Soon, things were worse. My intestines were in full revolt. I raced back to the hotel, where I spent most of the next four hours in the bathroom, a bathroom whose drain emitted a stench of sewage gas so intense I feared a spark might set the place ablaze. I doubly dreaded every trip there, as just breathing in that room was enough to make you retch.
I needed some medicine, and quick, but where? I hadn’t been able to follow the hotel clerk’s directions (in Spanish) to the drugstore, so immediately after another bathroom visit, I hurried back into the medina, where Ali was at his shop. I started to explain, but before I could finish, he’d already blocked the door of his shop with a ladder and was quickly leading me out of the medina, back in the direction of my hotel. The pharmacy was just around the corner. Armed with Imodium and the closest thing to Pepto-Bismol I could find, I thanked Ali profusely and ran upstairs to my room. The medicine calmed my intestines down a bit, allowing me to sleep through the night.
At about five in the morning, I was slowly awakened by a drone that at first sounded like a distant fire siren. It was soon joined by another closer drone, which I could make out as monotone singing. The first time one hears the Islamic morning call to prayer, it is rather startling and intimidating, particularly before dawn. There is nothing joyous or celebratory in the chant; rather, it is delivered with an intonation of foreboding, starting soft and becoming louder in an ominous, threatening tone that sounds like a warning to come to prayer or else.
On this morning, I welcomed being awakened by the call, because for me it was the call, not to prayer, but to bread. Ali had thought that the ferrane might be open today, so I switched on the light, took more Imodium, and prepared a poolish with the French flour I’d brought along. If the ferrane was indeed open, I wanted to bring my bread in as soon as possible, in case the owner decided to close up shop early because of the fete. If he didn’t open, well, then, I guess I’d have a bit of a sourdough for tomorrow. Having come this far, I was prepared to improvise.
After making my poolish, I went back to sleep, not waking till nearly nine. I hustled down to the ferrane and saw open doors, but the entrance was blocked by a small table. The baker was inside. He’d be opening at ten, he said in French. I hurried back to the room to make bread. The poolish was now four hours old. Ahh . . . it smelled like home. Clearing off a shelf that was set into the wall at just about the right height, I spread out a piece of parchment paper and set about kneading. Slapping the dough onto the shelf, I pressed hard. Really hard. All the way to the floor.
Shelf, dough, and paper all came crashing to the ground. Good start. Fortunately the dough had landed on the paper, so all was not lost. Since the maid was right outside, making her rounds, I quickly closed the door and drew the curtains, moving my operation over to a low table, which is where I should’ve been kneading in the first place. But this was Morocco and my brain was under the Arabian Nights spell. I continued kneading at the table, finding my good cheer returning despite my aching back, stolen camera, and angry bowels. There is truly something restorative about making bread. After two hours of fermentation and a ninety-minute rise, I grabbed my container of dough and a single-edged razor and headed into the medina. Where I once again became lost, an easy thing to do. Fortunately I spotted a woman with a large board covered by a floured cloth on her head. I fell in behind and followed her to the ferrane.
When I explained to the baker that I had traveled from America to bake in his ferrane, he welcomed me warmly and brought me upstairs, where two women were preparing bread, one taking dough from an enormous mixer that kneaded eighty kilograms (about two hundred pounds!) at a time, measuring and dividing with an old-fashioned balance scale, the other quickly and skillfully forming small boules from the lumps of dough as fast as the first woman could weigh. The ceiling was so low that I couldn’t stand up straight, but otherwise the scene felt unexpectedly familiar and comfortable.
The sight of boules surprised me because I hadn’t seen any in town. The mystery was cleared up downstairs at the oven, where just before loading the loaves, the baker pressed down on each boule, flattening it out, poked three holes in it, and dusted the top with a little cornmeal before sliding it into the largest oven I had ever seen.
I made four razor cuts in my dough, and the baker carried it downstairs on a plate. He asked me in sign language if I wanted it patted down, Moroccan-style.
