mccardey abroad

2006 - Sicily

2006-05-27T20:57:00.001-07:00

Sicily

We have met and been befriended by a young man from the village who becomes positively tearful at learning that we are Australian. I am surprised how often the fact of our Australian-ness shocks the Sicilians. I begin to suspect that Sicily is not quite as connected with Italy as one might suppose (in fact we'll come to suspect that its only just connected with the rest of the planet.... It takes us days to find the only internet cafe within a days drive, but it is closed) We are, admittedly, in a tiny fishing village on the poorer, south-western bit of the island, but there is very little of Italy here,
except in the churches and piazzas. The small amount of Italian I can speak is no help at all here (and I can't make out the dialectic differences) and, worse, there are none of the massive towers and castles we saw all through Umbria and Cortona, and I am just the tiniest bit disappointed - until we find the fallen acropolis, the ruins of ancient Greece and Carthage. And then I'm in heaven.

Our Roman darlings, Giancarlo and Roberta, whom we met in 2004, who took us walking through Rome all night and told the stories of battles and triumphs til four in the morning, are coming to stay in the place we have rented. They have never been to Sicily and are very excited; but Paul decides we should wait to explore the ancient sites till they get here, so Carlo won't miss out on anything. And just as well, because our young friend has made it his life's task to find us a good lunch in an excellent Sicilian restaurant. We are Australian and he lived in Australia all the childhood he could remember and who knows we may know some of his friends back there, too, and perhaps could contact his old school for him and send us word of the teachers he loved, and perhaps even a photo...? We arrange to meet up the next day.

Next Day

The young man (he is in his mid-twenties with English that is improving by the hour) takes us - to his enormous chagrin - from one closed restaurant to another all the while enchanting us with the story of his life. He begins again and again, "and now I will tell you as though you were my brother, honestly" and the story gets deeper and wilder and more chaotic and more tragic with every incarnation; the childhood in Australia which brings tears of love to his eyes, the death of his father from cancer ("and he was a good man, he was not the man to deserve this you understand?") and then back a little to explain that he had left Australia abruptly, and that $100,000 put by for his education was spent instead on his father's treatments, so he didn't finish school, didn't go to university ("But I was always happy, if I can do this for my father - he was a good man, and I loved him always"). Later still, walking together the three of us along the piazza, he mentions accidentally that this father whom he loved "as a god" woke up violent from his drugs time and again and threatened to kill his mother, so - terrified, sixteen years old and with no-one to help him for reasons he hasn't disclosed yet - he made his sister and mother pack their bags one night and booked them tickets to Sicily. And then, later, "because you can help me" he tells Paul what happened at Sydney Airport when he arrived with the women to be coldly informed that he and his sister were the children of illegal immigrants, were illegal themselves, that he must leave with them now and could never return to the place he had lived in before he had learned to walk.

Paul and I are keen to reassure him; surely if the right approaches are made, the story explained... a child can't be held responsible for his parents actions, and after all this time - And then, finally, because he has told us this much, he goes back to the beginning again, and the story comes tumbling out - the full story, begun generations before he was born, before his father was born, in a small town on this island, a story that he almost escaped, almost got away from and only learned by degrees once his father came back to die at last of cancer. "I swear to God", his father told him on his death-bed "I never shot a man, I never caused a death", but he had been born to an old old family, had seen things, had heard things had passed on messages and threats and had finally received warnings himself, and so illegally, through channels, through family connections, he took his young family out to Australia to start life all over again. Himself with a fifth grade education and his wife with less, they worked six days a week to educate the children in Catholic schools, give them music lessons and swimming lessons and all the things an Australian child should have. The boy's proudest day was making the side for the state schoolboy sports team and his greatest sadness ("the only sadness I knew and I didn't understand") was begging his dad to take Saturday off and come and watch him play. "Don't ask for what you can't have," his father would tell him.

Having given his story to us for nothing, the young man disappears again. He doesn't show up the next day as we'd planned and although we look for him, we don't find him again.

*

At our local gelateria on Via Giovanni Caboto, somebody's mother whips up a batch of cassatedda just for Paul - raviolina in Italian, but this, we are reminded is Sicily - and serves them hot; small pastries filled with sweet fresh ricotta, splashed with lemon juice, fried and then sprinkled with sugar. There is no extra charge for this treat, just pleasure and pride in the giving.

*

And finally, we are joined again by our darlings, Giancarlo and Roberta, and we go to see the acropolis and the fallen temples and ruins of the ancient Greeks who lived here so long ago; and Giancarlo tells us about the early Romans whom he abhors who were lawyers and soldiers and engineers, and the Etruscans whom we know only from their tombs who were despised and destroyed by the Romans who hated art; and then the Greeks whom he loves, whom the Romans conquered but who in turn destroyed the essence of Rome by giving them ideas "their hearts weren't able to live with" - ideas of philosophy, of arts and of love. "Even love'" Giancarlo tells us "It was nothing to do with the Romans. You must remember the pater familias and where can you find love in that?"

Giancarlo describes the Pax Romanus for us "Accept our laws, they said or we will destroy you utterly." "There are no Romans any more," he tells us. "And good. They were small," he says "smaller even than you" (He nods at me - I am short, but Giancarlo himself is tall and larger than life) "but swarthy, and - like you - determined." He gives the last word all four syllables, then considers for a moment and says "1.6 metres is all for average, the men. 1.6 metres e completamente risoluto."

He loves the ruins at Selinunte, just as we knew he would - but better still he likes the view from the cliffs on our drive through along the western coast; and best of all he loves buying the fish from the boats that come in to our village every morning, and bringing them home, and gutting them, and washing them, and stuffing them with herbs and then battering and frying them for us to eat straight-away from the fry-pan. I am roused on for not eating enough, and he turns to Paul in outrage. "She is a bird!" he says and he is not approving. Beside him, Roberta pushes her plate away, sighs with satisfaction and says "I am a condor." and he smiles and pats her face with deep, deep love.

We plan to meet them in Rome the day after tomorrow.

2004 - Italy

2006-05-26T23:10:00.000-07:00

Saturday - Casoli

I can hear the church bells ringing in the village down in the valley. We are too small here for bells – just a tiny eyrie of three or four cottages perched under the very lip of the hill. The road to our hamlet twists and turns and tangles into itself to keep a safe grip on the mountains, and the terraces and birds and the wildflowers are tightly encased in the crystalline silence. We are high, high in the Apuan Mountains, and ours is the final cottage at the end of the road. The world could burn and we would never know. There is no television here, no newspaper and the only phone down in the village has a broken connection. Our mobile phones accept calls intermittently, but may not make them. We are isolated and remote and like the cottagers here connect only to each other, and to the bells.

On the road up, we passed shrines - so the old gods still live in the area, although they wear the robes and carry the wounds of Christianity. It would be easy to worship here. In this icy, crag-faced indifference the small resilience of the anemones and finches carries a message of renewal and protection – an unquestioning belief in at least the chance of tomorrow.

The little child in the next cottage squeals. She wants papa and her dog. She has a head of Botticelli curls and thick braced overalls dusty and damp at the knee. In ENglish, Paul asks her “What is your name?” and she regards him with a deep understanding of everything the question entails. She plugs her mouth with her finger, considering; then takes the wet finger away and answers him in French “Tomorrow, it is Easter.” This is dangerous information, not lightly held, not lightly given away; in the face of her damp-kneed authority we doubt our own calendars. And which of us would dare tell her that Easter is still four sleeps away?

Up here, we drink coffee – strong black, bitter – and eat dark chocolate. These are not things I have ever liked before, but now they are our first food of the day. The wildflowers – anemonies, jonquils, ferns, muscatti – are just as I’ve always imagined. Our hills are almost bare, eaten by winter, but down below us, deep in the valley, the fruit trees are swelling with bud and everywhere the olives and the cranky grape vines – black and crucified on their stakes – give promise of eternal renewal.

*

A saint or holy man has guard of our staircase. I needed him this morning when my cell phone shrilled through the pre-dawn and I ran in socks through the darkness, trying to find it. There has been un catastrophe at home – a minor car entanglement and no-one hurt, but it underscores how far away we are and how strongly we believe in our children’s capacity to look after themselves. This is new to both of us though not, I suspect, to them.

*

Paul is keen to shop and cook. He comes into his own at the marketplace, where all the focus and talk is on food and good cooking. Saucisse, du pain, tomate, and de l’huile d’olive have all travelled down with us from France. But today we will become Italian, stocking up with pasta, panne, d’agnello pollo and vino. And vino. I will pick wildflowers for the table when we go out today, and some for the saint who guards the stairs and saved me from tumbling headfirst and breaking my neck.

We walk into the village, fifty minutes away down a steep goat-track. In the time it takes to walk, we pass three shrines to the lady and gather enough to make a posy (which the god of the stairs rejects) of fifteen different varieties of wildflower. The village is Casoli, and at the bar we order grappa and vino russo piccolo to beat off the chill. The bar is the province of local men who play cards and smoke evil cigars, and the grappa is foul and undrinkable and I wouldn’t be anywhere else in the world this cold evening. It is all quite perfect here.

Sunday – Casoli.

At Lia’aia, Paul plays the guitar as evenings come in. It is cold – very cold without any fire or heating – and the hamlet dwellers are just beginning the chilly walk down to the village. Today is Sunday, so they will gather for dinner perhaps and to catch up on the news of the week. There was no-one visible in the church when we went down earlier but we could hear a chattering of women’s voices rising and tumbling In from the presbytery. They are the women perhaps who prepare the robes for the priest.

The current church is old, but the Chiesa is twelfth century. Its doors are always locked and it seems to be disused. All the nearby houses have signs proclaiming the glory of the Catholic god – so perhaps the church has already done its work.

In France, where the language was simpler, day-to-day living was much less magical. Here, where no-one except next door’s child has spoken French or English since we arrived, there is an infinite degree of possibility and conjecture. We have no idea for the most part what we are eating. From force of habit we ask for and try to follow directions – but we seem always to end up lost in little hamlets and misremembered borghi.

Our landlord is Carlos-Alberto. He has no English and Paul has no Italian and between them they must uncover all the deep secrets of Lia’aia’s workings. Carlos-Alberto demonstrates cupboards and stairways and blanket-boxes; he takes Paul on a tour of the plumbing and explains the gas stove. It is all mime – all commedia d’ell arte. Carlos boasts that he knows two words of English – Carlos and Alberto – and Paul replies that they - are wonder of wonders! - Paul’s only two words of Italian. They are fast friends before the tour is over; some hint of disaster involving the gas stovetop has strengthened the bond between them. That, and some good vino russo.

*

We almost miss the train to Cinque Terra. In the quintessential Harmon style, we spend fifty-five minutes in the car-park repacking cameras and backpacks and realise with ninety seconds to spare that our train is about to leave the station. In a situation like that, we Harmons don’t run, we fly, hysterical and unstoppable, leaping obstacles and ticket barriers with open-mouthed Italians watching in awe and cheering us lustily on. The crowd (there is always a crowd) takes on the task of securing our berth and orders are roared and semaphored from the station master through the concourse to the platform and thence to the traindriver. The place is in total uproar as we make the carriage at the last possible instant. We are cheered and waved like the heroes we are as the train pulls away. We were made for this country.

*

Lia’Aia is not heated. This is manageable at the moment, although the air is crystal and very cold. But if the snow comes or the mistral blows it must be unbearable. The beds are big and the blankets thick, rough and heavy, but hard work and cheap wine would probably be the only antidote to a late freeze.

