2006 - Morocco
At 7:30 in the morning, the Fés roosters are still crowing as they have done for twelve hundred years. And though today is sacred to the Prophet's birthday, the donkeys are tapping their way up the hill through the steep and twisting laneways, already at work.
*
The marketplace on the hill outside the old medina is awash with colour and noise, and most of all with the smell of mint and coriander, of small white fleurs d’oranges and a touch of woodsmoke. I think this is the most purely medieval, purely beautiful place I have ever been in and we are befriended at once by Mohammad of the plaster casts, by Ahmed and by disapproving old Mohammad of the shoes who gives us thé menthe to drink and sweet biscuits from home with almonds and spices in them.
*
The Mederasa in Bouinania is twelfth century, and unlike the purely koranic madrassas of Afghanistan and Pakistan, was a university where the young men of 18 -20 commenced their seven years of study in astrology, mathematics, irrigation and the arts. Today there are tour groups everywhere – Moroccan but also continental, French and German. The Moroccans listen; the Europeans (and we) carry cameras.
In the musician’s shop, another Mohammad plays the lute and the drums for us, and then captivates me with a wailing, sobbing flute solo that sings of patience and warmth and lost promises in the weird quarter-tones of the Arabs. In the street outside, the little boys climb anything and everything - walls, pipes, benches; they are born to play.
Abdul the antique man tells us that in the Jewish quarter there is one old woman remaining who refused to go to Israel with the rest. She is known by the honorific Soulika which means “Professor” – though Abdul says this doesn’t convey enough of the word’s real meaning. She’s the one single holdout of the mass Jewish migration after the end of the six-day war, and Immigration have ordered her out, time and again. Finally, she appealed directly to the new King, who, like his father, the revered and beloved Hassan II, is “a good and kind friend to the Jews”. He turned the tables on Immigration and ordered them to leave her alone.
We are told that up until the six-day-war, the Jews and Berbers existed without rancour. They would have lived side by side except that the proclamation against usury keeps the Jews out of town. (Usury was one of the very few professions open to Jews, but charging interest is a sin against Islam.) Later, Paul will ask our friend Sayid whether the Muslims of Morocco are sect-based – are sunni or shia. Sayid will look confused and say “Muslim. All are the same.” and we will realize that the brothers of the book can coexist here in near perfect peace – because if the Muslims aren’t fighting each other, why on earth should they bother the Jews?
Abdul shows Paul how to differentiate between copies of old wood artifacts and the real thing. It’s a question of oil – the wood, he says, will always be old, but the carving itself might be new and the artifact worthless. The sellers will soak a piece in oil and bury it for the aging effect and then sell it through markets and hotels for ridiculous prices. Fés has not “gone” yet, Abdul tells us – there are still precious things to buy and people to sell them.
When he shows us the Berber belts, his voice hushes with respect and almost whispers. He brings out a three hundred and fifty year old Koran which is beautiful and obviously authentic. He shows us contracts written on wood, and takes us to visit a sixth century ryad where we photograph the base of the fountain at his urging. UNESCO have interfered with his father’s offer to purchase the fountain for twenty thousand dirham, and Abdul is still broken-hearted. He disapproves mightily of anyone else in the city who deals in antiques. Later we will learn that his family were the original antique dealers in Fés, and can trace their ancestry back all the way to the Prophet .
For all his sweetness, I’m a touch resistant to Abdul. Perhaps it’s just that he makes us feel too sure of ourselves as buyers. I am aware all the time of the generations of skilled Arab traders that lie in his blood…. He and Paul will later become great friends – a friendship cemented by a ride on the motorbike to the ville nouvelle for lunch with Abdul’s family. He tells Paul not to pay any of the tourist taxes from today on. “You are here for a week, you are not tourists,” he says “You are my guest.” He means Paul, not me. The new gender equality with which Fés is entering the 21st century is only skin-deep after all. Abdul is reluctant for us to walk together, Paul and I; he says that in his own house, if his father talks to his mother he leaves the room.
He is a sweetheart though, the treasured baby of the family, already adept at the trade his father has practiced for fifty years. He is reluctant to make deals without the approval of his father or elder brother, but he has an excellent eye – better than his brother’s – and a wonderful charm that Westerners will love. He will do very well, I think.
While they are together, I walk through the medina alone,
getting lost and found again, protected and well-looked-after by all the locals. I have absolutely no fear here, and in fact this is true of all the Muslim countries I have been to, and of India too. In the banlieus of France, in the village near Sorrento in Italy, and also in Germany I’ve been uneasy at times, but not here. Ros would like Morocco very much, I think.
*
Wednesday
It is just before 5:00 am and Paul and I have climbed to the roof of our ryad to watch the sun rise over the medina. It is still dark, but there are scattered lights in the town, and the ribbon of roadway outside the old town is lined with light. The mist softens everything so that the orange lights outside the houses seem mute and shrouded.
Two roosters are calling in turn. A third has joined them and now a forth, and there is a sudden commotion of donkeys and dogs from up on the opposite hill. Now that I take this book up again, I find it’s still to dark to see where the pen left off and there’s every chance I’m scribbling over yesterday’s time in the old town.
The roosters and cockerels have formed a chorus and the donkeys are braying at the too-cruel god who has given them another day of life in this town, another day of torment. “There was a shout about my ears, and palms before my feet”… but the memory must have died by now for them.
The dogs have woken on the hill behind me. These are not dogs as we know them, but the brutalized, twisted mongrels from the village. The donkeys and dogs are evidence enough of the cruelty that still lives here.
The smell from the sewers and drains is beginning to rise up even to this rooftop; but in the way of all things here, it drifts and shifts so that just as it was possible to smell mint and then spice and then leather yesterday on the hill, so this morning in the still-dark, there is the smell of human effluent, then the sharp wet tang of the donkeys and then the over-ripe fetid smell of rotting food and garbage left out for the village cats.
It’s twenty past five now, and in a burst the small birds have woken and I wish I could tape these sounds as the town shakes the soft night away and stumbles into the morning. The air is colder now and a sharp little breeze is picking up but the noise of birds continues, and of donkeys and dogs and from somewhere below comes the deep throbbing bass of a generator. This is nothing like the wild tumbling glory of the French and Italian mornings. This day wakes to the knowledge of hard work and the all-binding laws of tradition. But there is not, either, the terrible sadness of morning in India – perhaps because this medieval village has always existed, always and forever, without facing change.
I sit with my back to the mosque to watch the daybreak away from its hard white light. Yesterday, Ala'a, who is Iraqi told Paul about the corruption of a noble religion, of the burial of kings whom the Prophet outlawed hard up against his tomb.
The children are waking now, and the women are lifting their voices in demand and exasperation and impatience and the cold sun is rising.
*
At the first wall of the medina, hemmed in and roofed and cobbled, are the produce tunnels serving the stalls and markets. At this hour the men have arrived to pack in their spices and vegetables and herbs. We walk on, Paul and I, and suddenly the air is changed, charged and sick with blood and I realize we are coming to the place where smaller animals are slaughtered and larger ones butchered. It is atavistic and decades of vegetarianism make it quite impossible even to breath without tasting the fear and blood and cruelty. We come upon a mound of flensed and stripped horses skulls and I would like to take a photo because there is an eerie beauty to the pink and white bone and the soft rounded edges of eye sockets, but as I set up to shoot a man stalks past waving his hands and forbidding me to photograph. Why? I ask him, Why can’t I photograph here? I think it might be the Islamic prohibition on picturing, but no; he stalks past, angry, complaining in French (we have been talking in French, so he knows that I understand) about people who come and portray his town as a place full of savages.
We try later, in our relativist way, to unpick his reaction. All the world must eat and most countries eat meat and the brutality of butchering is some thing one can taste and smell in the tunnels. But it wouldn't have been evident in the photo I was planning; this was not a rotting mound of offal or covered with flies or surrounded with filth, it was a neatly structured pyramid of horse skulls, fresh and picked clean and lit with the surprisingly white morning light against the dark stone age-old floor and wall of the underground storehouse. His anger could not have been that we’d uncovered the shameful secret of butchery, nor that we were photographing squalor. “You make us look like savages!” he said, and savagely. His anger was strong enough to stop me taking the photo, and also to stop me arguing further with him. But it is strange that here he should take against savagery and horseflesh and history. He is, I think, one of the new breed who would give everything to exchange the barbarism of Morocco, of the twelfth century medina for the anonymous savagery of Western modernity.
In any case, I put my camera away for the rest of Morocco. I don’t understand yet – I will in time – what it is that Morocco finds so objectionable. But in any case, I’m here to learn, not to photograph. Almost all the pics on this page were taken by Paul.
*
Mohammad 3 is mortified when we ask for the supermarket. “It is too far”, he says, “It is in the old town.” I think he might weep, but he only apologises - again and again. Paul says he looks as though he is seriously considering moving the supermarket closer to us.
*
The internet café actually buzzes with radiation.
It’s quite disturbing.
*
I have been locked out.
I have made it back alone from Abdul’s shop with just a minimum of false turns and doublebacks, and, flush with triumph, find the big door closed to me. There is nothing for it but to wait in the square and hope Paul and Abdul don’t take too long over lunch. But this is a wonderful place to wait – very busy today, and full of conversation. The tourists mass around their guides, holding sprigs of mint to their noses (which would so offend my friend of this morning) and they front up en masse to the shops and stalls to take photographs and buy nothing. Paul is considering taking himself a piece of this town – a house can be bought for sixty thousand euros and renovated for another sixty thousand. At the moment, he feels very much at home here. Abdul has been a real find; we discover that our friends at the ryad with whom Paul spent last night have a high regard for him both as collector and as merchant. The Berbers take great pride in bargaining well but honestly – according to their lights. There is a nobility in them, and a pride in their reputation. There are by nature charming and friendly and very talkative – but I find it hard to join in, being a woman. Which is why I left Paul and Abdul to lunch together, since I know that makes Abdul more comfortable.
*
Abdul’s father has two wives. Both are mothers to Abdul, but he says with a smile (I think it’s flattery) that all children love their own mother “a little bit more”.
*
I think there are not too many years left for Fés as a true medieval town. It has grown too big for itself it seems to me, and will either collapse or turn to tourism to survive. It is poor, but not abject – there is nothing of India to it – its people are hard-pressed rather than struggling
and the race is between people like Alaa and Kate or the Germans and Swiss who buy houses and renovate rather than simply restoring. I suspect it will eventually resemble Eze in France, restored and full of tourists and no longer really alive.
