Who is Maud Dixon?(39)

23.



Florence set off westward with the sun at her back. The rental agency was located outside the medina walls. Brahim had told her it was about a twenty-minute walk.

“Go through Jemaa el-Fnaa square,” he’d suggested, pointing at the map he was marking up for her. “It’s one of the most famous spots in Marrakesh. It’s where they used to shoot prisoners. Afterward, their heads were”—he snapped his fingers a few times—“what is that word? You know? With the hot dogs? You eat them with the hot dogs—they’re long and green and crunchy?”

“Pickles?” Florence offered doubtfully.

“Pickles! Their heads were, just as you say, pickled and hung from the city gates. As a warning.”

“Oh.”

“Also, you can get henna on your hands, very beautiful.”

Jemaa El-Fnaa square turned out not to be a square at all, but a large, irregularly shaped plaza, anchored by the Café de France at one end. She and Helen had passed through it early that morning, when it was still empty, without knowing what it was. Now it was just starting to come to life. On tables shaded by tarps and umbrellas, towers of oranges waited to be juiced. An old man speaking in a hoarse voice held an audience of camera-toting tourists captive. Florence assumed he was one of the public storytellers that she’d read about. Still more tourists sat in the shade while their hands and wrists got painted with intricate patterns.

A man approached Florence holding aloft a skinny black snake and attempted to drape it across her shoulders.

“No, thank you,” she said, edging away.

He persisted.

“No,” she said more forcefully.

He laughed at her. “Don’t be scared.”

Florence bristled. She wasn’t afraid. Was that the only acceptable reason for refusing a snake around one’s neck? She veered around him and kept walking. His laughter echoed gratingly behind her.

Here, finally, was Marrakesh’s exoticism, albeit an exoticism made palatable to tourists, but she was no longer interested. She was hot. She was tired.

She reached the edge of the medina. A grand building sat in front of one of the gates, flanked by a trio of guards in different colored uniforms. She took out her phone to take a picture of it and they all started shouting at her at once. One of them started to cross the street toward her, still yelling. Several bystanders turned to watch. She felt the blood rush to her face and she put the phone back in her bag. She waved her hands in apology, and the guard retreated. A passerby in a full-body burka inspected her, the light glinting off her glasses. Florence walked away quickly and stepped in a pile of what she guessed was donkey shit.

It took Florence thirty minutes to find the car rental agency, and by the time she got there she was caked in dust. It clung to her damp skin and trembled on her eyelashes. She felt its grittiness between her teeth.

“De l’eau?” she asked the skinny teenager at the desk, her college French clunky on her tongue. She made a drinking motion with her hands. “Water?”

The teenager shook his head somberly. Florence sighed and handed over the printout of her reservation.

“Un moment,” he said and disappeared behind a splintered plywood door.

There were two folding chairs against the wall. Florence sat in one and leaned her head back. A fan rattled above her.

The teenager returned with an older man who greeted her in English. She handed over Helen’s driver’s license. He gave it a cursory glance and slid it back across the counter.

“Come,” he said. She followed him out through the door to the street. The man’s plastic sandals slapped noisily against the soles of his feet. His heels were riven with deep, dry cracks.

The garage was next door. The man led her to a white Ford Fiesta and gestured at it grandly. “Brand new,” he said, patting the roof. She thanked him and he stood aside and watched her climb into the car. She turned on the AC as high as it would go. At first the air was hot and rank, like someone’s breath, but soon it began to cool off and dry the perspiration on her skin. It also started to clear the addled, heat-warped vagueness that had clung to her since she’d woken up. The man from the office was still standing there watching her. She jammed the gearshift into reverse and narrowly avoided hitting an old woman as she maneuvered the car out into the frantic stream of traffic.





24.



When Florence finally pulled up, fifteen minutes late, Helen was standing at the intersection next to the same man with the same wheelbarrow, their bags piled inside. She was wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat, which she placed on her lap as she climbed into the car.

“New?” asked Florence, gesturing to it.

“Yes, I got it on my walk home. Forty dirhams. Brahim was right—the souk was incredible.”

Florence nodded and smiled. She leaned her head back against the seat briefly. Her entire body was tense. She hadn’t understood any of the street signs on the drive. She’d nearly collided with a horse-drawn carriage containing two alarmed tourists. The man from the hotel shut the trunk and patted it lightly. Florence didn’t move.

“Florence, let’s go.” Helen snapped her fingers at her, maybe facetiously but probably not.

“Sorry,” she said, sitting up. She gripped the steering wheel and shifted the car into gear.