Rocks, The (22 page)

R
achid showed them
into a small room at the rear of the long sewing shed. It appeared unused, a formal setting, with cushions on the carpeted floor. A single faded color photograph in a frame hung on one wall: a swirling multitude of bearded men dressed in white robes filling an enormous square.

“Please, sit,” said Rachid, indicating the cushions.

As Luc and Aegina sat down, a girl entered the room carrying a brass tray with a silver teapot and three small glasses. She placed the tray on the floor and left the room. Rachid sat down. “You will take tea?”

“Thank you,” said Luc. He turned and smiled at Aegina.

Rachid poured, raising the teapot dramatically, eighteen inches up and down again, as the trajectory of thin steaming green liquid perfectly filled each small glass. He placed a glass in front of Luc and Aegina and then picked up his own. “Please,” he said. He waited until they drank a sip of the hot, very sweet mint tea before he took a sip himself.

“Please, one moment,” he said. He rose and left the room.

“Better drink it all up,” Luc said to Aegina. “Manners.” He liked the Moroccan mint tea that was served everywhere, but Aegina found it too sweet and undrinkable.

“And then he’ll pour me more,” she said.

Rachid came back into the room. He carried two shirts, one black, one white, on wire hangers. He separated them and laid them on cushions in front of Luc and Aegina and resumed his seat.

“Please. Look,” said Rachid.

Aegina picked up the black one. The collar, hem, and sleeve edges were all minutely blanket-stitched, not bound with trim or appliqué. She looked closely at the embroidery around the neck, at the small buttons sewn down the opening at the chest. She held the shirt up before her. The black cotton was finely woven, light, silky, not quite transparent, and produced a velvetlike sheen where it broke into folds. The dense black-upon-black embroidery stood out like lace over a sheerer fabric.

“It’s beautiful,” Aegina said quietly. She turned big brown eyes on Luc. “Really beautiful. This is it.”

“Do you like the white?” asked Rachid.

Aegina passed the black shirt to Luc and picked up the white one from the cushion in front of her. The cloth was as fine and lightweight as the other. The embroidery did not stand out as visibly as on the black shirt, but there was more of it. It imbued the shirt with a suggestion of a fine, muted brocade.

“This is exquisite,” said Aegina, again in English. And then in French for Rachid: “These are very fine. Very beautiful.”

He nodded his head. “It is what you are looking for?” he asked.

“Oh yes. But more beautiful than I had imagined.”

“Good.” Rachid smiled, and nodded. “What are you going to do with the shirts? They are not for you only to wear?”

“No, I want to sell them,” said Aegina.

“This is what I thought,” said Rachid. He lifted his glass and took a noisy, slurping sip that cooled the tea between glass and mouth. He put the glass down and licked his lips. “Where do you sell them?”

“In Spain. Perhaps London,” said Aegina. “I know several people with small shops where they sell shirts and clothing for men and women. I will see if they will buy these shirts, or sell them for me. I’m not really sure.”

“And you would like now to buy one hundred shirts?” said Rachid.

“That depends on the price. But these shirts—your shirts—are very beautiful. They are the best I’ve seen. Yes, I would like to buy one hundred if we can agree on a price.”

“And if you sell all the shirts, one hundred shirts,” said Rachid, “what will you do?”

“If I can sell them for a good price—enough, you know, to make it worth the trip here to Marrakech—then I’d like to come back and buy more from you. Perhaps many more.”

Rachid nodded seriously. He lifted his glass and took another noisy sip of tea, licking his lips again. He looked across the room at the photograph on the wall. Then he looked at Aegina.

“For one hundred shirts I will sell to you for”—he lifted a hand and stuck up fingers one by one—“four dirham for each shirt. For one hundred shirts, four hundred dirham.” He gazed at them both.

Aegina looked briefly at Luc, her face void of expression though he could see something like a klaxon going off in her eyes. Then she looked at the shirts, and then at Rachid. “Four dirham for each shirt?” she said.

“Yes,” said Rachid. “Is very good price, I think you know. This price for one time. I would like to help you to make your business to sell my shirts in London. You will be able to sell for much more money, I think.”

“I think so, yes,” Aegina said carefully.