*
If I never see another glass of mint tea, I’ll be a happy woman. Likewise the sweet biscuits.
I have two Arabic words now – shokkoran which is thank you and schweera which is a little. Both get quite a workout every time we stop. Paul is brutal in his refusal to accept the tea which means I must do duty for both of us. It’s the durian story all over again.
*
I wish I could paint. I would paint the three old men sitting against the wall of the silversmiths shop, stripping bundles of mint and chamomile, bunching them into their hand-woven baskets. I would paint the black woolen cap the oldest man wears, and paint also the song that he lapses into when his old friends grow too quiet. He wears brown trousers and a brightly striped jumper, his black cap sits like an over-sized beanie, like the cap of the guelf in the painting we bought in Cortona. One of his friends, bareheaded, wears womens’ white loafers and a woman’s cardigan with a bright yellow shirt and navy trousers, and the yellow of the chamomile rests against its navy basket with thyme on either side. They have sat here all morning these three, joined from time to time by the brass-worker, the tinsmith and the artisans.
Dar Seferin is a square for men to lounge in, and meet and kiss and touch and talk. The tourists barge through in groups of twenty to forty-five, and I sit here, watching and waiting for Paul to return.
*
Night time shows us the angry face of Fés as the young men harass us, bullying and at times confrontational, in a way that I have never seen them behave. We have been careful all through our time here not to take refuge in the “maybe tomorrow” response to their invitations to stop and check out this or that shop or restaurant, but still they insist that we’ve made arrangements to meet them and not followed through. This is a ploy we have both seen before in other developing countries, but it’s nonetheless uncomfortable, and Paul doesn’t like it. Little Mohammed who claims to be fourteen, but can’t be more than eleven, faces squarely up to Paul when we refuse his help to get back to Dar Seffarin. “You not Australian!” he yells strongly, in a voice lacking passion but extremely sure of itself. “You are Hungaria!” This is quite evidently a terrible insult, but I miss it completely and call him back to ask what he means. “He’s calling me a Jew” Paul says, tight with fury, and Mohammad tells me quite calmly “Your husband no good man. You good woman, but your husband bad man.”
It’s hard to know what to say after that. We are very relieved to hear next morning that of the three other couples at our lodgings, all have been abused in the last twenty four hours, one by my young man at the slaughterhouse.
*
Thursday
We spend most of the day with Ala’a, our landlord and host (and chef) looking over old houses. Paul is still wanting to buy here, despite Mohammed and the Hungarians. Ala’a takes us finally to his friend Omar who runs an Aladdin’s cave that benefits battered women. I buy a few very old Jewish shekels, and a pretty bottle that once carried water from the sacred (and undoubtedly fetid) founts of Medina. The Jewish coins please me more than I can say, and before I leave Omar gives me a pretty brass bracelet “as a gift from his heart to mine. And for the publicity.” He has his small daughter Raja (to whom I have already slipped some hair pins with flowers and butterflies) kiss me goodbye “for the blessing. And the publicity.”
This is not the only kiss I receive today. We are led back through the medina at breakneck pace by a friend of Alaa’s who has no time to spare and no height to safeguard him from the throngs of shoppers. The medina is often just as crowded as the chowks of Old Delhi, being tiny and twisting and never more than nine feet wide. Despite disapproval from the Moroccan men, Paul tries to have me hold his hand as I run to keep up, but the men – and also the larger bolshier women – push between us and I am often hard for him to find again. Finally he takes to walking with his hand stretched behind him – and from three bodies back I see a small boy, who has been pulling my shirt and kissing my hand for baksheesh, slip his hand into Paul’s. I see Paul’s fingers tighten, and despite my calls (drowned out by “Balek! Balek!” of the donkey-man) he pulls the child along behind him, swept up in the tide of progress. It isn’t until I can catch up enough to tap him on the shoulder and say “You’ve got the wrong hand”’ that he looks back and sees the six year old at his side. He laughs, and calls the boy cheeky and releases the hand, but the child isn’t so easily dislodged, and he follows Paul for some time, grabbing our hands and kissing them over and over…
At the New Town, the three little beggar boys ask Paul for the rest of his coke and I wish to hell I had brought the chocolate bars I had packed in Australia. I’ll pack them tonight in case we go up there again. These little boys are the first I’ve seen who remind me a little of India. Just a little.
*
American Express are rubbish. That’s all I’m saying.
*
I think my best purchase (after the Jewish coins) is the child’s end-of-year exam paper the Medina flask was wrapped in. I’ll treasure that. The unknown child is appallingly bad at arithmetic (2/10) but flawless in French.
*
Seffrou
We have been given to a guide by a young woman we met in the grande taxi from Seffarin. He is Sayid, who takes us all through the medina, friendly and knowledgeable, protective of us and very imaginative in his choice of places we might like to visit. Thus we are taken in to a local home, where I am invited into the kitchen to see bread being made; and to another house to see the indoor garden. We meet a Frenchman, restoring a ryad that he bought for twenty thousand euros, and play games with the laneway children and give them stickers to wear on their faces.
Then we are taken to Bhilal to see the cave houses
and the hills – a beautiful spot where we meet stunning, sixty year old Aisha and her dying husband. We are given mint tea in her house, and I give Australian chocolates to her and the children – but not to her son-in-law who asks quietly for one of the boys to share his and is cranky when the child offers it to him in front of us. Paul has the camera and is shooting like a madman, and we are invited to go upstairs for a shot of the husband – who we find is a very old man in extremis, who plays with a kitten gently while he waits for death.
We don’t photograph him.
The people of Saffrou and Bhilal don’t know enough about tourists to hate us yet, and it’s a very pleasant retreat from the rigours of Fés. In the hilltown mosque of Bhilal, the imam is shouting in Arabic and I ask Sayid whether he is praying or preaching. “Not praying, not preaching”, Sayid tells me “but talking of social things – about things that the village must know.” It is so medieval!
*
Un marriage! Five robed men, three – no, four – silver and green banners, and three tambours. Women made up so beautifully and a tiny girl in a white frilled dress and bright shows leading the way. The wedding guests – all women – clap and dance and ululate, holding up the gifts, unwrapped, that they’re bringing to celebrate the wedding. There is a baby bath, a board game, some plates and plastic cups. I search my pockets frantically to find a decent sized donation to make, but all I have are restaurant business cards and the parade has passed by me…
*
Saturday
Fés is crawling with undercover police and informants and yesterday one of the guests got our own young Mohammed in trouble by walking beside him to check out a restaurant Ala’a had recommended at dinner. Ivan had given up trying to untangle the web of laneways and alleys in the medina and had instead co-opted the boy to show him the way. But he forgot to walk the obligatory six metres behind, and M was nabbed on suspicion of being a faux guide. Ivan followed the boy and the police to the station, using Ala’a as a reference and protesting M’s innocence all the way and was able to get him released; but Kate says it was a very lucky escape. Usually the boys are thrashed first and questioned later, and if things go against them they get three months in prison which is apparently more than common.
There is a sizeable amount of police corruption in Fés, according to Ala’a – they routinely shakedown the taxi drivers for ten dirham a time, and a large number of vendors are on the payroll as police informers, which allows quite a few personal scores to get settled. But we hear the heartening story of a donkey – overloaded and ill-shod as they all are here – being dragged by his owner down a wet and steep cobbled path. The donkey eventually refused to take a step further and the man began to beat it; whereupon the donkey threw a foreleg out and punched the man who slipped and was killed. I suppose it was a pretty pyrrhic victory, given that the donkey was almost certainly immediately slaughtered – but oh that one single instant of triumph!
*
Paul has gone to effect the last of his Abdul-transaction, and I am in the square again, being shoved around by the tourist groups. They seem so rude and brusque, these people. I watch one woman who has appropriated a boy of about nine for a photograph. She stands with her arm around his shoulder, not making any more attempt at communication than if he were an armchair or a tree. They pose while her friend plays around with the buttons which takes quite a while, the light eventually flashes - and without even looking his way the woman removes her arm from the boy’s shoulder and rejoins her friend. The little boy is suddenly discomfited, and worse, seen to be so by his friends. He puts a semi-circle of swagger into the walk back to the game, to give himself time to regain his sense of dignity. It is a shameful display of ill-breeding by the woman and I’m glad that she doesn’t speak English. And I’m glad, too, that I put my camera away on the first day here, since it bothered the man at the slaughterhouse and came between me and seeing.
I’m most upset, I think, by the callous objectification of the child, by the insult to his still-forming sense of autonomy and dignity. We would never photograph children at home without some ongoing communication, we would never drag them away from their games just for a tourist shot. So why would it suddenly be acceptable here? I wish I’d seen the set-up. I wonder if she spoke to the child at all, or if the guide (I have seen this done) simply clicked the boy forward to have him passed from camera to camera. It really really does make me very angry.
*
The square is so packed and crowded now that I’ve moved upstairs to our room. But even from here the wash and clamour is as audible as the sea.
*
Sunday
We have met some lovely people here in the riad, and some not so lovely, but the nicest – as is often the case – is the big American, Lance, who describes the bus trip he and his wife took to Casablanca. His wife, diminutive and red-headed, got lost in the tightly-packed throng of passengers and suddenly hissed for her husband
“Lance! Get up here!”
“I can’t move honey, I’m peopled in”
“There’s a man pressing up against me!”
“There’s a man pressing up against me, too, honey.”
“But Lance!” she is panicking now, “My guy is getting aroused!”
Phlegmatically from Lance “So is my guy, honey…. So is my guy.”
*
I talk to Kate today – herself a fine and sensitive photographer – about this issue of objectification of the locals. The ancient people, Kate tells me (they are called ancient people here, not simply “old people” and certainly nothing like “senior citizens”…) are taken out from their beds just after sunrise and put in their market places to wait out the day. They are sometimes empty handed, required to beg, and sometimes left with bunches of chamomile and mint and thyme to sell. She tells me about the tour groups who walk through the r’cif where the eighty year old Berber widow, her life tattooed on her face in the blue patterns of betrothal, marriage and widowhood, sits selling her herbs. Yesterday Kate watched a group of thirty or forty take turns to photograph her. The going rate for bunches of herbs is one dirham – about fifteen cents – but not one of them offered to buy a bunch from her. And when the last of the thirty had posed with her, she held out her hand for a coin and none was forthcoming. The tourists either turned away, suddenly blinded or fiddling with their cameras, or they became righteous and indignant, as though they were insulted by the request.
