CHAPTER TWO

Are You Experienced?

Marrakesh stands oil a broad field of terra-cotta soil at the foot of the Atlas Mountains. Its buildings are made of the orangish clay they rest on. Its color and the landscape's are the same. The night I arrived, a French poster pasted to a column outside the train station called the city Marrakech la Rouge.

From the backseat of a cab heading into town the flat-roofed dwellings on the boulevards appeared more salmon colored in the streetlights. In their coats of hand-troweled plaster the buildings looked organic, grown, not made. Roofs rose like rounded loaves coaxed up from nature, smooth and seamless. The skyline looked patted into shape.

The color of Marrakesh depends on sunlight. By night a name like the Red appears touristic. To get the meaning, you have to see the city around sundown, set against the white-capped Atlases.

These are North Africa's biggest mountains. Beginning in cedar forests forty miles from town, the green hills mount to headlands above tree line. The peaks beyond (to thirteen thousand feet) sit wrapped throughout the year in shawls of ice. Between their shoulders torturous switchbacks crisscross the higher passes, passes with names that call up dizziness, names like Tiz-n-Tichka, Tiz-n-Test, leading down by potholed, half-lane bends to the first Saharan palm groves of the south.

This geologic blend of fire and ice demands only a grain of imagination. The nearest dunes are a two-day drive from town. The roads up to the passes, at a distance, disappear like black threads in the rock. The snowfields are visible, however, from any rooftop in the city. All winter they form a whitewashed wall running up the map as far as Algiers. Their bleached faces sweep north like blown linen, forcing even locals to catch their breath. Cold causes the surrounding air to quiver. The snows add fire to the sunsets. The sunsets stain the city oxblood red.

The desert, out of sight, a two-day drive behind these peaks, is ever present. At street level in the springtime its breath can feel hot across your cheek. It is the largest of all deserts in a world by now half desert, and its borders are not easily defined. Even on this side of the mountains you see hints of its nearness on the street, in the billowing gold turbans old men wear here and in the faces.

The population of half a million looks less Arab and more Berber in its features, with a strong admixture of Saharan blood. If parts of Tangier appeared more like Marseilles, that was because on a clear day Tangier is visible from Europe. Marrakesh owes more to the oasis. Built entirely of sunburned mud, it feels less like a city than an enclave of Saharan villages, enclosed behind eight miles of clay wall. Flanked by dunes and orange groves, it proved to be in the coming weeks a real desert crossroads and a perfect labyrinth for getting lost.

In Marrakesh, I tried to find Mostopha.

It was night and the middle of Ramadan, and the Djema el Fna, the central square and entrance to the markets, was triple packed with after-dinner strollers. My cab's headlights pushed through crowds. The square we entered was ringed by ancient ramparts, pierced by wooden gates whose double doors, into the 1960s, stood bolted after dark and watched by sentries. Today the roads leading into the square are paved, and cars (mostly vintage European models) slip through unnoticed. But the cars don't get far. Just inside the walls a driver must park and go on foot. The design of the medina is medieval. Ninety percent of the streets are twisted alleys barely wide enough for carts.

The cab rolled into a lot at the edge of the square. I got out and paid the driver and walked my bags a hundred yards to the CTM Hotel. Here a bed and shower cost eight dollars. Upstairs I locked the remainder of my luggage into a one-bulb room, using a key too big to fit my pocket. Then I went up to a terrace on the roof.

Mostopha's shop was not far from here, perhaps a quarter-mile walk, through one of three arches behind the square. I could not remember which arch it was, however, or even see the entries at street level. The rooftop was a good place to get started. Looking down at the square, you saw what engulfed you: a shore of lights, a sea of shoulders, a heaving wash of shapes in floating clothes.

This thousand-year-old oblong acre of semipaved piazza was once the absolute center of the city. Here traders from desert tribes as far away as Mali have mixed, since the early Middle Ages, with polished Arab merchants of the north. The square was a thriving book mall, a social hive, and a military stage when Moroccan armies rode out through these gates to conquer Spain a thousand years ago.

Guidebooks render Djema el Fna as “Square of the Dead.” The square has been used in the past for executions, but the name refers more directly to a building—Djema (Square) of the Mosque That Came to Nothing. In 1194, Sultan Mansur had a mosque built on this spot, which among its other failings, lay inaccurately oriented toward Mecca. As the error of a compass point may invalidate the construction of a mosque, its walls were no sooner raised than he tore them down. The square remained the city's social nexus. The mosque was reconstructed a few blocks south.

