A Year in the World (26 page)

Not being a Muslim, I am not allowed inside a mosque and only can peer into the courtyards with fountains for the faithful to cleanse themselves. We happen to be outside a huge mosque when Friday services end. A stampede of men feeling holy and righteous thunders out and into the street. We have our backs to a wall to let them pass when a trotting donkey scrapes us and Rachid slips into a pyramid of eggs, knocking several to the ground. No one called
balak, balak
.

On our walks we weave by the house several times a day to check on Ed. Rachid says, “The mailman must be born in the medina, otherwise no one ever would receive mail.” Rachid thinks Ed should sit up. I’m giving the doctor in Italy an update. Ed says, “Maybe tomorrow.” He has turned a few pages of a book, has showered. He seems cool and peaceful.

I’m not mentioning the slow-roasted lamb with cumin sauce, the
pastilla
(or
bastela
, pigeon in flaky layers of pastry, dusted with confectioner’s sugar), or the chicken couscous with melted onions and honey. Rachid and I go by taxi to the new town to buy buns from a French pastry shop and bland cheese and bread for Ed. He takes me to a bookstore with books by Mark Twain and Sherwood Anderson. I find a Moroccan cookbook in English and wish I could make for Ed the chicken stuffed with couscous, cinnamon, and orange flower water, or the lamb with apricots, raisins, and nutmeg. I see much more use of spices than of herbs. And the range of ingredients must be inspiring—quince, pumpkin,
feggous
(a rough, skinny cucumber), Jerusalem artichoke, cardoon, barley semolina. The uses of pomegranate syrup, orange flower oil, almond milk, and rose oil intrigue me. Too bad Ed never wants to eat again. The new town’s broad avenue shaded with trees and lined with cafés seems like another world. Many women and young girls here have abandoned the traditional dress altogether, though some still cover their heads even though they’re in low jeans. Rachid says, “I like for my wife to dress modestly.” And, “I like for my wife to stay at home with our son.”

I tease him. “Do you want a second wife?” I know men are allowed to have four.

“One is enough. And who can afford two women?”

“Why would any woman put up with her husband bringing another wife into the house?” The first edged question I have asked him.

“Maybe the first wife cannot have children. There’s a law,” he says proudly, “that you cannot just throw away the wife.”

“What if I wanted two husbands, or four?”

He smiles in Arabic.

On
the hottest day so far, I tell Rachid I would like to look at fabric. We visit workshops where men sit on rugs sewing
djellabas
and embroidering the necklines. In the street, they card the thread, extending it and pulling it onto rolls. I resist ordering one of these splendid garments because it would hang in my closet until doomsday. I would like to find silk for table draperies or curtains. But most everything is precut to three meters, enough to make the
djellaba
. I find one square of antique ivory silk embroidered with apricot flowers. Rachid steps back when bargaining begins. Nothing ever seems to have a price, and I’m pressed to offer one. I offer so little that the seller appears to be shocked. Rachid puts his hand to his mouth to hide a smile. “What will you pay, madame?” I offer slightly more, then the seller says he must have at least four hundred euros. That is so far from what I would pay that I thank him, compliment him on the silk, and walk away. He’s dumbfounded that the American has escaped, having bought only a small silver hand of Fatima.

I’m not very interested in shopping here. I buy an embroidered black cotton blouse and a blue one for my friend Aurora, and slippers for my daughter. Rachid takes me to the ceramics district, and we watch pots and bowls being thrown from gray clay and painted. The Fez blue decorates most everything. I pick up a couple of small bowls for olives.

We stop into a herb store. Rachid says, “The owner is a special person. You will see.” Mon Kade Khalid, a pale man with a slight hunch, introduces himself and shows me his oils, hennas, and barks. He holds to my nose something that looks like yellow erasers—the musk gland of the gazelle. “The animal rubs against a tree, and we then gather the gland. It will scent your drawer for two years.” He has jars of colored rocks on a high shelf and explains that they ward off the evil eye. I pick out a packet of the forty-spice seasoning called
rasse el hanoute
, which translates as “heat of the shop.”

