by Jane Johnson
“Wow. That looks as if it’s seen some action.”
“That’s the Qasba des Oudaias—begun by the Almohad sultan Abd-el-Moumen in the twelfth century to defend the area against attack from the sea. His son, Yacoub el Mansour, continued the work, creating these great ramparts around an existing convent—hence the city’s name of Rabat, which means ‘fortified monastery.’ It was from here the soldier-monks set out for holy war in Spain in the Middle Ages, and later, in the seventeenth century, it became the base for the corsair republic’s holy war against Christendom.”
“You’re beginning to sound like my history teacher at school. We spent all our lessons taking down lists of dates, and none of us learned a thing.”
“I’ll do my best to spice it up for you.” He sounded disdainful and hurt at the same time.
I didn’t know what to say, so I let him take my elbow and ferry me across the lethal road into the shadow of the great walls.
As we entered the arched gate, a young man dived out at me. “Vous voulez un guide, madame? Moins cher—”
Idriss barked a barrage of words at him and the young man fled.
“I’m sure he didn’t mean any harm,” I said, taken aback by his ferocity.
“Unofficial guides give Morocco a bad name. They pester tourists and some of them prey on unattended women. It’s not to be encouraged.”
“All I wished for was a guide, not a guard dog.” I smiled.
He looked at me coldly. “Dogs are dirty animals not sanctioned by the Qu’ran. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t call me that.”
I opened my mouth to explain that I had meant no insult, realized I was likely only to dig the cultural hole deeper, and shut it again. After that we walked in silence for a time until we turned a corner between tall, rough stone walls and came out into a central garden of exquisite design. A crisscross of tessellated pathways partitioned areas designated for herbs and oleanders, flowers and banana palms, all growing in perfect order. Wooden lattices spanned a number of the squares and supported the climbing plants whose close-knit leaves gave some respite from the boiling sun. Oranges glowed in the trees and arcades ran along the edges, offering shady niches where people sat and read or contemplated their serene surroundings.
“Beautiful,” I breathed. “Just like a miniature Alhambra.”
“It’s called the Andalucian Garden, but actually it was laid out by the French in the colonial period, with the Alhambra in mind.”
“Ah.”
“But the palace behind it, which is now the museum, was built in the seventeenth century by the Sultan Moulay Ismail. Perhaps your ancestor would have seen it—the sultan had many European slaves. When was he taken?”
“It was a she. And according to the … the family story, it was in the summer of 1625.” Instinct warned me not to mention the needlework book.
He raised an eyebrow. “That’s earlier than I would have thought. The corsair republic wasn’t founded until 1626 and the raids were at their height later in the century.”
“Oh.” I was suddenly once more full of doubts. “Maybe the legend is just that, or they got the dates wrong.”
“I have a friend at the university we can ask, if you’re serious about this.”
I laughed nervously. “It’s just curiosity, really.” He gave me a hard look. “You’ve come a long way, alone, out of mere curiosity.”
We took a narrow alleyway off the main thoroughfare, which wound its way steeply between tall houses with walled gardens, turned a sharp corner, and came upon a group of children gathered around something glowing like gold in the sunlight. I bent to see what had them so entranced and the children made way for me with huge grins. In the center of the circle were eight day-old chicks, scrabbling around like popcorn in a pan as they pecked up the grain the children had scattered on the cobbles.
Idriss hunkered down beside me. He said something to one of the boys, who dissolved into laughter, openmouthed and gap-toothed, and gabbled back at him. Then the child—quite without formality—caught my hand, turned it over, and dropped one of the chicks into my palm. It stood there uncertainly, its tiny legs shifting minutely for balance, weighing almost nothing, its pale down flaring in the sun just like a dandelion clock. I could feel the beat of its heart pulsing fast in counterpoint to my own. Then Idriss put his hand on my forearm and it was as if someone had touched a live wire to my skin.
“Abdel here says you can keep it.” His solemn gaze held mine.
