I wasn’t expecting to fall in love that winter in Morocco, but there’s something about being in a foreign country that lets your guard down so more of the world can get inside. It’s as if when you travel, layers of your skin peel back. You expose yourself to the world so it can expose itself to you.
I first met Aziz in a small coastal village with a white sand beach, quiet walkways, old town ramparts, a palace, and one heck of a sexy bank teller.
After six weeks travelling alone through Morocco, I returned to the bank where Aziz, the sexy bank teller, had served me weeks earlier. There he was again, still looking as if he’d walked out of a 1940s movie playing the swarthy mysterious foreigner. Even his white suit fit the part.
“Ah, Jean, bonjour. You’ve come back! I am surprised by this!” I was surprised too. He remembered my name—OK, my middle name, which he must have read on my passport six weeks earlier and taken for my first name, but what a memory. He pronounced it with a French accent.
Since I was leaving Morocco the next day and didn’t need any money, I invented a banking question. He replied by saying we should have dinner together.
When we met that evening, I discovered he’d studied philosophy in Paris where he’d been rained on for four years, had written a book on cross-cultural communication, had soft brown eyes and a large muscled frame. We were so taken with each other, we barely noticed when a crowd gathered around to watch us. Aziz came up with an idea.
“Jean (still in French accent), we go to Tangier tonight. Tangier is full of the life.”
Off to Tangier, full of the life, we raced too fast in his car along the coast, singing show tunes and watching the stars out the window as I contemplated whether or not I was, at 30, too old for this kind of thing.
When we arrived at Aziz’s home, Aziz disappeared while his mother, aunts and sisters, all lounging on sofas in a velvet-lined room, yanked me down onto some pillows and commenced grilling me for over an hour.
After the inquisition and lively discussion amongst themselves, they announced it: you can marry Aziz.
Luckily, Aziz reappeared just in time. “Come Jean, we go off into the night.”
He said that. He really did.
Tangier, full of secret corruptions, notorious for espionage and intrigue, once decadent city of hedonists, writers, freebooters, artists, Beat poets, exiles, spies and romance. I soaked it all in.
My night with Azia in Tangier was a whirlwind night of crazed dashing. We dashed all over the place, from night club to disco, to some look-out point over the city where Aziz gave me a massage and then kissed every inch of my back before saying we had to go to another night club. Finally, we ended up at a belly dance club.
The belly dance club reminded me of an underground cave with hidden chambers. I could hardly see through the darkness, the curling smoke of cigarettes, hashish, and incense. Dimly-lit lanterns glowed on the skins of belly dancers. As if in a trance, they moved in time to the throaty voices of men on stage who brought their rhythms and drums to frantic climaxes.
Aziz clapped and sang to the music from our table. I watched Aziz, so full of charisma and beauty, but I didn't like him anymore. When men came to our table, Aziz didn’t bother introducing me but began treating me as if I wasn’t even there, apparently embarrassed that he’d actually been having an intelligent conversation with a woman. He also did a lot of leering, which gave way to glaring. Finally, when he groped me in a dark corner and asked what we’d be doing that night in his bed, the whole escapade didn’t seem very romantic and intriguing anymore. Clearly, this was a B movie he was charming his way through and I was about to walk out of it. There in the belly dance joint, an abrupt desire to be away from Aziz seized me and I had to follow. So I slipped out the back, eventually finding my way to Aziz's house where his sisters let me sleep on a divan.
“Sister, you’re back!” they trilled, bursting to know what I thought of their brother. He's not for me, was all I could say across such a vast cultural chasm.
I wonder today what my answer would be, or should have been then. Would it have made a difference to have given them my opinion on sexism? To have told them that where I come from, women are viewed as equal to men? How I was a strong independent woman who would never in a million years live with someone so culturally backward?
Whether it would have made a difference or not, I wish I’d told them all those things.
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