Movement (14 page)

“My Uncle Claude owns a hotel in Essaouira. Just the cure you need from the city,” Mohammed said.

She knew something like this would follow the croissants and tea.

“No,” she said halfheartedly, “I have to go further south, to the camel fair at Goulimime on Saturday.”

“That's a big tourist show now. If you want to see the way Moroccans really live, you have to go to the coast. Essaouira is too windy for the German bus tours. No army bases either. Just Moroccans. People fishing, making things for the fishermen.”

As they fumbled to their bus seats at five the next morning, Susan got more than the usual stares. The young men were the most insinuating. One brushed against her breasts as she climbed into the next seat. The women didn't seem to giggle as much this morning. They gossiped behind their brown veils. Even the venerable old men—whose wizened faces would come out of her camera so beautifully if she could develop the guts to take close-ups—seemed to watch her. To watch the two of them. Customs officials could not guard unofficial customs. That was left to one's sense of propriety. (“Putain.” “Whore.” “Hure.” “Putain.”) Mohammed told her not to worry about them.

She took notes on the landscape for a while, increasingly distracted by the reckless lurches of the driver and the chickens pecking at the knapsack under her seat. She finally figured out the purpose of those rusty tin cans when a pregnant woman threw up in one and passed it on to her sister who did likewise. Susan handed them squares of the toilet tissue she always carried and some spearmint gum to wash away the taste. They accepted with hesitant gratitude. The procedure was repeated twenty minutes later: vomiting, tissue, chewing gum, wary exchange of glances.

Mohammed listened attentively as she confessed how frustrated she was trying to talk to Morrocan women. They seemed to be repelled by her, fascinated and threatened. She, herself, was never able to get beneath their layers of brown and grey polyester. Damn these robes—these habits—that even the brides of Christ at home had surrendered.

“They have their uses,” he laughed. “It's easier to conduct an affair in my country. A woman can go visit a man as long as she likes. No one knows who goes in; who comes out.”

(“Putain.” “Whore.” “Hure.” “Putain.”)

She told him not to joke. None of the men in his country took women seriously. They either preyed or patronized. They were frightened and instead of hiding, themselves, they masked women in Arab chastity or Western wantoness. She caught herself and, in her best interviewer's tones, asked him what he thought.

He said he rarely had a chance to talk with Western women and if she didn't mind, he would prefer to listen right now.

Was he tame or cunning? She couldn't tell, but she admired his high cheekbones and his extraordinarily thick eyebrows.

(“Dear, remember to be your sensible self.” She heard her mother's voice. “All men suck.” Hilary's voice. “Putain!” The girls in Agadir.)

“We're here,” he said, regarding her with the scrutiny of one who is practiced at staring through veils. “This is Essaouira.”

The 9:00 a.m. sun illumined a white village behind the ancient Portuguese scala. The tiled, turreted quiescence, was such a relief after Agadir. Gulls sailed lazily over the docks. Women, downed in layers of white, like plump doves, waddled across the sunny courtyards. Essaouira. The Hotel Tourisme was just over to the left. The little Arab boys who meet the buses in swarms gaped as Mohammed and Susan walked off together.

They were greeted by a grunt from an old woman who was washing the steps with a filthy rag. Delicately stepping over the spaces they thought she had washed, they climbed up past the reeking toilets to the skylit lobby where a younger woman washed the tiled floor with another filthy rag. She raised her head at their footsteps, recognized Mohammed, and scrambled to her feet. She greeted him excitedly in Arabic. Then, out of courtesy to his companion said, “Bonjour, Monsieur. Vôtre Oncle est au restaurant. Je lui appellerai.”

“Non, merci,” he said and explained something in Arabic.

He was given two, Susan noted with relief, two keys.

“Over here. These are the best view.” He opened the shutter doors into a large white room and the sea beyond. The coast curved around to an island, unclaimed except by a lighthouse and a mosque rising above the sandy hills.

“That's Torsa. We can go there tomorrow if you like.” And perhaps fearing that “tomorrow” would make her weigh her time again, he made a more immediate suggestion. “See the Chalet restaurant there? Let's go see my uncle.”

