Interzone come to him, does something else come to him besides sleep, the heat will wake him the heat the broad daylight his arms folded on the table collapsed dirty the extinguished hashish still in his hand conquered by pleasure and death in the blue-tinged reflections of the Bay of Tangier guardian of the Mediterranean — the next morning William Burroughs is still trembling, aching, he pours water on himself in the communal bathroom and goes down to lose himself in the bustle, where will he have his coffee, I picture him at the Baba bar, I don’t know if it existed yet at that time, the Baba Café in Tangier seems as if it’s always been there, since the unscrupulous merchant Phoenicians ancestors of Ghassan and Rafael Kahla the writer, tables chairs old posters on the wall friendly waiters the legends of Tangier have all sat there, I imagine Burroughs there too, Bowles the blue man, Jean Genet, Tennessee Williams, Mohamed Choukri the half-starved wretch, at the Baba Café today there is a poster of the Barça the FC Barcelona a soccer club the Moroccans love I don’t know why they feel united to this Catalan team that doesn’t have half as many titles as its Madrid rival, maybe the colors of its blue-and-red jersey remind them instinctively of some glorious episode, did Jean Genet like soccer I have no idea, he certainly liked to watch those handsome athletes running around scantily dressed on green grass, Genet reaches Barcelona thirty years before coming to Tangier the murky, Barcelona is a dark city a port that smells of fried food and thieves, where there’s dried blood on the pocket knives with their worn-out handles, in the alleyways crammed between the port and the Avenue Parallel Genet falls in love with a Serb stinking of brilliantine and filth, Genet gets a hard-on for crime, Genet gets a hard-on for crime the way others do for the army, Genet gets a hard-on for a Serb deserter of the Foreign Legion, a one-armed Serb, a thief and pimp, who humiliates him and whom he humiliates, a Serb who served during the First World War, who survived the defeat, the debacle and lost on the highways enlisted with Millán-Astray Death’s betrothed, to end up also disabled like the general in love with decapitation, then a beggar a thief an opium dealer and a lover of Jean Genet the sodomite visionary, Stéphanie in Barcelona looked in vain for the traces of that glorious time when the writer coupled with sailors for a few pesetas, without thinking that it was of course impossible, that her own condition as a tourist was the very proof of the disappearances of the city that Genet had glimpsed just before the civil war, money and foreign visitors implied the end of shady neighborhoods, and it seemed to me very cowardly to look today nostalgically for traces of the humiliation of the poor the whores the thieves while staying at a ritzy hotel for the European bourgeoisie, whereas she couldn’t bear the contemporary version of those pre-war plebeians, all day North Africans stood leaning against a wall waiting for something that wasn’t going to happen, the fat black whores had shouting matches with the emaciated underage whores from Eastern Europe, all of them packed in, forced by cops with fast-acting nightsticks to a few tiny streets, to a crossroads where they kept returning between strongarmed arrests, required not to scatter into more peopled places, ordered to act discreet or disappear as if by magic, usually expelled without ceremony, Barcelona wanted to eradicate prostitution in the street and reserve it for the flashy modern brothels where there was a shower in every room and a certificate of hygiene — Stéphanie the curious played at frightening herself suggesting I take her to a pleasant cathouse, where we could have slept with a very clean pretty woman, the idea was very exciting to her, I remember at the hotel one night when she had drunk a little she whispered her fantasies into my ear, of course I played along, I explained the customs of bordellos to her feeling her desire mount, obviously I knew that Stéphanie was a well-brought-up girl, limited by her social class and her education and that she’d never go to such a place, but no matter we were on vacation far from the Boulevard Mortier far from international conspiracy dossiers and serious things, aside from Zone business I didn’t go out, the house of Francesc Boix the photographer of Mauthausen the Bota camp the police building on Vía Laietana where the Francoists tortured anything that fell into their hands the model prison on Entença Street that the father of Millán-Astray had run I had to think about all that when I went to bed with Stéphanie, Stéphanie Proustian in the morning Célinian at night, I’m thirsty all of a sudden, I could go back to the bar drink something maybe just a glass of fizzy water to wet the inside of my mouth dried out by gin and tobacco, outside it’s dark despite the moon, hills undulate at high speed, this express doesn’t pass through any more towns, there’s nothing but countryside between us and Rome, I observe the curves of the flautist sleeping on her companion’s shoulder, her lingerie shows through her sweater, Stéphanie was very partial to grey V-neck cashmere sweaters, she wore them with nothing underneath except a black bra, women left Genet indifferent, I think, not Burroughs, he had a child with Joan before he killed her in play — of all the heroes of Tangier, Paul Bowles Jean Genet or Tennessee Williams Burroughs is probably the only one who slept with women too, that October morning in 1955 after his first experience of hypoxyphilia delicious suffocation William Burroughs has a coffee calmly at the Baba or at the Tangis, Tangier is living through its last year of independence under the aegis of the international community, as we say, in 1956 the sultan of Morocco with his hooded coat and his little donkey entered the city, nothing was left to the Spanish except Ceuta and Melilla, and to the French only eyes to cry with, even though Morocco wasn’t exactly part of my Zone I still went there once on a mission, for purposes of international anti-terrorist cooperation of course, the Moroccans were very advanced on that issue they had already begun to hide the Islamists the leftists and the democrats in the desert ever since the 1960s, in very dry open-air prisons, in Kenitra, in Tazmamart then in Outita, a very recent prison that had no reason to be envious of its more famous elders: Moroccan methods were simple if not efficient, it was a matter of imprisoning the largest possible number of the poor, the unemployed, of tramps of all kinds, religious or not, for having gone to the same street, the same school or the same neighborhood as an opponent, which didn’t increase the popularity of the government in place but duly filled the kingdom’s prisons — the Moroccan intelligence agencies always had a grudge against us, or rather our relations were always under the shadow of Ben Barka, and every time a French judge got out some letters rogatory or a former cop came out with revelations about the affair they took offence, made obstacles for us while still vaguely understanding that we couldn’t do much about it, after all they didn’t just kidnap him, their Ben Barka, and dissolve him in acid or bury him in the furthest reaches of the desert, that was taking a big risk, the proof is that we’re still talking about it, once again I took advantage of my mission to go see a little of the country, Casablanca and Tangier in a fast train, an entirely agreeable train what’s more, without of course the Pininfarina design of today’s Italian rapid-transit trains, in Tangier I had looked for the pension-brothel where Burroughs stayed the visionary telepath and I had tried to read