Memoirs of an Escape Artist

The afternoon I left Ifrane, the weather was socked in, like a sock; like a grey sock had been pulled over the world. Snow blew hither and dither. Busy snowflakes that looked confused about which way to go but were in a hurry to get there just the same. Or, maybe it was just me that was in a hurry. I had planned to leave the following day, but the heavy snow filled me with a dread. At 2:30 pm I looked out of my office window and into what appeared to be a blizzard. I needed advice on this. Do I go now? Do I wait and risk waking up tomorrow with snow up to my neck and my escape route closed? I found Kate in her office. Kate is Canadian so she knows snow, and, after seven years in Ifrane, she knows what it would take for them to close the road. But the weather in Ifrane is unpredictable. It changes like the wind. Even the wind changes like the wind. I was in a state and decided to leave.

Ifrane, the town where I was living, is high up in the Middle Atlas Mountains and one of only two places in Morocco, that gets snow. I forget the second place. It is a strange bizarre place with French chalet-style houses which no one can afford to heat. Before moving there, I googled it, and, on the one and only webpage I could find that mentioned Ifrane, it said, “Just don’t go”. But still I went. Besides snow, the town has only one draw card: it is home to the most expensive university in Morocco, which, aside from a limited number of intelligent and hardworking students on scholarships, is a university almost entirely populated by the rich and the lazy. It is known as the Beverly Hills 90210 of Morocco.

Once I had decided to leave, I walked to my apartment, located on the campus, threw my things in a bag: passport, laptop, camera, and, at about 5:30pm, I walked that long driveway from my apartment to the main gate of the university. I hated that driveway. Jesus H. Mary Christ I hated that driveway. It always seemed to take forever to walk it, the weather was always cold and raining, and I was always lugging groceries home as the students drove past me in their brand new BMWs looking warm, snug and rich.

Sometimes there are petite taxis waiting at the main gate, but not this time. For security reasons, the taxis aren’t actually allowed to enter the university grounds. I called a taxi and waited. The snow had stopped to make way for the hail. Thank you Allah. I waited in the hail with my bags, aware of the lateness of the hour and the approaching dark. At the main gate, there is only a tiny guard box usually filled with three or four guards and not so much as a tree to shelter under. There were three others waiting for a taxi. When my taxi arrived, the other three called to it. The taxi driver asked if we could also take them. I told him to tell them no. If they can’t afford to call their own taxi, then screw you Jack, or Hassan, or whatever your name might be. I had my luggage, and, four people in a petite taxi would be too many. They would all be dropped off before me, all over Ifrane, I would be late and I would be the one paying. The guards at the front gate of the university are employed as spies and they know my every move, reporting it to…whomever they report it to. They know my comings, my goings and with whom I’m coming and going. No doubt my departure with luggage was reported to someone. Only minutes before leaving, I had emailed the dean of my department, a quick, hurried explanation for my upcoming absence over the next three days and cancelled tomorrow’s class. This was Tuesday and, for three days I would be playing some kind of hookey from my work.

The petite taxi arrived at the grand taxi stand. There weren’t many taxis there, as it was now getting late. I through my bag over my shoulder and walked fast through the cold and the gathering snow into the gaggle of moustached drivers and yelled out ‘Meknes’. I was led straight to a car. I suspect I got the last Meknesian driver just eager to get back to Meknes before dark. It would be difficult to get a ride come darkness. I rented all six seats of the dilapidated old Mercedes taxi and we hit the open road. It took only minutes for my tension and fear to drop off me like a knight shedding his armor, piece by piece.

Morocco is many things, but, what it is mostly, is a culture of moustaches; men, women, goats, they all have them; giant bristling ones like the business end of an industrial-strength broom. In Morocco, we have a saying. I will attempt to translate into English, “The moustache is mighty. Oh, yes, it really is.” It is a land where a man is measured by the size and depth of colour of his moustache. It’s a little like having a pet and always keeping it right under your nose where you can easily find it. And, did my driver have one? Well, yes, he did. He most certainly did. So much so, that I think it obscured his view of the road. I’m surprised they allow their identity card photos to be taken without first having to remove their moustaches. So my moustached driver and I drove the open road in silence through the rain and wind.

