On Sunday morning we got up early, met the guide, Khalila, on the hotel steps and went on a cultural landmark and shopping tour of Marrakesh. We’d done the Majorelle garden, which we all thought we liked. We’d done the Koutoubia mosque and the Jemaa el-Fnaa square. We’d had a look around an empty palace, former home of a prime minister with 52 wives, didn’t catch the name, now the home of a small colony of feral cats. And we’d strolled between the baked mud walls of the old quarter, where Khalila had pointed out the old synagogue, now closed.
And it was about here, in front of this synagogue, around ten o’clock, that the heat from the sun began to tell. I was therefore relieved when Khalila led us into our first shop of the morning, a herbalist’s shop, and delivered us into the hands of the smiling chief executioner, who in turn led us into his air-conditioned inner sanctum and bade us take a seat.
We arranged ourselves on the U-shaped padded bench especially designed for small parties of tourists from the more upmarket hotels on prearranged visits. From floor to ceiling the room was lined with dried herbs in glass jars. And I could see the herbalist casting his canny eye over us, trying to figure out in his mind what kind of social relations might exist between the three astonishingly beautiful and elegantly dressed young Englishwomen — a PR representative, a broadsheet journalist and a poet — and the sweating, piggy-eyed, 55-year-old man in their midst wearing the same black pinstripe suit that King Mohammed VI wears in his official portraits.
I’ve been in Marrakesh once before; 20 years ago I came up from the south in an overland truck from Nairobi via the Congo and the Sahara desert. It was the first time I’d been abroad. I remembered how keenly we’d looked forward to staying at this famous oasis town and how bewildered we’d been by the aggressiveness of the street touts and market traders and the unbelievably abusive treatment of our women by Moroccan men in general. So I returned this herbalist’s appraising look with a jaundiced eye. In Marrakesh, where the tourists are fleeced with clinical cynicism, one couldn’t help but admire a man with the panache to fleece us dressed in a clinician’s white coat.
But, in fairness, this time round Marrakesh seemed to be a different place. The poet, for example, resolutely wore only miniskirts outside the hotel, and wherever we went no one batted an eyelid. Admittedly, it was simply not possible, no matter how religious you might be, to be offended by God-given legs as long and as shapely as those. But even so, after my earlier experiences, I was staggered by the apparent indifference with which they were received in both the rich and the poorer quarters.
The herbalist launched into his spiel. He made us hold out our hands and dripped orange-blossom essence beside the knuckle for us to smell. I forget what miraculous properties he said orange-blossom oil has. After that came argan oil, a skin moisturiser made from the crushed seeds of a tree cultivated by who else but a Moroccan women’s collective. Then came black cumin seeds, recommended by the prophet Mohammed himself as a remedy for ‘all diseases except death’. These we sniffed through a cotton handkerchief. ‘Good for hangover,’ said the herbalist, rather pointedly, I thought, to me.
After galloping us through a few of the trendier essential oils, he ended on a lighter note by waggling a little sachet of ash-coloured powder at us. ‘And last but not least,’ he said, ‘we come to the aphrodisiac — or herbal Viagra.’ He gave sensual emphasis to each of the famous brand name’s three syllables and tried a tentative leer. The women tittered at his crassness, but only from politeness. And, give the man his due, he quickly saw he’d gone too far, and he was crestfallen. Then he noticed that the only reason the man in the suit wasn’t laughing was that he was now hanging on his every word and rummaging desperately for his wallet.
The herbalist’s confidence returned. ‘If a man takes this, it is not because he can’t,’ he carefully explained to the women, kindly pre-empting any embarrassment I might feel when going large at the purchasing stage. ‘It is only because he wants to be quicker off the starting blocks. In Morocco when we have mint tea, the host puts a pinch of this in all the glasses as a formality. Even in the women’s glasses.’
‘Even the women’s glasses?’ said the broadsheet journalist with gentle scepticism. ‘Oh, yes!’ said the herbalist. And with this seemingly blatant and rather ridiculous lie, the suspension of disbelief and spirit of tolerant good humour he’d so carefully cultivated temporarily evaporated.
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