Marrakesh

We arrived just as afternoon was going. The sky was still bright scalding blue ruled by a razing yellow sun that had just begun to slip. The buildings rising up before us were made of stone that came from the same earth our tires rolled past. Scarlet red buildings on scarlet earth rose up proud and heavy. Only scattered green palm trees interrupted the beckoning effect of crimson. We pulled up to the hotel and everybody climbed off the bus. The sun met us outside the doors and the taste of dust came on with the first breath. Even if no one had told me that we had come closer to the Sahara I would have known it. I could feel it. The sun glinted off the hotel. It’s name I’ve forgotten, but the lobby will live with me forever.  

As soon as we walked through the doors, the cloud of chatter fell away from us and our mouths fell open. The hotel was one tall rectangle pushing against the sky. The center of each floor was open like a courtyard and rimmed with balcony railing. From the very top ceiling of the hotel on the 20th floor, a chandelier started dripping swept and hung crystals, it filled the open space of each floor and it didn’t stop until the lobby. It sparkled by its own light like nothing I had ever seen. While our program directors were busy with the bundle of our passports, checking us into our rooms for the night, we were standing with our necks bent and mouths open, trying desperately to fit a 20-story chandelier into cell phone camera lenses. Amira adjusted her hijab and leaned toward me, “Marrakesh is like Las Vegas of Morocco” she said. Vegas was nothing to me but what I had heard about it, a glittering mirage.

I looked at her face, and her expression said “When we go out into the city, don’t let it sweep you up, it’s nothing, we Moroccans aren’t proud of this, it’s a trap for tourists, don’t let it fool you.” I nodded and tried not to look at the chandelier.  

We took the elevators up and the bus load of us filtered into our rooms in twos and threes. Imane, Layla, and I followed each other into our room, tossed our bags on the beds and crowded into the window. Red earth and red buildings stretched on and into lighter tan and brown structures, even white further out. The flush of Marrakesh faded as it sprawled. The buildings closest to us must have been the oldest. The largest one was a block square with the distinctive bristled turret tops of the old forts. There were enough afternoon hours left to rub together and the whole night laying out before us unscratched by scheduling of any kind. Tomorrow morning, we would pack ourselves back into the bus and move on. But Tomorrow was a long way off.   

“We should go out tonight, like on the town.” Layla said, adjusting her extensions in the back of her head, standing before the mirror on the wall. Her skin, something trapped between charcoal and mahogany, caught the light coming from the window. I was the only thing blocking its light, waiting on the sill for my turn in the mirrors. Imane sighed and shook her head from the bathroom where she was adjusting her enormous bun, her black hijab draped on the bathroom counter, waiting to return to its place. I turned from the window, tensing myself for the revival of the argument of last week, the one that got so loud it turned heads in the restaurant. I was the unhappy arbiter in the great contest of “how haram is drinking exactly when compared to other sins?” Or can sins even be compared? Is it not one and the same to go against the commands of Allah?  

They must have remembered it too because they fell silent again and remained focused on their mirrors. I admired Imane’s black hair coiled in its bun. It was months before I ever saw it. The only reason I had seen it was because whenever the whole group traveled it was always us three in a room together. We were the only three Americans who still believed in God, so even though we called him different names we clung to each other. We had an understanding.  

Imane was focused completely in the mirror. She sprayed a cloying floral perfume over her dark hair. Without the hijab she almost looked like someone else. Somehow her cinnamon skin seemed changed by the pride of her hair. She didn’t notice me watching the procedure. Her eyes were focused on her own reflection. The fold of the black fabric must be exact. Her hands swept past each other the way fish move around each other in water. Her hair was quickly lost to view. With a final adjustment, she retrieved a pearl pin from between her teeth and pushed it gently to the place in the fabric her finger held; into the hair just above her ear. And she was transformed back into Imane, as the rest of the world saw her. She turned slightly sideways and looked over her face, then left herself and the bathroom was empty. My turn.  

“When we get back to the hotel tonight, we should go downstairs to the spa” Imane said.  

“What spa?” Layla said, turning from putting on her mascara.  

“Didn’t you see the brochures downstairs? The hotel has a spa! We can get mani-pedis or a massage.” Imane pulled dresses from her bag, searching.  