I’m glad I put my camera away. It’s a two-edged sword here, and they’re both offensive. It wasn’t like that in India.
Kate is as angry as I am about the child in the square, which is comforting. But later, thinking it over, I’m also intrigued by the old women themselves, and this issue of begging places. Do jealousies grow up over time? Do the women covet the spot in the earliest sun, the spot furthest away from the donkeys, or closest to the herb gardens? Do they watch each other every day for signs of morbidity?
*
We leave dar Sefarrin with some regret after an early and enthusiastic breakfast with Kate and Ala’a. (Paul, disturbed by Alaa’s apparently complete lack of business management training, was up at six to create an all-purpose business plan for him.) We drive through the hardscrabble country on our way to the desert – some of the hardest country I’ve ever seen, rocks and stones piled on layers of rocks and stones, with clumps of hard grass in between. And yet a few kilometres ago there were cherry trees and acres of wildflowers and herbs – daisies and poppies, purple and blue scatterlings and grass as dense as wheat fields.
Here in the hardscrabble, tiny stone houses are lost on the sides of hills, decrepit and lonely, and in the distance the smoke from the fire
in the centre of the single room houses drifts slowly out through the roof. An old, old woman who might be forty is still against the yellow rock, her skirt a dull splash of purple beneath the smudged green-grey of her over-shirt.
*
We come to Azrou which means “rock” in Berber (! – you had to be there, but believe me, it’s funny) a little old place of carpets and brassware (and rocks) framed in Islamic green roof tiles. In front of me – I am alone in the car, the men having gone to discuss ancient rugs - a Berber woman, old, with a withered hand and a useless leg, sits propped on a cushions asking for alms in Allah’s name. She has a faded dusty-pink hooded robe covering a bright pink flowered dress - the exact colour I’ve just been shown in the desert agate. The dress can only be caught in glimpses under the robe - bright, joyous, optimistic - and her socks are black with bright flowers.
*
There is snow still on the slopes here at 1945 metres, and the sheep mill around below the drifts, warm and woolly and undeniably greasy. Fields of rocks are terraced in with rock walls and we come suddenly upon a field of yellow which looks to me like canola. But M says they are just plantes sauvages – weeds – not even herbs and useless as far as he knows. We pass old Berber villages built of stone on stone and smelling strongly of mouton and faintly of woodsmoke and lightly of snow. Storks – cygone – build wild and undisciplined nests
in the chimney pots and the tiny sparrows build side apartments into the chaos.
M and I try hard to reach an understanding about little gatherings of rocks placed one atop another, perhaps up to four at a time, but all I can gather is that it might – might – signify the end of the common ground.
*
The spring lambs are fattening. Any weaker ones will have been culled by now and those that are left are strong and rounded and woolly but still clean and new-looking, still suckling as well as grazing. There is a gorge here, and Paul comes back from his shoot with a rough piece of agate. This is a big country, on the Australian scale – wide, wide horizons, deep gorges and winterbournes and streams. We drive through the nomad grassplain where the snow runoff sparkles in pools and puddles and rivulets over bright grass. It is like the littoral of the sea, but with grass and purple herbs where the sand would be, and the rockpools are underlaid with growing things. I miss the chance to photograph these – I think there is a natural limit to how often poor Mohammad should have to stop –
but I will make do with a shot of the little bourne that runs on the grass under the road and into a little rivulet turning and twisting its way to the grassplain.
*
I am tired of fossils and carpets – though I’d kill for half a dozen of these huge old clay storage pots! – so I stay in the car while M. and Paul go down to inspect the merchandise. A man of about forty comes out of the nearby tent to stand gazing into the car with his index finger busily plundering his right nostril.
*
M. has brought us to a restaurant in the style of Cheap Charlie’s of KL fame. The table next to us has just been vacated and is awash with all the detritus of the meal. Plates are not used here, and neither do they use trenchers; the food is brought in in a communal tajine (grilled goat and stewed vegetables and water and – ugh – I just discovered – veal) and the leavings – the bones, cores, peelings and olive pits – are left where they fall on the table. Watching a little more closely, I can see that there is etiquette involved. Eating from a specific part of the bowl, leaving the detritus on a specific part of the table, and offering the meat at the centre of the dish to your lunch-mates seems to be taught; the adults are more reliable than the kids. But still it looks rather random, and the result, once the table has been abandoned, is for all the world like a Hitchcock movie.
M. kindly has our table double-cleaned, and brings us sheets of paper to use as plates. Paul, having learned the lesson of the medina, is ordering everything bien coute which is very gratifying
There are some beggars here, notably one old man who uses his hands to move around, lacking, to a large extent, the use of his lower half. I’m assuming India rules apply, and that donations are best given on the way out.
*
At Medet there is a dun coloured village built into the dun coloured sand, all little squares on squares like a dun coloured patchwork.
*
The Sahara
In the Sahara desert, we go out alone quite early to walk on the dunes. We walk too far, of course, and come to the base of a slope so high, so unclimbable, that of course Paul must climb it. I have read about the treachery of sand dunes and am bitterly, stridently opposed to relying on them not to fall in around us (they look like nothing so much as a frozen, orange tsunami) but Paul is, as always, implacable. Climb them we will.
I climb with him for about half the distance because I am scared of the slope and the height and being scared is an ignoble reason for refusing to climb them at all; but then I leave him and head for the base and make the mistake of turning back like Lot’s wife and he’s more than halfway up and deserves to be immortalized. He has the camera, alas, so I must climb back up even further than I had climbed before, get the camera, run back to take the shot – and then climb back again to return the camera to him for the god-shots. It is terrifying and he means to get right to the top and my legs can’t even get purchase half way up. I keep sliding backwards, and even Paul is having trouble now, crawling up on his hands and knees and very slowly – so I give up for good, and leave him the camera and come back to sit on the plateau and work on his epitaph…
*
He’s made it! Upright now and walking along the crest he is thumb-sized, and the dune is a mountain. Now he moves over the crest and I can’t see him any more so I am alone in the huge burnt umber of the Sahara. There is no sound here at all; but every few minutes the wind plays with the top film of sand like a breeze across the ocean, and the sand flecks and shimmers over the face of the hill. There is no shade in this great emptiness, and though the sun is not hot, it is inescapable.
I would prefer Paul to be somewhat more cautious, more respectful of the knowledge of people and unknown environments. He is very much of the “what a boy has done a boy can do” school of thought, and doesn’t consider the millennia of observation, acclimatization and education that make the desert a safe enough place for the Berber nomads. So he’s up there, out of sight, sans shirt, hat, sunscreen or water, with only his camera for comfort. He’ll make it safely back – he always does – and it will be another in a long line of adventures and stories – and one more reason for him never to doubt his own infallibility. He reappears for a moment, a speck on the highest part of the back dune and I am reminded again of the perilous castle in Val de Pierle just outside Mercatale.
*
The wind is picking up. If I get buried alive in the kind of sandstorms the press reports with such unabashed glee, I’m going to kill him. Now I can hear the light sand skimming over the hillsides, and it sounds surprisingly like the shallow plash of the sea on a shelly beach. There is a soft and sibilant music at play when the air moves, though I’ll bet the sound is more threatening in a high wind. Although its not hot here, its terribly dry and the skin of my arms is desiccating by the minute – not burning, just drying and peeling. I’ve wrapped my scarf around my mouth to keep the sand out, and hope that the skin of my face is at least a little protected.
*
This desert is not at all like the Great Thar Desert and not like the Australian desert either, which is parched and cracked and desperate for moisture. Here it’s quite simply devoid of water, devoid of the need for water. It is not cruel and pitiless like the Australian desert, or exhausted and stripped of hope like the Indian Thar. It is – indifferent; lacking interest in water, unaware of the things that might walk its sand needing water.
Years ago, I spilt some water in the desert near Lightning Ridge. The earth drank it down in an instant, and in less than a moment the place was dry again and there was no more sign than a slight depression in the ground where the water had been, as though the earth had sucked it in too thirstily. In the Great Thar, we gave water to the children of the desert who drifted in silently from the horizon the minute they saw us. Here, in the Sahara, I pour a little water and the results are the same as if I’d poured in onto the dry sand down at the beach. As though there was water everywhere, the little pool soaks down, the edges stay wet, the rim is damp and malleable still when Paul returns and we stand up to leave.
*
At Hamilidi village, the Sudanese and Mali and Senegalese children are waiting for their class to start. The school is one tiny room, and schooldays are taken in shifts. They are pretty, birdlike children, shy but friendly with beautiful French and they have learned to push the smallest ones forward to smile and ask for money. I am heartless – Paul will later give some money to an older man for the school – and we begin to chat and I tickle them and they giggle, and one little knee-high fellow runs off to collect an old bicycle tyre that we roll back and forth like a soccer ball. We play for about twenty minutes while Paul chats to some of the men – but then a tour bus arrives, and the children desert me to run to the carpark to beg for lollies and coins with great success.
We have found we don’t like being tourists. This is a problem, because in the Sahara there is no other option. It’s not that the people are importunate as the beggars of India are, but they have the idea that all tourists are the same, and that money and lollies are what tourists give and all they will give; and it’s on that basis alone that the people expect to know you. So it is, for instance, that we are forcibly fed tea and nuts in a Bedouin tent which we must not refuse since Bedou hospitality demands that a stranger be given water. We are then forcibly relieved of a twenty dirham donation to the Bedouin tent-owner, whom we have actually already (generously) paid for the day to act as our guide. (He seems to have given up being our guide, since he obviously doesn’t know the area.) We cannot demur at the request for the donation because Bedou respect must be upheld. We are invited to photograph a three year old who appears and grins at us sweetly and snottily - rather than go to the trouble of changing lenses we fake the action - and then a further three dirham is charged to us for the privilege. I am taken by the back of the neck and pushed down to peer into the underground kitchen where bread is being baked by the child’s sister or mother, and another twenty dirham is extracted. It’s not the money that galls; it’s the falseness of the entire experience. When we are drinking tea, the tent owner gestures at Paul to take a photo of him, and then lies down and poses as if he were asleep. Paul, nonplussed, waits for him to sit up again, but he won’t until the camera has clicked; then, immediately, he gets up and walks out leaving us alone with the flies and the empty teapot.