“How do you feel, madame?” he asks.

“Very good.”

“People come to me. If they have problems. I have things to make the baby. I have argan oil against arthritis. I have things also for the cooking. Here, give me your hand.” He rubs my hand between his, then holds his hands an inch away from mine, above and below. I feel a definite warmth emanating from his hands. He is staring into my eyes. Oh no, the lure of the exotic. The odd thing is, when he moves his hands away, I feel a sudden shiver. “Now how do you feel?”

“Wonderful,” I say. And I do. A fresh push of strength courses down my back, through my legs, like an adrenaline rush. All afternoon I experience a euphoria, a feeling of bodily force I knew in childhood.

We
see tombs and museums. I think my feet have covered every inch of the medina. We walk a long way in the heat and stop at what looks like remains of a fortress. Rachid says, “This is Palais Glaoui. Since you are interested in houses.” He knocks at a huge wooden door in a block-long wall. A dark, narrow-faced man who looks like a forgotten jazz musician opens the door. They embrace. “Welcome to my family,” Abdel Khalek says. “This is my home.” We enter a vast tiled courtyard with a fountain surrounded by a grand pool. Weeds grow out of the fountain, and the pool is home to a lone goose standing in mud. The scale of the house triples any house I’ve seen in the medina. Ballroom-size rooms open on the outer side to overgrown gardens, where I glimpse remains of tiled fountains and scraggly citrus trees. My mind restores the gardens to those I’ve seen in old Persian paintings. Abdel takes us through corridors to another wing, where his grandfather once kept one hundred women. The hallways overhanging the courtyard sag, but the floral delicacy of the carved plaster still bespeaks the feminine world of the harem.

“Did he say one hundred?”

Rachid says, “His grandfather was a busy man.”

Abdel leads us to the palace kitchen, not so different, except for being run-down and dusty, from a big kitchen in an English manor house—a bank of stoves, copper pots, cavernous space. Then he shows us “the first bathroom in Fez,” with English Edwardian fixtures and even a porcelain, not tile, tub. In his room, also a large room with a center door to the courtyard, I see a picture of his grandmother, perhaps age twenty, in a stiff, voluminous white dress, her face young and bright. No veil, no robes—I want to ask who she was in the hierarchy but don’t dare. This complex is only one of seventeen adjoining houses, all closed, all verging on ruin. I don’t ask, but I imagine that with a hundred women producing children, the inheritances won’t ever be sorted out. We sit on long banquettes and are served mint tea and gazelle horns, an almond cookie in a crescent shape. Not a jazz musician, Abdel paints as a vocation and wanders his ancestral home, sometimes showing it to guests the guides bring.

Ed
feels like walking out, so we stroll to La Maison Bleue, a fine palace house restored as a hotel. A scattering of French and English tourists are having drinks in the courtyard where two men play crude string instruments. We sit by a fountain, and I drink a glass of champagne while Ed sips water. Then we are shown to colorful banquettes and a low table. I love the Moroccan style of dining. “
Tajine
?” the waiter offers.

Ed sinks back and whispers, “Never.”

We order couscous with lamb and all the usual salads. Ed takes a few bites; he’s on his way but not there yet. The serene beauty of the place takes me far from the rough and heady medina I have come to know through Rachid.

Ed
wants to go out on our last morning. Rachid guides us to a taxi, and we get out in the
mellah
, the old Jewish ghetto. Rachid says, “Give the driver one euro.” The low, low prices here continue to startle me. The ghetto, with timbered overhangs, the characteristic windows where women could see out but not be seen, twisted alleys and small shops would seem atmospheric if I had not seen the medina still sunk in its medieval mindset. This ghetto is quite spruced up. We look at a UNESCO-restored synagogue, with a ritual bathing tub underground where the crypt would be in a Christian church. Rachid then leads us through the Jewish cemetery with blinding-white humped graves. Rachid says, “The
mellah
was formalized in 1438, but Jews had lived here for centuries. The wall around it was actually built for their protection from Arabs but later became a confinement. The Jews were kept to their quarter by the ban on wearing their black shoes outside it. Only in the seventeen hundreds were they allowed a woven sandal, which enabled them to leave.”

