THE ROAD FROM MOROCCO

by Wafa Faith Hallam

  On the other hand, he did introduce me, quite extensively, to the rich cuisine of the region. Old family restaurants and picturesque cafes were preferred meeting places for Jacques and him. There, they invited dozens of people, both veteran sales reps and potential hires, to mingle and share delicious food and wine in a relaxed atmosphere. They spent countless hours relating travel anecdotes and fantastic adventures in exotic lands. They appeared in expensive sports cars, attractive girls in tow, and they did not leave until they had charmed their audience and collected their contacts.

  I did not really understand it then, but now I appreciate how successful this carefully staged recruiting effort was. When Jacques, and his partner, Jean-Pierre, first founded their book distribution business in Toulouse, they did it with little money and a lot of savvy. They signed lucrative contracts with various publishers on all overseas-sold books. The more they sold, the greater the commissions.

  At first, they did most of the traveling and selling themselves, with their girlfriends and next of kin. Soon, they realized they needed to have hundreds of salespeople, in as many countries as possible, to be profitable. That’s where Michel came in. He was a skilled salesman and a charismatic recruiter and, very quickly, became indispensable to the growth of the company.

  As the business operations grew, and the need to shelter higher profits became more pressing, they added warehouses and administrative offices in Geneva, in the heart of the old city, and new headquarters in the tiny sixty-two-square-mile principality of Lichtenstein. At the same time, they offered Michel a minority stake in the firm. Recruiting had become the engine of their growing business model, thus the necessity of a plentiful and endless supply of reps, a sales force compensated solely with a fixed twenty-percent commission with no travel expenses or other benefits.

  The trick was to convince droves of young people to leave their homes, travel overseas to sell books, and finance it all out of their own pockets. For that, Michel and his partners turned their lifestyles into advertising billboards for the dream life, a world of fun, adventure, and success. That’s how I fell for, and unwittingly participated in, an incessant promotion campaign designed for hiring new recruits. And even though there was really nothing sordid or unethical beneath it all, I can now make sense of my inner resistance to that unrelenting sense of excessive and forced joie de vivre.

  The time to leave Toulouse and head for the Geneva offices finally came. Michel’s presence was required to report on his trip to Morocco and to start preparing the next expeditions. It was a lengthy transition for me. My only occupation was to follow Michel and wait for our next trip to begin so that I could be working again. With all the free time on my hands, I couldn’t help but dwell on the sad mess I had left in Morocco.

  The news I was getting from my mother and sister was that Paul had been devastated by my departure. My family had been trying hard to assuage his pain, explaining that I could not resist a great opportunity for work and travel, and that I would soon be back.

  My lingering guilt and remoteness from Michel’s entourage partly explained, without excusing, my desire to maintain a relationship with Paul from afar. Emotional insecurity was another reason for me to keep an anchor in the sea of free-spirited living I had plunged into. Thus began anew my familiar pattern of a twisted double life, simultaneously avowing love for two men.

  From Geneva, I called Paul to explain why I had left so abruptly. I had barely uttered a few words when he let his anger explode.

  “Listen to me, please, listen,” I begged.

  He hung up on me instead. I did not call him back; I couldn’t really talk anyway. There were too many people around me. I took a pen and paper and scribbled a note to him. But instead of coming clean once and for all, I ran from the truth and again reverted to the crudest of lies.

  How must I tell you that your anger is unjustified and unfair? You’re right, I haven’t been entirely honest with you […] I left with a man, it’s true, but it’s not a sordid sex tale as you think it is…

  My employment contract is being prepared; I’ll send you a copy right away […] I don’t despair to be back with you. Because I love you whatever you may think.

  Was this misleading letter my way of getting back at Michel? Was I seeking revenge for the jealousy blind-siding me? But why punish Paul? I will never know.

  Michel and I stayed in Geneva for over a month. During that time, I called Paul at every chance I got and wrote him several more letters, all on the same theme, swearing my endless love, my fidelity to him, and begging him to wait for my return. All along I was living an actual love relationship with another man who knew nothing of my duplicity.

  At the end of May, Michel and I left Geneva and returned to Toulouse on our way to Montreal. My last letter to Paul, sent from Quebec City, was dated June 17, 1975.

  Today, as I stare at all those epistles on my lap, I can’t stop my hands from shaking and my heart from sinking. One after the other, I opened and read through them, in shame and sorrow. Paul had returned all my letters to my mother in a final act of closure. His action stood in noble contrast to my endless delirium of lies and cowardice.

  Curiously, were it not for the reappearance of those letters, I would never have imagined myself capable of such unforgivable behavior. I had totally obliterated that episode of my life from my recollection and always prided myself in my honesty and moral virtue. I had forgotten all about the skeletons in my closet, and pulling them out signified the purging of my soul.

  13

  Travel and Self-Discovery

  Back in Toulouse, after a three-week trip to Canada, I found myself dealing with Michel’s philandering yet again. After one too many fights, I took a plane home, vowing never to see him again. Despite his loving reassurances, I was getting weary of my constant suspicion. More than ever, I felt as if I wasn’t living my life. But that was counting without Michel’s tenacity. Within hours of my landing in Morocco, he was at my doorstep. He had taken the earliest flight he could find after learning of my departure.

