Authors: William Alexander
Finally the class was over. After much shaking of hands and posing for pictures, we were told in no uncertain terms not to leave any loaves behind tonight. What was I going to do with this dreadful
pain surprise
? The veterinarian had the same dilemma. “Maybe I’ll give it to the beggar who’s at the Métro every day,” she said. I wasn’t sure if she was serious. But I left class first, and sure enough, right at the Métro entrance was a pathetic-looking woman sitting on the sidewalk, wrapped in filthy shawls, with a cardboard sign asking for money to buy food for her children. I’d passed her every day but hadn’t noticed her, just another beggar in Paris.
But was she even (excuse the term) a “real” beggar or a con artist? Deciding it didn’t matter, I bent down and handed her the loaf, pulling off the top, revealing the little triangular salmon and ham sandwiches inside.
“Pain surprise, madame. Du Ritz.”
No con artist could fake the look of joy, mixed with a little shock, that washed across her face. She thanked and blessed me, and that night she and her children dined on food from the kitchen of the Ritz. Seeing her face was heartening, but I really would’ve liked to see the vet’s face when
she
walked by.
The week at the Ritz had left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth (and I’m not just talking about the bread). The way it ended—giving my last loaf to a beggar—seemed not only appropriate but symbolic. My quest for perfect peasant bread had led me far from the peasants, and I needed to return. I had five days before I was due at Saint-Wandrille. I wanted to go someplace where bread was still vitally important, where it was a staple, not a plaything of the rich. I needed a place where the peasants last rioted over the price of bread, not two hundred years ago, but two weeks ago.
The next morning, Anne and I boarded different planes. Her afternoon flight followed the sun home to New York. I parked some clothes and my
levain
with a friend living in Paris and headed south to the continent where, six thousand years ago, the first loaf of leavened bread on earth was baked: Africa.
Full of hope, Edmond swallowed a few mouthfuls of bread and water, and, thanks to the vigor of his constitution, found himself well-nigh recovered.
—Alexandre Dumas,
The Count of Monte Cristo,
1844
“You have time? I take you to all the bakeries in town,” the shopkeeper offered, already starting to close his shutters.
I had prepared for my visit to Asilah by reading Paul Bowles’s novel
The Sheltering Sky,
a bleak, moody portrait of postwar Morocco in which the American expatriate narrator, savvy and experienced as he is, allows himself to be tailed by a stranger, rolled by a prostitute, and nearly killed—in just the first twenty pages.
This should’ve put me on my guard, especially as in my own first
seven
pages in Morocco, I’d already had my camera stolen, watched a prostitute leisurely and openly negotiate a deal with three teenage boys, observed my waiter sniffing cocaine (which may have explained his indifferent service—or improved it), been the beneficiary of a secondhand-smoke
kif
high during lunch, been fleeced by a “guide” working in concert with my taxi driver (to think that I trusted the taxi driver!), and nearly been assaulted by a rug merchant for committing the venal sin of leaving his store without buying a rug. And yet—and yet!—when this ceramics-shop owner in the medina (the ancient walled quarter
of the city) offered to close his shop for
half a Saturday afternoon
to personally escort me to the best bakeries in town, I thought (if you can call this thinking), Why not?
After all, I was here for bread
—
here because once upon a time, in both Africa and Europe, bread was widely prepared at home but baked in communal ovens. This economy of scale made, and still makes, a lot of sense, particularly when fuel is scarce, but this dying tradition is found in so few places today that it is in very real danger of extinction. I wanted to experience it while there was still time, in the way that so-called doomsday tourists are rushing to see polar bears in the Arctic before they disappear. Which was the reason I had come to this small city in northern Morocco, one of the few that still had the traditional
ferrane,
or community oven, deep inside its medina.
There was another reason for being in this North African country: while I had been chasing the ghosts of the bread riots that fueled the French Revolution two hundred years earlier, the real thing—a small bread riot—had recently taken place in Morocco, practically under my nose! Owing to a multitude of factors—not the least of which were those sacks of yeast stacked to the ceiling at the Lallemand yeast factory I had visited, destined to be used to turn corn into fuel instead of food—the price of wheat had doubled worldwide during my year of baking. For most American families, this was merely an irritation, if it was noticed at all,
*
but in countries where bread is still a staple (including such flash points as Pakistan, Egypt, and Iraq), it threatened social and political stability.
