Rocks, The (20 page)

L
uc was driving again
when the first light crept into the mirror, navy blue against the black ahead through the windshield. The light encircled the horizon until he could make out the silhouette of the Atlas Mountains ahead and to the left.

The road, a gray line trending away over the shallowly contoured plain like a road in a children’s book, gained elevation as they approached Marrakech. They entered the Département de l’Haut Atlas and the land became greener, hillier, supporting small farms and vineyards, resembling the backcountry of Andalusia in southern Spain, which they had driven through before reaching Algeciras. They navigated with the Michelin map of Maroc. At a bookseller in the rue de l’Odéon, Luc had found a guidebook
Marrakech et Sa Région
, eight years old, published by Guides Pol;
édition 1962
; thirty-one pages and a town map. The center of the town, and its most undoubted attraction, assured the guide, was the great central square, the Djemaa El-Fna, one of the busiest market squares in Africa, around which spread the labyrinthine streets and alleys of the vast souk, the largest market in Morocco. Inside the medina, or old town, of convenient access to the Djemaa El-Fna and the souk, would be found a number of riads, large old houses converted to guest accommodations with rooms around a central courtyard.

They passed through the walls of the medina. The streets immediately grew narrow and crowded with people. Luc followed the few signs for the Djemaa El-Fna until the signs stopped and the serpentine streets, lined with wavy-sided, outward-leaning brown walls pocked with irregular doorways and small windows, twisted away into an unnavigable maze. He turned, trying to follow a fading sense of direction, and was soon lost.

“Look,” said Aegina, who had the guidebook open on her knees. “A riad. Al Hamoun. It’s in the book. Shall we try it?”

•   •   •

A
h, oui, bien
sûr,”
said the shyly smiling, lightly bearded concierge/maître d’hôtel.

He led them to the second floor, where a balcony landing wrapped around a courtyard garden and gurgling fountain. The room was spacious. White walls, the long narrow French window framed with a wide strip of royal blue. A large double bed with a thin mattress, sagging in the center but covered with inviting-looking clean white sheets. Aegina went to the window, opened it inward, and pushed out the louvered shutters. There was a view of an alley, rooftops, some green palms beyond a wall.

Aegina turned to Luc, grinning with excitement. “I don’t think I want a nap now. I want to go explore.”

•   •   •

A
fter the press
of narrow streets between contiguous ragged-walled cinnamon buildings, an inward-toppling adobe pueblo continuum, the Djemaa El-Fna opened before them like a stadium-sized flea market. Rows of stalls shaded with cloth; idle donkeys; carts, tables covered with beads, necklaces, gems, fossils, dates, pistachios; orange juice stalls; snake charmers; chained Barbary apes; dervish dancers with wrist cymbals; drummers; beriberied beggars; bent pretzel-twisted snot-streaming emaciated blind cripples extending palms to the high floating clouds; water sellers dressed like London’s Beefeaters with brass cups and bulging, darkly sweating goatskins full of water.

Like a swarm of gnats, packs of feral boys in ragged shorts and T-shirts found them and tugged at their arms.

“Hippie! Hippie! What you want?”

“Come, hippie! Just for look!”

“You want kif?”

Cheerful grinning boys with glaucoma-clouded eyes, tooth-gapped scurvied gums, pellagra lesions.

“Berber bag!”

“Amber necklace! Silver!”

“I guide, I guide you, hippie!”

Shedding the boys, they found the entrance to the souk, a street that quickly devolved into a rutted path that led between buildings and descended in crooked tacks beneath sagging strips of canvas strung overhead, throwing bars of sun and shadow below. Stall-sized shops, filling narrow alleys between stuccoed walls lit with bare hanging bulbs, lined both sides of the path. Alleys of carpets and kilims, alleys of djellabas, leather bags, saddles, belts, alleys of sorbet-hued leather Berber slippers with pointed upturned toes. In almost every shop a transistor radio sat on a shelf or the floor, with a crude wire antenna snaking toward the low ceiling. Out blared Moroccan torch songs: ululant waves of female lamentation.

“Shirts!” said Aegina, grabbing Luc’s arm.

They’d reached shirt alley. Shop after shop filled with shelves of soft cotton shirts, shirts on hangers in front of each little retail space. Several styles and colors were displayed but the predominant shirt was white, with a round collarless opening to mid-chest, fastened with multiple small thread buttons.

