‘From where do Berbers originate?’ I asked my male hosts.
‘Right here in the Atlases,’ said one. ‘The Yemen,’ replied the other. To my knowledge, there were no definitive facts on the origins of Berbers. I had hoped these men might share a folktale or two that would have given me clues.
Lahrcen’s had been an arranged marriage. His wife had been fifteen and he twenty. Living within his in-laws’ house was a dynasty. His wife’s parents, the mother-in-law’s parents as well as a brother-in-law, wife, their two children and one other younger, unmarried sister. The toothless grandmother was skeletal. Dressed in a pink floral gown that resembled a floor-length nightie, chunky jewellery and a bright orange headscarf, she was a tiny bird with vibrant plumage. All the women wore brightly coloured robes and scarves and all had the palms of their hands and their fingers hennaed with intricate designs. The grandfather looked as old as the mountains in his faded green djellabah, beige slippers, a towel for a turban and a chin stippled with the dregs of a grey beard. The brother-in-law was remarkably handsome. I found most of the Berber men striking, with hooked noses and blazing black eyes. Semitic faces, oriental, regal.
I was ushered into a ground floor, open-air living area. Awaiting my arrival was an ancient, one-person-sized pressing stone on a very low blue table. To work at it involved sitting cross-legged on the floor. The entire family was gathered round it. I took two photos of the table before the ladies set to work and then the camera’s battery went dead. Lahrcen berated me.
‘I knew I should have brought mine,’ he cried.
What I noticed was how physical these people were with one another, how Lahrcen’s mother-in-law stroked and patted him, cradling his head in the crook of her arm, how she kissed him on his forehead and how frequently they laughed. A debate was in progress as to who would demonstrate the pressing of the fruit. Lahrcen volunteered, because he could talk me through the process as he did so. This decision resulted in eruptions of hysterical laughter. Since time immemorial, argan pressing had been a woman’s task. When Lahrcen settled on the floor, the women pulled their scarves across their faces to hide their giggles, tears running down their faces. I reversed to try another shot, hoping the battery might flicker back to life, and as I did so I nearly fell through the floor. Because the family had been gathered round the pressing stone, I had not noticed that, in the centre of this roofless room, the floor was missing. It was intended that way. Beneath us was a menagerie of goats, chickens, spring lambs, ducks, rabbits. One rabbit was sitting on a goat’s back. Only the donkeys and dog were absent. The two donkeys had a stable alongside the property’s entrance while the dog was chained by the front door. If he was let loose below, he would eat or frighten the poultry. The animals were fed from where I stood, victuals tossed into their underground pen. A kitchen, where they ended up, no bigger than the one I had seen at Lahrcen’s, abutted the room we were standing in. There was no furniture at all besides the low, round table for the pressing stone. Upstairs, reached by a hand-made wooden ladder, was where they slept, lay about on cushions and watched television.
Lahrcen was cross-legged, ready to begin the demonstration. The four stages of pressing lay in a quartet of blue bowls: kernels still in hard shells, kernels after the nut had been broken open, roasted kernels and finally the oil, pressed before our arrival for the display.
‘Unlike the olive, we only press the kernels. The most difficult part of the process is the removal of the pulp and cracking the nut. The removed heart is then roasted. Now, here we go.’
I was struggling to follow his commentary because the infectious squealings never abated.
Our demonstrator placed several roasted kernels on to the stone press, which was worn and shiny and looked as though it had been carved from beaten bronze. A sprinkling of water, and he began to grind hard with a thick stone pestle until the seeds started to disintegrate into paste. His face was turning red and he was now giggling himself.
‘From these crushed roasted nuts will slowly trickle drops of thick amber juice, but it takes about twenty hours.’
As with the olive, this was labour-intensive and it took large quantities of fruit for one litre of oil. The women were laughing so much that Lahrcen said he could not continue, which amused them all the more. He encouraged me to taste a mouthful from the pre-pressed offering.
‘We pour a few drops into our pans of couscous. It has a distinctive nutty flavour, don’t you agree?’ Lahrcen’s wife was saying.
