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.
WE SAT ON ONE of the lower terraces, under a few scraggly trees. The relief was immediate and I could breathe again. Up until that moment, I had not realized just how warm I had become, standing in the open field before the ocean, without a single tree for protection.
At our entrance, one of the workers ran over, balancing a swinging contraption that allowed him to carry several glasses of tea at once, its metallic coating glinting off the bright sun. Lucy ordered two, and thanked him: Choukran.
I mused briefly over the fact that “thank you” and “no thank you” were so closely related—the difference of a word added to the latter. It was, I realized, the type of inane observation that Lucy would probably enjoy. I closed my eyes and sighed. Wasps swarmed the blossoms on the trees above but for the most part ignored us, even our tall glasses of sugary, hot tea. It should have been peaceful, I should have felt relaxed—but anxiety gnawed at me, refusing to be ignored.
Her arrival had set something in motion. I could feel it already—churning, refusing to remain dormant. And yet, I could feel us both stalled, waiting for that something to happen, as if we had been waiting for it ever since that day she had stepped off the boat. I had the sudden irresistible urge to set it in motion then, to push us, together, over the cliff—to ask her everything that I had been wondering, puzzling over, ever since she had arrived in Tangier, ever since I had first met her at Bennington. All the things that eluded me, slipping through my fingers, the strange wisps of a girl I seemed to have conjured out of my misery but who had never seemed to materialize into something real, something concrete.
I was angry, the heat turning my mood. I could feel it, simmering around me, those things that I did not understand, the places and people that remained a mystery to me, that refused to yield no matter how often I puzzled over them. Tangier and Lucy were the same, I thought. Both unsolvable riddles that refused to leave me in peace. And I had tired of it—of the not knowing, of always feeling as though I were on the outside of things, just on the periphery.
“Are you all right, Alice?” Lucy asked.
“I’m fine,” I replied, though I knew there was an unmistakable edge to my voice as I pushed my sunglasses farther up the bridge of my nose. They had begun to slip from the sweat. I sipped my tea and then thrust it away in frustration. I was silent for a time, and then, only when I was certain that she did not intend to break the silence herself, I began, my eyes squinting in the sun. “I’ll never understand it.”
Lucy turned to me. “What?”
“This.” I indicated the mint tea. “How on earth anyone can drink hot tea in weather like this.”