“What does
mellah
mean?” Ed wonders.

Rachid says, “Salt. The place of salt processing. This is the old word for the place. And the legend is that heads of victims killed in battle were salted and preserved here so they could be displayed on the walls.” He points toward the king’s palace.

“Any Jews left?”

Rachid says, “A few. They live in the new town. Everyone lives together in the new town with no problem.”

We stop at the Royal Palace, huge and shut tight. There must be gardens—even trees—inside that the sun-struck populace could enjoy of a Friday evening.

In a side street we meet a boy toddling with his older brother. The small one wears a red fez and a white robe. Rachid says, “He is very important. He has recently been circumcised.” He lets us take his picture.

We eat almond pastries and sesame cookies with our late morning tea, then go back to the
masseria
to pack. Rachid talks about Joseph Conrad. Ed is limpid and insubstantial, like an angel. Rachid says, “You are leaving two kilos in Fez.” The energy imparted to me by the hunched man still courses. We give Rachid four
Times Literary Supplements
that we brought with us, knowing he will devour every word. We promise to send him books. Perhaps he surprises himself—he gives me a goodbye hug.

Hafid appears with the handcart. Ed is happy that we are not going home with a
tajine.
We’re picked up in front of a hotel, and I am presented with a bouquet of flowers by the representative of the company who stranded us on the road into Fez. We are whisked to Casablanca, where we see nothing but a fringe of harbor, palm trees, and the hotel, which we reach in the dark. In bed Ed recounts the whole movie
Casablanca
to me. When he sleeps, I think of my sister Nancy. When she married, her husband had just graduated from the University of Georgia and had become an ensign in the navy. They were assigned to a base near Rabat in Morocco. Our family was stunned by this posting. We took out the atlas to see exactly where that remote outpost on the globe might be. She sailed away, knowing our sick father would die while she was gone. He ranted that she would be among people “only three generations away from cannibalism.” We were remote people ourselves. Soon the letters arrived with descriptions of Berbers and hot springs in the desert and the bleak navy base. Her son was born there. I was fourteen. I devoured the letters. They were allowed to travel around the Mediterranean on a navy ship that called for several days in Marseilles, Naples, Athens, and Cyprus, a list of over-the-rainbow names. I followed the trip through the rose, aqua, and yellow colors on the map. My mother cried when pictures of Boo, the baby, arrived. He was held by a dark woman with sparkling eyes, jewelry on her arms and ankles, and henna tattoos on her hands.

Now, late at night in Casablanca, so many eons later, I can follow my sister and her husband around a souk, see them young again, intent on buying a leather hassock. They drive off in their minute Morris Minor, across a plain that looks like an enormous loaf of bread, then through sesame fields, mint fields, the forests of cork oak, back to that dot on the map where they started their life together.

This afternoon we must have passed the left turn they took. The loops, the stops, the intersections, the unrolling, the catching up, the intertwinings, the following, the leading in a life—all more mysterious than the rotations of stars. And my mother, whose radius of travel was short, tied the letters with ribbon and kept them in her desk. “When you get the chance,” she said to me, “go.”

A Paperweight
for Colette

Burgundy

Cherries, quail eggs, sweet potatoes, white asparagus at six euros a kilo, plump, erotic apricots, haricots verts (but they’re from Kenya), buckets of peonies and roses, clusters of crimson tomatoes—the middle of the Auxerre covered market buzzes with shoppers loading their cloth bags at fruit and vegetable stands, and groups of farm women visiting over their baskets of eggs. We could be at a market in Italy or Portugal. But around the perimeter we could be nowhere but France. The meat displays are as carefully arranged as the gold jewelry cases on the Ponte Vecchio. We gaze at trussed turkey stuffed with prunes, paupiettes of pork, rosy jellied hams, black-footed chickens, and roasts wrapped in lacy cauls. I count twenty kinds of terrines: fish, various livers, chunky pork, layered vegetables, and chicken. The bakery cases offer puffy
gougères
the size of softballs, rabbit pies, and great craggy loaves of bread. Cheese would be reason enough for a trip to France. A woman shopping next to me discreetly pokes several when the cheese monger looks away. Her shrewd thumb knows the stages of ripeness. She leans close to inspect the rind. She then points to her selection, a buttery-looking mound soft as a baby’s cheek. Ed selects several pillowy farm cheeses, several goat ones that look like chalky elf cakes or coat buttons. Two people are taking money. I pay one, and we start to walk away. The other money-taker shouts that we must pay, the one I paid shouts at him, and a big family argument breaks out but no one pays any attention.