So what’s the problem? Well, if I visit I don’t expect to take photos, sit in silence drinking tea, or gawk at the kitchen – but that’s not it. I don’t mind that my expectations are different from my guide’s expectations, and I don’t even mind playing to their expectations or paying for them. I mind that their expectations are so terribly slight and shallow. All they think I want is a couple of happy snaps. All they want of me are a few lousy dirham. Is Lonely Planet to blame? At Fés, Lance and his wife had told us that they went to visit Saffrou, clutching their copies of LP and were met by a guide who grabbed the book, opened it to the Bhilal entry, pointed to his name, autographed the page without their consent, and then took them at a breakneck jog up the hill to tour a place they hadn’t planned to see and couldn’t imagine was the same one we’d described with such delight the evening before. Then he dumped them back at the bus stop and pounced on the next lot. Paul and I will spend quite some time over pre-dinner vodkas and dinner- and post-dinner vodkas discussing this, and decide that it’s a) Paul’s fault for being an early traveller and thus Creating Tourism, and b) everyone else’s fault (except mine) for being Generally Wrong About Everything.
Vodka does clear things up mightily and Paul’s mood is greatly improved when he finally understands what it is about Hassan’s headgear that has been perplexing him. Hassan, (of the Tourag tribe, the wealthiest desert dwellers, the Blue Men, and the owner of our hotel) is blessed with a luxuriance of black curls. He wears his turban tipped back on his head to better display them. The effect is of a brilliantly blue sombrero.
*
We leave this sandy little mud-baked spur of the Sahara Desert and come, in a few hours, to a bright little well-stocked souk in a silversmith town to see what the locals are buying - and also perhaps to pick up some fruit for ourselves. Immediately we are met by the mandatory posse of early-teenaged boys wanting to be given sweets or dirham. I’m still opposing this. Something about the incessant demand for lollies and money seems totally wrong. Morocco is poor indeed, but it is not India, and the places we have seen have not been impoverished or even struggling; the kids who clamour at us (it is only kids) are usually dressed in school uniforms, clean and well-kept. I would like to react the way Ros and I did in India, where we gave not just food but money and books and pens and toys and ultimately even our jumpers and leggings and gloves, but it seems all wrong here – seems to be rewarding and indeed encouraging a very unpleasant, unnecessary and backward-looking approach to tourism. It’s a complicated issue, and we will fight later, Paul and I, because though I’m so tight-fisted with the children, I insist on our hiring a man to bring our bags to the hotel though Paul says we could easily do it ourselves. We could do it ourselves, but this is an adult man, who is doing the only job he can find in a crowded little town that is poorer than any we have seen – so I want to help him. But “Bonjour bonjour, un bonbon? Un dirham?” is a bad approach to inculcate in children of any age. I can’t help thinking how embarrassed an Aussie kid would be to barrel up to foreigners and ask them for sweets. I’m not opposed to hungry children asking for food or impoverished children asking for money. But a well-fed child in a school uniform, with clean hair and a good pair of shoes….. not a good idea, even in the third world…
However, we are met by the posse as I said, and I shake my head and tease them by turning the tables, and get them giggling and refuse them lollies and money, and they don’t seem offended (the kids are never offended by “no”, they’ll talk and laugh and joke just the same) and just as we near the car, Paul stops to slip the nicest of the fellows (who has been very helpful with directions) a couple of dollars and tells him to take the rest out to find ice-cream. It quickly gets very nasty indeed. Paul is mobbed; within a couple of minutes he and the car are surrounded. Mahommad, our driver, tries to edge his way through a mass of children (perhaps sixty in all) and before we reach the clear road, the older boys are thumping the car, trying to pull the doors open and trying their best to force the boot. These are – at the very oldest level – perhaps thirteen. I can’t help thinking how truly alarming it might have become if they had been five or six years older .
We discuss all this later at great length. For Paul, this is the first “difficult” trip he’s taken since his early hippy trips through India. He’s been blissfully unaware of the demise of traveling and the uprise of tourism. He is angry at the loss, and has just begun to come to terms with it. He is not enjoying this trip. It is very hard work. He finds it impossible to make any connection with the people here – which is made even more difficult, of course, because he doesn’t speak French. The thing is that just as tourists have objectified the Moroccans, the Moroccans have objectified us. We are pockets only - cash or bonbons or souvenirs. This bothers Paul terribly. I am less thrown by it, perhaps because I haven’t known real pre-tourist traveling and perhaps, too, because Paul carries a camera, and I don’t; I am sure that the camera sets him apart from Morocco, makes him fair game. Also I have some French and have picked up a smattering of Arabic, while Paul has no way of interacting at all which must make the irritations worse and the travel less rewarding. At any rate, this business of objectification has all the negatives for us that we – or the tourists at least with their sprigs of mint and their tour-guides and mini-cameras – have forced upon them. The tourists don’t see the people, any more than the people see us. One group sees a photo-op, the other sees baksheesh. It’s a fair trade, but a shallow one for both sides, and we are insulted by the smallness of their expectations of us. We are, as Westerners, are used to according ourselves somewhat greater complexity!
I am more disturbed to see what resembles a culture of begging springing up where none is required.
We stop for lunch at a very local eating-place. M. – who is very kind but knows nothing at all about Moroccan history and has barely satisfactory English, all of which adds to Paul’s irritation - heads off to buy meat for the cook to barbeque, and we watch as a donkey is made to reverse with a cart overloaded and piled high with vegetables. It is a distressing sight. This objectification isn’t just our doing, then. There is a staggering lack of empathy in the treatment of animals here, a terrible and quite pointless cruelty, unless the point itself is cruelty. In any case, I watch Paul becoming more and more incensed at the animal’s treatment. He suggests we buy all the food on the cart so the animal can at least have an easy ride back home, but it turns out to be unnecessary. M. brings us bread and chili-tomatoes and olives with paper for plates – a bit of special treatment, this - and we watch with great relief as the donkey is completely unloaded and our food is cooked and the world looks brighter again. For a while.
After lunch – I love this bit – while I am distracted discussing the possibilities of employment in Australia for a good Berber shepherd (I lie and tell him we really only need camel-drivers) Paul, who is guarding the rest of M.’s meal from flies while M. sorts out the finances, is approached by a vehement beggar. Paul offers him the dirhams he has in his pocket. The beggar refuses them and holds out his hand again, saying “Euro”. Paul, who has no euros, shakes his head - and the man, in retaliation, takes M.’s plate and tips it into the bag he carries for just this purpose. Paul is – well – baffled. This is going to be tricky to explain to Mahommad…
*
Oh lord! We are at the Maison d’Hote Aischa and they have taken it into their heads that we – being Australian – must be roving reporters for the Lonely Planet. Damn you, Lonely Planet!!! Consequently we are being more than lavishly served with everything and the youngest kitchen boy has been sent on the bike to his mother’s house to steal some lemons. (Paul is craving a good vodka tonic, with lemon and ice). The other kitchen boy has been dispatched to the village to drum up some Schweppes Tonic Water. Already I’m feeling better (this has been a hard day) just at the thought of vodka and tonic rather than vodka and something laced with caffeine and sugar. There is altogether too much sugar in the diet of Morocco… As Paul and M. cosy up over Paul’s pocket pc, I am finally able to kick back and chill out and be cool – literally. Its about 15 degrees up here and despite the very marked whiffiness upstairs (“it’s just the toilets” we were told when we asked to change rooms) I think that it must be very pleasant at the height of summer.
I’ve sent M. to the mosque. I think prayer will be good for him, and god knows the journey could use it. Besides, Paul and I want to drink a lot tonight and it’s bad for M. to watch us.
This is, I can confidently assert, two vodkas later, a magnificent though whiffy maison d’hote. I have spent the last little while revising my Arabic with M. who is back from his prayers, and I can now say the very important things - “My sister-son I have bought for you a knife/sword/scabbard from a passing Berber” which I hope will impress young Tim mightily. Paul has decided to unveil for M. his Abdul-tapis; and I’m hoping that M. won’t break our hearts. But, it doesn’t matter. I have bought two little things (I have no idea what they are – when I asked M. he could only reply “objets” and I think he was fundamentally unimpressed ) one for my Jennifer and one for Cindy; not for the purchase but for the act of purchasing. It is all for the story, isn’t it? and I had been very tired, had reached the end of my patience and decided to make the merchant happy at least (but not too happy; he was asking 400 dh apiece and I paid 200 for two. M thinks I was taken but I don't care.)
*
M. has the sweetest gesture – a crooked finger dragged over the cheekbone to indicate la bonne heure, the early morning.
*
Mohammad tells us about the King – the new king, who has been in power for only five years. I hadn’t realized he was in such bad odour! Apparently Hassan II was very much loved, and infinitely preferable to M. VI . Hassan II would visit Saudi, the US and tout le monde and bring back money. He encouraged the Berber culture and held a festival every three months. M. IV, according to M., is just out for himself.
The kitchen boys have come in twice with candles for the table, the second set smokeless. They are pulling out every stop to impress us, and won’t be dissuaded (Paul has tried) from their belief that we are Lonely Planet. Paul hops into the kitchen as he is always ready to do, and shows them how to mix a proper vodka tonic, and shows them too that lacking clean ice they can leave the vodka bottle in the freezer to chill it. (So dreadful – the Jew corrupts the Muslims with alcohol!!) He gets involved in plans for a massive expansion of the place (I only hope this is not predicated on our LP credentials) and before too long a cousin has been phoned and rides up the cliff on his bike to join in the planning.
I think about it later and decide the least I can do is send a note to the Thorn Tree. Abdul and Ali are charming, and are delighted that Paul is very much happier now than when he arrived (it’s true, he is.) They take this as a compliment both to themselves and to the truly remarkable bed. Oh my heavens, that bed! Three inches of sheeps wool which smelt and felt exactly like three inches of sheeps wool!
*
Marrakech
In the off-season the Ryad Mozart in Marrakech – aching with sadness, reeking of romance, melancholic beyond anything – is a beautiful place. And it is the terrace that captivates me now, at the top of the ryad, sparrow level. Above the street the breeze swells out the white curtains of the pavilion, the chambre abandoned, the deck chairs empty. The sounds of the street are almost inaudible here, and the stink of the medina, the woman beggar whose outstretched leg is open and inflamed, the children with running noses and dirty clothes, the condemned chickens and doomed little goatlings are all as far away as home.