Being ignorant and somewhat lazy, I had neglected to learn the language of my most generous host country. Moroccan Arabic, in addition to being perhaps the most ugly sounding language on earth, is also a little difficult to learn. After eight months in Morocco, I had finally come to the point where all Arabic words sounded exactly the same to me and I had only learnt how to say hello, or at least an approximation of it. When I passed by a Moroccan, I said, “Sallamaccamaacaamalaccamacamaca,” to which, they always reply back, something that sounds to me, almost identical. My driver spoke absolutely no English and I suspected that my compliments on his moustache fell upon deaf ears.

The clouds were low and dark and the landscape looked the most bleak I have seen it. Morocco is, indeed, a beautiful country. But, it’s beautiful in its bleakness, in its aridness. It’s beautiful in the sense of looking outside of the car window and feeling happy not to be out there in it. It’s beautiful in the sense of praying to Allah that the car doesn’t break down leaving you at the mercy of those wild dogs watching you pass from the side of the road. At about the halfway point, the taxi driver turned and yelled at me, waking me from a blank staring numbness. We were passing a car accident and he wanted me to see. It was an expensive car. I couldn’t tell the make as it was completely crushed. It was going fast, I guess, to look like that. The occupants were surely dead. Or, certainly never playing tennis again.

I arrived in Meknes, to see a red sunset, struggling through grey ominous clouds, stretching out behind a large mosque. By 6:45pm I was firmly and pleasurably ensconced in the small bar of the Meknes Ibis Hotel, up to my neck in beer, moustaches and peanuts. I love hotel bars and hotel lobbies. They are an oasis of calm. There could be wars and complete chaos raging outside, but inside, beer and peanuts. I like to experience exotic locales with one foot in the hotel swimming pool and the other in a martini. I'm a wild man. Days from now, I would discover, that, for the next three weeks, Ifrane would see snow, sleet, rain and hail and be plunged into depths of fog and mist so great, so utterly impenetrable, that, if you tried to penetrate it, you wouldn’t be able to. I had definitely made the right decision to leave when I did.

The following day (Wednesday) I took the midday train to Casablanca. It wasn’t until about two hours out of Meknes that the weather began to brighten up. The only other person in the compartment was an old Moroccan woman. We ate chicken sandwiches together and pretended that the other wasn’t there. I complimented her on her moustache.
My hotel in Casablanca was right next to the train station. On arrival I checked in, grabbed a map, started a fight between two taxi drivers at the train station, jumped in another taxi and drove off to the sound off their maniacal yelling. There was only one thing I wanted to see in Casablanca: the Hassan II mosque. Why? Because it’s big. Mosques, like moustaches improve with size. I wasn’t disappointed. A quick photo session and I headed back to the hotel. I had an early flight and had to take the train from the Casablanca train station to the airport train station.
This wasn’t to be a sightseeing trip.

I awoke early the following day and headed to the airport. The Casablanca airport, like Casablanca itself, is somewhat of a shithole but, for me, there was some nostalgia here. This was my doorway into Morocco some eight months ago and I hadn’t seen it since. I reflected on the changes that the past months of living in Morocco had wrought upon me.
I checked my bags and glanced at my tickets to check the details: Casablanca-Rome-Florence. I paused momentarily, my mind floating in oceans of romance at the sight of such exotic names: Humphrey Bogart eating pizza, Gregory Peck…eating pizza. Wait, they’re all guys…Audrey Hepburn…naked…with pizza. This was Thursday morning. The next day I was to attend two job interviews in Florence. It had, up until now, taken me two days just to get to the airport. The remoteness and inconvenience of my current living situation in the mountains of the Middle Atlas struck me as ludicrous, ridiculous…monstrous. How had such a thing happened? And I can’t even say that it’s not what they promised in the brochures. For, the brochures were filled with the cold and with peasants who looked like old gnarled wood and other medieval nightmares. Pictures of crabbiness. Cantankerousness. But I had wanted this. I had wanted camel and snow…snow camels. I had wanted the strangeness, the packs of wild animals and the Eyes of Judgement peering out from faces of men who look like they’re trying to snort an afghan dog. For, I was off into the mountains. No more art galleries and high culture. No haute couture. I was going to make do with camels and mint tea for a year.