“No,” I told him. I was making a boule, not a flat Moroccan smida.
“Comme ci?”
Yes, just the way it was.
He handed the loaf to a one-eyed assistant baker, who transferred it to the longest and most splendid peel I’d ever seen, made from the slightly crooked branch of a tree. But to my alarm, with a flip of the peel he sent the dough sailing toward the ceiling, where it turned onto its back before landing on the peel with a thud. He flipped it again, returning the dough, now devoid of any gas whatsoever, right side up, sprinkled on some cornmeal, and motioned for me to take the peel, a gracious gesture.
The oven door was almost at ground level, requiring me to get onto one knee (and for the baker to work from a crouch all day long). Seen from eye level, the oven seemed to stretch on forever, making the bread oven at the Ritz look like the Hasbro Easy-Bake by comparison. I took the tree-branch peel and gave my loaf a ride.
While the loaf baked, I spoke with the head baker. Ali, who’d closed his shop once again to help me, translated.
Did the baker know about the bread riots in the south?
He did.
Did he know about the larger nationwide riots in the early 1980s, which some say took the lives of over five hundred people?
He was a child then, Ali translated.
Was he concerned about the growing price of flour?
He was unfazed by the price increases. Last month it was high, but then, after the protests, the price came down. Bread is too expensive! No, it’s not that high. It’s outrageous!
Was my baker schizophrenic? “Wait a second!” I said to Ali. “Did he say all of that?”
“No, I said it’s too high. Last month it was only one and a half dirhams”—eighteen cents—“and now it’s two and a half dirhams!” Or about thirty cents.
This increase of twelve cents doesn’t sound like the stuff of riots, until you realize that the per capita annual income in Morocco is only $1,570, and the price of bread, which is eaten at every meal, had just jumped a full 67 percent.
The ferrane charged the equivalent of six cents to bake a loaf. I daresay it costs me considerably more just to preheat my oven at home. With the increasing price of fuel worldwide, the community ferrane seemed like an idea whose time had come. Sadly, though, it was an idea whose time was passing. Moroccans were becoming more Western, too busy to make their own bread.
My peasant loaf finished, Ali picked it up. “Heavy,” he said, signaling for one of the baker’s loaves. He held one in each hand, playfully turning his body into a balance scale to show how much heavier my loaf was. Indeed, the smida, although only an inch or so high, was light and airy, made with whiter-than-white flour. It was also tasteless.
My intestines started growling again, so I grabbed my loaf and retreated to my room. I hadn’t touched a morsel of food since the sickness had started over twenty-four hours ago, and I knew I had to eat—but what? What could I eat that wouldn’t make me sick? I remembered what Clotaire Rapaille had said about The Count of Monte Cristo: “If you have the right water, and the right bread—the old-time bread—you have total survival.”
I looked at my peasant loaf sitting on the table. I had made it with bottled water and French flour. It was the only food in this town whose ingredients I could be sure of, and it even had some nutritious whole wheat and rye in it. Thus I became the Count of Monte Cristo, living literally on bread and water for the next two days, nursing myself back to health with bread made by my own hand.
——————————————
My last night in Asilah, I headed into th
e medina one last time to look for Ali. He still hadn’t tried to sell me anything. I wanted to say good-bye, thank him for his help, and buy something from his shop.
He pulled up a stool and insisted I sit. “Would you like a drink?” he asked.
“No, thank you.”
“Why not?” He was hurt.
Why not, indeed? This man had been very kind and helpful to me. The least I could do was not insult him and accept his offer of hospitality.
Ali brought me a Coke (“in the bottle, please,” I requested) and poured himself a coffee. I asked him if he or his wife made bread at home.
“Oh, I’m not married,” he said. Then he explained why.
