The Blue Hour (6 page)

“Just keep walking,” Paul told me. “They are a nuisance, but harmless.”

The first cab we approached—a blue-colored Peugeot that appeared to have been in a demolition derby—was driven by a man who looked like he'd last slept in 2010. He had a cell phone to his ear, and was shouting into it. Paul approached him and gave him the name of our hotel.

“Two hundred dirhams,” he said in English, even though Paul addressed him in French.

“But the hotel is maybe ten minutes' walk from here,” Paul said.

The cabbie put down the phone for a moment.

“That's the price. You don't like it, walk.”

“
Charmant,
” Paul said.

The cabbie just shrugged. Paul, shaking his head, led us to the car behind this unpleasant fellow. When the first cabbie saw us approaching the next driver, he was immediately out of his taxi, shouting. The new cabbie—a rather stubby man with a look of fatigued resignation on his face—ignored the protestations of Mr. Charm.

“
Où allez-vous
?
” he asked Paul.

“
Vous connaissez l'hôtel Les Trois Chameaux
?”

“
Bien sûr. Ça vous coûtera environ trente dirhams
.”

Thirty dirhams. An honest man.

“
D'accord,
” Paul said and we loaded our bags into his truck. As we drove off we ran into a small flotilla of geese and chickens, herded alongside the city walls by a man in a white djellaba and skullcap. The driver honked his horn in a short, nonchalant manner, indicating that the shepherd should get his livestock out of the way. Nearby was a man wheeling a barrel filled with unrefined cotton. And—this was hallucinatory—a fellow sitting in front of a basket, intoning a tune on a reedy instrument as a python ascended upward from the straw hoop.

Paul could see me taking this all in. The taxi followed a route along the walls of Essaouira; walls that looked like fortifications from some medieval bulwark.

“It gets even stranger,” Paul said, clearly at home amidst the vivid chaos.

We hugged the road adjacent to the wall for another minute, then turned under a narrow archway and down a back alley, notable for its blue walls and the tiny lanes that branched off it. At the end was a doorway, also painted a deep blue. This was the entrance to our hotel. Les Trois Chameaux. The Three Camels. The lobby was dark, shadowy, austere. An elderly man was asleep behind the reception desk. He was dressed for a day out at the races: a flowery shirt, a gold chain with the Moroccan star heaving up and down with his snores, gold rings on his fingers, heavy dark sunglasses hiding his eyes.

I looked around. Old Moroccan furnishings—all heavy wood and once-luxuriant brushed velvet upholstery—now dust-ridden and showing serious signs of neglect. There was a loud 1920s railway station clock hanging next to the reception area that counted off each passing second with an ominous click. And there was a half-starved cat on top of the counter, eyeing us warily.

As we approached, Paul took the initiative, at first whispering “Monsieur,” then raising his voice several decibels with each additional attempt. When this proved pointless, I tapped the hotel bell near the open guest register. Its loud clang jolted the man back to life, the shock on his face coupled with bemusement, as if he didn't know where he was. As he tried to adjust his gaze on us, Paul said, “Sorry to have woken you so abruptly. But we did try—”

“You have a reservation?”

“Yes.”

“Name?”

Paul gave him this information. The man stood up and, using the index finger on each hand, spun the register around toward him. He peered at today's page, rifled back through several pages, shaking his head, muttering to himself.

“You have no reservation,” he finally said.

“But I made one,” Paul said.

“You received confirmation from us?”

“Of course. I made it on the internet.”

“You have a copy of the confirmation?”

Paul looked sheepish. “Forgot to print it,” he whispered to me.

“Surely if you went online,” I said, “you'd find it.”

“I think I deleted it.”

I stopped myself from saying, “Not again.” Paul was always clearing out his files and frequently removing essential correspondence that he needed to hold on to.

“
Mais il vous reste bien des chambres, non?
” I asked the guy behind the desk.

