Back of Beyond (16 page)

We were living a virtually cash-free life. We insisted on giving Julio’s father something for the house he’d so generously provided. He refused to take more than $20 a month, including all the electricity and even two bottles of Canary rum, which he left outside our door on the first Monday of each month.

We were utterly happy in our village and had no real desire to go anywhere else on the island. I found great satisfaction in painting again, something I’d let slide for months, and Anne discovered a previously unknown gift for knitting enormous shawls in bright wool colors with one-inch-diameter needles!

Every couple of weeks we’d pack a box of these new creations, leap into the camper, and drive thirty or so bumpy miles back into Las Palmas to sell our work to bored tourists with lots of money and very little to spend it on. Not that we needed the money, but it was rewarding to see people willing to pay real cash for our rooftop creations. And it somehow justified our return to the village for another two quiet weeks.

The residents of El Roque were a hard-working bunch. Up by five o’clock every morning, the men moved off quietly to tend the banana plantations on the surrounding hillsides, while the women cleaned every part of their houses (even the outdoor steps and the cobblestones on the main path through the village) before baking, washing, cooking, buying from the peddlers and fish vendors who passed through the village every day. No soap operas or siestas here. No meeting at the mall for a brioche and a bitch. Just the solid, daily, dawn-to-dusk ritual that should have left everyone worn out, but in fact seemed to have just the opposite effect. Our village had dignity, pride, and constant pep. If there were family problems, we never saw them. If there was malicious gossip or backbiting it must have been taking place well off the main path that we walked every day. If there was infidelity or illicit romance, it was done with such craft and guile as to be unnoticeable.

I know I’m a naïve romantic at heart and maybe I wanted my village to be a little too perfect, but, at least for the two of us, it brought a peace and a pace of creative energy that we had never experienced before and only rarely since. El Roque was a true home and we became as close to the villagers as our natures could allow. We went fishing and crab hunting with the men (the latter at night with huge torches of reeds dipped in tar that drew the crabs from the rocks like magnets). We worked in the banana plantations, we picked minimountains of tomatoes, we painted portraits of the villagers and gave them as gifts, we learned how to prepare the aromatic sauces for Canary Island fish dishes, and we even learned to love bananas in all their culinary variations!

El Roque is still a touchstone for us both—a place we have vowed to return to one day, a place that will remain with us forever and a place, in hindsight, where we perhaps should have stayed longer…

I lie wrapped in blankets on the warm sand, looking up at the star-filled sky. I can’t sleep. The moon is full and throws silver-edged shadows across the desert. The camels are restless too. They know their days of lazy grazing in the hills outside Goulimine are at an end. They have been watching our long preparations—filling the goatskins with water, packing the rugs and boxes of silver jewelry and all the other trading items, sorting the sacks of flour and sugar, cleaning the saddles and harnesses. They know today is departure day. We are finally off across the Sahara with the “Blue People” nomads.

I smile under those stars and the camels burp and fart in sympathy.

Say
Sahara
slowly and it’s the hot
sergi
that blows for days on end across the deserts of Western Africa. Say it fast and loud and it’s the sharp, knife-blade ridges that rise from endless gravel plains. Whisper it and you’ve got the vast nothingness of wind-skimmed sand stretching fifteen hundred miles south from Morocco’s Atlas Mountains to the steamy tropics of Nigeria, Senegal, and the Ivory Coast.

Sahara. A vast empty world as big as the United States and hardly known at all. It’s the epitome of desertness; a place everyone has dreamed of exploring with the nomads and their camel caravans—to go wherever they go and see the infinities through their eyes.

So, after years of musings and procrastinations I finally come to Marrakech, Morocco’s northern gateway to the High Atlas and the desert. I expect Saharan overtures here but instead find a lovely rose-red city of minarets, broad boulevards, and a mazelike older quarter, the medina, couched in a bowl of palm groves and orange orchards. No sign here of any “Blue People” nomads.

Founded as a tent city way back in 1062 by Yusef ibn-Tash-tin, a ferocious leader of Saharan nomads, the city has experienced the inevitable periods of invasion, cultural demise, and dramatic renaissance, most recently following the proclamation of Moulay Hassan as king here in 1873. At that time the country was known as the Kingdom of Marrakech, and the city, with its ornate palaces and shaded gardens, was reestablished as the great cultural crossroads of this powerful nation. Today, under King Hassan II, it retains that role.

“So where’s the desert?” I ask.

“Far away, behind the Atlas,” I am told by the locals who point proudly at the snow-capped peak of J’bel Toubkal (12,720 feet), the highest mountain in Northern Africa. “First enjoy our city, then go to your desert.”

I am restless, impatient for the Sahara. But then I find the Djemaa el Fna, the nation’s tribal meeting place and market, right in the middle of Marrakech. To many Moroccans the Djemaa is still the center of the world, and after two days held in its hullabaloo, I begin to understand why. It’s a tumultuous prelude to my desert journey.