Aegina fingered a white shirt hanging out in the alley. The proprietor, a short, plump, clean-shaven man wearing a white djellaba and yellow slippers, quickly plucked the hanger from aloft and laid the shirt out across his arm before her.

“Best quality,” he said, looking up from the shirt to Luc and Aegina with limpid eyes, as if proffering his firstborn for consideration of a scholarship at a music conservatory.

“That’s what you’re looking for, right?” said Luc. “It’s like yours?”

“Sort of,” she said. “But this material around the collar is really a piece of trim sewn around the edge—”

“Very fine,” said the proprietor. “Best-quality stitching.”

“Yes,” said Aegina, smiling at the man. She pulled her black shirt out of her bag. “I want it like this, do you see? The fancywork, whatever it’s called, round the collar, is embroidered into the shirt material, not stitched on afterward.”

“Yes, yes, yes, I understand,” said the proprietor, hanging the shirt up. “Come.” He beckoned them to follow him with a quick repetitive downward motion of his hand. “Come, I show you.”

“Do you have black shirts?” Aegina asked him.

A brief, tolerant exhalation. “Of course. Plenty black.”

They followed him into the back of his shop, the small space overstuffed to the ceiling with piles of shirts. He pushed through mounds with practiced bursts of force. He rooted through cardboard boxes. He turned and held a black shirt up before Aegina. “Especial shirt,” said the proprietor. With fat fingers he drew their attention to the embroidery around the collar, at the hem, the cuffs. “All make by hand. No machine. Especial. Very best quality. Much time.”

“Right, that’s more like it,” said Aegina. “Do you see, Luc?”

“Yeah.”

“I want to buy a hundred,” Aegina said to the proprietor. “How much per shirt for one hundred?”

“One hundred shirt?” said the man. “You want one hundred?”

“Yes.”

“This is fifty dirham shirt.”

“Fifty dirham?” said Aegina, clearly surprised.

“Of course. One person working, by hand, very careful, all day. Sometime two day.”

She looked at Luc. “That’s about six pounds. I can’t do that.”

“For one hundred shirt I make best price, thirty dirham one shirt. Three thousand dirham, one hundred shirt,” said the man.

“I’m sorry, it’s just nowhere near what I can pay.”

“How much you pay?”

“I’m looking for shirts for no more than ten dirham,” said Aegina.

The man carefully folded and smoothed the valuable black shirt, gazing down at it, smiling. “I have shirt for you for ten dirham.” He placed the black shirt down and moved toward the front of his shop. He pulled another black shirt from a pile and held it up to Aegina. “Very fine quality. One shirt, ten dirham. One hundred shirt, I make best price, six hundred dirham.”

Aegina looked at the shirt, and glanced at Luc. “See, it’s like the white shirt. All the trim is sewn on.”

“But black thread,” the proprietor noted sagely.

“Black thread?” said Luc.

“Of course.” He pantomimed trying to rip the trim off, conveying that it was practically riveted to the shirt and would never come off. “Strong.”

“Black thread is strong?”

“Stronger.”

•   •   •

A
t sunset they emerged
from the souk, exhausted, disoriented, as if out of a circus tent, into the Djemaa El-Fna. They’d heard the sound of it inside the alleys as they drew closer, like the ocean approached through buffering dunes. The number of people in the square had increased many times since they had passed through it in the afternoon. Countless men were drumming and clashing cymbals to a single aggregate rhythm. Smoke from braziers, from oil drums, mixed with spice and savory particulate, hung in oily blue wreaths over the crowd. Crippled dogs loped in skewed diagonals.

“I’ve got to sit down,” said Aegina.

“Are you hungry?”

“Yes.”

“Me too.”

They climbed steps to the second-story balcony of the Café des Palmiers, which overlooked the square. The tables on the balcony, bathed in the light of sunset, were all taken.

A deep, heavily accented, recently familiar voice penetrated the ambient din, in English:

“The little Renault people.”

A man, seated with a woman at one of the tables, stood up and drew out two empty chairs. “Eat with us.”

He was in his mid-thirties, medium height bolstered by Spanish boots to not quite six feet, studiedly dressed as a Barbary pirate: beneath an embroidered blue Berber vest, his cream linen djellaba glowed pink in the crepuscular light, a tasseled leather satchel of genuine antiquity hung from a strap across his chest like a bandolier. Sheaves of long blond hair hung below the folds of the black cloth he had wound around his head into a turban. A red walrus mustache obliterated his mouth.