  “So you thought you could just leave me, just like that?” he asked me with his trademark smile and singing twang.

  I couldn’t believe he was indeed standing right there, in front of me. I was flattered by his impetuous reaction. But I had no desire to go back to Toulouse and be waiting around for him, victim of my own distrust and consuming angst.

  “There is no way I can live this way, Michel. It’s killing me,” I said without inviting him in.

  He pushed the door open, dropped his bag on the floor, his jacket on the back of a chair in the dark vestibule, and took me in his arms.

  “But we’re not going to stay there indefinitely…” he protested gently.

  “Listen, I cannot imagine what kind of a future we could have together. We’re too different. That’s all.”

  My head was now resting on his shoulder. I was aware of the deep apprehension inside me as I uttered these words. I had no idea what else I could be doing anyway, or what my fear meant. I was more confused than ever about my options. I pulled back hesitantly and looked at him with tears behind my eyes, my heart aching, knowing I loved him still and was torn inside at the thought of never seeing him again.

  “Look, I have to take a team on tour anyway. We’ll go to the Middle East and Africa. I promise.” He pulled me closer against him, adding in a whisper, “I can’t let you go. I don’t want to lose you.”

  I wanted to believe him. I had no design of my own or any goal I wanted to pursue beyond what he had to offer me. I certainly was not ready to return to high school or go back living in a cramped apartment with my siblings. It was much easier to go back with Michel. Besides, when we were travelling I felt safer with him than when we were in Toulouse.

  We left France the second half of August 1975. My sister and her boyfriend, whom she had just met in Morocco that summer, had been persuaded by Michel to join us. Coincidentally, he too was from Toulouse, and his name was also Michel. We quickly
resorted to calling him by his last name, Riva, to distinguish between them. Nezha had gone back to France with him, on vacation presumably, and was staying with his family. A tall and handsome twenty-two-year-old, with a cheery nature, Riva was deeply in love with her. It took him only a few minutes to make up his mind, drop his job as a Peugeot mechanic, and join our team on our upcoming journey. As it turned out, his skills did come in handy multiple times during our trip.

  Michel bought a beat-up white Renault 16 with a hatchback and a spacious enough interior to accommodate the driver and three additional passengers with luggage. We all had very little financial means but Michel had reassured us we would be making money throughout our travels. We were going to sell books wherever we found French speakers and keep all cash deposits as advances on our commissions.

  It turned out to be a once-in-a-lifetime adventure. Two teenage girls and six young men started off with three old cars and slept many a night in gas stations, on roadsides, in crummy hotels, and in people’s homes, in far-off Christian missions, and in the middle of the jungle only to be awakened by tiny incredulous rainforest Pygmies. We ate what the natives ate and drank mostly tap water. But we also discovered lands of legend and history, people of diverse cultures, colors, and creeds, sites of ancient civilizations and untouched wilderness, and when after almost a year we finally found our way back home, we were grown, enriched, wiser and forever transformed.

  That is not to say that such a transformation happened to me graciously. Throughout our journey, I often found it hard to cope with the difficult circumstances and had frequent arguments with Michel. He was supremely at ease in any and all situations, no matter how incongruous or uncomfortable.

  “It’s like feeding jelly to pigs,” he would remark mordantly in my direction time and again.

  His sense of humor, positive attitude, and hunger for life never ceased to amaze me. His funny side, in particular, was most attractive, though, at the time, I did not always appreciate those qualities to the fullest. It was only later that I actually laughed off the dreariness related to the lack of basic comfort and acknowledged the extraordinary journey of discovery I had been fortunate to experience, at such an early age, thanks to Michel.

  The long road-trip took us down the breathtaking Yugoslavian coast—today known as Slovania and Croatia—through Northern Greece to ambivalent Turkey, the country that knows not where it really belongs, Europe or Asia, and where we spent three weeks before heading for Iran still under the Shah’s rule. After a fruitful two-month stay in Iran, we headed for Iraq and left it in a hurry. Under repressive Baath Party rule, the country felt most unwelcoming; then quickly onto Jordan, and Egypt before we made it to Djibouti, our port of entrance to East Africa. We had the most profitable two-month business results in that tiny enclave before pushing through Ethiopia to Addis Ababa and back southeast to Kenya, then Uganda under Idi Amin Dada to Rwanda, long before the genocide that ripped it apart.

  After a month in Burundi, the fourteen-days-thousand-mile-long journey through Eastern Zaire—today known as Congo—during the rainy season, on dirt roads and across bridgeless rivers, led us to Central Africa and finally Cameroon, where our last car broke down and refused to go any farther. We had visited seventeen countries in all from the end of August 1975 to the end of June 1976, a little over ten months. We sold an astonishing amount of books, as much as sixty-thousand dollars’ worth on a good month, an accomplishment which made the expedition a lucrative adventure.

