and he covered his eyes and shrieked

A few days ago I met Idriss, a skinny little man in a golf cap who perpetually roasts a spectrum of nuts and seeds in front of a corner shop. It's about a two minute walk from our residence, (straight down a street which zig-zags a bit as it crosses another, until it meets a main-ish sort of road  lined with a couple of gas stations - Mobil and Shell- airy cafes, money changers, electronic shops, cell phone branches, travel agencies and never-open airline outlets. It's called Avenue Abdelai Benchekroun.

By coincidence, the day before in class we'd read a text with this name in it, scratched out in five spare minutes by my burly, bearded and excellent tutor. Except in this story Idriss was a senior in high school, had a mother who worked as a secretary at a "big bank", and 3 siblings who all studied commerce, economics, or literature at university. It's a running joke among our students that virtually everyone in our bible-like, hegemonic textbook can be described by recombining the preceding sentence. Anyway thanks to this, I even knew how to write the name "Idriss". It looks like this:إدريس

I never met anyone with this name in Mauritania, which is sad for me, because I love it wholeheartedly. Conversely it's very common here, which isn't much of a surprise when you consider that it's the name of mythical founder of Fes, Idriss the First, who was also the great-great grandson of the cousin of the prophet, and the person who brought Islam to Morocco. So, let's dog-ear that one.

*****

Idriss stands behind a little counter, set up just in front of the shop as one rounds the corner. It's few steps past the live-chicken factory, which stinks of death, death, death. On the front of the counter are a couple rows of square, clear, plastic bins, the kind you find in the bulk section of grocery stores, except these don't open out or have big scoops attached by curly-cue wires; their contents are only displayed through the clear plastic, scratched and dulled with age.

On top of the counter he has a little scale, the kind with two, sea sawing metal plates. He uses it to weigh out however much you'd like or whichever substance you care for. Each nut or seed has its own price, and they're all filed inside of his neat little head. He roasts dark, dagger-shaped sunflower seeds, pale, beige teardrops of pumpkin seeds encrusted with white salt, curly, knotty cashews, rust colored peanuts, chick peas, and a black, hollow-seeming nut which looks like it just fell from a tree in the forest. He sells dried banana chips and some version of a trail mix like concoction, but I never see anyone buying that, so maybe he only makes it once in a while.

Idriss is about 5"9' and has one of those mouths whose teeth you can't see even when it's smiling. He has a broad shiny nose, smallish eyes and the kind of bright mocha colored skin which appears pore-less. It's stretched tight across his features and seems like it will always be, no matter his age. In fact, his age is indeterminate. He might be 25 (though I think he isn't) and he might be 35. He appears boyish; he's kind of adorable.

Anyway, he's always trying to give me free samples of seeds - whatever he's roasting when I stop by, which mostly seems to be the black sunflower seeds that have pale stripes running down the middle. I guess they're popular.

*****

The owner of the shop he's perched in front of is sort of a piss-ant - constantly sitting slumped on a high stool behind his counter, cell phone glued to his ear, neck cocked. He just returns my attempts at greeting with dour looks and stony silence. Moroccan customers get a (slightly) more lively response but that's not surprising.

His son (I'm just guessing) or whoever the 15ish-year old who works in the shop and actually, you know, carries out transactions is, isn't un-nice though doesn't smile that often either. He has a narrow, big-nosed face, a thin mustache and looks vaguely like a weasel. 

The exact nature of the relationship Idriss shares with this store is unclear to me: is he actually this man's employee, is he a traveling nut-salesman who just rents this space? Is it something else entirely? So many pressing questions....
 
*****

Idriss roast things in a sawed off piece of a metal barrel, over what appears to be a coal fire. Inside the barrel slice is maybe one or two kilos of whatever he's roasting, mixed in with a bunch of salt (it looks like sugar, but it's not- I asked once). He stands over the roasting pan in shirtsleeves. He stirs and worries the mixture of salt and seeds or nuts with a flat, rectangular paddle made from a fin of plastic. He is endlessly doing this. After a while, the salt changes from white to dusky white, to gray to brownish gray, I think from the influence of the sawed off bucket - it's not too rusty-ish, but whatever. The seeds taste just fine and I had a tetanus shot a few years ago. I think.

He's a sweet man. He was sweet right from the first time we came by, even though the shop's proximity to the American language school, the French embassy, the French Language Institute, and I guess, for that matter, France, means that we're likely only one brief cadence in a parade of outsiders who bustle through ungracefully during a break from some thing else. And who think, or more generously hope that a few pitifully inadequate statements in Arabic gives them a right to expect some kind of authentic experience with the locals. That's what I'm afraid of anyway, but maybe not as many people talk to the peanut guy as I imagine.

