A Cook's Tour (19 page)

     ‘He has only the leg,’ said Abdul.

     ‘I see that,’ I said irritably. ‘Tell him I want the whole thing. What do I have to do to get the whole thing?’

     ‘It is bad day,’ said Abdul. ‘The sheeps, they come to the market Monday. Today is Wednesday. No lamb comes today.’

     ‘Ask him . . . maybe he’s got a friend,’ I suggested. ‘Tell him I’ll pay. I’m not looking for a bargain here. I need a whole fucking lamb. Legs, body, neck, and balls. The whole animal.’

     Abdul embarked on a long and contentious new tack – one that was of clear interest to the butcher, who raised an eyebrow. I imagine Abdul was saying something like ‘You see this stupid American next to me? He has no sense at all! He’ll pay a lot of money for his whole lamb. It’ll be worth both our whiles, my friend, if you can hook us up.’

     The conversation became more animated, with multiple rounds of negotiation. Others joined us, materializing from dusty, trash-strewn alleyways, getting involved in the discussion, offering suggestions and strategies – as well as debating, it appeared, their respective cuts of the action. ‘He say one hundred dollars,’ said Abdul, uncertain that I’d go for such a figure.

     ‘Done,’ I replied without hesitation. Not too terribly far from New York prices, and how often would I get to eat fresh whole lamb in the Sahara?

     The butcher abandoned his stall and led us down the sun-streaked streets, deep into a maze of buildings that seemed to go on forever. People came to upstairs windows to look at the strange procession of Americans, Moroccans, and TV cameras below. Children and dogs joined us as we walked, kicking up dust, begging and barking. I looked to my left and noticed a smiling man holding a large, menacing knife. He grinned, gave me the thumbs-up sign. I was beginning to get an idea of what it means when you say you want fresh lamb in Risani.

     We arrived at a low-ceilinged manger, surrounded by worried- and unkempt-looking sheep. Our party had shrunk to four people and a TV crew. The butcher, an assistant, Abdul, and I crowded into a tiny mud and straw structure, sheep jostling us as they tried to look inconspicuous. A particularly plump beast was grabbed by the scruff of the neck. Abdul pinched his thigh and then rib sections; a new round of argument and negotiation began. Finally, consensus, and the poor animal was dragged, protesting, out into the sunny street. Another man was waiting for us with a bucket of water and a length of rope. I watched queasily as the intended victim was brusquely pointed toward Mecca. The man with the knife leaned over and without ceremony quickly cut the sheep’s throat.

     It was a deep, fast, and efficient movement. Were I, for one of many good reasons, condemned to die in the same fashion, I doubt I could have found a more capable executioner. The animal fell on its side, blood gurgling into the alley. There had been no cries of pain. I could readily see the animal’s open windpipe; the head appeared to have been damn near cut off. But it continued to breathe, to twitch. While the executioner chatted with his cohorts, he held his victim down with a foot on its head.

     I watched the poor sheep’s eyes – a look I’d see again and again in the dying – as the animal registered its imminent death, that terrible unforgettable second when, either from exhaustion or disgust, it seemed to decide finally to give up and die. It was a haunting look, a look that says, You were – all of you – a terrible disappointment. The eyes closed slowly, as if the animal were going to sleep, almost willfully.

     I had my fresh lamb.

     My new pals strung up the body by the ankles, letting the blood drain into a pail. They cut the woolly pelt at one ankle and the butcher pressed his mouth to the opening and blew, inflating the skin away from the meat and muscle. A few more quick cuts and the skin was peeled off like a dancer’s leotard. Stray dogs looked on from the rooftops as blood continued to drip, more slowly now. The assistant poured water constantly as the carcass was worked over, the entrails removed and sorted. The head was removed, heart put aside for the butcher, intestines and
crépine
(stomach-membrane) saved for merguez and sausage. Soon, the sheep looked comfortably enough like meat, save for two mango-sized testicles that hung upside down from the inverted carcass in distinctly separate blue-veined scrota. The butcher winked at me – indicating, I gathered, that this part was indeed very good and should be protected during the long ride out to our camp in the dunes – and made two slashes in the animal’s belly, tucking a testicle in each.

