The historic cultural venue is experiencing its most difficult hour, aggravated by the health crisis; Tangier lovers evoke its magic and promise to stop it from disappearing

La agonía de la Librería des Colonnes, mito del Tánger más internacional

photo_camera PHOTO/LIBRERÍA DES COLONNES - Night-time image of the exterior of the Librería des Colonnes, at 54 boulevard Pasteur in Tangiers

"The Librairie des Colonnes and Tangier form an inseparable tandem for me. They are incomprehensible without each other. We can establish a sum of sets being set A, tangier in lower case, small; and set B, the bookstore. Therefore, the sum of the two sets would give us as a result: Tangier with a capital letter, the full, complete set", says the writer Rocío Rojas-Marcos to Atalayar from her confinement in Seville. There is no way to ask about the mythical bookstore at number 54 Boulevard Pasteur in the old international city that does not get a similar answer, in the form of reflection or feeling. The venue, which was frequented for years by renowned figures such as Paul Bowles, William Burroughs, Samuel Beckett, Tennessee Williams, Marguerite Yourcenar, Jean Genet and Juan Goytisolo, is living its most uncertain hours. The health crisis has aggravated, after years of commercial difficulty, the poor health of the oldest bookstore in Tangier, which was founded in 1949 by the Gerofi family. 

"It is a unique space. Because of its location in the city, its shape as a tram car, its smell of cedar wood, its books in several languages, including Spanish, and the pleasant treatment given by its staff, I put it on a par with the big ones, such as Shakespeare and Company in Paris, City Lights in San Francisco or Fuentetaja in Madrid," Javier Valenzuela told us from his home in Madrid. The journalist and novelist -two of his works are set in Tangier- discovered the bookstore with the two red columns in the 80's, when he was correspondent in Morocco of the newspaper El País. "I've never stopped going there until now," the author of 'Tangerine' and 'Black Lemons' confides to Atalayar. Despite being small in size, the bookstore has played a giant role in Tangier's recent history, and its influence has been felt throughout Morocco. 
 

Los rostros de escritores como Mohamed Chukri y Juan Goytisolo presiden la estancia principal de la librería más antigua de Tánger

"It is one of my favourite bookstores because of the friendly treatment of all those who work there, Monsef Bouali, Anas, Audrey Caponi, and of course its director Simon-Pierre Hamelin," says Randa Jebrouni, a Moroccan Hispanist and writer from Tangier. Hamelin, who arrived in Tangier in 2003, created the literary magazine Nejma as director in 2006 and, four years later, the publishing house Librairie des Colonnes Éditions. Books in French, Arabic, English and Spanish can be found on the bookstore shelves.  

The bookstore's legion of faithful awaits good news in these long hours of confinement. With the premises closed due to the state of health emergency in force in Morocco, the ensuing crisis has aggravated the difficult financial situation of this universal and secular place of worship, which is confirmed by its current director, the aforementioned French writer Simon-Pierre Hamelin. The owner, Moroccan journalist Fadel Iraqki, died last March. He will be remembered in particular for co-founding the weekly Le Journal Hebdomadaire, a publication that marked an era in the neighbouring country. Iraqki had bought the bookshop only a year earlier from the Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent, which was looking for a buyer after the passing of the French businessman and patron in September 2017. Bergé, in turn, had rescued the bookstore in 2009. In this sad spring of the coronavirus pandemic, sources close to the owner's family admit they do not know what his heirs' plans for the bookstore are, although they are confident that it will succeed in overcoming this difficult time. 
 

Goytisolo conversa con Pierre Bergé en presencia de Rachel Muyal y Simon-Pierre Hamelin, los dos últimos directores de la mítica librería tangerina
Much more than a bookstore

"The bookstore has been for many years a meeting place for ''the new''; all writers and intellectuals, both Moroccans and foreigners, visited it to learn about the latest publishing news. Its location also contributed to its fame; located on Boulevard Pasteur, it attracted the attention of many passers-by, and continues to do so. Many tourists visit it to 'let themselves be touched' by Tangier's bohemian spirit," Jebrouni told Atalayar. "There you can meet the old Arab intellectual as well as the hipster from Morocco's north, the city's gay man as well as the foreigner looking for romanticism," evokes Valenzuela. "After a while, between the shelves, you always end up engaging in conversation with a stranger and, when you realise it, you're dancing in some unimaginable joint at night," says the Granada-born man. 

"Des Colonnes has had three main facets: the bookstore itself, the cultural meeting place for the city and the publishing house," summarises the writer Santiago De Luca for Atalayar from the Argentine city of Santa Fe. The professor, who is also based in the Moroccan city, decided one day, thanks to the intervention of this lay saint called Juan Goytisolo -as his friend Javier Valenzuela referred to him-, to set his sights on the Arab world. Love pushed him definitively to Tangier, "a literary city full of unusual characters, and that fascinates me". De Luca directs the literary magazine Sures, with the added merit that it is published entirely in Spanish and on paper.

Detalle del expositor de la popular librería del bulevar Pasteur tangerino, con varios libros en lengua española

Descending from the medina along the boulevard Pasteur, after a stop at one of the tables of the Gran Café de Paris and enjoying a cup of mint tea, until reaching the small display stand - which one can miss if one is not careful - of the Librairie des Colonnes is an essential tradition for lovers of Tangiers. Rojas-Marcos shares with us his usual ritual inside this multilingual temple of culture: "Start at the central tables of novelties and then go first to the wall on the right, where there are books about Morocco, Tangier, to the bottom where there are books in Spanish and then back to the door starting with the section dedicated to poetry and so on to the counter. As a routine: going to Tangier means doing that circuit inside the bookstore". "The day I first saw one of my books in your window I thought it was hard to believe that not one of my big dreams had come true. After years of looking at that shop window, now I saw myself there," confesses the Seville poet. 

