The Koutoubia Mosque and the Atlas Mountains (source)
In December I spent a week in sunny + beautiful Marrakesh. What follows are a series of anecdotes from my time there — a first pass, if you will, at the travel journal-type writing to which I find myself increasingly drawn, and a third-ish pass at bilingual prose. Here I have opted to mix French and English with a “code-switch” method; in the future, I may incorporate side-by-side translations or sentences in (language x) whose syntax reflects conventions of (language y). I call this latter technique the “Javier Marías method.” More on this bilingual writing stuff in a forthcoming piece…for now, enjoy Marrakesh!
I. Sandstone, tile, clay. In the late afternoon, the air in Djemma El Fna is suffused with dust and noise: honking horns, children’s wails, beating drums, revving engines, high-pitched pungi, heavy footfalls. A blond woman wearing a white tunic and patterned harem pants stoops to take a picture of a monkey held on a chain, her phone thrust toward its shrunken face. The thin skullcapped man who holds its chain observes her silently. Soon he will yank the monkey back and move towards her, hand outstretched and mouth moving in rapid French or English, cinquante dirhams la photo, madame, fifty for photo, cinquante, fifty. The woman will relent after her initial reluctance; he leaves her with no other choice. But fifty dirhams, or five euros, must strike her as a steep price to pay for a photo of a chained monkey.
Across the way, dark-skinned men proffer identical racks of knockoff soccer jerseys to passersby. These men are possibly from the south — Mauritania, Mali, Senegal, or elsewhere below the Sahara — perhaps drawn to Marrakesh for its strong tourist economy. They make their rounds at a steady pace, circling the square and searching for buyers in the sea of standoffish tourists. Because they sell goods not services, they cannot use the technique favored by many vendors here: provide the service first, demand the money second. They cannot give someone a jersey and then demand payment, expecting that the person will not just hand the jersey back. They must earn their money honestly. And so they circle the square for hours on end, calling out greetings to jittery pedestrians, following those whose gaze lingers, scouring alleyways and café patios, perching themselves on ledges shaded from the sun.
II. We fell victim to the provide-then-demand technique yesterday. As we walked across the square, a woman approached L and told her that she had beautiful eyes. This should have been a warning; never trust a compliment given to you by someone who probably has something to sell. Des yeux si bleus ! And your sister, she added, gesturing at B, she has beautiful eyes too, beautiful brown eyes, different than blue eyes, not like the ocean, but très beaux, vraiment magnifiques nonetheless. Might she paint some henna on the hands of these two beautiful blue- and brown-eyed girls? And before they could answer, she had grabbed B’s hand, conjured up an ink-filled pipette and begun to draw unsteady sloping lines on her skin. The result was pathetic — a few splotched lines, an attempt at a budding lotus flower, B’s name written in Arabic on the side. (Later, we would find out that she had actually written a series of random letters.) We coughed up the coins that we had in our pockets, sixty dirham between the three of us, and fled to the café duly ashamed of our gullibility and acquiescence.
Djemma El-Fna at dusk (source)
III. On its east side, Djemma El-Fna (literally ‘assembly of the dead’ — a reference to the public executions staged here in the 11th century) abuts the narrow alleyways of the souk, where men sit on folding chairs and drink mint tea while tourists and locals pour over stacks of Chinese imports and Moroccan handicrafts: leather bags, ceramic bowls, counterfeit designer goods, linen tunics, copper jewelry, braided sandals. To interested customers, they may call out an inflated price; as a rule of thumb, one should assume that the first price offered is 3x higher than what would be fair to pay. Here, bargaining is not only accepted but expected. Few salesmen will begrudge the frugal or shrewd customer. These shopowners are generally less desperate than the wandering vendors in the square. Their stores receive much foot traffic, and by the end of the day, they can be nearly sure to have turned a profit.
It is hard to blame the wandering vendors for their tricks. If they do not sell their t-shirts or paint their henna, they will not eat, and this prospect — those “intestines curling like snakes,” as Knut Hamsun once wrote — does not incentivize well-mannered salesmanship. Zeal and charm cannot make ugly products beautiful or poor services worthwhile. Survival demands guile and deception.
IV. Le Maroc et la France, ce sont des pays frères. This is what the man running juice stand 52 tells us as he pours our pre-mixed fruit juice into plastic cups. (Surely the strangest feature of Djemma El-Fna is the 70-odd identical fruit juice stands that circle the plaza; one wonders how they all make enough money to get by.) He tells us that his brother works in Lyon and his sister lives in Nantes. His cousin set up a restaurant in Grenoble and his uncle spent five years in Lille. He was planning on moving to France, to Marseille, but ultimately chose to stay in Marrakesh. Il faut qu’on construise notre propre pays aussi. The conversation turns to soccer. He says that the French and Moroccan teams are the best they have ever been — des équipes vraiment formidables — and that their face-off next week will be a battle of giants. But win, lose or draw, little will change. French tourists will keep coming to Morocco and Moroccan workers will keep going to France. On est tous des frères et des sœurs.
