HOW TO BARGAIN IN MOROCCO

                        RUTH’S 7 TIPS ON HOW TO BARGAIN IN MOROCCO

My father, may he rest in peace, was one of the great bargainers—an artist who entered a shop in the medina of Marrakesh or Fez, fixed on an object he wanted, & through a winding path of cajolery, teasing, charm & humor, walked out with the object … & a new friend, the vendor. Granted, my father was born in Morocco, spoke Arabic fluently, & was familiar with the ancient tradition of bargaining, but other Moroccans I watched didn’t do it nearly as well.

After carefully observing him, trying my own hand at it, & watching both experts & absolute duds, I humbly present my suggestions on how to get the most out of the bargaining experience.

RUTH’S 7 TIPS ON HOW TO BARGAIN IN MOROCCO

1. ENTER the medina (the market, the souk) the way you enter a casino. You know the odds are in the House's favor, & you know that eventually they will win, but you can have a wonderful time playing the game.

2. GAME is on. As a Westerner, you are at a disadvantage: you don’t speak the language (Give yourself 20 points if you speak French or Arabic), you don’t know the rules, & you are playing against the masters, & you’ll never know if you won or lost.

3. UNDERSTAND: price is a relative concept. There is a price for Moroccans, another for those who speak French, one for European tourists & another for Americans, one for students, & even, I'm convinced, one for blondes. There is a price if you appear interested, & another if they sense you’re wasting their time. There is a price if you charm them by getting into the spirit of the game, & another if you reveal actual knowledge about the object you want to buy. There is a price if you joke & another if you are sullen & act as if bargaining is beneath your human dignity.

4. YOU will never know what the item originally cost. The vendor himself has probably forgotten the original price, if indeed there ever was one. The mythical price he quotes at the beginning of the transaction is pulled from the sky, a magical number to start the game.

5. KNOW that what you pay has nothing to do with the cost of the object & everything to do with #3: who you are, how you present yourself, the experience of the game. I overheard a vendor exclaim to another—after a round of haggling with an American man that turned bitter & dark, even though the American capitulated & bought the item—“That was a bad one.”

6. THEY have been doing this for thousands of years. You are entering their world of labyrinthine corridors, dim booths shadowed by carpets, mysterious doors & archways that lead to dark alleys. In their world, bargaining is an art that involves laughter, warmth & personal connection, & often, a glass of sweet mint tea.

7. ENJOY the game. Carry your prize object out of the medina with a smile. Don’t compare prices at other booths. You carry not only an object, but a story, an experience. For a few moments, under North African sun or moon, you were part of an ancient tradition. Treasure that memory. It has no price.   

LISBON: YOU ARE ALREADY HERE

As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.

“You don’t need to travel to Ithaka,” says the handsome young man at the elegant stained glass window tea room/hotel in Alfama, the now-trendy, ancient stone & cobbled neighborhood of Lisbon. “You are already here, in Lisboa, the most beautiful city in the world.”

“What should I see?” I ask.

“Go out & wander. Lisboa is a city for walking,” he says, echoing my Portuguese friend, Mafalda, who suggested places to see & things to do, but insisted that in Alfama, “You should just wander.”

Lisbon is like a city in a dream—you turn a corner & have no idea where you’ll find yourself. A narrow, shabby street in which every building is covered with graffiti opens onto a vast sunny marble square lined with columns & cafes. A set of impossibly steep stone steps leads to an ancient cathedral. Winding cobbled streets, tiled Moorish archways, shadowy stone corridors & courtyards bump against weighty stone castles & fortresses. Laundry hangs from balconies—a pair of harem pants swaying in front of a doorway beckons me into a shop where I learn they belong to the upstairs neighbor. Over another shop, a man sits on his balcony, plays his guitar & sings. I realize that I love cities with balconies—they merge the inside & the outside, & invite the passerby into the street drama.

Like fado, this city doesn’t cover its dark heart—it displays it proudly. Fado is the music of the marginalized, the cry of the oppressed, the song of the yearning soul. Last night I went with my friend, Ricki, to Sr. Vinho, a fado restaurant. There were four performers—three women & one man—accompanied by two guitarists. The lights dim for a fifteen-minute set by one singer followed by a breather to eat, talk, drink, & then the next singer. The show begins at 9:30 & ends at about midnight.

My favorite singer is Liliana Silva. She tightens her fingers around the edges of her shawl & throws her head back to unleash her song. As personal & intimate as the balconies nearly touching across narrow streets, fado also seeks to connect. It means “fate” or “destiny,” & the emotion in Liliana’s powerful voice & the eloquence of her gestures & expressions transcend language barriers.

Fado is the expression of saudade, one of those wonderful words that means so much more than its definition. Saudade is a longing for what you’ve lost, nostalgia for the home you left behind, pain at the loss of yesterday, & yearning for what can never be recaptured.

The Portuguese understand saudade—their heads turned back like Lot’s wife—while they squint into the horizon for the coastline glimmering in the distance, a mirage from the future. Vasco da Gama & many other Portuguese sailors left their homes in search of new lands to conquer.