“Oh, a massage! Maybe they got some good-looking men for that.” Layla said at the mirror on the wall. I laughed from the bathroom but said nothing, carefully detangling my curls, spraying them gently and crushing them back to shape with my hands. Imane’s perfume still hung in the air as I sprayed my own, tuberose and iris, vanilla and amber.

“I want to go to the medina.” I said.  

“Well yeah they’re going to take us to the medina. But there’s a Medina back in Rabat, there’s probably clubs and bars here, we don’t have those in Rabat.” Layla said, pulling on her best skinny jeans.  

“True” I said. Finding a drink in a dry country was always a steeplechase. Back in Rabat, we went to school, we lived comfortably with the families who volunteered to take us in. And hardly dared to look for the tang of illegal alcohol we knew we would not find and as women, should not want. In these big tourist cities police mostly looked the other way, bars studded street corners and shops sold bottles. The opportunity was the substance of temptation. But I didn’t care.   

I didn’t care about drinks and bars. Somehow their usual weight was lost. There was something here that felt curious, it felt different from the other corners of Morocco that already wore my footprints. It compelled me to find it. I sensed the something of Marrakesh would be at least partially buried in the medina. I was running out of time to get dressed. Imane was sitting on the bed, staring out into the window full of reverberating red.  

 The doors broke into the hot still air, forcing it out before us as we stepped onto sunbaked asphalt. We went across the street, everyone talking at once. We left the hotel as a group, ten American students and five Moroccans as our friends and guides. The Americans walked so close together their legs nearly brushed against each other. They could not have been more obvious if they had been waving their blue passports in the air. I hung at the back, feeling the afternoon breeze sweep my legs. Laughter rung from them.  

It seemed to bounce off the streets, to repel the locals. They kept their distance as they walked looking down at us from the corners of their eyes or ignoring us entirely. I studied them as we passed and found them to be the mix of modern and traditional that had become familiar to me. Men wearing djellabas over jeans and tennis shoes as often as they wore them with babouches. The women walked past with the often blonde and perfectly curled hair, interrupted by the occasional hijab. Posh faux designer reigned among the Moroccan women as often as they wore djellabas.  

We went down a kind of promenade lined with palm trees. The group stopped, craning up their necks and looking around them like baby birds. Our guide met us and said something that I didn’t hear and then we started moving again. The sounds and smells of the medina closed in on us as we walked.   

Medinas are tangled back streets, layered and steeped in unknowable histories. They are open air markets in the oldest parts of a city and every city in Morocco has one. Nearly always a new street is available to go explore just as you thought you’d seen them all and every one is a perfectly unique repetition of the last until it isn’t. Eventually the market slowly fades, until it is only narrow old streets lined with narrow old doors, repeating themselves in a ripple.  

The main streets are lined with market stall after market stall, some larger and some small, sometimes bird cages hung in clusters on the walls between them, parakeets and finches and empty cages. Sometimes carts and bins crowd the cobblestone center of the medina’s heart. They can hold anything from hijab scarves to live turtles or fresh herbs. Medinas are filled with handmade things, things that look traditional or authentic and sometimes are. The things the locals are desperate to sell to tourists and the things tourists are desperate to bring home. Tagines, plates, and mugs all meticulously painted, little silver teapots in heaps, leather purses embossed with a thousand designs dyed a thousand colors. Folk instruments, ouds and flutes and little guitars hang from rafters. Pashmina scarves overflow.  

Medinas have food carts even I didn’t dare eat from. Amira told me I didn’t have the proper bacteria in my gut to digest it without getting sick and I believed her. But it always smelled so good. Some stalls are devoted to the things Moroccans preferred. Knock off designer bags with Chanel spelled with an extra n. Or very convincing not Burberry scarves. Soccer jerseys and equally compelling fake Nikes. Spices forming sculpted miniature mountain ranges fill stalls beside bowls of every kind of marinated olive. There are endless bottles of argon oil and rose water, handmade soaps and lotions and sometimes shoddy lingerie, hanging up high and blowing in the breeze just before the ever-towering minarets of the mosques.  

The medinas of Tangier and Rabat were already familiar to me. The group would wander in together and, waiting for my moment, I would break off alone from the clustering pale legs of the other students and let my feet feel for the cobblestones and wrap my intuition around corners the way a butterfly uses antennae. The medinas never swallowed me. My camera captured them. My dollars turned to dirhams and I haggled with the ferocity the Moroccans taught me and emerged with bags heavy like victory. I walked toward the medina of Marrakesh with expectations. Here we were in a foreign city far from our temporary home of Rabat and the worries of the other girls cast themselves on me they became a leash. If I snuck away at the wrong moment, they would all look for me, they would complain. It would be a scene. I would never be able to breathe or feel joy in it. I would have to wait for the right moment.  

