‘I’m afraid she has to leave now, Chris,’ he translated. ‘Her husband, you see. He is waiting for her.’ And he indicated a large man standing beside the door. I turned and he nodded at me, holding up a huge fist in a gesture of farewell. It was the singer. I returned the gesture, grateful we were communing at a distance, and retreated to a seat in a poorly lit corner where I could wait while Mourad and his friends had their fill of the disco and the novelties of the bar.
As Aziz had promised, the next day was Azrou’s market. A slope of waste ground near the centre of town had been transformed overnight into a medieval encampment, a labyrinth of stalls and huts and booths, or sales pitches marked simply with a sheet spread on the ground. It was already mid-morning by the time we arrived and great vats of dye were bubbling and steaming away, overseen by Berber women in full regalia. Mourad, proud of his local souk, assured me that they were natural dyes, rather than the common chemicals. You could buy the wool nearby – hot, smelly, tangled mounds of it, raw from the shearing. Beyond it, the smoke from cooking fires rose and hung in a thin blue cloud, at times giving a scanty brown shade from the full intensity of the sun.
We had arrived amongst the aisles searching for sacks but I was sidetracked by a thousand things. And then, among the storytellers and the often unidentifiable stalls, we heard a wild reedy music, soaring above the general noise and the Berber hand-drums again. ‘Come,’ said Mourad, his hand on my arm. ‘This is something we should see.’
A current had been created amongst the crowd by the insistent wail of the music. Mourad and I joined it and were propelled into a clearing, where a trio of snake charmers were at work, belting away on their trumpets. They were playing in the shade of an awning, rigged up to their battered white van, and one of their colleagues was placing boxes and baskets around them on the floor. A furious thundering of Berber hand-drums told us that the show was about to begin. Then, with an energy at odds with the blistering torpor of a late morning, the principal player launched into a chant and began striding about and drawing lines and circles with a stick in the dust.
‘What’s he on about, Mourad?’ I asked.
As I spoke, the head man spotted Mourad and me, and insisted that we move to join those squatting in the dust in the front row. I wasn’t keen, preferring to blend in with the crowd; however, blending in wasn’t really an option that morning as I was the only foreigner there, with sunburnt ears and nose. Fearing the worst, I allowed Mourad to lead me through the parting crowd to the place normally reserved at a public spectacle, for children. I squatted on my hunkers like everybody else – not so easy to get away if things cut up rough.
Then suddenly from somewhere there was a snake. God knows what it was but it was as thick as my upper arm, as long as my leg, and covered in the sort of markings that nature uses to proclaim ‘Danger!’ – and it was slithering through the dust towards us. I breathed deep and watched it philosophically as it approached. Just before it got to us, one of the assistants – who had been pretending he hadn’t noticed it – snuck up behind and, catching the snake gently round the neck and supporting its huge body with his arms, slipped it neatly inside his shirt. My heart was thumping fast, the crowd was spellbound. Another snake, thick as a slender wrist, long and grey, slipped out of a basket and moved across the dust towards the semicircle of wary onlookers. It was caught neatly with a stick, and into that same shirt it went. It was a voluminous shirt. The man strolled around for a minute and then nonchalantly slipped each snake back into its box or basket. More snakes appeared and lay quietly in the sun – more frenetic music. The excitement grew and grew.
The head man was explaining something to the crowd, and a number of men were coming forward and standing rather apprehensively in a smaller semicircle. ‘Come,’ said Mourad. ‘We will join them.’
‘What? I asked. ‘Are you crazy?’
But Mourad had already volunteered us both. ‘We must do this, Chris. It is for our protection in the forest. Come.’
There were about twelve of us. The head man, with a rather episcopal look, bade us all kneel. Oh Lord… I knew what was coming next… and, sure enough, the assistants started to move among us with boxes and baskets of snakes and things. I watched as they approached me, distributing various denominations of snake and draping them around the necks of the men kneeling in the dust. There was no way out of this.