Morocco was a country where bread was worth fighting for,
not some luxury item where a bad
grigne
(the slash on the top of loaves) might cause it to end up in the garbage. Yet I was still surprised at how omnipresent, how much a part of the daily routine, bread was. It seemed to be everywhere: sold from pushcarts around which Moroccans crowded the minute the carts stopped; stacked in every phone-booth-size pocket store (there must be one of these tiny stalls for every ten residents); sold from the half-dozen or more bakeries scattered throughout this modest town; and, not least, baked in the communal oven, the
ferrane.
It was the
ferrane
that had led to my encounter with Ali, the ceramics merchant deep in the medina. Wandering aimlessly through the maze of alleys without seeing anything resembling an oven or even a bakery, I’d finally decided to do the unmanly thing and ask directions from the next shopkeeper I saw, who turned out to be Ali. He informed me in English that I had picked a bad time to come to bake at the
ferrane,
for Ramadan had ended yesterday, and with it the frenzy of baking in preparation for the six-day festival that was just beginning. The
ferrane
was closed for several days, and Ali couldn’t say for sure when it might reopen—either Monday or Tuesday, he thought. Well, I was leaving on Tuesday. I’d come a long way to bake in a
ferrane
and didn’t want to go home empty handed.
I considered Ali’s offer to visit the town’s bakeries. A short man (he told me he was known in the medina as Petit Ali), he looked to be in his sixties and had a weathered but warm face—not at all like the young, cocky rug merchant in the baseball cap. That particular transaction had begun with handshakes, introductions (he introduced himself as Eddie, making me think of the seventies sales icon Crazy Eddie), and assurances of friendship for life, and ended with my new best friend literally screaming at my back as I walked out. “You say we are friends, we shake hands, I
treat you nice, then you do this!” he yelled, following me out of the shop.
“This,” by the way, was wanting to discuss the purchase with my wife, who (I said) was napping. Whether she was really napping or not was hard to say, since she was in New York, but Eddie returned the lie by saying I had to decide now; he’d be closed tomorrow because of the festival. Right. I don’t think Eddie would close for his mother’s funeral. “Do not do this again in Morocco, my friend! I warn you!” he screamed as I scurried away.
I flinched at the word “warn,” with its implicit threat, but at least I wouldn’t have to see him again. Asilah was a big place.
A little rattled and, after a long day of travel, badly in need of a beer—not always an easy thing to find in a Muslim nation, I was learning—my heart leaped and my mouth watered when at last I saw an Amstel sign. I flopped into a seat on the sidewalk and ordered up a cold one.
“Sorry, no
bierre,
” the waiter said.
I pointed to the sign directly above my head.
He shrugged.
I settled for a glass of mint tea, seemingly the drink of choice among Arab men. The tea was beautiful, served in a tall glass filled with mint leaves, kind of like the mojito I’d have greatly preferred, but without ice. Or rum. I looked around for sugar but didn’t see any, so while waiting for the waiter to return, I took a sip—blech! There was more sugar than tea in this tea, which explained the rotting teeth on many of the old men.
As I was wondering if the water in the tea had been fully boiled, who should wander by but Crazy al-Eddie! He glared at me. I tried to pretend we didn’t know each other, but let’s face it, I can state with complete confidence that I was the only person in Asilah who was six foot four and blond.
Eddie moved on, so I lingered at the table, enjoying the parade before me. On this first night of the festival, everyone was out, the women in their showiest robes, the men in both Western suits and traditional Moroccan djellabas, those hooded brown, white, or (my favorite) creamy yellow robes. The djellabas gave the men a monkish look, particularly as many walked bent at the waist, hands clasped behind their backs in the way of holy men, reminding me, before I was ready to think about it, of my next destination, the monastery. Very few families walked together, the young people preferring to congregate with their friends. And young people there were! So many that it was striking. Sit in a sidewalk café in any American city, and you see couples in their thirties or forties or older walking by. Here in Asilah the average age of the passers-by seemed to be about seventeen.
