Bookplanet: Juan Goytisolo and Islam

The Anti-Orientalist
By FERNANDA EBERSTADT

On a blazing blue afternoon last winter, I met the Spanish expatriate novelist Juan Goytisolo at an outdoor cafe in Marrakesh. It was easy to spot the 75-year-old writer, sitting beneath an Arabic-language poster of himself taped to the cafe window. He was reading El País, the Spanish newspaper to which he has contributed for decades. Olive-skinned, with a hawk nose and startlingly pale blue eyes, he had wrapped himself against the winter chill in a pullover, suede jacket, checked overcoat and two pairs of socks.

Considered by many to be Spain's greatest living writer, Goytisolo is in some ways an anachronistic figure in today's cultural landscape. His ideas can seem deeply unfashionable. For him, writing is a political act, and it is the West, not the Islamic world, that is waging a crusade. He is a homosexual who finds gay identity politics unappealing and who lived for 40 years with a French woman he considers his only love. "I don't like ghettos," he informed me. "For me, sexuality is something fluid. I am against all we 's." The words most commonly used to describe his writing are "transgressive," "subversive," "iconoclastic."

For much of the last 25 years, Goytisolo has lived in a kind of Paul Bowlesian exile in an old house in Marrakesh's medina. In Morocco, he has been able to indulge his passion for Muslim culture — a passion that includes a scholarly interest in Sufi theology, the finer points of Arabic and Turkish grammar and a self-confessed predilection for working-class Arab men. His choice might seem to have further isolated him from the contemporary fray. Yet in Europe and Latin America, Goytisolo (pronounced goy-tee-SO-lo) remains a leading public intellectual, celebrated enough to have appeared as himself in Godard's recent film "Notre Musique." In the 90's, he made a documentary series called "Al Qibla" ("The Direction of Mecca"), which introduced Spanish viewers to various aspects of Islamic civilization. His political essays, denouncing the official neglect that led to last November's rioting in Paris suburbs, the corruption and tyranny of Arab governments or what he sees as the pernicious influence of Christian evangelism on American foreign policy, appear in Europe's most prestigious newspapers. When he was already well over 60, Goytisolo continued to report from behind the lines in war-torn Chechnya and conducted interviews with Hamas leaders in the Gaza Strip.

But Goytisolo's writings extend well beyond politics. His novels, notably "Count Julian" and "Juan the Landless," have won him a reputation for daring linguistic and narrative experimentation. In Latin America, Goytisolo's longtime champions include Mario Vargas Llosa and especially Carlos Fuentes, who places him in the pantheon of legendary refuseniks, men like Jonathan Swift and James Joyce . In 2004, Goytisolo was honored with Mexico's prestigious Juan Rulfo prize for a lifetime's literary achievement. Gabriel García Márquez presented the award.

Yet he has remained all but unknown in the United States. This oversight may be explained in part by the difficulty of his fiction. He has continued to write in a densely allusive, high-Modernist style, which makes few concessions to the reader. In happier times, Goytisolo's preoccupation with medieval Islam's impact on Western civilization or the plight of Muslim immigrants in contemporary Europe might have made his work seem arcane to American readers. But in the post-9/11 world, this alternative vision often looks prescient. In "Landscapes of War," a collection of essays on the Muslim world that were first published in El País in the 90's, Goytisolo warns repeatedly that radical Islam is mobilizing a generation that has been impoverished and disenfranchised by the disastrous experiments of Arab governments with nationalism and secular socialism, which merely masked the military dictatorships that underpinned them. As for more theocratic regimes like Saudi Arabia's, Goytisolo compares it with Spain's in the centuries following Ferdinand and Isabella's Reconquista: a society characterized by "intransigent homogeneity," "autistic self-absorption and inquisitorial vigilance," whose New World gold (read oil wealth) is spent not on development or reform but on hounding dissidents and quarantining the nobility and clergy in ever more grandiose palaces.

The West is criticized no less starkly. Goytisolo regards Bush's invasion of Iraq, which he described in a recent essay as "the illegitimate war of an illegitimate president," as the crowning catastrophe in a series of American blunders in the Muslim world, extending from U.S. backing in the 80's of both Saddam Hussein and the Taliban to U.S. support of deeply unpopular and repressive regimes in Egypt, North Africa and the gulf states.