“Many years ago, when I was a boy, I was in love with a girl, but my parents had chosen someone else. But I was so, so in love with her. And she with me.” He clutched his heart, looking at me through his warm brown eyes. Ali’s hair flopped carelessly across his forehead, making it easy to see the lovesick teenager within. “But my parents would not approve the marriage. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to marry the girl they had chosen for me, but I couldn’t dishonor my parents and marry the girl I loved without their approval. I couldn’t bear seeing her every day. It was so painful.”
He grew quiet, lost in time and memory and sadness.
“What did you do?”
“I left home.”
For the next twenty minutes, Ali described how he bounced around Morocco, working odd jobs here and there, estranged from his family, brokenhearted, burdened by a love that, decades later, he was still trying to forget. My Coke grew flat, Ali’s coffee cold, as his life achingly drifted by, the bottled-up memories pouring from a long-corked bottle like a sad genie. Eventually his story reached here, the seaside town of Asilah.
“My heart was broken. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat. My weight was down to forty kilos.”
I gulped. Ninety pounds.
“And everyone said to me, ‘Ali, why are you so angry? You are the bitterest man in the medina.’ They were right. And one day I realized this is crazy, to go through life so angry at the world. So I stopped being angry.” He smiled. I smiled back. His face fell. “But I don’t think I will ever be married.”
A long silence followed, during which I realized what Ali’s true motives were in closing his shop and taking me to the bakeries, to the pharmacy, to the ferrane. Loneliness. I’d kept him at arm’s length throughout the week because I thought he was after my dollars, when what he wanted was my companionship and friendship. I felt ashamed.
“You shouldn’t give up,” I said finally. “You would be a good husband.”
“Have you seen the girl in the jewelry shop over there?” He motioned toward a shop adjacent to his. In fact I had. She was beautiful and young. “Last year, I asked her to marry me. She told me she wanted to think about it, and the next day she came to me, and said, ‘You know that thing that you talked about? I cannot. And please, do not ever speak of it again.’ She thinks I am too old. I was born in March of 1953.”
I almost choked. “March what?” I demanded, more curtly than I’d intended.
He was a little taken aback by my tone. “March eleventh.”
This “old man,” whom I’d pegged to be in his sixties, broken by life, his remaining years trickling away in the medina while he sold cheap ceramics to tourists, was born exactly two weeks before I was! I could feel my heartbeat speeding up. I needed to leave.
I had earlier spotted a bowl I wanted to buy, but as I rose, and before I could say anything, Ali said, “I want to give you a gift. Please, pick out anything in the shop.”
I insisted on paying, to no avail. So I picked out a second piece, which I paid for. I asked if there was something I could send him from the United States, something he couldn’t get here.
“I would like to speak better English,” he said. “My English is so bad now because no Americans or English come here anymore. Perhaps you could send me a book that would help?” He reconsidered. “But it will be very expensive for you to send. You shouldn’t.”
I wrote down his address and promised to send a book. Of course, what I really wanted to send him, what he really needed, doesn’t travel by post.
WEEK
45
The Trials of Job: Travel Edition
Gird up now thy loins like a man; For I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto me.
—Job 38:3
The scene at the train station reminded me of stories of the eve of the Occupation, when panicked Parisians packed rail stations and streets, desperate to escape ahead of the approaching Nazis. On this night, however, those of us who jammed the Gare Saint-Lazare were merely trying to get out of town before the transit workers went on strike.
When I think about that night, coming after a long day of travel from Morocco, I see a scene, in black and white, of women in long skirts, heels, and nylons, carrying chic suitcases, scurrying toward their huge, steam-belching locomotives as the clock ticks down to the strike deadline. I see men in fedoras and pin-striped suits kissing their wives good-bye, not sure when or if they’ll ever see them again. And I see—and this is the only even remotely accurate part—I see an exhausted, sick American, sitting on the platform, slumped against a wall, nibbling on a piece of crust, quietly taking in the scene, waiting for his levain, the rest of his clothes, and his train.
