Lulu in Marrakech

by Diane Johnson

  I had already prepared myself to run into her, had supposed I would. We had heard that Alice had left Mecca, years ago, for the more welcoming atmosphere of Marrakech, and my parents had instructed me to call her when I got to Morocco, but of course I couldn’t because of my new identity. I had thought about it, had weighed the possibility of carrying on an acquaintance without acknowledging our connection, and had decided on the course to follow should I meet her. Faced with dealing with it now, I admitted to enough familiarity with Santa Barbara and Palo Alto to enable us to play whom-do-you-know. I even admitted to knowing my parents, as if they had been pleasant friends of friends. I was not surprised that we should meet, since the foreign community, above all the anglophone community, is small, and most of the foreigners there were French. It was even predictable, and I could see that she was the perfect person to be an informant, connected to both the Muslim and American communities.

  I’d absorbed Ian’s reminders that any access to Moroccan culture must come either from inference, from him, or through some female network—the Moroccan male world was closed. Here was an entrée into a female network, though much would depend on her attitude to America. Sometimes people long-expatriated were nostalgic and positive about their native land, but sometimes they had retained what ever bitter conclusions had driven them away. I was more or less the former, but Habiba’s attitude wasn’t clear. In the meantime, she was very much the director of this branch of the Near East Friendship Foundation.

  “We can go visit some of the schools next week. I have a driver—my programs are mostly in the villages.” Her voice took on a tone of professional recitation, of a presentation she had often given, of facts and figures, funding sources, results. “We’ve seen the enrollment of girls go up from eighteen to nearly forty percent. Believe me, this is fabulous.” The most intriguing thing she said was, “I’m committed to girls reading. Not everybody agrees.” I wanted to hear more about the people who, like Marina Cotter, didn’t think that girls should read, but just then someone called her away. She stuck out her hand, said how glad she was to meet me, and glided away in her robes and hijab. Cousin Alice/Habiba. It was odd but not unpromising.

  It was hard to imagine a life without being able to read—the situation for three quarters of women and girls in the rural areas of Morocco. If you couldn’t read, you’d have to wait for people to tell you things—how unreliable that would be! The little girls I’d already seen in the city school I’d visited (most aged about ten, wearing head scarves) seemed to be following a more or less modern curriculum. Thinking of the people who disapprove of female reading, I also thought of Posy, with her Oxbridge degree and views about water imagery and scansion and the rest, lumbering around, pregnant, waiting, and fretful, and I could imagine what the naysayers might say, that reading was wasted on Posy too, on all women, they should just get on with their baby-having.

  As to recruiting informants, I had hopes of finding one in Habiba, and I also had hopes for Rashid. Though he hadn’t gotten over his dislike of me, over the incident of being made to drive us to the fire, on our daily outings he had become almost garrulous and didn’t disguise his outrage at things that were happening in Morocco, above all at the increasing despotism of the new king and especially his secret service.

  These groups had been appalling instruments of the torture and disappearances rife under the last king, Hassan II, elements the new one, Mohammed VI, had promised to control. Instead, they were active again; people disappeared or were imprisoned. The press was not free, and two French-language papers had recently been shut down.

  “What are we doing about it? Nothing, madam. We are dogs. If we had the tails of dogs, we would trip on them between our legs,” Rashid said.

  16

  Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it.

  —E. M. Forster, A Passage to India

  Ian had a leading and visible place in the business community, among both Moroccans and expatriates. I went with him several times to hear him address investors or bankers. His talks, adjusted slightly depending on the audience, were entitled such things as “Morocco, Land of Possibilities” and were about the potential in the sector of light manufacturing, focused on the availability of space, water, and labor. “The present business climate is the result of a favorable tax structure, generous financial incentives in terms of loans, mortgages, and exceptions for foreign investments.” I usually tuned out after too many paragraphs of this, but his audiences seemed up‐beat and responsive. I recognized that his English witticisms and his clarity about money made him a sought-after speaker. When I went to hear him, I didn’t go with him as his companion, but went instead in the role of literacy‐program examiner, separately, driven by Rashid. Ian had suggested this discretion.