I nodded.
The pestle brought to mind early twentieth-century photos from Greece where the women also sat with crushing stones and mashed the olives until they bled oil. This was no different. And in Malta, here was what I had written when I visited the BC stone temples on that island: ‘At one of the temples, I found coralline limestone slabs into which rounded and semi-smoothed central, circular dips, indentations, like the cup setting in saucers, had been carved … a quern. I have since learned that no fewer than eleven querns have been found at these sites. Querns that experts believe were used for pulverising olives and have been dated as Copper Age, 3000 B.C.’
What I was witnessing now was only one stage more developed than those prehistoric temple pressers. In other words, these Berber communities were still working a traditional, primitive method, a fundamental system that has been used around the Mediterranean for aeons before recorded history.
During the return journey, Lahrcen explained that the argan forests were keeping the desert at bay, maintaining the ground. If the forests are lost, the Sahara will move north.
As we arrived back into his village, the sun was beginning to disappear behind the high-range mountains. Evening fell early here.
‘It’s a pity about your camera,’ my friend said. ‘Hopeless, really, those newfangled contraptions.’ With that, Lahrcen bade his wife go and fetch his while he accompanied me to purchase a roll of film.
‘It’s not necessary. I’ll charge the battery at the hotel.’ I was assuming our outing had reached its conclusion.
The village store was a tarpaulined stall with a kerosene light, plenty of insects flapping and a gang of youths in jeans and djellabahs smoking, killing time, directionless. My arrival silenced everyone. When Lahrcen introduced me, they nodded and stared cautiously as though I might explode.
I requested a few dirhams’ worth of rock-hard, brightly coloured sweets for the children. When I drew out my purse, the young men crowded round, watching hungrily as I pressed the requested seventeen dirhams on to the counter. Two for the sweets served in paper, and fifteen for the out-of-date film stock.
‘There’s something I’m keen for you to see.’ Lahrcen was accompanying me down an inclined lane. His wife came plodding, puffing, holding up his plastic camera, less robust than a throwaway. After much fumbling and clumsiness, I managed to feed the useless film into it.
He seemed rather excited. ‘You can get it processed in Casa or back in Europe.’ From his pocket was pulled a monumental key. He beckoned me to follow. I sniffed the pungent aroma of ground olives even before we had turned the corner where, outside a flat-roofed stone shed, was a great mound of dried, discarded paste.
‘My father was the village miller,’ Lahrcen announced proudly. ‘He’s ninety-one, retired last season, and now the mill is to be mine.’ He turned the pantomime key in the solid lock and we stepped into total blackness. Even with the door fully open, due to lack of windows and apertures, it was hard to see anything, but there was no doubting its purpose. My guide lit a match and eventually my eyes adjusted.
‘This press is more than three hundred years old,’ he announced. ‘Take pictures, please.’
I pointed and clicked with his rudimentary plastic apparatus and its flashes fleetingly illuminated the silhouette of a stupendous stone press. Originally, it had been turned by camels, but today by donkey. I pushed at the stone crusher with all my force but it did not budge a centimetre. It was as solid as the mountain upon which we stood.
> ‘I knew it would please you,’ he grinned, ‘which is why I left it till last.’
I wished that he had not waited. Even more, I kicked myself for forgetting to charge my Zeiss-lensed marvel, but that’s life.
‘Do you spray crops, use pesticides?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘Against what? Lack of water is our problem.’
After we had locked up, he handed me the roll, which I never processed because it was exposed at the outset. I promised to return one day to introduce Michel to this future miller and his family. He begged nothing. I had agreed a fair fee with Themen who had accompanied us, even without the Peugeot, throughout the day, but I dug into my pockets now and handed over some notes. Lahrcen shook his head. I insisted.
‘That’s kind. Village life gets harder. I knew you’d like my olive press. You won’t find an older example in Morocco, maybe not in North Africa. What a pity you haven’t a decent camera. Buy one like mine. They’re not expensive.’