As my eyes began to adjust to the plaza's contents, smoky grills and picnic tables emerged about its center. Cafés ringed the edges on three sides. You could separate men from their shadows at this height and sometimes pick out a face in the arc of a lantern. Down on the street vendors hawked clay bowls stacked up on blankets or touted herbal cures from wooden stalls. A heap of what looked like shoe boxes had been dumped down on the pavement to my right, at the feet of a rough-voiced barker. The light behind the man gleamed like a Rembrandt. Down the way on stools sat a row of Gambians selling cotton T-shirts off a rack. Pushcarts of fruit fenced the fourth side of the square. Under hissing lanterns Moroccan boys in white shirts stood on boxes, hawking tall glasses of orange juice. Their carts formed a curb to the traffic lanes.

The core of the djema was taken up by entertainers: drummers, pipers, conjurers, a fire-eater, a sword-swallower or two, mimes, shell readers, storytellers—the usual constituents of a medieval circus. Each act had its circle of onlookers who paid small coins to watch the show. The djema has always been home to these performers, who work the passing crowds for bits of change.

From the hotel roof I could just make out Bab al-Ftah in the background. As this gate looked familiar, I went downstairs and crossed the street. I waded toward it, armed with Mostopha's calling card, but before I reached the other side, my recollections of the route grew smoky. The shops lining rue Semarine were mostly closed now. None of their look-alike, roll-down doors was numbered. The lane beyond debouched into a maze of cobbled alleys. The light was bad. The souks were shut. The card proved worthless. I poked around for thirty minutes and got nowhere.

Mostopha's bazaar lay near the hotel, but I hadn't been there in a decade. I remembered the man in fragmentary highlights. His face with a point of beard at the chin, for example, was reduced in my mind by now to a cluster of triangles. I still could name his two favorite guitarists: Django Reinhardt and Jimi Hendrix. I knew he was capable and ran an honest shop. He had invited me into his life for a couple of weeks some years before in the offhand way that makes a guest feel welcome. When I recalled the night-long Genowa dances he'd slipped me in to see in the Arab quarter, I still felt grateful. But I could not recall the location of his shop.

Braced by predawn Turkish coffees, I tried again, milling around Bab al-Ftah for twenty minutes before I engaged a three-dollar guide named Omar. Omar wore a butterball-yellow tunic. He was short, stout, with a built-in smile and regarded the world through Coke-bottle lenses—never a good sign in a dragoman. We spoke French when it came to the money. As I explained my situation, he grinned and touched the badge on his lapel.

“Official.”

“Expensive?”

“Not so expensive.”

By now a circle of street kids stood around us. They swam up out of the morning light at the first sign of confusion; each one was ready to show me the way for less than Omar was asking.

“Suppose I take one of these others?”

Omar shrugged. “If you do, you'll just get him arrested. No harm to you, of course, but no great bargain, either. Et regardez, on est même perdu! You'll have paid good money for nothing. You will still be lost. Let me see the address.”

He took the card and raised it to the light, as if looking through it. The boys retreated to the shade.

Omar led me back to the square and put me into the rear seat of a taxi. We made a circle around the sprawl of the djema, then entered the souks by a street running through a gate carved into the ramparts.

Every third store we passed was named Ben Yusef.

“The road ends at Ben Yusef's mosque,” Omar explained.

The pavement cut through a square of chicken vendors. Beyond lay a block of jewelry shops. Each had a small grille window with many gold chains and pendants pinned on felt. Gold, dispensed by the gram, was the only fixed-price item in the markets. Omar said, “My wife thinks of nothing else.”

The passage narrowed down and the taxi lurched. We had three inches of room on either side, then two, and then the right rear fender scraped on stone. A startled woman in a green burnoose jumped off a motorbike. She flattened her back to the wall to let us pass.

The driver refused to continue.

Omar cracked open the passenger's door and gingerly worked his girth into the street. I followed him down an alley into a spice market.

Lined on three sides by apothecary stalls, the Souk al-Attarine was a riot of heaped-up colored powders, fennel stalks, lizard teeth, bat wings, and glass jars. Lady Macbeth would have felt at home here. It was difficult to walk. The stones were checked with vendors seated on blankets with their wares. Faces swam out of frame in the constant jostle. Here and there a buyer squatted like a boulder in a river. As I tiptoed on, Omar glided ahead down the jagged rows, holding up two fingers.

