memories of Marrakesh

It was a shock to hear a news flash about a terrorist bomb detonated at “café Argana, which is located in Jamaa Lafna square in Marrakech,” which I spelled Djemaa El Fna in my story “Lindsay and the Red City Blues.” We may have eaten lunch there, since it’s characterized as an established tourist stop, and at the time there weren’t too many places that catered to European and American tastes.

I loved Marrakesh (as we spelled it) although Gay had reservations – the Moroccan men liked to sidle up and catch a feel of American flesh. We had taken the ferry over from Spain to Tangier, which was pretty frightful. The first place I’d been since Vietnam where dead people were left out in the open. Then we trained down to Casablanca, and it was bad in a different way – big soulless city. An English-speaking native acted friendly and lured us into a small café, where his buddies surrounded us and shook us down for twenty bucks apiece (which would have been ten days’ lodging in a double with a private bath). In my story I said it “combined the charm of Pittsburgh with the climate of Dallas.” Pittsburgh has improved a lot in the past 35 years. I don’t know about Casablanca.

We took public transportation to Marrakesh, which was kind of third-worldish, rolling across the dust-choked desert packed in a rickety schoolbus with mysterious sweaty people and their animals.

Once we got there, though, the place was magical. It did feel a bit dangerous, but more hold-onto-your-wallet dangerous than fear-for-your-life dangerous.

That said, I suddenly recall that it was in the back part of the Djemma el Fna where, for one of a few times in my life, I was glad to be armed. A teenaged boy took us on a wild goose chase to where his “uncle” was selling leather goods and carpets at ridiculously high prices, which we declined. We were outside of the tourist area and quite lost, and the one teenaged boy had become seven or eight, and they surrounded us and suggested that we give them some money. I grabbed the ringleader and pulled from my pocket a pretty large Mexican switchblade, flicked it open, and delivered a short dramatic speech. The essence was that I had just returned from Vietnam, where I had killed eleven men, and wouldn’t mind making it twelve. They all disappeared into the crowd. I suppose I could have been arrested and thrown into a deep dark jail. But Gay asked a grownup (in French or Spanish) where our hotel was, and it was only about five minutes away, walking directly.

Not a good place for a drinking man to recover from such an encounter – no booze at all in our Muslim hotel -- but fortunately I had brought a liter of good brandy from Jerez. Had a tumbler of that with ice while we watched the sun go down over the Red City.

(Just to complete the bad-movie scenario, that morning I’d bought the only book in English I’d seen on a used-book table in the Djemaa el Fna – it was Ernest Hemingway’s Fiesta, sold in America as The Sun Also Rises. My first Hemingway novel, not counting The Old Man and the Sea in high school, and I started it right after having a Hemingway-style adventure.)

On the train from Marrakesh back to Tangier, I started “End Game,” the novella that became the last section of The Forever War, typing on my red plastic Olivetti Valentine manual. Some of my happiest days of writing would be in the next week, writing in a little bar across the way from our hotel in the Jewish quarter of Sevilla, absolutely sure of what I was doing. It’s often that way after a novel passes the three-quarter mark.

I wonder if I thought wow, this writing life is going to be pretty exciting. Not knowing that the excitement had peaked early.

Joe