Loading the car, we’re happy. This is our third day in Burgundy, and we have been turning around as dogs turn before they settle down. We have rented a beautiful, if unkempt, old stone place in the tiny village of Magny on the Yonne River. I wish my friends Susan and Cole could buy the place. They love France and would make the garden into a little Eden. Already the fruit trees are in place. Houses inevitably exude the essential sense of the owners, and so I start to invent narratives about the English owner’s Early Ikea bed that smells like someone recently died there, and the news he looked for in his stacks of ten-year-old newspapers. A baronial fireplace and a grand piano, combined with plastic chairs, leave me trying in vain to answer the question
why
? There’s a novel here.

The rental agency’s photographs showed a romantically set table and a blurry living room with French doors overlooking the river—the owner’s dream of the house as it was before the unfortunate action in the novel took place. The idyllic river
is
there—I love the smell of rivers. A rowboat lies half submerged at the shore. The telephone does not work (of course by chapter two he didn’t want to hear from anyone), and even the cell phones receive no signal. What if one of us trips over a pile of mouldy jigsaw puzzles and needs an ambulance? When we asked the caretaker how to connect the telephone, she said, “Oh, he probably didn’t pay the bill.” The plot thickens. The owner is too sad to pay attention to basic details. The kitchen . . .
the well-equipped and spacious kitchen with dining area
. I try to see it as a challenge instead of as a place fit only for boiling cabbage. Two greasy shelves, mildew, a freestanding relic of a stove with doll-size burners, and an oven no bigger than a toaster. We shall dine on melamine. I would not be surprised to see a snake crawl from under the fridge. I met an exotic yard-long green and black one sunning on the kitchen doorstep. When I beat the path with a stick, he languidly slithered away. The caretaker from the village somehow started the stove for us without causing an explosion. But the novelistic potential remains—a Christmas tree from several years ago provides a fire hazard in the garage. This image grounds the novel I never will write—a tragic breakup occurred during the holidays. The dried-up tree symbolizes all that went wrong. Perhaps the wife took up with a mechanic in the village. But we are dreamy fools seduced by river light.

We stop to see Auxerre’s Gothic cathedral. The town looks appealing and prosperous. A city situated on a river is fortunate, especially when a cathedral soars against the sky. Shoppers crowd the streets, and people lounge at outdoor cafés. We detour to a gigantic French Wal-Mart–type megacomplex, where we buy sheets, towels, dish towels, a tablecloth, napkins, and a few cooking utensils. I think I’m dreaming of how my friends in their happiness would scrub and paint this house into its full and lovely potential. Yes, even our open windows, fresh flowered sheets, vases of flowers, and some scrubbing could perk up the rooms.

When
Colette was a child in nearby Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, her mother, Sido, travelled to Auxerre every three months. The aura of the nineteenth-century market town it must have been lingers still. She set out in the Victoria at two in the morning in her quest for luxuries: a sugarloaf wrapped in indigo paper, ten pounds of chocolate, cinnamon, nutmeg, rum for grog, pepper, vanilla, and soap. Colette perched on the backseat. I can imagine her intense interest, the bumpy ride under the stars, slowing at first light as they entered the waking town. My mother used to take me shopping in Macon, our Auxerre, when I was little. Suddenly there were things to want. I selected a skirt with wide rickrack. I was able to buy books, not available in my small Georgia town. Once my desires overcame me, and I threw a tantrum in Davison’s when my mother would not buy me a stuffed animal that played music.