Monday – Casoli

In the late quattrocentro in Lucca, a celebrated artist named Civitali worked with paint, wood, marble and terracotta and became a keystone in forming the Lucchese artistic style. I spend hours in the Villa Guinigi where an exhibition is given over to his works and the work of people in his circle. My own favourite of these artists I think is Fillipino Lippi whose painting of the Madonna, Child, St Peter and St Sebastian is richly human and laced with a quiet humour. But I love the wood statue by Civitali – the annunciate.

The stone floors of Villa Guinigi tap and echo underfoot. This early in the season, I am the only visitor. The villa and its artworks date from the 1400s. I am dwarfed by the size and the splendour and the antiquity. Lucca is a vortex of beauty, age and singular loveliness. In today’s grey and sombre light, the riches of the quattrocento are luminescent and we will have to return. There are too many roads that we didn’t take and too many times the noise of the scolari piccoli distracted us. They flock here, native born and stranieri alike, and always, always, there is one child outside the melee, watching the chattering group from a distance and wondering why.

*

The mist has come up now to shroud the top of our mountain. Up here, we close the shutters early; and when we go to bed we sleep very late indeed. It is a winter rhythm we live by. Our focus is food and warmth and our walk down the hill to the village is purely ameliorative - we must be warmed and salved with grappa and vino. But beyond the warm flush of the wine, the bar also provides a renewal of communication – a time to connect and mark off the faces of neighbours and strangers. We are not absolved from this process. A man from the back of the hill whom we’ve never met asks us if we had gone to San Gimignano today as he had been told we would. He is disappointed when we say we went to Lucca. There is nothing there, he tells us sourly – only old houses and crowds.

Later, Paul points out how lucky we are – to have work in Cannes and follow-up time in Tuscany. We are living a dream he says, and I think he is right.

*

Our hamlet is called Luciana. It lies above the village of Casoli in the brotherhood of Camaiorie. We are half a dozen houses, two churches and an alimentari; but behind the alimentari there is a bar on a terrace with views over the valley and stone benches along the walls. It is too cold out there these days, and we crowd at the bar with the wary cigar-smoking men and their playing cards.

*

The tomato was disappointing. That one can be disappointed by a tomato is news to both of us. We ate chicken that Paul had stuffed with prosciutto, tomato and mushrooms and cooked in red wine with wild green asparagus. The rucculo salad and parmigiano was wonderful. Only the tomato let us down.

We eat from five till eight-thirty every night. Anne Marie is to join us in three weeks and my first words to her will be “Tell me honestly, are we fat?”

*

Paul backed the car into a mountain yesterday, which was pretty moving for all of us except the mountain. The bumper is scratched and crumpled and with the Lenten palms on the back seat and the newly damaged rear we look very Italian and anonymous when we drive out. Driving in Italy is similar to driving in Malaysia with this exception; where the Malaysians fling their cars forward with a reckless and gleeful faith in Allah to protect them, the Italians – at least, our Italians, here on the treacherous mountain – are drivers enraged. There is a malignant god at their backs whipping them on against their will. They know the car will suffer and the mountain road will suffer, and they pit one against the other with black savagery. Their only care at the end of the day is to reach home or the village alive – driving is not a pleasure here. Our Italians become once again beasts of the agrilands hauling unjust and crippling loads for a cruel overmaster, serfs to an unjust feudal power. And so they berate themselves, their metal steeds and all other drivers – and above all, enraged, they take no care of the roadway. It is battered and scarred, for why should the serf protect the landlord’s furrow? The terrible injustice of the peasant is plain in the reckless, heroic echo of the drive down the mountain.

Tuesday – Casoli

The clouds have descended on our mountain while we were out. We have spent the day in Pisa and returned to a black storm and a terrible cold biting wind. Our little cottage is sturdy and proof against draughts, and with the shutters closed we are cut off once more from outside. Only the whip of the wind round our old strong stone walls lets us know of the rage building up over the top of the hamlet. Down in Casoli there was no breath of this storm. But the light was eerie - yellow-tinged and still – and a thick line of black cloud has cut off the top of our mountain.

There will be no walk down past the shrines to the village tonight.

*

In Pisa we talked about the dinner Paul planned for tonight. It is idiomatic that in Italy, surrounded by artistry, intellect, art and history we should be so obsessed with food.

The Duomo at Pisa was destroyed in a fire in the war. We call it the Last War, but of course it wasn’t. We call them The Enemy, till later we learn they were us.

*

The barometer is falling. The barometer is our only link to the outside world now, and we have come to know it well. The weather is worsening and our concentric circle tomorrow will not be possible. I don’t mind – overfull of pasta, piselli, funghi and salsiccia I can think of nothing better to do than sleep tomorrow till midday.

The wind stops it battering for a moment, and in the sudden icy stillness a dog on our hilltop barks out his fear. His bark echoes six times around the black-shrouded hills. It is the sixth of his echoes that he answers, just as the wind begins again.

Wednesday, Casoli

The wind slams against our cottage today, cold and pitiless and fierce. I imagine how it must have been for the contadini here years ago, and for the shepherds centuries earlier – shut in with only their faith that the sun would return.

Thursday, Casoli

The storm has beaten itself out in the night. This morning is almost intolerably bright and we will make use of it. Yesterday was a cathedral day – The Duomo in Florence – but today we will hike the road over the hilltop to visit the neighbouring village. The air in the wake of the storm is so clear and so light that it makes breathing a conscious act.

Friday, Casoli

The storm has whipped up again and somewhere a shutter is loose on the side of the cottage. This storm is bad news for the town of Camaoire which has been given the honour of the Passion Procession tonight. The procession is shared between all the neighbouring towns and their small populations. For months Camaoire has prepared wooden frames for the tiny oil-lamps that will outline each door and window, shrine and fountain. The lights are to be lit tonight for the holy day, but if our storm extends over the town, it will have to be cancelled.

*

In a lull in the storm, I open the door to look out just as a hiker appears on the foot trail soaked through and sullen, weighed down by his backpack. I dream of travelling light through a warm hospitable country, with a warm hospitable soul for company. I would invite the hiker in, but there is no fire, and no warmth to make it worth shrugging off his tight, soaked, waterproof raingear.

*

The only sound is the rattle of the gas burner, the wind, and in the silences, birdsong. Paul has taken the car to Viareggio for the day to catch up on business. In this rain, a walk is out of the question – the mist has closed in and there nothing to be seen at all. I had wanted to explore the space under the house, but that too must wait - the key I’ve been given won’t open the big metal door. It is strange to be soundless here with nothing – quite literally nothing to do except write these pages.

Soon I imagine, the gas will run out. Then it will be quite quiet with only the wind. The shutters are closed tight, the mountains cut off. I imagine it will be like being deep inside the catacombs.

*

The long Tuscan twilight is midway done, and the township of Camaoire has come out to celebrate Good Friday. A magnificent display of the Stations of the Cross highlights the intense emotionality they bring to Easter, but still it seems the Madonna is the main focus. Ahead of me, two men are making last minute adjustments to the black draped virgin who will, I think, be carried high on her throne through the crowd. Up and down the street the townspeople are trying to beat the darkness back with their tiny lamps – oil and water – tucked into the frames. Our storm it seems – still raging up at the top of the mountain – has pulled its skirts from this place in fear of the oil lamps.

The children are out and excited – not in the same way that ours get excited on Christmas day, not with the expectation of presents and toys – but with the exuberant wild delight of being out so late at night for this fire-lit ritual.

Under the dome of the chapel (the small, empty chapel) a life-sized jesus is taken down from the cross and laid on three cushions. On this night of the lights he is flanked by tall slender candles. Women particularly drift in from the street and kiss his face and stroke his feet. It is such a private and moving display of sadness and memory I move to the shadows and try not to intrude.

An ancient man comes in and pats my hand. “Journalisti?” he asks (he has watched me ordering shots from Paul and the camera) “No, sono una scritorria” I say and he pats my hands again and nods sympathetically. It will be our secret.

The thousands of lights are water and oil with wicks make of thread affixed by wire to four tiny corks. They float on the oil. Everything from olive twigs to mini-flame-throwers is used to light them, and now, with the rain beginning to threaten and the walls of this narrow street forested each side with ladders, the grandmothers (all in black) are out in force pressing young men and teens into the service. All these lights must be burning before the priests come, and the sulky boys put down their mobile phones and slouch away from the bar and pick up the tapers.

On a balcony, a woman in blue stretches up to her height to light the topmost lamp on her wheelframe.

*

It is after seven now, still dusk and still people are rushing back for the festival everyone thought would be cancelled. The noise and energy builds as whole families lean out of their windows, perilously, dangerously, boisterously touching flame to the wicks of the lamps. Most windows have two shutters, each shutter has twenty-six oil lamps, thirteen to a side. But there are bigger, prouder displays as well; fifty candles for a wheel-frame is not uncommon and four wheel frames on a single building is not excessive.

The woman who works at the Celero Bar has just burnt her hands. If she swore (and I think she did, cursing the mother of god for a pig) the tiny old nun in brown habit made a point of not hearing. The nun is the happiest person here tonight – happier than all the shrill, boisterous children together. This entire spectacle might have been made for her.

It is seven-twenty and the twilight has given way to deeper dusk. The preteens – the last to arrive, the fashionably late – have appeared on the scene. Eight-to-twelve is an age where even to notice the lights would involve serious loss of dignity.

I am worried that the Erbistoria is missing its chance. The candle frame they have built is intricate and wonderful, but no-one has appeared to light it. I don’t know whether they live too far from the town to come back through the storm, and I don’t know, also what protocols stand whether lighting another’s lamps is considered bad luck.

In the church, the priest is giving a press conference of sorts. He is little and soft and the journalist with him has wild un-brushed hair and seems to dwarf him, dressed to match his hair in a thick-pelted brown corduroy suit.

There are quiet, unobtrusive beggars here - a mother and her daughters, I think illegal immigrants because they have a different bearing, passive, apologetic, unlike the ebullient Italians.

Arguments are developing on the street. Military Shopping (for Girls and Boys) have confined themselves to a spare display atop their central window and an early grandmother – white hot, four-square – is furious. She thrusts an outraged arm towards the single frame – “It is a disappointment!” she shouts and now she has caught the owner by the arm and is scolding him roundly. I think before long that the omission will be rectified.

A bass drum begins throbbing in the black, lamplight alley at my side and I watch as a choir assembles itself and begins to sing. The audience – there are hundreds of us now, crammed into this street – continues to chat and critique. Unusually, I have had to move back in the crowd and I’m suddenly aware of just how tiny these villagers are. Two oboists and a flautist push past me, the flautist getting slapped by one of the women for arriving so late. There is no hush of respect for the choir here, in this country where art and music are part of breathing. The singers are shoved aside for a stroller with a baby, loud conversations continue through the crowd and a man in a red robe is calling for spare umbrellas – but the singing, which is beautiful, soars above the melee as it is meant to do, and beside me I see the tiny nun, nodding, ecstatic.

Beside me, a man exhales a plantation of garlic and nobody notices.

The procession waits to begin – the rain has held off and all the oil lamps are lighted. A huge monstrance, gold, elaborate, will lead the way, followed by servitors and my soft little priest from the chapel with the dome. It is not, as I expected, a silent, respectful procession – the servitors, tall, red-robed leaning on their four ornate altar lamps are engaged in a voluble and emotional story about a parking ticket and the fool who paid it. Ten inches shorter than them are the men who must carry the heavy loudspeakers. Banners are carried up to join the throng; the Commune di Camaoire, followed by 48 officials and 10 cabarisie. By sneaking in behind the officials I get halfway down the column, only to be held up in conversation by a delightful old woman who comes up to my shoulder (eighty-five if she’s a day) and her very small friend who is older. Monks in black hoods carry a rough and heavy wood crucifix, and my wall-mate and I exchange compliments about how beautiful the town is tonight and how heavy the cross.