They walked through the dark bar which led into a small dining room where extradurable hotelware was arranged on heavy linen tablecloths. The room smelled of cigarette smoke and thick coffee and last night's bouillabaisse. Out on the patio, a man with a peppery Afro stared at the empty water.

He turned at their footsteps. “Mohammed. Mohammed!” he shouted. Inspecting Susan carefully, he smiled more broadly and said, “Bienvenue, Mademoiselle.”

“Wrong language,” laughed Mohammed, hugging the older man. “Claude, please meet my friend Susan Campbell from London and Canada and San Francisco.”

“I am charmed. Well, Mohammed, perhaps you are not such a hopeless intellectual after all. Come, come, sit down, Susan. May I offer you a coffee?”

“Please, black,” she said.

“So, so,” mused Uncle Claude, examining her openly.

Should she save him the trouble and declare outright that she was 128 pounds, five feet four inches, naturally brunette with six streaks of grey, able to swim thirty laps when her bad knee accommodated, normally good skin—the pimples and the four chin hairs being the result of her period? Perhaps he wouldn't be interested that she preferred an IUD to the pill.

Mohammed explained. “Susan is writing an article on North Africa for an English magazine. I told her I would show her the real Morocco.”

“Ah, ha,” said Claude. “It is an intellectual attachment.”

Come on, she thought, I don't look like his bloody grandmother.

Claude turned to her sympathetically. “Mohammed is an incurable scholar. He talks only about his literature. A very backward boy. He has told you that we have surrendered and are sending him to America? Perhaps he will succeed where people are paid to think about thinking.”

Mohammed sensed her aggravation.

“We just came over to say hello, Uncle Claude. And to tell you we took the two front rooms if that's OK.”

Uncle Claude nodded benevolently.

“I thought I would take Susan for a walk on the scala, to see the village.”

The wall was built by the Portuguese against the Spanish. Essaouira and El Jadida were the oldest relics of Portuguese colonization. It was a good lecture, the first time she had listened to Mohammed at length. She was amazed at how easily they got on, without any of the hostility she felt from most Moroccan men. He was, after all, ten years younger than her. Too young, perhaps, to feel threatened. He told her that the village had been captured by the Spanish, then the French and for a short time by the Germans. This accounted for the polyglot of street names and the families with blue eyes.

“My family was very lucky. My grandfather was the assistant to the French owner of a phosphate mine in Zagora. He was able to establish my father and his two brothers in their own businesses. When my parents died, my grandfather took me in and educated me. Scholarship is very highly prized here. You must not listen to Uncle Claude. The jokes are his way of being modest. He is very proud. It is a big honor for the family.”

“And for yourself too? Does everything belong to the family? What do
you
want?”

“I'll learn that. Meanwhile I listen to other people, more experienced people.”

“You have to be careful. Really careful about this business of living your life for other people.”

“Who do
you
live for?” he asked.

“Myself,” she said.

“And is that enough?” he asked.

“No, not enough,” she said.

The sun hung high. Wind fanned the usually relentless Moroccan humidity from the air. They listened to the shrieks of children in the medina below and the calls of the gulls gliding around the boats. Women wheeled carts of fish along the wharf toward the village. She felt a slight panic that she would lose the sensation by savoring it like this.

“I feel worn out from that early dash and the bus journey. I'd like to go back to the hotel this afternoon while you go and…” (Did she really want to say ‘play'?) “…see your other friends.”

Now the room felt small and tawdry. The ocean was curtained off by a purple and pink synthetic spray of flowers. The white walls of this morning had retreated behind a functional plywood wardrobe, a chipped table and a filthy sink. The mauve plastic soap shelf was the newest accessory by twenty years. She curled up on the springless bed and took out the letter.

“So maybe I should give up on men my own age. And give up writing. I could run an apprenticeship program for young Arab pimps. Seriously, Hilary, this kid is all sinew and shine. Small tight ass and broad, solid shoulders. There's strength in every part of him. I'm scared whenever he opens his mouth that he's going to sound like my dopey little brother. I guess I have to admit that I have been turned on by a couple of kids back home. I feel guilty, not just lecherous, but perverted. Like I might defile this young, virgin flesh. Like the only reason he's interested in me is that he hasn't had any better offers. Like the only reason I'm interested in him is that I'm desperate. Horny. Old and horny.

