Marrakech, Morocco In beautiful Marrakech, we admire the towering Atlas Mountains in the distance from our bougainvillea-laden terrace. Nork nukes and Sotomayor feel blessedly far away. Moroccans care not at all about our Supreme Court nominee, and only slightly more about the North Korean missile crisis. The Iranian threat worries them enormously, especially as they broke relations with the mullocracy two months ago. “We will not be dictated by Shiites on how to live our lives,” says a Moroccan friend. The upcoming municipal elections in this relatively open society will be a test of the power of competing national parties, some Islamist and some linked to the government. For the rest, the talk in Marrakech is of . . . nothing, really: French fashions, how to open the U.S. market to lovely Moroccan wines, which of the little Gardens of Eden that are Marrakech’s finest restaurants to eat at tonight. Life in this jewel of a city of 600,000 is easy. Life in this benign kingdom is altogether nice. Our guide, J., takes us to the Jamma el-Fna, the main square just outside the gates of the Medina, the ancient walled city. Vendors of every variety of dried fruit, nuts, herbs, freshly-squeezed juices, grilled meats, call out to us; impromptu musical performances by fantastic Berber drummers allure us; beggars, fortune tellers, card readers, and snake charmers accost us: one proffers a snake. (J. calls it a “water snake,” but what can that mean? No water in evidence.) I touch it, feel its amazing snakish movement, demur when he makes to drape it around my neck. There are real live cobras, too-they’re small, or smaller than I thought cobras would be, anyway-who seem less charmed by the sounds of the charmers’ horns than poised to strike at them in annoyance. I would, too, if I were one. The noise is jarring and terrible. Lots of fifty-year-old tourists wandering here, looking like nothing if not ghosts of their former selves, now buying dried dates to aid in their digestion in place of the hashish they found here in their younger days. The casbah is a happy surprise: none of the aggressive hostility of the Jerusalem shouk, where these days (if you even enter any more) you may be hounded to buy and likely to hear “F***ing Amriki Jew!” if you don’t, and none of the horror of Cairo’s bazaar, where shopkeepers beat their nine-year-old assistants in full view of their customers. Inside the Medina, we visit the Bahia, a magnificent palace built in the late nineteenth century by the Grand Vizier Bou Ahmed to house himself, his four wives, twelve children, and twenty-four concubines. Punctuating the glorious tile-work walls and floors, painted ceilings, plaster carvings, carved wooden doors-all still essentially intact in spite of being mauled daily by tourists (us included)-are beautiful gardens, designed by Bou Ahmed himself. “He was growing lots and lots of Spanish Fly here, ha, ha, ha,” says J. “No Viagra in those days, ha, ha, ha!” Every afternoon at siesta time, apparently, the vizier would send for one of his concubines. Interestingly, the wives’ quarters are large and airy and as beautifully and intricately decorated as Bou Ahmed’s own, but the concubines lived together in tiny rooms, seeing the ceilings only during those afternoon assignations. It’s good to be the vizier. On to Casablanca, the commercial capital-a city of six million-to see a mosque and a dentist.