Saturday – Casoli/San Gimignano

We must say goodbye to our cottage on the hill, this morning. Carlos-Alberto comes to see us off and waves as we edge down the mountain. The Mediterranean Sea is as blue as the sky.

The children are leaving these hamlets and towns, and the townships themselves are dying. There was a school in Casoli once, but it is long gone. The French-speaking child of our neighbour is the only one left, and she will move back to France when she’s old enough for school. Near Lusitgnano Zavegn, we find a town empty of all but some chickens and a dog and the man who stands watch on the church. The church was renovated in 1150. The old church below is is ancient. Two statues watch over the garden that was once pathed and terraced. They are – how fittingly! – Hospitality and Abundance.

Inside the church, abandoned, a huge old (14th 15th century) oil – filthy and quite gorgeous above the altar.

We drive on country roads, quiet, with orto, olive and fruit. Pensees les enfant signs here have a big boy and a small girl hand-fast - running!

We pass Cevoli, a hilltop town, old and full of gardens. This is Tuscany as we dreamed her – the hills are planted, wooded, alive with colour, the trees are silver and yellow and all shades of green, the wheat is young and calf-high and ripples like water. Gnarled black vines are underplanted with borage – it is quite perfect.

*

We arrive at last at San Gimignano. Our apartment is four rooms in a thirteenth century monastery. The town is medieval, closed to traffic, with stone-and-iron buildings that pre-date our monastery, with circles in the walls that once held the rods for the Sienna cloth that could only be made in this place. Today is Easter Saturday, tremendously busy and over-run with busloads of tourists – but even so the chiesi are open only to worshippers. It is warm, and blue-skied with a zephyr that makes the flags dance. We will unwind here and maybe relax into Italy. Lia’Aia seems a world away. I miss it, cold though it was – miss the clouds and the mists and the silence. Here we are among people again and I imagine we will read the newspapers again and write letters and re-touch the world.

Paul is glad to be here, I know. I think he missed the world more than I.

The sun burns my face. It is hot, and strange to be hot again – to feel the sun and shy away from the glare of light unsoftened by mist or cloud or nebbia. Strange too to be so closely among the crowds, to have people so near and so loud and in such numbers! I watch Paul coming out of the church, his eyes and the cameras shining. I don’t think he went there to pray.

In our 13th century piazza, the boys of the town ride their bikes and call to each other, the shrill sing-song bravura of youth. The sun is beginning to lower towards the horizon and we have ordered another quattrocarafe to keep up the warmth of the day. We have Italians, Germans. French and us at the bar (the Locanda di S Agostino). The Italians are the loudest, us the least noisy and the French have the best of the languages. But the young Italian lovers – oh how they kiss!

Sunday – San Gimignano

It is Easter Sunday and I can count six different church bells – and I think there are many more. The peals have soaked into the ancient stone of the towers and the echo is deep and resonant and lasting. In the square here, a small boy, Matteo, is running and shouting out of control, overflowing. It is the bells that make him like this, make him twist and jump and shout and break into song. He is for the moment a physical form of the sound. And now the bells have stopped and he comes to a halt, surprised. But he will carry that tumult in his body all the days of his life.

*

An old man has bought a door-knocker. He peels it from its newspaper wrapping to demonstrate it for his wife who is not impressed. There are a surprising number of facets to this device and he explains them all in all their glory, to show her what he has seen and share his good fortune. There is the general shape, he tells her – pleasing and firm. The hinge, the handle just the right size for a man to grip strongly, the good metal, longlasting, well turned and again – look – the hinge can be worked either slowly or quickly and will echo loud and assertive ("fortemente! fortemente!")or quiet, not to wake the sleeping grandchildren. On the right door, he assures her, the device gripped hot in his hand, this metal will sing. She looks at him, briefly, in silence, and moves on her way and he follows her wrapping and unwrapping his find, satisfied and pleased with his purchase and the blue sky arcs over him.

Guess where wallflowers grow? They grow in the walls of eleventh century towers, and sweep the sky with their perfume.

San Gimignano

I saw a picture in the town of Volterra which took my breath away. It described the deposition of Christ and was so arresting and so compelling that I returned to it again and again and again. Instead of the two Marys the deposition was being carried out by a bunch of rough men – disciples I expect, or even just friends. What struck me most was the very Italian uproar at the scene. The artist had caught them in a moment of terrible activity. Three ladders were balanced against the crucifix, and the hands had just been released from the nails of the crossbar. But the weight of the body, now unsupported, had begin to shift sideways, putting stress on the nails at the feet. The rage of these men at the thought of causing more pain to this poor dead christ was palpable. The body was grasped by one man who was being yelled at by another on the ladder at the side of the cross. A third man hung over the top of the crossbeam from his perch at the back of the cross, trying to ease the weight from the nails at the feet. A man at the foot of the crucifix was looking up in agonised concern and the women around him were near hysterical. Only the crucified man looked relaxed, his face suffused in death. In every frame was the terrible despair of treating a dead body gently. And I awoke to hear an Italian hostage is gone.

Friday – San Gimignano

From the outside balcony of the Palazzo Communale, I can watch the man next door dig his orto - lettuce, artichokes, beans and rosemary beneath medieval towers and a blue and grey sky. His grapes are just starting to bud, and he and the garden a framed by hand-worked stone arches. There is a wood and brick roof over me, centuries old, and a laughing French boy teases his mother nearby and pigeons sneak into the gaps in the hand-thrown brick walls. Tomorrow I will come and shoot up here to bring it home.

*

Children love echoes and these walls make perfect echoes. The crests and shields carved into the walls are almost faded and it is impossible now to know who once looked for fame or remembrance this way.

Next day

We have come back to the Trattoria San Donato, scene of last night’s revelry, to shoot more footage. I am not yet robust enough to face the day, and have spent a glorious 30 minutes reading up on our local church – La Chiesa della St Augustine de San Gimignano – which promises great things. The Miracle of the Toe is remembered here, and the remains of the Blessed Bartolo are on view through a grille in his sepulchre – this though he died in 1299 a.d. Less gruesomely, ther is a terracotta floor I want to see by my friend Della Robbia (the first) and the hermit friars themselves, robed, rotund, robust and doing a roaring trade in benedictions, icons and prayerbooks

San Quirico D’Orcia – at a small restaurant, drinking wine that is made especially for the owner, Paul discusses the delight of travelling. For him it is not a passive or even a visual experience. For him it is a hunt, with the goal being connection to other likeminded souls – that is, other collectors. He talks of the vision he has of our home in twenty years time – a cluttered, eclectic and generous amassage of things garnered from our travels. He is, of course, the definition of that wonderful Italian specialist , the thingfinder.

We are early lunchers still, Paul and I – and there is an added delight when a restaurant fills up just as we are leaving, and we know that yes indeed, we did choose well…

San Quirico D’Orcia has not yet fallen to the charms of tourism. It is light and uncluttered, carless and full of sunlight and blue sky and bells. The biggest delight is the lack of cars, which leaves so much space for people. Paul likes the San Q crostini – surprisingly he likes the truffles best of all.

My request for cappuco after lunch is disapproved of – but Paul’s suggestion that he should be allowed a scoop of gelato with his dessert results in hilarity. It takes a long time for them to accept that he is serious.

In the church of the Madonna, we find the most exquisite statue we have seeb – a Virgin Annunciate by one of the della Robbias. The High Altar is flanked by an angel and a virgin, by di Valdambrino - also exquisite; but I think Rome knows their value. The votive candles, (25c everywhere else) are 5 euro here.

*

We have sighted the most exquisite little tableau in the distance – a building (a chapel perhaps?) nestled between three pines. We are trying to find a road that will take us there while the sun holds – but we (Paul) keep being distracted.

*

In the distance I can just make out the tiny figure of a man wading through acres of wheat. It is Paul, of course

When we get arrested in Italy, it won’t be because of anything I said at the airport – it will be because Paul persists in asking old comtadini the way to the Communist Party Offices so he can gather up a bunch of posters for David and Stephanie. If he just accepted the direction with thanks it would be no problem – but he will keep engaging the locals in heated discussion of the didter that is George W. Bush. And Berlusconi. One day he’ll find a he’s talking to an Italian neocon and then we’ll have trouble. “George the Younger and his cabal of economic fascists” – nicely put! But it doesn’t leave much room for doubt on where he stands…...

Tuesday – Cortona

It has become a battle against the weather now, a cat-and-mouse skirmish where we watch the sky continually ready to make a dash for the car. In the mean-time, housebound, we cook and read the papers or wander museums.

Today, for a moment or two, the sky is clear and we head towards the nearby Castel il Fiorentino near Santa Lucia – 11th century, gloriously un-ruined, crowning the hilltop with sunlight sketching its contours and rooks and eagles calling and soaring around the battlements. The vagabond light is perfect and we abandon the car where the steep and boggy road gets too narrow to pass, and - camerapacks and tripods thumping against our backs – we run the last hundred yards uphill to the lichen grey walls. But we are too late. As Paul raises his camera and I struggle to change my lens, the light dissolves. The sun has vanished into thick black cloud, the first drops of rain begin and a sturdy workman, renewing the 11th century outbuildings by the side of his cliff, tutts at us sympathetically. “Niente sole”, he laments “Il tempo e terribilo” – and set for the day.

Chastened we stomp back down the steep lane to the car. We have left a window open and the seats are wet.

*

In Cortona the cloud has returned like an unwelcome Great Aunt and settled itself with a steady stream of disapproval over the towers and spires of the township. The BBC weather-witch smiles spiteful delight as she tells us that Italy’s spring is the wettest on record. The rain should clear some time next week, she says – but sometime next week we’ll have left Tuscany behind us. There is no help for it. We shall have to come back

Italy’s war trial continues for the men who killed 560 villagers in Tuscany in 1944. Guns, bayonets and grenades were used on civilians and refugees seeking safety during the war

*

Paul has found his most beautiful church in Cortona – perfect dimensions he says, and the music of water torrents through the Etruscan aquaduct and a domed roof perches above the olive trees like a prayer to a countryside god. It is the church of S Maria Nuova and Paul is delighted with it.

Paul adores travelling. Open to everything and everyone, he befriends people, has long mutually delightful conversations in a tangle of mime and goodwill. He shares his appreciation and his enthusiasm. He is now fast friends with at least three of the locals; when we pass The Artist’s studio, he is called inside and feted with wine and small pastries. In every new town his first task is to search out the local bar for his morning coffee – not an appealing, artistic, bright bar, but always a dark and fuggy one, crowded with silent men who eye him suspiciously. On the second or third day, one of the men will be forced to acknowledge him. By weeks end, they are saving a space for him at the counter. That task – the task of belonging – seems to subsume all other requirements. It is the first and always the most rewarding task of our travels.

*

In the convent of San Agostino a naughty boy – small, in a brave red jumper – kicks a ball as high as he can; as high, he hopes, as the frescoes along the walls. It is an innocently anti-papist game in anti-papist Tuscany. He is as glad as I of the break in the rain. We both know it will end in a moment. When the rain begins he will be called back inside, to that unruly room with the wild and noisy classmates; and I too will have to protect my camera and take it inside again. No matter, though – in the school he has his little village of fights and forgetting and at home Paul is cooking tiny artichokes in garlic and oil.

