His name was Max. Or so he said. As I can’t think of a single Arabic name that could be comfortably shortened to Max I suppose it was just his nom de guerre, as his entire life or at least the bits he told me could be assimilated to a war against adversity.
I was sitting on some steps outside a row of merchant stalls in the square of the town of Ouarzazate, south eastern Morocco. My wife was exploring some of the shops in the souk, disappearing regularly into the back rooms where the real stuff, the family jewels so to speak, were kept for the real connoisseurs.
Situated at the very edge of the desert this town was in its most glorious period the commercial hub for the caravans traveling to and from Mali and the Southern Sahara down to fabled Timbuktu, a couple of months away by camel.
Nowadays mostly famed for its connection with the cinema world, the mud fortress of Ait Benhaddou not far away where bits and pieces of about twenty historical films were shot, the Atlas studios outside of town where you can still see the sets for the Asterix movie and where many visiting backpackers have been lucky over the years to find temporary employment as movie extras.
No such excitement on that day, the square empty, the day still hot even though the call for sunset had been made and everybody was free to eat again after the day-long fast of Ramadan.
The owner of one of the shops came to sit next to me on the steps.
“My name is Max”, he said. His accent was pure titi parisien. I queried. “Yes, I lived for many years in Paris”, he admitted. “Is that your gazelle down there?” he said pointing to my wife. “Yes, but don’t bother trying to sell her anything, we are photographers looking for work. Stock pictures, that sort of stuff.”
“I see.” He leaned comfortably against a pillar, brought out a pack of cigarettes, permitted after sunset, offered me one.
“Which team brought you here?”
“Pardon”?
“I mean which of our brave commercial warriors brought you to his brother’s or cousin’s house in this humble city? Was it the old man on crutches on the side of the road, the breast-feeding mother, the broken-down car?”
It was the broken-down car. Little white Peugeot that seemed to have problems with the radiator. We gave a lift to one of the guys to town so that he could send somebody back to fix the car.
“And he took you straight to his brother’s house to sample Moroccan hospitality, mint tea and little pastries while the family’s collection of carpets was displayed for you in case you wanted to buy one. Right?”
I just nodded my head. Small details that had not made sense at the time were falling into place. Like the way the young man had seemed to appraise us and our little Fiat rental car before accepting our offer of transport.
“And… how far from town did this pick-up happened?”
“About twenty kilometers I would say.”
Max nodded his head slowly. “Yeahh..” he said gravely. “Business is bad. Those raccoleurs have to go further and further away from town to be the first to pounce on the arriving tourists. We call them our paratroopers, they get dropped into enemy territory.”
The brother’s house where we brought the broken-down motorist was in reality a carpet shop. Three guys introduced as “the family”, tea and cakes for us, nothing for the others as we were in the middle of Ramadan, hundreds of carpets piled high around the walls. They obviously concentrated their selling efforts on my wife, unaware that she had already reduced to tears a few carpet sellers in Fez and Marrakech.
Myself, I was more interested in the hand-painted sign that showed a camel caravan and the words “Timbuktu 52 jours”, a copy of the one in the town of Zagora, the real doorway to the Sahara desert and beyond. The older “brother” claimed that he had the contacts to get us into one of these caravans all the way into Mali, but was a little more hazy about how the caravan crossed a desert violently disputed by Morocco, Tunisia, Mauretania, the Western Sahara, (formerly Spanish Sahara), the Frente Polisario and some tribes like the Touareg or terrorist organizations like Al-Quaida, all scarcely kept apart by UN patrols. Amazing how many people seem to criss-cross an apparently empty bit of territory.
On the sales side of things they didn’t relent: a clapping of hands, “more tea, more cakes!” I can personally manage about a dozen cups of syrupy Moroccan mint tea a year and I had drunk double that in the previous few days. It would not have been polite to leave while the hospitality was still active so we were shown more carpets, spread in front of us with a flying flourish until the guys suddenly stopped and looked at each other as if struck by a revelation. We knew from experience what was coming.