  But, my return to Europe meant going back into the background, waiting around, and following Michel from Toulouse, to Geneva, to Andorra. My sister and her boyfriend decided to settle in Morocco where they rented an apartment and continued to make a living selling books. I only worked sporadically, performing administrative tasks in Geneva; otherwise I was still without a goal, often in fear of Michel’s philandering, made the more seemingly inevitable by his occupation as a recruiter.

  In Andorra, Michel’s partners owned a quaint hotel, called the Kandahar, located at the bottom of the slopes of the Pas-de-la-Casa ski station in the Pyrenees. I was so useless I did not even learn to ski until the last weeks of my four-months stay there. We travelled infrequently, and only for short supervisory visits, to resident teams in Africa and overseas french territories. Every three or four months, I returned to Morocco to visit my family.

  On one such visit, in April 1978, my brother Abdu was almost killed in a devastating car accident, on the road from Rabat to Casablanca, where he was then attending school. His girlfriend was driving and died instantly when she hit an oncoming truck head-on. Their two friends, riding on the back seat, escaped safely, but Abdu suffered extensive head trauma and broken limbs. He went into a coma that lasted days and underwent innumerable hours of surgery. His injuries were so severe, he was told he would never be able to walk again and sent home.

  After I had lived so aimlessly, away from my family for so long, I instinctively felt responsible for his care and, without being asked, assumed the position of primary caregiver. For the following few weeks, I became his personal nurse, attending to him in every way, changing his bandages, cleaning him, feeding him, and interacting with his doctor.

  It soon became evident that he was in need of more advanced surgical procedures, and I set out to find a facility in France. His surgeon referred me to the reputable Hôpital Raymond Poincaré, in Garches, on the outskirts of Paris. I had my brother admitted in the summer of 1978. For an entire year he endured many complicated operations and long hours of rehabilitation but, in the end, he was able to stand and walk on crutches.

  My brother’s accident deeply affected me and gave me a new sense of purpose. Life felt more precious to me, my family more important. I could no longer wait around, hoping for someone to help me make something worthwhile of my existence. It became crystal clear to me that I had to take my future into my own hands. So right after my return from Paris where I left my brother in the hospital, I decided it was time for me to finish high school and take the dreaded Baccalauréat exam. I returned to Morocco and enrolled in a correspondence course for the terminale year.

  For the duration of that academic year, I focused almost exclusively on my studies, working only part-time selling books in Rabat and Casablanca. By that time, Michel had begun to fade in the background. We had effectively split up without ever voicing it overtly. To my surprise, and despite a subdued anxiety, I felt a whole new level of enthusiasm and motivation, but also a renewed sense of confidence in myself. I was single, and I was focused.

  I did meet a kind, young, and attractive Moroccan architect who graciously offered to help me with my math lessons, and we briefly had an affair. I knew a relationship was only going to complicate things. It was a little sad; he really was a special man, and although he never declared his love, I knew he had real feelings for me. From my point of view, it was a matter of timing and of not wishing to remain in Morocco for too long.

  In the spring of 1979, my mother, sister, and I drove from Rabat to Paris to visit Abdu in his Garches hospital. It was the first time that the three of us had gone on a long road trip to Europe by ourselves. I had money in the bank and felt comfortable paying most of our travel expenses, including food and lodging.

  There was an intoxicating feeling of independence and self-assurance in the air despite, or perhaps because of, the absence of a male presence. Michel had let me keep a cute, “super-mini” Renault 5, color aubergine, with an Andorra plate which I used everywhere during those couple of years. The little R5 greatly contributed to my budding emancipation.

  The trip started promisingly enough amid lively conversations until we reached the Rif Mountains and the twisted and, at that time of year, deserted road that separated Larache from Tetouan and the Port of Ceuta, the Spanish enclave on the Mediterranean coast of Morocco. We had planned to take the ferry-boat across the Strait of Gibraltar, from Ceuta to Algeciras, before nightfall. I had taken that trip many times with Michel in the past few years, and
I was supremely confident. Perhaps a little too confident!

  As the sun descended behind the mountains, shedding dark shadows on the green slopes, we passed a lonesome gas station on the roadside.

  “Let’s fill up the tank and be on the safe side,” suggested my mother.

  I glanced at the gauge; it indicated enough fuel.

  “No, I still have gas, and we have to hurry to make the last ferry,” I replied with poise.

  As we approached Tetouan, the car unexpectedly slowed down, hiccupped, and silently gave out its last breath. The three of us looked at each other in dismay.

  “What did I tell you, huh?” Mom started, “We ran out of gas!”

  “Oh, my God!” Nezha exclaimed from the back seat.

  “I can’t believe it, Mom! The gauge was clearly showing plenty of gas to get us there and then some. I swear I don’t understand.” I was stunned.

  Darkness had fallen fast. The small crescent moon peeking from behind a cloud was too feeble to lighten up the cold mountains. A heavy, ominous stillness surrounded us. We were three attractive women, alone, and scared, on a desolate Rif Mountain road, in the middle of “hashish country.” And drug traffickers were not the only danger. We were easy, defenseless prey for any small-time bandits.

  “Okay, don’t worry. We’ll be fine!” I said quickly. “I’m going to hitch-hike to the next station. You two stay here and wait for me. Lock yourselves up inside the car.”