*

And finally the clouds dissipate and we take advantage of a gap in the rain to climb up through the village, taking hidden streets and lanes that will lead to the top. The climb is endless and dangerous, the way steep and the cobbles green and slimy. The eaves drip and the handrails are treacherous here and not to be trusted. We pass churches and chapels and poke our heads inside, but apart from a modern “****He is Risen” there is nothing to really excite us. Then, at the top of the hill, the sun appears warm and steady as though she has never been away, and the cobbles are dry and we whoop with delight and continue our walk, renewed, straight through the walls and up a goat-track through a meadow that reaches to the very top of the hill, awash with long wet grass, slipped terraces and the infinitesimal forget-me-nots so much tinier than ours and so intense. The meadow, terraced once, but long wild, runs the foot of the crumbled tower walls. Our shoes and our legs are drenched to the knee by the thick, wet, abandoned grasses, but we follow our own trail back to the porta and see from the hilltop Cortona bright and warm , twisting along below us, hugging the hill. And it is worth all the days of rain and cloud and worth wet boots and blistered toes as well.

*

Later, coming in through the porta ****, I see the old woman with her handful of kindling, her ancient purple dress and broken gumboots.

Wednesday - Cortona

Signor Cherubini has now become Paul’s best friend, supplanting even The Artist in his affections. Signor Cherubini is a collector of antiquities. He collects, says Paul, who knows such things, from his knowledge, not from his hunger. This means, I think, that the basis of his desire is intellectual and not, as in Paul’s case, emotional. Remarkably, for we have no Italian and he has even less English, we spend some hours in his shop, discussing antiquities and collecting and his methods and successes. He lowers his voice and describes to Paul his methods. “Take a stick into the fields in early spring, just after the first rains have softened and lifted the soil. Where the herbs are growing piccolo, piccolo, where the legumes do not mass, there tip your stick into the ground – so softly – and listen. Allora, you hear the voice of the soil and the rock and if you are good you will hear the t’ing of ceramic. Then use your hands – but gently, gently. This is not excavation, this – this must be gentle.” “But who gives permission?” I ask, thinking of all those E Prohibita signs in the back of the car, and Signor Cherubini shakes his head and says “No permission.” “But the police,” I begin, and he expands and swells into his only English so far. “Carabineiri” he says with pride “Carabinieri my friend.”

Paul is his friend too, and will buy a broken Etruscan jar from him though Snr Cherubini doesn’t know this yet. He has extracted a promise from us that we will visit the Etruscan museum before we leave. “Domani-domani” we promise, Malaysian style because we don’t even know the names of the days of the week. But he is satisfied; he seems to understand us.

*

Paul is cooking again, while I write, curled into my place in the hearth of the sitting room. He has cooked a bowl of fava beans in garlic and oil to go with a pleasant chianti while he makes the main meal – Tuscan sausage with wild asparagus, zucchini and fresh carrots. The kitchen smells wonderful.

Paul is a better cook than I in this situation. He sees cooking as sport and enjoys the planning as much as the doing. I prefer it as a spectator sport – but I clean.

Signore Cherubini has given his opinion on our dancing boy – South American as we thought and probably 1850s. He tells us, and I am astounded that after so many weeks of chiesi and chapels and cathedrals I didn’t see it, that the boy is an angel. A cherub, in fact. This clears up what had been a problem for me – the mismatch of the yearning, effeminate little face and the sturdy young legs. It also explains the long back – where the wings took support. I like the idea that it is an angel, and particularly that Signor Cherubini noticed. It seems very appropriate.

The fireplace I occupy has a filled in chimney, exposed supporting beams and a stone seat built-in and covered with cushion. It is just the right size for me to curl up in – too short for Paul and not soft enough, either. It is in the same cheerful yellow as the room and the covers are cream. It is a darling little nook.

Tomorrow, on the advice of Maria, daughter in law to be of Giancarlo and Reoberta, affianced to Manuel, we are off to see the little church built by Francis, saint of the town of Assisi. It is small, she says, built by him with his own hands, and after a few days the boys of the village came down and helped build too. And they became, many of them, followers and disciples and helped support his work with the poor and destitute.

Thursday – Cortona

The basilica over St Francis’s church has enraged me, and Paul, who had the foresight to predict this, is attempting to salvage the day with a merenda he packed without telling me. In Umbria, a tiny simple chiesa, craked and hidden, restores my equilibrium – that, and the cheeky schoolboy who was startled when he saw me and broke into a torrent of welcome in the tiny clutch of houses. We drive on to Pilonico Materno e castel del piano and find along the way the ruins of an entire hamlet – three or four houses, outbuildings and a small church. Paul shoots the poppies and flax and the sheep move slowly away their bells echoing distant bells from the unremembered village.

*

We are at the back of Umbria now, near the Tuscan border, coming down from the tops of the hills. The first warm day after the first spring rains is still a magical time in Umbria. All the old, old, oldest people are out with their paperbags, hunting for mushrooms. I found two at the Uni dig we stopped at earlier – and Paul found a sign that said “it is absolutely forbidden to hunt mushrooms, asparagus, truffles or other wild food…” and promptly pinched it. (It occurs to me that anyone who searches our car for the stipulated mushrooms, truffles, asparagus or other wild food, or indeed any relics, artefacts or fossils will find only a sign that says “It is absolutely forbidden to…”)

We have sighted an ancient castle on the top of a hill and the daylight is starting to soften. Paul has stopped to ask a local (it is the enchanted Rafael, but we don’t know that yet) how we might best get up there. It will be a long hike, but we have water and if there’s a way in without (obvious) trespass, we’d like to find it…

*

We climb the hill to the tower. The sun is setting and we have wasted precious time exploring Rafael’s house and garden. Rafael has bought a ruin in a landlocked valley – once floodplain swamp, riddled with malaria. But before the house came the Etruscans who drained the swamp and channelled the water into streams and runnells and created a small and fertile valley where water sings everywhere. Rafael’s mill-house is at the lowest point of the valley where the streams come together. He has found and cleaned the old aquaduct under the mill and, Roman-like, channelled the stream away and down to the olives.

He is a magical sprite of a man, Rafael; part imp, part sorcerer, born in India, he replies to Paul’s “Do you speak any English at all” with “Perfect English, and eight other languages besides.” He is tiny, about my height, well-muscled, not wiry, and tanned from his work in the sun. He has almost restored the mill-house structurally, has planted windbreaks, dug and planted the borders of lavender, cleared the orto, pleached a barrier to keep the animals out and is tarring posts for the fencing when we happen upon him. He is enthusiastic about our plan to climb to the tower and drops everything to accompany us, until gently dissuaded by Paul. He will show us the way though, will guide us down to the best place to cross the river; but first we must see his house and watch as he unveils every room and the staircase he built by himself and the old tubs – ancient, Roman – that he found or bought or was given depending on his mood. Rafael redefines himself with every sentence. Sparkling, momentary, he changes his life and his story as easily and quickly as his surroundings. He was given the house and land, or he bought it – or it isn’t his at all but belongs to his students. He is a silversmith or a teacher or he has been a student all his life and never used money. The truth, I think, is probably more prosaic; the property belongs to his wife Stefania, who works as a language teacher and so earns the money for both of them; I think he provides the vision and muscle and dreams.

*

We cross Rafael’s brook which is running deep now (for which he apologises) and step out in the direction of the church as he advises. We have lost so much time with Rafael that the light is softening as it does in Italy – a prelude to the long and drawn-out twilight. We are walking fast, our camera packs thumping against us and the way is quite steep and its all uphill, the track outlined with little runnels of water – but oh it is beautiful! It is a secret, magical place, full of the whisper of water and echoes of worship.

The church is a ruin (and is it a church? We have only Rafael’s word after all, and the one standing wall looks prosaic and holds none of the platforms and plinths that usually stand for the gods) but it is beautiful in the warm afternoon sun. The roof – these roofs in Italy, centuries old, wonderful, delicate tiles and all mossed and messy with grasses – has fallen in on itself and bought the other walls down. Rafael has told us that when the roof goes, the house quickly follows after. This house is empty now – no sign that it was ever more than rock and stone.

The tower is still some way away, silhouetted above the hill and we come on it by degrees. Paul is excited, imagining David here, finding the place on his own. He starts shooting early, to bring back photos to show David the unfolding of the quest – the setting sun, the church bell so far distant, the whisper and giggle of the water and all the mad birdsong. After all this time, both Paul and I still trap ourselves with the hope that sound will be somehow maintained on the picture. We haven’t managed it yet…

And the tower! It appears full-length in the aging light when we turn the last curve of the track. It is huge – a knights-and-battles tower, and indeed we learn later that its aim was to protect **trade and customs duty. It is completely cracked through, decrepit and Paul must climb it of course, though the staircase gives way every step. I am happier in the outbuilding, in even worse state but gorgeous and perfectly made with fireplaces and stone shelves and carved stone benches and arches to keep the wood dry. It is a story-book place and we congratulate the makers and bless Rafael too for showing the way.

It is not over with Rafael yet, though. We come down through the forest at a jog with our gleanings (a stone from the Tower that Paul has for David, a small piece of carved marble for me) and stop to look for R. to thank him. He is back again at his tarbrush, but now splashed with the stuff and delighted to see us once more. He has thought of way we can repay him, and nothing will do till we have photographed him with the posts which he has cut and stripped himself (but in the next breath has bought like this from the farmer) and which he considers beautiful. They are beautiful, too, chestnut, taken from the mother-stump which sends up saplings that must be cleared every five years or so. Thus Italy retains her centuries of forests. Fifteen years between thinnings for wildwood on rotation so some is cut every year) and five for the chestnuts. We are taking shots and listening to Rafael who knows so much about Italy and happily makes up what he doesn’t know, when Stefania comes home. She is not happy with him, splashed with tar and the posts unfinished and guests expected for dinner within the hour. She shoos us off and berates Rafael all the way back to the house. Or we’d be there still…

*

We leave with the map Rafael has drawn to the local restaurant. The map is tar-splattered and sticks to his hand, so he tells us the way and we follow directions arriving at 8:45 at another hilltop town with a single restaurant. The streets are so very narrow and twisted we abandon the car and go in on foot (muddy, sweaty, tar-daubed). We find the Restaurant La Castagna Reschio, but it is closed. Two women are chatting in the dregs of the twilight, one on each balcony over the road from each other. They are amused that we expect the place to be open. “You must ring before and arrange with Andrea” they tell us. “How would Andrea suppose you were coming?” Chastened, we head back for the car and drive through the night, finding a superb meal at a town called ***. In this unprepossessing little place, Paul declares the Umbrian wine the finest he’s tasted in Italy (Antigniano Torgiano Rossi - Vendemmia 2000). His carpaccio of zucchini with rocket, pinenuts and parmesan is also the very best thing in the world

Friday – Cortona

We are going back to Lisciano today, since we saw so little of it yesterday. But first Paul must pay Snr Cherubini for the angel and Snr Cherubini has told his friend the potter that Paul will be gone tomorrow, so they must say goodbye too – loudly, with gestures, in florid Italian – which alerts The Artist and Signora-the-Tabbachi and others and they gather in the square and look set to dissolve into tears so we – Anglo, repressed – wave and beat a hasty retreat.

*

At Val de Pierle, near Mercatale we find the ruined castle we saw lit up against the darkness last night. The castle is perilous so of course it must be explored and photographed. Never mind the signs that say access is forbidden, never mind that it is attached directly to the back of someone’s home, car parked outside. Never mind that – unusually for Italy – it is swathed in orange plastic, or that the dog at least is home and that Snr di Castello may well be armed and inbred. Paul leaps the obstacles, scales the barriers and shoots to his heart’s content, while I, centuries of nun-disapproval burning my face – sit on an old stone step (scent of crushed sage and thyme all around me) and write disapprovingly, and wait for the gunshot.