The bookstore's spell has remained intact despite the passage of time. If in its glorious times the representatives of the 'beat' generation were the most recognisable names, in the last decades the Librería des Colonnes has seen Juan Goytisolo, the French journalist Jean Daniel -a friend of Goytisolo and who died last February-, the Moroccan writers Mohamed Chukri or Tahar Ben Jelloun or the Spanish novelist María Dueñas -author of the bestseller 'El tiempo entre costuras'-, among many others, search its shelves. The works of Dueñas, Cristina López-Barrio, Marta Rebón or Valenzuela speak of Tangier's good health as a literary theme (and of the love of the Spanish). "But, unlike my colleagues who are nostalgic for the international city, I am also interested in the current one, because it continues to be a cosmopolitan venue, for encounters and adventure," says the former El País correspondent. 
 

Interior de la Librería des Colonnes de la antigua ciudad internacional en una imagen del pasado mes de marzo
The modern history of Tangier cannot be understood without a space frequented by figures such as Paul Bowles, Samuel Beckett, Truman Capote, Jean Genet or Juan Goytisolo

It was precisely from the hand of Juan Goytisolo, whose light-eyed gaze presides over the main room of the bookstore, that Rojas-Marcos began to fall in love with this place forever. The researcher tells Atalayar about a special moment she experienced in the bookstore of the two columns with the late author of 'Reivindicación del conde don Julián': "We had been having a cup of tea, I had explained to him what I was doing, and I accompanied him back to his house, first he wanted to stop at the bookstore to see if he had any mail. I remember the feeling of being involved in a story read a thousand times: the bookstore, they said had been the mailbox and bank teller of so many writers and artists passing through Tangier, which proved personally that it was true and not a legend was wonderful". Goytisolo, who had his first love affair with the Maghreb in Tangier, never stopped coming to the city of the Straits and the Librairie des Colonnes. The library of the Instituto Cervantes in Tangier honours the memory of the writer, who died in Marrakech in June 2017, with his name.

Detalle de un cuadro con la efigie de un joven Hassán II en el interior de la librería tangerina
"There is a group of art and literature lovers from inside and outside Tangier ready to take a step forward to prevent the disappearance of the bookstore," says the writer Alberto Gomez Font
Tangier's 'conspirators' ready to step forward

The lovers of the Librairie des Colonnes conjure up. "I can say that there is a group of intellectuals and lovers of Spanish, Moroccan and other countries' art and literature, as well as a large number of people from Tangiers, that are waiting to see what happens; we would be willing to take an economic step forward, creating a joint-stock company or cooperative, for example, if it would save the bookstore from disappearing," the writer Alberto Gómez-Font, a self-confessed lover of the city, confirms to this magazine. The philologist, linguist and barman - as he likes to describe himself in his biographies - and former director of the Cervantes in Rabat, who dedicated his work 'Cócteles tangerinos' to the city, is reluctant to think of a day without the Librería des Colonnes. 

Portada del libro ‘Los conjurados de Tánger’, un conjunto de relatos dedicado a la ciudad del Estrecho

Like Farid Othman-Bentria Ramos, the exceptional Mohamed Mrabet -painter and writer and also witness of the mythical Tangier- or the mentioned Marta Rebón, Cristina López Barrio, Santiago De Luca, Javier Valenzuela and Rocío Rojas-Marcos, Gómez Font is part of the select group of lovers of the city that have been called 'the conspirators of Tangier'. An appellation with Borgian echoes born from the title of a book published by Sures and the bookstore itself that brings together seven stories dedicated to the old international city. 

The everlasting memory of Rachel Muyal

The history of the Librairie des Colonnes cannot be understood without the monumental figure of Rachel Muyal, who died in January of this year. Director of the bookshop for more than two decades, the matriarch of the city's cultural scene "was the link between Tangier's glorious era and the present day," recalls de Luca. With the passing of this Sephardic Jewish polyglot, she became an exceptional witness and active protagonist of the last decades of Tangier's cultural life. "Chained together are a series of images that I have accumulated over the years. Dear Rachel Muyal is one of those images, it is impossible that the bookstore is not united in my memory with her forever, they were almost a metonymy", evokes Rojas-Marcos. 

"Rachel, the last Sephardic Jewess, who spoke Haketia, that mestizo language, was like the city itself," says Valenzuela, "because Tangier is a frontier, rogue, port place, which does not stand out for its monumentality but for the charm of its inhabitants. Muyal's memoirs, translated into Spanish by Santiago De Luca himself and published jointly by Hebraica Ediciones and the bookstore itself, are waiting in print until the end of the epidemic to be displayed in the window of the boulevard Pasteur. In addition, the Argentine writer is finishing a special issue of Sures dedicated to the figure of Emilio Sanz de Soto, a fundamental character of the Tangier cultural scene - a friend and confidant of many of the city's greats, he never wrote or painted anything - during the 1950s and 1960s.  
 

Perspectiva de la parte posterior de la Librería des Colonnes, donde se encuentra, entre otras, la sección de obras en español

From the glorious years of the Librairie de Colonnes to its unsettling future: will the miracle happen? Will we be able to continue enjoying the historic library of the two red pillars in the years to come? For the teacher Randa Jebrouni, "we should draw attention to the city's own inhabitants, its customers, those who know its history, and its importance for Tangier. In fact, it is one of their marks of identity". A bookstore that has become a sign of identity - Goytisolo would sketch an ironic smile - of the mixed-race city that resists dying in an hour as unlyrical as the present one. For the time being, it is time to wait. After all, Bowles already said that Tangier was "a waiting room between connections, a transition from one way of being to another".

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