It was our last night in Fez. The next day, we’d be leaving Morocco, and we wanted to do something special for our superb guide, Youssef, and our stalwart driver, Mohammed.
Youssef had booked us all a table at a fancy restaurant, the Palais la Médina, which doubled as a kind of showcase for traditional Moroccan music and entertainment — in other words, dinner theater for well-heeled tourists and the local elite.
It had been a wonderful and exhausting adventure. The fact that we’d even had a guide and a driver was something to celebrate. We’d never traveled that way before, and had had our concerns about it.
For “do-it-yourself” travelers, the kind of people who avoid buses, big attractions, and restaurants with laminated menus in English, the idea of being trapped in a car for days with complete strangers was worrisome. What if we didn’t get along with our guide? What if we wanted to strike out on our own? Would it be awkward?
As it turned out, far from being constraints, Youssef and Mohammed liberated us from the day-to-day worries of traveling in such a complex and, at times, chaotic culture. Instead of fretting about logistics, we were free to engage Morocco at a higher — and much more enjoyable — level. While Mohammed zig-zagged through the High Atlas mountains with the brio of a Moroccan Mario Andretti, we were free to ask Youssef about the history of the Berber people; about the Moroccan monarchy; about the tensions in the society between Berber and Arab, rich and poor, mountain and coast, city and desert.
Through his extensive network of contacts, which we came to call the “Berber Mafia,” Youssef gave us access to corners of the country we hadn’t dreamed of. We met nomadic squatters in the desert; a descendent of former slaves trying to breathe life into a dying musical tradition; a hatchet-faced herbalist who offered us a spicy syrup that promised to cure anything — “Except death!”; a towering hotel man named “Little Mohammed” who challenged us with riddles that didn’t make any sense, even after he triumphantly revealed the answers.
Youssef showed us how to feed peanuts to roadside monkeys in the great national cedar forest; how to hurl bread to the wild dogs who waited, panting, by the side of the highway; how to negotiate ruthlessly, no-holds-barred, with a jewelry trader he’d just introduced as a “dear, dear friend;” how to cop free Wi-Fi at a desert gas station; how to buy a jalaba, a woolen robe with a pointy hood, the unofficial uniform of the Moroccan peasant, at a small-town souk, or market; how to tie a headscarf so it wouldn’t be jarred free by a sulking camel, or blown open by a sandstorm.
Yes, the camel ride in the desert was a highlight; yes, the stars over the Sahara were magnificent; yes, we loved walking through the medinas, medieval labyrinths, sometimes barely as wide as one’s outstretched arms, crammed with vegetable stalls, dangling animal carcasses, outraged roosters, and dodgy souvenir hawkers; careening with children, blaring with Arabic pop, pungent with cumin dust, coal-smoke, donkey fur, and ordure.
But there was a deeper heartbeat to our trip, a kind of social watchfulness that emanated from Youssef’s love for, and frustration with, his country. Sitting across from us in the Palais la Médina, dressed, as usual, in his rough-spun jalaba — which was conspicuously out of place in the palatial setting of the restaurant, with its brilliant tile mosaics and soaring colonnades — working his ever-present Blackberry, he seemed a perfect embodiment of Morocco’s contradictions: endlessly hospitable in private, but a sharp trader in public; idealistic about the possibility of a truly unified citizenry, but, at the same time, cynical about Morocco’s sclerotic society; eager for a future seemingly just out of reach, but nostalgic, almost to the point of paralysis, for a mythical past.
He and Mohammed had made our trip. Even now, he was arguing with the headwaiter, who seemed to want to oust us from our prominent table.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Nothing, my friend,” Youssef said. “Relax. He just wanted to move us upstairs, but I told him, ‘No! We have every right to be here.’”
The reason for the headwaiter’s desire to move us soon became clear, as busloads of well-dressed Moroccans poured into the restaurant. The king had left Fez that day for Senegal; part of his enormous entourage, several dozen doctors who’d been left behind in Morocco, were celebrating their freedom with a night on the town.
These were obnoxious people, fascinated with themselves and their social standing, the kind of men and women who obsessively photograph each other as they sit down to dinner. They even had a kind of cheerleader: a chubby clown of a man with a steel whistle dangling from his lips, whose job, it seemed to us, could be described as “Minister of Fun.”
They were given the best tables; they were fed before us, even though they’d arrived later; they dominated the stage with their silly dancing and what could only be described as “hi-jinx.”
The only thing missing were glasses of champagne and sloshing martinis. It was a strange bacchanal, mostly a dry one. For all its liberalism, at least compared with its neighbors in the region, Morocco is still, after all, a Muslim country.
Youssef was exasperated on our behalf, but he said, with a certain resignation, “This, too, is Morocco.”
We’d seen a nomad family in the desert with a tattered blanket as a tent-roof, living without papers, utterly exposed to the fierce elements and the whim of bureaucrats. And now we were seeing Morocco’s privileged class, enjoying its privileges.
Even so, we were enjoying each other’s company; the music was excellent; and the pigeon pastilla was delicious.
Welcome to Morocco!
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 28 March 2013
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