“If you return to Marrakech to buy more shirts”—he waggled his head slightly, once to each side—“I will ask you to pay a little more. Five or six dirham for each shirt. It will depend. But now, one time, you can take one hundred shirts to London for this price and see if you can make business.”

Rachid raised his glass again and slurped noisily.

•   •   •

T
hey walked away
through the unpretty streets of the Moroccan
polígono
quickly, as if they’d been shoplifting.

“I can’t believe it!” said Aegina. She alternately tugged at Luc’s arm, skipped ahead, went back and pulled him on. “That’s about
ten shillings
a shirt! And they’re a
lot
nicer than the shirt I bought. I’m
sure
I can sell them. And make some money, and then come back and buy a lot more. It’s fantastic! Why is Rachid being so nice? We didn’t even bargain with him.”

“Maybe you should have.”

“I think he went beyond that immediately. Do you remember the prices in the souk? This is really wholesale. He can’t be making much at four dirham per shirt.”

“Well, I’m sure he’s not giving them to you at a loss, but obviously he’s interested in what you’re doing. He’s investing in you.”

“Yes. He is. Why?”

“Because it could open up a whole new market for him. Who knows where this could go? He looks at you and he sees what you’re doing. He’s a good businessman. He believes in you.”

Aegina leapt skyward and whooped. She spun and wrapped her arms around Luc’s neck and pulled herself close into him. She lifted her face and kissed him. Abruptly, she pulled away, grabbed his arm and pulled.

“Let’s go have a wonderful lunch somewhere.”

•   •   •

T
he little Renault
people.”

Rolf’s monotone rolled out of the lowering windows of a large sleek silver Peugeot that slowed and stopped in the middle of an intersection they were approaching on foot.

“Hi!” Minka waved out the passenger window. Then she jumped out of the car, heedless of the small vans, bicycles, pedestrians in the intersection. “Come and have lunch with us!” cried Minka. “We’re going to have lunch by the sea! In such a beautiful place! You must come with us!”

Luc and Aegina looked at each other through their sunglasses. Aegina grinned. “Somewhere beautiful? Sure!”

Minka clutched their arms and pulled them toward the Peugeot.

R
olf drove
with the accelerator on the floor across the hazy beige plain. Luc sat in the passenger seat trying to ignore Minka’s long legs folded up against the back of his seat as she rocked and laughed with Aegina.

“I thought Marrakech was a long way from the sea,” he said.

“
Ja
, in a little Renault!” said Rolf. “No, man, we be there in an hour.”

The speedometer needle quivered at 180 kph.

“But back in Marrakech by dinner, right?” said Luc. As the kilometers accrued, he began to feel abducted.

“Yes, but you have to see Essaouira beach,” said Minka. “It’s incredible. You won’t believe it. It goes forever.”

“Not like the little beaches in Mallorca,” said Rolf. “I can’t believe you guys like that place. It’s fucked, no?”

“Depends where you go,” said Luc.

“A guy on a yacht, a real sailor who came across the Atlantic, he was telling me the Azores are cool, man,” said Rolf. “No one goes there, except the Portuguese. And not easy to get to, like Mallorca. You fly halfway to America. Too far for the package holiday tourist. The Med is fucking finished, man.”

“The coast of Yugoslavia is still completely unspoiled,” said Minka.

“Yugoslavia, Yugoslavia,” said Rolf. “Everyone is going to Yugoslavia now. Or to Turkey, the new Greece. The moment you hear this, it’s already too late. All those places are fucked, man.”

Aegina’s head lay on the seat back close to the fully opened window, the air blasting over her. She turned and said above the wind to the blond Teutonic head rising from the seat in front of her: “Half the tourists in Mallorca now are German.”

“
Ja
, I know. Fuck all tourists, man, the Germans too,” said Rolf. “They are everywhere now. I hope they don’t come to the Azores. Probably they are going to Yugoslavia now. You will get tired of Mallorca too, man. There are better places.”

“My mother was
mallorquina
,” said Aegina. “My family was on that island before the Romans got there. Before there were any Germans anywhere.”

“
Ja
, but you are an English girl. I can hear it. You are not
spanisch
or
mallorkisch
. I have a good ear for accents. And it’s better for you this way, so you are not a peasant.”

