Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [82]
“Exc-cuse me? W-w-where am I?”
Jay has steered me toward a crude stone hut beside the stream. Quaking violently with cold, I hurl myself inside, where a short, dark-haired man in a brown djellaba stands staring at me. I'm used to the drill by now. Another handsome stooge planted by the local tourist office.
“You're in the Ourika Valley,” he says, giving a little bow. His diction is wonderful, and that's what lets him down: he's much too sincere and coherent to be mistaken for a nomadic shepherd. Also, he has jeans and white sneakers poking out from underneath his djellaba! “Which is near Marrakech, which is a big city.”
“And how f-f-far is th-that?”
“Fifty kilometers from here.”
The guy introduces himself as Mohammed, although I believe his authentic Berber name is Tony. At least, that's what I heard people calling him off-camera. As I walk in, he's in the throes of doing something indigenous—another dead giveaway that this is a setup, which will no doubt thrill the New York Times TV critic and her many cynical readers. “Once again,” I imagine her writing, “Peters just happens to hit upon a hut in which someone who speaks good English is, at the very moment he arrives, engaged in an extremely interesting photogenic pursuit.” In this case, the man's grinding corn to a fine yellow powder to make bread, using two large rotating stones that he operates manually, the way his family has done for centuries. Or at least when they're being filmed they do. The rest of the time they probably buy it at Costco like everybody else.
“How l-l-long does it t-take?”
“Three and a half hours,” he says.
Per loaf??? My God.
“And you d-do this every d-day?”
“Yes.”
Of course you do. You're a miller and you stand in this perishingly cold hut every morning grinding corn. Sure.
“All the people in the village,” he adds, “bring their packs of grain and they grind it here. And after, they pay for the milling with 10 percent of the grain.”
Bullshit.
You know what this reminds me of? One of those Civil War reenactment villages you see in America, where retired women kitted out in elaborate period-style bonnets and crinolines address tourists in olde Englishe phrases they picked up from an audiobook of Twelfth Night: “Oooooh, verily, Sir Toby, nay! Avert thine devilish cuckold gaze, sire, lest my maidenly furnigrations grumpled ne'er can be,” while they churn butter, shoe horses, and pump with gusto at the treadle of a spinning jenny, before knocking off at 6:00 and rushing home with a Whopper and a six-pack to catch Entertainment Tonight.
Playing along, I allow “Mohammed” to show me the fundamentals of Berber bread-making: how the corn pours from a four-cornered basket dangling from the ceiling through a hole in a piece of wood, and then onto the revolving stones to be ground into flour. The process is powered somehow by the fast-flowing stream beneath the mill.
“Could you not just get donkeys to turn the stones?” I propose, thinking that one word in the right place could propel this culture forward by up to a thousand years. Into the fifteenth century. “Or a man on a bike peddling very fast round and round?”
He looks confused. Evidently, nothing quite so wildly futuristic has ever crossed his mind. I mean, why would it, really? “For other types of mill we use donkeys.” He steps over my suggestion. “Making olive oil, for example. For this we use water—”
“Look.” I have to interrupt. Not only am I bored with his shtick, but I'm also mere minutes away from dying of exposure. “Do you have anything I c-could wear? I love the flour thing, it's f-fascinating, but I've got to g-get warm.”
“Yes,” he says, seeming a little disheartened. “No problem. My house is nearby. I'll let you have something, and a cup of tea.”
Excellent.
“Aaaaaand … cut,” Jay shouts. “Let's move on.”
From the bread-making setup we shift along the road a little, ignoring a steadily expanding crowd of spectators, to Phase II of the Berber theme park: the family farmstead. If accurate, it's quite a shocker. Built