Lulu in Marrakech (5 page)

8

A man he is of honesty and trust.

To his conveyance I assign my wife.…

—William Shakespeare,
Othello
, act 1, scene 3

I
supposed that Tom Drill’s partner, Strand, would be Othello, but I was made to face my own literal-mindedness, or what ever you would call it, to have assumed that because he was African American he would fit the part best. (Were the others mired in a retro form of political correctness that assumed it would embarrass Strand to be cast as Othello? I’ve been out of the U.S. for a while, uncertain about the changes in P.C. nuance.) After Strand, I would have picked Khaled for his fierce nose and warlike bearing. But I had forgotten that Othello is also the best part, and so it went to Ian, who I could see did have the best voice, a deep baritone, like Orson Welles, and the actorly English diction, being an English man.

Nancy Rutgers said a few pedantic words about the sources of Othello. “From the
Ecatommiti,
the sixteenth-century collection of tales by Giovanni Battista Giraldi. We don’t know whether Shakespeare read the Italian or the French translation of 1584,” and so on.

I was not Emilia, as someone had foreseen, but a courtesan, Bianca, perhaps because Bianca has less to say. There was some oblique discussion of American accents. Posy Crumley was Emilia, and Gazi was to be Desdemona, but she objected. “I’ve always hated her, so docile and trusting, stupid really,” she said. “Make Mrs. Crumley be Desdemona. I’d rather be nobody.”

“It’s only a play, Gazi,” said Ian sternly, seconded by her husband.

“No, no, no,” she said.

Posy Crumley also refused, on the grounds that to be Desdemona might hurt her unborn child. In the end, Desdemona was played by Marina Cotter, whose incisive British upper-class tones, once she modulated them into a more pitiable sweetness, were not wrong for the part, any more than Ian’s for Othello, and the two gave the whole production a satisfying sort of professional patina.

Wonderful it was to hear all our voices gain in resonance and confidence, reading out the immortal lines. It seemed that the theater, as a genre, fulfilled its real raison d’être in this situation, re-creating for English people, exiled from their native isle, the epitome of its genius, the language of its principal Bard. (As Americans, in Paris, get together at Christmas and defiantly sing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and other songs the more dignified French don’t even know the words of.)

Khaled, the Saudi husband, reading Cassius, said to me afterward, as we drank tea in the patio, “The language of your Bard and the language of the Prophet have something in common—could Shakespeare have been inspired by a reading of the Koran?”

“Do you think it’s possible?” I said, not knowing if Shakespeare could have read the Koran. As Khaled spoke, I was wondering if he thought my sundress horribly immodest. I had read that Muslim men are offended by us. At the same time, I was telling myself not to be self-conscious, I am not immodest. Odd that the thought had crept in on me.

“Yes, yes! As where the Book says, ‘Seest thou not those who turn in friendship / To such as have the wrath of Allah upon them? / They are neither of you nor of them, / and they swear to falsehood knowingly.’ Cassius might have spoken those very words to warn Othello about Iago.”

And indeed, at moments during the reading, as the horror of the story mounted, I had been seized by a sudden bleak sense of dislocation to find myself in this unexpected, faraway corner of Islam with strangers reciting poems, without any real sense yet of the warm welcome I’d been looking forward to. As happy and excited as I was to see Ian, there was a little stab of dismay at the impossibility of what I had to do, tasks that seemed as far beyond my own powers as flying a jet would be, in a land I knew nothing of firsthand.

A warm welcome was to follow in the night and went a long way to reassure me, though when Ian, so recently speaking in the tones of the violent, murderous Moor, came to my room wearing a red robe Othello might have worn and the lacy-patterned light from the swinging lamp shadowed his face with flickers of darkness, he was unfamiliar and disconcerting, large, even a little frightening, even for me, who am not easily scared.

“Really, hello,” he said. “Rather stiff to plunge you into all this. Had you expected it?” Did he mean the size of his house, the trillion candles lit on the patio, Shakespeare, the other people, the general air of organization and ongoing life into which I would have to fit myself?

“I didn’t have much of a sense of your… real life,” I said. “I thought…” What had I thought? Business interests, philanthropy.

“Is this my real life? I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose it is. Anyhow, I hope you’ll like it here.”

“I hadn’t expected it to be so fancy.”

“As you’ll see, it’s relatively modest by local standards. But let me kiss you properly. I’ve missed you…” And so it went, the real welcome. We were practiced lovers by now, smoothly suited, satisfied.

Yet there was, perhaps, a little distance between us. I told myself it was because we’d been apart for two months, since Pristina. Now Pristina was elsewhere for Ian, and he was back in a world more natural to him, where I must have seemed to him a little out of place, the way people seemed whom you had met at camp when you ran into them during the school year. He was always an ardent lover—it was something else, a tinge of formality that disappointed. Soon, though, I was made to realize yet again, if I hadn’t known already, how much our relationship meant to me, physically and psychologically, and how easily sleeping with Ian returned to me the sense of love and ease that had been missing for the last couple of months, after he had returned to Marrakech and I was alone in Pristina.