*****

Another student at the school, X, was with me the first time- we've become fast friends and she's lovely (looking) in a way I could see being very appealing to Moroccans. I have no doubt that I'm not nearly as interesting to Idriss as she is, but that's only natural- the flush which attraction inspires in us just can't be replicated in other sorts of interactions, it puts a red gloss of magnetism on everything it touches.

A few days after our first meeting with him, X passed by on her way to somewhere else and Idriss offered her his phone number, written in square, blue little characters, with the funny French numbers- the 9s that look like Gs- on a little scrap of corrugated cardboard. In retrospect, accepting his number was a mistake but it's hard to blame X for wanting to be kind; I don't think she realized how weighty such a simple gesture might be. After handing her the number, Idriss asked "are we becoming friends??" Let's forget, I suppose, that friendships between men and entirely-unrelated women aren't exactly a central part of the social structure, and that he had known X for a total of 6 cumulative minutes.

*****

A few days later I came home from class to find X studying at one of the little round tables -curving iron legs propping up mosaic discs- which are scattered across our wide porch. X glanced up from her textbook, and smiled, and fished something out of her spacious purse. "Look what Idriss gave me!" she said, and held up a key-chain in a piece of brown paper. It was a short, slender solid tube of a translucent orange capped at the ends with winding silver work.

It was probably made of plastic, or some kind of silica composite (though it looked like a jewel) and the ends were probably only tin, and not any kind of silver. It probably wasn't very expensive, but it was very lovely, and the fact that this little Moroccan gentlemen had thought about it, had bought it with his own modest earnings, and wrapped it in brown paper, made it very beautiful indeed.

....Or maybe he just had it lying around the house gathering dust, or maybe he borrowed it indefinitely from his sister, what the hell do I know? But not for nothing - a few days later, while walking down a sidewalk littered with street sellers, camped out along a restaurant strip, I saw a piece just like it, placed among a bunch of other shiny curiosities on a white bed-sheet., I entertained stopping to see how much one might go for, but then thought better of it. No sense in allowing reality to needlessly shatter my illusions.

*****

That night it was time for an intervention. Our glamorous and vivacious Egyptian-born matriarch laid down the law over a plate of calamari at one of our favorite places: the adorably-named "Chicken Mac"

"You cannot see him again. You cannot walk by the shop." She dipped another fried circlet in mayonnaise and popped it in her mouth, her glossy ringlets, falling around her face. "You'll just make it worse."

I eyed her meaningfully across the table and nodded in agreement. "She's right. Everyone just wants to get married. Just assume everyone wants to marry you and move to America." I took a sip of my water and squeezed a lemon over my fries. "You're the jackpot, no red-blooded eligible bachelor is looking for a pen-pal, my dear.....

*****


The next time I walked by the shop I stopped and greeted Idriss, I shook his hand, reaching over the line of assorted, brightly packaged cookies which, stacked up, formed the border of his little counter. I have virtually no Darija vocabulary at all besides a few of the greetings, but it doesn't have nearly as many as Hassaniya, and when I try recycling them over and over again like I would do in Mauritania it begins to feel awkward.

I almost never have anything to buy in his shop, and there are only so many salted pumpkin seeds one can consume (fyi- it's not that many). I was about to leave when he handed me a white plastic bag, bulky and heavy with small packages. "What's this?" I asked. He said "It's for your friend. Please, bring it to her." He turned his head to the side and downward. "Please."

*****

Back at home, in the breeze of the fan, at our kitchen table, we opened the bag and discovered it was full of wrapped offerings in cones of wispy, white paper. The soap I buy gets wrapped in paper recycled from other purposes, embroidered with typed French paragraphs about random subjects - but this paper was new, dedicated, and blemish less. Almonds, cashews, pistachios, sunflower seeds, raisins- each enclosed in a white, plain sheet; each sufficient unto itself; each a flower. A bouquet, really. This was Idriss's equivalent of roses. It was heart-sinkingly sad. And funny and touching and awful and sweet.


And delicious. Later that night, after a little glass (or two) of vodka-caressed lemonade, (we have a lemon tree. We have a lime tree, and fig tree too. Did I mention I live in paradise?), X and I talked together and imagined that the addictive seeds had been doused with a secret love potion. We stood in the middle of our kitchen at midnight, staring at each other wide-eyed, wordlessly eating one wonderful, graceful almond after another.