“You think there’s a toilet here?” I asked Paul.
“No idea—but that line over there looks huge.”
He nodded toward a group of about a dozen women, all but three hidden by niqabs, lined up in front of a single hut.
“Maybe I should just try and hold it,” I said.
“But there’s at least another hour and a half to go. We should try to slip around the back of the depot.”
Which is exactly what we did—finding a patch of ground festooned with trash, broken bottles, two burned-out fires, even a dead mouse charred by the sun.
“You expect me to pee here?” I asked Paul.
“There is the toilet option.”
The stench enveloping us was nothing short of toxic; an aroma of fecal matter and festering rubbish. But I was desperate to empty my bladder. So, finding a patch of ground that was free of glass shards and trash, I undid my loose-fitting cargo pants, squatted down, and let go. Paul meanwhile was standing some feet away, peeing against a wall, laughing.
“Gracious living, eh?” he said.
The driver began to beep his horn. We had to get back on the bus. But as we came aboard we discovered that two young men—they must have been around twenty years old, both scowling and menacing, both wearing nylon bomber jackets and black plastic sunglasses—had taken our seats. They saw us heading toward them as we negotiated the tiny aisle, sidestepping all the bags and two very parched dogs (German shepherds, rendered inert by the heat). When we reached our places, Paul informed them in French that they were sitting where we had been sitting. Their response was to ignore us. I glanced around. Every other seat on the bus was taken. Paul quietly asked them to move. Their response again was to act as if we didn’t exist.
“Vous êtes assis à nos places,” Paul said, his tone getting edgier. “Vous devriez en chercher d’autres.”
Again, nothing. Paul tried again, adding, “S’il vous plaît.”
The two guys exchanged a cool, amused glance. They continued to say nothing.
At this point the other young guy, who’d been singing along tonelessly to his iPod all the way south, turned around and said something in Arabic to the two toughs. One of them shot back a short response—which, from its menacing vehemence, was a warning to stay out of this. The young guy remained cool in the wake of this exchange. He just quietly shook his head, then popped his earphones back on his head.
Meanwhile, the elderly man seated nearby heard this exchange and suddenly erupted in an angry flow of Arabic; so angry that all eyes in the bus were on us, the two foreigners standing in the aisle. The same one who had hissed at our friend with the headphones now said something so unpleasant to the elderly man that several people nearby—including a large woman whose face was completely covered by a niqab—began to shout back at the pair. Again they sat there silently, refusing to budge, refusing to listen to reason, determined to play out this scenario to some sort of unpleasant conclusion.
“I’m getting the driver,” Paul said to me.
But the driver—a harassed, constricted man with sunken eyes and a pencil-thin moustache—was already en route toward us, looking less than pleased. He walked into a sea of raised voices, as the elderly man, the woman with the niqab, and three others began to tell him what had just transpired. The driver asked Paul something in fast French. Paul responded equally fast, indicating that he had politely asked these two boys (they couldn’t have been more than seventeen) to vacate the seats that we’d had since Casablanca. Now the driver got vehement, yelling at them, staring into their menacing black sunglasses, which made them appear even more sinister. But, as before, they refused to respond. The driver’s voice now ticked up another angry octave. As he put his face close to them, the more verbal of the pair—the one who had spoken back to the young guy and the elderly man—did something startling: he spat at the driver, catching him directly in one eye.
The driver looked beyond stunned. To his credit he didn’t lash out, didn’t explode into understandable fury. Rather, with immense quiet dignity, he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, wiped the spittle from his eye, then hurried down the aisle, leaving the bus and heading into the depot building opposite where we were parked.
Immediately the young dude with the headphones stood up. Gently touching my shoulder, he motioned that I should take his seat.
“Ce n’est pas nécessaire,” I said.
“J’insiste,” he said. The man seated next to him—a quiet businessman-type in his forties, bespectacled, wearing a light-blue striped suit—also slid out of his seat.
“J’insiste.”