My knowledge of herpetology is not extensive – you don’t need it much in the temperate climes of Sussex. I can identify with a fair degree of certainty the difference between vipers and grass snakes; I have a hazy idea as to the morphology of anacondas and boa constrictors, but that’s about as far as it goes. I had no idea at all of the name of the snake that was being coiled twice around my neck by the grubbily robed snake charmer. It was a sinister-looking customer, slender and greyish and about as long as a useful scarf. Behind its head was a suspiciously loose flap of skin, which I feared might be the stuff of which a hood is made; but I didn’t want to think of the word ‘hood’ because the next word that comes into your head is ‘cobra’.
The stony ground was hurting my knees and I could feel the sun roasting the top of my head. My snake, which seemed tranquil enough, despite the frenetic rhythms and the atonal wailing of the trumpet, actually had the effect of keeping the sun from burning the back of my neck. I thanked it quietly, and almost took a little comfort in its being there, warm and smooth and not actually unpleasant. I looked round the semicircle of kneeling figures, dark-featured and earnest, some in denim jackets and baseball caps, most cloaked in djellabas.
Mourad, anxious for my well-being, looked over to me and smiled – but his smile froze as he was told to hold out the palm of his hand, and upon it was placed a large, black scorpion. I’ve heard it said that the sting of the black ones is lethal, and I felt pleased that I had not been the one selected for the honour. And then I felt bad: it was wrong to wish such a thing on anyone, let alone someone as charmingly ingenuous as Mourad. Even if it was entirely his fault and served him right…
Unlike my snake, Mourad’s scorpion was an adventurous type and within moments began moving up his arm towards the inviting opening of his short-sleeved shirt. It moved slowly for a scorpion, dulled by the intensity of the sun, but nonetheless soon reached the comfort of the sleeve and set about moving into its shade. I winced a little on Mourad’s behalf, as did the couple of hundred people now watching.
Mourad was desperately trying to catch the attention of the lead charmer, but he was too busy working the crowd with yet another energetic monologue, emphasising the rhythm of his speech with beats of the hand-drum. Suddenly he caught sight of the beseeching Mourad and his plight and, stepping swiftly across the space made by the kneeling men, took the scorpion delicately between thumb and forefinger and returned it to Mourad’s outstretched hand, where it sat still.
My snake, meanwhile, had gone to sleep, bored no doubt by the next part of the proceedings, where the snake charmer placed a piece of paper in our outstretched hands. Apart from Mourad and his scorpion, all the rest of us kneelers had snakes of one description or another draped around our necks, leaving our hands free. Mourad was kneeling on stony ground with both his hands outstretched: one for the scorpion, the other for the paper. This was a gruelling posture to maintain for any length of time. I hoped it was going to be worthwhile.
Drawn on the paper, which was lined and torn from an exercise book, were what I took to be runes. I’d never seen runes before and had no idea what they looked like but I was sure that that’s what these symbols were. They were drawn in blue biro and I found myself wondering about their efficacy; I’d have preferred them carved in stone or perhaps drawn in blood. Everyone seemed to be taking the ceremony absolutely seriously, though, and my fellow initiates had their faces bowed in earnest concentration, trying not to show their fear.
I was working hard on this, too. I recalled that wild animals are goaded by the smell of one’s fear, and that, while you can fool a fellow human be
ing into thinking you’re not afraid, you can’t hide the smell of it from an animal. Still, I was trying my best to fool this sleepy snake into thinking that I wasn’t afraid of it. I was thinking as hard as possible of things other than snakes. And perhaps it worked – for, apart from a brief interest in the openings between my shirt buttons, it didn’t stir… until, amid a climax of drumming, chanting and music, the ceremony came to an abrupt end, and the snakes and scorpion were collected up and put back in their various receptacles.
We initiates dispersed back into the crowd, and I was left with that sense of deflation you get as a child, when a show is over or you have completed some absurd dare. But it was short-lived, for Aziz came bursting through the crowd holding a dozen perfect sacks. ‘You’ll never believe where I found these,’ he announced, still evidently doubting the fact himself. ‘In the hardware shop!’
