Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [88]
My companion today is a local man with an intimate knowledge of Marrakech.
“Hi, good morning.”
“Hello,” he replies distantly, not really paying attention.
He's tall, middle-aged, balding, and wearing a functional blue anorak to ward off the morning chill. Haj is a taxi driver in Marrakech. He's been enlisted by Willy to walk me around the medina. I stumble across him, inasmuch as I stumble across anyone in these shows now, studiously picking through a jumble of artifacts outside an antique store, searching for something called a Hand of Fatimah. It's a gift for his sister's birthday.
“We hang it in the house or on the door. The Hand of Fatimah,” he explains, digging into a stack of them, “protects you from ‘bad eyes.’” To illustrate, he makes his own eyes bulge out of their sockets in a scary thyroid way. “We put them on the door to protect us from bad-looking.”
Fatimah was the only daughter of the prophet Mohammed. Those Moroccans who are superstitious—in other words, all of them—like to keep a talisman in the shape of her hand, and sometimes several, around their house to ward off hexes, jinxes, evil spirits, and Satan, when in most instances a simple dried octopus would be quite sufficient.
“But why would I want protection?”
“Oh, Gawwwwwd,” Haj groans in his thick Arabic accent.
When you're groundlessly superstitious, a question like this is considered so silly and obvious that it doesn't warrant an answer.
He then goes back to selecting a hand, evaluating two in particular. Which one, he's calculating, is more likely to frighten Satan: a plain tin one etched with curlicues, or a plain tin one etched with curlicues and with a raised bejeweled eye at the center of the palm?
After much inner wrestling, he opts for the hand without the jewel.
“How much is this?” he asks the shop owner.
“Two hundred dirham,” he replies.
“Awwww, come on!”
We don't realize how lucky we are sometimes to live in a Western economy, where purchasing something from a store is such a simple process: we choose what we want, we pay for it, and we leave. That's it. It's a great little system.
Alas, not so in Morocco. You can't simply buy stuff you need here. That would be considered eccentric.
“We have to bargain,” Haj tells me sternly. “You must bargain for everything.”
And the bargaining is super-complicated. It comes in a three-phase protocol.
In Phase I, you dispute the quoted price with a look of utter dismay, even horror if you're up to it, not only refusing to pay, but going full out to berate the shopkeeper for his lack of business sense in charging something so laughable in the first place. Shame on him. Shame and damnation! Once that's done, and the store owner is staring at you, going, “What the hell are you talking about, you son of a camel? That's cheap!” it's time to embark on Phase II. Here, you play complicated mind games, acting out a bell curve of emotions, by turns outraged, insulted, hurt, chagrined—if that's even a word—and desolate, in any order you like; walking out of the shop, coming back in again; shouting, pacing up and down, waving your hands, in a fine-tuned choreography of offers, counteroffers, and histrionics designed to leave the customer exhausted and drive the store owner to slit his wrists.
And all for a 5 percent discount!!!
Finally, in Phase III of the protocol, things calm down a little. You and the store owner arrive at a price for the item that's mutually agreeable, and all too often the exact same price it started out at.
So, the Hand of Fatimah Haj has chosen—a cutout metal shape with a hook to hang it up with, which might come in useful for breaking into cars perhaps, but doesn't look like it's capable of protecting anyone from anything—carries a price tag of two hundred dirham (roughly twenty-two dollars).
Naturally, Haj is disgusted and throws in a counteroffer. “One fifty”
“No, two hundred,” the store owner insists, waving