My policy with Ian—though “policy” is not a very good word to use about someone you are in love with, too redolent of desperate ancient female calculation—my rule is never to seem more in love with him than he with me. This requires some fine calibrations: What does he mean when he says “My darling Lulu” and “You are so beautiful”? Sometimes I’m not sure and don’t know what to say back. I realize I don’t know him very well.

9

Those who rehearse the Book / Of Allah, establish regular prayer / and spend (in Charity) / Out of what We have provided / For them, secretly and openly / Hope for a Commerce that will never fail.

—Koran 35:29

W
hen I came down in the morning, no one seemed around. The sun shone, the pink walls glowed in the matinal sun, there was a bird somewhere singing in the shrubbery as if it were in a forest. It was hard to remember that we were in the middle of a desiccated North African desert suburb. Ian’s vast house still seemed a little like a hotel surrounded by an oasis of flowering plants—the rooms on the main floor large and high, opening broadly onto the inner patio. Last night this inner courtyard had been lit by flaming torchères, though now morning calm had come over the building; a vacuum hummed somewhere, and there was the faint sound of a radio. Ian was gone.

It was nine. I was either early or late, but I had no idea which. Posy Crumley was the only other person there. A table had been laid outside, where she was just beginning her breakfast. I sat down with her. I saw she must only be in her late twenties, growing pudgy with her pregnancy, skin flushed.

It was reassuring and comfortable to have another woman to talk to. With the coffee and sunshine, the mood was one of friendly harmony; we admired the silent service by a house maid all in white, pants and tunic, head wrapped, feet in the noiseless slippers. We admired the charm of the silver teapot with its pointy lid and the greasy deliciousness of some thick pancakes kept warm under a straw dome.

“How long have you been here?” I asked.

She sighed. “Three months. Absolute hell, actually. It’s a sort of writer’s sinecure. Ian invites writers and that sort of person to stay for a month or more, to work in ease and solitude. Robin, that is. We’re to stay a full five months. I had thought there would be others…” Her voice trailed off hesitantly, an insecure young wife. “At Charleston, in England, there were plenty of people to talk to, but here, at first, when Ian was still away in wherever it was, Robin and I were the only ones. Of course that was nice, in a way, but it must have been hard on Robin to only have me to talk to.”

“You must have learned a lot about Marrakech by now,” I suggested, thinking that she too might turn out to be an excellent resource. I was also interested in hearing about Ian’s generosity to writers, something he’d never mentioned.

“Not much. I wish I could admire the beauty and interest of this culture. Robin does,” she admitted. “But I can’t, because of their sexism. I know that sounds rather American—sorry, not that that’s bad—” I could almost see her blush with her sudden perception that she had been on the point of saying something jocularly rude about Americans, something others say among themselves. I suppose my normal California accent has modulated now, from years in Europe, into a less distinctive mid-Atlantic speech, so that people can forget I am one.

“You know what I mean, Americans go on about such things. Those words ‘sexism’ and ‘racism’ are very degraded by now, but they do mean something—the way women are treated and thought of, the way the subject seems to preoccupy them up here. Of course I know they can’t help it, it’s the way they are used to thinking.…”

She talked on about the pitfalls for women here and the boredom of life in a compound in Marrakech where there was nothing to do until nightfall, when there were parties. She seemed desperate to have someone to talk to, American or not. We sipped our tea, we talked about the hard lot of Arab women. I told her about the literacy projects I’d be looking at. I thought of Suma, wondering if in coming from Paris to a Muslim country, she’d gone from the frying pan into the fire. I told Posy what I knew of Suma’s story, ending with how happy I was that she was being protected by the Cotters.

“Of course Marina Cotter would need a little slave, now that she’s stuck with her grandchildren; she’s a busy woman. People who live here full-time have lives crammed with things to do, mostly silly. Marina volunteers at the British Consulate doing something; there are charities and the like. Oh, I’m so glad you’re here!” she cried. “I can’t even go out by myself—you feel funny walking alone. I don’t know if it’s safe, and we’re miles from town. And you don’t see anyone pregnant here. Maybe they stay indoors the whole nine months. But two women can walk around together. We’ll go to the souk.” This prospect seemed to cheer her so much that I agreed; of course I did want to see the souk, the lay of the land, the nature of the tasks ahead.

“Don’t worry, things will unfold,” Taft had said. “Think of yourself as a woman in a window, watching, passive, part of the landscape. Your duty at first will be to build your cover. That will take months. Be nice to the English man.”

“Have you seen Ian this morning?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, “someone called him earlier to say there’d been an explosion, and one of his factories was on fire. Robin went with him to see.” I had a flash of irritation—we’d been sitting here for a half an hour and she hadn’t mentioned this.

“But we must go see!” I said. “Don’t you love a fire? Isn’t there someone who could take us?” I had to see it, for to me it almost seemed owing to my presence that an alarming event should unfold as soon as I got here, and it gave me a pleasant sense of being in the thick of things already.

