‘Leave me alone,’ I hissed.
‘No problem, no problem,’ the plump kid said, his face even more greasy as he came right up to me. ‘We’re friends.’
I tried to move forward, but the hunched guy had his bony fingers around my arm. Not in a restraining way, more as if he just wanted to touch me. My mind was racing. I figured the plump kid would make a grab for me, though at the moment he was simply hovering behind me, laughing a low laugh. And the old guy, though now in close, was just watching, clearly enjoying my fear.
‘We like you,’ the plump kid said with another unnerving laugh. The hunched guy’s hand was tightening around my right forearm. I took a deep steadying breath, quickly calculating that I was close enough to catch him squarely, cripplingly, in the groin. I began to count to myself: one, two . . .
Then all hell broke loose. A man came running towards us, a stick in his hand, shouting one word over and over again:
‘Imshi, imshi, imshi.’
It was the night man from the hotel, brandishing the cane over his head, ready to lash out. All three men scattered, leaving me there, frozen to the spot, terrified.
As soon as he reached me the night man took me by the arm the way a father would reach for a child who had gotten herself into deep trouble, pulling me along the alley and out of danger.
When we reached the hotel he all but pushed me inside. He had to sit down for a moment and compose himself. I too slumped in a chair, shocked, benumbed, feeling beyond stupid.
The night man reached for his cigarettes, his hands shaking as he lit one. After taking a steadying drag he spoke two words:
‘Jamais plus.’
Never again.
Six
JAMAIS PLUS. JAMAIS plus. Jamais plus.
I sat on the balcony of our room, watching light break through the night sky, still reeling from that incident in the alleyway.
Jamais plus. Jamais plus. Jamais plus.
But my ‘never again’ exhortations had less to do with the behaviour of those men and more to do with my arrogance and inanity. What was I thinking? Why did I even dream of following the loudspeaker voice out into the shadows? The accountant in me was trying to separate the menace and dread of the scene from the hard cold facts of what I’d walked into. Would they have actually attacked me, tried to rape me? Or was I just an object of curiosity for them?
My hero from the front desk served me mint tea, deftly entering the room and placing it on the balcony table without waking Paul. He was still collapsed flat out in the bed, oblivious to all that had just transpired. Sitting there, looking out at constellations diminishing with the emerging dawn, I came to the conclusion that, though deeply creepy and offensive, this encounter hadn’t had a serious sexual threat behind it. But there had been, without question, some sort of recklessness on my part that sent me out into the shadows. And I wouldn’t forgive myself for such impetuousness until I fathomed what had pulled me towards trouble.
‘Well, hello there.’
Paul was standing in the doorway of the balcony, dressed in the white djellaba that the night man had brought up along with the mint tea.
‘You really slept,’ I said.
‘And you?’
‘Oh, I was out almost as long as you.’
‘And I see that I have no clothes.’
‘They’re being washed as we speak. That djellaba suits you.’
‘The French have a word for an ageing hippy still dressing as if he’s just come off an ashram – a “baba-cool”. Even during my year here I never wore a djellaba.’
‘But it now suits your ageing-hippy look.’
He leaned down and kissed me on the lips.
‘I walked into that, didn’t I?’ he said.
‘Indeed you did.’
Now it was my turn to lean over and kiss my husband.
‘Tea?’
‘Please.’
I poured out two glasses. We clinked them.
‘À nous,’ he said.
‘To us,’ I repeated.
He threaded his hand in mine. We both stared up at the emerging daylight.
‘Do you know what this time of day is called?’
‘You mean, besides “dawn”?’
‘Yes, besides “dawn” or “the break of day”.’
‘The last one’s poetic.’
‘So is “the blue hour”.’
There was a pause while I let the phrase resonate for a moment or so. Then I tried it out myself:
‘The blue hour.’
‘It’s rather lovely, isn’t it?’
‘Indeed. Neither darkness nor light.’