And if Snr does hold fire for long enough to ask Paul what the hell he thinks he’s doing accidente Madonna! Hanging like a monkey from the battlements, Paul will probably reply with the words I’ve taught him. “Niente – non capisce Italiano” in a perfectly parroted accent; which should give them pause.

The castle is perilous, it is – but oh it is beautiful, too.

A workman has just driven up in his little fiat. We are so far outside the pleasantries of Tuscany here that he refuses to even notice me, a woman alone. He wears a flannel shirt and blue cotton jeans and a train drivers cap.He is small, squat, nut-brown, unshaven and I can’t see his gun. I toy with the idea of telling him there’s a trespasser up on the tower, but I’ll wait and let events follow their allotted path.

*

The tower hisses my name and I look up to find to my horror that Paul is now inside and thrilled with himself. But he has the wrong camera. In mime he explains that he wants me to leave the safety of my step, wander up to the perilous castle, and meet him at the towers door here, in full view of anyone who might be curious enough to be spying from their kitchen (or fiat) we can execute a swiftly secretive camera-swap. He’ll get me shot one day, but I’ll kill him first. Whispering – hissing – at him to get back outside the castle, miming the tower’s imminent collapse, describing in dumb show the fact that the neighbours are watching (in train-driver’s caps with undisclosed weapons) does no good at all. The longer I try to get him out, the more likely we are to be caught. We do a synchronised lens-swap – I am getting so good at these – and I hand over my camera.

Eleven centuries of disapproval bore into my back.

I will teach Paul a new sentence, I decide; “Your wife is ugly and your mother humps pigs.” We’ll see how much trouble that gets him out of.

Voices! A couple – locals – sound to be coming this way. They’ll see me, una scrittoria, my car and my camera; they’ll see the tower, but if Paul is smart – he is smart – he’ll stay in the shadows. According to the sign, if he is caught there he will be denounced (well, frankly that’s going to happen anyway) and quite possibly jailed. I won’t visit him.

Truck, bus or paddy-wagon is coming. We are (of course) illegally parked, and Paul (of course) has the keys. If they need me to move the car a little, we’re undone.

I can’t hear him now – can’t hear anything except the tiny finches and doves. The day is divine, the sun warm and herb-scented, the sky powdered with thin white cloud. God, the racket this castle will make if it falls in on Paul…

Why do I follow him into these places? Why don’t I stick in my heels and refuse to budge? But yesterday we forded a river that was torrenting too fast to be safe, and we climbed a hill that was too high and steep in light that was fading too quickly with too-heavy cameras; and we came to a tower that was too old and dangerous to climb and we climbed it. And it was all magic and wonder and wild, wild beauty.

*

A man – out of sight on the other side of my wall – is talking on his mobile phone. Every now and then the pigeons panic and mass and swoop from the tower. If the man notices, things will come unstuck. If Paul hisses for me again – but here he comes, hotfooting up the road with a fixed smile on his face hissing “Get in the car, we’ve been spotted!” Suddenly there is movement in the village, a voice calls out in anger and another responds and Paul starts the car and we shoot through the one street which ends some seconds later at a farm gate. There is nothing for it – we must drive back through the town, where I’m sure we’ll find people have gathered, watching the tower in deep suspicion. We pass, unnoticed, but I blush anyway. Paul is laughing. He got his photos.

Saturday – Cortona/Sorrento

Sorrento – at least the way in to Sorrento – is a voyage into insanity. The worst kind of insanity – paranoia, confusion, anxiety, mania. We drive through a township with streets so narrow that one single lane of traffic is barely contained – but pedestrians, dogs, buses, and cars from the other direction jostle and fight for space. There is a nastiness to the usually exhuberant machismo, and for the first time in Italy I feel unsure of myself. I don’t know the townships name but I want to get away – and there is no way out but to continue on through the turbulent, untrustworthy streets. The corners are tight and blind, the air is foul and every car has it’s lefthand mirror shattered. Theere is menace underneath the chaos and even Paul is unnerved.

We need to reach a place called Tasso Square, but before we do that, we have to get down the coast road, where the traffic has stopped around us, not moving for the last twenty minutes, and never at more than a crawl. We are not sure of our directions, not sure of our booking, and after the last town we passed we are not sure if Sorrento is such a great idea after all.

Sunday – Sorrento

Oh ho, Sorrento! In Sorrento, for the first time, we become part of the Italy scene – the tourist part of it, admittedly, but then Sorrento is lively and brash and want to be friends with everyone. Already Paul has found his personal coterie – Antonio from the gelateria, Il Politico from the alimentari and the woman from the bar outside our gate. Sorrento is packed and very scene-y, especially on Saturday night. We realise the big difference, the thing that engages us heart and body and soul with this town is the high high percentage of young people – especially our favourite age group, the 18 – 25s. True, there are babies in prams. Toddlers and little ones (and hear those little ones laugh at the street parade!) but the 18 – 25s mark the town’s heart, take over and crowd out the square, mill and preen and kiss and laugh quite unrestrained. This is Squealie territory; a depth of family and culture give it balance but it seems to both of us to be the spiritual home of the Squealies and their cohort; stylish, exuberant, self-concerned, protected and cherished.

On Sundays, the Piazza becomes the province of families and neighbours. The young people are out but looking a little chastened, the family groups (three generations) are milling around after mass and the square echoes with the shouting of names and laughter filled greetings and the squeals of the boy, Nico, six years old and stylish in black sunglasses who finds everything hilarious and above it all the smoke-shattered voice of the American woman at the next table who is a heathen and proudly so and would rather enjoy a midday gin than visit the church with her (very dull) travelling companion. It is safe to predict that theirs is a friendship that won’t survive the trip.

The companion leaves, disapproving, and as if in celebration, a swing band strikes up, loud, hip and infectious and Anne Marie appears out of nowhere, gorgeous and funny and beautiful. The large American lady lights a cigarette and draws deeply, metaphorically kicking off her sensible shoes.

*

Italian mothers wipe their children’s faces constantly. This is more theatre than hygiene, since Italian children are no more prone to food mess than any others. The child must be corralled and restrained, the top of its head firmly grasped. A wet cloth appears from mid-air and is rubbed across the squirming child’s face with an intensity and vigour that simply has to be painful. The child’s face has been screwed up in anticipatory agony and invariably mother (it is always mother or grandmother wielding the cloth) imitates the look as she scours away at the features. Thankfully, it is only the under-eights who must be subjected to this. Nico’s facecloth days are nearly behind him.

*

Oh the little girls ready dressed for church in frocks and stockings, jackets and black patent shoes. They have such curly hair and they hold on to adult hands and never get lost or run over or knocked down by the mixed-breed dogs that run freely in Italy.

It is strange to think just how soon these babes will be the gloriously scene-y young creatures who lean against motorbikes and flirt outrageously (and unconsciously) with the gorgeous young men

Monday – Sorrento

When the postman brings the mail to the apartment in the courtyard facing ours but two storeys up, he sings out for Giulia. She appears, on the balcony, seventy years old and round and sprightly and lowers a basket tied to a ribbon of tattered della robbia blue. The postman places the letters in her basket – letters from children and grandchildren far away, perhaps, or lovers almost forgotten or friends from her youth – and she draws the basket up and disappears inside with her bounty. The postman waits a moment, thinking, then he sees me watching and stretches his shoulders under the weight of the bag and moves on.

Tuesday, April 27 – Sorrento

My boots are covered with the dust of Vesuvius and after a long day tramping the ruins of Pompei we are ready to make our way back to Sorrento and dinner.

Pompei infuriates Paul. He becomes the essential American Tourist – finding fault with everything (maps, touts, translations) and above all with the precarious nature of the protection given the city. He has a point – this amazing, evocative, pitiless, desperate ruin is being badly mishandled. Barriers are flimsy or non-existent, people climb and clamber all over and through the houses and shops with no guard to keep them away and dogs pee all over the walls. Rubbish is everywhere – but worst of all every corner, every hidden room, every corridor is used without shame as an alfresco toilet. It is such a pity.

Pompei itself though! Despite the crowds there is a stillness, a silence that cannot be broken even by a classroom of eager eight-year-olds galloping down to the fugiteria. The atmosphere is quite airless, distanced, dusty. I could stay there all day

*

A very small girl – French – wanders up and gives me her bunny to hold while she clambers up onto the footpath. When she has steadied herself, I try to return the rabbit but she won’t take it back. Instead she finds two very specific stones and gives them to me. I would like to photograph her with the huge old ruins behind, but she is too tiny.

Saturday – Sorrento/Rome

We leave Sorrento early and with deep, deep regret. I am not looking forward to Rome, having developed a deep mistrust of Catholicism, churches and culture. And the weather is dim and damp, the sky grey and further we get the more crowded and boisterous and dirty the streets and we want to avoid that nasty nameless town we went through on our way down but I don’t think we can. And then suddenly we are on the autostrada again, and its not pretty, no castles, not really Italian, but its fast and the sky is clearing after all. And GianCarlo loves Rome like a woman, so it can’t be all bad.

Sunday – Rome

On the Via Corso, I am first to catch sight of Giancarlo and Roberta, and they look just as they did in San G. We are kissed – once, twice, three times – and hugged like the lifelong friends we have become, but immediately we must set off, Carlo tells us, before the wedding party arrives at Loyola and ruins everything.

Giancarlo… What to say of this man who loves Rome like a woman; who plays his guitar in a crowded fattoria and sings “bridge over troubled water” for his clever, chainsmoking Roberta; who laughs and is moved to tears; who has a son who makes him bleed and another of whom he can say “He is my love”. There should be one – one tender, clownish, love-burned Giancarlo - for each of us.

Nevertheless, he makes us run, for fear of the sunset and the wedding party, and when we get to Loyola (a cathedral in the centre of town) he pushes us up the stairs twisting us through the urgent delivery of flowers (huge lilies, lemon scented greenery, beautiful flowers and oh how Roberta and I would like to stand and look and drink their perfume!) and he calms the woman-general blocking the entrance with a gentle pat on her face and the promise we’ll be a minute only, just a minute. It is darkling, and he wants us to see it before the light goes, and he runs us through the painted, vaulted room, makes us stand just there, just so, and tells us to look up as though he is unblinding us. “Do you see now? Do you see?” and I look up into the cupola – dark but unremarkable – and it is Paul who sees first what Giancarlo has wanted to show us. The cupola is false, is painted in, and painted so captivatingly that it is hard to see the trickery even when it has been exposed. Indeed, I never see it. My usual problem with visual perspectives leaves me utterly convinced that this cupola is there, is realised in a dome outside the church, and Giancarlo must point out from the outside that no such dome exists. And then he tells the story – the story of the cupola, of the Chiesa, of the Vatican and the black pope and the battle between the two sectors. When the Vatican refused to allow the building of a dome because he feared the Black Pope’s growing power, the artist retaliated by painting one in. Giancarlo talks of betrayal and revenge and war as lyrically and simply as a poet. For him, history is made by choices and choices by men and women who love and hate and have children and worries and dreams. For him, life is all-embracing and his clown face with its long eyes and slow smile lights up and becomes beautiful. The woman guard, angry at our presence, starts towards us, but Giancarlo has already begun his history- and memory-filled tour and he carries us with him, not noticing.

