Soft Parade
Created | Updated Sep 18, 2006
Being at Rick's is like being in the driver's seat of a bus navigating a bumpy, winding road, with the dust hinting at your nose, and the wind ruffling your hair into your eyes - it has the best seats in the marketplace, the sangria is the best you will set lips to, ever, and the music the Romas play infuses you with the sense of being on a journey, as if Rick's were but a temporary biouvac in a world lived through a caravan. I think I went there for the pleasure of feeling I would have to leave the very next moment.
Being at Rick's is also like being at the real Rick's - but not as we saw Rick and Ilsa and Captain Renault experience it, in mute fading grays caressed by jazz in the evening's sultry intrigue. Our Rick's is colourful. It has wide brimless windows staining the tables Alhambric, some magic of architecture hustling a chattering breeze into every periphery. It has the best food, culled from all corners of the world by the delightful XaWen for whom no flavour is too lowly, and the most intriguing collection of loungers you will find in the marketplace, Panaglossis' fabulous watering hole notwithstanding. It has furniture and cutlery from every tradition imaginable, all mismatched in a glorious invocation of carefreeness. And it has talk, lots of it. Talk that would tell you everything about the marketplace, should you care to listen. Talk that teases, indulgent talk, imagined talk. Talk that bubbles in one spot and leaves another untouched, such that you can with ease move between a silent desert and an oasis of sound without altering either. Talk that reminds you that the marketplace is one big ceaseless happening, and that one can always go to Rick's to hear of it.
Arjan, I remember, was looking at me curiously. The coffee was at its seasonal best, XaWen's peach pie as excellent as promised, the next table cheerfully spilling its babble onto ours, and yet I had not yet responded to his whimsical stories and his wide-eyed gossip that would otherwise have had me rivaling him in fantasy and buffoonery. "Look here," he finally said, "if you're going to write it all down anyway in that diary of yours you keep hidden, you might as well tell me the story, eh? I don't know what knots you keep tying your head into, but I hate to see a good pie waste itself on you in the bargain. Young men, these days, you all…". But before he could start on a commentary on the affairs of the current generation I gave him both - my Mehr that I could not forget, and my pie that I did not wish to remember.
I think he was somewhat distressed, since he stopped picking at that pie about halfway through my narrative. Five times he opened his mouth to say something, but stopped, as if he was looking for something in my next few sentences. When I finished, drained and not one whit less troubled for all the effort, Arjan did something I have never seen him do before or since. He became serious. And eloquent. Then he spoke of the Marrakchi.
Do you know the Marrakchi? Weather-beaten, eyes full of scorn and cunning, from a lifetime of watching in a world of deceit. Voice like kif, and a poise that can only be found in the children of the Sahara. But what is unforgettable about the Marrakchi is the feeling you get when he is around that the Marrakchi has always been there. For the Marrakchi is memory.
Not Memory. But memory, with all specificity and no individuality. When you meet the Marrakchi you remember. Not your memories as such - not the last kite you flew, not the whisper of the sea, not your first paycheck. No, you don't remember things as such. You just remember. It is as if the past stands in potentia, like the way the earth looms up behind you when you stand at the edge of a canyon looking down. The Marrakchi is at the bottom, waving.
But now he was sitting opposite me, sipping the thick sweet coffee he always drinks. You're afraid that if you stay too long, you won't be able to come back here, he said. I nodded dumbly. Mehr and her room could only exist in a story; I could tell myself into it, but could I tell myself out? It is the oldest of myths - the storyteller trapped in his own tale, a prisoner of his own creation. As if the story is another world, and in the telling of it one enters it, or worse, as some other myths have it, in the telling one lets things out that should not have been. As if the gods exist because we believe in them. The truth is more complex, said the Marrakchi. Let's get off.
Get off?
Have I told you about the bus-stop? But it is the best part of the tale. So listen. The bus stop is a parade. You get off a bus and are instantly swept into the flow of people. Colours, scents, shapes are borne along by a tangle of faces and bodies. No one quite knows where the parade is going, but you keep moving along nevertheless, looking at the people piled up on the streetwalks, watching the parade. Here and there there's a seller of eats, and people drop out to refresh themselves. Then they fall back in, borne along again to wherever they happen to be going. When you step out for a moment yourself, possibly for a cup of tea, or those shelled peanuts you'll only find at the bus-stop, you realise that the parade is watching you. That is why the parade will never stop - because this is, after all, a bus stop, and wherever you go there will be someone watching you, because you yourself are colours, scents, shapes borne along by a tangle of face and body. There is nowhere else to go to, in any case. Oh, there possibly are places outside the bus-stop, where children play in the parks, where forms are filled and make the world work, where relatives live in houses and fear your arrival, but these things are not considered, and no one takes notice of them. For the purpose of a bus-stop is to bring you to a bus, and everything else is just temporary. Nothing stands still here and nothing stays.
The bus stop is also Boundary: the no-place that is someplace, experienced only in transition. In passing, you learn who you are. Sometimes you learn to become.
In the bus stop I saw... the tea-seller, brewing calm in a sea of tired faces... a beggar, who had missed infinitely many buses... a bebothered and confusticated mother, containing her children with invisible strings of threats and promises... the magazine vendor, selling dreams of places imagined and places to come...
In the bus stop I did not see a vendor of costumes, and that is how I realised that in this parade without occasion, I was the only denizen of the marketplace.
I found the Marrakchi perched behind the tea-seller. Where they come from, he said, indicating the crowd, those are not costumes. But why do i feel like I don't have a costume on, I asked. Because this is where you come from he said, and then smiled.
And I remembered. Passages came back to me: the perfect taste of hasty teas, the rest-stops punctuated by arrivals and departures, the agonizing tensions of destinations drawn near, and words in five languages for the price of an orange. My youth was made in transitions.
I nodded. Then everyone who is not home wears a costume, I asked. Except Mehr, he said, who is a costume who wears herself because you are there to tell me that story. Ah, Story - will I forever be the labourer of its construction?
I have to go, I said, andn rushed up the steps of the nearest bus. And into a marketplace, where the gadabout was called Yambo, the signs were hand-painted instead of glazed neon, and the local eccentric was one Dr. Abu-Khalil, who collected scripture. I rushed to the first door I saw, and entered. What kept you so long? It was Mehr, standing by the window, hair caressing the breeze. I went home, I said, back to the bus stop.
Why did you let me go, Mehr, I asked, dimly aware of the sadness engulfind my embrace.
Because this room is a boundary, and boundaries push one away. Then let us go elsewhere, I said. No, where else but here could I be found? Where else could you tell me my story?
I sat down and tried to cry, but couldn't. All I could do was stare at her hair, and wish it would stiffen and make the breeze stop.
Ah, Ishmael, while you are not heard, I am not heard, and now you're in the total silencing typhoon of Story... What do you mean, I asked. Remember the idea that only stories exist, waiting to be told by someone? I nodded - every storyteller would face that at some point in their lives. It is a myth, she said, but only a myth. The only thing that exists is storytelling. So tell me...
Mehr, I said, I have to do something, and I might even be back afterward; but if I don't do it I'll never know...
Then I opened the window and jumped out.
The Marrakchi was at the bottom, waving.