‘Come,’ said Mourad, putting his arm round my shoulder. ‘Now we are ready to make our fortune in the forest. Let us walk up to the Café Central and celebrate.’
SACKFULS OF TREASURE
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, after only the most perfunctory round of greetings and salutations in town, Ali and Aziz and Mourad and I set out up the track to the cedar forest, through the ilex woods and up into the domain of the magnificent blue Atlantic cedar. We found the hällehäll and I showed my pickers the highly technical contrivance I had developed for the work. You take a walnut-sized stone, cover it with a part of the sack, tie a string round the resulting knob, and take a turn round the waist – this leaves both hands free to pick the seedpods.
The first few minutes of picking are pretty exciting. You grasp a handful of pods, which on Cytisus battandieri grow like Indian feathered headdresses, and you break them off and stuff them in the sack. As you grasp them you can feel the ripe ones burst inside, and you see the little hard black seeds spatter into the sack. There’s a certain satisfaction in feeling the weight of your sack grow infinitesimally with each handful, maybe a gram. And then a pleasure each time you find a heavily laden plant – you can see the ripe seeds through the almost translucent pods when the sun is low. Your mind clears and you hear all the sounds of nature: the cobras slithering contentedly to and fro in the dry grass, and troupes of monkeys – the Middle Atlas is heaving with monkeys – jabbering in the trees.
After about an hour you start to feel the tedium of the work. Your hands are a little sore, you’re a tiny bit frazzled by the heat, your eyes are stinging, and your nose and forehead are a little burnt from constantly looking up at the sun as you reach for the high-growing pods. After two hours you never want to see another seedpod as long as you live and you’re stuffing sacks like an automaton. After four hours Mourad and I sort of drifted together. ‘I think we should stop for lunch now. It is hot and we are tired,’ he suggested.
We slumped in the shade of a cedar and drank water and ate olives and bread and little triangles of Laughing Cow cheese spread. Then we lay down in the soft cedar needles and slept away the hottest hours of the day. I hardly need to tell of my contentment as I woke and watched my pickers fast asleep around the tree, and considered the swelling harvest of ripe seedpods. The expedition looked like being a success: I would come home with the goods, the hunter home from the hill. But not only that, it was turning out to be such a pleasure, too – new friends, a new world to get to know. Granted, the picking was grim, but you can’t expect everything to be effortless and, besides, who would want to be anywhere else but here in the Middle Atlas, lying in a bed of soft needles in the Forêt des Cèdres, a gentle breeze cooling the air and lifting the great blue branches, and tonight to sleep in the friendly bosom of a real Berber family? I reckoned it a fair deal.
As I observed the sleeping pickers, lying lost to the world in various poses, I noted how thin they all were. There was not a hint of obesity – these young men were lucky when they could find enough to eat. They were poorly but neatly dressed; they could afford only the cheapest clothes but they wore them well and, although we were out in the woods for a day’s seed-picking, they were clean and neatly pressed. All of which stood in stark contrast to my own rather disgraceful appearance and incipient corpulence. Especially neat and fastidious was the tall, elegant Aziz. He had picked about a third as much as anybody else, but no matter: he was an engaging character and I loved his formal French. ‘Monsieur Christophe, you cannot know how I suffer,’ he would tell me in confidence. ‘Aziz?’ Mourad would say. ‘Aziz is not only utterly lazy, but also crazy.’
Looking at the sleepers, I wondered about wages. Mourad had been disinclined to discuss pay with me but this was a crucial issue for us all. I stood to gross £3,500 from this trip, which was a vast amount of money for me, and we needed a reasonable chunk of it to make ends meet at home. If I returned with nothing we would have to endure a certain amount of hardship – we would not go hungry or unshod – but it would be what is meant by hardship in our European society.
Hamid the waiter was earning about £4 a week – maybe £7, with tips, in a good week – thus the money I would gross would pay poor Hamid and his widowed mother for seven hundred weeks, the best part of fifteen years. Mourad had been lamenting to me the wretched lot of Hamid, but he was even worse off himself: he didn’t have a job at all. As he told me, he got the odd bit of translation work, and otherwise waited for whatever would turn up, while giving lessons for a pittance or for free. I figured that, at Mourad’s present perilous state of affairs, the money could support him for twenty-five years.
