Away from my Desk

A prickly-pear vendor in Morocco (photo by Claude Renault)

 

After the first day, I found out that those spiny fruit being sold off of handcarts all over the city were prickly pear, a seasonal delicacy that seemed to be at the peak of its harvest. 

I bought my first prickly pear from a vendor just outside the Medina (the walled city). I paid five dirham for it (actually, I tried to pay two euros for it, because the last guy who had given me change regarded a two euro coin as equivalent to five dirham. The prickly pear vendor did not share this view. He also didn’t speak French, so he held up the coin and looked angry, and it took an intervention from two of his (French-speaking) fellow-vendors to get it straightened out. The fruit itself was refreshing, if a bit too seedy.

So, I bought more the next day, near Bab Agnaou. This time, I got two for five dirham – the price had halved.

The following night, Briony and I ate in Jemaa al Fna at stall 65 (our favourite), then got a taxi back to Bab Tagzhout where, on Briony’s advice, I followed my dinner with a sandwich of lamb brochettes from a tiny café nearby.

The sandwich was magnificent, and on our way back to our riad, I decided to end the evening with a prickly pear from the cart directly underneath Bab Tagzhout. The vendor told me the price: two prickly pears for five dirham, as I understood it.

‘I’ll take one pear for 3 dirham’, I told him, and gave him the three coins. He nodded, took the coins, and gave me a clear plastic bag. This struck me as unusually fastidious for a prickly-pear vendor, but I held it open for him.

He took a pear, sliced off each end, slit the peel lengthwise, and presented me with the fleshy interior of the fruit. As soon as I took it, he’d lopped off the ends of another one, and, even as I repeated firmly that we’d only wanted one, presented it to Briony.

She thanked him and took it, and instantly he had a third in his hand. ‘Look, I’m not paying you any more,’ I told him, ‘I only asked for one.’ But he continued, this time dropping the peeled fruit into my bag.

Again, he started cutting open another one. ‘NO!’ I shouted, waving my arms wildly in the universal ‘cease and desist’ sign. But once he’d peeled it, there was no obvious option other than to let him drop it into my bag. And as soon as he did, he started peeling another. It was time for decisive action.

‘Right,’ I said, ‘that’s enough, we’re leaving,’ and Briony and I strode off, leaving him with his half-cut prickly pear.

When we were about halfway home, I had a moment of realisation: the vendor hadn’t told me his price was five dirham for two prickly pears, he’d told me it was five prickly pears for one dirham. 

I’d bought fifteen prickly pears from him, then protested vehemently as he peeled every single one. He sensibly (and graciously) chose to ignore me, and do his best to give me what I’d paid for.

He (and everyone else in the vicinity) must have thought I was completely insane. 

Deal complete, the negotiators pose for a photo around the mint tea.

 

On our first day in Marrakech, Briony spotted the shop in the souk (Marrakech’s central labyrinth of shops and market stalls) where she wanted to go to buy her leather satchel – partly because she liked the stock at this particular shop, and partly because the shopkeeper seemed like a good guy.

In fact, there turned out to be two shopkeepers: a short, voluble guy with a close-trimmed beard, and his boss, a friendly but hard-to-read guy, totally bald with some resemblance to a Buddha. Then there was the boss’s son, who was twelve.

Briony was looking for a small satchel, and I was after something that would fit my laptop with plenty of room to spare. Once we reached an impasse in our browsing, unable to choose between several bags, the shorter shopkeeper offered us tea.

He set up a table and three stools in a slipper shop across the street, then briefly disappeared down the street, returned with a pot of tea and two glasses on a tray, and invited us to sit down with him. ‘Now we talk about anything except the bags’, he explained.

This is the slipper shop where it all happened

 

A digression on tea

The process of Moroccan tea is, as with all good caffeinated drinks, burdened with ritual. It’s brewed from Chinese gunpowder green tea and springs of fresh mint, with huge hunks of sugar, broken off from a cake the size of a bar of soap. 

You put everything in the pot and fill it with boiling water, then pour the tea into a glass and empty the glass back into the metal pot, repeating a few times in order to dissolve the sugar.

When it’s time to serve the tea, you lift the pot high as you pour, so the tea travels a foot or more through the air into the glass. This, our host in the slipper shop explained, is done in order to create a layer of bubbles on top of the tea (like the ‘head in a glass of beer) without which some people will refuse the glass (our host told us he personally would never accept tea without bubbles).

Our host served our glasses of tea tucked into (new) children’s slippers lifted from the display racks at the front of the shop, so that we would not burn our fingers on the glass.

The most mysterious element of the ritual was the provenance of the tea itself. I knew he’d need to go out for it, because none of the shops in the souk have back rooms – but I have no idea where he went to get a pot of tea at such short notice.

Correct tea-pouring technique (photo by Banning Eyre)

 

Back to the matter at hand

As we drank, we talked, mostly in French. Our host turned out to be a poet and playwright, as well as a shopkeeper. He writes mostly on ‘political and sentimental themes’,  a phrase which loses a lot in translation.