On our way back to the hotel we passed a man and boy sitting beneath an argan tree with a large stuffed sack. I assumed they had been collecting the fruits. They waved. I urged Themen to pull over, offer them a ride. This pleased everyone. They had not been harvesting but visiting family some distance away, walking since dawn. I asked what the sack contained. Almonds and bread, the remnants of lunch. I was starving, Themen, too. We had spent almost an entire day, walked a dusty distance, but had not been offered refreshment at either home, not even a glass of water. Both families had been warm in their welcomes so why this should have been, I could not tell, but we fished greedily into the bag and, like a pair of gannets, gobbled down the strangers’ provisions.
Few options for transit between these Atlases and Volubilis. A grand taxi from my mountain-station hotel to Marrakesh (very expensive) and onwards by train to Meknès or a return taxi to Essaouira, coach to Marrekesh and train to Meknès. I chose the latter. It gave me an extra night at the seaside port and I fortuitously fell upon one of the sixty days in the year when the wind was not blowing. The port I returned to was a Mediterranean idyll: white gulls, blue skies, calm seas. Mohammed’s birthday had been celebrated; the Muslim tourists had disappeared. It was a tranquil parenthesis.
My afternoon bus to Marrakesh was empty aside from one silent, bearded European and the occasional farmer. I nabbed a window seat. I was back within the flat littered expanses of the Sahel where barely a weed grew yet numerous herds of goats were feeding. How different must it have been half a decade back when there was rain.
My silent contemplation: water, the source of life, is the most precious commodity on the planet. What if the rains do not return?
Black plastic bags, wind-trapped in tree branches, flapped like alarmed crows. Flat, square olive mills, flat, square houses with startlingly scarlet bougainvillea snaking their red-earthed walls. Many of the small groves were hidden behind mud-baked enclosures. The walled homes seemed to be sealed off from the outside world. Protection against Saharan winds or invaders, I could not tell. So many men in pointed hoods and pointed slippers perched on the scorched earth at road’s edge. A beige, timeless universe where the light was by turns soft, dusty or burned out. These desert peoples were Berbers, not Arabs. After Homo erectus, the Berbers were the first humans to migrate north from Central Africa. Their presence here in the Sahels reaches back aeons.
At the coffee stop I sat with the European, Jakob, a geologist and palaeontologist from Berlin, working down in the south-east. His skin was burned by all weathers and he wore a heavy black diver’s watch. He seemed reluctant to discuss the project he was here to research.
‘Worm fossils,’ he shrugged.
I asked him about the argan forests.
‘A Tertiary plant.’
‘Which means?’
‘It’s been around for about 1.5 million years. The natural forests have acted as a buffer against the march of the Sahara, against desertification for a long time, but they’re disappearing fast. Programmes have been launched to educate locals to the tree’s role and there’s overseas spend on marketing schemes to push its oil internationally. It’s a race against time.’
Once more Marrakesh with its pink-ochre walls. Such a contrast, such a cosmopolitan circus, and the avarice! This was not a city to be introduced to in a day; it was rich, varied, raucous, corrupt, crowded with slickly practised hustlers, horse-drawn carriages, orange juice vendors, snake charmers who harangued me, ‘This is work! We want money!’ as well as every other tourists’ whore.
I hurried off to find the olive souk. On display, piled high in jars, in bowls, glass cases, pyramids of them in tubs were succulently fat olives, pointy olives, mini ones, drupes of every shade, spiced with every herb known to man, all sold by bristly moustachioed men in white sheets and crocheted skullcaps. Marrakesh should have been much more than a stopover, and I would dearly have loved to hang out for days and engage, scratch a little beneath its meretricious veneer, spend more than one evening lost within the crowds and crazy-hatted vendors in smoky Djemaa el-Fna Square, but my Algerian visa was a limited feast. I had been given a tourist stamp that entitled me to thirty days within a pre-selected ninety. I had marginally miscalculated my chosen dates because I had not bargained on spending so many weeks in Spain. The consequence was that I needed to reach Algiers within the next six days or I would overrun. Aside from this constraint there was another difficulty: the borders between Morocco and Algeria were closed. There was no way into the adjoining state from here, except by air from Casablanca. Either that, or return to Spain and take a boat from Almería. Given the restrictions, I opted for the plane from Casa to Algiers.