Through the long, impassioned night we visit the fountain (“only think!” exhorts Giancarlo “only think of the people when this is uncovered – this magnificence! – all for the town, for the commoners. Oh the miracle of the water coming now here all at once and forever more!”) and I am made to turn my back and throw a coin, to vouchsafe my return here one day; we visit the government square “and that terrorist il duce, and berlosconi no better” the Spanish steps where I leave a rose for Christie, who would have just turned 18 and would have sat with the young men and women and talked of - whatever it is they talk of; to the bar… and the writers street and we stop for a proper Italian dinner full of rice balls and pizza and and gelato after gelato and coffee at the bar Levi drank at. He takes us up to the Circus Maximus from whence we can see Rome laid out before us, searches out the place with the best coffee in Rome (a tiny, unprepossessing bar with a wonderful, smoke-filled, coffee-filled, wine-filled perfume) and makes me a present of chocolate coffee beans. And then we walk back, through the streets dark now but still full of life

Monday – Rome

Giancarlo has shown us his Roma, so now nothing will do until Paul cooks his famous spare ribs (spuntaturre) for them. This is not as simple as it seems. For reasons that we are not being given, the streets of Rome are full of uzi-wielding carabinieri today. They are capitaned by CIA look-alikes with walkie-talkies. Spare-ribs are an unusual cut of meat. Brown sugar is an unknown quantity. We spend the morning being Roman, looking for shops in a city where landmarks appear by the minute – the Vatican, St Peters, the Pantheon – it doesn’t seem to matter after a while. The Pantheon moves me terribly – a huge and beautiful building, once a one-stop shop for worshippers who could simplify the issue by making their offerings to all of their gods in one trip. But then the pope came in and the Catholic Church was ascendant in all its power and now, when we wander inside instead of the fierce old gods there are five priests serving High Mass. I turn my back, not realising, but aware of the dislocation. We are forbidden to walk through the Jerusalem Gate because it would signify agreement with the destruction and pillaging of Sion – but the terrible old gods are humbled routinely and Rome doesn’t flinch.

*

Paul comes back from his sojourn in the Hotel Regno cucina. For a few minutes at least he has lived his dream of being a top European chef with a staff of servitors – in this case three pretty girls at his beck and call, cleaning his workspace, measuring his ingredients (something Paul himself has never done) and pestering him for the details of his recipe. They tasted the brown sugar that took us all day to find and quarrel about the range of knives available. The whole performance lasts about twenty minutes and by the time it was over of course they were all fast friends. Which is quite an achievement - because she was very much Boss of the Kitchen when he arrived.

*

At Via Geraldo we are welcomed heartily and warmly and walked through the apartment and made to pat the dog… and then to the balcony (tiny, awash with potplants) where we are fed fava beans straight from the basket (“You are Romani now!” says Roberta, gleeful and proud of me “Brava! Bene!”) and a good strong pecorino cheese with alight local wine. And then the lessons begin. Giancarlo teaches Paul the risotto con zucchini, and Paul in his turn teaches Carlo the Rite of the Barbecue. All the ingredients have been prepared in advance for both dishes – each wants to share the alchemy, the moment of transition from food to meal. Their enthusiasm and their good-fellowship is tangible and out on the balcony Robbie and I discuss travel and children and work in a pidjin of English, Italian and sometimes fragmentary French.

And all the time, Giancarlo talks. He gives us his history of Rome, his unrelenting questions (“Why the miracle of St Peter to come here of everywhere, to little Rome? Why the miracle, the perfection?” and “You must understand the catacombs – everyone knew. Allora, there was no secret, it was dangerous and everyone knew.”) and his considered predictions (“George Bush will go, he is gone already, he is gone. The big men want to have trade, want to grow rich and he makes for them too many enemies, he takes their chances. Iraq, all the musselmen countries, he takes their chances. He must go for their profits alone.”) and his stories – of his time in Basra and Bagdad (“and with the wisdom of the Arab this wonderful man said ‘not Rome, but you my friend, change’.”) and his love for the people and sorrow at what Bush has done; and his love for Roberta (“she is a volcano of ideas, and I am a gypsy.”) and the miracle of their meeting. For Giancarlo miracles come easily and are uniformly positive.

And then, on our final day, Giancarlo gives us the gift of Clemente. And one day I will write a book about that...

2005 - India

2006-05-14T20:54:00.000-07:00

We arrive at the airport and I send Paul away so I don’t start him crying. Ros retaliates by setting off all the alarms at immigration.

Thailand stopover

In Bangkok, at a little past midnight, the streets are awash with the roar of cars and trucks, the hawkers are trading from mats on the ground and we watch as a young mahood leads a baby elephant through moving traffic. Later another elephant, older this time and carrying his driver perched before a stack of newspapers, waits at the crossing for the lights to change. The air is hot and filled with dust and the smell and blaring of cars, and I think of KL, but without the rank durian, without the mould and without the standing drains.

Things I love - the corner restaurant where I ate vegetarian noodles (with pork which I passed on to Roselyne) and the Chinese man with the mole over one eyebrow who identified our ingredients for us and picked his teeth so delicately.

At Erewin Shrine, we make offerings for a disaster-free trip, for a real tour guide and for our families. I could sit out here for hours with the air so full of incense. Whole families come with offerings of grapes, guava, caffeine drinks; and they buy ropes of flowers, sticks of incense, felicitous yellow candles and packages of gold leaf. The leaf is for the elephants. The incense and candles are to be first of all offered to the gods and then lit.

INDIA
Old Delhi

The noise at the Hotel Goodtimes is incessant and night-long. We are close to the kitchens in a room that is small and spotless with a jewel of a bathroom that dates to colonial times. There is a conference of doctors at Goodtimes, and we endear ourselves not at all to them by stealing their places at table. This is not entirely our fault, dining places being scarce and under-resourced, but the affection and forgiveness with which our faux pas is accepted seems just the kind of omen we’re already looking for.

*

The cars drive impossibly close together. Any gaps that may appear between them are filled with rickshaw drivers, motor cycles, pedestrians and furniture vans. With wild disregard, the drivers open their doors to spit out the dust of the city from deep in their lungs.

*

To visit the Jain temple we must take off our shoes and socks, and wash our feet and hands. The women touch the first step of the temple with their fingers, bowing low and touching their fingers to their heads; the men are less observant. Two blue-capped infants in the temple grounds play chasings around old stone ornaments. The bigger of the two picks the little one up by the throat, almost choking it. Once released, the baby giggles delightedly. White turbanned men in white robes pull white cloth from the lines where the laundry is drying.

Roselyne enters the temple and is shown the rites and ceremonies by a young devotee. She is in heaven. In Ghandi Park, I give five rupees to a beggar child who smiles and runs off with such palpable delight that I wish I’d given him more. He doesn’t summon an army of beggars as I’d been warned he would, and I wonder if all the stories are true after all.

Raju has brought us to a very nice restaurant for lunch where we over-order and really enjoy ourselves. I’ll be interested to see how we feel about Indian food in a week or so.

*

“In India,” Raju says with some pride, “you only need, to drive, some brakes and a horn.” He reconsiders for a moment. “With very bad brakes, you can – but without horn, no.”

*

The dirt people of Old Delhi, having no other choice, inhale their city until it is part of them. The beggars sleep on the street in the daytime and build fires of plastic at night. Their blankets, wrapped around them as a garment day and night, are so thick with the dust that the grey seeps through to colour the skin of the people. Exhausted, they managed to sleep on the gutters and roadsides during the day, as the Delhi traffic belches and screams mere inches away from their heads.

They are made of dust, breathing and eating dust, and their eyes show a film of dust between them and humanity.

When the beggar children come to the car, Raju is firm. “Don’t give,” he says, “Don’t see.”

*

A step higher than the dirt people (whom I can't photograph because how can you point a camera at someone who has literally nothing to defend, or defend himself with?) are those with a roof of plastic tied to a fence and held up with a sapling. A step higher still are the tent-dwellers. They still sleep by the side of the road, but have walls at least to keep their bodyheat from being sucked away by the night.

As the colour changes (it does change as we leave the outskirts of Delhi) the colour of the people also changes. This is a yellower dust, thicker and just as pervasive as the Delhi grey – but we see young boys in impossibly gleaming whites on their way to play cricket. Raju has us stop at a sugar mill of sorts where we are greeted with stoney-faced indifference.

The cobra man is very unhappy with the ten rupees I proffer. He takes his revenge by making me practically beg him to take my money.

On the road to Agra, we pass a small industrial area where they make, among other things, leather. Goat, sheep and buffalo hides are used, but the cow is flensed only after it has fallen to a natural death. Then the hide is taken and the body left to the vultures. Once the birds have done their work and the bones have been stripped, the women can gather them. They are used to make buttons.

*

Taj Mahal

Today is the 8th of January, and at the monument of Shah Jahan to his beloved 4th wife, Muntaz, we manage (despite the mandatory baggage checks and searches) to drop our smuggled rose at the steps to the tomb. I cry, of course. Christie, I think, would have loved all of it – the trip out to the slum for the rose which was laced with white florets and a spray of gold tinsel and wrapped in cellophane, the crowd at the stairway and Imran’s quick deal with the guard; the small prettiness of the rose itself, which fell on the step and leaned, exhausted, into the corner. It will be collected tonight, along with the coins and prayers, but the blessing of course is in the remembering.

We sit at the fountain and watch the sun set on Muntaz’s Taj Mahal, and on the magnificent, aggrandising, desperate love of the Shah

Our arrival in the car park as the darkness takes hold is a signal for the rag-shrouded ghosts to move in from the shadows. They approach together, all at once, in complete silence, grey and unfinished, herding around us and pressing us in, and they have tumours half the size of their heads and cleft palates and grotesque and outrageous deformities and at this hour, in the darkness, the carpark is empty. In the instant before I understand this mass of spectres for what it is, I am terrified. These are the beggars who would be chased away in the daylight, being so bad for business. These are the worst of the worst, the ones who should not, could not, would not have survived their infancy without some special intervention, and they are all the more powerful for that. I am not prepared, not at all, and the young man who looks part-animal, his spine so twisted that he walks on his feet and hands, straight-kneed and straight-elbowed terrifies me. I instinctively and uncourageously put Ros between us and am, in the next instant, deeply deeply ashamed. But it takes all of my courage to look him in the face when I hand him some rupees, and I’m weak with relief to see Raju jogging up to the car.

Later, he apologises for being away. And he is pleased that we gave rupees to these people. There is no welfare system here, and charity is all they have to depend on. But he is opposed to us giving money to dalits and beggars whom he classes as work-shy junkies.

Next Day

It is pre-dawn and we are driving through fog so thick it is totally impenetrable. The only time we can see out is when we pass through the old moghul villages. We are on our way back to the Taj Mahal to watch the sunrise.

At the village, even at this ungodly hour, small boys and young men crowd around the car and tap on the glass. When I tap back, the cheekiest of them startles and grins.

*

We are hidden in a thick, cold, drifting cloud, and hidden too is the Taj Mahal just a small way ahead of us. Weirdly Indian music sounds through the greyness, and every now and then turbanned and cloaked men pass and disappear within ten or twelve steps, eaten unprotesting by the mist.

Unearthly in the greyness the Hindu temple bell calls on the sun to rise, as our accidental guide talks to Raju about a cricket game current at the SCG. It is cold, and he is small, smaller than me, and petite under his too big trousers and polyester shirt. His teeth are patchy with betel juice and he has been waiting an hour or more for the mist to rise and the boat to get through to take him east to his work. He will work till sunset – about thirteen hours – after which he will catch the boat back, mist permitting, and sleep in one of the hovels we drove past all day. I want to give him the bread and butter we took from the hotel for breakfast, but Ros says to keep that back for the kids on the street. And he does have a job.