“What are we doing?” they said. “This is all wrong. We are insulting this lady by showing her such inferior products. Bring on the family heirlooms!”
They just wouldn’t give up. They dressed my wife in Berber attire, they admired the jewellery she had bought up north, it turned out most of it was authentic, only some of the stones in the lot are actually polished camel hoove. We chatted in French. Spanish, English, they offered Catalan if needed, I am sure they could have found somebody to converse in Afrikaans had we asked. They were Berbers, they said, therefore oppressed by the government and badly done in, their language and traditions at risk of extinction. Same all over the world, really, the Britons, Catalans, Walloons, Corsicans, Afrikaners all suffer from the same problem.
Any language, any culture, will only disappear if people let it, and if they do, then… how many local languages have disappeared over the centuries? I enjoyed reading 15th century Spanish in the form of Ladino, the language spoken by the Sephardic Jews when they were chased out of Spain. Many still speak it in Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey, the island of Rhodos, even South Africa.
The “brothers” finally let us out. The older one embraced me warmly, saying how much he had enjoyed meeting us. “Sorry about the carpet business” I told him “You cannot draw blood out of a stone. But you were very good” He shrugged his shoulders and laughed “That was good practice. But I must admit your wife was better.
I nearly bought from her the carpets she had herself bought in Chefchaouen. She really got a bargain”
That is how after catching our breath in a hotel room and waiting for the heat to die down we found ourselves in the souk in front of some Sheik or Emir’s palace, my wife searching for bargains, me talking to Max.
“Does it always have to be done like this, through some confidence trick?”
“This is not trickery, just sound business practices. Is advertising any different? If you get in there first and create a bit of a personal connection you stand the best chance of selling. Also you must weave some magic and let the client’s imagination do the rest.”
“I see. Like these volcanic stones with amazing coloured crystals inside that we bought on the side of the road. These kids never said anything about them, we just thought they were amethyst and paid a lot of money for them. Meanwhile they were just plain white crystals coloured with ink!”
“Ah!” said Max “There is no end to man’s gullibility” The best example I ever saw of it was right here, before I had the shop, when I was a tour guide working with big buses. My clients had the day off, at leisure as we say, and I had heard about this old crook plying his trade on the edge of town so I warned my clients about him. To no avail. My clients, especially the ladies, started coming back from their promenade telling me all about this amazing old man who had just come in with a caravan from Mali, loaded with the most beautiful genuine jewellery pieces made right in the desert for which he wouldn’t even accept payment! “My needs are few”, he would say, “only my camels need some food so instead of paying me please go to the grain merchant in such and such street and buy a bag of feed for them”. And so it was done, the tourists literally falling over themselves in their rush to pay exorbitant prices for the supposed camel feed from the old man’s relative running the shop.
“I tried to explain to my tourists that there are no caravans to Mali, that the old man actually lives in town, that the animal feed shop is run by his brother, all these foreigners looked at me funny as if I was the very Devil trying to bring down a saintly old man. Couldn’t get through to them.”
Max stared into the distance, reminiscing.
“Next day I went to see the old man, told him exactly how I had warned my clients against him and how I had been ignored.”
“It doesn’t really matter” the old man answered. “Even I couldn’t stop this thing once I launched it. I managed to get as close as I could to the romantic image people bring with them of the desert caravans and from there on I could do no wrong. I could tell my clients that all the stuff I sell comes from China and they wouldn’t believe me!
Also the idea of not charging for myself was a genius idea. I tell you Max, I have traveled the world like you, run a restaurant in Paris, another one in New York, but this scam is the best thing in the world. I just have to sit here next to my camel and people shower me with gold. You must find yourself an arnaque like this, Max, I am telling you”
“And did you?” I said half turning towards his shop. “Naah, all legal, straight and above board, I buy and I sell, much happier in my old age. Problem is, everybody has seen Lawrance of Arabia and to pull a stunt like that you need to look like Omar Sharif. The old man did. I myself will always look like a shifty Moroccan dealer no matter how I dress.”