Surrounded by a scrabble of seedy hotels, arcaded teahouses, and lean-to stores piled high with Moroccan trinkets, the Djemaa is a raggedy space as big as three football fields and about as charmless. The name translates as “Place of the Dead” (the severed heads of rebels and traitors were once proudly displayed here), and for a few hours a day it feels that way. But shortly after dawn the magic comes—even as early as 5:00
A.M.
, life begins to leech into the space from the dozens of little alleys that feed in from the
souks
(markets) and medina. The eerie cry of the muezzin echoes from the minaret of the Koutoubia mosque, which rises over the Djemaa like Allah’s warning finger.

A couple of hours later you begin to see this place for what it really is and has been for almost eight hundred years—a magnificent daily melting pot of Moroccan cultures, a teeming urban oasis for the Berber tribespeople from the mountains, the nomads from the Sahara, the Bedouins, the Tuareg, the diminutive Chleuh and black-skinned traders from Senegal and Mauritania.

They flock in by the hundreds, turning this amorphous space into an amphitheater of activity: wily merchants from Fes and Casablanca spreading their silver bracelets and necklaces on worn shards of carpet; loquacious medicine men extolling the virtues of syrupy potions in brown glass vials, promising potency and “power of the limbs” to the gathering crowds; turbaned counselors offering advice for the lovelorn; astrologers with elaborate charts; jugglers; men with monkeys; men with snakes swirling out of baskets and around their necks to rasping tunes played on tin flutes; men who pull scorpions from their mouths; a pyramid of acrobats in scarlet tights featuring a tiny tot of a boy who bends in the most unusual places; a holy man, shadowy and aloof under his umbrella; veiled and cloaked women selling hard-boiled eggs served with a pungent dipping sauce, and the exotic bell-ringing, trinket-adorned water vendors offering refreshments of questionable quality from brass cups dangling from their bright red costumes. I was captivated by the beauty of blue-robed Berber dancing girls adorned in silver and jewels, their teeth and eyes flashing in the bright morning sun.

The crowd increases with the heat. Outsiders like me retire to the sidelines at regular intervals to sip sweet mint tea in the shady cafés. By 10:00
A.M.
the orange sellers are out in force, squeezing those wonderfully aromatic Moroccan fruits for the juice addicts. A young man who has been offering his services as guide for the last hour nudges my arm and laughs at the old men gathered at the stalls, drinking the juice devotedly as if it were the very nectar of life.

“They can’t drink alcohol. It is forbidden,” the young man explains. “So they get drunk on oranges!” And they do seem a little tipsy as they wobble away, tripping over their long striped
djellabas
(thick, hooded kaftans). Does the juice ferment in the heat? Does Allah know about this?

Over on the south side of the Djemaa are the storytellers surrounded by circles of enthralled listeners—a hundred or more in each circle, silent and still as the raconteur swirls, leaps, crouches, shouts, whispers, weeps, and wails in a mesmerizing one-man theater, acting out every nuance of some ancient drama that they all know by heart and yet hear fresh again every time.

Then comes the rich aroma of cinnamon from the trays of sweet cakes carried by artful youngsters, almost Dickensian with their sly eyes and “pick-a-pocket-or-two” demeanor. Everyone eats them—even the black-shrouded figure of an aged scribe pauses in the middle of a letter he is composing for a distraught veiled woman and licks his sticky fingers, one by one. Next to him a magic-man sells predictions on little pieces of folded paper while a young apprentice snake charmer milks the venom from a squirming black cobra and dodges the lightning strikes of a second, which rears (four feet of flared anger) from a battered cardboard box. Even the shoeshine boys, who’ve seen this kind of thing every day for years, watch with awe and nod knowingly as the boy snatches the cobra in midstrike and bundles it back into the box.

And the smells! By midday the whole place shimmers with the aromas of the mini—spice mountains displayed by merchants on the edge of the square and the broiling lamb
mechoui
from open-air kitchens set up by Berber cooks who left their high mountain villages before dawn to spend the day here sweating, swatting flies, and serving up some of the tastiest meat in the world.

Less pleasant are the smells from the leather tanneries hidden way back in the murky depths of the medina where scores of half-naked laborers toil in mud-walled vats pounding, stretching, and drying the ragged skins in a hellhole of noxiousness.

My guide (he has now proclaimed himself my “friend-for-life”) suggests a change of scene—a stroll through the bazaar “just to see what’s there” and swearing that spending my money is the last thing on his mind. “It’s much cooler there, not so noisy. And if you don’t like, we come back. No problem, okay?”

So I prepare myself for battle, girding my loins with guile. We enter the shadowy labyrinths of the souks, a place of endless twists and turns and suffocating cul-de-sacs ending against impenetrable wooden doors big enough for elephants to pass through; a place of secretive dealings and sideways glances from eyes lurking under the hoods of muttony djellabas; a place from which you wonder if you’ll ever emerge.