“We are never satisfied,” says the young man at the tea room in Alfama. “Like Fernando Pessoa, we want many lives, many identities. We want a chance to fail at all of them.”

“Is there any city that cultivates sadness more lovingly than Lisbon? Even the stars only ‘feign light’,” wrote Pessoa.

Pessoa—which means “person”—is the resident artist spirit who haunts Lisbon. He was raised in South Africa, but returned as an adult to Lisbon, which he never left. He worked at a series of accountant jobs while trying his hand at publishing & translating. A prolific writer, he wrote not only under his own name, but under 75 others, which he called “heteronyms,” each with his own independent intellectual life. He is everyone, & he is no one, & when you walk in Lisbon—as he did, ceaselessly—you might glimpse a short bespectacled hunched figure a few steps ahead.

You walk faster to see if it can possibly be … of course not, it can’t be … he died in 1935…  

Yet …

… this is Lisbon after all, the city that exists in the between—yesterday & tomorrow, darkness & light, poverty & opulence, barbarity & kindness, the journey & the destination. “To dream about Bordeaux is not only better but also truer than stepping out of the train in Bordeaux,” wrote Pessoa.

You stop rushing & look around you in wonder. After all, you are already here, exactly where you are meant to be.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
                                                --Cavafy

IRELAND: IN SEARCH OF THE GODDESS

I hear the call in the deep heart’s core. --Yeats

I heard it across the seas in the rustling forest near my home in Pennsylvania, & I heard it in the sound of the waves, & I heard it the instant we docked in the port of gritty & raw Dublin, one of my favorite cities in the world. I’ve only been here once before, for a wonderful Thanksgiving week with my son Avi, but it was enough to make me want to return. What I remember: the words of James Joyce across the window of the Guinness Storehouse as you survey Dublin over a foaming pint, the musty welcoming smell of old books in the Long Library at Trinity College, the forty shades of green in the parks, the rich, dark coffee, & the sweet sharpness of the language. Whether the Irish speak Gaelic or English, whether they’re joking or telling tales, there’s music to the words, a cadence & rhythm that invokes & evokes the soul’s mysteries the way poetry does. It’s a code to decipher & puzzle over. Letters take on new identities, others are present but silent, while others are heard but not seen. Niamh = Neve. Sidhe = She. The words curve like fingers & beckon into the woods, whisper the divine call of the Sidhe, those mischievous faeries: Away, come away (said Yeats, who heard them, too).

And then they leave us in the woods, our hearts tied in a Celtic knot, our eyes staring wistfully.

I hear the call as I leave the dock with my friend & Semester at Sea colleague, photographer Todd Forsgren. We head in search of the sacred feminine, & the first thing we see is a small statue of Mary guarding the sailors, & those who have sinned.

I hear it stronger inside the crypt of Newgrange, the Neolithic passage tomb, with its prophetically accurate Roof Box, a carved opening that lets in the sun during the Winter Solstice—perhaps the world’s first solarium. I lift my head to the vaulted carbelled roof, layer upon layer of scalloped, fitted rock that reportedly hasn’t leaked a drop of water (in rainy Ireland) in 5,000 years, & gaze at the mystical symbols—tri-spirals, diamonds & zigzags—carved into the recesses. The guard—an irreverent man with a metallic-gray Elvis pompadour & a side-creeping smile—turns off the light & says, “Imagine the Sun God penetrating the Earth Goddess to make the earth fertile.” A dazzling ray of light filters through the Roof Box & lights the crypt. I know I’m not the only one who shivers. It’s very sexual, very Demeter, & very powerful. I’m especially moved when I learn that the 92 massive rocks that circle the round tomb of Newgrange are carved with the same mysterious symbols as Howth (the neighboring passage tomb), but unlike Howth, where the rock carvings face outwards as if to protect those inside from invaders—at Newgrange, the carved symbols face inward, like magic amulets pressed to your heart.

I hear it deeper inside my heart as we enter Kildare, a medieval town dominated by St. Brigid’s Cathedral on one side of the town square. Cill = Church. Dara = Oak. Apparently Brigid, who was a real person before she became a legend—saint, goddess & witch—was beautiful & headstrong, & wandered the country in search of a place to set up her church. She found it here, in an oak ridge & set out her magically expanding cloak to mark the dimensions of the land. She built the first monastery in Ireland, & curiously one where monks & nuns cohabited (separately, but under the same roof). She was the Abbess, but so powerful she was known as a Bishop.

Inside the cathedral, which is as musty as the Long Library, we hear a persistent humming. Is that the call? Todd & I walk from one altar to another, surrounded by dark, damp stone, searching for the source of the humming. Is someone confessing in a hidden alcove? Is the cathedral haunted? The mystery is cleared up when we walk outside & wander the grounds. A weed whacker! An absurd prosaic detail that reminds me of exiting the sacred mysterious crypt of Newgrange to see a pasture of dozing cows a few feet away. The sacred & the profane rub shoulders in Ireland.

