Morroccing My Body

The naked woman beckons to me from the end of the passageway.

Clutching my towel to my chest with one hand, I use the other to awkwardly lean down and pick up my bucket before shuffling towards her. Wrought iron lanterns illuminate the path ahead with flickering shadows of geometric shapes from their alcoves in the walls. As I draw nearer the cloying perfume of the hammam’s changing area dissipates, and somewhere there is a distant echo of sloshing water.

Meeting my attendant’s gaze I realise that she is growing impatient. This was no wedding march – she means business. A heavyset woman with a slow stride, she continues around the corner while I attempt to hoist my towel above my knees and hasten my pace. Her pink flip-flops clack against the grubby mosaicked tiles and finally stop outside a wooden keyhole door.

She pushes it open and we are met with a wave of steam that cools as it settles on my skin. I survey the dingy room where some twenty women and a few young children are dotted about, completely exposed, amidst a light haze of condensation. It is very early and the hammam is quiet, its patrons subscribing to the globally unspoken understanding of muted morning tones.

The door thuds shut and my attendant is on the move again. She motions for me to lie down on a ledge running alongside of one of the mottled grey walls.

This is it.

Inhaling deeply from the balmy air I shed my veil of modesty with one swift movement, like ripping off a Band-Aid, and cautiously position myself atop the cracked slate tiles.

The Berber dialogue of the two women sitting closest to me continues as they slather their arms with a layer of dark brown soap. I recall the stares and heckles my blonde hair elicited yesterday in the teeming medina. In the souk where the air is thick with the smoke of grilling kebabs and raw leather, lurid aromatics tickling the inside of your nose.

My ruminating is interrupted as I am summoned to the slick floor, where my nameless aide kneels at my side and takes the now filled bucket in her arms. My eyes close and shoulders tense in anticipation…

Suddenly I feel her fingers beneath my chin, gently tilting my head towards the domed ceiling, just as my mother did when washing our hair with a pitcher in the bath. Our eyes meet and she smiles at me through the folds in her cheeks, crevices gleaming with sweat.

Soon we would all retrieve our leaden jellabas and confront the daily bedlam of the world outside.

I smile back.