The Shivan Letters: I

Scorpion Bite and Rose Attar

Tangiers, Morocco — 1960’s

Tangiers, the 3rd of October, 1967

Dear Mother,

I keep stepping in and out of myself. Perhaps it's the heat. I am more inclined, however, to put the blame on a scorpion sting from last week that is still dancing a slow samba with my nerves. Also, there the matter of that bitter flower Nadège uses in the desserts. I feel as if my mind has been overtaken by the spirit of an amorous rake. Is it delirium or is it an approximation of pleasure? I don’t know but I am floating. And not at all apologetic for it.

The traces of rose attar on my ankles are mingling with the distant scent of coffee and cardamom halva, stirring me from this bed I’ve grown so fond of. Oh Mother, this place…

Time moves differently here. I’m not entirely convinced it moves at all.

The club gets stranger by the night. Last evening a peculiar man arrived—not unusual in itself, but this one wore a single glove on his left hand and had the scent of winter about him. Not winter like December in Paris, but old winter—bone wind and silver rot. Nadège let him in without a word. They didn't speak, but something passed between them. Not a look. A memory perhaps? He was accompanied by the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen! Draped in saffron silk and jewels—pink, yellow, and blue sapphires. She spoke no English and, of course you know the terrible state of my French, but she left me a cigarette with a message written in Turkish on the paper. I’ll have to find someone who can read it.

Nadège and I have taken to keeping notes on the guests, whispering and scribbling observations—what they wear, what they pretend to be. After our little game has concluded for the night, she gathers the scraps, claims she’s throwing them away—but I’ve noticed lately that she pockets them. Last night I saw her slip them into the safe! I don’t know why. Perhaps she’s building a case against us all.

This morning the riad is alive and bustling with activity. A Belgian surrealist painter has just arrived—Franz something-or-other—a squatty man that smells of varnish and citrus peel but with quite a good eye for light and shadow from what I’ve gathered. I will be curious to see the work he produces whilst here. There’s a vague lawlessness to him. He has the look of someone recently exiled by mutual agreement, if you know what I mean. Perhaps he’s evading a scandal—forgeries and adultery, the usual. They all are, in their own way. It’s hard to tell who’s real here. Everyone is fleeing something they can’t name. I guess I am no exception.

They say Morocco is where the unfinished come to finish themselves. But I don’t know what I’m here to conclude. Or if I was ever properly begun. My name doesn’t sound like mine anymore. It’s become something I answer to out of habit, but all conviction is lost. I don’t want to sound like some kind of performative bohemian cliché, but frankly I am quietly aflame beneath all this American … fabrication.

Found inside a copy of Tarot of the Bohemians with a train ticket, this is one of the few remaining photos of Shivan. Dated Paris, 1966. Photographer unknown. She would have been approximately 36 years old.

Everything I was told to be—lovely, polite, artful but not too clever—burned off in the Cairo sun. What’s left is something drier. More precise. Less decorative. It isn't loneliness. It's lucidity.

Last night I dreamt of the violinist again. We were in an empty bathhouse—billows of steam pluming forth amid tiles of pale green, slick with condensation. His eyes were shut and the most heart-achingly beautiful song poured from the instrument into the echoing dampness around us. A woman stood behind him, almost faceless—an obscurity, really—her arms full of dry flowers dripping honey from their stalks. She wasn’t watching him. She was watching me. Without speaking, I could hear a word being whispered over and over between them—

Essaouira. Essaouira. Essaouira.

It repeats itself in my mouth like a spell even now. Perhaps it is a summons.
I will go soon.

If I don’t write again, it means I’ve found the end of the thread. Or the beginning.

All my love,
—Shivan

---

Provenance Note: The Shivan Letters

Filed under: The Counterculturist Archive – Artefacts from the Velvet Periphery
Sub Rosa. Sub Sole. Sub Specie Aeternitatis.

Following the discreet 2018 estate sale of a narrow, plant-choked brownstone in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, a faded Persian carpet bag was discovered wedged behind a false wall in what had once been a parlor turned makeshift greenhouse. The bag contained over two hundred handwritten letters, personal diaries, and postcards—most dated between 1959 and 1972.

The residence belonged to Shivan Moreau, a known figure on the mid-century art and salon circuits—a woman who appeared and disappeared through Tangiers, Palermo, Lisbon, Essaouira, and Paris under various pseudonyms. Few photographs exist. Fewer still are verified.

What is certain: the bag was addressed to “M. Moreau” in delicate calligraphy, and most letters begin simply: Dear Mother.

No record has been found of Shivan’s mother’s death, and it’s assumed the letters were written while she was still alive to receive them, although more than half remained unopened until their discovery. Others arrived to friends and New York neighbors decades after their post date—unmarked, unsealed, without explanation. The return addresses span riads, cafes, and hôtels particuliers. Some were scribbled on the backs of opera programs, Turkish cigarette cartons, perfumery packaging, or stationery. Each one captures a moment of a life lived at the edge of disappearance.

It’s unclear how the full collection came to be reunited or why they were hidden, but in 2021, the bag—along with its contents—was anonymously delivered to The Counterculturist, wrapped in waxed linen and tied with a length of what appears to be mourning lace.

What follows is a curated selection of those letters.

Some are diary. Some confession. Others spell and prayer.

All are fragments of a woman who lived between a myth and a memory—and insisted on being remembered exactly that way.

---