Now, on the map, Italy looks close enough to Morocco to swim to. Then why did I have such connections, that it was going to take me twelve hours to fly to Florence? Believe me when I say, when you are sitting in a place like Ifrane, without even a valid credit card, and you want to book flights and get yourself to Italy during a school week, you don’t think it’s going to happen. When a blizzard descends like the end of television on the day before your departure day, you don’t think it’s going to happen. When there have been nation-wide transportation strikes the week before, and you will need to take every form of transport short of a camel just to get to the airport, you don’t think it’s going to happen. I was happy enough to have made it this far; a twelve-hour flight was the least of my problems.

As I worked my way through immigration, a Moroccan man in a uniform started shouting at me, “Money!! Money!!” It took me a moment to realize he wanted to rifle through my wallet; I had forgotten to stash my Moroccan Dirhams. I had heard that they can take them from you if they want to, as you aren’t allowed to take them out of the country. I had also been told that if I showed my University identity card in moments such as these, that it produced trembling apologetic responses in mere mortals. The shouting man didn’t take my dirhams so it may have made a small difference.

At the entrance to the departure lounge, a man with a large moustache padded me down. Inside were Italians. And they were talking Italian, right into their phones. Just like normal people, only, in Italian. This was getting very exciting. Outside, on the tarmac, the rain was falling in sheets. I bet it doesn’t rain in Italy, I thought. Ever. Inside the Alitalia plane, the stewardesses were speaking Italian (again, just like normal people, only in Italian) and everyone was polite and calm. Even before we took off, it felt good to be somewhere that wasn’t Morocco.
A little duty-free window-shopping and a light snack later, Italy came into view. From the air, it looked like the most beautiful place I had ever seen, terracotta-topped villas nestled in green hills, roads snaking through just waiting for a Lamborghini.

I had a six-hour layover in Rome, so I took the Leonardo Express into Rome city, had a look around, grabbed a pizza, looked for Audrey Hepburn and took the train back to the airport. I saw lots of tourists and lots of Italian girls who looked nothing like old gnarled wood. Back at the airport, I found myself enveloped in chaos. But this was Italian chaos. This was chaos that came with a baguette in one hand, a latte in the other, a mobile phone in the other, slinking in a catwalk demeanor. Italians, I noticed, have an uncanny ability to look stylish and calm in even the most stressful situation.

My plane was delayed in Rome and I didn’t arrive at the hotel in Florence until midnight. Luckily I had informed them earlier by email that I would be arriving late at night. There wasn’t a reception as such and I would have been faced with a closed door out on the street, the sound of the taxi driving away, and some cat going, “meowwwwwwwwwwwwww”. My room was within five minutes walk of my job interview the following day, and was, in atmosphere and furnishings, very, very pleasant. I was somewhat relieved and exhausted to be here. I set my alarm, went to bed and wallowed in the wonderment of my own tenacity.

Wandering the streets of Florence the next day, I prayed to the God of fashion to strike my sorry ass down. My ten-year-old suit and tie were simply no match for these fashion magazines with legs. I was out of my league and I knew it. For a moment, I almost wished myself back in the land of old gnarled wood. But, the day progressed, I survived two job interviews, and all but secured one of them. Then, back in my hotel, I swapped my suit for something more me, and went out to jump into a carafe of Italian wine.

In most situations, in order to attend a job interview, one can often just nip out at lunchtime, but, not so, from Ifrane, where, even to get to a country that is almost right next door, it can take three days if traveling. But now, it was Friday afternoon and the sun was shining. I had, stretched out before me, one entire night and an entire day, of pizza, of wine and Italian girls.