Yet his vision is not altogether pessimistic. He sees "seeds of modernity" in the Arab world and even dares to hope that radical Islamist parties may be tempered and matured by partaking in national governments. This optimism perhaps accounts for why Goytisolo's work appears to have found a whole new generation eager to embrace his "Babelization" of language and cultures, his plea for ethnic, religious and sexual pluralism, his defense of the outsider. "What was appealing to me when I first came across Juan Goytisolo's books in the 1980's," the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk told me recently, "was that here was an experimental European novelist who had renounced the flat realism of the 19th-century novel and who was paying attention to my part of the world with an extraordinary humility, searching in his life and prose to create a different style enriched by what he's found in this culture."


The Café France, where Goytisolo goes every day, overlooks Jemaa el Fna, the centerpiece of Marrakesh's old quarter, a square where the open-air storytellers, snake charmers and witch doctors that enchanted writers like Bowles and Elias Canetti still ply their trade. Much of Goytisolo's organizational energies in the last years have gone into a campaign to preserve Jemaa el Fna from the Moroccan government's periodic efforts to sanitize it. At one point, there were plans to turn the medieval square into a parking lot. Thanks largely to Goytisolo's zeal, however, Jemaa el Fna has been classed by Unesco as a site preserving "the oral heritage of humanity."

"People ask, 'Why do you live in Marrakesh?' " Goytisolo told me with a chuckle. "I ask them, 'Have you seen it?' " In Jemaa el Fna, Goytisolo explained, he finds all the heterogeneity that is in danger of disappearing from Western cities. "In the 70's, when I was very poor, I was offered a permanent teaching post at Edmonton. I realized I would rather starve in Marrakesh than be a millionaire in Alberta."

The world in which Goytisolo has chosen to end his days is radically different from the one in which he grew up. Born in 1931 in Barcelona, Goytisolo belonged to Catalonia's ultraconservative haute bourgeoisie. His paternal great-grandfather made his fortune in Cuban sugar, and Goytisolo attributes his own political awakening to his discovery, in his early 20's, of a trove of letters from the plantation's Cuban slaves. These begging letters all innocently revealed the misery on which his family's privileges rested; his immersion in these archives coincided with his first reading of Marx. His politics were also shaped by the fact that his mother was killed, when he was 7, in a bombing raid by Franco's side. "What was most curious was my father hid reality from us," Goytisolo told me. "He said our mother was murdered by 'the reds.' At 15, 16, I finally realized Franco killed my mother. Much later, at the Cinémathèque in Paris, I saw newsreels of that day's aerial bombardment. Eight hundred people were killed in one day. I was terrified I would see my mother's body."

Goytisolo's mother came from a more liberal family than his father: "She wrote stories, she read Proust." With her death, Juan and his three siblings were cut off both from a mother's love and from any access to secular culture. (Surprisingly, his two brothers also grew up to be distinguished writers in Spain.) "I am the son not of my mother, but of the civil war, its messianism, its hatred," he told me.

In college, Goytisolo joined the anti-Franco resistance and began what he calls his real education. "I had received only indoctrination," he told me. "I needed a counterindoctrination to get clean. I went to a bookseller who had a hidden room. 'I have Sartre, Döblin, Dos Passos, Hemingway.' I read everything from Lenin to 'Lolita.' "

When he left Spain for Paris in 1956, his anti-Franco credentials gave him entry to the Left Bank intelligentsia of Jean-Paul Sartre, Marguerite Duras and Simone de Beauvoir, whom he met through Monique Lange, a novelist who worked at the French publisher Gallimard and who would eventually become his wife. He helped found a Spanish-language magazine that promoted the work of Latin American writers, many of whom had fled to Paris from repressive regimes, and published a half-dozen novels in a neorealist vein. Yet the virulence of his family's Catholicism proved, he says, permanent inoculation against ideology. When he accompanied his friends to Communist Party meetings, the cell leader's ranting against class enemies reminded him irresistibly of his childhood priest's fulminations against Freemasons and Jews.

What is remarkable about Goytisolo is the shrewdness of his long-term political judgment. On the ideological causes that tripped up so many of his generation, Goytisolo has consistently come down on what turned out to be the right side. Although he was an initial enthusiast for revolutionary movements in Cuba, Indochina and Algeria, Goytisolo was quick to point out how freedom-loving guerrillas, once in power, tended to morph into dictators backed by an omnipresent secret police. In the 60's, he was one of the first writers on the left to acknowledge that Fidel Castro had turned (as he wrote) "that ex-paradise of a Caribbean island. . .into a silent and lugubrious floating concentration camp." During the same period, he was accused of treachery by his comrades in the anti-Franco resistance for publishing an essay in the French newsweekly L'Express predicting, regretfully, that Spain was going to be liberated from Franco not by left-wing revolution but by the market forces that were "normalizing" the country.