Raju has prayed to Howa, the wind god, and we wait, stamping our feet and shaking our fingers. Every now and then the mist seems to thin, and then rises again and blocks the view completely. Roselyne tells Raju his gods must be teasing him.

There are burrows in the sand the size of a curled human, and Raju tells us they are the sleeping burrows of the unpeople – the people who are lower even than dalits, who don’t have a name or a caste, who burrow into the sand for the few hours of warmth it offers after the sun has gone down. I wonder if these were the people we saw last night who don’t show by day, but Raju says no, for the most part those people would sleep at the doorways of temples.

The sun is beginning to rise. It reflects itself in the water. Around us we see that the ground is covered in human excrement, and a few feet away, the mist outlines the shape of another man squatting, relieving himself. The bells salute him and so do I, for daring to bare his arse in this freezing air.

We have been joined now by Vikram, who wears thongs on his frozen feet and red gloves on his hands. He is aged about 13, and looks nine. His English is restricted almost solely to numbers, but he knows Australia and cricket, and he’s not going to budge from here until we give him some money. If we do that before the sun rises, we will be immediately surrounded by the rest of the village who will eventually get angry with us, and take it out on Raju – this has happened before. And Raju needs to be able to return to the Taj Mahal for his work, so poor little Vikram will have to wait with us until his gods see fit to burn the mist from the sky.

And still the mist drifts in and lies heavily over the tomb. We have been here in this perishing cold since well before six; and now Vikram has offered me his gloves since my hands are freezing. He has the sweetest smile – and look, the mist is lifting!

*

We are blessed by the holy man on leaving. This comes in very handy on the road to Fatipur Sikri when an attack is mounted against us by a bullock, an army truck and an old man on a rickshaw.

Deeg

Deeg is the summer palace of the Maharajah of Bharatpur. Roselyne does not enjoy Deeg, but I rather like it. It is a satisfactory counterpoint to the well-kept magnificence of the palaces.

In the dusk we see, outlined against the slum, the camels and hovels of the gypsy people. Originally they came from Rajastan, to make iron-work for the king. The iron-work – knives and swords – was used for warfare between the kings. Six months in the making, they would be displayed, and a message sent to the king that the time had come for him to purchase his weaponry. After the sale had gone through, the grounds would be used for feeding and celebration. What days they would have been!

*

We pass a Hindu Temple, and not for the first time, I see Raju make a quick obeisance. When he sees me noticing, he says “On the road I pray any god for my safety, for your safety, for my car.” I think that’s a fine idea.

*

At the Hindu school on the way to Abaneri, we are invited in by the Headmaster. It is a well-tended little place, a dirt quadrangle surrounded by a low wall of classrooms. The children sit in rows on the dusty ground, divided into three groups according to age-range. The principal, a hectic and dedicated man, has no English to speak of, but none-the-less translates the childrens’ rote prayer for us – a prayer to the education deity. The children – giggling and cheeky – are diverted to find us there, and I make the mistake of winking at a small girl in the front row. The whole group takes it up, and when I start giggling they are merciless. After prayers, the headmaster takes us to see a classroom – a bare dirt floor and one desk and chair for the teacher, walls empty save for a blackboard about thirty inches square on which is written the alphabet. He brings the visitors book for me to sign – mine is the only signature – and is utterly charming. He returns with us to the car, and we load him up with boxes of coloured pencils we brought from home, the books Ros brought, some koala clips and pencil sharpeners.

We move on to the ruined temple at Abineri and the adjacent baths. Roselyne attracts affection at every holy place we go to by virtue of her knowledge which is exhaustive and her enthusiasm for Indian history and religion; and we are given a long and comprehensive tour of the baori and adjacent buildings. It is towards the end that our guide is alerted by Raju to the armed policemen following our progress from the battlement. Trouble is brewing; as a compliment to Ros we have been allowed into protected areas, and allowed to photograph things which should not be photographed. The guide leads us at a quick pace back to the end gate, but we pause for a second in the shadows of a sacred building out of sight of the police to load him up with tips for himself and bribes to pay off the agents of the law. We have just finished the transaction when the police arrive and escort us (with guns) back to the gates.

From there, in disgrace, we wander away from the eagle eye of the law and into the village at the end of the lane. It is tiny, and very pretty, with women in beautiful shades of purple, gold and green, and poor thatched shacks around a bare dirt common. The village potter – an old man with twig-thin legs and big strong hands, shows us how he makes clay pots, dishes and the cylindrical, handle-less cups for drinking char. He makes us one of everything which takes him perhaps fifteen minutes. Afterwards, we belong to the children who are cheeky and delicious and transfixed with the pictures they see of themselves in our cameras. Like all the children we have met so far,(with the exception of an extraordinarily intelligent and dignified Indian boy at the sordid Pratap Palace at Bharatpur) they sing “hello, hello, tampel? (sample?)” asking for giveaways. We have nothing left, but Raju buys biscuits and we give them half a pack each. They are happy, and Raju is happy because we have listened to him on both counts – unlike, he tells us Mr British Times who ignored him for twenty-three days.

We leave, with the children running behind us - and the elf-child, a feral boy, older than the others, watchful and ready to bite, is smiling for the first time. Because the biscuits he will have,” says Raju “and will not be taken to sell.”

“Don’t look, don’t see” says Raju, except for the disabled, but it is impossible not to see the poverty and hunger. In the towns and cities, the mass of beggars makes them dangerous and threatening – they mob quickly when they see a westerner and are angry and aggressive. But on the roads between little villages, a child will accept a packet of biscuits with great good humour and run back to his parents who look up and smile and wave.

The caste system has so much to answer for. A story in the Hindu Times said that the Dalits are being chased away from the refugee camps and kept from the aid pouring in in the wake of last week’s tsunami. They are beaten away from the feeding centres and refused access to medical help – and this by the second-most-backward caste. In earlier times, Dalits were said to have brought their fate upon themselves by their deeds in a past life: now, in more enlightened times they are accused (by Raju as well) of not wanting to work, of being junkies or alcoholics. But I haven’t seen any drunkenness, and I can’t imagine they would have any money for drugs – and it is always food they beg for, not money.

Jaipur

On our second day at Jaipur, our guide, Maresh, shows off to Raju by coming to sit with us in the restaurant. But he draws the line at sitting alone with me while Ros heads off to the ladies’. Politely excusing himself, he trips over his own feet in his hurry to leave the table. He is usually very urbane and stares in a most unwavering fashion as he tells us the history of his city. His eyes water in their unblinking concentration and later he tells us with some pride that he has been exercising his stare especially for Australians, having learnt that Australians prefer a direct gaze to the downcast Indian eyes as a way of showing trust and respect. Maresh is an excellent mimic, whose English was learned from his teachers at the Catholic School. He repeats everything for us, leaving a raised inflection and a questioning pause before the final word of each repeated question – thus “And this was where the Maharajah would meet with his - ? (pause) Courtiers.” Generations of catholic schoolmasters live on in his inflections. “You will be amazed to learn - ” prefaces many of his sentences, or “I am now telling you - ” Jaipur is for him “a place of marvels and wonders”, and indeed it is for me, too. The Observatory, built in the 1700s and looking, as Ros says, like a precursor to modern art, the Amba Fort, built in 1592, breathtakingly proportioned and scientifically climate-controlled, the crematoria of the Maharajahs, and the artworks, furnishings and fabrics at the Palace complex are all astounding in their inventiveness and intricacy.

I have seen marvellous things.

*

Tonight, for the first time, we get to an internet café, and I have two emails waiting from Paul.

*

Jaipur to Pushkar

Raju wants us to use the time well, so we begin at the zoo where we attract too much attention, particularly from groups of very polite young men who want to shake hands with us. We end up leaving, and head for the Albert Museum, which is dark, dark, dusty, full of mould and decay.

*

The Lakshminaraya Temple was built by Mr Birla. We are fortunate to arrive just in time for the morning prayer. We are blessed with oil and water, and Raju secures for us some carved and blessed sugar which I pack away for emergencies or disasters at home.

Wherever we stop a crowd appears behind us and always, always, there is one singing under his breath. We see a pickpocket boy, quick as a fish, darting through the market crowd chased by his irate victim.

And today, finally, we are allowed to eat at a locals-only roadside restaurant. There are small bungalows upstairs where we could eat privately, but we opt instead for the big tables on the edge of the highway. Raju is very strict with the staff in the matter of hygiene, and has them wash the table again before we sit down. I am reluctant to draw his attention to my glass which is encrusted with something small and dead. He is ordering for us and has agreed to join us at table. Both Ros and I feel this is something of a personal triumph.

*

We drive past a fairly mundane adventure – a car with a flat tyre and smashed windscreen. Raju’s description of the event turns it into a mournful indian haiku:
“burst is the tyre
flies is the stone:
broken the glass”

*

The Pushkar Palace is heaven and the sun is setting over the lake, just as it’s meant to do. A green-eyed girl and her father who plays the rawanhat-tha are providing the music and a turbanned boy with a samovar sells char in the lovely little terracotta cups I’ve been coveting. The lake itself is indescribable. I can’t believe that they wash themselves and their clothes in this stagnant green water. Holy it may be, but with the sewage and human detritus, the ashes of the dead and the filth of the town, it must be crawling with everything known to the microscope.

The light over the sacred lake falls black, and the houses reflect brightly in the black water. Ros and I have returned from the unaccompanied night walk through the town that we promised Raju we would never take. I bought some pretty little pots and matching mirrors for 100/rp for the six, and two little bound books of recycled paper for 50rp each.

Next Morning

Sacred Indian music amplifies over the lake, and Ros is off – unaccompanied again - in the freezing pre-dawn to watch the sunrise. Mist keeps most of the light away, but it is still recognisably India. Outside in the streets and on the stairs where the dancers gathered, the charboy’s disposable teacups, terracotta, flawless, handmade in the village, litter the path like so much debris. I would love to pick some up and take them home to sit on the garden wall that Paul built me.

*

Raju, discussing Indian movies: “In every one movie, three or four singings is necessary. Fightings and dancings and lovings and three or four singings.”

*

Savatri Hilltop Temple

The halfway point of this very steep climb is marked by a small boy playing the zither-like rawanhat-tha. He runs after me up a steep, steep path to alert me to the fact that a business card is falling out of my back pocket. On the return journey I stop to give him some pencils and he is ours for the rest of the long trip down, but it is Ros who wins his soul with a clip-on koala.

*

Lunch is at the Shiva Om, where the full-on buffet costs 50r. Because Raju is eating with us, and Raju is Hindu, we need only go to the buffet once – and after that we are properly served at the table 

*

On the way back from the Mosque of the Sufi Saint, we pass a Hindu funeral – many men carrying the flower-covered corpse on a bamboo and straw bier. They are taking the body to a small funeral bier that we passed on the way in. Women are not allowed to attend, Raju tells us, because they are too weak and are liable to cry.

*

At the end of every day we are covered in dust.

The mosque today was the least-friendly place – we were appropriated by a young guide who had no English , made to part with a few hundred rupee and taken off to be blessed against our will. After the blessing we ought to have done a single full turn around the shrine, but the shoving and pushing was so intense and the dislike of westerners so palpable, we ducked out a side entrance. The guide is probably still waiting for us…. I wonder (having lived for three years in a muslim country, and knowing the gentleness and hospitality that that entails) whether this is purely a local response or is connected with the new hostility hat been built up between us.

There were very many disabled beggars here, and many aggressive touts, but we are learning to cope with the touts. All the same, we don’t stop to take photos.