The woman smiled radiantly and stood to greet them. She was about ten years younger than the pirate, and taller in white espadrilles. She too wore a turban, more loosely wrapped than his, of rust-colored silk, the same color as her hair. A long plain white shirt hung over white dhoti trousers gathered at her slim ankles.

“Hello!” she said warmly, as they approached. She stood and embraced Aegina and kissed both her cheeks, and then did the same to Luc. Her hair, pungent and slick with some oil, flopped against his face and mouth.

They had drunk beer together on the ferry from Algeciras to Tangier. Rolf, a German, was shopping for Moroccan merchandise for his boutique in Munich. He’d introduced Minka as his Yugoslavian girlfriend. “I’m Montenegrin,” she’d said in nearly accentless English. She looked more like a Pre-Raphaelite muse, with mahogany-red hair, large green eyes, and long milk-white, blue-veined neck. They spoke English, also the lingua franca between Rolf and Minka, who did not appear to speak much German.

When they’d returned to their cars on the ferry, Luc and Aegina to their stonewashed Renault, Rolf and Minka to his mud-flecked black Jaguar sedan, Rolf had admired their pluck at heading for the hinterland of Africa in their meringue of an automobile. “You are braver than me to drive this little Renault,” he said, with a suggestion of mirth somewhere beneath his inscrutable mustache. Rolf’s every statement sounded as if it were enunciated in unison with a Berlitz language course record.

Now he said, “So you make it in the little Renault?”

“Yeah, it was great,” said Luc.

“Did you find any shirts yet?” asked Minka.

“No,” said Aegina. “We just spent hours looking in the souk. We’ll go back tomorrow. It wasn’t encouraging.”

“Of course,” said Rolf. “They show you the tourist shirt with the tourist price. You have to find the manufacturer.”

“That’s what we’ll try to do tomorrow,” said Luc, irritated by Rolf’s implication that they were witless rubes who would be taken for every dirham. Luc knew that already.

“It’s incredible, Marrakech, no?” said Minka, tossing her hair and gleaming at them both. “Did you get here last night?”

“No, this morning,” said Aegina.

“Look!” She waved a hand toward the balcony. “The Djemaa El-Fna! It’s the most amazing scene, isn’t it? Like a fairy tale.”

“You drive all night?” said Rolf.

“Yes. One of us drove while the other slept,” said Luc.

Rolf said: “We spend the night in Tétouan. We make it in four hours straight today. Now we got a fantastic room at the Mamounia. Winston Churchill’s room. He always come here.”

“I’m so glad we found you,” said Minka, briefly touching Aegina’s arm, and looking at Luc. “I missed you both after we left Tangier.”

They ate couscous and tagine and dense unbleached Moroccan bread and drank two cold bottles of white Moroccan wine. After the sun dropped below the minareted backdrop, Rolf pulled a small wood and brass pipe from his satchel and lit it. A cloud of sweet smoke rose over the table and then flattened in the light breeze and drifted away.

“It’s cool to smoke dope here?” asked Luc.

“I think it’s cool, man,” said Rolf. He passed the pipe to Luc, who took a drag and held it out to Aegina. She sucked gently and passed it to Minka.

“Is it Moroccan?” asked Luc.

“Of course. Kif from the Rif. I always buy from my dealer in Tétouan when we come through. It’s fresh, just the tip of the leaves. No stalk.”

They were all tired from the driving and soon fell into a sleepy, giggling stupor.

“We’re going to go,” said Luc, as Aegina’s head fell onto his shoulder.

“Please come have dinner with us tomorrow at the Mamounia,” said Minka.

•   •   •

T
hey behaved as easily
as step-siblings when they got back to their room, although they’d shared only the Renault until now.

Each went to the bathroom down the hall in turn. Aegina returned smelling of toothpaste and got into one side of the bed wearing a T-shirt and underpants. The light in the room was poor, and Luc turned it out. He undressed to his underwear and got in the other side of the bed. The dim ambient light of the nighttime street came through the shutter louvers.

“Luc?”

“Yes?”

“Thank you so much for coming with me.”

“Oh, well . . .” He groped for a suitable reply, something neither too casual or enthusiastic, rather than tell her it was already the most exciting thing he’d ever done in his life. “It’s fun.”