Goytisolo's upbringing in a Spain ruled by what was known as nacionalcatolicismo has made him especially allergic to the mingling of state and religion. "I am against all fundamentalisms," he told me. He loves the popular Islamic traditions of North Africa and Turkey, the rich cultural and religious heritage of Arab civilization, but is repelled by the puritanical strains of political Islam that are displacing them. "The Muslim world needs to do an autocriticism, to take what's good from other cultures, prepare the way for social and economic change and not merely recall the extinct glories of Al Andalus." (Al Andalus is the Arab term for Spain under Moorish rule, which has been evoked as a golden age not just by writers and scholars but also with chilling irredentism by Islamist terror groups.) In 2004, when the French government banned the wearing of head scarves in public schools, many European leftists and libertarians took to the streets alongside Muslims in protest. Goytisolo, however, backed the ban, on the grounds that religion belongs strictly at home.

Goytisolo aligns his moral compass with that of the novelist and playwright Jean Genet, who became a close friend. "What I needed to hear, he told me," Goytisolo said. "Everything I was looking for, he showed me." Genet, too, was a defender of outsiders — convicts, junkies, illegal aliens, people living on the dark outskirts of the developed world. "Juan belongs in the tradition of Jean Genet and Pasolini, artists who used their own sexual oppression to agitate for broader social causes," says Edmund White, who met Goytisolo when researching his biography of Genet. "It was a heroic period that doesn't exist anymore. Juan takes the side of those who have been marginalized even by the marginal."

As with Genet, whose novels describe the lowlife of Barcelona and Tangier and who later championed both the Palestinian cause and the Black Panthers, Goytisolo's sexual awakening, which did not occur in his case until his 30's, was intimately linked to his political sympathy for those on the margins of society. In an Arab bar in Paris in 1963, Goytisolo met an Algerian laborer called Mohamed, and they began a relationship that drew the Spanish writer into what he soon realized was his ideal habitat. He became scribe to a fraternity of clandestines who needed money sent home to their families or needed their scrapes with the French authorities straightened out, and in exchange he got sex and Arabic lessons. (He told one interviewer that by comparison with the romantic companionship he had with Lange, homosexual sex was, for him, akin to a commercial transaction: "There is friendship but no love.")

Lange somewhat sadly agreed to accept the open relationship he proposed, much to the relief of Goytisolo, who had no interest in assuming an exclusively gay identity. (He and Lange lived together between Paris and Morocco until her death in 1996.) Even today, this remains the case. "I sign petitions for gay rights," he told me, "but it is not my thing. In countries I love, there is no necessity. I have relationships with many men who are married; I have very good relations with their wives, their children. There are too many frontiers in the world. I don't want to put frontiers in my private life."

It was from rented rooms in Tangier, in 1965, that Goytisolo began a novel called "Marks of Identity," the first in the trilogy that includes "Count Julian" and "Juan the Landless," which constitutes a savage, intricately layered, fictionalized account of his life and an indictment of Western chauvinism. Today the trilogy's blend of Francoist slogans and obscene martyrologies can seem a bit dated, but it was with its publication that Goytisolo was first described as "Spain's greatest living novelist."


When I met with him in Marrakesh, Goytisolo had just returned from Barcelona, where the publication of the first volume of his Complete Works ("Incomplete," he protested, laughing. "I'm not dead yet!") had been celebrated with a three-day symposium. Spanish newspapers were full of tributes to the exiled writer. That Goytisolo's work should receive such an official embrace represents quite a turnaround for a novelist who for decades was regarded in his native land as a seditious deviant. Though he left Spain 50 years ago, Goytisolo has devoted much of his literary output to lambasting its most treasured myths and institutions. "Campos de Níjar" (1960), a report on poverty in Andalusia, had an effect on European readers comparable to James Agee and Walker Evans's "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men." In "A Cock-Eyed Comedy" (2000), published earlier this year in the U.S. by City Lights, he takes a satiric potshot at the Spanish Catholic Church, lampooning the recently canonized founder of Opus Dei as a homosexual whose minions trawl the public toilets in search of converts.