  The frequent visits of the Cotters, and ours to them, gave me a chance to get better acquainted with Suma Bourad, whom they often brought along to social events. She was lonesome, I thought, and seemed happy to speak of Paris, which she wasn’t able to do with Marina Cotter or her grandchildren, who didn’t know Paris and didn’t speak much French. I also saw Suma from time to time if I happened to be at Tea Cosy, Tom and Strand’s tea shop, when she brought the Cotter grandchildren to play with Amelie. Other times she took them to play with the two Al‐Sayad children, and sometimes Gazi’s maid brought them to the Tea Cosy. The Al‐Sayad kids were pudgy, olive‐skinned, normal-seeming kids, jabbering in Arabic and capable of polite phrases in English: “Sank you, madame,” and so on.

  Soon enough, I had gotten friendly enough with Suma to ask her about the murder attempt in Paris.

  “That is not the real Islam,” she said. “My brother was misled is all.” I could see that she didn’t especially want to talk about it with me, an unknown American.

  “But what happened?”

  “He said I was not a virgin and that he’d tell people that, so I was afraid, of course. Horrible things happen to girls when people think that. So I went to the shelter.” I supposed she meant by “people” Muslim and unreconstructed people in the suburbs. I knew what she meant. I’d read about the horrible things—rapes, disgrace, disfigurement, and one girl in a Paris suburb had been burned alive.

  “Do you hope to go back to France?”

  “I am not at home here,” she said vaguely. “Though in some ways it’s better, because no one insults you for wearing the veil. I like it that everyone is a Mussulman. I’d be comfortable at the Al‐Sayads’, where pork isn’t served and prayers are offered, all that sort of thing. Inshallah!

  “Well, the Cotters are nice. I have nothing against Christians, I was raised among them after all. But I’ve come to see it isn’t my path.”

  I asked her if it had often happened in France that people insulted her for wearing the veil. “Oh, yes, waiters absolutely shrink if you try to come into a restaurant. They pretend you aren’t there. They think you’re a fanatic.” She laughed bitterly at some memory and added, “My parents didn’t like it either because they thought it wasn’t sincere. Sincerity is important in our religion, believe it or not.” I believed it, since you would have to be sincere to blow yourself up. I would have asked her more, but she seemed to want to talk about cinema and the recent French literary prizes—stuff suitable to her age—instead of her future, and she claimed to be perfectly happy with the Cotters for the moment. The Cotters, I’m sure, were pleasant enough—large, British, distant, and cheerful, though they’d been stunned by the death of their daughter-in-law and the subsequent arrival of little Freddie and Rose, and worried about their distraught son, who was now away in the Lancers or some such British regiment. I liked them, at least at first.

  The Al‐Sayads, though they were Ian’s neighbors, didn’t mingle much with the European community, but they often sent their two fat children over to play with Tom and Strand’s Amelie as well as with the Cotters’ Rose and Freddie, and often whoever was in charge would bring them to swim in Ian’s pool. We thought it odd they didn�
�t have a pool. I was at Tom’s once when they came there. Marcia, the Filipina maid, brought them in and then waited outside. Tom and I had studied her for signs of the famous abuse the Saudis are said to inflict on their foreign help, but she seemed fine. We speculated about the Al‐Sayads’ social life—they knew mostly Moroccans, but they also seemed to have a lot of Saudi visitors, judging from the black abayas their women guests wore getting in and out of white limos.