“I don’t see how,” Posy said, “but we can ask Rashid.” She went off to find him; she had rapport with him after all this time.

“He says no, Ian said we were not to come to the fire. Anyway, Ian and Robin took the car, but he is to take us to the souk in a taxi; he can guide us around if you want. Let’s do. I’ve gone to the souk a lot, but I still don’t know my way around it without him.” She was just bored, I supposed.

Presently, Rashid took us the few miles into the center of the city in a taxi. Rashid was a man in his forties, maybe no older than Ian, but already worn-looking, and he had a slight harelip. It was no more than a scar and the slightly flattened aspect of a repaired upper lip, but it caused a little lisp. He wore the tunic and the white skullcap most of the men seemed to wear, and performed the office of a tour guide, pointing out to us the houses of Yves Saint Laurent and some symphony conductor from London, and some shantytown villages whose corrugated metal roofs glittered in the sunlight.

“Moroccans,” he said. “These villages spring up from nowhere like maggots from a rotting melon.”

The taxi driver appeared to be his brother, at least so Rashid called him: “Turn here, my brother,” etc. I thought they looked alike. The driver wore a dusty suit and a sort of military cap, and
tutoyer
‐ed Rashid. It was odd that they spoke French instead of Arabic, perhaps to reassure Posy and me they had no secrets from us. I could see there was no use opposing Rashid and Posy, so I tried to submit to this expedition with some good grace at least.

As we drove, I became more aware of where we actually were when we were at Ian’s—some miles out of Marrakech in an area made up of large walled properties, mostly owned by Europeans, according to Rashid. Fanciful names in French and English decorated the portals, of the “Sans Souci” variety, but some were in Arabic, which Rashid translated; things like “Perfumed Rest” or “The Pearl of Solitude.” Luxurious vines bloomed on every wall, and all the walls were the same curious ocher pink, crafted from local clay; all the vines were intense fuchsias and oranges, ablaze in the dry landscape. I could see that our location so far out of town was not propitious for information gathering. The medina, the central walled part of Marrakech, was beyond walking distance, and a woman alone along the highway would rivet attention—every movement would be visible for miles.

We parked in a parking garage, a prosaic, rather jarring modern touch at the edge of the ancient enclosure of the medina. Posy and I followed Rashid, apprehensions coming back, into a dank alley lit by electric bulbs hanging from wires, though it was bright sun outside.

Orange halves and peels washed in a trickle of water down the center of the way, watched by a skinny cat, happy in her element of darkness, and two children splashed their feet in the water. From here we emerged into the great square I had seen the day before, and once again into a twisty maze of boutiques and hawkers. Fairy-tale carts were piled high with oranges and dates perfuming the air, wafts of incense and the smell of animals stung our nostrils, and the music of drums underlay the bustle with an exciting throb.

The narrow lanes of the souk were crowded with shoppers, mostly stout young women in long pastel robes and head scarves, carry ing baskets and parcels, but also men, families, little kids skipping along, and many, many tourists, so we were by no means conspicuous. Occasionally a woman stood out because her face was entirely veiled with a black handkerchief; these seemed like veils of shame, some sort of stigma, or symbol of contagion, but Rashid said they signified extra piety. We saw one group of women draped all in black, and these had the air of being tourists like us, turning confusedly at the intersections of the alleys or peering where the doors of a mosque stood open.

At stalls suggested by Rashid, Posy bought a caftan, the ideal maternity garment, and I bought some slippers, more or less for verisimilitude, women shopping. Of course I hated to bargain, but Posy had already gotten rather good at it. Why do we hate to bargain? Westerners, I mean. I suppose because it implies that a falsehood is the basis of the transaction—the first asking price is a lie. Whereas we value candor and relying on each other’s word, which would mean you state the true price right away. And there is an unpleasant metaphor of victory and defeat embedded in the bargain—you finally defeat your adversary, yet you really know you are defeated, because he is getting the price he secretly meant to get all along.

As we wandered the alleys of the souk, closely followed by Rashid, I began to understand even more about the limitations of my situation, a woman alone: first would be the simple difficulty of walking around unnoticed. I thought again of a discussion with Taft on the general principles of recruiting and getting to know the locals. What a poor choice he had made in me, an agent limited by social conventions. He couldn’t ever have been faced with those particular disqualifications: Without Rashid I would be, geo graphically, lost in seconds in the winding labyrinth, and the idea of establishing any sort of rapport with any of the indistinguishable men and boys crowding the indistinguishable stalls of polyester fabrics and cheap underwear was beyond imagining, let alone thinking of prying into their ancient networks and bankless financial repositories, resources existing since the beginning of time and entirely male. What had Taft and I been thinking for me to have come here?

But of course it was not expected I would get to read the native secrets of the souk—it was the European community that was, for the moment, of interest. “Someone with Western connections is cooperating with or running the Islamists,” Taft had said. “Nobody knows to what end, but there is chatter. Something may happen.” Was it Ian’s fire, was it happening even now?