‘The hour when nothing is as it seems – when we are caught between the perceived and the imagined.’
‘Clarity and blur?’
‘The pellucid and the obscure? Simplicity masking enigma?’
‘Nice image,’ I said.
He leaned over again and kissed me deeply. And said:
‘J’ai envie de toi.’
And I wanted him so much too. Especially right now after all that restorative sleep. After that business in the alley. With the blue hour enveloping us.
He lifted me right out of my chair, his hands under my T-shirt. I pulled him towards me, feeling his hardness against me. Then he was steering us towards the bed. Some time later, as I bit into his shoulder, I came again and again. And then he let out a cry and shot into me.
We lay there, arms around each other, bewildered and, yes, happy.
‘Our adventure begins now,’ I said.
‘In the blue hour.’
But in the world beyond our bedroom window, emerging sunlight had already eradicated the dawn.
‘The blue hour has passed,’ I said.
‘Until sunset this evening.’
‘The beginning of a day is always more mysterious than the onset of night.’
‘Because you don’t know what lies ahead?’
‘At sunset you are more than halfway through the day’s narrative,’ I said. ‘At dawn you have no idea what will transpire.’
‘Which is perhaps why the blue is always bluer at dawn. And why a sunset is always more wistful. The entry into night, the sense of another day of life spinning towards its end.’
Paul leaned over and kissed me on the lips.
‘As the Irish would say: “There’s a pair of us in it.”
‘How do you know that expression?’
‘An Irish friend told it to me.’
‘What Irish friend?’
‘Someone long ago.’
‘A woman?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Perhaps? You mean, you’re not certain if a certain Irish woman told you that?’
‘OK, since you asked, her name was Siobhán Parsons. She was a professor of art at University College Dublin and not a bad painter. At the university in Buffalo for a year. Unmarried. As mad as a lamp, to use another of her favourite expressions. It lasted between us maybe three months. It was all around twelve years ago, when neither you nor I were aware of each other’s existence.’
Paul kept so much about his life before me in a room marked ‘Off Limits’. And there was a part of me that was jealous about his past. Jealous about the fact that there were women who had known him intimately before me. No man had ever pleasured me the way he had, so I didn’t like to think there were others who’d felt what I’d felt when he was inside me. Yet thinking all this here, now, I couldn’t help but feel ridiculous. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. As stupid as wandering off down that murky alleyway.
‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered.
‘Don’t be sorry. Just try to be happy.’
‘I am happy.’
‘That’s good to hear,’ he said, kissing me.
‘Hungry?’ I asked.
‘Famished.’
‘Me too.’
‘There’s no way I’m going downstairs dressed like this.’
‘But the outside world beckons. And do you really think anyone will care that you
’ve gone native?’
‘I’ll care.’
‘I won’t,’ I said. ‘And that must count for something.’
‘It does – but I am still waiting for my clothes.’
‘Isn’t there a movie where someone says: “Come with me to the casbah”?’
‘Charles Boyer to Hedy Lamarr in Algiers.’
‘Impressive,’ I said. ‘So come with me to the casbah.’
‘They don’t call it the casbah here. They call it the souk.’
‘What’s the difference between a casbah and a souk?’
‘Mystery,’ he said.
Seven
THE SOUK AT midday. The sky cloudless, a hard cobalt blue. A pitiless sun overhead, pushing the mercury to steam-bath levels. But down here, in Essaouira, everyone bar us seemed to be oblivious to the punishing heat. A heat so intense that the unpaved ground beneath our feet felt near-molten.