The young man who shows us our room, who gave us a tour of the ryad waits awkwardly for a ten dirham tip that can’t be found in the detritus of too much packing and too much traveling. His smile as he leaves is so forgiving that I load him up with a handful of euros instead.
*
The marketplace on the hill outside the old medina is awash with colour and noise, and most of all with the smell of mint and coriander, of small white fleurs d’oranges and a touch of woodsmoke. I think this is the most purely medieval, purely beautiful place I have ever been in and we are befriended at once by Mohammad of the plaster casts, by Ahmed and by disapproving old Mohammad of the shoes who gives us thé menthe to drink and sweet biscuits from home with almonds and spices in them.*
The Mederasa in Bouinania is twelfth century, and unlike the purely koranic madrassas of Afghanistan and Pakistan, was a university where the young men of 18 -20 commenced their seven years of study in astrology, mathematics, irrigation and the arts. Today there are tour groups everywhere – Moroccan but also continental, French and German. The Moroccans listen; the Europeans (and we) carry cameras.
In the musician’s shop, another Mohammad plays the lute and the drums for us, and then captivates me with a wailing, sobbing flute solo that sings of patience and warmth and lost promises in the weird quarter-tones of the Arabs. In the street outside, the little boys climb anything and everything - walls, pipes, benches; they are born to play.Abdul the antique man tells us that in the Jewish quarter there is one old woman remaining who refused to go to Israel with the rest. She is known by the honorific Soulika which means “Professor” – though Abdul says this doesn’t convey enough of the word’s real meaning. She’s the one single holdout of the mass Jewish migration after the end of the six-day war, and Immigration have ordered her out, time and again. Finally, she appealed directly to the new King, who, like his father, the revered and beloved Hassan II, is “a good and kind friend to the Jews”. He turned the tables on Immigration and ordered them to leave her alone.
We are told that up until the six-day-war, the Jews and Berbers existed without rancour. They would have lived side by side except that the proclamation against usury keeps the Jews out of town. (Usury was one of the very few professions open to Jews, but charging interest is a sin against Islam.) Later, Paul will ask our friend Sayid whether the Muslims of Morocco are sect-based – are sunni or shia. Sayid will look confused and say “Muslim. All are the same.” and we will realize that the brothers of the book can coexist here in near perfect peace – because if the Muslims aren’t fighting each other, why on earth should they bother the Jews?
Abdul shows Paul how to differentiate between copies of old wood artifacts and the real thing. It’s a question of oil – the wood, he says, will always be old, but the carving itself might be new and the artifact worthless. The sellers will soak a piece in oil and bury it for the aging effect and then sell it through markets and hotels for ridiculous prices. Fés has not “gone” yet, Abdul tells us – there are still precious things to buy and people to sell them.
When he shows us the Berber belts, his voice hushes with respect and almost whispers. He brings out a three hundred and fifty year old Koran which is beautiful and obviously authentic. He shows us contracts written on wood, and takes us to visit a sixth century ryad where we photograph the base of the fountain at his urging. UNESCO have interfered with his father’s offer to purchase the fountain for twenty thousand dirham, and Abdul is still broken-hearted. He disapproves mightily of anyone else in the city who deals in antiques. Later we will learn that his family were the original antique dealers in Fés, and can trace their ancestry back all the way to the Prophet .
For all his sweetness, I’m a touch resistant to Abdul. Perhaps it’s just that he makes us feel too sure of ourselves as buyers. I am aware all the time of the generations of skilled Arab traders that lie in his blood…. He and Paul will later become great friends – a friendship cemented by a ride on the motorbike to the ville nouvelle for lunch with Abdul’s family. He tells Paul not to pay any of the tourist taxes from today on. “You are here for a week, you are not tourists,” he says “You are my guest.” He means Paul, not me. The new gender equality with which Fés is entering the 21st century is only skin-deep after all. Abdul is reluctant for us to walk together, Paul and I; he says that in his own house, if his father talks to his mother he leaves the room.
He is a sweetheart though, the treasured baby of the family, already adept at the trade his father has practiced for fifty years. He is reluctant to make deals without the approval of his father or elder brother, but he has an excellent eye – better than his brother’s – and a wonderful charm that Westerners will love. He will do very well, I think.
While they are together, I walk through the medina alone,
getting lost and found again, protected and well-looked-after by all the locals. I have absolutely no fear here, and in fact this is true of all the Muslim countries I have been to, and of India too. In the banlieus of France, in the village near Sorrento in Italy, and also in Germany I’ve been uneasy at times, but not here. Ros would like Morocco very much, I think.*
Wednesday
It is just before 5:00 am and Paul and I have climbed to the roof of our ryad to watch the sun rise over the medina. It is still dark, but there are scattered lights in the town, and the ribbon of roadway outside the old town is lined with light. The mist softens everything so that the orange lights outside the houses seem mute and shrouded. Two roosters are calling in turn. A third has joined them and now a forth, and there is a sudden commotion of donkeys and dogs from up on the opposite hill. Now that I take this book up again, I find it’s still to dark to see where the pen left off and there’s every chance I’m scribbling over yesterday’s time in the old town.
The roosters and cockerels have formed a chorus and the donkeys are braying at the too-cruel god who has given them another day of life in this town, another day of torment. “There was a shout about my ears, and palms before my feet”… but the memory must have died by now for them. The dogs have woken on the hill behind me. These are not dogs as we know them, but the brutalized, twisted mongrels from the village. The donkeys and dogs are evidence enough of the cruelty that still lives here.
The smell from the sewers and drains is beginning to rise up even to this rooftop; but in the way of all things here, it drifts and shifts so that just as it was possible to smell mint and then spice and then leather yesterday on the hill, so this morning in the still-dark, there is the smell of human effluent, then the sharp wet tang of the donkeys and then the over-ripe fetid smell of rotting food and garbage left out for the village cats.
It’s twenty past five now, and in a burst the small birds have woken and I wish I could tape these sounds as the town shakes the soft night away and stumbles into the morning. The air is colder now and a sharp little breeze is picking up but the noise of birds continues, and of donkeys and dogs and from somewhere below comes the deep throbbing bass of a generator. This is nothing like the wild tumbling glory of the French and Italian mornings. This day wakes to the knowledge of hard work and the all-binding laws of tradition. But there is not, either, the terrible sadness of morning in India – perhaps because this medieval village has always existed, always and forever, without facing change.
I sit with my back to the mosque to watch the daybreak away from its hard white light. Yesterday, Ala'a, who is Iraqi told Paul about the corruption of a noble religion, of the burial of kings whom the Prophet outlawed hard up against his tomb.
The children are waking now, and the women are lifting their voices in demand and exasperation and impatience and the cold sun is rising.
*
At the first wall of the medina, hemmed in and roofed and cobbled, are the produce tunnels serving the stalls and markets. At this hour the men have arrived to pack in their spices and vegetables and herbs. We walk on, Paul and I, and suddenly the air is changed, charged and sick with blood and I realize we are coming to the place where smaller animals are slaughtered and larger ones butchered. It is atavistic and decades of vegetarianism make it quite impossible even to breath without tasting the fear and blood and cruelty. We come upon a mound of flensed and stripped horses skulls and I would like to take a photo because there is an eerie beauty to the pink and white bone and the soft rounded edges of eye sockets, but as I set up to shoot a man stalks past waving his hands and forbidding me to photograph. Why? I ask him, Why can’t I photograph here? I think it might be the Islamic prohibition on picturing, but no; he stalks past, angry, complaining in French (we have been talking in French, so he knows that I understand) about people who come and portray his town as a place full of savages.We try later, in our relativist way, to unpick his reaction. All the world must eat and most countries eat meat and the brutality of butchering is some thing one can taste and smell in the tunnels. But it wouldn't have been evident in the photo I was planning; this was not a rotting mound of offal or covered with flies or surrounded with filth, it was a neatly structured pyramid of horse skulls, fresh and picked clean and lit with the surprisingly white morning light against the dark stone age-old floor and wall of the underground storehouse. His anger could not have been that we’d uncovered the shameful secret of butchery, nor that we were photographing squalor. “You make us look like savages!” he said, and savagely. His anger was strong enough to stop me taking the photo, and also to stop me arguing further with him. But it is strange that here he should take against savagery and horseflesh and history. He is, I think, one of the new breed who would give everything to exchange the barbarism of Morocco, of the twelfth century medina for the anonymous savagery of Western modernity.
In any case, I put my camera away for the rest of Morocco. I don’t understand yet – I will in time – what it is that Morocco finds so objectionable. But in any case, I’m here to learn, not to photograph. Almost all the pics on this page were taken by Paul.
*
Mohammad 3 is mortified when we ask for the supermarket. “It is too far”, he says, “It is in the old town.” I think he might weep, but he only apologises - again and again. Paul says he looks as though he is seriously considering moving the supermarket closer to us.
*
The internet café actually buzzes with radiation.
It’s quite disturbing.
*
I have been locked out.
I have made it back alone from Abdul’s shop with just a minimum of false turns and doublebacks, and, flush with triumph, find the big door closed to me. There is nothing for it but to wait in the square and hope Paul and Abdul don’t take too long over lunch. But this is a wonderful place to wait – very busy today, and full of conversation. The tourists mass around their guides, holding sprigs of mint to their noses (which would so offend my friend of this morning) and they front up en masse to the shops and stalls to take photographs and buy nothing. Paul is considering taking himself a piece of this town – a house can be bought for sixty thousand euros and renovated for another sixty thousand. At the moment, he feels very much at home here. Abdul has been a real find; we discover that our friends at the ryad with whom Paul spent last night have a high regard for him both as collector and as merchant. The Berbers take great pride in bargaining well but honestly – according to their lights. There is a nobility in them, and a pride in their reputation. There are by nature charming and friendly and very talkative – but I find it hard to join in, being a woman. Which is why I left Paul and Abdul to lunch together, since I know that makes Abdul more comfortable.
*
Abdul’s father has two wives. Both are mothers to Abdul, but he says with a smile (I think it’s flattery) that all children love their own mother “a little bit more”.
*
I think there are not too many years left for Fés as a true medieval town. It has grown too big for itself it seems to me, and will either collapse or turn to tourism to survive. It is poor, but not abject – there is nothing of India to it – its people are hard-pressed rather than struggling
and the race is between people like Alaa and Kate or the Germans and Swiss who buy houses and renovate rather than simply restoring. I suspect it will eventually resemble Eze in France, restored and full of tourists and no longer really alive. *
If I never see another glass of mint tea, I’ll be a happy woman. Likewise the sweet biscuits.