The guide began and did not stop. We skipped the main walkway and slid through a backdoor I didn’t see and suddenly we were moving through the backstreets the way a pebble falls down a slope. We passed a man making shoes. Bright dyed leather, the famous Moroccan leather, was in his hands as he sewed with his face bent. I could not see his eyes, only his work as his hands worked on the pair nearly finished in his lap. On one side of his crossed legs was a pile of shoes each almost exactly like the other. On the other side of him was a pile of leather. A table just behind his shoulder was stacked with shoe soles and spools of thread. He was busy now and had been all day. Was he content? Was he a prisoner, in a bondage of debt working for someone else? Or was this his own business, his pride and joy? I searched for his eyes but we swept past, as soon as I had seen enough to wonder, we moved on.  

We kept walking and passed another of the sickly little kittens that haunt Moroccan streets, it was drinking from a dish of milk set out by someone. Every city was home to many hundreds of street cats. Everyone cared for them in common, setting out scraps on the edges of doorways to fill in the gaps in their diet of dumpster diving. Overflowing dumpsters and skinny little cats climbing through the tumbling stinking piles were an expectation. Every few streets you’d smell it before you saw it, the cats and the shape of the garbage pile, shimmering in the sun, was always the same. I wanted to bend to the kitten, this one was so small, and no matter how many I saw I always wanted to see how bad it was, if it was really sick or if maybe it was alright. We kept walking. There was shouting, I could hear the main street of the medina, I could hear the echo of it and knew it was bigger than any I had seen before.

We moved down a narrow corridor and there was light. Lanterns hung above and beside us and were stacked below, at the edges of the walkway we moved through a universe made of scattered golden light, light pushed through pinprick designs individual to each. I looked up in time to see one above me the size of a watermelon. I opened my mouth to look for a shop owner, to ask, bsh hal? How much? But we kept walking. The golden light faded and was gone.  

We wound serpentine through the back streets where Moroccans were busy at work making the things they sold in the main streets. Our guide was proud to show us the behind the scenes tour. How many tours moved through these streets, men working as they were watched the way lions are peeped at by passing gaggles of school children at the zoo? I wondered but we moved too fast to breath the question. I was at the back, hanging, dangling on a thread of curiosity that threatened to loose me from them and expend itself on the medina.  

And then we were out and the guide was gone. The other Americans stretched and the Moroccans squinted around them and whispered to each other in Darija. We stood on a main square that was an anvil of sunlight. It was paved with rust red concrete and covered in wagons and carts with green awnings. It was filled with shouting. I looked over my shoulder, back to the entrance of the medina. I was standing right there, I could turn and walk back. I could go back, and try to see maybe -  

“Hey, are you coming?” Amira shouted at me and I turned to see they were walking. They were headed across the plaza in a cluster. We ducked into a building at its edge and climbed stairs with our voices echoing off the walls as our eyes adjusted to dark and again to light, we emerged to a rooftop where the sun hit us again. We wandered to the edge, and spread out onto couches made of embroidered cushions arranged over woven carpets. The waiter came and everybody ordered the same thing, atay blnana, tea with mint. The incessant drink of Morocco. No matter how hot the sun the tea was always boiling. The mint and sugar that brimmed in it always soothed. Moroccan days are wrapped in sharp mint and bubbling sugar. We sipped it gingerly, looking down on the plaza below and the medina beyond. I stared at the medina entrance. It was right there, I could walk right to it. I could see myself, standing up and going back down the stairs, the light fading and coming back brilliant again. I could see the entrance getting bigger and closer and myself walking through it. All I had to do was stand up and go, make some excuse.  

“Look down there, you see that man with the flute and the basket?” Amira said, nudging me and pointing down into the plaza. I nodded. “He’s got a snake in there and he blows on the flute and the snake comes out, people stop and watch and take pictures.” She said, her lips caught on a sneer. “That’s not even Moroccan. That’s more like, I don’t know, Saudi or something. But tourists don’t care so they still do it.”  

“What about the monkey? Look at him in the sun! Who cares about a snake.” Hamza was lounging next to me, he was suddenly closer to me, looking over my shoulder at the plaza below. There was a monkey tied up next to a man with some kind of street organ.  