My jaw dropped. Such generosity from a child—but how could I respond? Idriss smiled at my discomposure. Then he shooed the chick off my hand back onto the cobbles amongst its fellows, dug in his pocket, took out a couple of coins, and gave them to the boy, cupping a hand over his close-cropped head. “Tanmirt, Abdellatif. Bes salama.”
This little incident transformed the rest of the morning, as if events took their cue from its lightness and magic. I stopped worrying about the book, about its authenticity, about Michael, and gave myself up to Morocco: to its warmth and generosity, its exoticism, and its crumbling, pungent, ever-present history.
It would, in any case, have been hard not to enjoy the day, for the qasba offered up marvel after marvel: mazes of little winding streets lined with rough-plastered houses painted in blue-and whitewash, their windows adorned with intricate wrought-iron grilles, their doors of weather-silvered wood studded with heavy nails. Vivid cascades of bougainvillea and jasmine; glorious tumbles of climbing roses.
At last we came upon a lovely mosque with a tall minaret, and here Idriss stopped. “This is the Jamaa el Atiq, built in the twelfth century by the Sultan Abd-el Moumen. I don’t mean to bore you with dates and dry facts, but it is worth mentioning that this is the oldest mosque in Rabat.” He gazed upward, the lines of his face softened by the sunlight, which turned his black eyes a lustrous chestnut brown.
“Can we go in?” Given the elegance of the outside, I was curious to see the interior.
Idriss stared down at me. “Of course not.”
“Why not?” I bridled. “Because I’m a woman?”
“Because you’re not a Muslim.”
“Oh.” I laughed, without humor. “An infidel.”
“Indeed.” “Charming.”
“Come.” He took me by the arm. “Let me show you where my ancestors brought your infidel ancestor.”
“Actually,” I said, following him up through the maze of streets, “I think you’ll find that the Christians called the Muslims infidels, too.”
He had the grace to smile.
UP ON TOP of the qasba was the semaphore platform, a huge gun emplacement offering astonishing views over the ocean and across to a gleaming white town on the other side of the wide stretch of water.
“Our river is called the Bou Regreg—the Father of Reflection,” Idriss said, sitting on the wall. “It is a beautiful name, no? I do not know who called it that, but there have been people here since the earliest times. Three separate city-states developed here. Out there, across the river, was Slá el Bali—Old Salé, the port that served the opulent kingdom of Fez. In the seventeenth century it became the hub of the region’s slave trade and the heart of radical Islam. Across the water”— he pointed behind us—“lay Rabat, where the rich Jewish and Moorish merchants eventually settled. We are standing in what was Slă el Djedid—New Salé. When Philip of Spain expelled the Moors from Andalucia in the early part of the seventeenth century, many returned and set about reconstructing the city that had been abandoned here. They were welcomed with open arms: They brought considerable wealth with them—wealth and an indelible hatred of the Christians who had persecuted them. The ruler of this area, Sultan Moulay Zidane, gave them money to raise the ramparts and a garrison to guard the fortress, which became known as the Qasba Andalus.
“To begin with, they repaid him by paying over a tithe from the cargoes they took, but it wasn’t long before they stopped paying taxes to the sultan altogether. They didn’t need his aid, or his protection. Salé is s
trategically placed: The Straits of Gibraltar are very close. They funneled all the mercantile shipping as if through the neck of a bottle. All the corsairs had to do was to pounce as ships emerged; then, being faster and knowing the coast better than any pursuers, they sailed back into their home port with great speed. Do you see the disturbance in the water there?”
I followed the line of his pointed finger and saw where a line of surf ran across the river’s mouth, and nodded. “Yes.”
“There’s a sandbar hidden beneath the surface. Only a small shallow-keeled ship could pass over it, and if that didn’t stop them, the narrow channels would. Only an expert could navigate a passage through them. The wreckage of a lot of foreign ships litters the seabed there.”
“So why did they start stealing people?”