I caught up to him under a stone arch hung with carpets. A stream of Moroccan shoppers clogged the passage, pouring under the arch like beans through a funnel. Omar leaned on a wall, looking out of breath. I joined him in the entry of a shop festooned with foxtails. As he moved to make room for me, his magnified eyeballs darted. A quick discussion confirmed that he was lost.

He still clutched Mostopha's card. I took it from him and showed the address to the foxtail vendor. This man had an intelligent face and spoke, it turned out, four languages. But he could not read. I complimented the quality of his furs. He asked Mostopha's family name, and I gave it. His face ignited.

“The cowboy?” he cried.

“No, I don't think so. He's from Casablanca.”

“Mostopha! The cowboy! I know him from futbol.” The man's English was breaking apart in the excitement.

Omar tossed me a withering glance and turned into the traffic. He seemed miffed that I would betray him this way. The fact that he had no idea where we were going did not matter. Tourists had rules, too. One did not hire a guide, then ask second opinions. Not that I put much stock in the foxtail vendor's directions. The idea that his Mostopha might lead to mine through a full-tilt melee seemed preposterous.

“I know him! You'll see!” the man cried as I left his bazaar. “I'll bet you two coffees!”

The souks in this part of town were arranged by guild. First we passed into a colonnade of woodworkers, where cedar smoke and wood dust rode on sun shafts and finished tables stood stacked at every door. Down the lane the bang of mallets gave way to tailors’ treadles. Inside each stall a single gowned man sat under a light bulb, bent on feeding cloth through his machine. From there we passed into a field of leather shoes and cobblers’ blocks.

Omar paused in a kaftan glen to get his bearings. I watched him peer to the right, down a block-long alley lined on either side with small bazaars. I dismissed it as insignificant—just one more feeder lane off the main concourse. I was tugging at Omar's sleeve to move him along when I saw Mostopha.

The mustache was gone, but the point on his chin remained, and he still wore blue jeans. We embraced and shook hands and moved to the back of the shop. Omar followed. Mostopha produced three wicker stools to sit on.

“You hired a guide?”

“I forgot the way.”

“What route did you take?”

I told him.

Mostopha, I now remembered, abhorred incompetence. He had instant reactions whenever it cropped up. Today, in a half-joking voice that softened the blow, he was taking Omar to task before we were seated. The cab had been a mistake and a waste of money. The Ben Yusef route was ridiculous—we could get here on foot from the djema in ten minutes.

“You picked the worst guide in Marrakesh,” he said. “I know this man. He always gets lost. Don't you, Omar?”

When Omar nodded, Mostopha laughed and thumped him on the knee. “Have you paid him?”

“No.”

“Give him ten dirhams.”

“Twenty,” said Omar, reviving.

Mostopha shrugged. He opened a drawer and slipped a bill from a box into Omar's breast pocket, patting the cash as if pinning a note to a half-wit.

He turned in the doorway. “I'm going to show him the quick way here for next time. I'll be back in a minute.”

He nudged the guide from the stoop into the street.

Mostopha's bazaar was a typical Marrakeshi storefront.

A metal roll-up entry door gave onto a single room with twenty-foot ceilings. The stall was surprisingly deep but extremely narrow. One could easily touch the side walls with two hands, yet the depth allowed for quite a lot of display space.

Every inch of open wall was lined with running shelves full of brass teapots, ceramic bowls in Andalusian patterns, fake pirate pistols, inlaid ivory boxes, kohl dispensers, belts, and serving trays. To this Mostopha added Berber jewelry, of which the more expensive-looking items hung in a big glass case on the back wall. On a desk beneath the case sat a cut glass lamp, a dozen music cassettes, and a ghetto blaster.

There were hundreds of shops like this one all over the city, holes cut into the walls for making money, jammed with the usual local tourist fare. It sat at the top of a gently descending alley. Across the way a tailor's cubby butted against a stall selling leather jackets. Next door lay a carpet store. Down the way were a dozen more bazaars dealing in brass trays, ceramics, tea sets, or clay pots. One small shop the size of a closet, across from a café, specialized in nothing but mock curved daggers.

The air felt fresh and cool on Mostopha's side street. The cobbles had been swept and watered down.