  They didn’t invite us to their house, which was named Garden of Harmony, in Arabic of course; but if Gazi or Khaled was in their driveway when Posy and I began one of our walks outside the walls, they would wave in a friendly way, and their visitors, implacable behind their veils, still somehow, by their stares, gave off an air of surprise that such an acquaintance was possible. For all their talk of Yale and Shakespeare, it was plain that the Saudi couple were ambivalent about socializing with the boozy Brits next door; in part, they seemed proud of it, or rather of their ability to mingle and be accepted among Westerners as if there were nothing odd about them. (I could not forget the sight of Khaled at the airport in his white robe and checkered headdress with its crown-of-thorns circlet around his brow. I was never to see him in those again—he must have laid them aside during his Moroccan visits, though Gazi kept to her black shroud disguise.) I also saw her once unveiled in public, at the Mamounia hotel, in a lime-green Armani jacket.

  But with us they were always uneasy or on edge, as if at any moment they expected something to happen that would tax their ability to comprehend or stand it—some cultural absolute, some blasphemy that might really damage or appall them. Of course we were all careful not to tread on their beliefs, religion a subject never mentioned even when, as occasionally happened, world troubles or Arab unrest were discussed. Then they disclaimed any admiration for Osama bin Laden, or rather, they claimed to hate him. Gazi was outspoken about the lot of women in Saudi Arabia, and Khaled had the air of nodding in agreement, but more in the role of supportive husband than from conviction. I believed that at home he’d be a traditional Saudi husband, what ever that involved. In Marrakech, Gazi drove—I had seen her behind the wheel of a BMW—but I knew it was against the law in Saudi Arabia.

  I thought about Gazi and the other Muslim women in their cloisters—in former times in actual purdah—and could imagine the desperation and intrigues that must have festered there. I pitied them, but I couldn’t scorn them, since I was in thrall myself, to my “job,” and sexually, to Ian, an enthrallment of my own making, dictated by nature, maybe, or a response to the loneliness of my role.

  Once, I’d said something critical about Gazi—for I didn’t really like her, there was something about her resolute gaity, her jewels, her air of crazy, madcap heiress so at odds with her black abaya, and her reputation (I imagined) for mistreating her servants; I had called her “the princess,” sarcastically, and Ian rebuked me.

  “Think of what she has to bear in Saudi Arabia. Think of the lives of women there.”

  “I meant it in the sense we say ‘Jewish princess,’ or ‘Japanese princess,’ to mean a spoiled, demanding person who spends a lot of time on her nails,” I explained.

  Ian gave me a long look and said, “What do you think of yourself as, Lulu?”

  This was said lightly, affectionately, but though I’m not a sensitive person, it stung me, for its justice. As far as Ian could see, I was an indolent and sheltered American, who, apart from some harsh scenes witnessed in Kosovo, had not much experience with anything grim and had well-tended fingernails. And given that I hadn’t produced anything much in the professional line, that was truly about all there was to me.

  Once or twice I had caught Gazi in the act of hating Posy and me, mostly me, as Posy, married and pregnant, had already compromised the freedoms Gazi could see I still had and she could never have. Her feelings were seen in no more than a fleeting expression, and I couldn’t blame her for them. It was no wonder she often mentioned her years at Brown University, which must have been the only time she wasn’t constrained by her culture; her only act of defiance in her own country was the drive-in, the demonstration she’d been a part of after the first Gulf War in 1991 and the retributions afterward.

  Gazi had told us about being a member of the Saudi drive-in, when a number of mostly foreign-educated Saudi women got in cars and drove up and down the main street in Riyadh to assert their right to drive. “I was not the leader,” she said. “My older sister and her friends were. They suffered more than I. Really, the women did not suffer, for they are not responsible agents, after all, just suggestible sillies. Our husbands suffered. Khaled was put on leave of absence, and people— men—called us in the middle of the night, and sometimes there was just a voice uttering curses. And one girl committed suicide. My sister’s friend Leila disappeared after the drive-in. She was never seen again.”

  “The men are afraid of women, I suppose,” Posy said, voice dripping with scorn for Islamic manhood.