“
Oui et non.
”

He now picked up an ancient house phone—the sort that seemed to belong in some movie set during the German occupation—and started speaking Arabic in a loud, fractious voice. This was something I was beginning to notice: how Arabic was often a language declaimed in a stentorian manner, making it seem aggressive, swaggering, bordering on the hostile. It reminded me that I should try to resuscitate my still-reasonable, if rusty, French while here. The desk clerk finished his conversation. Turning back to us, he said, “My colleague, he gets the owner now.”

We had to wait ten minutes for the arrival of the man in charge. His name was Monsieur Picard. He was French, in his midfifties, short, fit, dressed in a crisp white shirt and tan trousers, formal, chilly; his face reflecting, I sensed, a lifetime of enforced diffidence and the dodging of emotion.

“There seems to be a problem?” he asked, his tone borderline supercilious.

“We booked a room, but you don't seem to have a record of it,” Paul said.

“Do you have the confirmation?” Monsieur Picard asked.

Paul shook his head.

“Nor do we. So a reservation mustn't have been made.”

“But I made the reservation.”

“Clearly not.”

“Well, you do have rooms, yes?” I asked.

“Has not Ahmed here told you that we have just one room free?”

“And how much does that cost?”

“It is a room with a balcony and a sea view. And you will need it for how long?”

“A month,” Paul said. “That's what we booked it for.”

He pursed his lips, then turned to Ahmed. He directed him in French to scan the ledger. Ahmed thumbed through its many pages, glancing down, clucking his tongue against the roof of his mouth, seeing whether they could house us for all that time. I began to wonder: Did Paul actually make the reservation, or was this one of his many “little oversights” that seemed to decorate our lives? Now I was starting to feel angry with myself for not checking up on the reservation before departure. Another part of me was castigating myself for questioning his veracity; given the sliminess of the hotel owner and the sleepwalking style of his desk clerk, who's to say they didn't lose the reservation or weren't playing games to get a better price from us?

This latter scenario began to seem more plausible after the next exchange. Ahmed turned to the owner, nodding his head, saying something that sounded positive. The owner now spoke to us.

“I have good news. We do have that room available for the entire period you desire. The other good news is that it is the best room in the house—a minisuite with a balcony that faces the Atlantic. The price is seven dirhams per night.”

Paul's face fell. Immediately the adding machine in my brain was whirring away. That was almost one hundred dollars: double the price Paul told me he had negotiated.

“But the room I booked cost three-fifty,” Paul said.

“You have no record of this offer, do you?” Monsieur Picard said. “As we too have no record of this reservation and are trying to accommodate you—”

“I booked a room for a month at three hundred and fifty dirhams,” Paul said, angry, stressed.

“Monsieur, if there is no proof, all we have is words. And words—”

“What are you, a fucking philosopher?” Paul hissed.

I put a stabilizing hand on my husband's left forearm.

“He didn't mean that,” I told Monsieur Picard. “We are both exhausted and—”

“I did fucking mean that. This guy is playing with us.”

Monsieur Picard smiled thinly.

“You act as if you are doing me a service by staying here. By all means find another hotel—and one of this quality and cleanliness that can offer you a suite of this size for a month. The door is there.
Bonne chance
.”

He turned and started heading up the stairs.

“Could we see the suite, please?” I shouted after him.

“As you wish,” he said.

I started following him upstairs. Paul lingered by the reception desk, fuming.

“You coming up?” I asked.

“Looks like you're the one in charge now.”

“Fine.”

I continued up the stairs. As we reached the first landing Monsieur Picard turned to me and said, “Your husband does not seem to be a happy man.”

“And what business is that of yours?” I asked.

The sharpness of my tone startled him.

“I meant no offense,” he said.

“Yes you did.”

The upstairs corridors were narrow, but reasonably well painted, with ceramic blue tiles surrounding the door frames. We reached a corridor and walked up a set of stairs barely wide enough to accommodate a modest-size person.

