Before I left for Morocco my best friend gave me an early birthday package. Inside, she included our old “traveling shorts”– baby blue stretch-pant cut-offs inspired by our love of Ann Brashares’ book series. If you asked the same girls that carefully wrote “Lake Erie” and “The Top of the Sears Tower” in Sharpie to guess where their shorts would be in 5 years, the answer was unlikely to be “on the floor of a bathroom in the Rif Mountains.” However, that is exactly where they found themselves…
Or, more accurately, where I found myself—curled up on the damp concrete at that stage of food poisoning in which one’s thought process writhes along the lines of “I know this is just food poisoning, but it feels like death.”
Seven hours earlier, as the sun was setting, we’d run up into the fields behind our house. Headlights appeared infrequently on the road below. A Springsteen song played in my head. We talked about how long we could live “out here,” some saying it’d be better in a tent, and others adding that it’d be better with wine. Our little sisters appeared in the tall grass and one slipped her arm in mine so we walked back together in silence.
“Hchouma!” an older sister chided as we approached the house. “Crazy man with a stick,” said another, performing a pantomime—apparently we were not to go beyond the cactus hedge after dark. I couldn’t understand how this landscape, the physical manifestation of endless possibility, was the galaxy to a system which women with 6th grade educations dreamed of marrying out of.
Now it was much too early in the morning for such questions. From the bathroom I could hear the dogs barking at the front of the house. I pulled my flannel shirt over me and tried to think about the stars hanging low beyond the ceiling of mud and straw, or really anything other than the glorified hole in the ground that was a foot from my face.
Suddenly, I heard a scraping sound along the outside of the house–like a man with a club, no teeth, and a hash-addled brain—like I read too many Nancy Drew stories as a child. It’s him. Stevie Wonder cautions that “superstition ain’t the way” but human beings aren’t above it when it suits us, suits the picture we are trying to paint.
In August I threw a penny in the fountain at the White Plains mall, right before eating at P.F. Chang’s. My fortune said “You will get what your heart desires” and I carried it in my wallet all semester. It didn’t turn out to be true, though–in all fairness–it didn’t come with a time stamp, so when the use of my student I.D. as an improvised ice scraper left it soggy, I put it in the dash of my Subaru for safe-keeping—where it presumably remains.
The vestiges of food poisoning were gone by morning, but the nagging questions that the village raised remained. Later my professor would ask if we thought that the villagers were happy, and whether we thought that they wanted to leave. A fellow student pointed out that such a conflation wasn’t an entirely fair question. “I know,” he replied, “but I’m asking it anyway.”
I concluded that the ignition of a very literary imagination is not incumbent upon literacy itself. To me the village seemed like that princess poised on a mattress, one that feels a pea like it’s a squash the size of a gargoyle. Any small change in routine sent a detectable ripple.When a gang of little boys led us across the river, laying down stones ahead of our TOMS, we ended up outside an old Danish military vehicle with a moped strapped to the roof.
“Who lives here?” we asked.
“A man and a woman,” one of the oldest replied.
At the sound of our voices, said man appeared at the door.
“Where are you from?” we asked.
“Czech,” he said. “Where are you from?”
“America.”
“What are you doing here?”
“What are YOU doing here?”
The part-time lumberjack and his Italian partner had been parked in the field for only one hour. The boys, who had seen them from the hill, were each rewarded with blank notebooks.
We peppered the couple with questions about their itinerant lifestyle; they laughed at the picture of 33 American students taking over a small Moroccan village. Spitting toothpaste into the cactus hedge on our last day there, my friend and I looked out and realized they’d moved on. “To Chefchaouen,” they had said.
We’d be along shortly. In fact, the “traveling shorts” would come up again over dinner in the Northern city.
“Wait, you wore shorts?” my fellow abroad-er asked as the candles flickered on the tajine broth.
“Just to bed,” I said.
“Weren’t you at the orientation?” she said, “You weren’t supposed to wear shorts in the village, even to bed.”
I wasn’t at orientation.
Moroccans, though they dream of travel, have a certain sentimentality about their past that I can’t help but share. The “traveling shorts” have now been to Marrakech, Merzouga, and Fes. They have more than made up for years in the bottom of my pajama drawer.
In Casablanca, the city whose silverscreen namesake brought the world “Play it once, Sam, for old times’ sake” my companion asked me what I wanted to see. Too afraid to admit that I’d be happy just coasting in his candy apple car with the windows cracked and trance cranking I replied, “What’s your favorite place?”
“I don’t have a favorite place,” he said, then—after a moment–“You want to see my favorite place? I will take you there.”
Satisfied, I sat back in my seat and watched the palm-lined boulevard transition to dogs with swinging bellies and shepherd boys in leather jackets. “It’s kind of far,” he said. We passed a Café named after a Madonna song.
When we parked and looked out at the ocean I waited for him to tell me what made this particular spot so special.
“I used to come here all the time and smoke.”
“By yourself?”
“By myself.”
He lit a cigarette. The ocean pushed some pebbles towards us, and then snatched other things away. That was Casablanca.
Chefchaouen can best be summed up by the hour spent in a carpet shop listening to tales of its well-traveled owner. One minute we were talking about Mexico, then Australia, some place near St. Petersburg that I’d never heard of…he wanted to go to Japan, did we want more tea?
At a café nearby there used to be a boy that played the drums. “The place was always full of music,” the carpet-seller told us, sounds all night and into the early hours of the morning. Then the boy, or then a man, met an Australian woman named Melinda (or maybe he was talking about himself again) and moved away– “And now there is no music there anymore.”
Silence. Just the sound of the past scraping along the outer wall of memory.