ONCF

I tried all spring to get Sylvia to love me, but it was no use. Eventually, I reconciled myself to friendship—better than nothing. Then one day I called her apartment and her roommate told me she'd left for the United States. “Se ha ido esta mañana—¿vale?” With even the ruins of my dream gone, Madrid released a thousand holds on me in an instant. I left my cat with a friend's girlfriend and boarded a train. Two nights later, I awoke on the ONCF to Marrakech, dawn breaking through the open window of the passageway.

The Moroccan countryside is peaceful at dawn. The sun comes and goes behind rolling mist-shrouded hills. Lone Arabs on mules cast long shadows at the train and are gone; distant huts and wells stay longer in view. The hazy air diffuses the sun's light, and an hour after daybreak darkness still lingers behind the trees. The English kids I met on the ferry sleep with smelly feet in the couchette behind me. Nothing changes, and I've smoked four cigarettes before the fields of sparse wheat finally pass into bright burning sun and we pull into Marrakech. Suddenly, having arrived, I'm aware that I am completely alone in Marrakech, in North Africa, in the world. And I have two weeks to go.

The day passes somehow. I explore the city with a guide. He cheats me, but as I had expected this, I don't mind. He is a student of linguistics, and we discuss the languages of Morocco. As a Berber, he speaks the unwritten tongue of the hills; as an Arab, he speaks the lingua franca of Islam; as a Moroccan citizen, he speaks the government-mandated French of the departed imperialists; as a guide, he speaks English well enough to discuss his admiration for Arthur Miller as he drinks the Coke I've bought him.

He waits nonchalantly, smoking the Fortunas and Camels I offer him, while I murmur appreciatively at the tombs and the marketplace.