Before leaving the country, I still intended to visit the Roman city of Volubilis, lying to the north of Meknès. Meknès, like neighbouring Fès, was situated at an axis, a mighty crossroads. East of Morocco lay Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, while to the west were the cities of the Atlantic littoral. Descending from north to south, the passage led from the Mediterranean towards the Higher Atlas Mountains, from where I had just arrived. Had the border between Morocco and Algeria been open, I could have continued on to Fès, marginally north-east of Meknès, and from there turned east, through the historically important pass of Taza and onwards by train or bus to the Moroccan-Algerian border town of Oujda. It would have allowed me to trace an ancient, authentic olive route, a transit road that had been travelled regularly by the Romans and possibly many caravan peoples before them. But that option was not available to me.
When I returned to my hotel, I learned that a transport strike had been announced, commencing immediately. The trains were only partially affected. Mine to Meknès, the following morning, was still scheduled to run. However, the station, situated towards the city’s outskirts, was not within walking distance. The concierge organised a private car for my departure.
‘And the price?’
‘Who can say, Madame?’
‘I have a plane ticket, just purchased, from Casa to Algiers to fly in two days’ time.’
The concierge shrugged. ‘Who can say, Madame, how long a transport strike will last, but it is nationwide. All problems in Marrakesh will be problems in Casa and Meknès. Perhaps worse. You might as well stay here. We have a room, a higher rate, but …’
No car showed up the following morning. A different concierge, another receptionist: both washed their hands of the matter.
‘No one should have promised you transport. There are a few buses running, but not directly from here to the station, or you can hire a horse and carriage. But why not stay? We have one room left.’
I grabbed my bags and shot across the square to the bank of carriages. The queue was endless. I confirmed with one of the drivers that a horse-drawn taxi would be willing to clop the distance to the station, and the fare would be six euros. I joined the queue. By the time I reached the head of the line, twenty minutes later, only one horse and cab remained and the driver was demanding two hundred euros. I began to haggle. Meanwhile, another de
mented passenger appeared, jumped aboard and off they went. I hiked to the nearest bus station. It was pandemonium but after several false attempts I eventually boarded a bus that delivered me more or less within walking distance of the railway station. Beyond the windows, harassed, perplexed, angry folk were running about the streets as though a fire had gripped the city.
I was warned that the train would be packed and that my best option was to jump aboard, stand as far as Casa and then pray for a seat, inshallah. This was a nine-hour journey. I hoped for better luck. In fact, the first class was relatively empty and I found myself in a carriage travelling with one other, Brigitte, a petite red-haired French woman, a photo-journalist living in Rabat. She had also come from Essaouira where she had been covering a story on the nation’s evolving tourist industry. From her, I learned that Tangier’s harbour was to be moved marginally east so that the port city could be marketed as Mediterranean. Had this ever been in any doubt, was the question I raised. She recounted depressing episodes of riads in Marrakesh rented out with minors, boys as part of the package. Paedophilia, she said, was rife.
‘The city has been rechristened Arnakesh.’
Arnaqueur, French for swindler. ‘The City of Swindlers?’
She nodded. ‘Such perversions serve no one, only justify the extremist’s determination to stem all liberties.’
She had been a Moroccan resident for seventeen years but now she was ‘ras-le-bol’, fed up to the teeth with the country. Islamic extremism was ‘twisting’ the mentality of the people. Morocco had been renowned for its progressiveness, for being the most open of all the Maghreb countries. Sadly, that was no longer the case. Women’s rights were diminishing not expanding.
I quizzed her about the Women’s Cooperatives, about the work the Berber women were doing to preserve the argan forests. ‘I heard the cooperatives are giving jobs to women, offering them the opportunity to step outside their homes; opportunities for those who are unemployed or living below the breadline.’
The Olive Tree (The Olive Series Book 2) Page 22