V. Tonight we walk back from dinner with T, a local friend of L’s family. He is a man of unassailable generosity and candor, possessed of ordinary good looks and an easy laugh. That afternoon, we sat in his shop for hours while he poured tea and rolled hashish joints. He told us that he was proud to have reached fifty in good health, proud to have a full head of hair and a successful business, proud to own a plot of land in the countryside, proud to cultivate tomatoes and onions and lettuce — produce that he hoped, inshallah, to one day export to Europe — proud of his smooth skin and flexible limbs, and proud, even, of his failed year-long marriage.
His ex-wife was a headstrong and uncompromising woman, une femme qui ne savait pas dire « oui, chéri » quand il le faut. T wanted a marriage of mutual possession — a fusing of two beings into one. He wanted to know her whereabouts at every minute, to leave her side only on rare occasions, to ingest and assimilate every fiber of her body and soul into his own. Même quand on fait pipi, il faut qu’on se tienne au courant. He laughed and exhaled a thick eddy of smoke. She wasn’t on the same page. These days, he told us, men behave like women and women behave like men. C’est la féminisation de la société, c’est le monde à l’envers. I glanced at L. She was staring at T with narrowed eyes. I suppressed a smile.
VI. A week ago we were in Bordeaux, drinking mint tea at a café in Saint-Michel when Morocco beat Spain in the World Cup. The sound of horns blaring became unbearable after fifteen minutes. Fans wearing Moroccan flags like capes set off red and green fireworks across the city. The gendarmerie walled off access to major plazas. Trams stopped running because people had flooded the streets. Shouts and ululations rang deep through the night.
I am told that these playful and harmless celebrations pale in comparison to the riots unleashed by even a low-stakes, friendly match between the Algerian and French national teams. The Algerians have not forgotten 132 years their country spent under French rule, nor the bloody, eight-year war they waged to secure independence. Any face-off between their national teams amounts to a rehashing of old resentments, a reopening of barely healed wounds. Cars burn in cities across the country. Windows shatter. Tear gas infuses the air.
But tonight will be non-violent. I am running home in the darkness to put down my bag and join L by the quays. The night promises dim lights, heavy heads, bodies pressed closed. Cars stall, bumper to bumper, in the streets. Young children hang out the windows and shout while their parents honk ecstatically. Men zoom through the gaps on motorcycles waving Moroccan flags. Even I, who care little for the going-ons of the World Cup, cannot resist the pure joy that swells the air. The sidewalks fill with people. We chant and clap and sing. Everyone is heading the same way. Tous à la Victoire !
VII. The talking heads online say the Moroccans fought valiantly against an uninspired, but technically superior, French squad. They went down with dignity. Arabs everywhere should celebrate the Moroccan team’s momentous achievement. On the dark patio of the riad, the night air is cool and thin. We watch the game highlights on my phone. The blue light from the screen makes L’s skin glow. She looks tired and sad, and lovely as ever. In three days I leave for Paris. We have not talked at all about what will come next. Fugitive beauté / dont le regard m’a fait soudainement renaître / ne te verrai-je plus que dans l'éternité ?
VII. Today we are eating grilled meat at a restaurant on the side of the highway heading north to Casablanca. T has offered to drive us to his fields this afternoon and we have gratefully accepted, eager for fresh air after a week in spent amid urban noise and pollution. Lamb and pig carcasses hang in the open air. I am told that grilled calf brain — this squishy, whitish substance sitting happily between the chicken and beef kebabs — is prized for its delicate texture and light flavor. In the 1970s in Tiruchirappalli, my mother grew up on a strictly lacto-vegetarian diet; there, it was considered offensive to even utter the word ‘egg’ at the dinner table. This strange fact occurs to me as I pick up a piece of squishy meat and shove it into my mouth, swallowing quickly. It has a pleasant mild flavor.
The man who chopped the tomato-and-onion salad offers us extras of everything — salad, bread, meat, tea — and his gleeful laugh rings clear in the smoky afternoon air. We accept the seconds with embarrassed gratitude. We eat with great relish. We laugh along with fellow restaurant patrons when the server arrives with a new plate of meat and tells us a joke in Darija. A woman stares at me, mouth flapping with laughter. I grin back. L turns to T and asks what the server has said. T shakes his head and laughs. We are all laughing now. But what is the joke? We insist, and T shakes his head several times before relenting. Il vous a dit de prendre l’avion et rentrer chez vous, et qu’Inshallah la France perde contre l’Argentine.1
“He told you to take the plane and go home, and that Inshallah France loses to Argentina.”