Aziz had no work and no prospects until his shadowy French girlfriend showed up with the imaginary visa. I didn’t know much about his financial position, if it could be called that, but he wasn’t a rich man. Then there was the gardien du forêt, with his lean frame, shabby suit and air of destitution; well, I dreaded to think what he was paid by the king to guard this little bit of the forest. (‘Against what?’ I asked Mourad. ‘Seed collectors, perhaps,’ he replied.)
I needed my lads to do the job – I’d need them even more later on, as it turned out, for the drying and processing. I could not do the job without them and I wanted it to continue – to come back every year or every other year to pick an order, and increase the variety of plants. Perhaps one day I could turn it into a business that Mourad’s group could run from here. But, for now, I decided I had the following options:
[1] Give them the whole lot.
[2] Split the money four ways (and pay the gardien daily).
[3] Pay outrageously good wages – say, £100 a day each. I was reckoning on twenty man days’ picking, which, leaving myself out, made £1600 between them, and thus £1900 for me before expenses (and the bill at the Café Central was building up);
[4] Pay the current day-labourer´s rate at home in Andalucía, which was then about £15 per day. A doctor in Azrou would be lucky, very lucky, to earn £15 a day, and it was eighteen times what Hamid earned at the Café Central.
I mulled over all this as I lay there beside my new friends, who for all their poverty seemed to bear me no ill will for the monstrous divide that lay between us. Well, what would you decide? In the end I opted for the Spanish labourer’s rate – £15 a day, irrespective of whether it was a whole day or just a part of one – and when the pickers awoke, I told them the deal.
To my relief, everybody thought it was a magnificent emolument, and the gardien was thrilled. I gave all the money to Mourad, who said he would act as paymaster, and I added a fee on top for his administrative and organisation work. I don’t know if he was taking a cut from the others, too, for fixing them up with the job; it wouldn’t have been unfair as, after all, he was the one who had read The Captain and the Enemy.
‘Eh bien mes amis, on recommence? Let’s get started,’ I called, and we tramped out into the forest again. We picked for a couple more hours until the light began to fade, and then, stuffing the day’s harvest into four sacks, we shouldered them and trudged down the edge of the scarp to Azrou. It was dark when we entered the town. We took the
sacks of seeds straight up to the flat roof of Mourad’s house, tipped them out and spread them out in the moonlight.
For three more days we left the town early in the morning, after the obligatory session in the Café Central, and spent the whole day in the forest, returning at sunset. The great heap of pods on the roof grew and grew. At night we shovelled it into a pile in the corner, to keep it from the damper night air, and in the daytime we spread it all out for the rays of the fierce sun to bake the pods dry. As the sun warmed them, there was a constant cracking and splitting, and everywhere, as the pods dried, cracked and twisted, they leapt into the air, scattering their seeds over the dusty concrete roof.
On the morning after the picking was completed, we spread the seeds and then spent the rest of the morning lounging in the Café Central. I learned a little Berber and, by constant repetition and example, gathered the correct and proper formulae for greeting people one had not bumped into for, say, an hour.
Towards midday we slouched home for lunch. Mourad’s house was not as strictly Muslim as some and, now that the family knew me, I was able on occasion to go to the women’s part of the house. As we arrived they were preparing lunch in what passed for a kitchen, although we from the Western world would hardly recognise it as such.
There was no sink, drainer nor tap, for example; neither was there a cooker nor a hob; and the only work surface was a low wooden table, around which the women were squatting in the gloom. The immense battery of tools and utensils, pots and pans and plates so necessary for our European cookery was quite absent. There was a sieve for sieving flour, a big plate, a knife, a big tagine dish, a battered old pressure cooker, a clay pot and a camping gas stove. The tap was in the yard. There were, unsurprisingly, no recipe books.
The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society Page 12