I have two Arabic words now – shokkoran which is thank you and schweera which is a little. Both get quite a workout every time we stop. Paul is brutal in his refusal to accept the tea which means I must do duty for both of us. It’s the durian story all over again.
*
I wish I could paint. I would paint the three old men sitting against the wall of the silversmiths shop, stripping bundles of mint and chamomile, bunching them into their hand-woven baskets. I would paint the black woolen cap the oldest man wears, and paint also the song that he lapses into when his old friends grow too quiet. He wears brown trousers and a brightly striped jumper, his black cap sits like an over-sized beanie, like the cap of the guelf in the painting we bought in Cortona. One of his friends, bareheaded, wears womens’ white loafers and a woman’s cardigan with a bright yellow shirt and navy trousers, and the yellow of the chamomile rests against its navy basket with thyme on either side. They have sat here all morning these three, joined from time to time by the brass-worker, the tinsmith and the artisans.
Dar Seferin is a square for men to lounge in, and meet and kiss and touch and talk. The tourists barge through in groups of twenty to forty-five, and I sit here, watching and waiting for Paul to return.
*
Night time shows us the angry face of Fés as the young men harass us, bullying and at times confrontational, in a way that I have never seen them behave. We have been careful all through our time here not to take refuge in the “maybe tomorrow” response to their invitations to stop and check out this or that shop or restaurant, but still they insist that we’ve made arrangements to meet them and not followed through. This is a ploy we have both seen before in other developing countries, but it’s nonetheless uncomfortable, and Paul doesn’t like it. Little Mohammed who claims to be fourteen, but can’t be more than eleven, faces squarely up to Paul when we refuse his help to get back to Dar Seffarin. “You not Australian!” he yells strongly, in a voice lacking passion but extremely sure of itself. “You are Hungaria!” This is quite evidently a terrible insult, but I miss it completely and call him back to ask what he means. “He’s calling me a Jew” Paul says, tight with fury, and Mohammad tells me quite calmly “Your husband no good man. You good woman, but your husband bad man.” It’s hard to know what to say after that. We are very relieved to hear next morning that of the three other couples at our lodgings, all have been abused in the last twenty four hours, one by my young man at the slaughterhouse.
*
Thursday
We spend most of the day with Ala’a, our landlord and host (and chef) looking over old houses. Paul is still wanting to buy here, despite Mohammed and the Hungarians. Ala’a takes us finally to his friend Omar who runs an Aladdin’s cave that benefits battered women. I buy a few very old Jewish shekels, and a pretty bottle that once carried water from the sacred (and undoubtedly fetid) founts of Medina. The Jewish coins please me more than I can say, and before I leave Omar gives me a pretty brass bracelet “as a gift from his heart to mine. And for the publicity.” He has his small daughter Raja (to whom I have already slipped some hair pins with flowers and butterflies) kiss me goodbye “for the blessing. And the publicity.”
This is not the only kiss I receive today. We are led back through the medina at breakneck pace by a friend of Alaa’s who has no time to spare and no height to safeguard him from the throngs of shoppers. The medina is often just as crowded as the chowks of Old Delhi, being tiny and twisting and never more than nine feet wide. Despite disapproval from the Moroccan men, Paul tries to have me hold his hand as I run to keep up, but the men – and also the larger bolshier women – push between us and I am often hard for him to find again. Finally he takes to walking with his hand stretched behind him – and from three bodies back I see a small boy, who has been pulling my shirt and kissing my hand for baksheesh, slip his hand into Paul’s. I see Paul’s fingers tighten, and despite my calls (drowned out by “Balek! Balek!” of the donkey-man) he pulls the child along behind him, swept up in the tide of progress. It isn’t until I can catch up enough to tap him on the shoulder and say “You’ve got the wrong hand”’ that he looks back and sees the six year old at his side. He laughs, and calls the boy cheeky and releases the hand, but the child isn’t so easily dislodged, and he follows Paul for some time, grabbing our hands and kissing them over and over…
At the New Town, the three little beggar boys ask Paul for the rest of his coke and I wish to hell I had brought the chocolate bars I had packed in Australia. I’ll pack them tonight in case we go up there again. These little boys are the first I’ve seen who remind me a little of India. Just a little.
*
American Express are rubbish. That’s all I’m saying.
*
I think my best purchase (after the Jewish coins) is the child’s end-of-year exam paper the Medina flask was wrapped in. I’ll treasure that. The unknown child is appallingly bad at arithmetic (2/10) but flawless in French.
*
Seffrou
We have been given to a guide by a young woman we met in the grande taxi from Seffarin. He is Sayid, who takes us all through the medina, friendly and knowledgeable, protective of us and very imaginative in his choice of places we might like to visit. Thus we are taken in to a local home, where I am invited into the kitchen to see bread being made; and to another house to see the indoor garden. We meet a Frenchman, restoring a ryad that he bought for twenty thousand euros, and play games with the laneway children and give them stickers to wear on their faces.
Then we are taken to Bhilal to see the cave houses
and the hills – a beautiful spot where we meet stunning, sixty year old Aisha and her dying husband. We are given mint tea in her house, and I give Australian chocolates to her and the children – but not to her son-in-law who asks quietly for one of the boys to share his and is cranky when the child offers it to him in front of us. Paul has the camera and is shooting like a madman, and we are invited to go upstairs for a shot of the husband – who we find is a very old man in extremis, who plays with a kitten gently while he waits for death. We don’t photograph him.
The people of Saffrou and Bhilal don’t know enough about tourists to hate us yet, and it’s a very pleasant retreat from the rigours of Fés. In the hilltown mosque of Bhilal, the imam is shouting in Arabic and I ask Sayid whether he is praying or preaching. “Not praying, not preaching”, Sayid tells me “but talking of social things – about things that the village must know.” It is so medieval!
*
Un marriage! Five robed men, three – no, four – silver and green banners, and three tambours. Women made up so beautifully and a tiny girl in a white frilled dress and bright shows leading the way. The wedding guests – all women – clap and dance and ululate, holding up the gifts, unwrapped, that they’re bringing to celebrate the wedding. There is a baby bath, a board game, some plates and plastic cups. I search my pockets frantically to find a decent sized donation to make, but all I have are restaurant business cards and the parade has passed by me…
*
Saturday
Fés is crawling with undercover police and informants and yesterday one of the guests got our own young Mohammed in trouble by walking beside him to check out a restaurant Ala’a had recommended at dinner. Ivan had given up trying to untangle the web of laneways and alleys in the medina and had instead co-opted the boy to show him the way. But he forgot to walk the obligatory six metres behind, and M was nabbed on suspicion of being a faux guide. Ivan followed the boy and the police to the station, using Ala’a as a reference and protesting M’s innocence all the way and was able to get him released; but Kate says it was a very lucky escape. Usually the boys are thrashed first and questioned later, and if things go against them they get three months in prison which is apparently more than common.
There is a sizeable amount of police corruption in Fés, according to Ala’a – they routinely shakedown the taxi drivers for ten dirham a time, and a large number of vendors are on the payroll as police informers, which allows quite a few personal scores to get settled. But we hear the heartening story of a donkey – overloaded and ill-shod as they all are here – being dragged by his owner down a wet and steep cobbled path. The donkey eventually refused to take a step further and the man began to beat it; whereupon the donkey threw a foreleg out and punched the man who slipped and was killed. I suppose it was a pretty pyrrhic victory, given that the donkey was almost certainly immediately slaughtered – but oh that one single instant of triumph!
*
Paul has gone to effect the last of his Abdul-transaction, and I am in the square again, being shoved around by the tourist groups. They seem so rude and brusque, these people. I watch one woman who has appropriated a boy of about nine for a photograph. She stands with her arm around his shoulder, not making any more attempt at communication than if he were an armchair or a tree. They pose while her friend plays around with the buttons which takes quite a while, the light eventually flashes - and without even looking his way the woman removes her arm from the boy’s shoulder and rejoins her friend. The little boy is suddenly discomfited, and worse, seen to be so by his friends. He puts a semi-circle of swagger into the walk back to the game, to give himself time to regain his sense of dignity. It is a shameful display of ill-breeding by the woman and I’m glad that she doesn’t speak English. And I’m glad, too, that I put my camera away on the first day here, since it bothered the man at the slaughterhouse and came between me and seeing.
I’m most upset, I think, by the callous objectification of the child, by the insult to his still-forming sense of autonomy and dignity. We would never photograph children at home without some ongoing communication, we would never drag them away from their games just for a tourist shot. So why would it suddenly be acceptable here? I wish I’d seen the set-up. I wonder if she spoke to the child at all, or if the guide (I have seen this done) simply clicked the boy forward to have him passed from camera to camera. It really really does make me very angry.
*
The square is so packed and crowded now that I’ve moved upstairs to our room. But even from here the wash and clamour is as audible as the sea.
*
Sunday
We have met some lovely people here in the riad, and some not so lovely, but the nicest – as is often the case – is the big American, Lance, who describes the bus trip he and his wife took to Casablanca. His wife, diminutive and red-headed, got lost in the tightly-packed throng of passengers and suddenly hissed for her husband
“Lance! Get up here!”
“I can’t move honey, I’m peopled in”
“There’s a man pressing up against me!”
“There’s a man pressing up against me, too, honey.”
“But Lance!” she is panicking now, “My guy is getting aroused!”
Phlegmatically from Lance “So is my guy, honey…. So is my guy.”
*
I talk to Kate today – herself a fine and sensitive photographer – about this issue of objectification of the locals. The ancient people, Kate tells me (they are called ancient people here, not simply “old people” and certainly nothing like “senior citizens”…) are taken out from their beds just after sunrise and put in their market places to wait out the day. They are sometimes empty handed, required to beg, and sometimes left with bunches of chamomile and mint and thyme to sell. She tells me about the tour groups who walk through the r’cif where the eighty year old Berber widow, her life tattooed on her face in the blue patterns of betrothal, marriage and widowhood, sits selling her herbs. Yesterday Kate watched a group of thirty or forty take turns to photograph her. The going rate for bunches of herbs is one dirham – about fifteen cents – but not one of them offered to buy a bunch from her. And when the last of the thirty had posed with her, she held out her hand for a coin and none was forthcoming. The tourists either turned away, suddenly blinded or fiddling with their cameras, or they became righteous and indignant, as though they were insulted by the request.