The souk at midday. A back-street labyrinth of stalls and shops and hidden alleyways containing more back streets, more spindly precincts where every sort of merchant was plying his trade. The sense of human density was extraordinary. So too was the prismatic concentration of colour. An entire alleyway with piles of auburn, maroon, crimson, scarlet, chestnut, sorrel, even chartreuse spices, displayed side by side, fashioned into minaret-style anthills. The contrasting aquamarine, ultramarine, turquoise and lapis lazuli of the intricately designed tiles on display by a vendor who had created a mosaic on the ground, which the passing crowd seemed effortlessly to dodge. The searing reds of the butcher meats; all hanging limbs and fatty flanks, dripping blood, around which flies congregated in mercenary clusters. The burnt yellows, sea-green, ochre, jet-white, electric-pink, salmon-pink bales of fabrics. The stalls selling beautifully patterned leather goods, shaded in every synonym for brown, tan, khaki. Then there was the melding of aromas, some enticing, some extreme. Fetid sewage interplaying with the redolence of the spice market; the pungent tang of the salted sea overhanging the flower stalls; the brewing mint tea at every kerbside stand we passed.
Add to this the souk’s crazed acoustics. Loudspeakers blaring French and Moroccan pop music. Hawkers shouting everywhere. Merchants beckoning us forward, blurting out: ‘Venez, venez!’ At least two competing muezzins – Paul told me the actual Arabic name for these distended voices – intoning high-noon prayers from a pair of strategically located minarets. The lawnmower chop of motorbikes and scooters, their drivers beeping manically as they negotiated the dirt-surfaced, potholed terrain, dodging stands piled high with Van-Gogh-ish oranges and mangoes, and vegetable stalls where the tomatoes were primary in their redness. And here was a man trying to reach for my hand and pull me over to a corner of the souk where soaps in many hues – ivory, copper, scorched cream, ebony – formed a geometric sculpture several feet high.
Even with the Atlantic nearby the air was still so parched, so arid, that after twenty minutes of exploring the souk’s early byways, my loose-fitting T-shirt and linen pants were sodden. So too were the T-shirt and shorts which Paul had pulled on when our laundry was delivered to our room later that morning (he held firm to the ‘no djellaba outside’ rule). By that time we’d had a large breakfast on our terrace. Then we set up what he called his ‘outdoor studio’ – Paul getting me to help him move the desk from the outer room to a corner of the balcony shaded by an overhanging roof, from where he had a direct view of the rooftops. He excused himself for a moment, returning ten minutes later with a brightly striped parasol he said he’d bought at a local shop. Positioning its plastic stand to ensure that his desk was fully shielded, he began to ready himself for work. A sketchpad was opened. Eight pencils were laid out with great formality on the varnished wood surface of the desk. Pulling his khaki safari hat onto his head, he sat down, peered out at the rooftops in the immediate distance, and then began his intricate, architectural rendering of them. I stood inside, watching him for a good ten minutes, marvelling at the precision and intensity of his vision, the amazing sense of line that he maintained, the way he seemed oblivious to everything but the work at hand, the ferocious discipline that rose up within him as he drew. All I could feel was a strange rush of love for this very talented, off-kilter man.
I drifted back inside and set up my own little workspace: my laptop, a very nice Moleskine journal bought before my departure and an old Sheaffer fountain pen which belonged to my dad. It was red with the sort of chrome trim that recalled the fins on a vintage Chevy. Dad always kept it filled with red ink, a source of dry amusement to my mother. ‘Your whole damn life is about the accumulation of red ink,’ she said on more than one occasion. But Dad once explained to me that he loved that colour for the richness of its imprint:
‘It really does look like you’ve been writing in blood.’
Before I was able to make the first crimson entry in my notebook, the phone by the bed jumped into life. I answered it to hear the guy at the front desk telling me:
‘Your French professor is downstairs.’
Monsieur Picard clearly worked fast, as I’d only asked him to find me a teacher yesterday.
Before I went downstairs to meet her, Paul said:
‘Whoever is going to be giving you the lessons will need the work. Don’t let her charge you any more than seventy-five dirhams an hour.’
‘But that’s only nine dollars.’
‘It’s great money here, trust me.’