He’d studied literature and philosophy at the University of Marrakech, with particular attention to the age of enlightenment, but he hadn’t finished, because he couldn’t afford to pay for it.

Now he taught himself. He showed us the poetry he was reading – books of poetry in Arabic, mostly missing their covers, with his marginal comments. Sometimes when he took issue with a poem he would right to the author to discuss it.

I mentioned the Moroccan author Tahar Ben Jelloun, and our host put his hand to his heart and said what a great writer he is. In turn, he spoke of ‘la poesie de la mort’ – the poetry of death. ‘What, like epitaphs?’ I asked. This wasn’t what he was getting at. ‘Like Julia…’ he began –

‘And Romeo?’ I asked. ‘Oui. Ça touche la coeur. Et Titanic.’

‘Le film?’

‘Oui’.

The boss’s son was standing at the entrance to the slipper shop, so I invited him to join us. It transpired that his favourite subject in school is maths, so I showed him the book I was reading, Alex’s Adventures in Numberland. He spoke little French and no English, so it didn’t mean much to him, but he had a look at the pictures.

At one point, our host produced a red piece of felt with the green pentagram from the Moroccan flag, and Morocco's name written (in French and Arabic) in puffy, glittery gold fabric paint, and gave it to us as a gift.

As we chatted, the Buddha-faced boss would stroll into the slipper shop, observe us flipping through books of poetry, chuckle, and shake his head over these non-Arabic-speakers poring over poetry they couldn't read. He’d also shoot expectant looks at our host, and I got the sense felt negotiations could be progressing more swiftly. I wondered if this might be a good cop/bad cop routine, but now I’m not so sure.

 

The negotiation

We’d been in the shop for well over an hour when I said ‘Now I think it’s time to talk about bags.’ Our host told us he’d be happy to drink tea and chat about literature all day, but he knew we’d want to see the sights.

So Briony and I selected the bags we liked best, our host took us to meet the artisan who’d made them (he was just around the corner) and only now, when we’d come back to the slipper shop, did negotiations begin.

They asked us to name the price we wanted to pay. After writing down figures in my notebook, showing them to Briony, and getting the nod from Briony, I started at 400D (that is, four hundred dirhams, or about £31). They laughed and made ‘raise it higher’ gestures. I told them I wasn’t saying anything until I knew their price. They started at 1200D (£92).

What’s difficult to express is how much silence there was in the negotiations, and how important it was – in my case, I needed it in order to make sure I was keeping track of my latest offer, their latest offer, and roughly what both numbers worked out to in pounds sterling. More difficult than silence was the bits of conversation that bled through from our previous chat, throughout which I would silently repeat our two current offers, so I didn’t forget them (easier to do than you might think).

Several times, our host reiterated the point that whether or not we bought anything, we would remain friends – which I appreciated. He also assured us he wouldn’t charge me for the tea, which I appreciated less, since it implied that morally, I was in his debt.

I raised my offer to 550D. Our host laughed – ‘fifty dirhams means nothing!’ he told me.

‘OK,’ I conceded, ‘six hundred dirhams’.

He countered with 1150D. ‘Fifty dirhams means nothing!’ I told him. He laughed even more than before, then clasped my hand. ‘I knew you’d say that!’ he told me.

So now we were at 600D and 1100D.

They told me that Briony’s bag was the last of its kind in the shop. ‘No it’s not,’ I countered, ‘I saw three hanging in the artisan’s workshop!’

‘Those won’t be ready for days,’ they replied.

They told me we had a special price because we were the first customers of the day, because they liked us, because business had been slow. I got the sense that these lines were the negotiation equivalent of pouring mint tea into the glass and back into the pot – not a tactic so much as a necessary element of the ritual.

Briony took our offer up to 800D (£62). Gradually, they came down and finally, our host conceded 800D.

The atmosphere in the room cooled noticeably when our host agreed the price, and for a moment nobody was meeting anybody else’s eye. But our host restored our earlier conviviality after I asked him about Mohammed Mrabet, the Moroccan storyteller. He showed us what he told us was a memorial to Mrabet aross the street, pointed out the ruined old reservoir next to it, and the ruins of a palace (I think) nearby.

Then he took us to look through the window of a mosque (something I’d have never done on my own) and took us to the entrance of the Medersa Ben Youssef.

Then our host, his boss, and the boss’ son posed for photos, and our host and I exchanged email addresses. 

When we happened to pass by the shop later that day, they greeted us like old friends.

From left: our host, the boss's son, and the boss

 

Here's how to find the shop where we got the bags:

Akram Cuir
Place Ben Youssef
Souk El Kbir No. 245 Marrakech
la3badi@yahoo.fr 

A tourist getting the monkey treatment (photo by Laura Aradi - NB: I don't know this guy, but he seems like a good sort)

 

Getting directions is a peculiar experience here. The first thing I want to say is that still, no-one has given us directions and then asked for money. 

A few teenage boys have had a go at guiding us in what I’m certain would be a professional capacity, but they always inform us in alarmed tones that we’re walking away from the Jemaa el Fna (the main square) when we’re going back to our Riad, which they wouldn’t know how to find anyway.

