In Fès, I have breakfast at the Cinema Café, a little street-side diner with movie posters on the walls and indoor and outdoor tables; a cheese omelet, half an avocado sliced on top, hummus with a tomato garnish, fresh-squeezed orange juice, tart black olives, café americano with a dash of sugar, and sliced and toasted khobz (traditional Moroccan bread) with jam. Most days, Ouissal or Mohammad are my waiters, Kenza is the cashier. They’re all in their twenties and pretty in that slim, stunningly beautiful dark skin, dark hair, dark eyes Moroccan way. They speak fluent English (as well as Arabic and French and they greet their customers from Spain in their language, too; my embarrassment in this multi-lingual city never gets a break). Two or three cooks wearing hijabs work the kitchen.
I wend my way to the café between ancient stone walls rising straight up on either side of the narrow cobblestone streets, a sliver of deepest blue sky just visible above. My route takes me past feral cats shopping the gutters, ornately carved and varnished wooden doors leading into homes (just inside the doors, beautiful tile stairs with potted plants on the landings curve up and away to doors, patios, gardens and mysteries above, I peek inside with the morning comings and goings), the corner store where I buy my bottled water (often with a donkey cart parked in front making a delivery), three tiny tailor shops carved into the stone walls each worked by a man with muscled fingers pushing fabric through a humming sewing machine, a hotel and spa, a fancy restaurant that serves beer (unusual in this Muslim country), a tiny sfenj shop (deep fried bread dipped in sugar, too hot to hold and so served hanging on a knotted ribbon of palm leaf to protect the fingers) with a couple of dozen high school kids in uniforms waiting in line shoving and laughing and fussing with their phones, a barber shop, an old woman begging (I make my morning contribution), mothers leading small children by the hand, a smoky putt-putt construction buggy or two filled with bags of concrete or debris squeezing past pedestrians, our backs pressed against the wall, half-a-dozen day laborers with pushcarts smoking cigarettes and waiting for work, a cop, sometimes two, dressed in blue and carrying a gun, people in hijabs and kaftans and trendy western wear hurrying to work, and all the rest of the every-city, every-morning bustle and hustle. Except here in the Medina there are no cars or trucks, the streets are too narrow, the cobbles were laid and the walls built a thousand years before cars became a thing. I say bonjour and tap my heart with my right hand as I pass the shopkeepers, the tailors, the barber, the beggar lady and everyone else and they smile and return my greeting, it’s their custom. I laugh with the school kids as I push my way through.
The barber shop is behind rusty double steel doors. It’s small, maybe six feet by eight feet, dirty white tile walls, the single chair facing an ancient mirror. There is a bench along the wall behind the chair where a customer can wait and where I throw my jacket. The back of the barber chair is broken and sags so that and he has to prop me up with a pillow for my beard trim and shave.
A shave with a straight razor provides a moment of clarity. It’s a time where you look in the mirror and say to yourself, I am trusting this man with my life. Is he mentally stable, is he having a good day, is his marriage good, are his kids well-behaved, is there something in his past that I can’t know that would cause him in a movement requiring no greater effort than flicking a light switch to slice through the skin of my neck, my trachea, my jugular so the blood pumps onto the towel covering my shirt and leaves me gasping in the smudged mirror as shiny red rivulets soak through the towel and flow onto the floor under my feet and my life ebbs?
As I consider my Berber barber and the various slights that we of European-extract have brought to the various peoples of the African continent, I think about character; does he have the character I can trust with my life? I reflect on that as he heats his straight razor with his cigarette lighter to kill off bacteria from the last throat he didn’t cut and sharpens it on his strop and lays it on the cluttered cabinet beside him as he trims my mustaches with his scissors and comb and whips up the shaving lotion in a cup with a brush and daps it ear to ear while I contemplate the razor lying next to his hip.
When finally he picks it up, he holds it between thumb and forefinger with a practiced care, visibly cautious in the way he handles it, the way he brings it to my throat. As the blade touches my skin and he begins to scrape at the stubble, I think about character, how success in life is so much a matter of judgement, of recognizing risk and the ways in which the ability to judge character mitigates risk. His motions are slow, practiced, efficient, painstaking in every sense of the word. I close my eyes, not because I can’t bare to watch but because I want to savor the moment, the moment in which my life is completely in the hands of someone who’s character I assessed through pantomime and smiles and a dozen words of a language I don’t speak. The trim takes half an hour or so and cost thirty-five dirham, about three and a half dollars. I give him forty, just to be safe.
That, it seems to me, is how much of life’s success is gained; through the careful assessment of character and the way that assessment is used as a tool for managing life’s risks. As my barber strokes his razor against my neck, I’m caused to think about the people who voted for the little man, about their judgement, about their ability to assess character and so control the risk in their lives. Never mind their barbers, how do they buy a used car?
I’m in a city that was founded twelve-hundred years ago. It’s lasted this long at least in part because of judgement, people making accurate assessments of other people. The United States is 248 years old. We’re not going to make it to twelve-hundred. We’re just not good enough judges of character.
The annual murder rate in Morocco is 1.7 per 100,000 people; in Canada, that number is 2.3, in the US it’s 5.8, in Mexico it’s 24.9, in Denmark it’s .98. So, while Morocco is more dangerous than Denmark, you’re considerably more likely to get murdered in Canada, the US or Mexico. I thought about that, too, as my barber laid his razor against my throat.
