Our Hotel Continental Photo Album

This wasn’t always holy ground. This used to be the Interzone. This used to be the Hotel Continental. Everything seems to have faded like an old photograph, Tangiers itself worn down like it was made of salt. But everywhere there are reminders, diffused ghosts in a diffused twilight, refusing to leave, refusing to let go. We find a few of these phantoms upstairs , the cool chambers echoing with the dim voices of a time gone by. And the eery echoes cry out, “Who wants a drink? Would anyone like a thirteen year-old boy? Hey, let’s have some heroin!” Indeed, the voices bounce off the walls and chop you down just behind the knees. I wobbled a bit, anyway.

Presumably, the rooms have been empty since 1956 when Morocco gained independence and came under Muslim rule. The hotel sits partly on the old Medina – holy ground. Is it possible that armed soldiers stormed the lounge and ordered everyone to put their martinis down? I’d like to think so. Or maybe they dragged the mad reprobate Burroughs out by his debauched fingernails and he bitterly avowed that one day he’d write a story about it. Or about something. Could a blind-drunk Kerouac have tumbled down those winding wooden stairs? Probably.

Bowles called Tangiers a “Dream City” because of its literal and living depiction of the maddening labyrinthian dreamscape that resides in man’s collective cranium, haunting him since the invention of the word “dreamscape.” Or was Bowles being sarcastic? If there is a nightmare outside in the Medina, if there is madness in the Souk, then even more so that this should be the “Dream Upstairs.” Especially since it is completely empty and free of carpet salesman or robed men hissing, “Trust no one!”

But I trust it – what my eyes don’t even see – somewhere in the coffee-black shadows that plunge across the long rooms, everything feeling like a mystery, everything feeling a little dangerous. Faded glory turns to faded magic here, pretending to be secret, but it welcomes you inside, still possessing the power to enchant. There are birds flitting about an open courtyard that contains a dead fountain and the sound of their wings carries through every room, the flap-smack-snap of time standing still, the rustle of history – of everything lost, impossible, and far away.

-Rod Filbrandt