Until Franco's death, Goytisolo's novels, composed in a stream of consciousness that is linguistically daredevil, learned and often startlingly scatological, were banned in Spain. Spanish readers had to smuggle in editions published in Mexico and Argentina. For decades, Goytisolo tells me ruefully, "my name was more popular in police stations than bookshops, and I do not mean to compliment the literary awareness of Spanish policemen." Peter Bush, Goytisolo's English translator, says: "In Spanish, there's a word, ninguneado , that describes someone who's been 'disappeared.' That was Juan."

Nowadays, Spain is a freer and more outward-looking country. After his election two years ago, the Socialist prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who replaced the more conservative and U.S.-allied José María Aznar , withdrew Spanish troops from Iraq. He negotiated a possible end to the nearly 40-year war that the Basque separatist group ETA has waged against the Spanish state, and he legalized gay marriage.

"The victory of Zapatero I experienced as a liberation," Goytisolo told me. On the morning after the election, Goytisolo's "adopted" Moroccan son, then 6, asked him, "Who won, los buenos o los malos? " "For once, I could answer los buenos . People accuse Zapatero of angelismo " — utopianism — "but you need a little angelismo. I am reminded of Mendès-France, who ended the French presence in Indochina. Same thing with Willy Brandt," who initiated West Germany's rapprochement with East Germany. Zapatero's government has also talked of amnesty for Moroccan immigrants and renewed official interest in Spain's Islamic heritage.

This "new Spain," multicultural, nonmilitarist and sexually diverse, is one whose emergence Goytisolo has long fought for. For years, Goytisolo's fiction and essays criticized Spanish Nationalists for denying the Muslim-Jewish culture that flourished in Spain before the Reconquista. "There are 4,000 words of Arabic origin in Spanish," Goytisolo informed me. "Even the quintessentially Spanish cry Olé! comes from 'Allah!' But the culture of ' limpieza de sangre ' " — blood purity — "admits no such pollutions." (In his novel "Count Julian," he imagines a Spain stripped of all Moorish borrowings — no agriculture, no architecture, no textiles, no music, no cuisine.) He went on to say: "You can't understand Cervantes or Fernando de Rojas" — the presumed author of the 15th-century comedy "La Celestina" — "without knowing they were both converted Jews, on the periphery of Spanish life. The regard from the periphery to the center is always more interesting."

Goytisolo's novel "Quarantine" (1994), set during the first gulf war, is just such a sidelong glance. In it, the narrator looks at the present through the spirit of a dead friend, whose soul, in accordance with Islamic teachings, is condemned to wander for 40 days between death and eternal life. This plot device leads Goytisolo into what Peter Bush describes as "a scholarly rumination on Christian and Muslim attitudes toward death and homosexuality, as refracted through Dante, the 12th-century Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi, Joyce, the 20th-century Russian linguistic philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, as well as the Spanish version of the Kamasutra written by a converted Muslim in the 16th century."

Tariq Ali, the London-based filmmaker, novelist and political commentator, made a documentary in 1990 for Britain's independent TV station Channel 4 about Goytisolo's life in Marrakesh. He describes Goytisolo as "the exact opposite of V. S. Naipaul. Naipaul came from Trinidad, a tiny colony, to the center of empire, and became an empire loyalist. Juan is trying to recover the vanished glory of an Andalusia which was destroyed by Catholicism. I'd say he's on the main track of history at the moment."

Symptomatic of this cultural revisionism, which Ali describes as Goytisolo's "victory," was an exhibition last year at Barcelona's Center for Contemporary Culture, curated by the Tunisian-born intellectual Abdelwahab Meddeb and titled "West by East." Its exhibits ranged from maps accompanying the 12th-century geographer Al-Idrisi's tour of Europe to a site-specific mural titled "The Magnificent Occident," by Iranian-born artist Marjane Satrapi, author of the graphic memoir "Persepolis."


After we finished our tea at the Café France, Goytisolo proposed a walk around the Jemaa el Fna. Offering me his arm, he stepped gingerly into the crush. The writer has grown pretty deaf — "In Spanish, you say ' sordo como una tapia .' I am not deaf as a wall, but as a paravent ," he said, using the French word for "screen." The peril to his life, he confessed, was not being able to hear the warning rumble of the bicycles, donkey carts and motorbikes that race through the Jemaa el Fna's crowd.