I hadn’t even planned to be at the station until the following morning, but just before leaving Morocco, I’d finally been able to check my e-mail and couldn’t believe what I read: Karen, the friend to whom I’d entrusted my levain, was warning me that the French transit workers had announced a strike beginning Thursday—the day I was to take the train from Paris to Normandy. Karen suggested I try to get a train Wednesday evening instead of spending the night in Paris as planned. She would meet me at the station with my starter and the rest of my clothes.
Sounded like a good plan, if—and this was a big if—the trains were still running, which we wouldn’t know until we met at the station. In keeping with true Gallic tradition, the Thursday strike was in fact rumored to be starting on Wednesday night, as early as 7:00 p.m. As my flight from Morocco wasn’t scheduled to arrive in Paris until 6:30, and the train to Normandy didn’t leave until 9:20, I could very well be stranded, not just in Paris, but at the airport, fighting hundreds of other stranded passengers for a taxi! I could not believe my bad luck. I felt like Humphrey Bogart, lamenting from the soundstage that passed for Morocco, “Of all the days and all the trains . . .”
Even if I were able to catch a train to Normandy late Wednesday, I couldn’t very well come knocking on the abbey’s doors at midnight. So just before leaving Morocco, I had frantically and luckily secured, at an outrageous price, what must have been the last available hotel room in Yvetot, the train stop closest to the abbey. Because of the late hour of my arrival, however, I’d first have to walk from the station to their sister hotel in town, pick up the key, and then find my hotel. Mon dieu! Couldn’t someone from the hotel meet me at the station?
“Non, monsieur,” the Frenchwoman chirped cheerfully.
Well, then, could they arrange for a taxi to meet me?
“Non, monsieur,” she said again in that same incongruously chipper, singsong voice, the tone that said yes while the words said no.* The hotel, Madame insisted, was an easy walk from the train station. And the second hotel was an easy walk from that one. I gave her my credit card number and hoped for the best.
The flight from Tangier to Paris arrived, thank goodness, on time. As I left the baggage claim, I looked at my watch: 6:45. Fifteen minutes before the earlier of the rumored strike times. I raced to the commuter train, relieved to find that it was still running. Eventually I made my way to the Gare Saint-Lazare, where I sat on the cold floor, facing thirty train tracks, the station fading from frenetic to eerily quiet as the last trains pulled out—or not. Up and down the platform, the departure times on each gate changed to CANCELED . . . CANCELED . . . CANCELED .
. . I stared at the sign at gate 29, willing it to remain at 9:20.
I couldn’t help wondering if I was being tested. It did in fact seem as if I had to prove my worth, my dedication to this mission, before being allowed into the sacred abbey. Injury, sickness, theft, strikes—I was experiencing the Trials of Job: Travel Edition.
This was a little tricky because, well, I didn’t believe in God, probably not in any kind of God, but certainly not the kind who’d want to become involved in the daily petty struggles of us mere mortals down here on earth. Yet I felt comfortable with my assertion that I was indeed being tested, comfortable with being able to hold the simultaneous beliefs that (a) God didn’t exist, and (b) He was testing me. After all, the theory fit the facts so well.
Whether my ordeal was due to divine intervention or a bad run with the dice, I couldn’t help laughing out loud as I realized that what I would normally view as a nightmare to be avoided at all costs—wandering around a strange foreign city at midnight with my luggage, searching for not one but two hotels—was the circumstance that I now fervently, desperately hoped for. This was, remarkably, my best-case scenario.
To realize it, however, I would need to be on virtually the last train out of Paris. The station grew nearly deserted. Another sign switched to CANCELED, and another. Clutching my levain, I went back to staring willfully at the sign above gate 29, a beacon of hope, still improbably glowing 9:20.
WEEK
46
A Time to Keep Silence
With curiosity and misgiving I walked up the hill . . . toward the Abbey of St. Wandrille . . . I wondered if my project had not better be abandoned.
52 Loaves Page 21