Starting to feel festive myself, I joined the promenade down the main boulevard, which was closed to traffic. Every bad travel book ever written has a cliché along the lines of “So-and-so is a land of contrasts.” Yet from what I was seeing, Morocco was precisely that. Young women in traditional robes strolled arm in arm with young women in jeans and T-shirts. Some bridged new and old by wearing a traditional silk blouse and head scarf over their Calvin Kleins. The biggest contrast was provided by the movie theater adjacent to the mosque. I wondered what the men on their way to prayer must have thought when they passed the theater’s posters of scantily clad women with their come-hither looks.
*
When the call to prayer sounded over the loudspeaker at the mosque, I paused, expecting the procession to come to a momentary halt. Yet no one else seemed to notice. As the procession
continued, the call to prayer largely unheeded, I went to bed.
The next morning, as most of Asilah slept off the long evening, I tried to wake up with several cups of espresso at the outdoor café around the corner. To move things along, I went inside to pay the check, but I had only the two-hundred-dirham bills (the equivalent of about twenty-five dollars) dispensed by the ATM. The waiter, unequipped to handle such a large sum of money, headed outside to get change from a neighboring merchant, but he never made it through the doorway—Crazy al-Eddie was just outside, with a wad of bills acquired no doubt from less discriminating tourists than I. There was no getting away from this creep.
Wanting to put some desert between myself and Eddie, I hurriedly left the restaurant, realizing half a block away that I’d carelessly left my camera on the table. Idiot! I raced back, but of course it was gone. This wasn’t Norway, where I’d once left my backpack, passport and all, on a bench, only to find it still sitting there, untouched, a good forty-five minutes later. I couldn’t help wondering if Crazy al-Eddie had made his rug sale after all. Only I didn’t have the rug to show for it.
——————————————
Despite this rude introduction to Morocco, when Ali—you remember Ali, the shopkeeper in the medina—off ered, illogically, to close his shop to bring me to bakeries, I inexplicably had only one question: “Do we need to drive?” I may be naive, but I’m not reckless enough to get into a car in Morocco with a stranger—I think.
“No, no, everything close by. We walk.”
We headed out of the safety of the touristy medina into a weirdly postapocalyptic scene, a tangle of deserted streets populated by stray dogs and illuminated by numerous smoky trash fires
that burned unattended, explaining the perpetual foul-smelling haze that permeated the town and everything in it, masking the salt air. As we got farther from the medina, I started taking snapshots at each intersection with the replacement camera I’d bought that morning, hoping it would provide a digital trail later if I needed it.
The streets became less populous, then even less populous, and before I realized it, Ali and I were alone. Not another human being was in sight. Even the dogs had vanished. Yet I didn’t want to show fear or weakness, and I wasn’t sure I could find my way back alone, so I recklessly continued on, becoming aware that I was weirdly paralleling the opening of
The Sheltering Sky.
Whose protagonist dies at the end, by the way. I also became aware of even more bizarrely paralleling another story, that of Hansel and Gretel, who lose their way in the woods and are lured into—yes—a house of bread!
*
With a large oven inside. I was even mimicking their ill-fated bread-crumb trail with the digital one I was creating with my camera.
As I was mulling all this over, Ali stopped in front of a shuttered storefront. “Very good bakery,” he said. I looked at the Arabic sign above it. For all I knew, it could’ve said glue factory.
“Closed for Ramadan. But now you can find later.”
I couldn’t have found this place again if my life depended on it. But if my life depended on anything, it was on finding my way
back
from it.
“Come. We check another.”
I obediently followed him deeper into the neighborhood to another bakery. Also closed. In fact, every bakery in town was closed for Ramadan. Okay, enough games. What was this guy up to? I suggested we return to the medina. I was mainly interested
in the
ferrane,
anyway. I expected Ali to lead me back to his shop, where, rug-merchant-style, I’d be pressured to buy some overpriced piece of pottery as his guide fee, but surprisingly, we parted at the medina gates with a handshake. I knew I would pay for it in the end, though. The longer the setup, the higher the payoff.