I’m glad I put my camera away. It’s a two-edged sword here, and they’re both offensive. It wasn’t like that in India.
Kate is as angry as I am about the child in the square, which is comforting. But later, thinking it over, I’m also intrigued by the old women themselves, and this issue of begging places. Do jealousies grow up over time? Do the women covet the spot in the earliest sun, the spot furthest away from the donkeys, or closest to the herb gardens? Do they watch each other every day for signs of morbidity?
*
We leave dar Sefarrin with some regret after an early and enthusiastic breakfast with Kate and Ala’a. (Paul, disturbed by Alaa’s apparently complete lack of business management training, was up at six to create an all-purpose business plan for him.) We drive through the hardscrabble country on our way to the desert – some of the hardest country I’ve ever seen, rocks and stones piled on layers of rocks and stones, with clumps of hard grass in between. And yet a few kilometres ago there were cherry trees and acres of wildflowers and herbs – daisies and poppies, purple and blue scatterlings and grass as dense as wheat fields.
Here in the hardscrabble, tiny stone houses are lost on the sides of hills, decrepit and lonely, and in the distance the smoke from the fire
in the centre of the single room houses drifts slowly out through the roof. An old, old woman who might be forty is still against the yellow rock, her skirt a dull splash of purple beneath the smudged green-grey of her over-shirt. *
We come to Azrou which means “rock” in Berber (! – you had to be there, but believe me, it’s funny) a little old place of carpets and brassware (and rocks) framed in Islamic green roof tiles. In front of me – I am alone in the car, the men having gone to discuss ancient rugs - a Berber woman, old, with a withered hand and a useless leg, sits propped on a cushions asking for alms in Allah’s name. She has a faded dusty-pink hooded robe covering a bright pink flowered dress - the exact colour I’ve just been shown in the desert agate. The dress can only be caught in glimpses under the robe - bright, joyous, optimistic - and her socks are black with bright flowers.
*
There is snow still on the slopes here at 1945 metres, and the sheep mill around below the drifts, warm and woolly and undeniably greasy. Fields of rocks are terraced in with rock walls and we come suddenly upon a field of yellow which looks to me like canola. But M says they are just plantes sauvages – weeds – not even herbs and useless as far as he knows. We pass old Berber villages built of stone on stone and smelling strongly of mouton and faintly of woodsmoke and lightly of snow. Storks – cygone – build wild and undisciplined nests
in the chimney pots and the tiny sparrows build side apartments into the chaos.M and I try hard to reach an understanding about little gatherings of rocks placed one atop another, perhaps up to four at a time, but all I can gather is that it might – might – signify the end of the common ground.
*
The spring lambs are fattening. Any weaker ones will have been culled by now and those that are left are strong and rounded and woolly but still clean and new-looking, still suckling as well as grazing. There is a gorge here, and Paul comes back from his shoot with a rough piece of agate. This is a big country, on the Australian scale – wide, wide horizons, deep gorges and winterbournes and streams. We drive through the nomad grassplain where the snow runoff sparkles in pools and puddles and rivulets over bright grass. It is like the littoral of the sea, but with grass and purple herbs where the sand would be, and the rockpools are underlaid with growing things. I miss the chance to photograph these – I think there is a natural limit to how often poor Mohammad should have to stop –
but I will make do with a shot of the little bourne that runs on the grass under the road and into a little rivulet turning and twisting its way to the grassplain.*
I am tired of fossils and carpets – though I’d kill for half a dozen of these huge old clay storage pots! – so I stay in the car while M. and Paul go down to inspect the merchandise. A man of about forty comes out of the nearby tent to stand gazing into the car with his index finger busily plundering his right nostril.
*
M. has brought us to a restaurant in the style of Cheap Charlie’s of KL fame. The table next to us has just been vacated and is awash with all the detritus of the meal. Plates are not used here, and neither do they use trenchers; the food is brought in in a communal tajine (grilled goat and stewed vegetables and water and – ugh – I just discovered – veal) and the leavings – the bones, cores, peelings and olive pits – are left where they fall on the table. Watching a little more closely, I can see that there is etiquette involved. Eating from a specific part of the bowl, leaving the detritus on a specific part of the table, and offering the meat at the centre of the dish to your lunch-mates seems to be taught; the adults are more reliable than the kids. But still it looks rather random, and the result, once the table has been abandoned, is for all the world like a Hitchcock movie.
M. kindly has our table double-cleaned, and brings us sheets of paper to use as plates. Paul, having learned the lesson of the medina, is ordering everything bien coute which is very gratifying
There are some beggars here, notably one old man who uses his hands to move around, lacking, to a large extent, the use of his lower half. I’m assuming India rules apply, and that donations are best given on the way out.
*
At Medet there is a dun coloured village built into the dun coloured sand, all little squares on squares like a dun coloured patchwork.
*
The Sahara
In the Sahara desert, we go out alone quite early to walk on the dunes. We walk too far, of course, and come to the base of a slope so high, so unclimbable, that of course Paul must climb it. I have read about the treachery of sand dunes and am bitterly, stridently opposed to relying on them not to fall in around us (they look like nothing so much as a frozen, orange tsunami) but Paul is, as always, implacable. Climb them we will.
I climb with him for about half the distance because I am scared of the slope and the height and being scared is an ignoble reason for refusing to climb them at all; but then I leave him and head for the base and make the mistake of turning back like Lot’s wife and he’s more than halfway up and deserves to be immortalized. He has the camera, alas, so I must climb back up even further than I had climbed before, get the camera, run back to take the shot – and then climb back again to return the camera to him for the god-shots. It is terrifying and he means to get right to the top and my legs can’t even get purchase half way up. I keep sliding backwards, and even Paul is having trouble now, crawling up on his hands and knees and very slowly – so I give up for good, and leave him the camera and come back to sit on the plateau and work on his epitaph…
*
He’s made it! Upright now and walking along the crest he is thumb-sized, and the dune is a mountain. Now he moves over the crest and I can’t see him any more so I am alone in the huge burnt umber of the Sahara. There is no sound here at all; but every few minutes the wind plays with the top film of sand like a breeze across the ocean, and the sand flecks and shimmers over the face of the hill. There is no shade in this great emptiness, and though the sun is not hot, it is inescapable.
I would prefer Paul to be somewhat more cautious, more respectful of the knowledge of people and unknown environments. He is very much of the “what a boy has done a boy can do” school of thought, and doesn’t consider the millennia of observation, acclimatization and education that make the desert a safe enough place for the Berber nomads. So he’s up there, out of sight, sans shirt, hat, sunscreen or water, with only his camera for comfort. He’ll make it safely back – he always does – and it will be another in a long line of adventures and stories – and one more reason for him never to doubt his own infallibility. He reappears for a moment, a speck on the highest part of the back dune and I am reminded again of the perilous castle in Val de Pierle just outside Mercatale.
*
The wind is picking up. If I get buried alive in the kind of sandstorms the press reports with such unabashed glee, I’m going to kill him. Now I can hear the light sand skimming over the hillsides, and it sounds surprisingly like the shallow plash of the sea on a shelly beach. There is a soft and sibilant music at play when the air moves, though I’ll bet the sound is more threatening in a high wind. Although its not hot here, its terribly dry and the skin of my arms is desiccating by the minute – not burning, just drying and peeling. I’ve wrapped my scarf around my mouth to keep the sand out, and hope that the skin of my face is at least a little protected.
*
This desert is not at all like the Great Thar Desert and not like the Australian desert either, which is parched and cracked and desperate for moisture. Here it’s quite simply devoid of water, devoid of the need for water. It is not cruel and pitiless like the Australian desert, or exhausted and stripped of hope like the Indian Thar. It is – indifferent; lacking interest in water, unaware of the things that might walk its sand needing water.
Years ago, I spilt some water in the desert near Lightning Ridge. The earth drank it down in an instant, and in less than a moment the place was dry again and there was no more sign than a slight depression in the ground where the water had been, as though the earth had sucked it in too thirstily. In the Great Thar, we gave water to the children of the desert who drifted in silently from the horizon the minute they saw us. Here, in the Sahara, I pour a little water and the results are the same as if I’d poured in onto the dry sand down at the beach. As though there was water everywhere, the little pool soaks down, the edges stay wet, the rim is damp and malleable still when Paul returns and we stand up to leave.
*
At Hamilidi village, the Sudanese and Mali and Senegalese children are waiting for their class to start. The school is one tiny room, and schooldays are taken in shifts. They are pretty, birdlike children, shy but friendly with beautiful French and they have learned to push the smallest ones forward to smile and ask for money. I am heartless – Paul will later give some money to an older man for the school – and we begin to chat and I tickle them and they giggle, and one little knee-high fellow runs off to collect an old bicycle tyre that we roll back and forth like a soccer ball. We play for about twenty minutes while Paul chats to some of the men – but then a tour bus arrives, and the children desert me to run to the carpark to beg for lollies and coins with great success.
We have found we don’t like being tourists. This is a problem, because in the Sahara there is no other option. It’s not that the people are importunate as the beggars of India are, but they have the idea that all tourists are the same, and that money and lollies are what tourists give and all they will give; and it’s on that basis alone that the people expect to know you. So it is, for instance, that we are forcibly fed tea and nuts in a Bedouin tent which we must not refuse since Bedou hospitality demands that a stranger be given water. We are then forcibly relieved of a twenty dirham donation to the Bedouin tent-owner, whom we have actually already (generously) paid for the day to act as our guide. (He seems to have given up being our guide, since he obviously doesn’t know the area.) We cannot demur at the request for the donation because Bedou respect must be upheld. We are invited to photograph a three year old who appears and grins at us sweetly and snottily - rather than go to the trouble of changing lenses we fake the action - and then a further three dirham is charged to us for the privilege. I am taken by the back of the neck and pushed down to peer into the underground kitchen where bread is being baked by the child’s sister or mother, and another twenty dirham is extracted. It’s not the money that galls; it’s the falseness of the entire experience. When we are drinking tea, the tent owner gestures at Paul to take a photo of him, and then lies down and poses as if he were asleep. Paul, nonplussed, waits for him to sit up again, but he won’t until the camera has clicked; then, immediately, he gets up and walks out leaving us alone with the flies and the empty teapot.