The din is unbelievable, particularly in the souks of the blacksmiths, wood carvers, leather embossers, silversmiths, copper pounders, and rice-pot cleaners. Donkeys bearing enormous loads are driven through the milling throngs by irascible boys barking out the watch-your-back cries of “
balek-balek!
” We seek relief in the quieter souks of the rug weavers, the wool dyers, and the makers of those lovely pointed slippers known as
ba-booshe
.

There is no middle ground. I leave my guide behind in the souks and abruptly enter even more mazelike alleys bound by high mud walls with the beetle figures of widow-women, cloaked entirely in black and scurrying in the shadows, on errands of apparent life-or-death import. I know that behind the high walls are gracious courtyards with little gardens and splashing fountains and all the intense domesticity of Moroccan family life, but I see nothing of this. The ancient wooden doors are sealed tight. There are no windows. There is no apparent logic to the endless meanderings, laid out centuries ago to baffle enemies. The outsider is alienated, threatened, and very quickly lost. You try to return to the comforting din of the markets but every way you twist only seems to lead you deeper into the endless maze. A hand touches your arm and body and heart leap together. “Sir, you should not be here. Not good place at all, sir. Come with me.”

You’ll clutch at any straw and follow any stranger who shows the semblance of a smile, hoping that a few words of thanks will be gratitude enough when you regain your bearings.

Except you never do.

Your newfound guide knows your confusion and leads you ever deeper into the mysteries, asking endless questions about your ancestry, your education, your vacation plans, and your current level of affluence. He claims to know everything—the places for the finest carpets, the cheapest turquoise, the best silver bracelets, the softest leather, and you go along with it because you have no choice.

Finally as you turn the last corner and reenter the market throng you are reminded by your wily guide that he has saved you from the terrible perils of the dark alleys and that his only purpose in life now is to ensure your safety, your happiness, and your pecuniary well-being. (Another friend-for-life.)

And so begin the real rituals of the souk—the time-honored tradition of bargaining for objects you’re not really sure you want but can’t resist, because the longer you spend talking the cheaper they get. Who can refuse an ornate silver-handled Berber knife in a bejewelled scabbard that starts at $100 and ends at the giveaway price of $12? Of course you know it’s not genuine silver and you know the blue and red stones cannot possibly be real turquoise and amber for that price, but where else can you have so much fun, with complimentary mint tea and sweet cake snacks too? Here in the comforting hustle and bustle of the souk time can be forgotten and the slow subtle rhythms of Islamic life can be enjoyed from your seat on a camel saddle, burnishing your bargaining skills with patience, eloquence, and endurance.

How dull and unimaginative seem the sterile price tags, cash registers, and retail regimentation back home. Here the ritualized process of negotiation becomes a little lesson of life you’ll remember forever. You learn to resist without insult, to reject without rancor, to reconsider with grace and benevolence. You offer wonderfully esoteric arguments to justify your offered price, supported by anecdotes, clever analogies, and stimulating similes. You permit the process to encompass a discussion of the weather, world politics, the sweetness of Moroccan oranges, the excellence of the tea, and the honeyed richness of the little pastries that are brought specially for you by the young son of the merchant. You imply interest in other objects, digress for a while, then return to the price of the original item. You flirt, you cajole; he praises, he sighs (he may even weep a little if the item is more than a mere trinket). You hold hands, you toast, you laugh at the pathetic antics of other foreigners who appear too impatient or too embarrassed to bargain; you share little secrets with shrugs, you exchange little wisdoms with your eyes.

In short, it becomes a wonderful exercise in mental shadow-boxing, where every twist and turn only seeks to bind the two of you together in mutual admiration and anticipation of the outcome. A voice in your head, becoming smaller and smaller, tries to remind you that you already bought two of these knives somewhere else yesterday and that Customs may confiscate them all anyhow, but it’s too late. You’re in too deep. The bond is too strong. The game is already won by the merchant, who bows again, proclaims your negotiating prowess to an assemblage of admiring onlookers, pours you another glass of sweet mint tea, and explains how his love for you is such that he is almost willing to give you the invaluable knife just to maintain your newfound friendship. The result is inevitable, the memory indelible!

The sun is setting. Shards of brilliant scarlet flash on the rough mud walls. It’s time to return to the Djemaa to find fresh diversions in that vast space, full of hype and hullabaloo.

Night comes and crowds cluster around even more bizarre antics than those offered during the day. Five little boys with powdered faces, dressed in effeminate costumes, dance strangely sensual dances in the glow of a dozen kerosene lamps. The men in the crowd stand silently, mesmerized by the delicacy of their movements; the women refuse to watch. There are unusual smells in the air—scents of an illicit nature. Perfumed young girls parade together, unveiled, yet untouchable. Young men stroll hand-in-hand (a familiar custom between male friends) watching the girls’ flouncings or collect in conspiratorial huddles on the cafés terraces. Two men box each other in a carefully orchestrated warm-up as a crowd builds and wagers are exchanged; a group gathers to watch as an old man in a huge turban seems to keep a tray with two glasses on it, suspended by itself in midair….