  “Our husbands tried to help us, by and large. Khaled was wonderful. One group that was afraid we would succeed, though, was the drivers. What would become of them if women could drive?”

  “Are the drivers the only men you are alone with?” I wondered.

  “Do women have affairs with their drivers?” asked Posy. Gazi stared, disconcerted.

  “No,” she said. “I’ve never heard of that.” By her expression, you could see she’d never thought of drivers as viable men. “We have to be careful, after all.” Her sisterly expression seemed to imply that they were as frisky and prone to adventure as we Westerners.

  I admired Gazi for the strength of character that drove her perfect poise, her perfect grooming, though in Posy’s opinion this was just self-preservation.

  “He might take a second wife at any time, remember,” she said. “Then a third and fourth…” I couldn’t help but remember that Gazi was one of the luckier Saudi women, relative to the poor village women, even in Morocco, who were like beasts of burden, limping down the road under their bundles of sticks—little, invisible, bent, disposable.

  All the while, I myself was feeling a little like a harem girl—sex in exchange for, in this case, the right to be here, to snoop into Ian’s affairs and those of his friends. I told myself that I’d be here anyhow, because of being in love with him, or as much in love as I could allow myself to be.

  As a younger person, in Paris, I had plunged into all that you’re supposed to do there—lose your head completely over a man, learn how to read a menu, muster a barely passable French, etc. But here, now, in my new situation, I had no sense of the expectations and whether I was living up to them, and no sense of self-improvement.

  And also, frankly, when he reproached me about Gazi, this admonitory side of Ian was new to me. Was it because I was now in the position of chatelaine of his house hold that he scrutinized me for perfection? Alas, I was/am so far from it. My ambivalence about Ian was complicated—as I guess ambivalence is by definition. The more I felt myself in love with him, the worse I felt about my exploitive double life, using him as cover. Thus I didn’t allow myself to be as nice as I wanted to be, or as in love as I wanted to be.

  Trying to be nice, I began to interest myself in the details of managing the meals and the gardens, knowing little about either, but this wasn’t received very well by the competent employees: Rashid, Aisha, Miryam, and Mohammed. (“You can call anyone Mohammed here and have a fair chance of being right,” Posy Crumley had told me. “They’re all called that or Ali. Oh, don’t rule out Ahmed and Hassan, but that’s about it.” To me she sounded exactly like colonial Brits in novels by Kipling or Maugham.)

  “I think that’s rather a good thing,” said her husband, “very leveling and democratic, the way Koreans are all called Lee or Park, or Kim.”

  “The African way of giving everyone an absolutely unique name makes it very hard to remember what people are called,” Ian had agreed. “Is she Taisha or Kimmet or La Donna?…”)

  In fact I had begu
n to realize that Ian’s staff mistrusted me or resented me. They bowed their heads or looked away when I came into the kitchen or asked questions about cooking or produce. Only very slowly did I begin to get the sense that it was moral contamination they feared: I was the unmarried mistress, the concubine, not at all the sort of person they should associate with. Of course this surprised me very much. Was it too late to redeem my character? The more I became aware that the house hold staff, especially the maids in their nurselike white head scarves and long, modest tunics, didn’t approve of me, the more concerned I felt to convince them of my goodness, my devotion to Ian (whom I presumed them to love), my standards of house keeping, my knowledge of gardening, my charm to his friends. But I could tell it wasn’t working. Their impassive faces, their politeness, the remarkable slowness of their movements conveyed their mistrust.

  I discussed it with Posy. The cooks liked and talked to her, especially one, Miryam, a middle-aged woman who seemed to represent wisdom to the others. “They wonder about your relationship with your family,” Posy said. “They asked me about it. They think that having lost your virginity, you’ve been cast out by them. They notice that you seldom get letters.”

  “How do they know I’ve lost my virginity? They must have been snooping in my pills.” I didn’t like them snooping in my stuff.