“Splendid isolation,” Picard said as we reached a wooden door carved with lattices. He opened it.

“
Après vous, madame
.”

I walked inside. Picard turned on a light on a side table. At first I thought: Oh, God, this is small. We were in a narrow sitting area with carved wooden tables, a sofa in heavy red brocade, and a small armchair. The entire room couldn't have been more than around ten square feet. Tiny slits of light from the blue wooden shutters caught the dust in the air. Sensing my disappointment, Picard said, “It gets better.”

Opening a connecting door, we were now in a high-vaulted room augmented by wooden beams. The centerpiece was a king-size bed with huge round cushions propping up the carved wood headboard, upholstered in faded red velvet. Everything here was heavy dark wood and maroonish: the bedspread, the large desk with a matching carved chair, the large chest of drawers, the sultan-throne armchair with a matching footrest. Stone walls. The bathroom was acceptable and clean, with a shower stall enhanced by an intricate painted design. I turned on the knobs and discovered there was reasonable water pressure. When I returned to the bedroom area I was taken aback. Picard had opened all the shutters, allowing light to flood in everywhere. This darkened enclave was suddenly awash with crystalline sun. I followed Picard's request to follow him onto the balcony, out into a day that was still white-hot, incandescent.

The balcony itself wasn't substantial. Perhaps ten feet long by three feet wide. But its prospect was ravishing. Turn right and you peered directly over the walled fortress that was Essaouira. The absolute wild originality of the place—its medieval bunkers, its spindly alleys, its visual and human density—was laid out in front of me with a near-cartographic clarity.

Then, when you turned left, the entire spread of the Atlantic enveloped the eye.

Is there anything more balming than the sight of water? Especially this body of water, linking us to home?

There were two folded deck chairs on the balcony and a small table. I quickly envisaged Paul here, his sketchbooks and pencils and charcoals spread out in front of him, engaged with the sky, the sea, the jagged rooftops, the strange scenic concoction laid out directly beneath us. I would be in the next chair, hunched over a French grammar book, fresh from a language lesson I'd had that morning, working my way through the subjunctive case.

“Not bad, is it?” Picard said, his voice more diplomatic since I'd snapped at him a few minutes earlier.

“It will do.”

I stepped back inside. Never negotiate a price when facing a peerless view. Picard joined me.

“I saw the email that my husband received from you,” I said.

“He never received anything directly from me.”

“From your reservations person, then.”

“
Madame
, we have no record—”

“But I saw it. I know that you agreed to a price of three hundred and fifty dirhams for a room with a balcony and a sea view.”

“It was not this suite. And as this suite is the only room we have left . . .”

“Be smart here.”

“You think I am stupid?” he asked, the tone shifting back into superciliousness.

“I'm beginning to think that I should send an email to the person running my accounting firm back in the States and get her to find the email and send it over here. Then I can find the local tourism authority and report you for price gouging.”

“Now I must ask you to leave.”

“A pity. Not a bad room—and you could have had us here for a month. But your call, sir.”

With that I turned and headed for the door. Halfway out he said:

“I can accept six hundred per day.”

Without turning back to look at him I said, “Four hundred.”

“Five-fifty.”

“Five hundred—breakfast and laundry included.”

“You expect us to wash your clothes every day?”

“Twice a week. We have little in the way of clothes.”

Silence. His thumb was rubbing up against his forefinger, a surefire sign of anxiety.

“And you will be here for the entire month?” he asked.

“I can show you our return tickets.”

“For this price I will need payment in full in advance.”

Now it was my turn to feel as if the tables had turned a bit. But looking around the suite, the hard radiant blue of that North African sky clarifying everything, I decided that a decision was in order. Throw in breakfast and laundry and the savings of two hundred dirhams per night, and I had just saved us well over a thousand dollars. I also sensed that Picard would be relatively civilized from this moment on. So I reached into my bag and pulled out a credit card and said, “All right, sir. You have a deal.”