Touching down in North Africa
Oops. In all the hubbub my little life has seen recently, I forgot to mention I was heading to Morocco this weekend.
I write this sitting in a smoky, poorly-lit cybercafé in Casablanca, butt planted in a sophisticated instrument of torture posing as an old, old office chair. Nothing but Arabic males share the café with me, apart from the elderly French-speaking woman planted behind the rickety desk by the door; a teeny, ancient black & white television behind her plays a French channel (the picture actually a distressed-looking, nausea-inducing dark lavender and white), its murmur a constant in the background.
I knew I was in for a different trip when I boarded the plane this morning in Madrid, finding myself among Spaniards, French, Moroccans, a handful of young, partying Germans and (I am not making this up) the Namibian national rugby team. All of them. And me -- the only native English speaker in the bunch. Though I spoke Spanish, so no one knew. This talking-Spanish thing is great -- it completely confounds some folks, and my accent is decent enough that they can't place me from that. One of the Spanish flight attendants seemed to be checking me out, trying, I think, to figure out just where the hell I hailed from. Or maybe simply fascinated by my sheer animal magnetism. (Insert laugh track here.)
But I digress.
The plane landed beneath turbulent skies, dark gray clouds trading off with bursts of sunlight. Inside the terminal, things were grimly serious. The unsmiling old fart who seized my passport took a good long time inputting my info into a 'puter. After which some burly uniformed types made me (and everyone else) put baggage and coats through an x-ray machine. After which I joined crowds of loud, hyperverbal families trying to maneuver carts piled high with suitcases and monstrous duffel bags through grimly serious customs types, the inspectors barking orders at many of the over-baggaged travelers, ordering them to nearby tables/counters for forced unpacking. Me and my two teeny carry-on bags tiptoed through, unharassed.
Out in the terminal: plenty of signage, all in Arabic or French. No Spanish, no English. All signage, all conversation: Arabic, French. No one spoke anything I did, which gave them all license to ignore me. I managed to get cash, managed to wring a bus ticket out of one functionary, a large framed photo of King Mohammed VI (an image found all over Mohammed V Airport) propped up atop a nearby filing cabinet. Asking where the bus might be found produced vague arm gestures in the general direction of outside.
Outside: no signs indicating a bus stop (I'd begun getting the hang of deciphering French signage). No bus stop visible anywhere, in any direction. Tons of taxis, though. Mostly stressed-looking Mercedes Benzes. I saw a pair of older Spanish women from the plane, asked one about the bus. She strongly recommended forgetting the bus -- unreliable, slow, with apparently no guarantee of actually getting where you want to go. Take a taxi, she said.
The one big hitch: the taxi drivers. A wild bunch who seemed bent on ignoring me. I watched one of them move his Mercedes when his turn came to inch forward to the head of the line. He opened the door, got out, pushed the car ahead, straining against its dead weight. Not a great omen. This, of course, turned out to be my driver.
I get in the car. The driver speaks Arabic, French, nothing else -- we blather ineffectually back and forth. He will not negotiate and quotes a price, substantially above the figure the Spanish woman suggested. Take it or leave it. On impulse, I go with it, hand over the cash.
He has no idea where my hotel is, begins quizzing other drivers, a crowd quickly collects around the car, arguing, debating, arms waving, voices raised. I manage to raise my voice above theirs, I mention the hotel's street address, they all go, "OHHHHHH!", begin arguing about the best way to get there.
A consensus is finally reached, the other drivers drift off, my driver gets going. Out on the road, he gives his Mercedes the gas; I find myself flying down a foreign highway, well over the already-high speed limit, the driver drifting back and forth across the lanes, riding the white line when no other cars are near, hitting the horn when we get within several hundred feet of other vehicles. Riding right up on their rear bumpers, complaining until they're out of the way, flying ahead when they are.
We stop at a small row of toll booths, he pulls a card from his pocket, hands it to the attendant. There is no conversation to be heard anywhere outside, from anyone. Dead quiet, eerily so; the quietest toll booths I've ever passed through.
The airport is 20 or 25 kilometers outside of the city, the countryside consists of low, rolling, scrubby land. Most houses are built within walled compounds, the buildings looking like impoverished cousins to the adobe houses of New Mexico. Yellowish and brownish-greens predominate the landscape, with stands of orange wildflowers. The occasional mule or horse stands out in the middle of it all, grazing.
As we reach Casablanca's outskirts, traffic increases, most everyone driving like my guy. Mopeds abound, I come to appreciate the piloting one of those teeny buggers through the increasing vehicular chaos as an act of massive, demented courage.
My driver uses his horn any time he approaches another vehicle. Also any time another driver appears to be thinking of changing lanes. Also any time another car turns onto the main drag from a side street. Also any time he breathes in or out. (Most drivers around us seem to have been trained at the same Academy of Four-Wheeled Aggression as my cabbie.) My driver engages in one life-threatening maneuver after another, me sitting quietly in the back seat, having reached a blissful state of detachment -- almost clinical disassociation -- as a way of coping with imminent death, laughing quietly to myself in well-mannered amazement at the video game unspooling outside the cab's windows.
We have one especially close brush with a major accident, my driver must have interpreted my terrified, rictus-like grimace as smiling approval of his skill. He asks me, using a combo of French and big gestures, how many days I'll be in the city. I answer two, he immediately commences a hard sell re: hiring him for my return drive to the airport. I briefly debate saying something about snowballs and hell, let it go, smile, answer his continuing shpiel with a pleasant, noncommittal 'Quizá, a ver' ('Maybe, we'll see').
I made it to the hotel alive, found out there that no one at the desk spoke either of my languages. The desk people summoned a young woman from the office -- hair under a shawl -- she spoke a bit of English. We sorted things out, I soon found myself in an eighth-floor room. A room that struck me right then as a cousin to the dungeon I shared with G. in Sevilla -- dark, no windows, with a mysterious, stale odor. A hallway extended off from one side, leading to the bathroom. A hallway with windows looking out over the city. I dragged a chair out into that passageway, sat down to catch my breath and get an eyeful of Casablanca.
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Twilight over a tired-looking Moroccan city:
[continued in next entry]
rws 2:15 PM [+]