nature and eastern with lots of ethnic instruments.  They shared the apartment with the other band members, French, German and Danish guys, some of whom were due to arrive in a few days for creative recording sessions to capture the new material influenced by recent travels since they last performed together in the States.  Sven said he felt like an over-ripe fruit about to burst with seeds. Moog, slide and sitar were his thing, while Ute played lute, sitar, oud and other ethnic strings and was the main vocalist for the group, although some of the others sang too.

Ute & I were in our best - free flowing embroidered caftans, while Sven & Tom were both in Indian white flowing cottons.  We were almost matching pairs.  Except my caftan was white and Ute’s a more elaborate embroidered gold.  Both of us had waist length hair. I was a tanned dark-haired woman with a blond man and she a fair blond woman with a dark-haired man. It was a meeting of the hippy royals. Oh what a joke eh? I was hardly feeling royal and have never been one for airs & graces. But we shared a philosophy of  simple living and high thinking, not to the point of bread and water on an earth floor exactly, as this pad was Boho luxury. Ute and Sven were warm, reserved and very self-contained as a couple.   Tom and I were still in our early days and rather less together.   

Mint Tea

Tom immediately mulled the kif while Ute and Sven made a small charcoal fire and boiled up mint tea.  

 Brown rice and toasted sesame and salad and khobs all to be prepared.   
I was happy to be busy doing all this but waves of pain of missing my baby kept washing thru me. Despite the company and the amazing apartment suddenly I wasn’t feeling sociable at all, all knotted inside, needing my solitude again.  So I opted for sitting with the sesame seed & brown rice sorting trays on the tiny latticed balcony perched dizzily above the sheer fifty foot drop.  Below was the harbor, seagulls cruised at eye level and across the water was the way we had come. 

The sesame seed had to be separated into prime and ordinary and the rocks removed.   Then the ordinary seed was toasted and ground and mixed with salt and served as a condiment called gomasio.  The prime was reserved for sprinkling whole on the bread and vegetables or mixed with the brown rice.   This was a quiet task well suited to my mind-state.  It had all been so full-on.  A week of go-go-go through the most extreme of scene-changes.   The enormity of my actions was sinking in and I confronted the reality, tried to assess the consequences. Underlying my facade I was benumbed.  The reality of what had been done to me bit deeply. I was having flashbacks of being slammed against a wall, punched senseless. My baby standing in her bed, her arms stretched out to me crying…Mama..Mama.............. I was spiraling into dissociation.

Next……Tangiers 3. Arlo takes me to Ixtlan.