“Yes, the monkey is also sad but I care about the snake too.”  

“La, arofshte ellaf3a” Hamza shivered over the word, ellaf3a, snake, and let the guttural vowels become fully round, falling back to Darija as he argued the way they all did.

“La, le serpent est un animal, hatha, kane it feels things too!” Amira nearly always slid into French and back into Darija when she argued, then she would remember me and return to English, even though I had studied enough to follow Darija the way hunters track animals in the wilderness.  

They continued arguing about who should care about a snake, and wasn’t it worse when we drove past the camels on the side of the road on the way here, the ones who are held there all day in the sun. Held there just for tourists to stop, sit on them, and take a picture. Wasn’t the monkey skinny. But the snake probably was too, he’s just in the basket, it must be hot in the basket. I caught what I could and half listened. My mind wandered back across the square, back toward the medina entrance. I could see one of those lanterns hanging in my room at home. I could see the streets of the oldest part of the city rippling out with every kind of architectural and human curiosity fit for a camera lens. I would sit here for a few minutes with everyone, and then I would go down and wander. I would find them later, somehow. I would come back.  

One of the girls from Boston was talking on the other end of the couches. The one who reminded everyone at every restaurant that she ate kosher, then apologized for the inconvenience and then gave a little speech questioning why she did it, since she didn’t believe anymore.  

“I know I just can’t believe the program is still called ‘middle east studies’.” A cluster of girls from Boston and Vermont clustered around her, they nodded gravely.  

“I know.” Answered the other girl from the same school.

“It’s just so pejorative, the colonial implications are all there-” The Kosher one said, her achromatic skin was chalky and bloodless in the sunlight, her voice rose as she spoke.  

“At least they’re not calling it ‘Oriental studies’ anymore, like my program.” Said the girl with the Scottish name and the Venezuelan complexion, from the other Boston school.  

I was opening my Oregon mouth to ask the kosher one, “aren't you majoring in that program?” when Amira nudged me.  

“You want some juice?” I nodded and followed her across the rooftop and back down the stairs, leaving the others behind.   

We walked past the man with the monkey. I dared not look at it, not now in March when things were slow, when there weren’t enough tourists and everyone was hungry. I could see from the corner of my eye man and monkey sagging in the heat. The sun bounced off their faces. The man's voice rose but cracked, he was shouting for someone to take a picture with the monkey, for someone to see it dance. If he caught my eye, he would try every trick to elicit my sympathy and curiosity, as persistent as a teenage boy when he’s caught a girl in the back of his car.  

The juice cart was enormous. Three men whirled around a table at the center,  taking orders from the counter and turning them to blenders. A table in the center was piled tenuously with colorful ripe fruit. The pile was ready to collapse, at any moment from the weight of its own opulence. The chance for it came every time one of the men whirled by like a dervish and snatched up another fruit and another to feed to the blenders. The blenders whirred and growled, overpowering the shouts of the man with his monkey as we came to the counter.   

“What do you want?” Amira asked.  

I smiled. “Pamplemousse” I said, and watched Amira wrinkle her nose and look at me like I knew she would. Like the other Moroccans she ordered orange or strawberry. But there was more than one grapefruit on the pile. There must be someone else like me. We waited in the sun, feeling the sweat drip in our clothes like a gentle touch. The man reached for my grapefruit and an apple fell from the pile. He caught it swiftly and tossed it back, and I could see behind him as the man with the snake pushed it back into the basket. I looked over my shoulder. The entrance was right there. I could just wander off. I heard the blender whirring, and Amira said something, I turned my head back.   

Dusk fell on us sudden and sharply cool. The streetlights were on and we were walking back down the same promenade. This time it was lined with horse drawn carriages down one side, all parked together one after another and each nearly the same. The men who held the horse's bridles were thin. The horses were big and white or grey or speckled, and the carriages were green or yellow, white, or pink with flowers. I hung back from the group, they were coagulating as they always did once it started to get dark. I walked slowly without thinking, my head turned from the street to the horses. Amira took my arm. “They don’t take good care of the horses, those are for tourists.” I nodded. I was a student, here to study, better than that, of course. No Dickensian daydreams could compel me to enjoy the work of a poorly kept horse. I wouldn’t toss a few dirhams to a thin man living a slim life.  