But everyone who has actually given us directions has been polite and  thorough, including a guy who was carrying a monkey – these guys make their money by putting their monkeys on people’s shoulders and having them take photos, but he didn’t make a single attempt to put the monkey onto either of us.

[A digression – it’s impossible for us to watch any of the snake charmers in the Jemaa Al Fna because as soon as we pause near them, somebody tries to put a snake around Briony’s neck so I’ll take a photo, and pay him. Why they think this is an appealing offer is beyond me, but I guess if a guy who has a snake coiled around your wife’s neck asks you for money, you’re likely to be generous].

Back to the guy with the monkey. As I say, he kept the monkey to himself, which was nice of him.

BUT, he confidently sent us in completely the wrong direction (Briony wondered if it might have been because the street he sent us to started with B, as did the place we were trying to find). The monkey guy was not alone in this – even a taxi driver today took us to an odd, ‘sort of right but really a long way off from where we were going’ destination, on a trip that would have been a five minute walk – and he seemed genuinely confused rather than deceitful.

What I’ve begun to realise is that not only do most of the roads not have street signs, and not only do Lonely Planet and the Rough Guide disagree on what some streets are called, but most residents don’t seem to know street names. If anything, they know the name of particular arches (called ‘Babs’). It’s not entirely clear to me how anyone finds their way around.

Inside the walled city (Medina) of Marrakech (photo by Simon Ward)

P’tit Habibi’s manager, Abdelouaffi, warned us that if we looked lost in the street, we would be accosted by young people offering to guide us, then refusing our payment as offensively low and demanding more. To help us out, he walked us partway to the souks and pointed out landmarks to look out for, and gave us some small change so we had something to give to guides if we needed them (as is probably already clear, I’ve never met a more thoughtful hotel manager than Abdelouaffi).

We haven’t been accosted by teenage guides yet, despite my repeated inspections of our large and difficult-to-fold map (though I’m sure it will happen before too long). On the contrary, when we’ve approached people for directions they have been solicitous, conscientious (two people looked blank, confessed they didn’t know, and then consulted someone more knowledgeable) but they were always partial – they seemed to end with an unspoken ‘and when you’ve got that far, as someone what you should do next’. Or perhaps it’s just that in a city with no right angles, where most roads have no names and different maps disagree about the names of those that do, the phrase ‘follow this road until it ends and then turn right’ is open to multiple interpretations.

At one point, I asked a young man in a café for directions – he in turn asked an older man, then came outside to show me where to go. He took me around the corner, where we discovered that a woman had been knocked off her moped by a taxi. The taxi driver and the woman exchanged strong words in Arabic (even as she remained pinned down by her bike) and another man helped her up and gave her a lift on his bike. Everyone else either honked (if they were in cars) or swerved around (if they were on mopeds) or, as in the case of our guide, took no apparent notice and continued giving directions, making sure we understood what he was telling us. 

Bab Taghzout at night (taken by Mr Libraryman)

 

I have never been anywhere as alive with commerce as Marrakech. Almost as soon as we left our Riad P’tit Habibi, on a sleepy residential street just north of Bab Taghzout, we passed a man in a tiny room whose doors folded out to reveal a brightly painted display of savon noir and argan oil – the man himself was sanding down a very small table. Next, we passed a slender teenager selling spiky green fruit in the shade of an arch. Then beggars outside the courtyard of Zaouia Sidi Bel Abbès (virtually the only beggars we saw all day, and all of them ill or wounded in some way), then down the Rue de Bab Tagzhout, were there were fruit stands in the road and beside the road, and a different business in every doorway – tailors of all sorts,  moped repairs, a man winding purple thread which ran through hooks along the wall for perhaps fifty feet, someone sitting at a makeshift podium made of cigarette boxes (was he selling cigarettes? I have no idea). There were people in rooms full of mysterious objects, with blue plastic tables out front.

Everyone had a business, and no-one had agglomerated – that was what seems most remarkable: nobody is merging. ‘We work for our families, not for a boss’, a Berber spice-seller told me, shortly before selling me a hundred grams of cinnamon for 80 dirham (I’d gamely talked him down from 100 dirham – he scowled theatrically and told me I must have some Berber in me, in a tome that made it clear I’d just been taken to the cleaners.

 

 

 

Here I am, writing in my notebook on our first day

 

Yesterday, I got back from a holiday in Morocco with my partner, Briony. 

I'd brought a notebook along (a Canson 5.5"x8.5" recycled paper sketchbook, if you're into stationary). I brought it along because I always bring a notebook on holiday, and because I didn't want the notebook I brought to be my work notebook (a Black and Red softcover A4 notebook).

On the first day of the trip, I surprised myself by actually writing in the notebook, something I haven't properly done for years. I decided to type it up when I got home, and start a blog. 

From here on out, 'Away from my Desk' will provide a home for observations and thoughts that have nothing to do with what I do at work. Naturally, it will begin with Morocco.