“Because they soon realized they could make a lot more by taking the crews and selling them at the slave auction. Besides, if you were running galleys into the Mediterranean, you needed crews of oarsmen to pursue the rich prizes.”
“But why the women?”
“Why do you think? For the purpose for which men have always stolen women.”
I flushed. Poor Catherine.
“I’m hungry,” I said suddenly to change the subject, and got up off the wall. “What can we eat?”
He thought for a moment, a deep vertical line appearing between his eyebrows. “Do you like fish?”
“Sure.”
“Then I have an idea.”
We walked down the right bank to the river’s edge, where a number of high-bowed, bright blue wooden boats were pulled up on the shore. On a little makeshift jetty people were lining up to get into one of these clinker-built boats. Idriss gave the ferryman two coins, handed me in over the gunwale, then joined me. The ferryman—a dark-skinned, emphatically bearded man who eyed me with barely disguised hostility—poled us into the river’s channel and across to Old Salé, and I walked into another world.
Men in djellabas, their faces shadowed by their hoods; women veiled in the full Muslim niqab, covering everything but their eyes; not a European to be seen. Self-conscious within moments of stepping onto this left bank, I wound my hair up into a knot and stuffed it under my hat. We walked past stall after stall selling the day’s catch. Men sat on stools beside the stalls, gutting and filleting, bombarded by a blizzard of screaming seagulls, their tunics smeared with blood and scales. I stepped carefully between stinking pools of fish detritus, rather dreading my lunch, but Idriss guided me by the elbow to an open-sided café on the shore, and there we dined like sea-kings on the freshest fish I had ever tasted, accompanied by great slices of lemon, new-baked bread, butter, and oil. At the end, licking my greasy fingers, I counted the backbones mounded on the paper in front of me. Fifteen. I stared at them in disbelief. I had eaten fifteen fish, and not all of them small. Idriss, however, had a significantly larger pile than I, and was still eating with deep concentration, applying himself to the task with intense care to waste nothing. He ate like a man possessed, like a man who didn’t know where his next meal was coming from.
“So,” I said as casually as I could manage. “Tell me about your family.”
“What do you wish to know?”
“Do you have brothers, sisters, parents … in-laws?”
“ In-laws?”
So much for subtlety. “Are you married?” Idriss shook his head. “No.”
“Never?”
“Never.”
He was not exactly being forthcoming. “Why not?” I pressed. He put down his fish. “It has just … never happened.” There was a pause as I wondered what to say next, then he said into the silence, “And you?”
“Ah, no. Same reason.” I could feel my lips pressing together as if to keep the unsavory truth imprisoned safely behind the bars of my teeth.
His eyebrows arched. “That surprises me.” His dark eyes scrutinized me with the same ruthless attention he had applied to flensing his fish. “Here we say, ‘A woman without a husband is like a bird without a nest.’”
At that instant the waitress passed. I signaled her urgently, but it was to Idriss she spoke. He began to dig in his pocket, but I pushed a two-hundred-dirham note across the table. “On me, please.”
I could feel the waitress’s keen gaze flickering between us and could imagine exactly what she was thinking, but at that moment all I wanted was to be out in the air, refocusing our conversation back onto the safely dead and buried.
THE MEDIEVAL SQUALOR of the riverbank gave way to a sudden burst of modern development, wide streets lined with French colonial villas, and after that the ocher walls of the old city reared up.