The laughter from them was further, they were almost to the asphalt of the street crossing. I walked with my eyes on the horses. The muscular horses. They looked healthy to me, but it was dark and I wanted them to be. Amira pulled my arm and said “We’ll go. Later tonight we’ll come back and go for a ride in them. I’ll find one that looks good. We’ll come back.”  

Back at the hotel Layla declared we were going out for drinks and the other girls agreed. We would find a bar. Even Imane caved to curiosity. She had never seen the inside of a bar before. I had. But I had not ridden in a horse drawn carriage before. I had not seen the main strip of the medina and I had not seen the oldest part of the city soaking in starlight and street lamps. In the hotel room, with my eyes out the window, they started.  

“Come on, just for one drink. I haven’t worn these heels yet, these are fire.” Layla said, sitting on the bed and strapping her feet into stilettos.  

“Everyone else is going, I’m going. Not to drink but just to see it, it will be fun, I think.”

Imane said. “You can always go off and explore after.”

I nodded, changed into a black dress and followed them out the door past the chandelier, throwing rainbows and light across the garish red carpet all the way to the elevator.  

The whole group clustered onto the street again as a cold wind tore at our clothes. We didn’t know where to go. Amira argued with Hamza again about the snake and the monkey. We came to the end of the block as two of the other American students argued about where the nearest bar could be. Layla leaned on my shoulder, her heels were too big and she had the gait of a newborn goat in them. We wound around the streets making ever widening orbits of the hotel.  

The last hours of the evening went to pieces with our feet on a sidewalk. After the first hours of night were spent, stomachs were growling, and the two women in hijabs were never really wedded to the bar idea. Enthusiasm evaporated with shrugs as we stepped into a café. SNACK in big letters transliterated into Arabic made up the sign. Snacks are everywhere and they all serve the same piss poor sandwiches, pasta, pizza, and the occasional tagine. Variety between them seemed to me to be worse or unforgiveable.  

The attempt at a carbonara on my plate tasted bitter in my mouth. I pushed a fork through it while two of the other Americans wrestled in their booth, laughing and arguing over something as the rest yelled over them. Layla was holding out her blistered heel for Imane to examine, which she did with the utmost gentleness. Amira caught my eye as I stared out the window at the streetlights. She said nothing, but she didn’t need to.  

Everyone was talking at once as we came to the hotel doors. The hours of the evening were scattered and could not be accounted for. The hours left belonged to sleep. I got to the door first. The handle was cold.  

The next morning the sun was oppressive. The heat was curdling the air even before we left the hotel room. We stood on spent time now, nothing left but to leave. We were packing our bags to go.

“We never made it to the spa. I really would have liked to have had a manicure.” Imane sighed as she folded her dresses into her duffel bag. I was standing in the bathroom, looking in the mirror but not seeing myself. My mind was already imagining the sprawl and surplus of Marrakesh I was leaving unseen. It was blooming in my mind like tea leaves in hot water.  

Layla limped past the bathroom, band aids stuffed in her shoes.  

“Well we never found the bar either.” She shrugged her shoulders. “It’s whatever, we were only here for a day anyway. The next city is supposed to be really chill.”  

 We found the rest of the group in the lobby, pressed together and chattering. The group organizers were at the counter, taking back the passports and signing papers. I looked back up at the chandelier and found I was looking alone. The other girls were talking, shoving, giggling, scrolling their phones. As soon as the passports were returned to us, we went for the doors and pushed out. The other girls piled on ahead, peeling out laughter on one plaintive breeze against the heat of the day. I climbed on the bus last, and took a seat near the back.  

As we pulled away and the bus shifted gears with the now familiar sound, the seat purred into my back with the vibration of it. The tires pulled us on and down the road. On to the next city, to Essaouira. As we pulled away, I turned back, reminding myself this was Las Vegas. Except I knew it wasn’t. It was only a city with a veneer of cheapening tourist pleasing plastic on top. There was something genuine sweating beneath, I could feel it. Or maybe I only dreamed it. But now I couldn’t know. I stared out the window as the scarlet red earth and the scarlet red city got smaller. Amira leaned over the seat in front of me as Imane leaned from across the aisle.  

“You can always come back.”  

“Yeah we’ve got lots of time left in the semester, you can come back by yourself.”

“Yeah.” I said. “What’s the cost of a train ticket down here from Rabat? Maybe three dirhams? I’ll come back.”