Accompanying Goytisolo on his daily stroll, I discovered, is like tagging along with the mayor of a small town. Every few feet, Goytisolo was joined or accosted by acquaintances: a laughing black man with gold-rimmed teeth who introduced himself to me as "Jimi without the Hendrix" and who turned out to be one of the Jemaa el Fna's most celebrated open-air comedians; an elderly storyteller in a white wool burnoose who handed Goytisolo his petition to receive a state pension. Everyone we ran into, depending on his own degree of traditionalism, greeted the Spanish writer with either a respectful " Salaam aleikum " and multiple kisses on each cheek, or with a sassier " Bikheer, Señor Juan? " (How's it going?) And Goytisolo responded with dry, old-fashioned courtesy in what I was told was fluent Moroccan street dialect.

For an exile whose literary enterprise has been founded on a fairly brutal revolt against the family, class, religion and nation into which he was born, Goytisolo finds a peculiar joy in submitting to the claims of his adopted home in the Marrakesh medina. "There are 20 children on my street who call me Uncle Juan," Goytisolo told me. He makes it a point of honor to greet them all more or less by name.

When he had finished chatting with a cybercafe owner who wanted the writer's help in getting municipal permission to build an extra story on his shop, Goytisolo turned to me, much amused. "I didn't recognize this man," he said. "He has grown such a very long barba ! These people really believe the long hairs on their face, like the Jews with their" — he gestured to illustrate side locks —"are very pleasing to God." An atheist, he shook his head in disbelief.

The Muslim tradition that Goytisolo relishes, it occurred to me, is the tolerant, syncretic strain found in North Africa, Turkish Anatolia and Bosnia. Predating the fundamentalist revival heralded by the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the spread of Saudi-style Wahhabism, it is a culture in which faith figures as nothing more stringent than keeping the fast at Ramadan or holding picnic feasts outside a Sufi saint's tomb.

After our stroll, we headed back to Goytisolo's house for dinner. His house lies 50 yards from the Jemaa el Fna, but to reach it, you zigzag through a labyrinth of back alleys. The writer unlocked a door, and we ducked into an interior patio luxuriant with 30-foot orange trees and hibernating turtles. Inside, the furnishings were austere, the tiled rooms lined in books, awards and odd photographs of Goytisolo's beloved dead — his mother, his wife, Monique Lange, Jean Genet as a teenager.

"Now you will meet my tribe," Goytisolo said with a dry twinkle. I had been told about Goytisolo's unorthodox domestic arrangements: he shares his home with two Moroccan brothers and three of their children. The brothers materialized as two middle-aged, square-set, mustachioed men, Abdelhadi and Abdelhak Darouzi, who serve the writer as cook, driver and companions. Their sons, whom he describes as "my dear children," are Goytisolo's heirs. (Abdelhak and his wife and two sons live in Goytisolo's compound; Abdelhadi, a former lover, is divorced and lives there with his 13-year-old son. His ex-wife and other children live elsewhere.)

In his books, Goytisolo paints himself as "a prickly customer," surly, suspicious, impenetrably self-absorbed. At home with his adopted family, however, Goytisolo was all solicitousness. He fussed over the boys with a grandfatherly affection, teasing the 13-year-old Reda for spending too much time on the computer, coaxing the 14-year-old Younes, whom he sends to Marrakesh's prestigious American school, to practice his English on me. Khalid, a mischievous charmer who, at 8, is still — just barely — little enough to be cuddled, is his pet.

"Aren't his eyes beautiful?" Goytisolo demanded.

With the older men, the manner was different. Indicating to me by comic pantomime that Abdelhak likes to drink, Goytisolo hid the bottle of Crozes-Hermitage I'd brought. Over an exquisite dinner of chicken baked with cinnamon and raisins, Goytisolo nagged the boys to stick to our common language of French, and for a moment they obliged, before reverting to their merry chatter in Arabic.

Goytisolo is full of projects for his "children": next summer Younes is being sent to study in Spain. "After my death, if he speaks Spanish, there will be people who will help him because of me. I want them to know the Old World, but without a moment of racism. To have two cultures is better than one. To know three is more important than two."


For Goytisolo, there are two worlds, and the gap between them is getting dangerously wide. There is the world he loves — the world of public storytellers, open-air cinemas and wandering saints, a world born out of an extreme poverty that both troubles and fascinates him. When he was young, this world still existed in Southern Europe, especially in Spain, and anybody with a conscience wanted to eliminate its injustices. Nowadays you find it only in Africa or Asia, or in the substandard corners of Western cities to which African or Asian immigrants are relegated. Then there is the developed world, in which elections are free and children no longer die of curable diseases but human relations are diminished, homogenized. "For many years, I've felt we were struggling for a world that would be impossible for us," Goytisolo admits to me. "Consumerism is everywhere; it's impossible to resist, even the children in Morocco want to wear Zara and Old Navy."

