She squinted down at my writing. “It’s in the Ville Nouvelle,” she explained, “behind the post office, on the Place du 16 Novembre. It’s not far from here. Take a right out the front door and another right on the Avenue Mohammed V. You’ll run right into it.”
If Tangier is the dying soul of French colonial Morocco, then Marrakech is the country’s Berber heart, an earthen city tucked in the shadow of the High Atlas, washed by clear African light. It was that light more than anything that told me I knew the place. Even in December the sun shone with a cool desert purity, clean, uncompromised, and familiar as my own voice. Yes, I thought, the two cities, new and old, laying themselves out in my mind like a long-stashed map finally unfolded, I had been to this place. I had walked these streets before, the orderly grid of the Ville Nouvelle, and the wild rambling alleys of the medina.
I left the hotel and headed up the Avenue Mohammed V, past the towering minaret of the Koutoubia Mosque, out the Bab Larissa, and into the twenty-first-century bustle of the Ville Nouvelle. Even in the modern part of the city, a lethargy permeated the air. There was an irritability to people, dour looks on the street, the edgy ache of hunger and thirst, a languor born of the long hours of fasting. It reminded me of Lent at the convent, of the dark Saturday-night vigil before the exaltation of Easter.
It was early afternoon when I reached the Place du 16 Novembre and the All Join Hands offices. A plaque on the windowless door announced the company’s well-intentioned name in English, French, and Arabic. The door itself was locked, the building’s windows shuttered. I knocked several times and got no reply. Closed for Friday prayers, I thought, as was much of the city. I could only hope there’d be someone working on Saturday.
Telling myself I’d come back first thing in the morning, I started back the way I’d come. But instead of going to the hotel, I veered north at the Koutoubia Mosque and made my way to the Djemaa el-Fna. Save for a few vendors who had stayed open to cater to tourists and those too young for the fast, the square was empty. Foreigners lingered in the outdoor cafés, Europeans, Americans, and a few Japanese sipping mint tea and picking guiltily at their lunches.
Figuring I had nothing better to do than to walk, I passed through the square and kept going. I shook off the ubiquitous crush of would-be guides and made my way down the Rue Souq as-Smarrine, toward the covered market, the textile shops, and souvenir stands, toward the tangle of alleyways I could see in my mind.
To walk through the souqs of a Moroccan city is to travel back through time, far back, and yet, at the same time, to remain firmly grounded in the present day. In the hivelike labyrinth of the market, donkeys navigate streets far too narrow for cars, their stout backs laden with buckets of flour, piles of blue jeans, or stacks of still-bloody goatskins bound for the tannery. In the coppersmiths’ souq workmen toil over open fires, their faces blackened and sweaty, while in the textile stalls, men in hooded burnooses do business on cell phones, their counters plastered with the bright emblems of Visa and MasterCard.
There’s a persistent odor to the souqs, the sour stench of the tannery mixed with the musky smell of saffron, the tang of curing meat, and the smothering sweetness of diesel fuel. Where the main arteries of the market intersect, the wave of bodies surges like a swollen river through a narrow canyon. Irritated cries of Zid! from donkey drivers mingle with the monotone chants of little boys in the madrassas and the tubercular coughs of beggars.
I wandered without direction, following the crowd through the bloody stench of the meat souq, through the sparkling jewelers’ souq, along a street of leather slippers, till I finally found myself in the pungent lanes of the spice market. The streets were at their narrowest here, the markets spilling their bounty out onto the cobbles. Waist-high burlap sacks bulged with cumin and cayenne, with various curries and garam masala. Baskets held the dried and brittle bones of small animals, desiccated skins, bird beaks. I inhaled and smelled the familiar, the sweetness of cloves and mace and ginger, the last few weeks of Advent at the abbey, and something older than that, not the convent but this place, so utterly foreign and yet so completely familiar at the same time.
“Miss!” A man fell in step beside me, a young guide in a leather jacket and slacks. “You want to visit the Berber pharmacy?” he asked.
I shook my head and kept walking.
“La pharmacie Berbère,” he tried in French, then motioned to himself. “I can show you.”
I turned, ready to tell him no, then stopped for a moment. “Do you know the Pharmacie Rafa?” I asked, thinking of the strange entry in Pat’s address book, the one he’d filed under H.
The young man nodded vigorously. “Yes, of course. This way.”
It was not far to the pharmacy, not much more than a European city block down the souq’s main thoroughfare. I paid my guide for his help, then paid him again to leave me to my own devices, thanking him profusely before stepping inside the cramped little establishment.
I don’t know exactly what I had expected, lip balm and laxatives perhaps, a woman in a white coat, but the room I had entered was nothing like the pharmacies I knew. The walls were lined with shelves, the shelves crammed with hundreds of glass jars. Most of what the jars held was powder, but in some were parts of plants or animals, more exotic versions of what the outdoor displays contained. English, French, and German translations, done with Western customers in mind, identified some of the remedies. Ashes of crow, one label read.
The front of the store was narrow, but the back opened up to form a small seating area. A group of middle-aged tourists, northern Europeans from the looks of them, were crowded into the space listening to a large man in a burnoose and a fez tout the merits of saffron.
“It is the most expensive of spices,” he explained, holding the jar of reddish orange filaments aloft for all to see. “Does anyone know where it comes from?”
“From a flower,” a woman in the crowd offered.
The salesman nodded. “Madame is correct. It is the stigma of the crocus flower. Imagine the care in harvesting.”
The tourists nodded appreciatively.
“Tell me, Madame,” the man in the burnoose said, “in your market at home, how much does saffron cost?”
The woman shrugged noncommittally. “It’s very expensive.”
“And for what?” the salesman demanded. His English was almost perfect, American in its intonations. I was sure his French was just as good. He took a step forward, and his burnoose opened slightly. Under the brown robe he wore suit pants and black leather wing tips. Even from the brief glimpse I’d gotten, I could tell the pants and shoes had not been cheap.
“For red powder, floor sweepings,” he went on. “You don’t really know what you’re getting.” Opening the lid, he offered the jar around. “Smell,” he exhorted. “This is the real thing. One hundred percent pure.”
It was true: even from where I stood the odor was overpowering.
“For you,” the man said, closing the jar’s lid, “a special price today. A mere quarter, no, less than a quarter of what you would pay at home for this precious spice.”
He quoted a figure in dirhams, and a murmur swept through the group. A Moroccan woman in the back, evidently their guide, nodded her awe at the price.
I did a quick calculation in my head. I’d ordered saffron for the priory, and the deal he offered was barely less than what I’d paid in France. Nonetheless, the crowd seemed eager to buy. There was a flurry of activity as the tourists pulled their credit cards from the money pouches they wore around their necks.