Service

A confusing arrival surprisingly bode very well. The Palmerie was vaster then we had thought. It was just after the date harvest and the large spaces between the large date palms made for an alien but attractive landscape. The Atlases surrounded us. The construction was relentless, ubiquitous, but somehow not noisy or disruptive. We passed by the entrance to the golf course and right by the big resorts, passed by private walled homes, palatial in scale, passed signs directing us to various dars to stay at, on and on, kilometer after kilometer, till we saw the orange sign directing a left to Sublime Allier. Down a rutted and beat up road, we slowly travelled almost another kilometer before we saw the domed structures that we immediately knew to be part of Sublime Allier. We knew the dome to be part of the house we were to be staying at (Villa Jomana). We didn’t know about the ancient tall gates. Or the arrival ceremony. Or the fact they had switched the house we were staying in to the one we had originally requested, the Villa Jinane. (We had wanted this house because it’s layout was a little friendlier to Doris, Villa Jomana, having a sunken living room, and Villa Jinane had a piano). We were a little bit in shock as we emerged from the limo. Everyone was smiling at us. There was a girl spreading flowers pedals before us as we entered the house. I was helping Doris along with the walker. The niceties of how to help someone using a walker, when to help them, the technique ascending and descending steps, when to hand off the device and when to depend on it, had become a little dance routine for me; sometimes I performed well, and when I had a willing and understanding partner, sometimes magnificently. But the change in time zones and languages all conspired against a high level of performance. The kindness of strangers often made the difference between graceful navigation or tottering delay and airports (we had been through Kennedy, Charles Degaule, and Orly on the way to Marrakech) had been the best kind of performance and training. Thus my enjoyment of entering the house was tempered by the little dance Doris, I and Calmal, our well meaning butler, were doing. The bright sun and 80 degree tempature was very welcoming and calming.

And you looked through the house, the vast open, cathedrals ceiling house, to the gardens and pool in the back to the pagoda at the far end of the pool, with it’s wonderful fetching daybed. We were flanked by the manager, Denis, and keep murmuring to him our disbelief at the beauty of the place and our shock at possessing the house Jinane

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The sardines were for the cats of course, as we were having a lite supper, if any supper at all after a huge lunch at the kasbah. And none of the fare would have served the cats very well. She waited for them to come. I remained in my nice jacket from the afternoon and she called to me to take off the jacket before I helped her open the can sardines. This made sense but it had a t first sounded like she had requested he take off his shoes before assiseing. This put him off alittle even as he removed the shoes. He put them back on after he had removed the jacket, with a slightly exaperated air but the open of the can would change his mood. It called for a slow steady application of strength, something he could set himself up for and work into and the small controlled he gained of the objecft and the process would return some satisfaction.

Feeding the cats turned into a circus. There was reason to for everyone to be screaming at each other before. But the stress of the different animals showing up all at once, instead of their previous behavior of showing up one at a time, thus allowing for a controlled distrubution of portions, made for an unfriendly and uncharitable chaos. The people treated each other poorly and thus the animals were made to suffer. They also treated each other a little poorly, with hissing and swiping as they jockeyed to eat the first portions. There was contreversy about the second portiion and where the animal that was to get this serving was located. This I am afraid lend to the poorly supported but not entirely dismissable fourth cat theory. It also lead to screaming and recriminations between him and her. The pleasure of feeding the little dears was denied him and sole claim of the priveledge, based on her being the one to actually have purchased the sardines, was awarded to the precious girl.(No allowance, or even memory of his having sacrificed a third of his diner the previous night in order to feed what was then though to be two cats was made.)

Much of not all of the tension of the evening and the cats derived from the partial failure of the day’s journey. The late arrival of the cab, the mysterious misunderstanding of how the time of the cab appointment and the subsequent time of the reservation at the kasbah came to be changed, and then the up and down nature of the kasbah, totally befitting a hill fort but really inappropriate for the old and infirmed woman,conspired against her daughter’s enjoyment of the day. There was an unintended argument about the reservation. They were out late and thus the kasbah lunch area was completly deserted. She wanted her mother to see the place. She wanted her mother to be what she had been and not the interminable burden she had become, dragging, dragging, desperately dragging, hindering, hapless, helpless, in need of constant service and care. Ring the little bell please and a man will open the door.