Mutual Epiphany

Jamal is a friend of Nathalie’s. He’s a young, handsome Moroccan with a university degree in French Literature. He works as a chauffeur for an architect and his wife. It’s the only job he could get, and he’s lucky to have it. One thing Morocco makes clear to us every day is that employment is a rare gift.

On the ride to Essaouira for the gnaoua festival, we’d passed numerous police roadblocks. We’re lazily waved through the first few, but when Nathalie takes over the wheel from Jamal, we get pulled over and asked for papers. Just like in the States, we’re nervous and have a sense of guilt, though we’ve committed no infraction. The police, however, don’t buy that Nathalie and Jamal are just friends and that she’s driving to give him a rest. They are concerned that Jamal is a false guide and is conspiring against us, the foursome of foreigners. Nathalie won’t be cowed, and she argues, with more than a hint of derision in her voice, that she and Jamal work together and that, despite the gendarmes’ quick and flawed assumptions, they are friends.

Once we’ve been allowed to pass, Nathalie tsk-tsks their rude behavior and articulates how “bureaucratic” it is for them to assume the worst of Jamal. Her intentions are good, but the mere necessity of her repeating the psychology of the incident makes us all painfully aware of the divide in our cultures.

After a weekend of beach and music and enormous crowds, we crush into the car an exhausted heap for the trip home. Jamal drives fast, rocking his head and tapping his hand on the steering wheel to the gnawa beat. I’m glad for the relative safety of the back seat, and as we careen around curves, I push away images of the car tumbling through the air and then less gracefully cartwheeling into the desolate farmland flanking the route. Who’d be witness to our calamity but a goat herder and his flock? Surely a helicopter airlifts to the nearest trauma center is not an option.



Conversation is minimal and we mostly zone out, enjoying the landscape whizzing past bathed in the wistful light of a Sunday summer afternoon. The car casts a long shadow as we fly past wheat fields, Monet-like stacks of hay, lonely herds and vast expanses of nothing. It’s a pensive ride and we’re all lost in thought.

Suddenly, the car screeches to a halt and we find ourselves in an enormous traffic jam in a small town on the outskirts of Marrakech. To call it a town is to aggrandize this tiny, washed-out strip of humanity. Along the sides of the road, men sell watermelons from laden donkey carts, others mill around junked cars. Inside the car, we are all instantly alert. We are surrounded by a large group of angry, shouting men. It seems there’s a fight in the middle of the road and everyone clamors around to watch. The air is electric. As we crane to see what’s happening, the crowd swells around the car and fists hit our doors, bodies are smashed against the windows. We grab for the door handles, sure that the mob will try to drag us out into the fray. “Unfortunate timing” replaces “reckless speed” in my mind’s obituary. A police officer in a beret and a pale olive top-to-toe uniform pushes the crowd back from the car, and soon we are moving past the scene. As the bodies clear away from the middle of the road, we see a boy hauling his mauled bicycle, its rear wheel a lifeless, dangling limb, from the road where it’s been freshly trammeled. We realize that we’d seen him pedaling alongside the road moments before we’d come upon the fight, dressed in a soccer uniform as if just returning home from a later-afternoon practice. A car ahead of us must have hit him when the fight spilled into the road. How different the outcome of his and our end-of-weekend ride home.

Oh, and the epiphany. Sometime during the drive, independent of one another, we each decide we don’t want to leave for Fes in the morning as we’d been planning. We aren’t ready to buy a home and commence what would surely be an all-consuming year-long restoration project. Jamal, Nathalie and Remi drop us off by the movie theater in Gueliz, and we negotiate our bags across the busy street towards a restaurant. It’s our first moment alone together all day. “Let’s give Hamoud a call to cancel the car for tomorrow,” I say. “And maybe he can help us look for a place to rent in Marrakech, instead,” comes the reply. We smile and jump out of the way of some oncoming taxis and scooters. Hungry and tired, but with an enormous sense of relief born of decision, we duck inside the restaurant for dinner.