Fatima puttered around in the kitchen trying to get the timing right on the soft-boiled eggs. I amused myself by singing Maggie's Maid to the tune of a Rod Stewart song. Wake up, Maggie's Maid, I think I've got something to say to you. The bus to Fes didn't leave until noon, so I had plenty of time for breakfast.
Marmalade and toast and olives and cheese. And that wonderful egg. Maggie came down to say goodbye and told me a great story about how she was an extra in Gladiator, "They needed European types to play the senators," and how in the desert there is pure oxygen, so you only need three hours of sleep a night.
"You wake up refreshed, don't you? We stayed up all night with Russell Crowe and Oliver Reed and, oh what is his name, the director. It was never a dull moment. Of course we ended up on the cutting room floor, you can watch the film twice and never see me, but it was quite the experience."
There was some hilarity where Fatima didn't know where to put a giant bag of minced lamb. "She says it's a gift from her family," said Maggie, "but of course I give them the money for the sheep each year."
Then it was time to go. I felt strangely close to her.
Took a grande cab for a petit price, because the tout was desperate. Easy ride to the bus station, which was a hive of activity. Men shouting the names of cities in competition, heavy pressure to take one bus line or another. I had arranged passage the previous day, so I was worthless to them.
Stopped into the little office to make sure everything was on schedule, and a man tapped me on the shoulder and handed me four-hundred dirham. That's about $40 or, roughly, enough for the guy who found it to buy an olive grove and retire.
Very careless of me to have dropped it. I've gotten so unused to carrying cash, I don't protect it properly. It flies out when I take my phone from my pocket. I thanked him and saw another 200 on my bag. These were the big bills I'd had trouble breaking earlier.
Everything's a dollar here, and it's hard to make change for what might as well be a fifty. It must have looked to the people who saw it like I'd been trailing a string of pearls. In any case, he returned it and revealed himself to be the bus driver. How about that?
It didn't take very long to be in the countryside and very soon there was nothing but golden hills and lonely onion salesmen. Shepherds sleeping in tents as their flocks grazed. Donkeys laden with alfalfa driven by boys with sticks. Men ride sidesaddle here and boys straddle the beasts.
I read a book called Where the Jews Aren't about a region in the Soviet Union they tried to make a Jewish homeland in the 40s. Birobidzhan. It was probably a more-appropriate book for my last trip, but having been to Latvia, Ukraine, etc, put the book in much better context. I enjoyed it and might not have gotten as much out of it if I'd read it a year ago.
Just as I will get a lot out of the books about Morocco I will read in the next few months. I really try to use these trips to broaden my understanding of the world and not just to get cool magnets. Although, it's true that I have a marvelous collection of magnets at this point. The envy of my peers.
I had the front seat, so I got to see the road. It was in some disrepair. Long ago, I read a thing about Mark Twain learning to navigate the river from the helm of a steamboat. He would look at the colors and patterns of the river to identify where a stump might be buried or where there was sudden current.
The bus driver read the asphalt this way, slowing to avoid invisible-to-me dips and depressions, speeding up to overtake slower coaches. It was very professional. We stopped for coffee once, and I bought some grilled meat from a roadside vendor. It was good and well-fed cats swarmed.
No dogs. They don't like them here. It's often on my mind.
As the sun set, the mountains changed colors as deliberately as someone turning the "hue" knob on an old television. A dazzling variety of yellows and reds and golds. The little hills looked like scoops of gelato in the window of an Italian sweet shop.
A long journey but not an unpleasant one. I was fresh, and I enjoyed my reading. We pulled into Fes in the evening. There was the usual weirdness where randos get on and off the bus in the middle of nowhere. It's a charter, one city to another, but as you get close, certain passengers gain strange privileges.
At one point, the driver lost his temper with a Mercedes and several riders were cheering him on and laughing at his probably creative curses. I laughed because they were, and people shared their smiles with me.
At the main station, I was accosted by the traditional cabmen and tourmen and facilitators of convenience. They're all liars and actors, of course. The driver was like, "Where you stay, Fes? You have riad?"
It was very kind of him to have taken such an interest in me, almost a responsibility. After the event with the money, I felt like I could trust him and he felt like I was a babe in the woods.
I told him I was staying in the Old Medina, and he pointed to where the petit cabs were. "Tell driver 'bab boujloud' 'bab boujloud.' Now you say!"
I said something closer to babaganoush, but it satisfied him. He patted my shoulder, and I touched his arm, and we will never see one another's mustaches again in this life.
Got a cab, he offered me a newspaper cone full of peanuts, and I told him where I was staying. He understood, so I didn't need to mention the babaganoush. The bus station is in the "new" part of the city, so it looked like anyplace. Starbucks, big gas stations, shops. We left it behind and made our way to the ancient walls of the medina.
He kicked me out near an old post office, and the second my feet hit the cobbles, a dude was like, "See-mon?" I had given an estimate of my arrival, but didn't think it would result in such an easy pickup.
His name was Mohammad, and he took my bags and I followed him down an alleyway about the width of my body. Two men could not walk abreast down this corridor, and a woman with breasts could not walk sideways. That's not a very good joke, but it is the one I wrote.
He offered me a great deal, but I wanted only sleep. Good night, Ali. In the morning, I had plans to get hopelessly lost and to take a great many pictures. For now, for then, I wanted only a pillow between my legs and another in my arms.
As I drifted off, I remembered that I had forgotten to ask what bab boujloud meant. It would soon be told.
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