“Mille mercis,” Paul said, as he gently directed me toward the window seat, then positioned himself next to me, ensuring that I was out of range of the aisle should anything violent happen.
“You okay?” Paul whispered as I reached for his hand.
“What’s this about?”
“Macho bullshit. Showing they can stand up to a Western woman.”
“But I said nothing to them.”
“Doesn’t matter. They’re idiots. Fortunately everyone else around us thinks that too.”
At that moment two policemen entered the bus, both looking as hot as the rest of us. The driver was right behind them. Seeing us now seated he explained something to the officers in rapid-fire Arabic. One of the officers turned and actually saluted us. The elderly man now began to get angry, pointing an accusatory finger at the two toughs, expressing his outrage at what had transpired with the driver. The second officer picked up the nastiest of the pair by his shirt, whipped off the kid’s sunglasses, threw them to the floor, and stamped on them with his foot. With his eyes exposed, the boy’s gangster image suddenly vanished. He was just a sallow adolescent. The other officer did likewise with his cohort, only this time, when the dark glasses were pulled from his face, all I could see was fear.
Within moments they were both being frog-marched down the aisle and out of the bus. As soon as they were clear of the front door, the driver was back in his seat, revving the engine, wanting to put immediate distance between himself and all the events that had just transpired. Paul and I stood up, offering to move back to our previous seats. But the businessman and the young headphone dude insisted we stay put. I glanced out the window and regretted doing so. Because I saw the tougher of the tough guys trying to break free of the grasp of one of the officers. Immediately the cop had his baton out and slammed it directly in the boy’s face. As soon as he fell to his knees the cop responded with a direct blow to the head. The other tough began to cry out, but was slapped across the mouth with an open hand by the officer holding him. The bus picked up speed, shrouding this brutal tableau in a cloud of dust. Behind me the young headphones dude began to sing his toneless song again. I buried my head in Paul’s shoulder, feeling profound guilt. As if my presence here had caused it all. Sensing my distress, Paul tightened his arm around me.
“It’s all in the past now,” he said.
And the bus sped off into the future.
FIVE
IF THE CAT could talk, she would have said: How did this happen? She looked dusty, grubby, world-weary; a cat who lived on the streets and had no human home to which to retreat. And tonight she was hanging off a wall. The way her claws were digging into the chalky texture of the brickwork made it appear as though she had been glued into place, her back in perfect parallel with the wall. There was something spectral and unsettling about the way she seemed to be frozen. I was reminded of images I’d once seen of wildlife that had been caught in volcanic lava flow and had fossilized into place; their final steps as sentient creatures frozen in time. I must have spent a good minute looking at the cat and the place in which she now found herself. How was she able to sustain this absurd, improbable physical position? And what fear or apprehension had forced her to take refuge on a crumbling bit of whitewashed stone down a dark alleyway within the labyrinthine confines of a walled city?
How did this happen?
And what
was I doing down this black passageway in the middle of the night?
To jump back around twelve hours . . .
The bus deposited us at its terminus—the depot at Essaouira—just before two p.m. As we staggered off that motorized steambath, the headphones dude—still singing that wonderful ludicrous tune (was that the only song on his iPod?)—gave us an amused wave goodbye. The bus driver, smoking what was evidently a much-needed cigarette, also nodded farewell as we grabbed our luggage and fended off several touts who were trying to convince us to take up their offer of cheap accommodation.
“You want room . . . very clean . . . good price.”
“Nous avons déjà une chambre,” Paul replied, steering me toward a line of beat-up taxis nearby.
“But I have better room . . . you come with me I show you everything in Essaouira.”
Paul waved him away while I sidestepped several women holding up woven shirts and multicolored shawls and cheap beaded necklaces. The afternoon sun was still punishing. This concrete plaza was thick with gas fumes and dust. I grabbed my scrunched-up field hat out of my shoulder bag, then pulled it down so squarely over my head that it shielded my eyes. The crowd of hawkers followed us as we moved toward the taxis. They were relentless in their need to hound us. They wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“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 sc
enario 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.”
The Blue Hour Page 4