Behind the cathedral is a Fire Pit where Brigid started a fire that burned without ashes for centuries. It was tended by nineteen nuns. Every night the nuns chanted, “Brigid, take care of your own fire for this night belongs to you,” & in the morning, the fire would still burn bright.

Brigid died in the year 525, but the fire burned on until a priest magically put out the flames. And that was the end of the fire.

I visit the Fire Pit—rectangular & hard-edged, with a few scattered offerings, including a small photo of a young woman, her eyes closed. Every year, on Brigid’s Feast Day, the 1^st of February, the fire is lit again. But as Todd & I wander the grounds of the cathedral, the call seems fainter. There is a Round Tower, tall & phallic, which the tiny female caretaker, her purse strapped to her chest in a tight diagonal as if afraid we’ll try to steal it, tells us we’re too late to climb, but I don’t mind. I feel no magic emanating from this stone tower, & none from the Fire Pit.

The call nearly disappeared outside the cathedral, but it resumes as we follow the obscure directions to Brigid’s Well, get lost, retrace our steps, & try again. We pass signs for the National Stud (a horse farm), the Black Abbey, & an outlet mall. And then a small sign to Brigid’s Well, with an arrow pointing vaguely in the distance. “How can there be signs to Brigid’s Well & an outlet mall on the same post?” I muse aloud. Is that a sign that there is no distinction between the sacred & the profane, that it is all one?

Evening is falling when we finally find the well, a green sanctuary on the side of the road. A fence separates this enclosed area from a field. I should have been prepared for the juxtaposition of the mystical & the kitsch—a small shrine at the entrance contains tiny dolls & statuettes, burnt candles, & a large snow globe of Mary & disciple (without the snow). We walk deeper into the sanctuary to the well, guarded by a life-size stone figure of Brigid holding up her hand in welcome. Under one arm, she grips a cane & flowers. The well is a small stream, murky & lily-dotted. A series of stones marks a path to another stone circle, a place to sit & meditate. At the end of the clearing is a tree, its branches strung with colorful Tibetan flags, ribbons, keychains, & pieces of yarn. It reminds me of a tree in Safed, a town of mystics in Israel, where I visited the shrine of a saintly Kabbalist rabbi. His tree was weighed down with hundreds of ribbons & scarves, all bearing prayers & yearnings.

A sudden green breeze carries me back to that windy day on top of a hill in Safed (pronounced Tzfat—Hebrew, another coded language with letters that function as doorways into the unknown). I’d been given crazy-chaotic directions to his sacred tree by a mystic. It took 90 minutes of winding through wooded dead-ends & wildly careening roads to find the tree. Later, I learned it was an easy 15-minute ride from the center of town, but when I asked my friend why I’d been given such a maze to follow, she said, “It shouldn’t be too easy to find the sacred. That ride through the dark & the unknown was your preparation.”

Todd & I are silent, but it is clear we both hear the call. Something magical is happening. We have entered a sacred space, & we try to remember this moment—each in our own way. He takes pictures, & I sit at the edge of the well & write. We linger & lose track of time.

After a while a woman climbs through the slats of the fence & enters the sanctuary with a small white muzzled Rottweiler. We talk dogs with her for a while, as she sits on a bench, smokes, & lets Daisy, the Rottweiler, wander. Dark-haired, pale, long-limbed, she won’t let Todd take her picture. She seems to fit perfectly in this space, & when she finishes her cigarette, goes to check on the shrine. When she returns to us, it’s as if she’s made up her mind to confide in us. “You know this isn’t the original well?”

Todd & I exchange glances. What?

She explains that there was no parking at the original well, & so her father donated part of his land—their property is just beyond the fence—to build a new well in 1955. The old well is minutes away.

We find it quickly, in the shadows of the ominously named Black Abbey, a grim abandoned stone tower with tall grasses blowing across Celtic cross-topped tombstones. I can’t stop laughing. I’m a little giddy—we did feel the sense of the sacred, I know in my bones that we did, but does the fact that we were in the wrong place invalidate that? What defines a sacred space anyway? Is it sacred before we arrive? Does our presence make it sacred?

The original well is smaller & simpler, lonely, guarded by a weeping willow and a tree branch strung with about a dozen ribbons & wishes. We’d never have found it without the woman. After the sacred experience at the other well, I still feel magic dripping from me, & sheer joy: we are here, in Kildare, at the original well, & all of this has come about because months ago I scribbled a few words about Goddess sites, including this: “Brigid’s Well, Kildare.” I didn’t know if I’d ever make it here, didn’t know where or when or how, but the intention was there.

There is power here—in the other well, & in this one, too—& I wonder if it was always there, or if we, the seekers, are the ones who bring it.

Water softly gurgles, & leaves scattered over the green green grass remind me it’s autumn. I climb over rocks to the center of the well & sit, cloaked in golden light. For a moment, I feel like a Goddess myself.  

Before we leave, I send a prayer—words, my magic—into the water & green-blue air. I hope she accepts my offering.