     There was more washing, a fidgety moment during the de rigueur postmortem enema, and then more washing. They were fast. The whole procedure, from ‘Baa-baa’ to meat, took maybe twenty minutes. I walked back to our Land Rover, retracing my steps with my new buddies in tow. With my hundred-dollar bill in the butcher’s pocket, and the eerily bonding experience we’d just shared, they seemed to like me a lot more. The carcass was wrapped in a clear plastic tarpaulin, like a dead wise guy. I got a strangely pleasurable thrill hearing the thump as the body’s dead weight flopped into the back of the Rover.

     We filled in a few holes in our
mise-en-place
at the souk, gassed up, and headed for the Merzouga dunes. I was looking forward to seeing clean white sand, free of the smells of sheep and fear, far from the sounds of dying animals.

     For a while it was more hard-packed lunarscape, until suddenly I felt the tires sink into softer ground, and soon it was sand, sand, and more sand, the vehicle gliding through the frosting of a giant cake. On the horizon were the mammoth red peaks and dips of the Merzouga dunes – the real Sahara of my
Boys’ Own
adventure fantasies. I felt exhilarated and relieved, considering, for the first time in a while, the possibility of happiness.

     A small sandstone hut with blue-clad Berbers sitting on couches awaited us. A camel train had been assembled nearby, the big animals kneeling and ready. We mounted up and set out across the dunes, single file, a lone Tuareg in head-to-toe blue leading on foot, another to the rear. Global Alan rode on the lead camel, just ahead of me, Abdul, still in his orange-and-green tweed jacket, behind me. Matt and the assistant producer rode farther back.

     Riding a camel, particularly if you’re comfortable on horseback, is not hard. I was real comfortable, cradled behind the animal’s hump on a thick layer of blankets, my beast gently lurching forward. My legs rested in front of me. It was a long ride and I had – in an unusually lucid moment – made proper prior preparations: briefs instead of boxers.

     Global Alan, however, had not chosen his undergarments with comfort and security in mind. Already in the awkward position of having to ride half-turned with a camera pointed back at me – for those all-important Tony of the Desert shots – he was not having an easy time of it. Whenever his camel would descend at a steep angle into the deep hollows between dunes, I could hear him grunting and whimpering with pain as his balls were pinched by the saddle. Alan hated Morocco. He’d hated it before we’d arrived, having been there before on assignment. Whenever I’d complained – in France or Spain or Portugal – about crummy bathrooms, uncomfortable rooms, rude waiters, or cold climate, Alan had just smiled, shaken his head, and said, ‘Wait till Morocco. You’re gonna hate it. Just wait. Buncha guys who look like Saddam Hussein, sitting around holding hands. Drinking tea. You’re gonna hate it. Just wait.’

     In fact, I was really beginning to enjoy myself. This was exactly the sort of scenario I’d envisioned when I’d dreamed up this scheme.
This
was what I was here for! To ride across desert sands with blue-clad Berbers, to sleep under the stars, surrounded by nothing, to eat lamb testicles in the middle of nowhere. Not to sit stiffly at a dinner table like a pinned moth, yapping at the camera.

     After a few hours, we made camp at the foot of a huge dune. The sun was setting and long shadows appeared, growing in the hollows and swells of sand as far as the eye could see. The Blue Men got busy working on a late snack, something to keep us going until we hit the main encampment, where we’d spend the night. One of them built a fire out of a few sticks of wood and dried grass. While the flames burned down to coals and tea was made, the other Berber made bread dough in a small bowl, mixing and working it by hand. He covered it for a while, allowing it to rise under a cloth, then wrapped it around a filling of meat, onion, garlic, cumin, and herbs. Judging the fire to be ready, he brushed aside the coals, dug into the hot sand beneath, and dropped the fat disk of meat directly into the hole, covering it back up immediately. Time to wait, said Abdul.