Abruptly, Aegina let loose a torrent of colloquial
mallorquí
, some of which Luc understood. As she spoke, Aegina was amazingly transformed into an authentic Mediterranean peasant woman, tossing her head and thrusting her chin toward Rolf.

“Yes, he’s a pig, this Syltsman,” said Minka, seriously.

•   •   •

I
t was an hour and a half,
almost midafternoon, before they reached the coast. Rolf turned left and drove past the beckoning rampart walls of Essaouira’s ancient medina. Beach and ocean appeared on the right, stretching away to the south for miles. A vast, uncontoured expanse of shimmering heat, lovely as a runway, disappearing into haze. Squat, blockhouse hotels and apartment buildings sat across the road. After five minutes drive along the shore, Rolf slowed the car alongside the low, dust-blown vegetation and swung the Peugeot down a sandy track to a squat concrete building on the sand. A thatch-covered terrace looked out over the beach and the sea. Across a whitewashed wall, large, roughly painted blue letters spelled BONGO BAR.

“Bongo Bar,” said Rolf, with immense satisfaction. “The best seafood in the whole of fucking Morocco, man. Fresh from the Atlantic.”

He parked in a sandy, poorly defined parking space strewn with smaller cars. They got out, squinting in the intense glare of sand and sea.

Rolf stopped before the entrance to the bar, blocking the way. He faced the sea. “Only a Syltsman—or a Phoenician—can tell you why Essaouira is here since prehistoric times. The town is already old before the Roman Empire. Why do you think?”

“I give up,” said Luc, who was thirsty.

“Protection, man,” said Rolf. He swept his hands toward the long isthmus north of the town that ended in a stone quay projecting far into the Atlantic. “Here there are always the northerly winds. They make the big waves out there.” He turned to face them and held up a finger. “Except when the winds come from the south.” Like a conjuror, he moved his finger portentously across their line of sight, so they dutifully followed it, until it pointed to a small brown island almost a mile offshore. “And there is the island of Mogador, to stop the seas from the south. So you have the best anchorage and the oldest African town on the Atlantic coast.”

“Fantastic,” said Luc. “Let’s get a drink.” He took Aegina’s arm and they walked past Rolf into the Bongo Bar.

At the table, Rolf continued his lecture: “The Phoenicians, man, they came here. The greatest traders in the world. They sail out of the Mediterranean three thousand years ago, they meet the wind in the north so they sail south to Essaouira. They stop right here. And they sail south again because they can’t go back against the wind to the north. They sail on and on and on, until one day they look back and they see the sun coming up not on the left and moving to the right, what they see all their lives, but now it comes up on right, and north of where they are, and it moves to the left. Now they don’t know where the fuck they are, man, so they keep going, always keeping the land in sight so they don’t lose the world. And then the sun moves again from the left to the right, and they arrive back in Carthage, and they think they have gone around the world. But really they have gone all the way around Africa.”

“They had the Suez Canal back then?” said Luc.

“Fuck, man, the Phoenicians didn’t need the fucking Suez Canal.”

A Moroccan approached their table. Rolf rose and embraced him. “Mustafa!
Mon vieux!
” he said. He seemed to cherish an epoch of warm memories. The man, middle-aged, short, dressed like a waiter in a white shirt and black trousers, allowed himself to be hugged and obligingly gave a tepid impression of acknowledging an acquaintanceship.

“Poisson! Merluza, atún, calamars frites! Le meilleur!”
said Rolf.

Mustafa lifted his chin, made a noise with his tongue on the roof of his mouth.
“Poisson finis. Brochette d’agneau. Bifteck. Couscous.”

“No fish?” said Rolf.

Mustafa made the noise with his tongue and his gaze slid away toward the back of the bar where a Moroccan man was whiningly berating a Moroccan woman.
“Brochette d’agneau, bifteck, couscous,”
he repeated, looking back at Rolf.

“Doesn’t matter,” Rolf told his companions. “It is the best in Essaouira.” He looked across at a table of badly sunburned Dutch tourists who were yakking away in their strange tongue which sounded to Luc like fluent English spoken with a speech impediment, rendering utterances indecipherable except to those, like family members, long accustomed to making sense of them. “Good,
ja?
” said Rolf.

“Ja, ja,”
said the Dutch table.
“Goed, goed.”

