37. Is that a camel in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?

I'm so happy to be out of grubby Nepal.  I'm now better than I have been in months. I've stopped coughing, the ache is easing in my heart and the Me Deep Within Is Stirring.

Marrakech is a head spinning, neck twisting, eye opening and mouth dropping city. Everything about it is ancient, unaware of the previous two centuries.  Domes, arches, minarets, shadows, cascading bougainvillea, carved doorways, mosaics, fretwork, secret alleyways lure and excite and tantalise from every bend.  Opening a doorway is an adventure in light and form, and sometimes relieved delight when I discover I have accidentally found my way back to the riad.  

Every person I pass has some secret they're carrying behind their smoky eyes.  Smatterings of French tangle with guttural Arabic, English is tortured and heavy which all adds to the exoticism of this remarkable place.  I'm drunk with the desire to get deeper into the souks, deeper into the textiles and textures, deeper into the lush foods and layers of life that collides with me at every turn. Aromas of cinnamon, cardamom and mint mix with the odours of dung, diesel and curing leather.  Finally, I have all the food groups I so missed in Nepal; vegetables that burst with greens and oranges, pyramids of oranges and pomegranates, mountains of oily olives that glisten like gemstones. I'm tempted to eat the moist, plump cous cous, tender meats that fall off the bone, aromatic chicken that an hour earlier would have been scrabbling around a garden, with my hands, and I'm sure it won't be long before I do.  

Drums and tambourines beat from the Djemaa el Fna, the raucous main square that comes to pulsing life at sunset. A car park by day, it's where the city wakes and feeds at night. Hundreds of small stalls are set up with braziers and trestles and chairs,  and the skilled cooks prepare their specialities: lamb chops, kebabs, tagines, soft hot breads, rice dishes with cardamom, bowls of chilis and pickles.  Dates, apricots, figs and nuts are sold in newspaper cones for a dollar.  I can have my fortune told by a small green parrot, my teeth pulled with rusty pliers, my hands hennaed like a bride, my hair dyed like an orangutan, and most often, my leg pulled, as well as feast like the last supper for 50 dirhams, (less than ten bucks.)

Moi in YSL Gardens Marrakech

I've now become a man-magnet.  I'm sure something has been added to the water, or perhaps its the delight in being alive, and happy, and stimulated that has transformed me into a femme fatal, rather than a fatal female casualty. I'm followed from the moment I step out the riad: I can't take a step without a wink, a bonjour, an ola, a handshake, a rub of my palm, a smile.  Kisses land on my cheeks like the first drops of rain after a drought ... hmmm .... feels a bit like that ....  from those with the first fluff on their cheeks to those whose whiskers have long turned white and backs bent from a lifetime of labour.

Luda and I are here for a few weeks to tour with Sarah, who will take us deep into the country on the trail of silver, beads, trinkets and ancient beads in the company of a few other women from different countries.  We'll meet up with her in a few days, but in the meantime are doing some of our own search and discover missions.

We have fingered and fondled and fossicked in baskets and buckets and bushels and barrels in dark shops, up rickety stairs, careful not to topple mountains of brass urns or tumble into piles of leather pouffes, until our hands are black, our cheeks are grimy and our nerves are frayed, but happy.  We haven't yet bought a thing because there's a constant refrain of "the price silver very high", "This piece very old cannot find again" (don't look next door);  or been told that pieces identical to those we saw in Nepal, and that we know are made there,  are "very old rare Berber".  Our credit rating is still intact.  We're fortified with a brown paper bag of fruit that helps us feel we've at least begun to improve the Moroccan economy. We are weary, rain splattered, frizzy from the damp and totteringly inebriated from the place, the people, the bounty, chunks of sticky peanut brittle and five glasses of fresh orange juice.

Marrakech souk

Miss Cheviousnesses ...in our Marrkech road

Luda - a follower on every corner

Luda - getting her hands grubby

  

We've 

doggedly inspected many of the hundreds of jaw dropping, can you believe this, OMG, Holy Mother of Mecca, Salaam Aleichem in'shallah silver price very high, I'm Moroccan and can rip you off you lousy non-French speaking tourist bead and silver shops, as well as the shops that have rare, battered, beautifully patinated pieces lining the walls.  

In one of them, a young, handsome man in tee shirt and jeans speaks a smattering of Morenglish. I fossick for a while then select a few pieces. "Nice," he says. "Very good price", he assures me. "You try?"    No, I tell him, no need, they're for my business.  

"Yes"  he grins,  showing off two rows of perfect pearly teeth, "Must. Because you more beautiful than necklace.  Lovely jubblies!"  "What?"   "Lovely Jubblies!" he grins again.  Luda and I laugh.  "Jubblies! Do you know what jubblies are?" I ask. "NO!" he says, beaming.  "What (are) jubblies?"  I point to my boobs and tell him that jubblies are a woman's breasts and if he stops a woman in the street and tells her she has nice jubblies he'll probably get smacked in the face.  He looks horrified, then bends almost to his waist apologising for offending me and promising that his mother and his sisters will look after me forever for this gross offence.  In between gasps of laughter I try to assure him that I'm certainly not offended. "No? No offend?"  "No!", I laugh.   He beams, then, and repeats Lovely jubblies!"  It's his new mantra.