Much of his work is devoted to the sometimes fruitful, sometimes tragic commerce between these two worlds, between a consumerist global culture and a culture rooted in local traditions and peculiarities. In the early 90's, during the breakup of Yugoslavia, Goytisolo's friend Susan Sontag encouraged him to visit the besieged city of Sarajevo. His weekly war reports in El País described with a heartrending lucidity the butchery that was once again taking place in the heart of Europe and that re-engaged 19th-century nationalisms at a time when most European countries were about to dissolve their borders in all but name. For Goytisolo, Bosnia was a replay of the Spanish Civil War without an International Brigade, and European and American governments' cynical cowardice in allowing 120,000 Bosnian Muslims to be slaughtered by Bosnian Serb militias destroyed any claims to the moral superiority of Western civilization. "I became pessimistic," Goytisolo told me. "We are educated animals, but animals. We repeat the same atrocities with minor variations, like Ravel's 'Bolero.' "

During this period, Goytisolo also published a slim novel, "State of Siege" (1995), which is perhaps his greatest as well as his strangest work. The book is constructed in concentric circles, mimicking the siege of the city. In one circle, a group of Sarajevan scholars gather in a tavern to eulogize Bosnia's now-threatened heritage of syncretism, in which Sephardic Jewish balladeers, Sufi dervishes and apostate Christian janizaries to the Ottoman sultan coexisted. In another narrative ring, a dead Spanish writer called JG revisits his happiest hours performing fellatio on strangers in public baths. The innermost circle of the novel is a parable in which Goytisolo inflicts on his own Paris arrondissement the fate of Sarajevo. He imagines snipers randomly picking off innocent shoppers, while the authorities cut off gas, electricity, telephone lines.

Trying to reroute their unknown assailants' wrath to what they suppose is its rightful target, the "natives" mark their "foreign" neighbors' doors with appropriate symbols — crescent, star of David, an African totem. But the snipers continue picking off "decent" French people too. By the end, the reader is left suspecting that the real besieger is "the free market," which erases any older humanism, turning citizens into consumers "programmed for passivity and resigned acceptance of the law of the jungle."

The year after he published "State of Siege," Monique Lange died, and Goytisolo, profoundly bereaved, fled Paris to await his own death amid his adopted family in Marrakesh, in the house he bought more than a decade before.


On the last evening I was to spend with Goytisolo, we were just finishing our tea at the Café France as night fell. The storytellers lighted their kerosene lanterns. The motorbikes that slalom in and out of the Jemaa el Fna's crowd became more deadly in the darkness.

When we'd made our way to Goytisolo's home, Abdelhak showed us the earthenware jar of lamb cubes marinated in wine and spices that he'd let bake in the ashes of the neighborhood hamam all afternoon. Despite Goytisolo's vigilance, Abdelhak had evidently managed to put away a bit of wine himself, and he was visibly jolly.

All week Goytisolo had been pestering Abdelhak's younger son, Khalid, to sing and dance for me. When he was little, Khalid used to come into Goytisolo's study every morning and sing "La Cucaracha" while performing a dervish whirl. Goytisolo dotes on the child, but he doesn't seem to understand how what at 4 years old was natural has become unthinkable at 8.

"Sing 'La Cucaracha.' "

"I've forgotten it."

"I'll sing with you," the old man coaxed.

"You sing. I've forgotten."

I waited, hoping against hope that the frail septuagenarian would sing me "La Cucaracha."

Then, after dinner, when nobody was expecting it, Khalid rose to his feet and began to whirl. First slowly, then gathering speed, faster and faster he spun like a dervish. When he stopped, he stared at us with huge black eyes, curly-lashed, unsmiling.

I thought of Goytisolo's telling me a few days earlier, in relation to Spain's leader, Zapatero: "You should ask for utopia. You need a little utopianism in the rough cynicism of contemporary politics."

Teaching his Moroccan "son" to whirl like a dervish and sing "La Cucaracha," it occurred to me, is just the kind of utopian gesture to which Juan Goytisolo has devoted his life.

(Fernanda Eberstadt is the author, most recently, of "Little Money Street," a book about gypsy life in France.)