Inside, on the little desk, I spotted a dog-eared letter jutting from an airmail envelope. Beside it sat a Hendrix cowboy hat. I recognized the letter, of course. It contained a recent snapshot of myself and a short note posted in March from California, telling Mostopha that I would try to find him. I picked up the hat. It was covered in tin lapel pins with rock and roll slogans: DIG IT! SUMMER OF LOVE.

All at once a tall, thin man with a famished face from several weeks of fasting swept into the shop and kissed my cheeks. I didn't know him.

"Salaam aleikoum!" ("Peace be upon you!")

"Aleikoum salaam. ‘'("And on you, peace.”)

“Abd al-Majeed! You look like your picture! “

Abd al-Majeed was the name I had signed to my note. It means Servant of the Glorious, with about the same force that Michael means “Who Is like God?” I had picked up the name at the mosque in San Jose, to simplify things for people there, who had trouble recalling “Christian” names.

The man before me was bird boned, with the posture of a crane. He pointed across the road at a stall full of leather goods. He worked there, he said, selling bags and jackets. His name was Sharif. He spoke arabicized English in a nasal, insinuating whisper that reminded me at first of Peter Lorre: How-uh l-o-o-n-g are ewe going to bay here? This and a habit of watching the ground while he spoke added a hint of conspiracy to his questions.

“How long will you be here?”

“Through Ramadan, at least.”

“A good decision. The Prophet did not require travelers to fast. You need a stable home, you need a kitchen. Was it hard for you in America?”

“Hard?”

“To fast.”

“Well, there aren't many Muslims.”

“How many?”

“Four or five million.”

“That's a lot.”

“It's a pretty big country.”

“You can relax now,” he said. “You're in Dar al-Islam. It's bigger.” He joined his palms and rubbed them.

Dar al-Islam, “the Realm of Islam,” is a popular Muslim catchword for a swatch of lands that covers most of the planet: stretching west from Morocco across North Africa to Egypt, rolling on over the Arab Middle East, north into Pakistan and Sino-Russia, south across India, Indonesia, Japan. Allah's realm has many mansions and about a billion souls. One did not have to ponder long to form a mental picture. The scale of the area is vast, and yet at root the image is domestic. Dar also means “neighborhood” and “house.”

Sharif confessed he'd been making plans since seeing my letter. An American Muslim headed for Mecca was rare news in Marrakesh. He wanted to take me under his wing, to prepare me.

“A month is not much time,” he said, rubbing his palms like a tanner preparing to stain a hide. It made me nervous. “You must come to the mosque this afternoon,” he said. “I'll show you a place where men take thirty-five minutes to say their prayers. In some of these places they do it in two minutes. I'll show you everything and make you correct. You have to be correct if you're going to Mecca.”

I smiled broadly. But I wondered.

Events of the past three decades had conspired to throw up thousands of young Moroccans like Sharif, born to Islam, then fallen away, lured by Western ways but now repentant. In Sharif's case, this meant making up lost time. His fervor took the form of proselytizing, and he had a born-again flare for pedagogy. In the next few months, I often felt sure he knew a thing or two, but I was not the one to memorize it.

His next remark stunned me.

“I have some videos you'll need to see: Jimmy Swaggart discussing Islam with an imam. And another of Cat Stevens, in a beard. You know this man?”

I nodded.

“We call him Yusef.”

Cat Stevens had been a Muslim for years. It was not a rock-star convert that surprised me. It was the presence of video players in the souk. Since my last time here, a media revolution had swept the lower classes of Morocco. Today you found cable news in most cafés and many fewer Moroccans attending the movies. Large parts of the population had gone from illiteracy to global awareness in a decade. I had read learned articles about this in academic journals, laments of TV's effect on the tribal fabric. But no one had mentioned Islamicized VCRs. And then there was the shock of Jimmy Swaggart.

When I expressed an interest in seeing both cassettes, Sharif was delighted. He would bring them to his shop in a day or two, but he warned me not to mention them in public. “Not everyone approves of these men,” he said. “The videos are risky.” And he raised a dramatic finger to his lips.

Mostopha returned to the shop during this exchange and overheard us. When Sharif was gone, he turned to me and smiled and tapped his forehead.

“I saw those tapes four years ago,” he said.

Mostopha was born in the early 1940s in Casablanca, the hardest working port in Africa. His father, a small businessman, earned more than most Moroccans, and the first few years of Mostopha's life were settled. The family lived in a modern flat in the Anfa district. He did not remember this period very clearly. His mother died in childbirth when he was four.

