Women do not seem to take much part in these entertainments, but they form the majority of the beggars, moving silently through the crowd, sleeping children on their shoulders, palms outstretched.
The Djemaa el-Fna is part fairground, part theatre, part zoo, underscored with a frisson of mysticism and primitive ritual.
Despite my appetite for all things strange and wonderful, I feel more and more of an outsider as the evening wears on and the hysteria mounts, stoked by the constant thudding of drums, squealing of pipes and blasts from brass horns. Repetitive, remorseless rhythms shred away the layers of consciousness until you either give in or, as I did, flee the whole madness and retreat to the wonderful world of bland resort hotels.
Day Ten
MARRAKESH
The grandest hotel in Marrakesh, and one of the most famous in the world, is the Mamounia, named after the exotic gardens around it, which were laid out by Pasha Mamoun, a governor of Fez, in the eighteenth century. It was once the official residence of the crown prince, until the French turned it into a hotel of great style, sophistication and expense.
The shopping arcades of the Mamounia do not deal in take-home gifts, unless there’s someone you know who might want a 6-foot silver lion sinking its claws into a 5-foot silver antelope, and the shopkeepers are not the sort who will fish out a box of matches and an evening paper from under the counter for you. In fact, they would not dream of calling themselves shopkeepers. They are dealers in and connoisseurs of fine things. Determined not to be intimidated, I enter one of these emporia hoping to find something useful, like a leopard-skin satellite dish or a lapis lazuli shoe-horn, and end up making the acquaintance of an exquisitely jewelled Spaniard called Adolpho de Velasco. He is not even a dealer, he is a designer.
‘A big designer,’ he corrects me. ‘I launch the oriental look in the whole world,’ he claims, before adding, endearingly, ‘I’m not modest. When I do something that I like, I like people to appreciate it.’
He sees no contradiction between the jet-set playground Marrakesh has now become and the spartan fortress founded nine centuries ago by Abu Bakr and his holy warriors, fresh out of the southern desert.
Marrakesh, he says, has always benefited from a trade in fine things from across the Sahara. ‘An enormously rich trade - glass, jewellery, precious stones, spices, silks.’
I ask him if he has spent much time in the desert himself. He rolls his eyes theatrically.
‘Yes.’ He pauses. ‘And it’s terrifying.’
Beneath a shock of carefully coiffured hair Adolpho’s lean, leathery face takes on the aspect of an early Christian martyr, racked by some distant anguish.
‘It’s something that takes you, as it were, into another dimension.’
Cheered by this, I bid Adolpho goodbye, only to receive an expansive invitation to come to his home for a drink at the end of the day. He gives me an address.
‘Next to Yves Saint Laurent.’
And he’s not referring to the shop.
I visit the souk, the old market in the medina, for a dose of reality, but even here the modern world seems to have won the day. I’m drawn with dreadful inevitability into a carpet emporium, an attractive vaulted interior off a muddy back street. The salesman has lived in London for many years.
‘Marloes Court.’
Then, as if I don’t believe him, he adds, in quick succession, ‘Andy Williams was my best friend. Do you know the Sombrero Night Club?’
His name is Michael.
‘Same as yours,’ he adds, warmly if unnecessarily.
I hover over an undoubtedly tempting Berber rug, bearing a Star of David motif, a reminder that it was not just Moors but the Jews as well who were thrown out of Spain by the Catholic Monarchs.
‘I’m going south, across the desert. I can’t take things like that with me.’
He shrugs, as if to say how could anyone who knows the Sombrero Club be going south across the desert.
There are some bewitching sights. Lengths of freshly dyed cotton are hung to dry across one alley, forming a swirling indigo canopy above us, and in the yard that leads off it I catch a glimpse of the men who dye the cloth, bent to their task, arms and torsos stained deep blue.
By the time I leave the souk the sun’s going down, and so are my energies. Then I remember that I have to find Yves Saint Laurent.
Yves, as I like to call him, lives in and owns the Majorelle Garden, a botanical garden in the New Town, and Adolpho de Velasco lives in a house surrounded by tall trees just over the wall from the great man. Adolpho is more than a neighbour; he is one of Yves’ forty ‘favourites’, which, amongst other things, means being privileged to receive one of his specially painted Christmas cards. Adolpho has a set of them, all framed, of which he is very proud. He’s proud too of how he has expanded his cottage by converting a loggia into a conservatory, with an open fire crackling at one end and the stout trunk of a false pepper tree rearing up and through the roof as if an elephant’s foot had just come through the building.
Immaculate in a gold-trimmed djellaba and stroking a very large citrine medallion around his neck, Adolpho smokes imperiously, talks flamboyantly and orders his servant to replenish my glass of pink champagne with such frequency that almost every sentence of my interview ends with the words ‘don’t mind if I do’.
Adolpho is a hot-blooded, passionate Mediterranean of the sort our fathers warned us about. He does not like things, he loves things. Himself, Morocco, his neighbour, emeralds, whatever. In fact, the only thing he doesn’t love appears to be tourists from Birmingham, one of whom had complained of having her bottom pinched while walking in the souk. Adolpho was indignant.
‘“What she look like?” I ask my friend. “Well, she was like this, she was like that.”
‘I say, “Bill, was she ugly?” “Yes,” he say. “Yes. Very.” I say how lucky girl she was. Never in England, in Birmingham, will ever, ever, her bottom be pinched.’
His eyes swell with pride for his adopted land.
‘Lucky country. Lucky country.’
Day Eleven
MARRAKESH
I meet Amina Agueznay at a scrubby patch of wasteground outside the city walls, where taxis, donkeys and minibuses have worn the grass bare as they come and go touting for business. Names of destinations are shouted out and horns blasted to announce the imminent departure of buses, which everyone knows will not leave according to any timetable but only when they’re full to bursting.
Amina is very much a modern Moroccan, a jewellery designer in her mid-thirties, unmarried and independent. She’s short, bespectacled, articulate and possessed of an attractive self-confidence. She has lived and worked in New York and her English accent is more Mafia than Moroccan.
When we met yesterday I put it to her that the Atlas Mountains, the world-renowned backdrop to Marrakesh, are a computer-generated image to fool the tourists, for strain my eyes as I have these past forty-eight hours, I have seen nothing more than a dim grey blur in the hazy skies to the south.
According to Amina, the mountains not only exist, but they’re less than two hours away, and she will show me villages more breathtakingly beautiful than anything else I’ve seen in Morocco.