He insists I try on a pendant. He stands behind, he lifts my hair, he kisses my cheek.  "I Berber man", he says dreamily, "I give Berber kiss". He kisses my other cheek.  "If I Moroccan man, I kiss mouth", he smiles sweetly, putting his forefinger on my lips.  "But today,  I only Berber."  He presses himself into my back, his chin touching the top of my head;  and every other part of his lean, young, eager, inflamed in full Berber glory body, presses into me from his sternum to his knees.  

Oh my, young man!  "Is that a camel in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?" I must admit, I lingered a little longer than a woman of a certain age in a certain country and still protesting that she is not quite ready to move on, should have. He put his arms around my waist, but by this time I'd  marginally recovered my senses and twirled away.  "How much you want to pay?" he asks locking his smoking black eyes with my green ones. "What?"   "For pendants, how much?"  "Oh, I'm not sure if I want to buy them ... still thinking, still looking...."  He flings five pendants on the table, at a quarter the price we'd been sneered at for offering in all the other dozens of shops we'd visited.  "For you, most beautiful jubblies," he beams happily,  I give extra one."   His price was ridiculously low.   I wasn't going to buy any, but it would have been cruel to refuse. He didn't take credit cards, so he offered to walk me through the souk to the ATM, near the macaroon and date sellers, through the men bursting their eyeballs wheeling carts of turnips and carpets through the throngs.

Winding past the carpet sellers, the baboochkes, the djellabas, lamps, the spices, past the entreaties to come, looking free, the shawls, he steers me with his hand on my shoulder.  He leans conspiratorially into my ear.  "How many husbands you have?"  "Four".  "Four! You very good wife!"  "How old you?"  "Guess."   "Hmm, beautiful jubblies, I think you 32, maybe 34."   "How old you?" I ask.  "Me 28.  Good for you.  How old you?"   "I'm 37."  "37!" He recoils. He puts his hand to his forehead.  "You very very beautiful 37! I think I manage!  You want Berber boyfriend, I can."  He takes my hand;  I think we're engaged now.   I ask him if he has a girlfriend. "Of course! Many.  But not so beautiful like you!"  We're back at the shop.   He wraps the pendants.  He whispers in my ear as I leave, "you not forget I ask? I make you very good happy!"  

I saw him again later, as we wandered dazed and retail delirious through the souks, and he dropped what he was doing and rushed out to grab my hand and kiss me.  "You not forget what I ask?  I fall in love with you!"

Luda and I shriek with laughter all the way back through the rain-dripping souk. Every man in the 1000 warrens are staring at us, every one leering, every one giving a thumbs up. Luda says it must be something I ate, because I'm radiating Come and Get Me.   I stop to admire a sequinned black tunic, and a bent double toothless camel herder leers into the stall,  gives a thumbs up and says Bon! Bon! 

Back at the Riad, Ali the hotel manager is waiting for us.  We tell him about the young man; he says, of course, you very beautiful princess, I love you too.  Not enough camels for your beauty!  I can give you massage you not forget! But first you eat!

We're exhausted and don't feel like the rigors of the souk.  So Ali rushes out into the downpour, through the souk on his motorbike, and returns with bags of Moroccan kebabs and steaming breads which we eat at the mosaic table in the courtyard of this lovely riad, drinking rough Moroccan rose by candlelight.  I have a hot jacuzzi then swan up to my room in my thick pink dressing gown, and sleep like I've been drugged.

Luda bursts in at breakfast time to start the next part of our journey, to meet Sarah.  Ali walks us out the souk with a young spunk with grease plastered hair and rippling muscles who wheels the cart buckling with our growing luggage.  Yes, we have bought silver!  Yes, we have bought kaftans!  No we have not yet bought babouchkes!  Or pouffes!  Or teapots!  We have bought sticky toffee nuts.  And had fresh squeezed orange juice. And gone gaga at the colours and architecture.

We spent hours in another antique shop, where silver and ebony and amber was piled to the rafters, run by an old man in foggy glasses, an embroidered skull cap and a beautiful embroidered, worn wool djellaba.  The prices were terrifying;  double what we were charging in Australia, but the pieces wonderful, interesting, and good quality.  At this stage we're quite uninformed about what we're looking at, so thankfully the prices deter us as the shopkeepers won't budge a dirham.   We have to negotiate everything - from the credit card commission slug to the price per gram of silver and the weight of beads.  

Phew!  I'll use more mascara tomorrow.  And I could do with some of that Oud I didn't buy in Abu Dhabi!

I went with a guide to the Jardine Majorelle, a gorgeous garden where Yves St Laurent splashed his designer colours, waded through the mobs of tourists, then visited a stinky tannery of mud and donkeys and sinewed men thrashing slimy hides over rocks.