So what’s the problem? Well, if I visit I don’t expect to take photos, sit in silence drinking tea, or gawk at the kitchen – but that’s not it. I don’t mind that my expectations are different from my guide’s expectations, and I don’t even mind playing to their expectations or paying for them. I mind that their expectations are so terribly slight and shallow. All they think I want is a couple of happy snaps. All they want of me are a few lousy dirham. Is Lonely Planet to blame? At Fés, Lance and his wife had told us that they went to visit Saffrou, clutching their copies of LP and were met by a guide who grabbed the book, opened it to the Bhilal entry, pointed to his name, autographed the page without their consent, and then took them at a breakneck jog up the hill to tour a place they hadn’t planned to see and couldn’t imagine was the same one we’d described with such delight the evening before. Then he dumped them back at the bus stop and pounced on the next lot. Paul and I will spend quite some time over pre-dinner vodkas and dinner- and post-dinner vodkas discussing this, and decide that it’s a) Paul’s fault for being an early traveller and thus Creating Tourism, and b) everyone else’s fault (except mine) for being Generally Wrong About Everything.
Vodka does clear things up mightily and Paul’s mood is greatly improved when he finally understands what it is about Hassan’s headgear that has been perplexing him. Hassan, (of the Tourag tribe, the wealthiest desert dwellers, the Blue Men, and the owner of our hotel) is blessed with a luxuriance of black curls. He wears his turban tipped back on his head to better display them. The effect is of a brilliantly blue sombrero.
*
We leave this sandy little mud-baked spur of the Sahara Desert and come, in a few hours, to a bright little well-stocked souk in a silversmith town to see what the locals are buying - and also perhaps to pick up some fruit for ourselves. Immediately we are met by the mandatory posse of early-teenaged boys wanting to be given sweets or dirham. I’m still opposing this. Something about the incessant demand for lollies and money seems totally wrong. Morocco is poor indeed, but it is not India, and the places we have seen have not been impoverished or even struggling; the kids who clamour at us (it is only kids) are usually dressed in school uniforms, clean and well-kept. I would like to react the way Ros and I did in India, where we gave not just food but money and books and pens and toys and ultimately even our jumpers and leggings and gloves, but it seems all wrong here – seems to be rewarding and indeed encouraging a very unpleasant, unnecessary and backward-looking approach to tourism. It’s a complicated issue, and we will fight later, Paul and I, because though I’m so tight-fisted with the children, I insist on our hiring a man to bring our bags to the hotel though Paul says we could easily do it ourselves. We could do it ourselves, but this is an adult man, who is doing the only job he can find in a crowded little town that is poorer than any we have seen – so I want to help him. But “Bonjour bonjour, un bonbon? Un dirham?” is a bad approach to inculcate in children of any age. I can’t help thinking how embarrassed an Aussie kid would be to barrel up to foreigners and ask them for sweets. I’m not opposed to hungry children asking for food or impoverished children asking for money. But a well-fed child in a school uniform, with clean hair and a good pair of shoes….. not a good idea, even in the third world…
However, we are met by the posse as I said, and I shake my head and tease them by turning the tables, and get them giggling and refuse them lollies and money, and they don’t seem offended (the kids are never offended by “no”, they’ll talk and laugh and joke just the same) and just as we near the car, Paul stops to slip the nicest of the fellows (who has been very helpful with directions) a couple of dollars and tells him to take the rest out to find ice-cream. It quickly gets very nasty indeed. Paul is mobbed; within a couple of minutes he and the car are surrounded. Mahommad, our driver, tries to edge his way through a mass of children (perhaps sixty in all) and before we reach the clear road, the older boys are thumping the car, trying to pull the doors open and trying their best to force the boot. These are – at the very oldest level – perhaps thirteen. I can’t help thinking how truly alarming it might have become if they had been five or six years older .
We discuss all this later at great length. For Paul, this is the first “difficult” trip he’s taken since his early hippy trips through India. He’s been blissfully unaware of the demise of traveling and the uprise of tourism. He is angry at the loss, and has just begun to come to terms with it. He is not enjoying this trip. It is very hard work. He finds it impossible to make any connection with the people here – which is made even more difficult, of course, because he doesn’t speak French. The thing is that just as tourists have objectified the Moroccans, the Moroccans have objectified us. We are pockets only - cash or bonbons or souvenirs. This bothers Paul terribly. I am less thrown by it, perhaps because I haven’t known real pre-tourist traveling and perhaps, too, because Paul carries a camera, and I don’t; I am sure that the camera sets him apart from Morocco, makes him fair game. Also I have some French and have picked up a smattering of Arabic, while Paul has no way of interacting at all which must make the irritations worse and the travel less rewarding. At any rate, this business of objectification has all the negatives for us that we – or the tourists at least with their sprigs of mint and their tour-guides and mini-cameras – have forced upon them. The tourists don’t see the people, any more than the people see us. One group sees a photo-op, the other sees baksheesh. It’s a fair trade, but a shallow one for both sides, and we are insulted by the smallness of their expectations of us. We are, as Westerners, are used to according ourselves somewhat greater complexity!
I am more disturbed to see what resembles a culture of begging springing up where none is required.
We stop for lunch at a very local eating-place. M. – who is very kind but knows nothing at all about Moroccan history and has barely satisfactory English, all of which adds to Paul’s irritation - heads off to buy meat for the cook to barbeque, and we watch as a donkey is made to reverse with a cart overloaded and piled high with vegetables. It is a distressing sight. This objectification isn’t just our doing, then. There is a staggering lack of empathy in the treatment of animals here, a terrible and quite pointless cruelty, unless the point itself is cruelty. In any case, I watch Paul becoming more and more incensed at the animal’s treatment. He suggests we buy all the food on the cart so the animal can at least have an easy ride back home, but it turns out to be unnecessary. M. brings us bread and chili-tomatoes and olives with paper for plates – a bit of special treatment, this - and we watch with great relief as the donkey is completely unloaded and our food is cooked and the world looks brighter again. For a while. After lunch – I love this bit – while I am distracted discussing the possibilities of employment in Australia for a good Berber shepherd (I lie and tell him we really only need camel-drivers) Paul, who is guarding the rest of M.’s meal from flies while M. sorts out the finances, is approached by a vehement beggar. Paul offers him the dirhams he has in his pocket. The beggar refuses them and holds out his hand again, saying “Euro”. Paul, who has no euros, shakes his head - and the man, in retaliation, takes M.’s plate and tips it into the bag he carries for just this purpose. Paul is – well – baffled. This is going to be tricky to explain to Mahommad…
*
Oh lord! We are at the Maison d’Hote Aischa and they have taken it into their heads that we – being Australian – must be roving reporters for the Lonely Planet. Damn you, Lonely Planet!!! Consequently we are being more than lavishly served with everything and the youngest kitchen boy has been sent on the bike to his mother’s house to steal some lemons. (Paul is craving a good vodka tonic, with lemon and ice). The other kitchen boy has been dispatched to the village to drum up some Schweppes Tonic Water. Already I’m feeling better (this has been a hard day) just at the thought of vodka and tonic rather than vodka and something laced with caffeine and sugar. There is altogether too much sugar in the diet of Morocco… As Paul and M. cosy up over Paul’s pocket pc, I am finally able to kick back and chill out and be cool – literally. Its about 15 degrees up here and despite the very marked whiffiness upstairs (“it’s just the toilets” we were told when we asked to change rooms) I think that it must be very pleasant at the height of summer.
I’ve sent M. to the mosque. I think prayer will be good for him, and god knows the journey could use it. Besides, Paul and I want to drink a lot tonight and it’s bad for M. to watch us.
This is, I can confidently assert, two vodkas later, a magnificent though whiffy maison d’hote. I have spent the last little while revising my Arabic with M. who is back from his prayers, and I can now say the very important things - “My sister-son I have bought for you a knife/sword/scabbard from a passing Berber” which I hope will impress young Tim mightily. Paul has decided to unveil for M. his Abdul-tapis; and I’m hoping that M. won’t break our hearts. But, it doesn’t matter. I have bought two little things (I have no idea what they are – when I asked M. he could only reply “objets” and I think he was fundamentally unimpressed ) one for my Jennifer and one for Cindy; not for the purchase but for the act of purchasing. It is all for the story, isn’t it? and I had been very tired, had reached the end of my patience and decided to make the merchant happy at least (but not too happy; he was asking 400 dh apiece and I paid 200 for two. M thinks I was taken but I don't care.)
*
M. has the sweetest gesture – a crooked finger dragged over the cheekbone to indicate la bonne heure, the early morning.
*
Mohammad tells us about the King – the new king, who has been in power for only five years. I hadn’t realized he was in such bad odour! Apparently Hassan II was very much loved, and infinitely preferable to M. VI . Hassan II would visit Saudi, the US and tout le monde and bring back money. He encouraged the Berber culture and held a festival every three months. M. IV, according to M., is just out for himself.
The kitchen boys have come in twice with candles for the table, the second set smokeless. They are pulling out every stop to impress us, and won’t be dissuaded (Paul has tried) from their belief that we are Lonely Planet. Paul hops into the kitchen as he is always ready to do, and shows them how to mix a proper vodka tonic, and shows them too that lacking clean ice they can leave the vodka bottle in the freezer to chill it. (So dreadful – the Jew corrupts the Muslims with alcohol!!) He gets involved in plans for a massive expansion of the place (I only hope this is not predicated on our LP credentials) and before too long a cousin has been phoned and rides up the cliff on his bike to join in the planning.
I think about it later and decide the least I can do is send a note to the Thorn Tree. Abdul and Ali are charming, and are delighted that Paul is very much happier now than when he arrived (it’s true, he is.) They take this as a compliment both to themselves and to the truly remarkable bed. Oh my heavens, that bed! Three inches of sheeps wool which smelt and felt exactly like three inches of sheeps wool!
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Marrakech
In the off-season the Ryad Mozart in Marrakech – aching with sadness, reeking of romance, melancholic beyond anything – is a beautiful place. And it is the terrace that captivates me now, at the top of the ryad, sparrow level. Above the street the breeze swells out the white curtains of the pavilion, the chambre abandoned, the deck chairs empty. The sounds of the street are almost inaudible here, and the stink of the medina, the woman beggar whose outstretched leg is open and inflamed, the children with running noses and dirty clothes, the condemned chickens and doomed little goatlings are all as far away as home.
The young man who shows us our room, who gave us a tour of the ryad waits awkwardly for a ten dirham tip that can’t be found in the detritus of too much packing and too much traveling. His smile as he leaves is so forgiving that I load him up with a handful of euros instead.
posted by mccardey at 11:41 PM
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