•   •   •

A
t five,
as they stood up from the greasy ruin of their table, Rolf said, “So we stay for the night, okay? It’s too late to drive back now.”

“Absolutely not,” said Aegina. “We’ve got to go back to Marrakech.”

“Oh, man, it’s too far. I don’t want to drive. I need a siesta.”

“No, Rolf!” said Minka. “I don’t stay here in Essaouira for the night! Everything is in the room at the Mamounia. We must go back.”

“Rolf,” said Luc. “You said lunch, it was great, nice beach. But we’re here on business. We have to get back. I’ll be happy to drive.”

“I drive, man.”

They walked out to the big Peugeot and got in. Rolf drove north again toward the town. He slowed suddenly and turned into the forecourt of the Hotel Mogador, a new, unattractive building unenlivened by a repeating motif of ogee arches in the ground-floor doorways.

“I take a shit, man,” said Rolf.

He stopped the car suddenly at a slant in front of the entrance and got out. Three squint-smiling bellboys of indeterminate age emerged from the cool shade of the lobby.

“Caca,”
said Rolf, waving them away, walking into the hotel.

Twenty minutes later, Minka came back out to the car.

“I’m sorry. He’s in a room. He’s not coming out. He says he doesn’t feel well. I’m really, really sorry! I don’t want to be here.”

Inside—a white Ali Baba ambience with daggers and fake Berber rifles on the walls—Luc asked the concierge when the next bus departed for Marrakech.

“Six heures du matin.”

“C’est tout? Il n’y en a plus ce soir?”

“Ah, non.”
Smile, tone, and body language of well-exercised sympathy crossed with immutable fact. “There are only two buses per day for Marrakech. Six and fifteen hours.”

•   •   •

A
egina got up,
staggering heavy-footed into the bathroom, and Luc came fully awake when he realized she was vomiting. Short barks, like powerful hiccups, soon followed by longer convulsions wrenched out of her like torture. They had both felt unwell when they went to bed and there had been only comforting cuddling.

Luc went into the bathroom and knelt behind her and put his hands lightly on her shoulders and her hips. Her long hair was falling around her face into the toilet bowl and he pulled it back as she retched with spasms that arched her back like a cat doing the same thing.

Then he stood quickly and lurched to the sink and spewed into it the viscous remains of the Bongo Bar lamb and couscous he’d eaten at lunch. Aegina, he now recalled, had only eaten salad.

When Luc finished, he ran the taps. Aegina lay curled up on the tile floor, her T-shirt soaked, face pale and glistening with sweat, eyes closed.

“Let me get you back into bed,” Luc said, trying to help her up.

“No,” she breathed. Then she quickly rose and pulled down her underpants, sat on the toilet and leaned forward across her knees and a gusher of liquid burst into the bowl beneath her.

“Sweetheart,” said Luc. He knelt beside her. She still lay with her forehead on her forearms crossed over her knees. Luc put his arm across her back.

“You too?” she said hoarsely.

“Yeah. But I had the lamb.”

“You had salad too. It was the salad.”

“Can you get up from there now?”

“No.”

Luc’s bowels flopped inside him and his anus puckered with a burning sensation. He moved in a quick crouch to the bath and sat on his thighs with his bum over the edge and shat explosively into the tub. When he felt he could move, he reached for the tap and turned on the cold water. He threw cupped palms of cool water between his buttocks, and then he sloshed the water around the tub to clean it.

“Do you want to come back to bed?” he asked Aegina, who lay limply across her knees.

“No,” she said. She reached for the toilet paper, flushed the toilet, and then lay down on the floor again.

Luc put a towel down beside her. “Lie on this.”

He tried to move her onto the towel, but she said, “I can’t.” He rinsed a smaller towel under the cold tap in the sink and wrung it out. He sat down beside Aegina and wiped the clammy sweat off her body and then picked up the larger towel and draped it over her. He ran his hand back and forth over the towel.

“Aegina,” Luc said.

“Unh . . .”

“I love you so much.”

“Oh, sure,” she said, her voice small and coming from beneath her. “Especially like this.”

“Like this most of all.”

Her hand moved across the wet tile and found Luc’s foot and closed around it. Her fingers were cold. Luc put his hand over hers.