Mostopha's next ten years were split between the city and seasons spent with his grandparents on a farm. In the countryside he learned to shear sheep and buck hay. In town he went to school when he felt like it. He cooked for his younger brother and discovered street life. He became obsessed with matinees, with double feature movie bills, with Gable, Bogart, Garbo, and Jack Palance.

General George S. Patton described mid-forties Casablanca as “a city combining Hollywood and the Bible,” a tough palm-lined skyscraper of a city where men still strolled about in flowing robes. By age fifteen Mostopha knew all the boulevard cafés. About that time he found a steady job, as a film projectionist at the local Bijou. The night work kept him out late and later led to trouble, but he liked it and he saw movies for free. This was during the years (he said) before filmmakers learned how to strip a girl, fire a pistol, get the results on film, and award it an Oscar. Mostopha saw On the Waterfront fifty times. He became a film buff, able to list Liz Taylor's marriages or Edward G. Robinson's gangster roles in order. He also began to smoke and to test life's limits. He bought a motorcycle. He met some Americans.

In the early 1960s, Morocco's Atlantic seaboard experienced a peculiar innundation. Unlike previous generations of tourists, this flood was composed of young malcontents and self-styled gypsies. Those drawn down from Europe by winter sun and cheap hashish arrived by bus, in campers, on the trains. Those from the States took cut-rate flights to Casablanca or floated into the port on budget freighters. However they came in, from whatever quarter, a smaller, matching wave of young Moroccans like Mostopha was usually there to greet them at the gates.

These new arrivals did not look like normal tourists. Their hair was long, their pace relaxed, their music not the average French vacationer's. Their novelty was not confined to dress codes. Unlike the French, they were not colonially aloof. They sought out Moroccans to travel with, to talk to. They did not isolate themselves in large hotels. They flocked to campsites, slept in tents, put up in hostels. They were romantics, that is, enthusiasts, and their stories betrayed a common theme: they had left behind their homes, jobs, schools, to taste a larger world and escape confinement.

They were footloose, independent; at the same time they did everything in groups. This combination matched the style of many Moroccans. Moreover, they were in no rush to leave. They had loose schedules or no schedules at all, no pressing need, it seemed, to return to a job, a family. They did have money, they did need guides. These things were attractive to young Moroccans, yet the effective side of this tidal wave was social. They carried news from a more dynamic quarter. Apparently they wanted to be friends.

One spring Mostopha followed them to Essaouira, where a wide expanse of beach sweeps south and sandbars and rocky islets break the shoreline. On the beach a fort with turrets rides the surf. The harbor town that frames all this has an ancient, mesmerizing beauty. Above its streets run Roman-looking aqueducts.

The year Mostopha arrived, a different history was brewing. Crosby, Stills and Nash had recorded “Marrakesh Express.” The Vietnam War was turning to televised slaughter. Generational rebellion was afoot. A banner above a yogurt stall read TURN ON, TUNE IN, DROP OUT in seven languages. Thor Heyerdahl launched a reed boat from these beaches. In town the Living Theatre rented a house and began “rehearsing.” Jimi Hendrix came down one week from London and tried to buy the fort of Diabet. At the height of the mayhem several thousand campfires lit the sand dunes. Acid rock music curled the surf.

Mostopha's taste for rock and roll dated from this period. So did the surgical scars and shattered bones suffered one night in a motorcycle crack-up. The accident sent him back to Casablanca, where he spent some months in a traction ward.

It was a curse and blessing, he said. At the hospital he met his future wife.

In the bed beside him lay an older man, a French Jew from Lyons, now a Casablancan. They shared their meals and the radio together, and every few days the man's adopted daughter came to visit. She was a Berber from the Atlases, named Qadisha. Her parents were farmers in a mountain village. The family was large, the soil poor. Unable to support a fifth child, they had arranged for her adoption by the Frenchman and his wife. The girl was now in her middle teens. Gradually she and Mostopha fell in love.

The day of his release he went to see her. When he felt well enough to travel, she led him to her village, Amizmiz, to meet her parents. It took weeks to persuade the family. They left the mountains married and settled in the Marrakesh medina. They saved some money. They opened a bazaar.

The first time I met Mostopha, in 1979, there were two sons. Today they had four children, one an infant. They owned a modest home. The shop was larger. They hadn't returned to Casablanca in many years.