     Warm enough for the moment to remove shoes and socks, to strip down to a single layer of shirt, I climbed the big dune, dragging my tired, wheezing, and hideously out-of-shape carcass up the most gradual incline I could see, feeling every cigarette and mouthful of food I’d had in the last six months. It took me a long time. I had to rest every fifty yards or so, gasping, trying to summon the strength for the next fifty. I picked my way slowly along the soft but dramatic edge of a sharply defined ridge, then fell onto my back at the highest point. Rising after a few moments onto my elbows, I looked, for the first – and probably last – time in my life, at something I’d never seriously imagined I’d cast eyes upon: a hundred miles of sand in every direction, a hundred miles of absolutely gorgeous, unspoiled nothingness. I wiggled my bare toes in the sand and lay there for a long time, watching the sun drop slowly into the dunes like a deflating beach ball, the color of the desert quickly transforming from red to gold to yellow ocher to white, the sky changing, too. I was wondering how a miserable, manic-depressive, overage, undeserving hustler like myself – a utility chef from New York City with no particular distinction to be found in his long and egregiously checkered career – on the strength of one inexplicably large score, could find himself here, seeing this, living the dream.

     I am the luckiest son of a bitch in the world, I thought, contentedly staring out at all that silence and stillness, feeling, for the first time in a while, able to relax, to draw a breath unencumbered by scheming and calculating and worrying. I was happy just sitting there enjoying all that harsh and beautiful space. I felt comfortable in my skin, reassured that the world was indeed a big and marvelous place.

     I was eventually disturbed from my maharishi-style meditations by the familiar sound of bread being scraped. I took that to mean my snack was ready, so I loped down the dune and returned to camp, to find my Tuareg buddies brushing the last grains of sand off a fat cooked loaf of meat-filled bread. Not a grain of sand or grit remained when one cut me off a thick wedge, a waft of spicy aromatic vapor escaping from inside. We crowded around a small blanket, eating and drinking tea as the sun finally disappeared completely, leaving us in blackness.

     The camels picked their way across the desert in the pitch-dark, moving slowly up and down the steep rises and dips. At one point, I could see the dark shape of poor Global Alan, asleep on his camel, nodding off, then nearly falling off his animal. He woke with a start and a cry, frightening the whole formation. We traveled for about two more hours in near-total absence of light, the only discernible sight the off-black surface of the sand sea. Then I began to glimpse a few winking lights in the distance. As the camels trudged on, the lights grew larger. I could make out a bonfire, sparks rising from the flames, the outlines of what looked to be tents, moving bodies. There was the sound of drums, and singing or chanting in a language I’d never heard. The spectral apparition disappeared as our camels descended into another hollow, where I could see nothing, the only sound – once again – the breathing and snorting of our camels. After a long, tedious climb over a last rise, suddenly we were there.

     A vast floor of ornate carpets stretched out for fifty or sixty yards, surrounded by tents. A covered table, fabric-wrapped stools, and pillows waited under an open canopy. A mud-and-straw oven, like a giant cistern, or the muzzle end of a sixteenth-century cannon, glowed to the left, away from the tents. Musicians beat drums and sang by a huge pile of burning logs, everyone dressed in the same blue or black head-to-toe robes of our escorts. And wonder of wonders: A full bar, nearly ten yards long, stocked with iced bins of beer and a row of liquor bottles, shone under a string of electric bulbs next to a humming generator.

     It was a good old time: the Blue Men whacking drums with hands stained blue from the vegetable dyes they use on their clothes, singing and dancing by the fire, a capable and friendly French-speaking bartender in full headdress. In no time, I was fully in the spirit of things, banging on the drums with my blue pals, rolling a fat blunt, watching as one of the tribe rubbed my whole lamb with onion, pepper, and salt, then wired it to a long pole. Assisted by two others, they hoisted my dinner onto their shoulders and walked to the smoldering, volcanolike mud oven.

     ‘See?’ said Abdul, nursing a Heineken in one hand while sticking the other hand into the glowing opening atop the oven. ‘Something very special. Very hot.’ The Tuaregs leaned down to the base of the oven, to another, smaller opening, and removed with a stick every ember of coal and stick of burning wood. Then they quickly sealed the opening with fresh, wet mud. My
meshwi
went in the top, straight down, securely held to the pole by wire, placed vertically into the wide, still-nuclear-hot oven, a round meat lid placed on top. The lid was sealed in place with more mud, the Tuaregs carefully examining the oven from every angle to see that it was completely sealed, pausing now and again to patch or reinforce any holes or weak spots, any flaw that might allow all that residual heat to escape. Abdul and I retired to the bar.