Tan Tan Plage

Each morning I watched a man emerge from his tent, then walk to the cafe directly underneath our hotel balcony, then walk back out to his tent, pinching the rim of an espresso glass. He sat on an industrial-sized paint bucket turned upside-down while he drank his coffee and watched the waves roll in. He meditated on the sea while I meditated on him meditating on the sea.

Tan Tan Plage, a coastal town in Morocco near the Western Sahara, was not the vacation my friend and I had imagined it would be (and not, I might add, what the guidebook said it would be). We were the only women donning bikinis where very few women were present. The other women there were locals dressed either in blue jeans, even on the sand, or Saharawi style -- long swathes of fabric called malhafas wrapped round and round their bodies. Some might say that after 18 months of living in Morocco, I should've known better than to wear a bikini in a coastal town in Southern Morocco, but saying so would mean ignoring the fact that Morocco is an incredibly diverse country where bikinis are not by definition taboo. It is true, though, that at the very least I should have known that I could only comfortably wear a bikini if I were with a man. 

Some boys threw food at us. Old chicken bones flung while we tried to sunbathe on our blanket. They ran close circles around us, then lay nearby throwing handfuls of sand. Every day men played soccer on the beach. Apparently they needed the entire beach to play, so every day my friend and I were asked to move our blanket. It was an extremely large beach. There were dozens of soccer games and there were hundreds of men. Every day. It was the man who lived in the tent who came to us once to apologize for our having to move.

We walked to a place called the Korea House once to buy beer, a random side-of-the-road Korean restaurant about five miles from our hotel, maybe four. It was closed when we got there, but still we banged on the door until a Korean woman came to answer. She didn't say a word to us, only opened the door and then sold us as much beer as we could carry. We drank most of it on our way back to our hotel until we were two wild women wasted out in the middle of a desert.

Seven days like that, maybe eight. Then we were to take a 22-hour bus to Dakhla, in the Western Sahara. There was a Moroccan guard in a shack on the way, and wind and only a candle lit while he checked our passports in middle of a cold night. He asked me if I was a man's wife.

But we were still on the edge of it now, still in Morocco. In the early evenings, after unbearable hours on the beach, we watched the sun set from our hotel balcony. We drank the Pastis we'd packed with warm water, no ice. I watched the man hold a long fishing pole with the bucket turned right-side up now, next to his tent. Six, maybe seven days. It appeared his job was to fish. I was thinking like that, thinking like a Westerner. Thinking, his job must be as a fisherman but what does he eat, how does he survive, does he have another home besides the tent, did he have a family who lived nearby, yes, perhaps he only sometimes slept in the tent. Like that.

His name was Ali. My friend and I, we kept insisting with our bikinis on the beach. There was nothing else to do. We took lunch at a restaurant, we walked to the public cyber, we insisted. A teenaged boy leaned into me when we were walking through town, then snapped his fingers not two inches from my crotch. I grabbed the boy by his shirt but didn't get a good hold and he ran and I chased after him screaming in Arabic, "Shame on you! Shame on you! Shame!" Then I cried. This is what you get for insisting, I knew. 

The man in the tent, the fisherman, his name was Ali. He had to ask my friend and me to move our blanket so the menfolk could play their games. Twice he asked, maybe three. So. He was the nephew of the hotel owner, that was his connection to the hotel. Ok, so he must eat at the hotel for free, I thought, and drink coffee for free and maybe sometimes sleep in the hotel. Yes. Each morning I watched him. He walked to the cafe under the balcony. Waved. Hello, Ali. Hello. 

I didn't want him to hear how I'd made a fool of myself with the boy who snapped his fingers not two inches from crotch, how I cried. There had been a group of boys who'd been sitting on a stoop not ten feet away, they laughed and called me names. Eight days we were there, or was it seven. Then we were packed and ready to go to another town called Tan Tan where we would catch a bus that would take us further south into the Western Sahara to Dakhla. It was Ali who helped us with our bags from the hotel to the grand taxi station at the top of a hill in Tan Tan Plage.

He came into the taxi with us to Tan Tan. Just like that he was with us in the taxi. We drove through desert, desert like Nevada desert, desert flat and desert tan. There was the Korea House with a pagoda roof. We must accept not insist that we were in a fairytale exiled in a desert where we were not wanted where we would find a woman in a Korea House who gave us an elixir and the man who fished on the beach was with us now in the backseat of a taxi.

In Tan Tan we had to wait for the bus that would take us further. Ali sat with us at a cafe. We spoke in Arabic, he and I. He said he'd lived in the Cayman Islands for two years. I didn't ask how he'd made it across the sea to the Cayman Islands, it was too private of a question, like asking a Mexican how he made it across the Arizona border. Ali said he'd met a Spanish woman in the Caymans with whom he'd fallen in love. He said he worked at a restaurant there. He and the Spanish woman worked together and then were engaged to be married. She came to Morocco with him and went back to Spain. He had to stay in Morocco for reasons he didn't say and the woman was supposed to come back, only it had been three years ago already. 

She might come back, I said.

I was drinking a cold Coca Cola from a glass bottle. There were flies and a billboard of His Majesty King Mohammad VI looking down upon us; the writing on the billboard said "Nam" ("Yes"). Propaganda for the upcoming vote on the King's constitutional reforms. 

Sure, maybe she'll come back, he said.

There were only fifteen more minutes now in Tan Tan. Fifteen, maybe ten. She might, I said again. He said nothing. Well why don't you go back to Cayman? I asked.

It's too hard, Sarah, too dangerous. The coast is heavily guarded by military. I looked at my watch. I could have imagined Ali's story. It wouldn't have been hard to do. Five more minutes now, maybe six. Check please. Ali said, I have to marry a foreign woman if I want to leave Morocco again. I knew that. 

But the Spanish woman, I said, she'll come back, I said. I knew what he was getting at. Didn't she love you? I asked.

It's been three years, he said again. He'd accepted she wasn't coming back. He was looking me in the eye. 

But, I said. He was the only man on the beach who'd been polite to my friend and me. And now he needed me to help him. I'm going to Dakhla, Ali. Right now, I said. 

But you'll come back to Morocco?

God willing, I said. And then he helped to put my bag in the bus. 

And then there was a man in a shack who checked my passport by candlelight. Then there were flamingos in Dakhla and white sand and white water and wind and men who let the wind take them who let the wind take them because they were rich men who could let the wind take them who could.