“I contrive this lurid scenario where my withered flesh meets (meats) his well-toned skin. Perhaps that's what's bothering me. Rejection. Rejection by this young prick. Oh, hell. How did I get myself into this mess? Mother would charge me with nymphomania. Where is my self-respect, she would ask. And I must admit that lately I don't seem to be able to find it. I've lost all momentum to do anything—to keep on writing, to travel, to give up smoking. I feel like my life is overdue at the library and I can't get around to taking it back, so I leave it to collect fines of guilt in my head.

“Anyway, maybe all this angst about Mohammed is vanity. Maybe he only wants a seminar on American foreign aid or an orientation course for his career at Stanford. He has said nothing. Nothing except that he wants me to see Essaouira. Maybe I'm the old maid, scratching for flattery. I've got to get back to work. I'd like to get some good shots of the scala and the mosque has some fascinating Moorish inscriptions.”

Susan was wakened by leaves fingering across her window. The tall tree looked like a hybrid palm-pine. She must ask Mohammed what kind it was. Running a trickle of lukewarm water from the faucet, she considered the grey porcelain. How could tourist hands get so dirty?

His door was ajar and her knock pushed it open. Mohammed was sitting on his single bed reading Matthew Arnold. She couldn't remember much. She liked
Calais Sands.
Maybe they could talk about it over dinner. She was starving.

The men shouted to them in Arabic and French the moment they walked onto the pier. “Sardine, Madame, Monsieur. Bon prix. Le meilleur.” The chefs stood behind long wooden tables roasting the day's catch of sardine. Fishermen hunched over quick meals, gulping glasses of murky water. They were ignored for these new customers. One man waved a lobster. “Dix dirhams. Ten dirhams. Zehn dirhams.” Who said the German coaches didn't get this far?

Mohammed's friend Paolo cooked up ten sardines and laid them on their plates, wide-eyed and oozing oil or vital fluids or both. She regarded the fish hopelessly, as the complete canned consumer. She didn't even know how to eat. He laughed at her and gently decapitated the specimen, then extracted the backbone. He showed her the flesh on the other side of the fish, too. Paolo squeezed lemon over it and told her to mop up the juices with a piece of bread. Mohammed and Paolo spoke in French so she could understand, but she was too absorbed in her meal to chat.

The next morning he took her to the medina. Susan found the spice stalls most appealing: glowing cayenne and paprika, the cologne of oregano. The tables of nuts seemed fresh, wholesome, real. The familiarity of the food was reassuring. She, as always, was seeing everything in comparison to the West. The mosques and schools were so different from the yawning steel and glass institutions at home. A high-pitched whine resonated behind them. Snake charmer? She turned into a darkened doorway. Inside sat rows of children droning the Koran.

“We have to know the Koran by the time we are sixteen,” Mohammed said with nervous formality. “It is the basis of our cultural, religious and civic behavior.”

She watched some small children playing outside their parents' jewelry shops. Peeking in a tapestry souk, she saw three men sitting around a pot of tea.

“So why don't you stay?” he asked.

“What was that you said about sand dunes,” she said. “I would really like to get some shots of the coast.”

Before they had walked a mile-and-a-half out of town, the wind erupted. The beach stretched between them and the ocean like a desert in a dust storm.

“The sand is terrible for my lens.” She fastened the cap and shut the camera in the leather case. “That's really too bad,” she said, shading her eyes and turning around toward the village.

“Come on. Let's take a walk as long as we're here. It's not often that you see North African sand dunes and a pirate's castle.”

“A pirate's castle? How can I refuse?”

Mohammed had already slipped off his sandals and was running across the beach. She followed, laughing and shouting for him to wait. He didn't turn back, just waved his hand over his head for her to follow.

Sun scorched the waves. The wind ballooned her blouse and quickened her feet. There was nothing on the beach except his feet making instantly disappearing tracks in the sand and her feet following. Nothing but miles and layers of sand. She had a sudden rush of freedom, exhilaration and fear.