When I entered the lobby I saw a demure young woman waiting by the reception desk. Though she was wearing the hijab, a headscarf that allowed her full face to be seen, she was nonetheless dressed in blue jeans and a floral blouse that – while it completely hid her décolletage – wouldn’t have been out of place in a 1960s commune. A touch of retro hippy chic. You could tell immediately that this was a young woman who was very much caught between disparate worlds.
When she accepted my outstretched hand the softness of her grip and the dampness of her palm hinted that she was anxious about this meeting. I tried to put her at her ease, motioning to two dusty armchairs in a corner of the lobby where we could talk undisturbed and asking the guy behind the desk to bring us two mint teas. She was intensely shy and seemed keen to please. Her name was Soraya. She was a Berber from the extreme south of the country, deep within the Sahara. Soraya was just twenty-nine and a teacher at a local school. Through gentle probing I discovered that she’d studied at the university in Marrakesh and even did a year in France. When she couldn’t get her visa extended she had to return home. Languages were her passion. In addition to her native Arabic and French she had mastered English and was working on Spanish now.
‘But the Moroccan passport makes it difficult to actually live or work anywhere else,’ she told me.
‘So you’ve never lived in England or the States?’ I said, completely amazed by her English which we occasionally slipped into, despite agreeing on an ‘all-French rule’ at the outset.
‘That’s my dream – to find my way to New York or London,’ she said with a shy smile. ‘But with the exception of France, I’ve never been out of Morocco.’
‘Then how on earth did you get so good at my language?’
‘I studied it at university. I watched all the American and British films and television shows that I could. I read many novels . . .’
‘What’s your favourite American novel?’
‘I really liked The Catcher in the Rye . . . Holden Caulfield was my hero when I was fifteen.’
I told her about having first learned French in Canada, and how I was here with my artist husband this summer, very determined to rejuvenate my French in four weeks.
‘But you speak it well already,’ she said.
‘You’re being far too kind.’
‘I’m being accurate – though a foreign language is one you must continue to work at, otherwise it does fade from memory.’
She asked me how I’d found my way to Essaouira. She was interested to know about Paul’s time in Morocco over thirty years ago, and where we li
ved in the States, and might Buffalo be a place that she would like?
‘Buffalo is not what one would call a particularly cosmopolitan or elegant city.’
‘But you live there.’
Now it was my turn to blush.
‘Where you end up may not be where you want to live,’ I said.
Shutting her eyes for a moment she bowed her head and nodded agreement.
‘So if I wanted to regain fluency in French in a month, how many hours a week would I need?’ I asked.
‘That depends on your schedule.’
‘I have no schedule here. No obligations, no commitments, no pressing engagements. And you?’
‘I teach at what you would call “lower school”. Children between the ages of six and nine. But I am free from five o’clock onwards every afternoon.’
‘If I was to suggest two hours a day . . .’
‘Could you afford three hours?’ she asked.
‘What would you charge?’
Now she turned an even greater shade of crimson.
‘You don’t have to be shy about this,’ I said. ‘It’s just money – and it’s best to get these things settled at the beginning.’
God, how American I sounded. Cards on the table. Name your price and let’s talk.
After a moment or two she said:
‘Would seventy-five dirhams per hour be too much?’
Seventy-five dirhams was a little under nine dollars. Immediately I said:
‘I think that’s too little.’
‘But I don’t want to ask for more.’
‘But I want to offer more. Would you accept one hundred and five dirhams per hour?’
She looked shocked.
‘That’s a huge amount per week.’
‘Trust me, if it was not affordable for me I would tell you.’
‘OK then,’ she said, looking away but now with a small smile on her face. ‘Where shall we do the lessons?’
‘I have a suite upstairs. I’ll have to check with my husband – but I think that should be fine.’
‘And if I may ask . . . what do you do professionally?’
‘Nothing very interesting.’ When I told her about my work as an accountant I could see her maintaining a neutral pose about it. I could also sense that she was wondering if I had children, and where were they right now? Or was this just me projecting my own concerns and insecurities onto this shy but observant young woman?
The Heat of Betrayal Page 6