We passed into the medina by the Bab Bou Haja, and from there into a wide square containing lovely gardens. Idriss led me through these and out the other side into a street where the houses almost touched one another across the narrow span. Little shops were set into niches, selling ironware, shoes, jewelery, groceries, mobile phones, computer parts—it was bizarre to see evidence of the modern world in this medieval setting. Scents began to fill the air—fish, which seemed ubiquitous in this part of the city, spices, frying food, and other less identifiable smells. We turned down an alley and there was shade. Looking up, I saw that the alley was covered by a rough thatch of reeds. Around another corner and we were in the heart of the souq, the traditional market. It was like an anthill: a heaving mass of humanity, noise, music, shouting, laughing, sizzling oil, all confined within this labyrinth of tunneled passages. I didn’t know what to look at first: The sensory overload was total. Things loomed out at me as we wove our way through the jostling shoppers—exquisitely worked leather goods, shoes and slippers the color of jewels, clothing, brassware, piles of bright fruit, olives and candles, garlands of dried figs and apricots. Spices had been ranged in perfectly formed pyramids, their colors vivid, their scents pungent, persuasive—the reds of powdered chili and paprika, rich browns of cinnamon and nutmeg, paler cumin and ginger; the yellow ocher of turmeric, stars of aniseed, spikes of clove. The smells became rank, and then we were surrounded by stalls of meat, selling objects I could hardly believe I was seeing—cows’ feet, ears, noses; sheep’s heads, goats’ heads, veiny white testicles, piles of tripes.
“Ugh.” I held my nose.
Idriss laughed at me. “I forgot your delicate Western sensibility. Come, we’ll go this way.”
We passed more odd sights—a woman surrounded by geese, ducks, and rabbits, people gathered around her to choose their dinner for the night. Bundles of dried snakeskins hanging from the rafters. A cage of monkeys, and one of some strange-looking reptiles with swiveling eye sockets and little handlike claws. We passed them at a clip and were some way farther on before I realized what they were.
“Weren’t those chameleons in those cages back on the corner there?”
“I should imagine so. Some people use them against the evil eye.” “What do you mean ‘use them’?”
“If you have a specific trouble, you can throw a chameleon on the fire. If it explodes, then your trouble will disappear with it. But if it just melts down”—he shrugged—“then your trouble is here to stay.”
“You are joking.”
“We are a very superstitious people, we Moroccans.”
“So are the English, but I don’t think we’d ever throw a living creature on a fire merely out of superstition.”
“No? What about all the witches you burned? I believe your Queen Elizabeth even burned cats at her coronation.”
“She did not!” The idea of our sensible, stolid old queen doing anything so barbaric made me laugh out loud.
“The first Queen Elizabeth—she burned them to prove that witchcraft had been purged from her kingdom.”
I raised an eyebrow. “You are a fund of arcane knowledge.”
We turned another corner and emerged into a market square. In the middle of it, an old man was weighing fleeces into a huge pair of brass scales. “This is the wool market,” Idriss said. “The Souq el Ghezel. In the se
venteenth century it was one of the places where Christian slaves were auctioned.”
I stood there looking at the old man and the brass balance. With his flowing white beard and his long cream djellaba, the wool-seller looked as if he might very well have stepped out of the same crowd that witnessed the corsairs’ prisoners being auctioned at the slave blocks.
What would those untraveled, sequestered people of Cornwall’s Penwith peninsula, most of whom had never crossed the River Fal, let alone the River Tamar, have made of this supremely alien place? It continued to shock and amaze me at every turn, yet I had traveled to a dozen countries in the world, and been exposed by television to images of hundreds more. Already traumatized by their abduction and the horrors of their voyage, they must have moved through these foreign streets as if in a drugged-out, psychedelic dream.
Idriss’s touch on my arm brought me back to myself. “Let me show you something else. I think you will like it.”
He led me around the city walls until we reached a monumental gateway, towering twenty feet and more above us. Despite its enormous size and the massive nature of the stonework, I was astonished by its beauty, for the arch seemed poised overhead as if held by some invisible inner tension between the two towers on either side and by the delicate traceried net of its mystical, interweaving patterns and scripts.
“This is the Bab Mrisa,” Idriss told me as we both gazed up at it. “The Little Harbour. In the seventeenth century, before the river silted up and changed its course, the corsairs sailed their ships right into the fortified heart of the city through this gate. It was through the Bab Mrisa that your Robinson Crusoe was brought. ‘Our ship making her course between the Canary Islands and the African shore, was surprised in the grey of the morning by a Turkish rover of Sallee,’” he quoted suddenly.