I came to Burgundy to revisit Colette. We drove our own car from Cortona because Ed wants to take back special wines, preferably those paired with dinners here. I’m hoping to find for my Bramasole garden herbs unavailable in Tuscany: sorrel, chervil, tarragon, and new-to-Bramasole varieties of basil. We brought a stack of French cookbooks and a book on cheese. And then there’s Burgundy, land of the
Very Rich Hours
, to see.

We meander on country lanes flanked by undulating fields. The villages seem ghostly, empty except for cats. We go through the village of Misery twice, and: “Stop, did you see the name of this place? Go back!” The town of Anus. We stop off “at home” to store the food. An amber light slants across the back garden, once an orchard. I step out onto the balcony to look, but the rusty railings do not seem entirely secure. The sight of the broken, overturned deck chairs reminds me of the owner’s saga. Did he consider leaping to the river below? “Let’s go somewhere wonderful for dinner,” I call to Ed.

After a drive, we walk along the river, then find a small restaurant beside a canal. I look up from the menu. There’s our house’s caretaker, working as a waiter. She brings us a complimentary aperitif and olives. The slanting light rakes the water. I love the long summer twilights. I’m always happy when I can see blue boats riding on their reflections. A little string of lights comes on, and we feast on simple salads and roast chicken.

When
I was studying for my master’s degree, I had to select three writers for my oral exam. I chose Keats, the American poet Louise Bogan, and Colette. The department chair called me in to discuss my choices. “Keats is great. Bogan is marginal,” he said, “a limited poet but acceptable to the committee. But this Colette? What has she written of value? Wasn’t she in the Folies Bergère?”

This was 1975 and hard to imagine from here. I was studying Craft of Fiction with Wright Morris, a writer I revered for his ingrained sense of place and his careful, revealing images. When he handed out the semester reading list, all the novelists were men. After class I approached him. “Mr. Morris, I was wondering about the list of books. Why aren’t there any by women?”

“Oh, hello, my dear. Oh yes, I thought of that myself. I considered Virginia Woolf, but really, she becomes tiresome. I want to give you examples you really can delve into.” Maybe he was farsighted, but he appeared to be looking down a rather proud nose at me, so far, far away.

“So.” Pause. “Ford Madox Ford is more important than Virginia Woolf?” My tone was infused not with aggression but with protective coloring.

“More to offer the novice writer, Miss Meyer.”

“Mayes.”

“Yes, of course. Miss Mayes, our southern belle.”

No one avoids conflict more than I. But pushed, I can throw a conniption fit, and I will go to any mat if necessary. I was reeling from this second blow. The next week, carrying a stack of Colette’s books, I visited each committee member. I admit to reaching for some southern charm. Finally they relented, probably not out of sudden conversion to the literary merit of my author but to avoid having to justify a decision if a troublemaker student, southern charm or no, forced them.

Colette was new to me. I’d read the Claudine books and
Break of Day
, which I thought was a classic. Soon Colette became my close friend. One of this life’s pleasures: a writer’s books can intersect with your life and lead you to the next largest space you can occupy. Her writing catapulted me forward. Even now, each time I pick up one of her books, her perceptions and images continue to wake up my perceptions. Life drenches her prose. She’s astute. I know the members of her family as well as my own. I follow every turn of her story, how she made her way alone, her mistakes, her droll perspective. Her story, compelling as it is, would not be enough to bind me to her. Story is not enough. She peels and sections and bites into experience like an orange. She’s wise and self-sufficient, two qualities I stand by. Her passion for roses, dogs, sunrise, and all the felt sensations of life runs through the molten alchemical process of selecting words. Her prose—immediate and spellbinding—lets me touch the hand of the writer herself. I feel most bound to her when I read about her childhood in Burgundy. Those years sustained her throughout her life. Her original house and garden remained a real and metaphorical world of
home
, her stern and passionate mother, the presiding grace.