*

From the deck of the hotel, we marvel at the height of the mountain we climbed today. Raju, it transpires, had climbed up after us for our protection “because the goddess told him to.” As good a reason as any, Ros and I agree…

*

Jodhpur

We leave Pushkar on the holy day of Sakarand for which I am privately grateful. I tip the military doorman the princely sum of 50r (about $1.50) but alas it is the wrong doorman…. On the way to Jodhpur, we stop at a little village of Nimaj, a couple of ks off the main road. Raju has never visited this place, but he has heard that it holds a small castle, and we’re off with him to find it. We bump our way 4ks down a track with “natural” houses gathered around a “natural” village. (“Natural” in India means without plumbing, electricity or even running water.) And we arrive at a hilltop oasis where we are shown to a communal tent and given a tray of cold damp cloths, salt and cold lemonade. We have arrived at Chhatra Sagar, the tent resort that only operates from October to March.

It is exquisite and we are shown that high hospitality that can only exist in India. Raju, being Hindu, is taken for a meal while we are shown inside the tents - and now we must wait for him, for a change. It astounds me that such impeccable manners can thrive and survive in a place of such chaos and extremity.

Sri Niti tells us without rancour that many of the “traditions” of Hinduism are in fact a response to the Moslem invasions. Girls were only veiled and kept in their houses because they were being kidnapped by the Moslem marauders with such frequency. The deference shown to men also came from the same place – before the invasions, women worked, played and warred alongside their men.

I am acutely aware of the spectacle I present after this two hour search for the “castle” – especially, my muddy shoes and the fact that - shame of shames! - my feet were pointed at Sri Niti for at least half of our conversation.

*
Jodhpur

After Jaswant Thada – a monument most remarkable for its pigeons – we visit the utterly bewitching fort of Mehrangah. Very few places touch me as deeply as this one. The current Maharajah ascended to power at age four, and by the time he was adult, his role here had been reduced to the merely ceremonial. None-the-less, he has instigated a restoration and education regime centred around the heritage of Jodhpur, and has made a stunning success of it.

Mundoo Garden, memorial to an earlier Maharajah, is a riot of monkeys, small children who want to shake hands, and stone towers and stairways that look like a model of themselves. It is a remarkable effect of this reddish stone that it appears to be cut to “look like” stone; it looks for all the world as though Disney created it to simulate Indian memorial parks.

*

The little dalit girl in the marketplace watches me with the very persistent barrow boy, and when I finally take his photo to get rid of him, she stands motionless in my path. She is not like the other children, who swarm and call out one picture? one picture?

and pose and preen and delight in all the attention.

She stands with one finger to her mouth, dwarfed by the sack of rubbish on her back that she'll sell to the garbage traders. I smile at her and she smiles back, and I don't know what she wants, whether she thinks I want to photograph her (I dont - she's too fragile) or whether she has just gotten lost in watching the raucus boy demanding his bit of attention. Finally I lift the camera towards her, and she straightens a little and looks at the lens like the boy and though I wouldn't normally, I take a few shots and show them to her. When the shutter closes, she flinches, but when I show her the shot, she smiles the shyest of smiles and points at it without touching the camera and back to her thin little self. I nod and smile and tell her she's very pretty, and she doesn't understand but puts her fingers out bravely - not as a beggar, but as the boy had done, to shake hands. So I shake her hand, this little untouchable, and stroke her cheek, and Ros, who is watching, runs back with a packet of biscuits. The girl takes them, and shows them to her mum who has turned up by now with a begging bowl (a nice, clean one) and we drop a few rupees in and they both smile and wave goodbye and it is SO SAD!!!

Meanwhile, a warmly-dressed child on a bicycle keeps riding around after me demanding pens because she’s seen me buying pens and books at the market.

*

The clever little boy at our guesthouse has a very poor mother, but excels at school despite working hard seven days a week for food only at Dhillon House. We have taken against the Punjabi lady who rules this establishment. We think she is unkind to the boys, and besides the place is under a flight path and meanly equipped. She overcharges for everything and adds charges we haven’t agreed to and makes no attempt to be friendly. But the food – the dinners – are surpassingly good, so we won’t complain after all. Though if we did, we might mention the stink of the rocket fuel which we taste all day, and the plight of the little boy working long hours every night for no wage at all.

*

Jaiselmer

The desert children drift in like sand, appearing from nowhere to stand silent and shy and always watchful and patient. They do not beg, but they are happy to have their photos taken and happy too to take the sweets we offer. The older five boys are given a choice between pens and sweets, and choose pens – so we slip them sweets on the sly. A middle-sized boy asks us for water and is pushed away by the group. At a roadside café, we are put into a kind of purdah, made to eat separately behind a curtain, and I spend lunchtime text-messaging home.

At night in Jaiselmer, we see the most enchanting puppet show I have ever ever seen. “The Boy With The Ball” was exquisite and terribly funny. Afterwards, in an internet café where the computer connections don’t work, we are held against our will till our driver returns, and we realise then that Raju is onto our unaccompanied night-time wanderings. There is a driver to driver semaphore that obviously works overtime in India, like the Amah Telegraph in Malaysia. We have been spotted on one of our illicit walks, and Raju has been informed. The internet boy explains that he has been told to keep us inside until Raju arrives at 8:30 - and our cries that we didn’t know the computers were broken, and that two hours locked in this (filthy) little shop is unfair are met with sorrowful determination. He has given his word to Raju, and Raju is a man. Until 8:30 we are the computer-boy’s guest and may not leave the shop. He gives us warm bottles of lemonade and packets of chips and tries to cheer us up, and we subside with as good grace as we can muster. Without him leaving us, word is somehow sent to Raju, and thankfully we are released into his custody only about twenty minutes later. We cannot raise the matter with Raju without forcing him to discuss our many lapses, our unprotected night-time wanderings – and this would shame us all.

*
Today, after a night in the tiniest bedroom in the world, we go into the vast, empty desert.

*

At Jaiselmer Fort (medieval – the last kingdom to sign the British Treaty which it did in 1818) our guide tells us that the Pakistani Government is much beloved here – because without that government there would be no problem between Pakistan and India, and without these problems there would be no army presence. The army has brought progress which has changed Jaiselmer from a benighted desert outcrop into a popular tourist town. It has roads, electricity, and - most wonderful of all – water, piped from the Himalayas.

The tourists are good and bad, says the guide. They are changing the culture by their presence, but they also teach people not to throw rubbish and except in the villages the baby girls are no longer quietly “put by” to leave room for a son.

We have seen paintings of the gods on grains of rice, and old quilts stained and faded through eons of use, wooden deities and travelling shrines, ancient silver jewellery, beads and brasses and bought none of them.

*

There appear to be four main castes in India – The Brahmin, the Rajput, the merchants and the untouchables. They do not intermarry in Jaiselmer, but mingle freely. In the villages however, the dalits will always be outcast.

*

Here at Jaiselmer we watch the middle class women cleaning and cooking on their rooftops and are startled to be told that they are never allowed outside, except to the rooftops. Some dalit women are allowed to work as labourers, but the Brahmin and Rajput women are disbarred from any employment and the Jain caste are allowed only to conduct approved work (henna painting etc) from their own front rooms.

*

Thar

The desert has taken our voices. Munir meets us and takes us to the camp and at dusk our camel men load us onto the camels. We are at the end of a long camel train and reach the dunes just as the sun begins to slide down under the skyline. The littlest of the camel-boys, Prem, digs a hole in the sand and burrows down, shivering. Prem had been singing along the camel trek, but now the cold – it is quickly very cold indeed – has turned him to silence. An older boy with a drum takes his place and sings heroic songs in admiration of Ros, of me, of our sons and fathers, our husbands and brothers, grandfathers, uncles and eventually, under duress, of Stephanie, too. We are about to slip him a 20 rupee tip when he disgraces himself by asking for 500. Even the camel-boys laugh, and Ros sits and regards him with deep disbelief, and turns to drawing patterns in the sand. To salve the honour of our party, I proffer 25 rupees in a manner that suggests he has three short seconds to accept it. He does and runs off, but is plainly disgruntled. Later we see him being chased away by every pilgrim on the dunes. He is an outrageous young man, but good value for all that.

*

Saway describes his camel: “The palms of his feet are soft unto the touch.”

*

In the morning, we are woken by the camelmen’s news-song, and prepare in the pre-dawn darkness for a second ride. Prem’s father is taking us, and Saway. It is freezing – bone-achingly cold - and my hands are red and shaking within minutes. The sky is bruising deeply and eventually the village detaches itself from the darkness, standing out icily in the cold. The camels halt there for a moment, their bells clanging in the stillness, while Prem’s father sings out to the houses. And in the chill black morning a small shape breaks free and runs towards us. It is Prem, barefoot and sleepy-eyed, who has been sung out of bed because of Ros’s disappointment that he hadn’t appeared with Saway in the pre-dawn. He loses a day’s schooling to ride with us – a great cost to this camel boy whose schooling is intermittent and greatly prized. Roselyne is mortified.

At the end of the ride, when we pay the men off, she peels off her mittens and slips them into his hands. She will pay for this later and not be sorry, in the chill air of Bikanir. Prem remains expressionless.

*

Bikanir

If the desert has silenced us, the Rat Temple appals us. It is the complete illustration of all that has gone wrong, and all that contrives to maintain the despair of India. A temple dedicated to the worship and feeding of rats, where the poorest of the poor women deposit their filthy 5 rupee notes and buy rat food and milk and flowers to lay before the rodents. And worse still, where these women prostrate themselves face down in the filth and droppings and then bring who knows what disease home to their children and families; because the priests are fat and well fed and oblivious to all but their stomachs, but the rats are multitudinous and often diseased, and run over our feet and hide in the shoes that we leave by the gate. And outside, staring, cold little beggar brats ask us for rupees or biscuits or pens, but mostly for food. Inside, pathetic amounts of carefully scrounged savings are given to placate the rat god who has seen fit to punish these tragically innocent people with illness or accident. And when, of course, bubonic plague sweeps through, as it did in the 90s, the beggars, the dalits, the merchants and brahmins will unite – for once - to forbid the eradication of these holy temple deities.

By the time we arrive in Mandawa, we have been cold – very cold – for five days and five nights. It is a tiny taste of the real life, this incessant cold – though of course one that we at least could remedy at a stroke.

Raju, in a discussion. of the seasonal poverty of his village mentions that every 100 metres there is a temple. There are so many gods in India, and each must be fed – but worse, each supports a totally non-productive colony of priests and parasites.

*

In a filthy little workshop in a no-name village, all the young men gather to lift our car and examine the broken chassis. Yes, we have come to grief, at last, on the road; the chassis is currently held together with some of Paul’s gaffer tape. Before anything can be done, however, Ros and I must be shown respect. There is one chair in the workshop, and another is brought from down the road. The little fire in a bucket is appropriated from another workshop, for our comfort.

It has been a harrowing drive for the last few hours, with the broken car limping ever so slowly through the rain on the rutted clay roads. All of Raju’s prayers have bought us nothing. But the men in the village workshop bring us fire and chairs and their good humour and interest and patience and it's surely time for India to side with the people against their terrible, terrible gods!

*

Raju is under the car as I wind down the jack in the cold cold rain on a deserted road to no-where, with the muffler strapped to the car by a torn strip of purple-and-gold-spangled sari:

Me: Raju – you have put the handbrake on, haven’t you?

R: What?

Me: Handbrake – on?

R: Hand - ? What is handbrake?

2006 - Morocco

2006-05-13T23:41:00.000-07:00

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.