My abiding friendship with her is only incidentally affected by the fact that she is dead. I know her intimately. In daydreams, I can sit down for a scrumptious lunch in her adored Palais Royale apartment in Paris. What would we eat? A delicious speculation. Oysters served on a bed of seaweed and ice. A champagne of Colette’s choice. A little pheasant stuffed with morels and nuts, a salad of field greens that she somehow managed to find at a street market. For dessert, wild strawberries, of course. What would we talk about? Prose style? Publishing? No. I’d tell her about the pink hellebores I planted under the crape myrtles, how my whole California garden revolves around what the deer won’t eat. We’d talk about politics, dogs, the boredom of dogma, winter coats, flamenco. The bouquet of red and purple anemones I brought attracts two bees. We’re fascinated to watch them roll in the vibrant petals. The warm hummm . . . blends with a few splats of rain beginning to fall in the garden below. We can watch this in silence.

Ed
and I light out for the great medieval pilgrimage towns. Autun’s cathedral, boxed in by houses and buildings, is hard to see. Mad twisted gargoyles look down at us. One pokes his rear end outward so that roof water drains out of his bottom. The world’s first instance of mooning? I light candles for the desperately ill mothers of my friends Robin and Madeline, then look for the relics of Lazarus. The Romanesque stone carving of the Last Judgment compels me to stand awhile in the cold for a good look at the depicted lineup of humans waiting to be sent to heaven or hell. They catch every range of emotion—praying, hand-wringing, eyes cast to heaven, head held in hands. Clearly, they are scared. And graphically, a crab-claw descends to snatch each one up a level to the judging. One capital shows Judas hanging himself, his head drooped between two flowers. I’ve always pitied Judas, who threw away his big chance. Someone practices on the organ but without much force. The music sounds snuffed, as though organ and organist were locked inside a trunk.

I never find Lazarus. This time he’s not going to rise.

Pilgrims
always come to Vézelay because the relics of Mary Magdalen reside at the basilica that bears her name. Vézelay—the name suits an exotic woman and is as intriguing as the place. The town serves as a grand entrance to the cathedral. Beneath the half-timbered houses and minute shops lining the street, vaulted basements once used to house the hordes who came at the beginnings of Crusades or out of devotion to the relics. The basilica looks small, with its bell tower and narrow facade, but a walk to the side reveals a long, buttressed structure with many windows. Inside, the soaring space feels open because of the white light falling through clear glass. The psychology of the plan: you are drawn through the long embrace of the nave to the luminous altar. The tympanum, recessed half circles over the front door, fascinates me. A master stone carver portrays an elongated Christ gathering his apostles before the crucifixion. His hands are expressionistic—enlarged and sending forth wavy rays of spiritual energy to his apostles, who must take His word into the world and convert the heathens. The variety of heathens imagined is amusing: dog-headed men, pygmies, people with enormous ears or snout-faces. Ancient cartographers scrawled
there be beasties
when the known terrain ran out. Here those beasties are given form. This enlightens me. How encompassing was medieval Christianity—even the fearful dog faces should be converted. Some of the apostles in the group look distinctly worried. The Romanesque imagination requires study. All those carnival, grotesque, whimsical, fanciful, monstrous figures came out of a fertile intersection of the pagan and the Christian. They manifest the rumblings of the collective unconscious, the worries about where the wild things are. One creature looks like a winged cow holding a suitcase.

The carved capitals of supporting columns are masterful. I especially love the one of grapes being crushed in a press, no doubt a metaphor for the blood of Christ. In one of the tourist shops, I buy a book on the carvings to savor later.

Ed spots a
pâtisserie
. The French pastry shops—aqua, blue, or pink with gold letters—look like their own confections. The little bell rings, and you’re welcomed into a tidy shop with buttery, warm smells wafting from the kitchen. The pastries are about form as well as taste. The rich puffs and ruffles and layers and colors form tasty morsels, but they also reward the eye. Ed chooses two or three delectables a day: delicate lemon or strawberry tarts, napoleons, pleated foil cups of dark chocolate, rustic plum galettes oozing juice. After each he says,
“Viva la France.”